Laurie Graham's Blog, page 15

Thank you, dear readers for your kind messages. It’s been a tough couple of weeks but I’m still standing. Plans A and B have now metamorphosed into Plan C, starting Monday:  dog-walking in Wiltshire, followed by a few days grannying, and then rounding off in London with a spot of Metropolitan cat-sitting, all lubricated with a glass or two. I may even get some work done.

Thanks also to those of you who left great reviews on Amazon for The Early Birds. I very much appreciate it.

So now all that remains is for me to haul down a suitcase and figure out what my better dressed friends refer to as  ‘a capsule wardrobe’. You know, the kind of outfits that will see you through from that early morning board meeting to the power party at the Groucho? Or, in this instance, from muddy bridle paths through to cut-throat games of Monster Jam Crush It.

Maybe wellies and a onesie.

Wotcha think?

Back soon. Well, late June, actually.

Only four sleeps till pub day for which I great plans  –  watch this space, patiently please  –  but Fate had something else in mind. This week my beloved husband will be going to live in a nursing home so my time is divided between packing, weeping and giving myself pep talks.

Plan A had been to run away immediately the nursing home door bangs shut and seek solace (and alcohol) with friends. A more sensible Plan B is to power through and catch up on my very neglected work in progress. I think a couple of weeks of writing will enable me to enjoy Plan A all the better. So if I’m quiet for a while, you know why. I’ll be back.

Oh, and a nice review in the Daily Mail thank you very much, Wendy Holden.

Ladies and gentlemen! In the blue corner we have the All-England green wellies and Aga Queen, Ms Joanna Trollope. In the red corner, Global Publishing Phenomenon with 10 million Twitter Followers, Ms J K Rowling. We want a nice clean fight. Seconds out!

It was Joanna who started it, remarking that JK seems to have an uncontrollable egotistical urge to Tweet. As far as I know JK Rowling hasn’t responded. She is perhaps too busy composing another political broadside. Or counting her money. Where am I in all this? I’m in Joanna Trollope’s corner with a sponge and a Styptic pencil. I think she’s picked an unwinnable fight.

Though I myself do have a small presence on social media platforms I’m there reluctantly. Perhaps it’s a generation thing.

An avid reader all my life, I never knew what Enid Blyton looked like or wondered about the political leanings of Dorothy Sayers. Writers used to be invisible miracle-workers. They transported me to other worlds and I could not have asked more of them. As a matter of fact as a child, had I been told that Lewis Carroll was a stammering churchman and Rosemary Sutcliffe was an invalid spinster about the same age as my Mum, I think it would have taken the shine off their wonderful books.

Will the current trend ever reverse? Will there come a time when authors follow the example of J D Salinger, go back inside their writing sheds and stop being celebrities?  I fear it’s about as likely as Kim Kardashian putting her bottom away.

RED magazine are first off the mark with a very nice review of The Early Birds. You can read it here.

Just one small correction: I’m not American. I am English, with a light seasoning of Welsh, but after twenty years in a mixed marriage I do speak (almost) fluent Amurican. In the early days I used to describe our cultural union as heff and harf but I soon grew tired of the gales of laughter that ensued whenever I said ‘handbag’ or ‘car bonnet’.

When your dialect dominates the global movie scene it must be hard to grasp that though millions of people understand it, they do not speak that way in their daily lives. And, before I jump down off my high horse which, incidentally, I ride on the left side of the road the better to swing my sword arm, may I say that it is also possible to lead a happy life without 110 volt electricity or mixer taps. That’s faucets to you, dear American reader.

The pace quickens. Only fourteen sleeps till pub day.

I hope you’ve noticed that my website has been spiffed up in preparation for the publication of The Early Birds next month. This involved posting images of the new cover plus the cover of its predecessor, Future Homemakers of America, on the home page slidey thing. Excuse my lapsing into techno terminology. The slidey thing can really only accommodate four units so the tough decision I faced last week was how to make room for the new cover? Which image was for the chop?

I have a tried and tested method for making painful choices. I carefully list the pros and cons for each option, I mull them over, reduce, if necessary, to a shortlist of two. Then I toss a coin. On this occasion the axe fell on The Liar’s Daughter. I’m okay with that. Sort of. I’ll get over it. It is the least favourite of my backlist covers, though I’m fond of the book itself, and the accountants have deemed it a regrettable commercial failure, so, all in all, I suppose it had it coming.

