Thursday 31 October 2013

THE GUEST ROOM by Penny Dolan




Back in July, when she read the email asking for an October school visit she answered yes. October would sunshine falling on a golden landscape, or so she imagined. 

She’d forgotten that October eats the hours of daylight and brings in the dark, but it was too late to back out.

Heavy clouds rolled across the sky as she drove past Doncaster and by the time she’d discovered the lanes beyond Ripon, night had arrived. Another signpost, another junction, another stretch of  unexpected dips and bends. This was definitely not how she’d imagined the journey.

And why had she arranged to stay with Amy? Curiosity, pure and simple. A convenient old friend. Reports of a dream home. Amy’s cottage seemed a couple of miles from the school when she’d looked at the map in London but she felt less sure about the distance now. There’d probably be a misty moor or blasted heath in the way. Oh well, she’d check when she reached Amy’s.

Just as the driving got even more difficult, she heard two texts come in. As soon as she could, she picked up the phone.
“Sos! Mum ill. Key undr mat. Food/fridge. Hlp yrself. Amyx.”
The second was even more of the same.
Ps Prob not bck 2nite. Njoy. xxx”
She grimaced. That was just so typical of Amy, she thought, but then she smiled. A night without mindless conversation would be bliss.

The porch lights came on as she arrived, so it was easy to unlock the ancient front door and lug her overnight bag inside. The school stuff could stay in the boot of the car till morning.

As she closed the door, the utter darkness outside felt unsettling. She promptly locked the door and slid the iron bolts across. In a short while, with the school and supper sorted, she lay stretched out on the sofa, scribbling away in perfect peace. What bliss!

Three hours and more than three glasses of wine later, there was still no Amy. Going to bed in an empty house felt strange. There were none of the annoying sounds of home. In fact, it almost felt as if the cottage was holding its breath. What a gloomy thought! Hiccupping loudly, she broke into slightly hysterical giggles.

Halfway up the stairs, she remembered the back door. Locked? Or unlocked? She padded down again. The key stood in the keyhole. She unlocked and locked  the backdoor twice, to be really sure, but the bolt wouldn’t slide, which annoyed her intensely. She wedged a wooden kitchen chair tightly up under the handle as reinforcement.

That was better, except then she caught her reflection in the glass panel. The damn windows! Why hadn’t she thought about those before? Anyone could see inside, if anyone was out there. Better safe than sorry. She went round, tugging curtains across the tiny windows, and checking catches were fastened.

Now for bed. Again. At the turn of the stairs, she paused. Had she forgotten anything? Maybe not, but she went down and heaved the dining table across the French window, scraping the stone floor. As she stopped, she felt a kind of noise. It was there for a second, and gone. An illusion. All she was sure of was the beating of her heart. .

She scurried upstairs, steadily checked Amy’s room and windows and then closed that door. She tested the bathroom’s frosted-glass window. When she unfastened and re fastened the linen cupboard on the landing, she knew she was just being silly.

At last, she was in the guest room. She switched on the light and shut that door too, taking a long, deep breath. The space hadn’t felt this large and empty when she’d dumped her bag here earlier. She checked her phone, and there was no signal, of course, not even a stupid text from a so-called friend.

She glared at the stuffed toy animals that crowded across the bed. Her bed. She gathered the simpering creatures up, flung them to the back of the wardrobe, and slammed that shut too. Luckily, the divan bed meant she didn’t have to drop to her knees and squint fearfully into any under-the-mattress darkness.

Still, she felt a fool, alarmed when there was nothing there. Nothing anywhere. Almost defiantly, she got into bed and sat there, wrapped tightly in the duvet. Suddenly, the small silver key in the door caught her eye. Laughing now, she leaped out, turned the key and brought it back to bed with her. Resolutely, she turned off the light and shut her eyes tightly. Right. Done. Safe. Think about tomorrow.

As she lay there, with the key clutched firmly in her palm, something broke the silence.
Something breathed into her ear. Oh, goody,” said a strange small voice. “Now we’re shut in together for the night, aren’t we?”

The next morning, in the school, the Head Teacher looked sad, in the highly meaningful way that teachers do.
“Children,” she said, with a profound sigh. “We had hoped to have a Real Live Author here to meet you today, but she just hasn’t turned up. Never mind. We’ll show you a Harry Potter video instead.”


HAPPY HALLOWEEN TO ALL  OF YOU -
AND HAPPY ALL SAINTS DAY TOO!


(Copyright) Penny Dolan.
31st October 2013.

Guilty Pleasures, by Lydia Syson

There’s something about watching a film ‘for work’ which always feels too good to be true.  I tend to wait for an evening or weekend to indulge, as though settling down with a DVD during a working day, even notebook in hand, is somehow unjustifiably frivolous. 

But if you’re trying to capture the period spirit for a book that’s set in the twentieth century, a film made at just the right time can be an absolute goldmine.  I first cottoned onto this while I was writing A World Between Us.  I spent many hours at the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive listening to International Brigade volunteers talking about their memories of the Spanish Civil War.  Even voices recorded in the 1980s had the accents and vocabulary of a vanished era.  But not quite.  And these were formal interviews.  They didn’t really convey a sense of dialogue.

