writing

Elephants are wonderful creatures to write about. It’s partly their strange, improbable appearance – those flapping ears, the piggy eyes, the ropey little tail, that twirling, muscular trunk – and partly their vast, mysterious, complex intelligence. They have paradoxical qualities: they’re big and heavy, but can move lightly and delicately; they’re very strong, but also very gentle and tender. They exhibit something like the same range and depth of emotions as humans: rage, greed, jealousy, hatred, impatience, curiosity, love. Some elephants have exuberant, extrovert personalities; some are shy and reflective. In other ways, they are unlike humans: the differences are perhaps as interesting as the similarities.

‘The Elephant Keeper’ is set in late 18^th century England. Zoos did not exist, and there were scarcely any elephants in the country. Animals were generally seen as unthinking and unfeeling, though attitudes were changing: a few enlightened people had begun to ask challenging questions. The most intriguing question, and one that the novel raises, is this: what would it be like to be an elephant? What would it be like to slip into an elephant’s mind, to become an elephant? How would one perceive the world?

Much the same questions, of course, could be asked of any historical character. What did it feel like to live in the 18^th century? But ‘The Elephant Keeper’ isn’t a straightforward historical novel; it’s as much fantasy as history. When I wonder why I wrote it, I think of real elephants but I also remember how, as a little boy living in suburbia, I used to fantasise about zoo animals roaming the English countryside, and how in my bedroom I had a long procession of carved wooden elephants which were the last things I saw each night before closing my eyes to sleep.

… or ‘how to write badly well.’

I spent four years of my life studying creative writing at university, but I would probably have been better off banking the loan and reading this blog.  On it, blogger Joel Stickley offers some very funny examples of all too familiar writing faux pas. My favourite:

Use as many adjectives as you can

He slowly walked the slow, winding path towards the crooked, run-down old house. With one slow, hesitant hand he bravely, resolutely knocked on the dusty, pock-marked, ancient and frightening door. Slowly, it opened slowly. He slowly poked his brave head through the narrow, foreboding gap.

‘Hello?’ he slowly said, bravely.

Just then, suddenly (yet strangely slowly), a terrifying, scary, bone-chilling, face-tingling, stupefyingly mortifying and stultifying, yet oddly inconsequential and subtly fragrant, big, massive, enormous multi-hued, monochrome monstrosity of epic, legendary, massive, indescribable proportions burst thunderingly from the shadowy, ill-defined, hazy, portentous, generically appropriate yet obviously underdeveloped and self-evidently over-described dark, dark darkness.

‘RAAAAAAH!’ it said.

As an aside, ‘pock-marked’ is definitely one of the most over-used adjectives I came across during that time. Weird. Maybe something to do with the angsty adolescent zeitgeist that pursues student writers like ectoplasm. By calling a door, chair, table, tree etc pock-marked we were all under the misapprehension that this imbued the object with some tortured emo character.

Thanks for the spot, Tom.

Well, it’s been an exciting few months since we launched our anonymous anniversary publication, the ANONthology, and asked you to guess who wrote what.

Since then, the ANONthology has been read over 10,000  times. We have in part to thank this brilliant plug on Springwise.com for the wave of recent digital attention.

The competition is now closed and the time has come to reveal the authors. We’ll be doing this right here, week by week, starting today with piece one: ‘Do’.  In fact, not only will we reveal the author’s name but also provide the full text of the story, for you to read at leisure. Look out for the next post when the author is revealed…

To celebrate the paperback publication of her new collection of stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, Orange Prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks to FifthEstate about what inspires her to write, the fateful coincidence of her childhood house and the books that changed the whole direction of her fiction.

It has also just been announced that Chimamanda is on the shortlist for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; winner to be announced Monday 30th November. Congrats Chimamanda!

The copyright of all the pictures in this piece is retained by the illustrator Phyllida Law © 2009

Annie. Otherwise known as ‘Gran.’ Phyllida’s mother-in-law. She is forced to move in after her daughter, whom she had lived with previously, absconds to Cornwall with ‘a beautiful young man.’  Has been getting increasingly ‘Mutt and Jeff’ of late.

Phyllida. Annie’s daughter-in-law. The author of the notes to Annie that explain what’s going on, and the author (and illustrator) of the book.

Mother. Phyllida’s mother. Has changed to enamel pots because she thinks aluminium pots create poisonous chemicals, and ‘that’s what’s the matter with uncle Arthur.’

Uncle Arthur.  Doesn’t like All Bran. Keeps a hammer in his bedroom to smash his pills into little bits.

Dad. Phyllida’s husband and Annie’s son. Likes to go golfing. Also known as Eric Thompson, writer and narrator of the Magic Roundabout.

Granny. Phyllida’s maternal grandmother. A ‘frightful bigot.’ She used to wear black garters on her green bloomers – ‘an unfortunate green, that seemed to glow in the dark.’

Mr Parnes. Responsible for the hearing aid that Annie has to have fitted, much to her discomfort. Ex-RAF.

Mrs Keith. An elderly friend of the family. Mrs Keith was like something ‘out of Dickens.’ When a bizarre foreign bird arrives in her husband’s warehouse, she knits it a woolen body stocking.

Boot. The cat. Is sick quite a lot. Especially when over indulging on spiders.

Emma and Sophie. Phyllida’s two children.

To find out more about Phyllida’s fasinating family life, why not read this article on the Guardian website.

I Know This Much is the upcoming autobiography from Gary Kemp, guitarist of Spandau Ballet. In his wonderfully written memoir, Gary not only tells the story of the band, but also evokes the atmosphere of a colourfull and provocative time period: the 1980s. Check out this great film of Gary discussing his book and reading selected passages:

I Know This Much: from Soho to Spandau will be released on September 3rd. It is published by Fourth Estate.

‘All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels’ - Leonard Cohen

‘The news is sad but it’s in a song so it’s not so bad’ – from The Favourite Game

In his short story ‘Career Move’, Martin Amis created a kind of alternative version of our universe — one that wasn’t so much parallel per se as just enjoyably wonky. Here poets are fêted as superstars. Forever jetting off for meetings in Hollywood, versifiers have the arduous task of dealing with adoration, good lunches and vast sales figures. Screenwriters in the ‘Career Move’ realm, meanwhile, toil in abject obscurity. Their efforts are published to little acclaim in small and largely unread magazines.

Swap pop stars for screenwriters, and we have a tale that, in a way, is curiously apposite to the career of Leonard Cohen. The Favourite Game, though widely reviewed, sold only a thousand or so copies when it was first published in 1963. And part of what persuaded Cohen to throw his lot in with music three years later, which he has admitted in hindsight seems ‘mad’ and ‘a very foolish strategy’, was an attempt to address an ‘economic crisis’. Poetry and fiction, his vocations until then, were simply not bringing in enough money for Cohen to survive on. From this position, it is fascinating, if facile and, of course, ultimately futile, to wonder what would have happened had this novel been a bestseller. A world without that voice, those songs surely is almost as unimaginable to many of us as, perhaps sadly, a planet where poets always fly first class. Equally, almost everyone coming to this novel today is armed with an idea of Cohen as a singer-songwriter. The book’s original readers knew Cohen, if at all, as a poet.

In the absence of a bout of amnesia or some sort of weird mind-wiping device, we can’t, obviously, unlearn what we know about Cohen. Or think we know, at least. Naturally this novel should, as it really deserves, be read as a freestanding, brilliant and inventive work of fiction in its own right. It is, however, also unavoidably a key and irremovable piece in the continuum of Cohen’s art. One that contains certain themes — the allure of the sacred and the profane, and the pain of love and loss, in particular — that admirers of his songs can immediately recognize. Its genre too — fictionalized autobiography — after all, also forms the basis of his musical output. In fact, the distinctions between Cohen the songsmith and Cohen the wordsmith all but dissolve the closer one looks.

Cohen was born and raised in Montreal’s affluent Westmount district. Cohen drew a fictionalized portrait of his formative years in his debut novel. His father, Nathan, died prematurely when Cohen was just nine years old. The young Cohen paid tribute to his father by burying in the garden a note to the dead man, slipped inside an old bow tie. He has said that composing this message, a few lines of verse, was his ‘first experience … with that kind of heightened language that [he] later recognized as poetry’.

The Cohens were observant Jews involved in the garment business. Leonard’s maternal grandfather was the rabbi Solomon Klein. Klein had compiled a thesaurus of Talmudical interpretations and played an important role in Cohen’s education, taking him to the library and instilling in him a love of the traditions and language of the faith. (During the 1990s when Cohen entered a Buddhist retreat and was finally confirmed as a monk, he stated that he wasn’t ‘looking for a new religion’ but was ‘quite happy with the old one, with Judaism’.)

This did not, however, preclude the young Cohen from accompanying his Irish nanny on her visits to the Catholic churches that are such a feature of Montreal’s architecture. These, too, would leave an indelible mark on Cohen’s creative imagination. While certainly chronicling an encounter with a friend who served him Constant Comment tea in her riverside loft, the song ‘Suzanne’, for example, actually offers an elliptical portrait of Montreal. The fusion of religious and nautical imagery in the lyrics was directly inspired by Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, the sailors’ church in the city harbour. ‘I have to keep coming back to Montreal,’ Cohen once observed, ‘to renew my neurotic affiliations.’

By the time Cohen entered McGill University in 1951, he had discovered the poetry of Federico García Lorca and was playing the guitar. He would go on to name his daughter after the Spanish poet and set his own translation of Lorca’s poem ‘Pequeño vals vienés’ to music with ‘Take this Waltz’.

At McGill, he formed a country and western band called The Buckskin Boys who played at college dances and functions. Living during this period ‘beside jukeboxes’, Cohen was also writing verse in earnest, encouraged by his tutors, the Montreal poets Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. (They were men who Cohen credited with ‘acting in many ways’ as his absent father.)

Cohen’s first publication came in 1954, when ‘A Halloween Poem to Delight My Younger Friends’ appeared in CIV/n, a shortlived literary quarterly founded by Layton, Dudek and Aileen Collins. His debut collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in the McGill Poetry Series in 1956, the year Cohen left Montreal for New York and a postgraduate course at Columbia University.

Cohen’s stint at Columbia was relatively brief, but there he met fellow student Anne Sherman. An intelligent and liberal-minded brunette, Sherman would serve as a longstanding muse and provide the basis for the character Shell in The Favourite Game. His spell in New York coincided with the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Greenwich Village, Manhattan’s bohemian enclave, was then in its Beat movement heyday. At the Village Vanguard, Cohen caught Jack Kerouac, whose epoch-defining novel On the Road remained unpublished at that point, reciting verse backed by a bebop jazz combo.

As Cohen has often stated since, music and writing were two activities that he himself had ‘never really separated’. His writing, he has maintained, ‘grew out [of an] interest in folk music and the lyrics of folk music’. And similarly, he has said: ‘I always felt there was an invisible guitar behind the prose writing that I’ve done and even the verse that I’ve done.’ Even in this early poetic period the guitar, or at least music, was not entirely invisible. Back in Montreal, Cohen often gave recitals accompanied by musicians at a jazz club in Dunn’s Steak House, an eatery famed for its ‘black radish with onions and chicken fat’.

While Cohen had already established his own poetic voice before exposure to the Beats, he shared many of their preoccupations and sensibilities. Although more generally associated with the 1960s, it was in the previous decade that antiestablishment ideas about sexual liberty, spiritual fulfilment, Eastern religions and the consciousness-improving possibilities of drugs took on a greater urgency for artists, intellectuals and writers. It was Beat writers such as Kerouac and Ginsberg, along, arguably, with J. D. Salinger, who helped to popularize Zen Buddhism in the West. And like Kerouac, whose parents were of French- Canadian extraction, Cohen took amphetamines to enhance his concentration and used hashish and opium in the intellectually questing spirit of Baudelaire or De Quincey. (Though they would also be used, along with wine, to stave off the depression that dogged Cohen for nearly half a century. More recently he has said of drugs: ‘The recreational, the obsessional and the pharmaceutical — I’ve tried them all. I would be enthusiastically promoting any one of them if they worked.’)

Cohen is, in many ways, much more a product of the 1950s — the era when Henry Miller’s Sexus and J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man were denounced as pornography — than of the countercultural maelstrom that came later. A few months older than Elvis Presley, he experienced the arrival of rock ’n’ roll not as a teenager, like, say, fellow Hank Williams fan Bob Dylan, but as a published poet in his twenties.

With a summer back in Montreal under his belt, writing and working as a counsellor at a youth camp where his duties included leading folk-singing sessions and teaching the kids to devise haiku, Cohen had his next collection, The Spice-Box of Earth, accepted by the prestigious Toronto house of McClelland & Stewart. An arts scholarship from the Canadian Council gave him the funds to travel, and so, in December 1959, Cohen headed to London with the aim of working on a novel. ‘I started to write novels because I couldn’t read other people’s,’ he claimed in 1970.

Though the book, an early draft of The Favourite Game, progressed well enough, Cohen found London drab and damp. The weather forced him to purchase what would be immortalized as the ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ from Burberry in Piccadilly. Another London shopping trip saw him acquire the green Olivetti typewriter that his poems, novels and lyrics were typed on for over twenty years — and which can be spied on the back cover of his Songs from a Room LP.

Wandering in the City, after a dental appointment in the East End, Cohen chanced upon a branch of the Bank of Greece. Entering it, he was greeted by a teller, who, in stark contrast to the rest of the financial district’s pasty-faced inhabitants, looked tanned and healthy. Learning that the man had just returned from Greece, Cohen booked himself a one-way ticket to Athens. From there he made his way to Hydra, an idyllic island that, while lacking electricity and telephones, boasted a lively community of expat artists and writers. (In due course, Cohen, who in September 1960 bought a house on Hydra, turned the eventual arrival of overhead cables on the island into ‘Bird on a Wire’.)

Among those who Cohen befriended there were the Norwegian novelist Axel Jansen and his girlfriend, Marianne Ihlen, a former model, and their son, Axel. When Jansen left, Cohen and Ihlen struck up a relationship that endured for a decade and whose dissolution was meditated upon in song.

