What's in a name by Ann Evans

Does the place where you live fill you with inspiration? Is the view from your window of crashing waves, or a rugged clifftop, or maybe fields of poppies dancing in the breeze? No? Me neither. Just a view of houses and gardens, roads and pavements. Except there is inspiration there – in the street names.

The area where I live is called Poets Corner, where as you might guess, the streets are all named after poets. Amongst them we have Longfellow Road, Tennyson Road, Shelley Road, Keats Road, and various others who I have to admit I know little about, such as Meredith Road and Herrick Road.

Seeing as I walk or drive along these streets every day, I thought it only right to find out who these poets were. Obviously I'd heard of Longfellow, Tennyson, Shelley and Keats. But as to Herrick Road, I had to ask Google.

I discovered that Robert Herrick was a 16th century clergyman and poet who wrote more than 2,500 poems, which makes me feel slightly ashamed to say I hadn't even heard of him. I have now though and I've enjoyed browsing some of his work. Here's one of his short poems that you may not have read:

Robert Herrick

Four Things Make Us Happy Here

Health is he first good lent to men;

A gentle disposition then;

Next, to be rich by no by-ways;

Lastly, with friends t' enjoy our days.

        Robert Herrick

We have an Omar Road too, named after the Persian scholar and poet Omar Khayyam. I knew the name but was amazed to learn that he was an 11th century writer – such a long time ago yet we all remember the name.

And then there's Lord Lytton Avenue. Research reveals that this was Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton a 19th century English statesman and poet. I was fascinated to also learn that he was the first person to use the phrase: "The pen is mightier than the sword". It was a line from his play Richelier. 

And through checking him out on the good old internet I discovered that he also wrote under the name of Owen Meredith – which solves my query regarding who Meredith Road was named after. Two for the price of one here!

Under the pseudonym of Owen Meredith, one of Lytton's works was a 24 verse poem called Vampyre which I've copied and pasted into a file to read at length – possible inspiration for a scary story at some point, maybe. Here's the first verse:

Robert Bulwer Lytton

           Vampyre

I found a corpse, with golden hair,

Of a maiden seven months dead.

But the face, with the death in it, still was fair,

And the lips with their love were red.

Rose leaves on a snow-drift shed,

Blood-drops by Adonis bled,

Doubtless were not so red.

    Owen Meredith

And here's a verse that Lord Lytton penned under his own name:

       A Night in Italy

Sweet are the rosy memories of the lips

That first kiss'd ours, albeit they kiss no more:

Sweet is the sight of sunset-sailing ships,

Altho' they leave us on a lonely shore:

Sweet are familiar songs, tho' music dips

Her hollow shell in thoughts's forlornest wells;

And sweet, tho' sad, the sound of midnight bells

When the oped casement with the night-rain drips.

        Robert Bulwer Lytton

And to finish with, one from John Keats. We all know the opening line, but as for the rest of his poem I had long forgotten it.

       A Thing of Beauty

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowers band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways

Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,

Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon

For simple sheep; and such are daffodils

With the green world they live in; and clear rills

That for themselves a cooling covert make

'Gainst the hot season, the mid-forest brake,

Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms

We have imagined for the mighty dead;

And endless fountain of immortal drink,

Pouring into us from the heaven's brink.

                John Keats

Okay, so where I live is just an ordinary street which may not seem inspiring, until you delve a little deeper. How about you? Are there hidden depths behind where you live?

Please visit my website: www.annevansbooks.co.uk

Alphabet Soup - Cathy Butler

There’s been a lot of ink spilt recently on the subject of the best way to teach children how to read (or more accurately to decode) written English, and how large a role phonics should play in that process. I’m not going to enter that fray today, except to point out that long before phonics there was another system that promised to get children up and reading in super-quick time. Its name was ITA, or the Initial Teaching Alphabet.

ITA was invented by a member of the Pitman family, whose shorthand system has underpinned the work of secretaries for generations, and like shorthand it relied on the sounds of words rather than on their spellings. Since English sounds don’t correspond to letters, at least in a consistent way, Pitman was obliged to create new characters for children to learn, producing books for five-year olds that looked like the example above. (Being Englished,  the text reads: Paul said to his mother, “Jet has taken the meat. Oh look, Jet has eaten the meat.” Paul said to Jet, “Bad dog, Jet.”) The idea was that, once children grew confident in reading using ITA, they would graduate smoothly to standard English spelling.

