Waverton Good Read Award Shortlist

Well, Testament didn’t make it to the short list of the Waverton Good Read Award but the whole experience was great fun – especially being invited up to Waverton to talk about the book. What the people of Waverton are doing with their Award is so different to any other literary prize in Britain that I feel it’s very much to be encouraged and supported. Ordinary people who don’t depend on the literary scene for their living are putting in a lot of time and effort reading, commenting on and voting for Good Reads. Fantastic. I hope Borders’ sponsorship places the Award a little more firmly on the literary map and that we start seeing books with ‘Shortlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award’ and ‘Winner of the Waverton Good Read Award’ stickers on booksellers’ shelves. .

The shortlisted novels are:

A girl made of dust - Nathalie Abi-Ezi
The Outsider- Sadie Jones
Spider – Michael Morley
Child 44 – Tom Rob Smith

Four very different books – I’ll be fascinated to see which one wins.

Meanwhile, the editing is bringing Not One of Us into much sharper focus for me and the whole thing is beginning to feel like a finished novel instead of a work in progress.
The structural edit’s done, now I need to go over it one more time tightening the language, sharpening the focus yet again, pruning where I’ve not yet been ruthless enough.
This time next week I might actually be getting to the stage where I’m ready to let another human being read it.

Amazon Reviews

I found this article about Amazon reviews and their influence on the bookbuying public on the Book 2 Book booktrade bulletin recently. And I was intrigued because the way in which Testament is represented on Amazon is not something I’ve given a lot of thought to. Stupidly, as it turns out.

I’ve been fortunate – the few Amazon reviews that Testament has received have been kind and complimentary but the article makes the point that it only takes a few sharp-tongued critics to ruin your star-average and have an impact on sales.
To which the answer is…get people to write lots of nice reviews.

Has anybody reading this blog solicited reviews? Is it becoming an acceptable thing to do, a simple marketing tool? Or is it a bit naff, a bit desperate?

Though one of Testament’s Amazon reviews was written by somebody I know, it was done entirely gratuitously rather than at my request, though I was no less grateful for that. Probably more grateful indeed; there’s nothing like a free gift, after all.

But, to look at the question from the other end, how many of us actually read Amazon reviews before we buy books? I tend only to buy books on Amazon if I already know about them and have failed to buy them in a real live bookshop or can’t afford to do so. But, I’m assuming that Amazon wouldn’t bother with the whole ‘people who buy this book also bought’ thing if people didn’t impulse buy or browse.

And if we don’t read reviews on Amazon, where do we get book recommendations? I’m often swayed by reviews from other bloggers but most of my book buying is done in store and after a good long time happily browsing shelves. How about you?

Testament in Germany

Just thought I'd show you the cover for the German version of Testament which comes out, so the Goldmann site tells me, in August of this year. If my v. rusty German serves me the title means The Master Mason's Testament but I'm prepared to be corrected.

I think it's rather striking - what do readers of HB think?

One I prepared earlier...

OK, time to 'fess up. The editing is going along pretty well but it is becoming all consuming, so here’s one I prepared earlier – like about a month ago - and forgot about! It’s a tag which originated with Nik Perring – I picked it up at Aliya Whiteley and Neil Ayres’s blog:

List at least five things you do to support and spread a love of the written word.. If you list something that touches youngsters, you get a bonus...

One:
I have a house which is apparently spawning books as we speak. Every time we think we have enough bookcases, it seems only to be a matter of days before we discover that books have begun to colonise the stairs, the windowsills, the blanket box in the living room which is supposed to house nothing but DVDs and Wii stuff - you know, you’re not supposed to put things on top of it because you can’t get at the stuff inside easily, so – obviously - there are books on it most of the time. Bedrooms, obviously are full of books, that goes without saying but bathrooms – do other people have stacks of books in their bathrooms – balancing on the side of the bath, stacked next to the loo rolls in the downstairs loo…
So, whenever anybody comes to our house they kind of have no choice but to interact with at least one book on their visit – normally so that they can sit down on anything. They’ve got to be interested in at least one, right?

