Back to basics (1): I am not a robot — Anne Rooney

 

Last month, Hachette pulled Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, the first case of a major publisher cancelling a book because the author used gernerative AI in its creation. Last month, also, the Society of Authors launched its Human Authored initiative, a scheme to allow authors and publishers to declare that a book has a human author.* There are other marks and schemes that also aim to protect and recognise the value of human creativity. It's very sad that this is needed, and that we can't instead get AI-generated content labelled as such, but that's the world we are in right now and this is better than nothing.

Most contracts that an author signs with a respectable publisher  require a declaration that AI hasn't been used to produce the book. There is a huge debate to be had about what constitutes using AI to produce a book, with some people saying they 'only' use it for plot problems, suggesting names or places, correcting grammar, or any other isolated (or not so isolated) task in the whole process. My view is that you shouldn't be using it for anything. If you can't work out a plot and write grammatically, you're not up to being a professional writer yet, so go learn. But there are a wide range of views, and I'm not here to argue the case. The point here is that if you have signed a contract that says you won't use AI, or even adopted a mark that claims you haven't used AI, what happens if you are asked to prove you wrote the whole thing yourself? What if Mia Ballard were wrongly accused? (I'm not suggesting she was, by the way.) How do writers protect themselves from the accusation that because they use em dashes or triplets or some other spurious bit of 'proof', that they 'obviously' used AI to write their books? It's a question that has been clogging up writers' spaces on the web for a while now. 

Drafts — you worked to improve it!

One obvious thing you can do is to keep drafts. These are dated and show the slow build-up of your book over time. Another is to note all your sources. My drafts are heavily footnoted with sources for everything that isn't such common knowledge that it doesn't need to be verified. 

I usually write non-fiction, but when I write fiction I also footnote anything that comes from research. Originally, this was so that I could check facts, or deal with queries from editors and translators (and sometimes readers), but now it serves a useful additional purpose in proving I did actually do the research and the sources do exist, unlike those invented by ChatGPT and other LLMs. 

Books — show where you got the info

 

 Sources are often books, with page numbers included in the reference; I don't see LLMs being able to do that accurately, even if they tried. If it's a book I have, I don't include edition details. If it's a book in the library, the footnote includes the library classmark so I can get the same copy back if necessary. All these footnotes are deleted when I send the MS to the publisher, but I have them if I need them.

 

Cards — very analogue, very niche

Another thing I've started doing recently is making more handwritten notes and plans. I'm currently working on a proposal for a book on extinct animals and, after many years of duplicating the same research, I've decided I need my own card index (not a database on the computer — a physical object) of organisms through time. It will have everything I need for the animals that might be in this book and I can add to it later for other books. It's on the computer as well, but I print out the entries and stick them to cards. They're easy to shuffle, sort, annotate and pick out for different purposes. 

I keep too many notebooks, so scraps for different books tend to be spread around, but I'm going to start at least colour-coding them so I can hook them out if needed. I have a proper paper trail, in the original sense of the term. I'm also occasionally posting to Bluesky and Instagram photos of ongoing work and commenting on where I've got to with things. This, too, will be evidence that I didn't knock up a book with a few crafty prompts one rainy afternoon.

I hope none of this will ever be needed, but if it is, it's there and hard to contest. I suppose I could have gone to the trouble of getting AI to do all this and then cutting it up or writing it out by hand and doing all this over a period of many months, but it would be more work than just writing the book (and would produce a rubbish book). I hope other writers, worried about this, are doing similar things. Please share your tips in the comments. And it's honestly nice to return to a less digital way of doing things. Cut and paste with scissors and a glue stick, just like the old days. (Though it was Spraymount and a scalpel when I was last being paid to do cut-and-paste, back in the dark ages.)

 

* The SoA scheme does allow limited use of AI in preparatory work, but not in generation of the text or images, following the precedent set by the Writers' Guild

Anne Rooney

Website
Bluesky
Instagram

Out now:

 

For adults; Arcturus, December 2025

 

 

For children; The Magnificent Book of Microscopic Creatures, February 2025 (I like the French cover better than the UK/US cover, but you can also get it in English! 

Hard Streets by Jacqueline Riding review by Lynda Waterhouse

 

 A few days ago, I went to The Cinema Museum for the book launch of ‘Hard Streets, Working-Class lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London,’ by Dr Jacqueline Riding.

The Cinema Museum is housed in what once was the Lambeth Workhouse where Chaplin had been placed as a child. It is an atmospheric place that’s well worth a visit. https://cinemamuseum.org.uk/

The event began with a screening of some archive footage of Charlie Chaplin in the 1950s as he revisited some of his childhood haunts and where he strolled mostly unrecognised in a bleak post-war landscape.