Then I watched David Lean’s This Happy Breed, made in 1944 and based on a play written five years earlier by Noël Coward.  John Mills, Celia Johnson and  Stanley Holloway are among its stars.  I’ve just found the notes I scribbled at the time, a list of little phrases that struck me because you simply never hear them any more:
‘Strike me pink!’
‘Queer ways of enjoying themselves…’
‘Thanks very much, I’m sure…’
‘Right ho!’
‘Seedy’
‘She goes on about the same…’
‘A nice way to behave’
‘Now listen here…’
‘If you must know…’

Can you hear those voices?

But this kind of research is not just about vocabulary, or speech patterns.  In fact, an obsession with period language can be positively dangerous.  That way lies caricature, even comedy – intentional or otherwise.  Mood in movies is just as important.

My new book, That Burning Summer, is set on Romney Marsh, Kent, in July and August 1940, when the Battle of Britain raged overhead and invasion was a constant and genuine threat.  This was also a time when going to the cinema – for both news and entertainment – was so central to life that even in a small town like Lydd, the programme changed two or three times a week.  Of course I wondered what kind of films my characters might have seen.  Being something of a Powell and Pressburger fan, I was delighted to discover the tongue-in-cheek espionage thriller Contraband was released at just the right moment.

Contraband played to my themes to perfection.  It was called Blackout in the United States, a follow-up to The Spy in Black, released in 1939, which also starred Conrad Veidt.  (Remember Major Strasser in Casablanca?)  And any lingering worries I had about overdoing the spyfever in That Burning Summer were quickly laid to rest as I watched Cottage to Let(Anthony Asquith,1941) - injured Spitfire pilot John Mills parachutes into loch and is ultimately revealed as leader of dangerous German spyring; Went the Day Well? (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942) – a brilliant and moving adaptation of a Graham Greene short story about the great British nightmare of the time, an English village taken over by Nazi paratroopers; and The Next of Kin (Thorold Dickinson, 1942), which features this immortal exchange:


‘I’ve always thought if I wanted a nice cushy job, I’d come to England as a German spy,’ says a man in uniform, after asking a passing Army vehicle for directions to Brigade HQ.
‘I thought you were with the Brigades, Sir.’
‘Well, I’m not.  For all you know I might be a German agent.’

The history of The Next of Kin is particularly fascinating.  It was a box office hit that started life as an Army Instructional Film, hammering home the Home Front message that ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. ‘A patriot can easily do as much harm as a traitor,’ remarks another character.  It’s said that Churchill wanted to ban the film, concerned that its impact on morale might outweigh its effectiveness.

When it comes to the curious overlap between documentary, drama and propaganda so peculiar to World War Two, one film stands out:  Humphrey Jenning’s magnificent Fires Were Started, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD2YYmuEzQM released by the Crown Film Unit/Ministry of Information in 1943, which records a day and a night with the Auxiliary Fire Service in London.  The characters, all fictional, are played not by actors but real firefighters, and it was filmed during the terrible winter/spring of 1940/41, at the height of the London docks bombings.  Lindsay Anderson described Jennings as ‘the only true poet of the English cinema.’  He was also ‘the man who listened to Britain’, one of the founders of Mass Observation…but that’s another story, for another time.  The good news is that the BFI has produced a complete two volume DVD collection of Humphrey Jennings’ films. I defy your eyes not to glisten at ‘Words for Battle’ (1941). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnZ5ExcXMxo

I’ll leave you with a final viewing recommendation: Dangerous Moonlight http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4cu1vtIVxo (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1941), a huge wartime hit whose music, ‘The Warsaw Concerto’, ultimately became more famous than the film itself.  Told in flashback, Dangerous Moonlight is the story of a Polish pianist turned pilot, Stefan Radetzky, played by the gorgeous Anton Walbrook.  Radetzky escapes internment in Romania after the Nazi invasion of Poland (not to mention the Russian one, though if I
Anton Walbrook
remember rightly, this is glossed over!) and ends up in America, giving concerts for the Polish Relief Fund.  He falls in love and marries an American reporter he first met in Warsaw.  Tortured with guilt, he soon leaves the US to join one of the Polish squadrons fighting in the Battle of Britain.  And I shall reveal no more… 

Once again, fact and fiction blurred in the making of this film.  It was shot at two RAF aerodromes near London, some of the non-speaking parts were taken by real Polish pilots, and many of its thrilling aerial combat scenes came from official footage.

There.  Writing this has assuaged my own guilt. Watching these films, and thinking about them now, has made me reconsider the relationship between truth and storytelling, and the power of fiction to affect reality.  More food for thought about exactly what I’m trying to do with the history in my own books.

I wish I could say I’m just off to watch another film.  But my current work-in-progress is set just a few decades before the birth of moving pictures.  Near the dawn of photography, as it happens…


@lydiasyson





Wednesday 30 October 2013

How do you make a book? Lari Don

When I visit schools, one of the questions I’m asked most often (usually by 6 year olds rather than 10 year olds) is ‘how do you make a book?’ They’re often very disappointed when they discover that I don’t make books. I just write the words. Someone else does the pictures, and someone else entirely makes the physical book with the actual pages that you turn. I can talk a little about the illustrator’s role, because I’ve chatted to illustrators, and responded to roughs and commented on layouts. But I always have to admit that I have no idea how a book is printed, how the book is actually made, because I’ve never met a printer or seen what they do.

