The Year's Midnight - Celia Rees

' 'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ; The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph. '

A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being The Shortest Day - John Donne

For John Donne, the shortest day was St Lucy's Day, the 12th December. For us it is the 21st. We are a day away, but as I write this and a dismal afternoon turns more drear and the light fades, it feels as if it is already here. The Winter Solstice has always been seen as significant, recognised all over the world and celebrated as a time of re-birth, a time of hope and re-affirmation as the year turns back towards the light.

Short days and long nights have always made this a good time to read. What else is there to do, once Christmas is over? It's a chance to withdraw from the world for a little while, curl up with a good book and maybe a glass of something, and read in front of the fire. I guess everyone has their favourite seasonal reading, their favourite Christmas stories and poems and there have been some memorable children's books set at this time of the year. When I was a child, I didn't particularly enjoy the stories of Beatrix Potter and I didn't like Alison Uttley's Little Grey Rabbit. I preferred the rougher charm of her Sam Pig and Brock the Badger. My favourite story from the Tales of Sam Pig was The Christmas Box, and my favourite part of that story was when Brock the Badger goes to the Christmas Fair. The light is going and no-one notices a 'little brown man' going from stall to stall with his silver penny, buying things for his wards, Sam, Tom, Bill and Ann. I used to look out for him in country markets, late on a December afternoon. I still do.

'Miracles happen on Christmas Eve', Brock says, and maybe it is true. it is a magical time of the year when it is possible to believe strange things could happen, like badgers going to market, so it is little wonder that two of the best children's fantasies ever written are set at this time of the year. John Masefield's hugely influential Box of Delights is exactly what it says on the cover. First published in 1935, every subsequent British fantasy writer owes an immense debt to Masefield's imagination and his inventiveness. The book is set in deep mid-winter with the hero, Kay, returning from boarding school. He meets a mysterious Punch and Judy man, the owner of the box, who then entrusts it to Kay to avoid it falling in to the hands of the evil Abner Brown. The gripping, powerful story unfolds over the few days Christmas. The weather and the feeling of dislocation, of being out of normal time, that is often present during this period, add significantly to the power of the fantasy and the sense of danger and isolation.








The other book on my Solstice reading list is Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising. Another brilliantly inventive, original and influential fantasy, like the Box of Delights, it takes place over Christmas and New Year and deals with the battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of the light. Perhaps both books are so powerful and convincing because they tap into the atavistic fear that fuels our midwinter festivals, rituals and celebrations, a fear that goes back thousands of years, the terror that the warmth and light may never return and we will be kept in a state of freezing darkness. M. R. James used to tell his ghost stories at Christmas and that seems entirely right and fitting. The impulse to read and tell stories of this kind, involving supernatural and magic, may be very ancient, a way of warding off forces that might engulf us, forces that grow in the darkness and shrink in the light.


What's your favourite Solstice reading?

Fiction but not as we know it... Celia Rees

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked by Armadillo, the Online Independent Children's Book Magazine, to review a book for teenagers. I don't know if the review is up yet, but home is http://www.armadillomagazine.com/ - for reviews, author interviews, and much, much more. If you don't already go there, you really should check it out. Anyway, the book arrived and I began to read. SF/fantasy is not my favourite genre - so easy to do badly - and this seemed to be a kind of Twilight with Aliens. It was sloppily written with every fantasy cliche jammed in there from Tolkien to, oh, anyone you like to think of, by way of Marvel Comics, Star Trek and Avatar. Suffice it to say, I didn't like it much. More than that, I thought there was something wrong with it. It was as if I wasn't reading a novel, as much as a novelisation - a print version of a film, or a comic, or a video game. It was written under a pseudonym, purportedly that of an alien. It certainly read that way. It seemed destined for great things, however, soon to be a major motion picture, a sticker said on the cover, the focus of an aggressive publicity campaign. Recently, I saw it has been picked out as a 'teen book of the year' in a major newspaper. So who am I to say? All I know was that it was not a book for me, and it didn't read quite right.