Dividing his time between Hydra and Canada, where The Spice-Box of Earth had been published to enormous acclaim in 1961, Cohen’s literary star was on the rise. Although it went through several rounds of revisions before it was published, The Favourite Game was awarded the $4,000 Prix Littéraire du Québec in 1964.

The poetry collections Flowers for Hitler (1964) and Parasites of Heaven (1966) that followed would, however, prove more controversial as did his next — and to date last — novel, Beautiful Losers (1966).

Eschewing the largely autobiographical bent of his debut, Cohen had vowed to write a ‘liturgy … [a] big confessional oration, very crazy, but using all the techniques of the modern novel … pornography … suspense, humor and conventional plotting’.

The final novel would be preoccupied with sublime grace and redemption and its recurring motifs were those of submission, saintliness and suicide. Central to its freewheeling narrative was the historical figure of Catherine Tekakwitha, the Mohawk who became the first Native Canadian saint. Cohen later maintained: ‘She spoke to me … she embodied in her own life, in her own choices, many of the complex things that face us always.’

Cohen wrote most of the book sitting on the terrace of his house on Hydra, a portable Dansette record player with a copy of Ray Charles’s The Genius Sings the Blues LP on almost constant rotation, normally by his side. Consuming a heady dose of amphetamines, Cohen often tapped away for twelve hours at a time. Perhaps not surprisingly given this regimen, when he finished a draft of the novel in 1965, he ‘flipped out completely’ and, hallucinating for about a week, was hospitalized on the island.

A gust of wind later carried Cohen’s only copy of the manuscript into the Aegean Sea — fortunately his New York publisher had a carbon copy.

The novel, like its predecessor, went through several further drafts but when it was completed Cohen regarded it as the best thing he’d ever done. ‘It’s a technical masterpiece. It was written with blood,’ he said, not long after its publication and scarcely exaggerating. The novel, however, initially polarized opinions (see ‘Nothing But Raves’ ) and sold modestly. By now, Cohen was growing tired of his peripatetic, centcounting existence. Left with little in the bank, he contemplated a career in broadcasting before hatching the slightly unorthodox plan of solving his financial woes by moving to Nashville and becoming a country singer.

Heading initially to New York, Cohen wound up staying in the city for most of the next two years — and a good part of that lodging in the notorious Chelsea Hotel. Located at 222 West 23rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and counting Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Edie Sedgwick, Patti Smith and Sid Vicious as boarders at one point or another, the Chelsea in the late 1960s was the residential epicentre of New York’s artistic demi-monde. Cohen was the right man in the right place at the right time. While his attempts to woo Nico, the Velvet Underground’s icily Teutonic chanteuse, didn’t go quite so well, Cohen befriended the then-popular folk singer Judy Collins who recorded a version of ‘Suzanne’ for her album In My Life in 1966. And on 30 April 1967, Collins was performing at an anti-Vietnam concert in New York’s Town Hall. Collins had persuaded Cohen to appear. Shaking with fear, Cohen mounted the stage. His voice virtually a whisper, and his guitar audibly out of tune, he got halfway through the first verse of ‘Suzanne’ before stopping. Making his apologies, he fled. From the wings, however, he could hear the audience urging him to return. Collins gently ushered Cohen back into the limelight. Finishing ‘Suzanne’, he was met with rapturous applause. A pop star had just been born.

Leonard Cohen’s two novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, were reissued by Blue Door this July. The extraordinary and inimitable singer-songwriter’s classic novels are among his most critically acclaimed literary work, echoing the dark poetry and wry humour of his timeless songs of loss, love, sex and religion.

I recently attended my first ever writers’ conference as a speaker instead of a delegate. I was doing a workshop on the Friday night and the Sunday morning plus a dozen or so one-to-one’s with unpublished writers who were looking for feedback on their work on the Saturday. In the build up to the conference I flicked through the programme to see what the other speakers were up to and spotted an hour long lecture on the Saturday with the optimistic title, A Winning Strategy For Escaping The Slush-pile. Given the fact I spent nearly twenty years trying to escape one slush-pile after another I sniggered and wondered what poor sod had drawn the short straw for that one. I glanced at the speaker’s name and winced when I saw it was me. Three things struck me immediately: I had to talk for an hour (I hate talking); I had to talk about slush-piles (I hate slush-piles); I had to be positive (I’m not).

Still, though, the programme was printed, and I’d already submitted my invoice, so I went and fetched all the beer from the fridge and started to plan what to say. I decided to run through what a slush-pile is, the most accepted format of sending a submission in to one, the best places to get the names and addresses of agents and editors who might be accepting unsolicited submissions, and give out the names of all the agents who hadn’t rejected me out of hand between two and five years ago, when I was busy making submissions myself.

As per usual, I was a total nervous wreck when it came to giving my talk and garbled incoherently at everyone in front of me. If you were there, I apologise, and here’s what I was trying to say:

A slush-pile is the place where a publishing house or literary agent stacks all the unsolicited submissions they’ve been sent until someone can find the time to look through them, and, more often than not, reject them.

Some people have different ideas on the best format for a slush-pile submission. I always went with the following. Although I got plenty of rejections, I never had any negative comments about presentation or not knowing what I was doing; just a few saying I couldn’t write…

A covering letter to the editor or agent you’re sending in to. This letter should be in an accepted business letter format with your name and address, the editor or agent’s name and address, date, title of your novel, a little bit about your novel and the market/genre you see it sitting in, plus a little bit about you.

A title page, including your name and address, your novel’s title, and the word-count.

The first three chapters of your novel, double-spaced, with only one side of the page printed on, and each page containing your name, the title of your novel, plus the relevant page number in a header or footer. (If the first three chapters of your novel are massively long, I wouldn’t send any more than the first twenty pages; Broken didn’t have any chapters, so I sent the first seventeen pages whenever I submitted it to slush-piles).

A synopsis of your novel. This should be no longer than two pages long. If you can keep it to one page, all the better. Most people hate writing them and not many people are sure what makes a good synopsis, and I’m not confident either. I always went for the ‘blurb’ style approach that set the scenario rather than a hard and fast list of characters and events. Just do what seems right for you and your book, but keep it brief. Also, keep in mind that many agents and editors won’t look at the synopsis until they’ve read your opening chapters, so if your opening is fantastic, your synopsis might not be such a critical thing, and if your opening is useless, they’ll probably never read your synopsis anyway, so it’s best not to worry too much.

A stamped addressed envelope for your submission’s eventual return.

All of the above should be loose-leaf (no staples, no paper-clips, no fancy binders). Also, though this is just my personal opinion, your font should be very plain throughout, with no fancy borders for title pages, no gimmicky twenty-point capital letters for the first word of the first page, no changes in font colour, etc. The thinking behind this is that you want an editor or agent to read the start of your novel and, hopefully, get in touch with you and ask to see the rest. That is the only point of making a slush-pile submission, so the plainer and slicker your presentation is, the less chance there is they’ll be fed up with you before they’ve even got to page 1 of what you’ve sent in. With this in mind, my covering letter was always very short and I always put my synopsis at the back of my opening chapter. All I wanted to do was move the agent to the opening pages of my novel as quickly as possible; I told them as little as I could about myself and what I thought of the quality of my writing (for anyone who’s interested, the covering letter and synopsis I used when submitting Broken to slush-piles are posted at the foot of this article here.

Once your slush-pile submission is ready, the best place to get relevant names and addresses of where to send it is from either The Writers’ And Artists’ Yearbook or The Writers’ Handbook. Both are published annually and have thorough listings of agents and publishing houses, whether or not they accept unsolicited manuscripts, and what sort of markets and genres they are/are not interested in: Unless someone’s entry specifically said they weren’t interested in the markets I was writing for, I would submit to them. The only exception I made to this was to avoid anyone who charged a reading fee; there are more than enough people out there willing to reject you for nothing, so don’t feel obliged to pay for the privilege of being told you can’t write. Also, these days, there are plenty of internet sites that give out information on who’s accepting unsolicited submissions, plus the vast majority of agents and publishers have their own websites, and these tend to have thorough submission guidelines on them, plus who to send submissions to. This site here actually rates different agents on their submission record and seems really up to date and thorough, so you might want to check it out: http://www.litmatch.net.

One thing I began to do was multiple submissions. Many agents and editors believe you shouldn’t send in more than one slush-pile submission at a time, and I think that would be fair if we were guaranteed an answer within seven to ten days, but, in many cases, it’s seven to ten months, and, occasionally, the reply just never comes. Rather than waste five years submitting one novel, I always tried to make sure I had at least three submissions out there at a time; as soon as one came back, I sent a new one off to the next agent on my list.

Also, don’t forget sites such as www.authonomy.com and www.youwriteon.com, both of which are sort of automated slush-piles where writers rate each others’ submissions and the top-rated novels go through to editors for review. Harper Collins have recently published their first author in this way (The Reaper, by Stephen Dunne) and youwriteon.com has an established record for helping writers get into print. As well as giving you that all important chance of making a breakthrough, both also give you access to feedback on your work, plus the chance to comment on the work of other writers going through the same process, which can only be a good thing; critically reading other peoples’ work is, for me, one of the best ways to improve yourself as a writer.

Other than that, I didn’t garble about too much else, except I really tried to ram home the fact that a rejection on a slush-pile shouldn’t be taken as a sign that your novel is rubbish or that you can’t write. I think I’ve said elsewhere on this site that making a slush-pile submission is like entering a lottery that rarely pays out, but, like a lottery, if you don’t buy a ticket, you’re never going to win, and the more tickets you buy, the more chance you have of winning. I think this is where most of us fall down when it comes to slush-pile submissions. We’re too sporadic and we give up too easily. There were times when I went months without submitting my fiction to slush-piles, and there were a few novels where I gave up submitting after five or so rejections. Broken picked up well over thirty standard rejections before Curtis Brown offered representation, but I’d made up my mind I wasn’t going to stop submitting it until there was no one left in the UK to submit it to; irrespective of how many rejections I got, whether the feedback was good, bad, indifferent, I was determined to give it the best chance it could possibly have of ending up in front of the right person. In terms of a winning strategy, I genuinely believe this is the only one there is: If you think it’s good enough, don’t give up until your options are exhausted.

The only other thing I tried to do in my talk was convince people that there are agents and editors out there looking through their slush-piles for undiscovered talent. I’ve met plenty of unpublished writers in the past who don’t believe it’s the case, but I’ve always been lucky in that respect — although I’ve picked up a huge amount of rejections over the years, I’ve also had a few agents and editors ask to see an entire manuscript following a slush-pile submission. With that in mind, the following agents either asked to see the whole of one of my novels or said they would be interested in seeing something else of mine if it was written more specifically for the markets they represented:

Jane Conway-Gordon, Dinah Wiener, Luigi Bonomi, Christine Green, Peter Buckman (at The Ampersand Agency), Judith Chilcote, Sheil Land Associates, and, of course, Curtis Brown.

Good luck if you decide to approach them. If not, fingers crossed you’ll have success with editors and agents more suitable to the markets you’re writing for. 

Yesterday I lost the last of my mother’s legacy. Twenty-five pieces of china and glass; gone in an instant when the shelf on which they stood came crashing down. Shattered porcelain and shards of crystal filled the room. Blue and white and strangely beautiful in their broken form. Four generations of use no longer usable. An entire history vanished even as I stared. I had a train to catch and so, shutting the door to the kitchen, I left. Numb. Looking at the fields rushing past, seeing my own face reflected in the glass, an old forgotten love like music ran through my mind.

All these things happen in one second and last forever.

Perhaps it was when the crow knocked a plate off the table that I had first noticed the crack. Yes, that was it; in the year when I was three. In order to fix the date it is important to remember the images clearly. The line across the plate was so faint as to be hardly noticeable. Except we all saw it.

‘It will only get worse,’ the servant said, picking it up. ‘This plate has been weakened.’

That was what she said. Weakened. I ran my finger across the hairline. I remember the hand that rested on the painted butterflies on that plate; a hand smaller than the butterflies themselves. How old would I have been? Two? Three? There is no one to ask, not now.

‘Eat up the murunga,’ my mother told me, ladling the hot rice onto the pale green curry.

The crack was by now a fixture on the plate and in my mind. The light it seemed was ever green. Saturated with movement. Piercing, like gold. The weakened plate was packed along with all the others, lovingly, into a rosewood trunk. My father had been to the market to buy a bunch of Asian watercress which he then chopped up and mixed with a little coconut and chilli. It was his invention on an old theme. We ate off Wedgwood plates because my mother said we must have standards.

‘When all around you there is chaos, that’s the time to keep your standards.’

‘Your mother is a mad woman,’ my father said, but still, he too ate his last meal on one of these fragile plates.

I traced my finger across his face. My finger, I noticed, had become larger, his face slightly smaller. He was leaving the island in a few days time and seeing him sitting with his back to the light I registered how very handsome he was.

‘This meal is the best you’ve cooked,’ he told my mother. ‘Must be because of the plates we’re eating them on!’ he added, winking at me. ‘Better bring them with you, then!’

We were following him to England. I would not have borne it otherwise. My father was the centre of the universe. Dappled sunlight shone on china bowls, cups and saucers, blue and white and paper-thin. This was my world, along with the sea breeze and the sun-warmed veranda steps. The crow glinted evilly at us from the mango tree. He was watching the china. Waiting for his chance. When he opened his mouth to squawk, I saw all the way back into his beak. In the silence that followed, the servant threw away some empty coconut shells. They clattered hollowly, like skulls.

After my father left, when there was time on our hands for such things, we packed the china. It was a way of keeping busy and in any case no one wanted to buy it. So that it was just as easy to take it on this epic journey.

‘What do we want your china for, child?’ the neighbours asked. ‘Lanka House is making its own bone china.’

But my mother, I sensed, preferred the delicate blues and faded pinks of a bygone era. My mother was, even then, politically incorrect and what might be called, nationally lapsed. Beauty, she subsequently told me, when I hit adolescence, had no barriers.

