Alison Mercer's Blog, page 6

After I Left You: the story of my second novel

Every story has its own story – the story of the story. Any debut novel is a tale of hope against the odds; you write it, you have no idea whether it will ever see the light of day, and then, miraculously, it does. That was so for Stop the Clock, my first novel, and yet it’s also true for After I Left You, which I started work on long before. So you could say that After I Left You is my other first novel.

The very first prototype of one of the main characters in After I Left You, which is due to be published in November this year, appeared in a fledgeling story about university students that I began and abandoned way back in 1999. The character who first emerged back then was Clarissa Hayes, the second-generation celebrity whose sitcom actress mother is a national treasure.

Clarissa didn’t start off having a famous mother, but she always seemed like a potential star herself – from the start, for good or ill, she was the sort of character you notice. It’s the presence of Clarissa in After I Left You that takes the story overseas for a brief interlude in 1990s Los Angeles, where three of the characters go rollerblading on Venice Beach – or rather, two go rollerblading and one sits out, for reasons that will become clear when you read the book. (Just to prove that I am a conscientious author and do my research, see above for a snap of me on Venice Beach in 1995.)

Some other elements of the story were present from the very first fragmentary drafts, including the idea of a secret that has caused one person to break away from a group of friends, and will eventually be revealed. Another character who appeared early on was Keith, the melancholy Gothic misfit. He attempted to squeeze into an early draft of Stop the Clock, but was cut out, which was just as well, because After I Left You is certainly where he belongs.

But much of the novel that will be published in November, and is now available for pre-order on Amazon, has only really come together over the last year, once I had decided to tell it from the first person point of view. Anna, who is the eyes and ears of the novel, knows all too well what happened back in the past to prompt her decision to exile herself from her friends, but she’s keeping it to herself. That tension between telling and holding back kept me on my toes as a writer and hopefully will have the same effect on readers too.

I, I, I… but why?

What happened to prompt the choice to write in the first person? While I was working on Stop the Clock over 2009 to 2012 I read all the Twilight books, and then the Hunger Games series. Also, Fifty Shades of Grey sat at the top of the bestseller charts for months on end, and I looked through that too, purely for research purposes of course… All of these books are first person stories, and that’s what gives them a lot of their immediacy and drive.

Another book I tried to learn from is I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith’s brilliant novel which foregrounds the fact that its narrator is not just telling you the story, she’s scribbling it down – right from the start when she tells you ‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink’, and then goes on to explain she’s actually sitting on the draining-board with her feet in the sink, because it’s the last place in the kitchen with any light left. (As good a metaphor as any for the situation in which the woman writer finds herself working, with domestic concerns never far away?)

I’m a big fan of the first person narrative, and always have been. Jane Eyre and The Catcher in the Rye are two of my very favourite books. The first person works brilliantly for coming-of-age stories, and After I Left You is a coming-of-age story with a twenty-year interval, so it struck me as an approach I should try.

I also love Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which puts age in sharp contrast with youth, and has a story-within-the-story – you’ll find a bit of that in After I Left You, too.

The novel as timetravelling machine

After I Left You has two timelines, one set in the early 1990s and one in the present day, which was fun for me because I could time travel, which is something that, in my view, the novel does better than any other art form. (See The Time Traveler’s Wife, which does this so brilliantly it was always going to be hard for the film to match up.)

Like zillions of other readers, I was very taken by One Day, and part of the pleasure of that was recognising the times that the characters pass through, from the late 1980s up to the present day, which are so sharply and astutely observed; I started a little later and missed out all the years in between, but was able to play with a similar timescale.

Where? An Oxford novel, or a novel set in Oxford?

Another decision that I made at a late stage was the decision to set After I Left You fair and square in Oxford. Now, I love Oxford, and Oxfordshire, which is where I live. But I was nervous about writing about Oxford students. Brideshead Revisited, another book that I love, casts a long and rather daunting shadow, although of course it isn’t really about Oxford students at all; it’s about the big, universal themes – love, family, loss, change and the passing of time; innocence giving way to experience; wrongdoing and redemption.

Actually even Brideshead isn’t even quite what you think it is. When I re-read it I was amused to find a scene I had quite forgotten, in which the students go up to London and get bladdered and drive the wrong way up a road and nearly end up getting arrested. Not so much of the cricket jumpers and fine wines, more your everyday big-night-out-on-the-town bender. But anyway, you’ll find at least two sideways nods to Brideshead in After I Left You; a scene in which somebody throws up, and another, on a quite different note, that takes place in a chapel.

My editor helped to get me over my scruples over setting After I Left You in Oxford by sending me Jilly Cooper’s Harriet, which opens with an account of Harriet, an innocent student, being quizzed by a rather randy-seeming tutor about which of Shakespeare’s characters would be best in bed. (She reckons, not Hamlet – he would have talked too much). So then I just got on with it and Oxford fell into the place in the story that it should really have had all along.

Another novel set in Oxford (but not explicitly about students) that I’m an admirer of is Charlotte Mendelson’s fantastic Daughters of Jerusalem, just for the record.

The story behind the story

Stevie Smith typed on yellow office paper while working as a secretary; Colette was locked into a room by her husband; Jane Austen wrote in the drawing-room and covered up her work when somebody entered. There’s always a story behind the story, and when we read we often want to know about that other story, too.

When my first novel, Stop the Clock, was published in August 2012 I knew exactly what the story behind it was: it seemed clear and distinct, with a structured timeframe and a hopeful ending. The first draft was written in instalments over the course of a year, a chapter a month, and handed over to a colleague, a fellow part-time working mother, in a series of A4 envelopes. A writer friend, Neel Mukherjee, suggested an agent to approach; two rewrites later, it found a publisher.

Shortly before Stop the Clock came out, my son, then four, was diagnosed with autism. The experiences of working on the novel and having it published, and working towards that diagnosis and obtaining it and moving on, are intertwined for me. The book was a breakthrough that helped to keep me upbeat, and the diagnosis was a traumatic but fundamentally positive watershed that showed the way to our family’s future.

‘So is it easier second time round?’ This is a question that friends have asked me a few times over the last few months, and I’ve found it hard to answer, because, like one birth compared to another, it has just been so different. One thing I do remember, though. Some years ago, around 2007 or 2008, I ceremonially posted off the first three chapters of an earlier version of After I Left You to a selection of agents (not including Judith Murdoch, the brilliant agent I am now represented by, who I approached later on with Stop the Clock.)

The agents who saw this early version of After I Left You all rejected it so fast it made my head spin, and probably they were quite right to do so, as it was a long way from taking the shape it has now. Anyway, that was obviously a bit of a downer, but not at all the end of the story.

Because what I really remember from that experience was this. I had gone into Oxford with my husband, and we sent off the chapters from the post office on St Aldate’s before going out for a celebratory lunch. And it felt special. It felt Christmas Eve, when everything is quiet and expectant, and the magic is just about to kick in. It felt like something was going to happen. And now it is.

