Caught in the net

My sons are into Bebo and YouTube, my friends say I must get onto Facebook, and I've just purchased a 'takeaway website in a box' from Mr Site, and there's a blog this week in the Guardian by Sam Jordison about the importance of social media to network, promote, sell ..

Am I the only one feeling just a teensy bit of pressure about all this? On the one hand, blogs, sites and networks are a brilliant resource and one that wasn't really available to me when The Chase was first published. I did what I could, in conventional terms (readings, signings, local radio, an article in 'Living France' and so on) to try to publicise the book, while being disappointed that so many of the excitedly-worded promises of my publishers ('We're going to promote it on Eurostar and the cross channel ferries!' 'We're going to run a postcard teaser campaign using images from the tapestries in the Musee de Cluny!') came to naught. I realised that in this business, unless you're a lead or superlead title, the publicity buck stops with you, the author, because the publicity bucks are not forthcoming from the publisher to fund the kick-ass attention-grabbing you'd like. Anyway, how good is that sort of thing anyway? If you see a poster for a book on a bus shelter or as you ride the escalator in the London Underground, do you dash to the nearest W.H. Smith's on the strength of it?

So, along come all these Web 2.0 opportunities for us to do it for ourselves: to create our markets, to build groups of 'friends', to have dialogue with our putative readership. Fantastic. Then it hits you: creating your site takes time, listing your favourite reads for a social networking site takes time, writing your blog takes time (though don't get me wrong - I love it). Time. Attention. Imagination. Creativity. Wait a minute, waitableedinminutethere - aren't those what I should be devoting to my Art? Shouldn't I be writing, like, books? Have I used so much energy and time and attention and imagination and creativity to create my market that I have none left to create the product I wish to market? The words 'hoist' and 'petard' spring to mind.

So, I'm not as yet on Facebook, though I may give in to the nagging. I do worry about it: it's like being back in the playground, somehow - 'Be my friend! Be my bestest friend!' And I've read the instructions on Mr Site for the easy-as-pie (ho ho ho) creation of my website, but Gawd knows when I'll get round to it. So many decisions! How many pages? How should it look? How do I link photos to it? How can I make it stand out?

If you're interested in social media debate take a look at the blog publishing talk, by reed media, a media consultancy, at http://www.reedmedia.eu/blog/
Although they use the painfully hip tagline 'mashing up books and social media', there's a lot of interesting stuff there.

So now I've spend half an hour worriting myself about spending half an hour on web communication. Heigh ho. I do love my little blog, though. It's so much better than being hermetically sealed into isolated artistic angst and it's so much more responsive than, ahem, publishers tend to be. And quicker. Bless you all for reading it.

Get your teeth into a good book

I'm delighted to learn that this year's Booktrust Teenage Prize has been won by Marcus Sedgwick for 'My Swordhand is Singing', which you may remember I recommended in my post a couple of weeks or so ago, Nix-Lit and Kid-Lit. One of the judges praised it not only for the gripping narrative but the' subtle poetry of its language.' Quite so. Given that vampires are coming out of the woodwork (or the crypt?) all over the place, it's good to see a book which takes a genre and transcends it, in this case by the spare and beautiful quality of the prose, the scene-setting in rural Romania, and excellent creation of tension. Like 'The Tenderness of Wolves' which I talked about last week (what is with me with snowy landscapes and predators?) I was drawn by the cover and by the brilliant title of the book. Do read it.

Transports of Delight

One of the bonuses of feeling under the weather is that you can give yourself permission to read, solely for pleasure and indulgence - and that's what I've been doing. Last night I finished Stef Penney's 'The Tenderness of Wolves' (superb title, superb cover),which won the Costa Book of the Year award a few months back. All too often novels which win the big literary prizes can be a disappointment, but not this one. I was absolutely gripped and read it all in one day. It works both as a murder mystery and as a poignant and satirical examination of the lives and interactions of a collection of characters in 19th century Canada, who've gravitated to the far north for many reasons and who have to take stock of their lives and the meaning of their lives. It's beautifully written and observed, elegaic, often dramatic and is one of those books that sucks you into its internally-consistent world and utterly convinces you. My only problem with it was that as the final page approached at a scary rate, I wondered how she was going to tie up so many loose ends - and felt, in the end, that she didn't. I took such an interest in so many of the characters I felt cheated not to know how they would go on, how their stories would resolve. She could easily have made a trilogy out of her material.

