How to Teach A Guardian Masterclass - Lucy Coats

Next July I shall have been working in the world of children's books, in one guise or another, for thirty-one years.  I've been an editor, a bookseller, a journalist and a writer. What I'd never been before last September (in any formal way) was a teacher of adults, but by agreeing to tutor a Guardian Masterclass on how to write for children, I became one.

My first book was published twenty-two years ago, and since then I've written a good many more. Could I teach others how to do it, though? Is how to write for children even teachable?  I've always been one who says that there are no rules for writing - only what works. Preparing for a whole day workshop taught me otherwise.  There are rules - the trick is how each individual chooses to interpret them. Thinking about how to get over the salient points of how to plot, write dialogue, create convincing characters and build credible worlds, plan story arcs, show not tell and all the other tricks of the writing trade, made me really focus in on what makes a children's book great instead of ordinary. It also made me realise how much I have actually learned in all those writing years (thankfully, quite a lot, in case you were wondering).

Until I started my first day of teaching, though, I had no idea if what I planned to say was going to be at all useful to anyone else.  I also didn't know what kind of teacher I was going to be.  Before that initial September morning, I prayed to all the gods of Story that I would be the flame-lighting kind, not the damp squib sort, and my prayer seems to have worked.  After three Masterclasses, the feedback has all been positive, and I have found in myself a surprising passion for imparting the writing trade I love to everyone from grandfathers to graphic designers.  (I've also loved working with my fellow writer, Michelle Lovric, who has kindly agreed to be my regular guest author, and whose incisive brilliance in pinning down plot flaws and age-inappropriateness during the group writing exercises fills me with awe.)

The wide spread of professions and ages who signed up to be taught surprised me. Their enthusiasm heartened me. What saddened and slightly depressed me, though, was that almost none had read any children's book later than Roald Dahl, even the ones who had children of their own. They'd just about heard of Philip Pullman, because of the film of his book, but they had no idea that The Hunger Games was a book first. None of them had even heard of Meg Rosoff or Patrick Ness, or Marcus Sedgwick or Sally Gardner, even though they are some of the biggest names in UK children's books right now, and they had no idea that Malorie Blackman is our present Children's Laureate.  Still, as with any class, you work with what you have - and they've all gone away with a long list of current books to look out for.  I hope at least some will use it to their advantage, along with my advice to read, read, read - the ones who really want to be writers, anyway. Because that was another surprising thing I discovered.  Not everyone who comes to a Guardian Masterclass actually wants to go away and write a book. Some are just there for the experience, and I think that's fine. As long as everyone enjoys themselves and takes away a bit of useful knowledge at the end of the day, I've done my job.

So, what are the five most important things I've learned from my Guardian Masterclass teaching experience?
First, that proper preparation is a key element to everyone's enjoyment, including mine.
Second, that a PowerPoint presentation is a thing of wonder, and, more practically, breaks up the talking bits.
Third, that writing exercises are a powerful tool for building confidence.
Fourth, that not everyone will ask questions, so having extra material to fill in unexpected gaps is good.
Fifth, that, as ever, chocolate is the way to a writing Masterclass's heart.

I've finished teaching the current Guardian Masterclass workshops for this year, but am delighted to say that the wonderful Nosy Crow team, headed by Kate Wilson, will be joining me next February for a whole weekend of children's writing and publishing, which will provide what we hope will be a fantastic opportunity to see both sides of the industry.  Personally, I can't wait to do more teaching - and to be amazed at the unique ideas even people with no confidence in their own creative capabilities can come up with in a very short space of time, given just a spoonful of encouragement (and, of course, a good dose of chocolate).

Lucy's new picture book, Captain Beastlie's Pirate Party is coming soon from Nosy Crow!

Bear's Best Friend, is published by Bloomsbury "A charming story about the magic of friendship which may bring a tear to your eye" Parents in Touch "The language is a joy…thoughtful and enjoyable" Armadillo Magazine. "Coats's ebullient, sympathetic story is perfectly matched by Sarah Dyer's warm and witty illustrations." The Times   

Her latest series for 7-9s, Greek Beasts and Heroes is out now from Orion Children's Books. 

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I had a dream - Michelle Lovric

In the cold light of dawn, there’s nothing my husband dreads more than the words, ‘Darling, I had a dream …’

My subconscious has always enacted dreadful deeds in the dead of night. And my almost blameless spouse has been the villain of a great many of them. He used to protest his innocence, but now he knows better. Every morning after, he apologises abjectly for whatever he (didn’t) do in my dream, makes tea and comforts me.

But secretly, I know, he shares William Dean Howells’ opinion of the matter:
The habit husbands and wives have of making each other listen to their dreams is especially cruel. They have each other quite helpless, and for this reason they should all the more carefully guard themselves from abusing their advantage. Parents should not afflict their offspring with the rehearsal of their mental maunderings in sleep, and children should learn that one of the first duties a child owes its parents is to spare them the anguish of hearing what it has dreamed about overnight …

Howells also documents the way the dreamer often turns on the dreamt-about, blaming them for dreamt-up sins. Unhelpfully, he adds, The only thing that I can think to do about it is to urge people to keep out of other people’s dreams by every means in their power.

‘But I didn’t ask to be in your dreams,’ protests my husband.

My latest novel for children, The Mourning Emporium, was published on October 28th. This means that my husband gets a break, because in the weeks around publication, my dreams change. All paranoia focuses on the act of publication and its sister-acts of publicity, performance and parties.

Here’s a selection of what my subconscious been up to in the small hours the last few weeks:

I am in a locked car, improbably parked on a jetty near our home in Venice. I’m tied up. The car teeters on the edge of the jetty and then drops into the dark green depths. A person I don’t know stands on the jetty, watching impassively.

I’m on a strobe-lit stage, wearing only a slightly grubby spotted sheet. The dancing mistress hisses from the wings, ‘DO YOUR BUTTERFLY DANCE!’ I stumble around like a blowfly who’s just been sprayed with DDT. I fall off the stage, crushing to powder a lady who has the shape and texture of a vast meringue. It turns out she was the one VIP I was supposed to impress.

I am at a party. I’m comprehensively snubbed by someone I am particularly happy to see – someone to whom I would have given custody of my professional happiness or with whom I would have shared my last Bendicks Bittermint. People turn away from my naked grief. I go to the kitchen and start washing dishes.

