A bit more research… and a Facebook author page
Off today to visit a place mentioned in passing in the draft of Glisteningair so far: Singapore. Except in Glisteningair it only exists as a theme park.
Still hoping it will generate ideas.
And I have a Facebook author page – please sign up, if you are so inclined:
And the rewriting begins
It’s not about the writing, it’s the rewriting. Working on the sequel now, thanks to notes from brilliant writers and mansucript assessors.
Book Club resources available
After a few suggestions from book clubs, I have pulled together some resources and leading questions, at the link below. I’d love to hear any other questions that occurred to you when reading Vividwater:
Vividwater paperback
I have published a Print on Demand version, so people outside New Zealand can order it as a paperback:
Amazon.com: Vividwater eBook : Owens, Jacqueline: Kindle Store
Thank you NZSA Wellington!
A lovely night last night, with other Wellington writers.
And now as the featured writer:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19WyzJ2Mhr/
10 writers read – event in Wellington, 10 December
Excited to announce I’ve been chosen as one of the 10 writers for the NZSA Wellington’s Writers Showcase. It’s on Wednesday 10th December, 6pm, at Two-Fifty-Seven, 257 Willis Street, upstairs from Unity Books:
Wild winds in Wellington – but bargain e-books as well
Today in Wellington and across a lot of the South Island and lower North Island of New Zealand, we are in the midst of the wildest winds for at least a hundred years. For those who know Wellington, that’s a very high bar, given the legendary winds in this city.
If you’re trapped at home, sheltering from the winds, or for any other reason, I have a price promotion for you: Vividwater is available on Amazon and Kobo for US$ 0.99:
Vividwater eBook by Jacqueline Owens – EPUB | Rakuten Kobo New Zealand
Vividwater – Kindle edition by Owens, Jacqueline. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
Another review – and price promotion coming soon
I thought I had scoured the internet for every available review of Vividwater, but missed this one from Wellington’s Regional News:
Vividwater – Reviewed by Jo Lucre | Regional News Connecting Wellington
Alas, the Regional News doesn’t come in hard copy format to my letterbox anymore – it’s a sign of a times, but I miss it a bit.
Also, e-book readers watch out for a price promotion on Amazon and Kobo in a few days. E-books made my lockdown experience in 2020 so much more enjoyable: without Libby, the free Wellington City Libraries e-book app, I would have gone nuts with boredom!
More questions about the science – SpecFicNZ review
A good review on the SpecFicNZ website here:
Review: Vividwater by Jacqueline Owens – SpecFicNZ
But this time, for all my lack of science nous, I do have an opinion on the basic premise that the world is running out of clean water – but we still have agriculture, which is very water-intensive. I could see a world, where our water supplies are sufficient, but controlled to control people. Also, controlling the water supply means enough low-grade water can be funneled to agriculture, as it earns such a lot of money.
In New Zealand we already make enough food to feed ten times our population. We already have environmental issues when high dairy prices led to farmers ‘dairy transitioning’ – not a new type of sex reassignment surgery for rural communities, but changing to dairy when prices are high – and we already pay more for locally made butter in our supermarkets than in those in Singapore and the UK:
Mainland Salted Butter 500g | Fridge, Deli & Eggs | New World
Dystopia for teens and environmental decay – reviews coming in
I was glad that the reviewer from ReadNZ/ Te Pou Muramura enjoyed the book:
Vividwater – Reviews • Read NZ Te Pou Muramura
and recommended it for high school kids who like dystopian fiction. Makes me wonder how real they would find the world already – maybe too close for comfort? I did, after all, grow up in a New Zealand that was, on the surface, more egalitarian. Except if you were brown, gay, foreign, or otherwise other. People in their teens today have known an entirely different country.
I was glad the reviewer was waiting for more – it’s coming!
Also read the thought-provoking review in Landfall, by the poet, novelist and environmental activist Tim Jones:
Something that stuck with me was his comment that the environment and society in Vividwater should have been more degraded – something I resisted, as I wanted to show a society that was pretending nothing was wrong, despite screaming evidence to the contrary.
How much can you create an alternative world in fiction? How much can you rely on a reader’s suspension of disbelief? In Breaking Bad, one of the early seasons hinges on Walter White creating drugs so pure they gave of a bluish white light and were called Blue Sky – in reality, something with the chemical composition would have been a dirty urine colour. I didn’t care, though: blue sky was such a great image. I was less convinced by The Luminaries, when a formerly illiterate character can read after being hypnotised – the power of hypnosis to give character skills they don’t have may have worked in Trilby, but it’s not actually possible. I felt bad for liking In the Name of the Father, given the controversy about errors in the story, because it was about real people who had already suffered enough.
But was it enough that the film had an emotional truth? Or for that, is it only acceptable in more clearly fantastical stories, like Breakfast on Pluto, on a similar subject?
Epub giveaway – through Library Thing
I’m doing a giveaway of the ePub of Vividwater here:
Book Giveaway for Vividwater by Jacqueline Owens
If you are interested in reading and reviewing, please sign up on Library Thing – a great site that links books and readers.
Not just for Vividwater, of course!
Global Girls Online Book Club – this Saturday, 7th June
Excited to report I will be the Author of the Day on 7th June 2025 – this Saturday – at the Global Girls Online Book Club on Facebook.
Please drop in and say Hi!