What readers want to know about writers (and Stop the Clock)

Meeting groups of readers is the closest I’ve come to having the stuff I’ve made up and stuck in a book come to life. Here, suddenly, is a group of women (sometimes with a few men!) talking about my characters as if they’re real people, who might walk into the room and join us at any moment. It’s a salutary reminder of how much readers bring to a book, and what a strange alchemy reading is.

Inevitably, readers have different ideas about books, just as we all have our own views of what’s going on around us in real life – otherwise, what would book groups ever find to debate? But often there’s some consensus, and sometimes readers have similar questions to ask writers. Here are some questions that I’ve been asked by groups of book lovers (most recently the Oxfordshire branch of the National Council of Women, who had way more life experience between them than any other group I’ve spoken to, and were as perceptive as they were good-humoured).

Do you really write every evening?

As the press release for Stop the Clock explained, it was written between the hours of nine and midnight. That’s most nights from spring 2009 to around January 2012. But, if I’m really honest, not all nights. Sometimes Homeland was on. And sometimes I fell asleep when I put my children to bed. And sometimes I had just finished a draft and gave myself a week off to watch a DVD box set (hello, Game of Thrones).

I know lots of writers say you ABSOLUTELY MUST WRITE EVERY DAY or you will turn into a pumpkin. I’m sure this is very sound advice, along with the guidance that we should all exercise three times a week and eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. I don’t always manage those either. (Ahem. I think I’m better at writing consistently than either keeping fit or consuming fruit.) So the honest answer to this question is, mostly, especially when in a deadline panic. But… not always.

How much do you plan in advance?

I know one writer (a screenwriter) who won’t allow himself to start work until he’s figured out absolutely everything that’s going to happen and can’t bear to hold back from getting on with it any longer. I don’t work like that at all, though maybe it would make my life easier if I did.

Stop the Clock started with characters rather than plot. I had a rough idea of what each character was going to go through, but although I gave them a bit of a steer, I didn’t know when I first set pen to paper exactly how it was going to turn out. What happened to them over time became apparent over successive drafts.

My work-in-progress had a slightly different starting point, a revelation scene – a revelation from the heroine to the reader – that I wrote very early on. Much of the rest of the process of writing the book was finding out how the heroine got to that point and what happened to her afterwards.

I think perhaps I plan relatively little, and then have no option but to plot: to scheme, manipulate, form alliances, and generally attempt to manoeuvre my characters – and the reader, who is just as unseen and imagined – into the parts I envisage them playing. As I go along, sequences of events present themselves and I scribble them down. Not so much planning as ‘plot and jot’.

I also listen to music. That’s my secret weapon. There’s nothing like a song for giving you a short cut to a particular mood. It’s amazing how music can bring emotions to the surface in three minutes flat that a book will toil away over hundreds of pages to elicit.

Do you do much research?

I think this is a very shrewd question. The flip-side of it is, How much do you make up, and how much do you draw from life? And it’s almost impossible to answer honestly, because just about everything is research. And at the same time, when it comes down to it, I make it all up.

The research aide I relied on most heavily for Stop the Clock – apart from my magpie memory and years of conversation with interesting friends – was a table in Sheila Kitzinger’s The New Pregnancy and Childbirth which is designed to help you calculate your due date. It was quite a headache getting everybody to reproduce within feasible timescales and when I wanted them to.

I also like asking myself ‘What if?’ and seeing what comes out.

What do male readers make of Stop the Clock?

I’ve been particularly intrigued by male readers’ reactions to this story, which is so much about women’s relationships with each other and women getting to grips with motherhood – or thinking that they would prefer not to. Some of the very earliest readers were male – my husband, the poet Ian Pindar, and the novelist Neel Mukherjee, who both encouraged me to set about trying to get it published.

Since then? The reactions have been unpredictable and surprising. I think the warmest responses have come from men of around my own age who have young-ish children. There was the twentysomething who gamely gave it a go, and diplomatically told me that he realised he wasn’t the target demographic. Though the truth is, there wasn’t really a target − if you’re at all interested, you’re it! There was also the older man who observed that it was ‘a bit birthy’. Which it is… But that’s life, I guess!

In general, amongst my very favourite reader responses are: the reader who cried; the reader who missed a tube stop; and the reader who promptly booked a holiday to Cornwall. (One of those was male, two female. The man cried.) That pretty much sums up what I wanted the book to do: to make you feel, to make you forget yourself, and to take you somewhere else.

The archetypal story you’ll end up telling, whatever you set out to write

I’ve been working like a mad thing on my second novel (title tbc) over the last couple of months. The second draft is now done, so I thought I’d take advantage of the respite to write about a book that I discovered thanks to the poet Ian Pindar, my other half, who has a knack for unearthing interesting things.

This particular find is called The Writer’s Journey, and it’s by Christopher Vogler. It’s primarily aimed at screenwriters (it discusses various films, from Star Wars to Pulp Fiction) but would probably be interesting for anyone who aspires to tell stories, because it looks at the mechanics of how stories work.

It does this in two ways: it discusses a number of archetypal characters, and then it sets out the different stages of the archetypal journey that any hero (even an anti-hero) goes on. If that sounds reductive, it isn’t – the book makes it very clear that it’s all in the telling. Part of what creativity is about, after all, is putting together elements that are familiar and shared (and what is more familiar and shared than language?) in new and unexpected ways.

I won’t set out to précis the whole book, because the edition we have runs to more than 400 pages… and if you’re keen to explore what it’s all about in depth, you’d probably be better off getting it straight from the horse’s mouth. But here’s a selective taster.

Heroes: not always heroic, especially to begin with

The hero is usually confronted with an initial call to adventure, and to start off with, often resists or refuses the call. The hero(ine) of my work-in-progress does a fair bit of this – it really takes a lot to get her over the threshold and into the next stage. It’s as if there’s a force acting to keep the hero in place, to preserve things as they are, and it takes extra impetus to get them to go forward and to begin to change.

At this point the hero may encounter a herald, who announces the call to adventure; a threshold guardian, who makes the barrier between the hero and the next stage – the special world of the adventure – even harder to get through; and/or a mentor, who is there to help the hero on her way. All these roles are fluid, so the same character might take on more than one function in the story at the same or at different times; they are like costumes or masks that may be put on or discarded.

The mentor: the quasi-parental figure who disappears when no longer needed

The mentor can be a teacher, protector or guardian, serving a quasi-parental role; they are there to give the hero whatever insight is needed for the next stage of the action. The mentor’s part in the story may come to an end as soon the hero has taken sufficient information on board.