So they were packed in soft straw that smelt of rulang. The crack in my favourite plate was still there but the plate itself appeared strong; my memories, not yet fixed as memories. And then, in a moment, unremarkable and languid, we left the tropics. Taking with us the sound of coconuts being scraped and voices rising and finally, somewhere along the shore, the sweet sad words of our National Anthem. That was that. And now those receptacles of memory are broken.

In London I had an appointment to meet my editor. It was an icy February day, flat and very grey, with nothing to recommend it. I sat waiting in the restaurant, my mind a dull, blank void. All around, through cracks in my consciousness I noticed a patchwork of starched white tablecloths moving in and out of focus. Old black-and-white photographs lined the walls. Above me were deep yellow stained-glass widows. Like crocuses. Winter struggled, as indeed I did. The air was filled with unfinished thoughts, insubstantial and obscure with no words to access them. And then, as I sat there, half in a dream, I caught a glimpse of my editor hurrying towards me through a reflection of glass and mirror and pale blue hyacinths. Bringing in a rush of outdoor air, smiling.

‘Here it is!’ she cried, handing me a copy of my finished book, Bone China. I had written in the dedication: In memory of my parents.

Forty years before, when we first arrived in England, we continued to eat off those china plates and drink out of delicate porcelain teacups. They reminded us of the people we had left behind. It made us closer to them; their lips were where ours were now, their hands merged into ours. But these were utensils from another world; a slower, languid life of bicycle bells and the sudden thud of a coconut in the grove outside. And then when the four o’clock flowers turned their magenta faces from the light, as the sun tilted in the sky, there was the sound of the sea. Endlessly turning; clearer always in the evening air.

‘Tea time,’ my mother would say.

‘Go and wash your hands.’ On the train coming in to London, an acquaintance, hearing how the china had broken, told me, ‘You must go and buy yourself some pretty old blue and white plates with the insurance money!’

I did not have the heart to tell her that bought china, however pretty, would not conjure up the bright magenta voice that called, ‘Tea time.’

I saw the way in which we must have travelled, hopefully, never knowing how things might turn out, or even that our past might be unrecoverable. We had crossed seven thousand miles, chased by monsoons, shedding the heat so carelessly, never understanding that these small tokens carried with us were insubstantial as air. For time itself had been the enemy, washing the years, bleaching our memories, fragmenting them until the china became simply a symbol of all we had lost. No more. The china, too, was no more.

We sat talking over lunch, my editor and I, about books. My book, the books we both loved, the writers we admired. The waiter poured water into huge goblets. Through the meniscus, I saw her soft wool coat. Light streamed in as in a Dutch painting. Water sparking in a clear glass on a winter’s day. It had taken a lifetime for my novel to surface. The connection between what lay broken in my kitchen and the book now in my hand was clear as the glass. The fugitive recesses of the everyday, hidden memories of a searing heat, a vanished life laid bare; through fiction. I had wanted to preserve the house in which I lived, the plates we had eaten off, the cups we once had drunk from, the touch of hands no longer alive. And I had failed. Memory could neither be contained nor made accessible by itself. The last cup of hill-country tea my mother poured out for my father, the blue-black glint of the crow’s eye, a ripe, plump mango as it fell with a green and fragrant thud, the mood of my polka-dot dress; all these things moved within me. China carried twice around the world, first with my great-grandfather on a sailing ship to Galle, and then with us back to England. The memories had collected like rainwater in a porcelain bowl, filling up the cracks, inaccessible and silent. We had not seen how mute they were. We had not noticed how much was held in these objects. We had seen them as heirlooms, beautiful things to be passed seamlessly down through the generations. Like exhibits in a museum, we had treasured them and then abandoned them to stand uselessly on a shelf.

‘Keep going,’ my editor said, as we stirred our coffee and the waiter, almost redundant now, poured out the last drops of water.

The scents of spring mixed with the coffee. Only in fiction was it possible to capture the fragmentary nature of memory.

‘It’s why I love it,’ she said, softly. ‘Good fiction mediates and shares, fixing what would otherwise be lost.’

Sitting in the restaurant, on an unremarkable February afternoon, watching the people come and go, I saw how it was that art could, by some strange, sweet, indefinable metamorphosis, quite literally preserve life.

This week’s extract comes from Jenni Mills’ pacy literary thriller, The Buried Circle. A gripping blend of fact and fiction, The Buried Circle is centered on the village of Avebury – one of the most mysterious places in the English countryside. Historically, Avebury has been a place well-known for its ancient standing stones, crop circles and burial mounds. In this compelling novel, we find that all is not as it seems in this sleepy country village…1942

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he says. The Insect King. ‘It’s only a mask.’

Eyes like a fly, elephant’s trunk that’s long, rubbery . . .

‘It’s only a mask,’ he says again.

‘I know it’s a mask,’ I says, braver than I feel. But there’s masks and masks. I’ve seen masks. I’ve seen what happens in the moonlight in the Manor gardens.

‘Frannie . . .’ It’s only a whisper, so I’m not sure if it came out of his mouth or out of my head. He’s at me now, pressing himself against me, and I’m feeling all the bits of him, long gropy fingers and the hard poky bits. There’s a glow in the sky, something burning near the railway yards, searchlights over Swindon, the banshee howl of the warning, and the anti-aircraft batteries have started up.

‘Take it off,’ he says.

‘The mask?’

‘Your fucking robe.’ At least, I think he says robe.

‘Coat.’

‘Whichever.’

‘A bit nippy for that.’ I’m trying to keep it calm, trying to be funny, pretend I’m in control, because this isn’t what I meant to happen. He gives me a push, quite hard, and I’m up against the stone. It’s cold against my back, like moonlight, and scratching at me like fingers through the thin material of my coat. There’s really nowhere to go now.

I would be afraid, but I won’t let myself. You can’t let them have everything. You can’t let them have your fear. You got to keep a bit of yourself. I’m going to put my bit where it’s safe, a long way away from here.

Beech trees, black against a silver sky. Somewhere else the real moonlight is pouring down. Bombers’ moon. A killing moon. Planes like fat blowflies trekking high above the Marlborough Downs. I take myself away, as far as I can, trying not to feel the burning down there, fingers, hands, other things, feels like there’s lots of them all at once, wanting a piece.

A voice whispering again, Frannie, Frannie. It’s terrible dark. There’s a smell of rubber, thick and choking. Hard to breathe. An awful slick, oily smell of rubber . . .

CHAPTER 1

Lammas, 2005

‘I don’t want to do it,’ I said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. The shots will be fantastic.You’ll love it.Unless you’d like us to use someone else on the series?’

The usual blackmail. If you’re experienced enough to do the job, you can say no. If you’re not quite twenty-five, and desperate to claw a foothold in television, you’ll do anything. I made one last pathetic attempt to get him to change his mind.‘Seriously, Steve, I’ve never filmed like this before. I’m not properly trained. If this was the BBC, the hazard-assessment form would have it flagged up as a major risk.’

‘There’s a harness, Indy. You’ll be strapped in.’

‘My legs’ll be dangling.’

‘What’s happened to your balls?’

‘My balls, if I had any, would be dangling too.’

 

So, my legs are dangling. My non-existent testicles are dangling. My bum, perched on the edge of the open helicopter door, has gone entirely numb. Below me is — well, if I were a proper cameraman I’d be better at judging these things, but I’d say a good six or seven hundred feet of nothing. Below that is hard Wiltshire chalk, with a skimpy dressing of ripening barley. The helicopter’s shadow races across it, a tiny black insect dwarfed by the bigger shadows of the clouds.

Steve, crouched behind me, taps me on the shoulder. I turn my head towards him, very, very carefully, in case even this simple movement unbalances me and I go tumbling out to become another shadow on the chalk. He’s saying something, but the wind and the noise of the rotors snatch his voice away. He makes cupping motions with his hands by his ears.

He wants me to put the earphones on so I can hear him — he’s wearing a set with a microphone attached. Like I have, too, only mine are round my neck and not on my ears yet, and to put them on I’m going to have to let go of my death-grip on the door frame.

With both hands.

I send a signal from brain to fingers to unprise themselves. Nothing happens. Fingers know better than brain what’s sensible. They’re going to stay firmly locked onto something solid, thank you very much, until someone hauls me back safely into the interior of the helicopter and there’s no more of this dangling.

Steve taps me on the shoulder again. Maybe if I try just one hand at a time?

My left thumb, fractionally more adventurous than the rest of my hand, comes free. Right. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Clear proof it is possible to move and not fall out of the helicopter. In fact, now my thumb’s no longer involved, the fingers are really not doing that much to secure me, so I might manage to let go altogether that side . . .

Very good, Indy, but one hand doesn’t seem to be much help getting the headset onto my ears. All I’ve achieved is to get my hair into my eyes. Should have tied it back more securely. The headset has knocked the pins outs. I can’t see. Perfect moment for the helicopter to bank and drop down towards Pewsey Vale.

Oh, God, I’m going to fall out . . .

Steve’s hands gripping my ribs, hot breath in my ear. ‘Let GO!’ he yells, practically rupturing my eardrum. The shock loosens the other hand. ‘I’ve GOT you.’ His arm snakes round my waist. ‘Now put the fucking headset on.’

‘OK.’ Not that he can hear me until I do. I could spout a stream of hangover-distilled vitriol and the wind would whip it straight out of my mouth into nowhere. ‘I hate you, you spotty little toilet-mouth. I despise the fact you walked straight out of a media-studies degree and into a job as a producer just because your father was a foreign correspondent for ITN, while I’ve had to spend two years hoovering the coke off the edit-suite floor. I loathe that you get to tell me what to do, although I’m the more experienced of the two of us and you’re far and away the biggest twerp I’ve yet met in my admittedly not extensive media career. In fact, right now, because you made me do this horrible, scary thing, I’d be delighted if you leaned over too far and tipped yourself out of the bloody aircraft.’

Of course, I never would say it, don’t really mean it (not all of it, anyway), but imagining it has made me feel a whole lot better. I fumble the headset off my neck and onto my ears, using it as a kind of Alice band to keep my hair off my face.

‘Everything OK back there?’ Ed, the pilot, his voice tinny through the earphones.

‘Marvellous.’

‘Fine.’ Steve and I speak at the same time, both of us lying through our gritted teeth. He wants Ed to think we bear some resemblance to a professional TV crew; I want the man I slept with last night not to notice I’m a gibbering wreck.

Steve — the man I didn’t sleep with — retracts his arm.

‘Comfortable now?’ Comfortable doesn’t seem to be in it, but I feel more secure, and can admit it would be pretty difficult to fall out. Tough webbing straps are digging into my shoulders. They join in a deep V at the waist, meeting the belt that circles my middle and the strap that comes up from the groin. I’m very glad indeed, now I come to think of it, that I don’t have testicles, though to be truthful, life would be less painful without breasts.Wrapped in layers against the wind chill, even though it’s August — a duvet jacket I borrowed from Ed over two fleeces, and thermal long johns under my jeans — I could still use more padding under the chafing straps.

‘Ready for the camera?’ asks Steve.

‘No.’

‘Look, you’d feel more balanced if you rested a foot on the strut. That’s what most cameramen do.’

‘Steve, I’m not most cameramen. I’m not six foot three. I’d have to be leaning right out of the helicopter for my leg to reach. You saw me try when we were still on the ground.’ I’m taller than scrawny little Steve, but that’s not enough — though it might have something to do with why we haven’t hit it off on this series. The main trouble is that Steve considers himself an expert. He’s been aerial filming more often than I have — which means he’s been out exactly once, and that must have been with a cameraman who had legs long enough to span the Severn Crossing.

‘Well, whatever.’ His real concern is how steady the shot will be.We both know we should have hired a footrest to screw to the helicopter’s landing skids, but it would have cost too much. ‘Now, can we please get a bloody move on? The budget only runs to two hours’ filming up here.’

Budget is, as usual, to blame for everything. The only job my limited experience (and lack of famous father — any father, for that matter) qualifies me for is assistant producer/researcher/camera/dogsbody at Cheapskate Productions, a.k.a. Mannix TV, who are making an entire series (working title: The Call of the Weird) on the televisual equivalent of about two and a half p. Today we are filming episode four, ‘Signs in the Fields’, which is about Wiltshire’s world-famous crop circles, after Stonehenge the county’s main tourist attraction. In fact, one year a farmer with crop circles in his field took more money from visitors than the ticket office at Stonehenge.

It took some doing to screw enough money for aerial filming out of the digital channel that commissioned the series, but crop circles can’t be fully appreciated from ground level. As it is, most of the programme will be made up of interviews in the back bar of the Barge Inn, on the Kennet and Avon canal and right in the heart of cropcircle country, with avid cerealogists, as crop-circle investigators are called. They will tell us (I know because as the series’ researcher I’ve already spent several hours listening to their theories) that only aliens could be responsible for such intricate and portentous patterns. It is simply not possible that such a primitive civilization as our own could have produced them. How could they have been made by humans? they ask, plaintively and rhetorically.

Well, I know the answer to that too. You need a thirty-foot surveyor’s tape, a smallish wooden plank, and a plastic lawn roller, obtainable from any good garden centre. I watched John do it, one moonlit May night in 1998, with a group of his friends who call themselves the Barley Collective. I was supposed to be the lookout but I was laughing so much that an alien mothership could have landed behind and I wouldn’t have noticed. The bizarre thing is that since people like John came out in the 1990s to admit they trample out the crop circles — gigantic art installations, the way John sees them — more people than ever have become convinced they can’t possibly be man-made. Apparently there’s a sociological term for it, John says, something to do with disconfirmation leading to strengthened belief, an idea that also lies at the heart of most religion. I gently put it to one of the cerealogists at the Barge that I’d seen it done, and he almost punched me.

