And so to bed...

If I could choose a luxury in this world, I think it might be to have a bed that doesn’t have to stand against a wall.  I know.  Call me sad, but that’s it.  I mean, this is my bedroom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yeah, right.  After all, doesn't everyone have a bedroom like that?

If only.

Why is it, that fitted sheets, which presumably are meant to make life easier, spring off the mattress and rumple up in an impenetrable mass as soon as the human form is inserted between them and the duvet cover?  Add a husband, a couple of cats, a child or two (or three or more) and – although strenuous efforts are made to dissuade same – a dog or so, then the whole affair resembles something by Tracey Emin in the Tate.  Only I’d like to sleep in mine.  After everyone’s joined us – on a Saturday morning, say – and we’ve added tea, toast and marmalade to the mix, our bed resembles something that would interest the Ordinance Survey as a demonstration of contour mapping.

Have you noticed, how on the How To Have A Perfect House TV programmes, however inept the householder is, however much in need of an urgent brain-cell transfusion, their bedrooms always have enough room to have the bed well clear of the wall.  That’s because, no matter how suave, competent or cheerful the presenter is (And yes, Anthea Turner, I’m thinking of you) kneeling on one part of the sheet whilst attempting to raise the mattress to tuck the corner underneath the end makes you look a prat. 

Single beds aren’t a problem, but double beds… Well, I rest my case. Only I can’t, because the sheet has taken on the properties of an independent life-form with malevolent intent.

 

Speaking of which, have you read that cracking ghost story, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you, My Lad by M.R. James?  That features a haunted sheet, and boy, do I know what he’s talking about, as Lee on The Apprentice would say.  The big moment is when the hero sees his sheet rise up from the bed and waltz across the room with A horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen.

 

 

M.R. James who also had problems with sheets.

 

 

 

 Sometimes I feel that M.R. James would feel more than at home in our house.  It’s perhaps easier to be spooked by linen than Tesco’s Value Polycotton (bit more tradition, don’t you know, with linen) but the principle is the same.  Perhaps the problem would be, for any Nameless Thing, that – particularly on a Saturday morning – its activities would go unnoticed.  I’m reminded of that grand old Northern song, where a sheet was more than just a sheet:

Mary, Mary, get out of bed, As fast as you are able.  Mary, Mary, get out of bed, We need them sheets for the table.

 Now that really is posh; I mean, fancy having a tablecloth at breakfast!

Goodnight, Children, Everywhere!

The Proof Of The Pudding…

 

            The proofs for the new book, As If By Magic, arrived on Friday.  Let me just say that again.  The proofs for the new book, As If By Magic, arrived on Friday!!! Now, okay, I realise that to most people, having a great hefty chunk of manuscript arrive through the door (even if it does come by courier!) doesn’t warrant a mention, let alone bold type and three exclamation marks.  (My daughter, Helen, reckons that exclamation marks are like cats:  more than three and you’re definitely mental.)

Here’s a picture of Helen with cat; exclamation marks are difficult to photograph.

 

 

 

I think I’ve earned those three exclamation marks.  !!!  Yes, those ones there. 

            You see, once you’ve tried to get published, you’ll realise all the inherent sadness and pity of Life.  After all, you’ve carved time out to live in a world that only you inhabit.  Meals, kids, husband, dogs, cats, going to Tescos and doing the ironing are taken care of – otherwise Complaints Ensue – but part of your mind is always somewhere else.  Away with the fairies, most probably.  I don’t know if you saw the excellent Terry Pratchett programmes about him and Alzheimer’s that were shown recently.  He tackled a difficult subject with bravery and humour, but what cracked me up was when he was asked if he or his family had noticed any signs of Alzheimers.  Such as?  Well, abstraction, obsession, losing your car-keys and forgetfulness.  But that, said Terry, is how writers are anyway.  Yup.

            Anyway, this wonderful world that you’ve created – it’s there, on paper.  You’ve lived with your characters and loved a good few of them; you’ve made them act in a coherent way, with coherent thoughts and what you hope are exciting (and coherent) deeds.  What’s not to like? I mean, who could possibly turn it down? Er… Quite a few, actually. 

            In fact, you are tempted to ask the Rejectors to form orderly queues, take a ticket and no shoving at the back.  It’s not, you tell yourself, that the book is Pants.  (Maybe it is, but that’s too crushing to contemplate.)  After all, take any given book, even a real classic, and show it to ten people.  Bet you at least half won’t like it, can’t see what all the fuss is about and have grave doubts about the judgement of those who think it’s wonderful.

