Grumpy Old Bookman

Sabbatical

2007-11-25T14:45:00.000Z

Long ago, in another life, I took a walk round the office corridors and thought about what lay behind the closed doors: quite a number of men of around my own age (then 55-60), grey-haired, grey-suited, grey-faced. Some of them weren't any too well. I decided it was time to go. So I did.

I retired from full-time employment. After which, of course, I had all the time in the world. Ha! If you only knew. First law of the universe: everything takes longer than you think.

Anyway, at some point thereafter I started blogging. Which took up an increasingly large amount of time, albeit in a most enjoyable and interesting way. Then, back in February this year, I gave notice here on the GOB that I was no longer going to be blogging on a regular basis. Why? Mainly because of the need to do other things, things which were either equally or more pressing.

Move forward a few months and it so happens that I have been able to blog fairly regularly once again. Now, however, I find that there are, also once again, numerous family and personal commitments which really do have a much higher call on my time than the blog.

What I found back in Feb was that it is all very well in principle, saying that you're going to do less; but if you do anything at all, then people assume (not unreasonably) that it is business as usual. So they write and ask you to review books, or they mention interesting things that they've seen on the web, and so on. And for all of these requests and pieces of info I was, and am, deeply grateful. Because I've found some amazing books and essays that way. And it is hard to disappoint people by ignoring what they say; it makes you feel bad, and it annoys the people who've taken the trouble to write.

So, the only sensible thing to do, I feel, if the quart will demonstrably not fit into the pint pot, is to stop blogging altogether. Which is what I intend to do, at least for a while. Call it a sabbatical. I hope -- and even intend -- to be back one day. But it will probably be a year.

As I also noted back in Feb, I am not the first blogger to recognise this problem. See Mad Max, Miss Snark, Poddy Mouth. And if you look again at Mad Max's last few posts, you will begin to suspect that the pressure of blogging on top of a more than full-time job did indeed make him a little mad. I'm not in that position, fortunately (or so I kid myself). But I do have other things to do which are undeniably more important than tapping away here.

In the meantime, the blog will continue to sit here, as a resource. There's well over a million words on it now, and if you wonder whether I've ever mentioned so and so, I probably have. Use the search instructions in the top of the right-hand column. For the moment, however, I won't be adding anything new.

Thanks for visiting, see you sometime, and best wishes for now.

More short reviews

2007-11-23T08:59:00.000Z

R.W. Holder: How Not to Say What You Mean

Please take note: This is a perfect Christmas present for a bookish person. It is, in effect, a dictionary of American and British euphemisms, and it's also an interesting example of how a non-fiction book can have a long and profitable life, subject to periodic revisions and repackaging.

The book began life twenty years ago, published by Bath University Press, a small academic publishing company with which I was then associated. After the hardback edition was exhausted, the rights were sold on to Faber. Faber kept it in print for five years or so, and when the rights reverted I sold the book, on behalf of the author, to OUP.

Well, I say sold. The book sold itself. All I had to do was write the right sort of letter to the right person. OUP brought it out in 1995, retitled and rebadged it in 2002, and it's now in its fourth, revised edition. The Financial Times called it 'a very funny collection', which it is, and the Sunday Telegraph described it as 'great fun, but not for the maiden aunt'. Available worldwide.

R.W. Holder: The Fight for Malaya

At the end of the second world war, the later lexicographer of euphemisms found himself participating in the war in Malaya. The Fight for Malaya chronicles that period, and is subtitled 'The Jungle War of Maurice Cotterill'.

This is an astonishing story. Maurice Cotterill had been in Malaya for fifteen years before the Japanese invaded, and when they arrived he took to the jungle. Working with guerrillas of Chinese descent, he overcame appalling conditions and survived the war.

This is a book of specialised interest, of course, but if you know an old man or woman who remembers Malaya in that period, they are bound to enjoy this book.

It ain't easy to get hold of, being published by Editions Didier Millet in Kuala Lumpur. The ISBN is 978-981-4217-20-0. Select Books offer it online, as do Brendon Books. If all else fails, send me an email (see profile, top of right-hand column), and I will put you in touch with the author.

While you're buying this one for Grandad you might as well buy Dr Holder's memoir of the same period and place, Eleven Months in Malaya. This has been warmly welcomed by many old Malaya hands, and the ISBN is 9814155136. It's a bit more widely available than the Cotterill book: if you google the title you will find it on offer at a number of UK bookstores, eg Blackwells.

David Loye: Tangled Tales of the Book Trade

This is what used to be called, I think, a conceit. It is written by a man who is possibly even older and grumpier than I. It takes the form of a series of reported dreams, or nightmares, in which 115-year-old author Dilbert Dickens describes some of the most famous authors and scientists of the past century as they attempt to achieve publication of their books and ideas in the modern world of high-powered trade publishing. Sad to report, they don't have a lot of luck.

The result is an entertaining sort of romp, but it does reveal, I further regret to say, that the overall author, David Loye, has a distressingly jaundiced and cynical view of modern-day publishing. I cannot imagine what would justify such an attitude.

Tangled Tales is published by the Benjamin Franklin Press, a firm which deserves a moment or two of your time.

Emmett James: Admit One

Emmett James hails from England. He grew up in Croydon, finished his schooling in Cambridge, and in the 1990s went to Hollywood to pursue a (successful) career as an actor. Admit One is a memoir about his early experiences ('as a kid') in the cinema. No, not that kind of experience. It's about the fascination of film. It takes the form of a fond recollection of the films which are most memorable to him, and it links them to the story of his life (so far).

Emmett's theory is that the key to experiencing film is context, i.e. 'the environment, mood, personal history and circumstances in which a person sees a film'. I absolutely agree. Context, in that sense, is crucial to our appreciation of any art form. As I have remarked elsewhere, a joke told in German may be a very good joke, but if you don't speak German it don't actually mean very much.

It is a clever device, imho, to link an autobiographical memoir (is that a tautology?) to a series of films, and I think it works very well.

The book is published through Wheatmark publishing services, an outfit which seems to have done a splendid job.

Clary Antome: Family Blog

Speaking of good jobs, in printing terms, Family Blog is another one, this time produced via Booksurge.

Here we have the twenty-first-century equivalent of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel: Family Blog is 'a humorous modern-day saga of an uprooted European family, told through a medley of blogs that each member is writing without knowledge of the others'. There are three sisters and two parents here, and each of them has a skeleton or two in the cupboard -- sorry, closet. You get, as with Rashomon, several versions of the same series of events.

Clever, and well done.

Clary Antome, we are told, 'is a young Southern-European female hominid with some experience of being tossed around the planet'. Family Blog is her first novel. Poke around in the material provided by Ms Antome, e.g. the advance reviews, and you will find some seriously weird stuff.

Andrew F. O'Hara: The Swan

Andy O'Hara very kindly sent me a copy of this book, but he asked me not to review it. OK, I won't. But I will mention it.

Mr O'H is the driving force behind the Jimston Journal. The Swan, subtitled 'Tales of the Sacramento Valley', is a collection of stories inspired by the people who live in the valley today. The author says that he was delighted to find that at least one of his stories was highly offensive to a few people, so I think he must be doing something right.

Details et cetera here.

Peter Anthony: A Town Called Immaculate

A Town Called Immaculate is the latest in the Macmillan New Writing series (actual publication date 7 December). This series has usually featured a remarkably high degree of professionalism in what are, by definition, first (published) novels, and this one is no exception.

The book is set in small-town, rural America, where a Vietnam-traumatised and bankrupt farmer, Ray Marak, is beginning to become unhinged. And it's Christmas Eve.

This book is, I think, harder to categorise than many MNW books, and it belongs, I suppose, in that old-fashioned mainstream novel slot which seems to be out of favour with most publishers. The author himself says that he likes to think of the book as literary fiction, but perhaps it could fall under the family saga or the thriller category as well.

For more detail, excerpts, and so forth, go here.

Bill Liversidge: A Half Life of One

Bill Liversidge will be known to some readers of this blog as the author of another blog, View from the Pundy House. He began that blog about two years ago, with the express intention of putting his novel A Half Life of One in front of the reading public by one means or another. And as it turns it, he's succeeded rather well.

What's the novel about? Nick Dowty is 'trapped in a happy marriage, and staggering beneath the burden of being a good husband and a loving father'. But disaster strikes. What is the half life of a nuclear family in those circumstances? One hour? A week?

As you will see if you visit Bill's blog, he has gathered together some very good reviews of this book from the likes of Maxine Clarke and John Baker, both of whom I would rate as no mean judges. I see from the dedication page that Bill has also had encouragement from Lynne Scanlon, a lady who would not, I suspect, encourage any but the talented.

You thought you had problems

2007-11-22T09:24:00.000Z

Writing is dificult enough for most of us, but if you're autistic it presents a different set of problems. Kevin Cann, himself autistic, has posted some thoughts on the issue, using his friend's blog to host the essay (18 November).

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There has been much discussion in the UK recently about teaching children to read. Well, we've only had compulsory education for 135 years or so, and you will appreciate that it takes a while to sort out the best way of doing things.

Anyway, one good sign. Richard Morrison reports in the Times that, at a primary school known to him, on the edge of a 'troubled housing estate', some of the parents have been helping teacher along. In one class of 30, six of the kids have been taught to read and write well by their Mum and Dad. Er, except that they've been taught to read and write in Polish.

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Now here's a pleasant surprise. An email arrives from Jyoti Guptara, one of the teenage Guptara twins who were mentioned here a year or so ago (end of the post) as authors of Conspiracy of Calaspia.

When I first mentioned them, the Guptara twins were lined up for publication in the UK by Aultbea; but that did not happen, so they remain unpublished here (or in the US). However, Conspiracy of Calaspia became a bestseller in India; and Mondadori, the largest Italian publisher, has bought rights to Books 1 - 3 in their epic fantasy saga Insanity. Rowohlt, a venerable German publisher, has not only paid a six-figure advance, but has announced that Calaspia will be the lead Young Adult novel in its 100th anniversary year, 2008. The book will be released in March at the Leipzig Book Fair with a first print run of 100,000 copies.

Not bad, eh? The twins have several web sites, including, of course, one on MySpace, but start here.

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By the way, those of you who read a great deal on-screen may be glad of a tip that I came across a year or two ago. Right click on the Windows desktop, then go properties>appearance tab>effects. In the dialog box, tick 'Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts' and select Clear Type.

To my eye, this makes screen type easier to read, and I have not found any disadvantages.

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The second book in Thomas Quinn's Venetian series will be out on 10 December. St Martins Press is the publisher and Barnes and Noble are pushing it. The Sword of Venice offers historical derring-do, war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, intrigues of the powerful papacy, conflict between the Ziani and Soranzo families, and so forth.

Progress?

2007-11-20T10:59:00.000Z

If you have requested a free book or two, please be patient. I am working my way through the requests on a first-come, first-served basis. Not everyone will get their first choice, I'm afraid, and I may run out of books altogether -- but in either case I will let you know.

How long can it possibly take to parcel up a few books and send them off? Ha! You would be surprised.

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I have long, long, long since given up expecting English schoolteachers to be able to spell. But one does have this vague, lingering hope that people who work in the book trade might be able to do a bit better. No chance, sadly.

Publishers Lunch offers quite an interesting story about a UK-based wholesaler who, because of various kinks in the exchange rates, and odd contractual quirks about who can sell what where, is able to sell books dirt cheap, more or less anywhere in the world. (And no, I don't think that should be dirt cheaply, thank you, despite various attempts to convince me that it should.)

But suppose we go to the web site of said exciting new wholesaler. What do we find on the front page? We find this:

'Broadwater will provide all book business’s with the ability to source from worldwide stocks, giving huge choice and the quickest delivery times.'

I spent some of the best years of my life teaching English to small boys. I don't know why I bothered. Nobody cares any more.

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I have discovered, more or less by accident, that Vanity Fair is the equivalent of what Esquire used to be fifty years ago, i.e. the home of some of the very best journalism around. On the shelf it looks like just another glossy magazine for women to leaf through under the hairdryer. But it ain't. Read the latest editorial and see.

Also, don't miss Dominick Dunne on the Phil Spector verdict, and O.J.

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Now here's a novelty: a short-story competition with a generous prize and no entry fee. But then it is organised by an eccentric outfit.

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Eric Walker seems to think that only Americans object to taxes. This cannot be true, surely?

Really short reviews (I hope)

2007-11-15T19:13:00.000Z

In yet another forlorn attempt to do justice to a dozen or so books which really do deserve to be mentioned, here are some quickies. More to follow soon.

David Isaak: Shock and Awe

This is a Macmillan New Writing publication, and it's unusual in that series (though not unique) in that it's by an American. How come? Basically, the Americans thought the theme was too hot to handle. Said one editor: 'The fact that the bad guys are Americans makes this a hard sell for us.' See David's blog for the backstory.

Essentially Shock and Awe is a thriller: modern, hard-edged, full of action, professional in its approach and skills; there are some superb descriptions of action at sea. It's long, but then they all are these days. It's intelligent: the author asks questions that other US writers don't care to ask; and it is deeply cynical, with good reason, about the motives of the US government. The book is also sensitive: we get, for instance, an insight into the mind of a lapsed Christian who has had an abortion. And either David Isaak has written before, or else he's been practising.

This is not a book to read if you're the kind of person who lies awake at night worrying about the future. But if you're the normal don't-give-a-shit type, this will entertain you.

Gladys Hobson: Awakening Love

A total contrast to the above. Awakening Love is a book for women readers, undoubtedly. And Englishwomen of a certain age, at that.

I read this book before publication, and was pleased to provide a supportive quote for the cover. Modern young women have absolutely no idea what it was like to grow up and come of age in the 1940s and '50s. Many young women then (though by no means all) lived in almost total ignorance of the 'facts of life', and the result, all too often, was disaster. I was particularly impressed by this portrait of a rather naive young woman struggling to make her way in the world.

Further details and sample chapters et cetera are on the publisher's web site.

Steve Almond: (Not That You Asked)

Another total contrast. This is a non-fiction (sort of) book, a collection of essays, by an American humorist with a pretty good track record. It's subtitle, or principal title perhaps, is Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions. (I like that comma after Exploits; which reveals one of my own obsessions.)

Humor, or humour as we Limies have it, is the key here. The book is indeed droll, and it would make a good gift for a bookish, mid-Atlantic sort of friend. Mr Almond often makes fun of himself, which is thoughtful of him, and you can read extracts and stuff on his web site.

Charles McCarry: The Tears of Autumn

In the UK, Overlook Press continue to put out new editions of Charles McCarry's masterly series of espionage novels; the series has been discussed here before. One of the latest (scheduled, I see, for February 2008) is The Tears of Autumn. It was first published in 1975, and it provides one of the earliest and most convincing explanations (other than the official one) for the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

This novel has been widely recognised as one of the best by one of the most thoughtful political, and mercifully non-literary, novelists of our time. And that's all you need to know really. If you haven't read any McCarry, start at the beginning of the canon and go on to the end.

Poetry

Finally, this blog does not really do poetry as I am completely unqualified as a judge, but a couple of volumes have come my way which are noteworthy as examples of what can be done these days for comparatively little money.

Time was when a poet had little chance of publication. But now, as we all know, publication is a fairly cheap option. And poets who go around giving talks and public readings and the like can carry a few copies with them, and sell on the spot.

First example: The Primrose Path and other poems, by Bob Taylor. The poet here is a retired Yorkshire miner, one who had a less than happy time in the miners' strike of 1984, but survived it to become a poetically inspired Christian. Details and samples at Magpie's Nest Publishing.

The second example also features Bob Taylor, with Gladys Hobson and guest writers. Northern Lights is a collection of poems and stories from the north of England. A number of writers here are survivors of the Christopher Hill debacle. This is also a Magpie's Nest publication.

Words of the week

2007-11-13T09:02:00.000Z

Leigh Russell is smart enough to have a three-book contract (with No Exit Press) for a series of UK-based crime novels featuring a female police officer, DI Geraldine Steel. On his blog, he writes weekly about the process of writing.

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Penguin, I hear, has successfully defended itself in a copyright case (link from the Bookseller). Which proves absolutely nothing to me except that it is most unwise to get involved in these battles. Lord Goodman used to say that anyone who sued for libel was demonstrably mad, and to my mind the same applies to copyright, which knobs on.

I speak here of individuals, of course. For companies it's different. Penguin, for example, can certainly afford to pursue breach of copyright cases where international, deliberate, and organised piracy is concerned. In fact, can hardly afford not to.

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Ron Hogan on Galleycat reports that big publishers are deliberately making royalty payments late, and paying less than is due, in the hope that agents and writers won't notice.

Nothing new here. I remember, about thirty years ago, reading an article in the Financial Times. A tradesman (plumber or some such) was getting regular work from a big firm, but his invoices were ignored. Eventually he managed to speak to someone in the big firm's accounts office who airily told him, 'Oh, we never pay anything until we get a writ.'

So, from then on, the plumber submitted his invoices monthly. With each one he enclosed a letter from his solicitor (lawyer) threatening legal action if the bill was not paid within twenty-eight days. This letter cost him £50 a time, a charge which, naturally, he added to the big firm's bill. From then on, no problem. Bills paid on time, tradesman happy.

Maybe agents should do the same?

Meanwhile, of course, if you want to know what big-time publishers really think about writers (ungrateful little sods, apparently) then Ron Hogan can give you an example.

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Gee whiz. Ron Hogan (a busy feller) also points out that Marion Boyars has just published a book about book blogs. (Marion Boyars? Into books about the internet?) Anyway, no one's ever contacted me about it, so I suppose I ain't in it. Not, frankly that it would trouble me. Nothing Marion Boyars ever did in the past was ever of any interest to me. Far too highbrow. The lady herself is deceased by the way, but she had her admirers.

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Cory Doctorow, at Locus Online, provides a very useful and succinct account of copyright in general and the Creative Commons licences in particular.

I can't emphasise too much that it is important for anyone reading this blog to read Doctorow's piece (or something like it, if you can find it). It contains information which is essential if you care about books and publishing, not to mention the other media.

In passing, you will also discover why anyone who knows anything about copyright is obliged to spit every time they speak the word 'Disney'.

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Dust Jacket Review is a newly launched resource for book lovers. It will take some time to explore this site, I feel, and you need to sign up to gain access to the full range of features. There are, I am told, some sixty of my own book reviews on the site somewhere (the GOB is issued under a Creative Commons licence).

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Not everyone is happy about the free use of their work, especially if no one asks their permission. A number of Welsh writers have taken a dim view of what the National Library of Wales is up to.

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Publishers Lunch rightly finds it intriguing that, in the music biz, some performers are issuing their stuff through specific outlets only. E.g., the Eagles' latest album via Walmart, Paul McCartney through Starbucks. Lessee now.... books? It's a question of when, not if, suggests PL.

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Crumbs. PL also reports that you can order a one-off book in which your child features in adventures with established media characters.

I don't know who wrote the press release, and if they were working for me I'd sack them, but eventually we get to the following: 'In days, the child will receive a timeless, one-of-a-kind story where they appear on every page of an exciting travel adventure with Dora, helping to save Boots the monkey.'

Whatever else may be said, it seems to me that this operation requires some seriously well organised firms to collaborate with some reasonably clued-up parents, digitally speaking, and it will be interesting to see if it catches on.

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Ah, now here is the kind of man I really have time for. A guy who gets seriously pissed off by the enthusiasm, energy and drive of all them wannabes. In particular, Peter L. Winkler is grinding his teeth over all this Write a Novel in No Time At All and Get Rich and Happy and Have Fantastic Sex Into the Bargain stuff.

His suggestion: let's have a month in which no one writes anything. There's far too much of it around as it is.

The man has a point.

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Eric is very keen on books and is building up substantial lists of blogs, software, publishers, and more. Several languages available.

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Leslie Hurst commented that John Twelve Hawks's number two book (number one being The Traveller) hasn't made much impression. And my search of the Publishers Marketplace archives (available only to subscribers) reveals that, after July publication, it never got higher than 24 on the New York Times bestseller list. And on most lists it didn't get that high. Which is no surprise to me.

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The Times has an interesting article about ghost-writing. It should be read after, or before, my own essay on the same subject. Subsequently you should be equipped for a new and dazzling career.

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Live in New York? The 20th Annual Independent and Small Press Book Fair takes place on Saturday, December 1st and Sunday, December 2nd, at the New York Center for Independent Publishing at 20 West 44th Street in New York City. Details here.

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Clancy Sigal has recently been awarded west coast PEN's 'lifetime achievement' award. And he was presented with it by Gore Vidal, no less. Now that is impressive.

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Is the net good for writers? That is the question posed by Ten Zen Monkeys, and it would probably take ten or twenty of same to figure it out. Unfortunately the Ten etc piece got up my nose fairly early on and my concentration faded. But I agree with the commenters at the end: let's have more women. (Link from Martin Rundkvist.)

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Samuel Edmonson showed me the Literary Rejections site, where lots of writers go to have a jolly good moan and join the massive crowds of those who have had lots of rejection slips and expect to receive a lot more.

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Yeshua, it seems, is the Jewish name for Jesus, as in Jesus of Nazareth, and Lulu.com alone has lots of books about him. One of these is by Edmund Jonah, who has chosen to write up the life of Jesus in the form of a novel.

Edmund has an interesting background in that he was a Jew who was educated by Jesuits. Like many another author, Edmund had two agents who enthusiastically offered his novel around, but without success; hence Lulu.

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Lapham's Quarterly is a new (US) history magazine started by Lewis Lapham, who was editor of Harper's for many years. The first issue is just out. Entitled 'States of War,' it includes both historical texts (ranging from Thucydides to Jessica Lynch) and contemporary commentary from Fritz Stern, Caleb Carr, Tom Holland, and John Mueller. By connecting the present with the past, the magazine hopes to place current political events within the context of their historical antecedents.

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Just out, Mary Scriver's biography of her former husband, Bob Scriver: sculptor in bronze in the Beaux Arts style.

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What is the Oxford dictionary's word of the year? You'll never guess.

The truth about short stories

2007-11-12T08:58:00.000Z

As you will see, from the next two paragraphs, I began to write this post thinking it would be quite short. But in fact it deserves to be longer, because as I clicked on a few links I found something a bit special. I originally began as follows:

Can you stand it? I'm not sure I can. But there's yet more discussion of whither the short story over on Galleycat, with links to more stuff thereafter.

And that's all I was going to say, really. Until I casually began to look at some of the comments at the end of Larry Dark's guest post on the NBCC blog, which is linked to by Ron Hogan on Galleycat. There I found a comment by Samuel Edmonson which kind of took my breath away. Here is just part of what he says about what he, and I, regard as the literary-magazine racket.

First of all, commercial magazines pay money and for working writers such as myself it's a job, a career, we earn a living wage; the tiny literary magazines pay nothing or close to it. So to get your stories published in them, you actually have to PAY because even if you sell a story for $100 you'll never recoup the cost of postage, copies, equipment, and so on. It is impossible to run a business on it. It is not a career. You need another job (in academe, of course).
Secondly, these journals are tiny, no one reads them except for academics who are trying to get published in them. You are so completely wrong about their impact and by the weakness of your argument I suspect you know it -- these literary journals have no impact on the world at all. But as a writer, I want to be READ. I'm writing for the man on the street, not for the politically correct chair of some college's English department.
Thirdly, the academic journals strongly, strongly favor teachers and MFA graduates. Read any of these academic journals and you'll see that most of the poetry and prose is from the academics. The writing, the worldview, the ideas, the very words are all so insular -- and if you operate outside of that world, they will ignore you. They have to support their buddies. Spend a few hours to put the names and their affiliations in a spreadsheet and you'll see what I mean about connections. And if you're not only MFA-less but also politically incorrect, you might as well save your stamps because they'll never, ever touch what you've sent.

Now I don't know who Samuel Edmonson is, and Google doesn't offer much enlightenment. But one thing's for sure: he punches above his weight. What is more, he agrees with me, so naturally I admire him. See my post of 16 October, which contains links to my earlier pieces about the official and true histories of the short story.

None of which, however, really solves my problem, which is finding short stories, week in and week out, that are the kind of thing I actually want to read. I suppose the only solution is to write my own.

More comment (brief) on Mason Fiction. And there's more about Stephen King on short stories in The Smart Set; if, as I said at the beginning, you can stand it; and I for one couldn't.

Short pants and miniskirts

2007-11-09T09:18:00.000Z

UK publisher Picador has decided, not unreasonably, that an enhanced online presence will aid marketing, and one of the features offered is a blog, on which various known (and some yet to be known) names make an appearance. General discussions appear, as well as pieces about Picador books.

Picador, it seems, have recently decided to 'launch its new fiction in dual hardback and paperback editions, in a bid to combat the ailing market for hardback literary fiction. The move raises serious questions about the future of the hardback literary novel, which Picador publisher Andrew Kidd described as a "moribund format".' So says the Bookseller, reported by Literary Saloon.

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PS Publishing have also revised their web site and this is well worth a visit. PS (UK based indie) do science fiction, fantasy, horror and crime novellas, novels and short-fiction collections. They also publish non-fiction titles and a quarterly short fiction digest magazine, Postscripts.

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Another independent and interesting UK outfit is the Legend Press. This is the publisher of William Coles's The Well-Tempered Clavier, which I mentioned the other day.

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Today in Literature appears, as its name suggests, daily, and each day's short piece is about an event or person in literature whose anniversary, of some kind, today is. This might well help to make the teaching of Eng Lit less tedious for all concerned. And you can get it delivered by email.

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Iain Manson tells me that a thriller by my soundalike, Michael Alan, is well worth reading. Entitled The Lorelei Effect, it has been published by YouWriteOn, and sample chapters are available online.

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Over at the Pundy House, Bill Liversidge continues to describe what it's like, in the real world, trying to market a self-published book to UK booksellers. The reading of which calls for strong nerves, a well developed sense of humour, and probably, one feels, most of a bottle of whisky.

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Peter Wright, editor of the UK Mail on Sunday, is having to wrestle with the problem of how much to give away free online. Here, courtesy of Edmond Clay, is his current view: 'To get traffic on a web site you have to publish free and encourage as many people as possible to read it. We encourage people like Drudge to aggregate our content because it means more people are see [sic] it and come back to browse the site. Whether that is the correct answer I can’t tell you, but it’s what we’re doing a[t] the moment.'

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The Friday Project finds another blog which justifies a book. (Info also from Edmond Clay.)

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And, finally from Edmond Clay, a bit about fire. Edmond lives in the area of those Californian forest fires that you've been hearing about. He says that this resident's account gives a pretty good impression of what it's like.

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Marilyn Saklatvala wonders whether she has found A New Way to Do Old Things no. 95, and I think she may have.

Marilyn, writing as M.J. Sak, has published a children's book via Lulu: The Stone Summons. In the book, one of the characters (Alex) writes a blog. She had hoped that a mainstream publisher might publish the book, and, as part of the marketing, run a competition for a youngster to write Alex's blog. In the end, having to resort to Lulu, she thought what the hell, might as well write the blog myself. Which she did.

Now that is interesting, and I haven't heard of it being done before.

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In more orthodox style, P.K. Munroe has launched a blog to help along The Thursday Night Letters. Blokes having ideas in pubs, but also doing something about them.

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How do youall feel about the Writers Digest? They are, for the sixteenth time, running a competition for self-published books. And the entry fee is $100. Well, that should keep out the riff-raff. (Link from G.R. Grove: a medieval Welsh storyteller for the modern world.)

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Are there any teenage girls reading this blog? If so, kindly make yourselves known to me, with photographs. Heh heh heh. Actually, what I really mean is, go take a look at Poppy, because it's supposed to be just for you.

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Fortuitous typos no. 94: On the Creative Commons blog, Michelle Thorne reports that the CC Salon London will be held at the Crown and Anchor, 22 Neal St, Covert Garden (on the 20th of November 2007).

I like that. For them as lives abroad, it should be Covent Garden; originally, of course, Convent Garden. Get thee to a nunnery, Michelle.

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Parts 2 and 3 of Barry Eisler's discussion of the effects of the web, and other changing technology, on the book world are now available at Buzz, Balls & Hype. 'I'd wager,' says Eisler, 'that the average reader doesn't know, and doesn't give a damn anyway, who publishes James Patterson.' So would I. Said so on 8 February 2005, in a post which you might like to read before, or after, sampling Mr Eisler.

See also my thoughts on whether big-time authors really need a publisher at all. These are buried in the middle of my general post of 18 December 2006, under the sub-heading Here, Kitty, Kitty. Everything that I said then remains true today. It's only a matter of time. And Jason Epstein, as you would imagine, influenced my thinking.

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This blog does not do politics, but we do pay attention to freedom of speech, and to the rational discussion of important issues. On Tuesday I referred to a discussion in the Times of the row about mentioning Enoch Powell's 1968 speech, and on Wednesday, I'm pleased to say, Simon Heffer, in the (right-wing) Daily Telegraph took up more or less the same position as the Times's Marxist columnist.

Heffer is unusual in having actually read Enoch Powell's famous 1968 speech, which the Telegraph helpfully makes available online. If you do read it, which most of those who talk about it apparently have not done, then it is hard to disagree with the contention that Enoch was right about immigration, as he was about most other things.

So why is it so difficult, one may ask, for sensible and reasonable people to accept that, and then to move on to discussing how best to exploit the undoubted benefits which (controlled) immigration brings, and how best to cope with the undoubted problems which also arise?

I note, in passing, that when I came to use the digital workstation in my local camera shop yesterday afternoon, it was displaying text in Polish.

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I long ago gave up trying to keep track of all the good crime writers, even the British ones, and here's another one: Martin Edwards.

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Sgt Mom, aka Celia Hayes, is taking positive steps (see post of 2007-11-06) to market her latest, To Truckee's Trail. A group of people who 'met' in an Amazon.com discussion group for writers of POD or small-press historical novels are getting together. All of them were 'stymied by the literary-industrial complex', and are now marketing their books themselves.

The group began as a way to swap tips and encouragement -- now they're putting together a glossy newsletter to publicise some of their books. For details of what they are up to, visit the Independent Authors' Guild's new web site.

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iGavel is an online auction house which sometimes has lit'ry things, such as this rare Irving Penn item.

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Londoners, Publishing News reports, will soon have the benefit of a free literary magazine. It will be a 16-page, bi-weekly, tabloid-format enterprise, with 'a broad variety of high quality content, ranging from short stories to cartoons and stimulating non-fiction, from both up-and-coming young writers and more high-profile published authors'.

It's the 'high quality' bit which worries me. If it's to be the usual creative-writing school kind of fiction, readers will not bother after week one. If, on the other hand, we have more commercial short stories, then maybe. But who is going to write them? Especially if, as seems likely, writers are going to be encouraged to do it for the exposure.

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Shelfari has a new widget.

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From time to time I have expressed the thought here that, at least as far as the UK is concerned, subsidy of the arts from public money is undesirable in principle and produces mostly ghastly stuff in practice. Now it turns out that quite a few artists and writers feel that applications for funding really aren't worth the time and trouble in any case. You are required, it seems, to give up your artistic independence. Thanks to Elberry for the link.

Ms O'Beirne attacks her critics

2007-11-08T09:52:00.000Z

You may remember the controversy about Kathy O'Beirne and her 'memoirs'. It was referred to here several times, notably on 20 September 2006, a post which, thanks to the peculiarities of Google, has attracted nearly 90 comments.

