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Barbara Erasmus: The winding road to writing Below Luck Level (Based on a canceled speech to U3A)

Updated: Nov 19

I turn 75 this year and must admit to considerable surprise about how productive the last 25 years have proved to be! When I reached the milestone of turning 50, I couldn’t face another classroom of adolescents – it was time to change direction! My majors at university were English and Social Anthropology so the job opportunities in the world of commerce were zero  – particularly if the applicant has already been around for half a century!   



Fortuitously, I’d shown some youthful foresight when I latched onto The Silver Fox whose career in commerce outshone mine considerably - we had become regulars on the corporate cocktail party circuit where a chance conversation with a fellow guest gave me a direction!  She was a journalist and after listening to my tale of woe about the dearth of opportunity on my horizon, she suggested free-lancing as an option - no specific qualifications required! This captured my attention immediately because writing had always been a closet skill of mine!  Being 75, I’d grown up in the Christmas cards era and always included an anecdotal letter which was flatteringly well-received by all recipients.  A number of women’s magazines featured a back-page of humorous anecdotes submitted by readers. Could I jazz-up one of my anecdotal Christmas letters for public consumption, I wondered? I’ll never forget my elation the day my copy of Fair Lady arrived, with Guest Last Word by Barbara Erasmus on the back page. I felt as if I’d won the Nobel Prize when my first check arrived!

 

Admittedly, it was a very small check. I am fatally attracted to poorly paid careers! Teachers are notoriously short of money but free-lancing was even worse because the cheques are intermittent, depending on how many submissions are accepted each month. Fortuitously, the journalist who sparked my career added a nugget of advice I have never forgotten. See yourself as a free-lance hooker, she suggested – write for anyone who will pay you!  This explains why my  freelance portfolio contains such a wide variety of articles – I tackled everything from business schools and the stock-market to health and holistic healing. Most importantly, The Silver Fox’s career took us to some of the world’s most exotic destinations - Russia, India, Europe, North and South America, Australia and Vietnam – much of my freelance portfolio is focused on travel! 


As the number of articles I’d had published grew, I became more ambitious and decided to try a novel, despite some significant hurdles. Our school curriculum didn’t include typing. I'm still amazed that I have now written six novels, a miscellany of short stories, and a screenplay using only two fingers! 


Choice of topic was a more significant issue.  I was born in 1948- coincidentally the year the Nats came into power, with the apartheid blueprint lurking ominously in their back pocket. I am intrinsically African, although you wouldn’t guess that at first glance. I am white with an English accent which makes me sound like some distant cousin of the Royal family. I grew up in Zimbabwe, which was as segregated as its South Africa neighbor. It’s a challenge to become an African writer when a criminal political system has isolated you from intrinsic African culture for decades.  It was only after the landmark day when Nelson and Winnie walked out of prison, hand in hand, that it seemed possible to write a novel set in South Africa that wasn’t about apartheid!  


Choice of topic was the major hurdle until another random conversation sparked my interest  - this time with a masters student writing a thesis around an autistic child. Autism was suddenly a hot topic after the release of Rain Man – Dustin Hoffman’s compelling portrayal of an autistic savant.  The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon was a bestseller.  Before I could board the autism bandwagon myself, I had to adopt a policy which evolved into the foundation phase of all six of my subsequent novels.

 

First-hand research!


I signed on as a volunteer teacher at a school for autistic children, allowing me to work with children in all stages on the autistic spectrum. I had access to their teachers, parents, psychologists. There was even an international conference on autism held in Joburg during the year I spent on research – I’m amazed by the amount of time those professionals were prepared to spend talking to a would-be-author like me, entirely lacking in credentials! I will always be in their debt. I filled a dozen notebooks, growing increasingly fascinated by an enigmatic disorder, with its trademark mix of ability and disability, gaining insight into the impact of any child on the autistic spectrum on the lives of everyone who loves them.


