Words with JAM June 2012

Sticky, but not in a bad way

Christos Tsiolkas has breakfast with JJ Marsh

Revolution in the Head Procrastinating with Perry Iles

Five Star Wars (or - Who’s Reviewing the Reviewers?)

by Derek Duggan

WWJ First Page Competition 2012 closing soon Information on how to enter inside

Travels with the Library Cat Catriona Troth reports on Toronto’s Independent Bookstores and San Francisco’s City Lights and other Bookstores

Deborah Moggach in conversation with Gillian Hamer

The Man Behind the Mask An exclusive short story for print subscribers by Maureen Bowden

Resources for crime writers

by Rin Simpson

Blog Tours: What Are They Good For?

by Dan Holloway

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June | July 2012

www.wordswithjam.co.uk

Photograph by Zoe Ali

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Contents PRINT ISSUE EXCLUSIVES 28

Centrefold Poster - perfect for your office door

30

The Man Behind the Mask. A short story by Maureen Bowden

The Team

Random stuff 5

Editor’s Desk

6

Book v Television - author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Deborah Moggach, in conversation with Gillian Hamer

8

Aye, that’ll be write - coverage of Glasgow’s Aye Write Festival 2012 with Danny Gillan

10

Five Star Wars (or - Who’s Reviewing the Reviewers?) by Derek Duggan

11

Controversial Pronouncements by Anne Stormont

12

Christos Tsiolkas has breakfast with JJ Marsh

18 Travels with the Library Cat, Part 1: Toronto’s Independent Bookstores 20

60 Second Interviews with Daniel Martin Eckhart and Chris Pavone

22

Revolution in the Head - procrastinating with Perry Iles

24

Travels with the Library Cat, Part 2: San Francisco: City Lights and other Bookstores

26

The Write Diet by Susan Jane Jones

27

A Rose for the Winner: The first ever Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2012

34 A Cartoon by Matt Shaw

Competitions 32

Flash 500 - the RESULTS!

33

First Page Competition 2012 Information

37

Comp Corner - be in with a chance to win a WWJ Mug!

Quite Short Stories and Poetry 30

EXCLUSIVE PRINT ISSUE CONTENT:The Man Behind the Mask. A short story by Maureen Bowden

Pencilbox

Sarah Bower is the author of two historical novels, THE NEEDLE IN THE BLOOD and THE BOOK OF LOVE (published as SINS OF THE HOUSE OF BORGIA in the US). She has also published short stories in QWF, The Yellow Room, and Spiked among others. She has a creative writing MA from the University of East Anglia where she now teaches. She also teaches creative writing for the Open University. Sarah was born in Yorkshire and now lives in Suffolk.

Sheila Bugler won a place on the 2008 Apprenticeships in Fiction programme.

Whilst publishers debate her first novel, she is working on her second novel and spending way too much time indulging her unhealthy interest in synopsiswriting.

Helen Corner founder of Cornerstones Literary Consultancy and co-author of Write a Blockbuster.

Derek Duggan is a graduate of The Samuel Beckett Centre for Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin. He lives in Spain with his wife and children and is not a tobogganist.

Danny Gillan’s award-winning Will You Love Me Tomorrow was described as one of the best debut novels of 2008. Now, for entirely cash related reasons, Danny’s novel Scratch is available for Kindle readers (‘users’ sounds a bit druggy). It’s so funny it’s made people accidentally wee, apparently. Really, actually wee in their pants. True story..www.dannygillan.co.uk Gillian Hamer is a full time company director and part time novelist. She divides her time between the industrial Midlands and the wilds of Anglesey, where she spends far too much time dreaming about becoming the next Agatha Christie. http://gillian.wordpress.com/ Dan Holloway’s thriller The Company of Fellows was voted Blackwell’s “favourite Oxford novel” and was one of their “best books of 2011”. He runs the spoken word event The New Libertines and is a regular performer across the UK, winning Literary Death Match in 2010, and was listed as one of social media bible mashable’s top 100 writers on twitter.

Perry Iles is an old man from Scotland. If he was a dwarf, he’d be grumpy. He lives in a state of semi-permanent apoplectic biliousness, and hates children, puppies, kittens, and periods of unseemly emotion such as Christmas. He pours out vinegary invective via a small writing machine, and thinks it’s a bit like throwing liver at the wall. He tells anyone who’ll listen that this gives him a modicum of gratification.

Andrew Lownie is a member of the Association of Authors’ Agents and Society of Authors and was until recently the literary agent to the international writers’ organisation PEN. In 1998 he founded The Biographers Club, a monthly dining society for biographers and those involved in promoting biography, and The Biographers’ Club Prize which supports first-time biographers.

35

Question Corner - Lorraine Mace answers your questions on writing

38

The Agent’s View with Andrew Lownie and something a little different with Bookoxygen’s Elsbeth Lindner

40

Cornerstones Mini Masterclass - with Kathryn Price

42

Rhubarb, Rhubarb: Looking at Dialogue with Sarah Bower

44

Resources for crime writers by Rin Simpson

46

Scripts: When Sadness Comes - by Ola Zaltin

Lorraine Mace is a columnist with Writing Magazine and co-author, with Maureen Vincent-Northam, of The Writer’s ABC Checklist, has had her work published in five countries. Winner of the Petra Kenney International Poetry Award (comic verse category), she writes fiction for the women’s magazine market and is a writing competition judge. www.lorrainemace.com

47

Blog Tours: What Are They Good For? by Dan Holloway

JJ Marsh - writer, teacher, newt. www.beatrice-stubbs.com

48

Synopsis Doc with Sheila Bugler. Working with Chloe Walker on the synopsis for her memoir, New Beginnings.

Matt Shaw - author, cartoonist, photographer, hermit, Billy-No-Mates. www. mattshawpublications.co.uk

Some other stuff 50

What We Think of Some Books

52

The Rumour Mill - sorting the bags of truth from the bags of shite

52

Guess the Book

53

Crossword

54

Dear Ed - Letters of the satirical variety

55

Horoscopes - by Shameless Charlatan Druid Keith

Anne Stormont - as well as being a writer, is a wife, mother and teacher. She is also a hopeless romantic, who likes happy endings.

Kat Troth grew up in two countries, uses two names, and has had two different careers. One career she has spent writing technical reports for a non-technical audience. In the other, she attempts to write fiction. She tries always to remember who she is at any one time, but usually finds she has at least two opinions about everything.

Ola Zaltin is a Swedish screenwriter working out of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has written for both the big screen and the small, including episodes for the Swedish Wallander series. Together with Susanne O’Leary he is the co-author of the novel Virtual Strangers, (available as eBook).

Contents | 3

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Follow our Blog

Editor’s Desk Welcome to the June 2012 issue of Words with JAM. As everyone will probably have noticed - or will know if you’ve read my editor’s note in the past – since June last year, we have themed each issue. This time round, with Christos Tsiolkas as our cover slot, we couldn’t think or a more fitting theme than controversy.

I must remind you all that, as it states every issue either on my editor’s page or on the back cover, ALL opinions expressed within the magazine are those of the individual contributor and not those of Words with JAM or Quinn Publications as a whole. I would also point out that any spelling errors, typos or grammatical issues that appear within the magazine (or on the cover) were not there when we proofread it. Honest.

The Ed

JD Smith lives and works in the English Lake District. She uses her publishing house Quinn Publications as a source of procrastination to avoid actually writing.

Now I’m going to give you a little insight into the workings of the magazine and how we create each issue. It’s nothing too glamorous or interesting. We don’t discuss the next topic or future features whilst drinking wine … Okay, we do actually. In the main, it’s a pile of emails that go back and forth between myself and the contributors, interspersed with submissions from outside the regular circle and also the occasional Skype ‘meeting’.

In our last ‘meeting’ (didn’t involve wine, promise) someone – not sure who – suggested that I actually write an article. And for a reason I still haven’t fathomed, I said I would.

If you flick back to the contents page you’ll see no mention of an article by me.

Unfortunately, and to my own and everyone’s disappointment, we ran out of space.

The theme of the article was going to be snobbery. And in the spirit of our controversy issue I’ll clear my desk and touch on it briefly here instead.

Copyright © 2012 Quinn Publications The contributors assert the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. All Rights reserved.

All opinions expressed in Words with JAM are the sole opinion of the contributor and not that of Quinn Publications or Words with JAM as a whole.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the individual contributor and/or Quinn Publications, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Distributed from the UK. Not to be resold.

Editor: JD Smith editor@quinnpublications.co.uk Deputy Editors: Lorraine Mace lorraine@quinnpublications.co.uk Danny Gillan danny@quinnpublications.co.uk Library and Podcast enquiries: Catriona Troth kat@wordswithjam.co.uk 60 Second Interview enquiries: JJ Marsh jill@wordswithjam.co.uk Book V Film Interview enquiries: Gillian Hamer gill@wordswithjam.co.uk

Writing Snobbery. I’ve witnessed this a lot since becoming actively involved in the writing scene and interacted more and more with writers’ forums and the like. Why is it that if a writer is successful, other writers like to comment on how rubbish they are? And the more successful they are, the more other writers feel that publishers have committed some great injustice. Oh, and that the hundreds of thousands of readers who have bought, read and enjoyed the successful author’s book must be stupid to even think it was a good book!

Here’s one of my favourite phrases said by writers: “I can’t understand how they got a deal!” Really? Eh, because an agent thought they were good, then a publisher thought they were good. Oh, and because a large section of the target audience, as foreseen by said agent and publisher, also think they are good. Must all be idiots.

From one unpublished writer to another: “Your book is much better than the crap being published at the moment.” Hmm. And yet people are reading that crap and don’t think it’s crap.

It’s a funny thing, opinion. We all have one. And just because you think something is shit, doesn’t mean to say that it actually is shit. Perhaps it’s just not to your taste, or maybe you feel more comfortable reading another genre or style. Where you want fast pace, others prefer a slow story. Or maybe the writer has taken over and you can no longer just be a reader. Then again, perhaps you are right, and publishers just choose to print rubbish, and the gullible, average reader chooses to read it. At which point, just think what that would say about you if a publisher decides to take on your masterpiece and expose it to the world. Then the next wave of wannabe writers can sit on forums discussing how shit your book is and wondering how you ever managed to get a deal. I think I’ll leave that topic there.

I hope you all enjoy this issue. As part of the theme we will be posting the question ‘Is the quality of self-publishing putting off readers of the future?’ for discussion on our blog. If you wish to take part and comment, visit: www.blog.wordswithjam.co.uk.

Random Stuff | 5

Book v Television:

A Conversation with Deborah Moggach

by Gillian Hamer

As an author, I wouldn’t imagine there are much better feelings in the world than the day you’re told that Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith have chosen to play lead roles in the cinema adaptation of your novel.

This is exactly what happened to British writer, Deborah Moggach, when her novel, The Foolish Things, was spotted by film producers, and adapted into the wonderful film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Which as well as the above cinema dignitaries, also featured the talents of Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Dev Patel among others.

After various press screenings and publicity regarding the release of the film in early 2012, Deborah will be continuing the hotel theme, with a novel she has recently completed called, Heartbreak Hotel, which takes the action from the sun-baked streets of India, to a rather cold and damp ramshackle hotel in Wales.

Deborah has certainly learned her trade, covering many aspects of the publishing world. The daughter of writers, she studied at Bristol University and worked in the publishing industry. After she married, she lived in Pakistan, and it was there she started writing, immediately bewitched by the country and the liberating experience. She then went on to write a variety of novels, two books of short stories, and numerous television screenplays. She has been involved in a cross-section of journalism and was also Chairman of the Society of Authors as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

So, as someone who has worked their way up the publishing ladder, how has she handled this latest adventure? And just how does it feel to see your characters come to life on the big screen?

There’s one way to find out. We asked her ….

How were you first approached about the cinema adaptation of These Foolish Things? (The novel behind The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) And what were your initial thoughts/fears?

The novel was published about 8 years ago and optioned pretty quickly. I suspected it would, not through big-headedness but because I thought it addressed a huge and looming problem: how are we going to pay for our old age? (The pensions time-bomb, all that). I knew that it would have to be streamlined, some characters lost and so on – after all, I’ve adapted many books myself and know how they have to be taken apart and put back together again. It’s a big and complex ensemble piece and needed simplifying for the screen.

Did you ever have any concerns about how the plot and characters, and particularly the humour, would come across on the big screen?

You bet.

The setting in India is a vital feature of the novel – you choose not to glamorise the country, but allow the reader to see both sides of modern India. How do

6 | Random Stuff

you think the sense of place comes across in the film compared to your book?

I think it reflects it rather well. This is a big mainstream movie so there’s a strong feelgood element – it’s set in Jaipur rather than Bangalore, for instance, as Jaipur is a lot more beautiful – but it doesn’t shirk the fact that India is chaotic and poverty-stricken.

You name the two years you spent living in Pakistan in the mid-1970s as the catalyst behind your decision to write. Do you think the spark that woke the passion in you came across through the vibrancy and honesty of the film, and its depiction of a country and people so very different from the UK? Many writers I know have only started to write once they’ve moved away from home – it’s very liberating to be removed from the familiar; maybe also from the feeling of people looking over your shoulder or thinking you can’t do it, or that you’re going to write about THEM. Pakistan gave me a perspective on my past, too – I could see and shape my former experience more clearly.

You handle some tough subjects with a very deft touch in the novel: prejudice, the decline of British society, and the alienation of the elderly in the UK in particular. Were you concerned about taking on these topics in the film, and do you think it was handled successfully?

Yes. I knew they would have to tackle it differently simply because it was a film. A lot of that depth came from the performances – also the direction and even the lighting and sound. For instance, a dark shot of Judi Dench gazing out of a window told us a huge amount about her sense of loss, of fear for the future and so on; one didn’t need words.

That’s what’s great about top movie actors. Their faces tell us that inner story.

Were there any changes made in the film version that you weren’t altogether happy with? Or alternatively, any you feel enhanced the story in this medium?

I didn’t agree with many of the changes, but some of them worked fine.

And people can always go back to the book, which is so very different it’s like a different story. But many things enhanced it – for instance, that lovely shot of the flying egret, which felt so elegiac. Something only film can do.

You’re such a prolific writer, sixteen novels to date, what motivates you nowadays, and is there an

additional spark when you write now, knowing your work could develop into so much more than just the original novel?

I try not to think of film when I’m writing a novel, it’s such a different medium. And the reason I carry on is I feel ill and strange if I don’t write every day. Besides, what else could I do?

You’ve spent time working in television script writing, and you’ve written short story compilations as well as novels. Which is your favourite?

I like them all. I like the sociable, collaborative nature of screenwriting but also the private and freer world of short stories and novels. They cater to different sides of my personality and I’m very lucky to be able to do both. For the moment, anyway.

Have you ever written yourself into a character?

Anyone in These Foolish Things feature just a little too much of Ms Moggach? And if so, is it odd seeing the part portrayed in film?

I’m sort of in every character. I’m sure most writers would say this.

Sometimes I HAVE written more autobiographically, and it’s always my least successful character.

Looking now to the huge box office success of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, how much involvement did you have in the film production? Would you have liked more or preferred less?

I had very little involvement. I was very fond of the director, John Madden, and thought he did a great job, but as I didn’t write the final script I wasn’t around much – just a few days on the set in India, which was fabulous.

Do you feel your writing has changed at all since the experience of moving into film?

No. Each new project is like starting from scratch. Or it should be…It never gets easier.

Do you have any follow-on projects or commissions in the pipeline following the success of the film?

Yes, three or four TV projects (I get many commissions but they often don’t come to fruition for various, mostly financial, reasons) and I’ve finished a new novel called Heartbreak Hotel. Hotels again!

Are there any other books to big screen adaptations you particularly rate in your chosen genre? And if so, why?

Lots. I loved the screen adaptation of Carver’s Short Cuts, for instance.

And Emma Thompson’s version of Sense and Sensibility. Brilliant.

As an author, how does it feel to pick up a newspaper and read that something you have created is now a huge Hollywood success, with some of the world’s leading actors portraying your characters? Does it ever feel a little unreal?

As a literary magazine, we relish sage nuggets of advice from published authors, so what words of wisdom or encouragement would you offer to new upcoming writers hoping to follow in your footsteps?

Be true to your own voice. Remember there’s humour in nearly every situation. Get to know your characters before you start writing, so they help you write the story. Work every day if you can and don’t go out to lunch.

Finally, as an aside, as a previous Chairman of the Society of Authors, you clearly care about the writers behind the books. How do you see the digital generation changing the publishing industry? Do you consider there is room for both convention and new ideas? And what changes need to be made in your opinion for everyone to co-exist in harmony?

Nobody really knows what’s going to happen. I dearly hope that books will continue to be bought, and that bookshops don’t disappear. The best outcome, which may happen, is that books and digital books will coexist. Let’s hope so.

Yes!

Random Stuff | 7

Aye, that’ll be write Danny Gillan reports on Glasgow’s Aye Write Festival 2012

Much as I love the annual WWJ pilgrimage to the Wigtown Book Festival, there’s something satisfying about a festival coming to your hometown. And by satisfying I mean cheaper and less energy intensive. Especially when you only go to events that begin after noon.

And so it was that WWJ embraced the challenge of jumping on a bus into town (£1.80) to attend a couple of randomly selected goings on at Glasgow’s Aye Write festival. As

as they recounted some of the less glamorous incidents in their writing lives and basically took the piss for an hour? Oh yes.

Billingham, being a former actor and stand-up, is a natural on stage and bounded about the place as he read out some of the actual emails he’s received from ‘fans’ over the years. It’s very refreshing to find a best-selling author who’s willing to tell pedantic arseholes to fuck off in public, while simultaneously reminding you he used to work in children’s television.

Brookmyre may not be as comfortable a public performer as Billingham, but he’s every bit as funny. And cynical. And sarcastic. And sweary - I honestly have no idea why I like

discovered there was also a comedy festival happening in Glasgow and so abandoned all pretence at being literary reporters and went to see some funny stuff instead. German comedian Henning When is gaining an excellent reputation on the stand-up and TV circuits, and he proved why at The Stand Comedy Club. Yes, Germans can be funny!

Well, this particular one can anyway. He even got away with a few Hitler jokes. What he proved more than anything else is something I think all writers can learn from when it comes to dealing with clichés, stereotypes and tropes, the best option is always to embrace and then subvert them.

There were four comedians on the bill that

Brookmyre shared the bill with Mark Billingham, another WWJ, and personal, favourite. Was it a combined book reading? Nope. Was it an earnest, deeply philosophical interview stroke entirely unnatural and stage-managed ‘conversation’ about the themes explored in their latest releases?

Nope. Was it the pair of them having a beer and a giggle as they recounted some of the less glamorous incidents in their writing lives and basically took the piss for an hour? Oh yes. discussed at length this time last year (you remember, of course you do), the festival takes up home in The Mitchell Library, which is all old and cool and stuff. And also very near lots of pubs. And a nice wee Italian restaurant. And a comedy club (more of which later).

For the thousands of you who avidly follow these roaming reports, you’ll recall that I’ve managed to miss seeing my favourite author, Christopher Brookmyre, a grand total of four times now. Not this year though! I finally pinned the bastard down, with only limited use of chloroform.

Brookmyre shared the bill with Mark Billingham, another WWJ, and personal, favourite. Was it a combined book reading?

Nope. Was it an earnest, deeply philosophical interview stroke entirely unnatural and stagemanaged ‘conversation’ about the themes explored in their latest releases? Nope. Was it the pair of them having a beer and a giggle

8 | Random Stuff

him. I’m pretty sure he even said ‘cunt’ at one stage, to my horror.

These two hook up regularly to do an evening spot at festivals, and I can recommend you try to catch them if you can. Unless you want to be boring and hear them talk about their books, in which case see them individually and while the sun is still out.

Given the safe, cultured and, frankly, conservative tone of the Brookmyre/ Billingham show, we felt it necessary to step over the line to the wild and controversial side of literature for our next event. So we went to see Alistair Darling talk about the economy.

Which was nice.

He actually proved to be a versatile and interesting speaker, and definitely convinced everyone that nothing was his fault. Or his mates Gordon and Tony’s.

While pondering our next move we

night, and as we watched, listened and laughed it occurred to me that these people are also writers. We may not always think of them as such, but they are. And they can’t get away with spending a couple of years working on one piece and then hoping it will live on forever.

They have to write the equivalent of a novella every couple of weeks. Then they need to learn it off by heart!

Despite having somewhat ducked our duties with regard to the book festival this year, I came away from the weekend feeling we’d spent more time being exposed to actual writing than any number of dry, passionless author interviews. Funny, that.

Danny Gillan’s novel Scratch recently topped the Adult Erotic Fiction Chart on Amazon. He has no idea why.

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Five Star Wars (or - Who’s Reviewing the Reviewers?)

By Derek Duggan

On a scale of one to five stars how reliable are the reviews you see on the web these days? They must be accurate because they are generated by users, right? Of course it’s right.

People who have actually read the book (or sometimes those who have read a bit of the book – or at least intend reading the book at some time in the future) have taken the time to sit down and write what they think about it and they do this because when they read/didn’t read it they thought they would help other people out by giving them the inside track.

First off let’s put to one side the notion that unscrupulous people might use multiple accounts to give themselves or their clients good reviews and so bolster their ratings. In fairness, the only people who would do that would be cheating self promoters who only want to sell their product and there’s no room in this business for those who want to make money. So let’s forget that idea and just concentrate on the general book review posting populace out there.

