Long night's journey into day - Anne Rooney

Today is the shortest day - or you could think of it as the longest night. The long, dark nights are a time for snuggling in the warm to read a good book. But they are also a time to write what we hope will turn out to be a good book. Some ideas need to over-winter, like seeds lying dormant through the cold months, getting ready to be written in sunlight. Others shine out with the holly berries and demand to be gathered immediately before they wrinkle and fade. I'd never noticed before, but I'm a very seasonal writer; I write ghost stories and gothic in winter, humour in summer. And this is a very gothic winter.

After the first really deep snow fall last week, I went outside with my daughters to find animal tracks in the garden. There were cat, mouse, fox, deer and rabbit prints as well as the usual birds. Snow is nature's Wikileaks - it reveals the hidden life you knew was there but had no proof of. I've used the revealingness of snow before in a ghost story (Soldier Boy), and I expect I'll use it again. Most ghost stories are set in winter, surely? Is it even possible to write something truly creepy that is set in bright sunlight and warmth?

Many years ago, I started a gothic novel while sitting in Cambridge University Library watching the snow swirling outside, snittering full snart. That novel took a very different turn in the end and moved so far from where it started that the original idea is still unwritten. This winter, I want to revive that old story. It begins in the morgue of Edinburgh hospital in December 1821 and ends somewhere in a frozen Russian cemetery in 2002. It is a dark, wintry story full of snow and death and revenge. I've thought about turning it into an opera libretto instead, though I haven't the first idea how to start an opera libretto so that probably won't happen. But it can only be written in winter. I'm in the mood for dark and terrible, it's become my natural medium, and I won't flinch from whatever horrors the story demands - as long as the snow still lies thick to reveal the footprints, the blood stains, the crumpled dark figure in the graveyard, the dead hand as white as the snow thrust up through the earth...

Are you a seasonal writer? Or can you write snow in summer and sun-drenched meadows in winter? I can't. Maybe this incapacity is why I tend to write such short stories - they have to be finished in their season, or hibernate until the following year. It's not just writing weather, it's mood - dark and gloomy rules the long, long night of the winter solstice.

www.annerooney.co.uk
Stroppy Author blog

In retreat

The barn occupied by my werewolf

I've just spent two and a half days shut in a room with a werewolf.

Dinner time

 Let's start this again. I've just spent a lovely, peaceful, regenerative four days at Folly Farm near Bath with a clutch of other members of the SAS, some of whom are also ABBA bloggers. It was called a 'Winter Warmer' and was planned and organised by the wonderful Liz Kessler and Elen Caldecott to break up the long, bleak interval between the established retreats (or jamborees) the SAS has in the spring and summer. So I was there with a wimpy vampire, a shoal of mermaids and a lot of stroppy teens, as well as my werewolf.

Hot chocolate in the forest

Lots of activities and workshops were planned, but I'm afraid I can't give any details of those as I was a bit of a boring recluse and locked myself away to work for the whole time. Well, I did venture out for the many and large meals, and the evenings of book-related jollity.

Lucy Coates and Miriam Moss 

Why do writers need to go away? And why do writers, who work best in solitude, like to get together for a week?

Cindy Jeffries and Mary Hoffman

Well, going somewhere where someone else does all the cooking, where there are no bints to look after (or anyone else), where you don't have to do any cleaning or tidying, or answering the phone, or justifying anything you do, frees up a lot of writing time. I was doing some bits on existing projects and starting something new. I wrote 6,500 words of the new thing (the werewolf thing) in two and a half days. I wouldn't have got that much done at home.

Fungi in the forest

And that was as well as going to a fantastic workshop on plotting by Sally Nicholls and Liz Kessler, having hot chocolate in the woods, failing to see any badgers on a badger-viewing trip, eating five meals a day, stargazing with Lucy Coates and Liz Kessler, gossiping with lots of people, helping Mary Hoffman edit a video, and spending all evening drinking/talking/playing/sharing our work.

Fun guy (Tim Collins) in the forest

But it's more than a chance to do some solid writing. It's fantastic to spend time with other people who understand the groans and grumbles - and thrills - of the writer's life. People whose eyes don't glaze over at the mention of agents and contracts and royalty rates, good or bad editors, poor choices of cover, incompetent proofreaders, and so on. It's wonderful to share work and rediscover the huge range that is covered by the umbrella 'children's books', and be astonished at how we all write such very different things.

