Katie Lee's Top Secret Project Podcast

Hello gang! A different sort of newsletter from me this week because I am trying to get all these books finished and ready to sell! This is an edited extract from a piece I wrote during Karen McLeod’s excellent creative writing course. If you like this sort of thing, let me know. I have more like it.

If you enjoyed this please do share it!

I’m struggling to decide what direction to take this newsletter in. This is because I am actually a very boring person. I don’t mean I have had a boring life. I have some fairly good stories – like the one about the time I made the Queen laugh – and I have suffered enough childhood trauma to write one of those depressing memoirs that were so popular for a minute in the noughties, but in myself, I am mostly interested in things that many (normal?) people find incredibly dull.

Here’s a for instance. The other day, I was at a quiz at my daughter’s school to raise money for their play (because apparently state schools can’t afford to put on plays any more and god help us). There was a question about which junction of the M25 had been closed, and my friend, an extremely Cool Woman (new album out now in all good record shops), said, “What a BORING question.”

But here’s what she didn’t know: I had just that day read a whole Twitter thread about the M25.

That is the kind of person you’re dealing with here. The kind of person who, yes please, will very much click on a link in a newsletter about why the M25 is a victim of its own success.

I’m the sort of person who will accidentally commandeer a perfectly innocent comment thread to talk about the con of non-bio laundry cleaner. I will discuss the myth of rising damp at length with anyone foolish enough to own an old house. I think Roman concrete is fascinating.

Meanwhile, as if that were not enough of a barrier, I have read some pretty catty remarks in the Substack Notes section about how dreary it is to write about writing or the industry.

And so we come to my problem. I am still not sure what direction to take my Substack in, but I’m fairly confident that my niche obsessions aren’t going to help me sell more novels, and apparently people are bored of reading about writing. So, I guess what am saying is: stay tuned for my newsletter about my childhood traumas!

That is a joke (although I reserve the right to occasionally mine my pain for content, like any self-respecting creator). What I am really saying is, please feel free to email me or leave a comment and let me know what you would be interested to read.

In the meantime, here are some links and things I’ve been watching and reading. I’ll leave you to decide if any of them are boring.

Links etc

Was I in A Cult?

By pure coincidence I’ve been going deep on Mormonism recently. I am a big fan of the Was I In A Cult podcast, partly because I am pretty sure I spent my twenties and early thirties in what was a borderline yoga cult, which I then REJOINED in my forties like a total loser.

This week listened to host (and filmmaker), Tyler Measom tell his story. After, I tracked down his documentaries about Mormonism. The first is Sons of Perdition (free on Roku), which is about the young boys kicked out of fundamental Mormon households, abandoned to live without money, possessions, education or basic human decency. The second is Murder Among the Mormons (Netflix) is an eye-popping tale that it’s better to know as little about as possible going in (I spoiled it for myself after episode two so I urge you not to do the same). By coincidence, I had already watched Tyler’s brilliant documentary about The Great Randi, who spent his life debunking psychics.

I also listened to Tal Bachman discuss his exit from Mormonism. This episode is amazing for music fans, since it features a reminder of one of the biggest One Hit Wonder songs of the 90s (which I had totally forgotten) and Tal’s dad Randy (another Randy!) who wrote some massive hits in the sixties and seventies that you will definitely have heard.

And finally, we are watching Under the Banner Of Heaven (Netflix and ITV X), starring Andrew Garfield, which is so far brilliant. Andrew does some lovely acting with his tie and makes a perfect Mormon, and there’s a Culkin in there who frequently looks so much like Kieran it’s confusing, especially as he has a much deeper voice.

As you can imagine, I’m feeling very Heavenly Fathered out right now.

PS. Still on the theme of cults, did you know that Jessica Sutta from the Pussycat Dolls claims to have been in a cult run by Phil Silvers’s daughter? She did an episode of Was I In A Cult about it.

On Pain

Sarno identified a disorder called Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS) that describes how the brain orders a reduction of blood flow to a part of the body, resulting in mild oxygen deprivation, which causes pain and other symptoms. Essentially, Sarno revived the Freudian idea of hysteria, pointing out that disorders spread in epidemic fashion, and that the mind prefers physical pain to confronting unconscious emotional pain.

Still on the theme of Yoga, here is a fascinating piece by Neil Scott about yoga injuries, pain and a man called Dr Sarno, an early proponent of chronic pain being in the mind, often caused by trauma. Perhaps this is why I suffer chronic pain from an injury that MUST have healed by now but which I got from my very cult-adjacent yoga class while I was also struggling with the stress of a troubled business partnership.

