A Garden Poetry Workshop

 When Mark Goodwin spoke to Leicester Writers Club in March, one forty-something business man, completely sober, left the meeting so elated he danced in the street outside.  Other members were equally impressed although in a more subdued  manner and invited Mark to give us a workshop.  Location  proved a problem. Suitable rooms in Leicester are expensive, especially on a Saturday,  so we decided to hold it outside in a member's garden.  The weather should be warm enough at that time of the year, shouldn't it?

Mark settled on Gardens as the workshop theme. and sent members  this message

 I am hoping that it will be like May, so we can actually work out in the garden. However, it of course might rain! If it does, then we would largely work indoors, but it would be good, whatever the weather, if we actually go out into the garden, if only briefly. So, it'd be useful for  writers to bring waterproof jackets and sensible shoes, should the weather forecast threaten something thoroughly British! 

In the event the weather was Arctic rather than British. We had to switch on an electric fire in addition to having the central heating on full blast, and that was before we ventured into the garden.

Despite that the workshop was a great success, mainly due to Mark being a compassionate poet as well as a skillful tutor.  He dug out nuggets of gold from even the the most unpromising of matrices. I would recommend Mark as a resident writer to any school or institution and am looking forward to reading the conglomerate poem he recorded on his state-of-the art voice recorder. 

A Writing Retreat

Last weekend along with 15 other members of Leicester Writers Club,  I enjoyed a writing retreat  in a secluded 16th Century farmhouse in the Cotswolds.  This is the eighth year the retreat has taken place.
We enter the secret world of Middle Stanley by a farm track that tunnels through a causeway carrying the Gloucester/Warwickshire steam railway.  The track lined with ancient apple trees, usually in full blossom during our visits, continues uphill to the farmhouse and outbuildings that make up the small conference centre. The estate, cut off from the world  by the causeway at the front is also cut off at the rear by the curving slope of a wooded hill.   A large pond, home to moorhens, coots and geese, lies in a hollow between the farm buildings and the hill.
We workshop in a room with enormous floor to ceiling windows that has been created from a former pigsty. We collaborate in a farmhouse kitchen, complete with temperamental Aga,  to produce superior meals which we eat in a dining room equipped with an elliptical table large enough to seat all in comfort.

The strictly members-only work-shopping week-end has been an annual event for eight years, and each year all who attend have voted to keep it on.
With no external work shop leaders, the Middle Stanley retreat could easily have become introverted and, with places for only 16 out of an average membership of 40, divisive.  Due to diligent planning on the organisers’ part, however, it hasn’t turned out that way.

The workshops far from being introverted actually open a window onto national best practice. Although the club contains several professional writing class tutors they usually take a back seat at Middle Stanley,  leaving  the running of workshops to members who have recently attended reputable writing courses and conferences elsewhere. These leaders  replicate the workshops they themselves have found most valuable, thus disseminating expertise gained from the outside world amongst the rest of us.
An important benefit that accrues  from confining workshop leadership to club members is that no one feel bound to attend the workshops. Members with approaching dead lines or with young families are free to use the time for long periods of uninterrupted writing, while still being enjoying the advantages of literary conversation during meal times.
Our efficient organisers avoid elitism by advertising the booking date and starting time  in advance with the assurance to newcomers that it is open to all regardless of length of membership. The bookings are taken on a strictly, first come, first served basis.  Old stagers tend to hang back to make sure newcomers have the best chance of a place. Miraculously, so far, all people, who have had to start off on the waiting list, have found places when other people have had to drop out. The majority of club members have managed to attend at least one weekend so it strengthens club unity rather than proving divisive.  For those with commitments which mean they can never get away for a whole weekend, the club runs a workshop day later in the year on similar lines to Middle Stanley which also helps with inclusivity.
I found the workshops this year extremely useful. They more than made up for the weather and the disappointment of not being able to climb up the hill and sit meditating on a log near the peak.
I came away realising once again how lucky I am to have such a vibrant club within easy travelling distance from home.