Some weeks later, I saw an article in the Guardian about bad boy American author, James Frey (the one who upset Oprah when she found out that his autobiography was, at least in part, fictional). He is in trouble again, it seems, for setting up a Fiction Factory, employing unknowns to churn out books to order - one of which is the one I read for Armadillo. I felt vindicated. I knew there was something wrong about it! He defends himself by citing artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons who come up with a concept and leave it to others to do the hard work. There seems to be a difference. Like these artists or not, the concept is often startling and original. The same cannot be said of the Fiction Factory, if the product that I sampled is anything to go by. And yet, and yet... major motion picture, ad campaign, reviews, Waterstone's placement, how many real writers of genuinely original fantasy fiction get that kind of treatment? Even more disconcerting is the idea of relays of energetic wannerbes churning out books one after another. How many writers of series fiction could keep up with that? And if writing style, storytelling ability and originality no longer matter, how long before we have e writers as well as e readers, cyberbots producing books at the click of a mouse?

It will be fiction, Jim, but not as we know it...

Significant Dates - Celia Rees

I mean calendar, not the other kind.

11/11/11

A date of particular significance. I thought I ought to mark it in some way. Write it down somewhere. So at 11 o'clock, I opened a brand new notebook, filled my fountain pen (I rarely write in long hand, let alone fountain pen), wrote the date, and officially started a new project.

I don't usually attend the Armistice Day Service in the town where I live, Leamington Spa, and did not consciously intend to do so when I set out for a walk this Sunday morning, but I found myself on the edge of the knot of people gathered around the War Memorial. My Uncle Bob's name is on it. That's him. The boy in uniform, standing next to his father in the photograph that was taken before he went off to France and didn't come back. As I stood in the crowd I thought about my family, my grandfather and grandmother, standing here when the memorial was erected, their remembrance new and raw. The family stories: that my uncle had been killed on the last day of the First World War (he hadn't, of course, he'd been killed some months before); that when my grandmother heard the news her hair went white over night. Then I thought about another war, my father here with Bob's brothers, all in their uniforms, standing to attention, honouring the memory of another generation of young men who did not return.

They are all gone now. The town has changed, the bronze figure verdigrised and weathered, but the crowd still gathers, sheltered by the tall lime trees, much as they would have been fifty, sixty, eighty years ago.

People disperse. The assembled groups from the different services line up and march off, standards held high. I go on my way.

Not much to do with writing, you might say, but then, isn't everything?

The Subtle Censor - Celia Rees

A quick look through recent blogs will tell you that writers for Young Adults spend a lot of time worrying about their readers and what is deemed to be appropriate or inappropriate in their fiction. More so than other writers, as Nicky Morgan pointed out last week. Other people also get exercised about this, hence the calls for book banning and burning that have been discussed here, too. The difficulties are almost always to do with sexual content. Violence not so much. Language a bit more concerning. But sex. That's the difficult one. This puts the writer for Young Adults in a bit of a dilemma. Do you, or don't you? If you do, how are you going to do it? I'm not talking about putting yourself forward for the Bad Sex Prize here, more how you are going to mention it at all.

Here are some rules: Sex is OK if...*

You are a male writer of some stature or a male writer who is Well Known For It (preferably both).

You are the above and writing about boys from a boy's point of view (but NOT homosexuality).

You make sex into a metaphor, so you are not writing about sex per se but something else, something Other, something to be put off for a long time (preferably altogether) or something Bad will happen and your heroine will never be the Same Again. It is better to burn than turn.

The outcome is Bad. See under abuse, rape, unwanted pregnancy, abortion, because then it is a) A Serious Issue, b) not the heroine's fault and c) even though it is not her fault, she's getting punished for it anyway.

NOT OK

Sex for sex's sake. Sex where people enjoy it. Sex that is part of everyday life, even if it is safe, legal and not frightening the horses.

So there is a kind of censorship, nothing official, nothing as dramatic as banning and burning, but it is there, nonetheless. Most damagingly, it can get into the writer's own head after years of being told to take it out or tone it down because if you don't then the libraries won't take it, the schools won't like it, the booksellers won't know where to put it and, oh, you can forget the Carnegie. No mention, of course, of teenagers, the actual readers, who might like to see their lives reflected with veracity and applaud the book's honesty.

* ellipses are useful in this area of writing.

