Taking Stock... by Rosalie Warren

Sorry about the visual pun, but it's Christmas after all and I had a lovely picture of some leftover gravy just begging to be posted...

It's now a little over five years since I gave up my university post as a result of ill-health and decided to take the opportunity to focus on my writing. This was something I'd always wanted to do but had never found much time for, in among the demands of bringing up a family, studying for a PhD and then being a researcher and lecturer.

So maybe it's time to take stock and ask myself what I've learned, where I've failed and what I've managed to achieve, as well as trying to decide my aims for the next five 5 years or so.

The failures speak for themselves. I'm not a household name, my books are not bestsellers and I'm not a millionaire... though I'm not sure whether I was aiming at those things, and I certainly wasn't expecting them. What I have achieved is three published books, several more completed ones which have not yet found homes, and an exciting new project for younger readers recently commissioned (and still under wraps). But, much more importantly, I've learned quite a bit, made some wonderful new friends and had a lot of fun.

I spent the first two years of my 'freedom' writing short stories and submitting them to competitions, as well as joining several online writers' groups and learning how to give and receive feedback. I took a creative writing class and began work on two novels, one of which I'd had in mind for several years. It turned into Charity's Child, and an independent publisher, Circaidy Gregory, with whom I'd had a short story placed in a competition, expressed interest. It was published in 2008 and I experienced all the joys (and disappointments) of being a first-time published author. The trouble was, I knew very little about how to publicise a book and my publishers, though enthusiastic, had limited resources. I had some encouraging reviews, did a couple of signings and was invited along to some bookgroups to discuss my novel. An agent read it and invited me to London to meet her. It was all very exciting, but she didn't sign me up (a story that would soon become familiar).

My second novel, Low Tide, Lunan Bay, was less serious - a sort of comedy-suspense-romance. I sent it to an appraisal agency, who recommended that my protagonist, who found new love on the internet at 46, had her age reduced by ten years. I did just that (gosh, I was compliant in those days...) A publisher, Robert Hale, liked it but said it was too long - could I cut it by 25%? I did - by removing the sub-plot and sewing up the seams. Hale accepted it and I was, of course, delighted, though I still think it would have been a better book with the heroine ten years older and the sub-plot still in place.

My next novel, Alexa's Song, failed to tick a number of boxes. Male protagonist for a female readership - black mark. Too 'dark' for a love story. Mental health issues - woopsadaisy. Several agents said it would be 'difficult to place'. It still hasn't found a home, but I may well revise it and publish it myself as an eBook one of these days. I think there's a need for more books about depression, bipolar illness and so on, and I'll be only to pleased to add to the list.

I attended the Winchester Writers' Conference in 2008 and entered one of their competitions - to write the first 500 words and synopsis of a novel for age 12+. My entry made the shortlist and became, eventually, Coping with Chloe, the story of a teenager whose life is being taken over by her twin. Several agents expressed interest, but no bites. I sent it to Cornerstones for an appraisal, then rewrote and resubmitted it. One agent, who shall be nameless, got very excited and promised (I thought) to sign me up when I'd made a few changes. I made a few changes, while she made just the one - her mind.

I was distraught, to the point where I didn't submit anything or even do much writing for several weeks. Then I picked myself up and sent Chloe to a new children's publisher, Phoenix Yard, who liked it... and signed me up. My editor there was brilliant - and thanks to her help it came out in March 2011 and has had some great feedback and lovely reviews. Though not, sadly, huge sales - or not yet, anyway...

In March 2012, Charity's Child is going to be reissued as an eBook and as a new edition in paperback, by the original publisher, Circaidy Gregory. Other possible eBooks for the future include my 42000 word novella about a woman with Alzheimer's, which is probably too short to be considered by a publisher. There's also an SF book for 12+ which hasn't yet found a home. And my current project is an SF novel for adults, which draws on my research interests - cognitive science, linguistics and AI. If it doesn't find a publisher, I'll definitely publish it myself.

One thing I've learned is that it doesn't get any easier - you just set the bar higher as you go. And there are always going to be people who are more successful than you, so why worry about it? I've also discovered that authors, and children's authors in particular, are some of the maddest, funniest and kindest people in the world.

I've learned that you have to stay true to yourself. There are always compromises to be made in terms of what agents and publishers are looking for - but if you lose your vision of what you want to write, you might as well give up.

I'm very happy still to be writing, after five crazy years. I wouldn't want to do anything else... though to earn a bit of money from time to time might be nice.

