tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23634445671240847762024-03-07T03:34:30.162+00:00Stroppy Author: A life in publishingThis blog started as a guide to publishing and if you look through the old stuff there's plenty of advice that is still useful. Now it's more random ruminations and pointless pontificating around publishingStroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.comBlogger251125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-78824316342133168482021-02-24T10:12:00.003+00:002021-02-24T10:12:41.269+00:00Writing and not writing: Day 7<p>Supposedly the final day of writing this — at least it's all I committed to. I might keep going for a bit, as it's a useful record for me of how this pandemic became such a juggling act.</p><p>Up at 5:30 to make coffee and start work as I have only six hours between now and MB coming. She will be here, I think, till Wednesday morning, or possibly about 9 pm Tuesday. I start by tidying up and uploading Day 6, then go back to the comic-strip outline. I realise there are two chapter 4s. I had planned six chapters and now there are seven. This comes from splitting the task into micro-chunks in a fragmented work week. I very rarely do chapter headings without auto-numbering the style. This is why. I set about moving and cutting, and wonder whether to take up the editor's offer of making it a 128-page book. No. I will regret that further down the line if I do it just to speed up sending in the outline! I work till 8 and then go to Waitrose.When I get back, a book finally comes from Waterstones that I needed for an outline that has now been sent in, accepted and the book passed on to the illustrator for roughs so there will be no input from that book now. This is happening a lot; book orders are taking forever. I can see why people use Amazon, but I'm not giving in. Back to the recalcitrant outline.</p><p>I stop at 11:10 to make coffee and then do the daily dadly Zoom call; MB arrives as soon as I finish. We play with Playmobil for half an hour and then cycle to school to pick up her work pack for the week. Back home, we have some lunch and do part of one of the tasks. Her class Teams meeting is cancelled, so we watch the prescribed maths vidoe for the day, fast forwarding through the painfully slow bits. There are constant requests to 'use your interactive white board'. I don't know what they expect us to have, but a Macbook Air clearly isn't good enough. </p><p>We go to the post office, which she grumbles about being boring as we have to stand outside in a queue for some incredibly long time, like about 8 minutes, and then on the way home she falls off her scooter, so a good deal of time goes into tending to grazes and bruises and hurt pride. I do a bit more of the dreaded outline while she does something — I'm not sure what — and then it's the bed, bath, story routine which takes until nearly 10pm. Nothing much has been done, besides terrorising some badgers. I determine to get up early and try to catch up a bit.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-51449884485632313002021-02-22T06:55:00.003+00:002021-02-22T06:55:12.736+00:00Writing and not writing: Day 6<p> <br />Up early because MB is turning up at 7:20 this morning. After coffee and replying to a reader's email I start straight off with the
comic-strip outline. In this story, I need three unrelated children to spend the night in the same house. This would have been easy before the pandemic, as they could do a sleepover. The current generation of children this is aimed at has never had a sleepover. How quickly will sleepovers come back? Will it just look weird? I'm saved from the problem after half an hour by the arrival of MB in a slightly subdued whirlwind of activity. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNshqvFXQi4L_FBLwPCUYwLETikX08RjixqdCrrgMLNRlQxGmdwAZNqPakGli8zvEatRAmw4rYitvITSxYC4x0f4ZWv1zY-kfWDGIgMG55TIRTrJj1MXSspqlxyuoBHSG8GNIVh4DMzFM/s1828/Screenshot+2021-02-22+at+06.46.54.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="828" data-original-width="1828" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNshqvFXQi4L_FBLwPCUYwLETikX08RjixqdCrrgMLNRlQxGmdwAZNqPakGli8zvEatRAmw4rYitvITSxYC4x0f4ZWv1zY-kfWDGIgMG55TIRTrJj1MXSspqlxyuoBHSG8GNIVh4DMzFM/w400-h181/Screenshot+2021-02-22+at+06.46.54.png" width="400" /></a></div>I give her mum blister plasters, take delivery of MB's bicycle and other bits and pieces from her dad, and they go off to work. MB and I sit on the sofa to discuss what we will do today and she asks me to read her favourite page of Dinosaur Atlas, which is about the mass extinction meteor. We then read about the internal structure of Earth and talk about continental drift, tectonics and the flood basalt of the Siberian Traps. We decide to make a marzipan model of Earth, with the layers in different colours, and possibly some tectonic models in marzipan. This takes over from llamas as the most-wanted marzipan project. <p></p><p>But first we go outside to feed the chickens, and get distracted into playing on the swing for ages. And then, since we now have our coats and wellies on, she wants to go on a hunt for badger toilets in the field, so we do that. It soon turns into a full-blown badger safari and we're off hunting for sets and footprints and are three fields away laying a sand trap outside a set so we can see the footprints tomorrow. We run round the field (well, she runs and I walk fast as it's far too hummocky to be safe for running on a slope in wellies for big feet). I teach her how to work out how old the badger poo is so she can tell when the badger was last there and she spends happy minutes poking badger poo with a stick. We look for footprints of badger and fox and try to work out the details at a crime scene: scattered feathers that look like owl, but what eats owls? We see the first skylarks of the spring and I get wet feet in a bog, showing the £12 I spent on stuff to fix my wellies was wasted. She discovers what she is convinced is a badger prison and we make up stories about the imprisoned badger. It's actually a grating over the outlet from the rain drains so people (and badgers) don't clamber long the underground pipes as I used to at her age. <br /></p><p>By the time we get home it's nearly 11 and time for the dadly Zoom call. She has a strop because the laptop she uses while I'm doing the Zoom call is doing a slow update and she can't watch YouTube. I give her the iPad and a hot cross bun and go off to talk to the elderly one. Doing so, I spot an email query from an editor but don't have time to deal with it. We go in the garden for a bit and I offer to pay her £4 an hour to help with gardening so she can buy more Playmobil mermaids. After ten minutes she goes back inside. Feckless young won't stick with agricultural labour. Huh!</p><p>She doesn't want any lunch so I have a toasted sandwich and then we do the last important outstanding bit of her last lot of school work before the new half term starts tomorrow. Although she makes a fuss about doing it, she actually writes a whole page of A4 ('sprisingly' as she would spell it). I spend the next hour trying to scan and upload the work from the two weeks before half term using the intractable system the school has, and struggling with the nearly 50 pages they give us each week that have neither dates nor page numbers on. I give up and dump the entire lot of spare bits on a day picked at random. I immediately find another page that I haven't done, but it won't let me upload extras. I hate this system. I am extremely tech competent and I struggle with it because of the terrible design of both the interface and the paper pages. I add a note to say that I'm not uploading any more pages of 'rainbow writing' but she is doing them. It's just not worth my time. OK, so she hasn't made and video'd a puppet-show version of a story (of their choosing) but she has learned how to track badgers and worked out for herself that lava and magma are the same thing in different places.</p><p>At about 5:30 pm her dad takes her home, after we've had a good grumble together. They will go out again at 9 pm to pick up her mum from work and she will be back tomorrow morning, but not till about 11:30. Monday's work will be done 6-12 and some odd snatched moments later on. I go and deal with the editor's dinosaur queries (the number of queries has now increased) before heating up some left-over aubergine parmiggiana, but can't face doing any more of the comic-strip outline.<br /></p><br />Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-64574506307771484272021-02-21T17:35:00.002+00:002021-02-21T17:45:11.824+00:00Writing and not writing: Day 5<p>I wake at 5 but stay in bed looking at Facebook till 6 because the heating hasn't come on and I don't want to get up in the cold. Bad start. I could just turn the heating on — I can even do it from my phone lying in bed. I get up, make coffee, faff about with this blog, move a few things around the house that MB has displaced — and suddenly it's nearly 8. Aaargh. Today I have to get lots done as MB is back tomorrow. It's very obvious which task is most urgent: the one I least want to do. Isn't that always the case? Today's opera from the Met is Don Giovanni. I will have to work through it at least four times. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBFaMheiqIxyJRdX8HA1435QEOp0p02lcYLMJ90KxAW55JVGLUgC1F90Z-JbkJy_kkMY-TNDD8bTduDmEHxqLFgmdS11V_qt_8BhLglcBbi633B41uicsRZHb1O65MbkuXtOdanug09kE/s960/000scamp.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBFaMheiqIxyJRdX8HA1435QEOp0p02lcYLMJ90KxAW55JVGLUgC1F90Z-JbkJy_kkMY-TNDD8bTduDmEHxqLFgmdS11V_qt_8BhLglcBbi633B41uicsRZHb1O65MbkuXtOdanug09kE/s320/000scamp.jpg" /></a></div>Biting the bullet, I try writing sample material for the book I've left too long. Within half an hour I realise how seriously I've misjudged this project. It's in a format I'm not used to, comic strips. I'd struggled to fill my very, very rough outline of the plot with enough detail to fill 96 pages. Now as I draft scamps* and dialogues for the first pages, I can see I've tried to get about three times as much into each spread as will fit. My first scamp is hopelessly optimisitc. I opt for just writing the dialogue and scamping from that. My response to the editor saying the book could be 96 or 128 pages, whichever I liked, reverses. I'd been keen to get away with 96 as I thought even that would be a stretch. Now, 128 looks like a squeeze. This might take a big re-think. I decide to stop for breakfast. Greek yoghurt, raspberries, seeds and nuts. I'd like to walk to Waitrose to buy some marzipan and make marzipan llamas, but this is clearly displacement activity. Back to the scamps.<p></p><p>More scamps, then Zoom call to elderly dad who has somehow managed to break Zoom so there's no sound. We end up talking on the phone while looking at each other on screen. After a bit of faffing about on Facebook I go back to the scamping. Just before stopping for lunch I realise I've planned the wrong number of pages in some chapters anyway. I <i>always</i> mess up the number of spreads in a book. Even in picture books sometimes, and they only have 12-14, depending on the publisher. I can't fathom why this is. I can definitely count to 96 and even to 128.</p><p>By 1:30 it seems as though the comic-strip book is do-able and the outline sortable — preferably today, but I can't be sure of that. I stop to answer a dino query and then decide, as it's sunny, to go outside for a bit. Too much sitting at the desk has given me a bit of a hip problem so some walking around will be good. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNv8TNoEiH0PerpgeE5dW7GO_lYpw9x24K-DYz1sPnKgw0XpqLR2_eg8TWIPqFrdm4xiyLFhWKiGw08WjhM6rSxUN6Jqx74vAIoWd5cCyYmWac2SF4SbUQWDo44GS0pcvNgeFn2R0rJOc/s960/000snowdrops.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNv8TNoEiH0PerpgeE5dW7GO_lYpw9x24K-DYz1sPnKgw0XpqLR2_eg8TWIPqFrdm4xiyLFhWKiGw08WjhM6rSxUN6Jqx74vAIoWd5cCyYmWac2SF4SbUQWDo44GS0pcvNgeFn2R0rJOc/s320/000snowdrops.jpg" /></a></div>I move logs around to allow the snowdrops space. Then I spot a suspicioius looking character wandering around the field next to my house so I fix him with a steely glare until he comes over to talk to me. He is an officer from the council, checking up on their. I fail to persuade him to plant a community orchard there, and go back inside to answer some dino queries. Instead, I start Googling 'guerilla orchard' to see if there is any advice on planting a community orchard without permission. Dino queries done, it's a trip to Waitrose, dinner, and to bed early as MB has been rescheduled for 7:20 am and I need to work before she gets here. Not done as much work as I should have done by a long way, but at least the naughty outline is starting to take shape.<p></p><p>Achievements: answered dino queries, begun to conquer the comic-strip outline, collected many dead leaves and snapped up some dead wood, cleared logs out of the way of the snowdrops, blocked a rat hole</p><p>Disachievements: most of the work I should have done today; and I didn't make any marzipan llamas<br /></p><p>*A scamp is a very rough sketch of a page layout, showing where the blocks of text go and the very rough content of illustrations. <br /></p>Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-76645142505699322202021-02-20T07:38:00.004+00:002021-02-20T07:52:17.628+00:00Writing and not writing: Day 4<div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVniFIzoDnvdmLfSGxwveT8v4Otj1SiG4DRJzgnjFpUrQVG5UJ_dX-v1VSFCsgX4mUXq_Aj-r8FPh7hGqgu1OBS3v5Xyqlb60d5-VM6-PheAwT8CMvqHvLXU26nRcEsApLzdQqBzR_btY/s1130/Screenshot+2021-02-20+at+07.31.36.