I am flattered into judging a literary competition. It will be good for my career, I’m assured. The UPS boat arrives, and a huge box is unloaded for me. It is as big as I am. These are the competition entries. I have two hours to read them all. Then the UPS man stagger onto the jetty with another box. And another. The whole boat is full of entries. I stare at the hopes and dreams of other writers and know that I am about to betray all of them.

The bitter aftertaste of bad dreams like these can linger till sunset. They leave the dreamer drained and feeling guilty. A really bad dream can perpetuate the sense of inadequacy it evokes by rendering the dreamer inadequate for the tasks of the day.

In Japanese mythology there’s a creature called a Baku, who looks something like a tapir crossed with a lion and elephant. It feeds on the bad dreams of humanity. I imagine it rather corpulent. But it can dine on dreams only if they are offered up voluntarily. The dreamer must cry, ‘Devour, O Baku’ three times before he or she may be freed from his hallucinatory tortures.

Does anyone else have any titbits for the Japanese tapir god?

Does anyone else have special nightmares on publication street?



LINKS
Michelle Lovric’s website
William Dean Howells’ full essay on dreams can be found in Impressions and Experiences, 1896.

Block print of Baku by Katsushika Hokusai

Rear Window - Michelle Lovric

After a mere fifteen years restoration, the lights have finally gone on in the palazzo opposite ours across the canal. Two of the new inhabitants are cat-owners. I don’t get out much. So who’s going to blame me for investing in a pair of binoculars?

First there was Neil, a handsome black-and-white gentleman, on the first floor window sill. And then, just a few days later, the lovely Samantha appeared on the floor below. The two cats also saw each other. It’s a proper colpo di fulmine, blinding love at searing first sight. Neil gazes down at Samantha. Samantha gazes up at Neil. It’s a wrap.

But it’s also an impossible love – for an entire tall floor of a Venetian palazzo separates Samantha from Neil.

Now Samantha and Neil pass some hours each day in the kind of yearning contemplation that calls to mind John Donne’s poem The Ecstasy. Sometimes Neil cannot take it any more – he makes for the dangerous edge of his parapet. But at the last moment common or cat sense always brings him back to safety. Sometimes Samantha is gripped by the fever of love, and stands on her back legs in her window-sill, scrabbling at the cruel walls.

These are quintessentially Venetian cats and therefore know the value of presentation. Neil’s tapir markings are set off beautifully by his two green cushions, one in each window on the canal. Samantha is probably just a particularly alluring tabby, but the nobility of her palazzo setting lends her the air of an Abyssinian. With apologies to R. Chandler, she’s a cat who would make an ailurophile pope (as we have now) kick a hole in a stained glass window. What amazing kittens they would make together …

But alas, there is another reason why this love is never to be. A few weeks after this love affair ignited. I discovered that Neil is … married! I should have guessed that there’d be a wife somewhere – handsome, prosperous chap like him.

I nearly dropped my binoculars when matriarchal Bessie – big and grey and pear-shaped – appeared on Neil’s window sill. She delivered a sharp cuff about the ear when she caught her man in the act of mooning after Samantha. There followed a Mexican standoff between Samantha and Bessie. Samantha eventually slunk back into her house. And now she and Neil snatch their lyrical moments when they can – but Bessie always appears quite promptly to administer wifely discipline to her husband and give Samantha the death stare.

Samantha is plotting something. She’ll have Neil, if it’s the last thing she does. Bessie’s grown complacent. She thinks Neil’s well cowed. But she’s not seen the glint in his green love-rat eyes lately. If I were Bessie, I wouldn’t be straying too close to the edge of that parapet any time soon.

My deeply embarrassed husband at this point insists that I inform you that ‘Neil’ and ‘Samantha’ and ‘Bessie’ are not their real names. They’re probably something guttingly prosaic. Neil might even be a ‘Maria’; Samantha could well be a ‘Gianni.’ But I swear that Bessie could never be anything else but Bessie. Unless she was a ‘Bertha’.

You’d never guess that I earn my living as a writer, would you?

LINKS
Michelle Lovric’s latest novel, The Mourning Emporium, the sequel to The Undrowned Child, is published on October 28th. Any similarities between the feline characters in this blog and those in the books are purely coincidental.

Michelle Lovric’s website - now featuring new pages and background on The Mourning EmporiumPicture of ‘Stewart’ from the award-winning Book Orchard Press

Whose Serenissima is it anyway? – Michelle Lovric

Last weekend I had the pleasure and privilege of sharing a stage with the wonderful Mary Hoffman at the Ilkley Festival. We were talking about the different ways in which we fictionalize Venice. And one of the questions that came up was this: ‘How do you both feel when you see yet another novel about Venice hitting the bookshop shelves?’

Neither of us owns Venice. We both earn our right to write about Italy novel by novel. But we did admit to a flicker of annoyance at books that cynically employ the undeniable commercial lustre of Venice to gild their lily – or to put a velvet bow on their dog.

Now I have returned from Ilkley to Italy … only to discover that Mary and I have both been thoroughly trumped in our attempts to write a properly Venetian Venice … perhaps. For a Venetian gondolier has just been and gone and published a novel.

Sad to tell, Angelo Tumino’s novel contains nothing of moonlight, romance or lapping waves. Invasione Negata takes the form of a diary of a widowed retired engineer who finds himself living in a condominium in the suburbs of Rome, surrounded by immigrants who speak other tongues, cook foreign foods – and persecute, rob and attack the native Italians.

Tumino, 36, claims that he is a gondolier only by economic necessity: his true calling is as a writer. He’s hoping that Invasione negata will lift him away from a life at the oar and into a properly literary existence in front of a computer.

Instead, the slim volume has so far propelled Tumino into controversy. The author claims that the book’s intention is to document the most profound fear that strikes the rich nations of the west – fear of the foreigner. He claims that the politicians are incapable of solving the problems and it is the ordinary citizens who pay the costs of clandestine immigration.

‘I would say it is a tale of metropolitan conflict,’ says Tumino.

What he not saying – according to La Nuova newspaper – is if he’s a member of the right-wing anti-immigration Lega Nord. But that’s not stopping others from labelling him that, and worse. The Indymedia Lombardia website has written a profile of Tumino entitled ‘The Nazi Gondolier’. And describes his work as ‘di chiaro stampo hitleriano’ – ‘of a clearly Hitlerian stamp’. But the site has been much criticized for the intemperance of its coverage, and in other places the novel and its writer have been highly praised.

Tumino protests that the character depicted in the novel is not a self portrait. He adds ‘Reading Stephen King, one might think that this is an author with psychological problems. But in fact he is a totally normal person.’