ITA flourished in the 1960s, when it was taught to many of my own generation (although not to me). Did it work? That it is now a historical curiosity suggests not, and a quick straw poll of my peers reveals that many feel it badly affected their ability to spell in later life. Others, however,  are more sanguine, so who knows? Did you learn using ITA - and, if so, how was it for you? I cite it here simply to offer a long perspective on present controversies. We have always had trendy reading schemes to deal with, and children have generally muddled through despite our best efforts. If that's not a positive message, what is?

For all the trouble it causes, I’d be sad to lose the strange system that is English spelling, just as I was sad to lose imperial weights and measures, and pounds, shillings and pence. Like these, English spelling offers a window onto our past and those who lived there. Each word is like a stone that breaks to reveal a fossil, a sudden glimpse of a world in which "k-n-i-g-h-t" really is a phonetic spelling. What is ugly when seen in two dimensions, in four may be a thing of beauty.

Thought for the day:

Though you plough thoroughly through the rough, you should expect the odd hiccough

On your marks...set...write!

To begin at the beginning…

Well, that’s easier said than done, Dylan, old lad. 

Most writers starting out on the long journey of creating a new novel are daunted by how (and where) to open their story. At what point do you start the tale? Do you leap into the action in the hope of grabbing the reader by the throat, rationalising with yourself that you’ll be able to wring the backstory out of your characters as you go along, or do you go back a bit, carefully setting things up with clever hooks to tantalise the reader enough that they will have no choice but to read on.

Writer’s block (for me, at least) is what happens when you struggle too much on finding the right words rather than getting on with the process of simply creating, and this is never more so than when starting a new book.

I have come to learn that you can’t wait for the perfect beginning. I used to do just that, and I would feel a rising sense of bewilderment and frustration when I couldn’t come up with the best possible start for a story. That way madness lies. 

There is no point gazing at that blinking cursor in the top left corner of a blank page, refusing to go on until you get the opening paragraphs of your work absolutely nailed. Instead, you must learn to write on, trusting that the revision process will resolve any issues you have. It’s not easy – doubts constantly nag at you, and the overwhelming desire is to keep going back and change things, especially those pesky first few chapters. Do yourself a big favour and try to overcome this. If you are really struggling, forget the beginning altogether and write from the middle outwards. Get that first draft under your belt, and accept that it is flawed – maybe painfully so. I read somewhere that great writing comes from revision, not creation, and I truly believe this to be the case. Only with a first draft completed can you really go about making your story come to life and come up with that elusive, enthralling opening.

To begin at the beginning? Not necessarily, but begin you must. 

It's not teaching, it's learning - Anne Rooney

I'm very busy at the moment (which is the poor excuse for this post being late today). The main reason is that as well as writing, I'm teaching a summer school in creative writing to American students. The summer school is run by Pembroke and King's Colleges in Cambridge, and the students get to live and work for eight weeks in a lovely environment. They have one-to-one supervisions in King's College (in the courtyard cafe when weather allows) and lectures in Cambridge Union Society. They find the setting delightfully and quaintly English and ancient, and help me to see it afresh.

I'm not really of the belief that you can teach creative writing, but I do think you can encourage people to learn and help them to develop their skills and ideas. What I hadn't anticipated when I started - and it's now six weeks into the eight-week term - is how much I would learn from them.

They bring not only their own wonderful ideas for stories, their voices, their styles and their questions, but also their very different lives and experiences. They are wonderful people. They shine like jewels, sparkling with enthusiasm and insight. Some have a lot of experience of creative writing already and produce quite breathtaking work. Some are new to it and their experiments, though not always successful, are always interesting.

The programme is great, because they have one-to-one supervision and lectures from published, professional authors. Brian Keaney is the other supervisor, and we invite writers of other genres to come as guest lecturers. None of us is a professional teacher of creative writing - we all make a living from writing. That makes it very different from the teaching they get in their home universities.

