Carol Hedges's Blog, page 25

Serial Killers: A series versus a one-off book?

As you probably all know, Diamonds & Dust, which was rejected out of hand by my ex-agent as ''not remotely publishable'' and subsequently went on not only to be published, but to be up for the CWA Historical Dagger, the Walter Scott Prize, the Folio Society Prize, and score 60+ reviews on Amazon, is now developing offspring.

It wasn't meant to. Seriously. Grateful as I was to Crooked Cat Books, I didn't envisage trotting out the two Victorian detectives Stride and Cully again. But like lily pond paintings by Monet and Haydn String Quartets, once started, it seemed logical to keep going.

Thus the sequel, Honour & Obey, which was published last November, and Death & Dominion which will appear this November. I have also started writing Murder & Mayhem which will be the fourth outing for Stride & Cully.

There are those writers who regard a series as a bit of a ''cop-out'': after all, you've got your characters already written for you. To them I would say: writing a series is MUCH harder than producing a one-off text. And I know what I'm talking about: this is my second series of books. (The Spy Girl series for Usborne was the first)

The main problem is that, unless you started with the idea of writing a series, and few authors do, they just tend to evolve, you are stuck with whatever you wrote in the first one. You cannot radically alter the appearance nor personality of the main character/s without readers going ''What the ...?'' After all, it was how they were in book 1 that will keep them reading books 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. You can and must develop the main characters, but in essence, they have to bear some resemblance to how they were in the beginning.

Then there is the problem of keeping the plot momentum going. I find book 2 is usually the easiest, as it seems to evolve naturally out of the first one. Book 3, however, is far more problematic. New areas have to be introduced to keep the reader interested. Some fundamental shifting of perspective must take place, or else book 3 becomes merely a watered down version of the previous two. Actually, book 3 is usually the pivotal one upon which the rest of the series rests. If you cannot pull it off successfully, it is best to admit defeat and pretend you only meant to write two in the first place.

By book 4, the pitfall is over-confidence. You have run the gauntlet of three books. You feel the surge of expertise as fingers hit keyboard. This, after the previous three, will be a doddle to write. You have your characters, you know how the story arc works. Sometimes this attitude pays off: I still think Dead Man Talking, the fourth Spy Girl book, is the best plotted. However, beware: book 4 can so easily wander off into alien territory, or become a repetition of book 3 with added lacklustre.

I have never got further than book 5 (and Usborne turned it down) so I cannot speak from experience, but I can say from avidly reading crime series, that some writers manage to sustain plot, characters and reader interest beyond book 5, but many more don't. The trouble with series is that publishers LOVE them. They are easy to market, and each book sells on the back of the previous ones. Thus the temptation to go on churning them out year after year, when by rights the whole thing should have been allowed to quietly slink off and hide in a dark corner after the fifth one.

I have been told, though, that the ''real money'' comes from a 5 book series, which means most other writers will have been told this too. I can't see myself getting as far as a fifth book right now. Mind, I never thought I'd get as far as a third. In the meantime, I plot on with book 4, crossing my fingers, hoping that it will avoid the ubiquitous plotholes and that I can pull it off successfully yet again.

So what's your experience? Do you prefer a series? Or a one off novel. If you are a writer, have you ever tackled a series, or does the prospect fill you with horror? Do share your thoughts....

Parking (Adventures of L-PLate Gran)

When You must be mad was young, the nearest park involved a fifteen minute walk and crossing a very busy road with no traffic island. The nearest open space was actually the local cemetery, which was why You must be mad grew up with a finely tuned sense of mortality and a collection of green gravel.

Cut to today, and Little G lives two minutes away from vast expanses of  lovely green park with a lake, swings and tennis courts. It is our favourite go-to place. The park clientele varies depending on the time of day. If we make an early morning swing run, we tend to see lots of dog walkers, or people using the park as a cut-through to the station.

From mid-morning, the park fills up with tourists (it is adjacent to the Cathedral) and mums with frazzled faces walking their babies to sleep. From three onwards, the park is taken over by children and teenagers enjoying their freedom from the constraints of learning.