PS Thank you to Liz Ringrose for allowing me to use her photos. I only found my camera when I unpackedback home!

Cold porridge

On Good Friday I thought I had completed the third draft of the fourth novel in the series 'Land of Broken Promises' and all I had left to do was the boring job of checking grammar, spelling and format word by word.

I intended to spend today (bank holiday Monday) sending off three chapters and the synopsis of the completed second novel to an agent. and was all set meanwhile to give my undivided attention to hostessing yesterday's family Easter Egg Hunt and lunch.

At 11 am yesterday, in a state of panic, I was replacing three eggs, and reprinting three muddied clues that I had hidden well from anyone searching the garden, but all too visible, apparently, to light fingered passers by. As I took the clues from the printer, it suddenly struck me that I needed an extra chapter in the first third of the fourth novel and would have to erase the pieces of back story I had carefully dropped into the second third of the novel. My instinct was to sit down and work on the rewriting immediately but of course one can't do that when one is a hostess, so here I am on the bank holiday faced with a task that has grown cold overnight and instead of buckling down to rewriting, I am finding all sorts of displacement activities such as washing up and writing neglected blogs. I won't even deserve my cold porridge at the end of the day.

Peeling the e-onion

As part of my presidential duties for Leicester Writers' Club, in conjunction with Creative Leicestershire, I am trying to organise a panel discussion on e-publishing, with the focus on mono-media ebooks that may or may not be published alongside their paper back counterparts. I would have preferred a discussion on multimedia productions for tablets but realised that is a subject too large for a single evening.

For this event I wanted an e-novelist, an epoet, an elibrarian and a British epublisher.

During the past fortnight I have wasted a great deal of time trying to find a British e-publisher, i.e. a firm that selects and edits mono-media books for free, publishes them online, markets them, takes the profits and pays the authors a small royalty.

I thought the task would be easy - I would just have to put the words British epublisher or perhaps UK epublisher into Google and up would pop a list. I would then be able to trawl through it, and send out an invitation to the firm I thought most idealistic, most successful and/or most local.

The first obstacle I came across was that the word epublisher often refers to a piece of software enabling authors to format their works; the second, authors who use that software to upload their books are often called epublishers .

After filtering out both software and software users I found lists of firms who claimed to epublish authors' work.

Most firms turned out to be ones offering commercial assistance to self-publishers, where authors pay for services like copy editing, formatting, marketing. Many of the firms also offered to produce a limited run of paper copies in conjunction with each eformat book.

Having paid the firm to produce the books and ebooks, the authors then takes all profits from sales, except where they sell their work through e-retail shops such as Amazon, ibooks or kobo, when they have to pay the retailers a percentage of the sale price.

Once I'd filtered out firms enabling self-publishing, I was left with lists of firms claiming to publish authors' works and to pay royalties.

A few of these firms turned out to be vanity publishing, basically firms retaining the copyright but asking authors to pay a contribution to publishing costs and offering small royalties on the sales. They tended to employ a good measure of flattery to make authors feel as if they were being published by a reputable firm who admired their work. Often these ' author contributions ' were higher than the charges made by genuine self-publishing firms.

I filtered the vanity publishers out to leave the firms that offered to publish for free and pay royalties. However I discovered that although I had included the word British in my Google search the lists did not consist of British epublishers. Most epublishers' websites gave no indication of the owners physical location. I only found out after contacting them, that the firms were based either in the States or in Canada. Admittedly this wouldn't make much difference to an author publishing an ebook but makes an awful lot of difference for someone wanting to bring a member of a publishing team to Welligton Street on March 22nd to take part in a panel discussion.

Having trawled through the lists without finding a single reputable British firm I feel as if I have finished peeling an onion and have found nothing at the centre.

Have I overlooked an obvious text-only only British epublisher because all along I wanted to be looking for a multi-media proponent or are there no real British epublishers in existence?

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.