Our time aloft this afternoon is limited, thank God, so limited I doubt we’ll achieve half of what Steve plans. He can’t afford to hire a proper cameraman — or a proper camera-mount, for that matter. Any minute now he’s going to thrust into my unwilling hands a DVC — digital video cam — secured only by a cat’s cradle of bungee cords. Financial constraints also dictated the choice of aircraft. We’re crammed into the back of a helicopter operated by 4XC, the CropCircleCruiseCompany, proprietor a wild Canadian called Luke, chief pilot his best friend Ed, with whom I made the enormous mistake of getting off with last night. Also in the helicopter are five paying passengers, three Americans and a Dutch couple, enjoying one of the aforementioned CropCircleCruises over Mystic Wiltshire. That way Steve hired flying time at a cheaper rate.

If I live, I’ll light a candle to the Goddess.

‘Crop circle coming up at two o’clock.’ Ed’s voice in the headphones. The helicopter lurches as three blond heads, a black ponytail and a bald spot all lean to the right to get a good look.

‘Jesus Christ, will you take the fucking camera off me, or we’ll miss it,’ snaps Steve, pushing the DVC in its sagging net towards me.

‘Relax,’ says Ed. ‘We’ll catch it on the way back.’ Almost as crazy as his friend Luke, who was drinking tequila shots last night in the pub, but fortunately more sober, and he seems to know what he’s doing. More than I can say for my esteemed director. For a moment I can feel sorry for Steve, trying to live up to his father, the famous name a curse tied to his inexperienced neck. I caught his expression while Ed and Luke were strapping me in, back on the ground. He looked like a little boy splashing in the bay, suddenly realizing that’s a big grey fin circling the lilo. Under other circumstances, this should have been fun, but he’s terrified we’ll fail to come back with any usable footage.

‘The best circles aren’t here, anyway, they’re at Alton Barnes,’ adds Ed, levelling the chopper. All I can see of him, if I twist in my harness, is the back of his neck, dark brown hair sticking out under his headset and over his collar. Hair into which I laced my fingers last night. I close my eyes with the embarrassment of it: what was I thinking? And if I’d known he was married . . . ‘I’m going to head north first, to fly over Avebury for these guys.’

My stomach lurches, my gut contracting with the scary falling feeling of coming home.

 

Avebury: state of mind as much as a landscape. The place my family came from, where my grandmother was born and brought up — until the old serpent entered Eden, as Frannie used to say. A place I never lived in, apart from a few weeks one long-ago summer, but entering the high banks that enclose stone circle and village has always felt, in some strange way, like coming home.

Below us, the summer fields are gold, ochre, tawny, separated by knotty threads of green hedgerow. I’m getting used to the dangling now; it’s almost — but only almost — exhilarating. We fly over the Kennet and Avon canal, a brown ribbon winding away into the afternoon heat haze, little matchbox barges meandering along it, while the helicopter gains height to rise over the escarpment. I can see the long, double-ridged scar of the Wansdyke, an ancient Saxon boundary, bisecting the Downs, then the land folds and drops away and already there’s the ridiculous pudding that is Silbury Hill jutting out of the fog in the distance, so unmistakably not a natural feature that you can understand why CropCircleCruiseCompany makes money out of people convinced it was plonked there by aliens.

I bring the camera viewfinder up to my eye, and Steve’s hand grips my shoulder, helping to steady me while I get used to the weight.

‘Looks fabulous on the monitor,’ comes his tinny voice, breathless with relief. ‘We couldn’t be luckier with the weather, could we? Shame about the haze — makes the horizon a bit murky.’

‘Can you give me a white balance?’ I say, and he leans over me, inhumanly unworried by the yawning void, holding a piece of white paper in front of the lens. I make a quick adjustment, set the focus to infinity, and film the ground like a gold and green carpet being pulled away beneath us. Slowly tilt up to reveal Silbury and the whole damn distant shebang, humps, bumps, ridges and secrets you can only see from above, fading into a wash of pale umber that then shades into an overhead blue so intense it hums. Through the lens, height, motion and scariness are pared down to beautiful. OK, I’m a bit ropy still on the technicals (did I remember to set the toggle switch to daylight?) but this is what I’m good at, composing a picture: colour, angle, geometry.

Euphoria unexpectedly fills me, and I can even admit the sex last night was good; not to be repeated, but maybe forgivable. Guilt sneaks back with the memory of his fingers strapping me into the harness, and I enjoyed that too — why do I get myself into these scrapes? I should have made it clear before breakfast: I don’t do married men, full stop, after a nasty experience with a tutor at college — but there wasn’t time for conversation.

The helicopter loses height as we fly towards West Kennet Long Barrow — ‘Just like a big vulva,’ says one of the passengers, the American woman, as I tilt down so it fills the frame — and then banks to the right, so my lovely shot ends abruptly in the clouds. I can hear the gnashing of Steve’s teeth because we’ve missed a close-up. We cross the A4 — ‘The old Roman road,’ calls Ed — and come over the green shoulder of the hill. A sigh comes out of me. There, at last, the first white tooth of the Avenue. I hadn’t even noticed I was holding my breath. The rotors are saying it: home, home, home. The image in the viewfinder is blurry, the wind pricking water into my eyes. England’s full of little exiles, and one of them happened at Avebury, for my grandmother, sixty-something years ago. One of them happened there for me, too, in 1989, so both of us were, in our own way, expelled from Eden.

Get in the van, Indy.

Now As far as blood relations go, Frannie is all I have. Grandfather, mystery man: not only did I never know him but neither did his daughter, born at the end of the Second World War after he was killed in action.Mother: well, best not to go there, but let’s just say she died, abroad, when I was in my early teens, having left me with my grandmother when I was eight. Father: itinerant Icelandic hippie my mother met in a backpacker’s hostel in Delhi, and never saw again. That was how I came to be called India. Could have been worse — Mum had been doing the world trip and I might have ended up with any name from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar.

We’re almost there, following the Avenue as it marches up the hillside. From above, the double row of stones looks tiny, but at ground level most are taller than a person. A single figure is walking between them, a dog racing ahead, then wheeling back to jump at the legs of its owner.

‘This must be the way they would pro-cess,’ comes a Dutch accent, female, in my headphones, separating the syllables. ‘Up from the Romans’ road, led by their priestess . . .’

Only a few thousand years out, not to mention one or two other errors, like there were no roads, unless you count the Ridgeway. And as for priestesses — well, I wouldn’t mind betting the boys were in charge back then, with the Neolithic equivalent of Steve leading the party. I swing the camera round — ‘Great shot,’ breathes Steve, watching the image on the monitor wedged behind the seats — and pan along the course of the reconstructed Avenue, as we approach the village.

If Silbury Hill is an upturned pudding through the camera lens, Avebury is a bowl, an almost perfect circle of grassy banks and a deep ditch, surrounding a vast incomplete ring of stones. Five thousand years or so ago, those banks would have been gleaming white chalk, enclosing an outer circle of more than a hundred megaliths, with two separate inner circles, north and south, and more scattered sarsens within.Half the stones are missing now, like rotted teeth, some replaced with concrete stumps. Two roads meet near the middle, cutting the circle into quarters, and the village straggles along the east—west axis, a scatter of cottages half in and half out of the circle.

‘This is Avebury,’ calls Ed, moving up a notch into archaeologicaltour- guide mode. He told me, last night, he’s doing a part-time MA in landscape archaeology with a view to getting into aerial survey. ‘Similar age to Stonehenge, but bigger — biggest stone circle in Europe.’

‘It’s like a giant crop circle, isn’t it?’ says one of the Americans. ‘D’ya think it coulda been, like, a signal to the aliens?’

Ed grunts in a way that could be roughly translated as For Chrissake, beam me up, Scotty. Down below, dots of colour between the stones mushroom into people as the camera zooms in. There’s a gathering over by Stone 78 — the Bonking Stone, so-called because it’s conveniently flat — probably a handfasting. Someone is beating a small drum, arms moving rhythmically and flamboyantly, the sound inaudible above the noise of the rotors. I zoom in further, but it isn’t John.

‘We’ll make a couple of circuits,’ says Ed. ‘I’ll go in as low as I can but the National Trust run the place and they don’t like us doing this. Ready? Hang onto your hats.’ The helicopter suddenly banks steeply, throwing me forward. The camera tries to tear itself out of my hands and I feel like I’m about to be diced by the webbing straps. There’s a dizzy glimpse of wheeling megaliths between my legs.

No. No. ‘Hold on. We can’t do this.’

‘Won’t take long, Indy. The Trust won’t have time to identify us. Tell ’em you bought the footage in. You and Steve can slo-mo the film and it’ll look gorgeous . . .’

I don’t care about the Trust or the fact we’re filming without a permit.We’re going round the circle widdershins. Anti-clockwise. The bad way.

Always respect the stones, girl. Sunwise, that’s the way you goes round the circle.

‘Can we go the other way?’

‘What?’

‘The other direction, I mean. Clockwise.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says Steve, witheringly. ‘You’re on the left side of the ’copter.We have to go anti-clockwise, or you’ll be pointing the camera at the fucking sky.’

He’s right, of course. And if I press the point Ed will think I’ve gone barmy. The passengers don’t seem to be concerned that we’re going widdershins.And they’re all probably right — what does it matter if we go the wrong way round?

Except — I never have.

Call me superstitious, but it’s the way I was brought up. Respect the stones, girl, they go sunwise, so should you . . .

 But, as with everything on this production, it seems I have no choice. Widdershins it is. I point the camera away from my dangling feet, and hit the record button.

 

The helicopter banks away as a dark green Land Rover with the National Trust’s acorn-and-oak-leaves logo on the side comes tearing up the Manor driveway. We managed three circuits and some great pictures, though I say it myself. Hard to go wrong, really, on a day like this — aerial shots always look fab and Ed takes the helicopter round at perfect height and speed.

‘Can we head back over Silbury again?’ asks Steve.

‘No way,’ says Ed, gaining height so rapidly that I’m becoming dizzy.

‘They’d follow along the road, and I don’t want them to identify the helicopter. Some of our work comes from the Trust and English Heritage. You’ve only got about fifty minutes left for the crop circles, anyway, unless you want to pay for another hour?’

‘Fifty minutes?’ squawks Steve. ‘We’ve been filming less than half an hour and I paid up front for two.’

‘Factor in fly-back and landing. Every minute we’re in the air counts.’

‘Oh, great. Now he tells me.’

You have to feel sorry for him. Under all that effing and blinding, Steve hasn’t a clue how the real world turns. He thinks people ought to feel honoured and privileged to be part of his amazing groundbreaking (ha ha) TV production. I ignore the bickering in my headset, and crane my head to look back at Avebury, disappearing behind us.

You’re like the rest of us, our kid, said John to me once, in his flat Brummie voice. Yo-yos. Once Avebury has hold of your string, you have to keep coming back. He’ll be in his cottage on the A4 below, smiling that twisted smile, crushing his roll-up in the ashtray. Look at Frannie. He’s right. After decades of exile, my grandmother sold up the terraced house in Chippenham, where I’d grown up with her, and moved back to Avebury. I thought she was mad. Not how John sees it.He knows why I do my damnedest to resist the pull of Avebury. Her life, Indy. Don’t fret. You need a massage. Or a healing. Drop in and I’ll do your feet.

The Marlborough Downs slide by beneath, a golden landscape sliced by chalky white trackways and dark green hedgerows. Pale grey sarsen stones lie in drifts like grubby sheep. High as we are, the camera lens makes the ground look close enough to tap with a toe. I imagine myself tossing the camera to Steve, jumping down, hiking back to Avebury . . . It doesn’t help that I feel guilty about Frannie because, in spite of what John says, I haven’t been back, not since Christmas, and I was away again to London on Boxing Day. Could you stay another night? she said, her eyes full of hope. I couldn’t.

Television’s full of wannabes jostling to fill any vacancy. The job at Mannix represents the first time I’ve had anything more long-term than a three-month contract, apart from a set of rip-off merchants in Leeds who took me on for twelve months’ work experience, paying expenses only. (Not much in the way of those while I slept on people’s floors and once or twice in the back of the cameraman’s car.) No wonder I have to grit my teeth, listening to Wonderboy Steve wrangle over how much it will cost to charter the ’copter for an extra hour. I told him last week we ought to have three hours in the air, not two. But he has the senior job and the mansion flat in Hammersmith, while I’ve the commute from Hades every morning, sharing a bedroom in SW17 with two Australian girls doing the London leg of their roundthe- world tour . . .

‘Indy!’ Mein Führer is about to issue his orders, now he’s told the pilot what’s what. ‘Is that OK with you?’

‘Is what OK with me?’

‘Weren’t you listening?’

‘Of course I was. What I meant was, you’re the director. I do what you ask me.’

‘Fine. Then do it.’ Mmm.Maybe I should have been listening. Never mind, I can wing it.

The ’copter is banking again steeply. ‘It’s an ankh,’ says one of the American men, pointing at something below. ‘These guys built the Pyramids, you know.’

Really?

The crop circle is lovely, intricate, a series of different-sized circles centred on a long, stave-like axis — nothing like an ankh, as it happens. Inside each big circle are little circles of standing barley. It looks like a radial lay, the crop flattened from the inside of the circle outwards, which some cerealogists will tell you can only be produced by the down-thrust of a hovering UFO’s engine. We’re coming in fast towards it, the helicopter dropping down and down. Damn, the light’s changed. And I’m going to get flare off the sun — but I suppose that’s what Steve wants. Makes it look nuclear-spooky.

The sun goes behind a cloud.

‘Shit,’ explodes my headset. ‘Pull out. Ed, you’ll have to go again.’

I told you, Steve, but you wouldn’t listen,would you? Filming always takes longer than you think.

The helicopter rises in a stomach-emptying corkscrew.‘You still want the run into the sun, Steve?’ asks Ed. ‘It’ll be out again in a second.’ Even through the headphones, his voice is a turn-on. There’s something unbearably attractive about men and machines and competence. He told me last night that piloting a plane is a technical exercise, but flying a helicopter’s an art form. I grit my teeth and remind myself that he’s married; I don’t do married men.

