The Polar Bear and the Butterfly

 APOLOGY

I missed my day for the blog yesterday. Completely forgot about, as I'm currently deep in revisions of a new story. So by way of apology, here's a short chapter from that story. I hope to resume normal service next month.

(Syl is escorting five wolves through a strange English landscape and has just struggled across a river with them.)

The Polar Bear and the Butterfly

For a few seconds, nobody moved.

The wolves stared at the polar bear. The polar bear stared back at the wolves. Syl, hardly daring to breathe, watched them both. She cast a quick glance behind her, wondering whether she’d be able to fling herself into the water if the bear attacked.

But the bear didn’t attack.

Instead, it took a cautious step forward and lowered its head to sniff the scent of the wolves. The wolves sniffed back. Dot was the first to move. Ears pricked, she crept towards the bear until their noses were almost touching. The rest of the pack then gathered around her and all four took turns almost touching noses. That done, they sank down on their stomachs and turned their attention to a new arrival.

It was a butterfly, and it fluttered out from the bushes to circle lazily in the air above the polar bear’s head. The bear watched it for a moment or two before, just as lazily, rearing up on its hind legs and raising its two enormous front paws on either side of the insect.

With its right paw, the bear gave the softest of taps… and pushed the insect sideways. Then it gave another gentle tap with its left paw and moved it back the way it had come.

Syl was mesmerised. The bear was playing with the butterfly. Not the way a cat plays with a mouse before eating it, but playing for fun. For pleasure. And the butterfly seemed to be playing too. There couldn’t be any other explanation.

She watched as the two creatures – one giant and heavy, the other as light and insubstantial as a scrap of fine cloth – continued their game. She was so entranced by it all that she never noticed more movement in the bushes behind the bear. And when it spoke, the voice took her completely by surprise.

‘Who are you?’ it demanded. ‘And what are you doing with my wolves?’

More taxing times with ALCS by Steve Way

 

As, appropriately I suppose, the plot regarding repayment of tax paid by ALCS to HMRC thickens, and because many of you kindly read the post and/or commented on it, I thought I would explain the developments since last month’s post.

Firstly, thank you to all of you who commented on the post. Penny Dolan and Rowena House, I appreciated your supportive comments… and you’re right Rowena, if I owed HMRC 20% of something, the boot would definitely be on the other foot and communication between us would be far more rapid! As you mentioned Stroppy Author, it’s more effective to get letters posted to HMRC by family (or in my case friends) in the UK rather than from abroad, when they either seem to get ‘lost’ or considerably delayed. Thank you Nick Garlick for sharing your experiences, I had been considering approaching ALCS to support me in this matter and I’m sorry to hear that you got no help from them.

As I mentioned in last month’s blog, I sent my application form for repayment of tax paid to HMRC by ALCS in January. This was based on me being a taxpayer in France and therefore, under the ‘double tax’ treaty being theoretically eligible to reclaim that tax.

A while after posting the blog I did finally hear from HMRC! It is actually dated from before my last blog but arrived by what’s known around here as ‘snail mail’ a month later. However, to my surprise and frustration, they stated that, ‘We cannot deal with you claim because it is not on the appropriate Double Taxation claim form for France’.

Since I cannot for the life of me understand why the form I sent them is not the or an ‘appropriate’ form I am thinking about sending them the letter below. As fellow ABBA and Scattered Author friends I would be interested to know whether you think it would be a good idea to actually send the letter, or if you think by questioning them in the way I have that they may lock me in The Tower and throw away the key!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing with regard to the letter of 29^th April 2026, which I received from #### ##### stating that I had not sent you the appropriate Double Taxation claim form for France.

I am enquiring about this, not only on my own behalf but because I contribute to a blog (An Awfully Big Blog Adventure) produced and read by many authors, particularly children’s authors, and I am aware that there are other authors like me, living outside the UK, trying to reclaim tax paid to you by ALCS, based on the double tax agreement. I would therefore ask if you could kindly explain why the form I sent you is not the appropriate form as several factors seem to indicate that it should be.

The form I sent you is titled ‘Form DT-Individual’. I have assumed the acronym ‘DT’ refers to the Double Tax Treaty, or am I incorrect in doing so?

