Laurie Graham's Blog, page 3

On Turning Up for Work

‘If you don’t sit at your desk every day, come the day your writing could go well, you might not be sitting there.’

So said Flannery O’Connor, who would have been 96 this past week, only lupus carried her off aged 39. I don’t agree with all her views  –  she had a low opinion of Carson McCullers’ writing, and she was fond of a dessert whose very name, peppermint chiffon pie, makes me gag  –  but when it comes to regular writing habits (or painting habits or any other creative endeavour) she was right on the money. She also said, when asked if she thought universities stifled would-be writers, ‘unfortunately not nearly enough.’ Perhaps it’s just as well she didn’t live to see what universities are stifling these days.

I push on, as per Flannery, turning up at the desk most days, a couple of hours here, a couple of hours there. One of my current not-writing activities is making something to put in my craft bee’s Plague Year Time Capsule. I’ll reveal more about that in a future post, but I mention it now in order to report the strangely sobering effect of time capsules. If you’ve ever contributed to one, you’ll understand what I mean. I’m making something that will next be seen by people not yet born. What will they be like? What will they think of a bunch of old ladies who, long ago, knitted and sewed and painted and wrote, all in the name of sanity, comfort and fellowship?

This week’s failed project: dyeing eggs for Easter. Not a white egg to be had anywhere around here and if you sacrifice half a red cabbage to dye brown eggs you end up with a very strange colour indeed. Ah well, they can’t all be winners.

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Days of Whine and Protest

A friend asked me what my plans were for the weekend. My first response was, ‘Is it weekend?’

I know I’m not alone in losing track. With lockdown, the days of the week are barely distinguishable. On Mondays, weather permitting, I meet friends for illicit outdoor coffees and sometimes the exchange of craft materials. It’s a sort of County Lines for knitting yarn. Wednesdays are now my screen-free days, yippee. Saturday means clean sheets, which I think you’ll agree, is better than three sheets. Everything else is a beige mural of sameness. Nothing in the diary. So I suppose my weekend plan may as well be to work.

I’m not going to get into That Interview (I’ve already been told how vile, clueless and arrogant we British are) except to ask, is there a family on God’s green earth that doesn’t discuss what an expected baby will look like? In my family the question was whether any of my children would inherit Grandad Bill’s ginger gene (they didn’t) or the distinctly dusky Romany appearance of Great Gran Lil (not that either). On my husband’s side we had the added ingredient of his (very) mixed race adopted daughter. Would her children have her colouring, her husband’s or an interesting re-emergence of something from her largely unknown ancestry? Well, all of the above, it turns out. My point being, it’s just something people talk about. Right?

Those of you who subscribe to my mailing list will recently have received the latest Interview With.

The rest of you, mailing list refuseniks, can now read it here, update on the once and Future Homemakers.  Because I’m a caring, sharing kind of person, albeit one who isn’t always sure what day of the week it is.

 

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The Eyes Have It

This week I have an appointment to get my cataracts checked so I thought I’d prepare for one inevitable question: how much time do I spend looking at a screen? I was horrified by the answer. What used to be five or six hours a day has grown, thanks to lockdown, to nine hours. Work is the least of it. I get my news online, plus most of my correspondence. It’s where I’ve bought birthday and Christmas presents for my grandchildren because all the shops are shut. I speak to family and friends by Skype, go to church on Zoom and for the past year every concert, lecture and movie screening I’ve attended has been online. It has to stop.

I’ve decided to make Wednesdays zero screen days. I’ll check my emails and the news headlines after breakfast, lunch and dinner and that’s all. It shouldn’t be hard. Thirty years ago I didn’t own a single screen. I know I’ll be able to fill the hours quite happily. I have books and sewing to occupy me, music to listen to, places to walk. The problem will be the dozens of little questions that arise during a typical day and are easily answered by Googling. This morning it was the gestation period in grey seals (11 months, if you’re interested) and, evidencing the flea-like behaviour of my mind, the opening line of Kipling’s poem, The Smuggler’s Song (If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet). A day without Google will be an exercise in self-control and my eyes may thank me for it.

A reader asks, has independent publishing worked out for me financially? The short answer is no. My Dr Dan books have earned me a little and a little is better than nothing,, but there is more to it than that. The principal benefit has been to my sanity. Being cut adrift by a publisher and unable to find a new publishing home, particularly after a long career, is a colossal blow to a writer’s confidence. We can be a neurotic bunch at the best of times. Self-publishing was a weapon of revenge, my way of saying, ‘Look, you blinkered Big House fools, I have readers who are loyal to me because they enjoy my books. Not my fault if my readership didn’t grow wider over the years. That was your job.’

