A good day!

Yesterday was rather a good day writing-wise. I had an article accepted by Best of British Magazine in record quick time (4 hours). I received my copies of "In Memoriam" (and a cheque - don't forget the cheque) from Candlestick Press. See details here: In Memoriam You know how you worry whether an anthology will turn out tacky - well this isn't - it's brilliant.

I am proud to see "Pink" in the company of works by:
Christina Rossetti
Goethe (tr Longfellow)
Michael Rosen
Billy Collins
Anna Wigley
Carol Ann Duffy
Peter POrter
Dylan Thomas
Paul Durcan
Derek Mahon
Wendy Cope
W H Auden
Adrian Mitchell
Jackie Kay
Penelope Shuttle
Robert Burns
Catullus
Laurence Binyon
John McCrae
Shakespeare
Tennyson
Emily Dickinson
Thomas Gray
Mark Twain.

An' ME!
Quite a day, really!

Royal Hoorah

I admit it: I admire HM The Queen. The fact that my own mother is only a year older and has always looked very like Her Majesty is a complication I acknowledge and – I hope – set aside. It isn’t just the longevity that I admire, since I have other relatives who are older than either The Queen or Prince Philip, and some I like and some I don’t.

But… There has never been a breath of extramarital scandal about this couple throughout their exceptionally long and public marriage. This can’t be attributed to Royal pressure on the media, since there has been plenty of gossip about their children over the years, so I have to assume that there’s no gossip because there’s nothing to gossip about. The couple are clearly each other’s rock. That in itself is a remarkable and admirable thing.

I really don’t mind the fact that HM inherited a lot of land, and a lot of goods and property. It’s not as though HM goes out and personally grinds the faces of the poor in order to take money from them. Since 1993 The Queen pays tax on her personal wealth and income like everybody else, some £190 million a year, exceeding the amount paid to her by the Civil List, the Privy Purse, and the Grants-in-Aid for upkeep of Royal Palaces and for Royal travel.

I admire HM’s ability to manage a punishing daily, weekly and yearly round of travelling, meetings and public appearances. She’s done it for sixty years, she stays in touch with everything that is happening politically and she shows no sign of retiring. And she does it all with so much more poise and serenity than Murdoch or Sugar or their ilk.

I haven’t gone out of my way to watch the Jubilee celebrations, and truthfully I had forgotten that today was the 60th time HM The Queen has presided on Horseguards Parade. However, I happened to catch Trooping the Colour at a friend’s house this morning, and I was stirred by the sight of the fabulous costumes and uniforms, the men and music and horses and carriages. I know people moan about the expense of “all that military showing-off,” but if these amazing ceremonials didn’t happen, would the complainers be a ha’penny better off? Unlikely. Would foreign visitors spend so much money in England if the only displays were of grey-suited politicians riding in bullet-proof limos? I know I wouldn’t. So I admired the organization that must go into the pomp and pageantry, I appreciated it all as the splendid theatre it was meant to be, and I was glad I didn’t have to polish all that brass and leatherwork.

I know there are things to criticize about monarchy, but I’m deliberately not going to touch on them here. On this miserable wet windy Saturday I want to make a statement: I enjoy the bright side of it. It makes far better viewing than most “celebrities” do. So, to celebrate her astonishingly long reign, three cheers for Her Majesty.

What I did in the Holidays

OK, so strictly the holidays have been and gone, with all the flag waving, but there was a local arts exhibition yesterday. I took part. Ostensibly it was related to the "Cultural Olympiad" (search and it comes up first on Google) but it was resolutely NOT about either London or the Olympics, but about Shap.

I trialled some of my "Galloway Gate" poetry sequence on Great Writing before recording the poems, which were spoken by myself and Janni Howker. I added images to support the various narratives that thread through the sequence. I would rather have run it purely as video-stills, but the laptop tended to drop frames or drop sound, so clearly I was pushing it too hard! I had to go back to PowerPoint, running the narrative as one continuous sound file under the changing slides. I had tried running each sound file (individual poem) under shorter slide sequences, but PowerPoint randomly cut off the sound in more than half the instances, so that was not at all satisfactory!

