Lest We Forget

Last week I was impressed to hear that Terry Pratchett, a recent diagnosee, was donating half a million pounds to research into finding a cure for Alzheimer's and I was horrified to hear that as many people suffer from it as from cancer but it gets about 3% of the funding. This is an atrocious state of affairs. I've talked about this disease before and about how it terrifies me witless (and may well do in the future). Endlessly we're subject to dire health warnings about what we eat and how much we exercise and how to avoid the horsemen of the apocalypse: cancer, stroke, diabetes, heart attack. And yes, they're all scary, but at least when you die of them you're still you. With Alzheimer's you're not.

Terry Pratchett is going to go on writing as long as he can, even though his abilitiy to touch type has already gone. I admire the spirit he shows. With typical bloody-minded feistiness he calls the disease 'an embuggerance'.

I wanted to mention this last week but didn't get round to it. But I have reason to today. My beloved Aunt Isa, with whom my sister and I lived in the immediate aftermath of the deaths of our parents when we were children, who was strong and pious and fun to be with, who was good of heart and sharp of brain, died this morning, suddenly, of a heart attack. But death had already taken pretty much all that she had, because for a number of years, Alzheimer's, which I will call in Chaucer's words, the 'secree theef', had stolen away the sharpness, and the sense of who she was, who anyone was. It's the kind of situation where when death comes, you find yourself, to your horror, about to use the phrase 'blessed relief'.

But it isn't. There's nothing blessed in it, and for the life of me I can't see how people can maintain belief in a kindly deity when the deserving and the devout have such treatment meted out to them. I'm told that she looked peaceful. There you go.

So I feel grief and loss and anger - and at the moment it's the latter that holds sway, futile though it is.

Diagram Time Again!

Time for some fun. Yes, it's Diagram prize time again: a couple of weeks ago The Bookseller announced the shortlist for this year's Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. If you go to my post of 15 April last year, you can see last year's list and my comments on it. (It was won by Stray Shopping Carts of America, a Field Guide - but should I think have gone to How Green Were the Nazis).

Anyway, here's the list: see what you think, and if you want to vote, go to www.thebookseller.com

I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen

How to Write a How to Write Book

Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues

Cheese Problems Solved

People Who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood

If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs

It's a tough choice, though my favourite is the last one, which I noticed in the early stages of the nominations. However, I do wish one of the ones that missed the shortlist had made it: Drawing and Painting the Undead ... One starts imagining chapter titles and topics covered: Mixing Cadaver Tints with special recommendations for Rotting Flesh Tones? Make your Ectoplasm come to Life? What to do when the Sitter is just too Still? Conveying Propped Postures and Shambling Gaits: a Checklist. Guidelines in the Event your Sitter turns on you. The Artist as Seancer: creating a Model Dialogue with the Dead. Morbid Fascination: A Survey of Art's Fascination with the Corpse.

All right, all right, I'll stop now. It's not as though I have nothing better to do. I have a book to write, you know.

Plead for PLR Justice

Yes, I skipped a week again - this time it was because of half-term. How people maintain daily blogs is beyond me - and often they're the ones who list the minutiae of their lives in excruciating detail. I promise, my people, never to tell you what kind of toothpaste I use or keep you informed of daily wordcounts or problems with that scene in Chapter 3 where Freddy is having an identity crisis ...

I do, however, have a backlog (as opposed to weblog) of matters of interest and idle notions - how I'm ever going to catch up I don't know. Thing is, access to computer so often fails to coincide with thoughts springing up in brain. Amazing how fluent and inspired I am in the shower or the bus queue or while an Eng Lit student of mine is trying to come up with a reason for the image of an oak tree in stanza 2 line 6.

Today I just want to ask for your help. As you are probably all too aware (especially if you are a writer yourself), most writers earn sod all from their work - and if, as is predicted, the era of the e-book really does dawn and publishing suffers what happened to the music industry, it may well be that with digital rip-off going on, we earn even less. All the more reason, therefore, to protect what we've got, which includes PLR - the fee paid to writers every time a book they wrote goes out on loan from a library. Our Olympics-focussed government proposes not only to freeze the payment (a few pence per loan) but actually reduce it: and it will take 3 years to bring it back up to current levels. For writers, as for Tesco customers, every little helps. So, will you please sign a petition to the government protesting about this? Please go to http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/plr-funding/ and add your name.