So, if by chance you’re a writer and thinking of self-publishing, I’d say sure, go for it. Do it for the satisfaction. Just hold off on ordering that new car.

 

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View from a Carousel

First, thank you for all the great Characters Revisited suggestions. Some of them I’d quite forgotten I created. Tsk, tsk. I wouldn’t do very well on Mastermind, specialised subject, My Own Books.

The world of publishing has changed so much, even in the 35 years I’ve known it. It used to be a gentlemen’s business, even when women became more involved. Editors and agents sat in their own offices, surrounded by the books they’d midwifed and other distinctive touches. One brought his dog to work. Another, her violin.

Lunch was a tax-deductible tool of the trade and publication of even the thinnest volume warranted popping a cork.

Now they all work in cubicles, staring at computer screens and developing a dowager’s hump. They bring in their own coffee, skip lunch and talk in sales jargon. As an independent publisher, I have lunch and the celebratory champagne under control, but it’s hard to avoid the jargon. I have no idea what a squeeze page is, nor a recency cap. There’s a thing called top-of-the-funnel customers that I should probably find out about, but I can’t be bothered. I don’t know my ROAS from my ACOS and I truly don’t care.

Publishing has become a high-tech, low-charm scrum for money, fame and a Netflix deal. But Fate has ordained that I spend the remaining years of my career on a gentle merry-go-round of my own design. So how lucky am I?

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Absolutely Nothing to See

I have nothing to report, apart from blessedly continuing, good physical health. I can’t vouch for my state of mind. In County Dublin we’re restricted to movement within 5 km of home, the weather is filthy, the shops are shut and online get-togethers are truly no substitute for real encounters.

I am working, nudging Dr Dan’s next book along at a snail’s pace and knocking out the occasional piece of journalism, but all work and no play would make Laurie a very dull girl indeed so, like a bright-eyed playgroup leader, I try to have a range of other activities to offer myself. Reading some of those yellowing, unread books, a bit of knitting (last week I mastered basic cable stitch), an hour of drawing. Days of the week are barely distinguishable. Tuesday is craft group, Sunday is church, both on Zoom. That’s about all.

I’m aware of friends and children and grandchildren who are struggling, and I sense tension between those who think normal life has gone forever and those who think we should just take our chances and get on with it.

I eat strange, fridge-clearing combos  –  the bacon and marmalade sandwich worked quite well. My voice grows croaky through lack of use. I reconsider my wardrobe. Since I’m unlikely ever again to go to a party or a first night, I reckon I might as well wear my sequins to work. Is this how the descent into dottiness begins?

It occurs to me that my mailing list subscribers are due a little something. I wonder who they’d like to hear from? I’m thinking, maybe Buzz Wexler or Lubka, or even both. But, suggestions on a postcard, please.

 

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Tools of the Trade

There was a time when all I needed to be sure of managing a day’s work were a spare typewriter ribbon, a bottle of Snopake and a pack of A4 paper. Oh, and running shoes, so I could make it to the post office before the final collection. That’s how I used to file copy in the 1980s: in an envelope, dropped into a postbox. How quaint.

Now, for better and for worse, it’s a whole other story. I mention this because I’ve just spent the morning uninstalling apps, reinstalling apps, updating drivers and doing a lot of other tech maintenance stuff that I don’t understand and don’t particularly want to learn.

My office set-up is modest: a laptop, a tablet for when I’m on the road, and a bog standard smartphone. I also have a printer, rarely used, which requires expensive ink cartridges. It eyes me nervously from the corner of the spare bedroom. One of these days I’m going to learn to live without it, and I think it knows.

I’m not a total techno-chump and I do acknowledge the ways the digital age has made my life easier. If I need information, I no longer have to hope that a) the library is open and b) that it will have the answers. When it’s time to submit a piece of journalism, all I have to do is hit SEND. And during the past year the Internet has kept me supplied with concerts and lectures and chats with friends. Without all of that I would undoubtedly have lost my mind.

So this morning, amid the cursing at failed downloads and head-scratching at impenetrable jargon, I was also thinking about the people I haven’t seen recently. Some don’t trust the Internet, some just don’t have the resources to buy a computer or upgrade their phone. They’re being left behind and that is a very sad state of affairs.

I’m delighted to manage without typewriter ribbons and Snopake, without smelly, vandalised telephone boxes and reference books that are years out of date, but still, let us not forget…

 

 

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WWDDS?

