My last post was about trying to get my book out in time for Christmas, so I could give a copy to my dad before he died. Turns out it was a really stupid thing to do. Debbie (editor at Beaten Track) had to jump through hoops to finish editing in time, my print copies hadn't arrived and I ended up ordering him one through Amazon - but hindsight is a wonderful thing.
What was I trying to achieve anyway? It's only now I realise it was vanity on my part, a final attempt to make my dad proud of me, which was totally misguided. Close to the end of life, as he opened the present, painfully and slowly, I think he was hoping for a gripping crime novel he hadn't read. He spent a good few minutes staring at the back cover trying to read the blurb, before handing it back to me, disappointed. I understand. When you've only got a few weeks left to live, reading something that doesn't interest you is a waste of very valuable time.
What he really liked was the photograph album I'd compiled for him, and fair enough. In your final days, you're far more likely to want to look at the story of your life in photographs, so you can remember things, family and friends in happier times, than read anything at all. And so at his funeral this week, I've arranged a tribute montage of 40 photographs of his life as part of the service. I think he'd have liked that.
Meanwhile, I now have the print copies of the book, but I've totally failed to do anything about promoting it. Maybe when the funeral is over - or maybe it's already too late. But if anyone wants the copy I bought off Amazon, let me know and I'll send it to you for free.
It’s funny
isn’t it that sometimes themes go in waves? Last week one of my Spanish
students who is learning English told me about how his daughter is part of a
group of girls who are participating in STEM based projects, such as making
robots and designing apps. Later in the week I was speaking with another
student who is a Vice-Chancellor of one of the universities in Barcellona.* She
talked about how the number of women in senior roles has gradually increased
from practically zero to a few during her career as a palaeontologist. Progress
has been made but clearly much more needs to be done to achieve parity.
In between
times, I stood in for a colleague and found myself teaching three young women
who work for a cosmetics company. The first student arrived several minutes
before the others and on introducing herself and her role as a training manager
for the company said, “It may seem strange that I work for a cosmetics company
because my background is in chemistry.” However, I could see the connection and
it sounds as though the industry is doing more to develop products that work in
harmony with the natural chemistry of the body, which seems encouraging. Asking
her about her interests, she told me that she loved cooking and then emphasised
that part of the attraction of cooking for her is that the process is
essentially practical chemistry in action.
I could
hardly believe it! She sounded like a modern-day version of Bonnie Garmus’s
wonderful character, Elizabeth Zott, in her novel, Lessons in Chemistry! I had only just read the book a week or so
before! All the way through reading it, I kept telling my wife how brilliant
and original the book is. Apparently this is Garmus’s first novel. If she keeps
going like this then phew!
The novel is
set in 1960s America, in an environment largely unsupportive of a determined
and brilliant female chemist. However, despite inevitable challenges Zott
progresses unstoppably and unpredictably, most notably by becoming the unlikely
presenter of a cooking programme, in which, you’ve guessed it, she focuses on
the chemistry underlying the cooking process. Not only is Zott an inspiring, formidable
character but she is accompanied in her absorbing journey by a diverse cast of
supporting characters, including her laser sharp daughter, an exceptionally
intelligent dog (named Six-Thirty), a neighbour locked into an awful marriage
and her agonised producer who is initially desperate for her to conform to the stereotypes
of the time.
I think
anyone with even a smidgen of interest in science and women’s roles within it
would absolutely love this book. It might particularly inspire older teenagers
to consider the idea of a STEM career, which would be wonderful if it sometimes
succeeded in doing so. However, I also think it would reinvigorate interest in
anyone, who for whatever reason lost interest in science. Having taught maths
and science in the past, as well as English, I think nearly everyone has had
negative experiences at some stage in either or both of these subjects, with
girls especially being told that, ‘this subject’s not for you’. I went to
university to do a biology degree and couldn’t have been more inspired after
completing my A levels. Three years of generally awful teaching squeezed every
ounce of enthusiasm from me and was only restored after, thankfully, someone
asked for some help with the subject, which gradually revived my interest, so I
know how powerful the negative experiences can be. (Also I gave up chemistry as
soon as I could at school because the teacher knew my dad and picked on me.**)
As you may
have gathered, I highly commend this remarkable book! I hope you enjoy it
should you decide to read it.