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1014" data-original-width="1130" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVniFIzoDnvdmLfSGxwveT8v4Otj1SiG4DRJzgnjFpUrQVG5UJ_dX-v1VSFCsgX4mUXq_Aj-r8FPh7hGqgu1OBS3v5Xyqlb60d5-VM6-PheAwT8CMvqHvLXU26nRcEsApLzdQqBzR_btY/s320/Screenshot+2021-02-20+at+07.31.36.png" width="320" /></a>MB's been here overnight so I have to make an early start to get some work done before she gets up. I check a dino spread I wrote yesterday, correct a few things and send it off. Then she's up. It's 7am. I persuade her to get into my bed with her toy panda so I can do a bit more work (and so she doesn't get too grouchy as she's only had 9 hours' sleep and usually has has 10), but she just lies there talking to me. We discuss a book I'm working on and she gives her opinion of the publishing schedule, which would be very sensible except that it doesn't take account of the different times of summer and winter in the northern and southern hemispheres. We briefly discuss the complexities this adds to international publishing: the books will come out in north and south at the same time, so her suggestion that the titles connected with cold weather come out in winter doesn't quite work. But she does say one thing that I pass on to the publisher later and we agree to take into account. Cutting-edge market research/customer consultation in children's publishing takes place with your key consultant snuggled under a duvet with a cuddly panda. All business should be done like this.<br /></div><p style="text-align: left;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPW7jFb5DUUH_bRWn3-ZpnFDJnlSuKblbZGnZizYzomN30OGhRpcK9cYd8FCFD-kTurqOHU3AIqEAqLxSAdD3hlI1aYq0VsYhTlXfdRWVNxBObKyFKTXVSZy9evINKsY6Z2aTzYBL0lDE/s1024/Screenshot+2021-02-20+at+07.30.32.png" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Ptero-girl and her pterosaur" border="0" data-original-height="812" data-original-width="1024" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPW7jFb5DUUH_bRWn3-ZpnFDJnlSuKblbZGnZizYzomN30OGhRpcK9cYd8FCFD-kTurqOHU3AIqEAqLxSAdD3hlI1aYq0VsYhTlXfdRWVNxBObKyFKTXVSZy9evINKsY6Z2aTzYBL0lDE/w320-h254/Screenshot+2021-02-20+at+07.30.32.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Ptera-girl and her pterosaur</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: left;">Eventually I give up and we go downstairs to have breakfast and build her Playmobil ambulance. That takes an hour. We had an agreement for the morning: ambulance, school work, play with ambulance, Zoom call to my dad, lunch, her Zoom play date with her friend. But instead we play with the ambulance and other Playmobil until it's time for the dadly Zoom call. We invent a super-hero called Ptera-girl who rides a giant pterosaur and rescues people, a surprising number of whom need to go in an ambulance. My super-hero boy gets demoted because his eagle loses to the pterosaur in a battle. I spend at least half an hour adding hair to all the Playmobil people who have been scalped over a period of promiscuous, hair-swappping, pandemic months.<br /></div><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;">After the Zoom call I sneak in some time to answer emails before going downstairs. She is allowed to watch Minecraft videos on YouTube while I do the Zoom call so she's happy if I extend the time by 15 minutes. We have lunch and finally do the bit of left-over schoolwork, with much grumbling, before her Zoom play date. Then I go upstairs and work, just fielding occasional requests to print mermaid colouring sheets, reach her unicorn dressing gown from the hook, and other such essentials. Her friend's mum is a lawyer. We are both using the play date to get work done. This is the usual pandemic juggling act. I've had three straight days of work before this day, which is probably the first time since the start of the current lockdown. A good chunk of time goes on a chat with the bank to sort out some irritating banking issue, and then an hour on working out my working hours and schedule for the next two weeks now I know everyone's shifts. I send the schedule to the dinosaur editor so we can try to make the to-ing and fro-ing all work as pages move between me, the editor, the artwork team, the designer and the consultant. </p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2vS68DYSLgwNaIfdmqf9b3xzEwNnsvqB_1uWS1ssbuvI5dqpzjRautPWiY1lut2ypdfr0ZdaN_i7iQzk7K99MC8vb64XpO-7tmoCY1Pn3RTp1dYsYYBZHl8xyRxSLZ5RKHdifUzCVLxE/s960/Screenshot+2021-02-20+at+07.31.22.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="912" data-original-width="960" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2vS68DYSLgwNaIfdmqf9b3xzEwNnsvqB_1uWS1ssbuvI5dqpzjRautPWiY1lut2ypdfr0ZdaN_i7iQzk7K99MC8vb64XpO-7tmoCY1Pn3RTp1dYsYYBZHl8xyRxSLZ5RKHdifUzCVLxE/s320/Screenshot+2021-02-20+at+07.31.22.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The hospital has an over-crowded out-building</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Then I flit unproductively between projects, keeping them all going but settling on none. I work on a picture book for a while, but immediately have to email the editor as I can't remember if we agreed a word count and the information, if I have it, is on the computer MB is using. I add a few bits to an outline. The stream of little interruptions, and the times I interrupt myself to check the loud noises from downstairs are OK noises, makes it hard to settle on something and do it properly. With her Zoom ended, at 4pm, we play more before her dad comes to take her away. It's 5.30 before I can get back to work, and I've not been out of the house all day. I work till 6:30, but rather unproductively, and then walk up to Waitrose to get some fresh air before a Zoom dinner at 8 pm.<p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;">Achievements: built an ambulance; helped design a super-hero; tweaked series concept to accommodate MB's insight into how readers might use the books; very slight progress on two outlines; some useful emails</p><p style="text-align: left;">Disachievements: omitting to upload Day 3 until late in the day; failing to make required fancy meal for Zoom dinner and keeping my food out of shot (at least that's possible); not getting enough of MB's school work done. We don't have much half-term left for catching up before the whole lot starts piling up again<br /></p>Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-89111322506676952922021-02-19T19:11:00.004+00:002021-02-20T07:56:02.139+00:00Writing and not-writing: Day 3<p> Off to a mixed start today. Worrying about having agreed to the latest lot of presentation materials, I decide to make a start on them. They are not urgent (yet) so technically the lowest priority task but I needed to get an idea of how long they might take. I write a complete draft in 30 minutes and realise it will only take another 30 at most to polish it. This is easy money, and reassuring. No sooner am I at the end of it, at 7:30, when MB and her dad turn up. I have to drive them home so I can drop the car off for MOT at the garage near my house. I do that, stopping at the garden centre to buy compost while I have a car — but don't get any as they offer to deliver it, which is even easier. Yoghurt and raspberries and back to work: but now 2 hours have passed and the high of virtually finishing the presentation materials gives way to gloom about other projects. Start with a dinosaur. Dinosaurs are a good way of easing into work.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzUOAIX1msBu361gTVbBEQ2mycyx00GZnaFLgS2ExQ_RBCCSuyBhpUCEhmlXwQlU9-nJzRktbyjd4JvO8o_zxeoqGNkauRxESRKJuJ1EGQxXv7jkagSc8no4fGZQIVu2R7WPJ82NZIjQ4/s1766/Screenshot+2021-02-18+at+12.40.53.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1056" data-original-width="1766" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzUOAIX1msBu361gTVbBEQ2mycyx00GZnaFLgS2ExQ_RBCCSuyBhpUCEhmlXwQlU9-nJzRktbyjd4JvO8o_zxeoqGNkauRxESRKJuJ1EGQxXv7jkagSc8no4fGZQIVu2R7WPJ82NZIjQ4/s320/Screenshot+2021-02-18+at+12.40.53.png" width="320" /></a></div>One dinosaur done and daily Zoom call to the elderly one finished. I read a publishing contract and send an email asking for the changes I want. Suddenly it looks a bit late to be starting anything new before lunch. I realise I don't actually know how many pages/words are supposed to be in the book I was about to start, so delay that till after lunch. I decide to watch London Zoo's cub-cam recordings of baby tigers playing. This is actually work. Yes, I know. I get paid to watch videos of tiger cubs. There are some up-sides to this job! I make notes and wonder if the local zoo is open (they have tigers) or if they are a victim of lockdown. They are not open, it appears.<p></p><p>Nor is lunch; well, carrots and hummus seems to be all I have. No bread, no cheese, nothing else remotely quick to make. Mental note to self: buy food before tonight as MB is here and will play merry hell if there is no food tomorrow. I read the Atlantic online and water the lemon tree in an attempt to put off the evil moment of actually tackling some real work, but it has to be done. The garage phones to say the car has failed its MoT and I tell them to fix it without asking what it will cost. <br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEUyOdfTu-1k8tcySIRZ70qYkwUq9wRTTnk38e_jbJtHlZgNHsWkvxZn84rJkqpSC8XWhSfVJYv-kvwY9dMR561Td8yUORjn1m6NMR6yRTqsXXDY3JTFM0kURY11YCTbBI9CqUb4DmQXE/s2048/Screenshot+2021-02-18+at+18.49.29.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1147" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEUyOdfTu-1k8tcySIRZ70qYkwUq9wRTTnk38e_jbJtHlZgNHsWkvxZn84rJkqpSC8XWhSfVJYv-kvwY9dMR561Td8yUORjn1m6NMR6yRTqsXXDY3JTFM0kURY11YCTbBI9CqUb4DmQXE/s320/Screenshot+2021-02-18+at+18.49.29.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />I work most of the afternoon, doing a chunk of an outline for a book on the history of science and a bit of admin. Then I walk to the vaccination clinic, just in case (closed) and to Waitrose where I buy a load of reduced stuff including a nice curry for my daughter who's been at work since 7:15 this morning and won't finish till 9pm. I stop off at the garage and beg them for the car, which they have finished but not cleaned, and they give it to me in exchange for many ££s. I go home and eat some of the unnecessary apricot frangipane tart I bought and write a dino spread, then drive over to pick up MB for the night. End of any useful work. I refuse to let her start building the Playmobil ambulance at 8pm. I feed her and read Mrs Pepperpot and we both go to sleep. <p></p><p>Achievements: cars MoT'd, 1; spreads on dinosaurs, 2; outlines tinkered with (relatively unproductively), 2; rough drafts of sample material completed, 1</p><p>Disachievements: most of the day...<br /></p>Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-72089008122659731082021-02-18T06:50:00.008+00:002021-02-18T09:14:46.129+00:00Writing and not-writing diary: Day 2<p></p>At my desk with coffee at 6:15 to find that I missed the British Library event (online) I paid to attend yesterday evening because I was still battling dinosaurs. If I watch it now, I won't start proper work until late, so I'll try to remember later — but it's only available for 48 hours. It's relevant to a book I'm not writing. That is, a book I was sporadically doing bits with until lockdown #1, and which just needed a good chunk of free time to sort out its shape. But a chunk of free time in which the British Library and the Bodleian were both open and accessible. So it's a book I'm not writing, and possibly never will write...<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikIrxsLU9NiQ7ikcQJJwLPYqqbVDCdjvpPbdz3qumKlhx1lx0NOEGIji-ChR8q-5DESWlaWUlO9Jpo-io-tN1o5qGVQYhphz6_byljxY9Vll6VRwPOFL2Na_20LpYeI2pw5ui7ajaU9TE/s2048/Screenshot+2021-02-18+at+06.45.17.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikIrxsLU9NiQ7ikcQJJwLPYqqbVDCdjvpPbdz3qumKlhx1lx0NOEGIji-ChR8q-5DESWlaWUlO9Jpo-io-tN1o5qGVQYhphz6_byljxY9Vll6VRwPOFL2Na_20LpYeI2pw5ui7ajaU9TE/s320/Screenshot+2021-02-18+at+06.45.17.png" width="320" /></a></div>I look at my rather ropey schedule and decide it's time to bite the bullet and do the outline I've been avoiding I was keen on this project a few weeks ago, had good ideas, sent off my concept — and then the publisher sat on it for some weeks while my enthusiasm withered and my calendar filled up. I'm pretty sure I'll be keen on it again once I get started. At this stage I only need to do presentation materials: a few spreads and an outline. They'll use this to try to secure foreign co-edition deals and if they do, the book will go ahead. I'm part way through another set of presentation materials for one of my regular publishers, too, and I've yet another set requested yesterday. These can be tricky because too much emotional investment in them leads to disappointment if they don't go ahead, and too little leads to them not going ahead because the work lacks the spark that enthusiasm gives it. I wonder if a walk in the early-morning dark would help? No, it's just displacement activity. Today had better be Outline Day. Grim. And today's opera from the Met is Falstaff, which is not the best to work to. I work to the day's opera from the Met all day, playing it on repeat until I get bored with it and go looking for another opera on the Radio 3 archive. I listened to La Bohème four times yesterday. When the pandemic ends, they will stop the daily free broadcasts and I'll have to make my own choices.<p></p><p>Today I need to get this outline at least started and at best finished; write a proto-spread of a book on coral reefs; answer all the emails I've been ignoring; check the final bit of artwork on the consultancy project, when it comes; and write one of the outstanding dino spreads. So — on with the outlines!</p><p></p>I start the most outstanding (in terms of time, not quality) outline, but then a friend asks me to post her some plant cuttings. As she's a publishing consultant, this is kind of publishing related, no? (No, I know it's not.) I stop work and do it, walking to the post office and buying croissant and raspberries for breakfast on the way back and suddenly it's nearly two hours later. And although I'd made a good start on the outline I can't get back into it and everything I write looks like rubbish, so I noodle around online, but don't happen to come across anything useful. In 20 mins I can legitimately make coffee and Zoom my dad. I catch up with emails as the writing isn't happening...<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxCUcm-Qh0Cyhyphenhyphenflvs_OG0vDmgnz8b38O1ME-KEkRkNBCMFOZ_Io2krE2EDHJSr3vYEfRhAUyJCnsBvnwalKXCjQbVrfLax0d71hZYghEODlR_dD1x6ad8f7KH_HZ-4n2pSZvQ_kjjFZQ/s2048/Screenshot+2021-02-18+at+06.45.40.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxCUcm-Qh0Cyhyphenhyphenflvs_OG0vDmgnz8b38O1ME-KEkRkNBCMFOZ_Io2krE2EDHJSr3vYEfRhAUyJCnsBvnwalKXCjQbVrfLax0d71hZYghEODlR_dD1x6ad8f7KH_HZ-4n2pSZvQ_kjjFZQ/s320/Screenshot+2021-02-18+at+06.45.40.