It has been hard work - there have been 13-hour days and coming home to a house with no food in it. But it has never been exhausting as the students radiate energy. They feed my inspiration and creativity as much as (I hope) I nurture theirs. I shall be very sorry to see them go, but hope they have learned a lot and expect to see at least some of them in publishers' lists in the not-too-distant future.

Oscar and August by Keren David

Oscar Pistorius has been one of the stars of the Olympics -  a double amputee who battled to win the right to compete against able-bodied athletes, using the prosthetic legs that have won him the nickname ‘blade runner’. Who can fail to be impressed by his determination and ambition?

In the opening ceremony of the Olympics, young disabled performers were featured from start to finish. When 11-year-old Humphrey Keeper sang Jerusalem so beautifully, who noticed that he had been born without a hand on his left arm?  Many of the children in the Kaos choir who sang and signed God Save the Queen have physical and learning disabilities. One girl suffered four seizures just days before the ceremony, but she was determined to get out of hospital in order to be able to take part.

Soon we will be hearing more stories of men and women who refused to allow disability to define their goals. They will compete at the Paralympic games, win and lose, showing the world just a part of their many abilities.

Sadly, along with the positive and inspiring stories that come from the Olympics and Paralympics, we also hear far too often about disabled people  being  bullied and abused, sometimes, horrifically, even killed by their tormentors. Political and media rhetoric can paint the disabled as malingerers, sponging off the state.  Children need to learn early in life to identify with people whose bodies, minds and emotions work differently from the supposed norm.

I think it’s a good time to be thinking about how we present disability in children’s books. Recently I read a book in which the (best-selling and very popular) author had -  shockingly, in my opinion -  used physical and mental disability to signify the sinister. It was like coming across a crude racial stereotype in a modern setting.

One book doing much to challenge prejudice is Wonder, R J Palacio’s debut novel which has deservedly won much attention and praise in her native America and beyond.  Wonder tells the story of August Pullman, a boy with extreme facial deformities, moving from home-schooling to the classroom for the first time. R J Palacio is extremely good at the small and large unkindnesses of schoolchildren, faced with someone different -  and the real wonder of this book is Summer, the girl who defies convention to be kind, and then moves beyond kindness to make a real friendship with August.

The book isn’t perfect – I’d have liked to hear more about August’s sister’s feelings about her own face, and I didn’t like the approval given to his strategy of joking about his face to make others feel better. The ending is just a little too sentimental for my taste (but Hollywood will love it). Still, I want to force it into every 11-year-old’s hands.

I have a paralympic athlete character in my book, When I was Joe. I wanted Ellie to be determined, ambitious, brisk and unsentimental. I wanted her struggle to be there alongside those of the other characters - not taking over the book, but important, nonetheless.  I also wanted to show the effect that a super-determined, highly talented special needs member can have on an ordinary family.

 Growing up, as I did, with a disabled brother whose ambition and determination bulldozed any obstacles in his way, I rarely read books about families like ours. Today we need them more than ever.

Wastelands to Wonderlands: Sue Purkiss

Landscape is very important to me, both generally, and in my writing. Different landscapes reflect and inspire different moods, different thoughts - in fact, the same landscape can occasion different moods. I was in France recently, in La Rochelle, a seaport on the Atlantic coast. It has a small artificial beach. One day, the sea was a dull greenish grey, the sky a mass of bright blue-grey cloud. The sand was pale, almost white, and there were were one or two white sails out on the water. There were two vivid spots of colour: a coat, and a buoy, both bright scarlet. There was something striking about the limited range of colours: something ominous and strange.

The next day, I saw the same spot in sunshine. The sky was mostly blue, with innocent puffball clouds. The sea was a much darker blue, and it looked calm and inviting; there was no hint of threat. You can imagine the different types of story - or different points in the same story - in which those two variations of the same scene could feature - could, in fact, become central to the narrative. I don't have a picture of the beach, but here's one of the towers of La Rochelle in that very special evening light you sometimes get. (They are beautiful, the towers of La Rochelle beautiful, but one of them was a prison in Napoleonic times and earlier - the walls are scratched with graffiti, carved painstakingly with images of the ships from which the prisoners had been captured.)

An exhibition at the British Library explores the way in which the British landscape has inspired writers for the last thousand years. It shows how authors not only record what they see, but their ' novels, poetry and plays can shape our perceptions and transform our places through imagination.'