Pencils? No, there are no pictures of
us working

 Perhaps best of all, at least for me, was the chance to refuel - to have the wonderful, kind, caring support of so many other writers and to feel creativity seeping back into my spirit. It was a brilliant, validating, refreshing, energizing, endorsing and inspiring few days. I just wished I could stay there forever.

A house of sticks, waiting for a big,
bad (were)wolf to come along

 And as for that werewolf? I got to know him, found out what it was like to feel the frosty leaf mold under your pads as you walk through the forest in winter, and how when you are in wolf form you don't think about your wife at all. Until you have to stay a wolf, and then your man-mind invades your wolf-mind and you live in despair. And I saw that being a werewolf is the same as being a betrayed lover, or being a writer (or maybe both at the same time), and that somehow this werewolf's story needs telling in a way that makes that clear. So I just had to be in the forest...

Straying from the path - Anne Rooney

Last Thursday, I gave a class to a group of delightful second-year creative writing students at the University of Essex. Their tutor had asked me to tell them what I do, how I got to be doing it, and what it's like day to day, as well talking about writing creative non-fiction.

At the end of the class, one girl asked 'If someone else had to do your job, they would need knowledge in so many different areas. How would they do it?' And of course the answer is that they wouldn't. No two people - and so no two writers - have exactly the same skill set and knowledge set. That's why our books are unique. It's one of the things that makes writing such an exciting and rewarding job. As writers, what we sell is not just our ability to string words together, but the peculiar mix of interests, insights, passions, knowledge and experiences that defines us as individuals. Leaving aside straight text books, no two writers would ever write exactly the same book. There are creative skills we can all develop (assuming some native talent to start with), but the way we all work our magic on the content, and the content we come up with in the first place, are intensely personal and individual.

When we read or hear about writers' lives, it's often the strangeness of the path that has led them to their books that is most intriguing. No-one else would ever follow quite the same path or end up in quite the same place. So I'm not sure how useful my talk was for the student writers, in that I couldn't give them a road map or even any hints as to how to get to my job. I didn't get here by following a clear route. If anything, I got here by straying from the obvious path at every opportunity, blundering through the deep, dark forest with scant regard for the bears and wolves that might inhabit it. And the job? As for all writers, my job is simply being me. And doing a bit of writing at the points where being me intersect with what other people might be interested in.

Anne Rooney
Stroppy Author blog

National damp squib day? - Anne Rooney

Thursday 7th November was National Non-Fiction Day. Bet you didn't notice, did you? No, me neither, and I spend a lot of my time writing non-fiction.

"National Non-Fiction Day was created by Scholastic to mark how significant and important non-fiction books are for the development and retention of intellectual and cultural heritage of learning for children. Through reading non-fiction, children can find a way to open the door on a lifetime of reading and writing." 
Primary Times (or, rather, from the press release they have reproduced pretty much verbatim. Let's hope that wasn't written by someone who hopes to write for children; parents and teachers might possibly be able to prise some meaning out of it.)

Quite apart from that being really, really badly written...if NNFD is marking how important non-fiction books are for children (which is not in dispute) why does no-one hear anything about it? This is such a shame, such a wasted opportunity! Non-fiction is a gateway drug to further reading, to knowledge, to loving learning, to fiction.

Good non-fiction gets children marvelling at the wonders of the world, history, the universe. It makes them want to learn, want to read. Yet non-fiction is treated as the poor relation of fiction. Parents and teachers who wail that boys don't read usually mean they don't read fiction - many are happy to read factual books. So let's celebrate them, make them available and encourage children who like to read them. Reading for pleasure doesn't have to mean reading fiction. All fiction is, after all, sparked by the truth - non-fiction. 

National Non-Fiction Day was launched in 2010 by the Federation of Children's Book Groups and Scholastic, a highly respected publisher with an extensive list of children's non-fiction. That first year, it was not large but it had more events and featured book than this year. The website then announced that NNFD 'aims to celebrate all that is brilliant about non-fiction and to highlight that it is not just fiction that can be read for pleasure.' Good stuff - shame it's not really happened.