Fortuitously by then, I’d come up with a plot! Sibling rivalry. Two sisters, an actuary and an actress-their career choice spells out the difference between them! One a high achiever with Asperger’s Syndrome, the other the mother of a severely autistic child. 


With all my novels, I have I followed the same procedure – I write the first and last chapters at the outset. I want my readers to be familiar with my characters from the start and I always know where they are going. Too many novels have unsatisfactory endings. That’s the easy part!   She was dead when I woke up beside her the next morning is one of my opening lines.   It took me over a year to decided how she died!  My GP thinks I’m a psychopath because I kept phoning to enquire about credible ways to kill her!  But a story slowly grew until another landmark day arrived - I left my two-finger typed manuscript with the receptionist at Penguin Books in Joburg!


Nearly a year passed before someone fished it out of the slush pile and decided it had potential!  A novel published by Penguin! Could this be true?  Because I’m 75, I grew up in the era when Penguin books had orange and white stripes, always associated with quality writing.  I could barely contain my excitement when I unwrapped the first copy of Kaleidoscope, to see that famous Penguin icon beside my name. Excitement snowballed when it was nominated for Best First Novel in an international competition! 


Alas – it didn’t take long to get back to earth. Kaleidoscope didn’t win the competition – and it didn’t fly off bookshelves from Moscow to New York as I had fondly imagined. Being published by Penguin (SA) means exactly that - the book is only published in South Africa –it would go no further than Durban and Cape Town. I had to face the economics of the real world!


Thirty years post-apartheid, the inequities of apartheid linger in the new South Africa. Only a tiny percentage of the local population ever buys a book – the weakness of our currency makes them too expensive! We still lack a reading ethos. Only a handful of authors make sufficient money to be independent. 2000 copies of Kaleidoscope were printed while the first print run of a friend who published her novel in Europe was 45,000… 


But by then, the writing ember was lit and refused to be extinguished! Humor had always been my strong point in my freelance career and so that was tone I adopted in Insecticides,  my second novel – an entertaining story revolving around  friendship and careers.  Drawing on my long background in teaching, I created a trio of characters with insect proportions--a tall mosquito of a girl who writes, an overweight queen bee with the voice of an angel, a tiny sensual firefly who paints. I was frankly amazed when Penguin offered to publish that story – if I agreed to change the title!  They  felt a novel called Insecticides would not sell, even in the gardening section. The internet saved the day!  I keyed in insects and haiku and got an immediate response from a poet in Japan! Even with insects/ some can sing/ some can’t. It was perfect! Even with Insects was published by Penguin, only a year after Kaleidoscope, and both were selected for HOMEBREW – still an annual collection of the best local novels by Exclusive Books – South Africa’s leading book chain!


I’d arrived!  It was time for novel number three. I’m no ivory tower academic with a message for the world. I’m a commercial writer! The plan was always to make enough money to visit the Canadian grandchildren - but despite strings of positive reviews in local newspapers and magazines, I wasn’t getting much richer. I prowled the internet to see which books made the most money. The answer was soon obvious – I had to turn to crime! 


But my novels are all based on first hand research, and I had reservations about getting too close to gangs and guns in the local townships. White-collar crime seemed more accessible. At the time, the story making the headlines involved a high-flier on Joburg Stock Exchange, jailed after embezzling a fortune from Old Mutual through insider trading.  My new heroine would have to be a stockbroker, I decided. I somehow managed to inveigle my way into the boardrooms of investment bankers who naturally had some reservations about disclosing ways to cheat the system.  I worked as a counsellor for women prisoners in Pollsmoor, the infamous jail which had held Mandela as a prisoner. And Chameleon evolved – a jet-set krimi set in Cape Town.      