Further to this (in bold type) the sub heading of the first page of the form itself (copy enclosed) describes it as an ‘Application for relief at source from United Kingdom (UK) Income Tax and claim to repayment of UK Income Tax’. The form then goes on to state that it is, ‘For use by an individual resident of a country with which the UK has a double taxation treaty that provides for relief from UK Income Tax on… royalties arising in the UK’. I believe that France and many other countries in the UK have a double taxation treaty with the UK, which would seem to further imply that this is an appropriate form to use.

In addition to this, the accompanying notes (copy enclosed) state that one of the purposes of the DT-Individual forms is to apply for ‘relief at source from UK income tax on… royalties… paid from sources in the UK.’

Finally, which I am sure you can understand made me even more certain that I was sending you the appropriate form was that my local tax office in France kindly confirmed my status as a French taxpayer. I assumed that if the form was inappropriate, or unfamiliar to them, that my local tax office would not have ratified my form. As you can no doubt understand I am reticent to send them a second form to sign, having to explain to them also that the original form that seemingly purports to be the correct form is not in fact appropriate. Should it be that there is a special form to use unique to France, despite this not being stated on the one I sent you, surely the officials at my tax office would know this? If this is the case, it would be useful for authors based in other countries if this idiosyncrasy applies elsewhere.

If indeed, for some reason, which as you can see currently eludes me, the ‘Form DT-Individual’, despite apparently strong evidence to the contrary, is indeed incorrect, please could you explain to me which form is indeed the correct and how I access it – I don’t want to send you a second inappropriate form! Also, for the purposes of my fellow authors can you provide a clue as to how they distinguish between the appropriate and  inappropriate form? It would also be intriguing to know which applicants can actually use the form in order to reclaim royalties paid in the UK via the double tax agreement, if any.

I, and I suspect a number of my fellow authors, await your reply with interest.

Yours sincerely,

…

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Are any of you good at baking as well as having access to sturdy cake -sized metal files?

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.

The more you think about it, the less well you do it.

Jonathan Carroll wrote one of my favourite books: The Land of Laughs. A fantasy set in the modern world and like no other story I've ever read. The reason for this month's entry, though, is not to recommend the book - although I do, unreservedly - but to offer this quote from Carroll about the writing process. I find a lot of truth in it.

Part of the act of creating is letting go. I remember very vividly when writing The Land of Laughs I reached the part in the story where the dog speaks for the first time. I wrote the passage and stopped. I thought— the *dog* just spoke— that’s crazy. But a moment later I said okay, let’s just see where that goes. 

In an essential way it was the turning point of all writing I have done since then. My paradigm moment came about because I simply let go, accepted the nutty for fact, and kept moving. The Germans have a nice phrase about trust in romance— ‘fall back and I’ll catch you.’ The same could be applied to writing or any art, as far as I can see: If you believe you have it in you, create whatever it is you want and stop thinking about approaches or limitations or or or… Just *write* it. Clear your mind of hesitation and everything other than the sentence you are trying to write and do it. Then write the next one. 

The more you think about it, the less well you do it. Start with a phrase or a character you like or who intrigues you. Then begin to spin a spider’s web out from that center point. But don’t *think* about it. Very often when I begin a book or story, I only have a single line or image which I put down and then think—who is this? What are they like? ‘Haden was in trouble again’ is the beginning of Glass Soup only because I liked that line. After writing it I thought— who’s this Haden? He’s a handsome asshole. Okay, what does he do? He’s a tour guide. Where does he do it? Etcetera. Don’t think about it— just be a spider and spin the web only you can design.

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.

A Beginning

I've been working on a new story these last few weeks - years, actually, with all sorts of gaps and delays for all sorts of reasons. But the end is coming into sight. And since the writing takes up nearly all my concentration at the moment, I thought I'd offer the first chapter here rather than try to come up with some thoughts about writing in general. 

1 The White Wood

Before most of the characters in this story were born, a tree began to die in the north of England. Nobody noticed at first, because it was just one tree in a forest full of trees. But then a second one died. And a third. Only when all the leaves on all the forest’s trees had turned white and the branches and trunks had stiffened and dried into dusty husks did anyone pay attention.

But by then it was too late.

The whiteness spread. Nothing was immune. Grass, flowers and crops withered. Water turned the colour of milk and grew sluggish and oily. Cows, sheep and horses - all the animals we see each day in the fields around us – were led away to safer pastures. 

The land kept dying.

