Laurie Graham's Blog, page 13

First of all, thanks to my team of advance reader volunteers. Proof copies are on their way to you. I should  have supplied you with motivational T shirts. I wish I’d thought of it. Hindsight again, Laurie. Very clever.

Next, the somewhat alarming news that Dot Allbones has taken her bid for freedom from authorial control a step further. She has set herself up on Twitter. You can see for yourself (not that I wish to encourage her). She’s @DotAllbones

It’s astonishing, the ease with which she’s stepped from the 19th century into the 21st, aided and abetted, I might add, by that other pair who went on the lam a few years ago, @NellieBuzzard and @DickMorphew

I just hope the good people of the Ilminster Literary Festival understand what they’re dealing with. Dot will stop at nothing to fill a hall. Furthermore, she’s not exactly an adornment to genteel society. Look at her history: from the backstreets of Wolverhampton to the music halls of Whitechapel. I fear the tearooms of Ilminster won’t know what’s hit them.

Yes, once again it’s that time in my publishing year. Anyone For Seconds? will be out in August, page proofs have been corrected and bound proofs will be available later in the spring, so I’m looking for volunteers to read the book in advance and, if they enjoy it, to buy a copy for a friend and leave a review on Amazon. I can’t pay you for your labours except in gratitude. When The Early Birds was published last year my crack advance troops did me proud. So if you’d like to join the team just send me a message.

And what next? A very good question. In a sense I’m out of work. I’ve fulfilled my contract and my publishers haven’t offered me another one so… However, I have not been idle. I’ve spent the past few months on a speculative project (the writer’s equivalent of trying out a new high-wire trick without a safety net), writing  volume 1 of a proposed series. I’ve had great fun doing it and I feel very positive about it but I take nothing for granted in these publishing dog-days. There are plenty of mid-list writers who are suddenly finding themselves on the scrap heap. But one way or another my new project will see the light of day. If all else fails, I’ll self-publish. You haven’t heard the last of me yet!

I recently heard a podcast about what Russians consider the best books ever. First place, no prizes for guessing, was War and Peace, and nipping at Tolstoy’s heels, wait for it….. Harry Potter. I love hearing Russians talk about Harry because they call him Gary. They’re also very keen on Sherlock Holmes, whom they call Golmz. But I digress. Way up on the Russians’ list was Pride and Prejudice, and I thought, ‘Really? Are you sure about that? You’re not thinking about the movie by any chance?’ I mean, I am a staunch fan of Jane Austen but I know that a lot of people who watch film versions of her books would never be arsed to actually read the books.

If we’re honest, we may nod approvingly when the canon of classic works is recited, but many of us haven’t really read the damned books. I’m going to come clean. Canterbury Tales? Only enough to get me though O Level English. Moby Dick? Just remind me, how does it end? The aforementioned War and Peace? Couldn’t wade through the battle scenes. Sorry. My name is Laurie and I’ve never read Proust. And The Dead is the only James Joyce I ever managed to finish in spite of my husband’s great enthusiasm for the man. I picked up Washington Irving’s Rip van Winkle one night and it certainly sent me to sleep.

So what am I reading? Well, I just finished Len Deighton’s excellent Berlin Game, which made me look forward to bedtime so I could edge a little nearer to identifying the mole. And I am now reading Some Sex and a Hill which I hope will clarify for me why I have a sudden and inexplicable urge to study the Welsh language. An Englishwoman, living in Ireland? Yes, it makes perfect sense.

Let us hold our heads high and not be embarrassed by our reading choices. There is no literature examination at the end of life. Is there?

A costume SOS this morning from one of my daughters. My granddaughter has decided she wishes to go to her school’s National Book Day dressed as Anne from the Famous Five books. Anne? Great heavens. She’s the one who not only makes sure they leave their campsite as they found it but probably runs a hoover over it too.

My granddaughter is, like me, an avid and low-brow reader. She consumes Enid Blytons like Pringles: once she’s started she can’t stop.

It got me thinking. What character would I have chosen if we’d had National Book Day in the 1950s? I was greatly in awe of Darrell Rivers of the Malory Towers series mainly because she was sent away to boarding school. This seemed to me, aged 7, the very epitome of sophistication. And the clothes! They had a special uniform for every activity. Who’d want to be tucked into their own bed by Mum or Dad every night when they could be at Malory Towers having midnight feasts in the dorm. What a horrible thankless child I was.

Girl comic was another staple of my childhood reading, and in particular a weekly story which featured, among others, a mean-looking, acid-tongued blonde called Lois. I was a polite, round-faced brunette so it kind of figures. Yes, I think, given my druthers, I’d definitely go to Book Day as Lois.