‘Fine,’ says Steve. ‘But lower, this time, right? I want to feel we’re just above the barley.’

‘Can’t go in too low at this speed or we could get yaw.’

None of this means anything. I should have been listening earlier. ‘Don’t we need a shot from higher up?’ I ask.

‘I told you, we’ll do the low shots first. Low as you possibly can, Ed.’ The ’copter starts its run-in again, skimming the tops of some trees and dipping down towards the barley. ‘Wooo!’ yells one of the Americans. ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning!’

It is a great shot, though, because it feels like we’re in the UFO coming in to land. The crop circle unrolls around us, immense, foreboding, the sun winking at the edge of inflated cumulus clouds as we lift again.

‘There,’ I say, pretty pleased with myself, if I’m honest. That looked professional.

‘We have to do it again,’ says Steve.

‘You’re joking. What was wrong with that?’

‘Too high.’

‘Oh, come on. Any lower and my foot’ll be scraping the ground.’

‘The shot will only work if we’re really low. Let’s go for another approach.’

‘Steve, I’m not happy about going much lower.’ Ed sounds uncertain. ‘You can get some tricky air currents round these fields at low level, not always predictable.’

‘Aw, come on,’ says the Apocalypse Now junkie. ‘Let’s do it.We ain’t scared, are we, guys?’ There’s an embarrassed silence. One of the women shifts a little in her seat. ‘Just a couple of feet lower,’ wheedles Steve. ‘I want that Gladiator shot, skimming the ears of corn. You can do it. I’ve directed moves like this before, and it’s always been fine with other pilots.’ I’m sure this is an out-and-out lie: Steve’s a shameless bullshitter and, if you ask me, they didn’t use a helicopter for the Gladiator shot.

‘O-kaaay.’ Never let it be said that Ed is afraid to rise to a challenge, as I remember all too well from last night. He swings the helicopter round, and we start to drop towards the crop circle.

The shot is not so good, whatever Steve thinks. We’re so close to the ground on this pass that we’re losing all sense of the shape we’re flying over. The viewfinder makes it appear we’re travelling much faster. I tilt up to get the flare effect on the sun again, but this time the exposure’s wrong and it looks like an explosion.

‘Slow down!’ yells Steve. ‘You’re fucking it up.’ For once someone else is getting the blame instead of me. But, suddenly, we are going slower, in a horrible, stuttery kind of motion that doesn’t feel right at all. It feels like the tail of the helicopter is trying to pull away, and we’re zigzagging over the flattened barley, coming closer and closer to the ground.

Nobody apart from me seems to think anything’s wrong. The Americans are whooping, and Steve’s yelling: ‘Keep it STEADY, for Christ’s sake!’ But there’s no way I can keep this shot steady, the bungee cords bouncing and the hiccuping motion threatening to pull the camera out of my arms altogether. I take my eye from the viewfinder, and twist round in the webbing straps to tell him so. Behind me, Steve is shaking his head furiously, staring at the monitor, oblivious to everything but the picture. I twist the other way, towards the front. Ed’s shoulders are knotted and writhing under his T-shirt. I remember the feel of those shoulders moving under my fingers, but this time it’s different. He’s fighting the controls. Shit, something is wrong. The note of the engine is rising to a howl. The tail seems to be trying to wrench itself right off. The helicopter is slewing sideways over the barley like a dragonfly with a torn wing. We’re going to crash.

‘Going to be bumpy,’ yells Ed. ‘Brace!’

Now we’re starting to spin. The rotors seem to be getting louder in my head — thoom, thhooom, THHHOOMMM, until everything else is drowned in the noise of beating air and beating blood and vibrating metal. God, the camera. If that comes loose when we crash it’ll bounce around in here like a lethal beachball. I wrap my arms round it, and try to fold myself and it into a foetal curl but the straps won’t let me and everything is shaking so much, the spin dizzying, like being sucked into a whirlpool. How long is this going to take, how high off the ground are we can only be a matter of five or ten feet at most we’re still going too fast what happens when we come down will it blow like in the films the helicopter always explodes in a fireball I don’t want to—

The helicopter hits the ground, bounces, metal tearing with an awful howl, my stomach tries to jump out through my throat, then we hit earth again and the whole thing rolls over and I’m being tumbled backwards, the camera flying out of my arms OW its whipping lead catching me on the ear and I feel sick with pain, someone’s shouting FUCK FUCK FUCK in an American accent and there’s so much noise, grinding, shrieking, smashing glass—

and the sledgehammer shatters the windscreen, my mother calling no no no, blood between my fingers—

All my fault.We shouldn’t have flown widdershins round Avebury. I should have made them take out the right-hand door, and we would have flown sunwise—

And I’d have been underneath the helicopter now, as we grind over the crushed barley and the hard dry chalk, and the metal skin on the right-hand side crumples like paper—

And we stop.

Silence. Blessed silence. Nothing. It’s all stopped, apart from a humming note that must be my ears, and the odd creak and sigh and tick of settling metal. I wait for the sound of running feet through the barley, of some sign there’s someone else alive somewhere, but nothing happens, as I hang in my straps, the helicopter suspended between worlds. I’m holding my breath waiting for the real one to rush back in.

‘Goddamn.’ It’s one of the Americans, his voice a croak. ‘You OK, Ruth?’ Then Ruth starts sobbing and the world is back with a bang, the others going Jeez that was close Didya see how we got caught in like a vortex? and Was it the forcefield of the crop circle that brought us down? and Ed’s voice saying Is everyone all right, take it easy, we’re on our side, be careful how you unbuckle and there’s a groan of shifting metal and everything sways sickeningly and something falls off outside and he shouts I said be careful you fat fuck stop panicking you’ll all be able to climb out through the side door there’s plenty of time it’s only in the movies that they blow up we came in really slowly hit the ground with hardly any force.

Steve is uncharacteristically quiet.

He wasn’t belted in, crouched at the back of the helicopter behind me, watching the shots unroll on the monitor. I twist in my webbing straps to see if he’s OK.

He’s lying on his back staring up at me, on the stoved-in wall of the helicopter. It looks like he’s reaching out one hand to catch the camera, which has landed beside him, its eye pointed towards him and the red light still winking, the black plastic rim of the lens smeared with thick red.Colour, angle, geometry: all fit perfectly, all come together to centre the shot on the ugly dent in the side of his forehead.

Today on Fifth Estate we feature a Q&A with Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley, authors of Londongrad, From Russia with Cash: The Inside Story of the Oligarchs. Mark Hollingsworth writes regularly for The Sunday Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times. Stewart Lansley is an award-winning television and radio producer and the author of eight other books. In Londongrad, for the first time ever, they tell the true story of how London became home to the Russian super-rich. Published by Fourth Estate, it is due out next week. 

Tell us a little bit about yourselves:

Mark Hollingsworth: Likes: Humour, politics, music, sports, eccentrics, movies, stories Dislikes: Being approached in the street by strangers, speaking in public, wasting time, racists, being interrupted, shopping.

Stewart Lansley: I’m an academic turned journalist, living in south London. Spend far too much time in front of the computer screen, but relax playing tennis, gardening, reading and walking. Love nothing more than exploring other parts of the world.

What books have had a lasting impact on you?

MH: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, 1984 by George Orwell

SL: Darkness at Noon by Arther Kostler, Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Mind of South Africa by Allister Sparks

As an author, what are you most proud of writing?

MH:The Ultimate Spin Doctor (a biography of Tim Bell) Saudi Babylon (about the Saudi Royal Family) Several articles in ‘ES’ magazine (London Evening Standard)

SL: Poor Britain, a book that has had enormous influence across the world in the way we perceive and measure poverty

Why do you write?

MH: Curiosity, fascination with language and I prefer to communicate through writing rather than talking. Besides, I cannot think of an alternative way of making a living!

SL:Good question. Mostly, it seems, for love.

What is your biggest failure?

MH: Being too slow and allowing myself to be distracted by other writing and journalistic projects while writing a book

SL: There are so many, it’s difficult to pinpoint one! 

When you were a kid, what did you think were you going to be when you grew up?

MH: Absolutely no idea

SL: A fireman.

If you could go anywhere in time for one day, where would you go and why?

MH: The civil rights march on Washington DC in 1963 to hear Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, because of being present in a moment of history

SL: Yalta, February 1945 where Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt carved up the spoils of the impending defeat of Hitler — the key moment in 20th century history which defined the post-war world

Do you like reading e-books?

MH: Definitely not, but happy to sell them.

SL: ‘Fraid not 

Who are the five people, living or dead, you’d invite to a party?

MH: Peter Cook, Lenny Bruce, Michelle Obama, Princess Diana and Miles Davis

SL: Roman Abramovich, Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Putin and keep the tape recorder on.

What are you working on at the moment?

MH: Profile of the Rothschild family

SL: The redistributional impact of the recession and a book on the post-war history of the rich.

Recently we had the chance to do a Q&A with Rosie Lovell, author of Spooning With Rosie. Five years ago, the passionate, energetic young cook opened up a thriving deli in Brixton market. This week, we featured a snippet of her book as the Weekly Extract on Fifth Estate.

Tell us a little bit about yourself

I’m 28 but I keep forgetting and saying I’m 23. I live in Brixton where it’s boisterous and loud and full of food, and I feel very lucky for that.

What books have had a lasting impact on you?

Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries is incredible. The pictures are so accessable and I love the idea that you can be on the exact same day and look up what he ate. It makes you feel really close to the magic. I mostly buy food books, though often old ones from markets which are really dated and comforting.

Why do you write?

I write because I love the process of typing, reading, re-reading and honing ideas into something that makes sense. Also it’s a really important part of recording in the case of cookbooks, so that things can be passed down and remembered. I’ve learnt in the last year that the people that work through this creative process with you are the key, and in doing so you meet really talented people. That’s an honour. 

As an author, what are you most proud (or embarrassed) of writing?

I’m proud of all the people that I got to talk about in my book. I’ve met, and continue to meet really great and interesting people, both in my deli and also around London, that I wouldn’t be able to cook with out. All the bits in Spooning with Rosie about my family and my upbringing and our lovely Suffolk home fill me with joy. It’s cheesy but true.

What is your biggest failure?

My rubbish memory. Since my brain haemorrhage I have a terrible memory and it’s really frustrating when you are trying to take over the world! Perhaps loving too hard too.

When you were a kid, what did you think were you going to be when you grew up?

A singer. But then I took up smoking.

If you could go anywhere in time for one day, where would you go and why?

Back to Gokana, where I had the best South Indian experience. Monkeys, juggernauts, and a wicked deep friend cauliflower salad, swimming to the sunset and watching cricket on the telly.

Who are the five people, living or dead, you’d invite to a party?

Nick Drake, Marianne Faithfull, Elizabeth David, Kate Moss and can I have the Mitchell Brothers from EastEnders as one?!

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on a top secret new book idea which I’m really excited about. It’s going to be so rewarding and enlightening to make, and all I can say is “Women of the world take over, because if you don’t the world will come to an end, and it won’t take long” (that’s a song)

You can check out Rosie talking about her book in this video:

This Friday’s piece comes from Caroline Smailes, author of two novels to date: In Search of Adam and Black Boxes - both of which avoid the traditional happy ending. As a result she has had quite diverse reactions to her work. She has an army of loyal fans, but then there are people who are completely thrown by the way she avoids the temptation to give us some hope! This short pieces discusses that happy ending syndrome.

I blame Walt Disney

The creative writing course I attended years ago taught me about a formula for creating a perfectly structured novel. It was said that endings should focus on ‘The Road Back’ and on ‘Return with the Elixir’. That’s all very fabulous, but what if that road back involves popping a few tablets and killing off the main character? 

If we’re all told to write by the same method and then some start breaking rules and expectations, not every reader is going to be happy. I mean, I understand, for many life’s a bit rubbish at the minute and reading about real life concerns isn’t exactly uplifting. And, I also understand why some readers have ripped up my books, thrown them in the bin, emailed complaints and posted comments online. But, I really couldn’t end my stories any other way. If I want to write realistic characters and throw them into challenging and often dark situations, then I’ve got to have real consequences too.

Of course, I’ve tried to be upfront about it all. The blurb for Black Boxes tells the reader that Ana Lewis has taken a cocktail of tablets and will die by the end of the book. It was hoped that the reader would focus on finding out why Ana had been driven to such an extreme reaction. Yet still some readers have expected a prince on a horse with a whopping big sword to come along and rescue the darkly distressed girl.

And I blame Walt Disney.

Once upon a time, fairytales were soaked in hidden meaning, the teller would adapt the story to offer their own warning or message to their audience. It’s what once made those spoken tales unique and significant. Look at Cinderella, look at Snow White and then look at the way Walt Disney made the endings of their stories perfectly happily ever after, or rather different from their original telling. Disney has happy endings down to a fine art.

The difference, of course, is that real life often (usually) doesn’t have the happy ending of a fairytale. And, of course, I’d love to live in a castle and make friends with the woodland creatures but fact is I don’t and can’t and the important thing about writing (for me anyway) is to write from the heart and to draw on experience. And while my life hasn’t left me in bed with a mixture of pills and a bottle for company, it doesn’t take many steps from disappointments or experiences to imagine myself in my main characters’ shoes. I tend to write about real life and about a society that needs to feel authentic. I want my readers to empathise with my characters and, most importantly, to believe in them.

I know that I pulled on fairytales for inspiration for both Black Boxes and In Search of Adam and I’ll happily argue that Jude in In Search of Adam is a modern day Cinderella and that in Black Boxes, Ana’s children are Hansel and Gretel. So Disney may be the king of happy endings, but I’m trying to offer a truly moral and social message, just like the early tellers of those original fairytales. My stories are trying to recapture those layers in meaning that were so significant in the traditional art.