Invasione negata had its official launch at the fish market in Venice on October 12th, as its author (still) serves on the traghetto between Santa Sofia and Rialto.

In Tumino's top drawer are two other books – a collection of comic short stories – The Gondolier without a Gondola and American Gondolier, a science fiction story set in a Venice that has been bought up by the Americans and is inhabited by android gondoliers.

So is it still safe for Mary and me to go in the water, with our historical novels about Venice and Italy?


LINKS

Mary Hoffman’s Stravaganza series starts in Venice, with City of Masks. The latest book in the series, City of Ships, is just published by Bloomsbury

Michelle Lovric's latest novels about Venice are The Book of Human Skin (Bloomsbury) for adults, and her children’s book, The Mourning Emporium, the sequel to The Undrowned Child, out on October 28th

Angelo Tumino’s website
gondola photo by Debbie Patterson

Comfort from Strangers - Michelle Lovric

For someone who’s not paid to be there, I’ve spent a lot of time at St Thomas’ Hospital A & E this year. There’s a seat in the corridor outside Majors that – in my daydreams – will one day bear a small, discreet plaque:

IN SPRING 2010,
MICHELLE LOVRIC
WROTE A LARGE PART OF
The Mourning Emporium
WHILE WAITING TO BE SEEN HERE.

From that seat, you watch the meat wagons arriving full of bloodied drunks, pensioners disoriented after falls, people on bad drug trips. If you’ve read me, you’ll know I’m not squeamish. But at times even I’ve needed to turn away from what was being wheeled down that corridor outside Majors. I’ve also winced at the shrieked claims of inebriated girls about what they took or what they definitely didn’t do with whom. Some of them, sad to say, are young enough to read my children’s books. I’ve shrunk away from the huddles of defensive friends, hustling the fumes of their night’s drinking through the disinfected air. Almost worse is the occasional querulous posh person who turns up with a finger-tip lopped off in a gin-and-gardening incident. They bray their needs imperiously, oblivious to the exhaustion of the staff or the less socially entitled who might be ahead of them in the queue.

On each occasion (apart from the time my eye was swelled closed), my only shield against all this misery has been a manuscript. I’ve been able to tuck myself inside my story, close the trap-door, turn out the cruel hospital lights and light a private candle. I’ve been able to unhear the yelling and the moaning, unsee the blood, to fade far away and quite forget the ugliness and pain.

Instead, I’ve embarked on a floating orphanage in Venice and sailed her through ice floes to London, where I’ve encountered poor children who sleep in the coffins of a funeral parlour, lovingly tended by a Fagin-like English bulldog. I’ve staged verbal battles between wan London mermaids and their feisty Venetian counterparts. I’ve launched a murderous campaign by a pretender to the British throne. I’ve buried Queen Victoria. And nearly buried King Edward VII, somewhat prematurely.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that The Mourning Emporium, part-written in St Thomas’ A & E, also has a distinctly medicinal flavour. I’ve cured London of the dreadful Half-dead Disease (having first inflicted it on her). I’ve let my London mermaids become addicted to patent feminine nostrums such as ‘Charles Forde’s Bile Beans for Biliousness’ or ‘Dr Blaud’s Capsules’, which, according to the manufacturer, produced ‘pure, rich blood without any disagreeable effects and are recommended by the medical faculty as the best remedy for bloodlessness’.

It’s not just mermaids. I’ve given one major character haemophilia. One of the children has ‘phossy jaw’, from working in a match factory. Another has a wasting cough – that could surely profit from 'Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic', as illustrated. The rodents of London’s sewers are terrified of a patent verminicide called ‘Rough on Rats’. In fact, I can’t think of a single character who gets through The Mourning Emporium without feeling a little unwell at some point.

Might I have all written those medical pages anyway, seated in the full bloom of health at my desk at home? Perhaps. But I would taken longer, been easily distracted, and succumbed to the blandishments of the cat or the email.

At St Thomas’, however, I was driven into the manuscript, and it welcomed me with all the exclusive, excluding cosiness of a private club. A manuscript is a not just a sanctuary; it’s a portable padded cell with all mod cons.

I, for one, would never get in an ambulance without one.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Mourning Emporium, the sequel to The Undrowned Child, is published on October 28th.
Michelle Lovric’s website

The Curious Incidence of Felines in Paintings of the Virgin Mary – Michelle Lovric

The Da Vinci Code tugs the veil off ‘the sacred feminine’. According to Dan Brown’s novel, this cult was ruthlessly suppressed by sinister elements in the Catholic Church. Brown’s Code suggests that generations of acolytes continued to worship ‘underground’, transmitting their faith in the language of symbols.

So – what if the same thing happened to cats?

Worshipped and misunderstood to the point of persecution, the cat has suffered a similar fate to the Magdalene’s. Cats, like witches, were once even burned at the stake. (Of course, cats’ fortunes, like women’s, are currently on the rise.)

It’s a little-known but fascinating fact that Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Rubens, Murillo, Lorenzo Lotto, Giulio Romano and many others inserted a portrait of a cat into their depictions of the Virgin Mary.

Intrigued by da Vinci’s sketch of a Madonna cradling a baby and a cat in her arms, I began to look into the matter a couple of years ago. You know how it is with cat lovers: one cat leads to another, and another. In the end, my quest put me on the road, on a journey through the backwaters of northern Italy, to abandoned churches in remote towns such as Bagolino, Isola Dovarese and Esine, and to Siena, Perugia and Florence.

The more cats-and-Madonnas I saw, the greater my craving. I became bold and implacable. Flabbergasted priests were dragged from their lunch tables to unlock their churches. Engaged couples arriving for their blessing were made to wait while I entreated their priest: ‘Lei sarebbe così gentile da mostrarmi la Vostra Madonna con gatta, per cortesia!’ (‘Kindly show me your Madonna and Cat, please!’)

In the library and on the internet, I tracked down yet more pictures. Cats are to be found with Madonnas in Russia, in France, in Greece, in America and in eastern Europe. Annunciations with cats. Holy Families with Cats. Births of the Virgin with cats. Tabby cats. White cats. Grey cats. Sleeping cats. Running cats. Cats who stare out of the painting, as if narrating the story. In the church of San Giorgio at Montemerano there’s a Madonna della Gattaiola, a painting of the Virgin with a perforation said to serve as a cat-flap.

Had I uncovered a secret cult? If I had, then it’s still secret, for no one has yet established the link between all these pictures.

However, all this exciting research came to a sad end. I thought the book was going to be published by a big American house that loved the idea. I’d worked with them before and was delighted with their enthusiasm. Then suddenly all the material was returned with a regretful note.

