That Delicate Thing Called Confidence by Ellen Renner

I knew I shouldn't do it, but I couldn't resist. 


I don't know if I'm unusual in this respect, but I tend to avoid reading fiction when writing a first draft. Partly, I don't want to be influenced by someone else's voice or ideas, swept away into someone else's world when I need to be thinking about mine. Building a story,  breathing life into a concept and creating characters, is a treacherous process, hemmed round with dangers and pitfalls. One mis-step and a shiny idea you've cherished for months or years can turn sullen and lifeless.


Also, I already have a problem with displacement activities. I don't need the seductiveness of story to provide me with yet another excuse to avoid bum on chair/fingers on keyboard/brain switched on. (The last being by far the hardest.) And because proper thinking - really digging deep - is hard work, I find that confidence (or the lack of it) makes all the difference.


So confronting someone else's utter brilliance while struggling through the thicket of angst that is my typical first draft isn't something I find helpful. But Oxford University Press had kindly arranged for me to appear at the 2012 Hay Festival earlier this month to promote CHARMED SUMMER, the first book in a series for 8-12 girls. I spent last year writing four books about friendship and mystery on a summer island. It's been a total delight working with the team at OUP and with Working Partners on the Flip Flop Club concept. I've enjoyed the collaboration, learned a great deal, and am very proud to have been involved. The books are lovingly produced by OUP and, as I'm sole author, I'm promoting them under the psuedonym Ellen Richardson, to keep them distinct from my own books.

So here I was at Hay for the first time in my life, rather in awe and very impressed. The festival was extremely well organised and they certainly look after the 'artists' beautifully. Even the porta-loos are posh! So impressive was the whole event that I found myself surprised the weather had the temerity to rain, although monsoon might be a better description. However, on the last Saturday the rain stopped and the sun almost shone. Better yet, directly following my session, I and my son were able to trundle off to hear Philip Reeve talk about his new book, GOBLINS. Which is, of course, brilliant. As was the session. I knew it would be. I shouldn't have gone but I couldn't resist.


All indulgences must be paid for in this life it seems, and I began paying the price at once. With each delightful, clever and elegantly written extract that Mr Reeve read out, a niggling little voice in the back of my head grew louder: 'You will NEVER be able to write anything half so good. Why try? Give up now.'


I think all writers, perhaps even Mr Reeve himself, have a similar goblin inhabiting the darkest recesses of their minds. One with a nasty, whining voice which takes considerable determination (or sheer stupidity?) to ignore. I tend to avoid circumstances likely to wake mine. I've been waiting ages to read FEVER CRUMB. I'm desperate to read it. I opened the book to the first page a year ago, devoured the words on it, snapped the book shut and put it carefully away. I won't open it again until my own current project has safely made the journey to that lovely, comfortable place known as editing.


My new thing is TRIBUTE, to be published by Hot Key Books in 2013. It's a young adult fantasy. It's ambitious and big and scary and I'm right in the sticky middle of the first draft. Still floundering; still finding my feet. And it's going well. I'm excited - when I let myself be - because I know it's the best thing I've yet written. But will it be good enough? Not if I listen to my own inner goblin. I couldn't write for nearly a week upon returning from Hay, but I'm not sorry I went to hear Philip Reeve. I thoroughly enjoyed his talk and will buy the book. But I won't read it. Not just yet.

So, a question to those writers brave enough to answer. Do you have your own little goblin? Do you read other writers when writing a first draft? Or like me, do you avoid?

Which Side of The Fence Do You Sit? - Lynne Garner

I've been teaching a course called 'Writing for Pleasure and Profit.' This week we discussed the many ways in which the writer can become published. We covered being traditionally published, being published by a packager, getting caught out by a vanity publisher, creating your own books in the form of eBooks and iBooks.

As we talked one of the students said she'd never dream of reading a book on an eReader. She was a book lover and would never change. Another student said they did all their reading on an eReader and didn't miss 'proper' books.