In brief, Ms O'Beirne wrote an autobiography/memoir about her early life in Ireland. This book is known in the UK as Don't Ever Tell, and in Ireland, Australia, and the USA its title is Kathy's Story.

In this book, Kathy O'Beirne claimed, among many other things, that she was beaten by her father and sexually abused by two boys from the age of 5 before being sent away to an institution. At the age of 10 she was, allegedly, repeatedly raped by a priest and whipped by nuns. Later she was forced to take drugs in a mental institution.

Subsequent to the publication of Kathy's book, her family went on record to deny, fairly comprehensively, Kathy's account of these events. 'There is not a shred of evidence,' they said, 'to support such outlandish claims.'

The O'Beirne story has been subject to extensive discussion, not least in the Irish media, because the book paints such a dark picture of Irish society in general. Now an email from Florence Horsman-Hogan, forwarded by Rory O'Connor, alerts me to what happened when Kathy O'Beirne was interviewed live on the Irish TV show Ireland AM on Tuesday this week.

Ms O'Beirne found herself up against one Hermann Kelly, who claims that her book is a fraud and has written a book of his own to prove it. (An extract from Kelly's book appeared in the Daily Mail in October. Title: Kathy's Real Story; published by Prefect Press; wholesaled by Gardners.) You can read all about what happened next in the Irish Independent, but basically it was Jerry Springer with an Irish lilt to it.

My email information says that 'Mark Cagney asked Ms O'Beirne about her accusation of sexual abuse against a priest in her book - Fr Fergal O'Connor. Not only did Ms O'Beirne deny such an allegation, but for some strange reason went totally berserk and started hitting Mr Kelly on the head and body with a copy of the book, and newspapers.' The director went to an unscheduled commercial break.

Florence Horsman-Hogan, by the way, is a leading force in L.O.V.E. (Let Our Voices Emerge), an organisation which was set up in 2004 to 'promote a more positive image of religious orders in their orphanages and industrial schools.'

L.O.V.E. has campaigned against the O'Beirne book since its publication, warning that Ms O'Beirne was not a well woman, and arguing that Mainstream publishing, in taking on her story, and Michael Sheridan, the co-author, were taking advantage of a very vulnerable person.'

You don't have to read much about the O'Beirne saga, and about organisations such as L.O.V.E., to realise that these are brutally controversial areas of concern, and that the rows and disputes which they generate can inflict serious damage on the participants. You enter these waters at your peril. Here's just a taste. And another. And more. And on, and on, and on....

Ghost stories

2007-11-07T09:06:00.000Z

The clocks have gone back, the nights are closing in, and this is no doubt the time of year when M.R. James used to begin to think rather seriously about the ghost story which he would read to his friends on Christmas Eve.

Perhaps the most successful of modern ghost-story writers is Susan Hill, whose new book The Man in the Picture was enthusiastically reviewed by Madame Arcati just a short while ago. Madame also announced that the book has been reprinted.

You may also remember that, a few months ago, the Times announced a competition for a short ghost story. Short being the operative word: 2000 words only, which is a bit difficult, in my view. For them as wanted to enter, Susan Hill provided a few tips.

The winner of this competition was Robert Fenner, with The Witch's Promise, and you can read it online. I did have ideas about entering the competition myself, but for a variety of reasons never got around to it.

So -- all of the above being the case, I thought I would give you a ghost story that I prepared earlier. It's called Gunner Balfour Treated Fairly, and you can read it below. It's one of the stories included in my 2003 collection, King Albert's Words of Advice.

GUNNER BALFOUR TREATED FAIRLY

Not many old ladies would ask their granddaughter to have a one-night stand with a soldier – especially if the two young people have not even been properly introduced. But that is what happened to me, in the summer of my twentieth year.

It was June, and I was at the end of my second year at Oxford. I received this slightly mysterious letter from my grandmother – my mother’s mother – asking me to phone her urgently. When I did, she invited me to go and see her. Well, more than invited – she pretty well demanded that I go and stay with her for a couple of nights. She said that she needed my help, urgently, but wouldn’t elaborate on what; just said that it was a family matter, and something of the utmost importance.

I dearly love my Granny, and I would go to quite a lot of trouble to help her, and as it happened I had finished all my exams so I was able to agree; though I must say I was a bit puzzled. ‘Bring that blue dress of yours – the one with buttons up the front,’ Granny had said. Which all added to the mystery.

My grandmother lives in a small village in Wiltshire, on the edge of Salisbury Plain. The Plain, as you probably know, is a big centre of military activity, and most of Granny’s neighbours are retired colonels or brigadiers. The tank regiments use the area for various war games, and the infantry practise street fighting in some of the deserted villages. These villages were not deserted willingly: they were taken over by the army during the second world war, and have never been returned to civilian use.

Granny, needless to say, is heavily involved in church affairs and village activities generally. She is president of the flower club, a member of the women’s bowls team (despite being over eighty), and is secretary of the women’s institute (or some such body – I forget the details).

I arrived soon after lunch on a beautifully warm June day: a taxi from the nearest railway station delivered to me Granny’s door.

We spent the afternoon resting and chatting, drinking tea, and then calling on various neighbours. We distributed excess vegetables from Granny’s garden. ‘Helping the old folk,’ Granny called it, oblivious of the fact that she herself was older than many of those we visited.

Nothing whatever was said about ‘the matter of the utmost importance’, and I knew better than to press the point. Like many old people who live alone, Granny talked a great deal whenever she had company, and I knew that she would tell me what was troubling her when she was good and ready.

After a light evening meal we chatted some more, and watched a television programme that Granny was particularly anxious to see.

Then she said: ‘I think we’ll just go for a little walk. Not very far. Just around the churchyard.’

Granny lives in a detached house, set in a comfortable garden, directly opposite the church – which is fourteenth century – so a walk round the churchyard was not going to tax either of us.

The sun had now set, and the light was fading, but the sky was still perfectly clear. The air was calm and sultry.

As we came out of Granny’s drive, and prepared to cross the road, I was struck by the almost complete absence of signs of life. Cars are few and far between in the village nowadays, because a new road has taken all the traffic away; and on that particular evening there weren’t even any dog-walkers about.

Granny took us on a small diversion, to look at the house of an absent neighbour and make sure that it was in good order, and then she led the way through the lychgate and into the churchyard.

I should explain that the churchyard in Granny’s village is one of a number in the area which contain both civilian and military graves. The civilian ones cover several centuries, as usual, and come in all shapes and sizes. The military graves all date from 1919, soon after the end of the first world war; almost without exception they mark the final resting place of soldiers from New Zealand, and they are absolutely standard in design. They are about three feet high, and arranged in lines, like a platoon on parade: the white headstones carry little more than the name, rank, and date of death.

I have been familiar with these graves since I was a little girl, and as I walked through the churchyard with Granny I paid them little attention. I was just listening to her telling me how difficult it was to find anyone who would cut the grass regularly.

It did occur to me that Granny was talking even more than usual, and perhaps a little louder than usual, but I made nothing of that: just an old lady’s eccentricity. If I noticed anything, it was that the soldiers’ headstones seemed to glow in the twilight, as if they were softly illumined from within.

We went into the churchyard at the west end, walked around the north side of the church, where most of the soldiers are buried, and then began to approach the east end, where there is a huge old yew tree. This yew is older, some say, than the church; so old that its trunk has divided into two sections, leaving a gap large enough to walk through.

As we approached the east end of the church, I began to hear this loud humming noise. At first I thought it might be a swarm of bees, or something similar, and I looked round in some alarm. But it was a bit too late in the evening for bees, I thought, and anyway I couldn’t see any. The loud humming continued. It sounded almost as if it was a human being, making a sort of Mmmmm! sound, in warm appreciation of something – as if someone had tasted something really juicy.

I said nothing to Granny, and we walked slowly on, with Granny still prattling away about the churchyard management committee and the curious intractability of its members – which meant that they didn’t always agree with her.

And then Granny seemed to notice my puzzlement. She stopped and turned to look at me. ‘What’s the matter, dear?’

‘Well... nothing,’ I said. ‘But can you hear that humming noise?’

Granny stood and listened. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t. Not any more. But I used to hear it when I was younger.’

‘What is it?’

Granny went into her evasive mode. ‘Oh, nothing to be alarmed about,’ she said vaguely. And began to walk on again. But still very slowly.

After a moment I followed her.

By now it was almost dark, but we were just able to see where we were going. And it was at that point that I heard a man’s voice. Quite distinctly.

‘It’s not fair!’ said the voice. The man spoke sharply, with a good deal of emphasis and some bitterness. ‘It’s not fair, I say! Do you hear me? It’s not fair.’

As you will understand, I looked around to see where this voice was coming from. The speaker was obviously some distance away, rather than right behind me, but at first I could see no one.

So I carried on walking, following Granny, who was doddering a bit, looking down to make quite certain where she was putting her feet.

I caught up with Granny as she prepared to walk along the south side of the church, completing our circular tour and heading back towards the churchyard gate. I put my hand on Granny’s arm to stop her progress.

’Did you hear someone speak?’ I asked her.

‘No, dear, I didn’t. Did you?

‘Yes.’

‘What did they say?’ The tone was innocent – so innocent that even then I guessed that Granny knew more than she was admitting.

I told her. Speaking quite distinctly myself, I said: ‘It was a man. and he said, “It’s not fair”.’

‘Ah,’ said Granny, with a slightly guilty tone to her voice. ‘In that case it was Gunner Balfour. Is he, perhaps, under the yew tree?’

I turned to look back at the ancient yew, and sure enough, I could now see the dark figure of a man, almost hidden under the lower branches.

And again I heard him speak. It was almost a shout, with a note of desperation: ‘It’s not fair! Not fair at all! I should have had my turn. And I never did. And that’s not right. I won’t rest till I do. Do you hear me? Won’t rest until I do.’

The voice was no so loud and aggressive that I began to feel a little alarmed. ‘I think we should go,’ I said firmly, and took Granny’s arm to hurry her along.

‘Oh you mustn’t be frightened of Gunner Balfour,’ said Granny. ‘He sounds a bit fierce but I assure you he’s harmless.’

I looked back at the figure under the tree, and was relieved to see that the man had not moved. And now that I looked more closely, I could see that he was wearing army uniform; his belt buckle sent a brief flash of reflection from the distant street light, as did his boots.

‘Harmless he may be,’ I said, ‘but it’s very late, and I think we should go home.’

Once we arrived back at the house, I locked the front door after us, and went round making sure that all doors and windows were fully secure. Granny, meanwhile, made some cocoa.

When she handed me my cup I said, ‘Now then, Granny, I think it’s about time you told me what that business in the churchyard was all about. Are you going to tell me who Gunner Balfour is, and what he means by hanging around out there?’

Granny took refuge, once again, in a sort of geriatric fatigue. ‘Oh not just now, dear. I don’t think now’s the right time. I’ll tell you tomorrow, dear. In what is sometimes called the cold light of day.’

*

The following morning we took our time about getting up. Then we had a neighbour in for coffee; and finally, after the neighbour had departed, I told Granny once again that I wanted hear about Gunner Balfour.

‘Oh,’ she said, as if faintly surprised. ‘I thought you might have forgotten.’

This was a transparent lie. She thought no such thing.

‘How could I forget?’ I said. ‘I want to know what on earth this man was doing, lurking about in the graveyard late at night, and scaring people by shouting at them. Is he a regular soldier?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘And what does his commanding officer think of him doing that sort of thing?’

Granny didn’t answer. What I got was a thoughtful question instead: ‘Tell me – how did he look to you?’

‘What do you mean, how did he look? You saw him, didn’t you?’

Granny shook her head. ‘No, dear. I can’t see him any longer. Or hear him either. Though I did once, of course. When I was younger.’

‘Granny, you’re not going blind, are you?’ I was quite upset and concerned.

‘No, no, dear. I’m not blind. Neither am I deaf. Not really.’

‘Well what then?’

I think it was at that point that I first began to understand; and, despite the warmth of the day, I shivered.

‘My dear,’ said Granny, ‘you’ve gone quite pale. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.... I tell you what, it might make better sense if we go across the road again. And Gunner Balfour won’t be there at this time of day, that much is quite certain.’

So that is what we did.

Granny led the way, and we wandered through the ancient graves until we were among the regular rows of New Zealand soldiers. And there, of course, we found the grave of Gunner Albert Balfour. Aged seventeen.

We stood and looked at the grave together.

‘He lied about his age, of course,’ said Granny. ‘They were farming people, his family. Good church-going folk, from somewhere near Christchurch. This boy was their only son, and they needed him on the farm really, but he thought he ought to volunteer for the army, and so they all conspired to let him. As soon as he left school he signed the recruitment papers, pretending he was older than he really was. And I expect the army knew what he was doing, but they weren’t too fussy about details in those days.’

‘And did he die in action?’

‘Oh no! None of these men died in action. What happened was, at the end of the war, in November 1918, the troops gradually began to drift back to England from France. Of course in an ideal world the troops from overseas – Canada, Australia, and so forth – they ought to have been sent home immediately. But there simply weren’t the ships available to move them. So lots of the troops were left hanging about in England, with nothing much to do, for months on end.’

I was astonished. ‘I bet that was popular.’

‘Well, exactly. The officers used to take them on endless route marches across Salisbury Plain, that sort of thing. I believe some of the Canadian troops actually mutinied, in protest against the delays, and the futility of wasting time. But that didn’t happen here. What did happen, of course, was influenza.’

‘Influenza?’

‘Oh yes. There were epidemics of influenza all over Europe in 1918 and ’19, and it wasn’t just your usual bad-cold-and-a-headache type of flu. This was a killer. And it did kill them. Even fit young men. Killed them by the score, as you can see.’ She looked around, at the rows of pale creamy headstones.

Suddenly – and this was most unlike my grandmother – her face seemed to crumple and she grew ten years older, right in front of my eyes. She began to weep.

‘I met his parents,’ she said, in between great gulping sobs. ‘They came over after the second war, because they knew they were going to die soon, and they wanted to see his grave. And it’s all my fault, you see! That’s the worst part. It’s all my fault!’

*

I took Granny home, sat her down, and gave her a nice strong cup of tea. It was what she would have done for anyone else in a similar state of distress. And when she had regained control of herself I asked her to explain what she had meant about it being all her fault.

Granny sighed deeply and looked down at the damp handkerchief in her hands. ‘Well, you see, it’s my fault that Gunner Balfour cannot rest in peace.’

‘Start at the beginning,’ I said firmly. ‘And go on to the end, and then stop.’

For once in her life Granny did as she was told.

‘Well, you see, at the end of the first war, all those New Zealanders died in England, as you well know. They survived all the shooting and killing, and then they died of a disease which most of us recover from in a week or two. Which is a dreadful irony in itself. And there they all lie, in a Wiltshire graveyard, many thousands of miles from their homes and their loved ones.

‘I don’t suppose the dead men were very happy about their situation, but they put up with it, as soldiers do. But then after the second world war, something happened. Something happened to upset them. Well, it upset Gunner Balfour, anyway.’

I waited, but nothing came. So I prodded. ‘What, exactly, happened?’

‘Well...’ There was much hesitation, and some embarrassment; a little guilt. ‘Well, you see, at the end of the second war there was a great deal of joy, as you can imagine, and a good deal of celebration, both formal and informal. And I think what happened was, a young soldier and his girlfriend went into the churchyard one night and celebrated in the way that young people do.’

Another pause.

‘You mean they made love?’

‘Yes. Under the yew tree. Quite near to Gunner Balfour’s grave. Too near, for his liking.’

‘It can’t have been very comfortable for the couple concerned.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t too bad,’ said Granny immediately. ‘It’s all right on a nice warm summer’s evening.’ She gave me a reproving look. ‘And besides, young people then weren’t as free as you are now, you know. They couldn’t just say to the family, Excuse us, we’re off upstairs for a quickie. They had to be more discreet. Take walks in the evening. That sort of thing.’

So, the rabbit was very definitely out of the hat. I now knew that my grandmother was rather more familiar with the couple in question than had appeared at first sight.

‘I see,’ I said, totally straight-faced. ‘But just assuming you’re right about the couple under the yew tree, why should it be Gunner Balfour who took offence, rather than any of the others?’

To Granny it was perfectly obvious. ‘Oh, because he’d never done it, you see. That’s why. He’d never made love to a woman himself. He says so, doesn’t he? “It’s not fair,” he says. “I should have had my turn.” That sort of thing. You’ve heard him, haven’t you?’

I had to admit I had.

‘It was after the second war, and after that bit of, er, informal celebration, that people began to hear him for the first time. Well, I say people. It’s only women, of course. Women of child-bearing age, so to speak. Children can’t hear him, or see him, and the oldies can’t either.... He’s not so bad in the winter – he lies quiet for most of the time. But in the summer, in the long hot evenings, he is troubled by desire.’

And he is not alone in that, I thought, but I said nothing.

Granny began to cry again. ‘And the worst thing is, I could have put a stop to it then. And I didn’t.’

‘How do you mean, you could have put a stop to it?’

‘Well, I could have gone with him, couldn’t I? I could have given him what he wanted. I could have given him the experience of having a woman.’ Her hands twisted together as she sought to express her guilt and shame. ‘He only wants to do it the once, you see. I’m sure of that. It’s just that he was so young, and he died so far from home, without ever having had a girl of his own. And that’s what he means when he says it’s so unfair! And he’s right! It is. Horribly, horribly unfair.’

I looked out of the window. Yes, it was still a normal June afternoon, in a perfectly normal English village, with a couple of perfectly normal English women, having a chat about ghosts in the churchyard.

‘So the figure that I saw and heard last night, he was a ghost, was he?’

Granny wiped her eyes and became very serious. ‘I prefer to think of him as a presence,’ she said. ‘People get frightened and come over all silly when you speak of ghosts. But technically Gunner Balfour is a ghost, of course. A ghost, you see, is the spirit of a dead person who for some reason remains earthbound. Such a spirit may generate an illusion, that is to say something which is actually unreal, but which looks and sounds convincingly real. That is why you can see him and hear him.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, I sort of see. But if he is a ghost then surely he ought to be exorcised.’

Granny was dismissive. ‘Oh, we’ve tried that. Last Vicar but one.’

‘And?’

‘Well, the Vicar went into the churchyard late at night, with his bell book and candle, or whatever, and he hadn’t got more than three words out when Gunner Balfour punched him full in the face and knocked him flat. The Vicar came out of that churchyard a sight faster than he went in, I can tell you. “I don’t know what that ghost wants, Mrs Bannister,” he said to me afterwards, “but one thing he doesn’t want is to be exorcised.” So that was the end of that.’

I tried another track. “Well why not leave him alone then? Just let him be. Is he very troublesome?’

“No, not... particularly. It’s only young girls who can hear him clearly, and they tend to keep well away. Or they used to. Modern girls are bolder – I’ve heard them shout back at him. Telling him what he can do with himself, that sort of thing. Well that’s not kind, and it’s not at all helpful.’

‘Time has not mellowed him then.’

‘Oh no.’ She quoted: ‘For they shall not grow old as we that are left grow old.’

That thought struck home a bit, and I paused.

Then I said: ‘What does the current Vicar think?’

‘He raised it at the last churchyard committee meeting. Tactfully. And I said that I had an idea for dealing with the matter. So I was appointed. Mrs Jenkin, the secretary, minuted that Mrs Bannister was appointed as a subcommittee of one to deal with the churchyard ghost. She made a bit of a joke of it. But it’s not a joke at all. It’s not a bit funny. It’s a serious matter, and it has to be dealt with properly. And I’m afraid it’s a family matter – because as I explained, I’m the one who started it all off.’

There was another pause, while I digested what Granny had told me. ‘Well, if you’ve been deputed to deal with it, what are you going to do?’

‘Well for a start, I sent for you.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘So it’s a plot, is it?’

Granny looked just a little bit sheepish. ‘I’m afraid so. You see, I’m a wicked, scheming old woman.’

*

I called a halt at that point. Subconsciously I had decided that I didn’t want to hear any more, at least for the time being.

We went out to lunch at one of the two village pubs. Then we came home, and after Granny had had a nap and a cup of tea, I asked her what she thought I could do to help.

‘Ah well, you see,’ she began, and I knew at once that she was going to take a roundabout route. ‘You’ve heard the noise, haven’t you – that low, rumbling, murmuring sound.’

‘Yes,’ I said – cautiously.

‘Well that means Gunner Balfour likes you. And you’ve seen him under the yew tree.’

‘Yes....’

‘And you’ve heard what he said. About it not being fair.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then....’

I genuinely didn’t understand, even then. And I must have looked blank, because Granny felt obliged to be more specific.

‘You’re not engaged, are you?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘Or spoken for in any way?’

‘No.’

‘Good. I was pretty sure you weren’t. It wouldn’t do otherwise.’

‘Granny, what wouldn’t do?’

‘Well, you see, you are exactly the sort of person he needs. Gunner Balfour needs a young, beautiful woman, preferably someone who is not attached to anyone else, and who has enough experience to help him. Because he hasn’t had any experience.’

I was, I must admit, incredulous. ‘You mean, you think I should go into the churchyard and let Gunner Balfour make love to me?’

‘Oh yes, dear. That’s the whole point.’

I must have looked stunned, and I was certainly speechless, so Granny continued.

‘It’s not much to ask, is it? Poor Gunner Balfour was robbed and cheated of fifty years of life. He was a perfectly healthy and decent young man, laid low by a terrible virus. And all he asks in return for his sacrifice is a little affection. That’s all. He doesn’t want a lifetime’s devotion, or a drawn-out love affair – he just wants a few moments of kindness and generosity and sympathy. A little recognition of the sacrifice he made. Now that’s not unreasonable, is it? And I’m sure you can put it all right for him if you choose. I mean you have spent two years at Oxford – so you’re not without experience are you?’

At last she stopped for breath, and I almost laughed. But I was forced to admit that she was right. About that last bit. ‘No, Granny,’ I said solemnly. ‘I am not without experience.’

‘Oh good. So you’ll do it then?’

I sighed deeply. ‘What precisely do I have to do?’

‘Well, you have to go into the churchyard at midnight tonight.’

‘Has it got to be tonight?’

‘Oh yes. It’s midsummer’s Eve.’

Well, there was no arguing with that. ‘And it’s got to be midnight, has it?’

‘Oh yes. That seems the appropriate time to me.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I think I’m going to need a minute or two to think about this.’ But of course we both knew that she had me.

‘Jolly good,’ Granny said chirpily. ‘And by the way, whatever happens, I don’t think we should tell your mother.’

*

After tea we went for a walk and watched part of a bowls match. Then we had non-alcoholic drinks in the pub and wandered home at about ten.

Granny disappeared into the kitchen. A few minutes later she emerged with a bowl of cereal, made with hot milk. I was mildly astonished, because we didn’t normally have any supper.

‘What’s this?’

‘Well, dear, I look at it this way. If I was going to go out into the churchyard, at midnight on midsummer’s eve, to meet Gunner Balfour under the yew tree, I think I would want to get a couple of weetabix inside me first.’

I was beyond protest by that time. I ate it all up, like a good girl.

‘I think you should wear that blue dress,’ said Granny. ‘The one with buttons all down the front. Nice and easy to get out of. And sandals.’

‘And nothing else,’ I added sarcastically, but Granny thought I was being vulgar and refused to reply.

‘I shan’t wait up,’ she said, ‘any more than I would if you were going to a disco.’

And when I had finished the weetabix she took the bowl from me and pottered off to bed.

After about half an hour I changed into the suggested outfit, feeling distinctly foolish and self-conscious, and then I waited, alone, in silence, until the church clock struck twelve. Perhaps I dozed, I don’t know, but the time seemed to pass quite quickly.

I turned off all the lights in the house and then went out, quietly, through the front door. There I paused for a few moments, letting my eyes become used to the gloom.

It was fairly dark, because there was no moon, and there was scarcely a sound to be heard. Just once, in the far distance, I heard the engine of a car. Then silence again.

My feet crunched on the gravel as I went down the short drive, and when I crossed the road I could see no sign of a light in any of the houses.

As soon as I reached the gate to the churchyard I heard the hum again – that hum of desire, as I now realised. It was much louder now than the first time, and for a moment I hesitated.

As if sensing my uncertainty, the hum paused, and then, when I did not run, it began again, more intense than ever. Too late to turn back now, I thought.

I went in through the gate, and I saw Gunner Balfour at once. He was waiting for me under the yew tree. As on the previous night, an indirect beam of street light, far away, flickered briefly on his belt and his boots.

As I approached the low boughs of the ancient yew, Gunner Balfour came forward to greet me, and I could see at once that he was far younger than I had imagined. He was nothing more than a tall, lanky boy. Shy, and little reserved. His eyes shone, and his belt buckle shone, and his boots shone like black gold. He had polished them just for me.

I led him, rather than he me, until we were hidden deep under the yew. And when we were both naked and ready I reached out my hand and took hold of his manhood. It seemed quite unusually hot and firm – but then he had been kept waiting for a very long time.

After it was all over, his hand stroked my face. And then he quietly faded away.

Nothing remained of him except his neatly folded uniform, and his belt, and his boots. I could see them clearly defined in the half light of midnight, and when I reached out and touched them they were as real as my own hand. But I left them there on the ground. I thought he might need them again.

The following morning I was awake at dawn. And when I had gathered my senses I remembered about the uniform.

I thought it might somehow alarm people – cause gossip and talk – if a soldier’s uniform and his boots were to be found under the yew tree. It might generate enough speculation about the ghost to get into the local press; and then the nationals would pick it up, and after that the village would have no peace. So I pulled on a few clothes – not the blue dress – and hurried across the road.

I knew exactly where the uniform, and the belt, and the boots, had been left. And I went straight to the spot.

But of course... there was nothing there.

No Assholes here

2007-11-06T08:52:00.000Z

Lynne Scanlon tells me that Bob Sutton's book, The No Asshole Rule, has won the Quill Award for best business book. This was achieved in the face of some pretty stiff opposition, Seth Godin's latest being one of them.

If you're worried about your own asshole status, take the test in the top right-hand corner of Sutton's site, the first one listed under ARSE tools. I'd like to tell you how I got on, but it's too embarrassing.

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Interested in how your book is doing on Amazon? Or how your enemy's book is doing? (Badly, one hopes; heh heh heh.) Then visit RankTracer and learn how to gloat.

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The Times is offering the chance to receive love letters by email. Or you could buy the book. Link from Edmond Clay.

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Ansible reports that Robert Ronson, author of a children's sf novel called Olympic Mind Games -- set at the 2012 London Olympics -- was sternly told by the Olympics 2012 committee that he wasn't allowed to use the O-word, nor such protected terms as 'London 2012' or even just '2012'. What's more, they complained, 'there is no such thing as Olympic mind games'. Ronson ignored this bluster and seems to have got away with it.

Good for him. This kind of thing is getting too ridiculous to tolerate. The UK Writers' Guild takes a dim view, and even some of m'learned friends aren't too amused.

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Alex Scarrow is worried about the future....

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Gee whiz. The Bookride blog reports that Bill Clinton visited Shakespeare & Co.

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Do you live in the UK? Do you write stuff? If so, it will be worth your while to join the Authors Licensing & Collecting Society. Last year they paid out over £16.74 million, split between (or is it among? Mr Robinson would know) 45,000 writers. They even paid me some, though I'm not at all sure why.

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Litlist is a web site which attempts to provide accurate info about various markets for literary writers. Looks useful, in its field.

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The Gents, as you may have noticed, are not always frequented by gentlemen in need of a pee. Some chaps are more concerned about other things. And there's a book about it, recently republished by the Friday Project.

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HarperCollins have an eye on as yet unpublished writers, believe it or not. If you're interested, keep your own eye on this web site.

The press release says that 'HarperCollins UK is to launch a brand new proprietary community site that will discover and nurture the freshest new writing talent online. Authonomy™ is a groundbreaking initiative that enables unpublished writers to build lasting relationships with readers and publishing professionals.' Kick-off early 2008.

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Pseudonymous Bosch has written a book. But, unusually, he is keeping it a secret. You need to be awfully clever to keep up with this stuff; which rules me out.

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A book about a mentally ill brother is not going to appeal to everyone, of course. But... if you're in a similar situation, this one may help.

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The libel/Mahfouz uproar continues. As indeed it should. (Even some British newspapers have dared to mention it now.)

And for comment on the latest UK nonsense about being free to say what you think, see this morning's Times. Things have come to a pretty pass when an old-fashioned Marxist is more tolerant than the leader of the Conservatives.

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Tim O'Reilly, of O'Reilly Publishing, has long been one of the smartest thinkers on the web. It was he, you may remember, who pointed out that writer's chief problem is not piracy but obscurity.

Now Mr O'Reilly further explores the issue of free material on the web. And what is more, he is sufficiently well connected to have had dinner recently with Rupert Murdoch. From which we learn that Mr Murdoch is a very smart man. But we knew that already. You may or may not like him, but smart you can hardly deny.

Link from Galleycat, where Ron Hogan discusses these issues.

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On similar issues, Barry Eisler gets space on M.J. Rose's blog to talk about how Web 2.0 changes the media, including, of course, the book biz. Are there any publishers out there who are worried, do you think? Or are they all saying Nah... Couldn't happen here.

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If you're interested in kiss-and-tell memoirs, the Times recently ran a piece about one of the earliest such memoirist: Harriette Wilson. It was she of whom the Duke of Wellington famously said, 'Publish and be damned.' She was damned, sadly.

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Further to last week's mention of Foyles, you may like to read an interview with the boss man, Christopher Foyle. It was Christopher who, shortly after taking over from his aunt, Christina, put an end to a massive fraud which must have been one of the book-trade's worst-kept secrets.

It seems that, at one time, any small-time crook who was short of a few bob knew where to go to get some drinking money. And the Foyles accountancy system (three old ladies with hand-written ledgers) was quite unable to detect anything amiss.

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Profile Books is one of the UK's most successful small publishers. A quick glance at the catalogue reveals some real gems. There's Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader and Susan Hill's The Man in the Picture, for a start.

We also have a book called Bertha Venation, which is about funny names of real people. I wonder if it gets as vulgar as the Times did in the eighteenth century, on the same subject. The list of (genuine) surnames which the Times of 1797 considered amusing included Holdwater, Pricke, Poopy, Piddle, Piss, Honeybum, Quicklove, Shittel, and Teate. And more. Easily amused in those days, weren't they?

Anne Weale

2007-11-05T10:03:00.000Z

I am sorry to hear that Anne Weale has died. The news came from Jenny Haddon, recently retired Chairman of the UK Romantic Novelists' Association.

Anne Weale was one of the founding members of the RNA. She began her career as a newspaper reporter, but by 1955 was already writing fiction. She went on writing a book a year, sometimes two, until quite recently. The total, I think, was 79. Fantasticfiction has, as usual, a complete list.

Anne was one of the first writers to recognise the power of the internet, and from 1998 to 2004 she wrote a web-site review column, Bookworm on the Net, for the Bookseller. She then transferred to blogging, under the same title.

The last post on Bookworm on the Net appeared on 13 September, when Anne was having computer problems. In it she says: 'It's an interesting experience to be forced offline for a while.' What a shame that the change has proved to be permanent.

