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Ooops! I'm dashing on to today's ABBA page, half out of breath! 

A rare and unexpected holiday has shoved the Things That Need Doing Right Now into a complex squidge of pages, people to contact and panic. 

So this post - sorry! - is just about my computer's current post-it note.
 
Maybe a month ago,Nick Green - thank you, Nick! - mentioned a second book by Dorothea Brande. As I have always been curious about how artists and writers work, I investigated.

Brande, an American editor, was the author of "Becoming A Writer". Originally published in 1934, her first book gained extra popularity when the novelist John Braine claimed in his foreword to the 1983 edition that Brande's advice cured his writer's block. Maybe that was the moment when the whole modern genre of "writing about writing" toddled to its feet and started walking and talking?

What is the essence of this second book? Basically - in "Wake Up and Live"  - Brande suggests that whenever we think and act in negative ways, we use up too much of the energy we could be putting into our art, our writing and living. Whenever we feel low or lack confidence, we slide into a constant cycle of giving time and attention to all those things that we can't do, all the failures and frets and fears.

We worry about all we haven't done or all that others seem to be succeeding at - and this was way before Facebook and Twitter! - and end up sapping the energy that we should be spending on the work itself. The book as a whole isn't one I'd recommend, but this particular point made sense to me. 

Brande also went on to say that before going into an important interview, an awkward meeting or a scary party, people are advised to pause, present their best self and enter the room acting as if they have confidence. Yes, ACTING as they can do it.
 
So that's what you, the writer or artist, do. You go to your work acting as if you were the person you'd like to be, imagining you are your best version of yourself, giving your energy to the positive side of yourself.



Each morning, now the holiday laundry is done, I'm going to approach my work in progress, take a moment to push away all that sad energy-draining stuff and try imagining myself as the writer I might be.

This is how Brande puts it:  

This week I've been staying with my son and his family in Brussels, One of the very many nice things about doing this is that I get the opportunity to read lots of new books. It starts on the journey over there. I travel from Bristol to London by train or bus, and then usually on the Eurostar, so there's plenty of time to read, and my Kindle allows me to take a good supply of books along with me. This time I finished the second book of The Flaxfield Quartet by Toby Forward, which is a fantasy about wizards (but not at all like Harry Potter). It's very good, and I'll be reviewing it soon over on Abba Reviews. Then I began The Storm Bottle, an unusual adventure story set in Bermuda, by fellow SAS author Nick Green, who knows so much about dolphins that I suspect he may have been one in another life. I'll finish that later today on the journey back.

Then I have a treat in store - Mary Hoffman's David, which is about the model for Michelangelo's famous statue. Mary Hoffman is another SAS person, and I first heard about this book when she talked about it at an SAS conference, just before it was published a few years ago. I've been meaning to read it ever since, and now the right moment has arrived: yesterday, I went to an exhibition in Brussels about Leonardo da Vinci, with my son and eldest grandson, Oskar. There were models of many of Leonardo's inventions - here's Oskar trying one out - and a film about his life and about the re-creation of some of his designs: notably an early parachute which an English adventurer with a gleam in his eye decided to try out - and survived to tell the tale! Anyway, there were hints of a not-very-friendly rivalry between Leonardo and the much younger Michelangelo, so I'm hoping Mary might have something to say about that. Even if she doesn't, I just want a pass into the world of fifteenth century Italy, and I know her book will give me that. 

Richard and Joanna are great readers, so there are usually lots unfamiliar books for me to read here - though nowadays Richard mostly uses his Kindle: apart from the convenience, it's much cheaper to buy English books in Belgium that way. Still, I was able to read Ian Rankin's latest, Standing In Another Man's Grave, in which crotchety detective Rebus makes a welcome return from retirement, and also a book called Train Dreams, by an American writer called Denis Johnson. I'd never come across this author before. The book, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, is very short (only 116 small pages), but it packs quite a punch without wasting a word. It's about an ordinary man, Robert Grainier, living in rural America in the first half of the 20th century, and it reveals how the extraordinary can be found inside the apparently ordinary: Robert is an unassuming, kindly man who endures some terrible things, and just keeps on. Despite being so short, it somehow manages to have an epic sweep.

Joanna is Polish, and she lent me a book of poetry by a poet called Wislawa Szymborska, called Tutaj/Here. The poet was 85 when this book was published, but her quiet, ironic, amused voice is ageless. I particularly liked a poem called Thoughts That Visit Me on a Busy Street, which ponders the possibility that Nature recycles faces: 

These passersby might be Archimedes in jeans
Catherine the Great draped in resale,
some pharoah with briefcase and glasses.