All those stories you read about (add your favourite author’s name here) who, after being turned down like bedspreads by (add your own number here) publishing houses and then go on to write best-sellers aren’t put about to make the PR release more fun.  It happened.  Lots of times.  And do those aforesaid publishers regret losing a good ’un?  Well, human nature being what it is, it probably depends on just how successful the author it.  I mean, we can all do with a bit more of those nice pieces of artwork with the Queen’s face on stuffed under the mattress, can’t we?  But – and this is the point – those editors aren’t idiots.  They simply didn’t like the book.  So when you do find an editor who likes the book it’s like every Christmas, birthday and riotous celebration you’ve ever had rolled into one.  Fireworks go off, birds sing, the Hallelujah Chorus starts up somewhere in the background.   Corn in Egypt, you might exclaim, if you’re Biblically minded.  Whosever findeth a friendly editor findeth a Good Thing.  Let It Shine, as Take That sang.

It’s so fast, too.  Most good news comes in instalments (unlike bad, which hits like a ton of bricks).  But getting published – one moment you’re another unpublished writer who apologises for their existence and cringes in corners, the next there’s no-one on Earth you would swap places with.  No, not even that girl with the size 8 figure, Because You’re Worth It hair and a bank-balance that looks like a telephone number.

In the B.P. (Before Publication) times I hated telling people I wrote, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.  The general idea is it’s anti-social, weird, and what’s more, you’re Got Ideas. Getting a bit above yourself, aren’t you? I mean, who do you think you are? Can’t you get a proper job?   And – this is a killer – you’re obviously neglecting husband, children, home and doesn’t the cat look thin?   The only excuse is being able to give the correct answer to the killer question;

 “Are you published?”

“No.”

(Thinks)  You’re rubbish then, aren’t you?

But to be able to give the right answer – yes – means that although you’re still anti-social, weird etc, etc, at least you’re successful and anti-social, weird etc, etc.

And your book, the book, that private world which you lived in for so long – is going to be in libraries and bookshops.  Complete strangers will read it.  People you you’ll never meet will read it.  Good grief, someone who hasn’t got my hand in marriage and I don’t have to cook the dinner for will read it.  For fun, please God, but read it.

So, yup, I’ll say it again. The proofs for the new book, As If By Magic, arrived on Friday!!!

 And by the way – cheers!

I thought you were someone famous

Electric guitars, Agatha Christie and Darwin

I played the guitar in church this morning.  Here’s a picture of me (I’ve got the silver guitar) my friend Victoria (who’s got a lovely voice) and my daughter Lucy on the flute. 

 

 

It’s a great thing for an amateur musician is to be able to play in public.  It hones your skills and teaches the vital lesson that, if you do happen to get it wrong, it actually doesn’t matter.  You simply catch the next note and hop back on board with that. Perhaps fortunately for me, a church congregation is a more or less captive audience! The thing is, while the psalm was being read, I was reminded of Agatha Christie.  From memory (and I’m far too idle to look it up and compare the New Jerusalem Bible we use with the King James Bible that Dame Agatha referred to) it sounded like the psalm that triggered Poirot’s terrific insight in One, Two Buckle My Shoe where it’s all about a snare being laid for his feet and God not being best pleased with the arrogant and favouring the humble and so on.  That’s a really good bit in the book, where Poirot sees the case the right way up and, I suppose, is yet another example of how the Bible can inspire all sorts of writers and artists. 

            I was thinking about the public face of religion recently because, what with the Darwin anniversary and all, there’s been a far few nutters gathered together to tell us that Darwin got it wrong. 

No, he didn’t.

This is a quote from the Catholic Encyclopaedia:

The theory of evolution as a scientific hypothesis…. is in perfect agreement with the Christian conception of the universe; for Scripture does not tell us in what form the present species of plants and of animals were originally created by God. As early as 1877 Knabenbauer stated "that there is no objection, so far as faith is concerned, to assuming the descent of all plant and animal species from a few types"

            I must say I don’t know who Knabenbauer is  (apart from being burdened with a hilarious name) but he got it right.  What bugs me is the idea that all Christians believe in Creationism.  I mean, in a way, we do (that’s me, my mate Knabenbauer and the rest!)  – after all if you’re a Christian it’s commonplace to talk about The Creator (aka God) but exactly how The Creator created it all is another matter. 

 I’m lucky enough to live within travelling distance of Castleton, Derbyshire, a fascinating area of the Derbyshire Peaks.  (The Peaks are where Mr Darcy’s Pemberly is, but that’s another story!) Anyway, Castleton is composed of limestone and was originally a shallow, tropical sea.  Fossils abound and it’s awe-inspiring and great fun to turn over a stone or pick up a rock and find an ammonite that hasn’t been seen for millions of years.  Rock on!

