Aly Monroe's Blog, page 9

The Alhambra-Pad

"Libraries are the souls of memories" I recently came across this splendid if somewhat obscure quote in a paper called 'Russian libraries, an indestructible part of national memory: A study guide for librarians' by Victoria Spain from Hofstra University in New York.

I was reminded of this on Sunday, when I saw the TV Programme When the Moors Ruled in Europe by Bettany Hughes. For a large part of the programme she was in the Alhambra in Granada. I first visited the Alhambra in the late sixties when I was spending a term in Granada as part of my studies. Now visitors are severely rationed because there have been so many visitors. But then you could wander freely around the rooms, sit in a stone window seat by a lattice window screen and listen to the sound of running water. It was a wonderfully calm, cool haven where we would go to escape from the baking heat of the city.

Apart from reminding me of this, Bettany Hughes also reminded me that the contents of the library were lost in 1499 when Cardinal Cisneros made a huge bonfire of Arabic manuscripts in an effort to obliterate all trace of the infidel. Thankfully he did leave the building standing, but destroyed a library of incalculably valuable documents in the name of the 'true faith'. There are numerous examples of similar losses in history, some at the arrogant hands of ideologues, others through accident, indifference and negligence.

Of course, we all have personal libraries – which constitute our own personal histories - both physically and in our memories. A few years ago I had to clear my parents' house. My father in particular had been a regular and enthusiastic book buyer from an early age. Apart from the crowded shelves, there were cupboards full of books, there were cases of books in the loft and even the garage had stacks of book-filled boxes. I couldn't bring myself to throw them out or donate them to charity without going through them. They represented a life. It was a long job. Neither I nor my siblings could house them all. Some of the books had deteriorated badly, with brittle yellowed paper and spines, and had become unreadable. I made a note to buy replacements of some – after all, a book's value is its content. Some, however, were irreplaceable because they were long out of print.

We took those we wanted to keep, our respective children filled some gaps in their own book collections, and a large number of boxes went to second hand book shops or charities. What was left was not burnt, but thrown away in sad black bags with the rubbish. And so a personal collection of books disintegrated and the memory of what they were and meant was on its way to being lost.

I am rather cheered by the thought that a lifetime's reading can now be preserved on a Kindle or an I-pad, well, a few Kindles and I-pads.

Cardinal Cisneros would be furious.

Tweetering On The Edge

I have often said that I wasn't up for Twitter and Facebook. I have a website and a blog and am signed up to Goodreads (a bit sporadic and behind with the updating), which all take up time, so how is there time for anything else in between writing and editing? And do I really want to tweet? However, my media savvy daughter told me I was missing the point – and I'm sure she's right. She recently opened a Twitter account and set up a Facebook author page for me, and presented me with the done deal. I'm really just getting used to the idea – tweetering on the edge, I suppose you could call it. (Click here and here to follow or 'like' me)

One of the undoubted attractions of Twitter actually answers one of my misgivings – the time factor. Five minutes to spare can be used to check on tweeting activity, and even tweet. Blogging is different - and serves a different purpose. Another thing is that just as you don't have to conform to what might be termed 'blog style', you are in charge of what you do on twitter. You don't have to go in for the 'I'm now waiting at the bus stop' kind of tweeting – which isn't really me. And you don't have to tweet all the time.

With the London Book Fair coming up (11-13 April), I was checking out their website and came across this, which is a discussion of authors and social networking, their different attitudes and the variety of ways they use them. It suggests that, given the increasingly limited resources and overworked publicity staff of publishers, authors have to take responsibility into their own hands for getting their name and work known, and social networks are an accessible and cheap way of doing this. I agree with this.

But I also came across these articles, here and here , which bring home how a site like twitter can be used to keep in touch with news about the authors, organisations and other people you are interested in – all in one place. And that is a definite attraction.

I am still learning – with interest.

Icelight - The Cover

Here is the cover of the new Peter Cotton book now renamed.
Icelight - is now scheduled for publication in October.

Icelight

Here is the cover redone for Icelight, the new Peter Cotton book, now scheduled for publication in October

We Read It Like This

All parents and grandparents of babies and young children should check out a new blog called We Read It Like This. It takes a different approach from other children's book websites and blogs by concentrating of the personal experience of reading very special books aloud. It's well worth a look for the books it recommends – and it is beautifully written.

Icelight

We now have a new title for Peter Cotton 3.

It is to be called Icelight. The cover is presently being corrected.

As soon as I receive a copy, I'll put it up for all to see.

Do titles affect the way people feel differently about a book?

There's 'Blacklight' ... and then there's 'Black Light'.

A confession – I had never heard of the SAW franchise. That's another way of saying I don't watch horror movies. In consequence I hadn't heard of Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton who wrote four of the movies. And I was unaware of Stephen Romano who has joined with them in a book called Black Light to be published in the UK by Mullholland Books (Hodder) in time for Halloween this year.