Wires had been crossed. I’d seen it as a $25 book, lavishly illustrated, something to appeal to the art market, the gift book market, the cat market and even the Christmas market. But the publisher had seen it as a very small gift book. And a $9.98 price tag would never support the reproduction fees for 80 paintings from museums and churches around the world.

Or so they said.

As I filed the research in a wicker basket, and regretfully set to work on something more commercial, I did idly wonder if Opus Dei (or Dan Brown’s sinister version of them) might have had a hand in the suppression of a 'Da Vinci code' for cats.

There are no cats in the Bible, an omission that has allowed some Christians to brand them as evil. (Llamas and kangaroos aren’t mentioned either, but they haven’t been anathematized.)

Cats certainly disregard the part of the Bible where God gives Man dominion over all the animals. Cats obey none of the Ten Commandments. Cats are the familiars of women. Cats are feminine. Many people – many, many people – worship their cats.

It’s all adding up, isn’t it?

Of course Dan Brown’s Christian fundamentalists would want to suppress the Sacred Feline just as much as the Sacred Feminine.

Maybe even more ruthlessly?

Michelle Lovric’s website

Michelle Lovric will be discussing ways to write about Venice with Katie Hickman at the Edinburgh Festival on August 21st.

Picture: Virgin with cat (part of an Annunciation fresco) by Pietro da Cemmo (c.1474-1504) at the Church of Santa Maria at Esine, Italy.

What the Dickens? - Sue Purkiss

I recently found myself reading a book I hated. Normally, I would have ditched it after a few pages – but this was for a book group, and moreover it was by an author whose work I normally enjoy and admire.

It didn’t get any better. In fact by the end of it, I disliked it so much that I felt the need to reach for an antidote. I wanted something guaranteed to restore my faith in fiction. I took a deep breath and reached for Great Expectations.

Now, I have always accepted that Dickens is a great writer. It’s just that I’ve never found him easy to get into. I have read some of his books; I once had to teach Our Mutual Friend, which obviously entailed reading it. (Though I did feel a sneaking sympathy for the student who confided that it was his aim to pass the exam without ever having read the book in its entirety – it is very long…) I read David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities back in the dim and distant past, and I’ve read the beginning of Bleak House lots of times – thoroughly admiring the amazing description of fog at the beginning, floundering a little at all the stuff about Chancery, and finally being too insanely irritated by the sweetness of Esther Summerson to carry on.

However, I felt that the time had come to try again. Somehow, I knew that right now, Dickens was what was needed. Plus, it’s the bicentenary of his birth next year, so it must be as well to be prepared for wall to wall Charles.

I was not disappointed. Great Expectations was a revelation. It was exuberant, it was funny, it had me on the edge of my seat; every character was distinctive and unique, Estella was far from sweet and Pip was an imperfect hero. The story rollicked along at a satisfying pace, but it also took the time to explore some interesting byways. And it made me think – about people, mainly, and how fallible but heroic they can be.

But another thing that struck me was that I have recently read a number of books for children and teenagers that have more than a touch of the Dickensian about them. I was interested to explore this: is it because Dickens – perhaps in the guise of film and TV adaptations – is so ubiquitous that his influence can’t be escaped if the setting is Victorian? Or were the writers concerned – Michelle Lovric, Penny Dolan, and Mary Hooper – conscious of his example? I decided to ask them.

Michelle’s book, The Mourning Emporium, follows the adventures of an extraordinary set of characters who we first met in The Undrowned Child, which was set in a sort of parallel nineteenth century Venice. For the second book, the action moves to London. Both books have for me the exuberance, the rich variety and the playfulness which characterise the master.

A mourning emporium also features in Mary Hooper’s book, Fallen Grace – amazingly to me, since I’d never heard of one before. It’s a shop where gloomy Victorians could buy all their mourning clothes, jewellery, cards etc, and arrange elaborate funerals with professional mourners (‘mutes’, whose job it was to look sad and weep), horses with black plumes, etc etc. Whereas Michelle’s book is a fantasy, Mary’s is set firmly in a real world, a world with vast divisions between the poor and the wealthy. Dickens actually has a walk-on part in this book.

Penny Dolan’s book, A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E., concerns the adventures of a boy who loses his parents and is cheated out of his inheritance by his unscrupulous Uncle Scrope and his lawyer. He is sent to an appalling boarding school, Murkstone Hall, whose headteacher is called Bulloughby – as with Dickens, the names tell you a great deal. He escapes, but has a long journey to make, and many villains to deal with, before he can find his way home

I asked the three writers whether Dickens was an influence they were aware of, and what aspects of his writing they admired or felt themselves to have been influenced by.

ML: For me, the greatest compliment I ever receive about my books is when someone describes them as ‘Dickensian’… If it is ‘Dickensian’ to extract the maximum joy from the English language, to royally entertain while pricking the conscience as painfully as if with hot needles… then yes, I want to be ‘Dickensian’.

Another thing I love about Dickens is the way he breaks all the rules. He makes lists. He repeats. He digresses. He invents patently ridiculous names. And yet… he makes it all work. I’ve always suspected that some of his success is precisely down to the gusto with which he trounces the rules. I can picture him writhing with pleasure at his desk while he subverts all the antiquated courtesies and conventions of writing.

When you love a writer as much as I love Dickens, I think you inevitably do end up writing ‘tribute’ characters. In The Mourning Emporium, I have Turtledove, an English bulldog who speaks a Victorian cockney dialect. He is a kind of Fagin character, looking after a band of orphans. Unlike Fagin, his entire being is focused on the welfare and happiness of his ‘childer’. I deployed Turteldove as a foil to a female villain, who pretends to ‘mother’ children, but in fact inflicts outrageous mental and physical cruelty upon them.

PD: There was no influence at the start, other than a preference for writing about the past. The growing points for the book were: a visit to an ancient boarding school; watching young actors ‘fly’ overhead in a theatre production and a BBC R4 fragment about the working conditions of Victorian theatre children.

My agent picked up on the echoes of Dickens and Nicholas Nickleby in the first section of A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E. I hadn’t tried to do a Dickens, but am sure his work unconsciously primes the canvas whenever we try to picture the Victorian period. Although the Ackroyd biography (of Dickens) was part of my random ‘research’ reading, so were biographies of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry and a range of social history books.

