Hello! Tell us about yourself, your writing and how you discovered the Sponsored Write?
My name’s Stephen Laws. I’m the author of 11 novels, numerous short stories, columnist, reviewer, film-festival interviewer, and lucky enough to have been the recipient of several awards. Peter Cushing loved my novels but hated the bad language therein. Horror actress Ingrid Pitt organised a team search of my hotel room, concentrating on a ‘haunted sock drawer’. Roger Corman bought me a pizza. I made Christopher Lee cry in public. I won second prize in a 1963 ‘Name the Sugar Puff Bear’ competition. My son has a famous godfather in the genre. I play piano, and one of my compositions was performed with full orchestra on a pre-Civil War Yugoslav television ‘variety’ programme. This is all true. You can find my work at www.stephen-laws.com
I was contacted directly about Sponsored Write and was immediately attracted to the idea, not just the concept of writing a story in a day (something that Ray Bradbury claimed he did regularly), but also the charity for which earnings were aimed.
Are you a “deadlines person” outside the Sponsored Write? Is the time-limit part of the challenge or the attraction?
I’ve always been a deadline person when it comes to novels. When my first novel was published, the contract had an option for a second novel and there was a deadline attached to it – so it certainly sharpened my focus right at the beginning. Deadlines featured continually thereafter, and I’ve always found that helpful rather than a problem.
Many of the writers involved have personal connections with Macmillan Cancer Support. Are you happy to share your experience of the charity’s work?
I have deep personal connection here, not only my mother and father but also my wife’s mother – and the Macmillan staff were utterly superb at times of great emotional stress.
What’s it like being in a Sponsored Write?
Well, it’s great being in such good company – even if we are working apart and individually!
What do you make of this year’s theme, ‘Constant Renewal’?
I’m not sure. Think I might ask my pal Ramsey if he has any spare ideas that I can use. He thought it up. So, it’s his fault. As soon as I heard about the theme, I decided NOT to think about it and stay true to the spirit of the Sponsored Write initiative. When the subject comes up, as it does now with your question, I try hard to file it away in my head until the day I start writing. I’m probably kidding myself, though. Most writers I know have ‘ideas files’, notepads, undeveloped research material, thoughts, random scribbled moments, newspaper cuttings, odd phrases and words that have intriguing possible associations for stories (There are several on my study shelves right next to me now). It might be that something there will leap to mind when I sit down and start writing. The phrase might just be part of a jigsaw puzzle that connects things I’ve already been thinking about and result in a story. Or not! I might just begin ‘blank’, apply pen to paper and see what comes out.
Absolutely anything else you’d like to share?
If you’re an aspiring writer and never had anything published, try to write a story in a day. Do yourself a ‘Ray Bradbury’! Give yourself that twenty-four parameter to determine its length. Get it down on paper, don’t worry about shape, form or content – just get a story down. Don’t go back over it too much; just get the story down. And then on the following day you can go back to it. Then you can amend and reshape and cut and add. Go on – give it a try.
Hello! Tell us about yourself, your writing and how you discovered the Sponsored Write?
With pleasure! I’m a memoirist, novelist, essayist, and short story writer who switches countries every few years. I was born in the US, but left in 2006 to take a job as a newspaper editor in Yemen. That job led me to writing my first book, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, a memoir about the hilarity that ensued when I took over a Yemeni newsroom and – more importantly – about my brilliant Yemeni reporters. Just as I was about to leave the country, I met my husband, and ended up staying another three years. Our daughter was born while we lived there, and I began writing my second book, the novel The Ambassador’s Wife. Since then, we’ve lived in London, Bolivia, and Uzbekistan. My third book, Exile Music, was inspired by the Jewish survivors who fled to La Paz to escape the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s. I’ve recently finished another novel set in Bolivia, about a queer community living underground, and am working on one set in Uzbekistan.
My life was upended in March of this year when I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I am in London for treatment, while my husband and daughter remain in Tashkent for work and school respectively. The hardest part is the separation from them. My work has thus slowed a bit as my focus has necessarily changed to surviving long enough to see my daughter through adulthood.
I met Rachel Knightley at one of the meetings of the novelists’ group of the Society of Authors. I can’t even remember how we first got to know each other, how it all went. I remember ringing her during the first lockdown, when my daughter and I had been evacuated to London, and crying as I walked through a park. And ever since then we see each other when I am in London and when I heard about the Sponsored Write I asked her if I could join! I’m always happy to write in service of a cause.
Are you a “deadlines person” outside the Sponsored Write? Is the time-limit part of the challenge or the attraction?
I love deadlines. I worked as a journalist for some fifteen years before switching to writing books fulltime, and I write so much more so much faster when given a deadline. I wish more people would give me writing deadlines! I’ve long wished my agent would say, I need the next book by such and such a date. Because I would do it. If you don’t tell me when something is due, you may never get it. I love the deadline challenge of the Sponsored Write, because it forces me not to be overly precious with my words and to just get something down. My inner editor barely has time to step in. Which is generally a good thing, at least in a first draft.
Many of the writers involved have personal connections with Macmillan Cancer Support. Are you happy to share your experience of the charity’s work?
Absolutely. Last year when I did the Sponsored Write, I had no experience with Macmillan Cancer Support. Now, alas, I have come to rely on them for all manner of help. They have financial advisors who can help with applications for grants and loans, they provide nurses I can ring every day to ask questions or just to cry. They have online support groups. They provide every kind of information pamphlet on every kind of issue cancer patients of call kinds face, from how to manage your sex life during treatment (yes people with cancer sometimes want a sex life!) to what to eat and where to seek help. I don’t know how I would manage without Macmillan.
What’s it like being in a Sponsored Write?
Last year, I did the Sponsored Write in Tashkent, in my little home office. I enjoyed being challenged to write on a theme, and the adrenaline of the short time period. It was also fun to chat with the other writers at the end. The story I wrote became the first germ of my newest novel. So, not a waste of time!
What do you make of this year’s theme, ‘Constant Renewal’?
You’ll find out, if you sponsor us! But I think we could all use some kind of constant renewal, just to survive our broken planet, our broken societies. The planet itself needs constant renewal. The cells of my body could also do with some renewal. But I don’t want to give too much away here. What if I want to use it in a story?
Absolutely anything else you’d like to share!
Please donate if you can, and I promise to do my best to write something you will enjoy reading as part of our anthology! If you’re interested in reading about my cancer – trying to avoid the word journey here – adventures, including my interactions with Macmillan, I’m keeping an online journal on Caring Bridge. https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/jennifersteil/journal
It’s ridiculously long and personal and full of unrelated rants, but if you want to know what goes through the mind of one current cancer patient, it will give you that.