I mentioned this gaping hole in my knowledge to my lovely publishers Floris Books, just once in passing (or perhaps I nagged, I’m not sure), and last week, they organised a trip to a printers and let me tag along so I could learn how a book is made. We went to Bell and Bain in Glasgow, which is the oldest book printer in Britain and the biggest book printer in Scotland, where Tony Campbell gave us a fascinating tour.

The first thing I noticed was the noise. I think of books as quiet things, though I probably shouldn’t because I make a lot of noise killing dragons and shouting ‘bottom!’ when I do book events, but writing and reading can be calm quiet activities.

However, printing is not quiet. The noise in the factory was overwhelming. When one of the printing presses started up right beside me, the hum and vibration was like an aeroplane taking off.

the inside of a printing press
And everything was so big! Books are usually little things you can hold in your hand. But all the machines which make books are great big industrial-sized metal giants.

Bell and Bain is a proper factory, which makes real things, in huge quantities. And for someone who loves books, Bell and Bain is a wonderfully optimistic place. 90 people are employed there and they have recently bought new printing presses (for figures which I won’t reveal but made me gasp.) It’s a thriving business, making books. 7 million books a year…

And here’s how it’s done.

First the digital file from the publishers is turned into a plate. A flimsy wobbly shiny sheet of metal is lasered, then developed with chemicals, so that it’s marked with an impression of the words and pictures the publisher wants printed on the paper. If you are printing black and white, you only need one plate; if you are printing colour, you need four plates (for all the different colours.)

And the plate is huge, because the paper to be printed is huge. A rug-sized sheet of paper, which can fit 32 novel-sized pages on each side. I reckon that about a dozen 10 year olds could sit cross-legged on one sheet of Bell and Bain’s paper. (Yes, ok, doing so many author visits has given me a fairly odd way to judge area…)

a large sheet of paper, scale provided by the powerful hand of my editor Eleanor
So the plates are put in the printing press and the paper is fed though. We saw the biggest press opened up to be serviced. The innards look like the inside of my computer printer at home, but these are the right size for the house at the top of the beanstalk. The ink rollers are amazing, long thick shiny rollers covered in gleaming ink, which is poured over them from bucket-sized pots. I took pictures of all the rollers, but I liked the blood red roller best…

a shiny dripping blood red ink roller
The printing press prints both sides of the papers, that’s why it needs eight presses for colour. But it can do 15,000 sheets of paper an hour. And it's printing all day and all night, 7 days a week.

Bell and Bain have black and white presses too, and we are fairly sure we identified the exact press which printed some of my First Aid for Fairies novels, so I got my picture taken in front of it. (This was much more exciting than getting my picture taken in front of the Eiffel Tower!)

my tourist shot - Lari and the First Aid for Fairies printing press

This process is called litho printing (or at least that’s what I scribbled down) and we also saw smaller litho presses for printing covers on card rather than paper, and a terrifyingly fast inkjet digital printer which printed onto rolls of paper rather than sheets.

After the litho printing press has finished, you have all the pages of your book, but they would be easier to sit on than to read. So next the sheets are fed into a folding machine, which I thought was the most fascinating machine in the building. It’s a conveyor belt, but not a straight one: it has lots of corners, and every time the sheet of paper goes round a corner it’s folded, and somewhere in there it’s also cut and perforated, so by the time it reaches the end the rug-sized sheet of paper has become book-sized, with holes along the back. Though it’s probably not a complete book yet, this section or ‘sig’ will be a fraction of the book, perhaps a quarter or a tenth of a book depending how long the book is. The folding machine also has lines of big shiny ball bearings, which are apparently there to stop the paper flying off the belt at the corners, but made me want to play marbles on the factory floor…

the fabulous folding machine - look at those tempting marbles
Then the book is bound. The folded sigs are put in hoppers above the binding machine, dropped down and layered in the right order. Then the spine of the naked book is dipped in hot glue, the glue goes up into the perforations in the pages and the cover is clamped onto the gluey spine. The cover is then folded round the pages, the edges of the book are trimmed to make them neat and tidy, and the book comes out the other end all ready to read.

Ready to read and still warm. Books actually are hot off the press. Because the glue is hot, when you touch the spine of a very new book, it’s warm!

That glue is also rather wonderful - it arrives in pellets like little white seeds, then is heated until it melts, and is used as hot liquid glue.

cold dry glue, before it's melted
And that is how you make a book!

I must thank the lovely Floris team for arranging our trip, and all the staff of Bell and Bain for letting half a dozen publishers and one nosy writer get in their way all afternoon. I must also thank every child who has asked me how books are made, because their curiosity prompted me to find out more about printing.

I should stress that the above is just my tourist’s understanding of the printing process. I’ve probably missed a couple of steps and misunderstood most of the rest. (I certainly wouldn’t advise setting up a printing company using my description of the process as a guide.) But I hope my account of a trip to a printing press will give you some idea of the skill, effort and technology which goes into creating a physical book.

And next time a child asks me ‘how do you make a book?’ they’d better be ready for a very long and detailed answer. Or perhaps I’ll just give them a link to this blog…
 

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 20 books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers. 