Two:
For years when my children were small I read dozens of books to them – often many, many times (Cherry Tree Farm anyone? I can probably still do it off by heart all these years later.) And I wouldn’t mind but THEY DON’T REMEMBER A SINGLE ONE. They don’t remember any of the characters they loved so much. Not a word. I mention Cherry Tree Farm and Hairy McLairy and they look at me blankly. And, more to the point, once they became literate themselves they did not start reading books off their own bat. Oh no. They became uninterested in books (unless I was reading to them, which I persisted in until they were 12 and 11) until very recently. Mind you, the Bassist is now talking about reading English at university and does things like hauling off and reading the whole F Scott Fitzgerald oeuvre which is more than I’ve ever done, so maybe Cherry Tree Farm and Hairy McLary from Donaldson’s Dairy weren’t such a vain effort after all.

Three:
Despite the prevailing tendency to listen to iPods on public transport, I persist in reading books whenever I am on a train or a bus. It puts me at a disadvantage in the carrying things around stakes – iPods are little and light and books are heavier and more chunky – but do I care? No. Reading Bill Bryson in public certainly spreads the love of the written word – nobody watching me have silent, I’m-laughing-in-front-of-other-people hysterics at something he’s written could fail to get the message that books are good for you.

Four:
I am forever lending books to friends, whether they want them or not. This may be related to One, above, but I’m not going to discuss that.

Five:
I shovel ridiculous amounts of money in the direction of Watersones and – when we’re particularly broke – the local Oxfam bookshop. The latter is also the recipient of the consequences of One, above – the trouble is, we tend to go in with a rucksack full of books which we leave with them to sort and shelve, only to leave with a rucksack full of books off the shelves. Poor effort.

Anyway, hope that goes some way to making up for the very poor showing in terms of recent posts here. I shall be putting up a few thoughts on the editing process in the next couple of days… be warned.

Trampled by a herd of toddlers...

So, with the first draft of the Work In Progress finished around teatime on Sunday 22nd (cue champagne) on Monday 23rd I started editing my friend’s non-fiction book – all 51, 029 words of it.

It took me 2 eight-hour days to do the spelling, punctuation and grammar sweep (and to get a feel for how it read as a whole book after reading chapters as they were produced) and another 11-hour day to do the structural and content editing.
On Thursday I’d arranged to travel to Buckinghamshire to catch up with an old schoolfriend and on Friday I was being gainfully employed.
I had gone 12 days without a break. (Seeing the friend was lovely but, for an introvert, not a break.) By Saturday I could barely string a sentence together and that’s when my non-fiction writing friend came round to work through my suggestions in front of his laptop, MS’s Track Changes feature to the fore.
On Sunday, I allowed myself to slump and cursed the fact that the Other Half and I have given up alcohol for lent. (Actually, by Friday, we were saying things like ‘maybe we could give up except for Friday evenings…’)

So, today I am sorting emails, writing this and catching up with the housework which has been horribly neglected for the last fortnight. Currently, our house looks like a badly-run ironing agency in a parallel universe where the vaccuum cleaner has yet to be invented.

Editing will have to wait until tomorrow.

As far as half term and the finishing – in draft – of the WIP (working title, Not One of Us) goes, I can give you a feel for how much I ignored my family (the boys were away for the latter half of the week) if I tell you that, in an average writing week - four days of actual writing - I produce between 5000 and 7 000 words whereas, during the week before last, I wrote over 23,000 words in 7 days.

I’m told that 25% of the calories you take in are used by your brain. Well I think my brain was taking more than its fair share during the last couple of weeks because my body feels as drained as my mind. I feel positively post-viral.

But still… it’s done. There is a book. And, given that I’ve been trying to get this particular book into some kind of shape since before MNW offered to publish Testament, it’s taken a while. I spent 18 months on an earlier version which I just left on one side when it was 80% finished and 120 000 words long. The current version, started last April, has incorporated the historical elements I had already written - something like 40 000 words - but, given that Not One of Us currently stands at 201,331 words I have been quite busy since the end of April 2008. I just wish I’d worked out who was supposed to be telling the story – and therefore what shape the story was going to take – a little earlier.

My younger son, known to long-time readers of this blog as The Bassist, asked whether the final chapters, having been written so quickly, were going to be easier to edit or more difficult. ‘Cos maybe, as he put it, I was really in the zone when I wrote them.
Good question.
I feel at a loss to know how long the edit is going to take. I’ve done quite a lot of structural work already – in July I looked at the previous three months’ work and realised that one of my characters wasn’t coming through strongly enough so went back and restructured. I’ve also done other tweakings on the way. So I’m hoping that the basic shape of the thing is right.