But straight away there’s a problem – when you look at the average ratings of a book is it telling you more about the type of person reading it than it is about the actual book itself? Catcher in the Rye has an average rating of 3.74 on Goodreads. You might think that’s about right. Maybe it didn’t speak to you. Perhaps you think it deserves less, or more, whatever. And this is all fine until you see that The Hunger Games has an average score of 4.54. So, this means that objectively, or at least empirically, The Hunger Games is a better book than Catcher. It’s also better than The Great Gatsby (3.71), Slaughter House Five (3.9) and so on. In fact, The Hunger Games

is one of the very highest rated books on that site, so, therefore, it must be one of the very best books ever written. It must have a cleverly constructed world and intelligently drawn characters and an amazing premise and beautiful prose. It absolutely must have all those things because it’s better than all of those other books. It’s even better than To Kill a Mockingbird (4.18) so it must deal really well with matters of great complexity and bring the reader to a new understanding of the human condition. It even has a mocking jay, a genetically better version of a mocking bird, and if that’s not telling Harper Lee where to stick it then I don’t know what is.

You may not agree with this consensus but they made a film out of it so that’s more proof that it must be good as it is common knowledge that they only make movies out of really good well written books like The DaVinci Code or War Horse (4.06 – seriously) and if Tom Hanks is willing to have his hair done

by Sideshow Bob’s hairdresser then it must actually be art.

disagree more with their analysis? Can you fuck! Responding negatively to someone’s glowing review is a dangerous business. If your opinion bucks the general trend it actually means that you are a cynical fucker who only wants to harsh everyone’s buzz. Perhaps you haven’t understood the concept best summed up in the old adage – Eat Shit! Ten billion flies can’t be wrong! You may even be given that most insidious and punch-in-the-face worthy line – You must respect the opinions of others.

Once you hear that you’ll begin to understand the level of those you’re dealing with – of course you must respect the right of others to hold an opinion and even to express it – but you certainly don’t have to respect the actual fucking opinion. Otherwise you’d have to respect Mel Gibson’s opinions on how to treat the mother of your baby or all of those people who hold the opinion that it’s OK to hold a phone to their stupid fucking faces while they drive and where would we be then?

So are any of these reviews actually any help at all? Well, here’s the trick – read all the one and two star reviews – once you weed out all the ones that say - It was boring – or – It was not goodly written – or – Jesus told me to hate this book – you’ll begin to find people who have taken the challenge of swimming against the tide and have posted thoughtful critiques. If they are pointing up things you think will annoy you then maybe the book isn’t for you – however, if all they are worried about are details like – The character has a digital watch but as we all know this particular type of watch wasn’t invented until two years after the story is set which just ruins the whole flow – and this sort of thing doesn’t bother you, then possibly you’ll be fine.

But possibly you won’t. And you may find that you have, in fact, spent more time trawling through the reviews than you would have spent just reading the book and writing your own review. All you really learn from this sort of thing is that there are a lot of people out there who fancy themselves as literary critics.

Glad I could help.

... what if you buy the book on the recommendation of all these reviewers and then you find the book to be about as enjoyable as drinking a pint of spunk custard?

Can you go back onto the site and tell the good people of the internet that they have led you astray and that you couldn’t disagree more with their analysis? Can you fuck!

10 | Random Stuff

So here’s the problem – what if you buy the book on the recommendation of all these reviewers and then you find the book to be about as enjoyable as drinking a pint of spunk custard? Can you go back onto the site and tell the good people of the internet that they have led you astray and that you couldn’t

Controversial Pronouncements

by Anne Stormont

Contrary and argumentative as a child, I’ve evolved to be a controversial, cynical and subversive old bat. I’m a grandma now, but have no intention of mellowing and getting all conventional in my dotage. I love exercise - of the intellectual sort - and love that unholy trinity of interjections - ‘What if ’, ‘Why not?’ and ‘Ah, But’.

So - Controversy – how you even say the word is controversial – which syllable do you stress?

As to its nature – that too isn’t absolutely defined. It’s a spectrum. One woman’s controversy is another’s convention. It all depends on relative perspectives. There can be controversies within and between controversies.

Life is a controversial activity given that all us human beans have freewill.

Controversy – real and manufactured – is the stuff of politics. Gay marriage, reform of the Lords, granny taxing, benefits axing, cosseting the rich and Scottish independence are just some contemporary flashpoints of passion – or controversially? - slumps of

indifference.

In the field of my day job – that of education - there’s also controversy aplenty.

There are the debates on the best way to teach reading, on testing, on school funding, on teacher performance, on curriculum content. All the professions have their share of controversy. And it’s right and proper that they do. It prevents stagnation. It provokes thought and reflection and is, essentially, refreshing.

In literature, controversy is also a constant and vital presence. There is the literary versus genre/commercial fiction divide. To assert as I do that ‘literary’ is at best just another genre and at worst pretentiousness on the part of an author is controversial. And I would stoke that controversy by saying it’s not for the author to decide one way or another if they’re literary or not. That will be down to the reader. Is Austen literary or women’s commercial fiction? There’s a controversial cat amongst the smug pigeons.

Is ‘War and Peace’ more literary than ‘Each Peach Pear Plum’? I’d say no – both are classics to their different readerships. I donated my two-thirds unread copy of ‘Wolf Hall’ to the charity shop after I threw it at the wall, other folks obviously loved it.

OOPS my prejudices are showing! Just a sec – I’ll make myself decent and impartial again.

Okay, where were we? Oh yes, literary controversy.

For writers controversy is a friend – maybe even the life-force. It fuels journalism and academic writing. Perhaps it’s even a factor in general non-fiction. After all even the ‘How-to’ manual, the dictionary, the atlas can be fields of debate. It certainly underpins fiction – from romance to sci-fi and yes, even literary stuff.

Consensus is fine but makes for a very dull story. Controversy, conflict and debate are the loamy compost of fabulous yarns. Writers are naturally controversial – discuss...

One of the most recent points of heated debate - aka the ‘c’ word - is the traditional versus independent routes to publication.

When I decided to self-publish in 2009 I was cautioned against it by some and ostracised by others in my writing networks. But now self-publishing, formerly, whisper it - ‘vanity publishing’ - seems to have mutated to ‘indie’ status and is perhaps, maybe, possibly, a respectable alternative to the older route of agent and big publishing house. It is most definitely a healthy development for readers and writers – she said controversially. Time will tell if it’s a brave new dawn. However, the future of publishing is the, possibly, controversial theme for the next edition of WWJ so I will leave it there – for now...

In the meantime - writer friends and combatants - keep stirring it up.

For writers controversy is a friend – maybe even the lifeforce. It fuels journalism and academic writing. Perhaps it’s even a factor in general non-fiction. After all even the ‘How-to’ manual, the dictionary, the atlas can be fields of debate. It certainly underpins fiction – from romance to sci-fi and yes, even literary stuff. Consensus is fine but makes for a very dull story. Controversy, conflict and debate are the loamy compost of fabulous yarns. Writers are naturally controversial – discuss...

Random Stuff | 11

Christos Tsiolkas has breakfast with JJ Marsh

Christos came to Zürich as part of a brief European tour. He gave a public reading and answered questions on his work to an appreciative crowd. On Sunday morning, he met me to talk about writing. Despite his previous treatment by the British press, he was friendly, thoughtful, articulate and damn good company at breakfast time.

Tell me a bit about your writers’ group.

The other members are women?

Yes. There’s four of us and we get together every two weeks. Jenna’s 50, I’m 46, Jess has just turned forty and Jeana is in her late twenties. We do two pieces of writing each fortnight. As writers, they ask questions that concern me as a writer; about narrative, style, intent. They also have a long-term understanding of the novel I’m working on. They were there right from the early stages of The Slap. There’s also another writer and old friend, Angela Savage, who writes crime. We don’t have a formal structure, but she’s been a fabulous critic.

You’re very lucky.

I know (touches wood). And my partner, Wayne, is a terrific reader. He’s not shy of being honest with me, but he’s my partner so is very tender in his criticism. I gave him the second draft of the novel I’m working on at the moment, Barracuda. He spotted the mistakes almost instinctually. I’ve just finished the third draft and I’m still climbing the mountain, but it works much better and a lot of that’s come from Wayne. He knows me so well. You know, we had our 27th anniversary on the flight over.

Congratulations!

Thank you.

Let’s talk about the books. I’ve just finished Dead Europe.

That’s a hard book.

It is, but I really enjoyed it. You wrote it before The Slap and the structure in terms of voices, points-of-view and tone are very different. Didn’t you have 13 different voices in the first version of The Slap?

Yes. Part of getting to the narrative voices in The Slap came from the experience of doing Dead Europe. That novel works by alternating between Isaac’s story and an almost fable-like structure, which come from my father’s storytelling. He has a vampire, for example, in his village.

Those wonderful stories used to terrify me as a child.

As I tried to find a voice to communicate these stories, I simply discovered the pleasure of writing outside my narcissistic self.

And that informed The Slap?

That informed The Slap. I became interested in writing

12 | Random Stuff

different points of view. And I think I came from a student and cultural generation which was very nervous about writing outside one’s own experience; gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and cultural space. I think The Slap is my attempt to resist that. Not to say those considerations aren’t important, but if I can’t write as a woman, a black person, an old man or a young girl, what the hell am I doing writing at all?

About Christos

At Friday’s reading, you said you were unable to write a paternal character like Manolis (from The Slap) while you were in your twenties. Why?

In 1999 Christos worked with three other writers (Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius and Melissa Reeves) and composer, Irini Vela, on the theatrical collaboration, Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? The production won the Australian Writers Guild top prize for that year and marked the start of a long professional relationship with the Melbourne Workers Theatre. The same year, he published The Jesus Man and in 2002, The Devil’s Playground.

Growing up in a migrant community, there was a lot of fear about the outside world. And part of the migrant dream is for the child to be successful. So I remember talking to my mother about writing and she said, ‘You’re going to die poor and on the streets’. There were real fears about the choices I was making and about my sexuality, so I had to make a very necessary rebellion and leave home. I had a fractured relationship with Mum and Dad, but they never cut me off. And I never cut them off either. My father, and my mother too, had grown up with a sense of honour. I’m not sure our generation has that.

But in those days, I was defining myself by the difference to my father; his conservatism, his patriarchal attitudes.

With age and experience, I can see my father’s courage, his kindness. I remember berating him for the safety of his choices and I am so ashamed of that now.

I asked another Melbourne author, Steven Conte (The Zookeeper’s War) what distinguishes Australian fiction. He said that nowadays, it looks away from Europe and towards Asia. Do you agree?

I’ve realised that the world is vertical not horizontal. I can travel to Beijing, Bangkok, Singapore and my body is not exhausted. I come to Europe and it takes me four days, even physically, to adjust. The migrant waves into Australia since WWII have altered our outlook. We used to be so fixated on London. That’s why you have Germaine Greer, Clive James, Barry Humphries in Britain; people who couldn’t bear to live so far away. But my romantic centre was Athens. Dead Europe was an exorcism of that, in a way. I love being an observer in Europe. You’re going through a tremendous, tumultuous time and I love listening to you talk about what that means, but I’m not part of that conversation.

Colonialism dictates so much about how Australia works, but I’ve realised we are the New World and there’s an opportunity to change what ‘English’, as a language, means.

So where do your influences come from?

In my middle adolescence, I read Philip Roth and Norman Mailer and Carson McCullers. They, along with Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote’s short stories, have a quality which is not so different to growing up in Australia. A sense of huge open spaces and the centre being so far away. The relationship to landscape in American writing is something I responded to. And, I

Christos Tsiolkas, whether as novelist, playwright or scriptwriter, has always been fearless. His first novel Loaded (1995) explored identity; racial, sexual, familial and social over one 24-hour drug-fuelled session in Melbourne. In 1998, it was filmed as Head On by Ana Kokkinos.

His third novel Dead Europe won The Age Fiction Book of the Year prize and also the Melbourne Prize in 2006. In 2008, The Slap propelled him to wider recognition and greater controversy.

The book upset myriad book clubs and won numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Pacific Region), the ASA medal and the NSW Premier’s Award, and was longlisted for the Man Booker. That summer, Christos spent three months at Cove Park near Loch Long in Scotland, taking part in the Cities of Literature International Residency programme funded jointly by the City of Literature Edinburgh, and Arts Victoria in Australia.

He lives in Melbourne with his partner of 27 years, Wayne.

Photograph by Zoe Ali

Random Stuff | 13

realise in hindsight, I’m responding to the Jewish immigrant tradition. Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint I read and re-read as they seemed to be detailing my life. There’s a vigour in American writing. A young man in Hannover asked me a really good question about vulgarity. I tried to explain Australian English; the convict history, the Irish and Scots and the deliberate use of coarseness and vulgarity to stick it up the English. In detailing that, I realised where my own language has come from. And I need to absorb myself again in European writing, because I see it through blinkered eyes, as a little effete and intellectually cool.

And you made a comment about a collection of short stories you called dry and academic?

It felt like they were all written from within some writing class in a post-modern department of a university. That kind of writing – post September 11, post the economic crisis – unless you are someone of immense creative talent, that is so spent now.

Changing your work for another medium intrigues me. Can you explain how you worked with the screenwriters on the television adaptation of The Slap?

The model we took was from HBO. As someone who grew up with cinema, it’s actually television which has been the most out there in the last 10-15 years. I’m talking about the Anglophone world, of course; Mad Men, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos. We got as many people as possible involved in the creative writing process to discuss how the story worked, how narrative works, how characters work and I found that collaborative process really exciting.

As a novelist, you work often in isolation. We worked Monday to Friday for a fortnight, separated for a three-week period and came back together. I was there with Tony Ayres, one of the producers, who was also a director on two episodes. I’ve known Tony a long time, as a film-maker and now a friend.

Some writers find the process of collaboration more frustrating than exciting, because you’re not in full control of the decisions made.

But I’d done it before when working in theatre. Although I’d been going to the cinema two, three times a week since I was this high (indicates his knee), I came to theatre later in life. So getting involved in writing for the stage, I really had to think hard about the writing process. I learnt a lot from rehearsals and working with actors. I’m not scared of that process, but I can’t imagine a collaborative novel. Working that way, I would bite someone’s head off. But in other media, I enjoy it. You’ve got more freedom for collaboration in television. It’s not bound to the auteur, in the way that film is. At least in Australia. There the auteur still rules.

Your work has polarised opinion and provoked some strong reactions. How do you react to criticism? Does it bother you? Are you able to ignore it?

The best way to read criticism is to let some time pass. You can never completely let go of the ego, but hopefully, you’ll have more clarity about the mistakes. I’ve worked as a critic and I think criticism is really important, but sometimes, we need criticism of critics. There’s a lot of lazy reviewing. I’ve just been reading François Truffaut’s The films in my life. His introduction is a wonderful justification of criticism. But a bad review really feels like someone has punched me in the neck. Still, if you’re going to accept the best, you have to accept the worst.

In your shoes, I’d find the accusations of misogyny the most offensive. It’s as if people wilfully want to misunderstand.

Yes. That really annoyed me. The cavalier way that word was used, especially in the English press, really appalled me. If you use terms such as ‘misogynist’, or ‘racist’, you need to be very careful and define exactly why you come to that conclusion. Only a fool would use language like that in such a light way.

Staying with criticism, your sex scenes have been slated for lacking eroticism. But I see the way you write sex, especially in Dead Europe as more political, or perhaps transactional.

Thank you! When I wrote Dead Europe, I’d just finished a play in Melbourne, Non Parlo di Salo, about Paolo Pasolini. I’d just re-read all his poetry, watched all his films and tried to understand what that man was doing with his last work, Salò (or 120 Days of Sodom), one of the most powerful and disturbing films I’ve ever seen. He used sex to interrogate power. That influence affected what I tried to do with Dead Europe. I could not put myself in his league, but as he used de Sade to reveal a truth about Fascism, I wanted to use pornography to reveal what I thought was a truth about contemporary Europe.

You must have seen the inherent risk.

Of course. Whenever you walk such a fine line, there’s the risk of failing; it just becomes the banal pornography or regurgitating the same racism you’re trying to highlight. It’s a book I will keep asking questions about because the more I understand, the more I want to rewrite and revisit. But I thought and I still think it’s important to do. I’ve just been through Germany. The way Europe is defining itself is in relation to that history of anti-semitism.

Do you write with a certain kind of reader in mind?

Literature is a gift, so I write for the most intelligent, sensitive, enquiring, openminded reader there is.

14 | Random Stuff

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Travels with the Library Cat, Part 1

Toronto’s Independent Bookstores

The day before I left England, I read a headline in the Bookseller’s Daily Bulletin. “Canadian bookseller announces closures.” Nicholas Hoare, one of Canada’s most respected independent booksellers, was closing branches in both Montreal and Ottawa. I knew, too, that this was only the latest in a long line of closures of independent bookstores in Canada.

So I decided to see for myself how things were in Toronto.

I began at Nicholas Hoare’s remaining branch, on Front Street East. This is an elegant space, with gallery runs part-way along one side.

Elsewhere, a slender set of library steps allows access to the highest shelves. Jazz music plays softly in the background.

Nicholas Hoare started 40 years ago in Montreal (1971) with a warehouse supplying libraries. They moved into retail a few years later, first with a shop in Montreal, then Ottawa, then Toronto.

“Our five most senior people have 140 years experience between us,” Hoare tells me.

The closures of the stores in Montreal and Ottawa have been forced on him by massive rent rises (72%, in the case of Ottawa and almost as much in Montreal). To some extent, he admits, he is the victim of his own highly individual approach. The shelving in the stores is a bespoke design, making it impossible to simply up sticks and move to another location. “I always thought I’d be taken out in a box,” he says.

He and his staff made the difficult decision to get out while still on top, focusing the business on the warehouse and on the Toronto branch.

Like many of the independent booksellers I have spoken to, he believes the future lies in specialising.

“We are witnessing the demise of the general independent bookstore.

Only niche stores are going to survive. And we are niche. Amazon and the big chains don’t carry the books we do. And we don’t carry bestsellers.”

Nicholas Hoare’s specialism is imported books from Britain.

How do they select the books they sell?

“We source books based on reviews. In England, we read the Literary Review, which is still astonishingly erudite. And in the US, we read the reviews from the American Libraries Association. When it comes to teen fiction in particular, they are absolutely on the button.

When we see two recommendations coming from those different points, we know we are onto something special.”

I ask him what the standout books have been for him recently.

“The Hare With the Amber Eyes,” he says immediately. “We received that in proof copy, and we could see it was something special. Japanese treasure, smuggling, the holocaust… We were way ahead of the game, promoting the book in Canada.

“Going back a few years, we were the first to introduce Sue Townsend to Canada. I remember we jammed two switchboards with people asking, ‘Who is this woman?’”

The shop itself has the feel of somewhere very select. Every book is placed face out, reinforcing the impression that they have been individually chosen. A William Morris sofa and some deep arm chairs are arranged around a huge fireplace. A whole section of garden books is arranged as if in an art gallery, just at the point where a potted tree grows in the middle of the store. In the children’s section at the back, the shelves sprout turrets, like a miniature castle.

The arrangement of the books is eccentric. There is a section of controversial books about God – from Christopher Hitchens to Ten Popes that Shook the World. Old books are mixed in with new, fiction with non-fiction, the unifying principle being a theme that can take

16 | Random Stuff

some working out. This is a bookshop to spend time in, and many people do - as their guest book, lying open by the sofa, testifies.

I move on to Ben McNally Books on Bay Street. McNally was previously the manager of Hoare’s Toronto branch, but the two fell out around five years ago and McNally opened his own shop a few minutes’ walk away.

Given that one of arguments with Hoare was reportedly over the playing of background music in the store, I am mildly amused to hear classical music playing at a similar low volume.

The design of the shop, if anything, is even more imposing. Dark wooden shelves stand out against pale walls painted with a swirling, Art Nouveau design. There is a chandelier and a decorative archway leading to the small paperback section. Only one chair – a large leather armchair – perhaps reflecting the fact that many of their clientele are from the business district and often have little time to browse.

A fair proportion, but not all, of the books are arranged face out. The stock here is definitely denser than at Nicholas Hoare’s. But again there is the sense that it has been purposely selected – and with scant regard to current bestseller lists.

“I have to know everything that a British or American bookseller has to know, and then about Canadian publishing on top of that,” McNally tells me. He is passionate about providing books that no one else is interested in – books that are unusual, difficult to get or expensive to carry. “We are very persistent in pursuit of books people want. It gives us huge satisfaction when we track down something a customer has given up hope of finding.

“Sometimes we have to tell people it will cost them one arm, one leg, the birthright of their first child and take six months. But if they still want it, we’ll get it.”

They will deliver books to the local offices. They get to know their clients and will recommend books when they haven’t the time to browse.

“I had one client who was on a long sailing voyage. He rang me to say he was ready to throw his Kindle overboard because there was nothing on it he wanted to read. He asked me to pick out half a dozen books for him and send them via a friend who was joining him for a leg of the journey.

He knew he could trust us to find things he would want to read.”

I move on, into the University district, where I find the Toronto Women’s Bookstore. This not-for-profit store began 38 years ago as a shelf of books in a women’s resource centre. Their first shop was in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where it shared space with a feminist printing press and a self-defence collective.

Since then, the store has moved several times, before occupying its current location on Harbord Street. In the face of increasing competition from chain stores and others, it has expanded outwards, embracing issues around racism, disability, sexuality and the environment.

The present owner, former employee and long-term customer, Victoria Moreno, took over two years ago, when the store was once again under threat of closure. She has added a tiny café at the back and opened up the courtyard behind as a pleasant seating area for sunny days. She’s also developed the store’s website and internet sales. In the basement, she says, are boxes of material relating to the store’s history, which she is beginning to delve through.

As well as books, the store sells locally made jewellery and crafts, and has run courses in subjects from knitting to exploring bisexuality. They also run drama, music and language programmes for children.

Ben McNally Books

buying something – and probably without discovering some hidden gem of a book backed by a cast iron recommendation. Only watch out. “If you come back and tell me you don’t like a book that I love, that’s really throwing down the gauntlet,” Sagara says. “You better be prepared for an argument.”