Afternoon also brings the ice-cream van.

Now,You must be mad has issued strict instructions about the non-offering of cake and other sweet stuff, so when the recent heatwave lures me into rashly buying myself a dark chocolate Magnum, I have it all planned out. As soon as Little G begins eyeing up the ice cream, I offer her the standard rice cake.

She gives it a withering look, drops it over the side of the buggy and points at the Magnum. I peel off the shiny paper and give it to her to play with. She drops it over the side of the buggy and points at the Magnum. So reluctantly, and telling her it isn't really allowed, I scrape off the tiniest bit of dark chocolate and hand it over.

What happens next completely negates the theory that the sum of its parts is not greater than the whole. Within a nano-second, Little G has chocolate all over her face, all over her hands and in her hair. Also on her 'Everything's Better At Grandma's' top that I like to dress her in for publicity purposes.

I remind myself that one cannot swear in front of a baby. Under the chocolate, Little G's face is a study in blissful contentment. I gulp down the Magnum in record time and we head back for a change of clothes and a wipedown with a warm flannel.

To be continued ...     .....

Invigilator At Large!

Whenever people learn that I invigilate GCSE/A Level exams at a local secondary school, they always respond with: 'Oh, exams were much easier in my day'. Which I translate as: 'the mists of time have blurred my memory of what it was really like.'

OK, some subjects - Modern Foreign Languages and Music for example, are easier, but the peripherals and pressures today are vastly different. Now the cohort of 2015 have to obtain B grades in Maths, Science and English just to get into Sixth Form, which would exclude me for a start as I only got five O Levels, none of them Maths (failed twice) and none of them Science (kicked out for disruptive behaviour).

In 1966, eight subjects was considered the maximum a student could handle. Now, many Year 11s take twelve or more subjects, meaning that they can be sitting as many as four exams in a single day. It's a logistical nightmare. But if you choose to turn your back on education and leave school at 16, there are very few apprenticeships or decent jobs waiting for you.

Even if you decide to stay on to do A Levels, the chances are you will have to pass with top grades to be considered by any decent university. Straight As and A* at GCSE and the same at A Level or you won't get that place you want on the course you have chosen. So no way would I, with my rubbish O Levels be offered an unconditional place to read English & Archaeology at London University, as I was in 1968.

And then after your three years' study, you leave with a debt of £50,000 and no prospect of a well paid job. No wonder every secondary school I know now holds therapy groups for stressed and depressed students. And incidents of self-harming and eating disorders have rocketed.

I was not a 'successful' student measured by today's standards. I wasn't gregarious, I was no teacher's favourite. I spent a lot of time not being there. My interest lay in other areas .... I read voraciously, wrote copiously and thought exams and school were a waste of my time.Today's hot-house system would have consigned me to to life's rubbish heap.

My fear is that it's probably doing just this to many talented teenagers who don't fit into the mould and can't handle the current one-size-fits-all educational treadmill. Easier exams? Possibly. But a far more uncertain future.

Ducks Deluxe (The Adventures of L-Plate Gran)

Spring is in the air and it is time to hit the park. Not that Little G and I haven't been there before - it is our default location as there is a long hill leading to the lake that generally sends her to sleep on the way down, and gives me arm ache on the way up.

Today armed with the bread crusts that were going to be my lunch but hey, I am prepared to sacrifice nutrition in the cause of a nature lesson, we head down to the lake which is, with the onset of warmer weather, a hive of activity (apologies for mixed metaphor).

Ducks are paddling, ducks are quacking, ducks are flapping, ducks are disputing over lady ducks, ducks are transporting dodgy bits of litter and inappropriate sticks to perilously tenuous nesting sites. Little G and I are entranced.

I park the buggy, and produce the bread bag from some inner crevice. Ducks pause in their various activities and start to foregather. Bread is thrown. I give bread to Little G to throw. She eats it. I throw more bread. I give her more. She eats it. Ducks squabble and fight and knock each other into the water. We run out of bread.