Villagers left villages. Towns were deserted. The roads and trains filled up with refugees heading north to Scotland and south to Wales and the rest of England. Many people fled the country altogether. So many that France blew up its entrance to the Channel Tunnel, to stop the migration and the threat of possible infection.

That wasn’t the only border.

Scotland built a new Hadrian’s Wall. A line of towers stretching from Port Carlisle on the west to Whitley Bay on the east. Between the towers came posts. Between the posts, a wall of electricity that incinerated anything – seed, leaf, speck of dust or animal – that tried to pass through it. 

England matched it with The Strip. From Liverpool to the Humber, the land was bulldozed, flattened and covered in a two-mile wide band of asphalt that smothered everything in its path. A fleet of drones patrolled both edges and destroyed anything living that tried to cross it. 

By the time all this was done though, the White Wood – it had a name now – had stopped growing. Nobody knew why. Nobody could explain. All they knew was that it was no longer spreading. But the borders stayed. And the land the wood had swallowed stayed white, choked and dead.

Two impassable borders on either side of a deserted landscape. A landscape with a core of dead whiteness in which nothing lived.

Or so people thought.

Puzzling

I wonder whether other SASSIES suffer from the same problem I'm regularly confronted with?

I have an idea for a story. I start to write and the ideas flow. I'm enjoying myself. But when I reach - roughly - the halfway point, the ideas that got me going just... dry up. I sit there, trying to think of ways to proceed and everything I come up with feels wrong. I might even write it. But it keeps feeling wrong. 

And I know it.

What started out as fun becomes anything but.

I haven't found a solution yet.

Publication or pleasure? Or both?

A recent BBC interview with John Grisham caught my attention. The first half anyway; the second is more Grisham being quizzed about why he writes what he writes. But that first half, where he discusses shrinking readership and the prevalence of 'screen time' is something I think about a lot, especially when I'm sitting in a train and look up from my book to find myself surrounded by faces bent over mobiles. When I left the UK 35 years ago, nearly all those faces in trains were bent over books or newspapers and magazines.

Reading.

(Yes, I know some of those people may be reading an article, but I see an awful lot of scrolling through TikTok videos.)

Anyway, the point of all this is that I'm now beginning to think fiction writing may be going the way of poetry. Perhaps not as fast, but certainly heading there. Becoming a niche pastime. And it makes me wonder why I write and what I hope to get out of it. When I started, it was dreams of being published. But that seems to be a horizon receding by the month. Not just for me, but for many, many others.

So is writing to be just a source of pleasure? With any prospect of publication a welcome, but really rather an unexpected bonus?

I'm still thinking about this.

Still puzzling it out.

And wondering where I'm heading.

Anyway, here's the Grisham interview. (You have to cut and paste the URL into your browser to play it.) He seems like a nice man. And I like his books, too.

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0mjb83d/john-grisham-on-why-he-still-writes-as-trends-shift

Do we protect the children?

It opens with father declaring that Christmas won’t take place this year because he’s annoyed with his son’s school report. He then hits his wife with a spoon, stabs her by accident with the carving knife, reminisces fondly about brutal public school traditions and says that if he’d talked to his father the way his son talked back to him, he’d have been forced to drink a gallon of petrol.

So the son gets sent to Groosham Grange, to toughen him up. He discovers strange things happening, meets gruesome teachers and watches the boy and girl who arrived with him gradually fall under the evil influence the school holds over all its pupils. The brave boy hero he is, he escapes.

But…

… and this really surprised me, everything I expected to happen at the end doesn’t. I can’t write about it because that would spoil it for others. Not fair. I’ll just say it took me by surprise.

Here’s the thing, though: reading it, the Protective Adult reared its head inside me. Should children be permitted to read this? Shouldn’t they be protected? Isn’t it too violent? Too grotesque? Too… well, just not nice?

And then I thought that if I’d found such a book when I was 12, it probably would have been just the thing. Weird, wild, funny, delightfully odd! It wouldn’t have been Biggles bashing the Hun and vanquishing the natives. It wouldn’t have been Enid Blyton. It wouldn’t have been all the traditional, jolly good stuff I grew up on, with all its faded Empire glory, rippling heroes, wet girls and snivelling foreigners.

It would have probably been The Best Book In The World. And it wouldn’t, ever, have turned me into an axe murderer.

Inspiration - Pt 2

 I think it also helps - a lot - to have an imagination as good and original as Stephen King's in the first place, but this comment still seems more than a little accurate.