Freiman directs me up the road to Ten Editions, a tiny secondhand bookshop of the sort that used to line the Charing Cross Road, where every surface is crammed with books and boxes, and the aisles are almost too narrow to move up and down.

The current owner, Susan Duff, has been there twenty years. “This was a bookstore well before that,” she says. “We have the vibes.”

She is squatting on a low stool, sorting books on one of the lower shelves. She wears a man’s tweed jacket over a heavy polo neck sweater, and with her mass of curly grey hair, she could be Margaret Atwood’s sister.

“Once upon a time, when people came in wanting to read about, say, Aristotle, they would want the original text, a couple of translations, history, criticism. Now they just want a specific text in a specific edition.

If they need to read around the subject, they go on-line. It’s not as much fun any more.”

Right across the street is the SciFi and Fantasy Bookshop Bakka Phoenix, now in its fourth home and celebrating its 40th Anniversary.

Bakka (named after a Freman legend from Frank Herbert’s Dune) was founded by Charles McKee in 1972 and is possible the world’s oldest continuously trading science fiction bookstore. Hopefully, it has now found its permanent home, as Ben Freiman (who took over in 2003 and added ‘Phoenix’ to the name), owns the freehold.

One of the reasons for the store’s success is apparent as soon as I walk through the door. Long-term employee, the Japanese-Canadian fantasy author Michelle Sagara-West, is holding forth to a customer, enthusiasm emanating from her like a heat-haze. Without drawing breath, she covers bad romantic tropes, the importance of finding at least one character in a book that you like, the problems with Buffy novelisations (“trouble is, too many people confuse ‘tough’ with ‘bitchy’”), Megan Whelan Turner’s The Thief and its sequels (“All of us in the store loved these books. Well, all of us except Ben, but he doesn’t do historical fantasy”) the joy of Terry Pratchett’s descriptive writing (“Except The Colour of Magic – I still can’t finish that,”) and the charms of The Night Circus.

“She’s only every hit a client over the head with a book once,” Freiman tells me, and they both dissolve into giggles. “It was a man who came in with two women,” Sagara says. “The women wanted some help browsing. As soon as the guy had found what he was after, he wanted to know if they were done yet. I picked up the book he’d just paid for and rapped him on the head. ‘You can’t rush them like that! They’re still looking,’ I told him.”

“What did he say?” asks the other customer.

“I think he was stunned,” Freiman says.

“The women both thought it was hilarious. One of them said, ‘See, even a complete stranger knows you deserve to be hit.’”

It would surely be impossible to escape from of shop like this without

18 | Random Stuff

My last stop takes me north on the subway to Eglington, and Mabel’s Fables, a children’s bookstore that opened in 1988. Mabel herself is a marmalade cat (the second of that name) who graciously puts in an appearance and condescends to be stroked.

The ground floor of Mabel’s is for younger children, arranged by ages and stages. Lamps above each shelf are marked with guideline ages (easily seen by parents, not so easily by children.) Huge stuffed toys peek out from various nooks.

A flight of narrow stairs takes you to the upper floor, where there are books for older children. At the back is a wonderful story area, its walls covered in doodles and autographs from all manner of authors, Margaret Atwood included. As well as story-time, they run rhyme-time groups, language classes, writing workshops.

The store also has a close relationship with the children’s hospital, the famous ‘Toronto Sick Kids.’ Customers can buy books at a 20% discount, inscribe them with a personal message, and have them donated to the hospital.

The owner, Eleanor LeFave, has always been at the forefront of innovation. Currently, Mabel’s Fables is one of forty stores about to start trialling a new way of selling ebooks. Customers will be able to come in, browse the store, avail themselves of the expertise of the staff, and then buy a token for downloading the ebook of their choice – either for themselves or to give as a gift. The scheme is a collaboration between Canadian publisher Thomas Allen and Cormorant Books and will initially focus on short stories. The stories will be available exclusively to independent bookstores, who will receive a comparatively generous 40% of the sales revenue.

It was great to find that, despite everything, Toronto can still boast an eclectic range of independent bookstores.

Also Recommended: Everywhere I went, staff were keen to recommend other indie stores. Here are a few I was told about but couldn’t make it to.

A Different Booklist, Bloor and Bathurst (Books for the African and Caribbean Diaspora) Another Story, Roncevalles Village (International fiction, political nonfiction, and alternative children’s and young adult lit) The Beguiling, Markam Street, (Underground and Alternative Comics) Little Island Comics, Bathurst Street (The Beguiling for Kids) David Mason Books, Adelaide St (Antiquarian and First Edition)

•Annual Open Short Story Competition £400 First Prize Theme is open, we like unusual, but no stories for children, please; No connection needed to Scotland either by entrant or theme

Next closing date 31stJuly 2012

Full details on website

www.hissac.co.uk

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CROW POEM COMP

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60 Second Interviews with JJ Marsh

Each month, we persuade, tempt and coerce (or bully, harass and blackmail) two writers into spilling the contents of their shelves.

Twelve questions on books and writing. Plus the Joker – a wild thirteenth card which can reveal so much. Be honest, what do you put on YOUR chips?

Your intrepid reporter, Jill

Daniel Martin Eckhart With a full-time day job how do you find time to write?

I set priorities. My family comes first. In my day job, I write up corporate stories, interviews, blog posts – I consider myself lucky – it’s a day job, yes, but it’s still writing. The stability of the day job means that I can be selective in what screenwriting jobs I want to accept. If I were a fulltime writer, I’d have to take whatever jobs I was offered.

Fortunately, I am in the position where I only take on jobs that emotionally grab me.

You’ve been working on adaptations recently.

Yes, and at first I was reluctant as I expected it to be less creative than writing original stories. But I took it on as a challenge - to see if I could do it. I quickly found out there is a tremendous amount of creativity in adapting novels. I’ve adapted four novels from three different authors so far.

How involved were they?

The whole spectrum. The first, American novelist David Liss, wasn’t part of the process at all. The second, Craig Russell, was more involved. I flew to Scotland to meet him and discuss ideas. He was very open and his clear views, and his discussions with the lead actor, helped us shape the script. Now I’m adapting Dead Simple for Peter James. Peter has had a successful career as movie producer as well as author – he executive-produced The Merchant of Venice – as you might imagine, he’s a pro and very hands on.

About Daniel After a stint in the army, Daniel escaped to the Vatican to become a Swiss Guard. After two years of protecting the Pope, he joined the United Nations, worked at the New York headquarters, plus five years in Israel, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq. In his various positions, Daniel had some close calls with bullets, bombs and kidnappings.

He switched his UN career for acting school in New York (Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre) where he discovered screenwriting.

Daniel writes thrillers, cop stories and all things dark and twisted. He’s worked with some of Germany’s best networks, producers, directors and actors and been Grimme-Prize (Germany’s top TV honour) nominated.

Recently he has focused on adaptations, such as Blood Eagle and Brother Grimm, both bestselling novels by crime writer Craig Russell. He’s currently working on the feature film adaptation of Peter James’ best-seller Dead Simple. http://www.danielmartineckhart. com/

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Where do start when adapting a novel?

By reading it as a reader. Then read it again and find those instant connections. If those strong connections aren’t there, I’m the wrong writer for the project. I was once asked to adapt a crime story about a missing body, but the thing that jumped out at me was a minor character, a child kept in chains. That was the story I wanted to write. Since they wanted to tell the story as it unfolded in the novel, I passed.

Where do you write?

In ‘The Cave’. We live in a big old farmhouse, but I chose a tiny room at the back on the shady side. I close the door and shut the world out. Because I have a day job, I write late into the night. I trained myself to do so. Work on a project may take a year, but for much of that time, you’re not actually writing. You’re thinking. The month before a deadline, I focus on bringing all that together. And the last two weeks are usually crunch time. That’s when I divide up my weekends. Half with family, half writing.

Robert McKee’s book Story had a powerful effect on me when I focused on the craft. Which screenwriting gurus do you admire?

I don’t admire any of them. After you’ve written for a while, you realise nobody knows anything. It’s great that gurus share their wisdom - but don’t let them define you. You learn most about screenwriting by watching movies and analyzing them.

Do you have a word or phrase you most overuse?

In writing, I don’t think so. But in conversation, I tend to say ‘fundamentally’ a lot.

What are you working on at the moment?

Dead Simple, and so far, the project is totally on track. After that, I have a drawer full of ideas I’d like to get out there. I’d like to write some specs again … unless of course my agent calls with another great project.

Chris Pavone Which was your favourite childhood book?

Winnie the Pooh. I was named after Christopher Robin.

Do you have a word or phrase you most overuse?

Where do you write?

I did. ‘Chuckle’. But after someone pointed it out, it got eradicated.

At a members’ club called Soho House. I use it like an office and go there after dropping the kids at school. I don’t have a desk, it’s more like a hotel lobby, with comfortable chairs.

There’s a sense of community, as a lot of other people are doing the same thing. We can take a break and chat for a few minutes, but we’re all there for the same reason. To work.

Which was the book that changed your life?

About Chris Born in 1968, Chris grew up in New York City, and attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn and Cornell University, where he majored in government.

He worked at a number of publishing houses over nearly two decades, most notably as an editor at Clarkson Potter, where he specialized in cookbooks. In the late nineties, he also wrote a little book called The Wine Log. The father of twin schoolboys named Sam and Alex, Chris is also the husband of Madeline McIntosh. They have an old cocker spaniel named Charlie Brown (he’s brown). He’s lived in New York City his entire life, except for college and a year and a half in Luxembourg, where he started writing The Expats in the cafés of the cobblestony old town. He now lives in Greenwich Village and the North Fork of Long Island. http://www.chrispavone.com/

Not really one book, but one writer. I only used to read what I considered high-quality fiction, the kind of books that won Nobel prizes, and I looked down on popular fiction. When I was working at Doubleday, our biggest writer was John Grisham. I dismissed his books as not important because of their success. Then I started reading them. I realised the craft of writing a page-turning thriller is a real craft. There’s something great about any book you can’t put down even if it doesn’t contain a single beautiful sentence. I realised that some books are a form of entertainment, a way to pass pleasant time and maybe learn something you didn’t know. That’s what I tried to do with The Expats. Just write an entertaining book.

You certainly succeeded. I devoured it in one weekend.

Thank you.

You mention you used to read only highquality fiction. Can I ask for examples?

I still do prefer to read those kinds of books in which nothing happens but it happens beautifully. The books I’ve enjoyed this year were Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency and King of the Badgers. I liked Julian Barnes’s A Sense of an Ending, The Art of Fielding by Chad Hardbach and I guess my favourite writer would be David Foster Wallace, and his book Infinite Jest. But Foster Wallace committed suicide. I wouldn’t trade a happy life for his genius.

Is there a book you were supposed to love but didn’t?

A Prayer for Owen Meany.

What have you learned from writing?

That I’m not as smart as I think I am. I’m not as good a writer as I want to be. It’s been a long painful process making the transition from editor to writer.

Which book do you wish you’d written?

The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss. It has a wonderful rhythm and has fun with words. It’s enjoyable to say and hear. Rhythm of writing is so important. Whether it’s the long sentences of Foster Wallace or the short snaps of Hemingway, they understand the rhythm.

Are there any books you re-read?

No, I don’t re-read. I’ve read Infinite Jest twice, but that’s all.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m writing a new book, but I don’t know where it’s going yet, so I’m not going to talk about it.

What’s your favourite wine?

L’Enfant Perdu. It’s a wine made on the French/Spanish border. I drank it in a restaurant in Barcelona and have never been able to find it again.

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Revolution in the Head Procrastinating with Perry Iles

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.

Mark Twain Poor old Mark Twain. There he was, just being inoffensive and writing kids’ fiction, but now this great man of American letters is embroiled in a controversy of his own. They want to re-write him, edit him, re-word his books to appease early twenty-first century sensibilities.

What’s the problem? Niggers and injuns; Tom ‘n’ Huck are full of them, and this filth must be stamped out immediately. We’re not trustworthy as readers, apparently. We’re not allowed to take matters into our own hands, especially where our children are concerned.

We’re not allowed to say “listen, kiddo, this is how people a hundred years ago referred to black characters and Native Americans. It’s not nice, it’s not big and it’s not clever, and if I ever catch you using words like that I’ll clip you round the ear. But these are great and important works of fiction, and it’s not up to philistines to alter them, so just use a bit of discretion, OK?” Nope, we’re not bright enough to be allowed this freedom. So, we’d better change Slaughterhouse Five too. Not for the traditional reasons of controversy – Vonnegut portrayed American soldiers as cowardly and inept and used the F-word way back in the days when they made you sit on the naughty step for swearing – we must change the part where he referred to a child with Down’s Syndrome as “a Mongolian idiot”. If we don’t, social workers will no doubt burn copies of the book like headmasters did back in 1969, because we can’t be trusted. We need to be looked after. We all need to come to love Big Brother…

Political correctness and the convoluted linguistics of sensitive terminology make me tired. Burning a book is an extremely unintelligent thing to do, whether that book is Slaughterhouse Five or the Koran. The best way to go about putting an end to literary controversy is, of course, to stop teaching children to read. Failing that, we might step back and take a moment to realise that we don’t live in a perfect present. We live on a straight line that started with an unwarranted assumption and seems to be heading towards a foregone conclusion. Our lives carry the

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moving point of now through an indistinct past towards an uncertain future. So the things we think are acceptable now won’t be in a generation or so’s time, and the sooner we step down from the spurious moral high ground we’ve created for ourselves and realise that we’re still fallible, the better for all concerned, really.

So here’s a starting point. It’s my contention that the humour of Bernard Manning and that of Jo Brand are pretty much identical.

Obviously one of them’s dead, but Manning used to go onstage looking sneery and cynical, sweating into a shiny suit and making himself look as ugly as possible whilst reeling off a series of sexist jokes. Jo Brand goes onstage looking like a contestant in a dress-like-alesbian contest and makes herself look as ugly as possible whilst reeling off a series of sexist jokes. Hers, however, are directed against men, so they’re acceptable whilst Manning’s are not. Why? Because of the prevailing thought-process of the times, and nothing more. “Take my wife… please!” “The way to a man’s heart is straight through the ribcage.” It’s tired, rehashed, lazy old nonsense. Basically, whenever someone affixes an …ism to the end of a word, it turns the word into a concept, into an accepted paradigm, which is dangerous on two levels – firstly because it’s accepted without question by the majority, and secondly because its inherent hypocrisy will eventually spark a counter-movement which will probably put those whom the paradigm purported to protect under even more threat than they were to start with. In parts of Africa they used to have a saying: “when elephants fight, the grass gets crushed. When elephants make love, the grass also gets crushed.” This saying came about after decades of being fought over and then courted by imperialist forces that resulted in little more than death, famine and exploitation, and the same can be said for the colonising processes of political correctness which tend to belittle and patronise the things they have set themselves up to protect.

All political correctness is hypocritical. All of it. I come from Britain, and I am therefore

a Brit. Kylie Minogue comes from Australia, and is therefore an Aussie. Mrs Patel down the road comes from Pakistan, and is therefore…. hold on, we’re not allowed to even think about going there. Why? Must be because Pakistan is a worse place to come from than Australia or Britain, or people would be proud to refer to themselves by a diminutive of their country’s name, just like us white folks do.

Obviously, I’m being over-simplistic, but the snobbish, racist hypocrisy of such presumed sensitivity is appalling. We’re allowed to tell jokes against American stereotypes because they’re an economic superpower and because they’re just as white as us. Hold on again. They aren’t all white. There are tens of millions of African Americans, and America once called upon the world to send it their poor, their huddled masses. Americans are about as multicultural as you can get, except the black ones, who are all just lumped together as “African Americans”. There, we’ve invented a comfortable term to hide behind so we don’t have to think about them any more. We can just brush them aside like we used to when they were niggers, but now we’ve allowed ourselves to feel OK about it. Until Hurricane Katrina happens, then suddenly New Orleans is full of black looters and white citizens who are re-distributing essential resources. But whenever we make a joke about Americans, it’s against a stereotypical white American.

A Texan, perhaps, or someone like George Bush, who bore a superficial resemblance to a chimpanzee and was therefore portrayed as one by the Guardian’s cartoonist, Steve Bell. What would have happened if Bell had portrayed, say, Robert Mugabe as a gorilla is anyone’s guess.

Steve Bell also drew a cartoon once in which George Bush referred to the French as “cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.” We laughed, because the joke was pretty much anti-Bush rather than anti-French, but there is a whole world of racist echoes in that cartoon.

It’s, you know, sort of right-ish about the French, and it’s sort of right about George Bush being basically stupid, and it kind of satirises

the red-blooded American attitude to people who seek peaceful solutions or who don’t want to get involved in bombing the middle-east back into the stone age. Such stereotyping is acceptable when it’s against countries that are as white and as rich as ours, but what if the cartoon had instead referred to the Ugandans as “Banana-munching tree-swingers”? Same premise. Like Manning and Brand, the humour comes from exactly the same place but is directed elsewhere and because of that it suddenly isn’t funny any more. Why? Because whichever way you cut it, we’re all hypocrites and racists. We can say what we like about rich white people but not poor black people.

Racism’s fine, as long as you remain conscious of the direction you take. Just like sexism. And anything else with an ism on the end. You can make jokes at the expense of intelligent people whenever you like. I wrote a column in this very magazine recently in which I conjectured at length about philosophers playing The X Factor. Maybe I should balance that by writing about Stephen Hawking on Total Wipeout – “he can understand the complexities of astrophysics, Amanda, let’s see how he copes with the big red balls!” Can jokes about the disabled be funny? I remember Monty Python’s sketch about the hundred metres for people with no sense of direction, and their sketch about the marathon for the deaf in which, of course, nobody hears the starting gun. Some of Vic Reeves’ characters were borderline too – his assistant, Les, who was in love with a spirit level and afraid of chives, or the Asperger’s of Graham Lister, who kept trying to win Novelty Island. I’m afraid that I found Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out two of the funniest programmes in the history of televised comedy. If someone were to tell me that I was no longer allowed to laugh at these programmes, I might make a controversial reply involving bad language.

So, I’m usually onside with those who attempt to subvert the comfort of accepted thought-processes. Which brings me nicely to Jeremy Clarkson. I strongly recommend reading his columns and his books. They are examples of dedicated writing, hard work, intelligence, consistency and great verbal dexterity. And they’re funny too. I don’t agree with what he says a lot of the time, but it doesn’t matter. Clarkson’s output and the consistency of the quality of his writing is phenomenal. He also has the best job in the entire world, bar none, at which he works bloody hard. And he once punched Piers Morgan in the face, an action for which I’d forgive pretty much anybody pretty much anything. Clarkson’s comments about foreign countries, striking workers, lorry drivers killing prostitutes and One Man and his Dog being a Korean cookery programme are deliberately targeted to be offensive.

I’m not exactly a stranger to that concept myself.

Clarkson’s collected columns sit on my bookshelf next to my Charlie Brooker

collection, my Monty Python videos and controversial books by Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, Joseph Heller, Bret Easton Ellis, Irvine Welsh and Henry Miller. Controversy used to involve simple tastelessness and offence. Now, controversially, controversy has got worse. It’s now a criminal offence to use racist language in conversation or in writing.

People lose their jobs for making comments about weathergirls, football disasters, tsunamis or anything else that’s deemed “sensitive” by those self-appointed arbiters who have taken over from Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford. The world is run by the sort of small-minded banality that keeps the Daily Mail Britain’s best-selling newspaper. And behind the smiling, caring mask, evil goes unnoticed by those who make sure they’re protected from it by keeping us interested in something else. Who do you want as your arbiter of national acceptability? Paul Dacre?

Come back Mary Whitehouse…

Let’s move to Israel, whose government is constructing a wall nearly five hundred miles long to protect their citizens by, oh, let’s say concentrating Palestinians into a sort of camp based on land captured during the seven days war in 1967, to prevent Palestinian culture or their perceived threat from spreading into the more, oh, let’s say, racially pure state of Israel. To be fair, most Israeli citizens fully comprehend the ramifications and historical irony of the concept, but “Holocaust, schmolocaust, get the fuck over it” might perhaps be one approach to adopt in the face of a government that seems hell-bent on refusing to learn from history. They might as well stick up a “Freedom Through Work” sign at the gate.

However, we’re not actually allowed to say this kind of thing, because it’s illegal. Historian David Irving, who wrote so knowledgably about the bombing of Dresden, got a bit silly by saying the Holocaust never happened. The man’s a fucking idiot, staring blindly into the face of irrefutable evidence. He’s accused of historical revisionism by those same historians who looked at Dresden and suddenly decided a few years ago that the death toll wasn’t 135,000, it was only about 35,000. I can sense Kurt Vonnegut spinning in his grave from here, as his “hundred thousand Hansel and Gretels, burned to cinders” are now condemned to overblown inaccuracy by revisionists whose rewrites are somehow deemed more acceptable than others. Still, what’s a hundred thousand dead children to a smiling politician?

As for David Irving, he was arrested for what he wrote, and spent time in prison for his opinions. Like I said, the man’s an idiot, and I certainly don’t agree with his opinions. I will, however, defend his right to hold and utter them. That same goes for Bernard Manning and Jo Brand too, and Jeremy Clarkson and Stalin and Chairman fucking Mao. Because one day, some of the things we say today with such unthinking lack of reason will be pilloried as filth and rendered unrepeatable by time and circumstance. What sort of things? My guess

is the cute paedophilia that surrounds the sexualisation of certain types of slang – baby, boyfriend, girlfriend, sugar-daddy, toy-boy, this kind of thing. The singer Usher, who appeals to ten-year-olds worldwide, had a number one hit last year with a song that included the lyric “You say you’re searching for somebody that will take you out and do you right. Well, come here baby and let daddy show you what it feels like”. We didn’t really notice, because we were too busy being shocked by Eminem, whose lyrics have actually brought issues of violence against women to the fore. So when my tenyear-old daughter dances to the music of bands that extol anorexia and exploitation, I’d really rather she were dancing to Kim or Just the Two of Us, not only because Eminem is one of the best lyricists since Bob Dylan (with just as much knowing irony), but also because I prefer the reality-check his songs carry.