Dickens, to me as a writer, offers an intense sense of the child or unformed hero struggling to make sense of an untidy and unkind world. To this he adds a variety of eccentric characters – likeable, silly, cruel or steadfastly brave. A whirl of other lives go on around the central character, enriching the story for the reader. And – is this Dickensian? – I often find myself thinking in terms of light and darkness when I’m picturing a setting as well as using emotional brightness and shadow throughout the story.

MH: I have read Dickens, of course (actually, not ‘of course’, because I only read him twenty years ago) but, knowing I was going to be writing a novel set in Victorian times, I deliberately didn’t re-read him when I was about to write Fallen Grace. I did read Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens, however, because I knew I wanted him to have a walk-on part and it was essential that I knew (a) he was in London at the specific date I wanted him to be and (b) how he felt about funeral directors! Of course, I must have been influenced by all the Dickens’ TV and film adaptations I’ve seen over the years, and quite a few have death/graveyards in them. Oh yes, and I knew Bleak House (my favourite) began with a massive pea-souper fog so I just HAD to have one of those.

I think what I admire most is the way Dickens manages to blend matters of great seriousness with humour. I also love his coincidences – I’ve got plenty of those in Fallen Grace but thought – well, if he can get away with them, then so can I.

SP: I’ve now moved on to my second Dickens – Nicholas Nickleby – and have been reading his account of the boarding school run by Wackford Squeers. (Oh, the names, the wonderful names!) It’s so horrifying I’m metaphorically hiding behind the sofa with one eye closed as I read it. (But I am not liking Dickens’ rendition of a Yorkshire accent. It’s very distracting.)

Many, many thanks to my panel. Oh, and a word to the wise; I’m told that there’s to be a new adaptation at Christmas on BBC of Great Expectations – no doubt the first of many tributes to the great man as his very big birthday approaches.

Sue Purkiss… whose most recent book, Emily’s Surprising Voyage, is set in Victorian times, and does perhaps have a very faint whiff of Dickens about it. For more information, see www.suepurkiss.com

WIN: The Undrowned Child - Michelle Lovric

I am offering three copies of The Undrowned Child paperback as a competition prize.

The question to answer is ‘Which Queen’s face do we see in The Undrowned Child video trailer on Youtube?’

The first three people to email me via my website www.undrownedchild.com with the right answer (plus their name and address) will be sent a copy.

Day-Glo and the Seven Firemen – Michelle Lovric

The fire-engine screams down the street at midnight, lights flashing. It disgorges a squad of London’s finest. Suddenly, we can smell something burning. Our two-hundred-year-old wharf is a timber-framed – so my husband gets up, dresses and rushes down to the street to investigate.

Ten minutes pass. Suddenly I hear manly voices and heavy footsteps on the fire escape. Then seven firemen thunder into our bedroom. I am still in bed with the cat, wearing the most abbreviated form of sleep attire and immersed in the excellent Beswitched, whose day-glo holographic cover (WHY, for a book set mostly in 1935?) glitters chavishly in the lamplight.

‘Evenin’, ma’am,’ chorus the firemen. The cat pokes her head out from under the sheets to give them a withering look and a long, sour miaow. I try to turn Beswitched over, but the back cover is just as bright.

The guys examine every crevice for fire. There’s nothing smouldering, except me.

‘Nighty-night. Sweet dreams! Fine cat you’ve got there!’ They thunder back down the stairs.

Actually, the real story is that my husband loyally prevented the firemen from entering our bedroom. As he said, ‘I still don’t feel I know you well enough to guess how you’d take it if I let seven men into the bedroom with you wearing that.’ (Mr and Mrs Morrison have been married ten years, though only my mother-in-law refers to me as ‘Mrs Morrison’.)

‘But you SHOULD have let them in,’ I cried, ‘because then I could have written about it!’

‘What’s stopping you?’ my husband grinned.

And indeed this is the difference between life and writing, or, to put it another way, between blogs and books. Life – and blogs – are feral, rarely pondered deeply. Most blogs are no more calculated than a sneeze, no more rehearsed than a scream. Because real life generally offers roads timidly not taken, and glimpses – from the sidelines – of major excitement and visceral danger.

Writing, on the other hand, offers an opportunity to regain lost opportunities, pursue every what-if, make hay even if the sun doesn’t shine all day. Writing is the better version of life – the one you’ve had time to refine, think about, rewrite, run past others, get copy-edited. Writing goes out into the world with its tie straightened, a clean handkerchief, and an apple for the teacher. Writing is also a form of displacement activity – but not in the usual sense. Writing allows you to take a real feeling or an incident and place it in an entirely different context, one in which it can work for you and your story.

I won’t forget the agony of my nearly-naked embarrassment when I thought seven firemen were truly about to storm into the bedroom and find me, the cat and the day-glo cover. Should I jump out of bed and make a dash for the bathroom … or should I cower under the covers? And that huge squirm, physical and mental, will eventually make its way into a book, maybe set a hundred years ago, maybe five hundred, maybe in London, maybe in Venice, maybe in Tasmania. It may be felt by a twelve-year-old girl, or a mythical creature.

The experience will be valid, in all those contexts, but only if it’s written well enough to convey its dreadfulness. The secret of the success of Bridget Jones’ Diary is that it is entirely made of such squirms. I see a lot of firemen and a lot of day-glo in Helen Fielding’s past, oh-so-cleverly recontextualized and harnessed into a best-seller.

For the moment, ‘Day-Glo and the Seven Firemen’ is just a kind of demi-monde blog, not quite the truth and not quite real writing, suspended between truth and fiction. Undigested material, like the little bones in an owl-pellet. Something to poke at with a stick, before proceeding on your way. But the book version – should it happen – will, one hopes, eventually end up on a shelf in a home, where it might earn its keep. At least until the next car boot sale, anyway.

Blogs have their hour, or their day. Books earn their years, or even generations.


PS. Sorry to post in advance. Tomorrow morning early I have to go to the lunatic asylum on the island of San Servolo. Really. Life-really, not blog-really. Though I’m not ruling out a blog either …

LINKS
Michelle Lovric’s website is at www.michellelovric.com
See the new video trailer for The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium on YouTube

Weekend writer – Michelle Lovric

How many writers have weekends? Or an off-switch, for that matter?

I have spent many weekends without writing a word of fiction. But if that happens, then I try to make sure that I am living it. (See my other blogs).

I’m in the lucky position of having deadlines, but in general who ever dares to stop writing?

You can’t just leave your characters alone for the weekend, any more than you can leave your dog in the car on a hot day. It’s just not responsible. It’s not kind. And frankly, it’s not really possible.