Notebooks - Celia Rees

Like many writers, I'm a sucker for notebooks and I have many. Big ones, small ones, handbag sized ones, leather bound, spiral bound, cheap ones and expensive ones with beautiful marbled covers and heavy, creamy paper that I can't bring myself to write on. Friends give me notebooks because they make the perfect gift for a writer, but most of them I've bought myself. I find them hard to resist. it is not just the pristine perfection of the pages. Starting a new notebook makes one feel one is doing something positive, making a fresh start.

I always advise anyone who wants to write to keep a notebook and I always have one with me. The notebook is the place where we capture fleeting ideas, impressions, note bits of description, write down 'the words in the air' that Abi Burlingham blogged about on Thursday (see below). It also acts like a sporadic diary, a place where what just might be that really great idea is recorded along with 'to do' lists, shopping lists, holiday lists, so I have a reminder of my ordinary life, as well as my writing life. I also like to collect aide memoire - cards, coasters, tickets, newspaper snippings - sometimes I stick them into the notebook, or if it is a moleskine I tuck them into the handy little pocket in the back. There is nothing like having a physical reminder to take you back to a time and place, either because you need to describe it or to conjure what was in your mind. My only regret is that I cannot draw. I have to confess to a certain amount of notebook envy when it comes to those who can fill the pages with little sketches and arty, italic writing.


One of my favourite novels is Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook - I fell in love with the idea of different coloured notebooks laid out on a table in which one would write different things - so exciting! I haven't quite figured out how to do it, but I'd love to try a similar thing myself.

Stop Press! Dianne Hofmeyr is reviewing my book, The Wish House in ABBA's Review Section today!

www.celiarees.com

http://www.facebook.com/theofficialceliareesfanpag

Dangerous Books for Boys? Celia Rees

'Gove's new curriculum: Dangerous Book for Boys', so read a headline on the front of The Sunday Times a couple of weeks ago. Nice sound bite, but the underlying sexism of the Secretary of Education's remark made me shudder. I leaf on through the paper to find a fresh faced young man in shorts - Gareth Malone - who has a new TV series designed to get boys to read. No mention of getting girls to read, but a quick perusal of the article shows that won't be necessary because girls like nothing more than to be sitting down reading a book, while boys are 'restless and won't want to sit down as much as girls,' according to Professor Stephen Scott of King's College, London. Now, I'm all for schemes for getting children to read, and read more, but was struck by the irony that Michael Rosen, when he was Children's Laureate, also had a series on BBC 4, called Just Read, where he transformed the reading culture of a school in Cardiff and sparked the Just Read Campaign, but it would never have occurred to Michael to work with just the boys. For him, it was, and is, supremely important for ALL children to read, regardless of gender.

I find this renewed emphasis on gender alarming. It seems to be a reaction to a perceived gap in attainment. Boys are falling behind and this is a reason for a full blown moral panic. No-one thinks to congratulate girls for their levels of attainment, for actually gaining parity and pulling ahead for the first time in history. The thinking seems to be, girls are OK because they like sitting down and learning stuff, but boys have to be taught differently because they are restless creatures who can't sit down, etc. etc. - was this true of Michel Gove himself, one wonders? Or of David Cameron and George Osborne and the rest of their cohort at Eton? Or the Miliband brothers at Haverstock Comprehensive School? Hmm, probably not. I bet they were all busy learning their lessons and sitting still as still.

The thing is, I don't like genderisation. Never have. I don't like it in education and I don't like it in books. I don't like the classification of books into girls' books and boys' books. It seems to me to be every bit as pernicious as age ranging. It also means I get classified as a writer, which I don't like, either. Over the last few years, I've noted a marked increase in questions like: 'Why do you always write books for girls?' The answer is: I don't. Even if the main character is a girl, it doesn't mean that the book is specifically for girls. I write for everyone, anyone. I don't discriminate along the lines of age or gender. I'm like Philip Pullman's storyteller in the market place. There for whoever wants to stop and listen. The riposte is often: 'Why do you have girls on the cover, then?' Again, why not? 'Because boys won't read it, stupid!' Really? There's a girl on the cover of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and sales figures would suggest that men are reading that book.