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />Emails done, but not exactly dusted. The new commission batted into the middle distance while I think, existing commissions picked up and replied to and then resettled to collect dust until they start wriggling. After lunch (toasted sandwich this time, it's heading downhill already) I start writing a spread on coral reefs but then glimpse <a href="https://www.davidhigham.co.uk/authors-dh/adele-geras/" target="_blank">Adèle Geras</a> and <a href="https://www.aquarellepublishing.co.uk/helen-craig" target="_blank">Helen Craig</a> walking down the road. True, you can't glimpse people walking down the road if you are looking at your laptop. The exciting prospect of speaking to an adult is too much to resist. I drop everything, grab my coat and run out to join them on a short walk to the bird pond. (It's a very literary area around here.) And then I wander down to see if the vaccination clinic is running today (it's not) and past the coffee man which inspires me to make coffee when I got home, and so here it is at 3pm and hardly anything achieved. But the walk with Adele and Helen was a splinter of bright normality as sharp as broken glass that refocuses the day. Settled, I find an email from another publisher who wants me to do something and to call for a chat about projects. Projects are the last thing I need right now. Back to coral reefs and sourcing sharks that live near Florida.<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8Tv5jwpEeiC6UpZVRfkUwIvtC8wANmA0gFz4xsAeIOIRJGb0HV_9-zQP6elTF_RlWDyuaXyDazzmoAHGq2DWE2VhE-_0It3dHMUD1FymBMSAclDXC1uORO39IDj6wUHDGA6cjD4NJBo4/s2048/Screenshot+2021-02-18+at+06.49.38.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1088" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8Tv5jwpEeiC6UpZVRfkUwIvtC8wANmA0gFz4xsAeIOIRJGb0HV_9-zQP6elTF_RlWDyuaXyDazzmoAHGq2DWE2VhE-_0It3dHMUD1FymBMSAclDXC1uORO39IDj6wUHDGA6cjD4NJBo4/s320/Screenshot+2021-02-18+at+06.49.38.png" width="320" /></a></div>Post-shark, the final chapter of the consultancy project has come in so I do that just so that a project can count as finished (at least until it comes back). The work is irritating but quickly done, so I turn back to the outline I gave up this morning. I sketch out a list of six things to cover in the chapter I'd got nothing for, which is huge progress but is also only actually six words. But then I get a message from my daughter asking me to drive her to the hospital (she works there, it's not an emergency) and sit in the car with MB for ten minutes while she picks up some stuff she needs, so I'm let off the outline again. <p></p><p> Back at my desk at 6pm to realise the whole day has gone on bits and pieces. Now what? Give up, watch the British Library thing I missed and drink gin? Or get on and do something useful? These books, sadly, won't write themselves and I've agreed to two more things and an open-ended 'let's talk about proejcts' during the course of the day, so the list is getting longer rather than shorter. Gin and dinosaurs, I think...</p><p>Achievements: outlines of an outline, 1; spreads on dinosaurs, 1; proto-spreads on coral reefs, 1; completed consultancy projects, 1 (yay!)<br /></p><p>Disachievements: Discover I've started the wrong picture book outline as the editor wants to kick off the series with a different title; agreed to one more project and a chat about other new projects (this can go in either achievements or disachievements really); a lot of skiving<br /></p><p><br /></p>Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-5703206351783581952021-02-16T20:45:00.005+00:002021-02-18T06:39:44.984+00:00Writing and not-writing diary: Day 1<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZGNQmwGk82nqbhFVqxgqXBtGH5a-81zLWm-pSbeXeWAFvTkZYz6tTFogANc2kurooJ8D5I9Hbeij7TWguF8COrFV56lAd2Pqs2PIYQBXfIbe2G-MimyZFPd9TW3xpZq1dZdwgw4ULEUc/s500/twwtb+virus.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="442" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZGNQmwGk82nqbhFVqxgqXBtGH5a-81zLWm-pSbeXeWAFvTkZYz6tTFogANc2kurooJ8D5I9Hbeij7TWguF8COrFV56lAd2Pqs2PIYQBXfIbe2G-MimyZFPd9TW3xpZq1dZdwgw4ULEUc/w177-h200/twwtb+virus.jpg" width="177" /></a></div>I've not done very well at rebooting. Turned out I don't work well in a pandemic. All the projects I thought I'd do when I had time were really projects I might do when I had time AND wasn't stressing about a deadly pandemic. Ah well. A couple of books came out of it, not least this one. Commissioned April 2020, we did wonder whether it would all be over by the time it was published. Not even close... Even though it took an incredible 85 days to ship from printing China it's still out in good time.<p></p><p>Although the pandemic is not over, publishing seems to be getting back on its feet so I'm working consistently again. Having lots to do is always a spur to me to do other things so that I suddenly have too much to do. Not sure why. Hence I'm back here...</p><p>The other day I discovered <a href="https://charcopress.com/dannys-translation-diary?fbclid=IwAR0MLYdpYbX7ZubJZ1Y_doTKRP8eFDlvdzK-vV4CtBmtxkfNQi0ffKdXR1k" target="_blank">this</a> wonderful translation diary blog by Daniel Hahn. One of the most talented people in publishing (and one of the nicest) he's documenting the process of writing a translation as it goes, with all the hiccups, embarrassments and strokes of genuis involved. It's fascinating. So much of what he says really resonates — it's how I work, even though I'm not translating. So I thought I'd do something slightly similar here. It won't follow a single book as I'd need permission from a publisher to do that. Instead it will document what I do each day on different writing projects. If you are doing this job it might have some voyeuristic appeal, in the way that nosing around someone else's writing space always does. If you're not doing it but want to, it might show you what you're letting yourself in for. And for me it will be a record of how I spend my time for a week, or maybe longer if I keep it up. I'll add in what else I do occasionally, where it's not too embarrassing. This reflects my pandemic working mode, not how I work 'normally', which involves a good deal of sitting in Cambridge University Library and going to the tea room a lot. Need-to-know: MB is my grand-daughter who I look after a lot of the time (as her parents are both keyworkers). <br /></p><p>16 Feb, Tuesday. No MB today so it's a straight work day. Coffee at my desk at 7am, checking first-pass layouts for a dinosaur book on a tight schedule. There's a couple of pages to write from scratch, but I finish the corrections, edits and extra artwork suggestions for the rest of the chapter by 12:45, taking time out for breakfast (blueberries, Greek yoghurt and chia seeds), to feed the chickens and to do the daily Zoom call check-up on my elderly dad. There's an email from another editor with layouts to check for a project I'm acting as consultant for, but I object as I've read all the text before and commented extensively. We agree I'll just check the artwork, which I've not seen before. I do three chapters, then have lunch (Marmande tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, avocado, olives, pine nuts, olive oil, pomegranate molasses and olive ciabatta — don't worry, there will be plenty of days when it's fish finger sandwiches). </p><p><br />Back to email. There's a message from an editor asking if I want to write a book for her, with publication date of 'June 22'. Instantly assume she means 22nd June before remembering it's 2022 next year, just in time not to fire off a 'You crazy?' email response. Decide to ignore it for a while as I've spent too long juggling my schedule over the last few days already. Email from another editor reminds me I'm supposed to be doing a short book for her. I've not started it. Deadline is (happily) extended from end Feb to mid March. I'm also aware of a fiction outline I've been ignoring which is now getting critical. I'm hoping it's working itself out in my subconscious but this could prove to be a vain hope. There's also a message from an editor I've just sent an outline to saying he's passing it on to the illustrator to start work. This is a series I write for a lot and I write straight into the InDesign template. The book is already laid out using the rough artwork when I get it, and this method means I can fit the text exactly to the illustrations and there's no copy-fitting faff later. It gives me some happy days messing about with InDesign, which I like. No word of when the roughs will come back so I can't schedule this one, but the outline was so full the book is virtually written. It will be a cut and paste job, essentially. </p><p>I was going to spend today doing the outline I've been ignoring and hoping is writing itself self sub-conciously, but now it's 2 pm and I've got another three chapters or the consultancy text to check pictures in, and two new spreads to write for the dino book. I want to go for a walk but have to wait in for MB's Playmobil ambulance to be delivered. We missed the attempted delivery yesterday as we'd gone to the park to practise cycling and climbing the perilous climbing frame. I'm kicking myself for writing one new dino spread without waiting for the publisher to OK the choice of dino, as now it's been vetoed on the basis of unavailable artwork. So that was a couple of hours wasted and, more importantly, a dino I wanted in is kicked out. So consultancy or dinos or reply to emails? I decide to start this blog diary and another half hour goes. I feel like making a mermaid meme but that would not really be productive at this stage. Consultancy, then — it can be finished quickly.</p><p>By 15:45, the consultancy is finished as far as possible, in that I've now done all the chapters he's sent me. I know there's one to go, and this is annoying as I can't tick the task off. Sometimes I think the only reason I do anything is so I can tick it off. I dip into FB to chat to a friend who's trying to work out how to do something in Zoom for a school visit. Other people's problems are always more fun to think about than your own. It's now a choice between more dinos and one of the things I've been ignoring, so I walk to the garden centre. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit9zSrmXuS5vKX76i3Shw7Im3ut1poeuqsiOK3TNHpchiEB9OpdWmCQInAXxrhxyce5IW_TM0U1D_Jg6yedvqsKQ18yhTRU4uzrtKdC9wDxW4QKN-zeBUxKPa1tMjmEUWXDpUAE_XiU-g/s1440/0016+feb.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit9zSrmXuS5vKX76i3Shw7Im3ut1poeuqsiOK3TNHpchiEB9OpdWmCQInAXxrhxyce5IW_TM0U1D_Jg6yedvqsKQ18yhTRU4uzrtKdC9wDxW4QKN-zeBUxKPa1tMjmEUWXDpUAE_XiU-g/s320/0016+feb.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Bought some bulbs, backed out of buying a grape vine as it requires serious planning since it will be there for years. In going to the garden centre I completely forgot my plan to hang around outside the vaccination centre to pick up a last-minute Pfeizer jab because they give them to anyone around 5 mins before closing to avoid wasting them. Ah well. At least I have some nice flowers. So I came back and did more dinos, this time choosing replacements and writing a new spread on Ichthyosaurus and having a grumble to the lovely editor. More snacks — freshly squeezed orange juice, which was a weird colour as one of the oranges turned out to be a blood orange, and a slice of gin panettone that a highly esteemed and dearly beloved novelist friend gave me for Christmas. Finally sent in the Ichthyosaurus and associated corrected spreads and made pasta with spinach, mushrooms and feta. Enough is enough. Wine, pasta, and reading Monique Roffey's Costa-winning Mermaid of Black Conch. All the ignored projects have been successfully ignored for another day.<p></p><p>Achievements: Artwork checked, 100 pages; new writing, 2 pages; layouts corrected, 12 pages</p><p>Disachievements: New commissions ignored, 1; existing commissions with outstanding tasks and no progress today, at least 3; letters not sent, at least 3; VAT returns not started, 1.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br />
</p>Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-23229326985599664462020-04-10T09:21:00.000+01:002020-04-10T09:21:09.532+01:00Along for the ride — with quailsWell, that reboot plan didn't go well. My mother died in the autumn, and my daughter and her little family moved out, all in the space of two weeks. And now we're all in lockdown. It's a kind of overdose of isolation, starting in October and building to peak isolation. I'd just started to get back to work properly when the virus hit us all and most of my book projects were cancelled or suspended indefinitely. So no, no progress so far on getting the blog back up and running. But now, with all this time?<br />
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Isn't it odd how we can spend years seeking out moments to devote to pet projects and then when there is an endless of desert of time ahead, the inclination to knuckle down disappears? OK, it's probably been eaten by anxiety. But I'm going to try to drag it back. I've had three weeks inside (and in the garden — I'm lucky to have a garden). That must be long enough to wallow, drift, or go round in small circles of confusion and aimlessness. Let's say it was time needed for acclimatization. But books don't write themselves and projects don't pick themselves up off the floor. If you are happy pottering and enjoying the freedom to do nothing all day, that's brilliant. If, like me, you are frustrated at your own inactivity, let's see if we can find a way out of it. Any suggestions you have gratefully received. I'm going to start today by making a list of the things I would ideally like to achieve during lockdown. I know I won't do all of them. But it will be disgraceful if I do none of them. Some will be work. Some will be non-work.<br />
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I have already started one, yesterday. Finally despairing of the chicken-man's inability to provide any chickens after a foxing episode reduced by flock to one solitary rooster (lots of non-chicken people have decided to keep covid-chickens, apparently) I have downsized to quails. I ordered some quail eggs with my shopping and have put them in the incubator. If all goes well, that's eighteen days to quailhood. (It might well not go well; only some of the quail eggs you buy are fertile, and the rat-man — an expert on this — says try different suppliers, but Waitrose is good.)<br />