Problem is, you might not like the endings.

www.carolinesmailes.co.uk

When Joseph Conrad died in 1924, Ernest Hemingway wrote a piece for the Transatlantic Review laying out his position on the legendary author of Heart of Darkness. To the young Hemingway, Conrad had long served as an “antidote” against all bad writing and as a source of inspiration. In his piece, Hemingway related how he had “saved up” Conrad’s novels. Knowing that once he read them all he could never read them again for the first time, the previous summer Hemingway had managed to save four to bring with him to Canada. By the time the summer was coming to a close he’d already raced through three of his Conrad novels. Finally, after saving it until the autumn, he used up the fourth and final Conrad book while sitting up all night in a hotel in Ontario. “When morning came,” wrote Hemingway, “I had used up all my Conrad like a drunkard. I had hoped it would last me the trip, and felt like a young man who has blown his patrimony. But, I thought, he will write more stories. He has lots of time.” But alas, he was wrong, for Joseph Conrad was dead the following year.

I immediately remembered this story when I read about the new version of A Moveable Feast, due to be published in the US this week, because I have lately found myself in a similar predicament. About two years ago I used up all of my Hemingway and have been fiendishly reading biographies and critical studies of the author in a desperate bid to recreate the feeling of first reading his books. So far, I’ve been too proud to move on to things like collected letters (though recently I cracked and read the posthumous Islands in the Stream) so this news got me turning over a new idea in my head — perhaps, just perhaps, a new version of A Moveable Feast would almost be like reading it again for the first time.

Edited by Sean Hemingway, the 42 year-old grandson of the author, the new version of A Moveable Feast is being called the “restored edition”. Apparently, the most significant change is the shift in the portrayal of Pauline Pfeiffer — Hemingway’s second wife. In the new version Hemingway squarely shares the blame for his marital betrayal of first wife Hadley, rather than turning Pauline into a ruthless seductress who tricked him into leaving a happy marriage — as in the original.

Scholars have been quick to point out that Hemingway never finished A Moveable Feast in his lifetime. When he died, it was left in a nearly publishable state which fourth wife Mary Hemingway edited and arranged to create the version most people are familiar with today. As such, there is no authoritative version. Because Hemingway never finished the book, one version is technically as authoritative as the next.

This being the case, besides supplying additional unpublished sketches, what exactly has the main text been “restored” to? Given the authoritativeness of all genuinely created versions that are possible, it seems like the word “restored” is being used a bit deceptively here. From the sound of it, the only things that have been restored are Hemingway’s sense of shared responsibility and the reputation of his second wife.

I haven’t yet read the new edition, but I instinctively worry that by making these changes to the text some of the consistency of viciousness apparent in the first version may be lost.

Carlos Baker keenly notes in his late 60’s study of Hemingway that the rancour displayed towards Pauline in A Moveable Feast is by no means exclusive to her. Indeed, in his analysis Baker is convinced that many of the sketches — in particular those involving Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, Zelda Fitzgerald, dos Passos and the Murphy’s (who Hemingway blames for encouraging him to leave his wife for Pauline) — were written with vengeance in mind.

According to Baker, in writing the book Hemingway “explained that he was using a special technique, like a cushion shot in billiards or a double-wall bounce in jai alai…what one learned about the young Hemingway…was revealed in part by watching him rebounding from the personalities of Miss Stein, Ford, Fitzgerald and the wine-sozzled habitues of the Cafe des Amateurs in the rue Mouffetard.” Most often, what one learned about Hemingway through this technique was that he was a disciplined, humorous, serious young artist. However, in addition to this, it is often obvious that many sketches were written with “the tacit assumption of his own superiority, accomplished through the persistent denigration of others” — it was in these places “that the tone of the book sometimes turned sour.”

Looking at the underlying tone of the original book like this, it almost seems like you lose something essential about the kind of writer he was if you “restore” Hemingway to a more responsible position. It would be nice and pretty if he wrote that way, but often he did not. To transform the ending into something more palatable may be just as authoritative as the bitter conclusion in the original edition. However, as authoritative as it would be, and despite how desirable it is — it might not make for a better book.

In any case, I withhold all judgement until I read the new edition — after all, perhaps reading it will really be like reading Hemingway again for the first time.

August. If you’re posh, it’s time to start hunting for grouse, and if you’re not, it’s time to start hunting for a place to hide from Other People’s Holiday Photos. And, of these, as we all secretly know, the most interesting ones are a) the technically brilliant ones but really b) the ones with you/your beloved in the picture.

And why should publishing be much different? Personalization, making an activity or object relevant to oneself, is key to determining value.

So, a good week for some of us: the BETA website authonomy.com, has finally come of age and brought in its rankings system — which is key to the whole thing. (Bit of disclosure/background: I’m part of the development team setting up the site to help a lot of unpublished and self-published writers and readers.)

With a lot of luck, authonomy will allow people to step into their own picture of the book world — and post up their manuscripts (budding authors) or lists of discovery (budding critics) for the public to read.

It’s early days yet because we’re still about 2-3 weeks away from removing invite code and allowing open access on the site. To be honest, we’re as interested as anyone to see what precisely people will make of this service and how far it can go to help them achieve their goals.

Gratifyingly, one of the digital tribe who really knows his stuff, James Long, has some generous, encouraging things to say over at The Digitalist and even wonders …. is Authonomy relevant to his Big Question of what brings people to a publisher’s website.

Now Authonomy is not really the kind of publisher’s website I have in mind for this question – usually I’m thinking of the catalogue and marketing site – but it presents such a clear answer. You come to Authonomy because you want to get published. And now, the mechanism for achieving that (or having a good stab at it) is in place.

I think the user group / market segment that Authonomy is serving is a bit different … to the group relevant to my Big Question; this is, in my mind, the middle ground: folks who are more than just readers (ain’t nothing wrong with being just a reader!) but not quite writers yet (in the sense of being published, especially within the publishing establishment).

Cheers for that. Agreed we definitely didn’t develop authonomy to market HC books so we’re not at the same party as a publisher’s marketing site…but now you’re mentioned it: about those “folks who are more than just readers”….

Them.

The people who inexplicably want to do more with books than just read them.

It’s this group of people who have dogged my (and probably your) thoughts ever since someone dad-danced up to us and mumbled “web 2.0″ in our ears, isn’t it? We’ve clearly all been wondering if today’s book lover might want an active role or (great word this) conversation, from tagging through to list-building to writing erudite reviews and recommendations…to attending a book group and now even dating (link). 2.0-tastic!
Do we know the answer yet? Hello – does anyone want to talk to us? to each other via us? Not sure.

It’s been said that authonomy is the obvious development of this 2.0 lark. I’m not sure if we could have ’schemed’ for it in such terms, but I’ll admit authonomy’s proposition is certainly more extreme and involved than asking book lovers to dedicate themselves to tinkling round the edges, listing, recommending and tagging heavily-protected and -copyrighted material for the sheer joy of it. Possibly more fun. Hopefully with a reward a lot more commensurate with the effort.

Well, authonomy’s fledgling BETA community are an amazing bunch of people. Committed, creative, enthusiastic, supportive, (and, my god, active), and I don’t know much about this ‘underground‘ but some of our members are certainly pretty leftfield.

I recently ran a little group interview/survey, ‘Writing and You’, to serve as something of a group photo before our community meets our public. (to anyone interested, I’ll post the full results on the authonomy blog soon.)

What exactly are these 1300+ people doing at authonomy for such a generous amount of time per day? Why the hell are barristers secretly staying up at 2am to recommend other people’s books to the community and policewomen sending encouragement to fellow crime afficiados?

Well it might come as no surprise to learn that the majority in our community are what marketeers would call heavy book readers and ‘consumers’, and care passionately about words and writing.

What might surprise you more is the authonomy community’s stated ambitions. Whilst half of us have eyes on the prize and, if we haven’t got one already, are going all out for a nicely rewarding publishing contract (and I really hope authonomy gets these people there) a healthy number of us (34%) are writing for other reasons — as a hobby, a creative enterprise, or simply to communicate. One member writes

The process of creating a piece of writing is utterly absorbing, and the best way to spend my time.

And according to the survey, some of our members, by nurturing their hobby, are creating stuff they’re pleased with, which in turn drives an ambition to take their creativity beyond a secret pasttime. This passion and drive is truly exciting.

And I’ll tell you what. People interested in books and publishing really like using words. If you’ve got access, take a look at the average comment on a book at authonomy and you’ll see what I mean. Rarely do we get a comment shorter than 100 words (some stretch for pages of involved and committed feedback).

If all that doesn’t get you feeling better about publishing-and-the-web’s long term prospects, you and I have different reasons for being here.

But, granted, whilst it’s not to be counted part of the recent tranche of publishers’ consumer websites, authonomy does not come into the world without its own ambitions. It’s not to sell books, print money or steal ‘book ideas’, or market HarperCollins existing ‘product’.

Ultimately, our own aim is to help authors get their work promoted or published, help all publishers recruit new talent, and help readers/critics discover at grassroots some exciting and eclectic new writing voices. Why?

It’s simply that we recognize that in a world where reading is in danger of becoming a minority sport, where government-funded reading campaigns are fast-adopting the same tone as a public health announcement, we have an interest in nurturing, fuelling and encouraging that passion for the written word. Even Apple’s Steve Jobs, the man with the power to put a copy of War and Peace into the pocket of most people in the developed world if he so wished, said books aren’t that big a deal. We so need to prove him wrong.

Obviously I‘d be lying to say, after the months of development work we’ve put in, it doesn’t feel absolutely fantastic to have a decent handful of people say they’re admiring what we doing. But my own (personal) opinion is that if authonomy site comes to anything, it’s not primarily to be seen as a point scored for HC, but as a point scored for reading and writing.

If you’re in the industry and you’d like to know how authonomy can help you, please do drop me an email some time — it’s my pet subject. I suspect if authonomy is functioning correctly and doing its community justice, it’ll be used as a tool by agents and publishers all over the shop to spot talent, to keep the passion alive — and to keep us all in the picture.

“Stripper power! Go Diablo!”

That’s how my friend Susan, a stripper for 15 years, responds to the news of Diablo Cody’s Oscar for best screenplay. At Desedo.com, a blogger known to me as MHB cites Diablo’s tattoo — “a bikini-clad + rope bound lass” — as a reminder that the screenwriter “was once a stripper.” According to MHB, Juno’s dialog is “strongly rooted in the self-aware and acerbic style of writing oft found in sex worker literature.”

Thank you, MHB. But who is MHB? (Full disclosure: I found Desedo.com because a reader known as Christian Dior wanted to show me the Manhattan Call Girl reference in MHB’s post.)

Not everyone is feeling as excited as Susan. Or myself. Some unfortunate-sounding malcontents have cobbled together a Diablo-dissing parody which was posted at SpoutBlog. Sad!

The go-to guy, if you want historical perspective — and who doesn’t? — is Richard Porton, one of the editors at Cineaste and author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination.

“Even the most successful screenwriters working today are not household names for the general public,” he tells me. “Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges had to become directors to become famous. So it’s great that Diablo Cody is helping to put writers on the map — even as it creates a big backlash and a lot of jealousy.”

I find this rather bracing. The price of writer power?

“There have been famous screenwriters in the past like Robert Towne (Chinatown) and Ben Hecht,” he points out, but they didn’t have Diablo’s kind of visibility. “Of course, they didn’t write during the age of the Internet. That seems to make a big difference.”

Film and the Anarchist Imagination is an excellent guide to anarchist thinking, some of which plays a role in today’s sex worker activism. Richard’s book is also available in Spanish.

Rejection is part of being a writer the same way depression is part of being married.

You can’t be a writer without facing an element of rejection, but the sad fact is the vast majority of writers only ever get to see the rejection side of the coin. I was in the same boat until Jonny Geller picked my debut novel, Broken, off the slush pile at Curtis Brown.

Had he rejected it, I’d probably still be in the same boat today: more than thirty agents rejected the same submission he picked up on, so who’s to say everyone else wouldn’t have rejected it too?

There’s no pretending rejection doesn’t hurt, but some rejections hurt less than others. The slush pile rejections I received rarely offered a specific reason for why I was being rejected, so it was just a case of crossing these agents off the list and sending out my next submission. I tried to look on these as the literary equivalent of a blind date not turning up — not exactly nice, but not exactly personal, either.

The hardest rejections were the near misses, and it’s frightening how close I came to giving up on Broken because of one specific rejection.

I was just putting the finishing touches to the original manuscript when an agent asked to see the whole of the previous novel I’d written. She rejected it pretty quickly, saying it was too slow, too dark, and too depressing. She did say, though, that she loved my writing and would be really interested to see whatever I wrote next.

Her rejection didn’t come as a surprise. Nor did her reasons. I’d had the same criticism about my writing before, so had done everything I could to make Broken as fast-paced and vibrant as possible. Thinking I was in with a great chance of representation, I sent her the whole novel and tried my best not to get my hopes up. Even so, I was stunned when she rejected it for exactly the same reasons.

I wasn’t just stunned, I was disgusted with myself for making the same mistakes again, so stuck Broken in a drawer and started to write something else. If I hadn’t finished that next novel a few weeks ahead of schedule and decided to read Broken through one more time to see where I’d gone wrong, it might still be sitting there now. Not the best way to cope with rejection.

On the whole, though, my reactions were much more balanced, especially on two occasions when I was told I was wasting my time with Broken – in 2005, a literary consultant at a writers’ conference ripped the overall plot to pieces and said it would never work. I ignored her and continued to write it.

The following year, another agent at another conference looked at the opening page and the synopsis and said publishers would never go for a novel like this by an unpublished writer. I ignored her and carried on sending it out. In each case, I listened to what they said, then decided I knew better. Why? Because I loved the plot and the characters in Broken while I was writing it and there was no way I was going to stop writing before I knew how it all turned out. Then, when the writing was done (and I’d recovered from my psychotic over-reaction to that first rejection) I knew it was good enough to be published and wanted to make sure every relevant agent in the country had the chance to reject it before I finally gave up.

Even if that had happened, I would still have written a novel I’d taken a huge amount of pleasure in writing, and I think that’s the best way to handle rejection as an unpublished writer. Write what you believe in and what you care about, and take your pleasure from writing rather than how your writing is received. You might only be pleasing yourself if you follow this outlook — but at least you’ll be pleasing someone.