So, for example, in Game of Thrones, Sylvio Forel teaches Arya how to fight. His last piece of advice to Arya is to run, and she does, as he holds off the soldiers who have come to capture her. We don’t actually see him die (I don’t know whether any more detail emerges about his fate later on); we assume that he has been killed, but Arya thinks back to all the advice he gave her about how to be stealthy, alert and brave throughout her time on the run, so it is almost as if he is still with her.

Arya’s not the only character on a heroic path in Game of Thrones, mind you, not by a long chalk – it’s an epic spaghetti junction of individual journeys, at least some of which end in death. I’m only on the second book, and that goes for two of the heroes already.

Sometimes whole stories turn on the hero-mentor relationship – the film The King’s Speech is a good example. And sometimes the mentor function’s of imparting knowledge is partly accomplished by the hero spending a couple of hours on the internet, as in the sequence in the film of Twilight when Bella does her research and figures out what Edward really is.

Mentors aren’t always lovely and kind and inclined to do the best for their charges, either – they may not even want to let them go. Jeremy, Tina’s blunt and rather appalling boss in Stop the Clock, is a mentor of sorts, as is her married lover, but they are not exactly straightforward role models, and the lessons she learns from them are ambiguous and uncomfortable. Perhaps they both include a tinge of shadow (of which more later).

The special world: different to the ordinary world, not always in a good way

On to the next stage: the hero’s arrival in the special world. I love this concept: the special world is the world of the story, the place where change is possible, but it isn’t necessarily magical – it’s just different to where the heroine started out.

So, for example, Sara in A Little Princess starts off rich, and finds herself reduced to poverty and servitude, from which she eventually emerges having learned, among other things, how differently some people will treat you when you’re well-off compared to when you’re not (in the words of the song, Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out.)

Jane Eyre goes through more than one special world: Lowood, Thornfield Hall, the moors after her flight from marriage to Rochester, and St John Rivers’ house. For Thelma and Louise, the special world is the road trip; for the king and the therapist in The King’s Speech, it’s the treatment room.

Once you’re through to the special world, you’re particularly likely to encounter allies, tests and enemies, and the shadow may make a particularly forceful appearance. Jane Eyre’s already had Mrs Reed and John, her horrible cousin, to deal with: in Lowood there’s Mr Brocklehurst, shadow par excellence, whose hypocrisy and cruelty represent a kind of false goodness – false Christianity, even – that Jane will set herself against as she learns to trust her own heart and instincts.

Bella has James, the tracker, on her trail – and he finds her at the conclusion of a sequence which confirms her (sometimes unstable) alliance with the Cullen vampire family (when they go out to play baseball – what an all-American ally scene that is! – showing that they’re on the way to becoming a team.)

Here’s an interesting point about something that often happens at this stage: the visit to the watering hole – often, literally, a bar, as in the fantastic alien space bar sequence in Star Wars, which is probably one of my favourite film moments ever. The watering hole is a place where characters can clash (or flirt) and the truth may be revealed, like the cafe scenes in Stop the Clock when Natalie finds out more about Adele. (Allies – the pack of friends – have a huge role to play in my work-in-progress, and it has a lot of watering hole scenes.)

The shapeshifter: doubt, suspense, romance

Adele in Stop the Clock is a shapeshifter – Natalie is never really clear about what she wants, or intends (but then, Natalie is uncertain about her own desires too). Shapeshifters often crop up in romance: Mr Rochester even goes so far as to dress up as an old gypsy woman. They may be lethal (the femme fatale type). They bring doubt and suspense and are a catalyst for change (Adele is most certainly that).

The Twilight saga is full of shapeshifters, obv. I guess Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades books fits the bill, too, with a bit of mentor and shadow thrown in – is he a lover, or a horrible controlling sadist? He’s certainly in charge of an occasionally alarming special world.

The shadow: depending on your point of view

So… what about the shadow? Shadows aren’t necessarily all bad, and, indeed, in their own eyes, they may be perfectly reasonable (I’m sure Mr Brocklehurst thought of himself as a good man, a hero even, and regarded Helen Burns as a repository of villainous tendencies). Their function is to challenge and oppose the hero… and the hero may behave in a shadowy way himself at times.

The shadow’s story may be the inverse of the hero’s, with moments of triumph when the hero is at his lowest. I’ve just seen the film of Les Misérables, and was struck by how the relationship between the implacable policeman Javert and the former convict Jean Valjean follows this pattern.

Valjean goes on to forge a new identity, but Javert cannot bear to let him go. Valjean’s freedom torments him just as the prospect of a return to captivity torments Valjean. They represent wholly different and incompatible views of the law – Valjean believes in forgiveness, mercy and redemption, Javer only accepts the rule of right and wrong, and cannot contemplate the possibility that someone could be capable of change. Ultimately, one of them will have to be extinguished in order for the other to survive.

Shadows may come in unexpected (shapeshifting) forms; Cordelia in Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye is a monstrous shadow whose activities very nearly lead to the destruction of the heroine.

Ordeal and climax: life and death – twice over

Stop the Clock has a crisis scene that draws together the major characters about two-thirds of the way through. But that is not the end of the story, the final unravelling of the knots; for each character, there’s still a further confrontation to come, some more unfinished business to be dealt with.

The Writer’s Journey makes an interesting distinction between crisis or ordeal and climax. It quotes Webster’s definition of a crisis: ‘the point in a story or drama in which hostile forces are in the tensest state of opposition’. The ordeal effects a brutal and irrevocable transformation in the hero, and is a scene of death and resurrection. This is subtly different from the climax, a final confrontation, showdown or test which shows how the hero has changed and been reborn.

In Les Misérables, the crisis of the battle at the barricades puts Valjean and Javer on opposite sides of the uprising. It is followed by an astonishing sequence in which Valjean carries the injured Marius – his adoptive daughter Cosette’s hope of future love – through the sewers of Paris, emerging into the light to find Javer waiting for him.

There is a further climax to follow: Valjean must overcome his shame and tell Cosette who he really is. In doing so, he brings back not only Cosette’s mother Fantine – as if they have actually been a family all this time, separated only by death – but also the wider family of the comrades on the barricades. It’s like the sequence at the end of Titanic in which Rose returns the jewel to the sea and reclaims not only her long-lost love, but everybody else who was on board.

It may be that the point of the crisis is that it resurrects the hero, while the power of the climax is that it brings life back to everybody – even the reader (or viewer), creating a strange emotional rush that will send you on your way conscious that you’ve been somewhere else, and are now back in your ordinary world, but subtly changed. 

My best reads of 2012

The books pages are filling up with round-ups of what people most enjoyed reading this year, and here’s my contribution. Most of my choices are fiction, but there’s a bit of poetry and non-fiction in there as well – and only two books with a 2012 publication date. I tend to let the idea of a book grow on me, or go with recommendations or gifts, rather than struggling to keep up with all the latest releases… Or in the case of Game of Thrones, I watch it on DVD first!