When asked my opinion I must admit I sat on that fence. I love the smell of an old book. I love the feel and sound of the pages as you turn them. When on holiday or out for the day I often pop into an old book shop to 'get my fix.' When you walk in the smell is just wonderful. So give me a good old fashioned paper based book any day.

However I own a Kindle. It was originally purchased to test the eBooks I was in the process of publishing. If you'd like to see my collection of eBooks click on this link.

Anyway I soon discovered I was converted to reading on an eReader. I know my eReader doesn't smell like a book.  It doesn't feel like a book. It doesn't sound like a book. However I can pop it into my bag and take it anywhere. I don't have to worry about the book mark falling out and I can take a library of books with me where ever I go. So if I want to read some fiction I can. If I want to do a little research and read a non-fiction title I can. So give me an eReader and I'm happy.  

So if you ask me which I prefer I'm sorry I simply can't decide. Which got me thinking. If I were to ask you which side of the fence do you sit when it comes to this subject what would your answer be?

A little note:
There is now a product that will make your eReader smell like a book - just click here if you don't believe me.

Lynne Garner

My blog - Fuelled By Hot Chocolate
A group blog I contribute to: The Picture Book Den
Another group blog I contribute to: Do Authors Dream of Electric Books 

BOOKSELLER SUNDAYS: Scent of a (book) Woman, Kate Agnew at the Children’s Bookshop, Muswell Hill

The third in our new series of Sunday guest blogs by booksellers who work with children’s authors. These guest blogs are designed to show life behind the scenes of a crucial but neglected relationship – the one between a writer and a bookseller. These days, such relationships are more intense and more important, as increasing numbers of authors go on the road to promote children’s books – a goal shared by the booksellers who will contribute to this series.

The Children’s Bookshop first opened its doors nearly 38 years ago. To this day I still vividly remember my own first visit. Encouraged by a brilliant infant school teacher, I went with my mum, ostensibly in search of the latest additions to the series I was enjoying, but really, I suspect, just for a good browse. The then owner, Helen Paiba, took the time to talk to us about what I was reading, what I enjoyed, and to think about what else I might like. It was a revelatory experience for us both, and, having received some wonderful, personally tailored advice, we left clutching not just the pirate book I knew I wanted, but also an armful of books to enjoy. My mother Lesley took over the shop in 1994 while I was running Heffers Children's Bookshop. Now I work there myself, along with my sister Emily.

There are days when, if I shut my eyes and don’t stop to think too hard, some things don’t seem to have changed all that much in the intervening decades. As I open up on a Monday morning, the shop still smells of that heady new book aroma (which Karl Lagerfeld is trying to bottle!) and at least some of the books I enjoyed then are still selling today; the outside loo has grown no warmer over the years and the pillar that holds up the ceiling is still as inconvenient as it ever was. On the plus side, even in these days of ebooks and cut-price offers in other high street stores, in the specialist independent bookshop our in-depth knowledge and passion for what we do are what reign supreme. We still spend a great deal of each day enthusing about the books we love and talking to customers about just which books will be right to meet their child’s particular needs.

Meanwhile the role of authors – as readers of this blog need little reminding – has experienced one of the biggest changes in bookselling since the Children’s Bookshop first opened its doors. Our active relationship with authors is almost as obvious to customers coming into the shop today as that distinctive scent. Piles of signed stock jostle cheerfully for space with Carnegie short-listed titles, and passers-by might be forgiven for thinking that we are suffering from something of a split personality at the moment. One of our windows is draped in dark fabric, covered in gore, blood and spiders ahead of a signing with Darren Shan. The other features bright-yellow flowery trims, pastel eggs and little fluffy chicks to mark the launch of Helen Peters’ delightful first novel, The Secret Hen House Theatre.

