John Ironmonger's Blog, page 7

Why I’m retiring (but not from writing)

 

The overwhelming response when I’ve told people I’m retiring from full-time paid employment has been, ‘what kept you?’ ‘You should have retired when your first novel came out and devoted yourself to writing,’ one friend told me. Others are astonished that I’ve still been working all this time. ‘What!’ they exclaim. ‘You’re still working!’ As if this was somehow a sin.

A lot of novelists never give up the day job of course. Anthony Trollope wrote ten novels while working for the post office.  Conan Doyle was a doctor. Kafka was an insurance clerk. T.S. Eliot was a publisher. Nabokov was a lepidopterist (I bet you never knew that). Most of the writers I know still do a nine-to-five of some kind. Personally, I never wanted to give up the day job. Not really. I have always rather enjoyed working. I like the people I work with. I get carried along with the projects we’re doing and the ambitions we have. It’s fun. I have worked in my industry (healthcare computing) for so long that I’ve become something of a sage. There are very few of us left who recall the early days. I remember one of the first computer systems I was involved with (a lab system at a London hospital). It had 512KB of memory. Half a megabyte. It seemed a lot at the time. I remember the clunky green screens and the colossal monitors and the achingly slow response times. I remember learning BASIC programming on a Commodore PET.  And all those things that might now be hard to explain. Queuing for the photocopier. The telex machine. Memorising phone numbers. Carbon copies. The tea trolley. Circulation envelopes. Treasury ties. Ties! Fax paper. Floppy discs…

… and now, like a very-slow-motion movie, the decades have passed, and I’ve watched things change. The kind of systems we’re installing today would have been extraordinary science-fiction to my twenty five-year-old self. The almost limitless power of mobile tech, and the coming of AI are transforming this space beyond recognition.

I have been incredibly lucky.  I’ve visited hospitals in ten US states, in UAE, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait and most of Europe. I’ve worked on deals in South Africa and Malta and Nigeria and Scotland and Ireland and too many other places to mention. It has been a blast.

I am, however, now in my, er, mid-sixties. And here is the truth. I’ve become a bit of a dinosaur. I didn’t see it coming. But perhaps we aren’t supposed to. Maybe it takes everybody by surprise. You wake up one morning and you realise, with a start, that your time has come. There is the door, there is your coat, what’s your hurry? This is what happened to me. I can escape it no longer. I will still dabble and do odd jobs. But I am no longer a programme manager.    

But I am still a novelist.

I won’t ever give up writing. I couldn’t. It is what I do. So I am doubly lucky – to have had a first career I enjoyed, and a second to keep me going. Thank you to all the amazing, fascinating, brilliant people I have met and worked with for so many years. I will miss you guys a lot. Do, please, stay in touch. Keep on making the world a better place. I want to read about your great successes. And, by the way, if you fancy, just occasionally, putting your feet up with a good book – ask in any good bookshop or check out my page on Amazon.  

My Map Pins 36: Swimming with Manatees - Crystal River, Florida (10th June 2021)

It takes a little under two hours to drive from Orlando to Crystal River on the Gulf coast of Florida. Well worth the drive, and not just to escape the Orlando crowds. The Crystal River Reserve State Park is a little oasis of tranquility. Make sure you pre-book a session to go swimming with manatees. We booked with Fun2Dive Manatee Tours and would wholeheartedly recommend them. There is no sense of rush. You have half a day out in the boat on the river, a very helpful guide, and you see manatees! The water is brutally cold, but wetsuits are available if you need them. The manatees just ignore you, and go about their business munching the vegetation while you snorkel around them. It is perfectly lovely.

 

What3words: dangle.earbuds.paces

 

My Map Pins 36: Swimming with Manatees - Crystal River, Florida

It takes a little under two hours to drive from Orlando to Crystal River on the Gulf coast of Florida. Well worth the drive, and not just to escape the Orlando crowds. The Crystal River Reserve State Park is a little oasis of tranquility. Make sure you pre-book a session to go swimming with manatees. We booked with Fun2Dive Manatee Tours and would wholeheartedly recommend them. There is no sense of rush. You have half a day out in the boat on the river, a very helpful guide, and you see manatees! The water is brutally cold, but wetsuits are available if you need them. The manatees just ignore you, and go about their business munching the vegetation while you snorkel around them. It is perfectly lovely.

