I originally wrote this for the Authors Electric blogging group to which I belong, based around a bit of de-cluttering over the Christmas holiday break: emptying lever-arch files full of research no longer needed! The size of the piled-up notes, articles printed out to re-read and study more carefully, and story plans was as deep as a stair… not a waste of paper, but just amazing to see what it takes in raw material to develop an idea…
And now I’ve thrown out the image so… 2 lever arch files stuffed full… and my imagined characters, in childhood…
Summer term, the mid 1970s. Two small girls who’ve reached the top of the village primary school, lie on their stomachs at the back of a large Victorian house, staring down into a basement room. The house, suitably converted, is the local GP surgery, the basement, one of the consulting rooms. Jenny has brought her soon-to-be stepsister Daisy here to view the place where her mother (who’ll soon be Daisy’s stepmother), works. They watch, full of curiosity, as Jenny’s mother examines a young woman, whom they recognise as a shop assistant from the local town. Until, discovered by the receptionist, they are roundly told off…
This passage was written as the opener to a story which takes up these two characters some years later. Jenny is one of the central players in a complex story involving the two girls in some risky occurrences, a medical mystery, and romance. At the time, it seemed to fit perfectly as the reader’s introduction to several central characters, giving a portrait of Jenny as a child consumed by curiosity, and of Daisy as someone she won’t allowed to forget. But it was axed by happy mutual agreement when I worked on the draft manuscript along with a literary consultant.
Another vivid scene introduces our reader to Jenny’s fellow protagonist. We meet Max, aged about thirteen, in his father’s gloomy study, dark velvet curtains partly closed. He is in trouble, along with some friends, for using an antique microscope to repeat a well-known historical experiment. Max’s father, a church minister, is so outraged at what they’ve done that he has lobbed the innocent piece of scientific equipment through the window of Max’s attic bedroom, before punishing his son.
Rewritten in historic form, and later in the book, that scene was retained as an iconic family memory. And the manse where it happened has now been a setting in three stories. I know that big granite house somewhere in the north-east of England so well that I could conduct you around it, from the hall (with coat stand and special home-made rack to store skateboarding helmets and knee pads), past the study and the formal living room (opposite doors in the passage) to the big family kitchen–breakfast room (Aga and pine table large enough for a family of seven), and the family room with piano and doors opening onto the garden. I know the veg patch and the treehouse and their stories. Another house I know well is the converted chapel (with artist’s studio), where Jenny grows up far in the west of Cornwall, the clifftop blackberry plants, the coves and the zawns, the landscape of her childhood. They are ‘home’ in the minds of the chief characters, even though the descriptive passages have long been dropped.
Recently I even threw out, in an attempt at decluttering, four fat lever arch files full of articles I’d downloaded, printed out, and mined for information necessary to understand and describe the scientific mystery which the young people in my story attempt to unravel. In the writer’s mind, old writing can live alongside her characters, especially if she chooses to write a series and (far from being wasted hours) it remains fresh and accessible, even when the scenes it was created for never become part of a book.
And of course, as we write and rewrite, our characters may get up to all manner of activity which, again, never sees the light of day beyond a few weeks or months of existence as a precious computer file, now deleted.
The odd thing is, they can be retained in our memories. The writer can picture the scene even if it has been eliminated from the character’s life — it hasn’t from the writer’s!
Memory, imagination, creativity are wonderful and curious things. Do you have characters or incidents or even plots retained in your mind, a world built in words and pictures but eventually consigned to the recycling bin? We may know how our characters reached the point where they enter the plot — the reader may have only hints of childhood, university, first love, prior career, the the influence of siblings and environment — vital to the outworking of their developing characteristics, interests, skills or psychological problems — and these have all been developed and then dumped in the process which some people call “murdering your darlings” — but were those extra writing hours a waste of time?
One of our local Squirrels eating seeds put out for birds…
(Re-blogged from my July contribution to the July Authors Electric blog)
“As writers, as a group, readers of this blog take words and their meanings seriously.”
Life in the world beyond books, blogs, and articles however tells us that large numbers of people don’t. Take the heading ‘NATURE RESERVE’ on a notice: is this a place set aside to provide a safe and suitable habitat for wildlife, native plants, trees, maybe a wetland area? A location where a handful of rare species have been seen to hang out? Even the slow worms in our 7-hectare local nature reserve are counted to make sure they are doing okay.