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Today's target, then: turn quail eggs three times; write up quail chart with days, turn times, temperature requirements etc; write list of things to be achieved; start working on book outline for final commissioned project. If you want to play along, but your goals in the comments and we can all revisit and check how we're doing. I think making things public makes you more likely to stick to them.<br />
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Good luck!<br />
<br />Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-24401970672000137982019-10-05T08:16:00.000+01:002019-10-05T08:16:45.523+01:00Recalculating....<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This blog has been moribund. No, dormant; hibernating. It has slumbered through a long winter of attention-deficit. Let's see if I can prod it back to life, as I need prodding back to life. For nearly six years, I have spent a great deal of my non-earning time (virtually all, actually) dealing with a Domestic Situation which has left no time for this blog. The DS is shifting. I am allowed out. But the landscape is almost unrecognisable.<br />
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I don't usually talk about dreams, but I'll share the dream I had last night as it is a fine example of the subconscious speaking loudly and clearly:<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">I had an interview for a job; the first
part consisted of playing chess in a well organised room on a neatly laid out board. I won the games easily. For the second stage, I went into a room with junk
piled high and the chess sets were already half-played games. They were those travel sets where you have to push the pieces into peg holes. I tried to
reset some, but it was a lot of aggro. I had to play against a disembodied
voice. I told it I couldn’t be arsed with this and we could play without a set and spoke my first move. The voice was clearly disturbed by this
change. It took a long time to make a move; it took longer and longer as the game progressed, and after
a few moves I said I couldn’t be bothered — I didn’t want the job that much and
I was leaving. The voice called, ‘Wait — you have the job.’ My response was
‘Why? And why would I want it if this is how you plan to run things? If it’s
just gong to be a mindfuck, I don’t want the job.’ </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The second room is when things became complicated in my domestic life. The final question is now. Do I want this job? Being a writer has become a harder and harder way to make a living. But it's what I do. It's all I want to do, but I need to find ways to make it work better. I think that's something a lot of us in this job feel. I'll be poking around among my writer friends to find new strategies. One or two have shared their experiences already, in private, of how they added a self-publishing stream to their work which became very lucrative. I will be thinking about that. And thinking about other ways that give me more of the reward from my work. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">The next few posts will be musings rather than advice. There are fewer certainties in publishing than there were when I started this blog. The landscape has changed. The sat nav needs resetting. You can come along for the ride, or come back in a few months when I might know how it works. I will share the good roads, the back roads, the dead ends and the crashes here as I know a lot of other writers are in the same boat (whoops, mixed metaphor: if the boat is on the road, no wonder we're in trouble!) </span></div>
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</style><br />Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-84529688219026170702016-06-19T08:02:00.004+01:002016-06-20T10:19:02.276+01:00On giving up and giving in<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA4qS2t7_0zmcj0ks4pnA09xMcjCyBUxsOORgadzQA0wHr6VHF32Iv0g1JSNuI4_jrCc76xpIR4JO41QZT2uqxlWcnGVrQ5N5AVlwGo9nmsqnsoAoWHKJvy3_D10WEVY3aGrTpb6D7VMM/s1600/20160525_112103.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA4qS2t7_0zmcj0ks4pnA09xMcjCyBUxsOORgadzQA0wHr6VHF32Iv0g1JSNuI4_jrCc76xpIR4JO41QZT2uqxlWcnGVrQ5N5AVlwGo9nmsqnsoAoWHKJvy3_D10WEVY3aGrTpb6D7VMM/s320/20160525_112103.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hard at work with Zola and coffee</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Yesterday, at the tea after a memorial service for a talented woman who had packed much into too short a life, I mentioned to an acquaintance that I had gone away to write for a week and during the first few days had given up on a book I'd been working on for a few years and decided to write something different. My co-conversationalist considered this a very brave and decisive action, which surprised me rather as it seemed to me to be an entirely pragmatic and sensible one. There is also the knowledge that giving up on a book is far from irreversible. Unless I were actually to delete all the files and throw away all the books and notes, I can go back to it later. Leaving a book project is not like leaving a partner or a house. No one else will move into my space while I'm gone, even if I leave it for a few years (as I have done in the past with this particular project).<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhVAJUZWJnsxkiHGOGoVJdC0GERPYToxdOxAkV4CVfIK-0WTXjQ3ZykKsomx5AAGyX39nmyfwyi8_-Sel1-DG-OwSb5491kO9hbTWNV-TceYUYibQ_nhpoYNVDVmLAG7lMoOeEvx5Xl48/s1600/20160527_171741.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhVAJUZWJnsxkiHGOGoVJdC0GERPYToxdOxAkV4CVfIK-0WTXjQ3ZykKsomx5AAGyX39nmyfwyi8_-Sel1-DG-OwSb5491kO9hbTWNV-TceYUYibQ_nhpoYNVDVmLAG7lMoOeEvx5Xl48/s320/20160527_171741.jpg" width="192" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Spot the fish: some things take<br />
time to identify</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It is, of course, hard to give up on something you have been working on for a long time, especially if you still think it is basically a good idea. And to be honest I have not given up hope of one day wanting to get back to it - but it will be a day when I can devote the time to it that it needs, in unbroken chunks, rather than a few hours here and there separated by weeks or months of more urgent work and domestic responsibilities. The week in Sardinia I thought would be enough only showed me one thing - I was restless, less excited by it than I had remembered being, and found it hard to get into. Now, I could throw good time after bad, or cut my losses. If I had been at home, I might have done the first but with only one week to write on something uncommissioned that would have been rash. Being unwilling to write off a substantial investment is one of the worst things we do to ourselves in all areas of life. I remember bemoaning to a wise writer friend (<a href="http://www.louiseberridge.com/" target="_blank">Louise Berridge</a>) that a remark she had made led me to feel that I had wasted ten years of my life on something, and she said that it was better to have wasted the last ten years than the next forty. Which is entirely true.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtIZzUftXt4JXx7P4Vt127CdlMvmCFrPxqlSK8zxrlETqcQuweqPSTgnHMH8yp7N12HydXqQajOiHOb80lb4Au77Pdt3DEmHxALQD1CPMehBohziRsUx0s63u2wVpYkbp2i4BblwBPrmI/s1600/20160527_172854.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtIZzUftXt4JXx7P4Vt127CdlMvmCFrPxqlSK8zxrlETqcQuweqPSTgnHMH8yp7N12HydXqQajOiHOb80lb4Au77Pdt3DEmHxALQD1CPMehBohziRsUx0s63u2wVpYkbp2i4BblwBPrmI/s320/20160527_172854.jpg" width="192" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Finding things in rockpools, <br />
including books and sea urchins</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
But giving up is not giving in - it is moving on. I'm not going to sit moping about the half-formed novel. Indeed, there is a certain irony that this particular book might never come into being as it's about things that don't come into being. I did not set it aside because I don't like it any more, though I have lived with it for too long. Nor, I think, because it's hard - though perhaps because it's too hard for current circumstances. I set it aside because I realised it's not what I should be doing right now.<br />
<br />
This is an exciting time in publishing, particularly in the world children's non-fiction which is my original territory. There will always be fiction publishing. It makes no difference to the world whether I write that novel this year, next year, in 2025 or never. It's not as though the world is short of children's fiction. But there are projects I want to do whose time is ripe. I will regret it if I let that time pass while fiddling with a book that's not going right. Better to have wasted the last three years on a book than the next ten.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWnwFP6k4Hx3YfH0zlJlwiYEkNBY7Hf64Tc4na9Wta19Khp91euifgfhhkFE4pvB7sO69kjdKxEecPRY55Pc0ONJAyISMmMbEfwVmLQuUm0Q7AFmmHkf3js-3bV0DPjLj5KKFuzAR0rTw/s1600/20160527_131348.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWnwFP6k4Hx3YfH0zlJlwiYEkNBY7Hf64Tc4na9Wta19Khp91euifgfhhkFE4pvB7sO69kjdKxEecPRY55Pc0ONJAyISMmMbEfwVmLQuUm0Q7AFmmHkf3js-3bV0DPjLj5KKFuzAR0rTw/s320/20160527_131348.jpg" width="192" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Back to work</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
As soon as I decided I wasn't going to work on it that week, a weight lifted from my shoulders. I found a new pattern to the days - working franctically in the morning on the book I did want to write, then spending the afternoon lying reading in the sun and poking around in rockpools on the beach. And that spawned another book idea. I know what I'm doing now. I have lots of ideas, and I can even prioritise them. All I had to do was give up. Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-5746009910858914432016-05-25T06:56:00.001+01:002016-05-25T06:56:36.216+01:00Retreating: running away from the battle to write<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk8DikuOMK6-CtE8ym-AmTavZrtu9m6gOAeUDVSikngPtXiz6SB0HEN0m4axMo7gB2SaJ2-n0eRMyOok8yCf-9I1xoW75qV2tXmCZ9ozfBtkqiv9A7TrjNgq-VPi54NNhGc3L2aGAA71Y/s1600/Screenshot+2016-05-25+07.50.56.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk8DikuOMK6-CtE8ym-AmTavZrtu9m6gOAeUDVSikngPtXiz6SB0HEN0m4axMo7gB2SaJ2-n0eRMyOok8yCf-9I1xoW75qV2tXmCZ9ozfBtkqiv9A7TrjNgq-VPi54NNhGc3L2aGAA71Y/s320/Screenshot+2016-05-25+07.50.56.png" width="320" /></a></div>
Have you ever been tempted by the adverts for writers' retreats? Do they really help you write more?<br />
<br />
I've been on one official retreat, which was a bit of a disaster: after a single day of writing I got labyrinthitis and spent the rest of the time feeling sick as the world swayed like a ship beneath me. It should have worked. I went with three other lovely writers - all more famous and successful than me, and all better at not having labyrinthitis. It was a proper writers' retreat, with all our food provided, lovely countryside to walk in, a fire to write by, prosecco delivered to our desks at 6pm, and so on.<br />
<br />
This year I'm doing it a bit differently. I'm at the Hilton in Olbia, Sardinia, with no one else. The hotel is in a cultural and aesthetic desert so there should be nothing to lure me away from the desk. There is no one to chat to. If I don't write I'll get bored.<br />
<br />
Which brings me to pondering the word. Is a writer's retreat a sort of running away, like a retreating army? Or is it re-treat, as in have a nice time again? This place is definitely a batten-down-the-hatches-and-get-stuff-done kind of place. My only stipulation to myself is that I don't use the time to work on the commissioned work I would be doing if I'd stayed at home, but that I use it to do the projects that get shuffled aside: one that my agent has been waiting for for quite a long time and one that is brand new and she doesn't know is coming.<br />
<br />
I started with the first, with reading and thinking and trying to find the holes and restructure where necessary. But I'm not excited by it here. I can't get into cold London fog when it's bright Italian sunshine outside. Also, I write best in cafes but it's been too windy the last couple of days to do that (I mean, to sit outside in a cafe). So I turned to the other one which is still fresh and exciting. I know, finish the old one first - but they are very different and the second is easier to do here. It's a bit like retreating from the retreat, though. Tackling the first project required a retreat from life to get the thing done and this is a re-treat - a chance to enjoy it all again. Perhaps that's what it should really be about: reinvigorating that love of the job that got us all here in the first place.<br />
<br />
I'm starting to think a week won't be long enough, though. Maybe I need to become one of those people who lives in a hotel, probably Simpsons on the Strand, writing in pyjamas and having lunch and cocktails. But perhaps a permanent retreat doesn't work and I'd have to start borrowing houses and families from people so I had some responsibilities to re(-)treat from.Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-89140820214124699742016-05-13T06:52:00.000+01:002016-05-13T07:01:25.244+01:00SATs 'n' all thatThose of you in the UK will be aware that there has been a lot of fuss this week and last about SATs, the tests that primary school children in England (that's grade school, or first school) are obliged to take. In particular, the fuss is about the way that writing - or grammar - is taught and tested. Young children are being obliged to learn not only grammatical terms but completely invented ones, such as 'fronted adverbial', and identify them in a sentence. Their own writing has to observe ridiculous practices, such as only using an exclamation mark after a sentence starting 'How' or 'What'. And filling their work with 'wow-words' - unusual words, usually adjectives, intended to give their writing a bit of oomph. (This latter is a widespread teaching practice rather than something the curriculum spells out as a requirement.)<br />
<br />
