Day job

We've just relaunched our new website at work - huge effort, lots of brainy people, project nearly ate my brain, but it works. Here 'tis.

Get your license in a cornflakes packet?

He was such a bad writer, they revoked his poetic license.
~ Milton Berle

Big weekend

Alan Marshall Short Story Competition announcement on Saturday afternoon at the beautiful Eltham Library (I'm not actually doing much beyond handing around finger-food, but helped with the shortlisting). All welcome.
Then I'm at the Emerging Writers Festival on Sunday, hosting a panel on collaboration. Great festival - for writers, rather than just being about writers.

Arts & crafts

I take back what I said only the other day about historical detail in fiction.
I'm reading A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, an intricate Art Nouveau gem, layered and woven and brimming with Victorian and Edwardian detail, which is just as it should be for the era, and a triumph of "tell, don't show" (yes, I do have that the right way around).
Points of view are as slippery as a Pre-Raphaelite sprite, descriptions are as richly detailed as Lalique masterpieces, and bald historical fact is not trussed up or embedded in dialogue: one is simply updated by the narrator on the progress of the Boer War or anarchist assassination attempts.
Of course - of course! - historical detail is only annoying and excessive in clumsy hands, and Byatt's hands are masterful.

Thrillers aren't always thrilling

Just finished reading Sarah Waters' latest, The Little Stranger.
It's an odd read.
I get what she's attempting, I really do. But does it work?

In one sense, yes. The setting is a dilapidated country house; the point of view a local lad made good, a doctor, as dull as dishwater, just a little obsessed with the house and its family. Strange things start happening there, sad and violent things, and you know there'll be tears before bedtime (actually, there won't be, because most of the characters are too stiff-upper-lip). All nicely realised.

Waters is doing what she does best, recreating a genre, or perhaps era, of fiction: absorbing it, reliving it, and somehow conveying its essence in both plot and language (if not character). It was pitch-perfect in The Night Watch and Fingersmith. It may be close in this - post-war ghost stories are not my thing.

But it's pretty boring.

The second strange event had me absolutely spooked, though that's not hard since I get too scared to watch the most run-of-the-mill police show on TV. Apart from that it was difficult to engage as a reader, and even more difficult to care about any of the characters.

The central issue is obvious, and one with which many authors have grappled: the unsympathetic narrator.

It's not that Doctor Faraday is completely unsympathetic. We appreciate the class anxieties, the son of the former maid now able to enter the big house as a friend. But, as one reviewer noted, "Waters gives herself a sort of handicap with the dull doctor's narration. This indirectness, which in cruder hands might have led to a yawning insurrection in the reader, becomes essential to the novel's unsettling power".

I missed the unsettling power and felt saddled with the dull doctor, and having figured out the supernatural element about halfway through, plodded on laboriously and loyally to the end.

It also seemed to me that Waters' usual control of her historical detail seems to have gotten away from her: the meticulous descriptions that worked so well in The Night Watch became even more words to wade through here, and seemed often at odds with the doctor's character.

Tricky stuff to pull off, and points for trying, but it doesn't really work. Millions disagree, I'm sure, and it was short-listed for the Booker alongside Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, the eventual winner; a triumph of the unsympathetic narrator who wins us over completely and utterly.

Note to self: The more historical fiction you read, the less interested you are in historical detail. And remember this warning, since you are currently entangled with a dangerously borderline unsympathetic narrator.

Sharp as

The view from my reading desk: Joan and Jackie helping through the window.




My next book may have to be The Joy of Pruning.
The love of pruning applies, of course, to both gardening and writing. Today I've been doing both.

I feel quite sorry for the cotoneaster, since objectively it's a pretty little thing - one has orange berries, one has red, both quite lovely at this time of year but, sadly, a pest plant in this area.

I feel less sorry for the spare adverbs and adjectives, not to mention gushes of passive voice - can one gush passively? I suppose not - now cluttering up my laptop memory but no longer, happily, my manuscript.
How they got in there in the first place is beyond me.

Purple hebe and purple prose, all gone in one day.
Perhaps the new title should be 101 Ways With Waste.

Tweaks

Gorgeous weekend at my own sacred place.



Final proof-read of the new manuscript. Think it's OK. Then was too stupid to read anything but old gardening maagazines, Vanity Fair, and a Robert Harris thriller.

One day my reading brain will return to normal. I hope.

Some days

"It is tiresome to write a novel, and more so to read it"

~ Théophile Gautier (on whose words I have been hanging all day)

Carol Ann Duffy on David Beckham's blessed ankle

O, how I love Carol Ann Duffy, and love even more that she's Poet Laureate (and even more that Anthony Brown, a Surrealist, is the Children's Laureate, which just cracks me up - two of my heroes in one Laureate era).