Or is it, as a runner recently put it, ‘just a place for everyone, and dog-walking…’
As fiction writers, we’re in the business of creating both environment and inhabitants, which will include inhabitants who don’t think like ourselves, and environments we’d find strange, hostile, uncanny, as well as beautiful, welcoming, or exciting. Possibly more often than not these environments will indeed be in the negative, at least for a fair part of, say, a crime or mystery novel. Even a cosy crime or mystery may need to lead the reader into a place they’d rather not go… and characters dubious and devious. But today I’m thinking about those people who are simply ‘unlike us’. The ones who while seeing themselves as ‘nice people’ simply, maybe thoughtlessly, make words ‘not apply to me.’
Let’s enter our nature reserve. On a day of dazzling sunshine and promised heat, passing the notice, ‘nature reserve’, plus a few more details and requests, we enter a small wooded area, and follow a path which opens out to reveal a large reed-bordered pond. Young moorhens, their beaks not yet characteristically brightly coloured, are paddling across. Further on are the flower meadows, now parched by drought. Numbers of butterflies and damselflies flutter among the mainly purple or yellow flowers, occasionally flying upwards into the surrounding trees. In the wood, which borders the railway line, there are small, brown, woodland loving butterflies.
There was, on Sunday, also me, watching a pair of these ‘Speckled Woods’. Preparing to take a photo, I squatted down on the path, to focus on one which had perched on the leaf of a low-growing plant. The creature opened its wings wide, displaying the speckled pattern and its furry body and long, quivering antennae. As I extended the lens to get in close, feet pounded up behind me. It only took a second, but a shadow passed over us both, the butterfly fled up into the trees, and a bulky male jogger panted and grunted past at speed, feet flying. I’m left wondering yet again about the brains of joggers, with no interest in nature, so intent on their own heart’s health (or not, who knows what they think, or if they think?)
At least the Speckled Wood isn’t rare – yet. We do have some. None the less, I am furious, ‘discombobulated’ you might even say. Because it’s not just me, it’s not just a first time, and worse can happen. We had foxes in here: one day, a visitor discovered one, killed by a dog. The owner had, as many do, ignored the request to keep their dog on a lead, and obviously sneaked away after a very nasty scene. ‘Lucky’ that nobody else had been around to witness. How do these characters think? A small detail, perhaps, in a novel: maybe leading towards, surely s/he wasn’t the forger – or the murderer?
Thanks, guys, for giving me an insight into your world: ‘Me, myself, and I, not making trouble for anyone…Gotta complete this circuit in one, not stopping for woke nonsense, notice needn’t apply to me…Preserving the balance of the planet? Piece of rough ground, a challenge to my running skills…’
Living room at my maternal grandparent’s first home…
**Last month my blog post for Authors Electric partly looked back at couple of interesting facts about my own family ancestry, including two studio photographs showing middle class women smartly dressed in the fashion of the time. In this post I want to talk about Sarah Moss’s follow-up novel, Signs for Lost Children, which continues the story of Alethea, (once ‘poor baby’), begun in Bodies of Light, the book which brought to mind for me the strange fact that the two families who would be later joined by my parents’ marriage both had connections to the Pre-Raphaelites.
One thing which has really struck me reading these novels, and was brought to the fore of all our minds in the past week or so, is that the position of male and female has not changed since Victorian times. What do I mean by this? Surely today’s woman is an independent person, capable of earning her own living in any field she chooses, spending her own money without necessary reference to any male relative? Of course she has the vote, won by the hard campaigning of the suffragettes, and we hope should she be walking alone at night, she would not be taken for a prostitute, picked up by the police, and subjected to an ignominious, degrading, painful (and ultimately meaningless) “virginity test”. (The intrusive tests are considered a violation of human rights by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations, which want to see them banned. e.g.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-55078634)
I say we hope – this lawful abuse of women was a common occurrence at the time Signs for Lost Childrenis set. The streets were dangerous, made even more dangerous for a woman on her own, (for what decent woman would be out alone in the dark? it was argued). Obviously, only one who is a sex worker, seeking clients. Such was male thinking of the time, at least where the law and the police were concerned. Does your memory resonate here with events of the past week? Is this not a hideous irony?