 

 

 

I Thought You Were Someone Famous

We went to the Dogs last night.  It was freezing.  Literally, I mean.  The temperature was zero and I was dressed up like the Michelin Man with more layers than the average onion.  This was how my eldest daughter chose to celebrate her 22^nd birthday, so it’s my fault, really.  She should have been born in summer. 

            Dog-racing has never had the social cachet of The Sport of Kings and in one way, it’s easy to see why.  There’s very few more impressive sights and sounds than standing at the railing, watching a group of racing horses turn the corner towards you. You can hear and feel them before them come into sight – the rail vibrates and the ground shakes and that tired old cliché about the horses “thundering” towards you is true – it does sound like the rumble of distant thunder.  Then these immense animals – they look really big close to – sweep past you and then there’s a gentle sound, like the pattering of rain, as all the unlucky punters tear up their useless tickets.

            Dog-racing isn’t like this.  For one things, dogs are… Well, dogs.  The lean, trim greyhounds might not look

 

 

like Barney

 

 

 or Lucky

 

 

 (as you can see, Lucky has only got three legs, which renders him a non-starter against most greyhounds) but they are dogs. Incidentally Lucky was called Lucky when we got him from the Rescue Centre.  I didn’t stop laughing for weeks.  But dogs?  I mean, they don’t have jockeys (not even very small ones) and they don’t Thunder, unless they’ve been given the last of the baked beans to finish. Dogs, after all are dogs.  Right?  Wrong. 

            I know about dogs, I said brightly.  You can tell which one’s going to win just by looking at them.  Huh.  So the moral of the story is Buy More Books.  (Mine, I mean.)  Apart from anything else, the Master of the Universe needs feeding. 

And, as we all know, the Master of the Universe looks like this.

I thought you were someone famous

I got an email this week from Jane Finnis saying how much she enjoyed Mad About The Boy? which was nice to hear.  She used – and I burgeoned with pride – the word “Unputdownable”.  That’s fairly good coming from Jane, as her own books, A Bitter Chill, Buried Too Deep and Get Out Or Die are pretty unputdownable too.  They’re mysteries set in Roman Yorkshire (no, the Centurions don’t say “Hey up!) and her heroine, Aurelia, is definitely someone you want to spend time with.  Incidentally, doesn’t the Roman name for York sound Northern?  (As in Eee By Gum Northern.)  Eboracum.  That’s Eee-Ber-Acum. 

Anyway, I can thoroughly recommend Jane’s books.  Another book I really enjoyed this week was Frederick Forsyth’s The Afghan.   It’s a cracking thriller that reads more like a documentary than fiction. Frederick Forsyth used to be a journalist and it shows. He’s never afraid to describe the technology or how a system works by addressing the reader directly, rather than wrap it up as dialogue or as a character’s thoughts. It’s an interesting nuts-and-bolts approach, where you can more or less see the rivets.   The subject of terrorism  is important, of course, but that alone isn’t enough to keep the reader gripped, as I was.  One thing Forsyth doesn’t do, though, is Character in the literary sense, which makes you wonder about that hoary old debate about Plot V. Character.  Obviously the characters in any novel can’t be merely names, otherwise you couldn’t care less about what happens to them but if a novel is character and nothing much else, I do find it a bit slow.

  There’s been a big debate on the Golden Age mystery website this week about Dorothy L Sayers with particular reference to Gaudy Night.   It must admit I find Gaudy Night a bit heavy going (and I like DLS very much) principally because there’s so much about the characters that the story gets side-lined.   I think my favourite of all the Wimsey books is Unnatural Death.  There the plot and the characters come together and drive the story forward with tremendous pace.  Miss Climpson is an absolute delight and enormous fun to read. The timing of Unnatural Death is great – the murder has to happen at a certain time otherwise it wouldn’t work at all and the scene when Peter twigs about the new Property Act is one of my all-time favourites.  One correspondent to the Golden Age debate said the DLS was a poor writer. Well, each to their own, of course, but there’s bits of Sayers I love precisely because they’re so well written.  Miss Climpson in Strong Poison, for instance, doing table-turning to get information from the nurse is a classic scene.  What I don’t find so enjoyable in the Wimsey stories is Harriet.  She’s fine in Strong Poison but after that, she doesn’t half take over.   The interesting thing is that if I met her, I like I’d like her very much but I’d rather spend the book time with Wimsey.

On a domestic note, I’ve just cooked the Sunday dinner.  It used to be eight for lunch and now, what with Helen at University and Elspeth working most Sundays, it’s more or less always six.  It’s weird how much quieter it all is.  Food; this isn’t a Sunday lunch recipe (that was roast lamb and rosemary from the garden) but a Saturday night favourite.  It takes no time at all and tastes wonderful.  Chicken breast with cream and mustard.  Simply combine a tub of single cream with a tablespoon of wholegrain mustard, heat slowly, then pour over the cooked chicken.  If you’re counting calories (and aren’t we all after Christmas!) then try natural yoghurt which will stand in for cream in most recipes. 

