Words Against Mental Illness Part 3 - From Cancer to Crime Fiction With Val Penny

Transcript

Nobody gave me sin for this That’s reason why I try both This is all that’s old, I can see a thousand times of this I’m here with Val, Val introduce yourself Art against mental illness So I’m here with Val, Val introduce yourself Hi Alex, I’m Val Penny and I write crime fiction I started writing crime fiction when I was recovering from cancer I was being treated for cancer and it’s a very worrying and depressing kind of time I was really quite ill and I don’t know if you’ve tried to watch daytime television but it didn’t hold my interest for very long and I didn’t have the energy to do the things I like to do like swimming, visiting with friends, seeing family I had no immune system because of the drugs that were helping me recover and so I turned to reading, which is what I enjoy that I could do The problem was that I kept telling my husband about the books I was reading about whether they were good books, about whether they were bad books about what made them good, about what made them bad and eventually he said to me, look, if you know so much about what makes a good book why don’t you just write one? And I thought, challenge accepted So it took me about two and a half years but I did write my first book, Hunter’s Chase Amazing, so what were you doing before that? I was a university lecturer at Harriet Watt and I lectured in law and I had remarried and moved away from Edinburgh so that the commute was more than I could cope with when I was poorly and so I had to give that up and take early retirement and this led me to writing Did that law stuff make its way into your writing at all? Not really because I was doing more commercial law and private law and obviously criminal law It’s not quite John Grisham, right? It’s not quite that, no and so most of the work that I do now centres around crime and criminal law which was not an area I practised or lectured on Amazing, and so tell us a bit about that, what do you write? I write crime fiction, the Hunter series is about a detective DI Hunter Wilson and I got his name when we were driving through to Edinburgh to visit my mother and as we stopped at a set of traffic lights there was a lawyer’s office named Wilson Hunter and I said to my husband, what a wonderful name for my main detective and he said, no, no, no, no, no, you can’t use that because he’s a lawyer, he might sue us and so I said, that’s fine, we’ll swap the names around and we’ll make him Hunter Wilson That’s even better, it’s a better name And how many times has Hunter made appearances? There are six novels and one book of short stories which has Hunter stories in it Wow Yes, seventh novel will come out next year That’s amazing And so obviously you recovered from your cancer I did, thank you Well done, I don’t know what the right thing to say there is but we are still here and that’s amazing Not everyone’s that lucky And so I do consider myself very fortunate And how long has that been? About ten years now Amazing Amazing, and how much do you think that experience has sort of affected your writing? Well it affected the writing in so much as that’s why I started writing And I produced about one novel a year after that And then of course we were all hit by Covid And I wrote two novels during Covid Because I had nothing else to do, like everyone else I was stuck at home And it’s worthwhile just looking for the bright side of things Sometimes that can be difficult, I sometimes find it difficult But you sometimes have to look for the positives And so what is the experience of writing like for you? I used to just, I was what they call a pantser In that a pantser, in that I write by the seat of my pants Oh right And that’s how Hunter’s Chase was written Because I didn’t know what I was doing, it was my first novel, I had not a clue But I then was, met a novelist by the name of Sue Murcroft And she writes romantic women’s fiction, totally different genre But what she did do was explain how she sets out her novels beforehand So she actually produces a background And so I have now become much more organized, much more structured in how I approach it I’ll write the background, I’ll write the bones of the work And then I’ll put the flesh on it and make the story And so you’ve got this character, and I’m imagining other characters that make recurring appearances And so I can imagine actually you can tie yourself in knots Because what happened in book three, and is it consistent with what I’m trying to write now And so I can imagine it becomes a necessity in that environment to at least keep track of what you’re doing And create that world How much do you find you have to inhabit that world to keep it consistent and keep it developing? That’s interesting, originally when I was writing Hunter’s Chase I thought I would create a completely new town in the same way that Peter Robinson did with Eastvale Which is set in Yorkshire but doesn’t exist And then I thought to myself, no I don’t need to do that Edinburgh is a small city, everybody knows each other And it has universities, it has theatres, it has posh areas, it has normal areas What were you saying, there’s lots of places to murder people Plenty pieces, plenty pieces It has an airport, it has a prison, it has everything that I’m going to need So I had lived in Edinburgh for a long, long time And that’s why I set the Hunter books in Edinburgh My second series of books is about, the main protagonist is DS Jane Rennick And she appears in the Hunter books But the Jane Rennick books go all over Scotland Because I thought I might get a good holiday out of further research Yes, indeed And there’s plenty of places to go Well A, there’s plenty of places to murder and hide bodies in Scotland And B, it’s just a great place to go, visiting places Exactly Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, that sounds amazing And so how do you transition from someone who’s written a bunch of words down While recovering from cancer to being a published author? Again, I was very lucky I knew nothing about the publishing world And so I said to my husband I’ve finished the book, I’m just going to send it off And I sent it to two different publishing houses One had cats in the name and one had dogs in the name And then we went on holiday And when I came back, there were two emails Both saying, one from each of the publishers And both saying that they wanted to publish the book Now that never happened, but I didn’t know this And so I said to my husband They both want the book And I’ve always been more of a cat person than a dog person So I went with the cats That’s