After a long, long, much longer than intended break, today I start work in earnest in the next Dr Dan book. The past two weeks were spent in a lockdown limbo, forbidden from any contact with my children and grandchildren and prevented from flying home. Hopes were raised and then dashed with depressing regularity. Flights cancelled, rules changed. I finally figured out my best moves (chess never was my game) and squeezed back into Ireland through a very narrow window of opportunity.

My journey home was a rich feast of illogic and downright stupidity. In order to fly I had to be tested for Covid and obtain a very expensive Fit to Fly certificate. Was I asked to show it before I boarded the plane? Nope. Was the onboard sale of food and drink suspended, on the basis that no-one starves to death on a 1 hour flight and better surely to forgo the BLT and remain masked? Nope. And then there were the impenetrable instructions to residents returning to Ireland from the UK. Get re-tested within 5 days of your arrival. On the other hand, do not go to the already over-burdened test centre unless you have symptoms. So, I asked myself, ‘what would Dr Dan say?’ Without hesitation, he replied, ‘Just stay home. Open the window, breathe sea air, write a book.’

 

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Hiss and Boo

A complaint this morning from a reader who notes that I haven’t posted since December 7th. Well EXCUSE ME! I was going to reply that I’ve nothing to say, but of course, I’ve always got something to say.

First let’s talk about Julie Burchill, who has been cut loose by her publisher, Little Brown UK. Her new book on the creeping tide of cancel culture has been… cancelled. Little Brown are part of the same publishing behemoth, Hachette, as the firm that canned me, though I was let go for a different reason: I wasn’t earning enough to keep the bean-counters happy. Julie is an excellent journalist, so the first reaction among writers was that some other publisher will soon snap up her book. I’m not so sure. The publishing world is now dominated by cowardy custards. Junior staff throw tantrums over the publication of anything that offends them and senior management cower under the boardroom table. Are there any grownups left in the building?

I’m currently stuck in London, prevented from travelling either to my daughter’s for Christmas or from flying home to Ireland. Luckily I’m not trapped in a hotel but sheltered with a friend. We have food, warmth and the company of a cat, plus a grand view of an eerily silent Thames. Nevertheless, Christmas Eve, my favourite day of the year, will be rather sad. No last-minute jostle through the market, no parties, no church. As I haven’t been to a pantomime this year, I feel this is the moment to get a hiss and boo off my chest. So here it is.

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Christmas with Dr Dan

This post will be something of a duplication for those of you who subscribe to my mailing list: it contains a link subscribers received on Saturday. I feel some sympathy for mailing list refuseniks. Emails from retailers and authors can get tiresome, especially if they’re always trying to flog you something. In this instance, I wasn’t and I’m not.

Some readers have asked me about the Welsh carol Dr Dan and his friends sing at the end of Book 3. It’s popularly known as Faban bach, or by its first line, Ar gyfer heddiw’r bore which means, roughly, ‘on this very morning’.  It’s a favourite plygain carol, plygain being a Welsh Protestant version of Midnight Mass. Plygain has died out a bit in recent years, though it’s now having something of a revival, and when it does happen it tends to be at a more convenient hour, to fit in with the final supermarket run and getting excited children to bed. But the rules remain the same. Anyone can get up and sing. There are no auditions but no repeats either, so if someone else gets in first with your carol, you’d better have an alternative up the sleeve of your anorak.

I managed to find this clip of Bryn Terfel and friends singing Dr Dan’s carol. I hope you enjoy it.

I wish you a very happy Christmas and a healthy New Year.

 

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Signs of the Times

Here is one of my favourite old London street signs. It manages to be stern and yet discreet. In case you’re wondering, it means DO NOT URINATE AGAINST THIS WALL. This particular example is at the south end of Great Guildford Street in Southwark, and it’s repeated on an adjacent wall in Doyce Street. It must have been an especially smelly corner. So many pubs, so many men caught short as they staggered home.

The signs survive but the pubs are gone. The Yorkshire Grey, the Bears,  a brown one and a white, the Salmon, the Catherine Wheel, the Rose and Ram, the Hat and Feathers, the Three Compasses and the Two Brewers, to name but a few. All demolished. I’m not much of a pub person, though both my grandmothers were barmaids, but there is still something poignant about a neighbourhood that has so comprehensively disappeared.  In its place there are just enormous building sites erecting more unaffordable flats and more shiny offices that no-one will ever work in because we now have Zoom.

Now, back to playing God with Dan Talbot and his entourage.

 

 

 

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