I haven’t included Fifty Shades of Grey, which I couldn’t honestly say I enjoyed, though it did pique my interest, and it is currently the only book in the house hidden away out of children’s reach, so I guess that’s a testimonial of a sort. (Here’s my blog post about why I prefer Jilly Cooper’s Octavia.)

There’s plenty in the list below that has made me think, taken me out of myself, made me see the world differently, and, in some cases, prompted me to wonder how I could ever have left it so long before coming to the book in question.

Still, sometimes you just hit upon the right novel at the right time… So here are 10 of my favourite reads of the year, in no particular order.

1. Game of Thrones, by George R R Martin

I’m filled with admiration for this. The scope and boldness of it, the Shakespearean echoes, the vivid and entirely real characters fighting for survival in a fantasy world, the way each chapter is paced and shaped… Onto the second volume in the series now. Here’s an earlier blog post in praise of Game of Thrones.

2. Constellations, by Ian Pindar

My other half’s second poetry collection came out in May this year, and has just received a wonderful review (along with Emporium, his debut) in the TLS. Musical, beautiful, elusive, melancholy and profound. You can read more about it and about Ian’s other work on his blog.

3. Bing Yuk!, by Ted Dewan

This gets my award for the children’s book that gave us all most pleasure this year. My autistic son had spent a lot of time reading Jelly and Bean books with me, and they are amazing – he was able to decode them in a way that was simply not possible with other books. Then I read Bing Yuk! to him and he was absolutely charmed. (He is a much more fussy eater than Bing Bunny, who won’t attempt a tomato, but does like lots of other things.) ‘Bip!’ and ‘Sput!’ have pretty much acquired the status of catchphrases round here… Meanwhile, my daughter enjoyed the Harry Potter novels, which made for some later-than-ideal bedtimes.

4. The War Against Cliché, by Martin Amis

I struggle a bit with Martin Amis, simply because he was a writer that boys, or I suppose young-ish men, liked when I was studying English and they were too, and I couldn’t ever quite get over the suspicion that they had appropriated him because they felt that in some way he was on their side and not on mine. It’s something to do with that scene in The Rachel Papers… Anyway, I read this collection of prose this year and must admit, albeit reluctantly, that it is blooming brilliant. Dammit.

5. Heartburn, by Nora Ephron

For humour at the edge of heartbreak: unbeatable. Memorable for, among many other scenes, the description of how the narrator’s family made its money, and her mother’s expletive-peppered reaction to finding herself in goyishe heaven after a near-death experience (she promptly decided to come back to life).

6. I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

I can’t believe it took me so long to discover this novel. Charming, dry, funny and sad coming-of-age tale in which the daughters of a helplessly blocked writer pit their wits against poverty, hunger and the inconvenience of living in a crumbling castle. A great book for any writer to read, since so much of it is about putting pen to paper (or putting it off).

7. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Ian told me he saw someone walk down the street reading this, and then cross over without looking up and carry on along the other side of the road. Dangerously addictive. Very carefully put together so as to maintain your sympathy for a heroine who might just have no choice but to kill.

8. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

Horrible Miss Hilly finally gets her comeuppance… and Skeeter gets the help she needs to tell the story she wants to tell. The stakes are high, but in the end the truth comes out… The plot is driven along by a plan to write a dangerous book in the face of an impossible deadline, and there is plenty of anxiety about the book’s possible reception. Seems to me that Kathryn Stockett wrote her own fears about the story she was telling, how it would go down with her readers, and whether she was entitled to tell it at all, into the heart of the narrative – and that combination of dread and compulsion is part of what gives it its power.

The Help, I Capture the Castle, and Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart, which I’m going to mention later on, all feature in this blog post about the way writers treat the subject of writing in their fiction.

9. Merivel, A Man of His Time, by Rose Tremain

I read Restoration, which features the same hero, back when I was still at school, and associate it loosely with A S Byatt’s Possession, pre-Raphaelite paintings, and going to see a French film in London for the first time (it was Gerard Depardieu in Cyrano de Bergerac, at, I think, The Lumiere). I’ve read very little historical fiction since, and I didn’t know what to expect from this new novel, which catches up with Merivel in middle age, but I certainly wouldn’t have expected a tale of queasy romantic compromise, near-starvation in Versailles, and a tragically thwarted attempt to save a bear.

… and some more great reads…

Top ten lists are a bit artificial aren’t they? It’s a format that lends itself to omissions. So here are some extras.

Bonus mention goes to The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which is about archetypal elements of stories – the relationships between the hero and characters such as the mentor and the shapeshifter, the trials and setbacks that have to be overcome on the hero’s journey. It explores the fresh twist given to age-old archetypes by films as varied as Star Wars, Pulp Fiction and Titanic, but when you start to look, you can see the story structures he talks about all over the place. (I spotted some in Stop the Clock! And now I know why crucial scenes so often happen in bars!)

Among other storytelling tips, I took away from this book the advice that you should be sure to have enough hazard in your fiction. A hero has to be up against it. Up against nothing much won’t do.

Also this year, I enjoyed my first ebook, though I read it on PC rather than Kindle so I’m still lagging behind the times: A Matter of Degree, by local author Beckie Henderson, a story of romance and poison pen letters set in academia, which opened my eyes as to what might be going on behind the scenes in higher education. Here’s Beckie Henderson’s blog about being a working mother.

I’m going to wrap up with a shout out to the writers who are mentioned in the acknowledgements to my first novel, Stop the Clock: Jaishree Misra, who has written six novels; Anna Lawrence Pietroni, whose debut, Ruby’s Spoon, blends magic with a Black Country 1930s setting, and tells the tale of a girl whose longing for adventure is granted when a mysterious stranger comes to town; and Neel Mukherjee, whose novel A Life Apart follows the stories of an Indian student in England and an Englishwoman in India. (Ian Pindar, my other half, is mentioned in the acknowledgements for Stop the Clock as well, of course.)

Final honourable mention goes to The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Essays, edited by Ian Hamilton, full of gems like George Orwell’s essay on Englishness, and Martha Gellhorn’s account of Ernest Hemingway getting into a butch-off with a Spanish Republican Army general, in ‘Memory’.

My reading ambition for 2013: rationalise the books. They are everywhere, in tottering heaps round my desk, in the kitchen cupboards… The writing’s on the wall. Ebooks are the way to go.

Q and A with an artist: Greg Rook and his Survivors paintings

The Cornfield, by Greg Rook

It’s a long time since I’ve been to a private view, but back in October I left the school run to my other half and got the train to the OMT Gallery in Deptford, where I saw these fantastic paintings.

I think they’re beautiful, but also a little sinister and unsettling – you can guess at the relationships between the people in them, but you can’t quite tell what’s going on. It’s like catching a glint of a story out of the corner of your eye.