The NNFD website now redirects to the site of a tiny publisher called What on Earth Books, which appears only to produce 'wall books' by Chris Lloyd, its 'founder and CEO'. These look quite jolly, though I've never seen one so can't give any useful verdict. Lloyd has previously published two books with Bloomsbury - there's no suggestion that he's not a real writer. But he's hardly the whole world of children's non-fiction publishing! (I put no store by Amazon reviews, but will share this review of one of his Bloomsbury titles just because it's obviously written by an idiot - the writer gave the book five stars and then said it 'will not fail to disappoint.' Erm. With good reviews like that, who needs bad reviews?)

I did comment on the blog for NNFD trying to find out why the day seems to have gone AWOL, but the comment failed moderation and I've had no email response. I can only conclude, sadly, that NNFD is really NOT going to raise the profile of non-fiction one jot. Indeed, it does it a massive disservice with its badly written publicity materials and its promotion of just one trio of self-published books by a single author. Perhaps I shouldn't have drawn attention to it at all, but it is such a shame that something which could have helped to turn children into enthusiastic readers has just become a national damp squib.

If any teachers or librarians DID know about the day, and DID do something to mark it, please do report back in the comments. I would love to think that someone is promoting the huge range of wonderful children's non-fiction books published in the UK.


Anne Rooney will be talking about writing children's non-fiction at the SCBWI annual conference in Winchester, 23rd November

Who reads writers' blogs? - Anne Rooney

In the late eighteenth century, the French Royal Academy of Sciences and the American Patent Office were so overwhelmed with proposed perpetual motion machines that they banned further designs. I wonder if writers' blogs are a form of perpetual motion machine, where we each comment on one another's blogs in a constant cycle, but there is never any input from, or leakage to, the outside world? Or like a snake eating its own tail?

We are all busily blogging away, encouraged by publishers who want us to have a platform, and buoyed up by good stats and interesting comments. And it's all great fun and we enjoy each other's writings. But who's really watching? We can see who comments, but we can't see who reads and doesn't comment. One of my recent posts on Stroppy Author has had 250+ hits and 8 comments. So I don't know who 242+ of the readers are.

I have a horrible fear that many of the people reading writers' blogs are other writers. That's OK for blogs actually intended for other writers, such as mine, and Nicola Morgan's fine Help! I Need a Publisher. But what about the more bookish or personal blogs? What about this blog? We hope they reach readers, librarians, teachers, publishers, agents, parents, booksellers, and other lovely people who are interested in books, read books and - sometimes - even buy books. But is it true?

If you are a silent reader who never comments, we can't know if we are saying things that you like or not. Or what you would like more of, or less of. So I'm investing my posting slot today to say - please, silent readers, let us know what you like to read on ABBA (and elsewhere). Because we really want to write things you want to read! Which posts do you like best? What do you like to read about? And who ARE you? Thank you!

Biting the hand that feeds - Anne Rooney

Health warning: this is going to be a controversial post, so please lower your blood pressure before reading.

Children's writers have always been great supporters of the wonderful UK library service. Libraries and writers enjoy a symbiotic relationship. Libraries nurture embryonic readers, they buy books, and they provide us with a sliver of our income in the form of PLR (public lending rights - the small payment made to writers when their books are borrowed). In return, we write books and those books are given free of charge to anyone who wants to read them. Many of us have been vociferous in our support of libraries in the face of threatened cuts.

As children's writers, we know our readers rarely have a book-buying budget. They may not be able to persuade a parent to buy a book, but should be able to persuade a parent to allow a library visit. Few parents can afford to buy the huge numbers of picture books a child reader can get through, but a library will provide. The library is a golden gate to a life of reading, a gate we need to keep open.

In the current economic climate, though, some libraries are ducking out of the symbiosis and turning to bite the hand that feeds. An advertisement for a library early last year read 'Buy none, get six free'. It's clever, but its implicit suggestion that people shouldn't buy books is underhand, and damaging to writers and the publishing industry. A meeting at Cambridge Central Library last month invited suggestions from the public on how to make cuts in the library service over the next three years. One measure the library is proposing to adopt is to cut the book-buying budget for the current year from £350,000 to zero. I suggested it would be less damaging for authors and publishers if they cut it by £120,000 a year in each of the three years. No, they said, this was a cut that could be implemented immediately. It was, they agreed, regrettable that it would be damaging to the publishing industry and to writers at a time when they were also struggling.