Two of the authors are quoted as saying "Black Light is a novel about a private eye (Buck Carlsbad) who gets in deep with a bunch of ghosts on a high-tech bullet train".

Of course I wish them well.

The only small problem is that, for some months now, John Murray have announced my next Cotton novel as Blacklight. John Murray and Hodder are in the same building and belong to the same company. Black Light is coming out first in the US.

So my Peter Cotton title has to be SAWn off, or ghost trained.

For the moment then we are back to calling it Cotton 3. As soon as the new title is fixed I'll report.

Apolaustic – And Other Words

One niggling business in editing is the sentence that just will not read right. There is nothing particularly wrong with the sentence. All its words are in good order, the sentiment is not complicated but a reader will trip on it. I include myself as one of those readers.

It can be down simply to how people see when they read. The word 'inexpensive', for example, should not end a sentence. In the run of reading, a lot of people, myself included, tend to see 'expensive'. This is something well known to advertisers – 'Not' is a no-no in a slogan. 'Not fattening', for example. The opposite impression is left in the mind of a consumer.

I have had some relief from the necessary fiddle of editing because my husband recently gave me the Penguin collection of all five novels about Richard Hannay written by John Buchan.

The most famous of these is of course the first, The Thirty-Nine Steps. I had read two others, Greenmantle and The Three Hostages. The two I had not read were Mr Standfast and, the one I am going to mention here, The Island of Sheep.

In Chapter Six – Sundry Doings at Fosse – Richard Hannay calls in on MacGillivray and finds him reading Greek, ancient Greek that is. Though MacGillivray is in his rooms in Mount Street , he works at 'the Yard' (Scotland Yard). He refers to and translates from Herodotus and in his description of Lancelot Troth, the man Hannay is interested in says '- he leads the apolaustic life, and that's an expensive thing nowadays.'

Vocabulary in those 'nowadays' was different from these 'nowadays'. I think I'm on pretty safe ground in saying that not many thrillers published this year will include the word 'apolaustic' (devoted to pleasure). I have no idea how many high ranking officers at 'the Yard' now seek consolation and wisdom in the classics.

In any case I very much doubt that 'apolaustic' was in common usage in 1936 either, but presumably Buchan thought that his younger readers could always look it up in a dictionary.

No, I am not going to defend 'apolaustic' or say ignorance of its meaning will prevent a full and happy life. We get along reasonably well without it and not many of us want to suggest something short of hedonism but, as it turns out in the novel, the kind of enjoyment that involves having a six hundred ton yacht. I can think of other terms for a person like that.

It will happen to us all, of course with time, but one of the incidental pleasures of reading Buchan is the sometimes sniffy attitude of his hero Hannay. Forget the six hundred ton yacht, this is more from the first class lounge of an ocean liner:

"I pondered long over that letter. The first thing that struck me was that it was not written in Sandy's usual fastidious style. It was frank journalism and must be meant to appeal to a particular audience."

And I am particularly fond of "the most sumptuous of Lombard's possessions" – referring to Mrs Lombard. "As a girl she must have been lovely, and she was still a handsome woman of the heavy Madonna type – a slightly over-coloured Madonna. Being accustomed to slim people…I thought her a little too 'fair of flesh', in the polite phrase of the ballads."

Now in Washington Shadow, I let an African character give Buchan something of a going over, particularly as regards Prester John. Buchan could be and was, as someone has limply said, 'as racist as his time.'

Buchan's fluency of style and wide vocabulary are a saving grace? I admire them but that's not my point here.

History is a tracing back to see how we are what we are. To deny the inconveniences of a text – as in the new, modern version of Huckleberry Finn, (see here and here) in which vocabulary and expressions from the original text were changed - is a mistake. It's particularly a mistake in Mark Twain's classic because it bowdlerizes the text of Twain's irony.

It is even more patronizing to the reader than Buchan could be to some characters.

Getting Branded - ASLA day and John Murray Authors Party

I've been very busy editing Blacklight recently – a consuming occupation - but in between, I have taken a couple of forays out from behind my laptop.

On Thursday (20 Jan) I attended a Professional Development Day: 'Working as a Writer in the 21st Century', organised by ASLA (Association of Scottish Literary Agents), and held at Sandeman House, the home of the Scottish Booktrust in Edinburgh. I had taken part in an excellent 'Web Workshop' two years ago in London organised by my publisher for a small group of writers (just six of us), so I was interested to see what this one had to offer.

