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.
Monday, 31 October 2011
Friday, 18 March 2011
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 15th century England depicting Richard 3rd 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.
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
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?
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?
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
A winding journey with many regressions
On a writer's forum the other day someone asked how each member got into writing their current novel
I could not give a brief answer to that question but here here is my reply, probably tediously long and overly self indulgent.
My novels sprung from oral story telling. For the last half hour each day, when I was a primary school teacher, I would tell stories to my class rather than read books. Most stories I told were based on Greek and Hindu legends but occasionally I would tell stories from my own childhood – hunting treasure in the secret tunnel under our house in Jerusalem, guarding , without adult assistance, a Mediterranean beach against the threat of German invaders in a pseudo military camp; learning to swim by being chucked off a pier when British soldiers mistook me for a Jewish child.
I started writing these personal incidents when I first attended a creative writing class.
The tutor suggested that I write a whole childhood memoir. I followed her advice.
The class at the local community college closed and I started at another. In introducing my writing to the new class, I obviously didn’t explain sufficiently that my work was a memoir because the tutor soon told me that I had too many characters in the central family; I didn’t need the little brother; I had too many names that started with the same letter so I would have to change most of them; and Zoe, (my mother’s name) was too modern for the period about which I was writing
Obediently I made the changes; decided I was now writing a novel instead of a memoir and pruned it down from 250 000 words to 120 000.
By the time I had finished revising, multiculturalism had become flavour of the decade and I was infected with a hefty dose of PC. I agonised that I had described a period of Palestinian history only through the perspective of a British child from a fundamentalist Christian family.
In the midst of my anguish, a local librarian told me that her mother was honorary secretary to a nearby synagogue and had lived in Palestine during the era about which I was writing. I visited her mother. We agreed to co-author a second novel about a Jewish woman with the start based on my co-author’s childhood in Frankfurt and departure for the Middle east in 1933. We had our heroine and her family live in Munich though as my co-author didn’t want to be identified by people she knew and we made our protagonist sail straight to Palestine rather than going to live with family in Iraq first. We based the main plot on an incident in my own history when my father’s best friend, a British Inspector in the Palestine Police became engaged to a Jewish girl but was killed by hashish smugglers a week before the wedding.
We spent time deciding on names for our characters. Many German Jews born in the twenties, had German forenames, my co-author told me, but she was surprisingly gentle with me over my inappropriate suggestion of Kristina . Since German girls, she said, were more likely than boys to have Jewish names, we settled on ‘Dalia’ for our heroine.
Back at writing classes I was in for more trouble with this second novel. We had one member of our class who was married to a British Jew. She told me that, as a gentile, I had no right to be writing about the holocaust. She would solemnly walk out of the class whenever it was my turn to read. I persevered but needn’t have caused the lady all the aggro as in the end, on literary grounds, I guillotined the first four chapters and started the novel with the heroine arriving in Palestine.
After three sessions my co-author retired from the project because her eyesight suddenly deteriorated. I carried on alone (although I did hand over part of the proceeds when my first novel was published many years later)
With the Jewish story finished, I began the Arab story that was to be the third novel in the trilogy. I had no trouble starting as I based the main character on the live-in maid who came to us straight from an orphanage school in Nazareth at the age of 12 when my family first moved to Palestine. For the heroine’s grown up life though I needed help. I flew out to Israel to stay in a hotel in Tiberias and took an Arab bus up to Nazareth, disembarking in a hurry when we passed a Baptist primary school with a board outside written in both Arabic and English. I asked the secretary if she could find me a retired Arab teacher. She did, and I had a very useful meeting with a delightful lady whom ,in 1948 at the age of 14, the Israeli authority had put in charge of a class of 80 children mostly refugees from the surrounding countryside. She agreed to co-author the third book and we had a most productive session. When I returned to England we continued our correspondence by email but unfortunately after our first week she became seriously ill and had to withdraw. While I was still dithering on whether I could finish the third book on my own, I looked again at the structure of the trilogy. There would be two books centred round grown-up heroines and one written from a child’s viewpoint. I decided to rewrite the British based novel, giving it a grown-up heroine, Patsy, and making it considerably less autobiographical.
I had finished the replacement novel, and was continuing with the Arab based novel, when I had a one to one interview with an editor of Writers’ News.
She pointed out that if I wanted to show a balance view of the last decade of the British Mandate in Palestine, I would have to rewrite the trilogy so I had three chronological novels, each telling the story from the viewpoint of all three women.