None of which helps my daughter with a costume for our Connie. The only thing I can suggest is a big girlie hair bow, an apron and a duster. But you, dear reader, might have a better idea…

I’m currently sleeping with Anton Chekhov. By which I mean, I try to stay awake for at least half an hour after assuming the recumbent position so I can re-read some more of A Life in Letters.  Chekhov never wrote his autobiography  –  dying at the age of 44 he hardly had time  –  but a man’s letters tell you so much. He was a prodigious letter-writer and his friends and family kept many of his letters, so Chekhov fans are blessed. What will we texters, emailers and Twitterers leave behind? Zip. 

How do I love Chekhov? Let me count the ways. I love his snarky satire. I admire his clear, unsentimental vision of human nature, and his industriousness, even in the face of terminal illness. I relate to his perverse tendency to fill his days with people and commitments and then crave solitude. When he was in residence in Melikhovo he used to look forward to the rainy season when the mud roads would become impassable and he’d get a break from house guests.

Melikhovo is the reason I’m re-reading his letters. In April I’ll be fulfilling a lifelong ambition and visiting his little country estate. This will involve taking three forms of public transport but that seems a very modest homage to a man who travelled from Moscow to the Pacific coast of Russia in 1890, a three month trek and with dodgy lungs too. No faintheart, Anton Pavlovich.

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In other news today…..   I have tracked down Dot Allbones. She’s still on the lam since her escape from The Night in Question but has secured herself a gig at the Ilminster Literary Festival on May 30th and until then she chooses to remain at a secret location. Anyone would think she doesn’t trust me.

It’s happened again.  I went off for a Christmas break, came home and discovered that one of my characters has broken out and made a bid for an independent life. It happened a couple of years ago when Nellie Buzzard and Morphew legged it out of A Humble Companion and turned up at the Chiswick Literary Festival. This time it’s Dot Allbones. She’s wriggled out of The Night in Question, aided and abetted by her admirer Tom Bullen, and gone on the lam. It’s his wife I feel sorry for.

Dot and Tom were sighted in Hounslow on Boxing Day, asking the best road to take for the West Country. I imagine Dot has in mind to find herself an audience, a litfest or a little theatre somewhere, addicted as she is to the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd. I understand. We writers can be inconsiderate jailers. We create our characters, breathe life into them (we hope), then we type THE END and throw away the key.

If I hear any further reports of Dot and Tom I’ll post them here. I’d quite like to see her take another bow.

Conversation with my husband is quite a challenge these days. Not only does he have very little memory, short-term or long-term, but his capacity for language is shrinking too. Once the most eloquent of men, he now speaks word salad or not at all. So how to communicate with him?

Some dementia sufferers experience a brief release from their neurological prison through music. I’ve seen it for myself. Sadly it hasn’t worked for my husband. Indeed he now finds all music irritating. Casting around for something to talk about I suddenly remembered The Year of Poems. I think it was 1997. We set ourselves a challenge, each month each of us to learn a poem by heart. And we did it. At the end of the year between us we had 24 poems. All pretty much forgotten by now but there are fragments I can still recall.

I said, ‘Do you remember the year you memorized The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?’

Blank face.

I must say it was typical of Howard to choose a poem with 130 lines. He could be such a show-off.

Prufrock was his poem but I managed to dredge up a few remembered words. Let us go then you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table…

For which I was rewarded with a beaming smile. Aha!

The next time I visited him I took in another of his poems, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost.

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here…

And quite unprompted, Howard gave me the next line    to watch his woods fill up with snow.

It was a wonderful moment.

The following visit he wasn’t up for poems. He wanted to sleep. But that’s the way it is with Alzheimer’s. Every day is different. The fact is I now know that somewhere amid the tangles of his brain there’s a bit of Robert Frost. Who knows what else is in there? Which makes me both happy and sad, if you get my drift.

On that bittersweet note I’m knocking off for a couple of weeks. I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy and healthy 2018. Learn poems! How about that for a New Year’s resolution?

Like Nora Batty I’m in battle-axe mode today. It may be the result of sitting too long doing final revisions. The blood drains down to my ankles and my brain defaults to its factory setting, i.e. irritated by little things. Such as the misuse of words.

Let me be clear (as politicians love to say), I believe language is a living thing, I don’t mind (some)neologisms and indeed I sometimes take linguistic liberties myself, but there are a couple of words that have now been so trashed I feel I must say something in their defence.

Iconic. The lazy journalist’s go-to word for anything that’s famous or fashionable. The Statue of Liberty is iconic, likewise the Taj Mahal. A restaurant is not. It might be famous but it cannot be iconic. Neither are a pair of sunglasses. You could argue that shades worn indoors for some idiotic reason are iconic of Anna Wintour but I don’t think I’d bother. Put the word away, hacks, before it becomes utterly meaningless. Oh. Too late! It already did.