I've got news - from the same newspaper. Men and women are not wired differently. Their brains are the same. All these supposed 'differences' are created by social conditioning and environment. There is no Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus divide. So no more girls are from Planet Pink, Boys from Planet Zarg. Genderisation in literature coarsens the appetite while restricting the fare on offer. Maybe it's time for Children's Books to ditch genderisation and grow up.

The Empty Chair - Celia Rees

Every day, authors appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival give their time to stand in solidarity with persecuted writers by reading aloud from their work. The readings are organised by Scottish PEN, in conjunction with Amnesty International. Pride of place at these events is given to an empty chair. The chair represents those writers who cannot be there, who have to have their words read by others because they live in repressive regimes that seek to silence them by censoring their work; subjecting them to imprisonment, torture, or worse, for daring to express their views and for demanding that their voices be heard.

All the writers taking part in this event must feel, as I did, honoured and humbled to be reading from the work of fellow writers who have suffered, and are suffering, for the right to do something which we take so very much for granted. We are free to write what we like, read what we like, say what we like.

I sat in the tent, listening to my fellow writers reading the words of our brother and sister authors, famous and anonymous, imprisoned or in hiding, in China, in Cuba, in Burma and in Bagdad. All around us events were going on, audiences queuing up, readings being given, while back in the yurt, a fair few egos were on display. I thought about how lightly we hold our freedom to take part in this sharing of words and writing and I found myself looking at that empty chair and wondering: would I be prepared to take the risk? Would any of us? As I did so, words came into my head. Words from the hymn, As I Survey The Wondrous Cross:

my richest gain I count but loss,
and pour contempt on all my pride.

If you are attending trhe Book Festival, go along to show your support and solidarity. These events are free and happen at 5:30 every day.

Serendipity - Celia Rees

I'm not superstitious. I walk under ladders, I stroke black cats when they cross my path. No, I'm not superstitious except when it comes to my writing. I carry amulets, I get very upset if they disappear. I don't tempt fate with loose talk about what I'm doing and I believe in serendipity. I have this in common with my friend, Linda Newbery. Her book, Lob, is on the Guardian children's fiction prize longlist, and richly deserves its place. She explains in an interview: Following the Walking Man, guardian.co.uk 9th August, 2010, how this book was inspired by seeing a man walking the roads between her home in Northampton and Oxford where she was working. He appeared at different points in the book's life: on the day she proposed the idea to her editor, the day after she handed in her typescript, her last sighting of him was at a bus stop in London. She called him Lob. I remember talking to her about this before the book was published and telling her that I used to see the same man, or one of his tribe, walking the main road between Birmingham and Coventry. I said I'd look out for him. Linda keeps a look out, too. She carries a signed copy in the glove compartment of her car, ready to give to him when she sees him again.

I have to report a sighting. The day after I read her interview I saw him walking up Putney High Street, swathed about with bags of different sorts, pushing a trolley, making his way between the shoppers and the buggies. Putney High Street was the old road to Portsmouth and that was the way he was heading, out of the bustle of the town, up onto the ancient heath. I hope it's a good sign for Linda.

I have my own examples, which is why I could identify so closely with Linda and her walking man. My latest novel, The Fool's Girl, was inspired by Shakespeare's play, Twelfth Night, and has Feste as a character, the Fool of the title, The first time I had to talk about the book in public, in Cambridge on a warm spring day, I saw this street performer on the way to the venue. My own serendipity. I can't pass a street performer now without giving him or her some money. Feste would never forgive me.

I'm hoping that serendipity is still working for me. On the day I was thinking about writing this blog, I went to the library and on the notice board there, I saw a flyer for something that was a clear message about the book that I plan to write next. I'm not going to say what it is, because that would be tempting fate.

If I could find the camera... Celia Rees

I'd take a photo of the chaotic mess that is my study. I know it's in here somewhere, I just can't remember which pile it is under. As a writer, I'm as prone to rituals as the Lords of Groan and one of patterns that has emerged over the years is the Big Clear Out after a book is finished, a physical and mental de-clutter before the next project gets truly underway. That is one way of spinning it, the other is I just can't find anything: letters, tax forms, notes and print-outs, books, cameras, staplers, rulers, anything I actually need has disappeared.