 

What3words: dangle.earbuds.paces

 

The Year of the Dugong (Das Jahr des Dugong): The Inside Story (31st May 2021)

 

This gorgeous cover-design is for my novella, ‘The Year of the Dugong’ (Das Jahr des Dugong)’ due to be published in German on October 26th by the amazing team at S Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt. So far, this is an exclusive deal and I don’t yet have (any may never have) an English language publisher for this story. All of which may sound a little odd, and it deserves an explanation.

Perhaps I should start with the story.

Early in 2020 my agent, Stan, called me for a conversation. Did I have another novel on the go? I told him I did. Sort of. Except it wasn’t strictly a novel. It was a collection of short stories. There was an uncomfortable silence on the phone. You never want your agent to go silent. And this was when I learned that short stories are not particularly popular with publishers. It may be my memory, but I seem to recall the expression, ‘career suicide’ being floated in the conversation. It wasn’t especially encouraging.

Anyway, I stubbornly persevered with the collection, and sure enough, just as everyone had predicted, the final set of stories was not really suitable for publication. Which is a shame, but I get it. I shelved the stories and started work on a novel instead.

But here comes the silver lining. There was one story in the collection I was reluctant to part with. It was a tale about climate change. Climate change is a tough subject for a fiction writer. It is a slow, unfolding catastrophe, and the time scales are generally too long to grapple with effectively – at least within the lifetime of a single protagonist. To get around this, I had the idea of a Rip-Van-Winkle character from 2019 who falls asleep and awakens a very long time in the future, only to find himself blamed for his part in the destruction of the planet. One day, in the spring of 2021, I mentioned the story on a zoom call with S Fischer Verlag. ‘The Whale at the End of the World, (Der Wal und Das Ende der Welt)’ had been in Der Spiegel’s Top 10 Paperback chart for 50 weeks, and we were exchanging ideas for the new novel. At one point I said, ‘this reminds me of a short story I’ve just written,’ and my editor in Frankfurt said, ‘send it to me.’  A day or so later she called back. Could they please publish it?

The story was The Year of the Dugong.

I am so excited that Fischer are publishing Dugong as a novella. I did wonder, for a while, if I ought to develop it into a full-length novel, but truthfully, the story felt complete;  I sensed that stretching it out, and introducing more characters would dilute the impact. I asked my editor at Fischer if she could time the publication to coincide with COP26, the UN Climate Conference planned for November 2021. She agreed. So it will hit the bookstands in Germany on 27thOctober.

If no UK publisher picks up the story, I will post the English language original onto this blog as a PDF or Kindle file to coincide with the German publication. Or drop a comment into this blog and I will email it to you on 27th October.  

And that’s it. That’s why I find myself in the very unusual position of having a book published exclusively in a language that I don’t speak. And it has a beautiful cover. Don’t you agree?

The Year of the Dugong (Das Jahr des Dugong): The Inside Story

 

This gorgeous cover-design is for my novella, ‘The Year of the Dugong’ (Das Jahr des Dugong)’ due to be published in German on October 26th by the amazing team at S Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt. So far, this is an exclusive deal and I don’t yet have (any may never have) an English language publisher for this story. All of which may sound a little odd, and it deserves an explanation.

Perhaps I should start with the story.

Early in 2020 my agent, Stan, called me for a conversation. Did I have another novel on the go? I told him I did. Sort of. Except it wasn’t strictly a novel. It was a collection of short stories. There was an uncomfortable silence on the phone. You never want your agent to go silent. And this was when I learned that short stories are not particularly popular with publishers. It may be my memory, but I seem to recall the expression, ‘career suicide’ being floated in the conversation. It wasn’t especially encouraging.