On the film I spotted Charlie in West Square, where he had lived as a child in relative comfort before his circumstances changed for the worse.  As part of my community project, ‘Capturing memories before the Elephant Forgets’, I’d heard accounts of life in West Square at this time so it was fascinating to glimpse some footage. It’s also close to where I live so this book has a particular resonance for me. I walk these streets every day.

Chaplin’s childhood experiences of poverty were central to his work for the rest of his life and this can be seen in his creation of the iconic figure of the ‘Little Tramp’ and in the evocation of place seen in films such as ‘The Kid.’  

The book also tells the story of another local lad, George Tinworth, whose unpublished handwritten autobiography Riding discovered in Southwark Archives.  George Tinworth, a neighbour of Chaplin’s grandparents and mother, started life a poor wheelwright and became a renowned sculptor, ceramic artist and modeller at the royal Doulton Factory at Lambeth. His talent was nurtured by the Lambeth School of Art which had been established in 1854.

Riding also provides a fascinating account of the Settlement Movement, particularly the Browning Settlement founded in Walworth in 1895 with its Christian socialist principles, and links to the newly formed Labour Party.

Alongside the many instances of poverty and suffering the book also illustrates the resilience and sheer hard work put in by both Tinworth and Chaplin in order to take advantage of the opportunities that were to be found in the area. With hard work and a sprinkle of luck you could survive and succeed. A career in the performing arts or attending an art college, could provide a good life.

This book highlights both the impact of poverty and the importance of the arts in shaping meaningful lives, something I hope the current Labour movement is paying attention to.

ISBN 9781800818644

Profile Books

Members' News April

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates. Spring is finally here! March was a whirlwind month of school events for many people. I think (I hope!) we all survived. And thousands more children are now reading books thanks to in-person visits, which is definitely worth celebrating.

On to April and a few belated congratulations.

Kelly McKain's Unbridled, was published in February.

Bethany Wheeler's How Not to Kiss a Prince was published last November. (Welcome to the Sassies, Bethany).

And last, but not least. Congratulation, Savita Kalhan, whose latest book deal was announced in the Bookseller.

Let me have your news for the next round-up. 

Claire

www.clairefayers.com

The Map That Came to Life by Paul May

I've always loved maps. W G Hoskins, who wrote a wonderful book entitled The Making of the English Landscape, sums it up very well:

'There are certain sheets of the one-inch Ordnance Survey maps which one can sit down and read like a book for an hour on end, with growing pleasure and imaginative excitement.'

Hoskins writes in some detail about one particular OS map that shows the area around the Wash. I have a 1934 edition of that map, so here's a small part of it. One of the notable features is a complete lack of contour lines. This part of England really is very flat. 

When I was still at school I travelled all over the UK by hitch-hiking. Just imagine! My mother dropped me off at the beginning of the summer holidays at Junction 6 of the M1. I was with my mate, Chris, and we thought we'd go and look at Wales. This was 1968 and our parents were quite happy for us to be travelling around the country in this way, with no particular destination in mind. We just had a Youth Hostel handbook and a road map. And it was the road map (without contour lines) that gave us the idea in the first place.

One of the things I love about maps is that they tell you enough, but not too much. Nowadays you can use Google maps and street view to see just about anywhere you want to go before you go there, which, for me, takes away half the fun of travelling. A road map tells you almost nothing about the countryside and the towns and cities you're about to see. You know there is a town, you can see rivers and the sea, but only a certain scarcity of roads indicates the presence of open moorland or mountains. For cycling, my favourite maps always used to be the Bartholomew's Half Inch series. The older versions of these were revised with the assistance of the Cyclists' Touring Club and they remained in production almost throughout the twentieth century, although from 1975 onwards they were rebranded and published at a scale of 1:100,000. Maps of the most popular areas were still in production until 1999.

Map owned by Mary Yellowlees CTC 1909

My very favourite Bartholomew's maps, of the ones that I own, were once the property of one Mary Yellowlees of the Cyclists Touring Club. The earliest of these is dated 1909 and shows the Fort William district. On these early maps the high ground was coloured in shades of brown, the darker the brown, the higher the mountain. Maps with brown bits on were always exciting to me, and the more brown the better. This map of Fort William is almost entirely brown, where it isn't blue for the lochs and the sea. I hope that Mary Yellowlees found all that brown as exciting as I did, and still do. Back in 1909 roads were not like they are today. The road through Glen Coe for example was graded in places 'indifferent' but 'passable'. And bicycles were still in their infancy. They had only settled into their modern form with a diamond frame and pneumatic tyres in the final decade of the previous century. Mary would probably have been riding a heavy bike (compared to modern ones) with no gears, or at most two or three. 