In conclusion, question everything.

Including your own attitudes. Question the motives of a government that has a war on drugs while collecting billions in revenue from the sales of tobacco and alcohol. Question a government that participates in a war on terror that claims the lives of half a million Iraqi civilians. The government that knighted and put up a statue to Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris whose deliberate policy of carpet-bombing civilian targets killed millions of German women and children and who makes Osama Bin Laden look like a fluffy bunny as far as terrorism is concerned. Question a society that belittles alternative thoughts via its media, and question a society that’s bringing up your children by encouraging them to be just like all the other children. Be aware that a lie can run halfway round the world while the truth is still putting its Nikes on.

And finally, as soon as someone tells you that you aren’t supposed to think in a certain way, question that too. It’s your head, use it.

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Travels with the Library Cat, Part 2

San Francisco: City Lights and other Bookstores One of the first things that I buy when I arrive in San Francisco (at Green Apple books on Clement) is a copy of the journal of American Pen. The theme of this particular issue is maps. “We hope you’ll allow us to accompany you,” it says, “as you reencounter a world you’ve come to know through literature.”

This is particularly apposite because, for the last twenty years, the map of San Francisco has been drawn for me by Armistead Maupin. His Tales of the City have made Russian Hill, Coit Tower, Grace Cathedral and the Castro as familiar to me (and considerably more vivid) than the streets around my home.

If there is one thing that tells me that I am, indeed, in the city of my imaginings, it is the large display entitled ‘Get Baked’ that I find in Books Inc. on Van Ness. It is, of course, a comprehensive display of books on cannabis.

But the book lovers’ Mecca in San Francisco is City Lights, home of a generation of Beat Poets.

City Lights was founded in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The name was taken from the Charlie Chaplin film and belonged originally to a magazine started by Peter D Martin. The store and its partner publishing house shot to international fame in 1957, when they published Alan Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. Ferlinghetti became the subject of an obscenity trial, which established a landmark ruling that a work could not be considered obscene if it had “redeeming social significance.”

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City Lights remains a cutting-edge publishing house – publishing fiction, poetry, literature in translation and books on social and political issues. A few examples of their current books gives a flavour of their range: I Must Resist, the letters of Bayard Rustin, published on the centenary of his death; Los Angeles Stories, a collection of short fiction from Ry Cooder; All Over Coffee, Paul Madonna’s beautifully drawn cartoons from the San Francisco Chronicle; Dear White America, Tim Wise’s radical new analysis of race and racism; Where Shadows Will, collected poems from Norma Cole; Outcast, an Iraqi novel in translation by Shimon Ballas…

And the store itself has lost none of its edge. A recent display outside the store showed a series of figures gagged with the American flag and the tagline, “Dissent is not un-American.”

When I first get there, on a Tuesday morning, it has the quiet, scholarly atmosphere of a venerable library. Seating consists mostly of wooden benches rather than cosy armchairs. Here and there, people sit on the floor to read.

The basement, where the walls still bear incongruous traces of religious tracts left by the previous occupants, (‘I Am The Door’) is for politics and other non-fiction. The ground floor houses fiction – modern, classic and in translation. And on the top floor is the Poetry Room.

During the day, this has the feel of an artist’s garret, but a few hours later it’s packed with rows of chairs as people crowd in to hear the poet, Jane Hirshfield, read from her latest book, Come, Thief.

On the bill with her are two younger poets, both Wallace Stegner Fellows in Poetry at Stanford University: Ryan Teitman, whose first book, Litany for the City, has just been published, and Mira Rosenthal, author of The Local World.

Teitman’s eponymous city is Philadelphia, ‘the city that swallowed the sea.’ His poems include a wry recollection of a school trip to the city’s Mütter Museum, with its bizarre collection of medical artefacts.

For Rosenthal, this is a “City Lights homecoming.” She is a former employee who spent many hours, she says, shelving poetry books in this very room. Her poems vary from the domestic (the image of a seam ripper unpicking stitches, the change of identity that comes with motherhood) to reflections on being a foreigner in the foreign land.

Hirshfield has been, variously, an erotic poet, a translator of Japanese poetry and a Buddhist monk. Now, at sixty, her poems have been polished so that each word shines like a pebble on the beach. She begins with a stunning image of a stag “flowing” though a gap in the fence that appears impossibly narrow. A journey that takes her to both ends of the Silk Road leads her to reflect that “the madness of empires continues.”

Time, the “thief ” in Hirshfield’s title, “gives everything and then steals it away.”

The last poem she reads is villanelle – and she acknowledges, with a smile, the irony of reading this most formal of poetic forms in the place where the Beat Poets first smashed through such traditions.

A Copy of Every Book Ever Published

Walk a few blocks west from Green Apple Books and you’ll find the gleaming white façade of the Internet Archive.

I fell in love with the Internet Archive the first time I stumbled across it on the web. Its beautiful online interface, BookReader (developed in conjunction with the Library of Congress), lets you feel as if you are turning the pages of a book preserved specially for you.

And they don’t just digitise books: they have so far archived six hundred thousand films, over a million sound files and more than 150 billion webpages.

The Internet Archive was founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996 and ran out of an office on the former military base on San Francisco’s Presidio. It began as a way of archiving the Internet itself and grew from there. It now has the stated ambition to preserve a copy of every book ever published. It operates in 32 locations in seven different countries and its partners include (among many others) the Library of Congress, the University of Toronto, the Natural History Museum in London and Project Gutenberg.

Two years ago, they moved into this beautiful Palladian building – a former Christian Science church – at Clement and Funston. Since then, as Robert Miller, Global Director of Books, explains, the company has taken exceptional care to preserve something of the feel of the old building.

The large ground floor space where we begin our tour is the former Sunday School. The alcoves that now form spacious open-plan cubbies for IA staff were once classrooms for the different age groups. There are clusters of sofas and chairs covered in Laura Ashley-like prints and shelves bearing cloth-bound volumes of old dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Altogether, the atmosphere is somewhere between an office and a tea-room in a high-class hotel.

The hall where services were once held, lit from above by a stainedglass dome, is laid out as a lecture theatre. Hymn numbers still posted by the stage now spell out the digits of pi.

Rather spookily, the seats at either side are occupied by papier-mâché figures. (“Our own terracotta army,” Miller says.) These are affectionate cartoon models, about two-thirds scale, of every staff member who has worked for the company for at least three years. Brewster Kahle’s own

bespectacled model stands on stage, beaming down at his employees.

Beyond a small garden lies the business end of the operation – the digitisation room. Here books, films and sounds are digitised at an extraordinary rate. (Miller estimates that they are capturing on average one book per minute.) Their servers are measured in pedabytes – that’s one thousand terabytes or one million gigabytes. The residual heat they generate is captured and used to warm the building.

The rig for digitising books uses high-speed cameras and museumquality lights. The book lies on a horizontal platen that holds the pages open at an angle of around 120°. A glass cover is brought down over the book, the picture is taken, the cover is raised, the page turned – and the process repeats itself.

The IA has now archived over three million books, at least a million of which are accessible to read online. Their website displays the three millionth – a book by Galileo Galilei, owned by the University of Toronto and published in 1605.

Digitising books that are long out of copyright is one thing – but what about more recent books? That’s where the IA’s Open Library project comes in, Miller explains. The Open Library currently holds digital copies of around ten thousand books that may be freely borrowed (a number that is growing all the time). Any Open Library account holder may borrow up to five eBooks at a time and read them either online using IA’s BookReader, or on an eReader (other than Kindle) using Adobe’s Digital Editions. As each book may only be borrowed by one person at a time, the Open Library operates under the same legal framework as any physical library.

The Open Library is also working in partnership with one thousand libraries in six countries, whose patrons may access a larger collection of more than one hundred thousand mostly 20th Century books jointly held by the participating libraries.

Taking inspiration from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Kahle has also chosen to preserve physical copies of the IA’s digitised material, intended to provide safe and authoritative copies in the event of problems with the digital versions. Any material not returned to its originating library is now stored a separate location in Richmond, California. This has carefully controlled temperature and humidity, appropriate for the sustainable long-term preservation of books, records and film, as well as software for cataloguing and coordinating the collections.

Perhaps the aim to preserve one copy of every book ever published is unachievable. But you have the feeling they’re going to give it a damn good shot.

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The Write Diet

by Susan Jane Jones

‘ It is a truth universally acknowledged, that writers need coffee and chocolate to help keep the pen flowing.’

While the above may be true, it’s important to keep the writing brain functioning properly, fingers and joints producing plenty of words, and concentration to a maximum; therefore, it makes sense to take an interest in what you eat and drink. Keep a bottle of water handy for constant sips. Tea would be more beneficial if herbal or green. Incorporate plenty of fish into your meals. Sardines offer a great source of calcium, iron, protein and selenium. All needed to keep the joints and brain cells oiled.

Eat small meals often. Start the day with some porridge or fruit and nuts. Yoghurt and prunes are ideal for keeping the digestive system working well. As if writer’s block isn’t enough to deal with, you certainly don’t need any other blockages…

When you make a soup or stew, put some in the freezer so that next time, all you need do is thaw out your ready labelled box and heat. Raw carrots, chopped with celery and beetroot make handy nibbles. Try to avoid cakes and chocolate if possible, or limit them to one portion of each a day. Easier said than done, but choosing healthier options will increase your writing output. With this in mind, it will be easier to reach for the healthy choices, without being a pedant.

In between writing, grow herbs. One of the most versatile of these, being parsley. In early April, sow seeds in trays and when they begin sprouting to around three inches in height, transplant into larger pots. Keep them on the greenhouse shelf, or kitchen windowsill. Perfect addition to omelettes, cheese sandwiches and sprinkling over sardines. Sprouting beans only take a few days to grow, and make a wonderful addition to salads.

Keep a handy bowl well stocked with fruit of the season.

Look out for bargains mid-week when the supermarkets sell off ripe fruit. You’ll be able to get twice as much, and not break the bank. When you have a spare morning in-between writing your best-seller, have a home-baking session. This way, you can add extra healthy ingredients such as coconut, cherries and sultanas to your cakes, making them tastier with twice the amount for half the price. While the oven’s on, make pastry, and concoct a few chicken pies. Not only will they actually have chicken in them, unlike the ones you buy in the shops, you can mix in some vegetables and a tin of chicken soup to make the mixture more tasty, and ready for when you need something quick for the family.

Invest in a sturdy tea-pot, with cosy to keep tea steamingly warm. It may sound a bit obvious, but instead of getting up from your writing and making one mug after another to enable your mind to keep on creating wonderful dialogue and characters that leap of the page, make a tea pot full and place by your side. Saving your energy, and tasting more delicious having had chance to brew. Thereby giving your characters, situations and plots time to do the same.

Vitamin and mineral pills can be useful while the homegrown salads have chance to grow. Though multi-vitamins and

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kelp, cod liver oil and evening primrose for the ladies are helpful; I do believe that garlic is best eaten in its natural form. Ginseng is a good supplement for men, though can be a bit strong for the ladies. Royal Jelly would be a better choice; this is also suitable for men. Kelp will help form strong healthy nails and hair.

While you’re banging away on the computer keys, no need to be worrying about brittle nails or dry and springy hair. Calcium is another supplement that will help with the strengthening of bones. If there’s only one tablet you take, a good one would be the one that aids memory. Not only is this good if you’re doing research, or taking lots of notes for your current writing project, it also sends the blood flow to the extremities, helping fingers, toes and in particular the brain. It’s called, let me think now…..

Yes, that’s it, Ginko Biloba.

No serious writer should be without honey. Whether it’s on toast in the morning, stirred into your porridge, or drizzled over yoghurt and fruit, you need to start your day with the food of the gods. If time is short, try whooshing up a banana, spoon of honey and yoghurt in your blender. Substitute the banana for strawberries or pineapple, as they’re in season. Not only will your brain feel nourished, your skin, hair and nails will also benefit.

Cider vinegar is the final addition to your’ write diet’ for the simple reason that my Grandma would take a teaspoonful of the very same along with a teaspoon of honey, and stir into a glass of boiled water from the kettle every morning. She was my inspiration, sitting me down at her large dining table every Saturday morning to write. From letter writing, diary entries, to doodling, she taught them all. She wrote romantic stories for ’Reveille’ magazine, often putting me in mind of Barbara Cartland - her role model. Though she lived more of a romantic life than actually writing about it, she gave me a love of penning words on paper and having the courage to send out something I’d written. Whether you eat more fruit, have honey on toast, or drink ‘Gran’s morning tonic.’ Your writing will greatly improve when you try ’The Write Diet’.

A Rose for the Winner:

The first ever Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2012 A hundred years after what came to be known as the Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the Alliance Of Radical Booksellers www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk chose to commemorate the centenary with the award of the first ever Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing.

The award aims to “promote the publication of radical books, to raise the profile of radical publishing, and to reward exceptional work.”

Eligible books must have been published in 2011, by author’s or editor’s whose primary residence is in the UK, and are “informed by socialist, anarchist, environmental, feminist and anti-racist concerns, and primarily will inspire, support or report on political and/or personal change.”

“The central involvement of radical bookshops in the establishment and running of the Bread and Roses award also really sets it apart from other book prizes,” says Nik Górecki of Housmans Bookshop, one of the trustees of the award.

Fittingly, the prize was awarded on May Day 2012, in the Bread and Roses pub in Clapham, London. The judges – children’s novelist and poet Michael Rosen, lecturer and feminist author Nina Power, and Festival Director of Liverpool’s annual Writing on the Wall Festival, Madeline Heneghan – came to a close decision, with two books from a shortlist of seven vying for the top place.

Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands: Tax Havens And The Men Who Stole The World, was commended by the judges for its thoroughness of research, and ‘usefulness’ in the current political climate.

But it was David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years that came away with the award. Presenting a beautiful sculptured metal rose to the winner on behalf of the judging panel, Power said: “The winner of the first Bread and Roses prize for Radical Publishing has written a text that breaks many rules, and does so excellently in each case: this is a book that covers so much material, refers to so many historical periods and geographical spaces, that the reader is dazzled – not only by the easy erudition of the writer but about how much it is possible to learn and with so little pain.

“It’s a book that has the appearance – and at 534 pages, literally so – of a fearsome academic tract. But it avoids everything that frequently plagues academic writing: this book is instead engaging, readable, relevant, motivated by a clear political will and utterly indispensable not only for understanding the terms of the world we live in, where they came from, but also for what we do about changing them. It is a book written from the heart, albeit with the aid of a library the size of a palace – a people’s palace, that is!”

The notion of judging radical writing brought up some interesting questions as to how to evaluate desirable qualities, says Górecki.

“As this was the first year the award was given, the trustees wanted us to talk that out and think about what we were actually asking of radical publishing,” explains Power. “We talked about whether it was a problem if a book was essentially academic or whether we wanted something that had already garnered a wide appeal. But our major political discussion

was around whether we were looking for something that diagnoses the present or summarises the past - or something that points the way forward.”

Górecki says, “We hope that as the prize continues in the future this is something we will continue to address, and that readers, writers and publishers will debate. We are starting this process by holding a panel discussion on the 9th May at Housmans Bookshop with Pluto Press editor Anne Beech, anarchist blogger Ian Bone, and Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore, asking ‘What makes good radical writing?”

In the light of recent events, it is perhaps not surprising that so many of the books from the shortlist were concerned either with economics (as both Graeber’s and Shaxson’s books were) or with protest movements.

Nadia Idle, one of the co-editors of the shortlisted Tweets from Tahrir, talked about the challenges of creating a book from an essentially ephemeral, fragmentary source.

“We set tight limits on ourselves – only posts from Tahrir itself, and only those in English. The timescale was compressed too. Just eighteen days, so in a sense the narrative thread was already there.

“We also made the decision that every single person involved should agree to our using their tweets. It helped that I came from that Egyptian activist background. I knew who to contact and people didn’t see us so much as a bunch of outsiders coming in to make money off their backs.

“Immediacy was very important. We went with OR books because they had a model of being able to turn round a book very fast. The downside of that is that they use print on demand, so there have sometimes been supply problems.”

Authors of radical books, more than most, must be able to pull off the trick of transforming themselves from writers shut away with their own computers to campaigners championing their own books.

Tim Gee, author of another shortlisted book, Counterpower: Making Change Happen, told me: “At heart I always see myself as a campaigner. For a year or more, the main thing I was doing was sitting in my room obsessing over every last sentence: is this phrased in the right way, is the spirit of this right, is this said as well as I can say it. But I started writing the book after climate camp last year and finished it sitting at the base of Nelson’s Column on the day of the anti-cuts march. I saw the book a continuation of the work I do in grassroots training and empowering. I have lost count of the number of workshops I have run since the book came out, but it’s definitely broken the forty mark.”

How healthy is radical publishing at the moment? Perhaps surprisingly, given that the publishing world is often seen these days as growing increasingly narrow, people here are optimistic.

“Radical publishers are actually doing very well,” Power says. There is a demand for coherent, non-patronising and interesting political writing that isn’t being served by mainstream publishers. Since economic crisis, for example, people are looking for a demystification of terms surrounding financial speculation. Lots of material is successfully crossing over from blogs into print. I don’t buy the argument that people’s attention spans are killed. People can follow Twitter and still want to read books.”

“Among NGOs there has been rush for centre ground, targeting the as-yet unconvinced,” says Gee. “That’s opened up a gap for individuals from social movements to fill the more radical space.”

“Radical publishing is going through a renaissance, making the establishment of the Bread and Roses Award timely,” says Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Publishing Power agrees. “One of the critiques of existing prizes that they can be introverted, cliquey and corporate. So this is a very strong prize, with the aim to ensure the future of radical publishing.”

A full description of the shortlisted books can be found at http:// www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk/?p=184:

Random Stuff | 27

PRINT ISSUE S

Lots of people have asked us for a p And we said, why not? So now, not o with jam and cream, but you print s EXCLUSIVE material. The digital ver also have a printed copy, available deadline in order to have a copy of a 14th of the month before: i.e. for a to subscribe before the 14th July.

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“I gasped. The Angel fell sil groan from the earth’s throa airflow with his tongue; the plunged. He slapped the cy bimli, adding percussion to We stood, cheered and roar The sound warped and wav cords to add animal croaks amplified in the warm wood

lent. We heard a rhythmic at. He controlled the e note quivered and ylindrical body with the o the primitive resonance. red for more. He obliged. vered. He used his vocal and screeches that were d.�

An extract from The Man Behind the Mask by Maureen Bowden - a print issue exclusive

Flash 500 - The Results We are pleased to publish here the winning entries of the first quarter of the Flash 500 Humour Verse Competition 2012, Crememento Morium by Lynn Roberts, and the Flash 500 competition first quarter 2012, Dandelion Breeze by Justin N Davies. The competitions were judged by Lorraine Mace and Margaret James respectively.

Although winning entries of Flash 500 competitions are published in Words with JAM, the competitions are independent, so please make sure you visit www.flash500.com for details on upcoming competitions and closing dates.

Crememento Morium

by Lynn Roberts Poor grandma died on Sunday – a circumstance we rue: now we’re learning things of grandma that we never ever knew... she lies in state upon the slab, and everything sinks in, but unexpected promontories rear up below her chin.

Now we have a little problem – when she meets her fiery end, should her implants go in with her? should we give them to a friend? should we stand them on the mantel with a melancholy plaque? should we think about recycling, or inter them in the park?

Of the many moral problems when a grandma bites the dust, perhaps the most incendiary’s disposing of her bust; for when aunty met the furnace in her most revealing gown, her décolleté exploded and it brought the chimney down...

32 | Quite Short Stories and Poetry

Dandelion Breeze

by Justin N Davies From here I can see a single dandelion clinging to the edge of the grave’s wall; it seems lost amidst the no-man’s land of freshly-turned clods, as if it knows it doesn’t have long left to shine. Yellow was her favourite colour; she’d have noticed it too.

I’d brought her flowers the day before; her favourite lilies. According to the police report they were knocked over in the struggle, a piece of broken vase entering her neck as she fell. The liaison officer told us she must have fought back; well-intentioned words, meant to comfort.

Has anyone else seen the dandelion? Or are they staring at me? I daren’t look up again. Eyes are like cameras: they rarely lie.

Already they’re saying that the attacker must have been known to Alison. The evidence, apparently, points to her letting him in willingly.

And they are assuming it was a man: the strangle marks and bruised windpipe suggest male strength.

They found the open bottle of wine on the kitchen table; one glass, with a lipstick mark. Red. Her favourite.

Someone’s weeping, quietly. Not her mother, or Fran; both stoic in the face of tragedy. Is it me? I think it might be me.

They say he must have removed the second glass; there were two glasses missing from the bottle and only one found in Alison’s stomach.

Pinot Noir. A good one. Our favourite.

They took a swab, (such an ugly word, surgical and invasive), to discount me from their investigations. Of course, there’ll be bits of me all over the house; I’m family, it would be normal. It’s the bits of me they might have found inside her that make me nervous. If they looked. They must have looked. Routine, probably.

The vicar’s speaking, no, praying: ashes and dust.

‘Amen.’

The only word I’m expected to utter. Did I? I think my lips moved.

Now we’re stepping forward, the family, reaching down for a fistful of soil. Fran clutches my hand; I hold my wife as she sends a shower of earth down on to her sister’s coffin. It dislodges the dandelion, which tumbles into the trench and vanishes.

Finally, I look up. David’s staring at the tears falling from my cheeks.

