The News in Brief

1. Uncle Alonzo will shortly be enjoying life in foreign climes! Yes, the excessively beardy fellow’s nefarious plans for world domination continue apace – various rights have been bought and sold and he will soon be making guest appearances in Denmark, Korea and Brazil!

2. Whilst Alonzo is gadding about the globe, my own travel ambitions are rather more modest. I am heading off to the Oxford Literary Festival tomorrow at (almost) the crack of dawn - hence the extreme brevity of this post! I have now signed up for a ridiculous number of talks, presentations and panel events. One of the talks that I was originally due to attend was cancelled a week or so ago, so I naturally went looking for a replacement. I found three. I'm not sure that I am fully prepared for the weekend of madness, mayhem and 'frantic rushing about the place' that now awaits me.

3. I am still waiting for John Lewis to get in some replacement Leg Master machines. In fact, forget ‘some’, a simple ‘one’ would be fine – as long as they sold that one to me, of course!

4. This week’s rather abbreviated vital statistics:
Books In: 17
Books Out: O
(People are starting to complain and the shelves are definitely showing signs of sagging...)

Happy Easter!

Easter

I got me flowers to strew thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree;

But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought'st thy sweets along with thee.

The sun arising in the east,
Though he gave light, and the east perfume,
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.

George Herbert (1593-1633)

Happy Easter, everyone!

And A Good Time Was Had By All!

Yesterday I had the privilege of visiting Lytton House, the Junior Department of Putney High School, and giving a reading of Uncle Alonzo’s Beard to the Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 children, before answering their questions about the book, My Freaky Family (the series that Alonzo belongs to), publishing and writing in general. I also had the chance to introduce them to Great Uncle Fred – another member of the family – and his most unusual pet!

The girls were a delightful and enthusiastic audience – very attentive during the readings and full of interesting questions afterwards. I’m only sorry that there wasn’t enough time to answer all of them before the session was over! I definitely got the impression that there were more than a few budding authors, illustrators and future publishers out there... :-)

At the end of the afternoon, it was a lovely surprise to be presented with a beautiful bouquet of flowers and three wonderful thank you cards – created by the girls themselves – which are now sitting proudly on the shelves above my writing desk.


Many thanks indeed to both Miss Brennan and Putney parent Gill Mais for organising the whole event, and to all the girls for making me feel so welcome. I look forward to visiting again soon...

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Lately, there’s been a lot of all three around. I’m not going to dwell on the usual newspaper fodder – crazy weather, annoying (possibly corrupt) politicians, shamefully mistreated military personnel, crime, violence, binge drinking and mind-bendingly dull ‘celebrities’. I’m sure you already know all you ever wanted to (and probably quite a bit more) about those subjects. Instead, I offer you just a few examples of each from my own recent experience:

The Good:

1. The members of lovely online writing community WriteWords have been enjoying a lot of success lately. Recently published books include Mothernight by Sarah Stovell, A Vengeful Longing by Roger Morris, Chips, Beans and Limousines by Leila Rasheed, Thorn in the Flesh by Anne Brooke, Split by a Kiss by Luisa Plaja, and Ways to Live Forever by Sally Nicholls - also the well-deserved winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize.

2. I have discovered (via a WW tip) The Big Green Bookshop blog – it’s always been a secret (or perhaps not so secret) ambition of mine to open my own bookshop at some time in the future, and reading about how these guys have done just that is really inspiring. I wish them the very best of luck!

3. Having wanted a fob watch for ages – and more specifically for Shadow Road’s Christmas production a few months ago – but not having any money to spend on a ‘proper’ one, I stumbled across an attractive faux-silver one at my nearest tube station the other day. At a mere £6 for the watch, chain and a spare battery, I thought it was something of a bargain!


The Bad:

1. My excellent ‘Leg Master’ exercise machine has just broken down. Just as I’ve worked my way up to 1,500 repetitions in a day – I kid you not, people, I’ve (almost) sweated blood to get here – the cursed thing has given up the ghost and John Lewis have sold out of replacements. Grrr!