*I know! She
could of course run rings around me on most topics but has the humility to take
lessons from a simpleton like me, who’s only advantage is being a native
speaker of English!
** To be
fair, I pushed back strongly so gave as good as I got – he was probably pleased
I gave up the subject too!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lessons
in Chemistry by
Bonnie Garmus. Penguin Random House UK ISBN 978-1-8049-9092-6
This is a very special book; one which I think children will remember forever. Why? Because it shows the very worst and the very best of humanity. It shows those things particularly powerfully because this story is true.
Mevan and her family had lived in Kurdistan for generations. It was a place 'where figs fell from the trees and the air smelled like honeysuckle'. It was where Mevan's family and friends were. My four-year-old grandson was particularly interested in the grocer who gave Mevan a sweet!
But then the Iraqi government forced Kurds like Mevan and her family to flee their homes.
Mevan and her parents travelled to Turkey, on to Azerbaijan then Russia, unwelcome and with poor Mevan feeling smaller and smaller.
But they found kindness in the Netherlands where Mevan was fascinated by all the people riding bikes. She'd never seen bikes before. She longed to ride one, but she had no bike until ...
... Egbert, caretaker of the building she was living in, gave Mevan a red bike that 'made Mevan feel a hundred feet tall'.
A year later, Mevan and her parents were told that there was a new home waiting for them 'in a country where they would be safe, where they would never have to leave. Mevan and her family had to leave in such a hurry that she never got the chance to say goodbye to Egbert.'
.
They settled in the UK, and Mevan 'never forgot the man who taught her how big a small act of kindness can be.'
In a heartwarming Epilogue we learn that Mevan grew up and visited that land of figs and honeysuckle, seeing grandparents but, poignantly, 'the grocer was gone', as were many others.
Grown-up Mevan also visited the Netherlands, and she asked if anybody knew of kind Egbert who had 'seen her when others hadn't' and give her that important red bike? They did ...
What's Mevan doing now? She's doing important and positive work towards a better world for everyone
https://mevanbabakar.com/
It's an astonishing story, as you can tell beautifully told and illustrated. Highly recommended.
The UK government is holding an open consultation on copyright and AI. This might seem an esoteric bit of government faffing that most people don't need to pay attention to, but it's far more than that. It's potentially a fight to the death between British creative industries and the techbros who are currently tearing the US state machinery apart in defiance of US law and the constitution. Do they look like people we can trust?
This is the issue: creative work is protected by copyright laws. This makes it illegal for one person to copy the work of another without their permission and distribute it or make a profit from selling or licensing it. The livelihood of the creative industries and individual creators relies on this. You can't steal creative work in the same way that you can't steal beans from the supermarket. It's simple. But the AI bros say they want an exception so that they can 'scrape' high quality creative works to train their AIs. And for some utterly bizarre reason, the government is up for this. The creative industries are worth £126 billion and employ 2.4 million people in the UK. Latest UK government figures show AI generated only £14 billion and employed 64,500 people. But the government sees potential for growth (even at the cost of die-back in the creative industries).
The argument the AI bros make is that they are not really copying anything. They are scraping the works and generating new works from patterns they have identified in them. Yet if you tried to publish a 'new' Harry Potter story, you would find Bloomsbury and Warner Bros suing you within seconds. If you copied all Disney's 101 Dalmatians and made a new cartoon in which they did something else, you would be sued. So where's the difference? If AI has been trained on, say, the works of an illustrator, someone can ask it to produce a particular image in the style of that illustrator and then they don't have to pay the illustrator, even though the new image would not exist if it were not for their years of training and practising and developing their style.