That kind of variety, and the chance to do different and exciting things in support of the books we love and the authors who’ve supported us, are among the delights of an independent bookshop. Last month alone featured a typically vibrant blend of events involving authors and children from a wide range of backgrounds. With so many good things going on, it seems invidious to single out particular events from the mix, but perhaps readers will get a flavour if I say that they included shop signings with Nick Sharratt and Lauren St John; an extraordinary succession of scintillating talks, readings and drawing sessions with a rich range of authors in schools; an inspirational residency with Kevin Crossley-Holland and some delightful workshops with Polly Dunbar creating Dream Boat hats; as well as a family author event with the local literary and scientific institution. And among all that, we enjoyed being involved in a wonderfully individual local launch, for Sita Bramachuri’s Jasmine Skies; it took place at a deli and involved barefoot Indian dancing on the streets of Muswell Hill!

As a child, although I visited the bookshop almost every week, I don’t remember ever seeing an author there, or one coming into school. It just didn’t happen, and we didn’t know to miss it. But a few years on from that first visit to the bookshop, it seemed an extraordinary treat to meet – at a Puffin book fair in Kensington – their editor Kaye Webb. It felt such a privilege to come face to face with the woman who’d worked on so many of the books I loved, I can only imagine what it would have been like to meet a real-life author!

Except, of course, I am lucky enough not to have to imagine it: as a young bookseller in the early 90s it was an unbelievable treat to come face to face with many of my childhood idols, among them Philippa Pearce and Jill Paton Walsh, whom I met in the gardens at Hemingford Grey, home of The Children Of Green Knowe, which our book club is enjoying this month. That delight is something I often think of as I see the pleasure in young fans’ faces when they meet a favourite author. The teenage girls who baked a cake for Derek Landy; the family who brought a huge bouquet of flowers for Jacqueline Wilson; the eight-year-old who quietly handed Michael Morpurgo the story he’d written; the class who made a big biscuit bear for Mini Grey: these are some of many moments to treasure.

Now barely a week passes in which we are not involved in several different author events, and long hours are spent behind the scenes in matching the right author to the right venue at the right time. All the events we do come on top of the assorted days spent in schools with children and evenings in the bookshop with teachers talking through the variety of new books available, which in turn come on top of the ordinary days spent hand-selling in the shop. If there were only more hours in the day, more days in the week and – most of all I sometimes think – more square yards in the shop, we’d love to do even more. In a world where independent retailers are under constant threat we know it’s our relationship with authors – and their supportive publishers – alongside our in-depth knowledge and love of the books that keep customers coming back for more. We’ve recently been shortlisted for the Bookseller Children’s Independent Bookseller of the Year Award. Let’s hope the award, the specialist independent bookshops, and the smell of new, printed books are still here to be enjoyed in another four decades.

Team photo with Jacqui Wilson: Kate Agnew, Ellen Ellis, Sanchita Basu De Sarkar, Emily Agnew and Jenna Harrington.

The Children’s Bookshop website

Watch out for Independent Booksellers Week, a campaign celebrating independents on the high street, which this year takes place between 30th June and 7th July.

Can you introduce yourself, please? - Nicola Morgan

I am spectacularly useless at introducing myself. I don't mean saying, "Hello, lovely to meet you." I'm quite reasonably good at that. I mean that thing where you have to introduce yourself at the beginning of a talk or an interview. "Could you tell us who you are and what you do?"

On Saturday I was speaking at a conference on writing in the digital age. At lunch-time, I was interviewed to camera. "Can you start by introducing yourself?"

What did I say? Well, there were a load of things I could have said but did I say any of them?

NO! I said, all meekly and pathetically, "I'm Nicola Morgan and I run a blog called Help! I Need a Publisher!"

WHAT? Help! I Need a Right Good Kick Up the Backside! And a Psychiatrist! Honestly, I do this every time and I drive myself nuts.

What goes on in my brain just before I open my mouth? Am I ashamed of what I do? No, I'm very proud of what I do. Am I confused by how many things I do and how to describe what I "am"? Yes, certainly, but it shouldn't be beyond the wit of woman, especially a writer woman, to come up with a sentence which says what I do without sounding either a non-entity or egotistical.

