In which I acquire twenty-five books

I went to the Christian Aid book sale in May with a long wish list. I took home twenty-five books, only two of which were on the list …

A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear

Maisie Dobbs is a private investigator. Love this series which begins just after the end of WW1.

A Quiet Year by Derk Tangye

Heard an interesting radio programme about him the other week

Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty

Was on wish list; the reviews have been brilliant

At Times Like This by Catherine Dunne

Irish writer; haven’t read her before

Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

I blogged about Geraldine Brooks here. This one is set in Martha’s Vineyard in 1650.

Cross Country with Grandma by Karen Testa

Great title

Dear Life by Alice Munro

After reading The View from Castle Rock I’m looking forward to this

Every Contact Leaves a Trace by Elanor Dymot

Sounds very intriguing

Girls will be Girls by Arthur Marshall

Arthur reviews girls’ school stories and other titles in his own hilarious way. The other title I’ve read of his was called Giggling in the Shrubbery.

Homeland and other stories by Barbara Kingsolver

Love Barbara Kingsolver’s novels and essays but have never read her short stories

If Morning Ever Comes by Anne Tyler

One of my favourite authors

Night Music by Jojo Moyes

Always good for a page turner

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Yipee, another Geraldine Brooks – this time set in Vienna in World War II

Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld

Was on wish list; have loved her other books

Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves

For when I feel like a spot of crime

The Aloha Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini

Anything with patchwork quilts catches my eye

The Beginners Goodbye by Anne Tyler

An Anne Tyler I haven’t read; what a treat

My Antonia by Willa Cather

First published 1918; set in the American West

The Hour Before Dawn by Sara MacDonald

A family mystery set in New Zealand

The House at Sea’s End by Elly Griffiths

More crime. Hope I like it as I see there are other titles with the same main character.

The Long Weekend by Victoria Henry

And a long book to get lost in

The Red House by Mark Haddon

Have started this one; don’t care much for the characters but his writing is stunning

True Grit by Charlie Ports

Loved both the 2010 version of the film and the John Wayne original so will be interested to see how they compare with the book

When the Children come Home by Julie Summers

Non-fiction, about children who were evacuated in WW2

Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell

A lovely Virago edition

Plus five girls’ annuals for my collection including one printed in 1948 when paper was still rationed. The board cover is counted as page 1.

I think that will keep me going in reading material for a little while. Have you read any of the titles above?

Six in April

I read six books in April.

The Physic Garden by Catherine Czerkawska, published by Saraband. Set in Glasgow in the 19th century. Young gardener William Lang forms an unlikely friendship with botanist Dr Thomas Brown while working in the university physic garden. Around them, City life is never short of drama: poverty and pollution preys on all but the lucky few and resurrection men prowl the streets to procure corpses for anatomists to experiment on. Atmospheric, full of fascinating historical detail, but above all a great story.

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. I first heard of Geraldine Brooks (Australian-born and now living in the States) when she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 with March, the story of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy’s father while he is away as a chaplain on the front line in the American Civil War, which also tells us something of his early life and how he met and married Marmee. March is faithful to the spirit of Little Women while being very much its own self and is one of my very favourite books.

So I was keen to read something else by this author and her first novel (2001) Year of Wonders did not disappoint. It is set in a different century and country from March and is based on a true story, as it is set in 1666, in Derbyshire, when the Great Plague reached Eyam and the decision was taken by the villagers to isolate themselves to prevent its further spread. Events are seen through the eyes of an eighteen-year-old widow, Anna. No less a person than Hilary Mantel said of it ‘It has a vivid imaginative truth, and is beautifully written.’ With which I can only agree and urge you to seek out Geraldine Brooks right now.

Take My Breath Away by Sally Quilford. My Weekly Pocket Novel: a murder mystery on the set of a remake of the film Cleopatra.

Treasures: What do we treasure most? published by Scottish Book Trust to celebrate Scottish Book Week 2013. Contributions from some famous folk eg Richard Holloway, Mairi Hedderwick, Denise Mina and John Barrowman, plus a host of others, ‘these items tell the stories of the people of Scotland’.