Every writer’s dream is to be short-listed for a literary prize. Last week I was short-listed for a first novel award, but far from a dream, I would say it was more like a nightmare.

There is a horrible secret in the scheme of things that everyone forgets to tell you while you wait hopefully for the judges to notice your particular brand of brilliance. It is a secret so well kept, so dire that, like the woes of parenthood, no one dares speak of it. In the light of this I feel it my duty to divulge certain things, if only for the sake of other writers. This is how it was for me.

From the moment I was told about the prize, I found that I was taking part in an initiation ceremony, chiefly in my head. There was this question, you see, that I kept hearing. Actually, I confess it sounded more like a howl of despair. The conversation went along these lines;

‘What if I don’t win?’

‘Well of course you won’t win,’ the left side of my brain said. ‘Why on earth should you? You’re neither good enough/well-connected/lucky/young/modish.’

‘Stop, stop, screamed another part, probably the right side of my brain, sobbing. ‘What can she do? ‘

‘Do? Why nothing,’ said the left side, nastily. ‘That’s life, don’t you know?’

By now several days had passed. Until the moment I heard about the prize I had been writing the third draft on my next book. I had been working since September, rising early, writing until midday, walking along the tow-path after lunch, then working again in the afternoon, pairing down and polishing sentences as though they were precious stones.

I was now only three chapters from completion. But from that morning, hearing of the short list, I could not settle. I switched on my computer and within seconds various e-mails popped up, congratulating me. Next I had a radio and television interview. Bent double with appalling desire I made my way to the local studio and talked my way through a lengthy conversation of precisely one minute 40 seconds. Back home, I answered phone calls with gritted teeth and a fake smile. My family eyed me speculatively, rather in the manner of property developers who didn’t care too much for the proposed plans.

‘Why don’t you chill out?’ asked the left side of my brain, kindly if condescendingly, I thought.

It sounded like one of the teenagers who inhabited our house.

‘This is the end of the road for you. Personally I’ve no idea what they were thinking of, short-listing your book! Get on with what you’re supposed to do. Write your next one.’

But that was the problem, you see. I couldn’t.

‘Why not?’ demanded the left. ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re a writer, aren’t you? So, write.’

That was easier said than done. Something had gone out of my latest manuscript. All the polish that was appearing on those lovely sentences, the rise and fall of the rhythm, was eluding me.

Leaving my desk I went into town and headed for the bookshops. It was a cold wintry day, dank and bitter, with a sharp wind from the North. Not a patch of blue sky, no sun. I wore my shades. This is a small town, you understand.

‘Idiot!’ said my left brain.

‘You never know,’ snapped the right side. ‘Someone might recognise her.’

The left side of my brain made a snorting noise, but no one heard. People in the shop were busy queuing up for a book-signing session. A famous author was in town.

‘Careful,’ said my left side. ‘You’re going a bit green. Woops, only joking!’

I made for the shelves. There was only one copy of my book on it. That was the good news. The bad news was – it was the same copy that was there last time I looked. I signed it.

‘Boo-hoo!’ laughed the left.

‘Oh shut-up,’ I said crossly.

‘Pardon?’ asked a startled woman, nearby. ‘Are you talking to me?’

I mumbled an apology and moved away.

‘You’re going nuts!’ jeered the left side. ‘Best go home back to Chapter Nine. It’s where you belong.’

‘The worst thing about all this short-listing,’ said the right side, conversationally, ‘is that while she’s been fantasizing, she’s lost all narrative drive, all momentum…’

‘I agree,’ said the left. ‘And now she’s in danger of losing her marbles too. So you know what you should do?’

‘Yes, yes, get back to the plot, start concentrating on the craft of writing, remember I’m doing this for me and not for fame or money or recognition.’

‘Good girl,’ approved my left side. ‘At last you’re making sense.’

‘She’s lying,’ said the right in a very small voice, sounding like a child. ‘She is doing it for all those things, money, fame…..’

‘No she’s not! At least, if she is, then not only is she a fool but the stuff she writes will be rubbish, too.’
It all seemed a little hard to take.

‘Now you listen to me,’ the left side said, bossily. ‘Stop skulking around in this bookshop and go home. Take your dark glasses off and get back to Chapter Nine. In case I haven’t told you, it’s terrific. So get to work, but before you do I want you to write a speech.’

‘Huh?’

‘Yes, a speech. You’re not going to win, not this time anyway, so you must have your “been-rejected speech” ready, right?’

I was speechless.

‘Remember Virginia Woolf?’

‘Didn’t she kill herself?’

‘Well yes, that is a bit cautionary, I suppose, but I was thinking more of something she once wrote in her diary. “Success is distant and illusory, failure one’s loyal companion, one’s stimulus for imagining that the next book will be better, for otherwise, why write?” You see how Virginia Woolf speaks for us all? So now write.’

‘To whom it may concern’, I wrote:

I am of course disappointed by the outcome of this prize. When I first heard I had been short-listed I was keen to win. But I have had a voice going on in my head for several days now, and slowly I have begun to realise that winning is not what this is all about. Winning is the very least of it.

‘Go on,’ said the left side, encouragingly.

What being short-listed has made me realise is that at last I can take myself seriously. I may never make any money, I may never…

‘Less of the whine,’ said the left, sotto voce.

What I have understood through a process of painful negotiation with myself is that I am a writer.

‘See how great it feels to say that,’ said the left side.

I am a writer who is happiest only when I am working on my next book, grappling with my characters, breathing life into them. What I want, more than anything in the world, is to be able to continue to write. Indeed, I now see, existence itself is impossible were I not able to do so. And all this jealousy, all this desperation to win is actually a distraction, a hollow thing by comparison to that impulse.

‘Do you really, really, mean it?’ asked the left. ‘You’re not just saying it for effect?’

I nodded. The right side of my brain nodded too, all three of us were nodding together for the first time in days. It was a great relief. Something, some danger had passed. The green-eyed giant that had been sitting on my head, squashing my characters, yawned and loped off. The air seemed clearer. I could smell the open sea even though we were miles away from it. Perhaps it was the ocean of my memory.

I opened up my laptop and put my head-phones on. J.S. Bach, tranquil and precise flowed into my head. The Partitas. Chapter Nine, I wrote. And I didn’t even see the left side of my brain smile with radiant contentment.

Sometimes the title of a novel is of secondary importance. A writer might choose from a range of possibilities or find that an appropriate title emerges in the course of writing. For me, however, the idea of grievance was central from the beginning, before the first sentence had been written.

Seamus Heaney, in one of his poems, uses the phrase, ‘When grief turns to grievance.’ His context is the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland where, until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, a sense of historical injustice was expressed in acts of violence whose victims were often personally innocent, but judged guilty by virtue of race or religion.

This process — of a hurt that doesn’t heal but settles into anger; and of that anger finding release in hurting someone who has no connection with its source — interested me deeply. It’s a universal feature of human behaviour, one that we all have to struggle against when tragedy strikes, but I was drawn to Northern Ireland because it seemed to me rich in possibilities when considering grievance as the dominant theme of a novel. I’m not Irish myself, but I have close family in Northern Ireland and felt that I knew the people well enough to write about them.

At the heart of Grievance is a family tragedy. Gerald Doyle, a respected figure in a small, largely Catholic town, a proud man who craves admiration but shrinks from the idea of being pitied, is devastated when his son, Felix, is born with Down’s Syndrome. In his case an entirely natural grief fails to heal but turns to grievance.

Having nobody directly to blame, he finds an outlet for his anger within the family, where he neglects his wife and develops an increasingly acrimonious and bullying relationship with his daughter, Nora. At the same time he finds comfort in the historical grievances of his tribe, becoming more bigoted in his views just at the point when his fellow republicans are striving to put the past behind them.

I felt that the Doyles’ story, of bringing up a severely handicapped child, had particular resonance in Catholic Ireland, where there is pressure from the community to regard the birth of such a child as a blessing. But for me that story offered an opportunity unconnected with Ireland.

I have a son with Down’s Syndrome and had long wanted to write a novel that was without sentimentality, but nonetheless showed the full range of emotions — joy, grief, love, anger, remorse — of which such a child is capable. On the other hand, Felix stands alone in Grievance in being incapable of nursing a grievance.

The central character, however, is his sister Nora, who is as clever and gifted as Felix is disadvantaged, and whose relationship with her brother is the emotional core of the book. In a narrative that runs parallel to the Irish story we see her trying to make a new life for herself at university in London. Having come from a place where the past is always present, she hopes to leave behind the misery of her childhood and be reborn into a new self.

I grew very attached to Nora in the course of telling her story, but nonetheless felt it was unrealistic to believe that she would not be damaged by her upbringing. Nora herself says at one point, in a conversation about Irish history, that people are not ennobled by suffering. When one of her professors falls in love with her — a man whom she had hoped might assume part of the role of father — she shows herself to be as capable of grievance, and of cruelty, as her actual father.

When they first met, Welsh Poet Laureate Gwyneth Lewis and psychologist Dorothy Rowe realised they had more than a publisher in common. In their recent books, Sunbathing in the Rain and Beyond Fear, respectively, they both interpret depression.

In my view, Gwyneth has penned one of the best first-person accounts of the state in Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book About Depression . The book is part memoir, part literary guide. She writes

Depression is internal snow. Black snow. The flakes whirl around like motes in the water around your personal shipwreck. The quicker you dive down to see your sorry state, the better for you in life. For above you, if only you can reach it without getting the bends, are sunshine, laughter on a yacht, the clink of plates as a lunch of steaming fish is handed round.

Dorothy, meanwhile, has worked in clinical psychology for many decades, and her now classic book Beyond Fear is one of the essential must-read titles for anyone researching or exploring this topic. (I spoke to her earlier in the year in a series of podcasts broadcast here).

They both visited the filing cupboard this week to record this conversation about living well, and how to interpret and survive darker times — one of our best podcasts yet, I think.

Dorothy Rowe in conversation with Gwyneth Lewis (18MB)

The wait for you and me is finally over. A vicar’s wife is the winner of the Waitrose Food Illustrated Writing Competition and a book deal worth £20,000.

Confounding every flowery pinnied stereotype, Elisa Beynon, (who is known to cook in her high heels,) has wowed our judges including Nigel Slater, Waitrose Food Illustrated Editor William Sitwell and Louise Haines of 4th Estate with her submission. They felt that her entry, bursting with mouthwatering ideas from the vicarage kitchen displayed ‘enthusiasm, warmth, gentle humour’ and ‘terrific home cooking.’ You can read her winning entry in the attached PDF.

Elisa says her spinsterhood signature dish was broccoli and tomato ketchup, until marriage to husband Nigel (a vicar) taught her that ‘church and food’ go together like ‘PMT and chocolate.’

But only trial, ‘unsavoury error’, and a delight in the impact her food had on friends, family and her husband’s parishioners, has seen Elisa develop her winning recipes including The Great Chocolate Rescue Remedy (for Hormonal Girls,) Hot Halloumi Salad (for Social girls) and Sunshine soup (for post-baby blues.)

She says,

For me, food is all about ingredients and interaction and planning the perfect dish for the person or people who are coming over. Left to my own devices, I’ll eat from the fridge, but to see others enjoy my food is delicious. Friends encouraged me to write down my recipes a few years ago now, but only seeing this competition on the front of WFI galvanised me in to action and made me realise that writing down my recipes brings together the things I adore— food, writing and people.

Judge Nigel Slater says “Eliza’s entry shone with enthusiasm, warmth and gentle humour. A truly original voice.” Louise Haines adds: “She is a witty writer and a terrific home cook.”

The folk at 4th Estate will now start working with Elisa Beynon to put her book together, and we’ll keep you posted.

Thanks so much to 2500 of you who entered, and – even if you didn’t walk away with the top prize this time – I hope you’ll keep cooking, and posting some signature recipes up on to 5th Estate for us hungry readers.

Click here to view a PDF of Elisa Beynon’s winning entry

One of the hot stories of the week:

David Lassman submits thinly disguised Jane Austen script to various publishers’ slushpiles and gets rejected.
Conclusion: publishers today wouldn’t know a good book if it came and hit them in face.

The counter-arguments are of course coming in thick and fast. Well what would you expect from an industry of accomplished wordsmiths? Try Andrew Franklin (today’s Independent) and Colin Brush (Penguin Blog) — putting it all far more eloquently that I can do in the short space of time I have available before I get another edit off to production this afternoon.

And I’ve got a decent amount of sympathy for these arguments … that the exercise displays a naivety about the modus operandi of a modern publishing business… that the world moves on and Austen, whilst much loved, perhaps isn’t cutting edge, as is the remit of many contemporary fiction houses …all certainly true. And perhaps most rigorous as an argument, as GOB said in early 2006, and Jean Hannah Edelstein put in her Guardian post on the slushpile, “publishers are not charities” for providing a literary feedback service. With the best will in the world, there simply isn’t time.

At the very least, you could say deliberately hiding the golden needles in a haystack is an old joke.

With the current system, it’s not surprising that the slushpile is given scant regard, that it falls right at the bottom of the priorities of a busy publishing house.

The predictable headline-grabbing conclusion that the lean and mean publishing industry has become inefficient at weeding out the good stuff, if you think about it, is not erroneous but an absolute tautology.

How can an industry that must necessarily pare down to 4 people handling a gigantic stack of (usually unsuitable) scripts each week try to wean out and nurture every drop of literary talent?

Oh, how outrageous and naïve to suggest that it should…Right?

Wrong.

Well, maybe it’s naïve and didactic to suggest that we should, but isn’t it reasonable, these days to discuss if we could?

I can’t help thinking that, where the didactic tone is misplaced, there is something useful and interesting to be gleaned by Lassman etc’s experiment.

And it’s a message that is amplified, not dulled, by the repetition of these public stunts of ‘got one past the goalie’ — which incidentally land pretty hard on the shoulders of the poor editorial assistants who have to wade through the ’slushpile’ single-handedly.

