Laurie Graham's Blog, page 16

I’m currently reading Sylvain Tesson’s Consolations of the Forest. Tesson is a French travel writer who spent six months living alone in the Siberian taiga, five hours walk from his nearest neighbour. Among the items he took with him (including eighteen bottles of Super Hot ketchup, ten boxes of paracetomol for vodka hangovers and a French flag for Bastille Day) were around sixty books. Which got me thinking. What books would I take with me into six months of solitude?

I wouldn’t need sixty. I’m a slow reader and anyway I suspect I’d need to spend more time than he did learning how to chop wood. I decided on three categories: practical books, improving  books and entertainment. Just two volumes aimed at self-improvement. The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer (a guide to the classical education I never had) and The Trivium  –  the Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric. I’ve owned both of these books for years but I apparently need to go into solitary Siberian confinement ever to sit down and learn from them.

In my practical library I’d need identification books on birds and plants and in particular on mushrooms. Otherwise I fear I’d be dead, done in by a risotto, long before I achieved that much desired well-educated mind.  For entertainment I’d like a selection of Evelyn Waugh, Elmore Leonard, Mark Twain, Jessica Anya Blau and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe stories. And if there’s any room left in the 4×4 transporting me to my log cabin I’ll have a vocal score of Messiah, plus a tuning fork, and some poetry. I might let someone else choose the poetry, for an element of serendipity.

Should I take along the cookbook that has recipes for squirrel? Naah. Knowing my ability as a marksman I’d probably be forced into vegetarianism shortly before being eaten by a bear.

Anyway, just so’s you’re clear, I’m not actually going into the taiga. We used to own a little wooden house in the wilds of Friuli and after five days of silence, broken only by the gnawing of rodents, the snuffling of wild boar and the buzzing of some distant chainsaw, I was whimpering to go back to the city.

The recruitment office is now closed. Thanks to everyone who volunteered. I have a great team of advance readers lined up, doing their warm-ups. Damn, I should have ordered T shirts.

I have a lot of projects on the go at the moment  –  proof-reading, novel-writing, non-fiction proposals, bonus material preparation, ironing, sink unblocking….  This may explain what happened to me the other night. I woke, couldn’t get back to sleep, and lay thinking about work, in particular The Early Birds which is about to go to press.

Suddenly I had a stomach-lurching thought. Having killed off a character on page 18, didn’t I then have him fishing for bass somewhere around page 90? WTF? How could I have done that? Why hadn’t anyone else noticed? Were my editors all asleep on the job? Better get up, I thought. Better to face the horrible truth right now even if it is 2am.

But it was a very cold night, the wind was howling across Dublin Bay and my bed was warm and toastie. Professional to my fingertips, I went back to sleep. In the daylight all became clear. Slick didn’t die on page 18. He was the one who found the body. Boy, was I relieved. Boy, was I glad I hadn’t quit my snuggly bed to go on that wild goose chase.

So was my brain simply over-burdened, or was it the Cashel Blue cheese I’d snarfed down just before bedtime? We may never know.

I am now recruiting a crack battalion of readers and reviewers to receive advance proof copies of The Early Birds some time next month. Unfortunately Amazon’s terms of business mean that a review only counts in their ratings if you’ve purchased the book from them, so if you want to help my sales you’d still have to pony up for a published copy when it comes out in May, but if you enjoy the book maybe you’d do it anyway and give a copy to a friend.

If you’d like to be considered for the advance guard, send me a message. A nice orderly line, please!

Transcribing The Man for the Job in preparation for publishing it as an e-book has brought back memories of how we used to write books. I used a typewriter, and Tippex. Lots of Tippex. Maybe I even used carbon paper. Remember carbon paper? I hope you didn’t have shares. 

I can’t recall which book was my first written on a computer but I do remember very clearly going to London to deliver Future Homemakers to my agent, realising I hadn’t paginated the damned thing and sitting in a cafe at King’s Cross station feverishly adding page numbers in biro. I used to deliver journalism as hard copy too, although at the time I’d never heard the expression ‘hard copy’. I’d type it on the old Zeiss, cut and paste on the kitchen table, re-type it and then run across Christ’s Pieces to the Post Office to catch the last mail collection. And if I didn’t make it in time, I’d dictate the piece over the phone to a copy-taker, which felt terribly glamorous, like I was a foreign correspondent.