2. Public transport in London – crowded, expensive, dirty, slow, and, depending on whom you end up travelling alongside, occasionally dangerous. And this is what people are supposed to leave their cars behind for?

3. My inability to maintain a regular posting schedule on this blog. It isn’t that I forget to write anything, nor that I can’t be bothered, it’s more that I don’t feel I ought to post unless I’ve got something worth saying. And then I remember that just because I think a thing is worth saying, it doesn’t follow that anyone else will necessarily agree with me. *Sigh* I suspect I may take myself – and this blog – a little too seriously. I am determined to be more trivial (and talkative) in future... ;-)


And The Ugly:


I am reliably informed that this is a sculpture of a ‘Lion Dog’. Hmm, I may still resent the fact that my parents wouldn’t let me have a puppy when I was little, but I don’t think even I would have wanted to go ‘walkies’ with one of these.

Any good, bad or ugly things happening in your life at the moment? If so, feel free to share...

Modern Marvels and Curious Cures

Having spent the last week and more battling with a rather vicious cold, a five-day long headache and wildly fluctuating temperature – hot sweats giving way to shivery chills, only to return again a short while later – I have had much cause to bless the creators of such modern marvels as the ‘Kleenex Ultra Balm Tissue’, ‘Solpadeine Headache’ tablets, eucalyptus and menthol inhalations and the soothing ‘Strepsils Extra’ lozenge. After dipping into one of my latest literary purchases (this week’s vital statistics: Books bought from a shop - 12; Books on order - 3; Books expelled to make room for newcomers - O), Nigel Cawthorne’s fascinating The Curious Cures of Old England, I have also spent quite some time being actively grateful that I was lucky enough to be born in shiny, new England, rather than the old, slightly mad version he describes.

Had I been suffering from similar ailments a few centuries ago, I would have found the local quack recommending the application of cabbage or lettuce leaves to alleviate my headache; admittedly not quite as bad as the Tudor solution of gargling mustard, or the rather disturbing 18th Century tendency to tie a piece of used hangman’s rope around your skull, but surely not nearly as effective as paracetamol. (In the 19th Century hangman’s rope dropped out of favour, only to be replaced by snakeskin - honestly, I’m not sure which would be worse.)

And what was it with these people and the application of ludicrous items to the skin? It seems that the common cold required a thick piece of toast to be soaked in vinegar and bound to the throat overnight with a handkerchief. Or, alternatively, you could try nodding off with a filthy sock or stocking tied around your neck, taking care to ensure that the heel was positioned over your larynx. Sticking orange peel up your nose was an optional extra in both these cases. Chest complaints might be fended off by wearing a vest made of brown paper and goose fat (not forgetting to apply extra grease to the soles of your feet at the same time), or strapping rashers of bacon to your ribcage. Given the scarcity of food at the time, one has to wonder whether or not the afflicted individual might be expected, come the morning, to cook and eat the same bacon he had lately been wearing?

Prevention being undoubtedly better than a cure, there were many methods of warding off the ague - a fever most commonly, but not exclusively, associated with malaria, it was marked by alternate chills and sweating, and recurred at intervals. In Sussex, it was believed that a necklace made from wood chips taken from a gallows would prevent the ague - but if it had been a particularly quiet year (tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, dontcha know) and there weren’t enough gallows to go around, a good second choice was a man’s woollen sock filled with earthworms.

Unfortunately, there were times when neither the gallows chips nor the wormy sock could get the job done and, despite all efforts to the contrary, people did fall victim to the ague. In this case, the solution was clear: EELS. Sir Kenelm Digby, a 17th Century medical bigwig, was most specific in his advice. The nails of the sufferer should be trimmed and the parings placed into a small bag or pouch. This bag or pouch must then be hung around the neck of a live eel, which was subsequently placed into a tub of water. The eel should then die and the patient recover. Failing this, of course, you could always resort to the ‘right foot of a black dog hung over the right arm’ option. One or the other was bound to work...