Being bendy is not the blessing you think it is

“No other condition in the history of modern medicine has been neglected in such a way as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.” Grahame, a now-retired NHS rheumatologist, specialised in hypermobility and connective tissue disorders. He was pivotal in advocating the view that EDS is likely to be far more common than we realise, and that it is significantly under- and misdiagnosed because its signs are missed.

Still on the theme of chronic pain and being a very bendy person. This piece about hypermobility – specifically EDS – made me feel quite angry. I don’t have EDS and I only rank 7/9 on the Beighton Score (a test I absolutely HATE doing and would like to argue about with someone because I think it’s bs), but I have suffered CONSTANT problems with hypermobility all my life.

Daisy Lafarge’s account echoes so many of my own experiences it’s crazy.

I was 25 when I first got the sense that my head might not be securely attached to my body. I got home from teaching my undergraduate students one day, sat down, turned my head to one side, and screamed: an indescribable, apoplectic pain shot through the base of my skull. It left me flat on my back, unable to move or hold my head up for four or five days. What I thought was a freak episode soon became regular, recurring three or four times a year, usually if I had been sitting for extended periods or walking with a laptop in my bag. I learned to normalise it.

I was about 10 or 11 the first time I “cricked” my neck. I turned and felt a burning agony down the whole side of my neck. I remember I had to jump 180 to check there weren’t any rapists behind me as I walked alone down a path near my sister’s house. It has happened regularly ever since – during lacrosse matches, right as I wake up, sitting in a chair minding my own business. My daughter had her first experience of it a few months ago too, so that’s nice.

When I told him I was hypermobile, he almost cartwheeled. “Wonderful!” He exclaimed. “It just means you are beautifully flexible.” He was even, I recall, “envious” of all the tricks I could undoubtedly do.

Did Daisy and I see the same doctor? The GP I saw after my yoga-induced whiplash injury told me I should be grateful I can put my leg behind my head since it’s a wonderful trick to be able to do. At this point I couldn’t move my neck at all without agony all the way down to my chest and back.

Honestly, everything about this article spoke to me. So much so that I have taken about five goes to read the whole thing.

I should add that Daisy makes a point of saying her illness is often disregarded as “hysteria,” but I don’t think her experience is mutually exclusive with Dr Sarno’s theories on “hysteria” in that context. I am perfectly able to believe my hypermobility is causing me grief, but my brain is hanging on to that grief in ways that aren’t helpful. Chronic pain is a weird thing.

The next one won’t be this long, I promise (maybe)

It's really hard to talk about things that make you feel vulnerable. But, turns out, it's super easy to talk about how hard it is to talk about things that make you feel vulnerable. In this newsletter I talk about how secretive I am for someone who has shared so much of herself.

You can find more of this kind of chat over on Katie Lee's Top Secret Project.

I have been why I'm not trying to go the trad route with my crime books quite a few times already, so I thought I would address it here with the usual levels of painful honesty, because – as we’ve established – writing stuff to a mailing list doesn’t count.

Join me over on Substack for more.

I have spent enough time in the various self-publishing groups and gently cyberstalking phenomenally successful indie authors to know that the key to success is not rocket science. Here is the surefire template for success.

The Surefire Template for Success:

* Write crime fiction

* Make them police procedurals

* Write in the third person, past tense

* Have a male lead (probably a DCI, middle aged, white)

* Give him a drinking habit/weight issue/messy divorce/anger management problem

* Be funny if you can, but at least make the team a kind of family

* Probably best to use a male or gender-neutral pen name

* Write fast

* Write a series. The more the better

* Make them good.

Now let’s mark my work

* Write crime fiction. Tick (phew!)

* Make them police procedurals. Big cross. See below.

* Write in the third person, past tense. Easy win!

* Have a male lead (probably a DCI, middle aged, white). X Fail. Insert the Family Fortunes noise. The main character is a young female journalist. The main police officer is a middle-aged female DS of mixed heritage.

* Give him a drinking habit/weight issue/messy divorce/anger management problem. Hmm. Half a tick? A quarter? More on my struggles with being mean to my own characters another time.

* Be funny if you can, but at the least make the team a kind of family. Well *I* think they’re funny.

* Probably best to be a man or use a male/gender-neutral pen name. ?? TBC

* Write fast. Bah.

* Write a series. The more the better. Does two count as a lot? It felt like a lot when I was writing them.

* Make them good. Please god.

I will write more about the rest of the list in another newsletter, but in the meantime let us dwell on my first few failures.