Truly, Madly, Deeply, an anthology of stories by members of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, some huge best sellers such as Katie Fforde and Adele Parks, others at various stages of their writing career. Many different settings and eras – I particularly liked the Indian setting of the stories by Jenny Harper (The Eighth Promise) and Louise Allen (Head over Heart). Other favourites were a contemporary story that harked back to ‘Summer '43’ by India Grey, and a contemporary story set in London, The Fundamental Things by Heidi Rice – lots of good reading here. I got the e-version which has eleven more stories than the paperback.

The Hundred-Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson – a good yarn and, along the way, a look at the history of the 20th century as our unlikely hero inadvertently meets President Roosvelt, Mao Tse-tung, Stalin and de Gaulle amongst others. A note on the front of the book says it is soon to be a ‘major motion picture’ – whether this refers to the one made in Sweden which came out at the end of last year I don’t know; it sounds as if a Hollywood one is in the offing too maybe. Very cinematically written so I feel as if I have seen the film already.

My Writing Process Blog Tour

Thank you to Juliet Greenwood for tagging me in the My Writing Process blog tour. See Juliet’s post here (and check out her two terrific books Eden’s Garden and We That Are Left).

I’ve been on this tour before here. I enjoyed it first time round and have come up with some different answers this time.

1) What am I working on?

(a) A new serial for The People’s Friend – currently writing Instalment 5.

(b) Three short stories in various stages of completion. One to be aimed at The People’s Friend and two for general competitions.

(c) One novella, two-thirds of the way through.

(d) Bits of a longer novel.

I’ve started so I’ll finish … I hope.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I write ‘women’s fiction’. I also write more generally eg I had a story called Hattie in New Writing Scotland a few years ago which was a kind of stream-of-consciousness from an elderly man with dementia. Was he imagining his mis-treatment at the hands of one of his carers or not?

Another World in the anthology Work (the short-listed stories for the Scotsman/Orange Short Story Award in 2006) was about a Gulf War veteran recuperating in the Highlands.

So I like to think that I’m versatile. I enjoy doing both types of story but I concentrate largely on women’s fiction because, frankly, it’s more sellable.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I’ll answer the question twice.

Why do I write?

I write because I love words, because I love stories. I write because I can create people and (mostly) make them do what I want …

Why do I write what I do?

Because I can.

4) How does my writing process work?

I am the world’s best procrastinator, looking at each email as it pings in, checking Facebook, daydreaming about potential writing projects, reading other people’s writing. So to discipline myself I’ve started setting a timer (an online one http://www.online-stopwatch.com/countdown-timer/) for twenty-five minutes and forcing myself to type without editing for that time. Five minutes off, and then set it again.

Many of my stories have started from prompts in the creative writing class I’ve been going to for the last ten years.

And inspiration is all around in everyday life – for me usually in the form of a setting or situation eg a university open day, mature lady having swimming lessons, holiday cottage, guests at a wedding table …

I can’t keep up with the material in the ‘Story bits’ file on my computer: currently 142 first few paragraphs waiting to be pumped into life. Not to mention the other files: 56 one-line entries in a ‘Character file’; 23 one-line entries in ‘Settings’; 199 one/two-line ‘Ideas’ and 49 ‘Titles’.

To use them up perhaps I could take a handful of ‘story bits’ and put them together in one story. Or maybe I should have a rummage sale and offload some of them. Any offers?

I’m passing the Writing Process baton on to Anne Stenhouse. Anne is an Edinburgh-based award-winning playwright and Regency novelist – in the last year Mariah’s Marriage and Bella’s Betrothal have been published by MuseItUp. Read about her Writing Process here.

Recycling words 2: Haymaking

After turning one poem into a story and having it accepted I delved into the poem file on my laptop to see what else could give me a ready-made character or plot. The obvious one actually had a name as a title – Cousin Hugh.

Originally written as my entry for the Edinburgh Writers’ Club’ poetry competition on the theme of Homecoming, the poem won the inaugural Stirling Book Festival Poetry Prize in 2010. I took it as a compliment when the judge expressed surprise on meeting me – she thought I’d be a man – and that she was disappointed when I told her that it was all made up and there was no such person as Cousin Hugh.

Cousin Hugh

His car was red. So was his hair,

the sandy crinkled mass of it

above brows bleached

by Californian sun.

The hair was his calling card:

there was no doubt he was one of us.

Yet when he smiled his Californian smile,

drawled, ‘So good to see ya,’

he was the familiar spun with adventure –

an authentic echo of the family genes.