But whether my characters leap off the page as the people they are in my mind; whether the themes that the book is structured around are too opaque, or – possibly – too laboured; whether the ‘flow’ of what is a slightly unusually multi-viewpoint book works… I won’t know any of these things until I start reading it.

What I would do – ideally - is read the whole thing through in one go. But, given my slow reading speed this would take almost 12 hours, so that’s not going to be possible. Not with a family to live around.
Also, just reading wouldn’t be possible. Not realistically. I’ll need to make notes about what needs to be changed and, possibly, how. That will slow me down. So it’s going to take, if I’m sensible, between two and three average days' work to get the thing read from cover to cover and begin to think about where I’m going with it. So I should start tomorrow and hope I get it all done by close of play on Wednesday as I’m gainfully employed again on Thursday.

But, should I begin with a read-through, or should I edit the last part of what I wrote in that hectic week, which amounts to about 15 000 words? If I don’t, that’s going to have had considerably less editing than everything else as every other section of the book has been read and tweaked, word by word, at least three times.

And, all the while, I still feel as if I’ve been trampled by a herd of toddlers after babysitting them for 24 straight hours.

Ah well, today’s been a nice day off…

The cunning plan worked...

Well... I'm not entirely happy with the epilogue and I've already got 2 whole A4 pages of notes entitled Things To Change which I need to address when I start editing but... for now, the work in progress has reached the end of draft 1. Or 2 or 3 depending on whether you think doing a major rewrite half way through entails a whole different draft and whether you think a version of the same story with different characters is a different book or an early draft.

So, I'm on for the non-fiction editing this week. I may fit in a hair cut and a visit to see a friend as celebrations for finishing the wip as well. And then, as of a week tomorrow, I'm into editing and rewriting with the aim of sending it off to my editor by Easter.

There, I've laid the marker down.

Stay with me....

Cunning plan update

Well, it's working so far. Got til Sunday and I'm on the last scene. Though there may be an epilogue of some kind. There generally is, I find...

I have a cunning plan...

OK, as I seem physically unable to bring the writing of the work in progress to an end, I have done something which is going to make me finish it this week. It was supposed to be finished last week – in my mind at least. And we’re talking first draft, here, not the totally finished, hand-it-to-editor item. Sigh…

So, what have I done?

I have agreed to edit a friend’s non-fiction book.

In fact, since he is in a hurry, I have not only agreed to edit it in a kind of 'oh yeah, when I've got a minute' way, I have agreed ona timetable for the week following half term:
Sunday - he will email the final article to me.
By Wednesday evening I will email his 50 000 word typescript back to him, liberally laced with the speech bubbles of MS Word’s ‘track changes’ feature.
He will then pore over my suggestions and all the punctuation I have provided and we will email back and forth (apart from when I’m at work on Thursday) until Friday evening.
He will then come over on Saturday and we will work on the whole thing most of the day.

In other words I WILL HAVE A WEEK WHERE I WILL BE MORALLY UNABLE TO WORK ON THE WIP. I therefore must finish this week.

And, then, following this frenzy of punctuation and suggestion, I will be mentally cleansed and prepared for the hard-core editing of my own work necessary if I'm going to get the book to Will (my editor) before Easter.

So, it’s simple, if you want to force yourself to finish your book, agree to interfere with somebody else’s.

The Hows and Whys of Hisorical Fiction 2

One of the most important things about writing historical fiction – particularly if you’re writing a dual narrative and have a contemporary voice as well – is to decide on a voice or prose style which conveys something of the contemporary world without actually attempting to imitate the language of the period. In Testament this was relatively simple as I couldn’t possibly resort to anything like a contemporary vernacular or I’d have been writing Chaucerian Middle English and that would have left the book with a very limited audience.
Still, I wanted it to be recognisably different from the voice used in the twenty-first century strand. I wish I could tell you what carefully thought out decisions that then entailed but that would be disingenuous. The truth is, I wanted to make it sound different, so I just did. By ear, or feel or whatever.
That’s how I do a lot of my writing, how I make a lot of the really important decisions – unconsciously. By what sounds or feels right.

Just to digress for a second about the general mechanics of producing a book, I am always astonished by the sheer number of books on writing which many other novelists appear to have read. Perhaps this is because, unlike painting, music, dance or acting, writing has – until recently – not been something that you went and studied until you got good enough to practice or realised you weren’t good enough to practice. So 'how-to' books filled a niche.