Then there are the books I read with my grandchildren. Oskar has been 'doing' Julia Donaldson at school, so we read several of hers, and also a book I'd taken over for him - Vivian French's Hedgehogs Don't Eat Hamburgers, which is a rhythmic, funny delight. Casper is only sixteen months old, but he already has his favourites: Rod Campbell's flap book, Dear Zoo, an Usborne nursery rhyme book which plays the tunes, and two French board books which he knows will play sounds if he presses a finger in the right spot. I took him a book by Jack Tickle called The Very Silly Sheep, which has brilliantly engineered pop-up animals. Casper loves it, as you can see, but I'm not sure how long it will survive intact!

This is my last post for the time being; I decided it was time to stand aside for a while. You'll see some exciting new blogsters joining us over the next month, namely Damian Harvey, Lari Don, Saviour Pirotta and Anna Wilson. I'll continue to review over on ABBA Reviews, and to post on The History Girls. Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you over there!

www.suepurkiss.com

I read an article some time ago about ‘Warcraft widows’, the partners of those who are addicted to online games, most notably ‘World of Warcraft’. One can only feel sorry for these individuals, for it made grim reading. The addicts themselves are not kids or adolescents – many are in their mid thirties, like me. Wives and girlfriends complain of up to forty hours a week lost to this obsession, as their partners retreat to an imaginary world full of make-believe people, surfacing only for food and the loo. Often the players only reluctantly engage with real life, forget to do basic chores, become uncommunicative, and generally act as if the people in the imaginary world are more real than their own friends and family.

Sound familiar?

I read it, and my ears were burning. Then I moved away from the fireplace and carried on reading, but uncomfortably. And this in spite of the fact that I haven’t played a computer game for ten years.

One might protest that writing novels is a job, not a silly game. It’s art, right? And you get paid for it, right? (Well, in theory.) But money or not (and sometimes it really is hard to tell) the fact is that, for much of the time, there is no visible external difference between the writer and the poor guy who lives most of his life as Bjorn Bloodaxe, 15^th-level warrior berserker mage. Those around him simply have to trust that he is doing something more worthwhile than lopping the heads off a bevy of goblins. Even if he is, in fact, lopping the heads off a bevy of goblins, via the more capable hands of his fictional hero.

Because it’s a freelance profession, and often carried on as a second job (as in my case) it’s easy to stray outside ordinary working hours, writing until your brain is fried and you’re incapable of carrying on a conversation. We talk about how hard it is to sit down and write – it’s harder, sometimes, to call it a day. Stephen King said that writing should be a support system for life – not the reverse. It’s good advice. No matter how important the story is to you, no matter how urgent the need to get it down, it should never reach the point where it replaces your life. After all, if we didn’t have a life, what would we write about?

Right now, I hope, my agent is looking at a draft of my latest book. This may lead on to more exciting things, or then again, it may not. The Road to Publication can be a long and rocky one, as well I know from my single successful journey down it (and from many unsuccessful ones). When my book The Cat Kin was going through the arduous submissions process, I kept a log of its progress. Be warned: if I had read this post four years ago, I would probably have chosen a different career.

Part 1: Finding an agent

After more than a year of hard work, in November 2004 I decide my book ‘Cat Kin’ (initially it lacks a ‘The’) is ready for submission. Between November and December I send extracts to six separate agents, one of whom has already shown cautious interest. Come the New Year, already impatient for a reply, I target three more agents.

Part 1a: Result!

It turns out I don’t have to wait long at all. By February 2005 not one but two of the agents are interested in ‘Cat Kin’. For a couple of weeks I work through the manuscript diligently with one of them… and then sign a contract with the other one, Curtis Brown. I’m not especially proud of that, but given the second agency’s reputation it seemed like the right decision. It depends on whether or not you believe in karma.

Part 2: Looking for a publisher

So it’s February, only four months after I finished the book, and already I have an agent. This is going to be easy. My agent gets to work, submitting ‘Cat Kin’ to a long list of publishers. In June, twiddling my thumbs, I ask for an update. No, there are no offers yet (as if they would forget to mention it). August arrives, and I can’t resist another query by email. Any news?

No.

By October I’m getting really twitchy. I want to write another book – I have a barnstorming idea for a sequel to ‘Cat Kin’ – but I can’t bring myself to write it if the first one isn’t published. I contact my agent again. They’ve tried 16 children’s publishers, and not one has expressed any interest at all.

Part 3: Desperate measures

So I give up. I decide that ‘Cat Kin’ will never find a ‘real’ publisher. I search the web for self-publishing options and find the print-on-demand company Lulu. With nothing to lose now, I put together my own edition and publish it in January 2006.

I don’t hope for big sales. Neither do I get them. I sell about 50 copies of that edition, most to friends and family. But I do send one to the Times’s children’s book reviewer, Amanda Craig. And – wonder of wonders – she likes it. She reviews it in the Saturday paper.