Getting a computer was a very big deal. I paid for it in installments and saved my work on floppy disks. Remember those? Typewriter ribbons, Tippex, carbon paper  – tools of the trade in the olden days – and now even floppy disks seem quaint. The world before the verb ‘to ping’ had ever been uttered. Now I save my work to a neat little memory stick. Also to a cloud. No, please don’t ask me because I have absolutely no idea.

Here is my (not so terribly) cunning plan for 2017. The accountants are sharpening their knives. I need more readers, dear readers.

So I have decided to put a free e-book out there in the ether, to try and reel in some new fans. But what to use? All my rights are tied up, mouldering  – some of them – in darkness and oblivion. Except, aha, and here was my brilliant Bucks Fizz-fuelled Christmas Day idea, except for my very first published novel, The Man for the Job.

I’ve sometimes been asked about it. My response has been an embarrassed mumble. It wasn’t very good. But heavens to Betsy, it was my first attempt. Carmen Callil published it, and she was no walkover. So yesterday I took two giant steps for Laurie-kind. I talked to my webmaster about the technicalities of creating an e-book. Then I blew the cobwebs off my hardback copy, opened it for the first time in twenty years and began transcribing it.

Frankly it needs a wash and brush-up. Vanity prevents me from leaving it exactly as it was first published, but I’m working at speed, tinkering on the run. At £0.00 it will still be a bargain.

I’m aiming to get it out there by early April, priming the pump for The Early Birds which will be published on May 17th. Maybe it won’t make a difference, maybe it will. Worth a try at any rate. The alternative, for us ageing mid-listers, is to shut up and fade away and I’m nowhere near ready for that.

A Happy New Year to all of you.

It’s almost a year since our last house move and the merciless cull of possessions which that involved. I’ve lived for a year with fewer chairs, fewer coats and the big one, fewer books. Have I missed any of the discarded ones? No. Have I re-read any of the ones I clung to? Nope. More to the point, have I kept my vow that in future I’d only bring a new book into the house if I made space for it by getting rid of a book? Well…. er…. not exactly.

I’ve continued buying, which is why the shelves are starting to bulge again, and then there’s the dirty little secret of my Kindle purchases, with no telltale cardboard boxes to dispose of. Like all 21st century addicts I know I’m only ever one mouse-click away from relapse. Heavens, when I was a teenager I had to put my shoes on and get a bus into town  before I could buy a book. Now, I read a review and ping, before you know it there’s another book in my basket.  Something has to give and I don’t want it to be the shelves.

So the deal I have just made with myself is that I’ll put no more books on my Kindle until I’ve reduced the unread balance from 30 titles to 15. And today I’m going to grab an empty box from the supermarket and do a high speed, no dithering sweep of my book shelves. The church fete is in May. If I haven’t felt a pang of regret for any of those books by April 30th the box will go, still sealed, never a backward glance, to the church hall.

An email just in: my order of Grace Paley poems and one other item has been despatched. One other item. What could it be? How can I have ordered a book so impetuously and forgotten so quickly? Well, I guess it’ll be like Christmas when the postie rings the bell tomorrow.

On which note, I’m knocking off till after Christmas so please don’t threaten me with cancellation of blogging privileges. I’ll be back when I’ve sorted out ASLEF.

Merry Christmas!

A sharp rap on the knuckles from the Bassano del’Grappa chapter of my fan club. Too long between blog posts. Quite right, of course. It’s just that my life is narcotically repetitive. Get up, write words, throw 50 percent of them in the trash can, go to bed. But anyway, here I am, just in case you thought some terrible fate had befallen me.

You’re probably all very worried about robots taking over your job some day soon. I’m not. Robots cannot write novels. Although, yes, there are novels that might possibly have been…. but wild horses wouldn’t drag any names out of me. Actually I don’t think a robot will ever do any of the things I’ve done today: written five hundred words, made a batch of clotted cream and ginger ice cream, listened to my granddaughter read, replaced another fecken’ light bulb.