Anyway, I stubbornly persevered with the collection, and sure enough, just as everyone had predicted, the final set of stories was not really suitable for publication. Which is a shame, but I get it. I shelved the stories and started work on a novel instead.

But here comes the silver lining. There was one story in the collection I was reluctant to part with. It was a tale about climate change. Climate change is a tough subject for a fiction writer. It is a slow, unfolding catastrophe, and the time scales are generally too long to grapple with effectively – at least within the lifetime of a single protagonist. To get around this, I had the idea of a Rip-Van-Winkle character from 2019 who falls asleep and awakens a very long time in the future, only to find himself blamed for his part in the destruction of the planet. One day, in the spring of 2021, I mentioned the story on a zoom call with S Fischer Verlag. ‘The Whale at the End of the World, (Der Wal und Das Ende der Welt)’ had been in Der Spiegel’s Top 10 Paperback chart for 50 weeks, and we were exchanging ideas for the new novel. At one point I said, ‘this reminds me of a short story I’ve just written,’ and my editor in Frankfurt said, ‘send it to me.’  A day or so later she called back. Could they please publish it?

The story was The Year of the Dugong.

I am so excited that Fischer are publishing Dugong as a novella. I did wonder, for a while, if I ought to develop it into a full-length novel, but truthfully, the story felt complete;  I sensed that stretching it out, and introducing more characters would dilute the impact. I asked my editor at Fischer if she could time the publication to coincide with COP26, the UN Climate Conference planned for November 2021. She agreed. So it will hit the bookstands in Germany on 27thOctober.

If no UK publisher picks up the story, I will post the English language original onto this blog as a PDF or Kindle file, free to download, to coincide with the German publication. Or drop a comment into this blog and I will email it to you on 27th October.  

And that’s it. That’s why I find myself in the very unusual position of having a book published exclusively in a language that I don’t speak. And it has a beautiful cover. Don’t you agree?

Tracing my Family Tree (6th May 2021)

 I’ve often been sniffy about people who obsess over their family tree. It always felt, to me, a rather pointless exercise to dust-off and parade your male ancestors from the last few generations when we are all pretty much related. I’ve blogged about this before, but it bears repeating. Every human who walked the earth ten thousand years ago is either a direct ancestor of everyone alive today, or else they are an ancestor of none of us. It’s true. Our most recent common ancestor, from whom everyone on the planet is descended, probably lived between 55 BC and 1,400 BC. We are all pretty close cousins. You and me and Kamala Harris and Xi Jinping and the Pope. We are none of us further apart than 27th cousins, but we are almost certainly much closer than that. A shocking statistic for all those people who prefer to believe in racial purity or Brexit – but there we are. *

Anyway. This has always been my objection to family trees. Until I started to trace one. And almost immediately my opinion changed. Genealogy may still be wholly pointless as an exercise in understanding our biological origins. But as a way of uncovering some genuine family stories, it is extraordinarily fascinating. I’m a convert.

It started as a way to while away the long days during the first Covid lockdown. My wife, Sue, wanted to resolve a few puzzles in her family tree. So we started to dig. Ancestry.com proved to be really helpful. Expensive, but ultimately worth it. (We paid the subscriptions for about six months.)  I should warn that it all took rather longer than we anticipated. There is something of a learning curve you need to get past. And we made mistakes. We spent days unravelling the family of one Welsh ancestor who proved not to be an ancestor after all. Never mind. We did uncover a host of stories. Like Sue’s great-great-great-grandfather, born in 1801, who died of exhaustion on Christmas Eve 1869 walking with a heavy bag of Christmas provisions from Whitchurch in Shropshire to Handbridge in Chester, intending to stay with his son – a journey of around 30 miles. He collapsed and died less than a mile from The Old Red Lion in Handbridge – the pub where his son was the landlord. The pub is still there. Or the black sheep of Sue’s family who drifted from job to job in the 1800s, and was fined £10 for assault in 1882 after throwing a cup of tea over his wife. It is endlessly fascinating. We discovered the marriage bans of ancestors who signed the register with a cross. Neither of them could read.