In this sequel to Bodies of Light, Sarah Moss has written how her protagonist of that story, newly qualified as a medical doctor among the very few women so qualified at the time, and also newly married, begins work in the Truro asylum. I will not spoil the story of Signs for Lost Children for you, but her conclusion, after six months working in the terrible conditions and reflecting on the treatment of the assumed mentally ill, is this: “It is not that some people’s minds are so fragile that they require the permanent protection of an institution but that some people’s homes are crazier than institutions for the mad.” *
As anyone who has read Bodies of Lightwill know, Alethea – known as Ally – was raised by a kind and ineffectual father more concerned with his art than his children’s welfare, and a mother fanatically obsessed with the plight of the poor, especially of poor women. This wasn’t bad in itself, but it was carried out as an all-engaging duty, accompanied by contempt for all those who weren’t concerned. She also skimped on any comfort both for herself and for her family, denying warmth (physical and emotional), interesting food, and more. Whether her motivation came from religion or not, her attitude towards her children and all other middle-class people amounted to hatred for soft and easy lives. Ally, already rejected as an infant due to her mother’s post-natal depression, suffered terribly from her mother’s cruelty. It is surely this which gave her adult self insight and compassion into how asylums were being used, and the (convenient?) medical assumption that all unconventional behaviour must be the result of madness. One example from the inmates whom she had to treat is of a teenage girl who constantly attempts to take her own life: clearly this poor girl had suffered rape, (possibly within her family?). Totally traumatised, she had been committed to the asylum as mentally ill. After all, this tided life up, didn’t it?
As a professionally qualified woman herself, Ally, at a low point, thinks about public attitudes: she was, in their eyes, ‘An unnatural, undomesticated being, very probably subject to mental instability herself, , for what woman would declare herself unsatisfied by her own family life and seek to usurp the feminine role?’
It is not really the place here to continue with descriptions of the treatments – to discuss whether the attitude comes from the practice of religion (no doubt we have often seen its misuse across the centuries and across the world). The salient point for us today is that we have been woken up to the continuing existence, hardly camouflaged by talk about equality, of institutionalised misogyny, and this is supported by some of those very women who have benefited from the chance to appear to compete and succeed in what continues to be a man’s world. Signs for Lost Children is certainly a significant book.
* apologies for no page numbers, as reading on an old Kindle
**This piece was first published on Authors Electric March 2021
As a writer, I know others who avoid what they’d brand as ‘political’, and that is fine for them. But, I came into writing to be political – being political, having awareness of ‘stuff’ is why I write – not crime (cosy or violent), not romance, not whimsy, not fantasy – I began writing my first novel prompted by some thoughts about what drives social change. How can a person not be themselves? Above all I want to be objective, (even if the concept of objectivity is denied to be possible today, I believe it is possible): and especially not to “preach”.
Change has complexity. Initially good and compassionate attitudes and changes have this way of slipping towards something less than perfect. How does this come about? New possibilities can look wonderful, progressive… they’re also open to manipulation for profit. To exploitation. These interact… some people fear change, or have special reasons to resist…
How do we stop that happening? Would we want to? Is cracking down on society and forcing traditional values and behaviour – often longed for, in a nostalgic terms, by some people – a solution? Can the clock be turned back?
Social change can never be turned back. We may be able – or think we are able – to change the future. But we can never return to the past. Not because nobody wants to, but because too much has changed, and become different, over time.
For example, we can’t easily reverse climate change by “cracking down”. That won’t bring back the lost species. The ruined rainforests. I say we can’t easily, as with care, international cooperation, and willingness to do without the comfortable ways we’ve learned to live with, we might. But that’s unlikely to occur, given that most countries will have special interests. Fast air travel, foreign holidays, cheap food, clothing outsourced to be made in poor countries, are what we have come to expect. It would take an enormous commitment in the face of huge opposition from those who benefit and profit to change. And the beneficiaries include all of us – you and me in our small ways, our governments and multinational companies in their powerful ones.