PowerPoint was cowed into obedience by the full soundtrack running under 111 slides, but editing so that the slides fitted accurately was extremely tedious. There is no way to dip in and out of the sequence as you can with a video editor, so an adjustment at the end of the sequence meant listening from the beginning to almost the whole 30 minutes - and a further adjustment needed another 30 minutes - etc. Very, very boring.

The presentation ran all yesterday, and it went all right because I had taken everything I needed to the venue, and had not relied on anyone else providing cabling or speakers or even Blu-Tack for posters pointing the way to the room. I did have a whole room to myself though! It was bad in one way because people had to be directed to find me, but also good because it was a nice light, quiet room with lots of space for people to sit down, or read the pages of poems I had put out, and there were few other noises interfering with the spoken poetic narrative. Donations to the Walking for Wishes charity (raising money to send sick children like Naomi on their dream holiday or whatever) were small, but better than nothing.

The main point is that the people who came in and sat down stayed through the whole 30 minutes, and some who came in at the middle then stayed to see the beginning of the loop which they had missed.

Having listened to the sequence endlessly for several days, though, I'm glad I was needed at a meeting elsewhere during the middle of the afternoon!

My next move is to contact the local arts organisation and book a date to use their space in Penrith. It's a nice live space with a soup shop which will bring people in! They can offer a large screen TV on which to run the sequence, which will be more attractive, if less intimate, than viewing on the laptop.

And next time I will definitely take some books to sell!

I'm delighted to have been asked to do a guest spot on M M Bennetts' blog. I drive a good deal, as you will know, and in this case, I'm looking at coaching, both stages and Mails.

I've been researching this history extensively for a good many years. Praise be for the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and places like the Post Office Museum and archive, which have all provided contemporary material or first-hand accounts from people who actually drove commercially in the 1830s and knew the proprietors of the great coaching businesses which, within a few years of Victoria's accession, had vanished from most of England.

I've now completed my historical novel, "Coachman!" George Davenport is a young, ambitious driver whose move to London coincides not only with the Coronation of Queen Victoria but also with the completion of major railways which marked the beginning of the end for coaching. Of course, being a novel, I've further complicated George's life, with Lucy, his pregnant girlfriend, and Sarah Chaplin, his boss's daughter, who is as ambitious as he is, and with far fewer principles.

I hope the Chaplin family will forgive me for having taken liberties with their history, but Sarah was the one member who never married, so there are no direct descendants to protest. My excuses are that the one Chaplin I know well was happy for me to write a novel about her famous coaching ancestor, while George, the coachman, and Lucy, are my own great-grandparents, albeit transplanted a couple of generations back in time ...

I like the results and I hope readers will too.

But first I need to complete the polishing and find an agent - or decide whether to go it alone and self publish.

Plagiarists beware

This is not so much a post as a link to others' posts to raise awareness. This ought to be a test case for online copyright.


Plagiarists beware (24 Feb 2012)

and

Author uncovered as serial copyright thief (25 Feb 2012) The internet gives opportunities for such theft, but its power extends to exposing them, too.

Did she do it just for un-earned kudos? Or did she do it for gain? How would she be punished if she'd stolen tangible goods or artifacts?

We as writers value our words as highly as artists value their paintings or sculptures. Also, I wish magazines would stop regarding us as handy page fillers who will write for nothing or for "incentives" such as a mention of our names!

Happy New Year

Hello dear reader, whoever you are (sings tune from The King and I)...

New Year's resolutions don't come easily to me but this year I seem to have several that are tapping on my skull. One is to get this damn historical novel (a) completed and (b) knocked into a readable and saleable shape. I'm sort-of telling myself that I must complete it before I start the spring tune-up of the ponies for carriage driving. (So what am I doing wasting time on here!)