The problem is twofold. I am naturally messy and find it difficult to throw things away. I have, for example, a great many books - not just on the two walls of shelves, but in piles on the floor, table, futon, chair, any flat surface, and I find it hard to part with them. This is not just sentimental. I never know when I might want them and I can guarantee the next time I think, 'I know I've got a book about that somewhere', that will be the book that's gone to Oxfam. I need more space (move house? Rent storage?) to put them and I need some kind of coherent cataloguing system (alphabetical? By subject? Dewey Decimal?) but I can never quite decide how to organise them (too many decisions) so that does not get done.

Then there are the foreign editions of my own books that publishers have kindly sent to me. It is wonderful to have foreign editions, but they do mount up. If I could find a good home for them, then I could use the storage space for other stuff. If anyone has any ideas for safe disposal, please let me know.

And then there are the notebooks. Like many writers, I love stationery and find it hard to resist the lure of The New Notebook. Consequently, I have many: big ones, small ones, hard back, soft back, posh, expensive, cheap spiral pads. Most of them have something written in them, so should they be retained, part of my 'archive'? Should I even have an archive, or is that just another excuse not to throw things away? More dilemmas...

Quite apart from all that, there are the box files of documents, notes, correspondence (archive again) - should I just throw the lot out, would I even notice? Going through everything is a big job, one I keep putting off because I've got better things to do (like writing books) but I can hardly move at the moment and I actually don't have a book to write, so I guess I've run out of excuses, except I've got a blog to write - now, where is that camera?

www.celiarees.com
Fan Page: www.facebook.com/theofficialceliareesfanpage

FIVE THINGS NO WRITER WANTS TO HEAR...

Writing is a weird thing to do. It's not like having a proper job where you have to go to work every day, get paid at the end of the month, can go on holiday without feeling guilty and toting a laptop about with you everywhere, even though you only use it to check your e mails in the wifi cafe.

Normal people pretend to be interested in what you do, but really they think it is weird and can't quite comprehend it. This leads them to asking questions which you can see coming but you dread being asked.

Here are five of my favourites. Feel free to add your own.

1. Have you got a new book coming out?

If you have, then,

2. I can't find your new book in Waterstone's.

If they can find it in Waterstone's, then,

3. When is the next one coming out?

4(a)If you write for children, or teenagers - Have you ever thought of writing for adults?

4 (b)If you write for adults - How's the kids' book doing?

And finally...

5. Should I have heard of you?

The SAS - Celia Rees (inc competition)

No. Not these guys…The other SAS, The Scattered Authors Society, came into being in 1997 when three Scholastic authors: Peter Beere, Malcolm Rose and Anne Cassidy got together over a weekend in Birmingham and decided that there should be some kind of way for authors like them to connect each other and stay in touch.

I joined a few months later, responding to a letter that Peter had sent to The Author asking for writers of specifically teen fiction I seem to remember, to get in touch. His letter seemed to be speaking directly to me. Publishers and agents tend to be centred on London, but authors (as the title suggested) are scattered all over the country. It was rare to meet up with fellow writers, apart from the odd publisher’s party or festival. It was easy to feel isolated and disconnected. I answered immediately and received a reply inviting me to a lunch at the Barbican. I remember feeling bereft because I couldn’t go but I did manage to make the next gathering in Stratford-on-Avon. There were maybe ten or twelve of us there and although I didn’t know anyone it wasn’t long before I felt as though I was among friends. We had so much in common. We could talk writing for as long as we liked without anyone keeling over with boredom. We decided we needed more time, so we agreed to a weekend get together – in Milton Keynes because it was easy to reach for most people and Malcolm Rose lived there and was prepared to do the booking. The SAS has always been like that. Someone suggests something, someone else agrees to organise it and somehow it happens.

More people came to Milton Keynes and still more to the next meeting. Many of the authors whom I met at those first meets are still my friends now. The SAS grew from there and has gone on growing until now we have over 200 members. No-one knows how to stop it, even if they wanted to. It is inclusive, not exclusive. Anyone can join for a nominal sum. The only rule is you have to be a published writer. It is a bit like the Hotel California – you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave, because there is nothing to leave. There is no committee, no chair, no secretary, no real organisation. We have a Newsletter, message board, web site at http://www.scatteredauthors.org and the ABBA blog site at http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com, but no-one is forced to do anything, members put in as much as they want.