Of course, if there's one thing the British Library has plenty of, it's books. But how do you go about creating an exhibition out of them? Well, first you decide on different types of landscape: Rural Dreams, Dark Satanic Mills, Wild Places, Beyond the City, Cockney Visions, and Waterlands. Then, you sift through the extraordinary range of manuscripts and printed books you have at your disposal - and you realise that for each category, you can display a fantastically eclectic mix of writers. So, for instance, with Beyond the City, which explores the suburbs (are they an idyll? A threat? A refuge?), next to a gorgeously illuminated centuries-old volume of the Canterbury Tales (click here to see this), you may find an excerpt from one of J G Ballard's books about the 'edge-lands', or something from Betjeman. Rural Dreams has examples from Hardy, a manuscript of Edward Thomas's poem Adlestrop, and the manuscript of Alan Garner's The Owl Service, along with a recording of Stella Gibbons talking about how she came to write one of the funniest books I've ever read, Cold Comfort Farm. Dark Satanic Mills includes a fascinating display about Ted Hughes' book, Remains of Elmet, which was inspired not only by the industrial remains in the Calder Valley, but also by Fay Godwin's wonderful, atmospheric photos of this landscape: recordings and letters offer a fascinating insight into how each of them fed off the other's vision.

There are videos, too, with writers such as Simon Armitage and Robert MacFarlane discussing the part landscape plays in inspiring their writing, and images and soundscapes - the ones which illustrate Waterworld are particularly atmospheric and imaginative.

The exhibition is called Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands. If you can make it to the exhibition, be sure to go to the cafe to restore yourself afterwards - it has its very own collection of treasures, including a pear and chocolate tart which I recall with deep affection and not a little longing!

Prospero's Books by Lynda Waterhouse

So far I have only walked out on one film in my life. I have fallen asleep in the cinema on a couple occasions but that was during the second half of a double bill of Che and I was full to the brim of painkillers after breaking my wrist. I like to arrive in time for the adverts, the trailers and the film.

In 1988, though, I walked out of a showing of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I couldn’t stand it. If you ask me why I can’t say - I have sat through worse but there was something that afternoon about the way Daniel Day Lewis kept saying, ‘Take your clothes off’ in a cod Eastern European accent that got my goat and I was off. A few years later my friend Tracy Lee had a similar experience with the film Prospero’s Books. So from that day forward any film, book or art that provoked an immediate and irritated reaction in us was called a Prospero’s Book.

It is my literary shorthand for something that I can’t get on with.

On the other hand I have to shamefacedly confess that despite several attempts Keri Hulme’s Bone People remains a Prospero’s Book .I live in hope that one day I will get it. That my intellect will ripen and I will be able to read Ulysses, The Waves or embrace magical realism. All these failures loom large in my imagination.

Some happier developments from immediate reactions have included the following:

• Making a lifelong friend after we discovered during our first conversation that we were both reading Miss Mole by EH Young;
• Knowing that I would get on with my father-in-law because he loved the film Random Harvest;
• Realising I could marry a man who liked Magazine’s Song from under the Floorboards as much as I did;
• Being unable to stop myself smiling at strangers reading Norman Collins‘s London Belongs To Me or Patti Smith’s Just Kids.
• What are your Prospero’s Books and have any books forged a friendship for you?
  
  

Protect Yourself - Savita Kalhan

Protect Yourself




Earlier this year I suffered a major knockback – the book that was supposed to have been published in Spring 2013, with ARCS and cover ready by this summer was returned to me when a signed contract was cancelled abruptly after a takeover. From all the wonderful messages of support I received, I know that this has happened to many writers and that I am not alone.

In seconds, my glee, excitement and anticipation of the amazing year ahead was crushed by an overwhelming gloom and despondency that surprised and shocked me. I allowed myself to wallow in it for about a week. Of course I know that there are far worse things that could have happened, but, professionally, this felt like the worst. Even though it was not down to me but a business decision made by the not very far-sighted suits who took over a wonderful publishing house with an exceptional list and great authors, didn’t make it any easier.

Eventually, I did what I knew I had to do - I picked myself up, dusted myself down, opened a new file on my laptop and gave free rein to my imagination.