Regrettable. Some of those writers and publishers will go to the wall if this strategy is widely adopted, but might survive if the saving had been spread out. Of course, 'it's not the libraries' fault, everyone has to make cutbacks'. That's true. But books are the core of a library. Why not cut back on whizzy, hi-tech borrowing systems that scare elderly readers, on new carpets, new furniture, and far too much lighting left on all the time? The symbiot is becoming selfish and ignoring the needs of its partner.

One man suggested that many people have books in their homes that they don't intend to read again, so libraries could just ask people to donate books and then the library wouldn't need to buy any books at all. The library spokespeople seized on this suggestion enthusiastically. There are around 4,500 libraries in the UK. That represents a lot of lost income for writers and publishers if they stop buying new books. The symbiot is turning parasite.

It looks likely that PLR may be axed as part of the government's cut-backs so loans, even of donated books, will generate no income for writers. The current PLR rate is around 6p per loan. If a book sale would bring an author a royalty of 60p (a fairly average figure), it takes ten loans to make up for one sale lost because the reader borrowed rather than bought the book. That's fair - by no means everyone would have bought the book if there were no library.

Compare and contrast:

• A pirate copies my book and posts it for free on the Internet; my publisher is outraged - people are reading the book for free, this is damaging sales, neither of us has an income from it. The publisher says they can't afford to commission more books if this continues.
• A library accepts a donated copy of my book and lends it for free to anyone who walks through the door. People are reading the book for free, this is damaging sales, neither of us has an income from it. Can the publisher afford to commission more books if this continues?

Will libraries still be nurturing new readers? Less successfully, perhaps, if readers are raised on a diet of scraps: secondhand books that, rather than being carefully chosen by knowledgeable librarians, have been chucked out by people who don't want them. It's not going to be the best books that make it to the shelves - literary pigswill, rather. Perhaps that will mean people who want to read the best, newest books will be more likely to buy them. Perhaps. The rich people, anyway. But I don't want to write only for rich people.

Will someone tell me what the library service is still offering writers, please? Because I would like to continue to support it, but if it doesn't value its principal commodity - books - and the people who provide that commodity, it's going to get very difficult to remain enthusiastic.

As there is no point in complaining without making a suggestion, here's my suggestion:

If PLR is to go could we, perhaps, have a ban on new books appearing in libraries until six months or a year after publication? After all, films don't come out on DVD until they have had a chance to make money at the box office. Then there is a chance for publishers and writers to earn a little more from the book before it becomes freely available. It would be easy enough to do, at least approximately - no book can appear in a library catalogue during the year of publication shown on the imprint page, for instance. If people want to read a book as soon as it comes out, they can pay for it - otherwise they can wait. And it would be really, really helpful if the libraries could have lots of advance publicity for these books so that impatient people will go and buy a copy. Maybe a library could even have an integral bookshop concession stocking the books the library can't lend yet? Come on, libraries, use a bit of imagination and keep us on your side. If writers and publishers go bust, your future book-buying budget won't be much use anyway.

Anne Rooney
website & blog

What makes you happy? (by Anne Rooney)

I'm writing a book for adults at the moment which is a set of philosophical questions. It's a sort of intellectual workout to help people to decide what they really think about various issues. It would be just as good for teenagers, though it won't be marketed directly at them. It's quite light-hearted, but it does drag in some old dead guys - some who have been dead for 2,500 years.

Yesterday I was working on the chapter How can I be happy? The possible answers given over the years range from "sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll" (the Cyrenaics, 4th century BC) to total disengagement with the material world so that the vicissitudes of fortune can't harm you - if you expect nothing, you won't be disappointed. Oh, and not forgetting 'you can't be happy, it's an illusion.' Most of the serious philosophers are agreed that just having a lot of money is not going to do it. A new iPhone doesn't get a look in.