Someone, I cannot now remember who, recently remarked that there’s never been a better time to be a writer. I beg to differ. Agreed, we no longer have to bother with carbon paper or Tippex. Agreed, anyone can now self-publish their hamster’s life story and flog it online as a literary item worth 99p of anyone’s money. But there can still be stiff hurdles to clear, not least what to omit from the slidey thing.

Would-be writers, you have been warned.

For want of anything interesting to report about life down the rabbit burrow I thought I’d share with you five of my favourite quotes about writing for a living.

Grannyboast moment: our Connie, aged 6, won her school’s spelling bee.

I said, ‘what was the hardest word you had to spell?’

‘There,’ she said. ‘Because you can spell it three different ways and one way has an apostrophe.’

Gosh darn it, I know junior copy editors who still haven’t got that one figured.

Give that girl a book token!

Some great recommendations by Anne Marie Scanlon in today’s Irish Independent. And I’m not just saying that because I’m one of them. Cross my heart and hope to die in a cellar full of rats.

This afternoon’s task was to organise my thoughts for the coming work week instead of just turning up at my desk tomorrow morning and hoping for the best. I have actually spent two hours trying to make an origami bear, Mk II, and failing. Paper too thick. Mk I was okay-ish but it was made with pink origami paper and I really, really wanted a brown bear. So it’s now nearly 4pm, my work thoughts aren’t organised and I’m bear-less. I thought you’d like to know.

But yes, urged on by readers I did buy the Great Dixter Cookbook. Still more excuses for faffing. When your origami bear keeps falling on his snout, toss him in the bin and make a pear tart.

[image error]

When we moved house a little over a year ago I pruned my collection of cookbooks to fit our new, reduced living space. I kept sixty books that were dear to me and disbursed the rest among my children and the closest charity shop. I also declared a moratorium on buying new titles and I have stuck to it.  I already have a sheaf of untried recipes clipped from weekend newspapers, so the last thing I need is another cookery book. But today I am tempted.

The Great Dixter Cookbook has just been published and, though I imagine its recipes are nothing out of the ordinary, many of them are from the personal collection of Christopher Lloyd, a man as famous for his generous hospitality and love of life as he was for his gardening books. Some cookery writers draw you into their world   –  Elizabeth David used to do it, Diana Henry does it now.  Even if you end up putting their books aside and eating bread and jam for dinner you still come away the richer for reading them. I have cookbooks I never use but wouldn’t part with for the world: Braising Saddles  –  The Horsemeat Cookbook, and The White Trash Cookbook,  to name but two. I also have my mother’s Cookery Illustrated and Household Management, 1937 edition because, let’s face it, you never know when you might need to prepared a Baked Arrowroot Pudding.

So will I buy the Great Dixter collection? Last night I decided to sleep on it. Today I find I’m still wide open to the possibility though the fever of impetuosity has faded.  It’ll still be there tomorrow. But I hear the ghost of Christopher Lloyd whisper, ‘Oh go on. And let’s open another bottle.’

A couple of months ago I mentioned my plan to make my very first novel, long out of print, available as a free e-book. To that end I’ve been transcribing it ready for digital formatting, a tedious process at the best of times. Reader, I cannot go on. The book sucks. I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know what Chatto & Windus were thinking. I’m very grateful to them for launching my writing career at the advanced age of 39 but that does not alter the fact that The Man for the Job was a pillow-bitingly bad turkey.

One good thing has emerged from this colossal waste of my time: I can now see that I have improved as a writer. Maybe, fifty years from now, some post-grad, scraping the barrel bottom for a Ph.D topic will unearth the last remaining copy of my debut novel and come to the conclusion that it must have been written by a team of monkeys. Thank goodness I won’t be around.

My decision to scrap the project brought me a feeling of instant relief. Why did it take me so long? All those wasted Sundays. I blame my mother, a woman who never called quits on anything, not a five hundred page novel she wasn’t enjoying, not a stale station buffet sandwich. ‘I’ve started, so I’ll finish.’ I reckon Magnus Magnusson got that from my Mum.