This approach to writing runs a high risk of wrecking any child's nascent enjoyment of language. Nicola Morgan and I have, with the committees of our respective groups in the Society of Authors, have put together a <span id="goog_695554091"></span>statement<span id="goog_695554092"></span> against the government's practice in this regard; it's <a href="http://www.societyofauthors.org/sites/default/files/Statement%20on%20Teaching%20of%20Writing%20May%202016.pdf" target="_blank">on the Society of Authors website</a>. I have <a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/de-wowing-wow-words.html" target="_blank">blogged about wow-words</a> (this will also be published in <i>The Author</i> this month) and <a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/oh-no-exclamation-marks-call-grammar_9.html" target="_blank">exclamation marks on ABBA</a>, and Nicola has <a href="https://www.nicolamorgan.com/heartsong-blog/grammar-a-message-for-parents-and-schools/" target="_blank">blogged about teaching grammar</a> on her own blog. The statement has been taken up by The Guardian, who reproduced a chunk of it straight after it was issued. And now it's gone global, being taken up by the <a href="http://dailytimes.com.pk/books/11-May-16/british-schools-may-upset-next-generation-of-writers" target="_blank">Daily Times</a> in Pakistan. It's obviously something people feel strongly about.<br />
<br />
None of us is against the teaching of grammar. And it's not an argument about testing per se. The people who object to this particular testing regime include some who approve of testing in primary schools and some who don't - but this particular testing regime is iniquitous. Essentially, the curriculum authority has come up with a whole lot of rules about language, supported with terminology, which it insists children as young as 6 learn. Some of this terminology and these rules are pure invention - they are not supported either by traditional grammar or by current and past usage by real authors. So children will see 'rules' they have to follow which the books they read don't follow - confusing in itself. These rules and terminology are very complex and so, correspondingly, are the tests. Adult professional writers, some with degrees in linguistics and English can't answer the questions. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheIndependentOnline/videos/10153628207871636/" target="_blank">couldn't answer questions</a> [video] about these grammatical entities when asked in the House of Commons. Consequently, a great deal of time in school is spent teaching to the test - training children to pass an insane test that does nothing to improve their use or understanding of language and a lot to destroy their burgeoning enjoyment of it. Many teachers are close to breaking point.<br />
<br />
The test and work for it are demoralising and destructive. Children are set up to fail. Many parents kept their children away from school so that they would not be subjected to the test. The minister for education condemned them for it. But countless schools reported children in tears, even the brightest children unable to answer the questions. What useful purpose can this possibly serve?<br />
<br />
It's not hard to frame teaching of writing and how it works in a way that increases rather than reduces children's enjoyment and understanding. Here is the bad way:<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;">1. Which sentence contains a fronted adverbial?</span><br />
<span style="color: purple;">a) 'Thrilled to be trusted with such complicated instructions, Roger took the crowbar from Billy.' (<i>I Was a Rat</i>, Philip Pullman) </span><br />
<span style="color: purple;">b) 'I stood in the morning room with Hodges, not knowing what to do.' (<i>The Dead of Winter</i>, Chris Priestley)</span><br />
<br />
Here is a better way:<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;">1. Which sentence tells us <i>how</i> a person did something before telling us <i>what</i> they did?</span><br />
<span style="color: purple;">a) 'Thrilled to be trusted with such complicated instructions, Roger took the crowbar from Billy.' (<i>I Was a Rat</i>, Philip Pullman) </span><br />
<span style="color: purple;">b) 'I stood in the morning room with Hodges, not knowing what to do.' (<i>The Dead of Winter</i>, Chris Priestley)</span><br />
<br />
And here is an even better way:<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;">'Thrilled to be trusted with such complicated instructions, Roger took the crowbar from Billy.' (<i>I Was a Rat</i>, Philip Pullman) - do you see how putting the descrption first makes us eager to read on to the end of the sentence, to find out what Roger is thrilled about?</span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: purple;">'I stood in the morning room with Hodges, not knowing what to do.' (<i>The Dead of Winter</i>, Chris Priestley) - this sentence creates a feeling of expectation and impatience. The standing is stretched out as the character and we, the readers, don't know what is he will do next.</span><br />
<br />
Oops, no test there. Damn it. The kids might just see how the technique works instead of being able to name it. That's no good, is it? And if the explanation is considered too hard for young readers (Year 4 is the time fronted adverbials are introduced), then they are too young to need the term as it's useless to them. If you want to know which terms children have to learn - and/or what they mean - there is a list on <a href="http://www.theschoolrun.com/primary-literacy-glossary-for-parents" target="_blank">The School Run's website</a>.<br />
<br />
How about we bolster #readingforpleasure with #writingforpleasure? Let our children enjoy language. If we don't, we'll lost a whole generation of writers - and not just writers of fiction, poetry, screenplays, and so on, but writers of biography, science books (and articles), journalism, history, philosophy...<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-12282641350244193862016-03-10T19:14:00.003+00:002016-03-10T19:14:39.136+00:00Wow words - or notOh dear, I should have been here - but I'm over at ABBA again writing about what a terrible thing the 'wow word' phenomenon is: <a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2016/03/de-wowing-wow-words.html" target="_blank">De-WOWing word words</a>. It's got a lot of attention - obviously an issue people are concerned about.Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-13041592057213302172016-02-09T07:34:00.005+00:002016-02-09T07:34:49.633+00:00Truffle-hunting<a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/truffle-hunting.html" target="_blank">Over on ABBA today</a>, with a truffle-hunting pig and Evernote. If you don't use Evernote, you should!<br />
<br />Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-20519150406799782312016-02-06T14:06:00.000+00:002016-02-06T14:06:36.477+00:00Grim and gruelI have pleurisy. Doesn't that sound Victorian? Not quite as good as consumption in that regard, perhaps, but also not fatal, so it has its advantages. I feel I should be chopping up the furniture for firewood, but (a) the axe is somewhere at the top of the garden and (b) not much of the furniture is actually flammable, most of it being, according to the labels, treated with flame-resistant substances so that it can legally be sold. Clearly whoever regulates the flammability of furniture is not aware of the needs of starving, consumptive writers in garrets.<br />
<br />
To be fair, I'm not starving. I can drive to Waitrose to buy gruel or, if things get really bad, have gruel delivered by Ocado. Though I am lying in bed in an unheated garret, so I'm halfway there. The unheated garret is my normal bedroom at the moment, as I've sub-let more sumptuous and comfortable parts of the house to people who seem to be strangely unafflcted by pleurisy. Perhaps next year I should sub-let the garret instead. <br />
<br />
What's all this got to do with writing, I hear you grumble, while locating your axe and gruel-supply just in case. Well, it has a bit to do with it. I have deadlines - of course - and deadlines don't go with death or gruel. Usually, I don't tell editors I'm ill or inconvenienced unless the problem will definitely have an impact on their work, or I know them very well and trust they know that I won't let the problems have an impact on their work. It can go wrong otherwise, I've found. Warn an editor you might be a bit late delivering because of a health/family problem and they panic and take your decisions for you. 'I thought it would be helpful...' No, it's not. I will suggest what is helpful, thank you. You just deal with your end of things and trust me to deal with my end of things and decide what I can - and want - to do. <br />
<br />
You can see their point. They have a book to deliver to a schedule. (A schedule which is usually screwed up by people other than the author, but we'll leave that for now.) If you are going to miss the deadline, or might miss the deadline, it's professional to give them good warning so that they can put things in place to limit the damage. But it's important for editors to realise, too, that if we are acting professionally and doing that, they have to trust our continued professionalism and not panic. So I have told the editor who is expecting 60,000 words on 16th February that the book is likely to be a week late, and why. I have told him what else might happen - I might get worse, and the book will be later; I might get better quickly and it will be only a few days late. I trust him. He will tell the copy editor not to leave time immediately to deal with this book, so the slip won't mess up another person's work schedule. And we will, between us, win the time back on the schedule later because I'll turn the editorial queries around quickly. We will meet the print deadline. All will be well.<br />
<br />
That's how a professional relationship works. Trust and openness and discussion. Editors sacrifice the right to be kept informed if they panic and act unilaterally when given early notification of possible difficulties. If they do that, next time they won't learn anything until the project is definitely in some trouble. If I ask an editor to work with me to avoid a problem, and they see that problem as already existing and needing their immediate action, without consultation, they won't get the same opportunity next time.<br />
<br />
Authors might be mavericks in that they work in their pyjamas all day and don't see the need to attend meetings. And they might look like mavericks to editors if they turn down the chance to work on boring books with one-week deadlines for a paltry fee. But they are, mostly, proper professionals who want to deliver a good book on time and work with their editors again. So, editors, if we have pleurisy or sick relatives or our house has flooded, please listen to our suggestions for solving or avoiding problems before cancelling the project or fleeing to Cuba. And please tell us before doing it, too. <br />
<br />
Of course, if I cut my arm off with an axe while hacking up non-flammable furniture, the schedule will not be so easily fixed. But I probably won't care then about remaining professional. At least not until I have sourced a decent prosthetic arm. So - off to the Ocado page for gruel and axes. And I'll bookmark the prosthetic arms page.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-52005847128763563512016-02-02T08:59:00.000+00:002016-02-02T08:59:48.676+00:00A view from the bridge<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH9MxYr-5HsVZ-a0IyBdcv1LkNdnBO_233n4i6jNM1zFxTqY6LHD9ebdXnk3bynesiNPbSXec4829VJvewfQn8RUBuYNIdscYGMWwRkOj5ETU6pxGca5PNvSZi4z4sdoREKF8BjVIeOdo/s1600/Lava_Lake_Nyiragongo_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH9MxYr-5HsVZ-a0IyBdcv1LkNdnBO_233n4i6jNM1zFxTqY6LHD9ebdXnk3bynesiNPbSXec4829VJvewfQn8RUBuYNIdscYGMWwRkOj5ETU6pxGca5PNvSZi4z4sdoREKF8BjVIeOdo/s320/Lava_Lake_Nyiragongo_2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lava in Lake Nyiragong</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
You could be forgiven for assuming I'd died or gone over to the dark side - maybe become a banker or something else that dare not lift its head in the booky corner of the web. But no. I've been that iconic squeezed middle that is pressed as thin as air by the needs of generations above and below. But enough of that. I miss being here. It's all too easy for the years to slip by that way. They will still all have my support. But somehow the days and minutes must be prised apart for other things, too.<br />
<br />
The things I do all day matter and I have freely chosen to do them. But other things matter, too, and it's time to find a way to do some of them. So Stroppy is open for business again. Writing matters to me, and the fate of writers matters to me, and that children have access to books - good books. And these books don't write themselves, you know.<br />
<br />
This year I am Chair of the Educational Writers' Group in the Society of Authors. There will be events (for EWG, I mean - I rarely do events-as-writer since the carbon dioxide of publicity chokes me). This year I will write all the books I'm contracted to write and I might even make real progress on one or two non-contracted projects. Because if I don't do it now, I will regret and resent that I didn't.<br />
<br />
It's difficult to draw a line around what to do for others, and how far to let short-term demands compromise long-term aims or needs. I would rather have loved and cared for people dear to me than have written 250 books instead of 200 books. No one will miss those 50 books; even I will only miss two or three of them. I am a firm believer in sorting out what matters to you and prioritising it, regardless of what other people think should matter or what they want you to do. I would rather spend a day looking after MicroBint than doing a school visit, so that's what I'll do. But there must be balance, too. It's important to seek out those two or three books I'd miss and make sure I write them. And, of course, write enough books to pay for sticks to keep the wolf from the door. It would be nice if they could be the same books, but that's asking a lot.<br />
<br />
Legend tells that Empedocles threw himself into the volcanic crater of
Mount Etna, keen to prove his immortality (or to be turned into a god).