Inspiration?

Something's puzzled me ever since I started writing stories.

How come, when I’m trying to work out the plot for the story I’m currently writing, I always get ideas for the story I’m not working on?

But if I decide to switch to that second story, then I get ideas for the first, only to find if I go back to the first, the ideas for that dry up.

It’s like trying to trap a blob of mercury with a pin.

Reading Lessons

I posted this in my little book review blog a few days ago, but I think it also has relevance here, in a blog about books for young people. And also because I'd just like to get the word out about a book I love.

This is an absolute joy. 

Carol Atherton has taught English for close to 30 years, and what she offers here is a beautifully written, ever-so-readable meditation on what books have always offered her; what they say about the world we live in now; and how she has attempted, in all her years of teaching, to bring the books she teaches to life for her students. 

She uses a poem by Robert Browning, and Of Mice and Men, to discuss attitudes to women and toxic masculinity. Great Expectations illustrates the power of friendship. Alan Bennett’s The History Boys looks at teaching. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is all about belonging, and finding the right place to belong. The Lord of the Flies… well, we probably all know about that one. That said, she does take care to mention Rutger Bregman’s Human Kind, and what that has to say about William Golding’s view of human nature.

She finds a way with every book she writes about – from Macbeth to Death of a Salesman, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to To Kill a Mockingbird - to say something about us all, about the power of stories to help us escape, and to connect. How they can help us make sense of the world, of ourselves, and of others.

It’s a love letter to literature and reading, and I doubt that that I’ll read anything better all year.

The Bixby Letter

If you start digging into the history of this letter – written by Abraham Lincoln to the mother of five sons who had all been killed in the Civil War - all sorts of bumps and complications bubble up. It later turned out that only two of her sons had died. Mrs Bixby herself was thought to have harboured Confederate sympathies. There’s even a suggestion that one of Lincoln’s private secretaries, John Hay, actually wrote it. 

But put all that aside – as well, perhaps, as the idea of dying gloriously in battle - and you have what is one of my favourite pieces of writing; as pure writing. It’s one I turn to regularly, just to admire the choice of words and the graceful fluency of its prose. 

Executive Mansion,

Washington, Nov. 21, 1864.

Dear Madam,--

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln

Do other readers have examples they treasure as much as I do this one?

Three times

A short post this month. 

(I’m stuck into the first draft of a new story, and plotting for me is like wading through treacle wearing lead-filled wellington boots. Exhausting.)

Anyway, I’ve been reading a critical study of crime fiction from 1800 – 2000. And in the section about Agatha Christie, I came across this sentence:

‘Like some other deeply original books [her first novel], The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) found a publisher with some difficulty, being rejected three times.’

I had to stop and read that again to let it sink in: three times.

Only three times?

Verbal gymnastics

Curiosity's the reason for this particular post. I really would like to know what others think about a style of writing I can't stand. 

Actually, that's too harsh. I may not like it, but I'm not about to assemble the villagers, pitchforks and flaming torches to go hunting Markus Zusak down to that burning windmill on the hill. He doesn't deserve that.

But I've just finished reading The Book Thief and on almost every page I came across a sentence using words and phrases that pulled me right out of the story and made me think only of the writing. Instead of focussing on the characters and what was happening to them, all my attention went to such constructions as:

Breath collapsed from Schmeikel's mouth. It collapsed down his throat.

A single word leaned against the girl.

Fingermarks clutched the book.

A patch of voice escaped his mouth.

And my (least) favourite:

Her nerves licked her palms.

In every single case, I knew what was meant. But in every single case, it also stopped the flow of the flow of the story. I was out of the book, not in it. And I know as I write this that people could come back with a list of authors recognised first and foremost for their 'style': Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Annie Proulx, Mervyn Peake... 

So I suppose it all comes down to personal taste. (Doesn't everything?) But I'd have liked The Book Thief an awful lot more if Markus Zusak had toned down the verbal gymnastics.

I do like his website, though.

https://www.markuszusak.com/

Thoughts about a classic

I’ve always thought a good writer ought to be able to write about almost anything. It’s a question of insight and observation. Research, too; although not so much the story drowns in too much detail.
And then I read this book and I think it could only have been written by a woman. 

(This is a comment in no way intended as any kind of a put-down. Not for so much as a millisecond. I really enjoyed the book, and my only regret is that it’s taken me so many decades to getting around to reading it.)