We boys examined the car – hired,

but exciting compared to our truck

and old Massey-Ferguson;

we stared to see our stern father

throw his arms around his brother’s son.

Hugh proudly introduced his wife.

Shirley, tossing corn-coloured curls,

pronounced Scotland ‘quaint’, our house ‘cute’,

until she saw the bathroom:

‘No shower? Oh my.’

Later she refused Mother’s crowdie with a shudder.

Hugh hunkered down next morning,

for a handful of earth

his father might have walked on;

he rolled his sleeves to show the

family freckles; he told us

of soda fountains, Death Valley

and drive-in movies.

We showed him how to milk the cow

and stack sheaves.

Shirley pouted, painted her nails,

said cookies back home were the size of saucers.

As we waved them away down the track

Father passed his arm over his eyes –

‘Darn dust,’ – and went off to the field.

Mother said, ‘I doubt she’ll be back.’

I hope it is apparent in the poem that the place is a farm in the Scottish Highlands and the time is around the late fifties/early sixties. In the story version I was able to expand on that. The poem is written from the point of view of a young boy and I stuck with that for the prose version.

I realised though that, while I was brought up on a farm in that era, my ignorance of farming tasks is woeful. (I could occasionally be coerced to help gather sheep, open and shut gates, or take tea down to the harvest field but I preferred, up a tree in summer or hugging the Rayburn in winter, to sit and read.) My young male narrator, on a small family farm, would be put to work and I wanted the details to be authentic. Luckily there are lots of farmers in my family and, when appealed to, a cousin wrote me a lovely piece on how a haystack was made. I hope I have done him justice in my interpretation of it.

 (Many thanks to Anthony Barker and Kirkby Fleetham Parish Council for permission to use this lovely photograph.)

 

I enjoyed working on the back-story – finding out what took Cousin Hugh’s father to the US – and having more space to show Hugh’s fish-out-of-water American wife.

 

I finished 3000 words, edited them, sat on them, re-edited and then waved them off in the post for a competition as the deadline was upon me.

Then I submitted the story to the critique group that I belong to with three writing friends.

They all came separately to the conclusion that the theme was not clear. Whereas the poem, as its punchline shows, was about Hugh’s wife not sharing her new husband’s enthusiasm for his native land, the story focused more on the previous generation and how farms are inherited. However, I’d worked towards the same last line and so my critics thought that the story didn’t hang together as well as it might. They were right.

So it’s back to the writing desk. And I’m thinking now, hmm, maybe there are actually several stories, each with a different theme, to get out of the poem … and perhaps versions from the points of view of the other characters – Mother, Father, Shirley, Cousin Hugh himself ...

Gulp. It’s beginning to sound like a novel.

Meeting my Main Character blog hop

Thank you Rachael Thomas for tagging me in Meeting My Main Character blog hop. You can read about Rachael’s' leading lady here; and about Anne Stenhouse’s here.

What is the name of my main character? Is she real or fictitious?

She’s called Cathryn Fenton and she is fictitious – which is a shame because I think we’d get on.

When and where is the story set?

The story is contemporary and is set in the Highlands of Scotland, as far north-west as you can go.

What should we know about her?

She’s originally from Cornwall; she’s an archaeologist investigating a possible Viking settlement; she’s just split up from her boyfriend, Daniel.

What is the main conflict? What messes up her life?

Cathryn is upset about the break-up with Daniel but the Viking dig and her new surroundings are a distraction, as is Canadian documentary-maker Magnus Macaskill who is lodging with the same family as herself. When Daniel turns up in Farrshore she doesn’t know whether he genuinely wants to get back together with her or if he thinks Magnus can help his fledgling TV career.

What is Cathryn’s goal?

Cathryn is a modern leading lady – she wants to be successful in her career and happy in a relationship. And she’d like to learn to ceilidh dance …

What is the book’s title?

 It’s called The Family at Farrshore. It was originally published as a People’s Friend serial and is now a large-print book available in libraries – 581 people borrowed it last year. If you were one of them I hope you enjoyed it! Look out for my new serial coming later this year, if all goes according to plan.

 Soon to introduce their main characters are:

Celia J Anderson

Celia lives in Derbyshire where she is an acting assistant head teacher and writes for both adults and children. Her first novel Sweet Proposal was published by Piatkus last year and has just been short-listed for the Joan Hessayon Award. See her blog here and meet her main character.