Whatever its drawbacks, my work is robot-proof. I know I often whine about lack of job security but who has that these days, apart from civil servants and I already tried that, thank you all the same. I have no commuting, no meetings, no calls to go on strike. I can do it on the kitchen table, in my pyjamas (or even out of them) and no PC commissar can stop me putting up Christmas decorations. I’m golden.

Ed, will this do?

Well apparently it DOES sometimes pay to throw a tantrum.

After posting about my proposed book cover I lay down on the floor and held my breath until my publisher said, ‘okay, okay, calm down and take a look at the designs we rejected.’ There, in the See Me Later pile, was an image, kind of Forties women’s magazine-style, of three women arm-in-arm. It’s not perfect but it’s a million miles closer to perfection than the one they’d planned to use. Result! I’m up off the floor and breathing again.

Earlier this week I was asked to contribute to a feature on Classics Everyone Should Read and they wanted it pronto Tonto. I didn’t have a lot of time to choose. The first book I thought of was one that actually kept me awake after I’d read it and nothing, NOTHING keeps me from my sleep, not even the threat of a dumb book cover. That first thought was Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler and I do believe it belongs on a classics’ list, but despite some dark humour it’s not a cheery read and  perhaps not the kind of thing Sainsbury’s magazine had in mind. So then I picked Huck Finn as an alternative, though it could as well have been anything else by Mark Twain. I love that man. He has a shortcut to my funnybone.

Then of course as soon as I’d hit the Send button I thought of other equally worthy candidates. A Tale of Two Cities, Emma, Dead Souls, Madame Bovary, Brideshead…  Oh well.

As you know, I’m not a great reader of new fiction, principally because I don’t have the time. I’m still making up for my mispent youth and my threadbare education by reading non-fiction. Plus, two pages and I’m asleep. But once in a while I try something different and occasionally I hit gold. I commend to you Jessica Anya Blau whose Drinking Closer to Home I just finished. It’s a keeper.

I’m going to jump. 

And why, on this fresh but sunny November afternoon? I just got the proposed jacket design for The Early Birds, that’s why. I’m not going to display it yet because I live in feeble hope that they’ll come up with something better. They won’t though.

The aim, apparently, was to give me an Anne Tyler look. All very well because she’s had some spiffing covers, but Anne Tyler is Anne Tyler. How about a Laurie Graham look? And given that Early Birds is a sequel to The Future Homemakers of America, which had a fabulous (and much imitated) cover, wouldn’t you think they’d do a riff on that? Like a row of old ladies in deckchairs? Like a cover that says ‘This book will probably make you laugh.’

I despair. Is it too late for me to do something useful with my life? Firefighter? Brain surgeon? Office cleaner?

After several dispiriting weeks of casting upon publishing waters and failing to tempt my publisher with any of my ideas I finally got a nibble. Which book in my backlist do readers seem to remember most fondly? Perfect Meringues. I’ve alway felt it to be a weak book, so much so that I could never bring myself to reread it. But I wafted the idea of a sequel under the nose of my editor and her nostrils quivered.

I hauled a yellowing copy off the shelf, sat down at the kitchen table and told myself to stop being a coward and read. Gosh darn it if I didn’t think it was okay after all. Short, fairly devoid of plot, but not bad. I wrote it twenty years ago when I, like Lizzie Partridge, was a middle-aged, single parent living on the financial roller-coaster of being self-employed. And the dating scene…. oh man, the dating scene was dire.

Where would Lizzie be now? What would have become of her Gothic teenage daughter, her hopeless twit of a brother, her begrudging mother? Was Tom Sullivan heaven-sent or too good to be true?

Well, dear readers, I knocked together a proposal for a sequel and it was greeted with joy and enthusiasm. Which begs the question, why didn’t they tell me that was what they wanted in the first place? So there it is. My new project, a sequel to Perfect Meringues. Working title: Eggs not Included.

Happy?