Write Police Procedurals

When I started on this project, I didn’t read much crime fiction. Yes, I had read a few Agatha Christies, most of the Sherlock Holmes books, and I studied a Wilkie Collins at university, but apart from that I couldn’t really think of a crime novel I’d read.

This was a bad start. It already felt like a mercenary endeavour (more on writing for money in future), but to write a genre I didn’t read added an element of snobbery. Did I think I was too good for crime fiction? Surely not. Given I will read anything that contains either 1. dragons or 2. mice who talk, I don’t think I can be charged with snootiness about any genre. It just wasn’t for me. However, I think we can all agree that, in life, it’s best to try not to be Gerald Ratner. I wanted to like my own products, you know?

Template Schmemplate

Luckily, salvation was right around the corner. I realised that of course I read crime fiction! Were Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels not crime fiction?! And then I discovered other authors. Authors like Belinda Bauer, Janice Hallett, Lisa Jewell, Elly Griffiths. All brilliant.

There was just one problem: none follow the Surefire Template for Success. (Apart, possibly, for Elly Griffiths, but not in the books I have read by her).

Now you may say that this is evidence that the Template is more a set of suggestions. See how brilliantly these people have done, you might cry! Lisa Jewell is at pains to let you know she doesn’t bathe in £50 notes, but she also sold 2m copies of one book in the US alone. Belinda Bauer was the first crime writer to be long-listed for the Booker. These people are rocking it.

But they aren’t self-publishing to appeal to a very specific audience, that is to say, Whale Readers. These are people who reliably read at least one book a week. (I am in an incredibly book-hungry crime fiction group and I can tell you that one book a day is more the norm.)

So yes, these writers break the rules, and yes these writers may be living in £3m homes, but they are traditionally published with proper marketing people. Their books can jump out of the crime fiction readership pool and into the literary fiction and popular fiction reader pools.

For my plan to work, I was meant to stick to the Template For Success.

But then I started writing, and what came out on the page was a journalist trying to blag her way into a hotel. You see? This is what happens when you let your subconscious do the talking. After all, it’s easier for me to write a journalist (something I used to be) than it is to try to work out if police are calling it SOCO or CSI these days (the jury is still out).

So there we have it. I have failed to write to the Indie template and, for reasons I will share another time, I have opted not to try to find a publisher who can shoehorn my books into the right eyeballs.

Pray for me, people.

So where are these books anyway?

Good question, I’m glad I typed it for myself. Due to yet another egregious error, and for reasons too dull to get into (but I’m sure that won’t stop me getting into them eventually), I wrote book two first. This means I cannot publish the first book until I have finished editing the second book (that is to say, book one). Since I am very much enjoying pretending to have a career as an author, this is not as distressing as you might imagine. Currently, I can live in a beautiful land of what ifs, where I imagine my books will magically buck the trend and succeed despite the fact I have failed to follow the Surefire Template for Success.

But to actually answer the question, I am about half way through editing the first book and then it will need to go to a proper editor. I have to get the covers designed and then I’ve got to lay it all out and get the print and digital files made. Write the blurb, work out how to do all the various Amazon settings, think of a title and a pen name, find ARC and/or Beta readers and learn how to do Facebook ads that don’t suck.

Just thinking about all this makes me want to scrap the whole idea and go to my allotment instead.

Coming up: Why am I indie publishing? Why I believe writing fast doesn't mean writing badly. How I tried to become a plotter not a pantser. Why speaking to experts for research is awful. Subscribe for all this and more!

Links that will now justify the time I spend online:

'POOR THINGS' MADE ME SICK: I'M REDESIGNING IT. Art YouTuber LavenderTowne perfectly summarises everything I hated about this film whilst doing mesmerising “fan” art. (h/t my daughter.)

Herds of Moss Balls mysteriously roam the Arctic together. Little moss balls called Glacier Mice wander about and no one knows how or why. It’s too much! I heard them discussing these on No Such Thing As A Fish and now I just want Miyazaki to swear off retirement for one more film.

‘“I don't like no whips no chains and you can't tie me down.” I mean this is where we've fallen since 1968.’ Rick Beato is on very amusing form here ripping apart the song lyrics in the Top 10, while also digressing to point out that the banjo part in Beyonce’s Texas Hold ‘Em is wrong (‘Someone should have said, that note doesn’t really sound that good, it’s kind of lame.’)

LISTEN! PJ Harvey’s I Inside the Old Year Dying pairs brilliantly with Wall of Eyes by The Smile. I am obsessed.

I wanted to do just do this quietly without any fuss, but I'm forcing myself to talk about it in the hope it will get easier just to SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS.

To find out more about my Top Secret Project, head to my Substack, where you can truffle about in the archives.