Laurie Graham's Blog, page 22

     There are very few stories I read again and again but Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is one of them. It is one of those instant pathways to my own childhood Christmases. My father, who never read any other book and who worked long hours, came home on Christmas Eve with just two things on his agenda. The first was to carry the previous Christmas’s empties to the off-licence and trade them for a few beers and a bottle of egg flip to add a bit of oomph to my mother’s lemonade. I went with him, partly to remind him to buy crisps and partly because he was very good company. He could do all the Goon Show voices, plus several others of his own invention.

Once the beers and the egg flip were stowed he moved on to Any Other Business: reading A Christmas Carol whilst smoking one of his rare cigarillos. As I grew older he let me do the reading. His favourite bit (and now it’s mine) was in Stave One. The city clocks had only just gone three but it was quite dark already. The funny thing is, year on year I misremember it.  I always feel the already should come before quite dark. The cadence seems happier. But Dickens knew what he was doing so I mustn’t tamper with his syntax.

This year, joy of joys, I shall be Scrooge territory on Christmas Eve. Nobody knows the exact location Dickens had in mind but the area around Leadenhall Market and Cornhill (where Bob Cratchit went down a slide twenty times in honour of its being Christmas Eve) is riddled with little courts and alleys. Any one of them will do. No gruel for me, I don’t care what the bank manager says. A pie in the George and Vulture sounds about right. And afterwards, if my husband doesn’t have a conniption fit, I may just smoke a cigarillo in loving memory of my Dad.

That’s me done. Back in the New Year.

So hands up who was shocked, amazed and disgusted that Zoe Sugg’s best-selling Girl Online was ghost-written? Really?

First of all, Zoe is 24.  Book writing is a long haul job and  very few 24 year olds have the necessary staying power. Perhaps there was a time, when the world moved slowly, working days were long and Sunday sermons lasted an hour, but today, when people have the attention span of a puppy? Naah.

Secondly, what do you imagine gets publishing executives out of bed in the morning? The thought that today might be the day they discover the next Tolstoy? Try again.

A book is now a commodity. A writer needs to become a brand and most of us don’t have the foggiest idea how to achieve that. It takes a team. The finished item may carry someone’s name but that’s just an eye-catching adornment. It might help you to think of Girl Online as the literary equivalent of a jar of Loyd Grossman curry sauce. Do you think Loyd fills the jars?

Publishing used to be reckoned a gentleman’s profession. Now the accountants run the show. Everything happens for a reason. Prime shelf position is paid for.  The favour of a good blurb from a household name is called in. Gravy trains are leapt on before somebody else grabs the last seat.

Ghost writing? A perfectly honourable profession, particularly in the world of celebrity biographies. There have been desperate times when I’d have had a go myself, but  one editor friend counselled against it. She told me I leave my fingerprints all over anything I write. A ghost writer is required to park their ego and deliver copy cleansed of their own style.

And what about writers who employ a team of research elves? What about publishers who ‘commission’ posthumous novels, like the new Poirot mystery? Where do all these fit on the spectrum of veracity and transparency? Darned if I know. Somebody said to me, ‘Nothing is what it seems.’

Perhaps it never was.

     I’m feeling a bit crushed not to have merited even a mention at this week’s Fashion Awards. I cede to no-one as Most Eclectically Dressed Novelist. In the frosty cave that passes for my book-lined den I am currently wearing: one vintage thermal vest, one long-sleeved cocoon dress, two sweaters and my old Mum’s shortie cape slung around my shoulders in a style not dissimilar to Anna Wintour’s white, furry shrug. Where am I going wrong?

Admittedly I don’t work wearing industrial quantities of mascara. I find the weight makes my eyelids droop. But I can do big hair. I’d have to take off my fur hat but give me half an hour and a can of dry shampoo and you’d be surprised.  The only reason I can find for my yet again missing the nominations list is that I haven’t perfected the art of standing with my legs crossed.

The exigencies of my working life require me to keep both feet firmly on the ground. Sometimes, towards the end of a long day, my eyes cross, and around publication day I keep my fingers crossed, but my ankles? Never.

Actually my ankles have disappeared. I’ve starting to look like I’m wearing leg warmers even when I’m not. Maybe next year I’ll get tipped for Stylish Crone. Me and Vivienne Westwood, head to head.