As long as our basic needs for survival and health are met, companionship, thought and freedom seem to be the only things we really need. Epicurus (who set out that scheme only 100 hundred years after the party-guy Cyrenaics) spent his time living in a sort of commune with his friends outside Athens where they grew vegetables for their table and shared skills and tasks so that they didn't have to engage in commerce with the nasty, grasping Athenians. You can see that would be a nice life. (Philosophers are big on vegetables: Pythagoras thought beans should be protected from harm; Voltaire ended Candide with his hero growing vegetables; the Roman emperor Diocletian retired to Croatia to grow cabbages.) It's not quite having nothing, though, having a big villa outside Athens...

Of cabbages and kings...

Writing the chapter, and comparing all the ideas got me thinking about what - excluding those core elements already mentioned - makes me happy. And I came up with books; opera on the radio; a bit of free time. Isn't that mundane? And they are all free, or can be (there are libraries for the books). Another trick of the philosophers: think of something you want. How will your life be different if you have it? How will it be different if you don't? That helps you to judge how useful (in happiness terms) the object is. So a car might make you happy if it means you can travel to see friends and go to events. But a bigger car just so that you can look fancy in front of other road-users? No. Not so much.

On the whole, the things that get a tick serve those key things - companionship (drive to see your friends - or to meet essential needs), freedom (mobility gives you more choices), and thought (that's where the books and opera get in). Utility and happiness might seem unrelated, but of course they are not (look at the Utilitarians, calculating in terms of happiness and harm... but that's another chapter). When you want something, ask why - what does it do for you? Incidentaly, Epicurus thought fame and power to be both unnecessary and unnatural desires. A big car is a natural but unnecessary desire.

So - what makes you happy? That is, excluding health, enough to eat, somewhere to live and your family having the same essentials, which are givens in this question. Do you even know, or have we lost track somewhere along the line? I'll raise you books, opera and some free time. And maybe a bar of Lindt dark chocolate with sea salt.

Anne Rooney
aka Stroppy Author
The Story of Philosophy will be published on 15th October (that's not the book I'm still writing!)

Finding a long-lost friend - Anne Rooney

This is just a little post to lighten the day with a tale of happy, bookly serendipity.

In 1985 I finished my PhD. It was referred - I had to move a few pages around and resubmit it, waiting the statutory six months even though I could do the required work in a week. I was cross, so I had it bound in lurid, fluorescent pink to annoy the University Library, who liked to have the stacks full of uniform navy, black and bottle-green theses. There are only two pink copies - my own, and that deposited in the University Library. The thesis was published as a book and I forgot about the pink copies.

Twenty five years passed, during which my copy got lost somehow. Sad - all that work.... But I had the published book so it didn't hugely matter.

Two weeks ago, a new twitter friend, @PoultonSmith, mentioned that one of his books was on sale on Abe Books for a ridiculously large sum even though it was only published three years ago. Ever ready to avoid work, I searched Abe for my most expensive book. And there it was:

Anne Rooney, Hunting in Middle English Literature, 1300-1500; original PhD thesis, Cambridge 1985, A4 size, bound in pink cloth, gold lettering, £65.

It was on sale from Plurabelle Books in Cambridge. I emailed them and explained that it should not be for sale - they were wonderful, replying immediately to say they would set it aside and I could collect it. I asked where they had got it from - it was one of 20,000 volumes they bought from Emmanuel College when the college was renovating its library several years ago. And so the pieces fell into place. My PhD supervisor was the Master of Emmanuel. I had no doubt lent him my copy for some reason and then forgotten about it. He had died, and the college had stuck it in the library. And so it got to Plurabelle.

Looking at it now, reading the acknowledgments, I can see the germs of my current writing style:

'My greatest debt is due to AS, who has patiently endured life under a sea of papers and a barrage of abuse...'

If @PoultonSmith hadn't looked for his own books on Abe and then tweeted about it, I'd never have found this old friend. And if I was more diligent about working I'd never have found it. Skiving puts you in the market for serendipity - long live skiving!

www.annerooney.co.uk
http://stroppyauthor.blogspot.com

Uncurtained windows: reading writers' notebooks - Anne Rooney

Writers' notebooks are personal, valuable, essential. Somewhere to jot down thoughts as they occur before they disappear back into the ether. They contain the germs of ideas, solutions to problems, plots and titles that never went anywhere - a nostalgia-fest for the writer and a boon for literary biographers and critics in the case of the famous. Reading them is like looking into lit, uncurtained windows on a winter night, especially those in the backs of houses passed on the train. They give a privileged insight into the interior life - the writer in the wild, roaming his or her territory unaware of observers.