This year has felt much like being on choppy seas, but luckily I have a life jacket. When I first met my agent, she said, “Develop a thick skin – it will protect you,” and she was right. It’s very hard to protect yourself against professional disappointments, but I know that without a life-jacket it would be impossible. Being part of the SAS and getting to know other teen/YA writers who have become friends, I have discovered a support network that is incredible and I am very grateful for it.

So, yes, it is important to find ways to protect yourself as far as you can.

I’m at the Olympic Park today, watching the athletics, so forgive me if I am late responding to any comments.

How I made my first e-book

Are you e-experienced? Until a week ago I wasn't. But, in the last three weeks I have made and published my first e-book.

It feels a bit like giving birth to, I don't know, some kind of strange mutant mongrel beast, some hybrid child whose destiny is unknown, who may grow up to mock me, betray me, give me glory (but only by leave of the wayward capriciousness of viral flukeiness) or, even worse, disappear completely without trace in the infinitely absorptive sponginess that is the e-thernet.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I thought I would share my experience. Some of you may be teetering on the edge of this mysterious pool of brave new publishing opportunities, debating whether to take the plunge. I expect many of you already are e-experienced swimmers with Olympian credits. If so, you can poke fun at my ineptitude.

I kindled thoughts of these waters for a long while. Some of my books had been converted into ebooks by my publishers, but they were like the offspring of alcohol-obscured one night stands; unknown and unclaimed. The publishers didn't even tell me they had been born, I only found out by accident, and I don't have a clue about sales figures.

In a tentative way, I had previously offered PDF downloads of one or two stories or chapters for sale through my websites, but they had languished as forlorn and undownloaded as an unfertilised dandelion in a meadow of opium poppies.

I own no e-reader; nothing I cannot read in a bath without fear. Every work of fact or fiction in my library looks dissimilar from every other, and I like it like that.

What persuaded me to dip my sceptical toe in these waters was partly the persistent encouragement of a local publisher, Cambria Books, whose manager, Chris Jones, is passionate about their new business model.

OK, I said. But I wasn't sure what content to offer first. Then, an old colleague and the series editor of some of my non-fiction, suggested that I republish an old novella of mine. (Thank you, Frank.) This seemed a perfect way of testing out the market, since I knew it would have an existing audience, and that there'd be a new one to which I wanted to introduce it. All I would have to do was find those readers. (The expected readership, by the way, is YA, most likely readers interested in humour, politics, science fiction, and comics/graphic novels.)

I still am sceptical, so I'm going to be watching sales with interest.

The whole process of preparing the content from start to finish took two weeks, which itself is very attractive: contrast this with the swimming-through-jelly tempo of traditional publishing - two years start to finish?

Here are the stages it went through:

One of the illustrations, by Rian Hughes

1. Scanning in the original book using OCR (optical character recognition) software. I used ABBYY. The software is remarkably accurate but does need a bit of an eagle eye for spotting 1s that should be Is and Os that should be 0s.
2. Scanning in the 12 illustrations, which different comics artists from Dave McKean to Simon Bisley had contributed to the original edition. This was the fun bit.
3. Designing the cover, which included colourising in Photoshop a black-and-white illustration that had been on the inside. That was fun too.
4. Adding a short story on the same theme to give extra value, that had been published elsewhere in another collection but not widely seen.
5. Writing a new afterword. This involved a nostalgic and enjoyable expedition into overgrown verges along the side of my personal memory lane. I took my butterfly net for effect (a butterfly effect) to catch those extra special chaotic moments.
6. Completing the whole thing in Word. Word, the software, is not my friend, although Word, the archetypal personification of language, is. But sometimes you have to dance with the Devil, since the e-book conversion process requires a Word file. How did Microsoft sew that one up?
7. Making sure all the prelims were hunky-dory and accurate. That included researching and writing up short biographies of all the artists, updating them from the previous edition, and making sure I thanked everyone.
8. Then I thought I ought to add some adverts for some of my other books at the back that readers might be interested in. Why not? 70-90 years ago, most books had adverts in the back - and the front, sometimes, just like magazines. Perhaps this is the way to go to finance this new form of publishing? Interactive ads for acne-banishing face creams in the back of YA novels, anyone?
9. Then I got carried away and added a real ad from the 1940s for a chemistry set for boys that included real uranium! Most people don't believe that I didn't make this up.