Another lucky break introduced me to Mike Nicol, a leading South African novelist whose krimis sold well, even on the international market. He was eager to promote crime fiction by launching a daily blog on crime fiction called Crime Beat, but he needed an editor. I decided not to mention that blogging was rather a foreign concept for anyone in my age group. Or my two-finger typing. I volunteered to edit Crime Beat without a salary. In return, he agreed to publish weekly chapters from Chameleon on the Crime Beat blog, giving me new exposure to new international readers. Then I published it myself on Amazon, hoping for multiple sales after the encouraging reviews I posted on the blog. A leading local critic described Chameleon as "a nuanced look at crime and punishment in an almost Dostoevskian style." When I read the review smugly to my son, he asked who this Dostoevsky dude was–perhaps a Russian tennis player? Alas, multiple sales never materialized…. 


After my lack of success on Amazon, I returned to traditional publishing with my fourth novel.  Below Luck Level was also published by Penguin and I’m excited to report an exciting new development in my writing career. The favorable reviews of Below Luck Level  caught the attention of Catalyst Press, an independent publishing agency in the USA, with a special interest in publishing quality writing by African writers. 


I could hardly wait to sign the contract - an international stage at last! 


No memorable conversation triggered my choice of topic for Below Luck Level. By then I was a pensioner myself and memorable conversations started to slip my mind.  I’ve been unable to remember where I parked my car at the supermarket ever since I started driving as a teenager but this becomes more sinister if you are a pensioner.  Panic sets in when I can’t locate my car. Is this how Alzheimer’s starts? I wonder  I remind myself that it’s perfectly normal to forget where you parked the car – there’s only a problem if you can’t remember how to drive it. Or if you can’t find the way home …


I thought autism was a topical subject when I wrote Kaleidoscope but it is nowhere near as topical as Alzheimer’s. By the middle of this century, there will be two billion people over 60. 10% of those people will develop Alzheimer’s by the time they are 65. And after that, the rate doubles every five years. There are already millions of people in the USA alone with Alzheimers and the cost of caring for them has become a significant figure in the national budget. Billions of dollars are spent annually. It accounts for well over 50% of long term insurance claims. 


Because it such a topical issue, novels around Alzheimer’s are currently as common as novels about apartheid used to be in South Africa. How could I persuade readers to buy one more? The challenge was that the bleakness of the topic is at odds with my style of writing, which is essentially light – my speciality, after all, is Christmas letters! And that gave me the idea. Could I write an Alzheimer’s novel which is entertaining despite the inevitable tragedy involved?   I’ve been particularly delighted with reviews which comment that I’ve succeeded! Below Luck Level is more focused on love than loss. I was afraid that first-hand research would be all too easy – all I’d have to do was look in the mirror…


I hope readers will relate to Hannah Cartwright and her mother Chloe – an eccentric, prize-winning author who wrote those books about apartheid I couldn’t face reading. Neither are role models – Chloe’s more into movies than education, while Hannah’s a waitress with a penchant for shoplifting. My story raises emotive issues such as death with dignity or assisted suicide.  I hope readers will empathize with Hannah who hopes that her beloved mother will die like a dog. Like a beloved, cherished dog, stroked, gentlly handed by a loving owner beside a qualified professional who’ll inject a measured dose to make the ending quicker. You can’t do that in Cape Town. South Africa, boasting one of the most enlightened constitutions in the world, denies its citizens a right afforded to its dogs. Even the famous Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland can’t always offer a solution. 


I will have achieved my goal if readers feel that Below Luck Level has a happy ending. I didn’t want to tie up the story of Hannah and Chloe with an unrealistic satin bow but it was important to that Hannah’s future held a credible chance of happiness after the trauma of Chloe’s death. Nothing can change the person Chloe had been before her illness;  the challenging road she and Hannah had travelled could never be erased but the story ends with the hope of healing.


I think I’m too old to start another book but that won’t stop me scouring the net in search of a publisher for my two unpublished novels, which also deal with topical issues,  Four Letter Words revolves around pregnancy issues from abortion to surrogacy and fertility while Don’t Give Your Daughter a Broom is focused on an  Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. No-one is ever too old to stop hoping ….  

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