Double Exposure by Paul May

I've been using a film camera a lot lately. Although it's handy having a phone in your pocket that you can use to make instant photos when someone dents your car or you need to read the small print on a medicine bottle or a gallery wall, using film feels much more like making something special. These days it feels as if technology is trying to do everything for you, remembering your phone numbers and addresses, curating your Google searches and sorting your emails, and making all your photos look lovely - perfectly exposed and lit with a weird iPhone light.

With an old-fashioned film camera you actually have to do something more than just pressing a virtual button. On my camera I have to think a bit before I shoot, and I have to think a bit more because what I really like doing, especially on a trip to a new city or country, is taking double exposures.

This is not the same as putting a couple of pictures into Photoshop and layering them over each other. That's far too intentional for me. I stick the film in the camera and shoot a whole reel of backgrounds first. These might be patterns, or landscapes or fields of flowers, anything really as long as it's consistent. Then I rewind the film, hopefully without the canister swallowing the leader, and reshoot the whole film, often mainly with people, but in reality not worrying too much, simply trying to bear in mind that if the backgrounds are soft then the second layer will need to be more graphic. For me it's a perfect combination of randomness and planning, which is kind of how I used to write children's books.

A digital photo

The thing is, if you go to a much-photographed place like the Alhambra in Granada you'll probably only go once and the weather and the light might or might not be great for you, and the perfect, atmospheric pictures will already be available in books and on postcards and it seems slightly pointless to take a photo like this, although I did take it, as you see. This was twenty years ago.

But the atmosphere of that visit, and of the place, is recaptured far better for me by the double exposures I took at the same time, even though, not having done it before, I forgot that it would be a good idea to keep the camera the same way round all the time. The added oddness comes from using slide film and then processing it as if it was colour print film - an extra layer of random.

Cross-processed double exposures

When I start writing a story, I love the idea that something is coming into life that wasn't there before, and that even I don't know what it's going to be. Sure, there's a certain amount of planning involved, but I never know exactly what a character is going to say, or where they're going to end up. The end result may be terrible, or it may not, but it's always something new. And that's exactly how I feel about this kind of photography.

Looking Back at Flamingos - Joan Lennon

Back in 2011, I was thinking about how good books breed more good books. Fifteen years later, it's still true.   

These big birds and children’s authors - what do we have in common?

Is it that both groups are leggy, prone to pink and spectacularly ridiculous-looking? Speaking as a short-legged pink-hater who can only dream of looking spectacularly anything, I’d say no. Is it that people tend to look at us strangely when they meet us at parties? Perhaps, though I can’t remember the last time I encountered a flamingo at a rave. Or, indeed, the last time I went to one myself.

No, I think the thing we have in common is that we are both groups which are better as groups than in isolation. We need each other.

Take flamingos. Flamingos won’t breed unless their numbers are greater than some magic flamingo minimum. Sneaky zoo keepers have got around this by putting big mirrors by their pools so that the birds think there are at least twice as many of their colleagues long-legging it about the place than there really are. And – hey presto – bouncing baby flamingos ensue.

Writers are the same. We don’t thrive in a vacuum. We write better when we are part of a collective of creativity. The more really good children’s books there are, the more there will be. Birds and book-writers alike, we need a community in order to be really pink and glowing.

For, as the saying goes, no flamingo is an island.

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

A PAUSE FOR THE START OF JUNE by Penny Dolan

 A short post today. I'm just back home after a wonderful few days away with family, celebrating a birthday.

Nothing amazingly exotic: sitting on pleasing gardens, strolling along nostalgic streets,  a quick visit to the V&A where children splashed in the sunshine - young spirits among the antiquities - and on to the delight of  an elegant Afternoon Tea and a small evening gathering afterwards. So many happy moments and dear people to see.

Right now,  my  head is full of all those thoughts and that's where I'm staying for now.

Tomorrow I'll pick up ordinary life again but not right now.

Have a very fine June.

Penny Dolan

It's reading, isn't it?

I was in a bookshop in England a while back, when a mother came in asking for help finding a book for her son, who was 11. He loved to read, she said, but was frequently coming from home from school with a book that his teacher wouldn't let him read. Because, the teacher said, it wasn't appropriate. 

What he liked, his mum said, was books with adventure. Horror. Monsters. But he couldn't take those to school because the teacher would stop him reading them. (I have no idea what the teacher thought was appropriate; the mother didn't say.)

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. At a time when kids are reading less and less, when lessons set aside for reading are being scrapped and book sales are declining, we have a teacher stopping a child who wants to read, from reading.

I can't remember all the books we recommended, but I do know we put a copy of The Call by Peadar o' Guilin her hands. 

I'll bet he loved it.