But this takes the cake. Actually, it's the cream on the cake: Duffy on Beckham's Achilles heel, and apart from anything else it's utterly gorgeous.

Myth’s river – where his mother
dipped him, fished him, a
slippery golden boy flowed on,
his name on its lips.

Read it all here: David Beckham Poem 'Achilles' by Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate | NowPublic News Coverage

Scrambling

Nearly there with the new book, Auto da Fe. Lots of editing to do but it's there, in one fairly reasonable piece, I think.
Whew.
Just in time to start the next one.

Ten rules for writing fiction

The Guardian has published a few thoughts from people who really ought to know about how to write.
I'm not sure they are rules, as such. More like guidelines:

'The two most depressing words in the English language are "literary fiction".'
- David Hare

'Only bad writers think that their work is really good.'
- Anne Enright

'Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.'
- Helen Dunmore

'You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.'
- Margaret Atwood

'Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.'
-Elmore Leonard

You can read it all here.
I'm going back to my desk to deal with a few sloppy verbs.

Researched out

Scrambling to finish writing one book at present, before I embark on another (for the PhD) in a couple of weeks.
My own fault. I could have finished this one a year or more ago. Lost my way. Got bored with it. Now I'm fired up and charging through it (pardon the mixed metaphor) but not taking enough time to look back over old notes and bookmarks.
Need a stern talking to.
Slow down. Breathe. Check your notes before you spend two hours finding out all over again the key dates in the history of the Book of Common Prayer...

Things that make me disproportionately pleased

(in no particular order, really)
1. Chooks
2. Wooden boats
3. My home-grown, home-pickled beetroot (arguably as good as Auntie Myrtle's)
4. Drew Barrymore smiling
5. Fish and chips on Blairgowrie beach at sunset
6. Writing so intently I don't realise it's lunchtime already
7. Pink (not the colour, mind you, which would be on the list of things I hate)
8. Lots and lots and lots of books
9. Turkish rugs in a deep crimson and midnight blue
10. Mist on the river in the early mornings.

Things I am utterly over

1. A sudden influx of blog spam
2. Australia Day posturing
3. Caterpillars
4. Celebrity updates masquerading as news (Brangelina? Sure. Corey Worthington? I don't think so.)
5. "Untold story" revelations about topics on which anybody with half a brain can find a dozen books
6. Hysteria over any mis-steps in reporting climate science: if only other science (say, testing of drugs or pesticides, or perhaps climate change denial claims) were subject to such media scrutiny
7. Unattractive tennis outfits
8. Tony Abbott. Although I can't think of a time since 1982 when I wasn't utterly over him
9. Apple product releases masquerading as news
10. The 2010 exercise regime I haven't even started yet.

The thrill of it all

Just finished my beach holiday.
These are the books I took with me to read:
- The Boat (Nam Le)
- D-Day (Antony Beevor)
- The Great War and Modern Memory (Paul Fussell)

This is what I actually read:
- Who Weekly
- Famous
- Old copies of the English Country Living (again)
- The Sensuous Gardener, by my new hero Monty Don (again)
- Elizabeth Jane Howard's memoir, Slipstream (vague and disappointingly light)
- Enigma (Robert Harris)
- When Eight Bells Toll (or something like that) and Where Eagles Dare (Alistair MacLean)
- An entire Desmond Bagley omnibus some of which wasn't very good
I nearly even read a Clive Cussler but my partner sent me off to the newsagents for alternatives just in time, including a rather annoying Alexander Fullerton WW2 resistance thriller the name of which escapes (pardon the pun) me already.

I never do that. I usually spend my holiday reading time catching up on the pile by my bedside that never seems to get any smaller. And I certainly don't spend the whole summer reading things especially designed to be read quickly and compulsively. God, it was fun.

Anyway, I was halfway through the first Alistair MacLean and realised: I should write thrillers. Never mind this literary fiction bollocks.

That lasted a day, with all sorts of life-changing decisions being made, until I finally remembered: I already do write thrillers; it's just that I write them for kids (it took a while to figure that out, I know, but I was very relaxed at the time).

But when I think about writing for adults, I get into this head space where I have to have Big Ideas. And convey Important Truths. Or some nonsense.

As if the ideas in my kids books (slavery, colonialism, violence, friendship, community, self-identify) aren't Big.

So after that false alarm, mixed in as it was with other major decisions about what to eat next and what time to go to the beach, I plotted out my next thriller. It's got boats, and spies, and danger, and late night death-defying escapes, and confrontations at gunpoint.
Just like Alistair MacLean.
And me.