All the way back up the long long hill I feel dizzy and lightheaded. And later, I can't stop fixating about duck. Roast duck. Duck risotto. Crispy duck with Hoisin sauce and sliced spring onions and pancakes ... I must be going down with some kind of mallard imaginaire.

To be continued ....   ....

Victorian Values: Alive and Well

Victorian slumStopped in my tracks the other day by a clip on the radio about a phenomenon in London called ''beds in sheds''. For those who haven't heard of it, such is the unaffordable price of housing, thanks to rich foreign investors buying up property, and rich developers refusing to build affordable housing, that unscrupulous house owners are throwing up primitive breezeblock structures at the back of their properties and letting them out to poor or immigrant families. No sanitary provision, no proper building regs. And local councils seem unwilling or unable to stop it happening.

Presumably these house owners must've been listening to Kevin McLeod (Grand Design bloke) who says if we want to meet the growing need for cheap 'affordable housing', we should model ourselves on the Victorian builders, who leased land and threw up street after street of houses at lightening speed. News for you, Kevin: we're already there.

My two books Diamonds & Dust and Honour & Obey are set just after the great Victorian house building boom, when speculative London developers maximised profits by using cheap cement, known as Billysweet, which never dried out, so these houses actually had their own internal weather system.

They also had no proper foundations, and floorboards laid on bare earth. As a direct result, by 1860 London had some of the poorest people living in some of the worst slums in the kingdom. (In those days, the immigrants were Huguenot silk weavers escaping from France, Irish escaping from famine and Jews escaping from Christians.)

At the same time, Parliament passed the Poor Law Act in an attempt to stop anyone who could work from receiving parish relief - it was thought that poverty was caused by 'moral failure', and paying such people only encouraged them to be idle and overpopulate. Is this resonating?

Dickens described these MPs and their property-owning chums as 'Experimental Philosophers ...whose blood is ice,whose heart is iron.'  I guess now we'd call them: 'Rich arrogant posh boys who don't know the price of a pint of milk.'

Nothing much changes ....

The tooth, the whole tooth (Adventures of L-Plate Gran)

And so Little G's teething marathon continues. I do not know what lap we are in, but I'm hoping we are about to complete it. Such is my current dental fixation that the first question I ask parents of any babies I encounter is not the name/age/sex of their child but how many teeth they have.

All, without exception, have more than Little G. Mind, she manages pretty well with two bottom and one top one. I am observing her crust technique for future reference. Meanwhile You must be mad and I try to focus on Little G's undoubted intelligence, and the fact that she can already hum a Watford supporters' song (no words thankfully and we blame Grandad for singing it to her).

Teeth are a mere by-product, we tell ourselves. She is clearly developing her brain first. But oh my - she is suffering. Of course You must be mad has been offered loads of advice, but all of it involves putting a fingerful of various gels into Little G's firmly clamped mouth, so it is not a viable option.

Last week Little G had a total meltdown on the 321 bus going back to St Albans. Never done this before as we like our bus trips. Screaming, arching her back, red-cheeked and inconsolable. Having tried every technique known to womankind to calm her down, finally I got up, turned round, and apologised to the rest of the bus for the noise.

I explained that the baby was teething, and however much it was annoying them, she was hurting far more. Luckily the bus was full of pensioners, so instead of pursed lips, tutting and disapproving stares, Little G and I were bathed in a warm wave of sympathy.

I think we will all be very glad when this particular phase of her development ends, though. To paraphrase King Lear (rather badly): ''How sharper than a serpent's thanks to have a toothless child.'' 


To be continued ... ...

Darkness & Decadence: A Book & a Friendship

I joined Twitter in July 2012 and shortly after that I met Lynn, or as she is known on Twitter @LynnGerrard The Grumbling Gargoyle. Unbelievably, we didn't hit it off immediately and it took a few months for us to find each others' feet .... and begin falling over them.

