On Worrying - Andrew Strong

I am a naturally anxious person. I worry about just about everything. When I was fourteen I worried about losing my hair. Years later, still with plenty of hair, I worry about going grey. I have had just about every illness there is, or rather, I have convinced myself, at some point, that I've had every disease know to medicine and a few known only to veterinary science.

Worrying is the ultimate distraction. It's what I do when I'm not hungry, or cold, or wet, or tired.

I worry about my going deaf, going blind and losing my mind. I am not a passive worrier though - I will read medical text books, trawl every internet site to confirm my worries. I will eat the right things, drink the right things, exercise, cleanse my body of toxins and fill it with anti-oxidants.

I worry about leaks, bills, missing appointments, rusty hinges, people, mice, loose tiles, my collapsing shed, the central heating, getting up, going to sleep, tomorrow, next week and next year.

I am a sceptic too. I may worry about eating the right foods but won't believe the people who are telling me what I should eat. I won't listen to experts.

And so it is with global warming, the future energy crisis, and the end of the universe. The sceptical me will deny anyone can know anything for sure.

Worrying passes the time. It gives the wide awake brain something to do. Hating Sudoku and all other forms of solitary amusement, worrying is a great time waster.

Working is a good time waster too. Do it for long enough and you can make money out of it. I've looked for employment as a worrier, but there aren't that many openings. Instead I would find any job, turn up at nine, settle in and worry about doing the job properly until it was time to go home.

Now I am worrying about my book. I used to worry that I would never be published. I found a publisher. Then I worried that my publisher would change their mind. They didn't. Then I worried my book wouldn’t appear in the shops.Now I’m worried about the third.

Worrying is quite productive, though. I channel it into writing, or sketching out new ideas for books. I don't just sit around and worry. I'm not a slacker. I am an industrious worrier.

Between worrying I've been reading "The User Illusion" - a wonderful, rambling book about consciousness. And it makes this point: if we compare the amount of information going into our brains with the amount we can hold in our consciousness at any one time, it is about a million to one. A million times more information flows into our senses than we know what to do with. Our little wide awake selves spend all our time trying to decide which tiny bits of information to deal with. And yet, meanwhile, our unconscious self deals with the rest.

So here's my solution: I'm going to let my unconscious deal with everything. I'm going to let it do the worrying. My conscious mind is going to get all the fun. I'm going to fill it with colour and music and tastes and smells. There won't be any bandwidth left to worry.

I just hope I will still manage to get things done. Do you think I will? Do you? Will I?

The Death of Reading - Elen Caldecott

I have heard from two different people this week that reading is in decline. One was a friend on a writing forum who just had a feeling he was right. The second was in the Guardian, so I took it slightly more seriously... for about two seconds.

The theory is, that there are so many other forms of entertainment these days, the internet, video games, text messages, Sky plus boxes, bionic arms... that there’s no time left for books. We are all assaulted from every direction by things that yearn to amuse us. Our time is no longer our own and that like-it-or-not we will find ourselves playing Resident Evil 4 for three hours a night before switching on Celebrity Come Dining on Ice. The world has gone to hell in an electronic handcart.

But, it’s not true, is it?
For a number of reasons.

First of all, I’m not convinced that there ever was a time when we spent all our leisure time reading. Yes, sure, maybe some Victorian families read to each other after dinner, but only the ones who weren’t working shifts down in the cotton mines. Certainly, when I was growing up in the 1980s in Wales, the idea that we should sit down and read aloud to each other after a meal would have been met with disbelief, then laughter. After all, Coronation Street was on.

And, even if we did have leisure time for reading, I’m not sure how many people read for fun. My guess is that it has always been a minority interest. I was definitely the only one in my junior school who did. Admittedly, it was a very small school; there were 10 people in my year. So, 10% of us (me) read for fun; All the other kids had BMXs and He-man figures and Mr Frostys and there was one wondrous day when even I put down my book because Hayley got a ZX-Spectrum and we could play Space Invaders. I never saw anyone else in my street read anything other than the Beano for fun.