Cheers,

Dolores

 

 

I thought you were someone famous...

The first proofs came through for As If By Magic this week. These are the preliminarily enquiries from the totally efficient Imogen of questions and quibbles she’s noted before the book goes to the type-setters.

It’s fiddly, nit-picking sort of work and took me a very full day to sort it all out.  The questions vary from straightforward enquiries, such as did they have luminous clocks in 1923 (Yes: they were invented by a bloke called Hammer in 1908 and had radium glow-in-the-dark paint on the dial) to clearing up when Mr Nasty Villian was actually dispatched and What’s Where and how many floors a particular building has.

When the proper proofs of  “Magic” – the ones that look more or less like the printed book arrive – that’ll be another three or four full days. This is the “invisible” bit of writing, the bit that no-one ever thinks about.

Apparently about ten percent of Britons dream of becoming an author, which means, as there’s about 61 million people in Britain, that’s 6 million, one hundred thousand people who want to write for a living. (To hear my agent, Teresa Chris, talk, you’d think most of them sent their manuscripts to her.) Six million-odd is pretty serious competition.  If you’re reading this, perhaps you’d consider becoming a sportsman or woman, a pilot, an astronaut or an events organiser, which are the other dream jobs.  Please.  Because I have a sneaking suspicion that a fair few of the 6 million-odd thinks writing involves this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whereas it’s a bit more like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the money’s sooooo much better in football.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My doctor once brightly told me that her uncle had written a book – well, he hadn’t so much written it exactly, he’d had an idea and he’d “Sent it in”.  Who to?  Where to? I questioned wildly.  Oh, to a publishers.  And then what?  Well, surely, she said, with every appearance of reason, if they liked it, they’d get someone to write it.  They had people to do that, didn’t they?

 Er… No.

I broke my toe last night, and that was the fault of Literature.  (Books; I ask you.  You can’t trust the damn things. I spend my life with them and this is the reward.) I crashed into a book left lying in the hall by a random reader, all of which, after the tumult and the shouting died, so to speak, and I’d stopped hopping about, swearing, reminded me of Young Sarah Byng.  Do you know the poem?  It’s by Hillaire Belloc and is dead funny.  The title tells you more or less what’s going to happen: “Sarah Byng, who could not read and was tossed into a thorny hedge by a Bull.”

 Sarah, on her way home across the fields, comes to where,

 “A gate securely padlocked, stood, and by its side, a piece of wood, On which was painted plain and full, BEWARE THE VERY FURIOUS BULL.  Alas!  The young illiterate, went blindly forward to her fate, And ignorantly climbed the gate!” 

Sarah gets chased by the bull and tossed into a prickly hedge.  The moral of the story is that,

“The lesson was not lost upon The child, who since has always gone a long way round to keep away From signs, whatever they may say, and leaves a padlocked gate alone.  Moreover, she has wisely grown, Confirmed in her instinctive guess, That Literature breeds distress.”

And my toe proves it.

I thought you were someone famous

It was the lady in the library who said it: I’d been asked to talk to the local reading group and God knows who they thought they were getting – J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown or, at the very least, the author of Cloud Atlas. Anyway, they got me. She adjusted her glasses and looked at me incredulously. "But I know you!" she said accusingly. "I know you by sight, anyway. I’ve seen you in Tescos." (True: - as my family, including the various dogs and cats, won’t stop eating, I have to keep shopping. Sometimes I think I’m going to get charged rent if I go in much more.) She brandished the copy of Mad About The Boy? that the library had thoughtfully provided her with. "Did you write this?" I acknowledged my guilt. She sat down, looking at me warily, as if waiting for the real Dolores Gordon-Smith to pop up. "I thought you were someone famous."

You see, the problem was, that as I write about the 1920’s, she expected someone looking like this:

 

 

 

 

or this ......



 

 

 

 

 

 

and we'd have an afternoon like this ....



 

 

 

 

.... whereas, of course, it was tea and biscuits and chat – and me. What’s more, I’d Made It All Up. Well, yes, that’s fiction for you. Ask Agatha Christie how many murders she investigated and the answer is worryingly low. Terry Pratchett has never actually been to Ankh-Morpork and C.S. Lewis never found the way through the wardrobe. (Or, at least, I don’t think he did.) The trick with fiction is not so much as to write about what you know as to know about what you write.

What I wish I could make up is better weather. To anyone basking under an Australian sun or in some Tropic clime – congratulations, you lucky beggar. Peel another grape and think of me sitting under a thick grey sky in Manchester with the rain hissing down. You can see where an imagination comes in handy!

See you again and all the best,

Dolores