Lynn doesn't know I've written this blog, so it could mark the end of a wonderful friendship ...for that is what we have. Over the years, we have become best mates. Firstly on Twitter, where we hold court in our imaginary bath, contesting duck rights and slagging each other off - I'm sure there are people out there who think we really do share a both and duck (BTW - it's MY duck, just to make that absolutely clear).

However, our weird and rather esoteric internet relationship has also spilled out into that strange place called ''the real world''. We email, chat on the phone and when Watford plays any team in Lynn's area, I am dumped on her doorstep demanding food, wine and entertainment.

Lynn has supported me through breast cancer, life traumas and publishing highs and lows. She has shared the joy of my new granddaughter and reads my books, comments on my blogs and promotes my stuff on her Twitter page regularly. She is not one of those fairweather friends who vanishes when the focus is no longer on her. If you are lucky to be counted one of her internet mates, then you are lucky indeed. Loyal, honest and caring, she is someone to be treasured.

Doing Stand Up for StigmaFor those who are unaware, Lynn is married to Michael Lindley @Fruitbatwalton, who designed the book cover, and they have a Jack Russell terrier called Ralph. Michael promotes bands, does an incredible amount of unpaid work for local mental health charities and is one of the best cooks outside of the profession. He is one of the most witty, gifted and generous people I know.

If you have ever attended one of my two Facebook launches, you'll have experienced Michael and Lynn in action. People still talk about them. I have found myself face down on the desk helpless with laughter at some of the stuff they've posted.

This weekend, Lynn's first book of poetry is launched. Called Darkness & Decadence, it is a collection of some of her amazing longer poems, shorter poems, and micro poems. I cannot say how proud I am of my friend and how chuffed to bits I am that finally someone has realised how fine a poet she is and has offered to publish her. (No, unlike the rest of is, Lynn didn't go to the publisher, they came to her).


Everybody will find a poem in the book that takes their breath away. Lynn is that sort of poet. My favourite is Melancholy Gargoyle. Look out for it .....


US. E Book: http://amzn.to/1Hi9xFf
UK. E Book: http://amzn.to/1c5BF5E

US. Paperback: http://amzn.to/1HvdknW
UK. Paperback: http://amzn.to/1cOZPSI

Teething Troubles (Adventures of L-Plate Gran)

It is amazing how one forgets so many things about bringing up a small child. I know You must be mad produced teeth at some time. She seems to have a full set now, as far as I am aware. I am sure it was horrendous for all concerned, but somehow I forgot HOW horrendous. Until now.

Little G is teething. She is utterly distraught and angry and I am utterly unable to get through to her. Toys are offered and pushed away. Songs are sung but drowned out by the sound of her wailing. Snacks are refused with a brusque headshake and a 'No..no..no'. Cuddles are rejected out of hand.

It is like Baby Jekyll has morphed into Baby Hyde. She glares at me, red cheeked, her eyes streaming and roars her pain into the air. There is nothing I can do. Teething gels are spat out, teething rings are thrown from the buggy in disgust.

Her eyes say: 'make it go away' . Her voice cries: 'I HURT.' This is where reason and logic break down. Her little world has imploded in pain and none of the people she loves seem to know how to make it better.

I can't explain to her that it is only temporary. That ginger biscuits and roast potatoes await. That soon, tomorrow, in a couple of days, she will be over it. That when she is sixteen and going out with her mates, this will not even be a faint memory.

All I can do is lie on the carpet next to her and listen to her rage. And tell her it will get better. Even if she clearly doesn't believe a single word I am saying.

To be continued ...    ....

The PINK SOFA meets Beryl Kingston

There are some people in life to whom the term 'grande dame' seems applicable. Beryl is one of those people. She is a novelist, a great grandmother, and at 84 has just written her 25th book. The PINK SOFA is so excited to welcome her that is has been polishing its legs and hoovering its crevices for days. Beryl's life story is not an easy one (see below) so it is all credit to her that she has emerged as the talented, supportive wonderful person that she has. Over to you, Beryl:

''Well here I am prepped, pampered, pink sofa’d and feeling very spoilt. I only wish I could tell you the sort of story I’m fairly sure you’ll be expecting, but I’m afraid I can’t because my writing career has been decidedly a-typical.