I've been using a facsimile of Bram Stoker's notebooks for Dracula while researching my own vampire series, Vampire Dawn (Ransom, March 2012). They look familiar. Spattered with odd jottings that are hard to interpret later, but also with longer pieces meticulously copied or summarised from books and conversations. There are typewritten notes and annotated bits of typescript as well as pages of handwriting (thankfully neat in his case). They offer a fascinating glimpse into the process of composing Dracula. The bits he didn't use are just as interesting as those he did.

He was very thorough. He went to Romania and interviewed local people. He wrote long lists of Romanian words he might use. He researched boats that had sunk off the coast of Whitby and boats that carried their cargo to shore. He recorded any odd episode or story he could use. Just as we all do.

I have two types of notebook. There's always a general notebook that is carried almost everywhere, and filled with odd ideas, observations, scribblings of any kind. Those are a chaotic jumble that probably make little sense to anyone else. Then there are specific notebooks for each project. These show the genesis and evolution of a book. It's interesting later to see the bits that never made it, the ideas that look really stupid later, and how far the final book has wandered from the original idea or plan.

My notebooks will never be of real interest, like Stoker's, but I can't show his as the facsimile is copyright, so here's a peek inside mine as a poor substitute for the curious.



This is a Moleskin softcover brown notebook. On the cover is a printout of an early version of one of the covers of the series (the first cover we fixed on).

I always stick a picture on a notebook or folder as it's the quickest way to see which is which.







Inside... these are bits printed from the web. I needed to know exactly how a guillotine works and the position of the body of the victim just before execution. This continues on further pages. In case you ever need to know, there is a tilted bench that the beheadee lies on.

And this just goes to show that I don't always carry the notebook. These notes are made on the slips of paper that come in books ordered from the stacks in Cambridge University Library and then stuck in later.












I try to find pictures of the characters. This is a series of six books (seven if you include Shroud-Eating for Beginners, the guide for new vampires) and there should, all being well, be another series of six in 2013. It's useful to have a visual reference for each character to make sure they stay consistent - no sudden changes of hair colour, for example. This is Titania. I'm not showing you the modern characters in case the real people object.





And this is how Titania got her name. After I'd written Drop Dead, Gorgeous, I noticed similarities with A Midsnummer Night's Dream.

Some more characters - these are historical figures I've co-opted as vampires. They are Louis Pasteur (lower) and Dmitri Ivanovsky. Working with real people, it's important to make sure they look as they did and to write characters that seem to match their appearance. Pasteur is robust, lively, intelligent, friendly and relaxed. Ivanovsky is reserved, polite, intelligent. They are both in book 4, Every Drop of Your Blood.

All writers discuss their work with other writers they trust. If you have those discussions on the phone or face-to-face you have have to make notes if you don't want to forget the insights they offered. I spend a lot of time chatting online on Facebook or Skype with two very dear friends who are also writers. This is a Facebook chat about plot issues with one of those people, printed out and stuck in the notebook. I won't name her in case she minds, and I've blurred the picture for the same reason.







That's enough of  a peek from your passing train. My camera has run out of battery now. But writing this has made me realise how lucky I am compared with Stoker. I don't have to copy pictures laboriously by hand (just as well - they'd be rubbish); I can print things out and stick them in; I can use higlighters; I can stick in a transcript of a chat! And, perhaps best of all, I can make a digital copy or photocopy of it all in case - God forbid - I lose the real thing. Not that I have made a full copy.... Next task!

Why we need vampires - Anne Rooney

See the end of the post for Adele Geras's
poem inspired by this picture

I'm back with vampires again this summer, after letting them lie in their graves for eighteen months. But this time it's different. Last time I was writing my own bunch of modern teen vampires coming to terms with vampirehood in Vampire Dawn. This time, it's good old Dracula and I'm doing a retelling. I read Dracula rather differently now, not because of writing about vampires but because of researching them. I did a lot of research for Vampire Dawn, and Bram Stoker did a lot for Dracula. I piggybacked on his, not going off to interview Romanian peasants myself but using his notebooks and various other ancient texts as my starting point. Returning to the vampires again set me thinking...