Morning with plough, by Greg Rook

‘Not so mock heroic paintings of our past potential futures’

I know Greg Rook, the artist – twenty years ago, we were students together – but I don’t know anything much about him as an artist. I’m always interested to know, with writing, how other writers set about their work – cork-lined study? Pyjamas? Kitchen table? Morning? Evening? – and I was curious to find out more about what went into this series of paintings, and how they developed. So I asked Greg if he’d do a guest Q & A post on my blog, and here it is.

What prompted you to make the Survivors series of paintings? (Did you see the recent remake?) Besides the TV series, was there anything else that provided inspiration?

Greg: The original and remake acted as an inspiration in that they seemed like a right wing, apocalyptic reaction to ‘The Good Life’. Both the original ‘Survivors’ and ‘The Good Life’ were first broadcast in 1975 and they function as opposed versions of potential futures imagined in the sixties and seventies.

I was brought up understanding ‘The Good Life’ to be some kind of ideal – affable, well-intentioned making-do and self-reliance were the cornerstone of my moral upbringing – and yet the more I romanticise an agrarian, self-sufficient lifestyle, the more I fear that it will only come about, not through enlightened, progressive thinking, but through disaster and collapse.

Harvest, by Greg Rook

What was the process – how did you set about them?

Greg: As with my earlier cowboy paintings, it is important that there is some remove between me and the imagery, as there is between me and the lifestyle – there is a level of naivety in my romanticising.

I spend months searching on the internet, through films and in specialist  ‘backwoods’ and ‘survivalist’ books and magazines sourced online, looking for the right figures and landscapes, researching the commune and off–grid movements that have been proposed and that have existed. I hoard, sort and refine until I have a body of images to work with. For this series I found myself particularly drawn to English Georgic landscapes, seventies US communes and Soviet social realism.

With my source imagery I set about creating collages in Photoshop. For this series I would have produced over a hundred from which I eventually paint about a dozen. In painting the chosen few I try to harmonise the different sources and yet let it remain evident that these are collaged from paintings, black and white photographs, film stills and drawings.

Landscape with goat, by Greg Rook

Where did you work on them? (What’s your studio like?) What do you have around you when you’re working?

Greg: I have a beautiful studio overlooking the canal in Bethnal Green. I’m surrounded by all the paintings that I’m still working on, as I work on all the paintings in the series at the same time, and a wall of windows watching the boats and towpath pedestrians as they pass. I nearly always have podcasts playing in the background – arts, politics, comedy. I find music a bit overwhelming whilst I’m working, and silence even more so.

How long did they take to do? Was there a particular pattern or routine to the time you spent on them ?

Greg: I work on all the paintings, in stages, at the same time – they are all sketched out, then I work on each one for a day. Some are finished at this point. Some need another day. Some need rescuing and I have to come back to them again and again. As much as I enjoy the freshness of the paintings that work first time, I get great satisfaction from bringing a painting back from the brink of disaster.

Untitled (pigs), by Greg Rook

The people in the paintings are doing various tasks – some of them labouring away, others not so much. If you were a Survivor, what do you think you’d end up doing?

Greg: Part of the ambiguity in my take on commune living, agrarian life styles and self-sufficiency lies in the fact that, although I romanticise it, I suspect I would be a terrible survivor. Although I might have some of the skills or knowledge, I lack the inclination.

Are the women working harder than the men?

Greg: A previous series of paintings saw men indulging in foot washing, laying on of hands and snake handling. I worry about men’s tendency to get lost in beliefs and self-importance and I predict that women would carry the burden of providing following a collapse. I imagine factions, sects, conspiracies and theories occupying the men’s time.

Untitled (tents), by Greg Rook

Do you think these Survivors are going to survive?

Greg: Ultimately we are adaptable and our happiness is relative to our circumstances. If are expectations become limited then our aspirations shrink to fit, and what we require to survive adapts accordingly.

Which artists do you think have most influenced you (and these paintings)?

Greg: There are always paintings that inspire you to paint, and often very different works that are referenced or inspire you to make a particular painting. I love Michael Borremans’ ‘Red hand, Green hand’, George Braque’s studio paintings, Phillip Guston’s ‘Ravine’, ‘Pit’ or ‘Ancient Wall’, to pick a few. But in this series I’ve used Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, whilst perhaps being most directly influenced in the way I approach the paintings by the work of Neil Tate, Varda Caivano, Edouard Vuillard and the drawings of Van Gogh. Then again the colours owe a debt to early Technicolor and the hand tinted photographs of the early 1900s.

If you had to describe your work in 140 characters, what would you say? (I know, I know – I got asked this one about my writing. Mine was, “you may laugh now, but wait for the dying fall”).

Greg: Not so mock heroic paintings of our past potential futures.

Is there a famous painting , or other work of art, you’d particularly like to be able to borrow for a bit and have around the house? (Choose more than one if you like…)

Greg: At the moment it would be ‘Red hand, Green hand’ by Michael Borremans. It makes my hands itch with wanting to paint.

What’s your next project?

Greg: I’m not yet done with this series of work. There will be another show documenting this ‘group’ as they continue to construct their lives.

Corn Dolly, by Greg Rook

You can see more of the Survivors paintings and other work on Greg’s website.

Aftermath of a scandal: Winterbourne View, Panorama, and my family’s fears

I avoided watching the Panorama documentary on the Winterbourne View private hospital when it aired – my husband sat through it, but I couldn’t bring myself to. As we are parents of a child with a learning disability, inevitably, when the Winterbourne View scandal broke, both of us were struck by the same fear: ‘What if that were to happen to our son?’

When our daughter caught a glimpse of a recent TV report about the trial and conviction of a number of the former workers from Winterbourne View, and picked up the gist of what was going on, she was horrified – I mean real horror, the sort you see represented in films when a malevolent stalker breaks into the family home, intent on harm.

I think (hope) we were able to reassure her. Perhaps it is a measure of how kindly our boy has been treated at school, by professionals and by the community around us that she was so profoundly shocked by the idea that anyone would behave in that way to people who had similar difficulties to her brother.

But can we really feel confident that our son is safe from the danger of ill-treatment at some Winterbourne View hell of the future? I think not. And it’s no good thinking ‘over my dead body!’ Now that I’ve finally brought myself to watch bits of the original Panorama documentary, and the follow-up, still available here on the BBC iPlayer, I can see how little control families have over what happens to their loved ones, who, it seems, can be whisked away to the other end of the country at a moment’s notice. Interesting how this seems to have happened on a couple of occasions when concerns about care had been flagged up.

Who could forget Simon Tovey, the affectionate, bear-hugging chap who was bullied and ill-treated at Winterbourne View? His mother, Ann Earley, describes here the guilt she felt over what happened to him. But the Panorama documentary shows what Simon Tovey’s family was up against: a cruel, senseless, but all-powerful system that, faced with a request for an extra £600 a week to pay for the care Simon needed at a local care home, ultimately sent him off, via another care home, to Winterbourne View – for years on end.