This is a quite a long story and very unlikely so I hope you’re sitting comfortably. When it’s done you’re at perfect liberty to yell ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’ Even I find it hard to believe and I know it’s true.

I’ve been writing since 1938 when I was seven – and no, that’s not the pants-on-fire moment – I know that’s how young I was because I was writing ‘poetry’, which I dated, and keeping a secret diary. It had to be secret so that my mother didn’t see it and it was very necessary to me, like a comfort blanket.

Age 14 with sistersMy mother, you see, was a difficult woman, so full of jealousy, anger and hatred that she had to off-load it whenever she could. She beat the dog, belittled my father until he lost his temper and hit her, drowned the kittens and caned me. The caning would have been bad enough but she also forbade me to cry or to tell anyone. So I went somewhere quiet and wrote about it instead. It gave me a bit of instant comfort and a gradual taste for shaping sentences and finding the accurate word. Soon I was addicted to the happy art of writing and story-telling. By the time I was nine I was hooked, writing a more elaborate diary and spooking my cousin with ghost stories.

I grew up, went to college, got married to my darling whom I met by accident when I was just sixteen, had children, embarked on a teaching career, which I enjoyed a lot, and went on writing and telling stories. But I didn’t offer anything for publication, naturally, because I could still hear my mother’s voice telling me I wasn’t any good and wouldn’t amount to a row of beans. So I destroyed everything I wrote, poems, plays, stories, the lot. Seems like a terrible waste to me now but that’s what I did.

Beryl's books Then in 1956 I joined the National Childbirth Trust and, although I didn’t know it at the time, that was a turning point. I became one of its gurus, teaching more and more women how to cope with period pain and going to local groups giving lectures about it, demonstrating relaxation, dry land swimming and the pelvic rock, which is belly dancing by another name. After one hilarious meeting with a large group in Leeds, the secretary phoned to ask whether I could write them a leaflet detailing all the things I’d been talking about. ‘We know it was good,’ she said, ‘but you went at a hundred miles an hour and it was so funny and now we can’t remember half of it.’ I said I would but then discovered I had so much information that what I wrote turned out to be a book. At which point, greatly daring and urged on by friends in the Trust, I sent it to Good Housekeeping Magazine as they were running a series of articles on the subject, asking whether it would be any use to them. They passed it on to their publishing arm, which was Ebury Press and, to my considerable surprise, Ebury published it.

At this point in the story things get incredible. Because it had been so easy to write a book, I thought I’d try a novel, just for the hell of it and to see if I could do it. Three years later it was written. (I was slow in those days because I was still teaching)  By then ‘Lifting the Curse’ was out in hardback and Ebury took it to the Frankfurt Book Fair and displayed it there. By amazing luck, the next stall along was run by a man called Darley Anderson, who published self-help books but really wanted to be an agent. He said he would like to take ‘The Curse’ as a paperback and asked my editor if I’d written anything else. When he heard about the novel he asked for my phone number.

Beryl's new book He rang me the next day and asked if he could have the paperback rights to ‘Lifting the Curse’. I said ‘Yes, of course’ feeling rather chuffed. Then he asked if he could see the novel. You won’t believe this but I said no. I was still living the dream and to send him the manuscript left me open to being told it wasn’t any good and being brought down to earth. He didn’t push me but said he would phone again and see if he could change my mind. He’s a Yorkshireman and determined. He phoned at regular intervals for three months and in the end I gave in and took it up to his club, with a covering note to ask him to ring and tell me that he’d got it safely because it was my only copy. Imagine the sauce of that!