Progressive, beneficial medical advance can’t help driving social change. Some will disagree, but reliable *contraception and safe clinical abortion were introduced by idealists passionate to improve the lives of women, particularly those caught in poverty, the ‘less well off’ majority. Not to offer easy recreational sex to both genders without consequences. Its opposers argued on both moral and religious grounds that ‘misuse’ was inevitable. It has indeed resulted in huge shifts in public attitudes. Personally I detest the phrase ‘sexual revolution’, since there’s so much more than ‘sex’ going on…also has removing ‘sex’ from ‘relationship’ been helpful and without consequences for women? (Think #MeToo, for example.) Genetic research, combined with legal abortion, has also changed public attitudes, in a way which could be seen as sinister. Introducing safe legal abortion opened up new possibilities in eugenics. Moral and ethical questions shift about. Few people now would consider it better to carry a dysmorphic foetus to term. (And this future may be applied to female foetuses, and to what other groups among the ‘inconvenient’?) Is this murder? The furore surrounding ‘pro-life’ can influence voters.
But back to my writing. My first novel tended towards a scifi mystery, its roots in the story of Dolly the sheep, successfully produced by cloning at the Roslin research centre near Edinburgh, in 1996. As I read up the historical background, and learned more about the scientific process, the story changed, evolved, and became domesticated. Where it works better. Hopefully the mystery concerning a shockingly dysmorphic baby, investigated (illegally as it would be now) by two Cambridge students, from very different family backgrounds, highlights several moral and ethical questions, not wholly confined to the field of science and medical advance.
A follow-up story goes on to look at an on-going everyday problem: ever since women gained equality in education and opportunity, we expect to be able to successfully combine career and family. However, who then cares for the kids? When career opportunities and family crises clash, what and whose ambitions, talents, and goals take precedence?
My prompts have always come from the effects of social change and the pushback from traditionalists. An ever present ‘dialectic’. History is increasingly driven by a combination of invention, its usage, and most significantly our desires. Our desires may be to eliminate suffering and improve life. But equally they may be hijacked by ambitions for profit or pleasure. Leading to destruction.
Objectivity, though it ‘doesn’t sell newspapers’, can be useful. I may be political, but I also try to simply lay out life as it is, not what ‘my’ Utopia might be. Asking the awkward questions does tend to look political.
*women’s lives in the 1920s? Follow this up! COMING SOON: This Thursday, 29 October, Who’s left holding the baby? – class & contraception in the 1920s, a guest blog by writer Fiona Veitch Smith, author of thePoppy Denby Investigates series... to celebrate the publication of Poppy’s latest investigation, The Art Fiasco, set in 1924…
Do we really know words as well as we think we do?
I have often heard aspiring writers saying how they ‘love words’ or referring to themselves ‘wordsmiths’. What are words, static material we beat into shape to form what we mean to say, or are they rather less like metal, and more like wild natural creatures, slippery as eels? Shape changers even? Researching their ‘meanings’ over time certainly reveals words as living things, capable of evolving and changing beyond recognition. Take the words ‘worry’, ‘why worry’, ‘don’t worry’, ‘no worries’… how many of us today would use ‘worry’ where ‘strangle’ would do? A dog ‘worrying’ sheep isn’t just increasing their anxiety. If a dog worried sheep, our ancestors were finding dead, mangled, sheep among their flock – a very different threat.
Here I need to seize another word and carefully lead it along—beating it with a smith’s hammer and anvil won’t do. Originally used simply to mean ‘relating to the Gospel or Good News’ the word ‘evangelical’ was adopted to describe a particular type of Protestant Christian belief, often including fervent practice and emphasising that faith should always stem from a personal ‘conversion experience’. Here we then have another way words ‘change their meaning’: the ‘meaning’ slithers by contextualisation, by usage, by connotation… The ‘gospel’ has been hijacked: as Evan Maloney (Where did all the Christian writers go? Guardian, 31 March 2010) says, ‘The central commandment of Jesus was “Love one another”—it’s not an idea that leverages power for religious brokers. With social power church needs to divide society into good and evil, and to have these divisions recognised as gospel.’ And so instead of ‘bringer of good news’ the word ‘Evangelical’ has become associated in a majority of minds with not bringing good news at all. ‘Evangelical has morphed in common usage from being a reference to a set of primary theological commitments into something akin to a passionately defended, theo-political brand’ says Mark Labberton, president of Fuller seminary, and editor of Still Evangelicals? (2018). And, ‘It is now painfully clear that the evangelical world was strategically and politically co-opted—not by more conservative evangelical leaders, but by political operatives from the Republican Party who saw a real opportunity to take over the evangelical world by making particular appeals to “conservative social issues”’ say Jim Wallis and Adam Taylor in Towards a more authentic Evangelicalism (Sojo website 10 March 2018).