I sent the file to the publisher, who checked it over, made more corrections, added the ISBN and converted it into the .mobi format, which Amazon likes.

I chose to go with Cambria Books, but there are many other companies offering similar deals. It may be worth shopping around, but I didn't bother. Some of them offer print-on-demand as another option. This may be worth considering as well. If you want to get reviews you should have a few print copies to send to reviewers. Also, if you don't think you will sell more than 1000 print copies, print-on-demand is generally cheaper than a conventional print run. Over this number, you should go down the conventional printing route.

The publisher then sent the e-book file back to me to check. I was horrified. I had designed it in Gill Sans font, which I love, and it came back in a frankly disgusting, evil, serifed font. All my lovely formatting was strewn about like weatherboard in a hurricane, and my unique work was reduced to the same common denominator as everything else that you see on a Kindle.

I had to resign myself to the fact that there is little you can do about this, except to control where some page breaks go. It's a bit like designing for the web, except you have even less control. That's the nature of this homogenising beast.

Then, holding a stiff drink, I muttered: “Go!" The publisher uploaded the file to Amazon and it was live - for sale - in less than 24 hours! Wow.

However, I didn't just want to sell it through Amazon and merely contribute to their increasing domination of the market. I wanted people to be able to read it on something other than a Kindle.

So the nice publisher also gave me a version in the .epub format, which works with other e-readers.

Cambria Books also made a Facebook page and a webpage on their company website for the title, to promote it alongside all of their other titles. For all of this Cambria charged £200, which includes £50 for the ISBN. The book is for sale at £1.84. So, I need to sell, bearing in mind the cut that Amazon takes, just 125 copies to get my money back.

I could also have chosen to do all of this myself, but I'm lazy, and I figured that it's worth it, especially since this was my first time.

But I wasn't finished yet.

I then chose to make the files available on my own website. I already sell books on my website through PayPal. Selling e-books is slightly different, because there isn't a physical product to ship, and you need to create a place where buyers can download the file, after PayPal has checked that they have paid for it successfully.

This place has to be completely inaccessible to search engines, otherwise people will just grab the files for nothing.

Here's what I did:

• I made the webpages holding the downloads, one for each format, which just need to be very simple, and put them together with the files in a folder on the server. At the top of the web pages is this text: <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />.
• Just to be safe, I also uploaded a text file to the folder named robots.txt, which simply contains the following:
  
  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /
• Both of these little tricks should prevent search engines from indexing and making public the content of this folder.
• The next thing to do is to get an account with PayPal, if you haven't already got one, and, once logged in, go to the Buy Now Button-making page (if you can't find it just type those words into the search function), which allows you to create a button for a single item purchase.
• All you need to do here, is to put in the name of the e-book, a product code that you make up, and its price. There is, of course, no shipping cost. You probably want to check the button that says “Track profit and loss".
• Then you come to Step 3, subtitled “customise checkout pages". This is the important bit. Answer the questions the following way:

1. “Do you want to let your customer change order quantities?" No, because they won't order one more than one e-book.
    
2. "Can your customer at special instructions in a message to you?" No, there's no need for that.
    
3. "Do you need your customer's shipping address?" No, because messages will go to their PayPal e-mail address.
    
4. Check the box saying “take customer to a specific page after checkout cancellation" and type or paste in the full website address for your shop page.
    
5. Check the box saying “Take customer to a specific page after successful checkout". Here is the really, really important bit: type or paste in the full website address for the page they go to download your e-book. Make sure this is right! This is the complete address for the page that you made earlier and uploaded, the one at the otherwise secret place.

• All you have to do now is click “create button" (don't worry, you can go back and change things if you made a mistake, as I did), and, when happy, copy the code and paste it on your page exactly where you want the button to be.
• Save your page and upload it to your website.

That's it!

The things writers have to do these days.

But I still hadn't quite finished. I had to write a news item publicising the e-book for the front page of my website, in which I included a link not just to the page where people can buy my books, but to the exact part on the page where they can buy that e-book, to make it super-easy for them.