You’ll take your characters shopping with you, noticing that a certain green scarf is just the colour of the eyes of your latest character. In the stationers, you suddenly realize it’s time you decide exactly what kind of pencil-case pedantic Renzo would take to school, or the exact pink of the lining of the coffin in which Rosibund sleeps, in The Mourning Emporium.

The most banal day is full of snafflable incidents. Whatever good or bad befalls the writer is easily recycled into her characters’ lives.

This being the case, the writer’s most vital organ is the one of discrimination. With so much possible input, the skill of the author lies in weeding out the unwonderful.

A clever journalist friend of mine once offered advice on my chronic affliction of over-writing (always closely followed by painful, drastic cutting). She said, ‘Think of each piece of writing as a sculpture. The sculptor chooses his piece of stone to suit the figure he will create. He doesn’t buy a ten-metre-tall piece of stone for a one-metre-high sculpture. He wisely chooses a piece 1.2 metres tall. This means less work and less waste. Try to think of each story the same way.’

And so I would, if it wasn’t for the weekends. Those weekends spent stealthily gathering odds and ends of seemingly vital material. Those Saturday afternoons watching black-and-white movies in which the heroine turns her head just so, and you know you need that gesture for your next book. The Sunday morning egg yolk that spills out of its fretwork of white – just like one consumed by your hero at dawn on the day of the exam that will change his life. Or the gondolier who admits that, if tourists ask who lived in a certain palazzo, he always tells them that Casanova lived on the first floor, and Marco Polo on the second floor and Lord Byron on the third floor. This charming and fluent liar also urgently needs a guest-appearance in your book. As does the ‘preen gland’ of the flamingo, just written up by scientists. And …

So Monday morning finds the writer facing a ten-metre monolith of material, when all she wanted was a nice shiny little pebble she could roll neatly into her text.

Does anyone know where the off-switch is, for next Friday night?



Michelle Lovric’s website
See the video trailer for The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium, on YouTube

Chateau Downunder - Michelle Lovric

Hyping up a product with hints of wickedness and perversion? Sexing up its contents with eye-catching art? A subtitle that teases? Terrible puns? Synaesthesia? Satire? Yes, books and wine have a lot in common. Both are mind-altering stuff. And both advertise their contents with imagery and words, sometimes more creatively than truthfully.

I spent last Christmas in Australia and New Zealand, where wine label art is particularly reminiscent of book jacket design. Antipodean wineries regularly use humour, drama and creative typography to get their wines noticed. A visit to the ‘bottle-shop’, just like a visit to the bookshop, can see the customer staggering out with more than he or she intended to buy, seduced by dazzling label/cover art and text. So here are some of the wines that I ‘read’ or tasted by word-of-mouth on my travels.

The trophy-winning Australian Shiraz of last year is called Ladies Who Shoot Their Lunch. The Gatsby-style illustration shows an elegant woman carrying a shotgun. The wine is said to be an ideal accompaniment to game. In contrast, a stark black-and-white drawing of a lone figure announces a Pinot Gris called Innocent Bystander. A sommelier whispered reverently of Dead Red Dog and Two Old Boots, and told me about an American winery called Pompous Ass, with offerings such as Highfalutin Red and Kiss My Ass Blush, illustrated with a girl puckering up to a donkey.

Animals feature strongly in Antipodean wine labelling. There are Chardonnays called Barking Owl and Platypus Play, a Shiraz called Shoo Fly, and a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc called Cats Pee on a Gooseberry Bush. One Chardonnay Semillon goes by the name Hair of the Dingo.

A Barossa Grenache is simply called Bitch (in an ornate typeface on a pale pink label). The back of the bottle is printed with the word ‘bitch’ 77 times. According to one wine website, Bitch is now the ‘liquid anthem’ for divorces, birthdays and, mysteriously, baby showers.

There are Californian Cabernet Sauvignons, Chardonnays and Merlots called Mad Housewife, with an Edna Everage lookalike on the label. An elegant white label announces a French Chardonnay that goes by the name of Fat Bastard (now joined by Utter Bastard Syrah). Boarding Pass Shiraz’s label is just what it says … on the label. There’s a Californian Chardonnay called White Trash White, from the same stable as Redneck Red. Vampire Vineyards in Romania produce various reds including Dracula. Let’s not forget Marilyn Merlot, made by Marilyn wines in the Napa Valley. There is also Norma Jeane Merlot and Sauvignon Blonde. (All royalties go to the Strasberg Theater Institute and the Anna Freud Foundation.)

South Africa has its famous parody wine labels, Goats do Roam and Bored Doe (say them out loud). And Sicily has satirized the much-advertised Piat d’Or with its own Fiat Door. Abruzzo has The Full Montepulciano. And France has even parodied itself with a Chat-en-Oeuf, illustrated with a cat sitting on an egg. (There’s also Longue-Dog.)

Alcohol labels are more regulated than book covers. But is not the requirement to list the alcohol content a bit like age-ranging? Labels may not lie, according to a ‘bevlog’ I read, but they may contain information that is not necessarily purely factual, just like a book jacket.

How much is its great title A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to do with what’s inside Dave Eggers’ book? Who cares? We all bought the book anyway for the pleasure of its name.

Perhaps wine labels are more honest than book covers? There’s a Spanish Tempranillo called Scraping the Barrel. And in Hungary, a Cserszegi Fuszeres varietal has been christened The Unpronounceable Grape. B Frank’s label asks the giver to complete this phrase: ‘I’m only drinking with you because ……’ There’s an American wine called Adequate Gift. Its label is a form for the giver to fill out: ‘Hope you and …… enjoy this rich red blend! Its fleshy mouthfeel of cherry, coffee and vanilla flavours reminds me of the …… times we’ve had, like the whole ……incident.’

Not a bad idea for the back of a book jacket, is it? Let the punter fill in the blanks! Especially useful in the gift book market.

Just to demonstrate the synergy, book covers can even become wine labels. Elizabeth Gilbert’s paean to me-ness, Eat Pray Love, is now not just a ‘major motion picture’, but also the label for a Pinot Grigio.

But wine and beer labels can also get the ‘publishers’ into trouble. The brewers of a series called Witch’s Wit – in a line of Catholic-themed beers, like Inferno Ale and Judgment Day – decided to use an illustration of a witch being burned at the stake for its new offering, The Lost Abbey. Predictably, the image caused a furore among wiccans, pagans, shamans and others. This generated a great deal of hot air, and the publicity no doubt increased sales.