So much for words, slipperiness, and hijacking.
Identity, and Getting inside another pair of shoes
My previous blog, on Authenticity, talked about identity books, the kinds of books which explore in memoir or in fiction the world of a particular culture, and how reading can open up our imagination to understanding people different to us, by culture, life experience, sexual orientation, etc. And how much I have valued several I read recently. The world of Damien La Bas, from a Gypsy background; the world of Vicky Beeching, raised evangelical, working as a singer/songwriter in ‘mega churches’, and battling with how and whether it was safe to ‘come out’ and be her lesbian self; the world of Afua Hirsch, being ‘mixed race’ where neither Britain where you were born and educated, or Ghana, feels like ‘home’. I feel a bit ‘mixed race’ myself sometimes—more of that later on…
In that blogpost I’ve also pointed out that ‘labels’ can define us: ‘Once labelled, anything can happen to you. Once a labeller, you lose sight of our common humanity…’ (Three Seek Identity (August 2018)). Our common humanity, sharing our crowded planet, is an important concept: possibly one which might stop the tribalism which threatens to lead us into mutual destruction. If we can all hang on to that. That’s one reason why I value books by writers who belong to different cultures from the one I was raised in.
My reading from other cultures began with Jewish novels, but more recently, and against the backdrop of fear created by this century’s wars and terrorism, I’ve read Sudanese Lela Aboulela’s deep thinking stories, particularly The Translator, Minaret, and The Kindness of Enemies. She paints a picture of Islam as the Western media don’t know it: sensitive, thoughtful. While Afghan Khalid Hosseini shows us another side, in A Thousand Shimmering Suns, nonetheless bringing the novel to a peaceful and happy conclusion, after much suffering. Damian La Bas finds suspicion and rejection from fellow Gypsy Travellers as well as kindness. Kamila Shamsie sums up today’s power hungry politicians and confused young men, and the misunderstanding and the misuse of ‘love’ in Home Fire…
Are there ‘shoes’ we don’t find in the bookshops?
In all this, where are the serious novels which examine any of this from the viewpoint of the major religion which has become associated with the West over thousands of years, Christianity? English Vicky Beeching, raised in an Evangelical family, growing up surrounded by positive family love, writes in Undivided about the heartbreaking cruelty of Megachurch (and other) leaders and members, who are convinced that being gay is seriously evil, and incompatible with her faith. Despite the fact that Jesus’s teaching omits to pronounce on LBGTQ+ and centres on generosity and acceptance for our neighbour whoever they are: ‘In Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Gentile, slave or free…’ writes Paul to the Early Church. Vicky’s book is a memoir, not a novel. The antagonism isn’t a story, it’s real.
Serious, thoughtful fiction, examining our present lives, the faith or absence of faith which drives us, underpins decision making, defines our culture, unites or divides us, is hard or impossible to find. In my intended third story in the Mullins Family Saga, Alice, in her mid teens, is going to spend the long, wet, summer of 2007 observing the antics of the adults in her life, discovering their strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately a tragedy which might have been avoided. It’s a bit like updating I Capture the Castle to early twentyfirst century North Oxford and it should be exciting to write. The ‘saga’ began with what was then a stand-alone novel, Baby, Baby, an attempt to look as objectively as I could at the relationship between two graduate students, powerfully attracted but from entirely hostile family backgrounds. The genre was partially inspired by the works of Shamsie, Aboulela and Hosseini, exploring family, generational, and community relationships in the context of Islam. And by being inside a family which is its extended form includes two ‘world religions’ and none, while also watching and accepting my own children and their friends turning away from following a path of faith, while maintaining a strong, but sometimes different, moral code.