Scrape away certain incoherent speeches from people who believe the world owes them and their script massive fame and fortune, rise above the subjectivity of a writer who’s simply a bit sore and rejected, and what the slushpile complainers are doing is pointing out the sheer inefficiency of our system of selection.

The moment of quality selection is positioned at the exact point at which we’re least likely to find something good. You’ve got 1000s of scripts with almost zero-visibilty. (And I’m willing to bet that some of these 1000s are genuinely good scripts that in an ideal world are worthy of more care and attention, which is a shame.)

Yes yes yes, it’s madness and commercial naivety to expect one single person with only 24 hours in a day to single-handedly check for genius every script that plops through the letterbox (or make that postbag — we get 3 sacks full a month) if that’s how it works, but are the slushpile rats so very stupid to assume we might be doing it a different way in this day and age?

If we take the boxing gloves off each other for a second, actually, is there a way to do this better? A way that still allows everyone their sanity, rather than the current squabbling, sorry tales of missed masterpieces, and massive pile of jiffy bags that trips me up every morning on the way to my desk?

How would you find a needle in a haystack? Especially if your established business depends on harvesting needles?

1) Roll the sleeves up, spend all day fruitlessly looking for the needle, cursing the haymakers, and forget the real business of the day (milking the cash cows) in the meantime.

2) Rely on the visiting tinker to supply you with new needles (you have to pay through the nose for it, but time is money and at least you don’t spend all day in the goddamn haystack — besides the tinkers always have the best needles)

3) Discourage all large piles of unsorted hay by putting a notice at the entrance of your farmyard that NO UNSOLICITED MATERIAL, BE IT NEEDLES OR HAY, WILL BE ACCEPTED THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

OR

4) Time to repaint that farmyard sign — PICK YOUR OWN NEEDLES
and
5) Start wondering if you’ve overlooked the value of hay.

If the legendary stories wheeled out (Proust self-published; Moby-Dick was a financial and critical failure; it took author suicide for Confederacy of Dunces to get noticed; Ulysses was a struggle for Joyce to get published, Harry Potter, Watership Down…) teach us anything, it’s that eventually this stuff does get an audience and its day of judgment.

And it’s no coincidence that this is usually happens at the point when the bottleneck of 5 stressed-out assistants and 600 scripts widens out to let a world wide market, surprisingly well-versed in the process of selecting books, decide for themselves.

This old industry might think lulu.com and blurb.com have nothing to do with them, but I admire them — they’re suggesting that the needles will to some extent find themselves, and in the meantime, have started to sell hay to people who actually want and value hay, a little at a time. They are already (or in Blurb’s case, about to be) nicely profitable in the process, thank you very much. You tell me: ‘commercially naïve’, or creatively finding a solution to make everyone on the farm in-print and impressed?

The quality-control is a whole other issue, but I think a clue for us as an industry is to be found in the likes of Threadless and even Mechanical Turk.

I mean, if you’re genuinely having to risk farming the slushpile out to ‘just anyone‘ why not trust it to everyone?

Watch this space.

Over the past month I’ve given a handful of readings, and at each one — after the dry-mouthed stage of beginning to speak in front of a roomful of intent faces, after reading a few pages that by now sound to me more like an incantation than like prose — someone asks the same question. Or a version of the same question. Which is: How much of your book is autobiographical?

Curiously, this question often comes couched in a hypothetical — How would you respond to the charge that your book is autobiographical? Charge? Am I being charged, right at this very moment? I feel like ducking behind the lectern, or slinking toward a seat, or pretending to notice some kind bookstore employee telling me my time is up.

You’d think, since this is the only question that dependably arises, that I would by now have come up with a reliable, formidable answer, which I could trot out at each event, speaking slowly but confidently, with pauses and bursts of fluency meant to simulate live thought. Nope. Each time, I stammer and stop and start over and hold my mouth open (a very real demonstration of live thought, unfortunately).

But now, at the comfort of my own desk, watched only by my new puppy (who would love to chew my keyboard, if only I’d look away for a minute), I hope I can do slightly better. So, how would I respond to the charge of having written an autobiographical novel?

Guilty! But also not guilty! See, the characters who populate the novel, as well as the things they say and do, are all happily invented. Henry exists nowhere but in the book’s pages, and same goes for Margaret, Sameer, David, Lucy, and all the rest of them — I had a lot of work for them to do, and fortunately or un-, that didn’t leave room for impersonations of family and friends.

The canvas on which they all were painted, however, is a good deal more familiar. I did, as described in an earlier post, once work as a keeper at the Central Park Zoo. I did grow up in Chevy Chase and then move to New York, just as my book’s protagonist, Henry, does. I too have an older brother and grew up in a yellow house at the bottom of a hill and went to an elementary school called Somerset. And many other particulars besides.

And yet I believe, in spite of the knowing smile now passing over the face of my pup, that all of those things are essentially incidental, like the fact of the book’s having been written in English. I wrote it in English because that happened to be the language I grew up speaking, but I think it could just as well have been written in Italian or Russian or Inuit. The substance of a novel is a jelly-ish thing that isn’t contained in its language, and similarly isn’t, I don’t think, contained in the biographical details of its characters.

I can imagine a Russian author writing a version of my book about a young man growing up in a small town outside of St. Petersburg and going to work cleaning up after the circus in Moscow. The particulars would all be different, the faces and names and settings would all be shuffled, but some essential thing — the way of looking at things, the manner of interacting with the world — would remain. The book would be Zoology’s long-lost identical twin. Zoology and it would sit across the table from each other, unable to speak but amazed at how they both take off their glasses when nervous and prefer peanut M&M’s to regular.

Its author would stand stumped at many a distant podium.

After my third year of college, I applied to be a zookeeper. The position wouldn’t pay; the hours would be long; the work, everyone kept assuring me, would not be the least bit glamorous. But it held a bizarrely strong appeal for me.

I’d spent a lot of time in zoos growing up (my mom worked designing exhibits for the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. and had always adored animals, so I had quite fond associations with the zoo. But also I wanted a job, strange as it sounds, that I knew wouldn’t lead to a job offer once college was over. I was already certain that I wanted to write fiction for a living, and I didn’t want to get involved in anything that might distract me from that.

The Central Park Zoo (which I’d visited and loved) seemed like just the thing.

And they really weren’t kidding about the work not being glamorous. I’d worked before — at a bookstore, as a research assistant in a biology lab, at a political magazine — but I’d never done steady work that was so physical. I know that the huge majority of the world’s jobs are like this, so it really shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, but I’d never experienced anything like it before.

Someone would hand me a rake and point to the long dirt-covered area where the goats lived — and that would be my afternoon’s work. Or else I’d spend a couple of hours scrubbing out the cages where the guinea fowl were going to lay their eggs. It gave me plenty of time to daydream and to stare at the animals and to think about the things I was writing.

I wrote on index cards that I kept in my pocket, so I could tuck them away if my boss happened to wander near. One afternoon I was leaning on the goat pen, writing an idea — probably a very lofty idea for a novel that had nothing to do with the zoo — when Newman the Goat, a central character in my book who really does exist, appeared over my shoulder and bit the cards out of my hand. He seemed to be making fun of me, reminding me that there was plenty of material right in front of me. And that I had forgotten to feed him his afternoon meal.

The next year in college, my last year, I started writing what would become Zoology, though I didn’t have any real idea of its shape at first. I had just found something about the animals so endlessly interesting — the way they carried on being themselves, day after day, in such limited circumstances — that I knew I wanted to do something with them.

After graduating, I took a job as a tutor for a company in Manhattan. I was able to set my own schedule, which gave me the time to keep working on my book, and it also meant I got to go into lots of families’ apartments and see how they live, which is something I love to do.

I’ve worked with everyone from eight-year-olds to eighteen-year-olds, so — aside from relearning the quadratic equation and the dates of the French Revolution — I’ve also gotten to re-experience, in a strange way, huge stretches of life that I’d forgotten. I remember now the amazing conscience-less-ness with which little kids eat (whole plates of mini-pizzas, pints of ice cream, bags of Cheetos), the daily painfulness of being twelve, the brilliance and industry with which high schoolers guard their social lives from their parents.

But I’ve been tutoring now for about two and a half years, and this spring, when the book comes out, I think I’m finally going to stop. I can already feel the formula for a parabola sinking back to the dark trenches of my mind, probably not to be dislodged until, years from now, some future son or daughter comes crankily home with a math test.

Two leading publishers have hit on the idea of boiling down classic novels for modern audiences who are too busy/stupid to read the real thing. Orion was first off the blocks with its Compact Classics, which will appear in May – Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, Moby-Dick, The Mill on the Floss, all reduced to not more than 400 pages for “less confident readers”…..Meanwhile, HarperCollins is reducing War and Peace from almost 1,500 pages to 900. It says it will give us less war. Perhaps it has hit on the answer. Why not The Only Child Karamazov, Le Misérable, A Tale of Two Medium-Sized Towns, Limited Expectations and A Couple of Days in the Country? That should do the trick.

Guardian, Feb 28th.

Really? Well, a lot of smart, witty pieces of journalism have come out of this (am loving new title The Odd, Isolated Skirmish and Peace), but no. No, honestly.

As the January Magazine has kindly reported for us:

They’re not happying up a really long (and arguably occasionally tedious) book, they’re publishing a previously unpublished earlier draft.

That moves the whole project to a different intellectual place. HarperCollins isn’t cheapening up a classic, but offering us a new view of the workings of genius.

So, bit of background then (thanks to Mitzi Angel whose 2005 article I’m now, er-herm, abridging):

‘In September 1865 It so happened that Katkov, Tolstoy’s publisher and editor of the journal Russkii Vestnik, was in a position to be able to accept a new story by Dostoevsky by the name of Crime and Punishment. The reason being that new instalments of Leo Tolstoy’s 1805, later War and Peace, were slow to appear, and he was grateful for some new material.

Although he managed a few more instalments in February, March and April, Tolstoy’s relationship with Katkov was strained. That year he’d begun to explore the possibility of publishing the novel in volume form, which — apart from causing a major distraction from the business of delivering regular instalments for the journal — caused consternation for its publisher, who was by now well aware of the public’s enthusiastic response, and reluctant to see the work appear in any other form.

More than any other writer before or since, Tolstoy was living through the novel as it developed, adapting and changing it as his ideas matured, the book undergoing transformation for a period of 6 years, until it was finally published in 1869, in a four-volume set. Just as Tolstoy, in the novel itself, follows people’s lives through marriage to middle old age, with no sense of artificially imposed beginnings or endings, the novel seems to have arisen organically, already living and breathing even as it was being developed and extended.’

What then, in the face of murmers that HarperCollins are offering a ‘dumbed down Tolstoy’, are we to make of this ‘Original Version’ which, as the back cover of the 2000 Russian edition proudly and boldly declared, is ‘half as long and twice as interesting’? Back to Mitzi:

‘The story of the ‘Original Version’ begins in 1918, when a Tolstoy Museum Researcher named Evelina Zaidenshnur, began trawling through some of the earlier drafts of the novel to establish what it was Tolstoy had written before he began the extensive revisions which were to take him from 1865 to 1869. This draft was believed to be the ‘Zero-Variant’; one which Tolstoy for some time considered to be the first completed text of his novel.

But it was no easy task to recover — Tolstoy revised his original manuscript by working on the page.

Bent over a desk, Zaidenshnur spent her days deciphering handwriting, comparing different ink colours, in order to work out which words had been used in the earliest incarnation of the novel.

It took her fifty years; more than half a lifetime. Her work of crippling dedication was designed for Tolstoy scholars eager to grapple with the implications of the differing texts. It was eventually published in 1983 by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and they called the book an ‘early version…restored for the first time.’ In this version, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Petya Rostov stay alive, the long, involved meditations on the nature of history and on Napoleon no longer feature and, there is ‘more peace, less war.’

It was this labour of love that the publisher Igor Zakharov published in February 2000, after having himself worked on the manuscript in order to make it accessible to a wider readership. His words on the subject, reported in the St Petersburg Times, are at first sight alarmingly cavalier:

I took out all the brackets, cleaned it up…took out all the French — and here it is! There is not a single word by Zacharov here!

One can hear the Tolstoy scholars turning in their graves (not least in the media last week), but as it happens the publisher himself is also an academic and a philologist, so his words suggest more of a laissez-faire attitude than is in fact evident from the care he took with the material. Zacharov continues in the same, exuberant tone:

I will never say that this is the only book [War and Peace] one should read…It is, if you wish, like one’s first and second husband. Of course, the second husband is better, but that first one — he is also part of one’s life.

Of course, the bold claims on the book jacket in Russia were bound to stir up controversy. People worried that the confusion caused by this new version might lead people to mistake the new, shorter version for the final version.

What was to happen in school examinations if pupils were to abandon the lengthy War and Peace for a quick and easy version? After all, it’s well known that many readers struggle through the lengthy historical disquisitions. Flaubert was reported to have vented his frustration with the novel — ‘Il se repete! Et il philosophise!’ — and if he hadn’t the patience to sit through all 1,500 pages, then what about the schoolchildren burdened with their homework? What would happen to their understanding of their literary heritage? Russian newspapers, magazines and television reported the appearance of the new book in detail; the merits of the new edition was put on trial in a televised debate.

It seems a similar controversy could happen here, because, yes, it’s true that we’re about to publish Andrew Bromfield’s translation of the ‘Original Version’ this April.

But this version, published for the first time in this country, is undoubtedly an insight into the departure points for the novel we know. Andrew Bromfield’s beautiful translation also reveals much more about Tolstoy as a stylist than previous editions have done — his wife’s editing for the later versions was extensive and she rewrote much of his prose.’

And, yes, this War and Peace is shorter. Isn’t that something some people might celebrate? Don’t some of us share Boris Johnson’s bedside reading thoughts from the Sunday Times: ‘Reading Tolstoy is like trying to invade Russia itself’?

The point is, considering the fifty years editing and five years translation, we didn’t do it for the the brevity.