Another is to play more music. I've de-bagged the guitar and shocked it into tune and am suffering with red-hot fingertips on my left hand from practising every day after years of not playing. But I am also struggling to find a comfortable playing position and so I'm waiting for the arrival of a kit harp from Backyard Music in America, who are very approachable (as though, shock horror, they really want you to buy their stuff and enjoy it) and despite the impression given by their web site's order form they do NOT charge the earth for mailing kits across the Atlantic. You just have to email them and discuss what you want them to send. So now I've joined a couple of harp forums and am wasting yet more time reading about and watching videos about how to play. How did I ever have time to go to work?

In the meantime the nags are pottering round the yard getting filthy, and the hospital appointment for my knee operation looms closer, and occasionally I do some web design and argue with precious photographers about the presentation of their posh and expensive books (Wave at me if you're buying expensive books at the moment? Can I sell you some of my cheap ones please?)

Then I waste a bit more time blogging...

Grumpy old Soul

Well, I thought I’d got all my grumpyness out, but you are right, I couldn’t stay shut up after all. As October freezes gently into autumn, here it comes again - Hallowe’en.

I receive a lot of emails, and read many more, from people who live in the last bastion of history’s refugees and whingers, the Home of the Brave, the Land of the Free. In those emails, now that October has begun, I am increasingly being exhorted to “Have a Happy Hallowe’en”. From being mildly puzzled I am developing a full-on peeve about this.

There is a Northern English and also a Scottish tradition that for children and youths, this night is Mischief Night. For one gloriously silly evening, they might play pranks that on other nights would earn them a swift clip under the ear and a complaint to their parents. Door knockers might be tied together with string, black cotton stretched across streets to knock off people’s hats, one man’s bucket mysteriously appropriated and filled with the potatoes of another, a wheelbarrow run down the street until it tumbled over in the front garden of a third. Signpost arms were turned round, gates were removed from their hinges and hung from tree limbs.

Groups of silly maidens (I was one, once) sat by candlelight or by smelly turnip lanterns and told each other ghost stories. They bobbed for apples with fortunes slipped into them, and cast nutshells and applepeel over their shoulders to discover the initials of future husbands. Perhaps they also used games of patience or more esoteric layouts of cards to forecast their futures. Maybe they even surrounded a table bearing an upturned glass and each placed a finger upon it, in the unlikely belief that it would travel to letter after letter because within the glass, the spirit of a dead person was constrained to answer their whispered trivial questions.

Here’s where the evening reflects its origins, and where I begin to become uneasy.

I was brought up a Christian, albeit I am now a non-practising one in that I don’t go to church and have serious doubts about interpretations of “The Scriptures”. Hallowe’en is, strictly, for non-Christians.

It began as a pagan celebration: the feast of Samhain, the endpoint of the annual sun cycle, the “night between the years”, the end of summer and beginning of winter. In Brittany November 1st is the Day of the Dead, the opening of the Black Month. As such it was a portal to the world of the dead and a mythologically important day for magical occurrences of all kinds. The Christian Church sanitised it into a celebration of past lives as All Souls, All Saints or All Hallows; but a reactionary element continued to celebrate its older meaning. “The night before the Feast of All Hallows” gave us the more modern names, Hallowmas, All Hallows’ Eve or Hallowe’en.

From that point of view alone, Hallowe’en is emphatically not something you should wish someone to have a happy one of, unless you know them to be of the pagan persuasion. And I was frankly furious one year that my University diary, in trying to be politically correct, noted the feast of Samhain but ignored All Saints. Both or neither, please!

Tradition has it that on the Eve of All Saints, evil spirits are abroad. On such a night the good and the decent should wrap up tightly by their firesides to pray all good angels to defend them against the powers of darkness.

With that in mind, I am doubly uncomfortable when I walk through a daytime supermarket and see witches’ hats on sale, along with vampire masks, cloaks and plastic broomsticks. Why should I buy trays of chocolate witches to placate those juvenile Al Capones, the “trick-or-treaters” who will blackmail me on my own doorstep in happy ignorance of the origins of this night of licence?

Get thee hence, Commerce. Do not make mock of the oldest fear of all; the fear of the departed dead.