Anne Weale did me a great kindness in providing a positive quote for the cover of my most recent novel. As the RNA says, she will be missed.

Catching up?

2007-11-01T11:11:00.000Z

Crumbs. The free book offer is a bit of a success, to put it mildly, so I will probably have to take the rest of the week off to pack stuff up. If you've asked for something, I should be able to oblige, but stocks may run out, in which case I will let you know. Allow at least a couple of weeks for delivery. Many thanks for your interest.

Speaking of books wot I wrote, Gladys Hobson has reviewed a couple of them on her Wrinkly Writers blog: Passionate Affairs and Beautiful Lady. Gladys, if you haven't discovered her, is one hell of a writer. Not many people write about a granny in search of an orgasm, but Gladys has done it beautifully.

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I am beginning to figure out that I may never catch up from the two-week period when my computer was out of action. However, in a pathetic attempt to give at least some publicity to matters which quite often deserve more detailed consideration, here are a few links and comments:

Levi Asher tries to figure out the book business. (Thanks to Dave Lull for the link.) This is an unusual and very interesting article.

Fifteen top thriller writers got together to write The Chopin Manuscript, and the result is available in audio form.

YoungMinds is a worthy cause and it makes an annual book award.

The American Scholar offers an article about Brooklyn-based big sellers. This is not an essay that I recommend, but it seems entirely typical of what academe offers, should you want to know what that is. Link from Clare Toohey, who didn't like it much either.

Stable-door department, example no. 94: In the US, evangelical leaders have called for a ban on Harry Potter books and films. Apparently, the news that Dumbledore was gay was just too much to bear. (Link from booktrade.info.)

Lots and lots of requests for reviews, of course. With the best will in the world, I couldn't possibly agree to read them all, but I normally mention them if they have an online link:

Michael Elking: Executing Mozart. A freshman arrives from England and sets the great university afire with his bipolar genius and random sexuality. I say. Bit much, surely?

Christopher Bowden: The Blue Book. Bookshop browser finds a mysterious note in the pages of a book.

Mike Dailey: Alarm. This one offers two CDs with the book; the CDs feature words from the novel performed with the author's band, O'Grady.

Joanne Harris: Runemarks. Seven o’clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the end of the world, and goblins have been at the cellar again. For young readers (of all ages?). Sounds good to me.

William Coles: The Well-Tempered Clavier. A love affair at Eton, which is attracting quite a lot of attention. Compare, if you will, my own Passionate Affairs (see end of this post).

Erik Ringmar: A Blogger's Manifesto. Ringmar is an academic who has been on the sharp end of a freedom-of-speech dispute.

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The Radio Times tells us that we are about to have a TV version of E.M. Forster's A Room with a View. Yet it only seems like yesterday that we had the Merchant Ivory film version.

This new TV adaptation will be written by Andrew Davies, which might lead one to expect a certain, shall we say, thumbprint? But no. Producer Eileen Quinn says that 'there are no lesbians and no full-frontal nudity.'

Well, all I can say is that that is most disappointing.

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This blog does not do poetry, for a variety of reasons, chiefly concerned with lack of sensitivity and patience, but the OUP blog does dabble in same.

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Taylor Mac is back in the UK: Croydon, Liverpool, Lancaster.

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Columbia University Press has linked up with VitalSource in an attempt to help scholars and students to use electronic technology to make faster and more efficient literature searches. A good idea in principle, certainly.

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Edmond Clay thinks that the US has got rich writers, but the UK's writers are richer. Which is interesting.

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The Economist reports that, in Chile, the poorer citizens will be given a literario, or free box of books. On the whole I think they would probably prefer a food parcel, but somebody no doubt means well. Thanks to Jon, the Seoul Man in Tokyo, for the link.

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Paola, wife to Seoul Man in Tokyo, sends me a copy of an email exchange that she had with Foyles. Expat Brits with a keen sense of loyalty sometimes prefer to order books from the likes of Foyles rather than patronise the giant Amazon et cetera. However, it is hard going.

Paola sent Foyles a substantial list of suggested improvements to their web site, and received a courteous and prompt reply, with some detailed comments on the comments. However, the reply does make slightly depressing reading.

In most of the responses, Foyles pleads that it can't afford to compete with the big boys. And on the question of why Foyles does not encourage bloggers and others to set up links to Foyles, rather than Amazon, the word is this:

Many of the links to Amazon do come from small self-published and independent works, and as a small business we often do not have the capacity to process orders for such titles. Many small publishers or self-published authors require payment for multiple copies of books or payment by cheque before they release orders. Amazon can afford to keep reserves of these small titles in their large warehouse if ordering multiples, whereas we do not have this capacity. These are authors who need us, rather than vice versa, and thus offer these links free.

Well, the lady tried.

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Sarah Schulman, in Slate, doesn't believe in a merit-based publishing environment. She points out some differences between UK and US approaches to sexual matters. Indeed, my own Passionate Affairs was rejected by one US editor because of its 'difficult' subject matter, whereas in England not a hair has turned. So far, anyway. Perhaps that's just because no one's ever read it.

Free books

2007-10-30T09:17:00.000Z

Mrs GOB and I are having one of our periodic clear-outs. Among other strange things which have emerged from dark corners of the loft and garage are several boxes of my own books: i.e. books wot I have wrote.

In some cases these books are the remains of the complimentary copies supplied by the publisher. American publishers often gave me 20 free ones, compared with the usual 6 in the UK. In other cases, I seem to have bought extra supplies for some reason, and never got around to sending them out.

Anyway, there they are. And they are yours, free, for the asking. The point is, I didn't write those books to have them sit around in boxes. I wrote them in the hope that they would be read. So you can have free copies if you like. But there is one condition. Please don't put the book on your shelf and keep it there for the next twenty years. When you've read it, or decided that it's not for you, put it in a charity shop, or give it to a friend.

For the same reason, I will sign every free book. But I would be reluctant to write 'To Jane' or whatever, because if I do that you will be inclined to hang on to it.

Set out below is a list of the books available, roughly in order of publication. If you click on the linked title you will find a bit more information, and quotes from reviews, about each one. You will also see that some of these novels are published under pen-names

If you decide that you would like one or more of these books, send me an email (see profile, top of right column). Don't forget to include your snailmail address!

Do I want you to cover the postage? No. Far too complicated and fiddly. Yes, airmail is rather expensive, but if you feel guilty about it, put a dollar (or whatever) in the poor box.

This offer holds good until 1 December, when the post office gets ridiculously busy because of Christmas.

The Leavers (1963). A typical first novel of the 1960s. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to read it now, but I have some copies if you do.

Spence in Petal Park (Spence and the Holiday Murders in the US) (1977)
Spence at the Blue Bazaar (1979)
Spence at Marlby Manor (1982)
These three are classic English whodunits, with a policeman called Spence as the detective. Spence at the Blue Bazaar is also available in French (La Scandaleuse du Blue Bazaar) and Danish (Thana Betyder Dod), if you prefer those languages. If you ask for one of these books you might as well have all three.

Counter-Coup (1980). A thriller/adventure story in the Wilbur Smith mould, set in Africa.

Topp Family Secrets (2002). A family saga.

Beautiful Lady (2002). A thriller set in wartime England.

Passionate Affairs (2002). Two interlocking love affairs; set in 1960.

Scrooge and the Widow of Pewsey (2003). A sequel to Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

The Suppression of Vice (2003). A nineteenth-century crime novel.

King Albert's Words of Advice (2003). Short stories.

The Truth about Writing (2003). A handbook for novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters.

Grumpy Old Bookman (2005). The first six months of the blog in book form.

How and why Lisa's Dad got to be famous (2006). A novel about reality TV.

Lucius the Club (2007). A crime-fiction novella.

Mr Fenman's Farewell to His Readers (2007). A short memoir (?) by a nineteenth-century novelist.

Hurry, hurry, while stocks last. Or something like that.

Fooled 'em again?

2007-10-29T09:15:00.000Z

The latest Private Eye gives the sales figures for the Booker shortlist, prior to the announcement of the winner. Anne Enright's The Gathering had shifted 3,687. None of the shortlist had sold over 6,000 except Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, which had achieved 122,631. Such is the power of publicity.

The announcement of the winner came on the evening of Tuesday 16 October. This left plenty of time for eager readers to rush out a buy a copy of The Gathering before the close of business on Saturday 20 October. But did they?

On 27 October the Times published (as usual) a list of the top 50 bestsellers in the UK for the week ended 20 October. Enright is nowhere on it. But she does appear on the much smaller list of the 10 best sellers for small independent bookshops. So presumably the Booker prize did not result in Enright selling as many as 6,404 copies, which is what book no. 50 on the main Times list managed to do.

No wonder Enright came out with some controversial statement or other. I forget now what it was. Oh yes. Google reminds me. She had a go at the McCanns. (See the Daily Mail of 18 October.) Well, that's a nasty cheap shot if ever I saw one; the mark of true desperation. Perhaps it backfired.

Private Eye reckons that the Booker's sponsor must be feeling pretty cheesed off, and I wouldn't be surprised. More to the point, perhaps, I have a feeling that this may be the year in which the penny finally dropped for the great British book-reading public. You can only fool people so often, you know. For a good many years now the public has been told that the Booker prize-winning novel is the best book of the year. And they've been going out and buying it, or borrowing it. And guess what? They've found that, er, well, actually the bloody thing was pretty damn boring.

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Various sources, e.g. booktrade.info, have carried a short report about a big-time success for a self-published author. Google the name of the author, Brunonia Barry, and you get more detailed reports of a self-published author with at least a 2-million-dollar deal; some suggest higher figures.

Now this is interesting, of course, and is going to convince a lot of other people that they can do the same. It was ever thus. But while I was not exactly suspicious, I was inclined to think that there was more to this story than simply author self-publishes, gets good reviews, gets agent, gets big-time deal.

How, for instance, would a novice self-published author get a starred review in Publishers Weekly? And please don't tell me that she just sent it in and its outstanding merit made it leap out of the dustbin, because I would find that impossible to believe.

A little more detective work, for instance on the book's own web site, leads to the information (not remotely surprising) that Brunonia has been around a while, has worked in theatre and movies (including promotional campaigns), and has been closely associated with Robert McKee; she has also written novels in the Beacon Street Girls series.

In other words, what we have here is a person with absolutely the right sort of experience to produce a highly commercial novel; and, having produced it, she knew how to sell it.

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Do you think your book deserves to be made into a movie? Does it pass the wicked witch's test (24 October)?

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There are supposed to be some clever men and women working in universities. So how come that, week after week, the powers that be at the University of Michigan still manage to look like a pathetic bunch of wankers? Don't they employ a p.r. person?

Galleycat has the story, plus a link to Inside Higher Education. The U manages to make more or less the right decision, but only very eventually. And gracelessly.

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Speaking of web sites, I came across a three-year-old recently who points out the spiders' web sites in the garden.

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I suppose, he says with a sigh, that this is the time of year when people begin to look for Christmas presents. And if you have an elderly aunt or uncle, of a bookish disposition, then you could do far worse than visit Old House Books, where some interesting items from the past are reprinted.

Is Grandad keen on railways? Buy him a map of the London rail network of 1897. Does Grandma speak fondly of old-fashioned cures for warts? Buy her The Lady's Dressing Room.

And so forth.

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Last Thursday afternoon Mrs GOB and I called in at Arundel for tea. As one does. And there we found (not for the first time) Kim's Bookshop. This is a very well organised shop, dealing in some valuable antiquarian and first-edition stock, but also with a pleasant intermingling of good to middling secondhand books. They also have a branch in Chichester.

It's a shame that the Webmaster can't spell category, but then who can spell these days? Ask Grandma.

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Oops. Forgot to add this. Just seen a report on the Bookseller site about CSS firing some agents at PFD.

There is a technical term for this kind of thing, I believe. Something about excrement being freely distributed through collision with a piece of ventilation equipment. M'learned friends must be chuckling and rubbing their hands. Sitting there watching the phone....

This is probably it for this week...

2007-10-24T19:19:00.000+01:00

...on account of the grandchildren are here, after which Mrs GOB and I take a well earned short break.

Should be a total no-brainer, but the University of Michigan is still debating the contract with Pluto and all like that.

Coming soon... Free books for the asking. Sugar blues. The woman who saw it all coming. And a lot more. Don't go away.

Late-night stuff

2007-10-23T20:00:00.000+01:00

New ways to do old things, no. 94: Simon Spanton, of Orion, sends out an email to people in the book trade, warning them about 'three bitter, angry, damaged, resentful and extremely violent people who have been making themselves very unwelcome around our offices. They should be in care, they'll probably end up in jail. Or dead, after a drunken brawl or from a drug overdose. And you might say good riddance.'

Turns out they're characters in a new book.

Hm? Oh, all right then. The Steel Remains, a 'new epic fantasy' from Richard Morgan. Published by you know who. Or part of them.

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Paul Brown of the UK's Tonto Press has an unusual book out: The Rocketbelt Caper. Described as 'a true tale of invention, obsession and murder'.

The Tonto blog has a discussion about small publishers somehow being regarded as inevitably publishing books of local interest. When you have a true crime/popular science book that is set in Texas filed under Local Interest in a Newcastle bookshop you know you have a problem.

Paul Brown also draws my attention to the article in the Observer which uses the Frankfurt book fair as the excuse for a survey of the modern book trade, and comes to some discouraging conclusions. You're surprised?

Old hand Patrick Jimjam-Smith: 'If you're not in a three-for-two or Richard & Judy, forget it. There's no point. If you ask me, publishing is in a mess.' No! Really? Who'd have thunk it?

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Lyn Lejeune continues to try to revive New Orleans. She is giving all royalties from The Beatitudes to support the city.

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Chris Keil complains that I made a comment about his book without having read it. Actually I was making a general point, rather than commenting on his book in particular. However, to make amends I will point out that Nicholas Clee has read Chris's book (Liminal), and reviewed it in the Guardian. And thanks, but it still sounds like the kind of book I don't want to read.

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Emmett James's Admit One can be previewed on Google books. Which is interesting for me, because it's the first time I've actually been to that site. But preview is the right word, because the book isn't actually published yet.

The title of this book refers to a ticket to the movies. And it is about, not surprisingly, a young man who is obsessed with film, and eventually makes his way to Hollywood.

Emmett himself spent his childhood in Croydon, South London, and after studying acting at Strasberg Actors Studio in London he eventually moved to Los Angeles in the early nineties to pursue a career in film. He comes from a family of authors which includes J.B. Priestley.

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Libel strikes again; this time in the classical music biz. But Yanks, it seems, will be able to read the material more or less as is.

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By contrast with other commentators on the book world (see above), Evan Schnittman returns from Frankfurt convinced that publishing has the edge over technology for three reasons: discoverability, print on demand and repositories. See the OUP blog.

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Mary Whitsell tells me that The Word Detective is a site somewhat like Michael Quinion's World Wide Words, but American. Looks promising.

New books and other stuff

2007-10-22T11:15:00.000+01:00

Bad Attitude is a new novella by Leopold McGinnis, and you can read parts of it, and eventually the whole, as it appears online. It's a comedy about a man who quits a high-profile office job to enter the McWorkforce; he then tries to get hired, and then fired, from as many jobs as he can.

Leopold already has a formidable track record as a writer. He is the author of the underground novella The Red Fez and the novel Game Quest. He founded and edits the literary site Red Fez Publications, which publishes under-recognised talent from around the world (with no funding). He was once a member of the Underground Literary Alliance, and is now a founding member of The Guild of Outsider Writers.

By the way, Leopold is also trying a dodge I haven't come across before. He's been putting ads for independent books into the pdfs of Bad Attitude. It's an experiment in cross-promoting indie writers. Interesting.

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Parlez vous Francais? Eh bien, allez voire Mots et Couleurs. The lady is an elderblogger, or so I am told by May, who provided the link.

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Dave Langford of Ansible provided me with a few links to an interesting case of plagiarism. It seems that one Lanaia Lee has published a book called Of Atlantis. Unfortunately, this appears to copy substantially from the work of British fantasy author David Gemmell. When challenged, Lanaia admitted that she had engaged the services of a ghost writer. Who he? Christopher Hill, that who he. A man famous for running a 'literary agency'.

One could spend an awful lot of time and energy following the links on this one. Start here.

Dave Langford also pointed out to me that Richard Morgan of Glasgow, a science-fiction writer, is an outspoken sort of fellow. To see what he has to say about the work of Nicholas Mosley, click here. Then scroll down to Skidelsky on Mosley.

The latest edition of Dave's Ansible is particularly worth reading. But then they always are. Here's Ursula K. Le Guin on Jeanette Winterson: 'It's odd to find characters in a science-fiction novel repeatedly announcing that they hate science fiction. I can only suppose that Jeanette Winterson is trying to keep her credits as a "literary" writer even as she openly commits genre. Surely she's noticed that everybody is writing science fiction now?'

And I see that poor old Enid Blyton is still being worked over. Dick and Fannie have become Rick and Frannie.

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On the future of reading, Jon Evans says Apocalypse Soon; his publishers don't like the idea of him making a book available free online. And he pursues a similar line of thought in the Guardian.

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Don't forget, if you live in the UK and get a bit browned off from time to time, that Not Born Yesterday provides almost daily comment which should give you a smile.

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The Chelsea Hotel book is now available.

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At Underneath the Bunker, arguably Europe's greatest cultural journal, debate continues on the merits et cetera of the novelist Jarni Kolovsky, aka Yefimovich Pasadziec. Principal contributors, as one might expect, are Georgy Riecke and Andrew O'Hara, of the Jimston Journal. Essential reading for anyone who wishes to keep abreast of what is happening at the cutting-edge of European literature.

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Speaking of Mr O'Hara, he recommends, for them as is feeling harassed, a short piece of restful ballet on YouTube. And why not?

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A. Igoni Barrett is a writer based in Nigeria. He is making his short-story collection, From Caves of Rotten Teeth, available free online. One of the stories here won the 2005 BBC Short Story Competition. For a review of the whole book, visit Laura Hird's site.

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Andrea Cumbo Dowdy is a teacher, writer, and reader. And she blogs, naturally. She has thoughts on ekphrastic writing (15 October) and other matters.

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The New York Times mentions William Gerhardie, in passing, and refers to him as 'now-forgotten', which indeed he is. But once he was famous. So was Angus Wilson, who, according to John Sutherland, died of Alzheimer's. At the end of his life he was the object of charity from his friends and the Royal Literary Fund, without which his estate could barely have afforded a decent funeral.

But I digress. Gerhardie is mentioned in the NYT's article on William Trevor. Trevor has won every prize going --well, several -- and is widely respected, but I have never taken to him. His work is extremely sensitive, well observed, caring, thoughtful, and so on. But ultimately, I find, depressing. As William Boyd says, there aren't many laughs.

Seven types of short story? Or just seven types of ambiguity?

Thanks to Dave Lull for the NYT link.

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Bluechrome is a relatively new (2002) indie publishing company with an interesting list. There are some known names here, and some original thinking: see the Mono EPs. Submissions, sadly, are closed at the moment, but there is a short-story competition still open. Go on, etonnez nous.

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Ooh dear. Another case of two books coming out with the same sort of ideas and content, and people jumping to conclusions. Duels, sadly, are out of fashion. Always an appropriate method, I think, for resolving disputes of this kind. Link from Publishers Lunch.

Words of wisdom

2007-10-19T09:53:00.000+01:00

Now here's a real find, for which I have to thank Edmond Clay. In World Wide Words, Michael Quinion writes about international English from a British viewpoint.

It would take a long time to explore this site fully, but it is clearly the work of one of those old-fashioned, elderly men (they're almost always men) who are fascinated by the English language, and who manage to communicate their enthusiasm to the rest of us. When they are gone, these chaps, are they likely to be replaced? I can't say that it seems likely.

Meanwhile we can all enjoy the benefit of their scholarship.

*
How to speak sooth safely. That is the question.

You may remember that, on Monday last, I noted that Rod Liddle, in the Sunday Times, had referred to O.J. Simpson as a man who 'murdered his wife'; and he had done so without so much as an 'allegedly' by way of qualifier. Where, I enquired rhetorically, was the ST duty lawyer when that went through?

I was assuming, you see, that the statement that O.J. Simpson was a murderer was libellous in terms of English law. I also assumed that the lawyer in question had not been down the pub and neglecting his duties, but had taken the same view as myself: namely that, while the statement was libellous, he did not think it likely that O.J. would sue; and that, if O.J. did, the whole of the UK would be greatly entertained while O.J.'s lawyer attempted to convince an English jury of his innocence, and while O.J. was being given the third degree by the ST's Queen's Counsel. The latter interrogation being a spectacle for which I, for one, would gladly buy a ticket.

However, the question niggled. What, exactly, was the true position?

Well, it is well known that this blog spares no expense or effort in the pursuit of a story and after the exchange of -- ooh, at least two emails -- I am able to bring you the facts.

You will probably recall that O.J. Simpson, as famous in the US as David Beckham in the UK, was charged with the murder of his wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman. In due course the jury acquitted him. Subsequently, Ronald Goldman's father brought a civil case against O.J. The civil jury in that case found O.J. liable for the wrongful death of Ronald Goldman, and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages. (He has not complied.)

M'learned friend has advised me that the civil verdict is the key to what we may and may not safely say about O.J. Simpson. A speaker is entitled to rely upon any legal finding that has been sustained by a final judgement, except if reversed on appeal, as sufficiently factual to defend against a claim of libel, either under US or English law.

So, any and all US and UK citizens can safely thumb their noses at O.J. Simpson and call him a murderer as often as they like. Although, if being extra cautious, they might wish to substitute the word 'killer'.

'Murderer' necessarily implies 'criminal'. M'learned friend, ever conscious of little tiny quibbles and loopholes, as these weaselly fellows are, points out that objections to the claim that O.J. 'killed' anyone would get thrown out by a judge at early stage, whereas if you said that he 'murdered' someone it would only get thrown out after discovery. And if you want to know what discovery is all about, go see your own learned friend.

However -- here's another of those little tiny quibbles -- it's possible, in theory, that the ST lawyer was dangling a bait here. Maybe the duty man doesn't like O.J. (Extraordinary, I know, but possible.) He might, perhaps, have been offering O.J. and his not-too-experienced-in-English-law US lawyer some hope that they could, after all, clean up in the English courts. And if they lost, the English courts have a much more vicious 'loser pays' regime than do the Americans. So who knows. It would probably be pretty hard to collect, though, given O.J.'s capacity for avoiding payment.

Isn't the law fun, eh?

But.... There's always a but where the law is concerned, isn't there? If laws were the same everywhere, and if it was all easy to understand, then all those lawyers would be out of a job; and then where would we be? Who said better off?

But, if you live in France or Germany you had better tread carefully. M'learned friend points out that those countries have exceptions for civil findings in the case of prior criminal acquittal. So there the saintly O.J. is a deeply wronged man, and you had better zip your mouth.

Of course, I doubt if O.J. can actually read French or German. But nevertheless, just thumb your nose and omit the description.

*
You will recall, I'm sure, that the question of how to make jam was hotly debated (both literally and metaphorically) in chapter two of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. How could one forget? And the key issue, of course, was whether or not one added water to the fruit.

Agafea Mihalovna maintained that jam could not successfully be made without adding water, while Kitty took the view that it most certainly could, and should, be.

You will be pleased, but not surprised, to hear that the UK politician and polymath Boris Johnson has come up with the definitive answer to this contentious issue. He passes on the secret in the Daily Telegraph.

Those readers who are not resident in the UK may not realise that Boris is currently the Conservative candidate for the post of Mayor of London. And how reassuring it is to find that Boris has his eye firmly on the ball.

Other candidates are rushing around making speeches about how to improve London's transport system, and how to prevent the Thames overflowing when global warming takes hold, and all like that. But Boris is much more down to earth; much more in touch with the everyday concerns of London citizens. Boris well understands what any Englishwoman will tell you, namely that a slice of newly baked bread, heavily encrusted with butter and damson jam, is a far more satisfying experience than sexual intercourse, any day of the week. And it is to this end that Boris's efforts are, rightly, directed.

I would be willing to bet that Mr Bloomberg never came up with an infallible and sensational recipe for damson jam. On matters of jam-making the citizens of New York are, I would wager, left entirely without guidance.

Next week, Boris will deal with the tricky question of how to get a vacuum cleaner into those awkward corners. Did Virginia Woolf have the right technique? Or is the answer to be found in the correspondence of the Mitford sisters?

One can hardly wait.

Would you believe it?

2007-10-18T10:08:00.000+01:00

The Register claims (link from booktrade.info) that the 'US Patent Office decimates Amazon's 1-click patent -- only five of 26 claims survive.'

Which is quite interesting, because, as I understood it, Amazon was earning revenue from any other web-based outfit which offered a similar facility.

And, what is more interesting, the patent claims were challenged by a New Zealand blogger, supported by funds donated by his readers.

In passing, of course, retired schoolmasters such as Mr Robinson will note that, in rejecting 5 out of 26 claims, the Patent Office was not 'decimating' at all. Strictly speaking, to decimate means (as Sir Ernest Gowers pointed out in Plain Words in 1948) to reduce by one tenth, not to one tenth. And here the Patent Office wasn't doing either.

Decimating was originally something done to mutinous troops. You shot every tenth man and the rest usually had second thoughts.

Sir Ernest offered the following example, drawn from a discussion of the misuse of the word 'literally' in the Times. It came from a penny dreadful: 'Dick, hotly pursued by the scalp-hunter, turned in his saddle, fired, and literally decimated his opponent.'

Forty years ago, my pupils in the top class for English used to enjoy that one.

*
The Times reports that there are plans afoot to make the Booker shortlist available free online.

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Oh my God. Madame Arcati is a fan of Martin Amis. I would never have thought it. Well, at least I made the right guess about Madame's sexual tastes.

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I read a news report last weekend which said that, on average, an American office worker receives 140 emails a day, and manages to look at less than half of them. One young woman reportedly deleted 30,000 unread emails, and felt a lot better afterwards.

My situation, mercifully, is not that bad, but I am still catching up on that two-week absence of computer. So, if you have written to me in the past month, and wonder why I am being so rude as not to reply, bear with me. You may yet get a response.

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Crossword fan? Go to the OUP blog and try theirs.

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Frank Beddor wrote Seeing Redd and The Looking-Glass Wars, and now I learn that he was producer of There's Something About Mary. His latest is a 'geo-graphic' novel called Hatter M. Wikipedia fills in the background.

There seem to be lots of reworkings of the Victorian stuff these days -- e.g. Lost Girls. Intriguing.

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The braindead are always with us. The Salt Lake Tribune says, 'Publishers rarely issue new books over the summer.' Only about 2,000 a week, that is. Link from Publishers Lunch.

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The Creative Commons blog has an interview with Brandt Cannici, creator of a web site called Strayform.com. This seeks to provide creative artists (for want of a better expression) with a platform through which they can perhaps obtain funding for their work. Strayform makes heavy use of the Creative Commons licensing system, which means, of course, no DRM or nonsense of that kind.

This looks to me like a good idea in principle, but it has some way to go, I feel, before it gets out of what is effectively the beta stage at present. It may, conceivably, offer a useful platform for writers at some point. Keep an eye on it.

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The BBC lists the ten main ways in which you are persuaded to read (and preferably buy) a book. (Thanks to Bill Sinclair for the link.)

In the US, substitute Oprah for Richard & Judy.

By the way, speaking of Oprah, Publishers Lunch recently reported the case of Sarah Symonds. Ms Symonds is the self-published author of Having An Affair: A Handbook for the 'Other Woman'. Somehow or other Ms Symonds got herself taped for an interview to appear on Oprah on 10 October. When Hatherleigh Press publisher Kevin Moran heard about this, he promptly signed the book, with a little help from his distributor, Random House.

So that makes everything very simple, doesn't it? All you have to do, if you're a self-published author, is get yourself pre-recorded for Oprah, go see a publisher with a distribution setup, and all your problems are solved.

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I have an idea for a short story, as yet unwritten. It's about a man who hates Christmas, especially when it starts on 1 October and continues until the end of January. This character has certain attitudes not entirely unrelated to my own, and he would not be too thrilled, I feel, by http://www.hollyclaus.com/. This is the story of Santa's daughter. And it is for kids. And it opens with a song.

Excuse me while I go and lie down.

Anne Enright wins Booker -- and what larks!

2007-10-17T09:07:00.001+01:00

My dears, I haven't had such a good laugh over breakfast in years! I fair spluttered into my porridge.

The Booker prize, according to its official web site, 'promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year'. And 'best' in these quarters is defined in terms of literary fiction.

It turns out that the 2007 prize was awarded last night. The winner was Anne Enright, who was apparently the outsider, and her novel The Gathering is 'a bleak story of a dysfunctional Irish family'. This is not, you will understand, a novel that I am about to rush out and buy. But nevertheless, the circumstances of the award provide much more entertainment than the average literary novel ever does.

The laughs came from the introductory remarks which were made by the Chairman of the judges, Sir Howard Davies. You can read all about it in the Times. Basically, what the Chairman had to say was that too many reviewers are far too kind to literary novels, being very reluctant to do anything except heap praise upon them. 'There appear to be some novels,' he said, 'where people leave their critical faculties at home.'

He quotes examples. Ben Okri's latest book was, he said, 'more or less unreadable, but you would never catch that from the reviews because of the status that Okri has achieved'.

J.M. Coetzee's latest was described by Sir Howard as 'a strange construct which I don’t think comes off as a novel. Yet it was treated with exaggerated deference by many reviewers.'

No! Who would have guessed it? Who would have thought that the literary establishment in London would be ensuring, with a few exceptions, that only nice things are said about lit'ry books, while books issued by small presses and written by unknown writers are steadfastly ignored?

Sir Howard, the Times said, stopped short of accusing authors of back-scratching, but the Times itself has more guts. In an editorial, the paper lays out the facts in plain English.

Presenting the Man Booker Prize last night, Howard Davies referred to a curious habit of literary critics. Their curious habit is to review each other’s books fulsomely. Author X selects Author Y’s novel as her Book of the Year. Author Y reciprocates by reviewing Author X’s novel as the most ripping yarn since Rudyard Kipled and Haggard Rode. In London’s literary tent, everybody is related to, or in love with, or in debt to, or has expectations from, everybody else.

Well, I told you publishing was a friendly business, only last week. 'Caveat lector,' says the Times. 'Select your reviewers (and books) with care.' Indeed.

Such general thoughts as I have had upon the Booker prize appeared here in January 2005. I have nothing to add, except that you might like to sit back and watch it all happen to Anne Enright, the winner who wasn't expected.

Stephen King (and my modest self) on the short story

2007-10-16T13:48:00.000+01:00

Stephen King writes the introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2007, which he edited, and which I really must get hold of. Dave Lull kindly told me that the intro was published in the New York Times, and it is eminently worth reading. Theme: Is the American short story alive? Yes. Is the American short story well? No.

Now, as it happens I don't really enjoy Mr King's novels at all. We won't go into why. But several decades ago, when Mr King was a newbie, a leading American agent told me that, even if you don't like his material, you had to admit that, by God, the man could write.