There are vampiric legends all around the world. I made a list of some of my favourites when I was writing Vampire Dawn - including the Ashanti vampire, Asasabonsam, which hangs from trees by the hooks it has in place of feet and drops onto unsuspecting victims passing below, and the southeast Asian Penanggalan, a disembodied female head that flies, trailing its entrails behind it. They make your bog-standard turn-into-a-bat type European vampire look pretty tame.

I wondered why there are vampire legends all over the world.Usually, when something crops up everywhere - like flood legends - there's a good reason rooted in fact. With my fiction brain in, I hoped it was because there really are or were vampires. People have thought this until pretty recently. There was even the Highgate Vampire scare in 1970 (the Highgate vampire has an appreciation page on Facebook). But that was just a scare and a vampire hunt. In 1892, the unfortunate Mercy Brown became the third member of her family to die of tuberculosis, not an uncommon fate at the time. Locals believed she was a vampire and, when her brother Edwin fell ill, had her dug up. Her body had not deteriorated at all, confirming once and for all that she was a vampire. The vampire hunters cut out her heart, burned it, and mixed the ashes into water which they gave Edwin to drink (a traditional way of ridding a victim of the influence of a vampire). Edwin died two months later, of TB rather an attack of raging vampires. That was in Rhode Island, where you might have hoped people would know better by 1892.

But then I put in my science brain and thought again about why there might be vampires all over the place and decided that it's probably - like so many story patterns and archetypes - because they satisfactorily explain something that is common to all cultures and is a fundamental part of the human condition. What could it be?

 I settled on the grief, anger and resentment that accompany bereavement. The vampire preys first on their nearest and dearest. The victim stays alive, but in only a semi-live state. The vampire/dead one sucks the life out of the surviving mourners. The survivor might long to join the dead one. The survivor feels sapped, destroyed, tormented by the dead one. They might feel hatred towards the dead one, but at the same time remain drawn to them. Only when the dead one can be well and truly nailed and accepted as properly dead can the survivor shake off the haunting and get on with life. And some don't - some do follow their loved ones to the grave.

Vampire stories give us a way of encapsulating the parts of grief we don't like to acknowledge, cloaking them in a form we are allowed to hate and shun. They give us the right to say 'stay in your grave, leave me alone'. There are other stories that do the same - The Monkey's Paw is one - but vampires provide an established and universal metaphor for the fear and hatred we can have even for the dead we loved, a way of acknowledging those feelings without guilt. Of course, we've picked up vampires and run with them, and I doubt any modern vampire writer would say that's what they're doing. I wouldn't have done.

Well, that's my vampire theory. Please tear it apart now and drive a stake through its heart.

POSTSCRIPT

Adèle Geras has sent this wonderful poem of hers,  inspired long ago by the top of the two pictures here, and given me permission to share it with you - for which I am extremely grateful.

THE SUITOR

          Mother, on first acquaintance

          he is not to my taste.

          (Put him in the Yellow Room.

          Gather me into my garments.)

          His coat glitters like cockroaches.

          His boots contain nightmares.

          (Pull the flat maids out

          from between grey sheets.)

          His fingernails are white;

          unreasonably curved.

          (At eleven o'clock the family portraits

          open their mouths to scream.)

          Wallpaper absorbs and disperses

          the shadow of his hat.

          (I am wearing a bustle.

          I am wearing a corset.

          I am wearing a hat

          with a veil; with a black veil.)

          Tears leave stains

          at the bottom of teacups.

          Sighs become cobwebs.

          Mother, have you seen them?

          Mother, is it rude to speak of them?

          There, there, thrusting between his shoulderblades

          he has a pair of ribbed and leathery wings.

          (He will spread them.

          They will mask the light;

          groan and flap like an umbrella

          in an ecstasy of wind.

          They will fall into dry folds

          when he is done with them.)

          Put him in the Yellow Room.