I’ll be honest: I don’t read books on writing. I never have (with the one exception of Stephen King’s On Writing which is more autobiography than how to book). I have a kind of bloody-minded ‘well, I read English at university, what the hell more do you want?’ kind of mindset, I suspect. So, as far as my own writing goes, there is a horribly arrogant feeling that I’ll find it out myself, thanks, make my own mistakes, find my own way, rather than doing it somebody else’s way. Which, of course, is why it took me almost twenty years and three books in the bottom drawer before I got remotely near getting published

In my defence, there’s also the slightly more relevant fact that I find it horribly difficult to assimilate lots of ideas at once, as in a ‘how to’ manual. I have picked up bits of interesting writing lore from reading blogs and, because these are bite-sized, single-idea messages, on the whole, I find that they stick in my mind. Often they explain to me why I do what I’m doing anyway but sometimes they are useful – ‘describe the coffin not the grief’ was a great one I picked up from the wonderful The Sound of Butterflies (though I haven't been able to identify the exact post - apologies.) ‘The writer makes a contract with the reader in the book’s first page’ was, I think, gleaned from the frighteningly well-read David Isaak’s Tomorrowville. But those are the only two I can remember off-hand.

All that is a long-winded way of explaining why I didn’t consciously sit down and try and plan what my fourteenth-century voice would sound like.

As I was going along, however, I noticed a few things:
I didn’t use contractions – I always used ‘would not’ rather than ‘wouldn’t’ ‘cannot’ instead of ‘can’t’ etc, including dialogue.

I developed a tendency to avoid latinate words in favour of more Anglo Saxon-sounding ones where possible and where it didn’t do violence to the rhythm of what I was writing. I noticed that I was doing this quite early on in the writing of Testament and it became a conscious decision thereafter. And it’s not just because one of the themes of Testament is the native Englishness of what’s going on in Salster but because most latinate words were introduced into English in the eighteenth century, three or four centuries after Testament is set. Linguists and grammarians of the time – under the pan-European influence of Latin and, possibly, a more national, lingering influence of the noble Norman French vs. the peasant Anglo Saxon thing – felt that English needed beefing up if it was going to be a suitable language for serious literature and public discourse. So, I decided that, if I could keep out as many fo these later imports as possible, I could create a pared-back, pre-enlightenment effect, if only to myself.

Similarly, in terms of grammar, I always tried to use the active voice, avoiding passive constructions and gerundive verbs. Again, I was aiming for a less circumlocutory, Latinate way of constructing things.

I’m not saying that no page of fourteenth century narrative in Testament contains any words or word-roots introduced after 1400 or other than subject-verb-object sentences – that would be difficult and dull – it just became a conscious effort to limit my vocabulary and to be selective about the kind of grammar I used.

Similes and metaphors present their own challenges. I once read an otherwise excellent Young Adult historical title where a character was described as being ‘drop dead gorgeous’ – such a jarring note that I almost stopped reading at that point. It was such an anachronistic phrase. And, even if I was wrong and it was actually a phrase which had been current in Tudor England, it’s such a popular phrase these days that to have it used in that context just felt very out of place – clumsy and maladroit.

But avoiding anachronisms isn’t enough. As readers in the US might say, that’s hist fic 101. You’ve also got to use your language to strengthen the feel that you are in another time and – therefore – another place. The texture of the language has to reinforce that feeling. So, for instance, modern-day similes and metaphors feel wrong, even if they might have been current then; de facto, they’re part of our world, not of the world of the historical characters, so they need to be omitted or altered.

The challenges presented by my current book, which has a mid-nineteenth century component were quite different, but I think they are going to provide fodder for another post…

A pick me up.

I know it probably only means that Testament has sold two copies in a few branches compared to other books’ one or none, but still, getting a phone call from a friend to tell me about this sighting of Testament on WHSmith’s bestsellers list was pretty amazing.

More on writing historical fiction tomorrow – today has been taken up with driving lessons, ironing, making lemon drizzle cakes and going to ogle my own book in town…

The Hows and Whys of Historical Fiction

I mentioned the other day that I’d had an interesting time thinking about Testament from a technical point of view, so that I could talk about it cogently to the folks up at Waverton.
I believe I mentioned plot, character, theme and language.
So, while I’ve got a few minutes to think about the blog, while it snows outside, I thought I’d jot a few things down.