Tuesday 29 October 2013

The Richness of Sifting - Anna Wilson

“It takes a while for our experience to sift through our consciousness. For instance, it is hard to write about being in love in the midst of a mad love affair. We have no perspective. All we can say is, ‘I’m madly in love’ over and over again.” - Natalie Goldberg Writing Down the Bones

When my grandmother died five years ago I wanted to write about her. It was my way of holding on to the memories I had. I have always kept a diary, but I needed to do more than merely jot things down, and so I thought I would write a story about her.

I wrote about the tricks Grandma used to love to play on her long-suffering husband, using me and my sister as willing and innocent pawns. I wrote about the regular trips I took with her to a large, now long-forgotten, department store in Tunbridge Wells where Grandma would head straight for the haberdashery and flick through pattern books while I stood in front of shelves of Silko, rolling my fingers down over the rainbow colours. I wrote about her garden where she allowed me and my sister to have a patch each to grow whatever we wanted, me with my boring, neat rows of bulbs and my sister with her unruly and ambitious patch of vegetables.



None of these scenes came together into anything other than a personal account of past events that held no interest for anyone other than myself. I was frustrated and gave up.

At the same time I was trying to write a book which was a new departure for me as it was not about animals and was aiming at an older readership for a change! All I knew about the emerging story was that I wanted to set it in a particular part of Cornwall and that the main character was a girl, taken away from her normal life. I struggled with the plot and had many false starts. The book took three years to write, and during that time I had no idea what was actually going on in the writing process. I thought I was simply inventing something new and fresh that had no bearing on my own experiences and that I was finding it tough-going because I had never written anything that long (or serious!) before.

Then, after a six month break while I was writing other things, I came back to re-write the book, now called Summer's Shadow. I read the first scene, in which Summer learns of her mother’s death, and wondered idly whether my grandmother’s death had had any bearing on that opening chapter. As I read on, revising as I went, I realized that of course it had; that in fact, the whole of the book was about the loss I had felt when my grandmother had died. Everything which Summer feels about the death of her mother and the ensuing sense of having lost a part of her own identity was how I had felt in the autumn of 2008.

I had not set out to write a book about grief. If you had asked me during the first drafts what the book was about I would have said it was a family mystery. Now I know it is about more than that: it is about how life changes when you lose someone dear to you.

Natalie Goldberg calls this writing process “the richness of sifting”. She compares our journey through life to an accumulation of rubbish which sits and decomposes over time to create a “very fertile soil out of [which] blooms poems and stories”.

And there is the key word in all of this: TIME. We all need time to process our emotions and experiences if we are to make sense of them and writers need this all the more if they are to be able to express them in their work.

Anna Wilson
Summer's Shadow is due for publication by Macmillan in July 2014




Monday 28 October 2013

The Tragedy of the Book Soundtrack - by Clémentine Beauvais


Being of a sarcastic disposition, I'd spent the past few years secretly laughing at the very fashionable trend of writing 'soundtracks' for novels. I'd discovered the concept with Stephenie Meyer (though I know it had been around for a while before), who on her website had denounced Muse as the number one, well, muse, for her glittery vampires.

Since then, I'd seen it appear again and again on various author websites, and I'd done my own snarky theorisation of the emerging craze. A book soundtrack, I'd decided, is a bricolage of the following things:
  • Songs that the author really listened to when writing the book.
  • Songs that the author really listens to, but not necessarily when writing the book.
  • Songs that are more or less linked to the novel, and/or that characters of the novel listen to or identify with. 
  • Songs that the author would like us to believe s/he listens to, but which in fact s/he doesn't really care about, but which will add trendiness points to the book and sprinkle it with cool, whereas if the author really put in the songs that s/he actually listens to, it would be an eclectic mix of 1980s pop, teenage-unfriendly cheese, and classical music. 
(Being of a relatively cynical disposition, I sometimes reflected that the fourth bullet point was probably often the most accurate.)

Anyway, book soundtracks are generally made up of ten to fifteen songs, and they wait for you on the author website there - wait for you, the reader, to come and read them and... erm... do what with them exactly? 

This is a chin-scratchingly mysterious riddle. What am I supposed to do, o music-savvy author, with your violently fashionable soundtrack? Listen to it while reading the book? Listen to it before reading the book? After? Listen to bits of it here and there? Some soundtracks even state which chapter corresponds to which song, steady on, this is serious business. What do I do, listen to the thing on loop while reading the chapter? It's definitely going to become my favourite song that way (not). Anyway, I don't even like listening to music while I read. 

In short, I'd been absolutely snarky and completely blasé about the hilarious trend of book sountracks, and I would go 'pffsha!' and even 'pfff!' like a good French person everytime the ludicrous phenomenon was mentioned to me. 

(I hope I used enough foreshadowing for you to guess that this blog post is actually following the story arc of a classical tragedy and that my hubris regarding the dreaded thing is going to lead to my own personal catastrophe.)

Catastrophe struck a few weeks ago, when my (French) editor innocently emailed me the following, re: YA novel coming out in a few months' time:
Oh yes I'll also need your soundtrack asap please.
Me:
Er what?
Him:
All novels in this list have soundtracks at the beginning, with songs that have inspired the book, etc.
[I'd previously published with them but not in this specific YA list]

Me:
Ah ok well unfortunately I don't know any songs. In fact I don't know what a 'song' is. I think I vaguely heard someone talk about that concept once but I've forgotten what it means, and I've Googled it and nothing comes up. So I'm sorry but it's not going to be possible. 
Editor:
Write that soundtrack.
 Me:
Not today, I'm going snail-hunting.