          Let me consider.

 
http://www.adelegeras.com/


Anne Rooney
Stroppy author

Buy none, get one free - Anne Rooney

Do giveaways and competitions work as a way of promoting a book? Following Mary Hoffman's suggestion, I'm about to try it for the first time. My book Grim, Gross and Grisly was published by Barrington Stoke at the end of August and the editor agreed to give me extra copies to give away (I wouldn't have thought to ask, so thank you, Mary).

I've seen lots of other people promoting their books on twitter and blogs by offering copies as prizes but never done it myself before. This isn't just laziness and a dislike of promotional activities. Many of my readers - particularly of the reluctant-reader books - probably won't be on twitter or my blog because, well, they're reluctant to read! So this is a bit of an experiment. I guess it will be a competition for parents rather than readers, and that's fine, but I'd like to reach those reluctant readers who don't have someone looking out for them, perhaps because they come from a household where other people don't read or don't value reading. So I'll be very happy if librarians and teachers enter the contest - you only have to send in a yukky fact of your own, about humans or animals. Full details are on my blog. (Of course, the book is also readable by enthusiastic and accomplished readers, and anyone can enter.)

I guess it's hard to tell whether competition/give-away success relates to increased book sales, so I doubt I'll ever know if it 'works' in a promotion sense. But I don't really care. I'm not after book sales, just getting the book into the hands of some children who might not otherwise see it and might like it. Obviously the publisher wants book sales, though. Has anyone who's done this before seen increased sales for books they have given away? And does it matter whether it's a book the competition-enteree wants for themselves or whether they are going to give it away? I can see it helps promote our own blogs and twitter presences as writers, but does it help the publisher at all (especially if, like me, you publish with lots of different publishers)? Please do share your give-away experiences in the comments - it's something I haven't really thought about before and I'd love to know how it works for different kinds of books and writers.

www.annerooney.co.uk
Stroppy author's guide to publishing

Domain name - tick; blog - tick; twitter - tick... (Anne Rooney)

It used to be the case that when you thought of a title for your book or series you were pleased, tried it out on a few people, and got on with writing. You might check whether someone else had used the title for anything similar. Now there is a whole post-title task-bank to work through.

Task 1: buy the appropriate domain names and put up holding pages. Tick.
Check the domain name for your title is available, or something you can plausibly use instead. If you can't use the title, is that being used for something you don't want your child readers to visit by accident? My series title is Vampire Dawn: it would be entirely plausible for a steamy temptress called Dawn to have taken this domain for her page of naughty vampire photos, in which case I would have changed the title. Luckily, no such vamp is operating. VampireDawn.com has gone (to someone respectable), but VampireDawn.co.uk is now secured and a holding page in place.

Task 2: set up twitter account @VampireDawn. Tick.
Get any useful twitter names and start using them. This might be the title, or the name of a key character. Gillian Philip has @sethmacgregor for one of her characters, for instance.

Task 3: set up blog. Tick.
Now the blog. This was trickier as the blogger name had already gone. Wordpress, then. Pick a vaguely appropriate off-the-peg theme for now and put up a post or two promising what is coming.

Task 4: set up Facebook page and start using it. Tick.
And the Facebook page. For now, this will have updates on progress and a few snippets, but it's important to get the name now in case it goes to someone else. It's better to have a few followers on it before publication day, too.

Task 5: set up YouTube account. Tick.
We'll need a trailer, eventually. Here I ran into problems, as there is an independent film in production called Vampire Dawn. That's the group that has taken vampiredawn.com and vampiredawn.blogspot. And they have the YouTube account. So I grab VampireDawn2012 quickly. No need to make any films yet, but it's a good idea to start commenting with the account occasionally.

From the publisher, I needed the logo for the series and an early cover image - nothing else. Depending on your book, you might need something else - or nothing at all. And you might think this is all too much faff and you aren't going to do it. The characters in my series will be using Facebook and an iPhone app to keep in touch, so some online traces of these make it all more real. If your story is set in the eighteenth century - or even the 1980s - that won't be necessary. Phew.

Now - time to get on with writing the books....

@VampireDawn
Vampire Dawn website
Vampire Dawn on Facebook
Vampire Dawn's blog