By the way, if anyone computer-savvy is reading this, can you let me know how to type a URL like that one and have it come up as a link, underlined? This blog used to do that and now doesn't and I don't know why. Thanks.

It's a sickness

I hope you've been over to Tess Gerritsen's blog and taken a look. How many blogs do you regularly read? I'm finding I have to ration myself to catching up with the main ones I read just once or twice a week - otherwise hours and hours can go by. It's one of the many forms of Writer's Self-Deception Syndrome, an insidious, and all-pervasive sickness to which creative artists are particularly vulnerable, also known as Displacementophilia, closely related to Procrastinitis. Social networking, blogs, websites and so on add to the many ways of distracting ourselves that we writers resort to: the particular danger of these ailments is that not only are they addictive, sap energy and stimulate unhealthy levels of bile, envy and contempt, but that we sufferers actually convince ourselves we're 'working' and that being sucked into these things is a form of 'research', 'knowing the market', 'being creative'.

Ha.

Then again, electronic communication is also an immense boon, an immense comfort. There are people out there who know things, useful things. There are people out there who feel as you do - and it's a consolation to know that successful writers such as Tess share the doubts, frustrations, fears and hopes all writers experience. Here's a quote from her blog post of December 23rd: 'I'm beginning to think that being a writer is a mental illness that deserves its own DSM classification, perhaps a sub-category under Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders: "Symptoms include anxiety dreams, inability to relax, intermittent feelings of inadequacy alternating with delusions of grandeur, hypersensitivity to criticism, and an abnormal preoccupation with people who don't even exist."'

Oh yes. Oh yes.

French fries, Tess Gerritsen and literary trauma

Yes, I know, I did it again - or rather didn't do it: didn't blog last week. This time, apart from ongoing GCSE coursework issues, I was preparing for the arrival of my elder son's French exchange student, who has left this morning. He was a nice kid but totally inscrutable, so the past few days have been hard work, not least because the fridge and larder full of food we thought would please a French palate ... didn't. Cheese? Salad? Vegetables? A shrug, a 'Non', a moue of distaste. He did drink a lot of fruit juice, but apart from this was only enthusiastic about Coke, chips, and roast potatoes. Looks like Europe has indeed caught up with us in the unhealthy eating stakes.

So, on to literary matters. A couple of weeks ago I went along to see Tess Gerritsen at Borders in Oxford. She delivered, not a reading, but a very detailed account of her researches for her latest thriller, 'The Bone Garden.' This involved explicit and gruesome descriptions of the horrors of nineteenth century medicine pre-anaesthetics and pre-hygiene: she let us know just how ghastly puerperal fever was, and read us a surgeon's account of how best to amputate a limb. The audience shuddered a fair amount and once again it struck me (as most of those present were women), that women are often better than men when it comes to coping with explicitness of this nature. In our household I'm the one who watches medical dramas while my menfolks leave the room! I like a good thriller and I can stomach a fair amount of gore: Gerritsen used to be a doctor and pulls no punches with the details of what goes on in the poor vulnerable body both pre- and post-mortem. The trick is that the nasties should serve the story, not just be gratuitous shlock-horror. I think women writers who deal with horror in thrillers and detective stories, never lose sight of the characters as characters: there is an interest in and a sympathy with the victim, an empathetic approach to those who grieve, those who detect, and, indeed, those who commit the crime, all of which involve the reader emotionally. I remember reading, years ago, P.D. James' 'Devices and Desires': near the beginning there is a very striking analysis not only of how the victim experiences their last moments but also of the broken nature of the perpetrator. (Sadly, the last P.D. James book I read, 'The Lighthouse' was dreadful: not a single character I could either believe in or sympathise with: laboured artifice and clumsy dialogue throughout.)

At Tess Gerritsen's question and answer session after her talk, I asked her about the demands of writing novels as frequently as publishers now demand. I don't know about you, but there are writers I am fond of, who, when they hit success bigtime, seem to be on a terrible treadmill: a novel a year, sometimes more, with the result that the quality of their work suffers: rehashed themes, sketchy research, poorly edited writing involving stock phrases, repetition and padding - a sense that the story has not been allowed to ferment at its own rate. The result is the same as a tomato forced in a greenhouse: it may look good, but the flavour ain't there.

