Writer's Block with R.B. Kelly - The Gloss Magazine

Writer’s Block with R.B. Kelly

After ninety-four rejections, R.B. KELLY finally found recognition at the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair. Here she talks life in HOLYWOOD, Northern Ireland, her love of Lord Of The Rings and BECOMING AN OPTIMIST

RB kelly
For the creator of such dark material, R.B Kelly is quite the optimist. Despite a staggering ninety-four rejection slips, the plucky scribe kept the faith until she finally struck gold at the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair two years ago.

Edge of Heaven is her debut novel, a beautifully bleak science fiction adventure that was twenty years in the making, starting at aged fifteen.

Prior to Edge of Heaven, R.B published short stories. Blumelena was short listed for the Bridport Prize in 2012, while Long Anna River won the Orange/Northern Woman Short Story Award.

Also known as Rachael Kelly for her non-fiction work, she has a PhD in Film Studies and a Dip NCFE in Journalism. Her fascinating doctoral thesis Mark Antony and Popular Culture was published in 2014.

The versatile author has also put her hand to screenwriting. Her script Holding Pattern has been optioned by a local production company, after coming through Northern Ireland Screen’s New Writer Focus scheme.

R.B Kelly lives in Northern Ireland with her fiancé. She is working on her second novel.

On home

I grew up in Belfast, but I now live just outside the city in Holywood, right on Belfast Lough. Holywood is a lovely seaside town, full of character and with all the best bits of small-town living, but it’s less than half an hour’s drive from the centre of Belfast so the city’s right on the doorstep. I moved here last September to live with my fiancé, and it felt like home immediately. There has been a settlement on this site for over a thousand years. We have a ruined Old Priory dating back to the Middle Ages and the ground it sits on has been the site of a monastery since around the seventh century. It and the surrounding forested hills are where the name “Holywood” comes from.

These days, the town tends to be a hub for the local artistic community, and it’s small enough that everything’s within walking distance of my house. Two minutes takes me to the main shopping street, the High Street, where there are some fabulous cafés and an eclectic collection of shops, from the quirky to the up market, that I can lose hours browsing when I have the time. Five minutes walk and I’m at the sea front. From there a coastal path leads the ten miles to Bangor, and it’s a beautiful hike. In the hills above us, about fifteen minutes walk from the house, we have Redburn Park. It’s a steep climb, but the path winds through bluebell-covered groves and along the burn that gives the park its name, and the view from the top is spectacular. I feel really lucky to live where I do.

On home

I have a beautiful work space at home. When I moved in with my fiancé Jesse, he was using the sunroom at the back of the house to store our bicycles, but we both agreed I was going to need a space to house my massive collection of books, so I took it over as my office. It’s compact enough that I can reach the bookshelves from my very comfortable chair, but it’s windowed on three sides and on the roof, so it’s full of light. I don’t have a desk, because I’m not very good at using them. I prefer to be curled up on a sofa to write, with my laptop on my knee. It’s probably terrible for my spine, but it is what it is.

I like to have my reference books close to hand, so they’re right beside my seat, although these days, most of my research is done online – but I still have bankers’ boxes full of paper notes that I made when researching the first drafts of Edge of Heaven back in the nineties. I haven’t looked at them in years and I’m not sure why I still keep them, since the science is now hopelessly out of date, but I can’t quite manage to part with them. The rest of the shelves are a kind of mishmash of books that I love and books that I have been meaning to read for ages. Scattered among them are pictures of my sister’s children: ten-year-old Stella, five-year-old Ava, and two-year-old twins Cora and Charlie. We’re a close family and I try to spend as much time as possible with my nieces and nephew. They’re great fun, and they give the best hugs in the world.

On her favourite bookshop

There’s a great independent bookstore in Belfast’s Queen’s Quarter, just around the corner from where I work, that is an absolute pillar of the local literary community. It’s called No Alibis, and although, as the name suggests, it specialises in crime fiction, it’s also a great supporter of local authors of any and every genre. I’ve had the pleasure of reading in at an event in the store on one occasion, and it felt like being part of a community of writers. It’s something of a literary institution in Belfast. I visit as often as I can.

On literature

I remember reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time and being incredibly depressed that I’d never be able to write it myself. The depth and detail in Tolkien’s world-building is just breathtaking. Like many fans, I suspect, I spent a bit of time trying to recreate my own speculative fiction in Middle Earth’s image, but it’s inimitable. It did leave one lasting impression on my work, though. When I was creating Creo Basse, the setting for Edge of Heaven, I knew that I wanted to build a city that felt real enough to me that I could walk its streets in my head, the way I can with Tolkien’s world.

On escapes

I love to travel, but when I go abroad, I want to visit new places and soak up another culture and environment, so it doesn’t tend to be particularly relaxing. But, closer to home, there’s a spot on the towpath that runs for miles along the River Lagan that I call “Inspiration Avenue” because of its ability to help me work out the issues in whatever I’m writing. It’s a rough dirt track that runs alongside the boundary with Belvoir Forest Park – one of my favourite places in the world – completely shrouded with trees and quite overgrown with bushes and flowering shrubs in the summer. Walking it just helps clear my mind of distractions and gently tease out my literary tangles like nowhere else I know.

On rejection

I think you just have to expect rejection and roll with it. I always knew that I had to be in this for the long haul, and I never expected that it would be easy to find an agent or a publisher. It helped, I think, that I was very young when I started writing Edge of Heaven – I completed the first draft when I was fifteen – and it feels as though it was much easier to absorb rejection at that age. I also have a fantastically supportive network of friends and family around me who wouldn’t have let me quit even if I’d tried. My mother in particular persuaded me a couple of years ago that I should put everything I had into forging a career as a writer. And if that meant moving back into her house for a while and letting her support me until I was in a position to pay the bills again, then so be it. I’m incredibly lucky and I know that, and it’s very hard not to stay positive in the face of all that support.

Edge of Heaven (€ 13.99, Liberties Press) is now available from bookshops nationwide. Mark Antony and Popular Culture can be purchased from Ibtauris.com

Sophie Grenham

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