Writers, do you all have this problem, too? Do you start to cringe when you say out loud the things you've achieved? We want people to know, don't we? And yet it's so very hard to say it.

Do you think we should all work out a suitable sentence and practise saying it in front of the mirror?

If so, what would your sentence be for yourself? Go on, it's your chance to plug yourself!

"Can you introduce yourself, please?"

(By the way, today I'm speaking at a conference for parents, about reading for pleasure. I am going to award myself £2.50 for every time I mention one of my books or something that I do. I'm hoping to be able to afford a cup of coffee on the way home.)

Well Past Midnight - Linda Strachan

 When I first started writing it was such an exciting time.

I had discovered, much to my amazement, that I might be able to put words together, express my thoughts and bring stories out of my head in a way that made people want to read them, even publish them.

Who would have thought?
 
This new part of my life was uncharted territory. I had no real expectations because I had never dreamt this was something I could do. I didn't know anyone who was a published writer so I knew nothing about what it would be like. But what I did know was that I had found something that I loved doing and I wanted to spend all my spare time writing.

I never had any expectations of.making a fortune, it was the excitement of being allowed, and encouraged, to create characters and stories. Being able to give myself permission, having a good excuse to spend hours scribbling in a notebook or on the laptop.  I was living lives other than my own, crafting words that would take the images in my head and create them in a reader's mind.



This excitement meant that I was writing in the evenings, at the weekend, when we went away for a break or a holiday I would take the laptop and a notepad so that I could write.











It also meant that I would find myself writing late into the night - I particularly enjoyed the quiet, atmospheric feel of the early hours, well past midnight, when darkness enveloped the world outside the circle of light that was my workplace.

That was then, but as time went on things changed and although the excitement of writing and crafting a story is still there my writing life has changed.  I spend a lot more time travelling - to events, schools and festivals etc, and there seems to be a whole lot more time spent on paperwork and other things that are not actually writing.  I am not unhappy about this because every day I wake up delighted that this is my job, and I wouldn't have it any other way.  It's just that it's different now.

Yesterday I went to listen to a masterclass by award winning author/illustrator Oliver Jeffers. It was fascinating. He talked about his picture books, his art and his life.
You can see his great Authors Live event on BBC iplayer here Scottish Book Trust's Authors Live event
  

Oliver Jeffers

During the question and answer session he was asked - with all the things he does, how did he manage his time? 

He said he used to work all day and then also work in the evenings and at weekends, in fact all the time.  There was no definition between working time and non-working time.  
Now when he leaves his studio at the end of the day he doesn't take work home, although he said he always carries a notebook for the odd sketch or notes if an idea strikes.

This struck a cord with me and I recall when I made the same decision.  When I started writing full time  I started to set aside time when I was not writing  - because writing, the joyful hobby, had become a full time occupation.  It doesn't mean that I don't have ideas or think about writing at these times, but I find that having time away from whatever I am working on means that when I come back to it I approach it with renewed energy. Often the solution to a plot or character problem seems obvious.
 I do still sometimes write late into the night but much less often I used to.

 Do you have defined non working/writing times? 



Linda Strachan writes books for all ages - picture books to teenage novels and a writing handbook Writing for Children
Website www.lindastrachan.co.uk

Blog Bookwords 

The Other Me by Ruth Symes / Megan Rix

I've always really liked the fact that ANYONE can be a writer - the work stands or falls on its own.  And, I’ve always liked the idea of having a pseudonym - but have usually been persuaded out of it. 'But people won't know it was you…’ True, but using a pseudonym can be a great way of beating writer’s block.

As Ruth Symes I’ve recently been concentrating on my Bella Donna series - about a witchling who lives half in the magical and half in the regular world. Before the first one came out I did suggest I used a more magical sounding pseudonym for the books  - Esmeralda Jones or The Purple Witch - but my publishers didn’t go for it.