Editor:
Write it.
Me: 
You know what, you do it and I'll credit you in the acknowledgements.  
 Editor:
No.

O! How ironic Fate can be, who knits our destiny exactly as we wish she did not! Wouldst that she were less playful! I was plunged into an abyss of angst. Because I've been a bit dishonest with you. It's not just that I find book soundtracks perfectly ludicrous. It's also that I'm terribly jealous of people who can write them. Because I have a huge musical inferiority complex.

In short, I have a s*** taste in music.

There it is, I've said it. I have no musical taste to speak of. My iTunes library is a dreadful smorgasbord of the most shameful musical creations, or rather noise, from around the world. My worst nightmare is that it should ever get leaked online, condemning me to a life in exile with gouged-out eyes in the manner of another tragic hero whose problem was barely worse than mine.

Following this exchange, I spent three or four hours biting all my nails and thinking of possible solutions to this predicament:
  1. Ask my eighteen-year-old sister, who oozes trendiness and is completely made of cool, to write a soundtrack for the novel in exchange for my not mentioning her abundantly Facebook-documented booze nights to the parents. 
  2. Resort to the so-called 'undergrad strategy' of sending a corrupt file entitled 'soundtrack.doc' to my editor, and then pretending I'm not gettting any of his emails for two or three days despite being very conspicuously active on Twitter.
  3. Resort to the 'Simba' strategy of going away for most of the rest of my life, overstaying my welcome in the home of a smelly warthog and a hysterical meercat.
  4. Actually go through my iTunes library and see what I can salvage from the humiliating playlist.
Being of an honest disposition (as well as the aforementioned cynicism and sarcasm), I opted for the last one. I conscientiously went through my iTunes library with a fine-tooth comb, selecting only the socially acceptable songs. Unfortunately it was too fine and nothing came out, so I selected a slightly wider-toothed comb, and this time a dozen songs fell out, which I carefully packaged and sent off to my editor.

Reply:
Oh. Ah. Right. Ah! Erm. Ok.
 Me:
Told you. 
I think he wore mourning clothes for a week after that. But anyway, it's done - the lamest book soundtrack in history will soon be printed on the endpapers of my upcoming YA novel (and no, I'm certainly not posting it here). It is entirely possible that because of it, the publishing house will go bankrupt within two days and trigger inextinguishable fits of laughter throughout France in the process.

Meanwhile, I'm looking at you, author of books which cannot possibly be fully understood without a sountrack. Explain to me how you ever managed to reach that level of cool which I clearly can't attain, and why you do it - what dark hopes are woven into this exercise you clearly devote so much thought to, what we're supposed to do with the music, etc. And can I please hire you next time for this fearsome task.

_____________________________________

Clementine Beauvais writes soundtrack-less books in both French and English. The former are of all kinds and shapes, and the latter, for now, a humour/adventure detective series, the Sesame Seade mysteries. She blogs here about children's literature and academia and is on Twitter @blueclementine.

Sunday 27 October 2013

Home is where the library is - Lily Hyde


For years, like many people I suppose, visiting my parents has also been revisiting childhood landscapes, dreams, hopes – and books.

In one specific way, these are all the same thing. I grew up in Alan Garner country. From the field above our house you could see Shuttlingsloe, Shining Tor, Mow Cop. These were simultaneously the hills my parents dragged me to for boring walks (boring because I’d much rather have been at home reading books) and perilous places of terror and enchantment where the Morrigan rode and Roman legionaries went native far from home – all inside those same Garner books. 

These days I’d rather stomp over the hills than read even a fantastic book. But it’s a tradition that, when visiting my parents, I’ll follow a walk through those semi-mythical landscapes by curling up with the books of my childhood, which my parents have kept in a wonderful library collected over the years. Alongside Garner there’s Diana Wynne Jones, Rosemary Sutcliff, Peter Dickinson, Joan Aiken, Leon Garfield, Susan Cooper, Noel Streatfeild, Elizabeth Goudge, Robert Westall… It is partly a retreat into the voracious reading of childhood, when the world of the book is more real than the real world (Tom and Jan on Mow Cop in Red Shift more immediate and vital than any boring walk there with my parents), partly a salute to these authors who inspired me to start writing myself (when those walks ceased to be boring, as I dreamed up stories to fit the landscapes) and partly an investigation as a writer, always learning, always hoping, always marvelling at how the masters manage it.      

Now my parents are downsizing (isn’t everybody?). There isn’t room for everything, so I spent last week packing up the children’s library to send off to its new home with my brother, in a different county, far from the landscapes of childhood.
One box packed, ten to go...
I also sorted through a drawer of my own adolescent writings. Most of them are awful. I can read them now and identify, paragraph by paragraph, here is Rosemary Sutcliff, here is Diana Wynne Jones, here is Ursula le Guin, Sutcliff again, Peter Dickinson, again Sutcliff… 

But in among the styles and stories lifted wholesale from other authors and legends and fairytales and films, the one thing that rings at all true is the landscape. I knew from Garner that stories as deep as myth could be written about an everyday real place. I took Narnia and Dalemark and Camelot and transposed them to the field above our house, to the hills and moors you can see from there. And in the process, I think I started to find myself as a writer.