He knows. Slowly, deliberately, he rests his hand on our mother-in-law’s shoulder and leads her away from the graveside. Despite the late-spring warmth, he’s wearing a scarf, and as he turns to leave a long auburn hair falls from it and drifts across the headstones chased by a dandelion seed, caught together on a breeze.

And I close my eyes and see her, as I last saw her, in the kitchen, auburn hair glowing in the candlelight; she’s washing my glass before I leave.

‘In case he comes home early,’ she says, before we kiss for the last time.

PAGE Competition ST

2012

NOW OPEN 1st Prize £500 2nd Prize £100 3rd Prize £50 Closing Date: Friday 8th June 2012 Entry Fee: £6 for one entry or £10 for two Results: All three winning entries will be published in the August 2012 issue of Words with JAM. For more information visit: www.wordswithjam.co.uk/ firstpagecompetition2012

Judge: Amanda Hodgkinson Amanda Hodgkinson is a British writer and journalist who grew up in a small Essex fishing village before moving to Suffolk, and attending the University of East Anglia. She now lives and works in south west France with her husband Guy and their two daughters. 22 Britannia Road is Amanda Hodgkinson’s first novel.

Debuting its first week on the New York Times bestseller list and earning comparisons to Sophie’s Choice and Sarah’s Key, 22 Britannia Road is an astonishing first novel that powerfully chronicles one family’s struggle to create a home in the aftermath of war.

Waterstones Best Debut Novels Of 2011. Amazon. com Best Books Of 2011.

Oprah Magazine Irresistible Reads. Library Journal Best Of 2011. Indiebound Best Summer Reads.

Nominated Goodreads Choice Awards. http://www.amandahodgkinson.com/

Matt Cartoon

34 | Pencilbox

Question Corner Co-author of The Writer’s ABC Checklist, Lorraine Mace, answers your questions ...

Estelle is due to give a series of book readings, which is great, but she is very nervous. She writes: Between us, my publisher and I have set up several readings and book signings in libraries, bookstores and writers’ groups. I am terrified because I’ve never done anything like this before.

Do you have any advice on how to prepare? I don’t want to end up making a total fool of myself. And what do I do if no one turns up?

Let me answer the last point first. Don’t leave it up to the organisers to arrange publicity. Do everything you can to spread the word. Send a press release to the local paper. Email everyone you know within easy driving distance of the event and invite them along – tell them to bring a friend or two (three, four or five is even better). Put up fliers advertising the reading at least a week in advance.

You need to be relaxed, comfortable and prepared The last thing you need is to arrive at the last minute, hot, flustered and out of breath! Find out how long it will take you to get to the place where the reading will take place. Is there adequate parking nearby? If not, find out where you can park safely. If going by train, how far is it from the station? If possible, go to the venue the week before at approximately the same time you’re due to read.

Check how long it takes you from the time you leave home to actually being in the building ready to set up.

Have a good look around. Is the room cold and whistling with drafts? Hot and stuffy? Dark and gloomy? Massive plate-glass windows allowing the sun to shine in your eyes? Will you need a microphone? Any niggles such as these can be dealt with if you know in advance about possible problems.

Once you know what the venue is like and how much time to allow for travelling, you can decide what you’re going to wear. Don’t sacrifice comfort for glamour. There’s no way you can do justice to your reading if your feet hurt, or you’re worried that you’re showing more cleavage or leg than you intended.

Plan the reading If you’ve been told you have an hour, only plan to read for just over half that time. Readings are often interrupted or delayed in some way, so if you’ve

chosen a full hour’s reading, you’ll end up feeling panicky about not getting through it.

Rather than read one piece, I would advise picking two or three shorter sections. This will enable you to show a greater spread of the storyline and means you can vary the pace of the reading (which will help to keep the listeners alert and interested). It also gives you the opportunity to bring in more characters, conflict, tension or (if appropriate) humour. If you can make people smile, that will go down better than dry narration.

Choose the passages carefully. Go for strong scenes with not too much dialogue (unless you have a gift for taking on several personalities in speech).

Also bear in mind that the people there are not likely to have read the book, so context might need to be given showing where each scene fits in the storyline.

Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. You might know the novel back to front in your mind, but reading it out loud is completely different. You’ll be amazed at how strange it feels at first, but the more you rehearse, the more natural it will feel.

Read slowly, don’t rush the sentences. Time yourself reading – preferably into some kind of recording device so that you can listen to it afterwards. Where did you rush the words? Where should you pause for emphasis and impact? When you’re happy with how it sounds, ask a trusted friend or partner to listen to the full reading and give you some honest feedback.

Make notes on the book to remind you where to pause, or place emphasis.

If there is anything you continually stumble over, leave it out, or choose a different scene. If you’re confident at home you’re far more likely to be comfortable in public, but if you get stressed in private because you know a sentence or paragraph is coming up that causes you problems, you’ll feel ten times more stressed in public.

On the night, read exactly as you did in rehearsal. Get involved in the scenes you’re reading. Share the emotional experience with the audience.

Another good reason for choosing two or three passages, rather than one long one, is that audiences like to find out about the author and the writing process.

As you move from one piece to the next you can chat to them about the next scene and why you’ve chosen it. They’ll feel involved and ready to listen.

Finally, be prepared to take questions at the end. By then, hopefully, you and your audience will be so in tune it will be like chatting to friends.

There is advice on every possible question you might ask. --Writing Magazine Regardless of the writer's level or ability, there is something extremely daunting about putting together a submission. It doesn't matter if it is for an article for a magazine, or short story for a competition, a humorous anecdote, a play or TV script, a novel or non-fiction book, "The Writer's ABC Checklist" will provide answers to questions you didn't even know you should ask. With its A-Z format, references can be found quickly and effortlessly. Unfamiliar terms are explained and bullet points at the end of most sections provide a quick reminder of the main items covered. This unique book is packed with writing tips and is something no aspiring writer can afford to be without.

Available from Amazon

Do you have layout issues, problematic characters, or struggle to get to grips with your grammar?

Email lorraine@wordswithjam.co.uk

Pencilbox | 35

n o i t i t e s 2 ’ 201omen comp t w etry 00 e l h p po rize: £2,0 m a p p t 1s s ’ n n e o i t m i t o e w mp coprize:

s in ook lus B ,p en Ser sales y b on et phl yalty m o . a t r p he r cent mphle oks t f Bo n o pe pa ren atio s a 10 of the e c i S l t a 2 pub 0, plu opies tor 201 edi e 25 ary c n y £ r t 8 Ju 1st 13, plusliment ck, poe s: 1 n p o a iti 20 com yW pet m m 25 A o c th ge: r bo Jud o f For more information, visit e dat www.mslexia.co.uk/poetrycompetition or g sin www.mslexia.co.uk/pamphletcompetition Clo

Gi ge:

Jud

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email poetry@mslexia.co.uk or call us on 0191 233 3860

Comp Corner Corralled by Danny Gillan

So, you’re all that good, eh? I mean, how hard can it be to write a terrible sentence? And yet, the entry sack was even smaller than usual this issue. I can only assume all our readers are supremely talented, so much so they find the idea of splitting so much as an infinitive physically repugnant.

Still, we got enough to pick some winners, so that’s all right. And what a prize they have won. Our three lucky buggers will have a copy of Michael Morpurgo’s Shadow riding a proud yet loyal stallion through a hellish battlefield en route to their domiciles forthwith (see, bad writing is easy!). All you ‘good’ writers are regretting not coming down from your war horses now, aren’t you?

And so, on with the show. Or in this case, on with the awful, awful writing. Our three winners are:

but!!! its elicit to either randomly, and resolutely destroy english: on purpose ‘though, it’s premeditated justification is its competitive jammy writing that enticed ensnared entrapped my erudite avaricious persona to Lorna D’Alton Look whose hear says duncan: whisstling merrily as he ‘arranged’ his montBlanche pens its cressida our terrible glamorous, Neighbour whos twin-boy’s has such diifferential personalities’;

So, what’s the big challenge this month, I hear you mutter illegibly? We want your most outlandishly ridiculous character biographies, simple as that. Make them as foolish, unlikely and downright nonsensical a list of prior achievements/jobs/tragedies as you can come up with. Ideally a combination of all three.

Here’s an example to show you what you mean. One of our regular columnists actually included the following on one of their short stories. And published it!

Idiot.

“Born in Liverpool, 1962. Egyptian father, Israeli mother. Educated in Spain.

Ordained as a Catholic priest in Edinburgh, 1983. Ex-communicated by order of JPII in 1991, for advocating the benefits of contraception. Disappeared for a few years, surfacing in California in ’97 as a radical anarchist. Recorded as encouraging anti-capitalist beliefs; no crime committed, no charges brought.

Spotted in a bar in Wisconsin on 9/11, laughing. Unclear what he was laughing at, but put a local man in the hospital with multiple contusions when challenged. Witnesses said the victim used the words ‘Bin Laden shit-fuck’ and ‘Arab mother-fucker’ before Parves reacted. Held in custody for eighteen days before being released without charge. Upon release, left the US for France.

Spent two years working as a baker in Nice. In 2003, he disappeared. Since then, twenty-eight thefts and fourteen murders across nineteen countries attributed to him. Actually, attributed is wrong, sorry sir. Twenty-eight thefts and fourteen murders boasted about, by him.”

You get the drift? We’ll give you a generous sixty words for this one. Entries in the body of an email as usual to danny@wordswithjam.co.uk. Attachments will be mortared all to hell. Closing date 5th of July. The prize this month is even specialer than a special thing. Three lucky winners will walk away with a state of the art, almost exclusive and extremely red WWJ Mug, that patronises and insults others for you while you sip your gin!

shes recieved a mysteryious, missive?

Nell Perpetual hubris prevailed predominating his countenance and demeanour portraying derogation of the plebeian populace with his manner of address indicative of clerisy lending obfuscation to his communicatory oratorical vocalisation.

Mary Cassells Big congratulifications to Mary, Nell and Lorna, and our usual commiserations and thanks to those who entered but missed out on a prize this time round.

Why not try again this issue? It’s free after all.

Random Stuff | 37

The Agent’s View with Andrew Lownie and Elsbeth Lindner

Andrew answers YOUR questions ...

Is it realistic for an unsigned author to look for an agent with a series in mind, rather than a one-off novel?

Andrew Lownie was born in 1961 and was educated in Britain and America. He read history at Magdalene College, Cambridge where he was President of the Union. He went on to gain an MSc at Edinburgh University and spend a year at the College of Law in London.

After a period as a bookseller and journalist, he began his publishing career as the graduate trainee at Hodder & Stoughton.

In 1985 became an agent at John Farquharson, now part of Curtis Brown, and the following year became the then youngest director in British publishing when he was appointed a director.

Since 1984 he has written and reviewed for a range of newspapers and magazines, including The Times, Spectator and Guardian, which has given him good journalistic contacts.

As an author himself, most notably of a biography of John Buchan and a literary companion to Edinburgh, he has an understanding of the issues and problems affecting writers. He is a member of the Association of Authors’ Agents and Society of Authors and was until recently the literary agent to the international writers’ organisation PEN. In 1998 he founded The Biographers Club, a monthly dining society for biographers and those involved in promoting biography, and The Biographers’ Club Prize which supports first-time biographers.

I realise that all agents have individual criteria, and the likelihood of them asking to see more depends on first impressions being favourable. But, supposing they were, how many completed novels would the agent expect to see for a proposed series?

Thanks in anticipation Liz (in Lincoln, studying a Creative Writing MA) No and, indeed, quite the opposite. Think big. It can often be easier to persuade a publisher to show interest if it’s not a one-off book and the author and series can be built over period.

I have a literary agent, who doesn’t seem to do very much. But I’m sticking with her for the time being, even though she hasn’t sold either of my books. Through a different channel, a film company has expressed an interest in picking up the film rights to my second book. Should I look for a film agent to represent me in these discussions rather than my literary agent?

Janet S., Oldham If the literary agent cannot herself or with an associate handle the film interest then you will have to find other representation. It is worth discussing with your literary agent what she is doing, why your books are not being sold and if film interest might make the difference.

An agency in the US is interested in my work, but suggests some editing work needs doing upfront. They haven’t said what exactly, but they have offered to work with me on bringing it up to scratch. The problem is that their editing service is quite expensive. Should I pay them to edit my work or find a cheaper editing service and get back to them when I’m done?

Nix, Thessaloniki If the agency is reputable and you feel their comments sensible then it is worth the punt. Increasingly proposals/ manuscripts need to be 100% there when submitting to

38 | Pencilbox

publishers and costs of editing can’t always be borne by agent who may not even sell the book.

Serious question – what can an agent offer a self-published author? I know three people who have seven books out now between them – fiction mostly but one does Irish history – and all are doing fine. Why would any of them need an agent?

Mark, Belfast It’s interesting that even very successful self-published authors are still keen to find agents and publishers. I believe we bring skills which authors may not have – knowledge of the market and who is buying what and publishing well, a fresh editorial eye based on knowing the market, a wide range of contacts that can help with exploiting the full potential of the book such as film, serial, lecturing, foreign rights, adding credibility to a book etc. The digital revolution allows authors a choice and it’s horses for courses as some books are not sufficiently commercial to benefit from an agent’s expertise. Maybe those three authors are fine but how do they know an agent might not take them to a higher level?

Another serious question – how much time does an agent spend on existing clients as opposed to considering new ones?

Honestly.

Mark, Belfast I personally spend as much time as each author requires but generally there is an inverse proportion of time spent to monies earned! Clearly when developing and submitting books I spend a lot of time and whilst books are being written less time but I probably have contact with 80% of my authors on some aspect of their work at least once a month.

Could you ask Mr Lownie if he sees demographic trends? Such as teenage literature fading and the pre-teen market developing? Or possibly apocalyptic scifi on the increase/decrease? My series is contemporary, but perhaps tuning it to current fashions might give it a boost and make it more attractive to agents and editors.

J. Hudson It’s always difficult to judge trends because once recognised the market has moved on. In any case, one is often selling a book two years before it is likely to be published and no one knows what the future holds. With so many books coming out each year, there’s always room for any genre as long as it’s done well. Nielsen (www.nielsenbook.co.uk) provides a lot of information and it’s free to sign up to their monthly newsletter - the latest of which rather ominously says “Fiction sees the worst decline among the broad market sectors, with both volume and value sales down around 20%.”

Elsbeth Lindner

Optimistic:

1. Always and ever, writers. Whatever happens to the technology and the means of publishing, the fact that writers write stories, touch hearts, change lives with their ideas and words fills me with hope, excitement and anticipation. The quest for another glorious find never stops.

2. Inventive responses to what the new technology makes possible. Small publishers working in a myriad new ways, writers’ collectives that connect work across continents, online magazines and sites (like www.bookoxygen. com - sorry, couldn’t resist) - all these new opportunities and more which make it easier for new work to be seen and don’t require a private income.

3. Small presses doing wonderfully inventive things, often with great quality, taste and wit.

“The truth is that major publishers put out more books written by men than women. Print publications write more about books written by men. [American] National Public Radio discusses more books written by men. Unsurprisingly, the bestseller list is dominated by books written by men: men outnumbered women 25 to 11 on last year’s number-one-best-seller fiction charts. (Eugenia Williamson, article in the Boston Phoenix, 25/1/2012)”

4. Literary festivals springing up like daisies and finding enthusiastic audiences.

Depressed:

Elsbeth Lindner and the bookoxygen team are committed to correcting the gender imbalance in literary coverage.

1. Megabrands seeking to control the market.

Elsbeth has spent a long, largely happy professional life in the publishing and book business, mainly as an editor and publisher. For the past five years she was editor-in-chief of magazine and previous roles include Managing Director of The Women’s Press and membership of the Orange Prize Management Committee. She is also a book reviewer and author.

newbooks

2. The rise of the e-reader and the slow erosion of the paperback. I am an addict of real paper pages, want to flick back and forth, learn a book’s geography, physically own it, keep it to hand for instant, easy referral.

3. Book promotions that reduce prices to unrealistically low levels. Books need to be valued. They don’t come free, either from writers or publishers.

4. Clouds. I don’t trust ‘em.

The world of publishing is changing fast. What aspects make you optimistic and which make you depressed?

5. Bad television programmes about books. Why aren’t there good ones?

Write a story for bedtime 3rd Prize (2 prizes)

Many people relax into sleep by reading in bed and a short story is the perfect way to do it.

Entries, in English, should be between 1500 and 3000 words. Any subject matter except children’s stories and erotica.

Full competition rules can be found on www.avogel.co.uk/story (closing date 28th October 2011)

Dormeasan® Sponsors of write a story for bedtime Competition Dormeasan Valerian-Hops oral drops - a traditional herbal medicinal product for use in the temporary relief of sleep disturbances caused by the symptoms of mild anxiety, exclusively based upon long-standing use as a traditional remedy. Always read the leaflet.

1058 M40510.XXX

2nd Prize

£500 £300 £100

2329

1st Prize

Cornerstones Mini Masterclass with Kathryn Price

SWEET MUNGO: CHAPTER ONE It was dark in the cellar. Black. And cold. Perhaps this is what it would be like if you died and were buried and then you woke up and found you were buried and everyone would think you were dead, but you weren’t.

I had been shut in the cellar before, and I knew that if I cried, my father would beat me. So I did not cry. Besides, it was my fifth birthday, so I was no longer a baby.

We had a little terrier called Gyp. He was really my father’s dog. Father said it was important to discipline him.

When Gyp made a mess in the house, my father put him in the cellar, even if he had been shut in the house for a long time and it wasn’t really his fault. Gyp never seemed to learn that if he barked or howled he would be beaten.

So, when he was shut in the cellar, I would kneel down and pray to God that he wouldn’t make a noise, and I would try very hard not to cry, because that was sissy and then I would also be punished.

So now I prayed to God that I would not cry or make a noise. The cellar smelt of coal. It was always dark, even in the day time. When my father switched off the light, it was as black as ink. After what seemed a long time, the cellar door opened. The light from the hall made me blink. At last, I thought, my punishment is over – perhaps now there will be a birthday cake for me upstairs.

“You are not a girl, Mungo. You must learn to behave like a man. Here is your supper.” And he put something down on the floor. Then he went away again, shutting the door behind him.

I was hungry, and I felt around and found a bowl. I put my finger in: it was water. Then I found a dish and I could feel small biscuits. I took one and bit it, but it was too hard to bite; I realised it was dog food. I felt tears come into my eyes, and I swallowed and swallowed so that the tears would not fall. I thought I would pretend to be Gyp, and I drank some water from the bowl. After that, I shut my eyes and tried to go to sleep.

At last, the door opened again, briefly, and a torch-beam blinded me.

“Shh, don’t make a sound,” whispered my mother. “I’ve brought Gyp to keep you company.” I hoped she would give me a hug, but she didn’t come in. The torch-beam lit up the cellar door as she turned away; I could see her silhouetted against the door before she opened it, but suddenly the figure of a monk was standing there beside her.

I wasn’t frightened. I have seen a monk in the house before and I knew that, hundreds of years ago, there had been a Greyfriars’ monastery nearby. I felt that he had come to bring me the comfort I longed for. He was only there for a moment, just before my mother went through the door. Then darkness again.

Gyp came straight to me and I hugged him, but he wriggled away and I heard him munching the dog biscuits. I felt much better with Gyp there. He didn’t bark or howl and once he licked my face. His tongue is very soft; not like a cat’s which is rough, like sand-paper. My friend Tom has a cat called Bast because she looks like an Egyptian goddess called Bastet who had the head of a cat with slanty green eyes. Bast sits on the garden wall next door and stares at Gyp to excite him. I think Gyp is really a clever dog, but there are some things that he does which are quite stupid – like jumping up and down and barking at Bast for ages, when he knows he can’t reach her.

This is a visceral introduction to a character who is clearly suffering extreme abuse. It is all the more disturbing for the simple, straightforward language that is used; though this doesn’t sound quite like a 5-year-old’s voice – which would be tricky to reproduce and would result in a pretty traumatic read – neither is it a sophisticated adult perspective. The thoughts, wishes and fears are very much a child’s and the line, ‘Perhaps now there will be a birthday cake for me upstairs’ is heart-wrenchingly authentic. As a result, the scene feels securely in the moment, as though it’s being observed as it happens by its young protagonist rather than as an adult looking back.

The first person POV works well here to convey this immediacy and on the whole it doesn’t suffer from two of the most common problems associated with this viewpoint: too much telling as opposed to showing, and excessive introspection. Instead, Mungo focuses our attention outwards, showing us what he’s experiencing in the ‘now’ of the story, using physical sensations and descriptions to root us in the scene. Bearing in mind that the perspective is already working well, the main way the author could sharpen this opening is to build on these existing strengths.

For example, there are a few small instances where we are told how something feels or seems, where showing could be more dramatic and involving. The very first line is a combination of both showing and telling. It opens with a passive, ‘told’ phrase: It was dark in the cellar. Black. And cold.

It then moves on to a unique, viewpoint-rooted piece of figurative writing which beautifully encapsulates the same sensations: Perhaps this is what it would be like if you died and were buried and then you woke up and found you were buried and everyone would think you were dead, but you weren’t.

Blending the natural fear of death with the even worse horror of being buried alive should really make the reader feel this character’s terror. At the same time, the tone of this phrase, the lack of punctuation, grounds us so completely in the childlike perspective that there is almost no need to tell us in the next paragraph that ‘it was my fifth birthday’.

The simile could therefore work without the passive introduction; the author could consider either cutting it or substituting it for something more ‘shown’. For instance, how does the coldness feel on Mungo’s skin?

How does it affect his other senses to be in complete darkness? My only suggestion then would be to keep the tense consistent and change ‘this is what it would be like’ to ‘this was what it would be like’.