He still can. And he puts his finger very precisely on what is wrong with the modern short story, whether American or otherwise. It's pussy-whipped, that's what's wrong with it. I speak metaphorically, and I paraphrase Mr King, but that's the gist of his argument. And the pussy to whom vast numbers of modern short-story writers are beholden is the vain hope that they might actually, one day, get published in the New Yorker. As if that goal was one which any sane person would consider important! The New Yorker short story is traditionally one in which absolutely nothing happens.

The audience for short stories has shrunk to the point where most of those reading the few magazines that still publish such stories are reading them in order to find out what gets published there, in the hope that they can do the same; and thus win a fellowship, or a teaching post somewhere, or acquire reputation as a writer of sensitivity and style. Thought and care for the kind of reader who used to read the pulp magazines and now watches football or reads the tabloids is a long way from their mind.

King read some hundred of stories before making the final selection for his anthology, and many of them, he says, 'felt show-offy rather than entertaining'. They were 'written for editors and teachers rather than readers', and they read like a 'fraidy-cat's writing-school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream of consciousness about what Bob Dylan once called "the true meaning of a pear".'

This is a recipe for disaster, as is blatantly obvious to anyone who bothers to read a so-called literary magazine.

Stephen King's intro to his 2007 collection is worth reading for its wonderful, loose, easy style, if for nothing else. Look how he expresses the truth with such informal but absolutely spot-on phrases as 'fraidy-cat's writing-school imitation'.

Fortunately, all is not entirely lost. There are places where you can find some stories which set out to entertain rather than impress, if you search hard enough, but by golly you have to search. And if there is one message which comes through from Mr King, with my endorsement, it is this: don't be afraid to write the damn thing. Do it your way. For preference, give it some balls, or the female equivalent. And for all our sakes, pay no attention to any of those creative-writing people.

'Talent,' says King, 'can't help itself; it roars along in fair weather or foul, not sparing the fireworks.' So, light the blue touch-paper and step well back.

Arising out of Stephen King's essay Maud Newton acts as hostess to short-story writer Jean Thompson, who nicely summarises some of the comment which the King NYT essay produced.

And, if you have the time and patience, you might care to look back at my own earlier statement of the position which is now so eloquently expounded by Mr King. On 16 March 2005, I gave some account of the official history of the short story; and then, on 17 March 2005, I provided a true history of the short story. These two essays are, I think, on reading them again, good combative stuff. And I stand by every word.

Miscellaneous accumulations

2007-10-15T09:29:00.000+01:00

A day or two ago, the Bookseller offered two stories right next to each other. One will attract huge headlines, and indeed already has done, and one will pass largely unnoticed, but it raised a small cheer from me.

Doris Lessing has won the Nobel prize. That's the first story. Well, at least she's more readable than most of those who get this accolade.

The other, rather more important piece of news, is that Orion have won a landmark libel case in the Court of Appeal. The Court has ruled in favour of investigative journalism; as a result, one allegedly bent copper and his supporters are left with a huge bill.

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Judging by the web site, Ron Wulkan's novel The Gook Lover seems to be a cut above the average. Certainly it is written by a man who has had an extraordinary life and knows whereof he speaks. Having lied about his age, he found himself, aged 17, serving as a military policeman in occupied Japan.

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David Loye is another World War II veteran, married to an internationally known holocaust survivor (Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade). He was a television newsman back in the Ed Murrow days, and an award-winning author himself (The Healing of a Nation) in the Nixon era. Now he's running the Benjamin Franklin Press, dedicated to publishing books 'for the restoration of national and global sanity'.

David is has not entirely given up the idea that the world may have a future if we do the right things. Take a look for yourself.

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Margaret Atwood told the Cheltenham Festival audience that young writers need an awful lot of luck. 'Writing is not a job description,' she said. 'A great deal of it is luck. Don’t do it if you are not a gambler.'

For a longer discussion of the same important truth, see my essay On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile.

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In the Sunday Times, Rod Liddle does as thorough a demolition job on If I Did It as I have ever read. He describes it as:

A book that is simultaneously morally disgusting and excruciatingly dull. A filthy little project that, although extremely brief (there’s a lot of padding in those 208 pages), succeeds in both boring the reader beyond endurance and making him gag.

Furthermore, Liddle describes O.J. Simpson as a man who 'murdered his wife'. Where was the ST duty lawyer when that went to past the sub-editors? 'Spare yourself and don't buy it,' Liddle concludes.

*
Commenters on my piece last Thursday, about the PFD debacle and the generally matey atmosphere in publishing, have accused me of a certain lack of consistency. Surely, they say, I have always argued that modern publishing is all about the money?

Well, maybe. I would not claim to be immune to inconsistency, but here I think I have just not explained myself very well.

Yes, modern big-time publishing is mainly concerned with profit, whereas once the big-time publishers were more concerned with literary quality, the public good, the need for the truth to out, and all like that. But where do books come from, whether chosen for literary merit and general worthiness, or for their ability to sell in large numbers?

Answer, they come from writers and agents. And since big-time publishing often pays big money (by publishing's modest standards), everything depends upon judgement, track record, reliability, trust. An editor who is going to pay half a million for a book ideally wants it to come from a writer with a proven track record, and a well known agent who will advise her wisely in the writing and marketing of same.

These relationships take a long time to build up. If an agent departs from an agency, taking her clients with her, you can't replace her in the same way that you can replace a van driver or a copy typist. That's why I think the money men have got it wrong where PFD is concerned.

Incidentally, it seems to me that the really smart money men take a quick look at publishing, decide that it's an absurd business, and push off elsewhere. Consider the career of Luke Johnson. He was once a publisher, but described it as a 'terrible business… a barely rational industry.... You ship finished volumes to booksellers who only accept them on a sale or return basis, and demand at least 55 per cent trade discount, and pay 120 days later.'

Not surprisingly, Johnson has recently bought the UK division of Borders.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

2007-10-12T15:11:00.001+01:00

Last night to the Theatre Royal, Bath, to see an unusual production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The British Council is a government-sponsored body, intended to 'build mutually beneficial relationships between people in the UK and other countries and to increase appreciation of the UK’s creative ideas and achievements.' In 2004, the Council invited the director Tim Supple to direct a theatre production with performers in India and Sri Lanka. This is the result.

The production was a fair while in gestation. In 2005 Supple worked with hundreds of performers in a variety of cities and other locations in India. He eventually narrowed his choice of performers down to 60, and, after a final difficult month, selected 22 to appear in this play. The only Englishman involved is the director.

What we have here is a most unusual, if not unique, style of production. In the first place, each actor usually speaks Shakespeare's lines in the language which he or she normally uses to perform. So the text is spoken in seven different languages.

Next, we have an amazing mixture of dazzling costumes, an extraordinary set, acrobatics, music, movement, dance, and ever-changing lighting, all built around and integrated with the framework of the play, with which most of the audience are already familiar. The outcome is an extraordinary theatrical experience, and one which I warmly recommend to you.

That being said, you do need to be aware of what you are letting yourself in for. This is not a normal Shakespeare production. I saw three people leave during act one, and the couple next to me did not return after the interval. And one could occasionally criticise the direction, in that the main thrust of the play sometimes gets lost in the spectacle. Most of the audience loved it, however; and this particular audience was much younger in average age than is normally the case at the TRB.

This production has already been widely performed in England and will, I gather, tour in Australia, New Zealand and parts of the US. Keep an eye open for it.

For further discussion see the Guardian blog.

Publishing is a very friendly business

2007-10-11T11:42:00.000+01:00

There was one occasion in the past when I proposed to my agent that we should deal with a particular matter in a thoroughly brisk and businesslike way, setting out on paper, in clear terms, what we would and would not accept.

My agent was not happy. 'Michael,' she said, 'what you have to remember is that publishing is a very friendly business.' She might equally well have used the word 'personal'.

The point which my agent was making, and I belatedly accept it, is that selling books is not like selling fish or buttons. Everything depends on personal judgement and personal interaction. A writer offers a manuscript to an agent, and the personal reaction of that agent is central to whether the agent takes the book or not. And ditto when an agent approaches a publisher. And then again when the press agent seeks to place the author on a chat show.

It is tempting to grumble bitterly about this, and to complain about the old-boy network and the public-school mafia and the literary cliques, and so forth. But it has been shown, time and time again, that it is easy to overlook books which could, properly handled, be enormously successful; and, equally, it is easy to become over-enthusiastic about books which prove to be duds. So much depends on trusting other people's judgement, and knowing their track record.

(The same is true, incidentally, of the theatre. With knobs on. Appearing on stage is a mighty scary business, and if you're going to do it you want to be on stage with people whom you know and trust. People who understand the traditions and the conventions. Which is why many actors are the sons and daughters of other actors, or people in the business.)

All of which leads me to the sad case of the mighty UK literary and talent agency PFD. As mentioned here once or twice recently, this agency has fallen into the hands of the money men, who simply do not understand the ethos of publishing. Consequently agents and clients are fleeing in all directions.

In the latest Publishing News, Andrew Franklin explains it all rather well. I must say that I have seen better formatted articles for on-screen reading -- some white space between the paragraphs would help -- but it's worth struggling with.

If only CSS understood the difference between shareholders and stakeholders, how much better handled this business might have been. Perhaps they're just not very good businessmen.

More catch-ups

2007-10-10T09:01:00.000+01:00

This morning, three British crime novels; each of them excellent, in its way, but all rather different.

Denise Mina: The Dead Hour

Back in August, I reviewed Denise Mina's The Field of Blood, which was the first in a series of novels about Paddy Meehan, a fat girl of Irish Catholic origins, living in Glasgow in 1981, and working for a newspaper. The Dead Hour is number two in this series.

The year is 1984. We're still in Glasgow, but Paddy has moved up a rung on the journalism ladder. She's now a junior reporter, and stuck with the night shift, which nobody wants, following police cars and ambulances. In the course of pursuing this thankless task, she inevitably stumbles across a crime, meets a lot of hard, vicious men (and that's just her colleagues and the police), and gets into all kinds of physical and moral difficulties.

Several decades ago, at the end of the golden era of detective fiction, the whodunit and the private-eye books of the time had become very formulaic. The more thoughtful commentators on that kind of fiction had begun to murmur about the need for a crime novel which combined the best features of the blood and thunder brigade with some of the character analysis, and other virtues, of the literary and mainstream novel. Well, it's not often found, even these days, but Denise Mina can do it.

Side by side with the story of plain, fat Paddy, who is her family's sole provider, we get the story of another young woman, much the same age, who is beautiful, has access to money, and has never done a day's work in her life. Unfortunately she's a coke-head, which leads, as always to trouble.

I am not a believer in the need for characters to 'grow', and I'm especially not keen on analysts who talk about a character's arc, and all that shit. But Paddy does grow, and develop, before your very eyes, and that's just fine, the way Mina does it. Paddy is a consistently interesting and convincing character.

Much recommended, but start with the first in the series.

This book ends, by the way, with a cliff-hanger which will make you gasp. But fear not. Number three in the series is available.

Very nicely designed by Bantam: royal octavo, set in 12/16 pt Garamond.

Peter Robinson: The Summer That Never Was

Of the three authors whose books are reviewed in this post, Peter Robinson is the one who has written the most books and has had the greatest amount of commercial success and critical recognition. (The Summer That Never Was made the New York Times bestseller list.) The fact that I like him the least of the three is neither here nor there: simply a matter of personal taste.

Robinson's series character is Inspector Banks, a British policeman of the old school. He has now, by my count, featured in 18 books, published over a twenty-year period. The Summer That Never Was first appeared in 2003, sixteenth in the series.

This is a long book, featuring parallel investigations into the disappearance of two teenage boys, forty or so years apart. Both investigations are headed up by women police officers, with Banks assisting each, either formally or informally.

This is a long book (489 pages), and in addition to hearing a lot about the investigations we also learn a great deal about the characters and backstories of Banks, his former lover Annie, and the woman he fancies now, Michelle. This is all well observed stuff, well written, thoughtful, literate, and cultured.

Why then am I not wildly enthusiastic? Well, for my taste the style is curiously old-fashioned, with a slightly plodding pace. The book feels as if it could have been written thirty years ago. But if it had been, the publisher would have wanted a book only half the length.

The cover quotes a blurb about how Banks is for those who miss Inspector Morse. But to my mind this book is not like Morse at all. It's more like Alan Hunter's books about Chief Superintendent Gently (1955 onwards); or W.J. Burley's books (1968 onwards), about Inspector Wycliffe.

But... Robinson is a big seller, so obviously lots of people find this very acceptable.

L.C. Tyler: The Herring Seller's Apprentice

Very stylish; very English; amusing, dry, clever, tricksy, draws on the best of the detective novel's past, and is clearly the work of a man who has read widely in the genre. He also has that old-fashioned virtue, much overlooked these days, namely a command of the language.

This is a Macmillan New Writing publication. The cover, painted by Mark Thomas, is excellent, and sets the tone nicely, as does the novel's subtitle: A gripping tale of murder, deceit and chocolate.

The two principal characters here are a writer (Ethelred) and his agent (Elsie). The latter is a forthright, plainspoken lady, who is described as 'very honest' in her assessment of her clients' work: on page 6, for example, she states that Ethelred's latest manuscript is 'crap'. When asked to be more specific, she says, 'dog's crap'. But Ethelred seems used to it.

Between them, these two look into the disappearance and death of Ethelred's former wife. And that's all you need to know, really.

In tone, this reminds me somewhat of the great and much-missed Colin Watson; and ditto Joyce Porter and her Inspector Dover. I have to confess (or boast) that I saw the Big Surprise coming; but then I am a deviously minded sod, with some experience of writing these things myself. And the ending of this book, like much else in it, is capable of more than one interpretation. So, as I said at the beginning, tricksy stuff. Keep your wits about you while you smile.

Catch-up reviews

2007-10-09T08:50:00.000+01:00

The pile of books which deserve a mention on this blog is getting worryingly large, so let's try to reduce it a bit.

Rupert Everett: Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

Rupert Everett, act-or of this parish, has written a couple of novels (at least one of which, he tells us, was a roman a clef) but Red Carpets is his autobiography. So far, one might add, since he is not that old (born 1959).

I call him an act-or because to my mind he belongs firmly within that group of theatrical personalities (theatrical even if they never appear in the theatre) who are known in some English circles as luvvies. Luvvy is a slightly unkind term, implying an excessive friendly and self-obsessed, pretentious approach to life. Every so often Private Eye runs a column giving quotes from such slebs.

My memory tells me, and a Google search confirms, that the UK publisher (Little, Brown) paid an awful lot of money for this book (£1 million, reportedly), and succeeded in selling only a modest number of copies (15,000, according to BookInfo.Net).

All of that being so, I wasn't expecting a great deal from Red Carpets, and it therefore came as a pleasant surprise. My first note says: 'Why did this not sell? It's a bit too good really, isn't it? Actually it is a lot too good. Classy in the extreme.'

You can see very easily how some editor might fall in love with this book, and bet the farm on it. Unfortunately, sales don't depend upon what editors and I think about things: it's all down to the punters, who, by and large, prefer Jordan (think big knockers).

Everett takes us through most major stages of his life. He was brought up as a Catholic (or Roman Catholic, as John Betjeman used to insist on it being phrased), and educated at Ampleforth, a well known English school. Thereafter he went into acting, and in his time has co-starred with the likes of Sharon Stone and Julia Roberts.

All in all, Mr Everett has had a fascinating life. Though essentially gay (he describes himself as queer, which is an old-fashioned English version of gay), he has had affairs with some beautiful women. His deepest love, however, seems to have been reserved for his dog, Mo. His account of Mo's death is carefully observed: he has the true writer's disease of being highly observant, even when distressed, high, or drunk.

The key to the whole thing is that Everett can write. No hint of a ghost writer here, take my word for it. [Later note. Actually, don't do any such thing. Madame Arcati tells me that the book was ghosted by Justine Picardie. Well, someone can sure as hell write, and the ghost has done one hell of a job.] His portraits of the likes of Paula Yates and Fred Hughes are full of insights, and movingly written.

Overall, Red Carpets is thoroughly recommended, but it helps if you're (a) English, (b) deeply interested in show business, and (c) tolerant of the gay world and luvvies in general.

Thanks to Martin Rundkvist for recommending this book. I should have had more faith in his judgement.

By the way, before I forget. Rupert E will shortly be seen in the new film version of St Trinians. He plays -- oh, but you've guessed -- the headmistress. Now this, I have to see. My guess is that the ghost of Alastair Sim is stirring uneasily.

Judith Martin: No Vulgar Hotel

Judith Martin is much better known as Miss Manners, under which name she advises Americans on how to behave. In her private life, however, she is more than a little taken with the city of Venice. This book is subtitled 'The desire and pursuit of Venice', and it is both a valuable guide for visitors and for those who want to go several steps further and actually live in the city.

And, er, that's about it really. The book will make an ideal present for anyone who is about to go to Venice, or, having been there, talks longingly about going back one day soon. Though not encyoplaedic in format, No Vulgar Hotel certainly constitutes an encyclopaedia of information about what is perhaps the most glamorous, romantic and compelling of all cities.

It's worth noting, in passing, that, in the Renaissance, Venice was the publishing capital of the world, with some 1,500 presses. The greatest of Venetian publishers was Aldus Manutius, who not only invented italic type but also pocket editions and -- best of all -- the rejection letter.

Venice can also lay claim, I think, to having invented the concept of Intellectual Property. The patent system originated there in the fourteenth century, and Marcus Antonius Coccius received the first known copyright in 1486.

The publisher, W.W. Norton, clearly didn't expect this book to sell in significant numbers, because it is not particularly well presented and the illustrations are not well reproduced.

Hugleikur Dagsson: Is This Supposed To Be Funny?

Yes, is the answer. And is it? Yes, in places.

HD is the most famous cartoonist in Iceland, though on the evidence given here he can barely draw more than stick figures. What he can do is think up utterly outrageous, shocking, and sometimes disgusting things for his stick men and women to do and say.

Is This is HD's second book, and his first led the UK's downmarket Sun newspaper to declare firmly: 'Ban this sick book'. Which should constitute a warning to anyone. The Sun points out that the first book has become a cult classic in Iceland, 'where during the winter there are only three hours of sunlight each day'. As if that explains the phenomenon.

Samples? Oh, all right then. If you insist. Daddy figure to child figure: 'Put broken glass in Mummy's food and I'll give you a pony.' Also: female figure arising from bed, with male figure still in bed: 'Our sex life is like a box of chocolates -- my fingers are brown and sticky after we're done.'

This would possibly be a suitable present for a young person of a crude frame of mind. But take a look at the book before buying.

Terry Pratchett: Making Money

And finally, Mr Pratchett.

Mr P's new book didn't get much of a fanfare. But then it doesn't need a fanfare, does it? All it needs is to appear in the shops, and thousands of people buy it. In the most recent week for which there are figures, Making Money sold 37,425 copies, easily taking it into the number one slot.

Making Money is, as you would expect, a Discworld novel: either the 31st or the 35th, depending on who's counting and what you include. Anyway, the point is that, if you have never read a Discworld novel, this is not the best place to start. Start at the beginning and work your way through the lot.

Those who are already familiar with the Discworld will know what to expect, and will meet a whole host of old friends. Even before you get into the story, however, you will note, no doubt, that the book is handsomely printed and typeset (11.75 on 15 pt Minion, which is eminently readable; although there are those who say that the kerning is a bit tight, particularly after full stops, and I can see their point). You will also note that Mr P has taken to giving us old-fashioned chapter headings, in which the contents of the chapter are briefly encapsulated; as if one actually needed an incentive to read on.

As for plot -- well, Mr P must be psychic, or have a very good crystal ball. Why? Because the story is all about banking, and what it is that causes us to have faith in banks, and what causes runs on banks; and all like that. The timing could not be more apposite, because within the last few weeks the UK banking system has undergone precisely that kind of crisis of faith.

As usual, the book is very funny. But it is, of course, an English form of humour. We learn, for instance, that the ruler of Ankh-Morpork once had an ancestor who had people torn apart by wild tortoises; it was not a quick death.

The book is much more than funny, of course. It is, in places, touching and sad; and, in a note on page 334, I described it as beautiful.

Now that's a funny word to use about a Discworld novel isn't it? Beautiful. Do you think that after all these many decades of reading, and all these many thousands of books, do you think that I might be going... Well... you know... a little bit... peculiar?

We have lift-off

2007-10-08T19:03:00.000+01:00

So to speak. My computer now works, and should be better than it was before, though I am not making a final judgement until it has been running a few days. However, I should be able to post things here as usual, beginning tomorrow.

The backlog of emails, however, will take rather longer to cope with, so if you are expecting a reply please bear with me.

Free speech is all very well, but...

2007-10-04T15:12:00.000+01:00

The little man who labours away in the back room of the computer shop tells me that, come Monday, he may be in a position to sew my right arm back on (metaphorically speaking). So who knows -- next week normal service on this blog might even be resumed.

In the meantime, here's something for you to think about.

We have often noted here, you and I, that the libel laws of England provide wonderful cover for those who have something to hide: R. Maxwell being a splendid (and helpfully dead) example. All you need is lots of money to pay the lawyers. And over the past few weeks we have occasionally noted that billionaire Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz has used said libel laws to force Cambridge University Press to pulp all copies of a book which said things about him that he didn't like (see, for instance, the post of 1 September).

You might have thought, were you not fully briefed on these matters, and deeply cynical, that the UK newspapers would have brought their readers fully up to speed on this issue, since it involves (doesn't it?) the principle of free speech: a principle in which you might have thought, were you not fully briefed et cetera et cetera, the UK newspapers had a deep interest.

But no. It turns out that, as usual, money doesn't just talk; it screams its bloody head off. What is more, it gets its way.

The fearless UK fortnightly Private Eye at least has the balls to tell readers what is happening. As of the time when the Eye went to press, the lawyers who protect the UK media against their own excesses have ensured that every mention of the Sheikh in question has been deleted.

The Observer, says the Eye, was all set to run a piece on Mahfouz by Nik Cohen, but the lawyers spiked it. The Spectator was going to do a piece by Brendan O'Neill, which listed all the titles that Mahfouz has succeeded in getting pulped. O'Neill' s essay concluded that Mahfouz is 'almost single-handedly determining what we Brits may read and hear about contemporary terrorism.' But, again, the story never appeared.

Oops

2007-09-27T15:00:00.000+01:00

Apologies, but I have computer problems this week and posts are likely to be thin on the ground. This one is being written on a very strange machine in an internet cafe. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Stuff from the weekend

2007-09-24T16:28:00.000+01:00

Last week I was having a quiet cup of coffee in my local, green, climate-friendly, and fair-trade cafe, when I came across a copy of a journal called The Spark. This is a freebie, issued every three months, and financed mainly by adverts for complementary health services and the like.

Right at the back of The Spark I found an article by Catharine Stott. It's about the virtues and advantages of being an unrepentant childless person, and I found it remarkably forthright and interesting. It isn't going to please everyone, however, and will offend some.

Finding this article is a bit of a fag, but you go The Spark site first; then you click on the Spark editorial download link; this produces a 5.99 MB pdf file, but if you've got broadband that isn't a problem; then you go to page 31.

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I take my hat off to a man who can write, you know. Every time. Here's an example which is a couple of weeks old now, but will still serve its purpose very nicely.

Few UK celebrities have had as much publicity in the past few weeks as Nigella Lawson (a TV cook of much fame and distinction). Ms Lawson is, imho, and in the ho of many other red-blooded males, a remarkable example of female pulchritude, and I have devoted much thought over the past few weeks to finding a succinct and appropriate term of description.

Ms Lawson, you see, is a pleasantly rounded person, of the shape which was once fashionable, and admired, before women got into this insane 'we-gotta-be-slim' mode. Think Jane Russell, if you're old enough. (I'm not the only person to have noticed this similarity, by the way.)

Anyway, A.A. Gill, in the Sunday Times, has cracked this succinct-description problem for me. The term he uses to describe Ms Lawson is moreish. Which is very clever, in that it conveys a due sense of lusciousness while also incorporating an appropriate reference to food.

Not only that, but Mr Gill continues in admirable form and style:

As far as I’m concerned, there isn’t anything like enough Nigella or voluptuous coquetry on television. She has developed a sort of gastronomic Method preparation, a sort of Stanislavsky cooking. Before our eyes, she becomes the thing she’s making: a slinky-fingered dish of baby squid dipped in mayonnaise, a darkly sumptuous and tempting chocolate mousse, a brazen splayed poussin. Nigella is an ingredient shape-shifter, an organic transformer. One minute, it’s merely bread and butter pudding; the next, it’s the goddess’s heaving breasts.

I couldn't do better than that in a month of Sundays.

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I am not the first, of course, to notice that Katie Price's big-selling novel Crystal was ghosted by Rebecca Farnworth. But in searching for some info on who RF might be, I found this lengthy article about ghosting in general in the Telegraph.

I haven't followed up every single Google reference, but I looked at a good few, and still couldn't find out anything useful about the talented Rebecca. Except that her agent is Margaret Hanbury. All other reports just say she's Katie's ghost.

As I have said before, if I were forty years younger, a ghost is what I would be. Definitely.

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Quite a few UK newspapers have picked up on the fact that the Oxford dictionary -- source of all wisdom on spelling (I regret to say, since I went to the Other Place) -- is dropping hyphens. By the thousand, apparently.

Well, it was ever thus. In the 1970s, when I began writing crime novels, firearm was officially fire-arm. Except in the real world, so Oxford soon changed it to firearm; then, just as I had got used to typing living-room et cetera, it became a living room. And well within living memory, today used to be to-day.

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Oh, my dears, the whole of the UK is absolutely agog with the PFD story, mentioned here last week.

The Times last Friday had a big article, coupled with a complicated chart of who is connected to whom, and now the Guardian's at it.

This is not a simple matter, I have decided. It isn't as simple as commerce versus art, for instance, with the wicked new bosses wanting to make PFD go commercial, and the saintly agents in post wanting to keep it pure. For one thing, much of the talent is highly commercial in nature. So perhaps it's more a question of autonomy. Though one might think that true autonomy went out the window a while back, with the original sale to CSS in 2001.

Anyway, whatever it's all about, this one will run and run.

Friday stuff early

2007-09-20T11:29:00.000+01:00

I came across an advert which said, quite simply, 'I did do it.' Which I thought was very clever. And look where it leads. Which is also pretty clever.

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You might, perhaps, wish to take a look at the publicity for the London Book Festival, which seems to be being organised from California. This particular Festival, which says that it has no connection with the London Festival of Books, is running a competition to find books which have been overlooked and which deserve greater attention from the international book-trade community.

I find the whole thing slightly puzzling, frankly, and I think you would have to read the small print very closely before deciding whether to enter a book. The cost is $50, but you can enter a self-published book, and it doesn't matter when it was published.

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Ah, you just can't keep a good woman down. Or something like that. I say this because Mitzi Szereto is running two more courses on erotic writing.

'Have you ever considered writing erotic fiction?' (It says here.) 'If not, why not? It is not porn but a stylised and sophisticated form of literature that is fun to write and easy to sell.' (I've heard that one before.) 'The workshop’s aim is to break down barriers in people’s writing. There's no need to be fearful or suppress your writing because of some inner censor. Workshop will consist of a lecture, group discussions, writing exercises and an overview of the marketplace for those considering publication.'

And all like that. Details of one course at Bournemouth here, 27 September, and another one on the Isle of Wight, 16-18 November. (Both in the south of England, if you're wondering.)

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Next week's Radio Times (which is the almost-a-century-old name for the BBC's list of TV and radio programmes, plus all the other channels as well) features, on the cover, a photo of Billie Piper in the role of Belle de Jour. That's Belle de Jour as in alleged contemporary call girl and blogger. The original blog became a book which is now a TV drama.

I forget now whether anyone ever proved that blogger Belle was a real call girl, or whether the whole thing was made up by a clever writer from day one. And I'm not even sure that anyone cares any longer. But I am inclined to doubt whether the latest Belle on film will match the original of Bunuel's famous film. A wonderful cool, puzzling, ambiguous thing. I remember it quite well even though it's about forty years since I saw it.

Anyway, that got me thinking about another blog whose bona fides were questioned by some. I found myself wondering what had happened to Wandering Scribe (aka Anya Peters) recently. More particularly, I wondered how her book was selling.

Well, the original blog has gone fairly quiet. And the blog which was set up by her principal doubter (Wanderingscribe) therefore doesn't have a lot to say either. But he does (3 June) make some interesting comparisons between the cover of Anya's book and the covers of some other misery memories. Seems these things are getting as stereotyped as the covers of certain romantic novel series.

Anya's doubter has also investigated (1 June) the question of sales of her book. It seems they aren't all that impressive. During the course of this discussion, however, we also learn that another successful misery memoir, Please, Daddy, No (a pornographic title if ever I read one)was ghost written by Andrew Crofts, who was once in line to assist Anya Peters. He certainly keeps busy.

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Further to yesterday's mention of Durham Literary Festival (they've got two Booker Prize winners -- good, eh? Oh, all right then), I saw that the programme is being kicked off by some (mercifully) non-Arts-Council-funded writers from Tonto Press. So all is not entirely lost.

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Getting on a bit? Maybe you ought to read Lillian B. Rubin's 60 On Up. What do you do with thirty-odd years of retirement? Is it OK to go on having sex? Will the kids look after you? And all like that.

Miscellaneous goods (and bads)

2007-09-19T10:53:00.000+01:00

Charles Whiting, the ultra-prolific British author (more than 350 books) has died at the age of 80. His work was discussed here on 6 July 2005 and there's an obituary in the Times.

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Various people are asking whether trade paperbacks can save literary fiction (see Galleycat for a summary).

The answer is no. Nothing can save literary fiction. It isn't a question of format or cost; it's a question of boredom.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, and you can even fool the same people for several years -- or books -- at a time. But eventually the penny drops.

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Sadly, I am not one of them as cares whether the mighty UK literary and entertainment agency PFD remains intact, or fragments into a thousand splinter groups, with talent huffing off in all directions. But the Independent has various articles on the situation (links from booktrade.info), and, of course, if you want the real story of who is sleeping with whom, Madame Arcati has the sordid truth.

It can't be very comfortable, spending so much time hiding under so many beds, but Madame has a Fleet Street background, and those guys (and gals) will do anything for a story. Madame has updates, by the way, on top of the original post linked to above, so go to the main site and learn even more about adultery, lesbianism, the licking of postage stamps and tying up parcels of paper with string and sealing wax.

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Steve Tiano, book designer and more, has been interviewed (16 September) by Paula Berinstein on The Writing Show. Paula asks some good questions, and touches upon my favourite book-design topic: why book design is more important for the reader than you think. (And, incidentally, much more important than readers realise.)

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Are there any readers of this blog who live in Hull, England? If so, Tindal Street Press are organising a launch for Daphne Glazer's novel By the Tide of the Humber. Thursday 27 September from 7 till 9 pm, at the Live Art Space, Ferens Art Gallery, Queen Victoria Square HU1 3RA. You need an invite, but give 'em a call, say you read it here: contact Emma Hargrave by phone 0121 773 8157, or email emma@tindalstreet.co.uk.

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The world is full of literary festivals. Naturally, being grumpy, I am not a great fan. I read the programme and as often as not find nothing I would like to go to. But hey, don't let me put you off.

I mention all this because there's a litfest coming up in Durham, England, 29 September to 13 October. Details here.