And finally finally... I've discovered that hearing a child or young person say they liked your book and found it interesting, exciting, helpful or whatever, is one of the best feelings in the world and no writer could wish for anything more.

Wishing all of you - readers, writers, whatever you may be - a very happy, healthy, prosperous and successful New Year.

Support for Bookstart - Elen Caldecott

Hello,
There is no post scheduled for today. However, the last few days has seen a 100% cut in funding to Booktrust's book gifting programmes, so I feel compelled to post.
There are articles in the press about it written by Michael Rosen and Catherine Johnson.
There is also a petition you can sign if you disagree.

Right, the news headlines are over, so I'm going back to my pile of Christmas books and a Thorntons box big enough to exert its own gravitational pull on the tides. Happy Christmas!

Christmas won't be Christmas... Miriam Halahmy

 ...without any presents, “ grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

Growing up reading Little Women is one of my most enduring memories of Christmas. My mother gave me her copy when I was nine. It had been a birthday present to her from her siblings when she was a child before the war and I passed it on to my daughter.

Mum’s book even appeared in The Independent. They did a feature on lists by well known people and then invited readers to send in their own. This is mine.

Five things I can’t live without (The Independent 26.8.04)

My polar library

Twice daily reflux pills

Tap water – yes, London vintage

Mum’s pre-war copy of Little Women

with a single black and white plate

him indoors

Which character were you? I was Jo, climbing trees in ankle length skirts, getting into scrapes, reading all day on her bed with a bag of apples, my head full of dreams about becoming a writer. I couldn’t be good little Beth, Amy was far too pretty and spoilt and Meg was a woman!

Little Women were my surrogate sisters. In real life I was the sandwich between two lively brothers. Probably that explains a lot of the appeal of tomboy Jo. I used to follow my brothers up every tree, usually falling on the way down.

At nine I marvelled when Jo was told off for using slang by Amy, “we are a pretty jolly set....” Crikey! But fortunately when Jo and Amy scrap dear sweet Beth is there to make peace. “Bird in their little nests agree,” sang Beth.

I loved the narrator who spoke to us in the voice of a kindly aunt. “As young readers like to know how people look we will take this moment to give them a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight, while the December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled within.” Totally absorbing, I wouldn’t raise my eyes from the page until Mum yelled at me to lay the table.

Little Women takes us gently through adversity, poverty, separation through war, love, friendship, sibling rivalry, sibling loyalty and death. I still remember the first time I read about Beth’s brush with death and of course the terrible death of the Hummel baby. Through it all we learn to be a pilgrim with our packs on our bags. The religious stuff went over my head but I loved the challenge.

And then of course there is the boyfriend - gorgeous, funny, attentive, rich Laurie next door. He even has a piano for poor Beth! I never really understood why he and Jo didn’t get married but of course silly little Amy had to morph into sensible and mature before the dear reader would accept her as Laurie’s good wife.

If you have time over the festive season, join me in Christmas with the Little Women.

SEASONS GREETINGS EVERYONE. HAPPY READING and  HAPPY WRITING!!

 www.miriamhalahmy.com

www.miriamhalahmy.blogspot.com

My Monoglottal Stop - Charlie Butler

It’s shameful, really. Only 3% of books published in the UK in English are translated from other languages. By contrast, in most European countries the equivalent figure is between 30% and 40% - in Finland, 80%. In my travels around Europe over the last year or so I made a point of looking in on the children’s sections of bookshops, and the penetration of English-language books was very noticeable – and not only with the obvious suspects such as Rowling and Dahl. In the UK, however, while you will find classic writers such as Astrid Lindgren (though only the Pippi Longstocking books), Laurent de Brunhoff, Tove Jansson and Hergé, along with a very light sprinkling of contemporary stars such as Cornelia Funke, that really is about it.

Perhaps none of this would matter much if we were able to read foreign books in their original languages, but the British (and the English particularly) are notoriously bad at learning foreign tongues, so that route too is cut off. I’m no better than anyone else in this regard. At school I studied German for seven years, and French for three, and passed my exams with colours that fluttered bravely, even if they didn’t exactly fly. But within a few years the language learning part of my brain had seized up like a piece of neglected machinery. There are odd sprockets and cogs lying about, and a whole storehouse of disassembled facts, but the thought of being able to read an entire book in either of these languages – let alone reading one for pleasure – is a taunting dream.