By the 18th Century medical thought had advanced. ‘Eels?’ the people scoffed, ‘What could those idiots have been thinking? Thank goodness we’ve moved on since then.’ And indeed they had. It was now recommended that ague sufferers should fast for seven days, eating only seven sage leaves during this time. If, however, crash diets were not the sufferer’s thing, they could instead swallow ‘pill-bugs’ (woodlice rolled up into balls) or – if they were feeling particularly peckish – a live spider. Some of the pickier eaters preferred to keep the spider in a bag hung around their neck rather than swallowing it – a ridiculous notion, because, as the people of Norfolk would have been happy to tell any Sussex man who asked, everyone knew that this was the cure for whooping cough, not the ague.

It was left to Norfolk parson and diarist James Woodforde (1740-1803) to come up with a sensible cure. He recalls that, when visited by a fever-stricken relative, ‘I gave him a dram of gin at the beginning of the fit and pushed him headlong into one of my ponds, then ordered him to bed immediately’. Not quite as good as paracetamol and a tissue, but definitely preferable to insects and eels...

Visits and Valentines

My lovely god-daughter, Lilia, and her mother have been staying with me for a couple of days and yesterday we spent a few hours at the London Wetland Centre. The weather was as perfect as possible for the time of year – crisp, blue-skied and sunny – and the Centre itself was starkly beautiful. I am always amazed that a place like this, 43 hectares of wetlands – wide open stretches of water and grassy walkways, teeming with wildlife – can exist in a corner of one of the busiest cities in the world. I love taking visitors along there to see the surprise in their faces when they enter the observatory, a glass-walled room, two storeys high, that looks out across the main lake. On a day like yesterday, so bright and clear, the view really is breathtaking and each new visitor’s astonishment at the sight mirrors my own. If any non-Londoners out there are planning a trip to the capital soon, then I recommend that you pencil a visit to the Wetland Centre into your itinerary. And if there are any Londoners reading who haven’t yet paid it a call, then what are you waiting for?

I have just booked this year’s trip to the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival and I am already looking forward to it. Just as last year – which was, astoundingly, my first ever visit to a literary festival – I will be staying in Christ Church College, at the heart of the action. And again, just as last year, I’ve booked more events than are probably good for me: in the space of a day and a half, I’ve committed myself to five different events and a Carvery Lunch! It’s bound to be a hectic couple of days, but also, I’m sure, extremely interesting and great fun at the same time. Another experience that I can highly recommend!

Thy bright eyes govern better than the Sun,
For with thy favour was my life begun,
And still I reckon on from smiles to smiles,
And not by summers, for I thrive on none
But those thy cheerful countenance compiles;
Oh! if it be to choose and call thee mine,
Love, thou art every day my Valentine!

‘Sonnet: For the 14th of February’ by Thomas Hood (1799-1845)

Happy Valentine’s Day, one and all!

The Art of Critique

If you’d just spent 48 hours in labour, you’d be understandably put out if the first thing someone said upon seeing your newly-delivered offspring was, ‘Shame about the hair, eh? And those features could do with a bit more definition, couldn’t they? I’ve never liked green eyes. And why, in the name of all that’s holy, have you gone for a yellow jumpsuit?’

Now, obviously, even if your ill-dressed progeny did happen to be genuinely unsightly, no one in their right mind would tell you so. Not unless they a) had some kind of death wish, b) were in no way attached to the current composition of their own face, or c) had recently ingested certain illegal substances known to eliminate all sense of personal inhibition, anyway. And while I understand that sitting at a desk and writing is a significantly less sweaty, bloody, painful and, let’s face it, messy activity than giving birth, the resultant piece of work is no less ‘your creation’ than the squalling infant might have been.

Thus, comments like, ‘I hate this bit’, ‘It’s all too jerky’, ‘Well, that doesn’t make any sense’, or even, ‘Why are you using that word’, are almost guaranteed to provoke a defensive reaction. (If you’re now wondering what sort of person might believe that a good critique consists of a selection of the phrases above, stapled together in the appropriate order, let’s just say that my mother has always had a tendency to voice her opinions in a manner best described as ‘spontaneously forthright’...) In the end, I was actually able to use each of the comments above to improve the manuscript in some way (with the single exception of the first one, which was retracted during the reading of the second draft), but they were not as easy to digest as those offered by fellow writers.