There are still local lunches, an annual conference, and a yearly retreat at Charney Manor in Oxfordshire (10th Anniversary coming up) but all these things are organised on a strictly ad hoc volunteer basis and no-one has to participate if they don’t want to. The fact that so many do is testimony to the how useful the SAS is to many of its members. The SAS is not just about sharing knowledge and expertise about writing and the process of writing, it is about it is about making real and lasting friendships. On a more mundane but equally important level, it is how to make a living from writing: how to handle publishers and agents, how to organise school visits, what to expect from festivals, how to set up a blog/website/twitter account. There is always someone who knows, someone with more experience, someone who is willing to share that knowledge with scattered comrades.

Website: www.celiarees.com


COMPETITION
I’m giving away a copy signed, hardback of my latest novel, The Fool’s Girl, to the first person to contact me via my website www.celiarees.com or my Facebook Fanpage www.facebook.com/theofficialceliareesfanpage and who can correctly answer this question:

What is the title of Celia’s first book and what year was it published? 

Rituals and e-visiting old friends - Celia Rees

The other day, a student asked me if I had any particular rituals associated with my writing. I was about to answer, 'No, not really,' in a lame kind of way, when I realised that I do, I just never thought of them that way, that's all. I collect things. Some objects are almost talismans, others are just fun - like the models that make up the interesting Pirates! tableau. I have witches in all sizes from big, to very small with flashing eyes, that belong to Witch Child; models of pirates, ships, flags, eye patches, pencil case, t shirts (Pirates! - what else?); a tricolour rosette I bought in Paris (Sovay) and various jesters for The Fool's Girl. I don't stop when the book is finished - the Lego pirate ship was free with last week's News of The World and I always give money to street performers because of Feste.

Perhaps the reason I go on collecting is because books are never really finished. The characters stay with you long after the book has been published. You've lived with them for a long time, they are part of you, like memories and people from your real life. I realised this when I re-visited Pirates! recently. This was a stand alone book, published in 2003, no sequel planned, so none written, but that didn't stop me wondering, speculating about what happened next, so when I was invited by a blogger, who was having a pirate month in May, to write a piece for her website, I thought, why not?



She wanted it to be called a The Brawl in Triton's Tavern. I've had stranger requests. I decided to write an episode from Pirates! 2, the phantom sequel. As soon as I began to write, the characters and their voices were back again. It was like visiting old friends. The result can be seen http://vvb32reads.blogspot.com/2011/05/tritons-tavern-brawl.html

It was fun. I might go back there again for a longer visit. Who knows? In these days of e books and kindle, we can write what we like, what we want to write, not what is asked of us by publishers.

What is on your playlist? Celia Rees

I was listening to Radio 4 the other day when I heard the author, David Nicholls, talking about his novel, One Day. Now, I haven't read the book, although my daughter has and recommends it highly, but I'm always interested in writers talking about their writing, especially ones who are selling shed loads. For those, like me, who have not read the book, it follows the lives of two people from their student days in 1988 to near present day. As I understand it, the device that Nicholls uses is to have them meet every year on St Swithin's Day. In this way we can follow their lives and changes, kind of When Harry Met Sally, but more organised and British. Do Americans know about St Swithin's Day? Anyway, what interested me was the way he described going back to these past years. He used the music, what he and everyone else was listening to in 1988, say, 0r 1992. He found this one of the best ways of getting into the feel of the time. Songs are like scents, they bring back detail, the kind of detail a writer needs to make a time come alive.

I have always used songs and music in my writing, not just to evoke different times, but also moods and states of mind. My first novel took its title from a song: Every Step You Take. I was listening to it in the car one day and remember thinking how creepy it was, the perfect way to get into the head of an obsessive stalker. Another early novel, Midnight Hour, also owes its title to song lyrics, Wilson Pickett singing, I'm going to take you girl and hold you, do everything I told you, in the midnight hour. 'Do everything I told you...' that was the line that chilled me. And it doesn't even matter if it is not the right words, that's what I heard, so it is what my killer heard, too.

