Fun, Jinks and Cover the Mirrors

Quite a lot of fun and jinks today (Saturday – this is going to be posted late) as the Other Half and I went up to London so I could sign some more stock at Goldsboro Books where the lovely David so kindly hosted Testament’s launch party last week. We also went on a hunt for Testament in local Waterstones and, I’m pleased to say found a stack of five (five!!) in the New Books section of the Piccadilly branch. I did take a picture of it on my phone but I’m having trouble downloading it on to my laptop so you’ll just have to imagine it sitting there, face out, looking at the world in a ‘buy me’ kind of way.
The dear friend who is always trying to get me to read more literary books and her daughter got (by their own admission) a bit over-excited at the sight of multiple copies of Testament in one of the two Canterbury Waterstones and texted me. Conversation with ‘the lovely book man’ revealed that ten had been bought and now only four were left. More texting ensued to relay this information. I would never have dared ask but I’m glad she did....

One of the nice things about going to London is reading on the train and today was no exception as I was looking forward to reading the last third of Faye L. Booth’s Cover the Mirrors in one go, having had to read the first two thirds piecemeal over the last couple of days.

When you read a book set in the Victorian period involving a young woman with ideas above her station, a young man with an eye for the ladies and some powerful – if slightly less than honest – and independent women, you think you know what you’re going to get. The women will be brought low and taught their place, the men will go all dominant and Victorian and break out in thinking only women of loose virtue enjoy sex and the repressive mores of the time will prevail and crush.
And then you read Cover the Mirrors and you realise that all these expectations, nicely set up by Faye at the beginning, are turned on their head and you get precisely nothing that you were led, by previous experience, to expect.

The line on the back cover of the book - ‘Molly was fifteen when she began working with the dead’ - is brilliant and really sucks you in. It’s soon clear that the dead she works with are ‘on the other side’ and she is acting as their spiritual medium. And when I say ‘acting’ I use the word advisedly.
But, although the book has some lovely scenes in the séance room in which an elegant sufficiency of detail deftly moves the action forward, Cover the Mirrors is not primarily about being a medium but about being a woman who wishes to retain her independence and, at the same time, satisfy her sexual desires, in Victorian Preston.

And very nicely done it is too.

It’s hard to say much more without giving too much information away and spoiling the reader’s own journey of discovery through Molly’s seventeenth year but suffice it to say that the young medium’s world is beautifully realised from the courtship-language of flowers to conditions in a cotton mill; from Victorian mourning practices to Preston street life.

I’m looking forward to meeting Faye in Cambridge on Friday so that I can pick her brains about what she’s working on now. From what she says about her writing on her website, I’m assuming it will be Victorian or Edwardian but, whatver it is, on the evidence of Cover the Mirrors it will only set up expectations in order to dump them in the nearest Victorian-style bin.

Writing again

When the four walls of the kitchen - my usual writing space - begin to close in on me and I feel stale and uninspired, I often take my laptop into town and sit in my favourite Canterbury coffee shop to write.
I always work upstairs where it’s light and bright and where, if I’m lucky, I’ll get the table by the window from which I can watch people scurrying about on the crossroads below.

I really had to get into town today and get some work done. I’ve done nothing serious on the work in progress for nearly a fortnight and I’m beginning to be very wound up by that. Add to that the fact that it’s mid-winter and, as I blogged about before, I have Seasonal Affective Disorder which is aproximately the opposite of a life-enhancing experience. Keep adding things like the fact that Christmas is over and paid work kicked in again yesterday; like the fact that the Ultimate Frisbee Freak and the Bass Player are not yet back at school and - though they don’t deliberately disturb me - their simple presence in the house makes me unable to shut the real world out and enter the world of my book (where it’s blazing summer) and I have not been a happy bunny at all. The Other Half described me as 'floppy'. She was being kind; what I was was unresponsive and morose. I had stopped making eye-contact (always a bad sign) and had begun to form an automatically negative response to any suggestions made to me.
Aliya Whiteley (of whom more below) also has these non-writing difficulties, as she admitted on the MNW blog here.

Why can I work in a coffee shop full of people when I can’t work in my own home? Don’t ask me. Clearly it’s not an absence of other people which I need, but an absence of people who have a right to expect something from me; I can’t switch off properly if somebody might want me for something at any moment. Not that they usually do, you understand, they’re pretty self-sufficient at their age, but they might. I suppose it’s just hard to switch off being Mum.

And, I’m happy to tell you, the coffee shop produced the goods. A nice spider-planned page of pencilled notes and 1,346 words produced on screen. Result. Two mugs of tea consumed and only two other people upstairs whose conversations I had to ignore. Sometimes, when I’m mulling things over, ignoring conversations is far from what I'm doing as I convince myself that listening in to snippets of other people’s chat is ‘research’...

Writerly fact - a laptop is a fantastic thing to hide behind when you’re eavesdropping.

Now that I’m home I’m catching up with emails and suddenly there’s a whole rash of publication-related ones to deal with. This is novel and therefore pleasurable. I’m sure that – like others who have gone through the being-published thing ahead of me – I will soon find it an irritating interruption to work.
I’m doing an event with Faye (L.Booth) and Aliya (Whiteley), two of my fellow-MNW authors in Cambridge on the 25th January. We’re meeting the Heffers’ reading group and doing a bit of book-signing. The three of us are getting together for coffee beforehand so that instead of trying to get to know each other and be interested in other people at the same time, we can introduce ourselves to one another and then speak sensibly to the kind readers who've come to meet us. It should be cool, I’ve been getting to know Faye and Aliya a little bit from their respective blogs and am pleased that I’m going to be able to do it for real, too.

Then there was an email from Sophie, the lovely publicist at MNW, wanting to know if I was planning to go to Oxford any time soon as the Oxford Mail are keen to do an interview and would prefer ‘in person’ to ‘on the phone’. As a) I’m always game for a trip to Oxford which I love and where I have great friends and b) I hate speaking to people I don’t know on the telephone as I’m prone to say rash things because I’m getting no facial-expression feedback, I’m inclined to foist myself on the said friends for the day and go up. But what fun, anyway, that the Oxford Mail is interested in me and Testament!

Then there was an email to be written to Steve who designed my website as we try, yet again, to sort out the non-existent email feed from the site. Apologies to anybody out there who has tried to send me an email from http://www.alishawkins.com/ – for reasons Steve can’t fathom things just don’t seem to be making it through. Hopefully the situation will be resolved soon.

Meanwhile, you can always leave a comment here.