Two down and one to go

'Maftur' and 'Patsy'

The first two novels in the trilogy, 'Land of Broken Promises'are now done and dusted.

Tomorrow I start putting Dalia together. I fear it will require much rewriting and some additional material.
The introductory novel to the trilogy 'Struggling Free' is now on sale in Kindle format from Amazon Store. It is currently out of print in paper format.

Mad,Hopeless and Possible+thoughts on E-books -Horses for Courses.

Last Thursday I attended the launch of a delightfully illustrated chapbook, Mad, Hopeless & Possible by Siobhan Logan.
Part prose, part poetry it tells the stories of the two parties making up Shackleton's 1914-1917 ill-fated Antarctic expedition. The multi-talented author drew the beautiful line-drawing illustrations from original photographs taken by crew members. Many of the memorable poems are inspired by extracts from the mandatory diaries of crew members. The elegant prose pieces are based on rigid research.
The chapbook was published by Mark Goodwin's small press Original Plus which was also responsible for publishing Siobhan's first chapbook Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Lights Journey
I have bought copies of both chap books. The first one had a professionally created cover, the upside of which is that it can be kept on a book shelf, the downside is that it costs £8 which, however, is cheap when one considers the cost of similarly produced books from other presses.
Mad, Hopeless and Possible costs only £3 so is within the price range of impoverished students and strapped for cash families visiting museums who wishing to bring away a worthwhile memento.
However, when reading Mad, Hopeless and Possible in its slighter smaller than A5 current paper form I can't help feeling that the visual impact for me would have been far greater if I were reading it in epub form on the 9'' glass screen of a tablet.
When I asked Mark Goodwin who gave us the talk if he had plans for publishing the work digitally he replied that poetry, is not suitable for digital as the e-reader has the option to choose any size and type of font they like which ruins the poet's carefully constructed layout.
I realised then that he was equating e-reading with kindle format which does of course give the reader that option and is very useful for people like me who want to read without having to bother with hunting for my invariably missing spectacles.
However, e-books can be published in another format than Kindle's.
e-pub is a far superior format when visual impact is important. It may not be so useful on a small six inch kindle screen or an even smaller i-pod but it comes into its own on tablets.
With e-pub the format can be controlled by the author. When e-pub is used on a tablet
the glass screen often give illustrations and photos a magic they lack on plain paper, I thought this would have been particularly true for Siobhan's original beautifully crafted drawings.
I have bought some classical illustrated books with considerable visual impact produced in e-pub format and sold by apple store.
I have heard that it is more difficult to get one's book authorised for sale in Apple Store. With Kindle, although it has a host of excellent books in its catalogue, anyone can put up anything, however badly written.
I wonder if poetry publishers and Apple store could get together to make special terms for poetry publishers, and whether Apple store and other ebooksellers, who sell books published in e-pub form, can advise small presses of the advantages of e-pub in cases where visual impact is at a premium.

Historical Novels

The primary purpose of a historical novel, as any publisher or agent will tell you, is to entertain. That’s why I am grateful to belong to a club with a wide range of writers. Each manuscript evening at Leicester Writers' Club is a master class in the art of entertaining.

Odd as it may appear, the primary purpose of a historical novel may not always be the primary purpose of its author nor the only reason readers choose that genre. Many multi-tasking readers turn to fiction not only for entertainment but also for information.

There seems to be a huge gender gap here at least in readers of my generation and older living in Leicestershire. (I am speaking now from 18 years experience as a WRVS volunteer delivering books to housebound readers.) Male readers who want historical information ask me to bring them non-fiction books only, women ask primarily for novels or memoirs. When speaking to volunteers in other parts of the country, I find their experiences experience are similar although of course there are always individuals who break the stereotype.

When it comes to the younger generation, many young men I talk to in Leicestershire, (apart from those on English courses at uni!) claim to read only nonfiction and that very sparingly. They say they can’t see the point in non-interactive fiction - they would rather play computer games. On the other hand young women I talk to read many more books with most of their reading being fiction or memoirs. They claim they learn a great deal from reading fiction but they also spend much of their leisure time watching soap operas. When you think of it the Archers, Casualty, Peak District originated as megaphones for public service announcements.

If many women are reading historical fiction for information as well as entertainment then authors have a duty to deliver historical fiction accurately, delicately weaving fictional weft between a warp of known historical facts. That means historical fiction writers have a duty to research primary sources in detail.

This is even more imperative where historical narrative underlies burning current issues. The most harm a novel, set say in 15^th century England depicting Richard 3^rd either as a villain or a hero, can do is to cause the proponent of an opposing view to burst a blood vessel.

In periods coming under the term historical, in publishing terms, but where many people living then are still alivel; and in locations were historical narrative underlies burning issues, there is far more at stake.

I have often found in these controversial areas most historical literature published in English have dates and events so skewed as to falsify cause and Frankly it is nothing more than propaganda.

One difficulty researching the particur period and location area I write in, where contemporary events were censored in both local and British papers under emergency regulations, is that it is impossible for hurried writing to be accurate. Only this week, for instance, after four years of research into the early thirties in the city of Haifa, I discovered major facts that made nonsense of many of my assumptions I made when writing my current novel. I owe it to the reader to be accurate and will have to rewrite.

Readers also often start reading with false assumptions that make it difficult for them to get into a book unless the author addresses the issues gently.

This is another area where I find membership of Leicester Writers club, with its cross-section of readers extremely helpful in discovering common assumptions held by the British public and gives me the opportunity to alter my writing so I can set scenes to open up vistas without sounding didactic.

Post modern

Some one was telling me the other night about his post modern detective story. This presented me with an opportunity to ask something I have long wanted to know - what does post modern mean in the world of literature. His answer , as far as my limited intellect allowed me to understand, is that it is narrative where the author deliberately jerks the reader out of the story to demonstrate that the story only exists in the matrix of another story.
I have just been reading Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and am wondering if this is an example of a post modern story.
I hope someone will tell me if I have understood what I think I was being told.
If I did understand with some degree of accuracy,however,it still doesn't explain why this type of writing should be called post modern - such a paradox title.
I take it the post bit means after as in post natal and post mortem. But how then can something be post modern?
Modern seems to me to be welded to a step on the escalator of our time dimension labelled 'the present' It cannot move past 'the present' to the next step 'the future' except perhaps as an idea in SF? So what does the title mean? Can someone help me?