Part 4: Finally…

I tell my agent about the review. Barely a month after it appears, Faber make me an offer. It is now March 2006 – more than a year since I signed with my agent, and 17 months since I first began submitting the book.

Another year is to pass before ‘The Cat Kin’ appears in the shops, and the whole sorry saga of the sequel is yet to unfold… but that’s another story. Just to get to this point has been a long, hard slog, consisting mostly of agonising waiting. Yet this experience is hardly unusual, and is by no means confined to first novels.

So, yeah – fingers crossed that the next book has an easier time of it.

I see my posts have taken on a festive theme. It’s quite accidental, though I must say I do enjoy Christmas. I even make my own cake. But I digress. Really, this post is about snow.

I keep a notebook. A green notebook. It’s where I record all my passing ideas: future books, work in progress, work in revision. I have to carry it everywhere because I literally have no free time. Sometimes I will scribble one line at desperate speed in between frantic bouts of housework, commuting, or childcare, or the very last thing at night. Often they are tiny things, barely there: a change of name for a minor character, a rewrite of one line that’s been bothering me. Once I wrote: ‘A martial art that gives you cat-like powers?’ on a page otherwise filled with junk, and a reminder to buy some perfume for my wife (and even that turned out to be the wrong brand).

Sometimes, making a jotting, I despair. There’s no way these bits and pieces could ever amount to anything. But it’s like snowfall. A snowflake hits the ground, melts, is gone. Watching snow, you feel it could never settle, never cover a whole country in white. But it does, because it keeps falling. My notebook, I see, supplies a steady fall of snow. A snowfall that may eventually become a crisp white inch of book.

Metaphor not quite wrung dry. Bear with me. I remember one snow day from early childhood. I was five-ish. My elder brother Simon headed to the front garden to have a snowball fight with a friend. I preferred the safety of the back garden. I started to roll a tiny lump of snow. It grew as I rolled it along, but not noticeably. Simon’s last words before he left me were, ‘Huh! What a silly little snowball.’

Those words stayed with me all that afternoon. Evidently, they have stayed with me all my life. Because when Simon finally returned from his snowball fight, I was pushing a snowball as big as myself.

Snow in October, and already it’s time to make the Christmas cake (the recipe I like requires months to mature). My son is now just old enough to be aware of Christmas approaching, and like all parents I face a decision: as he grows older, do I continue to pretend that Father Christmas is real? Do I go through the ritual of the mince pie and sherry near the hearth? Do I, in short, lie to him?

Some parents are quite adamant about this. Lying, especially to children, is wrong, no matter what the reason. Believers in Santa Claus face inevitable disappointment, possible ridicule at school. It’s a breach of trust, however well intended. Is it really?

My own parents lied to me on this matter. I don’t remember being traumatised when I found out. In fact I don’t think there was one moment when I found out. It was more of a dawning realisation, a gradual letting go. And I’m sure there was a long period of overlap where I had a foot in both camps: where I knew it was Mum and Dad who brought the presents, but continued to leave the empty pillow case at the foot of the bed, because it was so good to reach down with a foot at 6am and feel it heavy with chemistry sets and whatnot (yes, I was that sort of child). There’s a term for this, which I found out a few years later. It’s called ‘suspension of disbelief’.

Father Christmas isn’t a lie. He’s a fiction. There’s a crucial difference. Parents who tell their children he exists aren’t deceiving them. There are simply telling them a story, a long, interactive story – one which will end someday, certainly, but then all stories do. And I believe stories are worth the sadness of the ending for the joy they bring while they last.

Terry Pratchett speaks to this in his Christmas-themed Discworld novel ‘Hogfather’. In the story, Death explains why belief in the Hogfather (a Claus analogue) is so important. ‘Human beings have to start out believing in the little lies, so you can learn to believe the big ones. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing.’

Fiction flows in our veins. Without it, Pratchett suggests, we’d barely be human. We’re not computers; we don’t have to function according to the binary code of true/not true. We’re quite capable of seeing beauty in something that is manifestly not real, or of creating our own worlds when the real one lets us down. Fiction isn’t a false reality, nor is it reality’s poor relation. It’s a fundamental part of it – part of who we are. That’s why, this Christmas, my son will run to his bulging Christmas stocking wide-eyed in delight, and wonder who could possibly have drunk that sherry.

Wandering on the beach, I pick pebbles off the sea shore. They looked like colourful jewels, all glistening, so I give them to Mum to put in her pocket. Later I turn them out on the floor of our hotel room. Oh no – what happened? My sparkling stones are now lumps of drab rock.

A few days later we meet the man on the promenade. He is selling string bags of pebbles that look as bright as my own stones used to be. Yet they’re dry. How did he do that? I polished them, the stallholder explains. I put them in a tumbler with sand and gravel and grit, for hours and hours, until they wore totally smooth. And now they look as fresh as when I first picked them up.