The government and the AI bros are trying to get away with this by ignoring the distinction between generative AI (like ChatGPT or, more recently DeepSeek) and the more useful (for humankind) AI that will help develop new medications, identify cancer cells, decode degraded documents, and so on. Yes, we can benefit from AI's input in many fields. No, we don't need AI writing poor quality stories, or copying the artwork or musical styles of talented professionals. AI needs to be trained to recognise cancerous cells by looking at cancerous and non-cancerous cells, not by scanning images by illustrators or literary novels. It works out new protein structures by looking at the molecular configuration of known proteins, not by listening to all the work of Mick Jagger or scanning photos from a picture library. The point of training AI on high quality creative work is ONLY to replace those creators and their livelihoods. ChatGPT can already write coherent sentences, so if someone wants to use it to write their in-house reports, marketing documents, etc, it can do that now. It won't be improved by having scanned the latest prize-winning novel.
Here's a suggestion. The government could licence for AI scraping any text written at the expense of the tax-payer. So any government documents, anything published by people who are paid for their work in the civil service, research papers from research funded by the state, and so on. And they can leave the rest of us alone. If a particular organisation wants to use AI to write their reports or whatever, they can get an LLM and train it on all their previous in-house work — that is, the text they own.
As for those people who would like to write a novel but don't have the skill — just don't. There are lots of people who would like to be professional footballers but don't have the skill. They can't do it. That's life.
And finally... While this consultation has been ongoing, DeepSeek has stolen OpenAI's work to make its own cheaper and better model. Those of us whose work has been stolen think this is pretty hilarious. It also means the UK consultation is probably a complete waste of time as the baton has already passed to China and no one is going to invest confidently in UK-based AI anyway. But please, if you want actual writers and illustrators to survive, tell the government we don't want the AI bros to have access to our work. And make sure you don't buy or endorse materials based on IPR theft.
If you want to respond to the government consultation, you can write to your MP or respond individually until 25 Feb. The consultation document is here. It includes specific question you can respond to. It's long. Of course. To discourage you. Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Rewind to the late 1990s, a piece of graffiti on a wall in the
Elephant and Castle said:
A fungus grows on our
collected Dickens
Back home I took the line and added one of my own to make a
poem.
The soil of the
Elephant makes rich pickings
Like a demented Cassandra I wailed on and on about how the
developers will move in and destroy/sell off the area and that opportunities must
not be wasted.
I never finished the poem to my satisfaction. It languished
in my unfinished drawer.
In the 2010s I began a poem, ‘The Marmalade Ladies’, inspired
by two older sisters, Marian and Jessie, who made tons of delicious marmalade to
sell every year at West Square Summer Fete.
I never finished this
poem either. It also languished in my unfinished drawer.
Fast forward a decade or so and, as part of a campaign group
set up to protest at the high rise land grab by off-shore developers, I met Marian
who was now in her 90s. She told me she was leaving to move into sheltered accommodation.
There was no time to waste languishing or otherwise. Her
memories needed to be captured.
Encouragement
So many people offered encouragement and support. There was
a neighbour, John, who had lived in the area all his life, and was a treasure
trove of stories, photographs and connections. There was Ludmilla, a film maker
and housing co-op member. We’d recently worked together (with no funding) to
make a short film about housing co-ops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irrF_AdbaKI&t=513s
Our Local councillor, Maria Linford-Hall, encouraged me to apply
for some funding from Southwark Council’s Neighbourhood Fund. A local
historical society agreed to vouch for me and manage the funding. We started
visiting and recording Marian and John began to write down his memories.
The End Goal
At first our goal was simply to make a short film capturing
memories, put on an event, and stay in budget.
Experimenting in style
We began by recording conversations loosely based around a
theme but trying to capture the feel of a conversation between friends rather
than a specific interview. We did experiment with a more traditional question and
answer approach but it just didn’t work.
The idea changes
shape and the End Goalposts shifted
John kept on writing, Marian kept sharing, AND we discovered
Marian’s father’s photographs and felt that his work needed to be exhibited at
the event.