Tess acknowledged the pressure she feels and said she spends a month of each year on the road. So, we all dream of fame, success, the freedom to write full-time, but it may turn out to be a poisoned chalice. Freedom turns to commitment, inspiration turns to forced labour. Still, wouldn't mind giving it a go ...!

I thoroughly recommend Tess's blog on her website: http://tessgerritsen.com/blog , esspecially the posts of February 6th; January 30th, where she responds to a fellow writer for whom all the joy of writing has disappeared; December 20, where she talks about how as a writer you never can switch off from thinking about it, even when you're not doing it, and December 15th, where she talks about the pressure of maintaining success. Do read her - and let me know what you think.

If anybody's considering reading her books, she has a police series where her lead characters are detective Jane Rizzoli and pathologist Maura Isles, and she has standalones such as 'Harvest' and 'Gravity'. I started with the Jane Rizzoli story 'The Surgeon', which features a killer who does harrowing things to women, while they're totally helpless and still alive - and you need to be a woman to truly feel the squirm of what he does .. Read her if you like a good page-turner, but only if you've got the stomach for it.

See? I'm a total ghoul.

Taxing resources and testing times, Mr Hart-Davis

Yes, I know, I know I didn't blog last week:

(a) Elder son with Science GCSEs and deep-seated aversion to revision. Those of you in the same boat will know exactly what sort of conversations were held and in what tone, and will understand the massive levels of will and determination needed to counteract adolescent inertia.

(b) Trying to book a holiday property in France: yet another instance of how the internet, wonderful resource that it is, is a total black hole swallowing up hours of fruitless clicking from site to site. Overwhelmed with information and possibilities, you end up worried that if you don't click onto that site, that link, you might be missing something better than what you've just found. There's always something better just a click away ... and you look up and find six hours of your life have passed, your neck is irredeemably cricked and you've lost the use of your legs. Two solid weekends I've spent at this and we have found something - but yes, I am worried that there was something better, some perfect beachside blue-shuttered property with cool airy rooms, a superfluity of bathrooms and the ideal pool, with gorgeous views of the Med, with seclusion and calm, yet only two minutes from shops and restaurants, a retreat, a hideaway, yet convenient for the airport ... Holidays are like romantic love: a search for a composite of Willoughby and Colonel Brandon.

(c) Tax. End of January approaching. Need I say more. And note to Mr Adam Hart-Davis: you're a lovely man and I so enjoyed you scurrying about demonstrating what previous generations did for us, and no one can explain a Roman land-surveying system better than you, but you're wrong, Mr Hart-Davis, so wrong, as you trot across the sands of time in that hugely irritating Inland Revenue advert/harassment. Tax does, by its nature, have to be taxing. Bloody taxing.

You may never hear from me again. Remember me kindly.

Councils, Balls and Humbug

Apparently the National Year of Reading was launched by the government this week. Three cheers, eh? Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, said literacy is 'one of the best anti-poverty, deprivation and crime policies we can think of' and called for every employer, school, library, college and local authority to be involved. This is pretty rich: I refer you once more to Susan Hill's blog about libraries on Jan 2 (see links to the right).

Meanwhile, the British Council is going to disband its film, visual arts, drama, dance, design and literature departments, which serve to promote British culture worldwide and increase dialogue and cross-fertilisation, surely important in this global village of ours, and is now telling staff to focus on 'Progressive Facilitation', 'Market Intelligence Network', 'Knowledge Transfer Function' and so on. And no, I didn't make up any of that empty jargon.

To put the tin lid on it all, the Arts Council is reducing or removing grants to many worthwhile projects, including small independent publishers such as Anvil Press, Dedalus and Arcadia. Even so well-established a poetry imprint as Bloodaxe is, in the words of MD Neil Astley, 'scared stiff; you can't plan.' At least Tindall Street Press are OK - just as well, given that their first time author Catherine O'Flynn, won the Costa First Novel Prize with 'What Was Lost' (and it was also longlisted for the Booker). And why is the Arts Council being so mean with organisations for whom a few thousand pounds either way mean the difference between survival and going to the wall? It's because all those grants can go off to something so much more worthwhile. The Olympics. Yup. That cash-starved behemoth out in Docklands. Dontcha just wish we hadn't won that gig?