A gratifying response to last week’s book offer. Some readers chimed in simply to say they already have all my books   –  go to the top of the class!  They should really get a special prize, and perhaps they will when I can think what it should be.  Books are now on the way to five of the most alacritous claimants. The sixth will be delivered personally to a reader who, it turns out, shops in the same branch of Tesco as I do. See, you just never know who that might be peering at the Best Before dates on all the milk cartons.  I was once in Sainsbury’s in Cambridge and was absolutely convinced that the man two ahead of me at the check-out was Robert Mugabe. It wasn’t.

It is freezing cold in Dublin but as I’ve failed to master the art of typing in mittens I’m doing a different kind of work today. There comes a point in the writing of a novel when you need to pause, take stock, and perhaps tinker with the proposed outline of the next few chapters. That moment has come and it coincides very neatly with my desire to huddle in the warmth of the kitchen and chew the top of my pen.

An interesting analysis on Goodreads this week on who reads what, sex-wise. Men are more likely to read male authors   –  perhaps they’re put off female authors by the fluffy pink jacket designs so often inflicted upon us. Women seem to be more open to trying authors who are new to them, and to reading books written by men. Without doing an actual count I estimate that 75 percent of the books I’ve read this year were (if their names are anything to go by) by male authors. I guess J K Rowling/Robert Galbraith is on to something. Again.

  This can be a depressing season for writers. Those Best Books of the Year lists start appearing in time for people to do their Christmas shopping  and one must face the fact that yes, there are some brilliant writers out there talking about interesting subjects. And then there are the rest of us. There are a few cases of Mutually Agreed Plugging  –  you stroke my book and I’ll stroke yours  –  and I even spotted Julie Burchill recommending (tongue in cheek, but still…) her own new book. And there are some infuriatingly obvious stocking-filler bestsellers. Terry Wogan just published something. Nothing wrong with Terry. He writes well, talks sense and everyone loves him. But you can’t help but think, ‘did you really have to?’ It’ll fly off the shelves of course.

But anyway, I have to decide to stop being a whining Grinch between now and Christmas and become instead a cheerful giver. I’m offering a copy, signed if you wish, of one of my back-list titles, to the first six takers. I have stock of most of my fiction titles. Admittedly the books cost me nothing. They are gathering cobwebs in my study. My gift to you will be my time spent shuffling slowly forward in the Post Office queue.

Send me a message if you’d like a book. Tell me your preference and I’ll do my best to oblige. First come, first served. Hurry, hurry.

What has a moose oven glove to do with novel writing? Not a lot, but bear with me.

One gets to a certain point in one’s, ahem, career, when it becomes clear that The Big Breakthrough isn’t going to happen.  Fifty years ago it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. Plenty of fine authors bimbled along with a modest but appreciative following. Then they died and soon after the only place to find their books was a charity shop. These days who (apart from me) reads E.M.Delafield? Who reads Nevil Shute, or Bram Stoker  – except perhaps for THAT book. Actually I don’t think people do read it. Why would they when they can watch a movie? People don’t even read Robert Louis Stevenson and I count him a giant among storytellers.

So what hope for mid-list bimblers in the 21st century? None. We’ll be consigned to the pulping plant faster than you can say ‘Back List.’  Never mind immortality, novel writing isn’t even the way to modest financial solvency. I begin to think the way to go is merchandising.  Dodie Smith missed a trick there.

The Humble Companion tea towel. The Gone With the Windsors oven glove. The Grand Duchess of Nowhere in a snowstorm globe, the perfect gift for the Holiday Season.  What do you think? Or perhaps I need a collection. The Laurie Graham At Sea range of cruise wear?

By the way, it took three attempts for me to thwart Spell Check and get away with ‘bimbled’ and ‘bimblers’. Who is this language fascist lurking in my computer? This is my blog and I’ll take whatever damned liberties I choose.

A gratifying number of fellow ranters chimed in after my previous post. Many thanks. Not only is it encouraging to know people actually read this stuff, it is also comforting to learn that I’m not alone in being driven nuts by little (but important) things.

If you’re still in the mood for things in this vein I commend to you Rod Liddle’s recent Spectator blog post on Fatuous Phrases. Laughter is a great healer.

I’ve had a recent spate of questions about novels I wrote long ago. This is good and welcome because it means people are reading my books, but not so good when it obliges me to re-read my own work. I hate doing it because a) I find myself thinking ‘whaaaat?’ Please God, tell me I didn’t write that. I was off sick that day. A big boy did it and ran away.  And b) I have so many things I want to read I resent time spent sifting through my own books.

Currently stacked on the floor bedside my bed:

The Hunting Gene by Robin Page

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

Alphabetical by Michael Rosen

Dancing to the Precipice by Caroline Moorhead

and Oliver Ready’s new translation of Crime and Punishment.