BB: Science, Faith, and Prejudice
In Baby, Baby, Jenny’s secular family, her father a prominent fertility expert, and her mother, a GP, have no use for religion. Max’s father pastors the nearest thing to a ‘megachurch’ in Northumbria, preaching a narrow, patriarchal faith. Here’s my ‘mixed race’ feeling: raised in a birth family very much underpinned by Christian faith (though not at all Evangelical), I grew up very aware that ‘our’ family culture was not shared by, most probably, the majority of those around us. I happily read children’s science fact books alongside the Bible, but was kind of unable to ‘get’ Narnia.
So, my ‘mixed-race’, discomforted sense of not belonging to either culture: the ‘religious’ one, or the secular.’God is irrelevant, we don’t need one…’ ‘Are you religious?’ Well, actually, no. I belong to and follow a faith. I can’t identify as ‘religious’, that word which now carries a lot of ‘stuff’ including all those ‘don’ts and ‘do’s’ hedging a person around with a fence that has no door to open and let in compassion, integrity, and inclusiveness. My answer to this question is summed up here: ‘Writers are generally independent thinkers who dislike having their thoughts roped by doctrine’ (Evan Maloney, as above). Maloney’s article was asking ‘Where did all the Christian writers go?’, and he references many who lived, well, a very long time ago, pointing out that there aren’t many, if any, writing today.
“‘By the time Lewis and Elliott converted to faith in the late 1920s, Christianity was a bete noire of the literary world. Virginia Woolf wrote about Elliott to a friend in 1928 “I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Elliott, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would would seem to be more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.”’ (In Evan Maloney, as above).
This about sums it up. Though we can cite Marilynne Robinson and J.R.R. Tolkien, their books are quite hard to read and not perhaps in line with popular taste. In children’s writing, Narnia though loved in the 1960s and 1970s, is now inadequate through much dated language and culture, reflecting the era when Lewis was writing. Most novels from the twentieth century dealing with faith have been critical exposures of the woeful inadequacy of Christianity in various ways—John Updike, Graham Greene. And those whose unhappy brush with it has led to their atheism: Philip Pullman comes to mind—possibly also Patrick Gale (it seems possible, as he attended a Cathedral choir boarding school, and tells the story of the secret life of a priest in his novel A Perfectly Good Man). And I’m not unsympathetic to those who end up rejecting the God they were taught about by words or actions. ‘Modernist and post-modernist literature vivisected the body of Christian orthodoxy,’ (Malone, as above). Maybe that orthodoxy had already wandered far enough from its roots to deserve a radical removal?
Where then are the ‘Christian’ writers – and what does ‘Christian’ imply?
So, is ‘society today prejudiced against Christian writers? Or is Christianity rightly viewed as a faith that deters the freethinking that great literature demands?’ (Maloney, as above). Probably. Are we as a society afraid to discuss the relevance of Christianity, unbelief, ‘the Church’ with its positive and negative sides, its part in colonialism, as a state religion, does it have a future, and other controversial areas? Is that really boring and passé? Or is it so woven into our past that to banish it entirely threatens our understanding of our history, and our present?
I’d never claim to write anything approaching ‘great’ literature, but aiming for a serious literary handling of faith, in today’s English language milieu, it’s pretty much impossible to be published.
TLY: Art, Science, and Losing your Way
I decided on gong Indie (and joined the Alliance of Independent Authors,link here). There’s otherwise a choice between publishing ‘mainstream’ (do not even hint at spiritual or moral content) or approaching a ‘Christian’ publishing house (though these, even before the ‘Republican’ makeover, definitely debarred the more liberal faithful investigating risky areas, included a list of what not to say (for example, no dialogue with the f-word,) and preferred a happy ending, possibly with conversion though redemption could do.) This makes it hard to enter even a toenail into the water of agents or trade publishers. Authors are resorting, if they can, to writing fantasy, or historical novels set in times when (they claim) ‘everyone believed and it could be talked about’. But has that ever been true? I very much doubt it. In a hierarchical society, it was simply wise to go along with what everyone did, and keep your doubts or disbeliefs to yourself.
Fear, prejudice, or whatever makes a book unacceptable to either side if it discusses the definitely off-topic subject of faith or unbelief, without advocating or demonising one or the other, has now made ‘Christian’ literature an ‘elephant in the room’ best avoided. Like ‘evangelical’, discussed above, the label ‘Christian’ has now been shape-shifted, by usage, association, and connotation, into something aggressively opposed to the radical teaching of its founder, a man of integrity, inclusive of women, foreigners, outcasts, and passionate for the poor and dispossessed.