You may well have read about this book already, not just because of the quality of its writing but because of the landscape in which it is set: isolated communities, bleak snowfields, silent woods and wilderness, ice, frozen rivers and bogs, under a sky which is a lure and a threat. It is wonderfully evocative and all the more striking because Stef Penney has never gone there: she did all her research in the library. This says a great deal for the power of her imagination.

Looking back at recent books I've read, I'm aware of how much store I set by location and atmosphere. I recently read Kate Atkinson's 'One Good Turn' which takes you on a witty and detailed tour of Edinburgh and its environs (is Edinburgh ahead of Oxford yet as a setting for novels both literary and detective?), and last week I read Nick Drake's 'Nefertiti: The Book of the Dead' which is set in ancient Egypt at Thebes and Akhetaten (modern Amarna) at the time of Akhenaten and, well, Nefertiti. Also a few months ago, Jason Goodwin's 'The Janissary Tree', set in 19th century Istanbul. And you've heard me mention C.J. Sansom's Tudor detective novels set in the time of Henry VIII. What all these writers have in common is the power to evoke through imagery - and that means all the senses - the aura of the place and the time. Goodwin and Sansom are particularly good at smell, actually - and they don't beat about the bush: the past stank to high heaven.

There's a danger, though: the writer may be so in love with this aspect of writing, with conjuring up markets and slaughterhouses, ritual processions, the rank odour of a wolf's breath, the banks of oars on a golden ship, the gleam of light in a shadowed harem, that the story itself gets lost. I found this the case with 'Nefertiti', which at times read as grippingly as any thriller, but then meandered self-indulgently through the reeds of poetic philosophy, as if it couldn't quite decide what kind of book it was trying to be. The Goodwin book was fun but also confusing and frantic and overloaded with factual information because the writer really knows his stuff and wants us to know that he really knows it. Sansom's books are excellent but you couldn't call them pacey. Only in Stef Penney's book did I feel unsatiated - every detail served the meaning of the story. Even though descriptions were detailed and frequent, they never felt redundant.

For the rest of us would-bees, remember this: although Annie Proulx, another mistress of bleak scenery, says 'Place is paramount', that little thing called Plot matters too.

It was a Dark and Stormy Night

I've got a real backlog of things I want to discuss, but it's been a mad week. And I've decided to shelve those other worthy topics I had lined up - I think that, as we slide into autumn, relentlessly to be followed by my least favourite season, we should have some fun. You may have heard of the Victorian novelist Lord Bulwer-Lytton, who has gone down in history for writing what has been called the worst opeing line ever (you may argue he's up against some pretty stiff competition) in a novel called Paul Clifford. It starts 'It was a dark and stormy night ..' and it goes on. And on. And on. With non sequiturs, pomposity, padding and irrelevancy and too much exposition: the flaws we in the creative writing trade advise our students to avoid at all costs. So famous is this opening line that an annual competition for the Bulwer-Lytton Prize has been going on for more than a couple of decades, run by the University of San Jose. As you would expect, entrants have to compose awful opening sentences and the contest is so popular there are various genre categories such as Westerns, Romance and Science Fiction (is that a line of sitting ducks I see before me?) I keep a choice selection at hand for illustrative light relief when I'm teaching students the techniques of writing an effective opening.

So I'm delighted to see that Scott Pack of The Friday Project (see link to his blog Me and My Big Mouth opposite) is going to publish a gift book of the best winners over the past twenty years, entitled, unsurprisingly, It was a Dark and Stormy Night - he gives some examples on his blog post of October 8 and hopes the book will do well in the Christmas book market (why wouldn't it?) - amazingly, though, it seems that of the big chains, Borders is interested, Waterstones and W.H. Smith not. Probably because it doesn't have the word 'Shit' on the cover.

So put the book on your Christmas list or buy it for your (writing?) friends. You can also check out the contest website, (http://www.bulwer-lytton.com), especially if you want to enter!

In the meantime, for your delectation on a dismal autumnal day, here's a small selection (it would be a very big selection if I let it). If you're a would-be writer, be afraid - be very afraid. Even if you don't open your stories like this at present, you may become addicted to the delights of bathetic, parodic no-holds-barred verbifaction ...

General:
Through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, along the greasy, cracked paving-stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister, brother, and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to devastate his life.

Romance:
Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish, the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right direction, not to mention all that irritating barking.