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Edmond Clay is as unlikely a reader of the Daily Mail as ever I came across, even online, but he draws my attention to an article about people who will do absolutely anything to appear on TV. He reminds me that I once wrote a novel about that kind of thing. As did Daniel Scott Buck, only his is rather better.

The Daily Mail article, by the way, isn't just a snippet. It goes on and on and on. No shortage of examples, it seems. My favourite is the woman who says this: 'Ultimately, being on Big Brother would be my dream. Then I'd really feel that I had been a success in life.'

Catch-ups

2007-09-18T09:03:00.000+01:00

Not so long ago, when recommending to you the free online magazine, the Jimston Journal, I quite overlooked one important feature. It is that the editor of said journal, Jim Jimston aka Andrew F. O'Hara, is himself the author of a recently published book called The Swan.

Subtitled 'Tales of the Sacramento Valley', this is a work inspired by John Steinbeck. You can buy The Swan in hardback or paperback, but, as in the case of all sensible publications these days, you can download the whole thing in pdf form first.

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Mike French is the author of a novel called The Dandelion Tree, and he has a blog on which he talks about the processes of writing and marketing the book. But wait, before you rush off to the next item, thinking that this is all very familiar -- he covers a lot of other ground as well. And in any case, those of you in a similar position can learn quite a lot from Mr French's experience.

Said author also has another web site, on which he is posting the book chapter by chapter, but only when encouraged to do so by readers' votes. Interesting idea. Both web sites, by the way, are a cut above the average in terms of design.

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Back in September 2005, I wrote a post entitled 'Who is John Twelve Hawks?' During the past two years, this has generated a surprising amount of comment.

Now I find that Steve Huff has been doing some serious research into the author's true identity. Steve describes his extensive enquiries on his blog, and he has also written a longer and somewhat varied version of the same piece on Blogger News Network.

Steve chooses not to state the name of the man whom he believes to be lurking behind the Twelve Hawks pseudonym, but, with the aid of Google, it really isn't difficult to work out who he has in mind.

And who, you may be wondering, is Steve Huff? Well, he says he's a crime writer and a tenor. But that doesn't sound very likely, does it? Could it be that this is just another pseudonym for the Twelve Hawks guy, banging the drum in a different way?

Short reviews

2007-09-17T20:14:00.000+01:00

Eckhart Tolle: The Power of Now

The Power of Now is a book about spiritual enlightenment, and it comes endorsed by Oprah, no less. To some people this will doubtless render it instantly trivial, and I am bound to say that I was not, myself, overwhelmed by it; however, the book is well written and well thought out, and it might provoke thought; and that is, I imagine, one of the author's aims.

I hesitate to try to summarise a book of this nature, but the title certainly implies an emphasis on the importance of the present, as opposed to the past. And that, at least, is something that I sympathise with. As I mentioned the other day, I have recently met or corresponded with two old men who find that memories of the past are considerably burdensome to them. And it has surely been the case, since the time of Marcus Aurelius, that wise men have advised us that the past cannot hurt us.

Eckhart Tolle goes one step further, I think.

Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time -- past and future -- the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

I must say that I consider that a sound point. It is one which I think is particularly relevant to writers.

I can't speak for any writer other than myself, but I certainly became aware, some time in my twenties, that I was in danger of selling the present, so to speak, in order to cash in on the future.

Most people who want to write have to do their writing (at least to begin with) on top of everything else in life: earning a living, commuting, cooking, eating, keeping fit, maintaining some sort of social life. The result of all this is that writers are often rushing from a to b, longing for the activity of the present to be over so that they can get back to work on the book, longing for the book to be finished so that they can start showing it to agents, longing for the publisher to make her bloody mind up so that you can start buying things with that huge advance. And so on. This is a deadly dangerous frame of mind to get into, and Tolle at least reminds us of that.

Martin Cruz Smith: Stalin's Ghost

When I reviewed Martin Cruz Smith's previous novel, I gave some indication of MSC's background, and how he comes to be such an outstanding thriller writer. So I won't repeat that here.

Stalin's Ghost is the sixth in a series of books about Arkady Renko, an investigator (detective) in Moscow (usually Moscow, though he gets about a bit). This book is not, actually, one of MSC's best, and like its predecessor it is a bit disjointed in places. However, MSC's second best is better than most other people's really really best, so you're in safe hands.

At page 160, however, (which is, admittedly, a bit late) things take off. The author comes up with a quite brilliant solution to the problem of how to describe what goes on in the head of a man whose brain is bleeding. Not only that, but he simultaneously manages to provide us with some vital info on Renko's backstory -- and, furthermore, he produces something which is beautiful and moving and deeply evocative of time and place. (Beat that, you literary lot.)

MSC also, by the way, has a sense of humour. Any author who can make you laugh when his main man gets shot in the head is indeed a bit special. In fact, all the way through this book, we are continually reminded that being shot and garroted really hurts and does you no good at all. Mr Renko is not allocated those same miraculous powers of recovery from injury which are so often the prerogative of fictional heroes.

Finally, for them as wants more than just a story (pernickety, ungrateful, demanding buggers that they are), MSC provides that as well. For this is a story about the influence of Stalin on the Russian mentality. This is a theme previously tackled by Robert Harris, in his Archangel -- a book which I found much less convincing than this one.

I have never actually been to Russia, but it would, by my reading of European history, be most unwise to underestimate the strength and talent of that nation. Everyone seems to think that the twenty-first century is going to belong to China. But if I were a betting man I would back the Russians.

Peter Bevelin: Seeking Wisdom

I thought I'd reviewed this book a while back, but a quick google suggests that I evidently forgot to. Anyway, this is another non-fiction book, with the subtitle 'From Darwin to Munger'. And who Munger, you may reasonably be asking. The answer is that Charles Munger is Warren Buffet's sidekick; and Buffet is perhaps capitalism's most successful investor.

All of that being the case, you will understand that much of the discussion about seeking wisdom is couched in terms of finance, as are many of the examples quoted. Darwin also appears in the subtitle, however, and he is there because he is regarded by the author as providing a wonderful lesson in objectivity.

Peter Bevelin makes it clear, early on in his introduction, that the ideas in his book are built largely from the works and thoughts of others. 'I have condensed,' he says, 'what others have written in a usable form and added my own conclusions.'

Once again, in a short review, I am obliged to seek to summarise, with all the attendant dangers, but it seems to me that this book is largely about cultivating good judgement. The author admires clarity of thought, and so do I. To achieve such clarity, he recommends stripping out as much emotion from the decision-making process as possible; and again that seems to me to be sensible. It is a course of action which I have many times recommended in relation to writing and publishing issues, where, all too often, emotion dominates considerations to the point where it obliterates all traces of common sense.

By way of example, the author lists, as one of the causes of misjudgements and mistakes, 'Believing [that] one can control the outcome of events where chance is involved.' Readers of my essay On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile will not be surprised to hear that I endorse that.

The author also has no illusions about the forecasting ability of economists. He quotes Peter Lynch as follows: 'There are 60,000 economists in the US, many of them employed full-time trying to forecast recessions and interest rates, and if they could do it successfully twice in a row, they'd all be millionaires by now.' Quite so.

This is a well written and well organised book, with nice short paragraphs, and it certainly goes a long way towards providing the wisdom which features in its title. Particularly recommended for students on business studies courses.

This book is published by PCA Publications and is now in its third edition.

Chris Anderson: The Long Tail

The Long Tail has been out a while now. It was first published a year ago, and before that was available in draft online; many readers' comments on that draft (and it attracted up to 5,000 readers a day) were incorporated into the first edition; a revised edition is due out next year.

The subtitle of this book is 'How endless choice is creating unlimited demand', which is all very well but perhaps not as informative as it might be. What the book is really about, it seems to me, is how the internet has changed the way in which firms can do business -- and, more importantly for most of us, it is about how the economics of online trading mean that you and I get to choose from an enormously greater range of product than was the case in the past, and is still the case if we go to a high-street retailer.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the book, so far as readers of this blog are concerned, is that the internet is transforming the chances of success (however defined) for self-published writers and for small publishers. Which is not -- definitely not -- to say that small presses and unknown writers can now compete with the big boys on equal terms. The difference is that now the internet plus changes in printing technology mean that the minnows at least get to appear in print, if nothing else.

All in all, The Long Tail is essential reading if you hope to understand how the world is developing in the twenty-first century.

The art of saying no

2007-09-14T11:35:00.000+01:00

Several other blogs have mentioned a recent article in the New York Times, but it was not until tipped off by Jon Jermey (an Aussie indexer -- thanks Jon) that I actually went and looked at it. It turns out to be a lot of fun.

It seems that the ancient (by US standards) and honourable publishing firm of Knopf have lodged their archives in the University of Texas, and Professor Oshinsky has been reading through them.

Among the gems he has unearthed are the rejection letters sent to many a famous name, in respect of many books which later went on to become famous. Among the works which Knopf did not want to know about were The Diary of Anne Frank and Lolita.

This is all very entertaining, and will, of course, provide further ammunition to those of the 'all publishers are completely clueless' persuasion. As the years pass, however, I grow more sympathetic with the poor bastards who make fifty decisions a day about piles of manuscript, only to find, fifty years later, that some smart-arse, full of the benefit of hindsight, is sniggering at them.

I am particularly sympathetic to the Knopfs (Alfred and Blanche) because they were at least conscious that, in a commercial publishing company, there is no getting away from the fact that commerce is the key.

For instance, Harold Strauss, editor in chief, once wrote to a distinguished historian as follows: 'I am terribly sorry to have to tell you that, while we recognize the scholarly merits of the manuscript, we are deeply disappointed in its trade possibilities. We feel that you have completely missed your chance to write a colorful and dramatic book.'

The NYT article does not, however, include my favourite story about the house of Knopf. It appears (if my aged memory is still functioning correctly), in the autobiography of the English literary agent George Greenfield. The story was in all probability based on fact, but, like all good stories, it may have been embroidered somewhat over the years.

It is said that for some time the firm of Knopf had been keen to get its hands on the American rights of the novels by the very successful English writer, John Buchan. So keen, in fact, that Blanche Knopf is said to have gone down on her knees in front of Mr Buchan, and said, with intense feeling: 'Mr Buchan -- will you put your American end into my hands?'

This that and the other

2007-09-13T11:39:00.000+01:00

Cory Doctorow is usually a source of good sense, and in Locus magazine he has an article about the virtues of giving away books online. It's not the first time he has argued this case, and he assembles such quantitative data as are available on this issue.

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Hmm. This one will run and run, I think.

Publishers Lunch refers to a row rumbling in academe. The University of Michigan Press reportedly acts as distributor for the UK's Pluto Press. One book put out under this arrangement is Overcoming Zionism, by Joel Kovel. And it turns out that some 'members of the university community' have 'serious questions' about the book. Which means, in effect, they want to ban it, and, if they had their druthers, burn the entire stock and preferably pop the author on top of it.

Ah me. If this wasn't so funny it would be tragic. And vice versa.

Later. Seems that the U of M has decided, grudgingly, to resume distribution of the book in question. For one thing, their contract requires it. But the authorities in question can hardly be said to have covered themselves in glory on this one. They end up, frankly, looking like a bunch of ignorant deadbeats. Do they know nothing about the concept of free speech in universities? Not to mention the first amendment.

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Publishers Lunch also highlights another classic example of twisting and squirming. An Oregon newspaper wonders whether it really should have mentioned a reporter's book in quite the way it did.

But I thought that was the whole point of working for a newspaper. If you can't depend on your employer to give you a bloody good plug when the book comes out, what's the point? You might as well be a schoolteacher.

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The Tonto Press blog prints some correspondence which constitutes an absolutely classic example of how not to approach a publisher. I think the Press is a bit too kind to the sender of this nonsense, frankly. I think we should be told his name.

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Blogging By and About Authors is part of the CyberBookBuzz range of services. It comes up with some interesting stuff, for instance this review of a book about clearing permissions -- something of a nightmare.

Did you know, for instance, that many old TV series cannot be sold on DVD because the task of getting permission to use the background music in the new format is just too complicated and difficult? I read it on the internet, so it must be true.

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Booktrade.info provides a link to an article on the web site of the Institute for the Future of the Book. This is an exceptionally interesting, if speculative, piece on ebook readers, the future role of publishers, and all like that.

Suppose -- just suppose -- that instead of the endless conglomeration and concentration of power into ever fewer and fewer hands, which has been the story of the last few years, we get instead a vast distribution of authority, a garden in which a million flowers flourish. Wouldn't that be fun?

Along the way a point is made which was made here a while back, namely that readers neither know nor care much about publishers. Authors, they remember; book titles they remember too. But publishers? Nah. Not interested.

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I recently mentioned a new book on why we read what we read, by Lisa Adams and John Heath. Now they have started a blog on the same subject. They seek to 'analyze culture through bestsellers'. And the best of luck to them. (Thanks to Dave Lull for the link.)

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Vivek's iUniverse-published non-fiction book, Lies, Lies, and More Lies, is a defence of Hindu nationalism. Whatever else may be said about the book, it is pretty clear that it is well written. Take a look at the lengthy info on Amazon.com.

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The 20th Independent and Small Press Book Fair will take place on Saturday, December 1 (between 10am and 6pm) and Sunday, December 2 (between 11am and 5pm) at the New York Center of Independent Publishing, 20 West 44th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues, in Manhattan. More detail here.

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Further to my post about the Souvenir Press, Mr Hecht tells me that actually The Cooler sold well, and in lots of countries, and the author did two more books for Souvenir in similar style. These had 'really astronomical earnings' before Markstein was enticed by the Bodley Head, and then by Pan, and lastly Hodders; but he never touched the same earnings in those places and died at a comparatively young age.

Which just goes to show. Stick with the guys who treated you right in the first place.

Ernest Hecht and the Souvenir Press

2007-09-12T08:56:00.000+01:00

In 1951, Ernest Hecht set up an independent UK publishing company called the Souvenir Press. Today, he's still running it, in its 56th year of operation.

The Souvenir Press first came to my attention in 1974. In those days I was much younger and more naive than I am today, and I tended to believe what I read in the book-trade press. Hence, when I read in the Bookseller that an amazing new thriller was about to come out, I got a bit excited. I liked thrillers.

The book in question was The Cooler, by George Markstein. The author, Wikipedia tells me, was born in Germany but came to England as a child refugee. He was already a successful TV producer and scriptwriter. But I knew nothing of that at the time (and in 1974 there was no easy way to find out; you have no idea, you younger persons, what a difference the internet makes). All I knew was that the Bookseller went on for weeks and weeks about The Cooler, pointing out how the film rights had been sold for a vast sum, paperback rights for ditto, advance orders huge, and so forth. The author, it was said, had made a quarter of a million pounds even before publication.

Now all this, you will readily understand, was pure hype and flim-flam. You and I can recognise that sort of thing now, because we've seen so much of it. But at the time I believed every word. (I told you I was naive.)

When the book came out, I read it eagerly. And, er, guess what -- it wasn't really all that good. Not a patch on Ian Fleming.

I sat there scratching my head and wondering what I was missing. So I was not only naive, I was a bit thick as well.

Eventually, of course, some vague apprehension of what was going on here gradually sank in. I don't believe that a film version of the book was ever made (the 2003 movie of that name seems unconnected), and I doubt that the book was a huge seller either. But I did remember the name of the Souvenir Press and its publisher, Ernest Hecht.

Over the years Mr Hecht has published a slightly weird and eclectic list. This reflects something of his character, which was briefly described by Nicholas Clee, in the Times last year. Hecht has, in his time, published quite a lot of fiction, including, for example, both the Modesty Blaise series (commercial) and Knut Hamsun (Norwegian Nobel prize winner). Today, however, he publishes very little fiction 'because of the marketing difficulties with the chains'.

Despite the difficulties, every so often Hecht does re-issue a novel which he believes has been overlooked. In 2002, for example, he chose Address Unknown, by Kressman Taylor, which is now on its fifth printing. This dates from 1938, and is a very short but powerful expose of Nazi Germany. In 2003 the choice was In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, by Delmore Schwartz; the author was, it seems, the model for Saul Bellow's Mr Herzog.

Last year, the Souvenir Press re-issued two novels which the firm had originally published in 1983, by then young and unknown writers: If I Should die Before I Wake, by Michelle Morris, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, by Ron Hansen (recently filmed starring Brad Pitt).

One of the firm's latest re-issues is The Marvellous Adventures of Cabeza de Vaca, by Haniel Long. This was originally published in 1939, and the first Souvenir Press edition was in 1972. This novella has been described as 'a spiritual classic as powerful as Khalil Gibran's The Prophet' (Gibran is an author whom Hecht also published, by the way).

A glance at the Souvenir Press catalogue reveals, however, that the firm does not just put out the best of the past. New books include a history of chess, a guide to dog training, and a study of obituaries.

I would like to be able to point you at the Souvenir Press web site, so that you can explore more at your leisure. But I find, not altogether to my surprise, that the firm doesn't have one.

As an alternative, go to Amazon.co.uk, and search by publisher. With a bit of luck, this link might do the job for you, and you'll find a list of over 2000 books.

Long live the Souvenir Press and its distinguished and indefatigable publisher.

More accumulated stuff

2007-09-10T11:38:00.000+01:00

There's a book out which is an anthology of material from Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (recommended by Jessa Crispin at Bookslut). Should be good. It's the world's best title for a magazine, anyway.

Bet you don't know where the title comes from, do you? No, thought not. I think I did know once, but I've forgotten.

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Cyberbook Buzz will publicise your book on the web. For a fee.

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Lynn Lurie's Corner of the Dead is a novel, but an unusual one. Set in Peru, it is told from the perspective of a witness. More on the web site, including an extract.

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Don't miss the latest Jimston Journal, just out and free online. There are quite a few things in it which you will have heard of before if you're a regular reader of this blog. There's some of Mr Losovsky's Doorbells, a bit of Mr Fenman, and some Gladys. If you can't find anything to interest you there, then I give up.

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Here is a cultural announcement of considerable significance:

After the limited print-run of only 52 sold out last week, the forward-thinking publishing house Upside-Down-Then-Backwards is offering readers the opportunity to download Jean-Pierre Sertin’s experimental novel 'p.52' for free. This unique work contains 52 pages, each of them representing p.52 of 52 non-existent works. Hard to follow? Fortunately, Sertin has written an introduction in which he explores at length the process through which the novel was created. The full work can be found here.

As you may or may not know, Sertin is the co-creator of the literary form of ‘Intercuttings’ - various examples of which can also be found at Underneath the Bunker – the online home of Europe’s Premier Cultural Journal (as well as many other things).

May the treacle of culture continue to drip upon your faces.

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Abebooks is celebrating the 50th anniversary of On the Road. That book never quite worked for me, but then I am English.

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Worried about book coverage in newspapers? Then you must read Steve Wasserman's long article in the Columbia Journalism Review. (Link from Publishers Lunch.) Wasserman also has things to say about the conglomeration and digitisation of the book business, and changes in the culture of literacy. The author was formerly head of the Los Angeles Times's book-review section.

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Mr Mahfouz gets his name in the Washington Times. And serve him right. (Link from Lori at Bonusbooks.

If you've been following the Sheikh Mahfouz story, you may wish to know that Dr Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil, is the director of the American Center for Democracy, which is a good place to go for news and information about this and similar issues.

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John Heath and Lisa Adams have written a book about popular and bestselling books (Why We Read What We Read), and what such books tell us about their readers and the society we live in. If you like radio, you can hear the authors being interviewed by Steve Roberts. I'd like to say that you can also read a free transcript of the interview, but you can't. (Link from Dave Lull.)

To get a quicker flavour of this book, you might do better to read a good review.

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Not that you and I care, of course, because we are much too grand for that kind of thing, but self-publishing services provider AuthorHouse has taken over the similar outfit iUniverse. You can read all about it in the press release (link from Publishers Lunch).

It seems that the guys who runs these businesses see no chance that people are going to stop writing books; neither do they see any likely diminution in the desire to see the books in print. What's more, they're going to open up a new competitor for Lulu.com, called Wordclay.

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P. Viktor is an Englishman who once worked for Oxford University Press. Now he has a novel out (via Lulu). Its title is Veneer, and you can read the first three chapters online.

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Abebooks are running an auction of 14 signed books, published by Penguin. Proceeds to English PEN, which, I am sorry to say, is not my favourite charity.

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Redstone Press is an odd business, even by publishers' standards, but very professional despite its oddity. Go take a look. I can find no word about who runs it, but many of the books are by the artist David Shrigley, so perhaps he has a hand in it somewhere. The name Rothenstein also crops up regularly.

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Charles Hugh Smith offers aspiring writers what he claims is the worst advice they'll ever read. Actually, most of it is quite sound. (Link from Jon.)

Reading Charles's stuff, you would be forgiven for thinking that he is a complete failure as a writer, but actually, if you explore his web site further, you will see that that is far from the case. He has written quite a lot of journalism. He's also had a novel (I-State Lines) published by the Permanent Press, an outfit which says that it receives 6,000 submissions a year and publishes 12 of them.

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Back in August, I mentioned a novel by Wesley Carrington Greayer. In earlier life, Wes flew in a world-war II bomber crew. Now he has started a blog, on which he is posting some of the thoughts he has had about that experience.

For many years Wes's WWII memorabilia were locked away in a box in the attic; his memories and emotions from that period likewise. Now, while he still can, Wes is putting some of it on to paper, and into circulation. Well worth reading.

Everybody of any age has a story, I guess, and the men who fought in WWII have darker stories to tell than most. I met such a man recently, and quite unexpectedly he told me how much he was troubled, even now, by the memories of his appalling experiences in those days. I hope it helped for him to talk. All I could do to help was recommend that he read Marcus Aurelius.

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Last Saturday's Financial Times provided an amazing experience, possibly unique in recent UK newspaper history. It contained, so far as I could see, not a single word about the McCann family. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, my advice is: stay ignorant.

Accumulated stuff

2007-09-07T11:32:00.000+01:00

Maud Newton very sensibly highlights the importance of Edmund Wilson highlighting the importance of Edgar Allan Poe and his theories of literature. Those theories have, by the way, been mentioned here, with approval, more than once: for example, on 2 June 2004.

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The Oldie carries an advert for guynsmith.com. I thought the name Guy N. Smith was familiar, and having checked out the web site I now know why. It's because he's the author of over 100 books, most of them in thoroughly commercial fiction genres. You can find details of the man's career here.

Ever since giving up a life as a bank manager, Guy has been writing and selling books. He runs a secondhand book business and a small publishing company, in addition to keeping up with his writing. He is also the UK's pipe-smoking champion.

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Madame Arcati reminds me that there is to be a Desmond Elliott prize for a first novel. The enterprise has its own web site where you can read all about it. UK publications only, I fear.

Desmond Elliott was quite a character, as the splendid profile by Liz Thomson makes clear (she also seems to have written the Times obituary). But there's something which irks me about this proposed prize. Elliott was a man who agented or published the likes of Jilly Cooper, Penny Vicenzi, Derek Lambert, Leslie Thomas, Richard Doyle, and Claire Rayner.

I particularly remember Richard Doyle (though you won't) because he wrote an adventure novel called Imperial 109 which Elliott sold to the Americans for (if memory serves) $800,000 in 1977, when that was still quite a serious amount of money. As an ambitious writer myself at the time, I tended to notice that kind of thing.

All of the above-mentioned writers are pretty solidly commercial, you will note, and pretty successful too, under Elliot's guidance. But now that a prize is being offered in his name, it is suggested that likely winners from the past might have included such novels as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Beach, White Teeth, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, The Thirteenth Tale, Brick Lane, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and The Tenderness of Wolves.

Well, sorry, but I sense a certain disjunction here. I don't think it makes much sense to associate the name of a man who represented Jilly Cooper with the likes of some of those. A touch of the O. Henrys all over again.

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Essential reading if you care at all about science and progress is an article by Professor William Neal Reynolds in the Financial Times. (Link from the Creative Commons blog.)

Reynolds discusses the online availability, or otherwise, of the reports of scientific research which is funded by the public purse. He draws attention, not unreasonably, to the greed -- sorry, profit-making instincts -- of the commercial publishers of learned journals. More importantly, however, he highlights the irony of the fact that the world wide web is not being fully exploited by the scientific community.

The web was invented by a scientist as an aid to scientific communication. 'In every other area of life,' Reynolds points out, 'commerce, social networking, pornography - it has been a smashing success. But in the world of science itself? With the virtues of an open web all around us, we have proceeded to build an endless set of walled gardens, something that looks a lot like Compuserv or Minitel and very little like a world wide web for science.'

Similar issues were discussed here a few weeks ago in relation to the Martin Rundkvist-edited collection of papers on scholarly journals.

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Publishers Lunch tells me that Deirdre Knight of the Knight Agency has just sold an erotic novella by Joey W. Hill to Berkley Heat. It turns out, on investigation, that Joey is one of those highly productive pulp-type authors who produce at a prodigious rate. Pulp-type, by the way, carries no pejorative overtones at all; quite the reverse.

And Joey is a she, also by the way.

The same agent has also sold another (similar) erotic novella to Berkley Heat, this time by Jaci Burton. And guess what -- Jaci is productive too. Also she.

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Ansible 242 explains that, in the eyes of any halfway educated science-fiction fan, Jeanette Winterson is making a fool of herself with her latest novels and pronouncements upon same. Pity. Seems like a nice girl. Literary people never seem to learn that you can't just dash off a novel which attempts to use genre conventions without having spent a good many years acquainting yourself with those conventions.

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You know what the Booker prize reminds me of? Football.

In England, football (with the round ball; David Beckham-type game) is immensely popular, and it occupies acres of newsprint. Even the Times has a weekly supplement devoted to it. And the characters and the background stories are really quite interesting. It's just that the game itself is absolutely unwatchable. Nothing happens for hours at a time, and when it does it's childish play-acting and cheating.

Same with the Booker. The personalities and the gossip and the bookies' odds are not without interest, and the Bookseller provides as good a summary as any. But the books... Nah, forget 'em.

Anyone for royalties?

2007-09-04T09:34:00.000+01:00

Last Saturday's post was not headed Pre-holiday clearance for nothing: Mrs GOB and I are having various days off and out this week, so posts may be sparse to non-existent.

However, there is plenty for you to ponder in the meantime.

I did give a mention last Saturday to Richard Charkin's provocative prod into the body politic, with his proposal that the old (alleged) royalty system should be abandoned as a means of recompensing authors for their efforts.

I say alleged royalty system because in practice the author's advance is often all they get, and royalties are more theoretical than actual, and in any case the calculations are so bloody complicated that no one can understand them half the time, and certainly no one other than a chartered accountant with three weeks to spare and unlimited access to the company books could possibly know whether the calculations on the six-monthly statement are right or wrong, and -- Pause for breath.

If you go read Mr Charkin's prod today, you will see that, predictably, it has attracted some comment. What I would not have predicted, perhaps, is the high quality of the thinking that is demonstrated in these comments. You need to be fairly well versed in existing practice in order to follow it all. But, if you're a writer, or intending to become one, and you are interested in the money, then by golly you'd better get to grips with it.

One further essential port of call, in your search for enlightenment, is the OUP blog, where Evan Schnittman has some specific proposals to offer. These are not official OUP policy, but are part of the continuing discussion in that office.

Whichever way you look at it, the business side of publishing is an area (if I may mix my metaphors) which needs seizing by the throat and shaking hard. It's a mess. A hopeless jumble and jungle of impenetrable past practice, special deals, returns, and god knows what else.

Mercifully, it ain't really my problem. Not these days.

Pre-holiday clearance

2007-09-01T11:03:00.000+01:00

The Guardian recently carried an article by Scott Rosenberg, a co-founder of Salon.com and author of Dreaming in Code. He blogs at wordyard.com.

Scott's subject was blogging, and he views it from something like a ten-year perspective. This is worth reading if you're thinking of starting a blog, or if you're already writing one and sometimes wonder why you're doing it.

My favourite quote from the article: 'Blogs have realised [i.e. made a reality] that old wisecracking twist on an Andy Warhol aphorism: that, someday, everyone will be famous for 15 people'.

On his own blog, in a post dated 29 August, Scott reflects on his Guardian piece and adds some further notes on correcting what appears in the first draft.

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Chandler McGrew is a writer of hard-edged supernatural/suspense thrillers which are -- according to more reviewers than most of us get in a lifetime -- in the Dean Koontz tradition. This is not a sub-genre that I deal in much myself, but Mr McGrew and I occupy the same position in the literature versus commercial fiction argument. As his recent blog post testifies.

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It has often been argued here that the greatest problem that writers face today is obscurity -- being lost like a piece of flotsam in the vast flood of publications. Compared with this problem, the risk of piracy is negligible. If only we could write something that people would think worth stealing!

All of that being the case, I have often published the full text of some of my novels online, in the form of pdf files; and indeed I would put all my stuff online but for the fact that it takes time, some of it is not available in digital form, et cetera.

Well, here's another supporter of the same point of view. His name is Jon Evans, and he's an established novelist. His third novel, a thriller called Invisible Armies, was recently published by Hodder & Stoughton. Now Jon is publishing a new novel as an online freebie in serial form.

The book is entitled Beasts of New York. It is very different from his thrillers: it's an urban fantasy about the animals of New York City, with a squirrel protagonist. Jon calls it a 'children's book for adults.' See the book's FAQ for details, including more on why he's doing this.

Jon also has an article on the question of obscurity versus piracy, and other related issues, in this month's issue of Canada's news magazine The Walrus.

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The UK's Oldie magazine, aimed at the grumpy old people in the UK (a big market), has issued a books supplement with this month's copy. This is evidently to be a quarterly affair.

Well, everyone seems to be worried about the diminishing amount of space which newspapers and magazines devote to books, but personally I'm surprised that they give books as much space as they do. There are other things in life, you know.

Pick that man up and take him outside for some fresh air. He's only pretending to be shocked.

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One or two readers have recently commented on the fact that my novels and other books are published under a variety of pen-names. This is true, and for a variety of reasons.

All my recent stuff (since 2000) is published through my own small press, Kingsfield Publications. And even a few years ago, it was clear that self-publishing under one's own name was not a smart move. So that's one reason why I used such names as Patrick Read and Anne Moore.

The other reason is that I write books which are in somewhat different styles, and certainly in widely differing genres. And I thought, at the time, that it might help readers if I 'branded' them in some way.

I now think that I was probably wrong on all counts. I don't think anyone with any brains automatically dismisses self-published books any longer. Such books are just as (well, almost as) likely to be taken seriously as any other kind.

As for branding, that didn't work either. An editor in a mainstream publishing house remarked to me, a couple of years ago, that my three 'Anne Moore' books are, in fact, so different, that no editor in her position could publish them as a package by one author. It would be 'too confusing' for the reader.

So if I was publishing those books today, I would put my own name on all of them, and the hell with it. The descriptions make it pretty clear, I think, what is on offer in each case, even though they do differ widely and sometimes wildly.

As far as young and wannabe writers are concerned, please be aware that my example is not one which you should follow if you want to have some sort of 'career' in mainstream publishing. Definitely not. The way to success is to identify the genre in which you are most likely to succeed, pick a clearly defined sub-genre in that overall genre, and write a series of books which are, effectively, the same book each time, but with enough variation to hold the reader's attention.

Good examples: Agatha Christie (who grew bored with repeating herself and occasionally wrote books as Mary Westmacott, just for a change), and P.G. Wodehouse.