I invited some people to sing and for local poet, Paul
Taylor, to recite some of his poems. I finished the ‘Marmalade Ladies’ poem and
dared myself to read it. We made John’s writing and photos into a booklet. There
was a memory table for people to share their memories. The End Goal had
shifted.
Celebrating is not
showing off
By nature I am an introvert. I am also a product of my
northern working class background where any attempt to push yourself forward
was considered ‘making a show of yourself.’ This had to be worked on.
So, during this process I learned that ideas can take a long
time to shape and form and sometimes they are developed in unexpected ways. It’s
always good to have an End Goal to work towards but, once you start writing,
expect it to change in surprising ways and embrace that change. Experimenting
in style is a good thing because you can tell what doesn’t work as well as what
does, and always take time to celebrate your achievements!
This book has it all - a hidden tunnel, a secret lake and a disappearing dog. Good ingredients for a fun read and it delivers. Author, Karen Inglis, describes it as "a time travel mystery adventure with modern twists'.
Stella and her younger brother Tom have moved to London. When their neighbour's dog keeps mysteriously disappearing and reappearing, wet. They are intrigued.
Their attempts to solve the mystery involves a buried boat and a tunnel that leads them to a secret lake. The children travel back in time to their home and gardens as they were a hundred years before. Here they meet new friends and enemies and discover astonishing connections between the past and the present.
It's a book of short chapters which helps maintain the pace and the characters are interesting and charismatic.
The Secret Lake is a good read for middle grade and any age upwards, really and has already been enjoyed by over half a million young readers and translated around the world.
Congratulations to Susan Quinn on the publication of MY MUM from Quarto Books on February 27th.
The story celebrates the bond between mother and child and follows them as they take on life's big and small adventures - together. From sailing a ship around the garden and exploring forests, streams and meadows, to telling stories in a cosy den and cuddling before bedtime, a child reveals all the simple yet amazing things she loves to do with her wondrously adventurous mum.
The Welsh language edition of Miriam Halahmy's YA novel, BEHIND CLOSED DOORS is coming from Graffeg this February. The novel was originally published by Holiday House Books in America and Firefly Press in the UK. It won the Manchester Metropolitan University great student giveaway in 2018, "the clear and popular choice."
Congratulations to Karen McCombie for WORLD OF WANDA, from Uclan Books, publishing on 6th February
Karen McCombie’s latest MG novel – ‘World of Wanda’ – was one of The
Observer’s Children’s Books of the Month for January. The story was
partly-inspired by her son’s ADHD diagnosis, which coincided with her
developing the dual-voice story of Wanda and Margot. ADHD very quickly and
naturally became part of Wanda’s character.
Twelve-year-old Wanda doesn’t go to school, because she and her mum are
too busy back-packing around the world. The trouble is, Wanda is homesick for a
home that doesn’t exist. When she finds out a secret her mum has been keeping
from her, Wanda decides it’s time to have an adventure of her very own.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, 14-year-old Margot isn’t prepared for the shock
that’s about to land on her doorstep…
Gathering the Glimmers, written and illustrated by Ffion Jones was published on January 30th, from Tiny Tree Press.
Glimmers are brief everyday
moments that spark a sense of joy by reminding us of the beauty in simple
things.
A little girl called Wren is
on her way home through a dark forest when she gets lost. In the forest there
are many triggers, which evoke her fear and anxiety.
Yet through the darkness, Wren is able to notice glimmers all around her; in
the leaves, the sunlight, and ultimately within herself.
Barbara Henderson is celebrating the launch of I DON'T DO MOUNTAINS this month. Despite the official publication date of 17th March,
readers at the Fort William Mountain Festival will be the first to get their
hands on this adventure story set in the Scottish hills. It is Scottish
Mountaineering Press's first children's book, following their 2023 win of Small
Press of the Year, Scotland, at the Nibbies.
Congratulations to all, and to everyone else who has a book out this month. The next news shout-out will be on March 7th. Get your good news items to Claire Fayers by the end of February to be included.
