Cheeky sod, the sea. One minute you’re staring into a rock
pool with your wellies glistening and your net held high, the next you’re
floating home. Got a way of coming at you, these rising tides of ours; of
catching you unawares. The Channel Islands have one of the largest tidal tables
in the world and when it turns, it turns,
as any number of the tourists and locals who have found themselves waving
cheerfully to shore from newly acquired homes of cut-off coastal rock will
testify.
Seems like only yesterday that I was splashing round in a
rock pool of my own. Having released my novel Coyote Jack as an e-book on Amazon back in April 2013 I’d spent
several weeks exploring the brave new world of online publishing, working out
how best to market my work. Anyone who has spent any time amidst the seemingly
endless melee of blogs, promotion sites and book listing companies will tell
you that it’s an wild and choppy ocean out there. At times it seems like the
world and his mother have got novels for sale (hers is better than his, by the
way), and at times I found myself smashed down by the sheer immensity of it
all. Flailing around in my own little rock pool with the net stuck over my head
and the bamboo stick stuck somewhere it had no right to be. Landlocked.
I’d seen passing reference to other local Channel Island
writers in the local press; brave, fearless, handsome, modest writers like
myself embracing the age of internet self-publishing, unafraid to put their fiction
out there for public consumption. Surely there must be a place where they
gathered? An online hub or community for the swapping of tales, the comparing
of nets, the swapping of buckets? Which way, then, to Rockpoolers-R-Us?
To my surprise I found that there wasn’t one.
And so I set one up. Enter Channel Island Fiction, a small
but perfectly proportioned Facebook group featuring a small group of
independent poets and writers sharing work, smilies and encouragement. The
original aim of the group was based upon Forster’s famous imperative, and for a
few weeks only connecting is what we
did. Venturing out from my rock pool (with bamboo stick mercifully retrieved) I
began to scour the coast for local authors with work for sale, scooping up gems
like A.P.Wolf’s Vagabond, Dina
Andrew’s Tears in the Sand and Roy
McCarthy’s Tess of Portelet Manor and
ferrying them back to the group like some sandy-footed Gollum. Once there these
titles were listed on the site for all with an interest in local authors to
see, buy and more importantly read.
This element of the site continues, and it’s a real joy for me
to scroll back over the past year’s postings and see quite how many
self-published local titles we’ve managed to list. Equally satisfying are the
connections that have been made – writers talking to writers, thoughts and
advice being shared. I’m sure Mr Forster would approve.
Several months after the inception of the Facebook group it
seemed only right that the C.I.Fiction writers gained somewhere to display
their work, and after a welcome nudge from Guernsey author and all-round good
guy Peter Lihou we set up www.cifiction.com.
Aside from providing us with room to print short stories and poems from some of
our writers (including some wonderful work from poets Catherine Helier and
Jasmin Liron) the site allowed us to expand a little, and within a few months
we’d collected links, information and photographs for an even wider range of
Channel Island writers.
The tide had turned by this point, the white horses charging
back to shore. Self-published Channel Island writers now had a place to go – to
congregate, flaunt and paddle. And as the waters rose, so the impetus grew to
do something more with the talent we had on offer. A published anthology,
perhaps? A collection of C.I.Fiction members’ work? Why not?
I approached Peter Lihou with the idea in October 2013, and received
a characteristically positive response. Better still, Peter offered to publish
the anthology under the banner of his not-for-profit publishing company www.acclaimedbooks.com, set up in to
promote and assist self-published writers. It was agreed early on that this
would be a pan-island enterprise, and that we would attempt to gather work from
across the Channel Islands (and we were so close! Sark and Herm, we have you in
our sights…). Barring Eisteddfods the opportunities for local writers to strut
their funky disco stuff have been lacking of late, and thus it seemed only fair
that we spread the net wider and encouraged public submissions.
C.I.Fiction members were unanimous in their enthusiasm for
the project. Off we went. Cue press releases, radio interviews, social media
sweeps and promotional sky-writing (you probably missed that last one – bloody
fog). Soon the entries were rolling in (more appropriate metaphors for
‘arriving in my inbox’ gratefully received) and within a few weeks we had the
bulk of our anthology submitted and ready to go.
Several writers sent multiple submissions, not all of which
were accepted. Everyone that did
submit something has a piece in there, however (usually their best). And what a
range we’ve ended up with! From David Sellars’ brutally creepy The Cat That Sleeps In My Bed to the
subtly nuanced drama of Daff Noel’s Dirty
Linen; from the Wordsworthian grandeur of F.A.Coury’s The Sea to the raucous bounce of Ian de la Mare’s Small Acts of Rebellion, this is an
anthology as notable for its stylistic and thematic variations as it is for the
geographical proximity of its contributors.
It’s been a slog at times - were emails written on paper
then Peter Lihou and myself would be on our second stack by now - but it’s been
worth it. I can’t thank Peter enough for his patience and the professionalism
he’s brought to the project (copyright? What’s that? Oh yes), as well as for
the re-formatting and general fiddlery he’s taken in his stride as we waded out
toward completion.
We’ve made some friends on the way. I’m hugely grateful to
Ian Rolls for allowing us to use his artwork on the cover and for persevering
in his belief that handwritten cover text would work. It does. Thanks also to
The Jersey Arts Trust, for giving us their support in the form of a grant
allowing us to produce a limited print run. And finally a thank you to the
Guernsey and Jersey branches of Women’s Refuge for the fantastic work they do,
and to whom all proceeds made from the sale of this anthology will be going.
So there we go. It’s been such a busy time that I’ve only
now just taken the time to look up from this all this anthologising and see
that the waters have crept up on me. Like I said, it’s a cheeky sod, the sea.
You don’t see it coming. There I was this time last year splashing round in my
own little rock pool, and now here I am – that little speck over there – linked
up to a whole load of other little pools and waving cheerily back to shore. Tide’s
high; long may it continue to rise.