I moved away from my parents years ago, and I’ve never written about that landscape since. I don't know if I ever will; I can’t lay claim to Alderley Edge or Shuttlingsloe the way Alan Garner can; though I grew up with them, the roots go no further back. Yet the roots do run deep. I’ll miss the children’s library; in a way it was what made my parents’ house still home. But the landscape, informed as it is by that library, is even more important to me. Those fields and hills are full not only of the dreams and truths I read in The Moon of Gomrath or Red Shift, but of my own dreams of stories and hopes to be a writer.

Saturday 26 October 2013

The Art of Wandering - Andrew Strong

Every Good Friday, when I was a child, friends and I used to walk the ten miles or so to the top of Twm Barlwm, a mountain dominating the reclaimed marshlands of south Wales.  In my imagination, uncorrupted by historical detail, this is where the Celts stood fast, watching over the slow encroachment of Romans stationed in the fort of Caerleon, just below.  It was a mountain of war, and later, in my teens, I witnessed real battles as gangs from nearby towns fought with chains and axes, as determined as the Celts and the Romans not to give an inch.  I watched these events from the safety of the ferns, and sometime later, when the gangs had gone, returned with my dog to wander along the mountain’s spine, to the strange mound at its summit. From there, under the steel grey sky, it felt as if the future was spread out before me.

Arthur Machen’s Hill of Dreams is a book based on his boyhood love of Twm Barlwm, and Machen’s later work, particularly his London Adventure is a hike through the demi-monde of Edwardian London.  He was a flaneur who perfected the art of wandering.  He wanders London as he wandered the Welsh hills.  When, in my early twenties, I followed Machen’s footsteps and moved from south Wales to west London, I worked hard at being a flaneur.  I loved strolling aimlessly through the leafy suburbs, and in the city I adored the river’s muddy allure.  But I didn’t get to be a seriously good at it. I was Welsh boy in Dr Martens, I didn’t have the style.
    
After my own decade and a half of London adventure, I moved back to Wales, this time away from the industrial south and into the central wilderness. Here I crave nothing more than to be rambling in the mountains, getting closer to the clouds, and sometimes above them. 


I tend to walk with a small bunch of serious hikers. These people have all the kit, the Nordic poles, heavy duty water bottles, stainless steel thermos flasks. They study maps. Some of them have beards.  They are not wanderers, they are athletes. Usually these walks take six hours or so, and often cover twenty miles.  We struggle up steep slopes and spill over the top and down again. 

We usually start in a car park and at some point manage to find a pub, often an ancient, hidden place.  I’ve come upon remote hillside churches with eerie murals, like Death wielding a shovel, or St George slaying what I supposed was a dragon but which looked more like a giant, angry sparrow.  I know the twisted spine of Cwmyoy, and the tumbling, secluded magic of Llanthony and Tintern. 

Most of my fellow hikers have travelled this way before, and they know the stories.  Up high in the mountains I’ve seen the wreck of a Wellington bomber that lost its way in the fog; the caves where the Chartists hid their weapons as they planned revolution.  There’s the poet’s chair, and the grave of a famous racehorse. There are standing stones, remnants of Iron Age forts, terraced ramparts, a hermit’s cell.  I’ve looked across the plains of Herefordshire and seen the blue remembered hills of Shropshire.  Look south and there’s the Severn, glinting. 

I like writers who are walkers: Rosseau, Wordsworth, Machen, Bruce Chatwin, WG Sebald. Wandering has a great pedigree. In these walkers' books one phrase reappears time after time: solvitur ambulando – you can solve it by walking.  After hiking all day whatever problems you have disappear, and the simple pleasures of sandwiches, or a flask of tea, with the land spinning about you, miles and miles of it, on and on, never ending, whisk all worldly cares up into the clouds, to be lost forever in the vast ancient wilderness.

www.andrew-strong.com
@yawnthepost


Friday 25 October 2013

Meeting Your Heroes: Part Deux - Tamsyn Murray

So. Last night, I went to Waterstones Piccadilly to hear Susan Cooper in conversation with the most excellent Marcus Sedgwick. It was an event I mentioned this time last month, when I burbled on about wanting to marry the hero of The Dark Is Rising, Will Stanton. And I might also have blethered on about what a privilege it was to be meeting an author I admired so much. The event itself turned out to be everything I expected and more.

Marcus and Susan in conversation

Marcus began by asking Susan about her favourite childhood authors - she mentioned E Nesbit and Arthur Ransome. They moved on to discuss Susan's academic life at Oxford University and she immediately blew most of the audience away by revealing her lecturers had included one J R R Tolkien and a certain C S Lewis. Tolkien, she said, opened his lectures by quoting Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon and then went on the mumble a lot for every lecture after. Lewis, on the other hand, was amazing. As if this wasn't awe-inspiring enough, Susan then mentioned she'd later compared notes on these envy-inducing lecturers with Alan Garner (at which point I began gibbering into my Pinot Grigio), who was studying Classics at Oxford at the same time. She went on to say that she married an American and moved to the United States in 1963, where she's lived ever since.

Marcus wondered what her observations were when she arrived in America as a young British woman. Susan replied that the first thing she noticed on getting off the plane was that the police carried guns. She found the US quite liberating compared to UK, but very right wing. These days Susan still considers herself British, although she holds dual nationality and might possibly be 'rootless'.