I thought I’d start with a few thoughts on research.

I do two basic kinds of research for my historical fiction – the general kind where I immerse myself in the period as much as I can so that I get a feel for how the people and places I’m writing about would have looked and sounded, felt and smelled. I need to know what my characters would have thought and believed, the likely prejudices of the age, the things so taken for granted that they’re never spelled out.
At this stage, I’m trying to find out what, at a basic level, it was like to live then.

Then there’s the more focused research – for Testement, this involved teaching myself about medieval architecture and building, medieval learning and the difference between English universities and those on the continent, the state of the English church and the heretical sect known as the Lollards. After trying to find out about everything, you suddenly narrow your focus to a very small field.
This can lead to interesting imbalances – like when I realised that I knew pretty much every tool and technique a journeyman, labourer or master mason might use during the day but I had no idea how they arranged the whole issue of going to the toilet… Fortunately, I didn’t need to know but it bothered me that I hadn’t managed to find out something so basic. (Interestingly, I know that kind of detail for the book I’m writing now, which is based in the nineteenth century. And I know because the contemporary commentators were so outraged at the primitive arrangements in the area I’m writing about. Sources are everything…)

Of course, I’m not doing all this research so I can put every last little detail in my book. Far from it. Paradoxically, you do research so that you can leave most of it out. In the same way that you know your own contemporary world intimately, but never refer to the vast majority of what you know, you need to leave most of what you’ve learned about your historical period in your notes. You still need to know it’s there, because you might want to refer to it tangentially, without going into detail, but for each fleeting reference, you’ll probably have a whole page of notes on how this fits in to the world of century/decade X.
At least, that’s how it is for me.

You see, I think the reader of historical fiction enters into a relationship of trust with the writer - he trusts that you know the period and will continue to trust you until or unless you make an obvious mistake. It’s not a matter of proving how much you know by the barrowloads of colourful period detail you put in; you prove your grasp on how your plot and your characters inhabit the period by the telling details you choose to include.

So, I’ve always taken the view that I will put no more detail into the historical strands of my fiction than I include in the contemporary scenes. If I don’t routinely describe what my twenty-first people are wearing (and I don’t), then I won’t give you a garment-by-garment description of what my fourteenth century people – or, in the work in progress, my nineteenth century characters – are wearing either. People in my contemporary worlds are rarely seen eating so I’m not going to give you much in the way of what my historical characters had for breakfast unless it’s strictly relevant.

Interestingly, though, research can often take you in unexpected directions. As part of the background research for Testament, I read a book on the economic climate of the late fourteenth century. It sounded as dull as ditchwater from the title (I’m sorry, I’m too lazy to go and unearth it so that I can tell you the proper title and author, I’ll try and do that for the next post) but it turned out to be a gem. The author had ploughed through endless manorial and court accounts – who paid what to whom and what for – and, because money makes the world go round, it was fascinating.
It told me, for instance, that an order was given, one summer, for all journeymen, whatever their trade, to down tools when the weather was fair, and help to bring in the harvest. Previous years’ harvests had been diabolical and there was a serious risk of mass starvation so the powers that be (and I had no idea how much the machinery of the state interfered in every aspect of daily life in the fourteenth century) decided that the harvest was the thing and everyone would have to do their bit to make sure it was successfully brought in.
Well, once I knew this, I had to include it, it was just too fascinating to ignore. And, fortunately for me, it provided a useful way of moving the plot on and providing conflict. Because, if the weather’s been dreadful and the harvesters have been waiting for a few nice days to get the grain in to the barns, the master mason has been waiting for exactly the same weather to progress his building. Send his journeymen out to bring in corn when there’s building to be done? I don’t think so…

More next time on getting the language right in historical fiction.
Don’t go away…

An Award - Hooray!

Clearly, being nominated for awards is one of those things that comes in waves...because as well as the Waverton Good Read award longlisting, I have just been given an award by Juxtabook! Here it is.

It’s immensely gratifying when people say, publically, that they enjoy your blog and it set me to wondering what is is about the blogs which I like reading most that keeps me going back each time.