Then there’s awesome. Excuse me while I wipe the exasperated splutter off my computer screen. To be awesome means to inspire awe. A rare quality I think you’ll agree. A pair of shoes cannot be awesome and neither can a burger. I may be particularly sensitive to its egregious misuse since my recent visit to the US where I heard it all the time and the moment that really tipped me over the edge was the following exchange.

‘Hey, Sasha! Great to see you. How are you?’

‘I’m awesome. Great to see you too.’

No, Sasha. You were not awesome. You were just a girl in a woolly hat on the Downtown Number 5. And actually, even if, for reasons unknown to me, you truly were awesome, it was not your place to say it. So stop it.

The fan vaulted ceiling of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge  – that is awesome.

Right. Got that off my chest. Back to the revisions.

Holiday’s over. The structural edit of Anyone For Seconds? just landed on my desk, although thanks to the great British Christmas/New Year shutdown I have until January to deal with it. And exactly how do I do that? What is my process? To find out, I thought I’d allow that well-known red-top journalist Larry O’Gargle to interview me.

O’G:  So, Lauren, how do you tackle revisions?’

LG: It’s Laurie, actually. Well I do the easiest bits first. Typos, grammatical bloopers, that kind of thing. Then I look at my editor’s comments.

O’G: That must be pretty galling. I mean, it’s your book. Your editor’s not Colm Feckin Toibin  is he? What does he know?

LG: No, I don’t think Colm needs editing gigs these days. But funnily enough editors sometimes make very good suggestions. They have the benefit of distance.

O’G: Because he’s in London and you’re in Dublin?

LG: I meant creative distance. An editor hasn’t been living with those characters for nine months. They see things more clearly.

O’G: Okay. So this editor says “I think you should do this, this and this”. Then what?

LG: I give each suggestion careful consideration.

O’G: And then?

LG: I go for a walk. Clean the windows. Put a new plug on the iron. Then I start working the good suggestions into the story. It isn’t easy because my first draft is quite tightly written.

O’G: You mean you’ve had a few when you sit down at the typewriter?

LG: No, I mean structurally it’s quite tight. To introduce something new, for instance, means taking things apart a bit first. Like unravelling an almost finished sweater to incorporate a new motif.

O’G:  Such as a Rudolf the Red-Nosed reindeer head?

LG: Yes.

O’G: And what about the suggestions you don’t like?

LG: I ignore them.

O’G: Do you, you little divil! Doesn’t that land you on the bold step?

LG: No. My editor respects my judgment and I respect hers.

O’G: Isn’t that something. Well thank you, Lauren Grantham, for that very interesting glimpse into the life of a scribbler. And good luck with Rudolf head.

First the news that the paperback of Early Birds will be out on January 11th, rather sooner than I had expected.

‘To cheer people up in the dark days,’ says my editor.

‘Always supposing they have any money to spend after Christmas,’ thinks Laurie.

People sometimes get flatteringly excited about meeting an author. I fear it can be a cruel disappointment. Even those who sparkle on the page can be very mundane in the flesh, perhaps because we don’t get out much. Nevertheless it is nice to be stroked occasionally. Though perhaps I shouldn’t say that seeing as it’s suddenly open season on handsy, high-profile old codgers.

In social situations there are certain ‘writer’ questions I dread. For example, where do I get my ideas? The honest answer is I don’t know, and if I did I probably wouldn’t tell. Have I always been a writer? Yes and no. I was guilty of scribbling in my mother’s Cookery & Household Management at the age of three but I also spent the first 39 years of my life trying out other roles: Enid Blyton plagiarist, observer of human nature, square peg student trying to fit into the round hole of science, rubbish gardener, seamstress and driver, okay parent. I’ve also had a head-spinning number of jobs. Everything from dishwasher to office manager.

The toughest question of all is, what kind of books do I write? It is not enough to say one is a novelist. Are they detective stories? Science fiction? Young Adult? Romance? Well…. none of the above.

‘Aha,’ said someone I met recently. ‘You mean you write proper novels.’

His wife explained that he didn’t consider genre fiction as novels. Fantasy is fantasy. Historical is historical. An interesting perspective, but I didn’t feel it helped me to give a satisfactory account of myself. By ‘proper novels’ I suspected he meant literary fiction. The kind of books that get considered for the Man Booker and are not necessarily an easy, afternoon on the sofa with a bag of Maltesers kind of read. And clearly that’s not me either. Face it, Laurie. You’re unclassifiable.

There are times when I want to huddle in a corner and murmur, ‘I just write stories. Okay?’