I went home fired with enthusiasm and started separating the scenes in all three novels, jigsawing them into new patterns and making alterations as needed to synchronise chronology.
I worked 18 hours a day, attempting to keep the whole structure in my head. Unfortunately my head wasn’t big enough. At a social gathering of fellow writers, my memory shut down until it allowed me to retain only the current three second strip.
My caring friends took me to the Infirmary assuming I had suffered a stroke and stayed with me until one of them had fetched my daughter from one of Leicestershire’s more remote villages. I recovered in a few hours but after that experience I took things at a steadier pace.
I finished the first of the chronological novels and won a cash and publication prize. Unfortunately in between signing the contract and finishing the second and third novels, the firm that had bought the first novel changed hands and became a self-publishing firm. This would not be so disastrous if they didn’t still own three years of copyright.
Criticisms made by agents of the other two novels that I sent out is that, although it is acceptable to see events in a story from three or even more viewpoints, there must be a single character at the centre of a novel with whom the reader identifies.
So now I am writing a new first novel centred round an Arab Muslim character who plays an important part in the second and third novels but is not the central character in those stories. I have sidelined an original Arab Christian central character, Susannah, and am re-using some of the pre-1938 material concerned with Patsy and Dalia that I erased from the chronological trilogy.
When I have finished this new first novel then I will have to tinker with the second and third to make Patsy the central character in one and Dalia central to the other.
All this rewriting is preventing me from starting the novel constantly swirling in my head about a Neighbour Watch Scheme in an English Midland town.
I could not give a brief answer to that question but here here is my reply, probably tediously long and overly self indulgent.
My novels sprung from oral story telling. For the last half hour each day, when I was a primary school teacher, I would tell stories to my class rather than read books. Most stories I told were based on Greek and Hindu legends but occasionally I would tell stories from my own childhood – hunting treasure in the secret tunnel under our house in Jerusalem, guarding , without adult assistance, a Mediterranean beach against the threat of German invaders in a pseudo military camp; learning to swim by being chucked off a pier when British soldiers mistook me for a Jewish child.
I started writing these personal incidents when I first attended a creative writing class.
The tutor suggested that I write a whole childhood memoir. I followed her advice.
The class at the local community college closed and I started at another. In introducing my writing to the new class, I obviously didn’t explain sufficiently that my work was a memoir because the tutor soon told me that I had too many characters in the central family; I didn’t need the little brother; I had too many names that started with the same letter so I would have to change most of them; and Zoe, (my mother’s name) was too modern for the period about which I was writing
Obediently I made the changes; decided I was now writing a novel instead of a memoir and pruned it down from 250 000 words to 120 000.
By the time I had finished revising, multiculturalism had become flavour of the decade and I was infected with a hefty dose of PC. I agonised that I had described a period of Palestinian history only through the perspective of a British child from a fundamentalist Christian family.
In the midst of my anguish, a local librarian told me that her mother was honorary secretary to a nearby synagogue and had lived in Palestine during the era about which I was writing. I visited her mother. We agreed to co-author a second novel about a Jewish woman with the start based on my co-author’s childhood in Frankfurt and departure for the Middle east in 1933. We had our heroine and her family live in Munich though as my co-author didn’t want to be identified by people she knew and we made our protagonist sail straight to Palestine rather than going to live with family in Iraq first. We based the main plot on an incident in my own history when my father’s best friend, a British Inspector in the Palestine Police became engaged to a Jewish girl but was killed by hashish smugglers a week before the wedding.
We spent time deciding on names for our characters. Many German Jews born in the twenties, had German forenames, my co-author told me, but she was surprisingly gentle with me over my inappropriate suggestion of Kristina . Since German girls, she said, were more likely than boys to have Jewish names, we settled on ‘Dalia’ for our heroine.
Back at writing classes I was in for more trouble with this second novel. We had one member of our class who was married to a British Jew. She told me that, as a gentile, I had no right to be writing about the holocaust. She would solemnly walk out of the class whenever it was my turn to read. I persevered but needn’t have caused the lady all the aggro as in the end, on literary grounds, I guillotined the first four chapters and started the novel with the heroine arriving in Palestine.
