Laurie Graham's Blog, page 14

On my recent truly whistlestop holiday in America   –  I seemed to spend a lot of time navigating New York’s Penn Station and wondering about destinations with names like Babylon and Ho-Ho-Kus  – I visited two friends who are painters by profession. Seeing them in their studios made me consider their working lives and how they differ from mine. A chewed and broken pencil seems to be the only tool we have in common. 

In the space of a year my friends produce many paintings – witness the canvases piled high. They may rework a piece over several sessions but generally they finish it or put it aside, some lesson learned, and start afresh. Mine is a longer haul with constant reworking of the same piece. Whatever fails to satisfy me gets tossed away or at least consigned to wherever the Delete button leads.

I can work on a train or a plane, and I do. All I need is a notebook and that well-chewed pencil. Even when I’m required to work on a computer a flashdrive suffices. It can accommodate a whole book, and more. But when painters travel they must haul all their gear and make sure their materials conform to safety regulations. And then there is the delicate matter of money. An artist’s pay days are unpredictable. You might sell two paintings in a week or none for months. When I have a publishing contract I can expect to get paid when I deliver a book and when it’s published, but there is also the potential for future bonuses. I might manage to sell foreign rights, or earn royalties. My book might get optioned for a movie. Pigs might fly. But the possibility is there. A book has earning legs, a painting is a one-time deal.

Neither of my artist friends is starving in an attic and yet from where I stand their art requires far more faith, hope and commitment than does my writing. Lots of people buy books, even if it’s only Volume 7 of Katie Price’s autobiography, but very few buy paintings. Nevertheless, day after day those painters turn up at the easel. I take my hat off to them.

Their websites, in case you’re interested:  Lesley Powell  and Geoffrey Leckie 

And breaking news……  Anyone for Seconds? has cleared its first two hurdles. My editor loves it and my agent thinks it’s the funniest thing I’ve written in a long time.  Be still my fluttering heart.

‘Tis done. First draft of Anyone for Seconds? is on its way to my editor and I, as is my custom after delivering a book, am leaving the country. I used to run away because I feared being unmasked at long last. The dreaded knock. The Literary Police on my doorstep.

‘Laurie Graham, we have reason to believe that you have been impersonating a publishable author and we must ask you to accompany us to the British Library.’

Now I just go away out of habit. Click SEND, pull out suitcase.

This afternoon, as I typed the title page  –  always the very last thing I do  –  it occurred to me that we’re leaving ourselves a bit exposed with this title. There’s the danger a waggish reviewer may say, ‘Seconds? No thanks. We’ve had more than enough.’ Well, it is what it is and I am now officially unemployed. Which is the stuff of nightmares but also of exciting hare-brained ideas.

Back soon.

Today I’m going hunting, but not over hill and dale. The last time I was aboard a horse I was swiftly unseated and I can take a hint.

The book is almost finished and I now have to face reading it, from the beginning and quietly putting to death its most egregious flaws. It isn’t fun.

‘You wrote that?’ I whisper to myself. ‘Laurie, what were you thinking?’

To make this task more palatable I usually combine it with a cliche-hunt. If I can catch even a few I’ll sleep better at night.

Cliches slip under the radar. Even the best of writers, people who you’d expect to avoid them like the plague , fail to notice them. Scanning for them is a colossal pain in the neck but, you know, it’s all in a day’s work.

In the course of today’s hunt I’ll also be keeping an eagle eye for longeurs, repetition and continuity bloopers.

I wear old clothes for this kind of work. Blood may be shed.

Today, thanks to the dirty tricks of my computer, I lost  –  not once but TWICE  –  my morning’s work. The first time my laptop did a sudden, spontaneous, ready-or-not reboot without having the courtesy to auto-save my 500 words.  So I rewrote them. Perhaps they were even slightly improved. But I was so busy rattling away at the rewrite I overlooked the fact that the computer’s battery was almost….. Gone, gone. And no, auto-save hadn’t captured my brilliantly revised thoughts. So I have finally, at 4pm, regained the ground I occupied at 12 noon.

Was all this punishment for taking yesterday morning off to make piccalilli? Should authors with looming deadlines indulge in the domestic arts? I dunno. The pickles look pretty damned good though.

Two weeks to go. Head down. Repeat after me, ‘Auto-save, auto-save.’

At last the Perfect Meringues sequel has a title. My editor, who had rejected every brilliant suggestion we offered her, went away on holiday and while the gears of her mind were disengaged came up with Anyone for Seconds? Which gives us a nod towards Lizzie’s former incarnation as a TV cook and also makes reference to the passing years, lessons learned (or not) and second chances grasped. I reckon it’ll do nicely. Phew! Just in time for the Frankfurt catalogues.

So now all I have to do is keep my nose to the keyboard during these dog days of summer and finish writing it.

I sometimes think we anglophones don’t appreciate what a rich and wonderful language we use. We may not have thirty different words for snow but hey, why give the rail networks another twenty nine reasons for torturing us?

I love to learn any new word and this week’s treasure is ‘yuglet’ for which I must thank my penpal Ernest Pig. EP’s humans have named one of their sheep after Nellie Buzzard, protagonist of A Humble Companion. A yuglet is a Shetland sheep with a particular pattern of markings. As you can see, Shetlands are a veritable Allsorts Selection Box of colourings and there’s a word for every one of them. Katmoget, gulmoget, bersugget and many, many more.