He phoned the same evening and what he said blew my mind. He’d read the first three chapters. It was going to be a best seller and could he be my agent. He was and it was. It was the making of us both.  All together now. ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’

After a start like that I left teaching and wrote a novel a year. My paperback sales passed the million mark with my twelfth book. Now I’m finishing book 25, which follows the life and times of a girl who was born in 1897 and sent out to work a skivvy in a big house miles away from her parents, when she was 12 as so many country girls were.

Book 24, on the other hand, came out on March 31st this year and is a very different kind of story. I have to turn in a different direction with each new book, because I’ve got a low boredom threshold. This one is a modern story about a young woman called Francesca who has lived very unsatisfactorily and uncomfortably with a loud mouthed bully. Until one clear-sighted day when she sees a mermaid, swimming freely in the North Sea. The sight inspires her to leave her lover and start a life of her own. It turns out to be more difficult and complicated than she’d imagined. You can hear the first chapter on my website if you would like a taste of it. www.berylkingston.co.uk  and find it on Amazon and Kindle

What else?

Age 17I am proud of the fact that I was in Tooting for the first four months of the blitz, and only left it to be evacuated for the second time when our road was bombed and our house was uninhabitable. I spent the middle part of the war in Harpenden. (hence my friendship with Carol) and returned to live in London again at the end of the war at the time of the V2’s, this time without my family. It was a formative experience. As was meeting my darling. Ah the stories we gather in our lives!

Because of being evacuated twice, I went to 10 different schools. I ended up at Streatham Secondary School, an LCC grammar run on the Dalton system, which offered a few lessons as sparking points and then required pupils to be responsible for their own learning, either in study rooms with their teachers on hand to help and advise, or on their own in the library or the school hall. It suited me to a T and was another formative experience. Then to King’s College London, where I read English and enjoyed myself a lot, but wasn’t particularly distinguished, having other things on my mind by then.

 I taught in a variety of school between 1952 and 1985 and in the two schools where I was head of the English department, I deliberately covered the full range of age and ability, believing that as I was paid the largest salary I should carry the heaviest responsibility. My work was filmed by KCL Education Department for use in their PGCE course and I have given talks at various colleges and schools on a variety of educational subjects, from teaching poetry to ‘tackling’ sex education. I have never subscribed to the Gradgrind theory of education which is current now, but always believed that the job of a teacher is to enable her students to learn.

 How do I do publicity? Feeling embarrassed and groaning. I was lucky that I didn’t have to do any for my first 14 books because the big companies I wrote for took care of all of that. But I do now and it makes me cringe. I’m not cut out to blow my own trumpet.''



 Find Beryl here:

Twitter Link: https://twitter.com/berylkingston

Facebook Link: www.facebook.com/berylkingstonauthor

Links to Beryl's book

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fancesca-Merm...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Francesca-Mer...

Armed & Dangerous (The Adventures of L-Plate Gran)

It is becoming clearer by the week that it's impossible to navigate modern city streets with a baby in a buggy and the current meagre allocation of upper limbs. Take the other day. It was very windy with a side order of drizzle. Little G was kicking off because she was overtired and I'd hustled her into the buggy to walk her to sleep without the requisite yellow spoon and small plastic biscuit (don't ask).

I'd mislaid the buggy bag strap, so I had to hold my bag on one arm, which meant negotiating passersby with a one-handed manoeuvre that would have caused me to fail my driving test. And then the badly packed and poorly zipped baby bag decided to shed its contents all over the pavement.

So here's the dilemma. Do I abandon the buggy and rush around collecting stuff - risking someone walking off with Little G, (currently at WW2 siren level) or do I sacrifice all her snacks, spare nappies and favourite toys for the sake of preserving her for posterity?

Had I two pairs of hands, I could have held the buggy with one pair and picked up the stuff with the other. A prehensile tail might been an acceptable alternative. Evolution isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Luckily, a nice elderly gentleman took pity on my predicament, and helped collect my stuff for me, and a couple of mums with buggies formed a human shield round Little G. But it did make me wonder. If plastic surgery can augment other parts of the body, why not arms? Temporary ones, maybe. At least for those of us elderly inadequates left in charge of very small children.

To be continued ...   ...