When asked about the strong sense of place that permeates all her books, Susan told us that most of it arose from homesickness for Britain, at least in her earlier works. Her latest novel, Ghosthawk, is different; she became fascinated with the land around her home in Massachusetts, land which had become home to English settlers some 400 years earlier but that had supported Native Americans for much longer. She researched the novel's background using primary source documents and some contemporary works. Ghosthawk tells two stories; firstly of Little Hawk, an eleven year old Native American boy, and then of John Wakeley, the son of English settlers. As the novel progresses, these stories become inextricably intertwined. Initially, Susan considered making the white protagonist a girl but realised early on it was unrealistic for the era. And for those who want to know whether Susan is a plotter or a pantser, she had this to say, "I know the beginning and the end and not much in the middle."

Bowing to the inevitable, Marcus moved on to discuss The Dark Is Rising sequence (cue much audience satisfaction and over-excited squeaks from me). Susan explained that she drew directly on places she had known when she lived in Britain when choosing locations for the books - North Wales (where her mother grew up), Buckinghamshire (where Susan grew up) and Cornwall (where her family holidayed). When asked whether it was true that she had written the last half page of the final book, Silver On The Tree, before she had finished the first, Susan told us it hadn’t quite happened that way. The first book in the series was written as a standalone story which she left open-ended because she liked the characters so much. A skiing trip gave Susan the idea for The Dark Is Rising novel but it wasn't until she realised it should be a sequel to Over Sea, Under Stone that it began to really work. She went on to create four more titles and plan the series. "It was like a symphony," she said, "I needed to know where it was going."

Marcus handed over to the audience for questions and Jo Cotterill was by far the quickest on the draw. She asked whether it was true that Susan had round windows in her house with the symbols from The Dark Is Rising books incorporated (it is - there are two windows, each with one symbol). When asked whether the Cold War between the US and the USSR had influenced her writing, Susan replied that it was actually World War II which fostered a belief in them and us, goodies and baddies, the light and the dark. When faced with a question about what she might have done if she hadn't been a writer, she told us she might have been a gardener. "I like gardening, perhaps I'd have done a degree in horticulture."

Jo also asked what Susan was working on now. She replied that she was touring now but she had a small idea which she hoped would grow into a bigger one.

I'm pretty sure that's what every single person in the audience hopes too, Susan. Now, where do I sign up to meet Tolkien?

Susan's remaining tour dates are here.

Me, with Marcus and Susan, hoping their brilliance is catching (also wondering why I didn't wear a nicer jumper)
 



Thursday 24 October 2013

HA HA! HEE HEE! A BOOKLIST TO MAKE YOU HAPPY! by Penny Dolan.

Today  is a celebration of one of the most important reasons that children read: LAUGHTER!

It's often the funny books that get taken out of the libraries,  shared with friends, talked about, quoted, shown around and giggled over. So hooray for the dozen books that make up the SHORTLIST FOR THE 2013 ROALD DAHL FUNNY PRIZE!

 
 


Here's the list of titles, but beware! If you're someone who likes reading with a torch when you should be asleep, GROWN UPS CAN HEAR YOU LAUGHING!

 The Funniest Book for Children Aged Six and Under

  • Weasels by Elys Dolan (Nosy Crow)
  • Spaghetti With the Yeti by Adam and Charlotte Guillain, illustrated by Lee Wildish (Egmont)
  • Troll Swap by Leigh Hodgkinson (Nosy Crow)
  • Monkey Nut by Simon Rickerty (Simon and Schuster)
  • Do Not Enter the Monster Zoo by Amy Sparkes, illustrated by Sara Oglivie (Red Fox, Random House Children’s Books)
  • Noisy Bottoms by Sam Taplin, illustrated by Mark Chambers (Usborne)

The Funniest Book for Children Aged Seven to Fourteen

  • The Grunts All At Sea by Philip Ardagh, illustrated by Axel Sheffler (Nosy Crow)
  • My Parents Are Out of Control by Pete Johnson (Yearling, Random House Children’s Books)
  • Pants Are Everything by Mark Lowery (Scholastic)
  • Geek Girl by Holly Smale (HarperCollins)
  • Fish-Head Steve!  by Jamie Smart (David Fickling Books)
  • I Am Still Not a Loser by Jim Smith (Egmont, Jelly Pie) 

Wednesday 23 October 2013

Diversify to find I've returned to where I started - Lynne Garner

When I started to write professionally just over 15 years ago I read that apparently the average author earned £10,000 per year. Recently I read (sorry can't remember where so unable to include a link) that this figure has now dropped to £5,000 per year. A scary figure and one that unfortunately in my experience appears to be true.

I started writing for magazines when they paid a fair amount for the work involved and didn't expect world rights. Some magazines are now paying less per page than I was earning 15 years ago and are demanding full world rights. This means I am no longer able to boost my income by selling the same feature abroad.  Publishers are lowering their advances and I've noticed some are even saying they no longer offer advances.

So I have had to diversify. I've returned to teaching, something I was able to stop for around two years whilst my writing actually earned me a living. The way I teach has also changed. I not only teach face-to-face in a traditional classroom setting but also teach via the web (links below if you're interested). Some of my books have been turned into iTunes apps and eBooks available via Kindle and Kobo

Just one of my picture books
available as an eBook and an App 

But recently I went in a different direction. I've had a website built (TheCraft Ark) so I could sell craft related materials and tools. 