Watch out for similar instances throughout. There’s a repetition about how dark it is in the fourth paragraph which could perhaps be changed to something fresher, substituted for new information, or be dramatised in a different way. Mungo mentions the smell of coal, so could this be worked up further to provide more physical stimulus for the reader? How does the coal dust feel on Mungo’s hands? Does it make it hard to breathe?

And likewise, when we hear that ‘a torch-beam blinded me’, could this be rooted more firmly in Mungo’s POV? Would he even be aware of what was causing the light? How does it feel to be dazzled after so long in the dark?

There’s one point where we stray a little too far from the narrator’s immediate experience of the scene and that’s the final paragraph where he’s reflecting on Gyp and Tom’s cat, Bast. Whilst there’s something very poignant about the way he thinks about such mundane subjects to escape from the reality of his surroundings, the juxtaposition in tone is slightly jarring – the chirpy language like ‘munching’, ‘excite’, ‘really a clever dog’, ‘soft’, ‘jumping up and down’ doesn’t sit comfortably next to the preceding material. Is there a way either to keep the tone consistent (so that we know this is an escapist memory/fantasy rather than just a

digression) or to give Mungo something to think about which feels more apposite? I’ll come back to this shortly.

The material here is undeniably disturbing and affecting. The immediate situation itself holds its own terrors and discomforts, so it’s almost superfluous to touch on the backstory or give us exposition about the family situation, however brief. Additions like ‘I knew if I cried, my father would beat me’ and ‘that was sissy and then I would also be punished’ feel like laying on the misery a bit too thickly, and risk being off-putting for a reader. You’re asking them to accept awful circumstances without much context or introduction to the character/s; you don’t want it to be so uncomfortable that they don’t turn the page.

In addition, keeping back the finer details about why Mungo is being punished and what his dad is like could help to build tension and atmosphere. If Mungo were, perhaps, to stop himself thinking so explicitly about his father’s beatings and punishments (which seems plausible psychologically), the reader would have to engage their imagination in the scenario more, wondering what leads to the abuse and why. And as every good author (and director of horror movies!) knows, allowing the reader’s imagination to do the work can often conjure up far worse terrors than words are able to.

In fact, it’s worth considering whether Mungo might think of his father with a more ambiguous mixture of fear and affection. Abusers can hold tremendous emotional power over their victims. Might Mungo think of his father with love, and feel - almost - grateful to him for ‘helping him to become the person that his father wants him to be’? Something like that could work well to inject real depth into the characters, and could lift this opening out of the pure, simplistic horror of abuser and victim and into a more emotionally and psychologically complex place.

The last thing to note is the supernatural material that is introduced in the penultimate paragraph. This has the potential to be affecting and atmospheric but at the moment it almost passes the reader by. In a story that’s fundamentally gritty and realistic – albeit a version of reality that most people fortunately never experience – the sudden appearance of a ghostly figure risks undermining the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

Making this sort of thing plausible is all about getting the character’s reactions right. If the character/s respond in the same way a reader might, then the reader will be more likely to believe in what’s happening.

In this instance, the fact that Mungo has seen the monk before creates difficulties; he believes in it implicitly and doesn’t question it so the reader is expected to as well, and this is going to be hard for them. Why not have Mungo witnessing the monk for the first time on this occasion? Build up the atmosphere, let us really see what he sees and feel what he feels. What kind of monk is it? What does it look like? Does anything else change whilst the monk appears? How does he provide the ‘longed for comfort’? The subsequent paragraph about Gyp and Bast would then be redundant, and could be replaced by more detailed material about the monk, and Mungo’s reactions to it.

This is an opening which currently packs most of its power in the pure horror of the situation; with an even more intimate use of first person, a little more subtle texture to the characters and relationships, and more delicate handling of the supernatural material, the author can be confident that they don’t just have to rely on shock value to get the reader turning those pages.

If you would like to participate in the Cornerstones Opening Page Mini Masterclass, send your opening page to submissions@wordswithjam.co.uk with the subject ‘Cornerstones Masterclass’.

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Rhubarb, Rhubarb Looking at dialogue with Sarah Bower

It’s the difference between good and bad cosmetic surgery. A classy facelift doesn’t show. The features remain essentially themselves, merely enhanced by a little judicious scraping and remodelling. A less successful procedure, however, may leave the unfortunate patient looking more like a prop forward at the end of a rough Saturday afternoon than one of the beautiful people. Features may be lumpy and disproportionate. Scars may show.

Fictional dialogue is pure artifice, but the trick is to make it sound real. The reader must be led to believe she is eavesdropping on actual conversations while being shamelessly manipulated by the writer using all his literary skill. Writing dialogue well is ‘the hardest thing for a beginner’, according to John Mullan [Mullan, John How Novels Work, p134]. So why bother? Why put yourself through the pain? What is dialogue for?

The obvious answer lies in the fact that, unless your novel is set in some Star Trek-style universe where advanced beings shimmer prettily and communicate via telepathy, or sit around campfires and grunt, characters talk to one another. As the novel itself testifies, human beings are communicators, and a large part of that communication takes place

This sounds like a ‘real’ conversation but does it tell us anything about Jeff and Jenny? Not really. The exchange is so routine and so blandly expressed that Jeff and Jenny could be just about anyone. We learn they are both in work and both had a good day, and we infer from the terms of endearment that they are a couple. A couple, both with jobs which are going OK. Not the kind of information which really narrows down the field and makes Jeff and Jenny unique. But if you add a few small details, you can quickly and economically begin to pad out Jeff and Jenny and their world: ‘Hi, darling, how was work? How was the boss today?’

‘Swell, in fact. Just let me get my coat off and I’ll tell you all about it.

How was your day, honey?’

‘Oh, okay.’

Now we know Jenny has a boss and that she arrived home later than Jeff and, more importantly, we can infer other information from this.

What dialogue doesn’t say is as important as what it does. Think about everything this exchange might imply. Does Jenny work later than Jeff because she is a workaholic, or perhaps because her boss bullies her? The latter might be suggested by the way Jeff singles out the boss when asking Jenny about her day. It could imply they have had conversations about him before.

What about Jeff ’s response when Jenny asks him about his day? He prefaces his ‘okay’ with an ‘oh’, which might suggest he is considering what to say, or belittling his day in comparison to Jenny’s as in an ‘oh,

This dictum has a special resonance, however, in connection with dialogue writing because dialogue has to give the impression of being ‘real’ conversation. Real people do not talk in speeches – unless, of course, they are actually giving a speech. They do not declaim at one another, they talk in one liners, odd, disjointed phrases and complete non-sequiturs. as an exchange of speech. There are, however, technical reasons for using dialogue as well as its contribution to the authenticity of your fiction.

Dialogue can be used to create narrative pace. A passage of dialogue, particularly if made up of relatively brief exchanges, reads more quickly than an equivalent passage of straight prose narrative. It allows for white space on the page, and, while this is not a strictly necessary consideration for the fiction writer, there is a good deal of anecdotal evidence that readers like white space. They like the breather it gives them, and the fact that it enables them to ‘get on’, to turn the pages more quickly than if confronted by dense passages of print without breaks.

Note the use of the word ‘equivalent’ here. Can there be an equivalence between dialogue and straight narrative? Are they in any way the same thing? Well, yes, because both are ways of giving information to the reader. If dialogue doesn’t further the reader’s understanding of character or help to unfold the plot, it has no place in your story. Take this exchange, adapted from Julian Birkett’s Word Power: ‘Did you have a good day at work, darling?’ asked Jeff.

‘Sure. It was swell,’ said Jenny. ‘How about you, honey?’

‘It was okay.’

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you know...’ sense. Perhaps, therefore, Jeff ’s status is lower than Jenny’s, in the workplace, in the personal partnership. Is Jeff a house husband and uncomfortable with that role? Has he actually got some important news – good or bad – but is waiting for a better time to go into details?

At this point, as you can see, it is possible to put a wide range of interpretations on the conversation. This might well be your intention. If your dialogue appears near the beginning of your story, you may make it deliberately unclear because you do not want to show your hand too early. You want to suggest puzzles which will hook the reader and keep her reading but you do not, at this stage, wish to offer solutions.

The next step, if you wish to give the reader less ambiguous clues as to what this conversation is really about, is to add either speech attributions, or what actors call ‘business’ – the things people do while they are speaking. If, for example, Jeff ’s tone when he asks about the boss is anxious or angry, perhaps we can infer that he has been worrying about the boss’s behaviour on Jenny’s behalf. If Jenny refuses to look Jeff in the eye when she answers, this suggests she is lying. If her tone when she says ‘swell’ is sarcastic, we can easily infer she means the opposite. If she blushes when she mentions the boss, perhaps they’re having an affair,

and Jeff ’s anger or anxiety is because he knows about it. Will he confront her? Anger suggests he will, anxiety that he is afraid to.

As with every other aspect of writing fiction, in dialogue, less is more. The less you tell readers, the more you let them work out for themselves, with just the odd nudge in the right direction, the livelier their engagement with your story.

This dictum has a special resonance, however, in connection with dialogue writing because dialogue has to give the impression of being ‘real’ conversation. Real people do not talk in speeches – unless, of course, they are actually giving a speech. They do not declaim at one another, they talk in one liners, odd, disjointed phrases and complete non-sequiturs. They rarely listen properly to one another, but talk across each other, conduct simultaneous conversations face to face and on the phone, talk while fiddling with iPads, entering PIN numbers, watching their children playing football or a thousand other things which require at least as much concentration as conducting a conversation.

Nor do people tell one another things the other(s) would already know. Jeff would not say to Jenny, ‘You’re home after me,’ because that is obvious to both of them, so you need to insert the remark about her taking her coat off to show readers who arrived home first. As I have shown above, if you want to use dialogue to convey information to readers, you must find oblique ways of doing it.

Although I have referred in passing to speech attribution – the he said, she said part of dialogue – I have deliberately left it till last to discuss, because it is, when dialogue is properly written, the least important component in it. Unless you have more than two speakers, in theory, you can get away without using it at all. You can use context, and business, to show readers who is speaking. If you have more than two, or if you want an attribution for emphasis or rhythm, then keep it simple. He said, she said works much better than ‘she remonstrated’ or ‘he articulated’ or ‘she exclaimed’. The attribution should not draw attention to itself. It is the content of the dialogue which matters, and the attribution’s only job is to act as a discreet signpost as to who says what.

You will find you can repeat the verb ‘said’ almost ad infinitum without readers noticing, because they are focused on what is being said.

A final, brief, note on speech layout. This is not the place to go into details, though if you are in doubt, do find examples to follow, or use a copy editor, but as a rough rule of thumb, always put the business or the attribution relating to it on the same line as the speech and you won’t go far wrong.

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Resources for crime writers

by Rin Simpson So, research. It’s a pain in the backside, right? After all, we’re writing fiction, not textbooks. We’re meant to make stuff up. Whatever happened to a little thing called creative license?

Well sure, there’s something in that. No one wants to read a novel so stuffed full of facts that they feel like they’re back at school. But if you’re writing crime, you need at least a few (accurate) facts at your fingertips if you want to have even a vague hope of convincing your readers to buy into your story. Seriously, crime fiction readers are pernickity devils, and they really know their stuff.

That’s not to say you need multiple degrees in forensics, law and criminal psychology. But brush up on the basics of police procedure and a few common poisons and you’ll lend a level of authenticity to your work that will be very much to your credit.

So, where to start? Well, as we’re living in a digital age, so how about online?

Entering the blogosphere The wonderful thing about the internet is that it has given experts a space in which to go nuts on their pet subject. Unfortunately, you don’t have to pass an exam to set up a blog, so there are plenty of poorly researched, not very well backed up opinion pieces out there which won’t give you all that much insight.

Try to look for blogs written or managed by people who have a real life expertise, like DP Lyle’s The Writer’s Forensics Blog (www. writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com). Lyle is a forensics guru who trained as a doctor before moving fields. He has written a huge number of books, both fiction and non-fiction, and has contributed to about a gazillion TV shows, from CSI to Diagnosis Murder, Law & Order to Monk. On similar lines is retired senior criminalist Tom Adair’s site, www.forensics4fiction.com.

Another good example is Guns, Gams and Gumshoes (www. writingpis.wordpress.com), written by a pair of real life American private investigators. One is also a trial lawyer, the other a novelist, so they’ve got a lot to add to the mix. As well as an insightful and amusing blog, the duo have also written a couple of books: How do private eyes do that? and How to write a dick. Absolute gold if you’re planning a PI novel.

I’ve only just come across this criminal solicitor’s blog (www. criminalsolicitor.blogspot.co.uk) but I like the honest, open style.

The fact that he openly admits to being grumpy makes me warm to him immediately, and it’s useful to get an inside perspective on what happens in various scenarios (e.g. when someone is brought in for questioning) from a point of view that isn’t the criminal or the police.

Finally, although it’s not actually a blog, I wanted to include a great online resource for anyone wanting details of historical crimes. The Old Bailey’s site (www.oldbaileyonline.org) has records of court proceedings from 1674 to 1913 in a searchable database, with tutorial guides on how to start your search. Definitely a good one for historical crime writers.

Getting back to books If you’re old school, and prefer to grab a paper and ink book off your shelf rather than rely on Google for your information, you’ll find that there are hundreds and thousands of resources for you to choose from.

It wouldn’t be practical to list them all here, but these are a few that I’ve

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found useful: First up is The crime writer’s guide to police practice and procedure

by Michael O’Byrne (£9.99, Robert Hale Ltd). I’ve found this absolutely invaluable for those tricky little questions like, “If a body is discovered at 6am, which rank of detective is likely to turn up?”(most likely the DS or DC, according to O’Byrne). Covering everything from the personnel structure of a murder enquiry team to the use of informants by the police, this is a rare British guide (most are American) by a long serving policeman who ended his career as a chief constable in Bedfordshire. It is incredibly thorough, and packed with anecdotes and personal opinion which are – I find – as useful as the bare facts.

The HowDunnit ‘guide for writers’ series is a targeted, informative and well set out collection of books, which includes a large number of titles such as Book of Poisons by Serita Stevens and Anne Bannon and Forensics by DP Lyle (both £16.99, Writers Digest Books), who I mentioned above in the blogs section and whose HowDunnit book is, naturally, just as good.

Although most visitors who spot it find it rather disturbing to see Book of Poisons on my bookshelf, I’ve found it a useful place to start my hunt for a (literary) murder weapon. Stevens is a registered nurse specialising in forensics, while Bannon is a freelance journalist and author, making this guide as easy to read as it is professionally accurate.

Once you’ve selected your poison, you might want to do a bit more indepth research elsewhere, but it’s a good overview which doesn’t have too many baffling technical terms.

One other interesting title I’ve heard of (although not read myself, so don’t get cross with me if you don’t like it) is What everybody is saying

by Joe Navarro (£11.99, Harper Collins) about how to read people’s body language. His work has been field tested by the FBI, so I’m pretty sure it’s as accurate as it’s going to be. And while it may not make you into the next Mentalist, it will at least help you endow your chief investigating character with indispensable powers of observation.

Expert organisations Thing is, sometimes you don’t want to read blog posts or articles or books. Sometimes you want to ask a specific question. While you can often email questions to bloggers (DP Lyle regularly features answers to reader questions), one of the best places to find an expert is at an institution of some sort. Universities, research facilities, law enforcement agencies, and a variety of umbrella organisations are all stuffed with knowledgeable people.

In America, for example, you have the Drug Enforcement Administration (www.justice.gov/dea), which has a lot of information on its website about different types of drugs, drug awareness and prevention, drugs policies and law enforcement. It’s a good starting point for a subject overview, and there are lots of contact numbers on the contacts page (including one for the employment department, if you should fancy a new career as a Special Agent!).

In the UK, there’s the Serious Organised Crime Agency (www. soca.gov.uk), which covers everything from drugs and fraud to money laundering and people trafficking, and has a comprehensive list of web addresses for further help and information. There is a press office which is contactable 24/7/365, as well as a 24/7 general hotline.

At the London Metropolitan Police website (content.net.police. uk), you can get in touch with the commissioner during one of his regular live web chats. As well as this, the site has a fantastic crime map, with detailed local statistics, plus you’ll find information on historical cases, current initiatives, and loads more.

Start online but, if you need to speak directly to an expert, find the contacts page and give them a ring. I once spent an entire day with a noted forensic entomologist who gave freely of his time and knowledge simply because I asked nicely. If you’re not sure who to call, try the press office, but I’d email the experts direct. They worst they can say is no, right?

Meet them in person In my opinion, you can’t beat a face to face conversation. I’ll never forget the first time I met retired police chief Bob Barker (www.robertbarker. org.uk). It was at the Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate (www.harrogateinternationalfestivals/crime), and on the final night we propped up the bar until the wee hours talking crime and creativity.

Bob and I have kept in touch, as much because of our shared love reading and writing as anything else (he is currently writing a crime series of his own). But his offer to check over my writing and answer any procedural question stands, and is invaluable in those moments when the internet just isn’t giving me the answers I need.

Harrogate is a fantastic place to meet like-minded crime bods, as is CrimeFest in Bristol (www.crimefest.com). You’d also do well to link into some of the major organisations for crime writers, the most well-known of which is probably the Crime Writers Association (www. thecwa.co.uk).

If you can make friends with an active police officer, you’re potentially even better off. World renowned author Peter James is well known for spending regular time on the beat with his local police force,

and it shows in his writing. If you don’t know any police officers off hand and you don’t have any luck at your local police station, why not think about signing up as a volunteer? Visit www.police.co.uk/volunteer for more info.

Of course, if you’re interested in police life over the pond, you could always do one of the courses at the annual Writers’ Police Academy (www.writerspoliceacademy.com) where your learning schedule would include jail tours, ride-alongs, guest speakers and cold case investigation. This year’s event runs from 20 to 23 September in Jamestown, North Carolina, and places are, the website assures us, filling up fast.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for now. But there is plenty more out there in your nearest library and the vast ocean that is the World Wide Web. And that’s not including all the handy facts and entertaining anecdotes yet to be tapped from helpful contacts and experts. Happy researching!

About Rin Rin Simpson (@rinsimpson) is a freelance journalist and creative writer based in Bristol. She has had short stories published in anthologies including Honno’s Cut on the bias and the National Flash Fiction Day collection Jawbreakers, and has recorded readings of her work as part of Cyprus Well’s Writer Bites programme. She is also the founder of The Steady Table writers’ group (@TheSteadyTable).

Random Stuff | 45

Scripts: When Sadness Comes

by Ola Zaltin

The art of screenwriting (an oxymoron if there ever was) is one of collaboration. Whereas with poetry, a blog, photography or a novel - where you can sit at home and dream it all up and then submit pretty much own your original idea and vision from A to Z - with film, you’re cooked the second the text leaves your hard drive.

Anyone with the notion that screenwriting resembles anything close to a democratic process better go back to their mental storyboard and revise it thoroughly. Film and TV work is an open minded give-andtake game of creating as a team. An intensely collaborative effort where the sole focus lies on perfecting the story that is to end up on screen.

Nothing comes before this. All else: egos, money, time, girlfriends, family and sanity better be checked at the door.

The director is Jesus, Mother Mary and the Holy Ghost rolled into one very potent and unholy trinity. The producer is, of course, God: he writes the checks.

So as a writer, you have to choose your battles carefully. Because even if you’re the guy with the original idea, make no mistake, you’re part of a team effort the second someone calls you and says ”Love your script!”

From then on, it’s one long trip up-creek to heart-break.

All good drama is based on Conflict. Friction. Characters wanting and needing what they cannot instantly have by the push of a button and so having to overcome all kinds of mind-boggling obstacles to achieve their stated goal. Getting the Girl. Bedding the Boy. The slaying of the Dragon. Brother getting sister and bedding her. (In the case of Game of Thrones: all of the above.)

Controversy, by contrast, is something that surrounds movies and seems to permeate the making of them. The stuff that goes on behind the scenes, as it were.

Let me give you an example: A Swedish cinematographer, let’s call him Björn, is in NYC shooting a commercial for one of the biggest brands in the world, directed by Tony Scott. The shoot has got half of lower eastside Manhattan closed off to traffic, a crew of a hundred and one, and a budget of about three Scandinavian feature films - and all that is lacking is the director. Mr Scott is nowhere to be found.

They wait. It’s six in the morning. And they wait. No Mr Scott. In the end, Björn can’t stand it anymore and walks off to have a morning dump in one of the porta-shits. At this very moment (by laws known only to Murphy) Mr Scott arrives on set and starts energetically clapping his hands, shouting and acting like the generalissimo he truly is. Only his Director of Photography is missing. Told via polite whispers that Björn is having a moment in one of the portable toilets - in front of the assembled one hundred and one crew - Tony strides over to the blue plastic rectangle and bangs his fist on the door and yells: ”Get your ass out here this second - we got a commercial to shoot, man!”

After which you can hear a laconic voice from within proclaiming: ”Tejk it eesy Tony. I kan only handle one shit at a time.”

True story.

A laugh, for sure. But underneath the surface hilarity lies a bedrock truth that everyone that’s been involved with film & TV knows all too well: the need to mark off territory. I’m hired for my specific skills, and

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if you start trespassing, doubting, questioning my talent, sir, there will be hell to pay. This, to me, is one of the toughest challenges of the craft.

Believing in your own self-worth and sticking to your guns.

With so many cooks stirring the same pot, controversy is bound to ensue. It is said that every film is made three times: the film you write, the film you shoot and the film you edit.

As a writer, the trick is to know as much as you possibly can about your story before you submit and then to fight like crazy for your vision while you get endless notes, feedback, critiques and red markings in the margin of your labour of love. All the while acknowledging that there is a limit to budget, that the people you are working with actually know their stuff (you profoundly doubt this) and that perhaps, just maybe, having 300 penguins tap dancing in sync on Trafalgar Square might not be achievable without very costly CGI efforts or a major air-lift from Antarctica.