I first heard the Ballad of Sovay, sung by Pentangle, more years ago than I care to remember. I had no idea then that I would ever become a writer, much less that this song would provide me with the title and main character for a novel. But the haunting melody stayed with me, as did the story of the daring young woman who dressed as a highwayman to test the fidelity of her lover. Many years after that first hearing, I was having a conversation with fellow novelist, Susan Price, about folk ballads and Sovay came up. We both said how much we loved the song, and the girl. By the end of the conversation it was more or less decided that I would make Sovay the heroine of my next novel.

Songs do not just provide titles, characters, basic plots and starting points. When I'm writing historical fiction, they give me a powerful way into the world that I am trying to create. When I was writing Sovay I listened to John Gay's The Beggar's Opera over and over again, not just for the beauty of the lyrics and the music, but for the moods and emotions that they evoked and the deeply subversive, satirical view of a corrupt society where the heroes and heroines are thieves, murderers and prostitutes. John Gay gives us a view into an 18th Century underworld that he knew well. At the same time, he is letting us know that respectable society was also under scrutiny by those who would seek to change it.

You cannot beat contemporary sources for insight into any past time. Popular songs and street ballads are often the only way we have to see into the lives and minds of ordinary men and women, allow us to hear the words that they used, the cadences of everyday speech. For me, they help to 'raise the spirits of the age', to evoke a sense of love, loss, danger and excitement. When I was writing Pirates! , I listened to songs of the sea, of dark eyed sailors and female sailors bold. When I was writing The Fool's Girl, I listened to Elizabethan street songs, jigs and bawdy ballads, as well as Shakespeare's own songs and court music. Each of my books has its own soundtrack,. Sometimes the music gets mentioned in the text, sometimes it doesn't. That is not important. Neither is exact authenticity. What is important is how this music, these songs have sustained and fed my imagination and freed my creativity.

Anyone else care to share their playlist?

We Will Not See Their Like... Celia Rees

I was shocked, as I expect many who read this blog will have been, by the death of Diana Wynne Jones. I'm not a devoted fan, I will confess that now, so anyone who was planning to write their own obit. can feel free, but nevertheless, I mourn her loss. She was one of those writers that one simply thought would always be there, somewhere, a necessary presence, there to remind us of what fantasy should be like, can be like if you know enough, think enough, write hard enough, a reminder to fantasy writers of what they should be trying to attain. She was a writer of endless inventiveness, originality and imagination, an inspiration, acknowledged or not, to later generations of writers. She knew fantasy inside out and the mythos on which it is largely based, because of that, she knew how hard it is to be original. For me, originality is the hallmark of really great fantasy and Diana Wynne Jones had it in spades.

Taking a leaf from the Bookwitch's blog and adopting a bit of serendipity, going off at a bit of a tangent, I'll admit to another shock this week, with the death of Elizabeth Taylor. Again, I've never been a great fan of hers, but like Diana, I just always thought that she would be there, somewhere, being impossibly beautiful and sultry, a last reminder of a lost world of Hollywood glamour when stars were stars. I read Camille Paglia's article in yesterday's Sunday Times, mourning the loss of 'Hollywood's last great goddess of erotic power' and found myself wondering with her at the contrast between Elizabeth Taylor, the 'pre-feminist woman', and the 'skeletal, pilates-honed, anorexic silhouettes' of modern female stars, like Gwyneth Paltrow, Keira Knightley and most others that you could name. As though, somehow, Hollywood has rejected the depiction of real women in favour of androids.

I don't suppose that Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Wynne Jones will appear together anywhere else, but isn't that what ABBA is for? Nostalgia is probably just another word for getting old, but for me the world will be much the poorer for the loss of these two very different women.

It's That Man Again... Celia Rees

Lucy Coats has already blogged (Wednesday, 9th Feb) about the remarks that Martin Amis made when he was interviewed by Sebastian Faulks for the BBC 2 programme, Faulks on Fiction. Her blog has attracted 60 comments and the outrage felt has resonated as far as the national press and the Huffington Post. Martin Amis, as the Guardian on Saturday pointed out, is no stranger to controversy.

I, too, saw the programme and after the first dropping of the jaw, I thought that he actually had a point. Just in case anybody doesn't know, or does not want to scroll down the page and see his words in purple 18 point type, he said:

'People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say: "If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book."'

So far, so insulting. He then went on to say:

'The idea of being conscious of who you are directing the story to is anathema to me because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.'