I have to confess that I’m a bit of a blog-tart and will follow trails from one blog to another to another on occasion just to see what I’m missing. In the ‘blogs’ folder on my favourites menu I have nearly fifty entries, though many of these are visited only ocasionally. But, of the top dozen or so (which are visited almost daily) what are the common factors? Four of my top 12 are Macmillan New Writers, including the collective blog. The other eight are also writing related – the blogs of writers published and unpublished, the blogs of people connected to the writing business – booksellers and publishers. In fact, I have to scroll down in to the twenties to find a blog not connected with writing and a few more before I find the next one, though I do have a separate folder for blogs related to the podcasts I listen to and that is far more eclectic. (Clearly, writers are prone to write blogs, people fascinated by other things are more likely to produce a podcast.)

So what – if anything – do all the writerly blogs which I read have in common?
Some are humorous, some are far more serious; some are self-deprecating, some are more upfront about their own artistry; some write exclusively about writing and others write about various aspects of their life; some review other people’s work, others might comment more tangentially on books not their own.
But what they all have in common is that they take their writing very seriously. Some share craft secrets they have learned through their own writing apprencticeship whilst others digest the ‘how to’ writing of others. But writing, and doing it as well as humanly possible, is their concern.

So, because part of the award Juxtabook has given me is a meme, I have to award it along the line to others.

Here are the rules of the meme:
1. Put the logo on your blog.
2. Add a link to the person who awarded you.
3. Award up to ten other blogs.
4. Add links to those blogs on yours.
5. Leave a message for your awardees on their blogs.

I’m sending the award to David Isaak, Aliya Whiteley and Neil Ayres, Tim Stretton, Karen Clarke and Simon and Tim at Open a Bookshop.

Do check them out if you haven't already, they're all great blogs.

More on theme etc as promised in my last post, hereafter.

A lovely time in Waverton

Well, I’m now back from Cheshire having had a wonderful time speaking to a large and enthusiastic group of book-reading people in Waverton. They were so welcoming, so interested, so nice about my book (those who had read and reviewed Testament) that it was an absolute pleasure to be there. I spoke for far too long – over 50 minutes when I’d been asked for 30 to 40 – but you know how it is, they laughed at my jokes and asked interesting questions so the impetus to sit down and shut up was small.

I spent the train journey up to Chester writing my talk which was, essentially, about the main elements of a novel – plot, characters, theme and language – and how it’s almost impossible to separate them fully. Obviously, I was doing this with reference to Testament so I kept having to flick through the book to find relevant bits that I could read and, every now and again, I’d find myself actually quite impressed by what I’d done. That’s when I wasn’t wanting to rewrite the thing, obviously….

I must have looked a bit dappy. There I was sitting with my notebook in front of me, Testament on my lap, listening to The View on my little iPod (and occasionally, unintentionally, singing along… ooops!), scribbling my illegible spider diagrams which got more and more densely annotated until I had to make a fair copy so that I could glance at them and actually be able to read them during the talk.

Gwen Goodhew - one of the prime movers of the Waverton Good Read Award - had very kindly said that she would meet me at Chester station and take me home for supper before the meeting. ‘I’ll be holding a copy of your book’ the email had assured me. Well, better than a red carnation, I thought…and described myself and what I would be wearing as I am notoriously able to walk past burning buildings and not see them, never mind somebody standing in a crowd holding a book.

I shouldn’t have worried. Gwen had chosen a fairly quiet spot to wait for me in and the copy of the book that she was holding turned out to be an A4 bound proof copy. In other words, it was big. Unmissable, even for the observationally challenged.
‘Crikey’, I said, ‘where on earth did you get that?’

It turned out to be the only copy MNW had had to send. I realised that the Wavertons’ request for review copies of the book must have arrived at a time when the hardback edition of Testament had sold out and the paperbacks were not yet available.
Still, if you’ve ever seen a book bound in A4 format, you’ll realise what a disincentive it is to reading the thing, especially in bed (visions of it falling on your face and leaving you permanently scarred would immediately spring to mind) so I was even more chuffed when Gwen told me that everybody who had – man/womanfully - read it seemed to have liked it and Testament had made it to the longlist for the Award.

So, now, copies of the book will go out to anybody in the village of Waverton who wants to read it and is prepared to fill in a review sheet and give it marks out of ten. It’s fantastic that so many people who otherwise might not come across Testament are going to get a chance to read it.