true And you’ve never looked back And never will there be a dog in your life That’s quite amazing Funny enough, you’re the second author to say to me today I’m really lucky because I wrote my first book Because this was George, he wrote his first book during lockdown And just basically got published, the first person he talked to It was like, okay, okay, it’s really Well, basically what I’m hearing from today is really easy to become a published author Well, you know, it’s a lot easier than it used to be Yes Because there are far more small publishing houses than there ever used to be And also the ability to self-publish is available to people What I would commend to any of your listeners who are thinking of self-publishing Is do not skimp on an editor Get an editor who knows your genre Who is really quite critical And who will say to you, no, this paragraph doesn’t work You can take out that chapter You do not need that character You need a brutal editor, especially with the first book And even if you’re self-publishing It will cost you money, it will cost several hundred pounds But it is worth getting an editor, a good editor I’ve heard that a lot I don’t do a lot of writing myself I’m a visual artist And for me, it’s all about the process I make art because I enjoy the process And I find it really healthy It gets me into really good states of mind and relaxes me And to what degree do you feel that writing is something you do just because you need to do it? I get very unsettled if I can’t write It doesn’t have to be a chapter of a book It can be a short story It can be a poem It can be an entry into a journal But it might be a blog post But I do write something every day And a bit like you and your visual art Which is wonderful by the way, I was admiring it earlier Before I knew it was you And I think it’s important that if you have an art or a craft that settles your mind It’s important to use that outlet as best you can That whole thesis of this whole podcast is exactly that And I think I can probably sound a little bit repetitive In some ways, I find my job on this podcast is to find new and different ways of saying the same thing Which is find the thing that you like doing and do it And then just keep doing it and make sure that you find the time to do it So what would you say to someone who you’re blessed in that you can I’m guessing you do this full time, this is your job, right? Yes, it is And that people have to have proper day jobs, as boring as that is That people who don’t really have the time, how do you think? What I would suggest, and what I find many of my friends who have day jobs as well as writing Is they’ll get up maybe half an hour early and they’ll write a couple of hundred words Or during their lunch hour, they maybe eat their sandwich and write a hundred words And then when they get home in the evening, rather than sitting watching the soaps, making time to write And as much as you require time for your visual art, I require time for my writing When I had a real job, I used to long for the day when I could have a job that started at 11 And finished at 4, and had an hour for lunch, and now I have that And I think even if you only have a couple of half hours a day, if writing is your thing, write Because if you write a couple of hundred words a day, then it doesn’t take very long before you have 2,000 words, 20,000 words, 60,000 words and you have a novel Yeah, I can’t agree more, that’s amazing And so we’re going to have hundreds of novelists out there that have written it all in their lunch hour That’s fine It’d be good, it’d be maybe lots of novels about sandwiches But there’ll be different flavours of sandwiches Yes, indeed, they’ll be the most amazing sandwiches ever So you just did it, you just come off a panel with George Patterson and… Mark Bridgerton Mark Bridgerton, yes So Mark is a true crime author, and you and George are both fiction authors Correct So what sort of themes came up in there? How do you… I mean, especially someone writing true crime and someone writing fictional crime I mean, what is this? Are you squaring off there? Is it a fight? Not really, but I do think that if you’re writing true crime, you’re much more constrained than I am Because in my books, because they are fiction, I can play with the truth a little bit So that while something in real life might take three weeks to happen, in my books, the detective inspector says And I’ve fast forwarded this, and it gets done in 24 hours Mind you, if anybody looked at my computer history, I’d get locked up in a second Well, that’s the thing, right? So you presumably know the best way to murder someone Well, I was on a panel with a group of authors once, and we were discussing how to murder someone And one of the women was a medical doctor, and one of the others of us would come up with an idea And she would say, no, no, no, that’s not dependable And then we would come up with another idea of maybe a good, hard stabbing And she’d say, no, no, no, you have to be really particular, you’ve got to get the right knife And I’m thinking to myself, you know, she would be very difficult to have around in my books Inconveniently knowledgeable about murders OK, so there is another female crime author from Scotland, also called Val, am I allowed? Normally, when I am invited to speak, I have to explain to audiences that I’m not Val McDermott And I’m not the Canadian crime writer Louise Penny I am, in fact, Val Penny, and they’re stuck with me I don’t think adjacency in names is a terrible thing And if a few people are picking up your books instead of Val McDermott, maybe you’ve got a convert there But I just, you know, Scotland’s such a rich place with crime authors And I think we can handle more than one Val Oh, I think so, yes And I just think it’s quite amazing, especially in a day like today when there’s so many of us here That I just can imagine anyone who doesn’t live in Scotland thinks it’s a bloody terrifying place You know what I mean? You go to Australia, you’re going to get killed by animals You come to Scotland and someone’s going to murder you and bury you on a hillside somewhere But I’m still here, right? And no one’s tried to kill me yet today I’m delighted to hear that Well, thank you If people want to find you My website is very imaginatively named www.valpenny.com Amazing And I’m assuming you’re available on all of the usual places to buy books Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, yes And your next book? My next book is North by Northeast, which is a Jane Rennick thriller And the next Hunter book will be Hunters Festival, which should be out next summer Ask against mental illness