Finally, most crucially, just because we have Facebook and Avatar and iPads doesn’t mean you have to surround yourself with them. If you want to read a book, well, what’s stopping you? The digital world isn’t being beamed onto the back of our eyeballs just yet! As another of my favourites shows from the 80s said, ‘why don’t you just switch off your TV set and go out and do something less boring instead?’

Like read a book.


Elen's website is www.elencaldecott.com

You Know That Saying 'I Couldn't Get Arrested'?: Gillian Philip

I can’t think what to write about this month (‘can’t think what to write about’ being a near-pathological condition I really should be able to dissect in detail). So I’m just going to pass on a couple of cautionary tales about research.

I'll be honest, I don’t like research. It’s the one displacement activity – apart from cleaning the loos – that I don’t enjoy. I resent it for keeping me away from the story (whereas Facebook and Twitter: I don’t resent them for the same thing. It’s an innate laziness).

I tend to do detailed research after the fact, and not just because of idleness. The one time I did get into historical background in a big way, it was for a book with a background of the 16th century Scottish witch hunts (obligatory plug: FIREBRAND, published in August 2010 by Strident). I got so into my subject, I was so pleased with the depth of my research, that every syllable of it got shoehorned into the story, thereby bringing said story to a screeching halt. So, out it all came again. Just because I knew it, I didn’t have to inflict it on the reader. To paraphrase Russell T Davies, it doesn’t really matter why meteorites would miraculously burn in a vacuum; for the purposes of the story they JUST DO.

Sometimes, though, I have to know before I start writing that the whole plot or setting is actually going to work. Which is why I caught myself on the phone to the British Embassy in Paris one day, asking how far back it was set from the road and was it possible to drive a car up to the front door? The official was very polite in the circumstances, told me to forget it (in the nicest possible way), sent me a smart brochure about the Ambassador’s house and suggested I use that instead.

Impetuous is a Bad Thing to be, because after this experience, I should have known better. No, a few months later a plot occurred to me in all its perfect glory (as they do, hem hem). But no! What if my heroine had bodyguards? That would ruin everything.

So I got onto the net, found the phone number for the Cabinet Office, dialled without a second thought and asked a nice lady about security arrangements for the families of cabinet ministers. After about ten seconds I realised what a bad idea this was, but I didn't want to just, you know, hang up...

Well, at least I must have sounded reassuringly incompetent.

So there you go: a few ways not to handle your research. And what is my point? Well, I don’t really have one. But it’s an excuse for a picture of Richard Armitage.

(Above: Ros and Lucas marvel at the idiocy of authors, then go for a drink)

http://www.gillianphilip.com/

Publication Day - the biggest myth going Karen Ball

There are lots of myths that surround the life of a writer. That we earn lots of money. That we have lived every experience we write about. That ideas are easy or that we are kind and friendly people who pat children on the head and have a stash of chocolate in our pockets to hand out whenever meeting a new fan. All wrong. (Well, in my case at least. I give chocolate to no one.)

There's another myth that does the rounds, but one that is possibly less discussed. Publication day. You know that all important day when your book hits the shelves in a riot of publicity and promotion? Your publisher takes you out for a champagne dinner, fans queue up around the block, your parents weep with pride and the first editions become immediately priceless. That's the way it works, right? Possibly for some people. My publication days have always been quiet. I know several of you enjoy 24 hours that are full of flowers, interviews, attention, joy and activity, but I hazard a guess that even then there is something uniquely isolating about being the only person at the eye of the storm.

So, what is publication day? Usually in the middle of the month, but it could be one of any number between 1 and 31. It doesn't really matter to me, as not much happens. I get up, have some breakfast, get on with the day. If I'm feeling reckless, I'll wander into a bookshop to see if I can spot a copy of my book, but I know that's a dangerous dance with the devil. There might be a card from the publisher. But often, the day continues much as any other. This momentous event that has been creeping up on me for months and months turns out to be ... well, not so very momentous after all.