This was much bigger - there were about 60 people there – and covered more areas. Apart from the first talk on the new media by Julian Westaby from Creating Sparks, the day also included: a panel with representatives from Scottish publishers (Jan Rutherford from Birlinn and Polygon, and Jenny Todd from Canongate) and from a bookshop (Rosamund de la Hey, owner of The Main Street Trading Company in St. Boswells); an author panel with Barry Hutchison, Janet Paisley and Sara Sheridan, 'discussing the merits, practicalities and impact of blogging, tweeting, linkedin, social web sites - and other income streams including ghost writing, copy writing etc, and finally a panel composed of Aly Barr (Creative Scotland), Alistair Moffat (BookNation and the Borders and Lennoxlove Book Festivals) and Caitrin Armstrong (Scottish Book Trust) on the different opportunities they offer authors.

A large part of the time was spent on how writers can use the new media to create awareness of their work and make contact with readers. Some of the authors there were very practised and media savvy, had websites, blogs, were on Facebook and/or Twitter and were expert on-liners. Others were still at the stage of thinking about it all. I consider myself to be somewhere in between. I have my website and my blog. I don't do Facebook or Twitter, but have an author page on the reader networking site Goodreads. I'm not sure I would have time for anything more.

There were a number of interesting aspects for me that arose as I was talking to other writers. First is the question of what different writers aim for with their websites, and what people look for when they visit a writer's website; the second is the question of the author's 'voice'. Obviously writing content for a website or a blog is not the same as writing a book, but Julian Westaby told us in his talk that 'an author is a brand like any other'. From the shifting in seats and murmurs around me, this obviously made some writers decidedly uncomfortable. A 'brand' has the idea of creating an image – 'manipulative' muttered the person sitting beside me. 'Just be yourself – you are your brand' said someone else. 'Which self?' said another voice. The possibility of straying into philosophical notions of self hovered momentarily, - and marketing took over again.

A few days later, on 25 January, I went down to London to the John Murray Authors party held in their historic Albemarle Street house – the home and office of the original John Murray, publisher of many eminent names. The house is remarkable in itself as the room where the party was held has been preserved as it originally was, down to the paintings on the walls, the books on the shelves, the furniture and curtains – and the proof is there to see in a painting of the room including the first John Murray together with Byron and Walter Scott among others. An enjoyable evening, chatting to authors I knew and meeting others for the first time.

On my way out after the party I shook the hand of a slim, elegant elderly gentleman, who described himself as 'the doorman for this evening' – the present-day John Murray.

'Princess Grace.'

After a flu-flattened opening to 2011, I have been cheered up by learning that I can now resume my account of nine hours of tapes recorded in Guadalajara between 2005 and 2007 -(See blogs from July and August last year)- with the 'original' of Peter Cotton.

I am very grateful that the Spanish lawyers contacted me to tell me this and, through his step daughter, Caroline, have learnt that 'things have been settled'.

Our sessions were always held in his study with its glass wall facing north. On the book-lined south wall, I noticed there was a panel for an oil portrait of his second wife Helen. This was rather a fashion in Spain – in case you did not know whose house you were in a portrait was there to remind you. The portraits usually flattered – an old-fashioned sort of photo-shop in oils. It was not simply a matter of regularizing the features within a likeness. I once talked to a portrait painter on the Costa del Sol – he said 'the camera adds ten pounds, I can take off up to thirty.' His earnings were fabulous. And he worked very quickly. He had drawn, in pastels, separate portraits of a mother and three daughters in the morning and worked on the mother's oil painting in the afternoon. His fee would have bought a medium sized car.

'We were married in April 1973 in Chelsea. We were second timers and rather wanted a quiet wedding. It was, but Helen's uncle took umbrage that he had not been invited, so he invited us to Cannes where he lived and gave us this portrait as a wedding present. Helen always called it 'my Princess Grace moment' – meaning Grace Kelly, then living along the coast in Monaco, and something of a yardstick. The Côte d'Azur is the Costa del Sol of France.'

We considered the painting. It showed a strikingly cool lady wearing a green gown and a string of pearls and brought to mind cheesy old expressions like 'alabaster skin' and 'golden hair'.

Since there were several photographs of Helen in the study, the contrast between the vivacity of the snaps and the flattery of the painting were marked.

'Have you come across the Picasso/Dali divide?' he asked.

I had. In Spain, very generally, politics did not just divide into left and right but Picasso and Dali.

'Helen's uncle behaved as if we had planned our wedding to coincide with Picasso's death. He was determined to correct an impression that only he had. We kept it partly because her uncle sometimes visited us here and partly because I became quite fond of it. It was so far from her.' He shrugged.

'I think of it as art subverted to social aspiration. Some art reveals, some closes things off, presents an idealized front. The painting is worthless but it is worth something to me, mostly as a contrast to my own memories.'

Helen's daughter Caroline has told me they don't know what to do with it. 'It's like an aged piece of Angel Cake. I can't help feeling my mother's uncle was a sentimental misogynist. You know, the kind of man who uses words like 'fragrant' for some women and wants all to be lady-like and contained.'

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