Taking part in an arts festival - Sue Purkiss

 The first bank holiday weekend in May is known in these parts for being the Chaff weekend. 'Chaff' stands for 'Cheddar Arts Fringe Festival', and it began eleven years ago, when a group of artists in Cheddar decided that it had become too expensive to take part in the county-wide arts festival, and had the notion of developing a trail in Cheddar - the idea was that people would walk from house to house, and see the artists' work and chat to them about it. There were various add-ons: one was a grant for a local willow weaver, Sophie Courtier, to create a group of goats made of willow (wild goats are endemic to the gorge) which would be placed at the bottom of the gorge. They're still there, though they need attention every few years - willow doesn't last as stone or bronze does, but it's very embelmatic of the Somerset countryside. (Pause here for a very unsubtle plug for my children's book, The Willow Man).

For the first couple of years, I offered a free writing workshop as part of the festival. In 2020, there were exciting plans for the festival to be themed around the 75th anniversary of the end of the war. I decided with my writing group to produce a book, a collection of memoirs and short stories to do with the war. We called it Encounters With War. Putting this together was a really interesting process. I particularly remember the piece written by Phyllis Goddard, a hugely valued member of the group - sadly no longer with us - who was living and working in London at the time of the Bltz, and had written in a previous collection of an encounter with General de Gaulle, and of crossing the Thames one evening when the river itself seemed to be aflame.

But of course, we all know what happened in 2020. Covid came along, and the festival that year had to be cancelled.

After that, for a few years we had a table as a writing group, to publicise it and hopefully sell a few books. But this year, I decided to take part fully as one of the artists. Of course, taking part as a writer is rather different to taking part as a visual artist. If you sell a painting, you will hopefully make a reasonable amount of money in return for your work - and you can sell cards too. If I sell a book, I will make two or three pounds' profit if I'm lucky. It's just the bizarre economics of writing, and there it is.

So I knew I wasn't going to make any money - but that wasn't why I was doing it. So why was I? Well, mostly, it was about feeling part of a bigger community. For this reason, I wanted to be in a venue with other artists. (Well, and let's be honest, I also hoped to benefit from the footfall that the artists would attract.) And this worked beautifully. I was in a venue with Ellen Watson, who is a textile artist; Gemma Lane, a painter; and Nico Mann, a sculptor of beautiful abstract shapes. It was a delight to spend three days in the company of such talented, interesting, creative, and thoroughly nice people. For more information about their work, and the work of others, please take a look at the Chaff website, which has information about all the artists and examples of their work.

The venue. My books are on the table on the left, Nico's sculptures are on the table and shelves. The hangings were done by Ellen's textiles group.

We were in a busy spot at the bottom of the gorge, so we got quite a lot of tourists coming in to see what was going on, as well as people who had come specifically to take part in the trail, and there were lots of interesting conversations to be had. I'd hoped that my forthcoming book An Ordinary War might be ready in time. That wasn't to be, but I had the cover on display and was able to chat to people about it. And there were extra treats too: friends I used to teach with back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and lots of other more recent friends whom it was lovely to catch up with. And it was specially precious to meet the remarkable Phyllis Goddard's daughter-in-law, who said how much the writing group had meant to her. I sold a small but respectable number of books too - Warrior King, which is about Alfred the Great and his daughter Aethelflaed and is mostly set on the Somerset levels not far from here, was the most popular.

But before the festival could take place, an enormous amount of work had to be put in by the committee, who were all fantastic organisers, and very patient with those of us who were at times slightly bemused by the requirements of social media communication. In partuclar, I'm thinking of potter Jo Brimble, who came up with brilliant posts on Instagram etc (and helped me to concoct some photographs of my work which weren't just book covers), and Adam Clutterbuck and Lucy James, who sorted us all out with charm and patience. 

All in all, it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. My only regret is that I wasn't able to get round and see many of the other artists' work - and there are a lot of them now: over 40 this year. Next year, perhaps!

Chips away: the new metaphor – by Rowena House

For years now my favourite writing metaphor has been the sand castle one. Your pour your words into a sandbox called Draft Zero or just Draft if you’re feeling optimistic, and when the box is full of story, you start shaping it into a wondrous castle for however long it takes.

This month, though, I’ve met the marble block metaphor. The idea that a story is a thing waiting to be revealed as the writer chips away at it. My process has never felt like chiselling before. Nothing was found; it’s all been built.

Why the change? Feedback on the development edit AKA Draft Gazillion of the seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress which my supervisors read (it’s a creative writing PhD novel) for the first time in April. Amid kind words, they said (in subtext) that Act 2 Part 1 was a pup. 

‘One more run through ought to do it,’ they suggested.

Then I had a good close look at what I’d sent them.

How? After YEARS working on my wordsmithing, how can I have got it so wrong? I coined a new editing acronym for the margin: CUT. Complete and Utter Tosh. [Actually, it was CUS, but this is a family-friendly blog.] So, chisel out, spit on the hands, cut, cut, polish and cut in pursuit of Draft Gazillion + One AKA Development Edit Mark 2.

The sensible editor bit of the brain said I needed a Book Map (copyright The Golden Egg Academy) or similar (copyright Book Bound UK), charting the whole thing.