I have similair issues with the day you find out your book is going to be published. That phone call or email after an acquisitions meeting is possibly one of the moments of purest delight I've ever known. But then what happens? When I took the call saying my first novel was going to be published, I was cycling home. I pulled over, wrestled my mobile to my ear with sweaty palms, tried to sound like a Professional Author rather than harassed cyclist, then when the phone call was over, I... Did a dance? Pulled strangers to me and kissed them? Threw my bike aside and went out for an evening of debauchery? No, I put my feet back on the pedals, cycled the rest of the way home, made a few phone calls and watched Eastenders. This really big moment in my career remained caught up with the mundane details of my workaday life. I am certain I was tucked up in bed by 10.30pm, ready for the next day in the office.

Is this one of a writer's biggest secrets? There's a hole in the middle of the polo. A writer's world exists largely in the mind, and never is that more obvious than when real, concrete things are happening - somewhere else. In a meeting or a warehouse or a bookshop but not in my home and not in front of me. 'What does it feel like to be published?' people ask. I don't know. Publication is what happens somewhere, out there, in the ether. Perhaps it's all a big dupe. Perhaps none of us are really published at all? Perhaps... Oh no, I'm veering into conspiracy theory territory. No one would do that to us, would they? Kid us, I mean?

Visit my website at www.karen-ball.com

Stitchin' n Bitchin' by Penny Dolan

About a week ago I suddenly “saw” that an early scene in Tome Two could work in another way. However – and maybe that’s why the new vision struck me – I was on a run of trains, meetings, researches, visits, storytelling workshops and mightily sore feet.

I just couldn’t wait to get back to the unpicking. Started on it a day or two ago, and ooh blooming blimey! My very own Column of Infamy has raised itself before my eyes!

You see, back there on the train, the changes went so swiftly and easily. Pick up this person here and put them down there. Put these two together and let them have a really big falling out about something major, something that will drive the book along. Add this and that rather interesting incident. . . No, I won’t reveal more. It was all there in my mind, and wonderful.

So how come the actual Tome-work is so difficult? Think I’d forgotten just how much I had worked over and over the scenes before. Now the thread of the unravelled story seems full of kinks and twists. The colors in the wool look a little re-used, and unusual holes keep appearing where the story once went in another direction.

I keep working on, writing on, wanting to return to my once smooth and seamless surface. Occasionally I think I’ve almost made it, but then up comes a bit of pattern I’d once put in and that I really rather love. How am I going to manage this? It’s very much a head-down, keep-going sort of writing time.

In fact, there have been moments when I wish my bright idea hadn’t revealed itself. I’ve also – sssh! – had moments of being really rather glad that this is a renamed version, and the old document is still there waiting. Just in case I end up with an ugly lump of sows ear from my once silken purse.

Hope all of you writers out there are having a much better time!


You can also find me on my new blog, THE YEAR OF MOUSE.

Stranger than Fiction – Michelle Lovric

I’m scarcely writing at the moment. I’m doing something stranger than fiction. I’m trying to drag a 700-year-old piece of marble out of the moist bowels of the Doges Palace in Venice.

It is that fascinating object, a Column of Infamy. It was erected to the eternal dishonour of one Bajamonte Tiepolo, Venetian nobleman.

Bajamonte’s plot to murder Doge Pietro Gradenigo dissolved into a bloody comedy of savagely ironic errors. A last-minute betrayal cost him the element of surprise. Then the heavens opened, drowning in wind and rain all Bajamonte’s plans for simultaneous strikes on San Marco from three different directions. The whole grandiose conspiracy was finally quashed after an old lady dropped a stone mortar-and-pestle on the head of Bajamonte’s standard-bearer, scattering brains and blood. When it was all over, Bajamonte Tiepolo’s palazzo at Sant’Agostin was razed, his family crest suppressed, the man himself consigned to perpetual exile, a kind of living death, the worst possible punishment for a Venetian. Except …

Except knowing that on the site of your destroyed home, your vengeful vanquisher, Doge Gradenigo, has erected a colonna d’infamia, a metre-tall column of white marble with an inscription to keep your name in perpetual odium. ‘For ever’, says the column, one of the earliest examples of stone script in Venice.