It’s just that the level of detail in the thoughts of the 17-year-old narrator – her reactions to the men who appear in her life; the meaning of a kiss; what clothes to wear and how to look; what to say and to whom… I’m not sure any man could have described all this with such surgical precision and insight. 

One other aspect that interests me: It’s currently being released as part of a Vintage Classics series that also contains The Wind in the Willows; The Secret Garden; Emil and the Detectives; The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and The Silver Sword. 

I’d classify all of the above as children’s classics. No question. But does I Capture the Castle belong with them? Is it really a children’s book, a book for young readers? I’d have said you’d have to be at least the age of the narrator to get anything out of it, and that anyone younger would just be bored by all the talk of looks and glances, stolen kisses and the right dresses and who should really be marrying who.

No argument about it being a classic, though.

None at all.

I know we could all argue about the implications but...

... it's an interesting thought

Michael Cunningham (The Hours) came to Amsterdam several years ago to give a reading. After he was finished, he invited questions from the audience. I asked whether there were any subjects a writer should avoid; anything that just shouldn't be tackled.

His answer was no.

Except, he went on, the repetition of dull clichés long past their sell-by date. He offered as examples, silly women who go all panicky and collapse in times of stress. Limp-wristed, useless gay characters. Men for whom no challenge can't ever be met. And so on.

Keep away from them, he said. But otherwise, nothing's off the table.

Ingredients - by Nick Garlick

If Heart Beat, the 1980 film about Jack Kerouac and Neal and Carolyn Cassady is to be believed, then all Kerouac needed to write ‘was a pencil’. I take his point, but in the light of the recent cold snap, I’ve been thinking there’s one other necessary ingredient.

Warmth.

Our budget here in house doesn’t extend to keeping the heating on all day. Not after the recent huge price rises. We’re not freezing; we do turn the radiators on at certain times. But there are other times when the flat is cold and I’ve noticed that as the warmth in my writing room fades – radiator on for an hour when I get up - so my mind becomes more and more sluggish. 

And I write less and less.

I don’t know whether this is anyone else’s experience. (I once worked with a man who liked a cold office; it kept him awake and alert, he said.) I just wanted to put the thought out there. 

Not just pencils.

This too:

The Girl Who Lived

I've read lots of great books for young readers, but this for me is one of the very best: using the simple, direct language of children's literature to convey an almost unspeakable horror. And to convey it from the viewpoint of a child. Which is why this month, for this blog, I'm simply going to repeat what I wrote about it a few weeks ago. 

 

This adaptation of Tova Friedman’s The Daughter of Auschwitz is intended for children*, to convey more of what it was like to be a child living through the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews, first in the Polish town where she lived with her parents, and then in Auschwitz itself. 

And it is superb. As history. As a piece of writing.

The prose is clear, simple and straightforward, and never, ever fails to put across the horror of what is happening, from the first arrival of the Nazis in the town, to the establishment of the ghetto, and then the final journey to, and survival in, Auschwitz. The crash of boots in the street. The sound of gunshots. Barking dogs straining at leashes and the stench of open latrines. Little Tova’s gradual, numbed acceptance of the daily deaths in her children’s hut and how she’d drag the bodies to the door for removal with all the thought we might give to disposing of an old newspaper.

I’ve read many books and watched just as many films and documentaries about the Holocaust. Some are more horrific. Others are more analytical. But I’ve never read one that’s told the story from the point of view of a child and done it with such skill and power.

Easily, easily one of the best books I’ve read all year.

 *A shout out to Hilary Freeman, the adapter, whose name really out to have been on the cover too.

Slump Time

Strange.

I've no desire to write fiction at the moment. I might tell myself I'm going to, but then the moment comes and all I end up doing is sitting staring at the screen. Or the pen and the paper.

But... I can sit down and bang out a mini-review of a book I've enjoyed without any problems at all. They're almost always first drafts and don't take much more than 15 minutes apiece. And I enjoy writing them.

So the writing drive hasn't vanished. It's the type of writing. I'm curious as to when the phase will pass.

I'll close by offering links to my three most recent endeavours.

https://thenickgarlickbookblog.blogspot.com/2024/10/melissa-and-rick.html

https://thenickgarlickbookblog.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-talisman.html

 

 

 https://thenickgarlickbookblog.blogspot.com/2024/10/small-mercies.html