Thin Reflections

Well, here she is. Charlie's first full outing outing in all its glory. It will take a little while to feed through to retailers, but it is already listed at The Book Depository, Amazon, Waterstones, and Foyles. You can place your order now to be certain that as soon as they receive stocks, they'll pass a copy on to you.

On finishing...

…a book that is. Not reading the last page and wondering what to pick up next, but typing the equivalent of FIN at the end of whichever draft is the one you finally decide has to be the last.

It is a bitter-sweet experience. Especially after reading the bloody thing for the umpteenth time through various drafts and proofs (in which you still find typos, right up to the moment they have to pry the typescript out of your fevered hand). There is enormous relief that the task is done, that three years (in this case) of living with a character through situations, of their resigned stare when you put them through yet more horrors, is finished. That for better or worse it’s all gone to the printer. You can get your life back.

So you think.

Because the moment is gone, the sweats start. Cold Turkey (although being vegetarian, I’m not sure Cold Quorn has the same ring about it). You have no writing to fret over, dream about, wake up in the middle of the night and scribble about, worry at as you do the shopping. You have handed your tenderly nurtured child over to a harsh world where people have the choice to fork over hard cash for your masterpiece or for that heavily marketed, half-price, humungous bar of chocolate. And having foregone the joys of chocolate, said folk now have access to all sorts of online media where they can make or break you and the novel into which you have poured your soul.

All those worries last until the fidgets begin. You’ve cleaned away three years worth of dust in the study, mended the leaky tap in the bathroom, and reacquainted yourself with whatever members of your family still recognise the shambling wreck that has emerged from the back room. You’ve played games on the computer until your right hand has seized up (make of that what you will). You’ve watched all those box sets (and The Prisoner really is the bees’ knees – the original, that is). You’ve pretended there isn’t a notebook full of ideas. You’ve tried.

But just when you weren’t looking, you find a pencil in your hand and a few words on a piece of paper; you find a new file opened on the computer; you find yourself sorting out a new set of music to play as the soundtrack to the movie in your head.

All of which mad ramblings are to announce:

Thin Reflections has gone to the printer and will be available soon (watch this space for details).

And I will soon be starting work on something new (as well as getting some of my back catalogue into print).

A Life Less Auden-ary

A disappointing level of reading accomplished, largely because I have been spending all day proof-reading and indexing. Come the evening (when I read the most), I have for the most part been putting my feet up and watching DVDs.

I have managed to read a few short stories as a warm up to the main reading project of the year (Dubliners) and some lighter stuff, but I was struck today by how much and how little we retain of certain books. I know Joyce well because I have read and re-read his work (and yes, that includes Ulysses and Finnegans Wake). I don’t know how many copies of The Essential James Joyce I’ve been through (even my hardback is looking… well read). Yet much of the content of Dubliners seems to have slipped from my mind. This is good in a way, as I’m coming to it fresh.

This thought was sparked by the arrival of the volume of Auden’s poems I will be re-reading. There was a frisson in getting the book in the post as it is the exact same edition I had back in 1970. I carried my school books in a canvas horse’s nose bag and this, along with others was a constant companion for two years. I have flicked through the pages, but apart from a few titles that ring bells with flat batteries, there is nothing apart from that vague memory of finding little or no connection when I first read them.

Perhaps my other reading at the time coloured this. The works we studied were (and still are) part of the literary canon. I was very much into… non-canonical writing (I started to put experimental, but much of it wasn’t; perhaps exploratory would be better?). Having said that, Chaucer, Milton, and the others all made an impression.

It will be interesting to see what happens this time round (beyond a vague nostalgia for those sixth form days – all the lovely people and wondrous events).

40 Years On

Yes, I’m still in the land of the living.

And a chance encounter with a photocopy found whilst tidying a folder set me thinking. It is forty years (-ish) since I did my A Level literature course. I sat the exam in the summer of 1972, so I would have been part way into the first year (pauses to take socks off and use toes for counting) – possibly. It was literature, after all, not mathematics.

Anyway, I have decided to revisit my roots. I had been writing long before I took this literature course, and I had read some pretty heavyweight stuff – I was already an avid proponent of the likes of Beckett and Camus as well home-grown writers such as Woolf. I read just as voraciously then as I do now (my father put up a wall of shelving for my books). But this course was my first systematic introduction to reading with a purpose to understanding not just the content of a book, but the ways in which an author achieved the effects they were after.

In other words, this was a step-change for me as a writer. I learned to be critical in a systematic way and I was provided with a set of critical tools by an English teacher who was a scholar and a gentleman. No longer with us, I dedicate this project to the memory of Colin Silk.