In the 1970s and 1980s I always used the Bartholomew National Series, the half-inch maps reprinted at the 1:100,000 scale. I have one here of Skye and Loch Torridon which has just about survived repeated soakings on the handlebars of my bike. The one problem with these maps was that the contours were at 50 metre intervals, so you could hit a fairly substantial hill without realising it was coming.  And of course maps never warn you about the weather. 

My much-soaked map of Skye and Torridon. The updated maps have
land over 900m coloured a kind of blue/grey. I prefer the old style.

I learnt about contour lines in geography lessons at school, but I could equally well have learnt about them from The Map That Came to Life. It's possible to view a PDF of this remarkable book online. When I first saw it a few years ago the thing that most struck me was how cleverly it integrated the drawings of landscape and the features on the map. The illustrator, Ronald Lampitt, had worked in RAF Intelligence during WW2, creating drawings for pilots and navigators from aerial photographs, and he put this skill to brilliant use in this book. The story, 'described by H J Deverson',  is straightforward: two children are staying with their uncle and aunt on their farm and after their uncle teaches them about the One Inch Ordnance Survey map and its symbols, they set off to walk into the nearby town. Each double-page spread contains text, a small section of map, and a detailed illustration of the area shown on the map. This may not be quite as good as taking a map and going out into the real world but it does a great job of, for example, showing how a small section of map represents a large area on the ground. We learn about many map symbols, and about contour lines, about footpaths and roads, canals and rivers. But there's another way in which this isn't the real world.

This book was published in 1948, just three years after the end of the war in Europe. As I was growing up in the 1950s there were still plenty of bomb sites in London and I can remember seeing barrage balloons flying. I doubted myself about this, but on checking I discovered that they were still used for training purposes until the end of the decade. The world of The Map That Came to Life shows no trace of war and, as others have noticed, this is an English landscape that probably never really existed. The roads in the book are beautifully signposted, so you'd never know that tens of thousands of signposts were removed during the war to avoid helping potential invaders, and many weren't put back for years, if at all. 

Very many children's books of this era were set in a world that never actually existed. Think of Enid Blyton or Richmal Crompton or even Arthur Ransome. William Brown's rambles through the woods and fields around Hadleigh could easily have happened in the world of The Map That Came to Life. It's a world where friendly farmers provide cake and glasses of milk, and friendly vergers show you round the parish church. But although it is an idealised and unreal world it has real similarities to the world I grew up in. I grew up just down the road from where Enid Blyton and Alison Uttley lived, and after all this time I find it hard to distinguish between my real memories and the memories of places and events I read about in books. I must have been very young when I read Alison Uttley's Sam Pig stories, but they remain incredibly vivid in my mind, perhaps because they are set in a countryside that was so familiar to me.

Fourteen years after they wrote The Map That Came to Life, in 1962, Deverson and Lampitt wrote a kind of follow-up called The Open Road. This book is a paean to the motor car, praising its ability to transport everyone through the open countryside. In the book, the same Uncle George  transports the same children on an adventure in a Hillman Minx convertible. They even travel in style up the brand-new M1 Motorway, the same bit of road where me and my friend, Chris, started our own adventure a few years later. It really was a different world.

If you want a copy of Reading the Carnegie, my illustrated compilation of posts about Carnegie winners, I have copies available. You can order them via my web page here. A PDF of the book is free.

Free-wheeling and Unfettered - Joan Lennon

Let me share with you some structures, made by a child, before the tidiness and homogeneity of the world's expectations have come in and said, NO! That's NOT how you do it! It won't be long before the flamboyance is lost and the complete and untrammelled ignoring of physics and general laws of architecture are suppressed.

I'm not dissing physics or the laws of architecture - I'm not an idiot! - I'm just celebrating imagination that is free-wheeling, unfettered and unselfconscious. (Apparently, my room is the one with the blue triangle and the view. I'm chuffed to be invited and will stay as long as it lasts.)

Sir Ken Robinson has insightful things to say about this kind of creativity in children and in human beings generally, which you can access on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SirKenRobinson) or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/sirkenrobinson/) and longer talks on Youtube.

And thank you to children for reminding us.

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

APRIL & NATIONAL POETRY WRITING MONTH by Penny Dolan

Today, April 1st, is the start of National Poetry Writing Month, which celebrates its twenty-fifth birthday this year. Hooray and well done!