It’s also in illustrious company. Here are the other longlisted books:

A Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie Abi-Eze
The Behaviour of Moths by Poppy Adams
One Man’s Empire by Geoffrey Bird
The Paradise Trail by Duncan Campbell
How to Survive Your Sisters by Ellie Campbell
The Palace of Strange Girls by Sallie Day
The Love of My Life by Louise Douglas
The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato
Out of a Clear Sky by Sally Hinchcliffe
The Outcast by Sadie Jones
Nights Beneath the Nation by Denis Kehoe
Spider by Michael Morley
Warrior of Rome 1: Fire in the East by Harry Sidebottom
The End of Sleep by Rowan Somerville
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling
Monster Love by Carol Topolski
An Expert in Murder by Nicola Upson
The House at Midnight by Lucie Whitehouse

Those in the know will spot a couple of books which have been nominated for other prizes and, if what the people I spoke to on Monday evening said is to be believed, there are some crackers on the list. Spider by Michael Morley and Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith were particularly singled out for mention. Macmillan New Writing is represented twice (Geoffrey Bird is also an MNW author) which, given that the imprint only produces twelve books a year, speaks extremely well for the editorial judgement of Will Atkins.

One of the questions I was asked was –approximately – ‘given that you can’t untangle plot, theme, character and language, how do you actually go about writing a scene?’

The subject of the next blog post here, I suspect.

Of mice and me

Apologies for the dearth of posts recently – I am suffering from what I can only assume is the beginnings of RSI and am therefore keeping typing to a minimum – ie to the work in progress.

On the subject of RSI, I already have various gizmos (laptop stand to put it at the correct eye-height, separate plug-in keyboard) but was wondering about investing in an ergonomic vertical mouse, as it seems to be the ‘cocked wrist’ position which is causing the trouble. Does anybody have any experience of these so-called ‘handshake position’ mice? If so, I’d be very grateful to hear from you in the comments trail.

With luck, I will be able to type more easily when my hands have had a couple of days rest on my jaunt to Cheshire so I hope to have more to say then...

The Waverton Good Read Award

It is with immense pleasure that I can tell readers of this blog that Testament has been nominated for the Waverton Good Read Award.

In case you don’t know about the award, Wikipedia has this to say:

The Waverton Good Read Award was founded in 2003 by villagers in Waverton, Cheshire, based on Le Prix de la Cadiere d‘Azur, a literary prize awarded by a Provencal village. First adult novels written by UK residents and published in the previous twelve months are eligible for consideration and are read by villagers. "The aim was not only to stimulate reading in the village but to provide encouragement to British writers".
It is the first British award to be judged by normal readers rather than literary figures.

and, should you be interested you can read more about the award on its website, here.

There’s also a natty summary of winners and shortlisted novels on Wikipedia here.

Having read all this, I am very honoured indeed that Testament has been nominated. I have read three out of the five previous winners – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (Mark Haddon), Boy A (Jonathan Trigell) and A Brief History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Marina Lewycka), and enjoyed them all very much. It feels wonderful that Testament is being bracketed with books like these, even if it is only for a short while until the long list is announced…

I am off up to Cheshire next week as they have been kind enough to ask me to and talk to the group about Testament. Must remember which book I’m talking about and not start wittering on about the all-encompassing work in progress…

Salutary Thoughts

I knew, from the beginning, that I was on to a good thing with Macmillan New Writing. Not, you understand, because I have a vast and varied experience of publishers and how they do what they do but because, sometimes, you can just feel that people are rooting for you, rather than just in it for the money; that they are people of integrity.

And then, earlier in the week I read this by literary agent Simon Trewin of United Agents. Read it and weep. It’s not a pretty picture. And it made me even more convinced that I’m in safe hands at MNW.

Who decides which four percent?

Imagine not being able to read. Not being able to see the words on a page. Not being able to just pick up a book and lose yourself in it.
I do occasionally contemplate what it would be like to go blind. I have an eye condition which, if it progresses to its severe form, could leave me unable to see well enough to read even large print books.
It’s not a prospect I relish and it’s one I try not to think about very much.

Could I learn braille?
I don’t know. I imagine it’s hard to do once you’ve passed a certain age.
I had a blind friend at university whom I used to read for as critical works weren’t readily available. She had, I remember, a natty kind of tape recorder which enabled her to mark the tape so that she could find important passages easily. It was a kind of auditory highlighter. It seemed to me that the level of determination she needed to get through a degree in English when she had to rely on others to give her access to so much of the material she needed was far in excess of what the rest of us needed.