Here’s a very brief post on the blog! Here’s wondering if any of you nice followers have discovered my Author Page … or investigated what I wrote when I’m not writing the blog or doing one of a hundred thousand other things?
For example, this weekend, promoting my work (and hopefully entertaining an audience) at a book festival along with other authors, many of them, like me, members of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi).
On Saturday (23rd, Shakespeare’s Birthday …) the Hawkesbury LitFest will be taking place – all day from 10.00am to 5.30pm … a great gathering of authors in the Cotswold village of Hawkesbury Upton. H.U. is a friendly place – especially friendly to Books and Reading … (Also to Italian food at the Fox restaurant, and to cakes, coffee and tea at the festival Cafe). It’s friendly to authors and a crowd of us will be going along to read, discuss, promote, hopefully sell our work, and to meet other authors and our readers …
me at HULF 2015 (copyright Clint Randall)
You may live far away, in South Africa, Canada, or the USA – but have a look at the Mari Howard Author Page on Facebook anyway … have a look at the LitFest adverts to see what we’re (I’m) doing this weekend, and let me know, via blog comments (if you have an opinion: should Facebook ask authors to pay to promote their pages? I am undecided – this is not a rant either way – I am just wondering, would the promotion be worth the cost? At $10 a day?)
And thanks for following .. welcome to several new readers …
Random jottings for the blog – which then became the blog …
Not being Moleskine-notebook person, I scribbled these in a very small, uncharacteristic notebook late at night, a notebook for shopping and to-do lists
I have begun: the first three pages of novel No. 3 (theme: What is Love?) exist outside of my brain. I’ve re-engaged with the characters. So, thinking about what we mean by love, and how is it shown, encourages me to look even more at how human beings think, behave, function towards each other, under a virtual microscope.
Of course, thinking about people is what fiction writers do all the time: we do it by nature, we are amazed, frustrated, delighted, appalled, by people … Observation presents random thoughts all the time: but now, how do they add up ?
Some Examples: is the other person ‘real with needs like me’?
Are you real like me?
1. People are weird. No doubt about it. For example,how does another person hear what we say?Through a filter of past experiences. A straight remark can be heard as sarcasm, a word of praise taken as ironic, an enquiry about whether a person is free on a certain day or has a certain skill as the precursor to a demand for that they should help or be available to the speaker. We are afraid each other!
2. People, after what seemed like period of historical peace, are on the move again. Vast numbers of people, displaced and driven out from countries where life is becoming unliveable are taking almost unbelievable risks rather than remain where they were. We joined our local demonstration.
Oxford Demo ‘Refugees Welcome’ September 2015
It was maybe March when webegan to increasingly hear about‘migrants’ on the News. It wasn’t until late summer, and finally until someone published a photo of a drowned toddler, that the international community began to talk loudly enough to be heard. Yes, these people did indeed need somewhere to be. They were after all ‘refugees’: fleeing for refuge.Were the demonstrators serious? Or will it soon look like emotion, the sunshine, and a Sunday afternoon out with a banner? I hope not.
A parallel: last year,in about March, supporters of aid organisations, especially of MSF, were made aware of the crisis in West Africa caused by a massive outbreak of Ebola. It wasn’t untilAugust that the WHO ‘declared the emergency of international concern.’ At last the whole thing sounded as urgent as it had always been. And then, development of possible vaccines and treatments was stepped up … a shocking example of how tropical illnesses don’t usually receive the same interest and research grants that typically Western disease does.
It’s not a global village: there’s little care or knowledge about people in really troubled places. It is however, very definitely a global village: infection can travel faster than ever. So can terrorists and weapons of war.
How Rules are Applied … is this compassionate?
3. Another scenario: health and safety. So, a patient is admitted to an acute ward in a mental hospital – disturbed, frightened, maybe aggressive, panicking … their cigarettes, on which they depend for comfort, are taken away,…Basically,smoking is harmful … But, a baby is being left at nursery for the first time: would we snatch away a pacifier or favourite toy, right away?It’s possible to argue for the protection of the staff from passive smoking: but shouldn’t this ban be explained, later, to the patient, when they are feeling calmer, and able to understand? (My info. source: mental health nurse on acute ward)
We implement rules without applying sensible, but pragmatic, thought to individual situations. It’s so much easier to treat people as things, as a mass to be processed.