And why was this the case? It is my guess that writers are rather better at offering critiques than non-writers because they understand what it is to receive them. They know from experience how it feels to spend so much time, effort and creative energy on a piece of work, only to have someone without that emotional connection to it pull it apart in a few careless sentences. They know how that feels, and endeavour to ensure that they do not inflict the same experience on others! In critique, writers tend to focus on particular points in a piece of writing, explaining which parts, in their opinion, do not work and why, and often proffering a few potential solutions to the problem. They are also careful to point out what they feel does work – what you have got right – so that you are not left with a desperate urge to shred everything you’ve ever written and take up some far more straightforward occupation – like accounting, say, or becoming the curator of a nice museum – instead!

This is not to say that writers always get it right – nor that the non-writer’s critique is not valid; only that the very different style of delivery – and content – can make the latter a little harder to process. The art of critique is a tricky thing indeed, requiring a varied mix of instinct, knowledge, diplomacy, confidence – and practice. As a writer, however, it is well worth trying to master, since the very act of critiquing not only helps the person whose work is being looked at, but may also prompt a significant improvement in the critiquer’s own writing as well. Two birds, one carefully-crafted stone – and everyone’s a winner!

For more on the art of giving a ‘good’ critique, try http://www.britishscbwi.org/critique.htm


And that was it, folks – post number 10. We're into double digits at last! Apologies for the marked delay between posts 9 and 10: a couple of opportunities came up for me at the end of January, both of which demanded a large amount of editing, writing and/or rewriting in a short amount of time, and I’m afraid that the blog fell temporarily by the wayside. However, while I may not be a daily poster, I have no wish to become a monthly one either, so I shall endeavour to do better hereafter... :-)

What's In a Name?

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
by any other name would smell as sweet.”
(Romeo & Juliet, Act II sc 2)

Would it really, though? Consider, for example, the fearless ‘John’ and the Argonauts. Hmm. Not quite such an impressive band, after all, are they? Similarly, one might judge King ‘Roy’ the Lionheart to lack a certain amount of the requisite gravitas. And, one has to ask, would the whole “we will fight them on the beaches” speech have been so well received if delivered by our brave Prime Minister, ‘Wendel’ Churchill? Would ‘Hercules’ Potter have become an international publishing phenomenon? Or the plucky, Dickensian urchin, ‘Orville’ Twist, have tugged on quite so many heartstrings? Possibly not.

Generally speaking, it’s as unlikely that the 19th Century Lady Farquharson at the centre of one story would be named ‘Stacey’, as it is that the genial bricklayer starring in another tale might be called ‘Algernon’.

Unlikely - but not, I’ll grant you, impossible. However, on those occasions when an author does elect to name their characters so outlandishly, they usually do so with good reason. The very incongruity of the names not only contributes to the story, but may even begin to tell it before the first page has been turned...

A brickie called Algernon? Perhaps he was born to an aristocratic family, the proverbial silver spoon jammed firmly in his mouth. Sadly, however, his good fortune was soon to fail him and, one way or another (through his own fault, or that of others?), he fell from grace. By the time we meet him, therefore, he is busy making his own way in the world and proving that the value of a man is not measured by the size of his inheritance.

And Lady Stacey Farquharson? Could she have been a housemaid who got lucky – whose seduction by the heir to the title ended not in pregnancy, disgrace and dismissal, but in a marriage far above her station and beyond her wildest dreams? Or might she perhaps have been a time traveller from the 21st century, who somehow (how, exactly?) found herself adrift in a strange time and place – a place where, even as she struggled to adapt to her incredible situation, she found herself falling in love with and then marrying the Lord of the Manor?

A ‘fitting’ name may suggest a great number of things about a person or a character, but the ‘wrong’ name can often suggest even more. Either way, the choice should be made with great care.


Are you currently having some difficulty in choosing a name for your new character/infant/pet/alternative life-form, fictional or otherwise? If so, then you may find the following sites helpful:

http://www.babynames.com/character_names.php

http://www.babynamewizard.com/

http://www.lowchensaustralia.com/names.htm

http://www.behindthename.com/

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/SearchRes.asp?term=names