Personally, I rather wish that the acronyms – NaPoWriMo or GloPoWriMo in the worldwide version, or even that Na/GloPoWriMo version - sounded more poetical. They remind me, spoken aloud, of a vocal exercise, good for ten repetitions as a warm up before giving a poetry performance. But that’s acronyms for you.


This year I feel a little bad, not about the daily writing prompt but because I have two boxes of poetry books in the hall, both on their way out of the door. They will be going to a nearby Oxfam shop or similar: one box is full of children’s poetry, while the other holds ‘grown-up’ poems. But now, both are sitting in the hall sulking, reminding me of that statistic that shows more people write poetry than read it, and silently asking me why I am getting rid of them now, eh? But I have read them, I have used them and now they need to go.


Several were really useful when I was part of a monthly Poetry Reading group, which had some great sessions. We met with the simple aim of reading other people’s poems, never our own. This meant that the group could also include friends and partners who simply enjoyed poetry. We began with a list of named poets, set one per month and used the four weeks to find out more about their life and work, both through books or online. Then we met, bringing our thoughts and favourite poems to share at the next meeting. Occasionally, we chose poems around a theme instead, bringing four or five poems to read aloud and share. I must say that hearing the lines that you’d read and knew inside your head suddenly voiced and out there in that shared room could be magical. Ah well, that was then - and the small group is now a memory: a social casualty of the Covid era. Moments of the past, as the boxes of books will soon be.


I still have a lot of poetry books and anthologies here: mostly old favourite poems and poets where the language or spirit spoke to me, or to the person I was at that time, and still does. Rather like favourite song lyrics, I suppose. Can't let go.

   

But as for today, the first of April, and that daily poetry challenge? Will it be a good idea for me or not? As soon as I have a ‘Hmm, this is me sort of writing a poem’ thought in my mind, the old poetry worries start muttering.

Some anxieties spring from the host of poetic forms and rhythms and structures out there. Can one work on a poem ‘seriously’ without all that in your skill-set? Hopefully, if you are familiar with poetry at some level, the patterns and shapes reveal themselves as you think and voice the seed of the poem over and over in your head. Or so I hope and trust.

At a practical level, the daily NaPoWriMo email, once you have signed up for it, can be a useful source of inspiration and information. Each day brings a new writing prompt, which often links to a suggested structure, so gradually the month becomes a reminder of the variety of poetic forms, both traditional and contemporary. 

Of course, the email can simply be dipped into for any interesting knowledge, letting the writer carry on with their own ideas for the day. With no obligation, no posting poems online and no need to become ‘part of the community’, unless that is what is wanted. The writer can choose.

However, there’s another anxiety that comes with poetry for me: a fear of exposure, of being too seen. Fiction is wonderful for giving the writer a disguise, a way of hide themselves behind the clothes and the characters and story. Poetry often feels closer to the maker, gives more obvious evidence of their moods and thoughts, and there's the uncertainty. What will happen if my work reveal ‘louder’ voices than I use in my everyday person? Will the bare-faced writing reveal moods and thoughts I’d rather keep secret? Bring on an unfamiliarly confident tone? Will I even know who I am a month of focused poetry-making? Thank heaven one’s work can be kept private. 

For now, the focus is on Day One . . .


Hope you have a good April and happy celebrations, with or without poetry.

Penny Dolan


ps. I felt I should end with something to honour the day, so here are some thoughts on a particularly annoying poetic form. Are you ready? Here goes . . .


Ain’t gonna do one
Can‘t make me write one
Really, who needs one
Over-worked trick?
Show me no poet ways,
Throw me no poet praise,
I ain’t gonna go for it, ain’t gonna stick, ain’t gonna do that A-
Crostic.

Away with the facts. Think of the story.

I’ve been struggling with the last third of a story, much of which takes place mainly in the Lake District. I knew the ending, on the Scottish border close to Gretna Green, but I could never work out how I could find enough story for my 12-year-old heroine as she walked there from Lake Windermere. 

I spent hours studying books of photos and Google Maps, measuring distances, calculating how far she could walk in a day and trying to mould my plot around all those distances. Trying to be as faithful to the landscape as possible, I kept asking myself what she could do in all those miles. I ended up covering pages and pages with her walking and looking for food and water and shelter. And it was BORING! Nothing happened. There was no drama!

Then one morning I realised that I was writing a story. My story. And since it’s set in the future, in a landscape destroyed by pollution, I’m not exactly constructing a documentary. So if I wanted to cut the distance from Lake Windermere to the Scottish border in half, I could. And add a castle where there isn’t one. Which I did. 

Once I’d done that, the ideas emerged and everything began to flow. I was able to get a decent storyline down with little trouble. 

And it all became fun again.