Is nothing special now …
or I thought going out was the now way to meet with friends?
A coffee too ordinary
4. Coffee comes in many forms: cappuccinos, lattes, flavoured coffees… we used to get these when we’re out. They were special. Do we really need a coffee machine in the home, which performs all the same tricks? Beans to cup? Steam heated milk included? Going out and staying in are getting so samey? What happened to treats?
What happens to people who have, in material terms, everything? What actually is ‘love’?
Before the old blog collapsed, I was thinking about the kindness of friends.
It all began with someone else’s blog (as it often does), posted on a Facebook site I belong to, where authors share about writing. The blog piece had all of us rather quirky writers sharing how it is for us who don’t fit the standard ‘genres’. I was still working on my Charlie Hebdo response (I may bring that over here later, or I may decide too much time has gone by and reactions have become old news). But I think the discussion was kicked off by this a guest post by Vivienne Tufnell on Philippa’s Rees’s blog ‘Involution’ (http://bit.ly/1DTFgfJ).
Since when the phrase The Kindness of Friends has stuck around in my head like a catchy title for Alexander McCall Smith, something to partner The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, and The Lost Art of Gratitude. An introduction toMcCall Smith’s lighthearted wisdom was the kindness of a friend during a time of loss and sadness, and now we have a whole host of them in our bookcase.
Without the kindness of friends, I’d probably not have moved from writing articles to writing novels: way back when a friend gave me that push of confidence, and showed real interest in what I wrote, books began appearing on my doorstep. Slightly unusual books, books which made you laugh or smile but carried deep and honest assessments of human nature and human predicaments. Books which encouraged my sort of writing, the kind I wanted to do.
Years before, the kindness of friends had assisted my flight from a perfectly frightful flat-share at Uni. Details apart, one of the horrible things was, the flat was in somebody’s attic, which three of us shared, and we had no front door. The landlady’s cats had a nasty habit of coming upstairs to poo underneath the furniture in our rooms … and once the dog came and deposited a present on one of the beds (not mine). Friends, once they heard, came with a car (rare for students to own one back then), we bundled my possessions into it in plastic carrier bags, paid the rent up and did a flit. That of course has nothing to do with writing, though it may get into a story one day.
Spike files himself on the bookcase, among the research
Not that I don’t love cats: cats with clean habits and outdoor toilet ideas. Spike is a close friend: a ‘friend who sticks closer than a brother’ and possibly has a story in him too.
Our twins, long ago
Then there’s the kindness of friends who love to push a pram with your twins in it when they go to collect their kiddies from school: my New Zealand friend got to revisit her maternal baby-instincts and I got an hour off in the afternoon. Mummy-stuff indeed. And my more recent Hong Kong friend, who lived next door for a year with her family, and was always up for a mug of tea and a chat. The weary writer and the weary, breast-feeding mummy ‘chewing the fat’ in her rather chilly, rented house. The kindness going both ways.
So when creation’s by the mind, and the book’s our baby, is there a kindness of fellow-author ‘friends’?
Despite talk about jealousy and competitiveness of authors, about ‘trolling reviews’ on Amazon, our discussions around reaching readers with books that defy genre-typing engendered posts written with enthusiasm and encouragement. Comparing our experiences, sharing what works. A counterbalance to the thriller/crime/sci-fi mystery guys’n’gals whose sales top the lists. ANd followed by a rather splendid review of my first novel, Baby, Baby (Hodge 2010, available from the website (http://hodgepublishing.co.uk/home/) (or Amazon, p/b or Kindle).
Technology is neutral: how we use it is not. The Alli site members’ group (allianceindependentauthors.org/) proves the kindness of friends can exist across the net : sharing ideas at every level from newbies starting out to experienced authors who sell in large numbers. Even support themselves by writing. Sharing advice, frustrations, thoughts, guest posts.
Virginia Woolf 1937
(I wonder if Virginia Woolf would have lived longer if she had had a virtual band of fellow-writers displaying the kindness of e-friends?)
Here’s a very brief post on the blog! Here’s wondering if any of you nice followers have discovered my 
Mari Howard, Author 