Sue was a Newnes and her mother was a Sargeant. We compiled all the stories we uncovered into a book (for family only of course). After this I had to do my tree too. More fascinating stories, and another book. My dad’s family were cockneys, living in the borough of Bow in the East End of London for five generations. They worked on the railways. I never knew. One of my ancestors, Robert Ironmonger, was indicted for ‘certain petty larcenies’ and transported to his majesties colonies in America in 1774, leaving his wife and baby son (my ancestor) in London. In 1776 the pesky colonists only went and started a revolutionary war and Robert was conscripted to fight for the British. Fascinating! I traced my father’s family line back to a gentleman fittingly called ‘End Ironmonger,’ who appears to have been born sometime around 1400 AD. Or thereabouts. And that’s as far as it goes.

So here I am with some new advice. Check out ancestry.com (they’re not paying me a commission). And have a root through your family stories. You might be surprised what you find.

And by the way ... if you happen to be an Ironmonger or a Newnes or a Sargeant or a Wilson, or if you think you might be related in any way ... drop your email address into the comment field and I'll send you the pdf of the book.

 

*Humans Are All More Closely Related Than We Commonly Think - Scientific American

Tracing my Family Tree

 I’ve often been a bit sniffy about people who obsess about their family tree. It always felt, to me, a rather pointless exercise to dust-off and parade the male ancestors from the last few generations when we are all pretty much related. I’ve blogged about this before, but it bears repeating. Every human who walked the earth ten thousand years ago is either a direct ancestor of everyone alive today, or else they are an ancestor of none of us. It’s true. Our most recent common ancestor, from whom everyone on the planet is descended, probably lived between 55 BC and 1,400 BC. We are all pretty close cousins. You and me and Kamala Harris and Xi Jinping and the Pope. We are none of us further apart than 27th cousins, but we are almost certainly much closer than that. A shocking statistic for all those people who prefer to believe in racial purity or Brexit – but there we are. *

Anyway. This has always been my objection to family trees. Until I started to trace one. And almost immediately my opinion changed. Genealogy may still be wholly pointless as an exercise in understanding our biological origins. But as a way of uncovering some genuine family stories, it is extraordinarily fascinating. I’m a convert.

It started as a way to while away the long days during the first Covid lockdown. My wife, Sue, wanted to resolve a few puzzles in her family tree. So we started to dig. Ancestry.com proved to be really helpful. Expensive, but ultimately worth it. (We paid the subscriptions for about six months.)  I should warn that it all took rather longer than we anticipated. There is something of a learning curve you need to get past. And we made mistakes. We spent days unravelling the family of one Welsh ancestor who proved not to be an ancestor after all. Never mind. We did uncover a host of stories. Like Sue’s great-great-great-grandfather, born in 1801, who died of exhaustion on Christmas Eve 1869 walking with a heavy bag of Christmas provisions from Whitchurch in Shropshire to Handbridge in Chester, intending to stay with his son – a journey of around 30 miles. He collapsed and died less than a mile from The Old Red Lion in Handbridge – the pub where his son was the landlord. The pub is still there. Or the black sheep of Sue’s family who drifted from job to job in the 1800s, and was fined £10 for assault in 1882 after throwing a cup of tea over his wife. It is endlessly fascinating. We discovered the marriage bans of ancestors who signed the register with a cross. Neither of them could read.

Sue was a Newnes and her mother was a Sargeant. We compiled all the stories we uncovered into a book (for family only of course). After this I had to do my tree too. More fascinating stories, and another book. My dad’s family were cockneys, living in the borough of Bow in the East End of London for five generations. They worked on the railways. I never knew. One of my ancestors, Robert Ironmonger, was indicted for ‘certain petty larcenies’ and transported to his majesties colonies in America in 1774, leaving his wife and baby son (my ancestor) in London. In 1776 the pesky colonists only went and started a revolutionary war and Robert was conscripted to fight for the British. Fascinating! I traced my father’s family line back to a gentleman fittingly called ‘End Ironmonger,’ who appears to have been born sometime around 1400 AD. Or thereabouts. And that’s as far as it goes.