Western:
Butch glared balefully across the saloon at Tex, who had been stone dead since the scorpion he had unwittingly sat on had bitten him on the butt some half an hour or so ago, little suspecting that this was going to be his toughest staring contest since the one against old Glass-eyed Juan, during the great sand-storm of '42, at the height of the Arizona conjunctivitis epidemic.

And (resisting the urge to post loads more of the things), here's my favourite, highly relevant to a literary blog:

"I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"

Egosurfer? Moi?

A few days ago The Guardian blog was debating the rise of the literary blog - with some cruel quotes in it, such as Rachel Cooke's opinion that bloggers are 'latter-day Pooters' - and not for the first time I started thinking about why I blog. I started because one of my creative writing students suggested I did and it seemed an easier option than trying to create a website, which is something still on my To Do list. I must admit I was quite tentative at first but it wasn't long before I found myself really enjoying it.

At the time I was coming to the end of my third year of teaching a twenty week evening class course on novel-writing. Afterwards, I made the difficult decision not to offer a course this year, although I am still involved in the University's summer school programme. I did this quite simply because it was taking up too much of my time and attention, and there was a level of bureaucracy involved which was disproportionate, I felt, to the nature of the course as an evening class.

The decision wasn't easy, because I had actually enjoyed the teaching itself and for three years had been lucky enough to have had lively, interesting and talented people attending. Apart from the teaching of techniques and so on, I did feel it was important to share news of competitions, recent writing articles and what was going on in the publishing world, so I was always keeping an eye out for snippets and anecdotes and news items which we could discuss. Then the class ended and I found myself missing that kind of interaction - the blog, therefore, is a way of maintaining contact with my ex-students and my writing friends. Writing, after all, can be a lonely business - it's always good to feel part of a community.

The next reason is the reason one has for any kind of writing - it's communication of thought, idea, opinion, feeling. It's finding your voice, making your mark. It's saying 'Here I am'. It is, as someone said, egosurfing (the term for Googling your own name - hands up all those of you who've done it. Yes, you at the back - that includes you). It's expression of your own individuality in the hope that someone out there will hear and respond. Of course, now that blogging is so incredibly popular, you're calling out your name in a huge stadium of competing voices ('I'm Spartacus!' 'No, I'm Spartacus!') - how can you be heard? Well, initially you're heard by one or two, and if you're lucky, they tell one or two others who listen in, and so on and so on.

This brings me to the relation of the blog to publishing - and yes, there are 'blooks' - the blogs which mainstream publishers have bought, such as those by Belle de Jour and Wife in the North. Can't say I'm holding my breath to be discovered like that - there are simply too many lit blogs out there. Still, what's positive is the sense of growing a readership, some of whom post comments, of building a minor literary community, and knowing that, should I publish again anytime soon, there will be people out there who'll be rooting for me. Also, given the enormous time-delays one faces when waiting for responses from agents and editors, where the torments of Tantalus are as nothing compared to the endless on-tenterhooks state of wondering if today will be the day when ... - well, I'd say that for me the biggest pleasure of all in this blogging lark is to be able to say whatever I like at whatever length I please in whatever style I choose - and to have it published INSTANTLY! Joy!

Nix-lit and other Kid-lit

Given that Children's Book Week is next week (1- 7 )Oct), I thought I'd mention that a couple of weeks ago I visited my local Waterstones because the children's author Garth Nix was doing a signing there. And what a good experience it turned out to be - it was so encouraging to see a queue of children, not just parents, there (though there were some parents dutifully standing in line, with armfuls of books to be signed for their children). These were children who were calling out to each other across the shopfloor, naming books and characters as if they knew them! Hallelujah, I thought, some of the blighters actually do read! One teenager boasted to another that a mate of his was going to be so sick when he heard he'd met Garth Nix. This was great.

I, dutiful parent too, stood in line with my Nix-lit and met Mr Nix and he turned out to be a really nice man - he'd taken the time (as do Mr Horowitz and Mr Pullman) to engage in conversation with every signee and give each of them an individual moment which served to counter the conveyor-belt aspect of these affairs (publisher's representative progresses down the waiting line with little orange slips of paper to pop into your book to speed up the signing process: 'And who would you like yours signed to?')

So, I had a brief chat with Mr Nix, about the difficulty of pronouncing the name of his heroine, Sabriel - turns out the man himself doesn't know: he changes it according to his mood. I like that. I didn't tell him that I'm the only one in our household who's read Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, even though I leave them around invitingly, for my boys to read. So far, the only spontaneous reading I've seen my boys do involves Yu-gi-oh, Antony Horowitz and Lemony Snicket. Which is something - but they're missing out on so much! (Not their mother's fiction, of course - they are tied to chairs and forced to listen to that).