S.J. Perelman famously said that getting feedback from producers was akin to being nibbled to death by ducks. He has a point. But it gets sticky when the ducks are clever and point out things not good in your script.

It often evolves into a very emotional inner-debate where your gut, your heart, and your ratio are at war with above mentioned clever ducks and that big bad thing called reality.

More often than not, what you’ve dreamt, created, laboured so long with and lost a girlfriend or two over, doesn’t even end up in the finished product. It’s a steep learning curve and entails just as many amazing highs as incredible lows.

Writing is controversy is friction is life is art is trite is fun is sadness is joy - is failure and success. And just once in a while, you get to see your work realized up on the screen. And then, it is worth it all. In the words of that great Shakespearean character (and no stranger to controversy himself) Nixon:

“Because greatness comes, not when things go always good for you. The greatness comes when you’re really tested. When you take some knocks. Some disappointments. When sadness comes. Because only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know, how magnificent it is, to be on the highest mountain.”

Blog Tours: What Are They Good For?

by Dan Holloway

So this is it. After the weeks, months, years of sweat, the tears and sleepless nights, your finger finally hovers over the publish button, ready to send your ebook out into the world. It’s a moment that for so many self-publishing writers turns out to be little more than the whimperiest whimper not the bosh bang bosh of your adrenalin-fuelled imaginings. But not for you, surely not for you, because you’ve done everything you’re meant to in order to make your book ... “discoverable”.

Only there’s a nagging thought worrying itself away at the back of your mind. You don’t really mind that you spent almost as long researching how to discoverableise your book and then meticulously acting upon every piece of research. Your book, as they say, is worth it. And it’s an essential part of acting professionally, like every advice column tells you, you must because if you don’t your book will sink beneath the slush. But the nagging thing is still there ... if you do all those things mightn’t your book still sink? You think about those websites where you’ve been meticulously researching. They all seemed to have a whole lot of page views. And those how-to guides you downloaded. They were doing awfully well in the charts. Isn’t it the case that everyone is doing what you’ve done, in which case haven’t you been treading water, pedalling furiously just to keep up, any one of a hundred sweaty exercise-based metaphors? And do these professionalisms even work?

Few things are so de rigueur for a writer with a new book out as the blog tour. Whilst having a casual Google, I came across sites dedicated to helping you arrange blog tours, even those offering course on how to do a book blog tour (this one, in all fairness, raised some very good and very practical points about what to look for in sites you’d like to go touring round http://blogbooktours.blogspot.co.uk/).

To my mind the blog tour is an absolute minefield. Done just right they can launch your book perfectly. Anything else and they are yet another contribution to the grand time suck that is book marketing. Let me offer my very

unscientific opinion why – the only sales data, if they equate to your key criteria, I have to go on are my own. The rest is anecdote and rant gleaned from colleagues.

First, the rationale. A blog tour will bring you in front of people who’ve never yet heard of you. No two people’s blog readerships are the same so every new blog you appear on will introduce you to potential new readers, and every new reader has friends they will introduce your book to if they love it. And the advantage of a tour rather than one-off posts done whenever is that it builds a head of steam. It keeps your book being talked about. It ensures that the all-important early sales are bunched together, which will help your ranking on Amazon and make the longterm success of your book more likely – in the world of epublishing 100 sales are not 100 sales whatever. If they all happen in a narrow window they are much more likely to be a foundation for ongoing success. And a book blog tour seems a great way of making that happen.

Next, the undoubted “upside” of blog tours.

All of the above is undoubtedly true. Your book *will* be put in front of new readers, any one of whom could be “the one” who dips in, loves it, and takes it up as a cause to champion.

And that, of course, is our ultimate goal, to give birth to a buzz that takes on a life of its own. It’s also true that making a big push to do your publicity in one go is very sensible, and uses not only the way Amazon rankings work but basic psychology – how many times have we thought “Oh, I’ll buy that when I have time” only to wander off into our own sweet thoughts never to return. If we had seen the same thing the next day, chances are we would have thought “oh yes, I remember!” and clicked through to buy. In other words, it may be the people the blogs have in common rather than the new readers that are most valuable.

Another key thing is that this is not just a oneoff effort. You are leaving a digital footprint.

Every post about your book will be stored forever in the elephantine memory of search engines everywhere.

Now for the drawbacks. First of all, think about your own blog reading habits. We all have blogs we love, ones we return to again and again, ones we look for in our RSS feeds and blogrolls and e-mails and feel a little flutter every time it’s updated. The reason for that is we love what these people have to say. They are our friends, our confidants, our advisers.

And if we’re honest, when we discover that latest update is a post by or about someone else, we feel ourselves dip a little. We don’t always dive straight in. In other words, even if someone’s blog is fabulously active and popular, that will not necessarily translate even into page views for you, let alone sales. There is also the question of editorial control. When someone gives you a slot on their blog, you are, of course, grateful to them and don’t want to make a nuisance of yourself. But you lose a lot of the benefit of being on someone’s blog if, for example, they don’t tag their posts thoroughly, or don’t include lots of links to the page where they can buy your book across the globe and not just in one region. And, of course, not to be underestimated is the time it takes actually compiling your tour. It’s just one of the many things you will need to do as you prepare your launch (next time we will be looking at the other things competing for your attention such as reviews and promotions) and you have to apportion your effort to each ruthlessly in line with what you can expect it to deliver. Finally, many bloggers feel that in the long run it is more effective to build up a body of content on their own blog, continually drawing in new readers and then keeping them. Writing for blog tour takes a lot of time and your own blog may suffer.

I will leave it to you to decide what’s right for you but I hope I’ve given you the information for the key equation: do the previous paragraph and the one before add together to give an answer that looks like the content of the first paragraph? If you do decide to go ahead, these are the key things to draw out of the points above.

1. Draw up your tour a long time in advance.

Ideally months rather than weeks. Make sure you have at least 10 and preferably 15 stops along the way or you lose the momentum.

2. Choose the blogs that will host you carefully. Make sure their readers and yours have an overlap of interest but not too much of an overlap of actual readers.

Ideally the blogs who host you will be more established than your own, but if this is the case they will need to know who you are. That means taking the trouble to get to know the person behind the blog and maybe their commenters. Take the time to be an active participant in the blog. A great place to look for blogs is

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amongst those people who comment on yours, or people you know from twitter and who sometimes retweet your posts.

They are involved in your literary life already. But before you do, check out their blog thoroughly. If they have never hosted anyone before, it is unlikely they will host you. And, on a mercenary level, you need to look at how they present (and promote) the people they do host.

3. When it comes to asking people, be professional and always do so in private.

Twitter, the comments section of someone’s blog, or a Facebook wall are not appropriate places to ask for favours.

Prepare a polite e-mail. Set out exactly what’s happening – you have a book out on x date and are running a blog tour for a month from that date. You would love them to be part of that tour on a date that best suits them within that timeframe.

And, importantly, outline what you will offer them. At the very least you should

put together a blogroll and some posts on your own blog with links to their sites (and not just your post on it), maybe even selecting some of their best posts to recommend to your readers. And keep in touch but without being pushy if someone says yes. Make sure you submit anything they want early (you should have a file with cover images and author photos ready for this) and make sure you are clear about dates.

4. Don’t neglect your own blog. A very good thing to do is put a little snippet of each post on your own blog and a link to the place where people can read the whole thing. Someone who does this very well, juggling not just many of her own blogs but lots of guest pieces, is Roz Morris who runs the highly influential blog Nail Your Novel (http://www.nailyournovel.com).

5. Write for search engines. It’s a good idea to add a list of suggested tags at the bottom

of what you send people. But you can’t make someone use them, so fill your piece with those terms.

6. If someone gives you carte blanche, you will best use the space they have given you if you make what you say interesting to their readers, so spend time researching their most popular posts.

7. Make your host’s life easy. When I recently hosted a piece for a wonderful poet, Jessica Bell, she sent me html that I simply pasted into the html window on my blog.

It was already stuffed full of links and pictures and I instantly felt well-inclined.

To do this, compose the post as if you were posting it on your own blog, then simply switch to the html window and paste what’s there.

Dan Holloway’s new collection of poetry Last Man Out of Eden is out on June 12th as an ebook, a pamphlet, and a CD.

Synopsis Doc with Sheila Bugler

Working with Chloe Walker on the synopsis for her memoir, New Beginnings.

Sheila’s comments: Chloe approached WWJ for help with the synopsis for her memoir, New Beginnings. I was delighted to help, although I confess I was worried as well.

The topic – as you can see from the synopsis – is very emotive; I wanted to make sure my help was as valuable as it could be.

Two things helped enormously. Firstly, when I researched memoirs, I realised the process for submitting them is very similar to that for fiction.

Secondly, Chloe is a good writer and her synopsis really didn’t need much work.

There were a few areas I thought she needed to focus on. Most importantly, the synopsis felt incomplete to me. Her title, New Beginnings, wasn’t reflected in her synopsis. I felt she needed a stronger emphasis on her own new beginning – where she is now on her personal journey.

The second thing that needed work was Chloe’s use of past and present tense. Her synopsis was written partly in the present tense, partly in the past.

Agents expect a synopsis to be written in the present tense (I am NOT I was).

Chloe needed to change her synopsis to fit this convention.

I also thought her opening should be more powerful. I suggested she took the line about her wedding day and used this as her opening. I think it reads better this way – it’s a more effective ‘hook’ into her story.

Finally – as with so many synopses I see – there were issues with punctuation and grammar. There were many long sentences which would be more effective if split into two sentences (or more). The punctuation needed quite a bit of tidying up, especially in relation to the incorrect use (or lack) of

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commas and unnecessary extra spaces between words and sentences.

Chloe incorporated the changes and, with a few more tweaks, I think she has an excellent synopsis. Her memoir has obviously taken a lot of bravery to write and I wish her every luck when she submits it for publication. To see her novel in print would be a fitting end to the long journey she’s gone through.

Chloe’s comments: In the past, I have written academic research reports and in-depth theses across a multi-disciplinary field very successfully. I hold two masters degrees and am a qualified teacher and social worker. Therefore, I was confident in my writing ability but I soon learnt that academic writing skills are not transferable to a novelist, there is a whole set of principles and values. So, it was with a triumphant sigh that I put the finishing touches to my first novel.

Now for the synopsis. I had heard so many myths and truths about this dreaded deed that I wondered where to begin. The dictionary definition stated ‘a brief review of a subject.’ That certainly sounded manageable. I then turned to the internet but found myself even more confused that was until I hit upon ‘Words with Jam’.

Sheila’s constructive advice to a fellow novelist helped me to start and structure my synopsis, building it layer by layer until I had a finished article that I was happy to present. With baited breath I pressed the send button and waited for Sheila’s reply.

Her positive comments were a real boost to my writing in general. Here was a professional writer saying that my writing was very good. I made her suggested changes. The synopsis certainly reads better in the present tense and flows much more eloquently because of the changes to its sentence construction. Shelia’s support through the whole process was invaluable, she allowed me to work at my own pace throughout the process. Her advice was constructive not only in respect of my synopsis but to my writing in general.

On the following page you will see the original synopsis, and the finished version after working with Sheila ...

New Beginnings – Synopsis One

New Beginnings – Synopsis Two

I was born in the North west of England in the mid 1950s into a working class family.(one space only between sentences) My mother’s pretentious snobbery and egocentricity entwined with my father’s debauchery and cruelty led me to a secret life of lies, deceit, fear and shame. Reg, my father, was an entrepreneur who thought he was going places. My mother, Stella, immersed herself in keeping up appearances for the neighbours. To the outside world we looked like a normal, loving family but it was a precarious façade. Underneath lay a cruel and brutal world, one that I was desperate to get away from.

Novel: New Beginnings Word Count: 98000 Words Genre: Memoir

At the age of ten, I was sent to a private convent school as a boarder.

School life influenced me greatly; it offered me stability and a safe and secure environment in which to grow up.(one space) The nuns showed me a kindness, tolerance and compassion I hadn’t known before. Visiting the grand homes of my friends, Margaret and Helen, gave me a glimpse of a privileged world of hunt balls and county shoots and an insight into genuine family life, of which I had a very limited experience.

The book starts on my wedding day when my mother asks me ‘Are you happy?’ It was a question I couldn’t answer then and I still can’t answer today Immediately, there are hints of the strained relationships between my newly divorced parents and myself. There is impending(delete extra spaces) air of loathing and hatred. The marriage isn’t a happy one. For Daniel, I was the love of his life. He, on the other hand, was my means of escape. In a quest for independence we moved to the north-east. The Pennines acted as a natural barrier and enabled us to resist the weight of parental pressure. We had the freedom to make our own decisions and choices now.

There was one thing we both yearned for, a baby of our own. Sadly, that wasn’t to be. So we foster instead. Despite a house full of foster children our marriage didn’t survive, just as my mother had viciously predicted on my wedding day.(delete extra space) In time I remarry, Ernie, the love of my life and I go into business. But there is more heartbreak to come.

I switch my focus from family to academia, always chasing a first, a perfectionist to the end. I start to collect degrees like other people collect postcards and, whilst they opened doors for me, all I ever really wanted was maternal approval and praise.

Then one dayI receive a chance telephone call and BANG Pandora’s box opens. The past floods out like a gushing torrent. No matter how hard I try, it doesn’t stop. This time the lid is well and truly off.(delete space) My life will never be the same again. I was sexually abused as a child and the memories I had managed to suppress for so long come flooding back, not in chronological order, but haphazardly. They can happen anytime, any place. I have constant flashbacks and nightmares; I wake up screaming, his voice ringing my ear.

I don’t want to live, not like this, I want to die, but I can’t even get that right, I am a complete failure. (space) In my head I am still that dirty disgusting little girl, the one he called ‘his special princess.’

It’s been a long battle, but today I am starting to live again, it’s slow, but I am beginning once more to take back control of my life. There are still many decisions to make, do I prosecute and risk losing my sister and family? Do I keep quiet and let him getaway with it?(one space not two between sentences) At this moment in time my story finishes with the letters I cannot post.

Whatever happens, I’ve found the strength to move on. From now on, I decide what happens to me, not anyone else.

‘Are you happy?’ my mother asks on my wedding day. It is a question I’ve never been able to answer. Here are my reasons why.

My story starts in north-west England in the mid 1950s. Born into a middle class family, my mother’s pretentious snobbery and egocentricity entwined with my father’s debauchery and cruelty led me to a life of lies, deceit, fear and shame. Reg, my father, is an entrepreneur who thinks he is going places. My mother, Stella, immerses herself in keeping up appearances for the neighbours. To the outside world we look like a normal, loving family but it is a precarious façade. Underneath, lies a cruel and brutal world, one that I am desperate to get away from.

At the age of ten, I am sent to a private convent school as a boarder.

School life influences me greatly; it offers me stability and a safe, secure environment in which to grow up. The nuns show me a kindness, tolerance and compassion I haven’t known before. Visiting the grand homes of my friends, Margaret and Helen, gives me a glimpse of a privileged world of hunt balls and county shoots and an insight into genuine family life, of which I have a very limited experience.

I marry at eighteen, before I’ve had a chance to live life. Immediately, there are hints of the strained relationships between my newly divorced parents and myself. There is an impending air of loathing and hatred.

The marriage isn’t a happy one. For Daniel, I am the love of his life. He, on the other hand, is my means of escape. In a quest for independence, we move to the north east. The Pennines act as a natural barrier and enable us to resist the weight of parental pressure. We now have the freedom to make our own decisions and choices.

There is one thing we both yearn for - a baby of our own. Sadly and cruelly that isn’t to be. We foster instead. Despite a house full of children, our marriage doesn’t survive, just as my mother viciously predicted on my wedding day.

In time, I remarry Ernie, the love of my life. We go into business together. But there is more heartbreak to come. I switch my focus from family to academia, always chasing a first; a perfectionist to the end. I start to collect degrees like other people collect postcards. Whilst they open doors for me, all I ever want is maternal approval and praise.

Then one day, I receive a telephone call and BANG, Pandora’s Box opens. The past floods out, like a gushing torrent. No matter how hard I try, it doesn’t stop. This time, the lid is well and truly off. My life will never be the same again. I was sexually abused from the age of three.

Memories I managed to suppress for so long come flooding back, not in chronological order, but haphazardly. The flashbacks and nightmares are relentless; they can happen any time, any place. I wake up screaming, his voice ringing in my ear. I don’t want to live, not like this, I want to die, but I can’t even get that right. I am a complete failure. In my head I am still that dirty disgusting little girl, the one he called ‘his special princess.’

It’s been a long battle, but today I am starting to live again. It has been slow, but I feel I now have the strength to start to take back control of my life. There are still issues to resolve and decisions to make but I am beginning to be able to honestly answer ‘yes’ to my mother’s question, all those years ago.

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What we think of some books Floccinaucinihilipilification: the estimation of something as valueless Tacenda: things better left unsaid 5’9”: The average height of a British adult male Deipnosophist: someone skilled in making dinner-table conversation Logodaedalus: one who is cunning in the use of words

Brighton Belle by Sara Sheridan Review by Anne Stormont Rating: Logodaedalus I have previously reviewed ‘The Secret Mandarin’ and ‘Secret of the Sands’ by bestselling author, Sara Sheridan. I very much enjoyed both novels so I was delighted to receive a review copy of Sheridan’s latest.

‘Brighton Belle’ is designated as The First Mirabelle Bevan Mystery and is published this month by Polygon in hardback and e-book. It will be available in paperback in July.

There’s always a slight worry when coming to read the latest book by an author you love.

What if it doesn’t live up to expectations? There was no need to worry in this case. ‘Brighton Belle’ is another very engaging read from this talented author.

Sara Sheridan can be relied on to be original in character, setting and plot. Her books push at the genre boundaries. ‘Brighton Belle’ is part (recent) historical, part crime and part thriller. I was hooked from the start.

Set in post-war Brighton, the story’s heroine, Mirabelle Bevan, works as a secretary in a debt collection agency. She wants a quiet life after her role in the Secret Service during the war and following the death of her lover. However, she’s soon overtaken by scary and mysterious events. She and her sidekick, the marvellous Vesta, have to turn detective to solve various possibly linked crimes of fraud, murder and kidnap. They are involved in an illegal exhumation, breaking and entering, and helping a killer flee the country – all in an ultimately good cause. There’s darkness, suspense and surprises throughout. It’s gripping.

I love the originality – Mirabelle, a 1950s independent white woman and Vesta, a 1950s independent black woman – ‘doing

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it for themselves’ long before it was fashionable and feminism wasn’t even a gleam in her mother’s eye. The descriptions of Brighton and of the postwar era are charming and hugely atmospheric and the pace is brisk.

And, at the end, the scene is well and truly set for further adventures for Mirabelle and Vesta. I also hope there’s more to come of DS Macgregor.

There was a definite frisson between him and Mirabelle. I can’t wait for this trio’s next outing.

A Parachute in the Lime Tree by Annemarie Neary Review by Sheila Bugler Rating: Logodaedalus This novel is published by The History Press Ireland – an independent publisher I’d never heard of before. Fiction is a new outing for this publisher, with just two fiction novels on their list so far. From reading this book, I’d say it’s a clever move.

A Parachute in the Lime Tree is a very good novel. Set in Ireland during the Second World War, it follows the story of four young people – Oskar and Elsa from Germany, and Kitty and Charlie from Ireland.

Oskar and Elsa grew up side by side in Berlin, falling in love as teenagers, before being separated when Elsa’s Jewish family were forced to flee the country. They move to Holland and, from there, Elsa travels to Ireland with the Kindertransports.

War-damaged Oskar is determined to find her. During an air raid over Belfast, he jumps from an airplane and his parachute becomes entangled in the lime tree of Kitty Hennessy’s garden.

Kitty, a dead ringer for Hedy Lamarr, has given up her life in Dublin to look after her sick mother in rural Ireland. Desperate for excitement, Oskar’s sudden appearance couldn’t have come at a better time.

Meanwhile, unaware Oskar is looking for her, Kitty is trying to get on with her life. She’s living with a Jewish family in Dublin, has started playing the piano again and is courting medical student, Charlie, who has fallen madly in love with her.

The novel is utterly absorbing as we follow the lives of these four people.

Annemarie Neary does a wonderful job of getting inside each character’s head. I found myself racing through the pages, desperate to find out how their stories are resolved. Because young love is complicated, no matter what the era. Poor Kitty is in love with Oskar, who’s chasing after Elsa who, in turn, is falling for the lovely Charlie. How will they all get what they want? Can they? Should they? Believe me, you will want to find out.

There are so many things to praise here. The characters are

compelling: fully-rounded, flawed individuals all trying to find their own meaning in life. Neary writes from different narrative perspectives, so we get right inside the heads of each character. She does this effortlessly, switching with elegant ease from voice to voice. And she can write. This is a literary novel. Beautiful descriptions fill each page (my favourite was the description of Oskar’s arrival in Ireland: ‘a man who’d floated down to earth like a dandelion clock’).

At its heart this is a story about the triumph of the human spirit in the face of terrible adversity. In that way, it reminded me of another novel I read recently, the brilliant 22 Britannia Road by Amanda Hodgkinson. Like Hodgkinson, Neary’s characters are survivors, finding new meaning in a world changed forever by the ravages of war.

After reading the novel, I did some research on the author and learned her work has won several writing prizes and been short listed for many more, including the prestigious Bridport short story prize.

I’m not surprised. This is a great novel by a very talented writer.

Shut Up/Look Pretty Reviewed by JJ Marsh Rating: Deipnosophist Shut Up/Look Pretty is an anthology featuring Lauren Becker, Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty Logan, Michelle Reale and Amber Sparks. It‘s an unusual collection, containing everything from flash fiction to a novella, and is best savoured over time.