Perhaps I’ve merged two separate holidays in this childhood memory, and perhaps the actual dialogue wasn’t quite so loaded. But I did collect pebbles, and I did meet the man with the polished stones, and I still remember.

Pieces of writing are like those pebbles. Pulled fresh from the sea of your mind, they’re all shiny and enchanting. Time passes, and they look like rubble. Polishing is what’s needed – not to change what you’ve created, but to put it back the way it’s meant to be.

When writing early drafts of books, I frequently end up with whole scenes that never make the final cut, or which simply don’t belong in the story. But these orphaned scenes are not wasted; far from it.

When talking about writing I tend to use metaphors a lot. Even though I can’t paint at all, I sometimes think of characters as different coloured paints. Not in a literal way (I’m not that freaky) but in the sense of them all being there, lined up on your palette. To write in a particular character’s voice, to paint them into a scene, you have to get into their head. But you can’t do this unless you already know them well.

Just as an artist has to mix their colours in order to paint a picture, so a writer needs to mix their characters. Much of this I do along the way, with every scene in which each character appears. After you’ve written with a character a few times, you have a fairly good idea of how they will react in certain situations, how they sound, what they say, and what they’d never say. After a while, you don’t have to think about it… you just dip your brush into the appropriate character’s colour and they appear on the page, with even the smallest brushstroke containing something of them. You even know when they’ll fade into the background.

I tend to ‘mix my colours’ as I go, learning about the characters during the messy first draft. But I’m sure it can be done deliberately too. It must be a good idea to pick random dramatic scenes from life, and write your character taking part in them. By the end of the process, you ought to have a good quantity of their ‘colour’ on your writer’s palette, there to use freely when you start writing the book for real.

The story I’m writing at the moment is an extreme example of this. I had planned an entire book, getting so far as to do a chapter-by-chapter outline, but then the story went splat (as they do). But when I cleared up the mess, one supporting character was left behind. She became the main character of my new book. And, although virtually every detail of her life is different now (even her accent), her essential character and voice remain the same. The colour is ready-mixed. If only that happened more often.

One of the best things about blogging about books is that you can meet bloggers and writers where ever you travel. Today I had the chance to meet Nick Green, writer (The Cat Kin, Cat's Paw) and blog friend in London. (By the way, Nick is now blogging with several U.K. children's writers at a great new blog called An Awfully Big Blog Adventure. Is the ABBA acronym significant?)

Nick suggested we meet at the Crypt Cafe at St. Paul's Cathedral for a coffee. We scheduled our meeting for 1pm. My daughter, who is a fan of Nick's books, was very excited. The kids behaved themselves and we had a great conversation.

Here's the obligatory meetup photo, taken by Kid2. I wanted Kid1 to be in the picture, but she was too shy. (Also, had I known I'd look so, well, pedantic in this photo, I would have requested that Kid2 take a second. Sheesh! I look like I'm going to launch into a lecture or something.)

Our meeting with Nick was fabulous, but it wasn't our only adventure of the morning. The kids and I decided to go to the British Museum before lunch in order to expand our wanderings beyond the Egypt wings. A good plan until I realized I didn't have a watch. I spent a good forty minutes trying to read the wristwatches of fellow museum goers. Finally, score! Only, it was 12:30 and we were upstairs in the Cypriot section.

Kids and I race out of the museum and flag a taxi. Traffic was so bad, though, we got off halfway to walk. Suddenly I notice a church clock and it says 12:00. I confirm with a fellow pedestrian, who checks his cellphone (of course) and, yep, museum tourist's watch was set an hour ahead. French, probably.

As we stroll up leisurely to St. Paul's Cathedral, I notice there are no tourists inside the gates. Odd. We walk around the perimeter to find the Crypt Cafe, but everything is deadly silent. Finally, we turn a bend and there's a barrier set up. Police and Secret Service types swarm. We're now forty minutes early, so kids and I join the scrum like lemmings. A few minutes later, the Queen walks out of St. Paul's Cathedral.

Unfortunately...I'm a terrible photographer, so my visual record is blurry. Also, I don't really know how to use the zoom. But here she is. (And if you want some actual proof, here's the St. Paul's announcement.) Seriously, though. It was cool to stumble into the Queen when out and about in London. Like any good American, I was suitably awestruck for a moment or two.

Since we had so much time remaining before the meetup, we stayed and watched ladies in hats march by.

Finally, have you ever wondered how the Beefeater Guards tool about town? Here's your answer:

I illustrated an educational book hitting bookstores March 1st. It's called "Phonics Comics: The Fix-It Crew," written by Lara Bergen and published by Innovative Kids. Innovative Kids does a terrific job with this line of books. If these were available when I was a kid, I would have raced to the bookstore to buy them. I love comics and I love children's books. It's a great concept to help