I'm not going that far. But I feel it's time to do a bit of prising apart of those dark wodges of time and let the red-hot ooze come out, fiery and enthusiastic to run downhill. Move aside, dark wodges....Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-57142385688320285192015-08-22T15:19:00.002+01:002016-02-23T20:27:39.120+00:00Information wants to be free? It is already<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There are many people in the anti-copyright brigade who claim that information wants to be free, that the sum total of human knowledge is our joint heritage and that this is not compatible with copyright law and other regulations that restrict intellectual property. <br />
<br />
A lot of things are covered by IPR. What I am not dealing with here is original research that discovers information that is commercially valuable - how to make a particular new plastic, for example. That's a different part of the debate. And I'm not talking about fiction, which might or might not be considered to be information. I'm talking here about the people who like to defend ending or vastly reducing copyright in books because 'information should be free'. <br />
<br />
Information IS free. That's what wikipedia is for. Many, probably most, of the facts in my books are - I am fairly confident - available on Wikipedia. Not because I took them from Wikipedia, but because most things end up there sooner or later. You might have to go through a very large number of pages to find everyone of the facts that I have included in a particular book, and it will take a long time, but they should be there somewhere. So someone having to pay for my book about - say - gravity or spies or evoution or demons does not mean that information is not available. The work I have done on collecting and collating and connecting, on expressing and explaining is NOT free, and there is no reason why it should be. People who have freely given their time to write and correct Wikipedia (myself included) are giving you information. You don't need to steal it.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwn4JU4BjuXq_D5PQ688Su9KDIzar6D6aTbkU5KACsYMrC7NGkJC4NcZ7mDddzm2vWOx-dJGrHKOCcHBAg2G_xM4J45UQAHetpx5n11gs14vpQR8za2tDGXWCo06yrpGcB68hsQRVdSNM/s1600/Asteroids.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="165" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwn4JU4BjuXq_D5PQ688Su9KDIzar6D6aTbkU5KACsYMrC7NGkJC4NcZ7mDddzm2vWOx-dJGrHKOCcHBAg2G_xM4J45UQAHetpx5n11gs14vpQR8za2tDGXWCo06yrpGcB68hsQRVdSNM/s320/Asteroids.jpg" width="320" /></a>Let's take a step back. Assume I want to know about asteroids. There is lots of information about asteroids available on the NASA website and it's likely to be reliable. I can use this information - it's free - to write a children's book about asteroids. Why would a child read my book rather than look on the NASA website? Because I have selected the most interesting and relevant (for the child) information and presented it in a way that a child reader can understand. I have avoided unnecessary long words and complicated sentences. I have worked with an editor and picture researcher to find suitable images and diagrams that make the information easy for a child to understand and exciting to read.<br />
<br />
I am not claiming to have studied lots of asteroids or to have collected data in space. Those are not my areas of expertise. The people who have collected that information have been paid for their work. My area of expertise is finding and presenting information in an appropriately accessible way for my readers. It's a type of work I expect to be paid for. And why not? I do it for 35-40 hours a week, just like people do other jobs, and I have spent many years learning and practising my trade.<br />
<br />
If books are stolen by people who think information should be free, publishers won't commission more books. Then everyone will have to read through Wikipedia - plus a gazillion other websites, books and academic journals to find the information that goes into a book such as <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Evolution-Other-Stories-Science-Simple/dp/1783251344" target="_blank">Evolution</a>. So by all means take the information that is freely available online and through libraries, but if you want the particular expression, presentation, layout, combination and selection that makes a book more than information, please pay for it.<br />
<br />Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-37905184605653622522015-04-04T10:41:00.001+01:002015-04-05T21:57:15.540+01:00"I've been looking at your website..."Do authors need websites? It's a question often asked. The answer, predictably, is 'it depends', though I'd tend toward 'Yes'. New authors are sometimes told by their publishers to get a website. Personally, I think this is a bit presumptuous. If a publisher wants you to have a website, they should pay for one. If they are going to give you a small advance, they can't then demand you spend it on promotion, <span style="color: purple;"><b>which is their job</b></span>. But see my later point about why it's better to have your own website than a page on your publisher's website.<br />
<br />
Let's start at the beginning. Not all writers write the same kinds of things. I'm on the committee of the Educational Writers Group (EWG) of the Society of Authors and when I asked a group of educational writers a few months ago how many had a website, only half did. I was stunned. When I've asked that of a group of children's writers, they all - or pretty much all - have websites. The EWG people tend to fall into three groups (though I'm trying to extend it!) - they either write in the English-as-a-foreign/second-language market (EFL or ESL), or they write test/exam papers and textbooks, or they write children's non-fiction (of any type) and schools fiction (reading schemes and so on). The first two don't generally have a website. They work for the same publishers again and again, their readers don't know their names, and they don't see a need for a website. I'd argue that there could still be a benefit, but if they are getting enough work, then why bother?<br />
<br />
On the other hand, there are many writers who do/should have a website. Probably most. Why? What's the point? This is where it all depends. Ask yourself the following questions and answer honestly.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>1. How many books have you published?</b></span><br />
<ul>
<li>zero</li>
<li>one or two</li>
<li>several</li>
<li>many</li>
</ul>
If you<span style="color: purple;"> <b>haven't published any books</b></span>, what are you going to put on your website? Think carefully about that. A website needs content.You can talk about yourself and the book(s) you are writing, and what drew you to those topics/stories, but don't assume an air of authority about publishing and writing (though you can about an area of specialist knowledge) and don't say anything that you won't want future readers, editors, agents, teachers, librarians or parents to read. In particular, never ever slag off publishers or agents who have rejected you.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>One or two books</b></span> published and you're off to a good start. You can talk about those. You can talk about how you got to be a writer, what else you do, whether you do events (though frankly I'm not a fan of talking as though you're an old hand when you've published one book - but it's up to you). You can talk about your life and your next book, but be wary of saying too much if the book is not finished (and accepted).<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>Several </b></span>is the best position to be in. You have books you can talk about, but not so many your website loses all sense of shape because there are too many. You can probably pick out some key themes or series or topics. You should be able to make a nice website out of this, with plenty of emphasis on the books and only as much extra material (about events, school visits, yourself, other interests) as you want to include - you won't be scratching around for stuff to fill the pages.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>Many</b></span> is not as tricky as too few, but it has its own problems. Your website is in danger of being obese and sluggardly. Do you really want to list and describe every book? Even those that have been out of print for years? Who's going to read that? If you are going to include them all, you need to develop a clear structure so that people can find what they want, and get an overview of your work - two different things. Look at the structure of publishers' catalogues. They don't give loads of detail about every book on the backlist. It might be time to let some go. There are books of mine I have mentally pulped. They get a mention, at best, but no big shout.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>2. Who will look for you online?</b></span><br />
Be brutally honest. No one? Your ex and your neighbours? Schools? Publishers and agents? Your readers? Readers' parents? People who thought you were someone else? People who have just met you or are going to meet you (at a meeting/conference/date)? Other writers?<br />
<br />
This is a really important question as it should determine what you put on your website and how you present it (which is not really covered in this post, but I might write about it later).<br />
<br />
You really don't need to cater to <span style="color: purple;"><b>your ex and your neighbours</b></span>. They might look and they might not - who cares? Except they will care if you slag them off - 'The evil car-park attendant in this story is modelled on my next-door neighbour.' Don't.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>Schools </b></span>(ie teachers, librarians) will look if you do school visits, or if they think you might do school visits. They might look if they are using some of your books and want to see what else you have written. They might look to see if there is any extra material they could use, such as worksheets to support your books, or ideas for activities they could do using them. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>Publishers and agents</b></span> will quite likely look if you submit to them (and your stuff is any good; they won't look if they have no intention of following up). It will give them an idea of what you are like, whether you behave professionally, and what else you have published. For this reason, a prominent page of your website might not be the place to foreground the problems in your life. Harsh but true - unless it is relevant to the subject of your books. If you are writing about depression/cancer/caring for an aged relative, it's good material for your website. If not, it might lead a publisher to wonder whether you will be able to meet deadlines. Your call - but bear it in mind.<br />
<br />
Your existing <span style="color: purple;"><b>readers </b></span>might look at your website. Someone who has seen one of your books and wondered about buying it, or has had a book recommended to them, might take a look. Readers and potential readers want different things. See below.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>Readers' parents </b></span>and other gatekeepers might look from a potential-reader or reader point of view, or they might be checking that you are not an obviously evil influence. Still, if they want to decide you are an evil influence, they will do so regardless of what is on your website. (This is from a review of one of my books on Barnes and Noble: "One quick look at the authors' [sic] website and you will know exactly the type of values, and her MISSION to "educate" children." - I'm an evil influence, you know. But my website doesn't mention a MISSION or use the word "educate".)<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>People who thought you were someone else</b></span> will probably be disappointed, but if your website is super-exciting, they might stay. But probably not. They're busy people. Unless, of course, your name is Kitten Video.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>People who have just met you</b></span> will look out of curiosity, and the kind of curiosity will depend on who they are and where you met. If they are a publisher/agent they fall into a category above. If they are someone you met at dinner, or a party, or on a train, they will probably just want to see what sort of books you write. Someone who is expecting to meet you at a meeting or conference might want to be prepared (to introduce your talk, for instance) or want to look as though they are familiar with your books. If you are going on a date with them - well, this is one of the problems of a public profile. They are going to know a lot more about you than you know about them. The best solution is only to go on dates with people who are equally famous. And make sure you have read their website, too. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>Other writers</b></span> will be curious and look you up to see what you do. They might buy your books - writers buy or borrow a lot of books (well, good writers do). If you have helpful information for other writers, put it in one place so that it doesn't put off people who aren't writers. One nice thing you can do is put links to the website of other writers whose books might appeal to your readers - it will please readers and writers (but possibly not your publishers). That depends on whether you think of other writers as competition. I tend to think that people will buy more books if they find more books they like, not that they will buy one book instead of another, unless they are very obviously in direct competition - two books that are about the top ten biggest whales, for example. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>3. Why will people look at your website?</b></span><br />
Just as important as who will look is why they are looking. It is quite possibly not why you hope/think they are looking (on which, see below).<br />
<br />
They might want to:<br />
<ul>
<li>find out a particular piece of information, such as whether you do school visits or live in Bristol</li>
<li>find out what kind of books you have written</li>
<li>buy a book you have written </li>
<li>look for other books, if they have read and enjoyed one</li>
<li>find out how to get in touch with you</li>
<li>find out more about you generally. </li>
</ul>
It is pretty obvious that you should make it easy for people to find what they want. Otherwise they will be frustrated, and having a website will have done you more harm than good. Put yourself in the shoes of each potential visitor. A school will want to know what type of events you do and how much you charge. An existing reader will want to know more about the book they have read and see what else you have written. A potential reader will want information about your books, but without spoilers. A publisher or agent will want an overview of your professional path and aims, as well as a good idea of the type of books you have published (and who for). Publishers and schools might want to get in touch with you. (An email contact form is the best way to handle this.)<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>4. Why do you want people to look at your website?</b></span><br />
Think about your aims. Why are you going to the trouble of making a website? It can be any or all of the following, or something else. The important thing is to determine what you want from the website. Getting it is another matter, but at least make it possible for your website to do what you want. You could very broadly divide the intentions of a writer's website as selfish or generous. Do you want something from other people (book sales, school visits)? Or do you want to give to other people (information, entertainment, freebies)? It can do both, but most have a bias one way or the other.<br />