The first section is entitled Things About Me and You, a collection by Lauren Becker. She has a cool observational style, reminding me of Lorrie Moore or Wally Lamb, and her prose is often mesmerising.

“Your voice is motor oil. It makes things move. It is dark and liquid.

Without it, damage is done. I check you frequently. You are enough.”

Her stories are about relationships, connections, compromises and oddly dispassionate decisions; “I will love you for a little while longer, I think.” This is not a collection to be rushed. Take long walks in between and think about the images, such as playing Risk as foreplay.

Erin Fitzgerald’s This Morning Will Be Different is a set of sixteen stories which puncture pretension, such as the title story. Or they draw you into imaging something you’d never considered before, such as Booking Number 2409756, in which Erin writes letters to a jailed Lindsay Lohan.

What I like about Fitzgerald’s pieces are the sense of backstory. In each of these vignettes, we get the feeling that we don’t know the half of what went on before. Or in the flash, Early Decision, what’s coming next. Absorbing and enjoyable.

The novella at the centre, Local God, is a superb piece, full of gritty detail and honest emotion. The love triangle at the centre is played out against the backdrop of a punk band at Stirling University. It’s very different to what goes before, but the pace and characterisation are perfectly pitched, and Logan is excellent at realistic dialogue.

What we think of some books Her work reminds me a little of Scratch, by our own Danny Gillan.

There is also a sensuality in her writing, a way of describing the physical which is both direct and moving. As for the ending, it comes as a beautiful shock.

Michelle Reale’s collection of flashes, What Passes for Normal, reflect experiences of distance and discomfort. There is a bleakness to many of these short tales, snapshots of sad relationships, cruel parents, wintry worlds and disillusioned lovers. Each story is perfectly crafted, sharp and hardedged, and almost every single one is troubling. A line from Learn(ed) sums it up: “We can’t be more than who we are”.

Amber Sparks veers off in a different direction with A Great Dark Sleep: Stories For The Next World. Not only are her short stories full of ghosts, vampires, decay, and angels, but her language is deep and resonant, as she explores the line between this world and the next. But for all the shadows of the subject matter, there is a lightness of tone, a relish for words which makes stories such as For These Humans Who Cannot Fly more delightful than depressing.

All these writers display real skill, and despite the varying themes and effects, this is a collection to enjoy again and again. Perhaps not all at once, as there’s a lot to take in, but this one is a keeper.

The Coincidence of the Palm House Murder by Dave Shonfield Reviewed by Perry Iles Rating: Floccinaucinihilipilification There was an advert on the telly a few years back.

It showed a young man in a city somewhere on the Indian subcontinent repeatedly ramming his old car into a wall and hitting it with a really big hammer until it took on a vague approximation of the shape of a new Peugeot, whereupon he put some bhangra on the sound system and some pretty girls in the back seat and no doubt lived happily ever after.

A little patronising perhaps. Possibly even borderline racist, but a great metaphor for the self-publishing industry. It looks like a book and it quacks like a book, therefore it must be a book.

Unfortunately, most self-published works bear as much resemblance to literature as a battered old Hindustan Ambassador does to a brand new Peugeot, and The Coincidence of the Palm House Murder is no exception. Dave Shonfield has come up with an original and interesting plot that mixes politics, racial cleansing and tribal differences in Rwanda and their consequences in London. This could be fascinating and involving, but sadly it isn’t. There are, of course, reasons for this, which hinge mainly upon great lumpen downloads of fact, lack of adequate characterisation, typos, spelling mistakes and bad grammar that render the book unreadable. I got as far as page 32, where I came across the following: It was as if her bowels were on a low gas hob, simmering with her juices about to bubble over.

Why oh why had she succumbed so theatrical to

that appeal on “Crimewatch”.

At this point I realised that life was too short, and gave up. So, is it legitimate to review a book I couldn’t finish? A book I’d given up on so early in the proceedings? There are some who will say I’m being unfair to the author, that I hadn’t given him a chance for the plot to show through and the characters to come alive. To which I’d reply that an agent would not have got as far as this, which is why the self-publishing industry is thriving at the expense of quality reading matter.

Which in this case is a shame.

On the face of it, Dave Shonfield has come up with a plot centring on subject matter that hasn’t been explored before. A man is killed at Kew gardens, a man connected to the Rwandan genocide and the war between the Tutsis and the Hutus, groups so cutely named that they sound like they ought to be making guest appearances on In the Night Garden rather than performing unspeakable acts on a vast scale in a distant land.

Shonfield gives us the facts, the history of colonialism that sparked the conflict and the present state of affairs that’s led to this murder.

However, a good editor would re-organise the book so that the research is eased more subtly into the reader’s subconscious.

The background, the history and the facts are there to give more depth to the story being told.

They shouldn’t be there for their own sake, but to compliment the fiction. Everything should serve the story. The story is what the book is there for. The story rules, OK? But here the characters are subsumed by their background, here the narrative is jerky and marred by typos, bad grammar and a style that doesn’t know where it fits, moving from police procedural to theatrical to factual and back again.

Here is an author who hasn’t found his voice yet. Perhaps he never will, or perhaps it’ll take him a few more novels and some good peer-group advice to do so, but until that point arrives, his output will be doomed to commercial failure.

The Secret River by Kate Grenville Review by Liza Perrat Rating: Logodaedalus Orange Fiction prize-winner Kate Grenville wanted to know what happened to one of her ancestors, Thames boatman Soloman Wiseman, when he arrived in New South Wales early in the 19th century. She wondered about his interaction with the Aboriginal people. Originally intended as a non-fiction work on her research into Wiseman, the book eventually became the fictional The Secret River, narrated through the eyes of William Thornhill.

A Thames River bargeman born into poverty, Thornhill’s dire circumstances lead him to commit a crime for which he is transported to colonial New

South Wales with his feisty wife, Sal, for the term of his natural life. Once emancipated, he seizes this opportunity to reinvent himself by becoming a trader and landowner, staking a claim on patch of ground by the Hawkesbury River, which, unbeknown to him, is Aboriginal land.

The undercurrent of tension with the natives begins as a murmur, gradually becoming palpable, until it is clear that some kind of conflict between Thornhill’s family and the Aboriginals is inevitable.

The situation builds to a horrifying climax when William Thornhill is forced to make a difficult choice; a clash between one group of people who are desperate to own land, and another group for whom the concept of ownership is entirely foreign.

Kate Grenville’s dedication reads: to the Aboriginal people of Australia: past, present and future. This immediately leads us to believe the author sympathizes with the aborigines over the white men. On the contrary, she weighs the argument deftly, weaving a fine balance of empathy for both the Aboriginal population and the new settlers.

Whilst attempting to understand and exist peacefully alongside the natives, Thornhill, working hard for small gain in a hostile environment, gains our sympathy when the natives steal his crops. At the same time the author never lets us forget that this land, which the white man has stolen, belongs to the Aboriginals; that they are as much a part of it as the earth, rocks, trees and fauna on which they survive.

She presents the reader with the plight of both blacks and whites, with no aim of resolving the problem, or pointing the finger at one or the other. Various other settlers in the area make different decisions on how to deal the Aboriginals, which leads us to question how we would act in similar circumstances. The author leaves this up to us to decide. Or not.

All moral dilemmas aside, this is also simply a good story: a man trying to carve a better life for himself and his family in brutal and unforgiving conditions. Kate Grenville creates a vivid sense of colonial New South Wales –– a place we feel, smell and taste through her lyrical prose.

I discovered the brilliant writing of Kate Grenville when I read The Idea of Perfection. The Secret River, too, is story-telling at its finest, a thought-provoking story which subtly raises issues on class, ownership and power. So superbly written it had me mesmerized from the outset, and I will certainly be reading the second and third books in this series.

Other Stuff | 51

The Rumour Mill

sorting the bags of truth from the bags of shite

Heard a rumour but you’re not sure if it’s a bag of truth or just a big bag of shite? Send it to us and we’ll get our top investigative journalist Kris Dangle to look into it for you.

As the theme for this month’s issue is Controversy here are some of the more controversial rumours I’ve been sent over the last few years - Kris A friend of mine who really knows his stuff about music told me that Jesus was the first super fan of the Bee Gees and that’s why he always dressed like them. This couldn’t possibly be true, could it?

There are several reports (unconfirmed and actually made up) that he was heard to be singing Staying Alive in an ironic tone while dragging the cross through the streets of Jerusalem, so you never know.

Guess the Book

Try to guess the classic novel from these genuine one-star reviews. All spelling and grammar maladies remain the copyright of the reviewers.

1) I was bored from the start. It starts in words, but by the third page all I was seeing was “Bla bla bla bla bla bla bla. . .”

Then the little house blew up in flames and my interest was rekindled. But, disgustingly, I was turned off by this book because he peed on the flames to put them out. That is just totally gross.

I immediately put down the book and honestly wished I could burn it.

If you want an actual GOOD book, try Lord of the Rings or The Count of Monte Christo. Don’t bother with this rubbish that somehow was published.

A friend of mine saw on the internet that the most under reported miracle in the Gospel was when Jesus did a pie chart for the distribution of the loaves and fishes on his ipad. Could this be true?

I’ve heard this one before and it is, of course, nonsense – Jesus was, of course, officially sponsored by Vodafone and at the time they were only offering deals on the Galaxy Note. We can be sure of this because we have his signature on the recently discovered Dead Sea Vodafone Contracts.

Some bloke down the pub who knows a girl who has a cousin that claims to know Derek Acorah said that Jesus hung around with loads of ghosts, but only the Holy one made it into the final edit of the Bible because of a dispute over likeness rights. Is this absolutely correct?

It is not known for sure whether Jesus spoke a lot with the dead. It is clear, however, that like Jesus, Derek Acorah regularly speaks to very thick and gullible people.

Is it true that despite the traditional view of Jesus and his disciples always walking from place to place they actually were more inclined to go by BMX bicycle and that Jesus could do some mad moves on the half pipe?

According to some recently translated stuff from the Dead Sea Scrolls (yet to be verified, so this could turn out to be wrong) Jesus was the first person ever to pull off a 720 tail whip and land it at the Nazareth X Games in 31 AD – the move was named The Miracle and was the primary reason people believed he was the son of God. I’ve heard there are hundreds of versions of the New Testament that the Pope or Dan Brown or someone doesn’t want us to see and that most of these are about how Jesus was in a gay marriage – is this true?

That’s absolutely ridiculous as many religious people will tell you – Jesus loved everyone, except gaylords. As he famously said in the sermon on

2) [THIS BOOK} is an overhyped, monotonous, pretentious, pseudo-intellectual piece of crap, in other words an English lit major’s wet dream. It’s the absolute meaningless ramblings of a half wit, not some great intellectual masterpiece. Maybe [AUTHOR] was the Justin Bieber and “Twin Peaks” of his day, talentless and meaningless but few will admit they were fooled.

3) This is probably one of the worst books that I have ever read. If you have good taste in books, you should be reading the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling or Holes by Louis Sachar or the Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Edwardsnot this.

4) The books first chapter is an amazing and truely thought provoking on that all people should read and consider if we are in fact moving towards it.

But from there on out it’s pretty much crap.

Not sence reading the crystal Star and the Black Fleet Crisis Trilogy have i detested a book! If you want the point of the book watch the Simpsons parody. It’s funnier and it makes fun of Bill Gates.

the Mount – Love nearly everyone. He didn’t have time to go into all the various people we shouldn’t love and that’s why he invented American

52 | Other Stuff

Answers: 1 – Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift; 2 – Moby Dick by Herman Melville; 3 - The Wind In the Willows by Kenneth Grahame; 4 – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Baptist churches so they could tell us who to hate in the name of Jesus.

Crossword created by Lily Hobgoblin and The Pullet 1

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What is Benson sucking, in Michael Carson’s comic coming-of-age tale? (7,6)

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In which Guy de Maupassant short story does Elisabeth Rousset perform a sacrifice while the rest of the party enjoy a feast?

(5,2,4)

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In which novel do Vianne Rocher and her daughter Anouk arrive in Lansquenet and cause sweet mayhem? (8)

12 “chopped hard boiled eggs with a cream and cheese sauce laced with English mustard.” Ian Fleming’s description of Oeufs ...? (6)

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13 Who famously wrote of a taste ‘as old as cold water’? (8,7) 23

14 What does Oliver Jeffers’ Incredible Boy eat? (5) 17 Jonathan Safran Foer won’t eat it these days. (4)

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19 Which character is a lover of ‘hunny’?

(6,3,4) 21 A drink drunk liberally at The Hog’s Head? (10) 22 In which Margaret Atwood novel does Marian suffer from ‘metaphorical cannibalism’? (3,6,5)

April 2012 Answers

23 L’Enfant Perdu – whose favourite wine? (5,6) 24 Which Lucy Ellman book features Suzy Schwarz and her relationship to food?

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Which YA novel and successful film do all these clues reference? (3,6,5)

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Larry Diamond to Gwen Mati: “I ate asparagus too. Do you realize that for the next five hours, our urine is going to smell exactly alike.” Which book?

(4,6,2,4,7)

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What condition does Natalie suffer from in Anna Maxted’s Running in Heels?

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What was good discipline in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast? (6)

10 In which novel does a wine barrel fall and split, exciting much enthusiasm and eager slurping from the locals? (1,4,2,3,6) 11 Whose characters reminisce, on a train, about a particular woman and a Nebraska childhood ‘buried in wheat and corn’? (5,6) 15 Where do Idgie and Ruth fry green tomatoes? (3,11,4)

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Random Stuff | 53

Dear Ed Letters of the satirical variety

Dear Ed, I want to know why every time I turn on my television there is a program where the actor Robson Green is catching the fuck out of a fish. Don’t the government realise that the money spent on making programs like this could be better spent on keeping our libraries open? At the very least, if they felt they had to spend this money on a television program why couldn’t they have Robson going to a library and reading the fuck out of a book. It would be far more interesting.

That’s my sixpence worth anyway.

Yours truly, Sum Wun Dear Jam, I suppose you think you’re clever telling people to read books and that.

Well, I took your advice and read one and it was shit. What have you got to say for yourselves?

Yours truly, Doe Pee All I can say is maybe try another one, Doe, Ed Dear Words with Jam people, Two weeks ago I went to a big field where I like to do a bit of reading surrounded by the peace and quiet of the countryside. Would you believe it, but they’ve only gone and put a wind farm in the field. My reading was absolutely destroyed by the swishing noise of the giant blades as they whizzed around in the gale force winds. Everyone knows that they cost over a million pounds a day each to run. When will the government stand up to these so called ‘Green Energy’ people and put the money currently being wasted on wind turbines into libraries?

Yours sincerely, Mrs G O’ Bshite Dear Words Editor, I often write letters to magazines and newspapers even when I haven’t got anything at all to say.

Yours sincerely, Mo Ron

keep libraries open? It’s like we’re living in the Middle Ages.

Yours etc, I N Jale Dear Ed, I was very disheartened to read some letters recently printed on your pages from Doe Pee (this issue). Perhaps I could recommend something that might change your mind about reading – why not try Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson? It might open up a whole new world of drug taking for you.

Yours sincerely, Jun Keye Dear Words with Jam, I was appalled to see some of the letters you have printed on this page of your magazine. I am referring to the ones from Doe Pee and Jun Keye. When will the government realise that the money these people are spending on drugs could be used to keep our libraries open?

Yours truly, A Pald Dear Jam, Thanks for printing that top tip from Jun Keye which I read a few minutes ago. I have since bought Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and am now fucked out of my box on monkey adrenaline. I’m going to read Trainspotting in a minute.

Yours truly, Doe Well, er, Doe, at least you’re reading. Let us know how you get on with Trainspotting.

Ed

Dear Jam, Nice try, but you won’t catch me out with that one again – as George Bush jnr said – Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, fish and people can be friends. Or some other shit. I’ll be spending my money on drugs in future.

Yours truly, Doe Pee

Dear Jam, I just had to get back to you because I’ve just finished Trainspotting. It was brilliant. I’m sorry now that I complained about reading that shit book. Unfortunately I overdosed on heroin and am now dead. Ah well, swings and roundabouts.

Yours truly, Doe

Dear Editor, I recently had the misfortune of crashing my car into a lamp post on the way home from the pub. Imagine my surprise when the Police showed up and took me to the station where they used a very expensive machine to check my blood alcohol level. I was even more surprised when they charged me and sent me to prison. When will the government stop wasting tax payers money on blood test machines, court cases, and custodial sentences when this money could be used to

Dear Words Ed, I for one have had enough of all this talk about taking drugs. It’s absolutely disgraceful, not to mention wasteful. When will the government realise that the money spent on the funerals of the likes of Doe Pee could be spent keeping libraries open? It’s just common sense.

Yours sincerely, S Talwart

54 | Random Stuff

Horoscopes

by Shameless Charlatan Druid Keith It’s exam time of year again and many students will be getting stressed about the future – but there’s no need because it’s all predetermined by the stars. So forget about cramming for your finals and trust to fate. After all, no amount of actually studying can change where the stars were when you were born and that’s all you have to say to your parents when they complain bitterly about your results after all the money they’ve spent on your education.

LEO All Leonianistsic students will have left things to the last minute as it is in your star given nature to do so, and now you’ll be feeling that urge to stuff your brain with as much stuff as possible before the exams start. Relax, there’s no need – with Jupiter in your house you’ll sail through the tests without any problems at all regardless of how much study you do. It’s guaranteed because it’s in the stars.

VIRGO Ever the pragmatists, Virgonianists have planned every single detail of the past year very carefully and have avoided all those wild student parties and weekends away. No one is as prepared as you.

However, a combination of the moon waning and the world economy being fucked means regardless of what grades you achieve you’ll still be going on the dole with all the lazy people who enjoyed their college years.

LIBRA As the star child with the biggest leaning towards technical nerdery (but only the second biggest nerd rating of all the children of the stars) many of you Librarianists will be confident that your natural computer skills will get you through the coming exams. However, with Venus leaving your sign this month confidence may turn to despair when you find that circumnavigating the parental control lock on your parent’s broadband so you can watch unlimited free porn does not come up in the tests.

SCORPIO Male Scorpionianists have had a reasonably steady time throughout your academic career although you do make up the vast majority of the percentage of young men who have failed to

get off with any girls at all, even by chance, the whole time you’ve been at college. You may put it down to simple bad luck, but it’s more likely to be the way you quote Monty Python sketches verbatim every time a girl talks to you. The one thing you have not learned from University is that when a girl says – I wasn’t expecting to see you here – the correct response is not – No one expects the Spanish Inquisition. Best of luck with your engineering career and have a pint of real ale to celebrate your results.

SAGGITARIUS Saggitarianists are not the most academically gifted of the Star Children which is why Media Studies was invented. Don’t fret about the upcoming exams as the transit of Mars across your house ensures you will graduate with honours. Don’t let snide comments from someone you thought was a friend get you down on the 26th – despite what they say, the world of television soaps will always need qualified background artists.

CAPRICORN As by far the biggest out and out nerds in the Zodiac Capricornianists have always wished they could remember their school work in the same detail as they can the layout of every deck of every version of the Starship Enterprise. Be careful around the 12th as a heated discussion about the first time the interior of the TARDIS was explored may lead to injury of your hand when you attempt to administer the Vulcan death grip. This may affect your ability to hold a pen and therefore cost you valuable marks.

AQUARIUS Hard work and being a boring bastard comes easy to you Aquarianists and now at exam time it’s all finally going to pay off. Revise on the 18th to use the extra brain power that Saturn brings as it aligns with Mercury and you’ll sail through your exams.

You may have had to put up with a lifetime of wedgies from the rough kids but you’ll have the last laugh as your results will ensure that you get one of the three jobs that will be on offer in Britain next year. Everyone will still think you’re the dullest person on the planet, but at least you’ll be an employed dullest person on the planet.

PISCES Unfortunately the stars are showing that no matter what you do you are going to make a complete and utter hames of your exams. It will almost be as if despite reading all the facts you will be entirely unable to solve any of the problems presented to

you. In fact, every solution you offer will actually make the problem worse. Luckily, this is exactly the sort of qualification you need to join the Tories and so your career in politics is assured. Happy days.

ARIES Fun loving Ariesianist students always have a great time at University, but you may be surprised to find that despite all your research how quickly you can drink a yard of ale in the student union bar will not feature on your finals this year. Not to worry as with Pluto hammering into your sign at the end of the month there’s a good chance that even if you fail all your tests you will be able to walk straight into a job at one of Peter Stringfellow’s clubs so long as you’ve got nice boobs and don’t mind showing them to footballers and lecherous old fuckers for money.

TAURUS Like all Taurusianists you have spent your entire time in college worrying about how animals are treated and why we are still using fossil fuels. This driving force has been fuelled by Neptune’s slow transit through your house over the last three years, its ever present gravitational pull drawing your mind to these serious matters. Neptune will leave your house on the same day as you sit your final exam and you’ll find that you just don’t give a bollox any more which will be handy because you will end up working in a new type of power plant where live tigers and pandas are burned to create energy. You can’t fight it – it’s in the stars.

GEMINI Geminianists – you have not squandered your time in college despite having the lowest attendance record of any of the Zodiacal Children. You have learned many things, but not from your course – it was irrelevant to your chosen career. While many thought you were being lazy sitting in your flat and experimenting with levels of constipation that can only be brought about by a diet consisting solely of Pot Noodles, you were really studying how to make money by selling shit antiques to people on the telly. You are also shit hot at Countdown.

CANCER Cancerianists have a will of steel, true grit and determination. You may find that your resolve will seem to weaken slightly around the 16th, but hang in there and you will be proved right. It is possible to live for four years in a flat without ever washing your bed clothes or your towel without dying.

Some Other Stuff | 55

Come on a journey We’ll take you to another place And tell you a story

Three writers. Three places. Three stories.

Tri s kele BOOKS www.triskelebooks.com