For this writer, the idea of a Column of Infamy has an irresistible appeal. What can compare with it by way of an insult? A libellous roman-a-clef? A spiteful scrawl of graffiti? A rancid blog? A perpetual icon at the top of every Google search? A malicious character assassination in a national newspaper? I don’t think so. This is an insult that becomes part of the fabric of the city: a phantasmagorical white effigy by moonlight, a harsh reality by day. It’s a urinal for the dogs, and for humans with some dog in their nature. (And don’t think Doge Gradenigo didn’t think of that when he put up the column.)

And it turns out that Bajamonte Tiepolo’s Column of Infamy has a story of its own, something stranger and perhaps sadder than even a novelist could invent.

For even in exile, Bajamonte Tiepolo could not bear the thought of it. One of his henchmen was sent in the night to destroy the column. He succeeded in breaking it in three pieces before he was caught in the act. The henchman was deprived of a hand and his eyes were put out. The column was repaired and re-erected. For a while.

Also implicated in the Tiepolo conspiracy were members of the Querini clan, one of whom was Bajamonte’s father-in-law, Marco. Family counts in Italy. Memories are long. It seems that in 1785, one Angelo Maria Querini asked the city if he could buy the column. No-one paid too much attention, it seems, when the shameful object was quietly sold off and a humble stone plaque embedded in the pavement. Loc. Col. Bai. The. MCCCX. says the broken slab, which almost seems designed to obfuscate all but those who speak abbreviated Latin and know fourteenth-century Venetian history.

Strangely, however, Querini did not destroy the column. Instead, he sent it to his villa in Altichiero on the mainland. Then it passed into the hands of the antiquarian Antonio Sanquirico, and finally to the heir of the Duke of Melzi, who used it as a garden ornament at a mansion on Lake Como. It was returned to Venice in 1838 by the last inhabitant of the villa, Duchess Joséphine Melzi-d'Eril Barbò, and it was briefly put on display in a courtyard of the Correr Museum. But some time, at least a hundred years ago, it was carried down to a depository of the Doges Palace, and never seen again.

Never seen again: the Column of Infamy that was supposed to stand ‘for ever’.

I have talked to many Venetians and to organizations that find the column fascinating and compelling, both as an object and as a symbol. 2010 is the 700th anniversary of Bajamonte’s plot. Even Venice doesn’t have many seven-hundredth anniversaries! Yet the conspiracy’s most important and tangible relic languishes unseen. The column is not fragile, and it’s not massive. Why can't it be brought out of the depository and placed where Venetians can see it? Even inside the Correr Museum, if stone conservation is an issue. The clock is ticking. On the day of posting this blog, it will be four months and ten days until the 700th anniversary of Bajamonte’s fall.

Now Venice forgets her past at her peril. In some ways, it is all she has left. So far, I have attempted some consciousness-raising in the form of my novel, The Undrowned Child. That shaming Column of Infamy gives Bajamonte a visceral reason hate Venice: his vengeful ghost serves nicely as a highly motivated villain. In my story, when he’s vanquished, Bajamonte’s lost column magically reappears where it always should have been.

And I haven’t renounced hope. For my sins, I’m offering myself up at a press conference in Venice later this month. I’m presenting a paper (The Novelist’s Bajamonte Tiepolo – the Lure of a Column of Infamy) at a conference in Venice in April. I’ve been honoured with an invitation to deliver the Venice in Peril Summer Lecture on June 1: The Night Venice Nearly Died - The Conspiracy of Bajamonte Tiepolo 1310 - 2010. All this from someone who would rather chew off her big toe than do personal publicity (see my previous blog on the Golem).