Once I heard that, I could see where he was coming from. I did not think he was saying 'all children's writers have half a brain', that would be false logic. He was just explaining his own writing stance and he is entitled to do that. He writes literary fiction for adults, as such he sees it as his task to write to the top of his register and would not, could not accept any restraints on that.

The disregard for the reader that Amis expresses is just not possible when one is writing for children. Children's writers, and I include writers of Young Adult fiction, are ALWAYS aware of what their readers will and will not tolerate, or will or will not understand. Anyone who denies this is being disingenuous. Quite apart from the target readers themselves, there are other agencies involved. We have to worry about things that would not trouble writers of adult fiction in the least - see Leslie Wilson's blog below. How many writers for adults would feel the need to explain and justify their use of swear words or the incidence of sex in a novel? How much we take these factors into consideration, how much we allow them to limit our fiction, is up to us, but those limitations are there. We do not use our full palate, as Patrick Ness would say. How can we? We have to write at a lower register because we are adults and our readers are children.

There are other pressures on us, too. Pressures that have nothing to do with our writing but everything to do with the market place. In a squeezed market, there is more and more demand from publishers for novels that will sell. Books that fit into an obvious, popular genre - action, dark romance, whatever. A book that is perceived as 'too literary' is seen as problematic. The equivalent of the literary novel is a rare beast, and becoming more endangered by the minute. If one or two do sneak through, they usually turn out to have been written for adults in the first place and tweaked a bit in a bid to capture that holy grail, the crossover market.

In an interview in the Observer Review (13th February, 2011)) Nicole Krauss attests that the comment she heard most frequently on a U.S. book tour for her novel, The History of Love, was: 'this book is difficult'. Krauss worries that 'we are moving towards the end of effort'. Readers don't want to have to think too hard, it appears, whatever their age. That is the spectre that frightens me. In the hope of keeping that at bay, I actually want Martin Amis to write to the limit.

A Sort of Life - Celia Rees

At the end of his autobiographical memoir, Graham Greene says:

'For a writer, I argued, success is always temporary, success is only a delayed failure. A writer's ambition is not satisfied like the business man's by a comfortable income, although he sometimes boasts of it like a nouveau riche.
...
The writer has the braggart's excuse. Knowing the unreality of his success he shouts to keep his courage up. There are faults in his work which he alone detects...'

The real satisfaction lies in putting those things right, in other words in the writing itself.

Graham Greene was a great writer, one who understood not only how prose works, but the inner workings of those who produce it.

As I read this, I was struck by the truth of it. I'm sure there will be many who will deny it, but they know in their hearts that this is true. We ARE never satisfied. Once we are over the first great hurdle, that of getting our work published at all, then there are other goals to achieve: prizes, sales, money, fame, recognition. We need other people to recognise the worth of our work, and through that, ourselves. Even if we gain everything, prizes, fame, money, the whole works, then we still know that our star will inevitably fade. Success is fleeting, at best.

We now have more ways to shout, to keep our courage up. We can blog, tweet and twitter, post videos on YouTube. We can be out there, like barkers at some virtual literary fair, shouting out out wares, bidding readers to come see, come buy, know about us. I wonder what GG would think about all that?

Yesterday, I came across the wise words of another great writer: Margaret Atwood.

I was directed by Adele Geras to fictionbitch.blogspot.com where I found this quote from an interview in the Literary Review:

'...people are trying to pile stuff onto authors, like you have to blog, you have to have this, you have to have that. Various party tricks. You actually don't ... an author's job is to concentrate on the writing, and once the writing is finished what you essentially do is throw it into a bottle and heave it into the sea... There is still a voyage between the text and the unknown reader; the book will still arrive at the door of some readers who don't understand it - who don't like it. It will still find some readers who hopefully do...'

I guess people will say, she would say that, wouldn't she? Just as it is easy to dismiss Graham Greene's words - how much more successful can a writer be? But I don't think these observations come from self satisfaction and complacency. They come from the very things that make these two such successful writers: their powers of observation, depth of insight, honesty and courage to express thoughts that might be unpalatable, but are nonetheless true. The only real satisfation has to come from the words we put down on the page and the connection we make with readers, no matter how many, or how few.