Before a decision was made to take Simon out of the local care home, he was assessed by doctors – but in a hospital environment, and, Ann Earley says in the Panorama documentary, when she questioned this, she was told that if she didn’t agree, Simon would be sectioned.

Now Simon’s back at that local care home, near his family, and this is costing £1,400 a week LESS than Winterbourne View.

Here are some more interesting numbers. A placement at Winterbourne View cost £3,500 a week. Yes, that’s right, £3,500 a week… for what? Staff were paid on average £16,000 a year. The undercover reporter, Joe Casey, who filmed the abuse at Winterbourne View, was paid around £303 a week for 12-hour daily shifts. According to my calculations, that would have covered 11 members of staff for each person placed in the hospital.

Where did all that money go? And why is it acceptable to lavish taxpayer money on poorly regulated private companies at a time when the government is determined to cut back on the relatively meagre sums that go directly to disabled people or their families?

What about the people in charge, those higher up the organisation that owned and operated Winterbourne View? This 2011 article in Community Care about the management structure of Castlebeck makes interesting reading.

So what about Castlebeck now? According to its website, it’s ‘following a wide ranging framework of change’, and ‘The safety and well-being of the people who use our services remains our top priority.’ So that’s all right then.

As for those former Winterbourne View workers who have been sentenced… We can only hope that they will change their attitudes and the way they behave, and won’t find fresh victims to target in prison. According to this research by the Prison Reform Trust, around 8% of general population has a learning disability or borderline learning disability, and this rises to around 32% in the prison population.

Here’s what the National Autistic Society has to say about the aftermath of Winterbourne View: ‘Far too many people with autism are sent away to assessment and treatment units, and other institutional settings, which are often miles away from their homes and families.’ It believes the Government must act to stop

poor commissioning
lack of training of staff
lack of regard for human rights and poor safeguarding procedures
inflexible funding arrangements

Yes. A thousand times yes. The system needs to change. But even that won’t be enough to rid us of the fear that one day, our affectionate, placid, but vulnerable son will fall victim to the sort of ill-treatment that Joe Casey caught on camera at Winterbourne View.

In praise of Bond. James Bond

Growing up in an all-female household and going to an all-girls’ secondary school had the effect of making me hopelessly curious about men. But where was I to find out about these strange trouser-wearing creatures? When I got to 17, I finally discovered the answer, which was: down the pub. But till then, I had to make do with books. Bond became a formative influence, a sort of ghostly proxy uncle, offering, or so I thought, a sneaky insight into what men were really like, and what they wanted.

So what do men really want? Nowadays, I would probably say: a quiet life, with suitable technological entertainments to hand, a comfy sofa and an amenable lady. But in the world according to Bond, men wanted danger: the lethal ski run, the underwater swim round the villain’s yacht with a Geiger counter in hand, sex with the villain’s girl.

Bond liked to gamble, and drive fast, and drink, and did not like to lose, or ever want to settle down: he feared boredom much more than death, and was not at all domesticated. He didn’t even believe in garaging his car, because fumbling round with garage doors slowed you down and broke your fingernails and, anyway, cars ought to be able to start in the cold.

‘What every man would like to be, and every woman wants’ 

The blurb on the back of one of the Bond books we had at home proclaimed, ‘James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between the sheets,’ or words to that effect. I suppose there’s a subtle, but important, distinction between what one wants (the sofa and a good book), and what one wants to be, or take to bed (the fantasy the book contains).

My attitude to Ian Fleming’s books is muddled up with the image projected by the Bond films. Now I perceive the films as a slick but compelling franchise, but, back in the 80s, when I stayed up late in the run-up to Christmas, sitting close to the telly with the sound turned down low to watch whichever Bond was on that year, the films seemed exotic, glamorous, and, well – sexy. None of which was particularly British – and yet Bond was.

This was the era of Moonraker and Roger Moore, who played it all a little tongue in cheek, not that I was particularly aware of that. I remember the villain with the mouthful of silver teeth, a bit of crocodile-hopping, the soft, malevolent hands stroking a long-haired white cat, and, of course, the Bond girl who slept with Bond and then didn’t wake, because she’d been covered in gold. I remember, also, piranhas in the pool, and one of those classic masochistic scenes in which Bond is pinioned, spread-eagled and about to face damage to a crucial part of his anatomy, although in the end his manhood is preserved.

Even though the image of the books and the image of the films tend to blur, the books have a quite separate life of their own. Here are some glimpses of Bond and his world from the books that particularly stick in my memory (and I can only apologise if my memory has reinvented them):

Bond was kicked out of Eton at the age of 13 after being found in bed with a chambermaid.
Bond’s secretary, Miss Moneypenny, is helplessly in love with him.
Honeychile Ryder in Dr No does not, in fact, wear a bikini. She has a badly broken nose, and when she first sees Bond, she is naked, and her instinctive reaction is to cover her face and her crotch (she isn’t bothered about her breasts); he is reminded of a rearranged Aphrodite emerging from the waves. There is then a scene involving the sucking of sea urchin spines out of someone’s foot, though whether it’s Honeychile or Bond doing the sucking I really can’t remember.
The opening of Diamonds are Forever: very short, something about a scorpion, no Bond in sight. Life is nasty, brutish and short, is the message.
Tiffany Case, the woman in Diamonds are Forever: tough, vulnerable, survivor… but a Bond who took to family life wouldn’t be Bond, so even though he falls properly in love with her, she has to be written out.
A scene in a health spa in which Bond engages in some rather brutal one-upmanship which leaves a fellow guest with third-degree burns.
Patricia Fearing, who was, I think, some kind of therapist at the spa, and ends up experiencing Bond on the back seat of her bubble car.
Somebody (perhaps Patricia Fearing? Or Mary Goodnight?) who impressed Bond as potentially more exciting than the other women she was with because she ordered a strawberry daiquiri rather than something non-alcoholic.
Bond turning down the option of an emergency suicide pill which could have been stashed in one of his teeth.
In The Man with a Golden Gun, Mary Goodnight’s arm smelled of Chanel no 5. Chanel no 5 has been my favourite perfume ever since.

In praise of Game of Thrones

Someone older and wiser once told me, ‘You can get away with a lot if you can do characters.’ I think there’s a lot of truth in this. One of the great pleasures of reading is getting to know people who seem real, even though they’re only made of words.

On the evidence of the DVD box set of the first series of Game of Thrones, George R R Martin can do a lot more than characters, but character is something he does spectacularly well. Maybe that’s part of why his fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire has exerted such powerful crossover appeal, and won over readers and, ultimately, an audience who aren’t all that familiar with the fantasy genre. (I’ve just ordered the first book in the series – can’t wait!)