I’m not proud of this. I come from, and later married into, a family of multi-linguists, and my deficit has always struck me as rather disgraceful. Moreover, as a writer I’m naturally fascinated by my own language, but English is such a mongrel that to be interested in it is necessarily to want to know about the vocabulary, history and grammar of French, German, Latin, Greek... Yet, although I’ve made occasional self-taught forays into Latin (not taught at my school), Welsh and Esperanto, I’ve never climbed further than the foothills of any of them. Whether this is due to lack of talent or of application is a subject of recurrent debate, but either way I don’t see the situation changing any time soon.

What have I lost thereby? As I suggest above, one thing is access to literature published in foreign languages, the vast majority of which is never translated. But I regret still more the slightly-rearranged view of the world that fluency in another language must afford: the chance to experience a sensibility that evolved out of a different history, in which such fundamental concepts as time and agency undergo a subtle tectonic shift, in which new distinctions appear like mountain ranges (‘“neuf” and “nouveau” both mean “new” in different senses! Who would have thought it?’) and others disappear beneath the surface of consciousness (‘They use “porter” for “carry” and “wear”? How on earth do they manage?’). I envy my father, who told me how, when he was a seventeen-year-old cycling across Europe in late August 1939 – not the best time to choose for a cycling holiday, but that’s another story – he stayed the night in a French farmhouse and dreamed, for the first time, in French. Even fifty years later, his excitement and pleasure were still palpable.

Each language holds up to the world a mirror made with a slightly different curvature. I can think of no better training for an imaginative writer than to walk through this linguistic funhouse, peering at oneself and seeing a cast of familiar strangers staring back. This more than anything else is why I regret the fact that, in the universal lottery, I was dealt the card of monoglottery.

A Twong in My Heart - Andrew Strong

Have many of you have read Roberto Bolano’s ‘2666’? I can’t remember why I bothered to start reading it. Perhaps it was the title, it had an enigmatic lure of some sort. I'm not going to even try to describe the book here, but I will list some adjectives that occur to me when I think of it: long, infuriating; irritating; convoluted; plotless.

But I couldn’t put it down. After I’d finished it, I wondered what it was all about. What was it about that book that held me in its power? The hold a book can have, without obvious attractive characters, or clever plot, I felt it with Murakami’s ‘The Wind Up Bird Chronicle’. A sense that I was being carried along by a current of words, rather than what they meant.

For the last few weeks I’ve been recuperating from Bell’s Palsy. This is not unrealted to Bolano’s book. You’ll see, in a minute I’ll tie it up. Be patient. The palsy started with a numbness around my lips. I couldn’t blow a raspberry. If I was a professional brass musician, I’d have been in serious trouble. Before the diagnosis, I quietly considered whether I could be having a stroke. I went to my day job (I’m a primary school headteacher) and felt my eye beginning to do strange things, and at this point, other people were beginning to notice.

I was driven to my GP who conducted some tests. I was not having a stroke. (He asked me to wrinkle my brow. A stroke victim can still wrinkle his brow on the side of the paralysis; I couldn’t.) Slowly, creepingly, my face was losing more feeling. My lips, eye, tongue all began to lose sensation.

My GP scrolled through my medical records. “You’re stressed,” he said. “You’re lucky you didn’t have a stroke. You can’t work like this. One month off, at least.”

I ignored him and went back into work the next day. Soon enough I realised I could hardly speak, I couldn’t eat, and I certainly couldn’t drink. I kept spilling coffee down my shirt, on to my trousers. I couldn't smile. And then my right eye refused to close, and the left wouldn’t open. I gave up and went home.

My colleagues were very supportive. They insisted I take time off. For the first few days I woke thinking about work; about emails that needed an answer, cheques that had to be signed, a child whose story I had promised to discuss and had not been able to. If this continued, I wouldn’t get better. I had to find a distraction.

I wasn’t able to write: my eyes opened and closed at random intervals. I had to tape one down, and intermittently feed the other eye drops. I had to find something else.

With no one else in the house all day, I began playing music at window rattling volumes. It was bliss. I cranked up a recording studio that’s been in various stages of evolution over the years, and began composing music again. Very pleasant, it was, to be hunched over the keyboard, my eyes closed in reverie.

At the same time I was trying to make up jokes to donate to the Twitter community. I like making up jokes, it’s the closest I’ll ever get to algebra without doing maths. Here are a couple of seasonal efforts. (Yes, I know, they wouldn’t make it into a damp cracker.)

The salt just bid me 'good morning' and then the pepper said 'how are you?' I suppose those are seasonings greetings.