In my own case I grew bored with that same-novel-every-time game fairly early on, and decided that if I couldn't have fun I wasn't going to bother. Hence the absence of worldly success. But I had a good time writing them though.

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Oh dear, you have to laugh, don't you? Well I do, anyway.

A couple of times in the recent past we have noted the attempts by Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz to silence the criticism of himself which was contained in a book published by Cambridge University Press. He did this by suing CUP for libel through the UK courts; the English libel laws permit, in effect, a form of libel tourism.

In my last discussion of this, on 16 August, I suggested that anyone who abuses the English laws on a grand scale, too many times, eventually achieves precisely the opposite effect to that which is intended: a circumstance which I find greatly entertaining.

The most recent discussion of all this is to be found in the 29 August edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. The article repeats much of the known facts, and then describes some of the 'opposite effects' which I mentioned last time.

Link from Lori at Bonusbooks, who has a keen eye for this kind of thing.

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Richard Charkin, head man at Macmillan, has, as ever, some sensible things to say about rationalising the present royalty system.

I think that his proposals (not new) are sensible, but I want to make a comment from the writer's point of view.

Big publishers -- and most small ones too -- are in the business of making money. Hence they constantly try to economise on costs. And one of their major costs is payments to authors, in the form of advances and royalties. In any reform of the royalty system, it will be a major objective of publishers to try to reduce, in total, the proportion of their income which is passed on to authors. Equally, in discussion of such reform, it will be the objective of literary agents and the Society of Authors (in the UK) to ensure that writers do not end up being paid less than they were under the old system.

So that's one good reason why writers and agents may not be too keen on the Charkin suggestion. Which at present is little more than a provocative prod into the body politic to see what happens.

For a full (very full) discussion of payments to authors, please see my discussion of Advances, published here in June 2005. It comes in three parts, which are, unsurprisingly, part one, part two, and part three. But do be aware that these are not short posts. To absorb them fully, I would guess that at least half an hour is required.

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Duncan Fallowell, writing on Madame Arcati's blog, says that Richard Booth has sold his Hay-on-Wye book business, but has kept control of the castle.

If you have no idea what all this means, read my description of Hay-on-Wye (centre of the used-book universe) from 26 September 2005.

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Virtually every newspaper in England has published a report about books that people leave behind in hotel rooms. Here's a typical example from the Daily Mail.

The report was compiled by the Travelodge chain, and it tells us that the book most often left behind this summer was The Blair Years, which is an edited diary written by the former press secretary of our beloved (and much missed) leader, T. Blair, Esq.

I wouldn't normally bother you with such tedious nonsense, but I think it's worth pointing out that here we have yet another example of the fertile imagination of the p.r. persons of this world.

Personally I do not believe for an instant that this alleged survey ever took place at all (despite what it says in the press release). I think this was made up, from start to finish, with Campbell's book being chosen for the number-one spot because it was the book thought most likely to catch the eye of news editors, most of whom have rather mixed feelings about A. Campbell.

Some hard-pressed p.r. person, under orders to get the Travelodge name some publicity or else, sat there sucking his pen and thinking, Hmm. August is a quiet month. What can we do about the things that people leave behind them? Let's see now. Vibrators, of course. Handcuffs. Nah, a bit too risque. Clothes? Who cares?

And then, bingo. Books! Campbell! Result, hundreds of column inches.

Your job, as a writer: think of ways to manoeuvre yourself into topping the poll in a similar sort of story.

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Finally today, something which outshines all the others.

In early life, Lucilla Andrews was a nurse. She saw plenty of service during the 1939-45 war, and she wrote a memoir of those difficult few years: No Time for Romance.

Later on, Lucilla became a famous romantic novelist, and last year the UK Romantic Novelists' Association gave a special lunch to honour her, together with two other venerable members of that association.

No Time for Romance was one of the books used by Ian McEwan when he was doing research for Atonement, and the Financial Times magazine today has both an article about Lucilla and an extract from her memoir.

I recommend that you read the extract (scroll down) if nothing else.

Jack Myers and Virtual Worlds

2007-08-31T10:37:00.000+01:00

Another man who is unafraid to bang his own drum (see Wednesday) is Jack Myers.

A recent press release, in connection with his new book, describes Myers as editor and publisher of Jack Myers Media Business Report, the web site JackMyers.com, and MediaVillage.com. The latter is 'the online community for intelligent TV fans'.

His abbreviated c.v. tells us that Mr Myers was identified as one of the 1,000 Most Creative Individuals in the U.S by Who's Really Who and is the recipient of the George Foster Peabody Award; he has won the Crystal Heart Award from the Heartland Film Festival, and has been nominated for both an Academy and an Emmy Award. Myers has consulted with more than 200 leading media companies, agencies and major global marketers on media and marketing trends.

More importantly, perhaps, the Myers Emotional Connections Research Studies, launched in 1999, are said to have emerged as state-of-the art standards for measuring audiences' emotional connections with media.

Now, if you've been reading the GOB for long, you begin to see how I might be interested. Myers has recognised a point often repeated here, to the point of tedium, namely that fiction and drama are all about creating emotion in the audience.

Moreover, Myers has recognised that the same is true of much else in the modern media, even when said media appear to be dealing with established fact. For example: watch any modern TV news bulletin in the UK, and what you see, as often as not, is not news as such, but some form of gossip or speculation deliberately dressed up in such a way as to arouse emotion. I doubt whether news bulletins anywhere else in the world are much different these days.

Even more to the point, Myers has picked up on the new phenomenon of virtual worlds, and the fascination which they hold for young people in particular. Do I need to say that fascination is an outcome of emotion? Wow, that was terrific! say the participants in, say, Secondlife. Wouldn't mind some more of that. This is an emotional reaction.

Arising out of his studies of emotion, Myers recently authored a book, in co-operation with Jerry Weinstein. Entitled Virtual Worlds: Rewiring Your Emotional Future, the book itself is interactive and 'virtual', in the sense that it allows readers to submit contributions to a 'reader-generated novel'; successful contributors may even take a part share in the royalties.

The book argues that 'Virtual Worlds and enhanced social networks allow people to explore and experience new universes, while expanding their emotional range and depth, changing the nature of communication, and creating different identities.'

This, I somewhat reluctantly agree, is true. I also agree with the authors' view that 'a growing number of young people are spending unprecedented amounts of time in a virtual existence. Virtual Worlds are becoming an embedded part of our culture and the implications for every aspect of society are unimaginable.'

Whether this is a healthy situation or not is open to question, and I for one have reservations about it. But even those who are violently opposed to these developments need to recognise that opponents aren't going to get very far by standing up and shouting, 'This ought to be stopped!'

For me, much the most interesting aspect of Jack Myers's numerous enterprises is his research into audience emotions. You can find the titles of some of his reports on his web site.

If you do click on the titles of these reports, you find, not surprisingly, that getting sight of his research findings costs money. For example, a copy of the Myers 2008 Emotional Connections Research Studies will cost you (or your company) $120,000.

Myers's press release states that Myers is a Board Member of the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University, and serves on the Dean's Advisory Board for the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University. This suggests that he is working with some pretty respectable academics.

All of which is fascinating to me. I have thought for at least forty years that there was considerable scope for linking up audiences to some form of data measurement device(s), and finding out what exactly happens to human beings, physiologically speaking, when they watch a deeply moving or exciting play or movie.

We already know some of this, from observation of our own reactions and those of other audience members. For example, in a suspense movie, people's hands sweat. In a comedy, people laugh, and rock backwards and forwards. In a tragedy, I have heard it said, a side to side movement can be observed in the audience.

Such physiological research can be supplemented with psychological research, through the use of questionnaires and interviews.

The holy grail of all this, of course, is to identify the triggers of emotion, so that various emotions can be produced pretty much at will. Find the answer to that, and you will make a fortune. Even better, or worse, depending on your point of view, those who control the levers of emotion can sweep themselves into positions of leadership and influence in politics, religion, and the arts. No trouble at all.

Don't we live in a wonderful world?

M.J. Rose's new book

2007-08-29T09:35:00.000+01:00

You don't get anywhere in this business by being backward in coming forward. Hence I am not altogether surprised to see what the Mistress of Buzz and book marketing, M.J. Rose, has to say about her new novel.

What she says, basically, is that if you read her blog regularly, and absorb all the free info and help for writers that it contains, then the least you can do is go out and buy the book. Think of it as paying your dues.

This works out at roughly $20 a year, so I can't say that I disagree with her, but the blog is not called Buzz, Balls and Hype for nothing. And it's the balls bit I'm thinking of first.

Entitled The Reincarnationist, M.J.'s new book is suspense, takes place in NYC now and in 1884, and Rome now and 391 (AD). M.J. says she's really proud of this novel. It's her first BEA Buzz book, her first Booksense pick (for September), her first starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, her first review in Entertainment Weekly, and more to come according to emails she's had.

Oh yes, and there's a booktrailer done by Vidlit, an interview done by Expanded Books, and a podcast where Carol Memmot from USA Today interviews the author. Links to all these on the book's web site.

Those are the buzz and hype bits. A lesson in how to do it.

Something from the weekend

2007-08-28T10:23:00.000+01:00

Phenix & Phenix is a firm of publishing publicists based in Austin, Texas. Their main web site contains some interesting information for published writers and for those who wannabe: they report, for instance, that their self-published client Sherrie Mathieson is about to published by Random House. Which is a nice encouraging story for first thing in the morning -- though note, please, that it is a non-fiction book. Ninety per cent of publishing is non-fiction, a statistic often overlooked amid all the razzmatazz.

More to the point, perhaps, Phenix and Phenix staff have just started a blog. This makes available further chunks of free and valuable information for writers. See, for example, the piece on how to get ink in a publishing trade journal; or how to prepare for a radio/TV interview.

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Fancy yourself as a graphic novelist? If so, go see what is on offer at Random House UK. Jonathan Cape, the Observer, and an outfit called Comica are putting up a prize of £1000 plus a full page in the Observer, and, presumably, an entree into the graphic-novel biz.

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Martin Goodman has thoughts on being reviewed, and much more, on his blog.

The reviewing policy on the GOB, by the way, is that I only review stuff that I can be reasonably enthusiastic about. Occasional exceptions are made for heavily hyped books which, imho, don't really deserve to be singled out for a big push, but have been, nevertheless.

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Linda Kelsey has some really interesting thoughts on how you not only have to write a book, but sing and dance for it as well.

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Puzzling, isn't it? C.S. Harris reflects on how she feels When Bad Things Happen to Good Writers. The reflections come in part one and part two. (Link from Chap O'Keefe n Misfit Lil.)

You enter this business at your own risk, folks. And nowadays you have no excuse for not knowing what you're letting yourself in for.

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Well, dammit, here's a pretty good offer. Novelist/playwright Susan Hill also runs a publishing company: Long Barn Books. The company's web site now offers a couple of blogs, and the new one contains information about how to submit a proposal for a book (The Quest, 28 August). Not many companies make it that easy. Agent not required. Non-fiction, on the whole, preferred.

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There's a lot to be said for niches these days. Find a niche market, write for it, collect books within that sub-genre, blog about it, and so forth. Either for fun or profit, or both.

One such niche is occupied by Paul Taylor's blog With Sword and Pen. This focuses on first edition and collectible books pertaining to the American Civil War.

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There are blogs, and blogs. Although I'm reluctant to give it publicity, here's one which rips off posts from other blogs (including one of mine), without credit, and uses them to encourage readers to click on the ads and links. (Tip-off from Debra Hamel.)

Technically, it seems, these things are known as spam blogs, or splogs. More on Wikipedia.

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Bat Segundo interviews an awful lot of writers, in more or less hour-long mp3 formats. Among the more interesting subjects recently are SF novelist William Gibson and the controversial date-rape theorist Katie Roiphe.

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Hotel St George Press is an unusual enterprise. It is is both an online, literary and arts quarterly and a new, experimental imprint of Brooklyn-based Akashic Books.

The quarterly features original fiction, artwork, short films, music, soundscapes, spoken word and secret histories; all of these occupy carefully designed rooms in an ever-expanding virtual hotel.

More recently, there are books. The first book, published in April,was not unreasonably by the Hotel St. George cofounder Aaron Petrovich: The Session. (Scroll down to the foot of the page.) This was was released in April and attracted good reviews. Now (well, October actually) there is The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales, by Alex Rose. Judging by the extract, this is an intriguing mixture of pseudo-science and well informed flights of imagination. Probably an acquired taste, but some people are certainly going to admire it.

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On Thursday nights, four English guys get together in the pub and, over a few beers, decide how the world really ought to be run if it was done on sensible lines. And they invent new products that people really do need but no one so far has had the wit to manufacture. Then they write to the good and the great and explain what's what. Then they publish the results. Allegedly.

See more on the Thursday Night web site. Dovegreyreader likes the book.

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Bear Parade, dedicated to non-profit literature, has just published Compassionate Moose, by Mazie Louise Montgomery.

This is another one which is a bit of an acquired taste, but Mazie has a voice all right. And just think: twenty years ago, the author of this book would have had to xerox a few copies, staple them together, and stand on the street corner, handing them out to people who were too shy to say no. Now she can get it on the web and weird guys in England can read it. And tell other people about it in India, and South Africa, and New Zealand. This is what's called progress. Don't underestimate it.

Compassionate Moose may not be the one which takes off and spreads faster than Ebola, but one day something will. From wholly outside the mainstream hit machine.

Pete n Di

2007-08-27T10:34:00.000+01:00

Mrs GOB and I went to London last week -- a rare event. Having an hour to spare, we wandered through Kensington Gardens.

The Gardens are the site of two interesting memorials, of a sort. I suppose that top billing these days must go to the Princess Diana memorial fountain. You can see a photograph of part of it here.

Actually the memorial isn't so much a fountain, in the ordinary sense, as a water feature. It is positioned on a slight slope, and takes the form of an approximate circle of concrete -- but concrete tarted up to look like some kind of low-grade marble. A considerable volume of water rises from underground at the top of the circle, but doesn't shoot up into the air. Instead, it moves away sharply, both left and right, rippling over a variety of cunningly shaped ridges and hollows. Then, at the bottom, the two streams meet, and the water disappears again, into an underground drain.

The fountain is quite an intriguing piece of park architecture, but quite what it has to do with Princess Diana I really don't know. Comments about it being both fast and wet would, I suppose, be quite inappropriate.

As mentioned here a while back, there are already more than 200 books about Princess Di, so when is someone going to produce one about the fountain? Or did I miss it?

More important than such frippery, however, is the far older, and, in some quarters, far more famous, statue of Peter Pan. This was erected in the park, at the expense of Sir James Barrie, in 1912.

I have several times previously mentioned Sir James Barrie and his disturbing story about Peter Pan: notably when I agreed with the eminent critic Amanda Craig in describing it as 'terrifying'. The story emerged in several versions, early in the twentieth century, but it soon became a hugely successful stage play, with a prose version to match. The edition that I have is the Everyman edition of the version of 1911, which was originally published as Peter and Wendy.

Here, to be more forthcoming, is the full note of what I scribbled in the back of my copy of Peter Pan after I had finished reading it -- well, re-reading it -- perhaps ten years ago:

Terrifying. Appalling. It is the confusion of mother/wife role, in Wendy, which is so disturbing. The story does not so much reveal, as give a horrifying glimpse of, the author's dreadful confusion of mind. Painful to contemplate. It is the embodiment of the fear of maturity -- the dread of adult responsibility -- of having to take command of one's own life.

Not the best quote for a book cover, really, is it?

Anyway, from 1904 onwards Peter Pan was famous, and the Kensington Gardens statue was commissioned by Barrie from Sir George Frampton. It took a year to create, and was erected overnight, with no opening ceremony; it was said by the Times to a gift to the young children who played in the park -- no doubt carefully supervised by their nannies.

But just look at the bloody thing. I mean, it's all right as far as it goes. Quite charmingly done. But what the hell are we to make of it -- and of the subject's progenitor?

Official sources tell us that the topmost figure of Peter himself was modelled -- loosely -- upon some photographs of six-year-old Michael Llewellyn Davies, taken by Barrie, with the boy wearing an outfit which apparently represented the author's 'ideal vision' of his character.

But, I repeat, just look at it. The boy is wearing a dress for a start. Did you ever see anything more androgynous in your life? (And it is traditional, please remember, for an actress to play the part of Pan on stage.)

The base is populated by quite a number of figures and animals. The animals are mostly unexceptionable rabbits, and squirrels, with a few mice and snails. The figures are said to be fairies, and indeed they obviously are. But am I alone in finding their wings much more insectivorous than is usually the case, and consequently slightly sinister? They remind me of flying ants -- not my favourite creature.

What I found really worrying, however, was the topmost figure, the one whose head reaches almost to Peter's knees. This figure is larger than the others, and although identified as a fairy in an authoritative source, you could certainly be forgiven for mistaking her as human.

In either case, what in the world is she doing? She appears to be staring up Peter's skirt, as if anxious to ascertain whether he is wearing any knickers; and, whether he is or is not, she appears keen to identify his gender. As well she might.

Perhaps I am taking this all too seriously. The statue is probably harmless enough. And judging by the rubbed areas, where many generations of hot little hands have stroked the bunny rabbits' heads, I dare say that most children emerge from viewing the thing without any great harm done.

But I do wonder about the sculptor, Sir George Frampton. Was he just a bit of a bumbler, with a talent for sculpture, who produced the Pan statue, pretty much to order, in return for a fee? Or was he, as at least seems possible, a much more thoughtful man, possessed of a keen insight into Barrie's personality? And perhaps, just perhaps, the man had a sense of humour.

Note to self: read him up. But this might prove difficult, I find. A man at Leeds has done a PhD thesis on him, but there's no full-length biography.

A handy starting point for Pan studies in general is the wonderful Terri Windling's essay, which has a useful bibliography at the end.

Everybody's at it

2007-08-24T11:19:00.000+01:00

The Guardian (link from booktrade.info) reports (as I imagine do most other papers) that quite a lot of Brits want to be writers. Well, hell, it looks so easy, doesn't it? And they all make so much money.

YouGov, a well known opinion-sampling agency, asked 2461 people about their ambitions in life. Almost 10% of Britons aspire to being an author, followed by sports personality, pilot, astronaut and event organiser on the list of most coveted jobs. (Event organiser?)

More women than men yearn to write, while those aged between 35 and 50, and those over 50, were most likely to dream about getting published.

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We were talking about westerns last week, and if you're interested you might like to look at Saddlebums, a new website dedicated to that genre. Opening gunshots: an interview with Brian Garfield.

My favourite quote: 'I don’t agree with those who say, “Isn’t it terrible what Hollywood did to your book.” Hollywood hasn’t done anything to my books – the books are right over here on the shelf, untouched.'

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Mark Watson is reportedly a well known UK comedian, though he wasn't known to me until he appeared as the author of A Light-hearted Look at Murder. The publisher is Chatto, which normally means literary.

Watson is a man, I now learn, who made a bit of a name for himself by performing stand-up comedy for 24 hours non-stop, at Edinburgh. Then he came back the next year and did 36 hours.

Not surprisingly, a man like that has been getting some coverage for his book. One reader tells me, however, that he found it disappointing. A case of don't give up the night job? The Times, however, thinks it's 'Packed with brilliant observations and sharp one-liners'. See what you think.

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In the US, Little Brown are publishing a debut book by Valerie Trueblood, a woman of sixty. Hope for the oldies yet, it seems. Seven Loves is the story of the seven loves in one woman's life. It moves back and forth in time, from her childhood to her eighth decade, and it 'weaves together the strands of an ordinary life made extraordinary by the complex passions that drive it.' And all like that.

Not for me (it looks a bit lit'ry, for one thing), but mature ladies might be pleased if you bought it for them. And it never hurts to make a mature lady happy, believe me. They are more grateful than most.

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The Book Depository has a new look.

Personally, I am always less than happy with front pages which are packed with information; they look overcrowded to my eye. But if I knew anything I would have got rich in the dot.com era.

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Americans are at risk of libel too. And even if they're bloggers. One case getting some airing currently is summarised on Galleycat. Some theorists hold that it's a publicity stunt, but I bet it doesn't feel that way to the blogger concerned.

So far, I have had only one mauvais quart d'heure with a lawyer, and I must say that I would prefer, on the whole, by and large, taking one thing with another, not to have any more.

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Question: What's the top-selling sex manual on Abebooks this year? Answer, a Christian guide to 'new' approaches to sexual intimacy in marriage. 'New' in this case means 1981, when the book was first published.

Also in the top ten are four Taoist books. Secrets of the East or something. Why is abroad always racier than home?

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The Everyman's Library is republishing (UK and US) some of Dashiell Hammett, with an introduction by James Ellroy.

Hammett is a famous name in crime fiction, but I never quite got on with him myself. Several of his novels were filmed, notably The Maltese Falcon, but Red Harvest I found ridiculous, and I came to the conclusion that he owed at least some of his fame to mixing with the right set. He was sort of married to the playwright Lillian Hellman, which can't have done any harm.

However, Hammett did behave bravely and honourably in standing up to McCarthy. He refused to betray his friends -- see Forster on that -- which got him blacklisted.

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According to the web sites which measure these things (don't ask me how), about 5 per cent of readers of this blog are based in India. And such readers might well be interested in a new print on demand service: Cinnamon Teal.

India has 18 officially recognized languages, hundreds of dialects and sub-languages, and many cultural differences and varying ideologies. All of which gives special relevance to the concept of print on demand. Of course, Cinnamon Teal offers the same service to those outside India, since most projects can be handled over the net. The company claims to offer a service similar to that of Lulu.com, but significantly cheaper.

Cinnamon Teal, by the way, is a division of the online bookstore Dogears Etc.

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You may perhaps have noticed a comment from Siobhan Curham the other day. Siobhan is a writer whose first four books were published by mainstream publishers, Random House and Hodder, but now finds herself reduced (or happily released?) to publishing her own. She has a web site where you can read all about it.

Denise Mina: The Field of Blood

2007-08-22T09:00:00.000+01:00

Denise Mina's The Field of Blood is as impressive a novel as I've read in some time. It is not always, however, a lot of fun to read. And it is saved from being just another unpleasant slice of life by the fact that it is a crime novel: this gives the book structure, and purpose, and renders it ultimately satisfying. The literary version of the same material would be just plain distasteful.

The Field of Blood was published in 2004, being by my count the author's fifth novel. It was identified on publication as the first in a series, and book two (The Dead Hour) came out in 2006, while Slip of the Knife has just appeared.

The principal character in Field of Blood, and in the series, is an overweight young woman called Paddy Meehan. When we first meet her it is 1981, and she is eighteen years old, working as a copy boy (sic) on a Glasgow newspaper. She still lives with her family, and has ambitions to be a journalist.

However, this is Glasgow, and it's 1981, a time and place in which sexism and religious bigotry were the order of the day. Furthermore, Paddy comes from a working-class Catholic family. The family has no expectations of her, other than that she will marry her fiance, Sean, and have children just like any other woman. And the newspaper is staffed exclusively by hard-drinking men who regard her as part of the furniture.

The opening chapter of the book describes the murder of a child, by two other children. This fictional crime is clearly based on a real-life crime in Liverpool, which you can read all about if you've the stomach for it. My stomach is medium strong, but I didn't find this happy reading, and I wasn't sure that I wanted to continue with the book. However, continue I did, and it pretty soon had me gripped tight.

Paddy, of course, begins to investigate the murder, prompted in part by the fact that one of the children accused of the crime is related to her fiance. In a complicated course of events, she falls out comprehensively with her family (and is sent to Coventry by them as a result), gets herself unengaged, loses her virginity, and very nearly gets herself killed.

She doesn't lose her Catholic faith, but that's only because she lost it years earlier, before her first communion. She goes to church to please her mother, who goes to church to please her husband, who goes to church to set a good example to his children.

Side by side with the story of fat Paddy Meehan, the teenage girl, Denise Mina tells us the story of real-life Paddy Meehan, a professional criminal who was nicely fitted up by the police for a murder that he did not commit. Eventually, after some crusading journalism and a 1976 book by Ludovic Kennedy, Meehan's conviction was overturned. Mina interviewed him when she was a law student.

As an evocation of time, place, and atmosphere, this book is, I am sure, the equal of any Booker shortlisted book, but it is also, fortunately, much more. Because it's a crime novel we have a good strong narrative thread, and we are spared the arty-farty fancypants bullshit.

We learn, of course, that children do not commit systematic, deliberate, and brutal murder without having first had some very nasty things done to them. The cycle, as is now well understood, is self-perpetuating.

Strongly recommended, but it's dark stuff. It remains to be seen how the series develops, but I will certainly be having a look in due course.

More on the author's web site.

A summer of smart publicity

2007-08-21T11:24:00.000+01:00

Ian Rankin has been awfully busy this summer, and has generated lots of newspaper inches by a few well timed and well placed remarks. The cleverest thing about this personal drum-beating is that it all seems, superficially, to be about other people. But note, if you will, that I. Rankin Esquire, creator of Rebus, gets lots of mentions along the way.

First there was the Val McDermid business, noted here on Sunday. Wouldn't surprise me if Ian and Val cooked that one up over a couple of drinks.

Then there was his statement, made to an audience of 600 at the Edinburgh book festival, that his wife had seen J.K. Rowling back where she started out, namely, scribbling furiously on the text of a new novel in an Edinburgh coffee house. That one worked wonderfully well. See for instance, the Sunday Times.

All of that was smart enough. But hell, it doesn't stop there. The Rowling story turned out to be a double whammy.

When contacted by the Guardian, for further details of the J.K. goes in for crime story, Rankin revealed that he had made the whole thing up. And, once again, the headline is about Rowling, catching everyone's eye. But the picture is of Rankin. (Link from the Bookseller.)

By the way, I got thumped by a feminist commenter last week, for referring to Val McDermid as a big, heavy, butch-looking lesbian, all of which she undeniably is. 'I notice you don't comment on Rankin's looks,' said LizH, with an audible sniff, before flouncing off to check up on some other sexist blogger.

Well, OK, since then I've done some research. And I can now reveal (exclusively) that Ian Rankin is actually an albino dwarf. Three foot six in his Addabit shoes (as endorsed by Tom Cruise). Not many people know that.

Yes, I do realise that he doesn't look like an albino dwarf, in his newspaper pictures. That's because he uses a body double for his publicity photos and public appearances. You would too, if you had to stand on a box and buy several items from Max Factor every time you wanted to make a speech.

The joy of subsidy and other myths

2007-08-19T15:17:00.000+01:00

You may have gathered that I do not approve of the subsidy of the arts from public funds. It's not a simple matter, but basically that's my view. Also, I am usually unimpressed by literary reputation.

It is always, I suppose, heartwarming to find people who agree with me; but it is also distressing, frankly (especially for a sensitive chap such as myself, who has led a very sheltered life), to discover the snarling, rabid hatred with which some people despise that which I merely (in my mild-mannered way) dislike.

These thoughts are prompted by a visit to The Lumber Room, where Elberry has posted a piece about literary fame. I particularly like the story about Yeats's response to being told, at four o'clock in the morning, that he'd won the Nobel prize: he opened one eye and said, 'How much?'

But what really catches the eye in The Lumber Room is the comment from one gravely disillusioned Canadian, which runs as follows:

Right on the mark. Living in Canada, where there has never been such an industry in the government support of “approved” fiction writers, I can assure you that the decision making process on all these awards is the same: it is an incestuous butt-fuck procedure.
The group that votes are always the same who have a personal stake in the determined “short list.” Either government supported “businesses” who do no real business, or a certain crew who give or are given government grants. It is all very disappointing.
I will give you an example of the government slash publishing industry in Canada. A few years ago, there was a large book selling chain, by the name of Sandpiper Books. Sandpiper was instrumental in the giving of numerous awards during the 1990s. Sandpiper also received most of its stock from two or three government sponsored publishing houses, one being Coach Hill Press, which continues to operate.
Sandpiper had a nice deal with Coach Hill. Coach Hill provided Sandpiper its stock absolutely free–accepting a cut of the sales, if a book actually sold. If a book did not, then it was returned to Coach Hill with no penalty. This remarkable financial situation was managed because Coach Hill Press received $10 million yearly from
the government to support “Canadian Literature.”
This was nice for selected, approved writers of the Canadian establishment. It appeared, for the general public, that their books were important, as they were on the shelves of dozens of stores across the country. The writers could then pat themselves on the back, gather for important readings and apply for their grants, all with the appearance of being part of the business community.
In 1999 the government pulled three quarters of Coach Hill’s funding. Coach Hill, in turn, could not provide the considerable number of books Sandpiper needed to fill their shelves. Sandpiper went out of business within a few months.
It’s all crap. Every bit of it.

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Wanna make a bit of a splash? Get your name in the papers? Sell books? If so, make a provocative statement in a public place on a slow day for news, and the papers will love you for ever. Run with it for weeks, they will.

Example: Ian Rankin (creator of Inspector Rebus) did his best to generate copy with a statement made in an interview last year that women crime writers in general, and lesbians in particular, are more bloodthirsty than men.

'The people writing the most graphic novels today are women,' said Rankin. 'They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.'

No one, it seems, took a lot of notice at the time, but Val McDermid is no sort of fool. Come her appearance at the Edinburgh book festival, she trotted out the Rankin quote and beat him up for it. Result: lots of coverage.

I don't wish to be rude or sexist, but McDermid herself is a big, heavy, butch-looking lesbian, as well as a very successful crime writer. If you think that description is rude, all I can say is that (a) she's made no secret of being a lesbian, and (b) I saw her on telly the other night, and she is big, heavy and butch-looking. I sure as hell wouldn't want to annoy her in a dark alley. But she is dead right, of course, when she says that Rankin is talking 'arrant nonsense'.

Try the Guardian. And some comments on the Guardian blog. Link from booktrade.info.

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June Austin is the author of Genesis of Man, a self-published non-fiction book mentioned here a while back, and she has been spending what seems like a huge amount of time and energy marketing her book. This is the only way, one gathers, to achieve significant sales, though unfortunately the expenditure of time and effort does not guarantee significant sales.

Anyway, June has been slogging away. Like any well organised author, she has her own web site, where you can learn more about her. She works through Authors On-line, which is a provider of services for self-publishers on a POD basis.

June's achievements will sound modest enough compared to those of any even halfway competent trade publisher, but will doubtless make a big difference to her sales. She has managed to persuade book distributors Gardners to handle her book on a sale or return basis, and she has had several reviews in magazines such as Nexus (circulation 100,000). The Self-Publishing Magazine has not only reviewed her, but asked her to write an article for them about how she operates.

How she operates, by the way, involves working her way through a list of Waterstone's and Borders shops, ringing them up, and asking them to stock her book. So far, 1 in 5 of the shops has agreed, and she has been asked to do signings and/or talks in two of them. She plans to start contacting universities shortly.

As I say, time and energy.

The book, by the way, is a sort of antidote to Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion.

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The BBC reports that staff in an Australian bookshop failed to recognise Stephen King, and when he started to sign copies of his books thought that he was a vandal, defacing the stock.

Well, hey, that's understandable, isn't it? Could happen to anyone. King is only just about the world's biggest-selling author. (Link from Publishers Lunch.) You and I, if we'd seen him at it, we would probably have thought he was just another four-eyed git too.