Truthful characters, fantasy world

We’ve just finished watching the box set of Game of Thrones, having put it off till after I’d finished the first draft of my new novel. I knew it would be amazing – and it was. It’s a pretty unbeatable combination: the alien, unknown world that you escape into and get to know, peopled with characters who are absolutely believable. If the characters weren’t real, the fantasy might not seem so either; but because there’s so much truthfulness in the way they behave, you give yourself up to the whole of the world they inhabit. That little doubting, sceptical voice in the back of the mind that says, ‘Oh come on, this is ridiculous, it would never happen,’ is hushed, and you’re free to enjoy the ride.

Was the fantasy genre kicked off by Tolkein? If so, it really has its roots in everything that inspired him – Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf and all of that. Apparently there are dwarves and so on in Wagner (not that I would know, I’ve never quite managed to engage with Wagner, it all seems a bit lush and thundery). Maybe the fantasy genre ultimately owes a debt to Germanic folklore. Anyway, you can see bits of Tolkein in the DNA of Game of Thrones, but there’s a whole lot more sex – and a lot more women.

Girls, women, queens: powerful women in Game of Thrones

Tolkein did either elf maidens or Rosie Cotton, and not a whole lot in between. But Game of Thrones has Arya, the spunky girl who wants to be a boy, and the scary Cersei, who could be one of those fearsome Roman women, like Agrippina, who plotted and schemed to use their relationships with sons and other relatives as a way to wield power. There’s Catelyn, the resourceful queen, and her deranged sister Lysa, who breastfeeds her little boy, her only child, as they sit together on the throne. Perhaps most original of all is Daenerys, who is a weird combination of innocence and invulnerability, buoyed up by magical powers of which she herself is only just becoming aware. She is instinctive, intuitive, and, when she deems it necessary, completely ruthless.

Of course, the male characters are terrific too. Poor old Ned Stark is always trying to do the right thing, not that it’s easy. There are the snakelike, cunning plotters at court, Baelish and Varys; the psycho princeling, Joffrey, who is both cowardly and sadistic; fat, choleric, boozy Robert Baratheon; Daenerys’ hopeless brother Viserys, who wants desperately to wear the crown his father lost, but has no personal qualities that are likely to help him win it back, and few assets other than a once-feared family name and a pretty sister. There’s Cersei’s dashing brother Jaime and bully-boy father Tywin – played by a magnificently scornful Charles Dance – and best of all, Tyrion, who compensates for his lack of stature by being wittier, more insightful, more honest, bawdier, funnier and more commanding than just about anybody else.

Threat from beyond the borders and within

The story is full of threat. There is danger from the north, where the supernatural White Walkers appear to be stirring from a long sleep, and also from the south, from the nomadic, horse-loving Dothraki tribe, living just beyond a narrow strip of sea which they have never yet brought themselves to cross. The Dothraki are a fearsome lot, exactly the sort who lay waste a crumbling empire, and would have given Genghis Khan and his Mongolian hordes a good run for their money.

Perhaps a strong leader could rally the various powerful families of the seven kingdoms of Westeros and see off these dangers, but no. Nature abhors a vacuum, and a power vacuum is particularly untenable. The seven kingdoms have had a mad king, then a drunk, hunting-mad king, and beyond that the succession looks uncertain. There are internal factions, old grudges, uncertain loyalties, and one very big, incestuous secret, threatening to destabilise everything.

Not so very long ago…

Go back five or six hundred years, and that was pretty much what the British state was really like. There were pretenders to the throne; noble families battling it out for power or, the next best thing, proximity to power, and, on occasion, paying for it with the lives of their heirs; question marks over whether those heirs were really descended from their supposed fathers; strategic marriages; wars fought as displays of wealth and power; brutal punishments – amputations, beheadings, burnings alive – and, inevitably, less able sons taking over from capable men, and mucking things up. (If you can manage three generations of leaders who can hold onto the reins of power in such a set-up, you’ve got a dynasty that hold a rare and special place in history – like the Tudors.) It’s ironic that we tend to talk of the hereditary principle today as bringing stability, when history shows it’s anything but. If you want a stable state, you want stable institutions; have a figurehead monarch by all means, but on the whole, the less real power they have, the better.

Power and vulnerability

Game of Thrones is all about power: what people will do to get it; how they behave when they have it; how they survive, or go under, when they don’t have it. It’s also about love, loyalty and honour – and their opposites, hatred, treachery and betrayal. There’s a flavour of many different times and places in the mix, from the Wars of the Roses to the Ottoman Empire, where, if I remember my history correctly, the sons were kept locked away until the Emperor died, whereupon whichever one had the support of the army made it to the capital first, and the others were strangled with silken cords. However, having grown up a prisoner, the new Emperor would be barely fit to rule. This system limped on for a surprisingly long time before eventually collapsing. But it did in the end, as all empires do. I have to say, by the end of series one of Game of Thrones, I’m not filled with confidence about the outlook for peace and stability in Westeros, and wonder if its decline and fall is on the way sooner rather than later.

The landscape of Westeros felt recognisably like a reimagining of Britain to me: cold to the north, beyond the Wall, with a coastal capital further south, separated from potential invaders by a thin strip of water. But then someone else pointed out that North America also has an icy north and a hot South. Perhaps the geography of Westeros is just another way in which the Game of Thrones stories put a fresh spin on familiar patterns.

Watching the extra feature on the DVD box set about the making of the series, and the dedicated work of so many people – the animal trainers, the carpenters, the location scouts, and so on – it was amazing to think that all of this had originally been made up by just one person. That’s the potential power of the writer for you. A king can only rule a kingdom, more or less wisely and well; but a writer can create it.

Random new terminology I learned this week…

The comments in this week’s Guardian Review section about J K Rowling’s A Casual Vacancy included a couple of references to the Harry Potter stories as ‘low fantasy’, which I assumed was people being snooty about it, but no – it’s a whole genre of its own, in which fantastical happenings take place in the real world, as compared to high fantasy, where the whole world is fictional.

I also discovered, via Wikipedia, that there’s a narrative technique called sexposition – a TV technique for keeping viewers watching while you’re giving them chunks of narrative information by having some steamy goings-on for entertainment while someone explains it all.

Stop the Clock quick quiz #1: are you Tina, Natalie or Lucy?

If you’ve read Stop the Clock, you’ll have a pretty good idea about who Tina, Natalie and Lucy are, and if not, you will have by the time you’ve finished this quiz!