After three sessions my co-author retired from the project because her eyesight suddenly deteriorated. I carried on alone (although I did hand over part of the proceeds when my first novel was published many years later)
With the Jewish story finished, I began the Arab story that was to be the third novel in the trilogy. I had no trouble starting as I based the main character on the live-in maid who came to us straight from an orphanage school in Nazareth at the age of 12 when my family first moved to Palestine. For the heroine’s grown up life though I needed help. I flew out to Israel to stay in a hotel in Tiberias and took an Arab bus up to Nazareth, disembarking in a hurry when we passed a Baptist primary school with a board outside written in both Arabic and English. I asked the secretary if she could find me a retired Arab teacher. She did, and I had a very useful meeting with a delightful lady whom ,in 1948 at the age of 14, the Israeli authority had put in charge of a class of 80 children mostly refugees from the surrounding countryside. She agreed to co-author the third book and we had a most productive session. When I returned to England we continued our correspondence by email but unfortunately after our first week she became seriously ill and had to withdraw. While I was still dithering on whether I could finish the third book on my own, I looked again at the structure of the trilogy. There would be two books centred round grown-up heroines and one written from a child’s viewpoint. I decided to rewrite the British based novel, giving it a grown-up heroine, Patsy, and making it considerably less autobiographical.
I had finished the replacement novel, and was continuing with the Arab based novel, when I had a one to one interview with an editor of Writers’ News.
She pointed out that if I wanted to show a balance view of the last decade of the British Mandate in Palestine, I would have to rewrite the trilogy so I had three chronological novels, each telling the story from the viewpoint of all three women.
I went home fired with enthusiasm and started separating the scenes in all three novels, jigsawing them into new patterns and making alterations as needed to synchronise chronology.
I worked 18 hours a day, attempting to keep the whole structure in my head. Unfortunately my head wasn’t big enough. At a social gathering of fellow writers, my memory shut down until it allowed me to retain only the current three second strip.
My caring friends took me to the Infirmary assuming I had suffered a stroke and stayed with me until one of them had fetched my daughter from one of Leicestershire’s more remote villages. I recovered in a few hours but after that experience I took things at a steadier pace.
I finished the first of the chronological novels and won a cash and publication prize. Unfortunately in between signing the contract and finishing the second and third novels, the firm that had bought the first novel changed hands and became a self-publishing firm. This would not be so disastrous if they didn’t still own three years of copyright.
Criticisms made by agents of the other two novels that I sent out is that, although it is acceptable to see events in a story from three or even more viewpoints, there must be a single character at the centre of a novel with whom the reader identifies.
So now I am writing a new first novel centred round an Arab Muslim character who plays an important part in the second and third novels but is not the central character in those stories. I have sidelined an original Arab Christian central character, Susannah, and am re-using some of the pre-1938 material concerned with Patsy and Dalia that I erased from the chronological trilogy.
When I have finished this new first novel then I will have to tinker with the second and third to make Patsy the central character in one and Dalia central to the other.
All this rewriting is preventing me from starting the novel constantly swirling in my head about a Neighbour Watch Scheme in an English Midland town.
Thursday, 2 September 2010
Ageism
Two incidents today have made me realise how guilty I am of Ageism. Both are connected with books in some way so I don't feel they are altogether irrelevant to this blog.
Quite early this morning I was phoned by one of my WRVS (Women's Royal Voluntary Service) Books on Wheels volunteers who is 87.
Her role, in company with her 86 year old husband, is to carry heavy baskets of books to 4 residents of an old people's residential home. She phoned to say that the arthritis in her legs has recently become very painful and she will have to give up her task at the end of the month. I was expecting to have to find a replacement for her 10 years ago!
Soon after I put down the telephone, I checked my email and found a reply from a 95 year old Palestinian lawyer whom I had contacted by email the previous evening to ask about the path he had taken pre-WW2 to gain his law qualifications. I requested this as part of background research I needed for the book I am writing to replace the already published first volume of my trilogy. This new novel will cover the period from 1933 to 1948 and will centre on a woman who was a minor character in the original first volume.
I received a far clearer and more succinct reply from this elderly lawyer than I would have expected from anyone from a younger generations, the only irrelevance being his apology for boasting about the hard work required to gain his credentials.
In those days truly there were giants in the land
Regards,
Margaret
Quite early this morning I was phoned by one of my WRVS (Women's Royal Voluntary Service) Books on Wheels volunteers who is 87.
Her role, in company with her 86 year old husband, is to carry heavy baskets of books to 4 residents of an old people's residential home. She phoned to say that the arthritis in her legs has recently become very painful and she will have to give up her task at the end of the month. I was expecting to have to find a replacement for her 10 years ago!