When I wrote me my memoir ‘The Puppy that Came for Christmas’ under the pseudonym of Megan Rix my reason for writing it was so I never forgot the three wonderful puppies we had in a single year. But then one of my agents sold it to Penguin and they wanted the personal trauma we’d been going through written about too and a pseudonym started looking like a very good idea. There was an unbelievably short deadline to get the book out for Christmas and our real forever puppy, Traffy, became seriously ill and we were told we'd have to have her put down and I refused, and she recovered, and with all that going on it was a case of pseudonyms snoozeonyms - not a big deal either way in the scheme of things.

The name Megan Rix was only supposed to be used once (Rix is a family name of my husband’s - so he chose that) I didn't know Puffin would then commission me to write a children's book as Megan Rix - and now I have a double career as a children’s book writer and double the work (yikes - I’m typing as fast as I can!) If I didn't sleep or do any housework (hate housework) maybe I could do more...

Writing under two names means I need to do a lot more commissions to keep both careers going and as I mark off the time I have left to finish my next book a tiny part of me wishes I could have squeezed more TV writing in.

I'm writing this at 3-30 in the morning with Bella asleep on my feet, keeping them toasty, and a poorly Traffy beside me. (She doesn’t think she is poorly but has to have an op at 9.15 this morning so please wish her good thoughts if you can – they’re going to try to do a less major one first and if that works she’ll be home by Friday, if it doesn’t they’ll continue straight on to the more invasive op.)

One thing I know is whatever name I choose to use (and I don’t think Megan Rix will be my last) three things never change:

1. The pleasure I get when someone tells me they enjoyed my work – I’ve had some incredibly moving emails from adults and beautiful letters from children and will never forget watching a toddler ‘reading’ one of my picture books to his sibling whilst holding the book upside down.

2. Who I truly am.

3. The people and animals that I love.

(Thanks to Jan Burgess for the photo)

Ruth's latest book is Cat Magic (out in August) www.ruthsymes.com

Meg's latest book is The Great Escape www.meganrix.com

Stand up Tammy Bunting! by Cindy Jefferies

Little did the developers of estamet, a sort of light, worsted cloth made in England from as early as 1594 know what they were doing. This fabric was made in Norfolk, and one day someone had the idea of pressing it with a hot iron. The result was to put a shine on the fabric. I wonder if it was done by mistake or on purpose? I certainly remembering using too hot an iron on my young son's school trousers some years ago. The result then was a very unwelcome shine but the cloth manufacturers in Norfolk took a mistake, if mistake it was, and turned it into a great success.

The cloth was bought by ribbon makers. This shiny, home produced cloth was probably cheaper than imported silk, and maybe more available too. It wasn't long before the navy saw the possibilities of the fabric. This estamet, tammet, tammy (the name evolved over the years) began to be used to make flags, particularly signalling flags. No one seems to know when or why the name for this fabric became bunt, but for a long time signalling officers in the navy have been known as bunts.

Did that first person who shone the cloth and began the process of creating bunting lose his job or get a rise? Mistake or happy experiment? Probably we will never know, but this summer that unknown person's handiwork is in evidence all over the place, as Britain celebrates the Jubilee, the Olympics and numerous fetes, festivals and parties.

Today, if you go into a shop and ask for bunting you're likely to be offered a string of gaily coloured plastic or paper triangles. For more durable decorations there is also cotton bunting, which, found in various craft shops has become popular as an interior decoration for children's rooms or second, seaside homes. For those who are getting tired of seeing it everywhere at the moment I'm not including any photographs. You all know what it's like!

We don't know who first coined the word bunting, or who made the first shiny cloth, or who decided to take the navy's signalling flags and use a version of them as decoration. As a gift to the world perhaps bunting is hardly significant and yet, how dark and sober our lives would be if we never thought to put out the flags. Royalist or republican, sports fanatic or not, at its simple, non partisan best bunting celebrates what it is to be human and optimistic in spite of everything that life throws at us. That gets my vote.