At one point when we were working on different ideas for the covers I came up with a long list of accessories and clothes that might work for each of them. It was really good fun – a bit like a grown-up (ish) version of dressing-up dolls. Yes – that’s the kind of research I like doing – scouring the internet for Tina’s watch, Lucy’s engagement ring, Natalie’s friendship bracelet… (I’m guessing male writers very rarely end up doing this kind of thing…)

So, here are some quick questions that will help you work out whether you’re more of a Tina, Natalie or Lucy. I turned out to be perfectly evenly balanced mixture of all three, which is probably only fair:

1. Your ideal working wardrobe consists of…

A Pencil skirt, killer heels, feisty attitude

B Comfy old favourites – loose trousers, big cardigans, things that don’t pinch when you sit down

C Your family is your job now. For the school gate, you dress in knee-high boots and skinny jeans in winter, or floaty skirts and sandals (and pedicure) in the summer

2. Your overall look could be defined as:

A Melanie Griffith post-makeover in Working Girl

B The girl-next-door in jeans and beat-up Converse

C Betty Draper

3. Your favourite perfume is:

A Dior Poison

B Soap and water, perhaps with an occasional squirt of something from the Body Shop

C Chanel no 5

4. Your ideal night out with friends would be:

A Cocktails at the Cobden Club/Atlantic Bar/Sketch

B Lager down the local followed by karaoke, just like the old days

C Everyone round to your house for supper – something out of Delia Smith (tried and trusted) followed by a screening of Mamma Mia

5. Your ideal date would be:

A Dinner at Moro followed by hot sex in a boutique hotel (though you won’t want to get too carried away and end up being late for work the next morning)

B Holding hands in the cinema and crying over a film… then being whisked a little out of your comfort zone for hot sex that catches you (almost entirely) by surprise

C A long country walk in the Cotswolds, a pub lunch, and hot sex back in the beautifully appointed holiday cottage. Someone else would be minding the children back in London, obviously

6. You read:

A A bit of whatever everyone’s talking about, plus the odd pageturning thriller/crime novel

B Chick lit and romance

C Historical fiction. If it’s Tudor, chances are you’ll love it

Mostly As – you’re Tina, a career-focused siren. You like to be in control, but life has a way of turning your best-laid plans upside down – still, if anyone can cope with chaos and come out on top, it’s probably you.

Mostly Bs – You’re sweet-natured, supportive Natalie, an idealist who perhaps hasn’t quite yet found what she wants in life. You don’t particularly care about social status – what you yearn for is a sense of purpose. Perhaps you don’t realise just how strong you are, but anyone who underestimates you does so at their own peril.

Mostly Cs – you’re Lucy, the domestic goddess. Others may brand you a yummy mummy, but that’s not how you see yourself; you’re just trying to do your best for the people you love. Actually, you’re tough, resourceful and resilient, as becomes apparent when the going gets tough. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, ‘a woman is like a tea-bag – you never know how strong she is till she gets in hot water’.

A week in the life of Stop the Clock

Me with the owners of Mostly Books

I’ve always fought shy of public speaking, but no longer! Just over a week ago, I gave a thank you speech to a lovely group of people at the launch of Stop the Clock. The launch was hosted by Mostly Books, a brilliant independent bookshop in my hometown.

It’s funny how you can end up feeling physically nervous even if, in your head, everything is hunky and dory. I couldn’t have wished for a warmer, more encouraging audience, and I knew exactly what I wanted to say, which was along the same lines as my last blog post. I wanted to thank everybody for coming, acknowledge the help and support I’d received both from the people present and from some who had been unable to make it, and let everybody get back to their wine. Yet, when it came to it, it was – not intimidating, exactly, but definitely a little tremble-inducing!

You can see some more pictures of the launch on my public Facebook page (you don’t have to be signed up to Facebook to see it) at www.facebook.com/AlisonMercerwriter and on the Mostly Books blog.

Tip for handling speech nerves: kid yourself it doesn’t count!

A work friend googled nerves about public speaking  and sent me a good tip (it’s funny how google has become the first port of call when potential problems arise – google is the oracle). The tip was that it’s actually counterproductive to build up to something and steel your nerves and tell yourself how desperately important it is. Instead, if you kid yourself that the stakes are low and it really doesn’t matter, you’ll be much more relaxed and confident.

This reminded me of the advice we were given on hitting high notes back when I was a child singing in the South Berkshire Music Centre choir: you were meant to imagine yourself falling down onto the top notes like a cat landing on its feet, rather than straining up as if they were on a high shelf out of reach. I tried to remember this when I did my first ever radio interview at Radio Oxford on Bank Holiday Monday.

Sex on a Bank Holiday Monday… with a lion on the loose

As it was a public holiday, most people were off work when I went into Radio Oxford – I had to go through the car park to the back door to be let in. I’d never been in a local radio station before, and was reminded ever so slightly of a hospital – it had that functional, conscientious, public service feel, where things tend not to get chucked out for the sake of it, as long as they still work.

The green sofa I perched on while waiting for my slot could have been in a parents’ room off a children’s ward, and the big notice reminding staff to ask listeners to send in their pictures reminded me of the signs you get everywhere in hospital, exhorting everybody to go and wash their hands.

I had somehow managed to kid myself that the interview was going to be pre-recorded, and it wasn’t until I was sitting down at a little desk with a big green baize-covered microphone in front of me (there was a lot of green baize) and saying ‘Good afternoon’ that I allowed myself to realise I WAS NOW LIVE ON AIR! Actually, we had a nice chat, and it was all over very quickly.

And so I got to talk about sex via a public service broadcaster at lunchtime on a Bank Holiday Monday. Well, sort of. We chatted about 50 Shades and how the girls in my class at school didn’t think the family saga I wrote as a teenager had enough rude bits in it. I giggled quite a lot. You can hear my Radio Oxford interview here, for the time being anyway  – my bit kicks in at 1:07:25 (after Saturday Night Fever!) It’s about 10 mins.

The big story of the day was the lion on the loose in Essex, which turned out to be a big cat. I left the studio and found I had a very cheery text message of congratulation from my husband. Then I went home and ate a very large slice of caramel cake to celebrate.

What they’re saying about Stop the Clock

Here are some of the comments that have appeared in mainstream print media about Stop the Clock:

‘Mercer has a satirical eye which she puts to good effect in describing such cornerstones of middle-class life as private antenatal classes and bitchy newspaper columnists. A funny, promising debut’ Wendy Holden, Daily Mail

‘Effortlessly readable and sharply realistic, this is grown-up chick-lit at its very best’ Closer

‘Funny and moving, this is a fab debut from Alison Mercer’ new!

There have been some great amazon reviews, too, and some lovely blog reviews:

Reading in the Sunshine 

Shaz’s Book Blog

Curious Book Fans

I also did a guest blog post on Shaz’s Book Blog which sets out my dream cast for a film adaptation of the book

And, on a slight tangent… here’s the Guardian article I wrote about birth scenes in fiction. (Birth does feature in Stop the Clock!)

I was particularly chuffed to hear about my friend’s mum who read Stop the Clock in six hours straight. Once they get started people seem to read it fast!