THE PRESS & JOURNAL

It's difficult to avoid talking about sex when you're taking tea with Chancery Stone.

The café where we meet is busy, but not busy enough for the chatter from surrounding tables to drown out a conversation littered with language way beyond the pale for a family newspaper like this.

The s-word predominates, but there are many more that could only be repeated here as a collection of asterisks and exclamation marks.

Not surprisingly, we're getting plenty of barely concealed interest from those neighbouring tables.

But Chancery is oblivious to the stir she's creating - and almost certainly wouldn't give a fig anyway - as our chat descends further into the dark world her first novel so colourfully portrays.

Colourful is very much a euphemism for her new novel, DANNY, a book she describes as the darkest of family sagas.

It's a story of murder, dark secrets and lies, whose central character is so beautiful he's desired by everyone he meets, whatever their sex.

The author has calculated that the 1,014 pages contain no less than 3,623 swear words and exactly 2,472 references to sex.

All in all, Chancery says, there are more than 12,600 things to object to among the 500,000-plus words that make this a monster of a novel. She calls it the book "Your mother wouldn't like - mine didn't".

Which is why - to use the c-word again - our colourful conversation in Kirkwall is generating more ripples than a sack of stones dropped into a very large pond.

It's also almost certainly the reason why DANNY, to Chancery's growing frustration, became the book publishers wouldn't touch.

Very nearly 100 rejection notes from publishing houses across the land dropped through the Orkney-based author's letterbox.

Most explained that the book was far too long for a first novel. But Chancery suspected this was another of those euphemisms. And her suspicions were confirmed when a manuscript was returned with a "post-it" note from one of the publishing team accidentally still attached*.

"Had a very cursory glance at this and think it is foul," was written on the yellow sticker.   "Have a look if you want, but please just give it the most cursory rejection letter we have."

All but those with the hardest of noses would have had their confidence severely dented by the endless knock-backs Chancery had to cope with.

She readily admits her faith in the book wavered at times. But that faith was underpinned by a firm belief that something very special has flowed from her imagination during two years of fevered writing that produced not one, but four books, each with a word count of half-a-million-plus.

"It might sound strange, but when I was writing I was absolutely convinced I'd produced a best seller," she says. "I used to come downstairs after long writing sessions with a conviction that this was a book people would want to read.

"I never lost that conviction, in spite of the 96 tedious rejections I received. I had a feeling in my bones about the book - and I clung on to that, and my patience has finally been rewarded with Poison Pixie's offer of publication"

The process culminated with the delivery from Scandinavia to Orkney of a satisfying stack of chunky paperbacks - each more than 1,000 pages long.

Now just one more step was needed to give DANNY the sort of launch the author had always dreamed of.

So the firm laid on a lavish, Hollywood-style party, where Orkney's glitterati dressed in their finest and were rewarded with an all-chocolate buffet and a taste of what was billed as the world's first sexually explicit cake.

The cameras whirred as Chancery was whisked away, sipping champagne, in a stretch limo. It was, in the words of many a guest, one hell of a party.

A day or two later we meet to discuss the book.

"I see it as a Wuthering Heights for the new millennium where I've turned everything on its head," she says. "I've flipped all our preconceptions of what a love story should be - another way to describe it is like the dark side of Barbara Cartland."

So had she set out to write a book that can genuinely be labelled controversial, a novel that carries a warning that the content is sexually explicit?

"Yes and no," Chancery says. "I was fed up with the way so many books are written, the way everything stops at the bedroom door. I was fed up of euphemistic writing. So yes, there was part of me that wanted to pull out all the stops and go where no author had gone before."

In DANNY, she is uncompromising in the way she tackles subjects like child abuse. For many, this will be uncomfortable reading.

The author describes how a farming family in the north of England served as her inspirational springboard.

"There were four sons, two of them twins, but all close in age to each other. The middle brother was the favourite of the father - but not of the mother. The eldest boy was the only one interested in farming. The twins were totally ignored and formed a separate unit all of their own.

"The father himself was grumpy and inarticulate and, all in all, there was a very strange dynamic running through the family.

"We were living in the area at the time and somehow they struck a nerve. There was a lot of sibling rivalry and I was fascinated by the way they all interacted - all the hostility, resentments and tensions between them - and particularly by the close bond between these identical twins. It certainly fired my imagination."

Chancery looks back on the writing of DANNY- and its three still-to-be-published sequels - as a time of compulsive activity.

"I hardly saw Max during those two years. I'd simply disappear upstairs and write and write. I was totally caught up in this world I'd created, a world I felt I was living in.

"I loved the whole process, the way I was subverting everything anyone reading the book would expect. I wanted everyone to be constantly surprised by what occurs. Writing it all was a huge pleasure for me."

DAVID HARTLEY

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Chancery's Postscript: The quote in this feature regarding the Post-it note accidentally returned to me is slightly inaccurate and, as the truth is actually even more bizarre, here it is.

My manuscript was sent out in a zip-lock bag made of clear, soft plastic. When it came back I noticed distinct ghost-handwriting carved into its surface. This transpired to be an unwitting carbon of a Post-it note from one editor to another which had been written so emphatically the original note might as well have been included as its content was clearly legible. It read, "Dear Eve, [name illegible] had a very cursory glance at this and thinks it is foul . Have a look if you want but please just give it the most cursory form rejection letter we have. Thx! J."

The 'foul' was underlined so thickly it had indented the MS through the bag. The offenders were literary agents Greene & Heaton of London, who represent P. D. James, and the "cursory form rejection letter" they sent was so unctuous you could have buttered bread with it.

Guess there's a moral in there somewhere...

THE KESWICK REMINDER

The following is an e-mail conversation between Mrs Joyce Wilson, "Book reviewer for the Keswick Reminder", a fairly old, established and respectable Cumbrian journal, and Poison Pixie's Marketing Director. It shows quite admirably, for all those who may believe otherwise, that the world is still a censorious place and sex, regrettably, does not necessarily sell.

"I have read your press release with curiosity! I was brought up on a West Cumbrian farm and my 4 books telling humorous tales about life on our farm sell successfully throughout the county. (Muck But No Money books)

Rape, incest & murder intrigue me! What have I missed?!

Anyhow DANNY interests me & I would love to read & review it. However, my editor (& owner) of the Reminder would not appreciate me promoting a book which she might consider to be porn! She is an elderly lady.

If you care to send a copy to my home address I can move on from there."

This was replied to in the affirmative and she was given the website address so she could read more about it. A little later that same day the following e-mail arrived:-

"I've just looked at your website & read the excerpt from Danny!

Please don't bother to send me a copy. It is porn & does a disservice to the people of West Cumbria. It reminds me of Sarah Hall's book The Electric Michelangelo which I found sickening and sleazy. So DANNY might just be bad enough to reach the short list of the Booker Prize!

I hope my comments don't offend you - but then again if that sort of literature pleases you then anything I say will pass over your head!

I consider myself to be open-minded, but not open to bad taste. I have no wish to probe into the dark of a deeply flawed psychopathic mind.

Try reading my books and treat yourself to a good laugh!"

The finish to this tale of bad taste meets 'The World is Lovely Because I Say So' is that Joyce was convinced to give DANNY a try and not judge it unread. She promised that she would make her review a "considered and balanced one... and as I spent my working life teaching French Literature to A level I will make it as academic as possible."

However, we can assume that the works of Baudelaire, Anais Nin and the Marquis de Sade were outside her remit as DANNY was duly sent and returned immediately with a Post-it note saying she was unable to read it as it was "too disturbing".

And so it goes...

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