Now out - my crime novel White Spirit

 

Thirteen-year-old Jamie is found dead in the Scottish Highlands and DI Allan MacIntyre is asking questions. Who gave him his top of the range phone? Who lit the fire to dispose of his clothes? Two teenage boys are acting suspiciously. They have phones and games consoles hidden in their room, a connection to the mosque and a blood connection to a paedophile.

Then a second fire ‘ignites’ in a bin at their school. MacIntyre is beset with his own troubles, and it’s not just juggling two women. His health is letting him down, and, at 37, it shouldn’t be. With November fireworks exploding, one of the boys lets slip there’s going to be ‘a big one’.

Can Allan get a grip in time to prevent it?

White Spirit 

Set in the north of Scotland, close to Inverness, my new novel White Spirit combines a fast-paced plot with empathetic characters. Early reviews are in, and they're encouraging! 

'Totally absorbing' 

'Earthy gripping plot'

One of my aims for this book is to raise awareness about the life-threatening condition which is Addison's Disease - an auto-immune condition which often goes undiagnosed until it reaches the dramatic end-stage. I'm giving my author royalties from sales of White Spirit to the Addison's Disease Self-Help Group charity which has helped me so much since my own diagnosis.

You can read more about White Spirit and the rest of my writing on my website www.carolmckay.co.uk

You can read an extract on Amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/White-Spirit-Carol-McKay-ebook/dp/B0BJG61B5V

The e-book retails at £2.99 and the paperback is £10. 

 

Reading the Landscape

I went to primary school in a vast council housing scheme in Glasgow. The school was called Stonedyke and there were forty pupils in each class. This was in the days near the end of the post-World War Two baby boom. School pupils were from the immediate neighbourhood and were from families where the mums tended to be housewives and the dads tended to work long hours in factories and industry. My dad was a slater's labourer and my mum bucked the trend and worked full-time in a shop.

It might seem like an unlikely place for poetry. And yet, this was an aspirational era, and an aspirational school, and this is where I was introduced to poetry. One of my favourites from when I was about ten years old is Aince Upon a Day by William Soutar,. It's written in Scots, and our class learned to recite it. Odd, when you think of it, since Scottish children were routinely discouraged from talking in Scots in school at that time. It was regarded as 'bad English', rather than being seen in its geographical and cultural context, i.e. as a separate strand with connections to Denmark and Germany and so on. 

Anyway, here we are, over fifty years later, and I've had my very own pamphlet of poetry published! Perhaps curiously, none of it is in Scots. But I'm sure the code-switching of my childhood helped arouse my curiosity about exploring language. Here it is:

Reading the Landscape

Reading the Landscape brings together poems previously published in literary magazines along with new work. It's published by Hedgehog Poetry Press as a result of their 'White Label - Quatre' poetry pamphlet competition.

The cover shows a scene from woodland in the Eildon Hills in the Scottish Borders. Landscape is key to my writing as landscapes and the natural world fill me with hope. The pamphlet contains poems that explore and relish the natural landscape as well as exploring inner mindscapes. You can read more about it (and be given the option to buy it) via that link.

It's a big moment for me, to have that first poetry pamphlet published after years of mostly writing prose. I'm now working on material for a second. In the meantime, having long been a fan and supporter of poetry publishing from Scottish poets and beyond, it gladdens my heart to see my pamphlet take its place with these other poetry books! 

 

 

 

Writing round-up

In my experience, writers suffer nightmarish levels of Imposter Syndrome. When I was a child growing up in Glasgow, in Scotland, this syndrome hadn't really been named, but was an overbearing presence in phrases like 'Who do you think you are? The Queen of Sheba?' and 'Don't get above yourself!' and even 'I kent his faither.' Working class children like me were conditioned from infancy to know their place and never aspire to anything beyond that.

A big part of being a writer is imagining other lives - lives beyond the narrow constraints we and/or wider society set ourselves. And if we want our writing to be published, we have to resist Imposter Syndrome.

With that in mind 😀I'm going to tell you that 2021 was quite a good year for my writing. Wait! No, 2021 was a good year. I didn't win prizes; I wasn't lauded around the world. But I did have a good handful of publications - individual stories and poems - in a range of quality magazines and anthologies, and that makes me feel my writing efforts are worthwhile.

Poetry Scotland #102, Break in Case of Silence (NWS 39), Ghosts of the Night Shift, Wee Dreich #5, Gutter 23

While I'm pleased with all of these publications, I'm particularly happy that - after at least a dozen attempts - I've finally had a short story accepted for the very prestigious New Writing Scotland. Published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, this annual volume is the pinnacle for short fiction, poetry and other forms of writing.

Not only that, but the story itself - Her Body was an Aviary - is one that I'd sought a home for sixteen times before it was accepted. It's a story I've always believed in, but it obviously needed editorial distance to fully draw out its strengths. And, given there's always a subjective element to choosing items for publication, it must have needed to find the right editors, too!

Of course, I sent out far more than five items (well, six poems and two short stories). In the year, I sent out thirty-five submissions. So that's a hit rate of one in seven, or 14%. The year before that, my hit rate was about 10%. That's a lot of 'no thank you' to bolster the Imposter Syndrome, but according to Keysha Whitaker, who wrote about her study of this for US magazine The Writer in 2016, 5% acceptance is the average, with a range between 2% and 22.5%. So, hey, rejection is normal, and we should celebrate our successes without allowing ourselves to wilt under the stern gaze of Imposter Syndrome.

Incidentally, if you want to learn more about the origins of the term 'Imposter Syndrome', this link takes you to a paper written by Pauline Rose Clance & Suzanne Imes, the psychologists who coined it.