A pedant might argue that those words aren’t English at all, but rather Norn, the old language of the Shetland Islands, but imports are one of the reason English is so well-endowed and most pedants don’t have a problem swallowing hors d’oeuvres. If you see what I mean.

Now I hesitate to challenge Ernest  –  Nellie is, after all, one of his close neighbours  –  but having studied the possibilities (is it any wonder it takes me so long to write a book) she looked to me more like a bleset, or even a smirslet. But you could write everything I know about sheep on the back of an ear tag so I must defer to the Pig-on-the-Ground. Local knowledge and all that.

Here, dear townie readers, is your homework for the week. Do you know your gimmers from your ewes? Your tups from your wethers? Then get to it.

I will also share with you my favourite bit of sheepery: a shepherd’s way of counting his flock. Around Lincolnshire and the East Midlands where I grew up it goes like this. Yan (1) Tan (2) Tether (3) Pether (4) Pimp (5). I can’t remember the rest except for Bumfit (15) which appealed to my childish sense of humour, and (Figgot)20.  Shepherds count in twenties, dontcher know. That’s where ‘keeping score’ comes from.

Tune in next week for another 300 words of pointless drivel.

I’m working flat out with the hot breath of the deadline hounds on my neck so I have little of interest for a blog post. Got up, wrote 800 words, deleted 250 of them, went to bed. That kind of thing. But I’ve also been travelling a bit, an indulgence completely compatible with working because I pack A4 pads and write longhand. It gives me a welcome break from the computer screen and my optician approves.

Travel means airports. Airports mean noise, crowds, men in flipflops, delays and the humiliation of having Security investigate your handbag right down to the layer that contains biscuit crumbs and old bus tickets. You also have to run the gauntlet of the perfume squiffers and massive displays of Toblerone. If there is a way to get to the departure gates without completing the Tax Free slalom I have yet to find it. Really the only good news about airports is that because of my neurotic insistence on getting air-side way too early, once I’m there I have time to read.

Which brings me to my recommendation. Last week’s flight delays were made perfectly bearable by 2 a.m. at the Cat’s Pajamas. Marie-Helene Bertino needs no help from me. She’s already picking up bouquets. I’ll just say that she has a completely original voice, sharp, funny, poignant. All this and she looks about seventeen. Give her a whirl.

Marcel Proust had his madeleine crumbled in hot tea. Yesterday I had a moment too, because the supermarket had peas, actual peas in their pods. I brought a bag home, though it was lighter when I arrived because I sneaked a few while waiting for my train.

Peas in their pods transport me to summer Sundays in my grandfather’s garden. My grandad was a legendary grower of vegetables. His crops were improved, I’m sure, by the bags of horse poo he brought home after visiting our country cousins. What the other passengers on the bus thought about that, heaven knows.

You name it, he grew it, and also cooked it. My grandmother, whose idea of a meal was a Park Drive and a glass of Guinness, wasn’t allowed anywhere near the kitchen. So on Sunday mornings after church I was allowed to ‘help’ him. We’d sit on the grass and shell peas and quite a lot ended up in my mouth instead of the colander.

The pods went on the compost heap. When I lived in Italy I learned what a criminal waste that was. Italian cooks turn the pods into soup or into stock for a pea risotto. Yesterday mine went in the bin. I’m not in the mood for soup and a risotto for one is a sad thing. But I had my pea pod moment. Fleetingly I was back in a sunny English garden with my grandad and his dog Pig. It was around 1956 and all was well with the world.

Thank you, dear readers, for your title suggestions. Some of you went to a great deal of trouble and I make special mention of Signor Uccello for Fifty Shades of Grey Mullet. Totally unusable of course but it did brighten a wet Monday morning.

I now feel vindicated in my opinion that we need a food-related title and tomorrow I’ll be donning my armoured pinny and going into battle. My fave contenders at the moment are Guaranteed Sugar-Free and Now with Added Fibre.

If you hear the sound of machine gunfire coming from the direction of EC4 you’ll know it’s not going too well.

Plans A, B and Z accomplished, I’m back between the traces hauling behind me one very delayed novel. I really have to get on with it now, not least because I have a million ideas about what I want to write next. Well, a couple of ideas at any rate. That’s what holidays can do to you.

But today’s question, thrown into the court of public opinion, is what to call this sequel to Perfect Meringues. I opened the bidding with Contains Nuts, which was quite well received by my publishers but then they got the notion that the title of such a character-led book should include the name of the protagonist. They suggested Lizzie Partridge, Three Ways.

This was a bit lost on me as I don’t have a television but it was explained as being a very popular trend on cookery shows. As in, Tripe, Three Ways, I suppose. I tried to love this idea though I wasn’t convinced. For one thing I feared people would ask, ‘what are the three ways?’ and I wouldn’t have an answer. Furthermore, I doubt whether even readers who enjoyed Perfect Meringues would remember Lizzie’s name. She was played, by the way, by Imelda Staunton, when I adapted the book for radio. Christopher Biggins played Louie, Lesley Joseph played Kim and we had a lot of  fun creating the glop and squish of an audible food fight. But that’s all a long time ago and my book still doesn’t have a title.

I, half-heartedly, offered Lizzie Partridge, Sweet and Sour. It’s being considered. But in my heart of hearts I still think we should have something off a cake-mix box. Just Add an Egg? Now with Added Calcium? Garnish Not Included? 

So now over to you, dear reader. I welcome your views and suggestions and will even convey them upstairs to the Court of Appeal.