So here I am with some new advice. Check out ancestry.com (they’re not paying me a commission). And have a root through your family stories. You might be surprised what you find.

 

*Humans Are All More Closely Related Than We Commonly Think - Scientific American

My Map Pins (35): Lombardy (3rd May 2021)

 Lombardy is a huge piece of geography in the north of Italy and I can never do it justice with a single map pin. But, quite frankly, if you haven’t been to Lombardy yet, what’s keeping you? This is the home of the Italian Lakes. It needs to be on your bucket list. This isn’t a manufactured landscape like the English Lakes, this is Italy rough and raw from Milan to the Alps, from urban to wilderness, possessing some of the most glorious vistas imaginable. Hire a car (a little Fiat 500 is fine), book somewhere reasonably central to stay, and then get out there and explore for a week or so. As well as all the things you’ll discover on TripAdvisor (and there are lots) I’d recommend hiring bicycles to pedal around Lake Varese (it's about 28km all around so not too taxing – although we lost out way at one point and ended up going much further), visiting the Parco del Campo dei Fiori national park and the Santa Maria del Monte Trail, taking the cable car up Laveno Mombello on the edge of Lake Maggiore, and of course those lakes. Ahh, those lakes. Bella. Bella.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: decorate.solves.building

My Map Pins (35): Lombardy

 Lombardy is a huge piece of geography in the north of Italy and I can never do it justice with a single map pin. But, quite frankly, if you haven’t been to Lombardy yet, what’s keeping you? This is the home of the Italian Lakes. It needs to be on your bucket list. This isn’t a manufactured landscape like the English Lakes, this is Italy rough and raw from Milan to the Alps, from urban to wilderness, possessing some of the most glorious vistas imaginable. Hire a car (a little Fiat 500 is fine), book somewhere reasonably central to stay, and then get out there and explore for a week or so. As well as all the things you’ll discover on TripAdvisor (and there are lots) I’d recommend hiring bicycles to pedal around Lake Varese (it's about 28km all around so not too taxing – although we lost out way at one point and ended up going much further), visiting the Parco del Campo dei Fiori national park and the Santa Maria del Monte Trail, taking the cable car up Laveno Mombello on the edge of Lake Maggiore, and of course those lakes. Ahh, those lakes. Bella. Bella.

What3words: decorate.solves.building

My Map Pins (34): Independence Day in Vilnius, Lithuania (23rd April 2021)

 On February 16th every year, Lithuanians come together to celebrate their Independence Day. In Vilnius, celebrations begin around 5pm when it is already dark, with the lighting of thirty symbolic bonfires in the streets of the capital. Yes, you read that right. Massive bonfires in the city streets. How could that not be a good idea? But hey, it’s a party! A very jolly crowd in full independence-day-spirit trails around the city from one huge fire of logs to the next. Pretty well the whole city comes out for this. Alcohol is consumed, songs are sung, flags are waved. There are little stalls like the cabins from a Christmas market selling hot foods and mementos. It’s a night-out for all the family.

As it happens, I knew absolutely nothing about any of this when, in 2011 (or thereabouts), I drove into Vilnius (from Riga in Latvia via Kaunas) on, er, February 16th. I had no idea it was the National Day. I did know that it was brutally cold. Scarily cold. And there was a humongous bonfire right outside my hotel window. It crossed my mind that perhaps this was some odd Baltic approach to keeping the city warm at night. But any excuse for a party. I pulled on my coat and went off to mingle. More of an observer, really, than a party-goer. But I did manage about five bonfires, I drank some very quaffable beer, and ate some curious pastries, I discovered the old town, and I learned about the fierce independent spirit of the Lithuanians. So all good.

what3words /// The simplest way to talk about location

What3words: passion.shop.shelter    
Photo from http://www.lithuanianstories.com/