Ready or not

Lorraine Mace is desperate to find an audience for the talks she had prepared before the virus cancelled all her events

Idon’t normally start with an explanation. However, this month, I feel I should do so as I have no wish to upset or offend readers. The column is about the effect the virus had on how events I was due to attend in 2020. I know the pandemic has been painful for many and don’t want anyone to feel that I am minimising that suffering, but this column has always been about my writing life and, along with everyone else on the planet, the virus disrupted my best-laid plans.

I hope you’ll laugh with me – or at me, I don’t mind – as I tell you how my attempts to raise my author profile failed miserably.

The year started brilliantly. In February Rage and Retribution, the fourth in the DI Sterling series, was released. This was the first under the auspices of my new publisher Headline, so it was a very special time. I was so ecstatic at being published by one of the Big Five that I allowed my feet to leave the ground and I floated up on cloud nine.

I was convinced that this was it – at last I was going to become a household name.

Could it be that my detective series would be talked about in the same breath as the great writers of crime? Make room Martina Cole, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Patricia Cornwall and Ann Cleeves, I’m on my way up! Oh how easy it is to prove that old saying right about pride coming before a fall. Huh! I hadn’t even taken the first step before ending up flat on my face.

I should have known my name wasn’t going to be up in lights any time soon when coverage of the pandemic started to dominate all news reports. At the beginning of March, as told in an earlier column, I held the paperback book launch.

Unfortunately, fear of the virus, which was already the topic of everyone’s conversation, naturally kept many invited guests away. Even the press reporter, normally desperate to cover sufficient events to fill the pages of the local newspaper, chose not to attend – just in case. But enough people turned up for me to be able to convince myself it was a minor (albeit barely noticed) success.

Still, at that point, I wasn’t overly concerned because I knew I still had some amazing events lined up. In addition to giving a talk on being a crime author to the clients of an international bank, I had been invited as guest speaker to three book clubs. There were also two international literary festivals later in the year where I was down to join other authors on crime discussion panels.

In short, this was going to be the year where I would be able to shout about my crime series to all and sundry. In my simple mind I was about to shift up a gear or three in public awareness.

The first event was for the bank and I knew this would be an opportunity second to none, so I wanted to be organised. I spent hours working on the various aspects of my talk, bringing in snippets of humour while describing the research I do on how to kill, torture and maim – all in a day’s work. Even if I do say so myself, it could have been a good night as I was so well prepared.

Titled Inside the Mind of a Crime Writer (inside my head is somewhere my partner says no same person wants to be) I spent many happy hours refining the talk, covering such topics as writing from a psychopath’s perspective (something I seem to find particularly easy to do – no wonder Chris sleeps with one eye open) and explaining how easy I find it to devise ways to kill people.

A week before the big day, the event was postponed for a couple of weeks, then for a couple of months, finally to a vague possible date in 2021 – maybe. At least I had the book clubs to look forward to, but they also disappeared into a distant horizon that seemed to drift further away the longer I looked at it.

Unsurprisingly, neither literary festival took place, but I would have been more astonished if they had, than if they hadn’t.

To make use of all the material I wrote, I’m ready talk to anyone I can pin in a corner. Online, offline, two people waiting in line – I’ll be there!