Given that I've been writing children's fiction lately, I've found myself getting into reading it too - though I'm careful to avoid anything that resembles what I myself am writing, in terms of subject matter or location: I want to plough my own furrow undisturbed. And what might have been a pursuit of duty has been an absolute delight. It's a cliche now to say that we seem to be living in another golden age of children's fiction, but I really believe it might be true. Certainly children's fiction is garnering so much more attention and respect than it might have done fifteen or even ten years ago. This is a two-edged sword because everyone wants to get into it now, including writers who are extremely successful in the adult sphere (Joanne Harris, Jeannette Winterson, for example), and the obligatory toying with the form from the celebrity contingent (Madonna, Julianne Moore, Jordan - who writes about ponies, can you believe it!)

So here are some of the books I've recently delighted in:

Marcus Sedgewick: My Swordhand is Singing - starkly beautiful vampire fable

Michelle Paver: just finished Outcast, which is the fourth of the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series. They're brilliant: the sense of time and place is spot on, the hero, Torak, has a touching bond with his companion Wolf (and parts of the books are narrated by Wolf himself), landscape and survival techniques of the Stone Age are immaculately researched and the pace of the stories never lets up.

Geraldine McCaughrean: White Darkness - the heroine visits Antarctica with her mad uncle and converses in her head all the time with Titus Oates of Captain Scott's expedition, because she has a crush on him. Very funny, original and beautiful.

Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief - great fun, as the hero, discovering one of the Greek gods is his father, goes on a quest across America to recover Zeus's stolen lightning bolt. A road movie with Greek divinities: Ares rides a Harley and wears shades.

Celia Rees: Witch Child. It's The Crucible all over again and none the worse for that.

Julie Hearn: Follow Me Down - excellent sense of period, lively, amusing - but also with pathos. Loved the Bendy Man.

Eva Ibbotson: Journey to the River Sea - lyrical, beautifully structured story, set on the Amazon where there's a strange and lovely blend of the exotic and the normal.

And the aforesaid Garth Nix - dark horror, gripping adventure and amazing levels of originality.

So I think you'll get the sense of the sort of thing I appreciate in a good children's book: emotional engagement, a genuine sense of a child's perception of the world, convincing use of setting both in place and time, language which is vibrant with sharp and telling and often beautiful images, dialogue which animates the story and the characters, and a momentum and suspense that means you can't put the thing down. Oh, and the sort of idea at the core of it all that makes you think 'Damn, damn, damn! Now why didn't I think of that?'

Dissecting Loss

Last night I watched the South Bank Show programme about Joan Didion, whose book 'The Year of Magical Thinking' I read and loved last year, although 'loved' doesn't seem like the right word. Appreciated. Respected. Almost couldn't bear to read. The book deals with the shock of the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, while their daughter Quintana was dangerously ill in hospital (Quintana died after the book was written). It is a literary dissection of the processes of grief which is both clinically dispassionate in its analysis of symptoms and significance and at the same time unbearably moving in its account of the sequence of the little moments, the telling details, the revelations that occurred during the year after Dunne's death. Any of us who has suffered loss (and who hasn't?) will recognise those stark anagnorises: yes, it has happened; yes, the loved one is gone; no, they will not come back; no, you will never speak to them again; no, no one can ever understand; no, no one can carry this for you; yes, this is how it is. This is how it is, for all of us.

At the start of the book she understatedly, chillingly, says 'Life changes in the instant', as she focuses on the transition from life to death in a moment, on her own transition from wife to widow, to woman with a soulmate to woman with concerned friends but who has to find her own way.

I'm fascinated, gripped, overwhelmed by the fact that we teeter on the brink with every passing second. I speak from experience of a massive loss, many years ago, which took merely an instant to accomplish. That something so big took mere milliseconds to occur - still I wonder at it and still I cannot incorporate it into any sense of just order. A sane world became at best ludicrous, at worst malign.

Some changes, some losses, are insidious, incremental, subtle and unseen, a slow erosion, like the change of a river-course or shoreline. Others are like the shift of plate tectonics; a jarring shudder casting people this way and that, with no concern shown for individual fate or identity. As writers, we have to record the changes, and bear witness to that individuality in the teeth of the blank, gorgeous, finite and infinite universe. As writers we do this, whether what we write is trite and hackneyed or as awe-inspiringly sharp and precise as Joan Didion's work.