<br />
Many writers hope a website will <span style="color: purple;"><b>sell books</b></span>. That's probably what their publishers hope, too. If you are self-published, this will be an important part of what your website is for, and that's really outside my realm of expertise, so go and ask someone else for advice. If your books are published by mainstream publishers, you might:<br />
<ul>
<li>sell books directly through your website</li>
<li>link to your publisher's website</li>
<li>link to a bookseller, such as the ubiquitous Amazon or a real-world chain (such as Waterstone's) or a network of independents</li>
<li>not link at all. </li>
</ul>
You might think the last is stupid, but it's what I've chosen. I reckon people know how to order a book online, and I can't be bothered with creating all the links. If you have published fewer books, your enthusiasm for making links might be undulled. Good for you. <br />
<br />
Some writers hope their website will <b><span style="color: purple;">sell them</span></b>, either to schools or other organisations to do visits or events, or to publishers who might commission them. If your primary aim is to sell visits and events, they must be prominent, but remember that people only want you to appear because you are a writer, so it's important not to let that aspect slip out of view.<br />
<br />
A website that <b><span style="color: purple;">gives </span></b>might well attract more visits. If that is your intention, giving something - information, a good laugh, free stories or worksheets - might appeal to you. But make sure the material is good quality and - if it's downloadable - compatible with systems your visitors will have.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>5. Why do you visit websites?</b></span><br />
The visitors to your website will be human beings. You are a human being. Use that to your advantage to gain insight into your visitors. Think about what you want from a website and how your website might satsify those requirements in someone else. Do you ever go to a website thinking, 'I hope it will be full of shouty endorsements for a product and lots of chances to buy things'? Probably not, unless you are actually going to a retail site. Do you go to a website thinking, 'I hope it will be really hard to find what I'm looking for'? Unlikely, unless you are writing a guide to web development and need some examples of bad design.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: purple;"><b>Do you really have to?</b></span><br />
No, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. You are not an employee. If you really don't want a website, don't have one. We are all allowed to make choices, even stupid choices. It's the prerogative of grown-ups. If your publisher is desperate for you to have a web presence, they will build you one, or put a page on their website. This, in their view, is better than nothing. But really think about it. If you have your own website, you are in control of how you are presented. Your publisher won't mention books you have written for other publishers, or anything you have self-published, and they probably won't mention school visits or how to contact you. You won't have the chance to build a web persona - all they want you to have is a profile. A profile is flat, it's a view from one side, it's an outline. You can have more than that. You can have a personality. If you want.<br />
<br />
We're not finished with this yet. There will be more. But this is long enough for now...<br />
<br />Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-72802148595494901642015-02-23T07:00:00.000+00:002015-02-26T00:05:40.607+00:00Dear Editors...Most of you are very lovely and a joy to work with. Some of you have also become valued friends. Some of you - while still lovely - are rather young or inexperienced. Which is fine - everyone has to learn their job before they are good at it.This is not a stroppy post at all. This, I hope, is a helpful post for new, young editors.<br />
<br />
Firstly, as an author, I am very pleased to welcome new editors into the publishing world. The more editors the better. We need you. And, sadly, editors get older and retire and we don't want any gaps in the supply. I hope you will enjoy working in publishing and that we will become friends.<br />
<br />
No doubt when you took your new job someone in-house told you all their procedures, and how to work the coffee machine and all that. I doubt anyone told you how to deal with authors, though, and we have more buttons than the average coffee machine. So here is a little guide to working smoothly with authors.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #20124d;"><b>Five steps to a good relationship with your authors </b></span><br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: #4c1130;">1. Authors are people, too</span></b><br />
We have families, friends, domestic commitments, lawns to mow, supermarkets to visit and existential crises to fit in. Please assume that we work around 35-40 hours a week and those hours are not all overnight or over the weekend at the time of your latest crisis. Do not send work late on Friday that you want back on Monday. If we choose to work weekends, that's our business. In exceptional circumstances - and that doesn't mean when the in-house people have taken too long to turn things around and eaten into the schedule - you may politely ask us to work over a weekend if you already have a good relationship with us, have not made the same request already in the previous 12 months, and as long as you will be polite if we say 'no.'<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #4c1130;"><b>2. Authors need to eat</b></span><br />
We don't write these books for fun. Or not only, or always. We need to earn a decent living. Let's do some maths.<br />
<br />
Say you pay an author £1500 advance or flat fee. How long do you think the author can afford to spend on your book?<br />
<br />
Let's assume an experienced author with years of expertise would like to earn £35,000 a year. That's not unreasaonable, is it? That's not very much for the expertise the author brings to the job. A senior author should not be paid less than a senior editor - they are comparable jobs.<br />
<br />
So imagine an author works for 5 days a week, 46 weeks of the year (four weeks' holiday and 10 bank holidays; no time off sick). In general, 20% of an author's time is not productive in that it doesn't directly earn money. It is time spent chasing the invoices publishers haven't paid, reading and arguing about contracts, writing outlines for books that don't go ahead, attending meetings, computer admin, going to and from places for research or other purposes, ordering stuff, buying stamps, doing tax returns, picking up books from libraries and bookshops, fixing the network, fixing the printer, calling the ISP when the internet doesn't work for three days in a row, and all the other things that are magically done by someone else in your office. So we need to earn about £27 an hour to make £35,000 <span style="color: #20124d;"><b>turnover</b></span>, not profit.<br />
<br />
My expenses during a year are in the region of £5,000. So I need, let's say, £40,000 turnover. This comes to £31 an hour. Call it £30 to make the maths easier. Your £1500 buys you 50 hours. OK? If you want a 48-page book, you're looking at just over an hour a page. And that includes the hours spent writing the outline, answering emails, talking on the phone, writing a picture list, dealing with editorial queries, checking layouts, suggesting replacement pictures when the ones chosen are inappropriate or the ones we wanted are not available or too expensive, checking the layouts (twice). Oh, and writing the text.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #4c1130;"><b>3. We have the same number of hours in the day as you do</b></span><br />
This is related to point (1). Try to remember this when you send a request for a book outline that you want in three days' time, especially if two of the days are Saturday and Sunday. For a book of less than 30,000 words, the outline is most of the work. That's when we have to feel the shape of the project, set the parameters for the book, do most of the research, divide the material (that we are not wholly familiar with yet) into workable chapters or spreads, find out what could be used to illustrate it, search for artwork reference, and persuade you we know what we're doing. Do you really think that is going to fit into three days? Especially as we will also be answering emails from other publishers, checking layouts of the last project - and quite often answering queries from you, too. Plus sleeping, eating, getting dressed (optional), going to Waitrose and dealing with other people in our lives.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #4c1130;"><b>3.5 and the same number of days in a month</b></span><br />
You go on holiday sometimes and leave an auto-response email saying you are away. Sometimes (rarely) authors like to go on holiday, too. We try to give you good warning so that you can build it into your schedule. If your schedule slips, we will still be on holiday. We will not cancel our holidays to do the work. We will not take it with us - or we might if you pay a lot extra. I have done that once. It was an extra £770 to check colour layouts on holiday. Just so that you know.<br />
<br />
If your schedule slips (your end) it is <span style="color: #20124d;"><b>NOT </b></span>our fault and <span style="color: #20124d;"><b>NOT </b></span>our responsibility to make up the lost time, though we will try to help you with that. If we have booked out time - following a schedule you wrote - to do your work and it doesn't turn up, that is wasted time when we earn nothing. We can't push other publishers' projects out of the way to pick up yours when it comes back, all late and urgent. You won't have thought of this, because if the designer doesn't send the book back to you on time, you will still be paid to sit at your editorial desk. We have to suffer a week or two unpaid because of those cock-ups. We can't just magic work out of the air, and no one pays us extra because the work didn't come back on time.<br />
<br />
Further - if we said we could do something in two weeks, that was because we had set aside time in those two weeks to do something. It doesn't follow that we can do it in two weeks if you send it at a different time, because we will have other work then - or maybe we will have gone on holiday for a fortnight. Letting your schedule slip a week means it might take us four weeks to do the work, alongside our other commitments. And the less you are paying, the less likely we are to prise our schedules apart to make a crack to fit in your late project. So don't pay £1000 for a book and then say, 'It took ages for the designer to do this, so can you just turn it around for tomorrow, please?' Because the answer is often 'No, sorry.' We will always try to help - but you can't rely on us being able to. There was a schedule to help everyone plan their time, including us.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #4c1130;"><b>4. We are proud of these books and want them to be good</b></span><br />
We like this job or we wouldn't do it. After all - we'd hardly do it for the money, would we? To you, this book is one of many that you are struggling to get finished, or off your desk for a while. For us, it represents a piece of us, and it will go out into the world with our name on it, and will represent us to readers and to other publishers. So we will put in more effort than you are paying for.<br />
<br />
Please do not introduce random errors because you can't be bothered to check something. Don't think of extra things to put in - there is usually a good reason that thing you just thought of is not in there. By all means make suggestions: we welcome suggestions, and sometimes we did just overlook or not know something. But please don't make changes without telling us. There is a lot of misinformation out there, and we check everything carefully. So you found a nice snippet on Reddit you thought would fit in that book about Nostradamus? I read Nostradamus in the original, and that 'quote' is not in there. If you want to make changes, give us the chance to check them. We won't always just spot them when you send the layouts - we don't remember every word we wrote, and our minds have moved on to a different book in the weeks it has taken for the book to go through design. And don't introduce grammatical errors. The proofreader should pick them up, but it doesn't look very professional and it's very annoying.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #4c1130;"><b>5. We are proud of these books and want to see them</b></span><br />
Don't forget to send our contractual copies of the books when they are published. This is what we have to show for our work: a shelf of books. There is<b><span style="color: #20124d;"> no excuse at all for</span></b> not sending the pitiful number of copies you are contracted to give us. We need them. Not just to gloat over, but to show other publishers at meetings what we can do. Don't imagine we are going to accept that it was an unusual oversight that you didn't have them sent out. Unusual oversights like that happen with about half the books we write. You are not special in your discourtesy. You know what [some] novel-writers get? A note of thanks and some flowers when their book comes out. We usually discover they have come out because the publisher advertises the book on twitter, or we notice the publication date posted on Amazon has passed. Do you really think that is a polite way to treat the person who put more work into the book than anyone else?<br />
<br />
Oh - and please also tell us when new editions come out. This is not just a pride thing, and we won't hassle you to send a copy (though it would be nice if you did, especially if it says in the contract that you will) - we need to register all editions in order to get our payments from PLR. This is not money you have to pay. It's money we are entitled to and you prevent us getting (but can't get yourselves) if you don't tell us the book has come out with a different ISBN. So please tell us.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #20124d;"><b>That's it </b></span><br />
That will do for now. There are other things you can do, but if you could do these five it would be a great start. It would make working with you even more of a pleasure. And you will learn, as you ease into the job, that good writers are easy to work with. That you need good writers on your list of contacts. That when you are promoted, or move to a different publishing house, you will need people to commission, people you know can write, know can follow a brief, know will deliver on time. And you don't want to have pissed us off, because we do turn commissions down. We turn them down if the book is ill-conceived (or just not interesting), if the schedule is too tight, the fee/advance too low or the editor impossible to work with. Don't be that editor.<br />
<br />
Enjoy your career. We look forward to working with you again, many times, in your many different publishing houses over the coming years. And let's meet for a drink at the London Book Fair.<br />
<br />
[This post was not prompted by any recent experience with any specific editor. Please, lovely editors, don't try to work out if it's you - it isn't.]<br />