I’m working with some locals on the idea of a small, dignified and quiet symbolic gesture on the night of June 14th, the eve of the anniversary. Since the Fondazione controls all the images of the column, I’ve commissioned an evocative painting by Kaitlin Zorah McDonough that shows la colonna d'infamia not in a warehouse but in the campo of Sant’Agostin, where it should be.

Anyone got any other ideas?

I appeal to the creative and subversive imaginations of all those who read this blog.

Venice, and her languishing Column of Infamy, need you.

Michelle Lovric’s website
Venice in Peril
Painting of the Column of Infamy by Kaitlin Zorah McDonough.

Two novels about violence: Leslie Wilson

I have recently read two excellent books for teenagers; one of them is just out, the other has been out for some time, but the subject matter of the two seems to go together, both dealing with issues around boys and violence, both exciting novels, but also sensitive and perceptive, and managing never to moralise.

The first is Gillian Philip’s Crossing the Line, which was published last year – and she has blogged here about writing it. It deals with the aftermath of a stabbing: Aidan Mahon was stabbed while trying to protect his girlfriend Allie from a school bully. The bully just happens to have once been in a school gang with the narrator, Nick Geddes, who is Allie’s elder brother. Nick, cut loose from the gang, is now isolated at school, traumatised by the murder, and bewildered about life. He’s also drop-dead gorgeous, Philip leaves us in no doubt about that, and so is his sister. So is the girl he loves, Orla – who is the murdered Aidan’s sister.

Nick’s other problems include his beloved grandmother, who’s now suffering from Alzheimers, his ineffectual ageing-hippy father, who drinks, and his mother, who has a rather vapid and highly embarrassing New-Age spirituality slot on the local radio. The novel weaves past and present together with superb aplomb; it really kept me turning the pages, completely gripped, and also amused, because Nick has a sense of humour, however bad things are.

Inside, by Julia Jarman, is the story of Lee who is ‘inside for a crime he has committed. He’s mugged an old lady and put her in hospital. Now, angry, resentful, and scared, he’s sent to Parkhall Young Offenders Institution. He’s at a tipping point in his life: ‘You can turn yourself round in here, Lee, if you stick to the rules,’ the nurse tells him. Only Parkhall is full of young criminals who are determined what will happen to Lee is further training in crime and gang culture

When I was young and a student, I did voluntary work with adolescent offenders, and they were just like the characters in this novel. I remember looking at them and seeing grown lads with the minds and emotional maturity of toddlers. They’re lads who’ve never had a chance, actually; I remember the principal of Newton Aycliffe Approved School saying to us: ‘If you think where these lads are coming from, you’re surprised they’ve done as well as they have.’ This is certainly true of Lee; Jarman gradually, subtly, builds up the picture of his background on a sink estate with a mother who isn’t able to cope with her money, with her life, with parenthood. We may not have street children in our society, but there are too many who are literally cast away, from the moment they’re born, deprived of the loving hard work and care it takes to properly bring up a child.

All the same, Lee is frightening. He’s beaten his own mother up, a crime even the other young offenders despise – and his cell-mate, the horrible Sharpey, knows about this and uses the knowledge to control him. All through the book, you’re trembling for him, knowing that his future hangs in the balance – will he be able to turn himself round, or will he slither downwards?

The novel’s told in Lee’s own voice, and Jarman has rendered it brilliantly, a mixture of brutality and vulnerability. It is, in many ways, the voice of a child. But a child who’s effectively on his own, who has to make major choices with the odds stacked against him.

A novel for teens has to have the teenager solving their own problems – that’s what it’s about. The teen novel is always, in my view, the classic Bildungsroman. But there are adults in both these books who help; the teacher McCluskey in Crossing the Line, and in Inside, the prison officer McGiven (what is it with Scots?) who’s able to be tough and caring at the same time. And the youth worker, who reported Lee to the police, but who is himself an ex-offender and who reaches out to Lee. These are bits of good fortune that I’m sadly aware aren’t available for many kids. God help them.