I won’t even mention all the unread books on my Kindle. And to think I just wasted five minutes of my life reading the Lidl Christmas catalogue.

Gosh, look at that.  A Liddle and a Lidl in the same post. Spooky.

If there’s one thing guaranteed to light my blue touch paper…  okay let me back up here. There are MANY things that light my blue touch paper but in particular, recently, it’s people who say ‘haitch’.  I’m not alone in this, which gives me some comfort though not a lot.  There’s  been quite a correspondence about it in that redoubt of English conservatism, The Daily Telegraph. Still, all very well for Despondent of Virginia Water to complain. I’ll bet he can go an entire week without being ‘haitched’. Where I live, in the Republic of Ireland, ‘haitching’ is a national sport. It goes on in the north too. I’ve heard it suggested that you can tell an Ulsterman’s religion by what he does with the letter H: Prods say ‘aitch’, Catholics say ‘haitch.’

What’s to be done about it? Offhand I can’t think of anything. But isn’t it good to get things off your chest? So while I’m at it let me also condemn The Wandering X.  Why is it that people who seem incapable of inserting an x into the word ‘sixth’, (thus rendering it ‘sickth’) insist on using it in ‘espresso.’  Yes ‘espresso’ is an Italian word, but so is ‘pizza’ and you manage to pronounce that. All together now, ‘I’d like a double eSpresso.’

Am I done? Not quite. Might as well do a thorough download while I’m about it.  There are two Cs in arctic, there is no ‘aitch’ nor even ‘haitch’ in ‘assume’  and the place you go to borrow books (if they still have any) is called a library. Not a liberry. If you call it a liberry I cannot be answerable for my actions.

I feel so much better now.

After last week’s snivelling post it seems only right that I also share the joy. The Grand Duchess got a fabulous review in today’s Daily Mail.  My fingers have been fairly rattling across the laptop keyboard this morning. So much so that I feel able to take the afternoon off. Well…. to go to Tesco at any rate. It sounds like they desperately need my custom.

Mixed success earlier in the week when I tried to talk to a Yorkshire book group who had been reading A Humble Companion.  Corks were pulled and glasses were filled but then Skype let us down. Of course it’s an absolute miracle that Skype functions at all. What is it? How does it work? It is a cause of constant and grateful amazement to me that I can, in the space of an hour, get a chocolate-y screen kiss from my granddaughter in England, and hear my Russian tutor’s idiot dog barking in Nizhniy Novgorod.

So thank you Skype (when you work) and thank you novel-reading ladies of Pontefract. It was good to talk to you, while it lasted.

     My official position on reviews is that authors shouldn’t read them. If they’re bad they can pull your confidence from under you like a rug on linoleum. If they’re good they may bathe you in an unmerited glow. I regret to say I abandon this position at the drop of an email.

So it was on Monday that my publicist alerted me to what she described as ‘an unnecessarily snippy review’ in the Sunday Times.  Could I leave the file unopened? No. I just had to run, throat bared, towards the reviewer’s knife.   The charge : that The Grand Duchess of Nowhere lacks rigorous rooting in historical time and place. This was all the more painful for being sandwiched between cracking reviews of books by two already hugely successful novelists.

Was it a fair comment? Well it would have been had I ever made any pretence of being a thorough historian or an educator. But mainly I hope my books will entertain. If I failed to entertain that particular reviewer the fault is certainly mine. Or perhaps being entertained isn’t her thing. I noticed she praised Victoria Hislop for her ‘anti-beach’ books. This says something about her tastes. But there’s a time and place for everything. What kind of poseur takes War and Peace to Torquay? Personally I’d be thrilled for any of my books to be chucked in the bag with the sun cream and the picnic blanket.

Anyway, it was Monday and before me stretched a week of writing, plagued by fears and uncertainties, but on we must go. Sticks and stones and all that. It crossed my mind to ask Margot not to send me any more reviews. Then on Wednesday I was glad I hadn’t because in came a lovely on-line notice from Random Jottings which began, Now this I loved.   And pathetic though it may be, that’s all it took to restore my equilibrium.

Many years ago I did a bit of book-reviewing. I soon jacked it in. Book buyers are entitled to reviews  –  I read them myself and sometimes a good review prompts me to buy the book   –  but when I was reviewing I was always conscious of the author. It was far too easy to destroy someone’s work with a smartass complaint.  If you don’t like the book, kinder to lay it aside and review something you did like. Silence can be eloquent, but far less damaging.

So, the weekend again already and Margot will now be going feverishly through the review sections. Monday morning I’ll be hiding behind the couch.