You may wonder why craft items. Well part of the marketing strategy was to include a craft how-to blog. Something I knew I could do because I used to write lots of hand-outs for my craft classes. These hand-outs I adapted and sold to craft magazines. Now I'm adapting my craft class/workshop notes for The Craft Arks blog. A little ironic really as I decided to diversify and have found I've returned to where I started.

Having told you my story of diversifying I was wondering what you do to boost your writing income (if you have to that is) as I'd love to know. 

Lynne Garner 

I also write for:
The Picture Book Den - all things connected with picture books
Authors Electric - a group of self-published authors sharing their experiences
The Hedgehog Shed - concerned with hedgehog rescue
Fuelled By Hot Chocolate - my own ramblings
The Craft Ark - craft how-to blog

My online classes with WOW starting November:

Tuesday 22 October 2013

No more postcards any more - Nicola Morgan

[After writing this, I saw Saviour Pirotta's post about school visits, in which he praises postcards. I don't disagree with him in that context but you'll see that I have come to a different conclusion, because I'm asking a different question.]

I recently conducted some modestly scientific research and I bring you the results: buying postcards in an attempt to support my books is a) far too expensive and b) utterly pointless if measured by ensuing book sales.

The only type of writer in a position to discover this is someone who has a self-published ebook-only books, because that is the only way precise, near-real-time sales can be monitored. With my ebook-only books, where I'm the publisher, I know for a fact whether I have sold an ebook in any given 24-hour period.

So, let me tell you two recent opportunities I had to test the value of giving away postcards to support a book.

TEST 1 - Mondays are Red
I do nothing to promote Mondays are Red and it sells the same (small!) number every week, with no variation other than an overall 10% decline in the last year. It is available only as an ebook and I will see every sale within a few hours.

Recently, I did a school event at a private school. 120 pupils in the audience, of the right age to enjoy Mondays are Red. Each pupil was allowed to pick up a Mondays are Red postcard, signed, on the way out. Each pupil did. So, 120 cards went into the world, carried home by a person who was a) fired up to enjoy a book (it was a very positive event) and b) almost certainly able to afford to pay under £3 for it.

Over the ensuing two weeks, how many extra copies of Mondays are Red were sold in the UK?

None. Zero. I know, someone might buy it later but I'd like to think at least one person was moved to buy it NOW.

TEST 2 - Dear Agent, Write a Great Synopsis and Tweet Right (all on one postcard)
I do a bit to promote these books, because they are featured visually on my Help! I Need a Publisher! blog, which gets good traffic and has 1600+ registered readers. They sell steadily - and by steadily I mean that I sell uncannily the same number every week. The weekly figure does not vary unless something has spiked it. Again, they are available only as ebooks and I will see every sale within a few hours.

Recently, I was speaking at the York Festival of Writing. There were hundreds of people there but I decided not to leave piles of postcards because I wanted to know they'd been picked up. I did leave one small pile but I also properly handed out 110 over 24 hours.

Over the ensuing two weeks, how many extra copies of any of those books have been sold in the UK?

None. Zero. I know, someone might buy them later but...

And yes, of course, we don't know whether those cards will find their way into other hands and whether sales might ensure but I'm not anticipating a pre-Christmas rush, tbh.

So, let's look at the cost of this embarrassing failure
I buy my cards from Vistaprint. Maybe there's somewhere cheaper (though they aren't known for being high-end) but I like being able to design them easily and I do take advantage of the special offers. (For example, if I want 500, I know that I should just order 250, because, when I've clicked "buy" I'll be given the chance to buy another 250 for a far cheaper price.)

But the unit cost of a postcard is still pretty shocking, even when bought in bulk. I looked at my last order, in which I ordered 250 of Mondays are Red and 500 of the writing/publishing one. And I worked out that each card cost me just over 13p.

So, it cost me £30 to fail to sell a single copy of four books. And when I think how many postcards I've handed out over the years... Well, I'd rather not, to be honest.

And that's why I won't be buying postcards any more. (Oops - see PS...) I'll be signing jotters and arms and scraps of paper and punishment slips, but not postcards bought by me. I may order some business card sized things, but not postcards. I can't afford the waste, pretty as they are.

What about bookmarks? Don't get me started on bookmarks. I researched bookmarks years ago and decided that, as well as the greater cost (usually) they don't work well as marketing tools because people put hide them inside a book and they've already bought the book so it's unlikely to prompt a sale. Again, they're pretty and it's nice to give something to a reader, but...

You see, don't get me wrong: I'd love to be able to give pretty presents to everyone who smiles at me and asks for a signature and if money flowed from my pen I'd happily go back to buying postcards. But I can't afford it.

I'd love to know what everyone thinks. I am sure loads of you will disagree with me, and you might easily be right.
_____________

*cough* The books mentioned above are available on Amazon, but, apart from Tweet Right, they are also available on my own online shop, which is the cheapest place to buy them and you get all formats in one package... But no postcards!

PS Added later: Erm, I capitulated. I just ordered postcards again. One for all my books on one card, including the forthcoming ebook of The Passionflower Massacre and Sleepwalking. Why? Because I ordered 1000, making them cost just under 8p, and because I like pretty things. I am a fool!