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CreateSpace.com, an arm of Amazon.com, has announced the launch of a new online Books on Demand service. The company is no longer charging setup fees for books, audio CDs and DVDs. As a result, 'Authors, filmmakers and musicians can now offer their works to millions of customers on Amazon.com, CreateSpace.com and via their own free customizable eStore without any inventory, setup fees or minimum orders.'

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Publishers Lunch tells us that a publisher has discovered the wheel.

In a letter to agents and authors, Random House Audio Group publisher Madeline McIntosh has put forward the amazing idea that digital rights management systems are no help to anyone and won't work anyway.

Now where have I heard that before?

More short reviews

2007-08-17T09:42:00.000+01:00

Martin Rundkvist: Scholarly Journals between the Past and the Future

Academia is pretty big business these days. There are many more people earning their living as lecturers and professors than there ever have been before, and they all prosper according to the extent to which they publish the results of their 'original research'.

Sorry. Excuse my absence for the last five minutes, but I had to gather myself together after laughing uncontrollably. Tears dripped on to the keyboard and caused a temporary short.

Where was I? Oh yes, talking about the need to publish research. Yes, you see, academics need to write 'papers', of one sort or another, and get them published, preferably in reputable journals which are 'refereed' (as it's called) by world-class performers in that particular field of enquiry, such as physics or economics. The more papers they write, the more likely they are to get promoted, and the more likely their universities are to become prestigious, and hence rich and powerful.

You may think that's a crude overstatement but it ain't. Here in England, academics, and their departments, are actually subjected to periodic assessment, on a points-scoring basis. Money is handed out accordingly. If you haven't published much, your career withers and dies, your head of department will hate you, other departments will talk about closing you down and taking all your student places and badly used resources for their own excellent purposes.... And so forth.

What fun it all is. Hence it has been known for decades that academics need journals. Robert Maxwell was the first to recognise, at least forty years ago, that there was a market here. So he created lots of new academic journals, through his firm Pergamon Press. Academics insisted that their libraries should stock them, naturally. And then Cap'n Bob put the price up. And up. And up. And up. And sued anyone who objected for libel.

Which brings us to the collection of papers which Martin Rundkvist has edited, Scholarly Journals between the Past and the Future (ISBN 978-91-7402-368-8; and ISSN 0348-1433). This is a collection of papers delivered at a conference at the premises of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters and Antiquities in April 2006.

The main theme of this collection is the change, or potential change, from paper to online publishing. This has, as you will appreciate, substantial implications, not least for the publishers of paper journals. The publishers -- some of them -- have been making very juicy profits here for decades, and now it looks as if it might all go out of the window.

There are also massive implications for librarians. If everything, or even major chunks of it, is made available online, there will no longer be a need for miles and miles of shelving, as the years of thick, heavy volumes accumulate. Those who make a penny or two from binding 12 monthly issues into one volume will also lose out. And so on.

My guess is that we will move steadily towards the online model, and a damn good thing too. But whatever happens it will be necessary to maintain 'standards'. In other words, even an online journal will still need to be refereed by leaders in the field. Otherwise how will anyone know which journals are prestigious, and which researchers deserve to be given the most money to go on producing more and more papers, and pounding out research and...

What's that? Teaching. Oh yes. Somebody does some teaching. Somewhere. Can't immediately think who, but there must be a few grad students giving lectures. I think. Somewhere. Ask the Bursar.

Jim Kelly: The Skeleton Man

Jim Kelly first turned up about five years ago with The Water Clock, a crime novel which was reviewed here on 4 May 2004. I see that I also covered his second, The Fire Baby, on 11 January 2005. Another book, The Coldest Blood, won the CWA Bodies in the Library Dagger, and The Skeleton Man is actually Kelly's fifth. All of these books are set in the same place and feature the same detective.

The setting is the Fen country in the east of England. This is territory that I know well, but I can't say that I like it much. It is flat country, much of it reclaimed from the sea: treeless, featureless, and to my eye sinister. A ten-foot mound is a hill, and likely to be the site of a church. Houses are few, the people inbred and suspicious. Much of the land is below sea-level, and held back by inadequate defences (a bit like New Orleans); and even if you can't see it you are conscious (well I am, anyway), of the sea's presence over the horizon. As often as not the sea, when you do see it, is steely-grey and malevolent, like some cruel monster, just waiting to take back what it owns. (Last major flood: 1953).

Kelly's detective is a journalist, Philip Dryden, who comes complete with a wife in a wheelchair and a taxi driver as his Watson.

Right up my street then. In a way. But for the first 80 pages or so I wondered if Kelly was having an off day, because it was all a bit pedestrian and, frankly, dull. But then things perked up markedly, and from then on I had no complaints. The ending strains the old credulity a bit -- but hey, the main man's a journalist, right? And we all know that journalists will do anything for a story.

English crime fiction of a high order. And Kelly has some competition, because Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham set books in this sort of area.

This is a very nicely printed book, by the way. Royal octavo, 13.5/16 pt Garamond.

James Aach: Rad Decision

These are supposed to be short reviews, and we're not doing very well so far, so let's do better.

Rad Decision is a novel written by an author who worked in the US nuclear-power industry for twenty years, and it's about -- naturally -- espionage and disaster in the real world of atomic energy.

If you've got an uncle or a grandad who's a retired engineer, and doesn't read novels because they're arty-farty and time-wasting, then this might be just the thing for his birthday present. More details on the book's web site.

Rosemary Ingham: Where the Truth Lies

Hmm. Not sure that I approve of this one, in principle.

The problem is, you see, that I have always considered it bad policy to write a novel about an institution in which you have yourself spent time. Yes, yes, I know the old adage about 'Write what you know'. But I have always taken the view that it's much better -- not to mention safer -- to write pure fiction, if necessary doing lots of research.

The danger lies, you see, in our old friend the law of libel. I don't want to tempt fate, but it says on the dust jacket of this one (a Macmillan New Writing book, by the way) that Rosemary Ingham, now retired, was formerly the Head of an English comprehensive school (= high school, for Americans). And what's her novel about? It's about the head of a comprehensive school.

Isabel Lincoln, single parent of teenage children, has a tough job running a London comprehensive. Her Deputy may be plotting against her. Her Second Deputy shares her bed. And then there are problems with teenage girls...

All very skilful and interesting I dare say. An intriguing exploration of truth and falsehood, professional conflicts, and a lot more. But the modus operandi makes me nervous. No matter how carefully you avoid (you hope) describing real people, by changing their age, hair colour, gender, sexual orientation, people who knew you will still say: Oh yes, that's really a portrait of old Bloggins.

And if you make old Bloggins a villain, when in real life he was a pussy cat.... It's far worse. All one can depend upon, or hope for, is that Bloggins may not recognise himself.

The English playwright Ben Travers only once portrayed a real person in his plays -- an ex-Army man, Colonel (we'll call him) Smithers -- and it troubled his conscience. One day Travers was out walking and he saw the Colonel approaching him. His heart sank, especially when the Colonel demanded a word.

'Now look here, Travers,' spluttered the Colonel, 'I've seen that new play of yours, and I must say I take exception to it. Anyone can see that the military chappie in your play is based on Major Robertson, down the road, and I think that's going too far. Don't do it again.'

Travers promised, on his honour, that he never would.

Sheikh it about

2007-08-16T10:36:00.000+01:00

Lori at Bonusbooks has been keeping an eye on the cowardy-custard behaviour of Cambridge University Press, mentioned here recently.

CUP, you will recall, pulped a book, apologised, and paid over some money. Why? Because a Saudi billionaire threatened to sue the arse off them via England's libel laws.

Not surprisingly, this has attracted some attention worldwide. Latest comment appears in the Weekly Standard. This retells the story, and quotes the two authors of Alms for Jihad, the book which has generated the row.

The book's authors are Americans, and one of them points out that 'the British and American libel laws are as different as night and day.'

The Weekly Standard's article also looks back at similar cases involving this same Sheikh of Araby. There are, apparently, at least 36 of them. Either this man is much maligned, and the innocent victim of a hate campaign, or else he's got something to hide. Um... Scratches head and thinks hard. Which could it be?

There is further discussion of this worrying situation on Hot Air. And there is also a really intriguing right-wing view of the affair on Human Events, which describes itself as 'Leading the [US] Conservative Movement since 1944'. The author of the article is a Mr McCarthy. No, you mustn't laugh.

Well, all I can say is that things have come to a pretty pass if the Conservative right-wing finds itself obliged to defend the liberal press establishment. In this case, the argument seems to be that the bastards don't deserve to be defended, really, but a chap with principles has to make certain things clear. And the conclusion?

It is crucially important to our development of a sound national counterterrorism policy that good-faith journalists are not silenced by Saudi intimidation. American courts ought to crack down on Mahfouz’s pettifoggery and make him feel the consequences of his litigiousness.... Moreover, the current administration or the next one, regardless of party, should be diplomatically pressing the Saudis to desist from, and the Brits to bar libel tourism directed at, American journalists.
Whether or not the American media deserve such protections, the American people surely do.

As a final comment, perhaps it's worth mentioning that those who (ab)use the UK libel laws on a regular and persistent basis, mainly to cover up things they don't want anyone to know, eventually discover that the effect is quite the reverse. Example: Robert Maxwell, a heavyweight bully who distributed writs at the least provocation. A few years of that, and people twig what is going on. What is more, they begin to poke around in your affairs even more intrusively. The outcome? Wasn't there something about a yacht?

*
The Creative Commons blog alerts me to a new site where you can find short stories, and more, published under a Creative Commons licence. Titled Ten Car Train, the web site's mission statement tells readers that 'You should read these pieces in their entirety while at work or when someone is paying you to do something else.'

So far so good. However.... It seems that the web site's offerings are provided by a group of former MFA students, which may be a slight drawback, and I can see no immediate way for anyone else to post stuff there.

*
Edmond Clay, author of the Eros and Psyche dialogue, points out to me a poem about the English language. Several sources on the web; here's one from Humble Apostrophe, a site which also has all sorts of other stuff about the language.

The poem is modestly amusing, but would be best employed, I think, as an aid to those who teach English as a foreign language.

*
By the way, Keith Chapman aka Chap O'Keefe, the author of Misfit Lil, reviewed here Wednesday, points me to a few interesting bits and pieces.

Coincidentally to my piece about The New Intimacy, writer Candice Proctor/C. S. Harris has run a couple of posts on her blog: 'Are Book Trailers the New Blog?' (1 August) and 'Book Videos, Part Two' (2 August).

Keith also liked the Newsweek piece about Elmore Leonard, and his forthcoming Ten Rules of Writing, which should indeed be a fun read. Newsweek's favourite among the rules was: 'If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.'

Newsweek also went on to give Leonard's selection for 'My five most important books'. Among them was For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. Keith Chapman adds that aspects of his latest Misfit Lil story, Misfit Lil Fights Back, were also inspired by Hemingway, in his case the famous short story The Killers; this was filmed in 1965 starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes and Ronald Reagan.

Hemingway (wherever he is) and movie buffs won't recognize the characters or the setting in Keith's western, but some points of the plot situation confronting the unorthodox Miss Lilian Goodnight may be familiar.

For those who want to learn more about the Robert Hale western series, including info on the cover designs, there's an online bi-monthly magazine, Black Horse Extra. Try the Hoofprints section.

Short reviews

2007-08-15T09:12:00.000+01:00

They deserve longer, but...

Ken Gelder: Popular Fiction

In a lifetime of reading (or, more often, dipping into) academic books about the novel, I have found only a handful which are of the slightest practical value. This is one of them, and I warmly recommend it to anyone who is either writing or publishing commercial fiction.

The subtitle of Ken Gelder's Popular Fiction is 'The logics and practices of a literary field.' The publisher is Routledge. There's a hardcover version (£50 in the UK) and a paperback (£15.99). The book first appeared in 2004. Ken Gelder teaches at the University of Melbourne.

While I am enthusiastic about the contents of Popular Fiction, I have a heartfelt and bitter complaint to make about the publisher.

In the first place, the print is too damn small. What the hell is it -- eight point? Nine if it's lucky. Far too small, anyway. And all done to reduce costs, of course. The result is a nasty, cheap, shoddy piece of work which is a disgrace to its publisher and does no favours to the author.

And don't lecture me about how hard it is to make academic books pay. I know all about that. I ran an academic publisher for about ten years. In that time, I tried not to publish a book unless I thought it would still be read in fifty years, and since it would be read several decades hence I made sure it was printed in a format which would last.

The cover is no better than the insides. A book about popular fiction -- even an academic book -- surely offers an opportunity to feature a lurid cover: something from a 1930s gangster novel, or a bodice-ripping romance. But no - no one at Routledge had the wit to think of that.

There is much in this book which runs counter to the perceived wisdom of the Eng. Lit. brigade. For example, the author supports the view that romantic fiction should not sensibly be viewed as escapist. Gelder quotes with approval the idea that it is feminism which is remote from women's lives, not romance. 'Romance,' he says, 'can indeed sit closer to women readers' actual lives and aspirations than one might at first imagine.'

Good on yer, Ken.

Chap O'Keefe: Misfit Lil Fights Back

What a terrific name for a character, eh?

This book belongs to an endangered species: the western. It's published by Robert Hale, who is one of the few remaining publishers who still dabble in this genre.

Hale is a firm which sells (I would guess) almost exclusively to the UK library market, which these days has dwindled almost to vanishing point. Hale have always laid down pretty tight specifications for their books. Forty years ago the preferred length was 55,000 words, and this one is about 35,000 -- presumably, as with the book above, to keep costs down. What is more, I see that all the other recent westerns put out by Hale are the same length: 160 pages.

The binding is a sort of hardback -- one of those library bindings in which the cover illustration is laminated on to the card covers. Incidentally, the cover illustration is terrific too.

As for the story: totally professional, as you would expect, and a lot of fun. By my count, Misfit Lil Fights Back is the author's sixteenth book, so he knows how to do the job. Ms Lil has appeared in the series before, and doubtless will again.

Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick is a bigger name now than he was when he died, in 1982. In recent years his work has been 'discovered' by Hollywood, leading to movies such as Blade Runner and Total Recall.

The Man in the High Castle is often spoken of as Dick's best novel. It is the only one of his books to win a Hugo award (for best science-fiction novel), and according to Wikipedia it is considered a defining novel of the alternate history sub-genre. (I prefer the term alternative history myself.)

The novel (first published in 1962) asks us to assume that America was on the losing side in World War II, and that the Japanese control the western parts of America, while the Germans dominate the east. It's an intriguing premise, and Dick certainly makes the most of it.

To my mind, the most interesting aspect of the book is the way in which he manages to convey the fact that his American citizens, now firmly under the thumb of the Japanese, have unconsciously adopted as their norm a manner of speech which reflects the way in which the Japanese speak English.

Dick being Dick, of course, he also throws in all sorts of other ideas. He offers a reference to an alternative-history novel in which Roosevelt, instead of being assassinated (as in Dick's book), survives and makes America strong again, so that Germany and Japan actually lose the war. Complicated, isn't it?

Mr Dick's universe is also one in which Goebbels was a novelist. And funnily enough, I find that it's true -- in our universe. I never knew that before.

Mark Gatiss: The Devil in Amber

This is an odd one.

Mark Gatiss is a British comedy actor, one of the team in The League of Gentlemen. And now he writes novels. The blurb of this one describes him as the twenty-seventh most dangerous man in Islington -- a title for which there is, perhaps surprisingly, a great deal of competition.

The Devil in Amber is an affectionate... what? Spoof? Pastiche? Take-off? Tribute to? In any case, it is written in the style of, and in homage to, the kind of 1920s and 1930s thriller which was written by such writers as Sapper. It's a thriller -- described on the title page as a shocker -- and it's the second book to feature Gatiss's hero, Lucifer Box.

Box is a kind of precursor of Bond. Unlike Bond he is bisexual, and extremely active with it. Not only is the text written in 1920s style, but the spelling follows suit: school-girl, for instance, with a hyphen. And we get unusual words, such as frowst. In other words, what we have here is an unusually literate and intelligent author with a serious command of the language and the medium.

Given the author's history, we should not be surprised to find that he summons up some very strange characters indeed. Mrs Croup is my favourite: a sort of geriatric Rosa Klebb, when needs must, and randy with it.

There are many built-in tributes to other great thriller writers of the period in which this book is set. Box's servant, for example, is much the same person as Albert Campion's Lugg, only female.

It's all schoolboy stuff, but extremely well done of its kind and consistently entertaining. Very English, however, and it helps if you read widely as a schoolboy some sixty or seventy years ago.

Oh woe

2007-08-13T09:03:00.001+01:00

What have I always said? Hmm? Writing is never easy. When faced with the urge to write something, you should always do what Sir Billy Butlin used to do when feeling the urge to take some exercise: lie down until the feeling wears off.

If you live in England, the writing of anything is complicated by the laws of libel. As indicated here in more posts than I care to contemplate, writing either fiction or non-fiction is a hazardous business from that point of view.

Peter Carter-Ruck was England's most famous and successful libel lawyer. His advice to writers was simple. To be certain that you will never be liable to pay damages for libel, you should 'refrain from writing, printing or publishing or distributing any written matter of whatsoever nature.'

You may have thought, in your innocence, that if you stuck to non-fiction you wouldn't have any trouble. After all, a fact is a fact, right?

Wrong. As usual. In America the laws on libel are less stringent than they are here -- or so one has been led to believe; hence libel tourism -- but apparently there is now a growing movement towards being super cautious and careful and checking everything and getting permission from everyone, and... Oh, forget it.

For a prime example, visit M.J. Rose's blog, where guest writer Dr Susan O'Doherty describes, in painful detail, what it feels like to be messed around by people who have been reading the health and safety handbook and taking it seriously.

That way lies madness. As I say, lie down until you feel better.

*

I get an email telling me that I might like to look at Schvoong.com, which offers the opportunity to download term papers, essays and the like. Presumably this is a service for students who want someone else to do the work for them. Those who write the term papers, essays, et cetera, earn some income from the site, varying according to the popularity of what they have written. The home page says that 109,077 writers are earning royalties already.

So, OK, not too impressed so far, but I go to the page which offers essays on novels. And the first item which comes up (on my visit) is an essay about Tolstoy's War and Peace. And the extract, which is supposed to entice me to read more, goes as follows:

In the novel what has been done for our present and future generations are a great asset for human civilization for peace and conflict resolving.

Hmm. Shome mishtake here, shurely, I think to myself. So, mad impetuous fool that I am, I click to read more. And it really doesn't get any better.

I decide to sample the History section, and I come across a piece on Germany and the Second World War. I am not kidding when I say that I've read essays by twelve-year-old boys which were better than this. Much. English is evidently not the author's first language. Neither is anything else, by the looks of it.

*
In the old days, what did you do if your business went bust? You started again in your wife's name.

Something similar seems to have happened to Aultbea Publishing, mentioned here many a time, usually with a sigh. The operation seems to have resurfaced as Script Publishing Ltd.

Libby Rees is still listed as one of the authors. She, you may recall, wrote a 'book' about how she coped with her parents' divorce. Six-year-old Christopher Beale, on the other hand, seems to have vanished, as has the young lady who started it all off, Emma Maree Urquhart. Charles Faulkner is again listed as Owner.

Funnily enough, the firm's latest publication, by three brothers, hasn't attracted the national publicity that many other Aultbea authors enjoyed. Can Mr Faulkner be losing his touch?

*
Not that I mind being called a pompous ass, but I am intrigued as to who might be organising a little campaign in defence of John Twelve Hawks. People, you see, are still writing comments in response to my less than impressed review of The Traveller, even though it appeared nearly two years ago.

Or perhaps I am over-sensitive. Perhaps these comments are not being orchestrated at all. Perhaps it's because of Google. I just typed "John Twelve Hawks" into Google, and my 2005 post came out fifth in a list of 142,000 references. Go figure.

A similar situation applies in relation to Kathy O'Beirne. Type her name into Google and my post of 20 September 2006 comes out top of 61,100. I think this is probably a function of the fact that Blogger is owned by Google.

*
The Sunday Telegraph advises you to sell your WH Smith shares. 'The retail sector is not a good place to be at the moment... Although WH Smith management, under chief executive Kate Swann, has an excellent track record of delivering profit, observers point out that UK high street sales remain weak.'

*
Dale Slamma tells us that the Australian Society of Authors is none too amused by the actions of Angus and Robertson (see last Thursday).

*
In the late nineteenth century, Professor Meiklejohn wrote An Outline of the History of English Literature. My copy is the twentieth edition, 1905. In a general clearout of old books, I am about to get rid of it.

Before dumping it, however, I noticed that I had particularly marked page 51. This tells the story of William Collins (1721-1759), a poet and friend of Dr Johnson. His Odes, says the Professor, appeared in 1747. 'The volume fell still-born from the press: not a single copy was sold; no one bought, read, or noticed it. In a fit of furious despair, the unhappy author called in the whole edition and burnt every copy with his own hands.'

And yet, Meiklejohn adds, this book was, with the single exception of the work of Burns, 'the truest poetry that had appeared in the whole of the eighteenth century.'

There must be a moral here somewhere. If only I could work out what it is.

Failure, widgets, and more

2007-08-10T10:32:00.000+01:00

A while back I mentioned a forthcoming interview with Josh Giddings, the author of Failure, on NPR's 'Weekend Edition Sunday'. Now he tells me that scheduled interview with has been cancelled due to a family emergency just suffered by the host, Liane Hansen. This is an almost inevitable fate, one might think, for a book entitled Failure.

*
Over at Jane Holland's blog, she recently published a piece about whether one should write in the white-hot heat of passion, so to speak, or whether it's best to write with a more detached, objective approach. I'm a supporter of the latter method myself, as is she, but the former has its advocates.

One of the commenters on Ms Holland's essay is Edmond Clay, who refers you across, by way of example, to his own imagined dialogue between Eros and Psyche.

Also, if you've ever wondered about the backstory of Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, Edmond (writing as The Griffin), has an answer.

On the same Eros and Psyche web page you will also find links to two sets of hints on how to win the love of a woman.

*
Long-tail theory tells us that no matter how obscure or specialised your taste (Gor novels, anyone? Westerns?) there is a book for you somewhere. Suppose, for example, you fancy reading a free-verse novel about Californian werewolves. No problem, sir or madam, Mr Rundkvist has found one for you. Further information about Sharp Teeth can be found in the New Statesman.

*
John Howard's success may give some encouragement to self-publishers. His children's book The Key to Chintak has enjoyed substantial sales (for a self-published book) in the UK. Nielsen Bookscan's data show it as the second best selling children's paperback amongst small publishers in the second quarter of last year. The Nielsen's Small Publisher list contains the likes of Faber so John is well pleased.

Furthermore, Chintak was the only self-published book in the top 500 for the whole year, finishing in 25th place. It is worth pointing out that in addition to the sales recorded by Nielsen, John sold just as many books again direct into schools, libraries, independents, book clubs, et cetera.

Now he has sold Italian rights to Mondadori. Details of this, and a lot more, on his web site.

*
I've only ever had one widget, and it didn't work so the hell with 'em. You may be more tolerant. Now you can get one which gives you videos of authors talking. Coming soon: authors who juggle, authors who tap dance, authors who cook spaghetti for their Italian mothers-in-law....

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Once there was (and probably still is) a series of children's books called Write Your Own Adventure. This allowed kids to have a story go in whichever direction they preferred. Now adults can do it too, through interactive fiction as offered by Malinche Entertainment.

*
Despite what is said above, some videos which are developed to arouse interest in books are works of art in themselves. To see a quite exceptional piece of computer graphics, take a look at the video created by Ian Irvine's son Simon, to publicise the latest book about Runcible Jones.

The arrogance of Angus and Robertson

2007-08-09T14:32:00.001+01:00

This snippet deserves a post of its own.

Periodically there are rows in the UK about the charges that the big book chains impose upon publishers if the publishers want their books to have any kind of prominence. See, for example, my post of 26 October 2004.

Now there's one hell of a row in full spate in Australia -- reported by the Sydney Morning Herald. Angus and Robertson get a smart kick in the balls in response to their arrogance. So far, as I write this, 68 steaming comments. Many more, I suspect, by the time you read this.

Link from Anastasia.

Mostly cobblers but sometimes not

2007-08-09T09:38:00.000+01:00

Aaron Shepard is a smart cookie. Mentioned here as the author of Aiming at Amazon, and other books, he has also developed a software tool for checking your sales position on Amazon. What's more, he has got himself featured in the New York Times. And, as you would expect from a smart cookie, he has a pile of Aiming at Amazon books right where the camera will see them. Oh yes.

The NYT story is mostly cobblers, with its claim that 'many' writers can't get on with writing because they're obsessively checking their ranking -- but hey, this is a newspaper story, right? What the hell do you expect?

One of my books is listed with a sales rank of 4,457,051. I didn't think Amazon listed as many books as that. And it's got a five-star review, too. No, I didn't. That would be naughty.

*
If you care about writing for the theatre (and there is life outside books, you know), you should keep an eye on Michael Coveney's blog. Coveney is a former theatre critic of the Daily Mail. He was recommended to me by Madame Arcati, who knows everyone, of course. Coveney writes about the UK theatre scene, but it's also relevant in you live in the US (I guess), as London seems to provide quite a lot of Broadway product.

*
If you care about the Booker -- and I must confess that I don't -- then you should know that details of the 2007 long list have been published. Articles in most papers, but here's the Guardian.

When reading some of the publicity details of these books, I am struck, not for the first time, by the wonder of it all. Most of the long-listed books are published by 'major' companies, whose primary objective, naturally, is to make profits. But, if you set aside the remote chance of one of these books winning the Booker, then publication begins to look like an act of charity rather than a rational commercial decision.

Who, for instance, would ever bother to read The Gathering, by Irish author Anne Enright? It's described by the Observer as 'a gruelling portrait of a dysfunctional Dublin family', and is praised for its 'exhilarating bleakness of tone'. Bleakness of tone? Exhilarating? Personally I would have to be paid a substantial fee even to contemplate it.

What saves the publishers' bacon, of course, is the bizarre illusion, fostered on a thousand and one Eng. Lit. courses, that literary fiction is somehow superior to any other kind, and that to be seen reading such is to increase one's standing with one's fellow men. Public endorsement by the Booker judges somehow enhances this effect, leading people to expend money which could much better be spent on a round of drinks for a few friends.

Truth is, of course, that, for some of us, the sight of someone reading a Booker nominee merely generates a politely suppressed snigger. We nudge our friends. 'Look,' we say. 'Another sucker.'

Fair's fair

2007-08-06T10:58:00.001+01:00

It takes all sorts.

I read in the Publishers Lunch newsletter that Richard Curtis (a smart NY agent) has sold (actually resold) John Norman's 26 Gor books to Rob Simpson of Dark Horse Books.

The books are described by PL as a 'controversial science fiction world chronicling dominant men and submissive women', the action taking place on the imaginary planet Gor.

The phrasing made me smile a bit. I have never read a Gor novel, but they're famous in a modest sort of way. There is, for instance, a web site set up by and for fans of the series: it grew out of one woman's (note that, please) love for the series. But what amuses me (somewhat) is the way people wriggle and squirm when discussing these novels.

The Gor books began to appear in 1967, and they soon centred on the sado-masochistic relationship between men and women on the planet Gor. Actually it would be more accurate (apparently) to speak of the relationship between men and slave girls on the planet Gor.

Eric Lindh's essay on the series gives you a reasonably concise insight into what is on offer, and it nicely illustrates the difficulty which nice, decent, law-abiding, church-going liberals have with this kind of thing.

On the one hand, our nice et cetera liberals believe in a free press and free speech, and they oppose censorship and so forth. But here we have a series which, to quote Lindh, 'orbit[s] around uncomfortably nasty sexual humiliation of women. Sure, this has been an (often implied) element of most weird heroics, from Conan on, but Norman goes over the line that many readers would find acceptable. Elaborate set pieces of sexual torture and slavery are the essential core of the stories; they are not plot devices insomuch as they become the plot. Sadism, rape, and violence are repeated ad nauseum (sic).'

And yet, you see, Lindh also feels it necessary to point out (because he is a fair-minded nice et cetera liberal) the following uncomfortable fact: 'The creepy thing is that Norman has touched quite a chord out there. The books are tremendously successful, and not just among men. A bookseller who hazarded some statistics had at least half of his sales being made to women.'

Oh dear oh dear. This is all very distressing, isn't it? At least it is if you're one of the many who haven't yet got their head round the general principle.

And the principle is this: If you want to publish your own work uncensored -- unmodified by political correctness, religious dogma, or any one of a thousand other forces which are all too ready to interfere with what you have to say -- then you have to accept that the reciprocal applies. It other words, you have to accept that other people are going to write, publish, and read, material of which you heartily disapprove. Simple as that.

But oh what heartache it causes.

Portents and examples to us all

2007-08-05T14:07:00.000+01:00

I have remarked here more than once that the unpublished writers who plaster their work with large copyright signs, and warnings that their precious manuscript must not be xeroxed without permission, are simply labelling themselves as rank amateurs.

There is a serious copyright problem, and I would not wish to underestimate it, but it doesn't concern the unpublished. And for an inkling of how big this problem is, see the report in the International Herald Tribune, about various fake Harry Potters in Chinese. (Link from Seoul Man and David Isaak.)

The article concentrates on young Harry, but my guess is that there is an equally big problem about the piracy of textbooks, particularly in science and technology.

Piracy on this scale can only be tackled by big-time publishers with enough money to pay for big-time international intellectual-property lawyers. The average writer can safely forget all about it.

The average writer's main problem is obscurity, not the theft of copyright.

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If you're interested in the Old West and the Wild West, then Celia Hayes has just the book for you. Based on real-life events, To Truckee's Trail tells the story of an early group of pioneers on the California wagon-train trail.

More news on Celia's other books can be found on her web site.

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Dr Tanya Byron is a UK Clinical Psychologist, specialising in the care of children. Unlike many 'experts' she is eminently respectable and sensible with it, imho.

Not the least of her virtues, again in my estimation, is the fact that, having hosted a number of very successful TV programmes about handling difficult children, she has recently decided not to do any more, on the grounds that they really aren't very helpful to the children. She will, however, continue to offer advice to parents and others in the columns of the Times.

Meantime, Tanya Byron has a book out soon: Your Child, Your Way appears from Michael Joseph on 6 September. Better then Spock, I would lay odds.

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London-based Virgin Books has just opened a new outpost on Bleecker Street (New York). They are about to start publishing original US titles. Their mission, they say, 'is to publish authors -- be they novelists, memoirists, humorists or former hooligans -- who have something new and engaging to say about popular culture. And, being Virgin, we have a special affinity for the up-and-coming, the underdog, and the unconventional.'

The catalog(ue) is available online, of course. (Actually quite a few aren't -- see Mark Thwaite -- thus demonstrating that some publishers have a death wish.) So you can decide for yourself whether Virgin Books US is your thing or not. Personally I just wonder how anyone can find anything 'new and engaging' to say about Princess Diana. But who knows -- maybe the guy has.

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Scott Stein is the author of the novel Mean Martin Manning (published by ENC Press), and I must say he is pretty adept at getting himself web and press coverage. He has recently been interviewed by Ed Pettit, who writes book reviews for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia City Paper.