I suspect similar intentions in the South Australian winery that named its Cabernet Sauvignon simply Evil, printed white-on-black upside down with a dramatic tagline of ‘It’s just wrong’.

During the long summer evenings to come, I’m planning to drink a lot of books and read a lot of wine. You’re all invited to submit tasting suggestions.

LINKS

Michelle Lovric’s website

See the new video trailer for The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium on YouTube

The Ladies Who Shoot Their Lunch series of wine has its own website, including a picture gallery showing their butchery course.

The lovely Chat-en-Oeuf illustration comes from the beautiful Arts Parts clip art site

An excellent site for wine labels, including many that I could not mention on a site for writers of children’s books, is this one

Death of a Bookshop – Michelle Lovric

In view of the date, you’re probably expecting something romantic. If so, hie thee to Loveydovey.com or FuzzybearluvsMaggotyknickers.blogspot. I object to institutionalized romance, and disapprove of commercialized love, so instead I’m going to tell you a sad story: it’s my blog-day, and I’ll cry if I want to.

Venice has suffered a bereavement. (And, as ever, Venice functions as a microcosm of the bigger world.) Venice’s bereavement is literary. She has lost her one large bookshop. After seven years trading, la Libreria Mondadori has closed its doors just steps from the Piazza San Marco.

The Mondadori bookshop has not failed. It was not downsizing. It has simply been evicted by its landlords, Benetton, in favour of a Louis Vuitton shop.

(In scandalized tones, Lady Bracknell: ‘A HANDBAG shop?’)

For Venice, the loss of Mondadori shows just a little more dumbing down, a little more bully-business trouncing the arts, a little more globalization, a little more bling, another dark inkling of la Serenissima’s bleak destiny as a picturesque high-end shopping ghetto rather than a cultural destination. Venice becomes a shop window – people look at the merchandise, not at the city. So Venice’s identity is eroded. So the world goes.

For me, the loss is also personal. I have lost my local bookshop. My fellow-writers will know how nasty that feels.

As far as bookshops are concerned, I am a little promiscuous. Or, as it's more charmingly put in Italian, sono un po’ farfallina – I’m a bit butterfly. There isn’t a bookshop in Venice that I walk past without entering for at least a browse. But that Mondadori bookshop was the one to closest to home, the one that I visited most often. The staff were ever kind to my novels – which were frequently placed in the window, and were always in stock. My third novel for adults, The Remedy, had its launch in Mondadori’s third-floor event space, which hosted 1200 such ‘appuntamenti culturali’ in its too-short life. The children’s book section was particularly magnificent, so when I heard that the wonderful Italian publisher Salani had bought the rights to The Undrowned Child, the first thing I did was rush to the Libreria Mondadori to see how Salani style their covers and what kind of production they do.

When the news came out about the planned closure, there were eloquent editiorials. Two thousand signatures were collected in a petition. To no avail. On January 5th the shop held a final stock sale with discounts of 20 per cent and offered a farewell drink to customers. Then it closed its doors.

So. Designer bags instead of books. It makes you wonder what plans our politicians have for the shells of Britain’s closing libraries, doesn’t it? Somehow I doubt there’ll be a rush of Louis Vuittons to rent the British libraries that will soon be stripped of their books and readers. The lights will go out. They’ll shut the door. And file the key under ‘Irreparable and Senseless Loss’. But has anyone, i.e. the cost-cutters, given thought to the built environment of the post-library world? The best way to keep a building safe and sound – is to fill it up with people. Turn your back on it, and a building weeps angry leaks. It crumbles. Lonely, it invites in a rat or two. A rough sleeper. A woodworm or million. Some kids break in, start a fire. The pipes burst. A sodden beam comes down. A year or two later, the building is condemned. Then there’s a scar on the environment where a beloved library used to be.

A curmudgeonly Happy Valentine’s Day from me, then.

(I did give you a heart at least, even though it’s dark and made of stone.)

Michelle Lovric’s website

See the new video trailer for her children’s novels, The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium.

Angel heart tombstone from DecoratingWithElegance.net

Hard Times for Romanian Witches – Michelle Lovric

Is anyone else enchanted by the Romanian witches behaving badly after being told that they have to pay 16 percent income tax? Are there any other writers out there now cursing themselves because they never managed to work such a relevant, emotive and morally satisfying storyline into one of their own children’s books?

For anyone who’s been sweltering under a cold stone the last 31 nights and missed the news – Romania’s economic crisis has inspired the government to cast a wider net for taxes. The witches have been caught up in it, as have the astrologists and fortune-tellers. According to the new decree, Romanian witches will now be obliged to do paperwork as they eek out (forgive me) their living: to itemize and produce receipts for their services, which include telling the future with corn grains, curing bad habits, casting love spells and preparing amulets against curses. A Romanian witch – known as vrăjitoare – usually charges around 10 dollars a consultation, though the fees can escalate dramatically once a client is hooked.

Romania, home of the Dracula legends, is steeped in superstition. Every village allegedly has its own witch. Only recently were witch adverts banned from Romanian television. Witches still advertise extensively in the newspapers. The New York Times reports that President Traian Basescu and his aides wear purple – believed to ward off evil – on certain days. The dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife apparently employed their own personal witch. Perhaps fear of witchly reprisals is the true reason why the original tax proposal was voted down last year.

But Romania’s recession has deepened. Needs must, and on January 1st the new tax law became official. Witches must own up and pay up, and even make pension contributions to the state now.

And like any fairytale witch worth her worts and warts, the Romanian covens are reacting with spleen, acrimony and the dark arts. It’s time for the tax man to be afraid, very afraid.

As the old joke goes, ‘What do you say to an angry witch?’
The answer: ‘Ribbit, ribbit.’

Some of the Romanian witches have threatened to throw poisonous mandrake into the River Danube. Others plan to cast spells on the government and the president, using ingredients including cat excrement and dead dog.

How will it all end? Will the tax-collectors be afflicted with boils? Will the Minister for Finance turn into a newt? Will the witches knit a tax loophole for themselves out of cat-fur and snake-gut lubricated with frogspawn? Will the witches file their tax returns written in invisible bat blood? Will the Romanian jails fill up with tax-dodging witches? Will Romanian accountants cook their books in gigantic cauldrons?

One intriguing aspect of Romanian witchery is the use of the ‘nine-times-married-knife’ that has been secretly hidden in the pockets of new husbands by their brides. Such knives are used to prepare concoctions of basil and frankincense. Will the nine-times-married-knives end up embedded in the flesh of those who passed the offending decree? I’ll bet those gentlemen are not enjoying reading their horror-scopes at the moment, and wondering whatever possessed them when they decided to tax the witches. ‘Why oh why,’ they are thinking, ‘didn’t we go for the quangos and the libraries like that nice Mr Cameron in Britain?’