Soon after I put down the telephone, I checked my email and found a reply from a 95 year old Palestinian lawyer whom I had contacted by email the previous evening to ask about the path he had taken pre-WW2 to gain his law qualifications. I requested this as part of background research I needed for the book I am writing to replace the already published first volume of my trilogy. This new novel will cover the period from 1933 to 1948 and will centre on a woman who was a minor character in the original first volume.
I received a far clearer and more succinct reply from this elderly lawyer than I would have expected from anyone from a younger generations, the only irrelevance being his apology for boasting about the hard work required to gain his credentials.
In those days truly there were giants in the land
Regards,
Margaret
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Vintage launch
A member of our club, Maxine Linnell held her book launch last Thursday. Her book was published under the genre Young Adult but it is a good read for adults too.
There was a strong correlation between ethos of the launch and the theme of the book. In the launch the author was superbly supported by her offspring who provided a buffet in two parts , one with food that would have suited such an occasion in the 1960s and one with the more globally inspired recipes that we enjoy now
The theme of the book contrasts family relationships and expectations in 1962 with those of 2010 using the 'body swap' device to good effect.
After reading the book I felt that the author and I were in agreement that on the whole family relationships are healthier and more mutually supportive in 2010 than they were in 1962 although social life outside the family for young adults can be physically more dangerous now than they were fifty years ago.
For those of us who were parents fifty years ago there is a realisation that although we gave our young children greater freedom than primary school children get today, yet we put too many restraints on them in puberty.
For younger people , the book will pose very different questions.
We old ones can also read this book for nostalgia, young ones for horrified incredulity.
Monday, 23 February 2009
WW2 in Palestine
What is it about the WW2 years that cause novelists and civilian writers of memoirs who write in English about the British Mandate of Palestine to skate over them?.
I have had people tell me that nothing interesting happened in those years so they wouldn't want to read about it anyway but I would argue that the events of 1942 are as eventful as any, marking as they do a watershed in British -Zionist relations. I consider the formation of the Palmach by the British as a resistance group against probable German Invasion and the subsequent disbandment order was one of the single biggest factor leading to the post war mess. Yet people seem to know nothing about those events
Golda Meir probably had an excuse for skating over the period in her memoir in that the war years covered painful events in her marriage,
Moshe Dayan also had an excuse in his memoir. He was in prison from 1939 and then so severely wounded in Syria in 1941 that he confined his life to his own family for three or so years.
Other people who became famous were on war service outside Palestine but there were others
who stayed in Palestine who must know their importance. A small part of it may still be covered by the official secrets act but most of it is in the public domain.
Perhaps it is because of the paucity of memoirs that novels set in that period appear to be non-existent.
My outburst is caused by today's delivery of two well-written novels by Dvora Waysman. I had been looking forward to their arrival for some time. One covers events from 1951 onwards but the other The Pomegranite Pendant is a saga that covers the period 1890 -1950. I turned to it eagerly only to discover that the events of WW2 occupy about a page and a half.
It makes me all the more determined to hone my writing skills sufficiently to get the second novel in my trilogy spanning the years 1942-1945 published.
I have had people tell me that nothing interesting happened in those years so they wouldn't want to read about it anyway but I would argue that the events of 1942 are as eventful as any, marking as they do a watershed in British -Zionist relations. I consider the formation of the Palmach by the British as a resistance group against probable German Invasion and the subsequent disbandment order was one of the single biggest factor leading to the post war mess. Yet people seem to know nothing about those events
Golda Meir probably had an excuse for skating over the period in her memoir in that the war years covered painful events in her marriage,
Moshe Dayan also had an excuse in his memoir. He was in prison from 1939 and then so severely wounded in Syria in 1941 that he confined his life to his own family for three or so years.
Other people who became famous were on war service outside Palestine but there were others
who stayed in Palestine who must know their importance. A small part of it may still be covered by the official secrets act but most of it is in the public domain.
Perhaps it is because of the paucity of memoirs that novels set in that period appear to be non-existent.
My outburst is caused by today's delivery of two well-written novels by Dvora Waysman. I had been looking forward to their arrival for some time. One covers events from 1951 onwards but the other The Pomegranite Pendant is a saga that covers the period 1890 -1950. I turned to it eagerly only to discover that the events of WW2 occupy about a page and a half.
It makes me all the more determined to hone my writing skills sufficiently to get the second novel in my trilogy spanning the years 1942-1945 published.
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