RAY BRADBURY, GREEN TOWN, ILLINOIS, AND NEW TENNIS SHOES – Pauline Fisk on the passing of a great writer

I’m not mourning Ray Bradbury, because I never knew him, not like Margaret Atwood who wrote about him so movingly this weekend.  No, I’m mourning that boy who was sometimes called Douglas Spalding, sometimes Will Halloway, sometimes Jim Nightshade, because that boy was my friend and now he’s gone, his life like a leaf blown down a midnight street.

But Green Town, Illinois, still stands.  Thank God for that.  With its ravine, which scared me witless first time I read about it, and its hero celebrating summer and new tennis shoes, it’s alive and well.  All you have to do is open ‘Dandelion Wine’, or ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ or one of the other stories drawing on Bradbury’s childhood in Waukegan, Illinois, in the 1920s, and there it is.

Over the last year or so I’ve been taking part in a Goodreads debate, started by me, on whether ‘Farenheit 451’ or ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ is Bradbury’s best book. In the course of this debate I’ve been introduced to ‘The Halloween Tree’ and ‘From the Dust Returned’.  Both have the power to fascinate, but for me they don’t match ‘Something Wicked.’ And they definitely don’t match the short stories.

Would Bradbury get a look in if he were writing today? How much shelf space would our booksellers – how much media space would our publicists – afford him?  And our publishers, who can’t imagine how to market authors without tidy pigeon-holes – how would they have dealt with a writer like Bradbury who created his own pigeon-holes?

If you’ve never read Ray Bradbury, do so immediately and see what I mean. And prepare to be inspired. Fiction’s a conversation.  You read a story and, by means of your own stories, find the way to join in. I’d never have written my first novel, ‘Midnight Blue’, for example, without ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’.  And how many other authors, I wonder, owe a similar debt of gratitude - not just to Bradbury as story-teller but as wordsmith too?

Bradbury always had a lot to say, but he always got it dead right. ‘The ocean burned,’ he wrote in the short story, ‘The Women’, in the celebrated anthology ‘I Sing the Body Electric.’ ‘A white phosphorescence stirred like a breath of steam through the autumn morning sea, rising. Bubbles rose from the throat of some hidden sea ravine.  Like lightening in the reversed green sky of the sea, it was aware. It was old and beautiful. Out of the deeps it came, indolently. A shell, a wisp, a bubble, a weed, a glitter, a whisper, a gill. Suspended in its depths were rainlike trees of frosted coral, eyelike pips of yellow kelp, hairlike fluids of weed. Growing with the tides, growing with the ages, collecting and hoarding and having unto itself identities and ancient dusts, octopus-inks and all the trivia of the sea.’

See what I mean.

Lately I’ve come to appreciate a more pared-back style of writing. When it comes to short stories, Raymond Carver’s my man. I love the clean, clear lines of Annie Dillard, Marilyn Robinson and - newly discovered by me - the wonderful American writer, Linda McCullough Moore.

When it comes to Bradbury, however, I’m a child again.  His words come tumbling out and I’m tumbling after them, seeing where they’ll take me, clinging on for the ride. Another me - the editor me - might groan as gusting follows spinning, and whirling follows trembles, shudders and inhalations of a wind-sucking kind.  But the reader me would have it no other way. Nor would the writer me, who can’t see a tattoo on an arm without wondering if it ever comes alive.   Nor the explorer me, young again, tucked up in bed with book and torch, waiting to see where Bradbury’s electricity will strike next. 

But now something’s come to Green Town, Illinois, and taken Ray Bradbury away.  Some might say it’s a rocket come to take him to the stars, or a train come to take him on a midnight ride. But I say it’s tennis shoes that have taken Ray Bradbury - shoes soled with marshmallows and woven of grass; new shoes, magic ones, and he’s off, jumping over fences and sidewalks, dogs and houses, rivers and trees. And it’s summertime where he’s heading.

It always is when an author gets new shoes.