We’ll probably have to wait until Midsummer to find out what happens. That’s the most potent date in the Romanian vrăjitoare calendar.

In the meantime – even if I can’t own this story, I’m a writer, am I not? So I can PRETEND that I do. And it’s a truth universally acknowledged that someone else’s book is always far easier to write than one’s own. I’m currently haunted by a scary deadline, so my current displacement activity involves fashioning notional plot refinements for the Romanian Witch Tax Hex File, confecting new Romanian witch tax jokes (‘A vrăjitoare walks into Inland Revenue and says ...’), deciding who’ll cackle the audio book, designing the website and the app, and scripting the You-Tube trailer.

As a priority, I’m looking for a title.

All suggestions are welcome.


Michelle Lovric’s website

In flagrante delicta – Michelle Lovric

Michelle Lovric is a long-term ABBA Irregular, posting here many times in last five years. She’s the author of four children’s books set in Venice and five for adults, also with a Venetian theme. She’s guesting today with an account of an embarrassment that may well have befallen other writers.

NB Cathy Butler, who kindly donated her day, will be back in this spot next month.

 

 

So I was in the Chinoiserie bedroom of the Palazzo Papadopoli in Venice, half-crouched and half-lying in a corner, scribbling a description of its strawberry-and-apricots-in-cream stucco ceiling and the frescoes on the walls. I was writing the strange floating world of the painted Orient through the eyes of my protagonist, Manticory Swiney.
 

 

 

 

I aligned my body so that I could see what Manticory would have seen, if she were lying beside her faithless lover on the humid Venice morning when she looks on his face for the last time.

Alive, that is. Alexander Sardou will get what is coming to him, all too soon.

Did I mention that I also write books for adults? The end result of those scribbles at the Palazzo Papadopoli is published this week: The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, about seven Irish siblings with 37 feet of hair between them. Born in the wake of the Famine, they grow rich and famous on the commercial exploitation of what grows naturally from their heads.

 

But too many secrets haunt the Swiney girls, Darcy, Enda, Berenice, Manticory, Oona, Pertilly and Ida. They end up hiding out in Venice, pursued by a ruthless journalist, and nursing seven separate heartaches, one for each sister.

 

 

So there was I in the Swineys’ Venetian refuge, the white palazzo above, at the end of a serpentine Canal near Rialto. I imagining Manticory with her six feet of red hair tangling around her body like a fox’s pelt, when who should walk in on my tryst between art, sex and storyline, but a publisher!

Not my own lovely publisher from Bloomsbury, Helen Garnons-Williams, but the very eminent and elegant Pete Ayrton, founder of Serpent’s Tail. He publishes the English editions of the remarkable Venetian writer Tiziano Scarpa, with whom I sometimes share events. So Mr Ayrton and I are known to one another.

My first reaction was to leap up, red-faced. I had been writing a somewhat spicy love scene, and I’d been caught in the act.

But it was not the pictures in my mind, nor the words in my notebook that made me blush and squirm.

It was being caught in the act of working, in the down-and-dirty, unglamorous, nuts-and-bolts bit of writing. The part where your rear end is coated with the dust of an ancient crumbling palace and your hands are smeared with ink. You have forgotten the time. You’re not even in the current century. You are not a person anymore; you are a prism through which your characters refract onto the page. Your breath is coming in rags from your unattractively open mouth, and your eyes are strangely askew with concentration. You are whispering fragments of dialogue to yourself, pulling your hair across your eyes to see what it does to the view.

Writingwas the last thing that I wanted to be seen doing by an eminent publisher.

Mr Ayrton clearly understood the situation, accepted my stammered greetings with polished ease, and proceeded swiftly down through the enfilade of brocaded, mirrored rooms, leaving me to my blushes and internal disarray .

I tried to analyse my embarrassment afterwards. I guessed that I’d succumbed to an old prejudice about literary genius (not that I’m in any way claiming it) being a fine flow of what comes naturally rather than something you actually sit down and work at.

Byron – not my favourite – used to call it the estro: a rare appreciation of any feminine quality by this most misogynist of writers. The mysterious estro fell upon Byron and poems appeared. The English milord would never claim to do anything so grubby as working hard himself. He decried visibly industrious writers like Southey as ‘scribblers’. And anyway, why should Byron lower himself to clerking when there were £5000 worth of women to be had in Venice (he boasted that he got a lot for his money, including a sexually transmitted disease) and show-stopping swims down the Grand Canal to perform, or horses to be galloped along the beach with his friend Shelley. Or posing for portraits, like this one by George Henry Harlow (courtesy of Wikimedia commons). Work? Never!

 

Yet he did. Thousands of lines – Beppo, Don Juan and a steady stream of (ok, I’ll admit it) brilliant letters – the latter, to my mind, far better than the poems. They were just as preeningly self-conscious, however: his most private correspondence was crammed with wit informed by a foreknowledge of its publication. When writing my first adult novel, Carnevale, of which he is a kind of anti-hero, I found his letters far more useful than his poetry.

So even Byron worked on his writing, though he wouldn’t be caught dead actually doing it. And I, in Venice, had suffered an attack of that most egotistical of emotions, embarrassment. (I’ve heard shame defined as thinking that we might possibly be better than we actually are.)

Had I caught Byron’s image-mad malady of thinking that writing must not be seen to happen?

 If so, I hope it’s the only thing I ever caught from him.

 Has anyone else ever felt ashamed to be caught working?

 

 Michelle Lovric’s website

The True & Splendid History of theHarristown Sisterswas published on June 5^th by Bloomsbury.

There's a new pinterest site for the book and an interview with Mary Hoffman on the History Girls June 1st.

Carnevale is available as an eBook.

NB My embarrassing incident occurred during the Venice Arte Biennale a few years ago, when the Papadopoli (Palazzo Coccina Tiepolo Papadopoli, to give it its full name) hosted a major exhibition. Manticory’s frescoed bedroom was devoted to just one artwork: a fresh watermelon carved into a rectangle.

I was then privileged to be given private access just before the building works started to convert the palace into one of Venice’s most luxurious and beautifully positioned hotels. My photographs were taken before the restoration. Manticory’s frescoed room is now a part of the Tiepolo alcova suite. Many thanks to Sabine Daniel for showing me around.

Picture of Michelle Lovric by Marianne Taylor