But you know how some writers hate writing synopses? It’s book mapping for me. However sensible it is, I loathe it. There are at least three versions of a map for this WIP languishing in various folders, to which I dutifully added another this month, then ignored it. 

What I did instead was analyse each CUT chapter to see for myself what ailed it. Result: I think it’s a combination of slow pace, unclear progressions, and hidden rising stakes. Which are all sort of saying the same thing. Tackling them individually seemed simpler, however,

Thus, 1.5K words are gone and I’m only half way through Act 2 Part 1. I also buffed up cliff-hanger chapter endings and changed chapter breaks so they could all end at a cliff-hanger.

It’s also been good to have a run through for micro-pacing, achieved by tightening sentences and making sure, e.g., that they end on the most powerful word.

For progressions, I’m trying a sentence-based system, too, copy-and-pasting key passages, with their respective page numbers, to track my protagonist’s state of mind and make sure it is progressing in a logical way. By shuffling back and forth between them, altering phrases subtly or wholesale as I go, I think I’ve now linked them together and arrived, ta-dah! at the turning point of Act 2 part 1. Which is the chapter I’m chipping away at now.

Raising stakes is proving trickier. For this WIP, I’ve used a hierarchy of needs system adapted from John Truby’s Anatomy of Story which in turn borrowed from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. (I might have got Truby’s title wrong. Anatomy of Stories? The Story? Sorry, in a rush today.)

Tom, my protagonist, starts in survival mode, protecting his physiological needs: shelter & his livelihood. He then tries to catch a criminal, then faces incrementally-rising moral jeopardy until he finally challenges institutional corruption.

For me, the rising stakes are inherent in this pattern and therefore readable in the subtext. That’s where my instinct says they should stay. If the reader knows from Act 1 that Tom is out on his ear if he messes up the Inciting Incident task that’s been set him, why repeat it in Act 2? And isn’t moral jeopardy by definition a higher stake than keeping your job?

My very clever beta readers didn’t seem to think so. Thus, it’s hammer and chisel to the fore, hoping they’ll be able to see it once I’ve chipped away at more of the dross.

 

 

Rowena House Author on Facebook and Instagram for the WIP

Stuff about my debut, The Goose Road, at rowenahouse.wordpress.com  

WHERE THE HELL IS MY AGENT? - by Lu Hersey

 In case you didn't realise, I hacked the title from Raye's song, WHERE IS MY HUSBAND? The point of song being she doesn't actually have one, but she's ready and waiting for one, so where the hell is he? 

And that's how I feel about my agent.

I did have one once. I learnt many useful things from him. Like how to cook simple Italian dishes, and where to find great fossils on British beaches. Basically he was fun to hang out with as a friend, but being an agent really wasn't his priority. He spent far more time diving with sharks.

He genuinely couldn't cope with the increasing pressures of the publishing world. In the end he disappeared in a cloud of mental health problems, leaving his entire business behind. He'd definitely chosen the wrong career path for someone with chronic anxiety, and I hope one day he'll resurface as a marine biologist or something he'd really enjoy. He's certainly clever enough.

But meanwhile, what about me?? 

What have I done about finding another agent? 

Not a lot, to be honest. I tentatively tried a couple I liked the sound of, and they were very kind and gave me positive feedback, but sadly... (Another thing I learnt from my last agent is that they have to not only really love your work, but believe they can sell it. Which they didn't.)

I also tried a couple of publishers, whose websites informed me I didn't need an agent to be considered. Result? They simply ghosted me like they were online dating or something. Which seems unnecessarily rude when it's easy to email back a standard rejection from a template, but sadly that seems to be the publishing industry's attitude towards writers. We're all totally dispensable. I ended up feeling like a piece of used clothing, destined for the charity shop. 

I guess all publishers need to see the potential for commercial success in your writing - unless you're celebrity so they know your books will sell anyway (they can always find a ghost writer to actually write the books). Publishing is an increasingly competitive market - and getting worse. Don't even get me started on books being written by AI...

However, once a writer, always a writer. I told myself I simply needed to change direction for a while. So I've been writing a non-fiction book about Somerset dragons, which will come out sometime before Christmas. Seems there's not so much stigma attached to self publishing local books, as no agent or traditional publisher would consider the project anyway. It's kept me busy and I love research...

But unfortunately, what I like writing best is teen fiction. And any writing for children involves gatekeepers like parents and teachers, who need to know the book is good (preferably traditionally published and well reviewed) before they buy. Which means you still need the publishing industry to back you. 

And for any publisher to even consider your book, you need an agent to present it to them - practically no publisher takes unsolicited manuscripts. (Ignore all those stories like JK Rowling's sending out to zillion publishers and how it only takes one, blah blah - that simply doesn't happen any more.)

So I'm stuck with a hole in my bucket syndrome and there's only one way out... 

WHERE THE HELL IS MY AGENT?

Lu Hersey

https://www.lu-hersey.com/