My daughter wants some felt pens for Christmas. I said I could afford to get her some that no one had even touched!

And so it goes on. There are millions of people out there, furiously tweeting jokes, and some of them are really quite good. Twitter is a madhouse . Twitter is a force for political change. Twitter is dull. But, don’t think you can do what you like on Twitter, you can’t. Here, for example, are Roger Quimbly’s Rules of Twitter. Please take note:

http://rogerquimbly.blogspot.com/2011/10/roger-quimblys-rules-of-twitter.html

So, having decided I wanted to start composing music again, but needing inspiration, I looked to Twitter. I wondered if I could compose the musical form of the tweet. A ten second opera, or musical. Something that made a point musically, in a few seconds. But what?

In a moment of sublime joy I knew what I had to do. Set other people’s tweets to music. Eureka! It became my sick bed passion.

Some tweets threw themselves at me, others crept up and whispered in my ear. But one by one, each told its own tale. Each was a little mystery to solve, a code to break.

These tiny phrases, unlocked, revealed more than their surface meaning. I began recording the best ones, and as I did, I sang them over and over to find their heart. Because of the palsy, my singing was a bit odd. I sounded like Tom Waits, but with a drink problem.

I had to find the rhythm of the tweet, extract the melody. Some revealed an emotional depth that was sometimes quite surprising. One particular tweet moved me so much I found it hard to sing. Another suddenly revealed itself as a waltz, transparently in three four time.

When my daughter was tiny, just months old, we communicated in a sort of wordless song. I would sing a meaningless phrase, she would complete it. If I hadn’t recorded our wordless conversations, I would think I had imagined it all. But I still have her pre-verbal songs, and lovely they are.

What occurs to me is the underlying music of language, below the meaning of words and sentences, may have a more profound effect on us than we acknowledge. And so, back to Bolano. I know the book I read was a translation, but nevertheless, I wonder whether if some of its hold on me was musical. That between them, Bolano and his translator had created a sort of emotional sound map. Not that I know what that means.

Writing these little songs helped me get better quickly. I was told I should expect to start feeling better in six weeks. In three, I was smiling again. Here are a few of the twongs: tweet into song.

http://soundcloud.com/yawnthepost/weather

http://soundcloud.com/yawnthepost/double-1

http://soundcloud.com/yawnthepost/argubath

Long night's journey into day - Anne Rooney

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

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

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

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

www.annerooney.co.uk
Stroppy Author blog

Top Reads of 2011 - Elen Caldecott

There is a section of this blog devoted to reviews, so it might seem odd to post about my favourites here. But sometimes, rather than review, it's nice to simply celebrate the books you've enjoyed. Reviews seem such a grown-up thing to me, perhaps with a touch of A-Level English about them - character development, plot arcs, language and imagery... It also gets especially difficult when you know the writers, may even be friends with them! Sometimes, it's better to just press a book into someone's hand and say, "read this. You'll love it."

So here I am, pressing books into your hand. "Read these. You'll love them."

A Tangle of Magicks by Stephanie Burgis was a real treat this year. It's a sequel, so do read A Most Improper Magick first. It's a lovely mix of a Georgian comedy of manners and witchcraft - Jane Austen does Hogwarts. I loved the sequel as it's set in Bath and makes good use of the ancient elements of the city.

A Year Without Autumn by Liz Kessler was a joy. It's a time-slip novel, but rather than finding herself in a Victorian kitchen or Medieval stable or somesuch, the heroine moves forward through her own teenage years. She sees the consequences of one event played out among her family and friends. It's warm, sad and very readable.

One Dog and His Boy by Eva Ibbotson may be my new favourite book (sorry, Holes by Louis Sachar, but you had a good run). It is really simple, direct and honest. I wish I'd have written it. Sigh. Still, that's why reading is so good for writers - it should inspire us to try harder ourselves. It's the story of a lonely boy and his quest to keep the dog he loves; this is one I'll come back to again and again.

I do occasionally read books for adults too. So, I have a grown-up choice to add. A Song of Fire and Ice by George R R Martin is quite an old series of books now (the first, A Game of Thrones was published in 1996), but the TV adaptation was first aired in 2011, so I'm counting it for that reason. I started watching the series, but having to wait a week for each installment was killing me, so I stopped watching the show and read the books instead. I say 'read', actually I'm listening to the unabridged audio books. They weigh in at 40 hours per book and with seven books planned for the series I have a lot of epic, sword and sorcery to come. Hurray!

So, those are my highlights of 2011. What would you have chosen?

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