Cara Cooper

Meet Cara's main character here. Cara writes short stories, serials and novellas for The People’s Friend and My Weekly and she also blogs at thepocketeers.blogspot.comhttp://thepocketeers.blogspot.co.uk/.

Recycling words 1: Online dating

 I don’t think it helps to save the planet … but I recycle/upcycle stories frequently. If they are rejected by one magazine, I send them to another, first making some alterations to the tone, and adding to /subtracting from the length if necessary.

Then there are the stories deep in the bowels of the laptop hanging their heads in shame having been rejected by everybody. They can be fished out, ripped to shreds, the usable bits saved and built up again.

Recently I have recycled in a different way, in that I’ve used words I put together in one form and reshaped them for another.

In an earlier post I published a poem of mine called Choosing a Man from the Lakeland Catalogue. It’s one of the poems I take along when asked to do a poetry reading and it struck me rather belatedly the other month that some of its phrases could be used in a story. So I came up with a character – Patsy, widowed, over 50 and looking for love, trying to fill in her requirements on an online dating questionnaire. It was published in The People’s Friend in January under the title Meet Your Match.

Result! So I had a look at other poems to see what else might re-emerge as prose. I came up with one and will relate how it turned out in a forthcoming post.

Given that all this has been on my mind I was very interested to read in Avril Joy’s recently published (and highly recommended) To Writers with Love that her Costa-Award-winning short story Millie and Bird began life as a poem.

Have you ever thought about turning a poem into a story? Or, now I come to think about it, vice versa?

Eleanor Catton

Last week, 11 April, Eleanor Catton was a guest of Edinburgh University at an event in which she discussed her book The Luminaries with EU writer-in-residence Jennie Fagan. The Luminaries won the Man Booker Prize last year and at twenty-eight Eleanor Catton is its youngest recipient. She was born in Canada and moved to New Zealand, where she still lives, when she was nine. So this was a rare opportunity to hear her speak and to buy a copy of the book and get it signed.

It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes.

Despite having achieved so much at such a tender age, Eleanor Catton was charming and modest. Her ambition for the book, in terms of how she would tell the story, was huge. She worked out the complicated structure in advance, determined to stick to it – plot and structure, she said, are sometimes uneasy bedfellows and plot usually wins.

Her structure includes using the signs of the Zodiac to delineate each character – she is fascinated by astrology which she came to through studying psychology.

She thinks of plot as ‘pass the poison’ – five people, a cup of poison, you have to keep track of who’s got it.

It seems to her that modern novels in the genre of ‘literary fiction’ tell what happened in the aftermath of a tragedy, or just before a tragedy –  and that it was ‘no fun’ being the ‘inert waters in between’.

She still loves reading children’s and YA fiction. Her mother was a children’s librarian and EC read her way through the library. (Willard Price, Hugh Lofting and Avi (pen-name of Edward Irving Wortis) were early favourites.)

In fiction for young readers, she said, the author puts the reader first and sets out to entertain them and, avoiding the ‘inert waters’, this is what she wanted to do for adults.

She also wanted to produce a big 19th-century-style novel for the 21st century. (The Luminaries is 832pp.) Nineteenth-century novels were never in the first person nor the present tense which seems to EC to be a double limitation writers put on themselves now (although she cited The Hunger Games as a successful exception).

Nineteenth-century authors were not afraid to ‘play God’ and use the omniscient, third-person point of view, rarely used today. However, these novels were aimed at the establishment – white, western/northern hemisphere and educated. They would, for example, have quotes in French and Italian in the expectation that the reader would have learned these languages. These novels did not take any account of young nor coloured nor antipodean readers.

Her novel has quotes in Maori and Cantonese. She has been criticised for not adding a glossary but, true to the style of the 19th century novelist, she didn’t want to do that.

She takes creative writing classes at home in New Zealand. She has no truck, she said, with ‘finding/not finding your voice’. A book will have its own urgency, its own voice.

At question time she was asked about creative writing courses, in particular the one she herself attended at the University of Iowa. She said that as in all teaching there were good and bad ways of doing it. She’d resisted a tutor’s attempt to get her to write more like Raymond Carver. 

The course’s main benefit for her, she concluded, was making friends – soul mates – other people who were happy to discuss eg the omniscient third point-of-view into the small hours.

I am looking forward to reading it.