Pettit reviewed Mean Martin Manning in the City Paper back in March, and the interview with Scott Stein is now posted on his blog. It covers the reviewed novel and other subjects that might be of interest -- including the surveillance society, dystopian novels, the writing process, literary influences, and the tyranny of 'public health.'

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You may have noticed last week that Cambridge University Press announced that they were withdrawing a book which they had published in 2006. The book in question, Alms for Jihad, by American authors Robert Collins and J. Millard Burr, had recently been the subject of a libel writ in the UK.

Not only have CUP withdrawn the book, but they have also agreed to pay damages, and have issued a formal apology on their website . This states that the authors of the book made 'defamatory allegations' to which there was 'no truth whatsoever.'

The person objecting to this book is Sheik Kalid bin Mafouz, the son of the banker to the Saudi royal family, and you can read about him on Wikipedia.

Well, we have many a time noted here that the UK libel laws favour the rich and so this announcement didn't do much to raise my own blood pressure. Been there, seen it before. Many times. When faced with a litigant who has bottomless financial resources, few publishers can afford to do anything other than cave in. Consider, for example, poor little Arcadia.

While I was unsurprised by the CUP affair, and frankly gave a shrug of the shoulders about this latest proof that money doesn't just talk but screams its bloody head off, Jeffrey Stern, President of US publisher Bonus Books, was very exercised indeed.

You can read Mr Stern's statements on the matter in a press release put out by his company. He takes a very dim view of 'libel tourism', and asks, rather plaintively, 'Whatever happened to freedom of the press?'

Well, pardon me while I indulge in a hollow laugh. But freedom of the press has never really existed in the UK, and certainly doesn't today. Not only are there stringent libel laws, but there is political correctness to contend with, and 10,000 busybodies of one sort or another peering over your shoulder and jumping in fast to complain if you step over what they take to be a line set in concrete. If you criticise anyone, chances are that it interferes with their 'human rights' and they can take you all the way to the European courts about it.

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While watching the end of a Poirot TV episode the other day, I found myself wondering whether Poirot was gay. Did Agatha intend him to be thought of as gay? Or is it just that David Suchet, who has played him more often than anyone, seems to suggest (at least to me) that he is?

As I read the performance, Suchet plays Poirot as if he is gay by inclination, but almost certainly too fussy and particular ever to actually do anything. (Cf. Kenneth Williams.) After all, you never know where young men might have been, and one might get stains on one's shirt.

In search of elucidation on this vital issue, I typed "is Poirot gay" into Google, and came up with zilch. "Was Poirot gay" gives the same result. But a search for the two words Poirot + gay produces, as you would expect, some earnest discussion.

David Suchet himself has things to say on the matter. He claims that Poirot is a typical bachelor of his time, the 1930s. Hmm. Maybe. Typical of some, certainly. But to me he is very reminiscent of Kenneth Williams: gay by inclination, but usually far too nervous and fastidious to do anything about it.

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Chicklitreview.org is a web site 'focused on providing compact pieces of fiction for young professional women.' This month, the attention is on mystery stories. Gentlemen who visit should be warned: there's a young woman on the site who is keeping an eye on you.

The New Intimacy

2007-08-03T10:31:00.000+01:00

I wonder what Agatha (Christie) or Enid (Blyton) would have thought about this kind of thing. I don't think Agatha would have liked it, anyway.

I speak, of course, about the New Intimacy between readers and writers. It is no longer enough for a writer to sit at home and write the books. Dear me, no. Neither will it suffice for an author to go on the occasional book tour, give readings, and answer questions for a few minutes at the end.

No. Nowadays Web 2.0 interaction is all the rage, my dears. If things go on the way they are, readers are pretty soon going to want to be present when their favourite author buys his underpants, or gets fitted for a new bra.

By way of example, witness the case of Philippa Gregory, bestselling author of The Boleyn Inheritance and The Other Boleyn Girl. On Sunday 16 September, at 2.00 p.m. EDT (you'll have to work out for yourself what this is in Europe), Ms Gregory is hosting a live web event for her fans around the world.

'Never before,' says her publisher, Touchstone, 'has an author such as Gregory participated in an interactive web event of this magnitude.' Oh, but they all will before long -- mark my words.

Philippa Gregory LIVE will feature a 'live simulcast' (whatever that is) of Ms Gregory speaking to an audience in London. She will discuss her historical research; writing process; her latest novel, The Boleyn Inheritance; the upcoming major motion picture based on The Other Boleyn Girl; her next novel, The Other Queen; and where she buys her bras.

If you want to get truly intimate with Philippa you need to register in advance. And it's worth doing, apparently, because 'throughout the one-and-a-half-hour long event, online attendees will have the opportunity to ask Philippa their own questions and interact with other fans and book clubs.'

What fun, eh? Bet all you wannabes just can't wait for it to happen to you. Good luck, kids.

The Book Depository

2007-08-02T10:16:00.000+01:00

The Book Depository is a UK-based enterprise with world-wide ambitions. Basically, it's a bookselling business. It aims to deliver books to the customer cheap(ish) and fast; and not just today's bestsellers either, but highly obscure books too. It works, as I can testify from a recent test.

To call this enterprise ambitious is an understatement. If you want to know more, take a look at the About Us page on the company's web site.

You will note that the underlying technology is being developed by a team at the University of Bath (one of the UK's better universities, specialising in science and technology), and the research is being part-funded by the UK's Engineering & Physical Science Research Council. What that means, in plain English, is that the underlying science is considered highly respectable and vitally important. The Book Depository is committed to making all programming open source.

The average customer, however, is not going to be too concerned by that. What your typical punter wants is a copy of a given book, at the cheapest possible price, and to have it delivered as near instantaneously as possible. By interacting with other retailers and distributors, the Book Depository seems to be getting as close to that ideal service as anyone could reasonably ask. Their software aims to work out the optimised purchasing route of each isbn, depending on cost, availability and historical service delivery, and then places orders.

Unless I've been more than usually sleepy, the Book Depository has been attracting little public attention. Instead of pumping out bullshit publicity, it's just been developing systems that actually work, and setting up arrangements with other companies, who also want (naturally) to maximise their business.

I first came across the company when I looked for a book on Amazon, and found that the Amazon page showed that the cheapest way to get it was to use the BD. I thought this was very odd, but did not complain, especially when the book arrived the next day.

Independent booksellers will not like me saying all that, however, and the truth, I fear, is that the BD constitutes yet another serious threat to your friendly neighbourhood independent -- and indeed to that favourite secondhand shop of yours, where you cough your way through the dust to unearth (you hope) long-lost treasures. Before long you will find that the BD will have reprinted that 1930 item that you were looking for, and a lot more besides. POD, naturally.

The BD has recently reported 3rd year sales of £24 million, £12 million up on 2005/2006, showing a treble-digit increase for the second year running.

There is a massive amount of material to explore on the BD web site -- too much to describe here. Though you could begin with the very sensible article by Mark Thwaite on the possible death of publishers.

And don't think the BD isn't relevant if you live in the US. At present they are able to ship 700,000 US books from 8 fulfillment centers across America, and the range will doubtless increase fast.

Lickerish allsorts

2007-08-01T09:41:00.000+01:00

While buying some printer paper in W.H. Smith's on Monday (my normal supplier having run out), I noticed that, if you buy the latest Harry there, you can get a special deal on G.P. Taylor's Wormwood. This latter book is also supposed to be part of a seven-book series, and is described by WHS as 'the perfect partner for Harry Potter'.

According to Publishers Lunch, the Taylor book sold 20,000 copies in the first five hours of this offer, which ain't bad. Particularly as Amanda Craig (a leading children's book critic) -- not to mention my modest self -- came to the conclusion that Mr (actually the Reverend Mr) Taylor has a marked under-supply of talent.

Perhaps this success demonstrates the power of prayer.

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Errol Lincoln Uys (pronounced Ace) is using the web as a kind of catalogue of his various books, and, more to the point, book proposals. He is then, as he puts it, 'sending out snail-mail invites asking editors and agents to come visit the site and take a byte.' If you are thinking of doing the same, you might take a look and get some ideas.

Uys's book proposals are not open to just any old web visitor, but the professionals who are contacted by mail are given appropriate passwords for entry.

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Let's hear it for the old guys. Welsey Carrington Greayer (on bookshelves he comes between Grafton and Grisham) is old enough to have flown missions over Germany in WWII, and at 87 he has produced The Tornado Struck at Midnight.

Wisely or otherwise, Wesley used PublishAmerica to produce his book. I gather that ten copies offered in his local Barnes and Noble sold very quickly. When Wesley alerted PublishAmerica to this, they responded by pointing out that he could get a 50% discount on orders of 100 or more books.

PublishAmerica is not, perhaps, the first place that I would advise writers to go to when searching for a publisher.

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If you've got a Chinese girlfriend or boyfriend, the Everyman Library has the perfect birthday present.

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Lovelybooks.com describes itself as 'a new online initiative to get people talking and thinking about books. Developed by Holtzbrinck in Stuttgart and being launched by Macmillan in the English-speaking world, the English-language version has just been rolled out and is currently in beta form. The website is totally not for profit and non-commercial. Lovelybooks lets you create a virtual bookshelf, rate and review books, recommend books and meet new people with similar tastes.'

So. Take a look? As mentioned here a while back, these social-networking sites such as Shelfari et al are said to be the coming thing. Book marketers are very keen on them. Whether they will actually help to sell many books remains to be seen.

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Replacing a once-worn hat on my head, I was very interested to see Galleycat's report about experiments in POD et cetera in the university press community.

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While buying a loaf of bread yesterday afternoon, I was served by a bloke of about thirty. After handing me my change, he went back to reading a book which was open on the counter in front of him. Being expert in upside-downy, I could see that the running head was Harry Potter.

'Is that the latest?' I enquired.

'Yes,' said my friendly neighbourhood bread man. 'I'm reading it for the second time. It's that good.'

Now -- question: what other book(s) can you think of which would achieve that effect?

Meanwhile, P.J. Parrish concludes (link from M.J. Rose), re the selling-Harry-at-a-loss phenomenon, that 'the book business is just plain whacked-out.'

Dearie, dearie me. Say it ain't so.

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If you aren't smart enough to know this already -- and you really ought to be -- then Cory Doctorow, in the Guardian, explains why digital rights management systems are a chimera. (Link from booktrade.info.)

'DRMs are often designed by ambitious, well-funded consortia, with top-notch engineers from every corner of the industry. They spend millions. They take years. They are defeated in days, for pennies, by hobbyists.'

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In similar vein, about the difficulty of trying to prevent things from happening on the internet, Seoul Man has some thoughts on free speech.

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Over on Galleycat, James Frey's publisher, Nan Talese, takes a well aimed kick at Oprah Winfrey's ample ass. Worth a few minutes of your time for an insight into how big-time TV operates. What was I saying in my novel last year, and repeating only a few days ago? Everything on TV is faked.

The Agent

2007-07-31T09:31:00.000+01:00

Martin Wagner's new stage play The Agent is about writing, publishing, and (obviously) the business of being a literary agent. First seen in London in the spring, the play has now transferred to Trafalgar Studio 2, a venue which, as its name suggests, is located just off Trafalgar Square.

I haven't seen the current production, but I have read the script. It's published by Pinter and Martin.

For anyone with any experience of publishing, the play script is a slightly painful read, being based all too clearly (one suspects) on the author's personal and far more painful experiences. However, those unfamiliar with today's wonderful world of bestsellers might well find it an eye-opener.

The play is a two-hander, featuring a not very successful writer and an agent who is an archetypal wheeler-dealer. And that's almost all I can sensibly tell you without revealing too much.

One thing I can add is that the plot hinges around some incriminating photographs. This is not remotely surprising to me. Sin, I have decided, must be rife within the book world, because I long since came to the conclusion that the existence of incriminating photographs is the only possible explanation for quite a number of publishing decisions.

Reviews of The Agent have not been universally favourable, but Benedict Nightingale in the Times seems to have liked it. Other reviews appear in The Stage and the Financial Times. All these reviews, however, tell you more than you might wish to know if you're going to see the play.

One final note. There have, in the history of the commercial theatre, been a fair number of successful two-handers. Two for the See-Saw (later filmed with Mitchum and McLaine) was one; Albee's The Zoo Story was another; and more recently we have had An Hour and a Half Late.

However, my favourite drama theorist, Professor Grebanier, argues that, from a structural and theoretical point of view, two-handers are never successful. It's all to do with climaxes, you see. Two people can, it seems, achieve a perfectly satisfactory climax in sexual terms, but not in dramatic terms.

For a two-hander to work, Grebanier argues, there's has to be, as he puts it, something which 'is used with the catalytic force of a third personality'.

In Two for the See-Saw that something is the telephone. And so it is in The Agent, wherein we have a publisher person on the other end of the phone and playing a vital role in the proceedings. (I wonder if he gets paid the Equity rate?)

Just in case you're interested, Grebanier argues that in The Zoo Story it's the park bench which at first assumes the importance of a third personality; and a bit later on it's the knife.

As for the more recent An Hour and a Half Late, the third personality in that is, at least according to my own dazzling powers of theatrical analysis... Er, lessee now. Sure I'll think of it in a minute.

Ah! The clock. Or that's my story, anyway.

Reflections on our Times

2007-07-30T10:51:00.000+01:00

The UK Sunday Times has been my favourite newspaper for a good many decades. It is not, however, perfect. Far from it.

Madame Arcati has been less than complimentary about some of its staff, and there is the occasional article which is just plain ridiculous -- such as last year's nonsense about publishing.

That being said, one can usually depend on the ST to provide food for thought, if nothing else, and yesterday's issue was up to scratch in that respect.

Bryan Appleyard, for example, is one of the ST's most reliable performers, and yesterday he appeared twice. First, in the magazine, he produced a useful survey of Web 2.0. Nothing terribly startling there, and probably all younger readers, who would feel as if they had had a limb amputated if you took away their BlackBerry, will know it all already. But the average ST reader probably found it enlightening.

Mr Appleyard also featured in the ST's Culture section, and here, I fear, he came sadly astray. He chose to interview an American literary novelist. I will not record here the man's name, because my purpose is not to attack the individual. Rather it is to state (strictly, restate, because some of you will have heard it before) my view about a particular attitude which is embodied in this article.

Our novelist, you see, is of the lit'ry variety. Not only that, but he has attended the most prestigious of American training schools for lit'ry types, namely the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Mr Appleyard, by the way, regards this as 'what every aspiring young writer in the world should do'. It is, he claims, a step 'so sane, so enviable, and so right'.

Personally I regard going to the Iowa Workshop as nuts, entirely unenviable, and wrong, and I am deeply grateful that I have no personal dealings with anyone who has even thought about doing such a thing. Long-term readers will know that, when faced with another mention of that institution, I groan loudly, make the sign of the cross, and hang garlic round my neck for a few days. But let us contemplate, for a painful moment or two, what attitudes this particular 'creative-writing' course represents.

I submit that the course embodies, and has succeeded in making respectable in many quarters, a form of Me-me-ism which, on a good day, I regard as offensive, childish, and immature, and which on a bad day I regard as both pathetic and contemptible.

All too many writers, whether Iowa trained or not, tend to take themselves very seriously indeed. They hold the view, consciously or unconsciously, that the universe revolves around them, and that everything they do, think, or feel is of vital importance. Not least to interviewers from the Sunday Times.

All of which, I submit, is demonstrably untrue. It is a world-view which should be firmly discouraged. But the ST's Mr Appleyard, to my dismay (for he is normally a sensible chap, when he sticks to what he knows best), seems to accept all this without question.

I have read the interview carefully, though with the exercise of a good deal of will-power to get me through the thing, and nowhere in it can I find a mention of anything so vulgar as a reader.

Now this is odd, not least because in his Web 2.0 piece Mr Appleyard sees full well what is going on. Appleyard quotes the results of some recent research into the attitudes of US college students, to the effect that modern students suffer from an excess of self-esteem.

'Today's college students are more likely to have a feeling of self-importance, to be entitled, and, in general, to be more narcissistic,' said Professor Jean Twenge, lead author of the study. And Appleyard comments on this situation as follows: 'Kids put themselves on Facebook, say how great they are, and then believe it. The problem is that this New Narcissism is utterly without foundation.'

Now, if Appleyard can see that in relation to kids on Facebook, how come he can't see it in relation to literary novelists who think that they too are 'important', and are entitled to be taken at their own valuation?

Of course, Appleyard, were he here, would doubtless tell us that, in the case of the novelist whom he chose to interview, the talent would justify a high level of self-esteem. Possibly. I am not in a position to judge. But what I can say is that there are few areas of life in which the New Narcissism is more evident than among the wannabe literary community. I have the emails to prove it, and Susan Hill has a lot more.

And why should I care, anyway, you may be wondering. Well, because at the very least it will result in wasted effort and deep frustration; and at worst it will end in madness and death.

I was taken to task recently, by a correspondent, for my excessive fondness for commercial fiction as opposed to the literary kind. 'Surely,' he wrote, 'your heart must sink when you contemplate the bestseller list.'

Well yes. Indeed. But between the crass commercialism of Katie Price's Crystal on the one hand, and the extremes of lit'ry nonsense on the other, there is plenty of sensible middle ground.

This is the ground which was occupied fifty years ago (to quote English examples) by the likes of Margery Allingham and Ian Fleming, and is occupied today by such as Rosie Thomas and Susanna Clarke.

Fortunately, we have a splendid example elsewhere in yesterday's ST -- admittedly from a field outside that of the novel -- of a woman who has her feet very firmly on the ground. The actress June Whitfield is probably little known outside the UK (except perhaps for her appearances in Absolutely Fabulous), but for the past fifty years or so she has worked with almost all UK comedians of note, feeding them lines and nobly allowing them to enhance their reputations at her expense.

June describes working with Tony Hancock, a troubled man who later committed suicide. He was always under some stress or strain and was very inclined to say 'What's it all about?' 'Well dear,' says June, 'it's about five minutes and we're on.'

Exactly. Precisely the kind of attitude that I would encourage in would-be novelists. Stop intellectualising and get on with entertaining the reader.

Speaking of which, let us not overlook a one-time would-be novelist who succeeded in reaching precisely the kind of broad, non-literary audience that I would advise all would-be novelists to bear in mind. I speak, of course, of J.K. Rowling.

Now you may well feel about this lady as I feel about Churchill and Kennedy, namely that I have read quite enough about them to last me through this lifetime and several others. But do spare a minute to at least glance at A.N. Wilson's review of the latest and reportedly last Harry Potter.

Mr Wilson is not a man with whom I always agree, but he assuredly made me think about giving young Harry another go. I read the first one long before it was famous, but haven't bothered with the rest, mainly because some of them seemed fearful long. But Wilson quite persuades me that, in the HP sequence, we have a gigantic intellectual achievement and one which I might well appreciate were I to give it the time. He at least is not afraid to admit that he can read popular children's fiction and weep real tears. I take my hat off to him.

Market day

2007-07-26T10:02:00.000+01:00

The Bookseller is launching a series of blogs by people in the UK book trade. Let's hope they're a bit more interesting than those at Publishers Weekly, which I'm afraid I only looked at once.

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Alcemi is a new fiction imprint based in Wales. Not surprisingly, they are concentrating on Welsh writers, but in principle 'there will be no bars to setting, subject or style'. They are looking for 'original contemporary fiction that will resonate within Wales and far beyond'.

First two out of the box are Liminal by Chris Keil (not a very Welsh name, is it?) and Salvage by Gee Williams (that's better).

Both of these books have a mystery/crime tinge to them, but both seem determined to aim higher, and be metaphors or some such. That always makes me a bit nervous, frankly. I think most writers would be well advised to stick with the blood and thunder, and do it really well. After that, everything kind of follows naturally, without forcing it.

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Alan Gerstle did an MFA degree in acting and has a PhD in social science. He is also a fiction writer. On the sound basis of this considerable academic experience he now runs a blog for the benefit of humanities students -- particularly those on creative-writing courses. And let's face it, students on those courses need all the help they can get.

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The Times has an obituary of Don Arden, one of the UK's leading managers of pop groups in years gone by. Known in his youth for beating people up and threatening them with a nasty fate, Arden was chiefly famous at the end of his life for being Sharon Osbourne's father, and hence Ozzy's father-in-law.

Arden also published an autobiography of sorts: Mr Big -- Ozzy, Sharon, and My Life as the Godfather of Rock. It was written with a ghost, of course, and the ghost must have had to work hard for his money, because he gets his name on the book too (Mick Wall). I imagine that about 10 per cent of the stories might even be true.

Sharon gave up talking to her Dad for a good many years, and she told her side of the story in Sharon Osbourne Extreme.

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The BBC reports that Charles Whiting has died. Best known, perhaps, by the pen-name Leo Kessler (among others), Mr Whiting was the author of about 350 books. His work was discussed here on 6 July 2005. (Link from booktrade.info.)

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There is much to entertain us on Madame Arcati's blog this week.

First, Madame was watching (shorthand pad and pencil to hand) when George Galloway went to work in the House of Commons (post of 24 July).

Say what you like about George (and people do), he has the balls to say things which a lot of people are thinking but never quite have the courage to articulate. In this case, he wonders why the (New) Labour Party is prepared to accept money from a man whose TV channel features 'Spunk-loving Sluts' (and that's one of the polite ones). Not a bad question. Consequently, the Speaker, as you would expect, shut him up.

George wrote a book, of course, discussed here on 14 June 2005.

Then there's the results of the Arcati poll as to whether Daniel Radcliffe is cut or uncut (post of 25 July). Look, it was Madame's idea to have a poll, not mine, OK?

And finally we have the intriguing saga of Susan Hill and Fallowell, D. (posts of 24 July and 26 July, plus comments).

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A little bird tells me that the Russians aren't too fussed about copyright, and have posted lots of books online without permission. Which is, of course, very naughty.

However, if I were one of the authors, I think I would be quite relaxed about it. No one, surely, is going to read a full-length novel online, and printing it out would be slow, cumbersome, and expensive. On the other hand, having access to the entire thing gives one a pretty good taste of it, and one might, perhaps, go out and buy the book afterwards.

The list is eclectic, and, so far as I can see, in no logical order whatever. Or am I missing something? The two files that I tried were zipped, and you may need one of those fancy WinRAR programs. He says, as if he knows what he's talking about.

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Raft is a newish UK literary agency which is looking for a small number of new clients. There is also a company blog with news of latest deals et cetera, and Raft will be at Frankfurt this year.

Snobbery 4

2007-07-24T08:45:00.000+01:00

I call this post Snobbery 4 because the other night I was slumped in front of the TV and half-watching Aliens 4. Actually I gather that the movie is properly called Aliens: Resurrection. Anyway, it's the fourth Sigourney Weaver movie about those really nasty and apparently indestructible alien life forms; and it struck me, when I came to read the piece that I am going to refer to in a minute, that good old-fashioned literary snobbery is just as tough and indestructible as them nasty ole aliens. There is absolutely nothing that you can do to get rid of it. Think you've wiped it out in one place, and bugger me but it pops up again somewhere else.

These thoughts were prompted by reading an article by Michael Faber. (Faber was born in Holland, and sometimes appears as Michel Faber.) The article ain't brand new and was sent to me by Viktor Janis. It appeared originally in the Scotsman, but is now available at their web site to subscribers only. For the next few days (I gather), it may be available on a file-sharing service. But in any case, even if you can't find the article or don't want to bother reading it, the content is the same old rubbish.

Mr Faber is undoubtedly a much-honoured writer; see his entry on Fantasticfiction for details. He also mixes in some very high-powered company: in 2006 he was one of the contributors to Not One More Death, getting equal billing with Richard Dawkins, John Le Carre, and Harold Pinter, among others.

The title of Faber's Scotsman article is 'Dumb and Dumber?' In brief, Faber argues that literary fiction is infinitely superior to commercial stuff and is aimed at 'intelligent grown-ups' -- everything else, he implies, is bought and read by teenage morons. The rubbish, he argues, is crowding out the worthwhile stuff.

The fact is that every crappy book you see reviewed in a newspaper or stacked on a table at Waterstone’s is there in place of a better one....
Trivial books fail to touch us deeply, leaving us in exactly the same state as before... We need literature that inspires and changes us.

And so on. As an example of arrogant, snobbish, fuzzy thinking you would be hard pressed to find its equal.

However... My purpose today is not to go through Faber's argument step by step, because I've done that kind of thing before, several times. What is pertinent, however, is to ask the following question: Do you think it is possible -- just conceivably, perhaps, maybe -- that Mr Faber has now changed his tune? His tune being, if Imay paraphrase, to the effect that everything in a prominent place in a bookshop is crap.

In the Scotsman article, Faber tells us that he has just returned from Slovakia, where he was celebrating the publication of a collection of short stories, Raz Urcite Zaprsi -- or Some Rain Must Fall, in the English version. And that book was published in Slovakia in 2001.

But in 2002 Mr Faber had a considerable hit. His novel The Crimson Petal and the White was a New York Times bestseller, and had sales, I understand, of almost a million copies. So -- in the light of that experience, does Faber still, I wonder, take the view that 'the crassest, most aggressively marketed books take up the most shelf space, column inches in the media -- and everything else gets pushed to the peripheries'?

The Crimson Petal and the White can't have been pushed to the peripheries. Its publisher must have paid for it to be displayed up front. So what gives? Did Faber suddenly decide to join the ranks of Jeffrey Archer and Kathy Lette (writers whom in the Scotsman he clearly despised)? Have publishers suddenly seen the light and abandoned crap? Or is Mr Faber's whacking big opus (894 pages) an exception to the rule? I.e. is it a literary masterpiece which somehow was such a work of genius that it contrived to win some newspaper space and some shelf space, despite his claim that 'everything else [my italics] gets pushed to the peripheries'?

The questions are rhetorical. Mr Faber, I suspect, finds himself in the same position as those authors who despise all literary prizes on principle. Until they win one.

And consider the fate of poor Mr Franzen. Nominated as one of Oprah's choices, the poor fellow wriggled and squirmed and wondered what the hell he should do. Could he (a frightf'ly sensitive artist, my dears, a man devoted to literature rather than commerce) accept such a vulgar commendation? Or should he make an excuse and leave? I haven't had such a good laugh for ages.

Why do I love Mondays?

2007-07-23T08:55:00.000+01:00

Further to the Jane Austen nonsense, referred to at the end of last Thursday's post, the Times reports the comments of two seasoned publishers. These two have been in publishing for a total of thirty years. They receive 1,000 unsolicited submissions every month. Each. Between the two of them, over the whole of their careers, they have only published four or five unsolicited manuscripts.

Moral: don't waste your time and money by sending unsolicited books to big-time publishers. You have to find some other way to gain their attention. Preferably, you need to get into the position where they approach you, rather than vice versa.

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If the above doesn't put you off sending in mss to unsuspecting and uninterested publishers, here's a story that just might. It was passed to me by translator Viktor Janis, and it comes from another translator, Anna Feruglio Dal Dan.

Once I was called upon by the fiction editor of the publisher I worked at to write a vitriolic rejection letter for a particularly egregiously offensive manuscript.
I duly went and composed six dense pages of shattering deconstruction of the manuscript, starting with its poor spelling and uncertain grammar and ending by taking issues with its theory of homosexuality.
Then I presented it to the fiction editor who frowned and said: “You know, I appreciate this, but I gotta tell you, it’s not cruel enough.”
I said. “Oh, come on, have some heart. One of those poor girls is a depressive, says so in the cover letter. What if she gets the letter and kills herself?”
The fiction editor hesitated a little, then she said firmly: “No. Some people have got to be stopped.”
(We didn’t do this to everybody: this manuscript really managed to offend my fiction editor deeply. Mostly she wrote kind encouragement critique letters - which usually earned her the emailed wrath and never-ending hatred of the people she responded to, such being the ego of your average would-be writer.)

Good, eh? Anna, by the way, has a blog. She also has some Daily Observances in the form of podcasts.

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Frank Beddor's second book in the Looking Glass Wars trilogy is out soon: 21 August to be precise. Intended for younger readers, age 12 and up, and based on Alice in Wonderland, part 1 of the trilogy attracted quite a lot of attention. More on the trilogy's own web site.

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I kind of like odd addresses. I just noticed that the UK small press Tindal Street is located not in Tindal Street but in 217 Custard Factory. And Duckworth, once upon a time, used to be in The Old Piano Factory.

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Oh I say. Bit much this. One of my most faithful correspondents, Jibby Collins (whom the goddesses preserve) tells me that Mitzi Szereto is at it again. Or still, probably. She is compiling material for The New Black Lace Book of Women's Sexual Fantasies. So you are invited to submit. But they gotta be genuine, OK? And no, sir, you can't send one in. Not even if you do wear a dress while you're writing it. Go to the Black Lace web site and click on the shoe. No, I don't know why it has to be the shoe. I expect somebody has a kink for those things.

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If you live in London, or within reasonable reach, take note that Martin Wagner's play The Agent will be staged at the Trafalgar Studios (Whitehall) from 25 July to 18 August. This play was well received at earlier performances. It's a two-hander, the two characters being a writer and an agent. Here's the blurb:

It’s just another day at the office for high-flying literary agent Alexander; manuscripts to read, deals to be done, celebrity clients to be taken out to lunch… and just one quick meeting to get through with an author whose latest book the agent thinks is, frankly, not up to scratch. This gripping and often bitingly funny two-hander about a writer’s struggle for proper representation perfectly reveals the subtle shifts in power in the relationship between artist and agent. The only thing we can be sure of is that there can only be one winner.

This might be a bit too much like real life for some, but for those who have never had an awkward discussion with an agent it could be a lot of fun. Details here.

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Miss Bellasis -- you remember her, surely? If not, see the end of my post of 6 June 2007 -- tells me that she has been frightfully busy recently (the nipple tassel business being absolutely hectic, my dears), but she has acquired a new friend; one who makes gorgeous knickers.

The knicker firm goes by the name of Buttress and Snatch, and the garments in question are made in Hackney by honest, hard-working girls who never fail to attend church on Sunday.

No, I know that doesn't have much to do with books, but this bit does. Miss Bellasis herself is threatening to write her memoirs. These, if completed and published, will doubtless cause many a heart to beat faster.

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If you're interested in satirical/humorous writing plus some hard-edged criticism of our saintly politicians and leaders (mostly in a UK context, but with some excursions into the US), then do remember that the author of the Not Born Yesterday site turns out some good stuff at alarmingly frequent intervals. The site takes a bit of exploring, but you could try Life in the Wrong Lane for topical material. And for UK readers I recommend this bit.

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The Daily Telegraph, a week or so ago, published a brief obituary of the American romantic novelist Kathleen Woodiwiss. Her novels, they say, were 'absurdly overdramatic, overwritten, overlong, and filled with ludicrous sex scenes'. And then a paragraph or two later we get this: 'Altogether Kathleen Woodiwiss's 13 novels sold 36 million copies.'

Let me see if I've got this straight. Romantic novelist, writes 13 novels, and does the job well enough to get 36 million people to pay hard cash for them, not to mention the millions of other readers who borrowed the books from a library or a friend -- and these books are absurd, too long, too dramatic, ludicrous?

I hardly think so. Wouldn't it be more accurate, not to mention more gracious, to say that Kathleen Woodiwiss was an immensely talented novelist with an unusual ability to generate emotion in many millions of grateful readers.