Why have I suddenly started talking about blindness?
Because I picked up this story on the lovely Juxtabook blog. In case you don’t want to read it, it’s about the need to protect the long-term future one of the most important braille presses in Britain. A campaign has been launched which is being supported by Ian Rankin who, apparently, has a son with a visual impairment.

This story told me something startling. Only 4% of books ever get produced in a form that visually impaired people can access. Four percent? That’s nothing!

And who decides? Who decides that this novel, this work of non-fiction, this reference book will be printed in braille while all the others won’t? Does there have to be a ‘demand’ and, if so, how does the blind and partially sighted community know what it should be demanding? Are people who read braille confined to ‘bestsellers’, never able to pick up something new and interesting off the obscure literary shelves, always waiting for sighted people to decide in large numbers that they think a book is good enough to warrant being produced in a braille version? Or am I being cynical.

Given the paucity of books already available in braille – four per cent, remember - I imagine I’d be panicking a bit if I was unable to read printed books and there was the prospect that one of the most important braille presses in the country was becoming more and more antiquated and out of date. I’d be worried that my supply of books was going to dwindle even further.

Seems like a good cause for book lovers to get behind, don’t you think?

132 words instead of a photograph

What there should be here is a photograph.
Of Testament.
On a three for two table in Waterstones.

The total absence of photograph arises from the fact that:
1. I can’t seem to make my laptop recognise my mobile phone
2. Nobody else in the family can make their laptop recognise my mobile phone (it is very old)
3. I’m not prepared to stand in Waterstones taking pictures.
4. Nobody else in the family is prepared to stand in Waterstones…you get the picture.

A photograph would have conveyed the news much better. I wouldn’t have had to say anything. It would just have been there, underneath the title ‘Look What I Just Found’ or something. There it would be – Testament - obviously lying between Kate Mosse, Rose Tremain and Michelle Moran.

Oh. My. Giddy. Aunt.

A new arrival...

So, how was your Christmas? Peaceful and happy I hope.

OK, now for non-Christmas news. Today, my paperback copies of Testament arrived in the post. Not quite as astonishing a moment as when the hardbacks arrived and, for the first time, I saw my book as a real thing which other people would buy, but still quite something. And paperback – I mean, that’s a real book isn’t it, the kind of book ordinary people like you and me buy? (Many thanks, however, to all the wonderful, noble people who bought it in hardback…)

Interestingly, Pan has decided to retain the hardback’s dust jacket design for the paperback’s cover. I have to admit, it’s very distinctive and looks brilliant in the paperback format – just enough out of the ordinary to make people pick it up (or out – even the spine is gorgeous) and wonder what it’s about. I know we’re proverbially warned not to judge books by their covers but we all do, don’t we? So I’m very pleased with how it looks. Here it is...

It's slightly brighter (more red, less brown) than the original hardback image but in other respects it's the same. Actually, the published version is slighly different to the one above, with the ‘shout line’ (‘what would you sacrifice to carve your name in history?’) dropped further down the cover which I think looks better, though I’m not sure I understand why. Maybe a graphic designer out there could clarify the visual psychology?

The publication date is this Friday – the 2nd of January – so it’ll soon be out there in the bookshops… I shall be in Canterbury on Friday seeing if I can spot it. If any of you manage it, let me know!

I keep reading in papers - and even in The Author - that the dreaded credit crunch is going to mean an upswing in book sales as people decide that they can’t afford to eat in restaurants or treat themselves to expensive evenings out. And, when you think about it, a paperback book is amazing value when compared with other forms of entertainment. At 568 pages, Testament represents around 8 or 9 hours of reading time (if you’re a slow reader like me, at any rate) which, at £7.99 seems like a lot better value than a cinema ticket at anything upwards of £6.00 for a couple of hours’ viewing. And you can’t even take the film home and lend it to your friends! Scale up for the theatre (or premiership football match) and even more so for eating out and, suddenly, paperbacks seem like astonishingly good value.

Of course, I’m preaching to the converted here but I am pleased that the industry I’m part of offers such good value.

Here’s to a New Year which sees publishing bucking the crunch trend!

Just to wish all visitors to Hawkins Bizarre a very

Thanks to all regular readers and commenters for your cyber-company this year - let's hope 2009 is happy, healthy and peaceful (with a bit of success thrown in) for all of us!

Have a good Christmas and some wittering here will recommence sometime between Christmas and the New Year.