There will also be giveaways, so watch out for questions and clues.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2707378716037558
More media – Coast Access Radio and More FM
I really enjoyed talking to Catherine Scullin for her Books Aloud show on Coast Access Radio: https://lnkd.in/gPJT9cvw
https://lnkd.in/g7x6Ve2u
https://lnkd.in/ge6Gdht6
And very grateful for this review on the More FM Book club:
https://lnkd.in/grihkZju
A review – thank you DustyShelves
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2052790734891439/permalink/2650658805104626
Very chuffed at this lovely review from the DustyShelves facebook group.
… I usually stay well clear of anything with the word “dystopian” in it – but there was something in the publicity that tempted me to this book…. I am thrilled to say it was a great decision and I was justly rewarded for taking the punt on this title.
It doesn’t mention global warming in any way – however it is there the whole time just bubbling – or not bubbling – under the story.
Set in New Zealand sometime in the future – perhaps only thirty or forty years in the future when the world has suffered “Two Big Droughts” – bit like two world wars.
Water is the new gold – this brings in China to New Zealand – very much like a present day China – the story is complete with strong dangerous characters in this water valued world.
Lead character “Miss Alex Pym” – a delightful name but a character who works in a water supplier as a “Mnemopath” – a secretary with amazing memory retention.
She meets up with a boyfriend from a longtime ago who now works for the Chinese company that Alex’s company sells water to.
It’s a whole lot more interesting than the above – believe me….
And there are free giveaways… Mindfood and GrownUps
Look for the May edition of MindFood magazine, with the picture of Jamie Lee Curtis on the cover – there are eight free copies of Vividwater to win.
For members of the web magazine GrownUps, there are two free copies to win:
Book Giveaway | Vividwater – GrownUps New Zealand
And we’re live!
It’s happened – the book launch at Unity Books in Wellington…
And a few reviews:
https://www.nzbooklovers.co.nz/post/vividwater-by-jacqueline-owens
It’s all getting real
Things are advancing at pace slowly, or inching quickly: depends on the level of optimism and how well I slept the night before. Distributor, publicist, a few interviews, a bit of interest in reviews, signed off on the cover, soft copy and e-books proofs. And a launch date – 2nd April at Unity Books, Wellington, 6pm.
Now the hard part, telling people, putting myself out there.
Another crumb
I’d never heard of a vivid diamond until I read the account of Jho Low, the Malaysian financier who embezzled something like five billion dollars from the Malaysian economy:
Billion Dollar Whale – Wikipedia
Vivid diamonds are the highest quality of diamonds there are, the ultimate in luxury, the crème de la crème of diamonds. It got me thinking – what if this applied to other things? What if it applied to things you need to keep you alive, the most important of all: water? How does that make people act and think?
It’s in bookstores!
You can see where here.
Which I promise is not the link to a dodgy Brazilian fart porn site. I wouldn’t do that, even if I knew hat Brazilian fart porn was.
A random search for the distributor, Nationwide, pulled up all these other places, that have at least a few copies. But the journey of a thousand miles stats with the first steps, as Lao Tsu said, something I used to find very comforting.
E-books are coming – pre-order
I have conguered my tech phobia (for now) and managed to upload Vividwater to Amazon and Kobo. In a related vein, I also managed to jimmy a fix on my Nutribullet with a few well-placeed toothpick fragments.
Why do I, and so many women, think we’re crap at technology? Is it learned behaviour, something to do with looking ans sounding feminine? For the moment, I’m feeling pretty tech savvy.
And now for the speech
The food is ordered for the launch on 2nd April at Unity, people have said they’re coming. Now I just have to say something. Water, work, memory. Inequality, drought, climate change. Thanks for everyone. So long and thanks for all the fish, etc etc…
The character of Lawrence had been hanging around in my head for a much longer time: first, when I was working in London as a posh British man living in a luxury apartment in the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, which was near where I lived. A former home for girls orphaned by the Crimean War, and then a prisoner of war camp in World War II, it was now a mixture of offices and strangely posh flats, some complete with minstrels’ galleries. It was wonderfully scary and evocative at night, especially when you crept in the entrances that nobody ever remembered to lock.
- after a two-day period to give feedback where I was not allowed to tell anyone else, and the management and HR people had to read from a script in every interaction with me, the job being disestablished
- having to apply for a badly scoped job I didn’t get, after providing an EOI, then 20 odd pages of further information
- an interview to justify my commercial existence and prove what I did (not the team, it’s all I talk now) where everyone but me seemed to have been taken over by pod people1
- not getting the job, and lastly
- maybe being in the running for one at a lower level.
Rehearsals and scraps of ideas for my speech have been pinging away in my head for a week. it’s about water, work and memory. It’s about my past jobs.
Until last year I would have said it’s not about my current job, but now, after months of restructuring, my job being safe, then being ‘proposed to be disestablished’ and then:
Well, after all that, I’m not so sure. Maybe all jobs turn out that way in the end, starting with promise and humming merrily along until someone notices you.
If this is the case, my speech should be about the role of the invisible Excellent Women in the world, with due respect to Elizabeth Pym.
Water, work, memory. Corporate infighting, being above it all, but not being able to escape. A world which seemed very futuristic when I started writing Vividwater in the early days of the pandemic, but feels much closer now.
- Except for one person, who already was one. ↩︎
Crumbs of ideas
Royal Victoria Patriotic Building – Wikipedia
It would have been an amazing, if spooky, place to live: far more atmospheric than my Tudorbethan semi-detached up the road on Nightingale Lane. That building was probably the genesis of Lawrence’s house, now that I think of it.
The main character, Alex, took longer to arrive. They often do: they have to do so much more work, it’s as if they can’t be bothered some of the time.
Vividwater 