<br />
<br />Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-61121830577843838462015-02-14T10:59:00.000+00:002015-02-14T11:04:18.571+00:00The flipside of PLR: the books people don't want to buyThe media have just started their annual assessment of what can be learned from the library loans (PLR) statistics. The answer is - not entirely what they think can be learned. Someone needs to teach these journos about statistics. An article in <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/13/library-users-firmly-focused-on-fiction?CMP=share_btn_fb" target="_blank">the Guardian</a>, for example, claims that fiction totally dominates borrowing because most of the top 100 most-borrowed titles are novels. That doesn't follow. Bestsellers are less of a thing in non-fiction. There could be more non-fiction loans in total than fiction loans, but just spread over far more books so that few make the top 100. Indeed their table of 'loans by genre' puts fiction in second place (largely because they didn't include children's fiction, probably - but no matter).<br />
<br />
But that aside - PLR figures tell you which books people borrow. Or, looked at another way, they tell you which books <b><span style="color: purple;">people don't buy</span></b>. The Guardian is surprised that the only cookery book in the top 100 is Jamie Oliver's book on cooking for cheap (laughable, really, as his view of cheap is not everyone else's). That's not at all surprising. On the whole, you want to have a cookery book in the house so that you can use it again and again over a period of years, not borrow it for a couple of weeks. Cooking for cheap (<a href="http://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/food-drink/save-with-jamie-shop-smart-cook,jamie-oliver-9780718158149" target="_blank">whatever it's called</a>) is an exception, and is presumably borrowed because the book is so expensive that people who want cheap food can't afford it. (£26! WTF?)<br />
<br />
The books people borrow from the library are those they can't afford to buy or don't want to buy. Some people can't afford any books (or think they can't - some just have different priorities) and so borrow anything they read. Then there are people, including me, who will borrow books that are very expensive and which they don't expect to use repeatedly. I do occasionally buy books that cost over £30 but I try not to. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBFn5yKFz_lxaHOwA2VM_m6CpFQqNyTZ8HMjb_L_T4yzorF6zwCl8LyvmORNIV4_4tBRrNogyzFRhSIp0QMl_zGwDKzFprwQ8dzDenEXYY34bgbsBvudQ7Wk5BqOTipH5DeZ_Q0bYR6y4/s1600/duck+is+dirty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBFn5yKFz_lxaHOwA2VM_m6CpFQqNyTZ8HMjb_L_T4yzorF6zwCl8LyvmORNIV4_4tBRrNogyzFRhSIp0QMl_zGwDKzFprwQ8dzDenEXYY34bgbsBvudQ7Wk5BqOTipH5DeZ_Q0bYR6y4/s1600/duck+is+dirty.jpg" /></a>Children's books are heavily borrowed. This is good, of course, as the children get to read the books. But it also indicates that people are unwilling to buy books for their children. Fine, many kids get through books at a rate of knots and it's too expensive to keep up with them. But that's not all that's going on. There is a perception of value related to book length. Picture books in particular are heavily borrowed - often because people think it's 'not worth' paying £5 or more for a book that's only a few pages long and has few words. I won't even go there. I've read the 19 words of <b><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dirty-Satoshi-Kitamura-Board-Books/dp/0862646685/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1423908099&sr=1-2&keywords=duck+is+dirty" target="_blank">Duck is Dirty</a></b> about 200 times in the last fortnight. And will read them again and again and again over the coming months. Plus all the times I read them 23 years ago, and 19 years ago. That was money well spent. Looking at my own PLR figures, I get way, way more PLR on very short illustrated children's fiction than on anything else. <br />
<br />
What else don't people want to buy? Blockbuster/bestseller novels they would read once and give to the charity shop - hence Dan Brown being top of the 'not bought' chart. Obviously lots of people <i><b>do </b></i>buy these books - that's why they are bestsellers. But if I ever felt the need to read a Dan Brown novel, which I can't see happening, I would be quite likely to borrow it from the library and leave my book-buying budget for books I will value more and want to own. <br />
<br />
Anyway, the cheque should come soon, so I shall be happy enough to benefit from people not wanting to buy my books. I hope those who don't get very much PLR are comforted by the thought that there are not many people who don't want to buy their books.Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-61310166778754858332015-02-14T10:58:00.002+00:002015-02-14T10:58:46.863+00:00Why use the web when you can use a book?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgbIi_th-hn1rGBd57M9Zm5sksi2WVjCtk04pzE4LwiIy9Nwd7Mff5bOm5-UKvCw3G4Nsa5AyKY5XPNdWfL0dPnt2jlY6tSqiNdWjKOHb7nsgtMvX-c54ZaxiUrZNd-57Vt3VW1SniM1c/s1600/abba+-+evo+spread.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgbIi_th-hn1rGBd57M9Zm5sksi2WVjCtk04pzE4LwiIy9Nwd7Mff5bOm5-UKvCw3G4Nsa5AyKY5XPNdWfL0dPnt2jlY6tSqiNdWjKOHb7nsgtMvX-c54ZaxiUrZNd-57Vt3VW1SniM1c/s1600/abba+-+evo+spread.jpg" height="214" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Evolution</i>, Hachette, 2014</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/why-use-book-when-you-can-use-web.html" target="_blank">Over on ABBA</a>, a quick summary of my talk to the Hampshire school librarians on defending books to pupils and teachers keen to turn to the web. Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-22364368758951666862014-11-15T13:54:00.001+00:002014-11-15T13:54:26.868+00:00Paper or online? (Paper)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinnvzd3iEjYFRECUwpnDnFTnDWCfoSnPVMA-IvyREZPPGQ-F-U6O7SwZoTuMdEAMVRtABwt80d2nPf3U74Y6LPYOxh9g0mTlf7ceL_fVuJ5pTMwGLmxCYZVj-WvXFxr78VtrIfzfwkVPI/s1600/catal+huyuk+map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinnvzd3iEjYFRECUwpnDnFTnDWCfoSnPVMA-IvyREZPPGQ-F-U6O7SwZoTuMdEAMVRtABwt80d2nPf3U74Y6LPYOxh9g0mTlf7ceL_fVuJ5pTMwGLmxCYZVj-WvXFxr78VtrIfzfwkVPI/s1600/catal+huyuk+map.jpg" height="141" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Is it a map? <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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Today I'm working on <i>The Story of Maps</i>, the next in my <i>Story Of...</i> series. The principal source I want to use for the theoretical history and development of cartography is the seminal work on the subject, The History of Cartography, edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward and published by University of Chicago Press in 1987. But.... although I have Cambridge University Library on my doorstep, there is only one volume of the series available in Cambridge. (It is, happily, in Newnham College Library and as that is my current college affiliation, I can easily see it.) Here are my options:<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #20124d;"><b>go to London and use it in the British Library. </b></span>Can't afford to - £15 a day each day I need to go, which will be many - perhaps 20<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #20124d;"><b>buy it.</b></span><br />
Can't afford to - each volume changes hands at around £150 and there are seven.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #20124d;"><b>use it online.</b></span><br />
This is what I'm doing. The whole thing is available as PDFs from the UCP website - which is a brilliant resource and very generous of them.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsR-La8XUUNu8OOmtHsYHVhODM1o5fK3skooR5uy1xJkD4jvnW3WLfwSsyv-0wrXodfvuVpUv3un44IWeuNUXrLcFPo1CqZ1Fkd9fbstdpAjrl9Mua2xjtzkhYU553k1MYuaXehstB6PI/s1600/jiangxi,+18th+C.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsR-La8XUUNu8OOmtHsYHVhODM1o5fK3skooR5uy1xJkD4jvnW3WLfwSsyv-0wrXodfvuVpUv3un44IWeuNUXrLcFPo1CqZ1Fkd9fbstdpAjrl9Mua2xjtzkhYU553k1MYuaXehstB6PI/s1600/jiangxi,+18th+C.jpg" height="320" width="263" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It is a map - Jianxi, China, 18th century</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
I am hugely grateful that it's there, but I would SO MUCH prefer to use paper copies. Then I could flick through to find pictures of maps I want to discuss. I wouldn't have to wait for hi-res images to appear on the page (not normally a problem, but after my poor computer has buffered about 50 of these it starts to get tired).<br />
<br />
The frustration with using the electronic version will probably boost sales of the paper copies. I'm going to be filling in recommendation slips for CUL to buy all the volumes. But this is just the sort of book that should be a real, paper book.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-9983801921198764342014-08-23T08:21:00.000+01:002014-08-23T08:32:10.144+01:00On the shoulders of giants<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHo5UCzbrrL55Bx_OXWFcRvGBFXT4cX6cDHaoqavIx0XyMheBUPh1JobFwO_hTtL9EV8wukshax0Ev56azlyj2NnBjWqlcyso3sPorCmqspDQfch8VRffsJTMLFcA7m7JDA-5Ornhm6Yg/s1600/DSCN9251.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHo5UCzbrrL55Bx_OXWFcRvGBFXT4cX6cDHaoqavIx0XyMheBUPh1JobFwO_hTtL9EV8wukshax0Ev56azlyj2NnBjWqlcyso3sPorCmqspDQfch8VRffsJTMLFcA7m7JDA-5Ornhm6Yg/s1600/DSCN9251.JPG" height="200" width="160" /></a></div>
Phew. Just finished the creative writing summer school I teach at Pembroke and King's Colleges in Cambridge each year. It's always very sad to see the lovely students heading home, as I love those manic eight weeks that come along just as everyone else is planning to wind down and go on holiday.<br />
<br />
The format of the course is simple. There are two of us teaching it; my partner in crime is children's author <a href="http://www.briankeaney.com/" target="_blank">Brian Keaney</a>. Every week, there is an evening lecture (with wine), sometimes with a guest lecturer, but more often just our double-act. And the rest of the week, the students write, and each have an hour-long, one-to-one supervision (=tutorial, outside Cambridge) on their work. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirPpffU7vFK7nRBYumLAmcIUb8bVH4voIyEzKizMaOi1iftfANDI6kdw_xFzTmmgKXyWqWcgWOnuPmx6yW-H65RZGzg50Qj4mAhHl5t8v8LojyRtqqgP3eGJBf0KgzxjrK4xKpCe4i9u0/s1600/DSCN9248.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirPpffU7vFK7nRBYumLAmcIUb8bVH4voIyEzKizMaOi1iftfANDI6kdw_xFzTmmgKXyWqWcgWOnuPmx6yW-H65RZGzg50Qj4mAhHl5t8v8LojyRtqqgP3eGJBf0KgzxjrK4xKpCe4i9u0/s1600/DSCN9248.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a>But of course it's <i>not </i>just us two. We have lots more guest teachers, many of them dead. Each year, we drag many other writers into the lectures - sometimes as reference points, sometimes as illustrations or examples, sometimes for proper discussion and sometimes just mentioned in passing. Of course, none of the students will have read all those we refer to (they aren't old enough, they haven't had time yet) but many will have read a lot and all will have read some. The range is huge - last week's 'mentions' stretch (in time) from Aesop to <i>The Hunger Games</i>, taking in Sophocles, Euripides, Hamlet, Macbeth, Shelley, <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rosetti, Edgar Allan Poe, <i>Dubliners, Ulysses</i>, Stephen King, Raymond Chandler and Anne Lamott amongst others. During the course, there have been many, many more.<br />
<br />
Previous writers are our currency of debate as well as our models. We don't want the students to write in the style of Jane Austen or Matthew Arnold - they would never sell anything. But we do want them to learn from the structures, the intensity, the insights into human psychology, the depiction and development of character and all the other universal aspects of their predecessors' writing.<br />
<br />
So as they all go off into the world, back to Yale and Cornell and Berkeley and all the other places they came from, and ask us what they should to do improve their writing, we tell them to keep reading. To read the type of books they want to write and the types of books they don't want to write. To read recent books and to read books by people long dead. To read books they like and books they don't.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYdLHSYpVxtl0JoShlEd9K3gY0XZkzk4vRQ7Kgk7aaM283v7HMMg17tCIlK5yeDWxdE9p1BZBW1j9DiW1Bbf586b5_7dB22GL4mSt4SX4_T_lR7-mdJmTb_yxxnTUg11EeIWA-GqGqF2U/s1600/DSCN9256.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYdLHSYpVxtl0JoShlEd9K3gY0XZkzk4vRQ7Kgk7aaM283v7HMMg17tCIlK5yeDWxdE9p1BZBW1j9DiW1Bbf586b5_7dB22GL4mSt4SX4_T_lR7-mdJmTb_yxxnTUg11EeIWA-GqGqF2U/s1600/DSCN9256.JPG" height="200" width="170" /></a> The course is not about writing literary fiction - we are as happy with them if they write a decent fantasy or sci-fi story - and it has a commercial aspect: how to write books that will sell (if they want to make a living as a writer). We tell them there is no shame and a lot to be gained by writing (and selling) books of many types and that reading widely will help with all of it. One of the questions we ask them to come back to when they are reading contemporary books is 'why was this published?' There is always a reason. If there is a book they hate, we encourage them to work out why they hate it, and not stop reading it until they know. Of course, no one has to carry on reading a book they don't like, but if you haven't worked out what you don't like, your work with it is not done. And then they have to decide whether it is a badly written book (and how) or a well-written book that is not to their taste. We don't have to like things to recognise their qualities. There are plenty of good books I don't like.<br />
<br />
And so to all our students, just past and longer past, and to everyone - just keep reading, and read thoughtfully and critically. You don't need a living tutor - there are plenty of dead ones that will let you climb onto their shoulders and see far into the distance.<br />
<br />
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PS - and these two came out last week when I wasn't looking. <br />
Both from Arctuturus, both adult/teen books. All types of writing - it's what you need to do to make a living.<br /> Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-35651017142839743842014-08-09T08:00:00.003+01:002014-08-09T08:00:52.231+01:00Not dead yet...Over at the other place again... sorry. I will be back. Working crazy hours to finish a book (delivered yesterday - hurray!) and teach summer school at the same time.<br />
<br />
On ABBA - do you read books to find out how to survive being different or how to fit in? <a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-same-or-different-anne-rooney.html" target="_blank">The same of different?</a>Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2363444567124084776.post-17977973647580567922014-07-11T16:48:00.001+01:002014-07-11T16:48:13.438+01:00At the other place: What are words worth?Long absence... back in summer school and deadline trauma. But I have been <a href="http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2014/07/killing-our-darlings.html" target="_blank">over at ABBA </a>writing about the <a href="http://www.alcs.co.uk/About-Us//News/News/What-are-words-worth-now-not-much.aspx" target="_blank">ALCS report on authors' earnings</a>. If you haven't read the report, you should. You don't need to read the media coverage, which is mostly rubbish, but do read the report.Stroppy Authorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16560035800075465845noreply@blogger.com1