And the project?

I’m going to re-read those A Level texts. No big deal, but it will be interesting to see if it re-opens any doors (or maybe just cracks open a few windows). Some of the texts I have revisited constantly in the last forty years. Others I have not read since.

It will also be interesting to see if I can detect any change in my attitude to them. There was only one that left me cold at the time. The rest were inspiring, eye-opening, often difficult, but always rewarding.

The texts are as follows:

Oxford A Level – 1972
English Literature

Paper I
Chaucer – The Franklin’s Tale
Shakespeare – Hamlet
Milton – Paradise Lost – Book II
Charlotte Bronte – Villette

Paper IIE
Shaw – Major Barbara
Yeats – Selected Poems (Macmillan – Poems of W B Yeats)
H G Wells – The New Machiavelli
Joyce – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Eliot – Selected Poems (Faber)
Auden – Poems (Penguin 'selected by the author' edition)


I have most of these on my shelves, but will need to track down three: the Chaucer (I do have this as rendered in modern English, but I’d like to find the original text we used and brush up on the original), Auden, and Wells.

I am currently working up to the Joyce by reading Dubliners and will report on each of them in the usual place.

In the meantime, I have to get back to Charlie who will be appearing in print in the not too distant future.

Rearing its head (again).

The last phrase of my previous blog could not have been more prophetic. It has slipped out (an entirely apposite way of doing business as far as the current UK government is concerned - they are all so slimy things cannot help but slip out, slide out, ooze disgustingly around our feet giving off a bad smell…) Sorry, where was I (apart from expressing a loathing so deep it makes me physically ill).

Ah, yes. It has slipped out that the ConDems want to review copyright law in the UK. Details are vague, but the gist of it is that they want to make it easier for those poor, suffering, cash-strapped corporations like News Corporation, Sky, Google, Facebook and so on to use work by creative folk and not have to pay for it.

We’ve already had a bout of whining from people who think that creatives should not have their work copyrighted after they die. Thus depriving their families - who have probably lived in poverty for decades - from reaping any reward for supporting someone who has spent their lives entertaining and enlightening others.

In the last few days we’ve had the explosion of wrath over a cookery magazine that has been stealing other people’s work and when challenged the ‘editor’ (who is clearly ignorant about copyright law as it currently exists) had the audacity to try to charge the complainant for editorial work (which did not need doing). That isn’t just ignorance; that is bullying.

Bullying is what the big corporations are good at. They buy politicians to do it for them, but it goes on just the same. The only thing we get to vote for these days is which particular bunch of scum-sucking CEOs we want in charge of us. The rest makes no difference at all. At the moment it is banks and media corporations who call the shots. They don’t want to have to pay us anything, although they do want us to keep feeding them. Perhaps they will eventually realise that a parasite needs to keep its host alive and reasonably healthy - other wise when the host dies the parasite dies with it.

Of course, it is not an equal relationship. The host can exist without the parasite. When the host wakes up to that fact, we can but hope that the parasite is removed and squashed under heel.

Level the field.

I recently received a little brown envelope containing a slip of paper. It was from the Royal Society of Literature informing me that I hadn’t won a short story competition. It went on to list those who had.

One of the names looked familiar so I did an online search. And was left more than a little annoyed.

Before I go any further, let me say that I had no expectation of winning this competition, but like the optimist I can sometimes be, I thought I’d give it a go. So this is not a rant about how my genius is being overlooked. It is about being fair.

My search revealed that one of the runners-up was a story that had just been published by Virago in a short story collection. Yet the rules of the competition clearly state that entries should be stories not previously published.

I emailed the RSL and asked them about this. The response was mealy-mouthed at best: the story had not been published at the time it went before the judges.

Technically I suppose this is true. Yet that story will have been seen by an agent, accepted for publication, and passed through the hands of a professional editor by the time it was entered into the competition. I entered a story that was all my own work from start to finish.

If anyone is going to take money from entrants to a competition, the competition needs to be fair. Transparently so. The RSL needs to make its rules a little more comprehensive and explicit.

I am sure quite a few people entered that competition in the belief they were being given an even chance to win. That some people may have entered work that had gone through a number of external editorial processes undermines that belief.

It is hard enough as it is to get a foot on the publishing ladder these days. Winning or being given an honourable mention in a prestigious competition certainly does no harm. However, it seems even that route in is compromised.

To those that have…

A message from Charlie Cornelius...

...who would like you to go here for a sneak preview of the cover of Thin Reflections.