On that page, I include all the options for them to make the purchase: a link to the Amazon page, because most people will be comfortable doing that; and the two buttons for both formats that I made using PayPal.

You can see the news item on the front page of my website here.

I then wrote a post on my blog promoting the book, which you can read here.

Of course, I also had to promote it on Facebook, on both my own page and the page made for the book itself, and on my Twitter account.

And, I launched the e-book at what was billed as the UK's first festival for e-books, in Kidwelly last weekend. My publisher had a stand there.

Unfortunately, this event was poorly promoted and badly attended (having it in a more accessible place would have helped), but there were many excellent speakers, not to mention, for children, our own Anne Rooney, plus Simon Rees and Mary Hooper, Clive Pearce and Nicholas Allan.

Several speakers told their own experiences of publishing e-books. Notable for me was Polly Courtney, who confessed her lamentable experiences with HarperCollins that made her realise that self-publishing was a far better route than being with one of the big five, and Dougie Brimson, who has sold over one million self-published e-books, because he knows his audience really well.

Listening to the speakers gave me confidence that it really is okay to do it yourself and publish ebooks. It doesn't mean you have to give up working with mainstream publishers. You can do both. But given that we all nowadays have to spend at least 25% of our time marketing ourselves and our books, in practice it is not that much more work.

As one of the speakers said, most readers don't care who the publisher is, as long as the book is good.

Did I leave anything out? Is there a better way of doing this? Perhaps some of you will share your experience. After all, I'm just a beginner, but at least I'm no longer an e-book virgin.

Choosing Your Battles - Joan Lennon

 It's been exciting, the Olympics - it really has.  All those amazing human bodies everywhere you look, doing all those amazing things.  But it's important to remember that not all competition is good for us.  Let me tell you a story ... 

Here’s how it is.  I have an older sister.  This is not unusual.  Many people do.  And many people find their older sisters irritating.  But no one has an older sister who is as irritating as mine.

            Because mine has done everything.

            Let me give you an example of how irritating this can be.

            When I was about to go to university, my sister came into my room and handed me a nice, leather-bound notebook.

            “This is for you,” she said.

            “Oh, thanks!  Is it a journal, for me to write my experiences with boys and men in?”

            “No.  It’s a journal in which I’ve written my experiences with boys and men.  Read it carefully, and you won’t have to make the same mistakes I did.”

            “Oh.  Well, what makes you think I won’t make my own, new mistakes?!”

            My sister just smiled.  “I think you’ll find I’ve already made them all.”

            Well, I wasn’t having that.  I went off to university and set out to make all the mistakes my sister hadn’t.

            I thought, I’ll date my professors – I’ll date my room-mate’s brother – I’ll date the entire football team – I’ll date the janitor … but when I checked, I found that every bad idea I came up with had an entry in my sister’s journal already.

            It was when I saw the sign called for recruits for the newly-formed Scottish Historical Re-enactment Group that I realised I’d cracked it!

            This she hadn’t done, I was sure!

            It turned out the Group consisted of two boys – Trevor (the president) and Greg (the co-president).  They were wearing Braveheart wigs and cardboard swords.

            “We don’t get a lot of girls,” said Trevor.

            “You don’t get any girls,” said Greg.

            “Yuckedy yuck.  Look who’s talking.”

            “At least I’ve had a date!”

            “Snogging my cousin when she was unconscious doesn’t count as a date!”

            Wow! I thought.  This has got to be the best mistake EVER – my sister won’t be able to hold a candle to this!

            “Anywho,” said Trevor.  “We’d better get started.  As you know, Historical Re-enactment Groups strive for absolute accuracy.  To that end, we will be performing the Battle of Bannockbuns wearing nothing but our tattoos.”

            “What?!” I said.

            “In the historical nuddy.  You, too, of course, Miss.  But don’t worry, it’s not as if we’ll be really naked.  Greg and I have painted ourselves with blue runic letters, just to make it decent, and we’d be more than happy to do the same for you, wouldn’t we, Greg?  Greg?”

            The co-president’s eyes had glazed over in a worrying fashion.

            “Never mind him,” said Trevor.  “Here, let me show you mine …” 

            As the president of the Scottish Historical Re-enactment Group began to strip off, I beat a hasty retreat …

            I phoned my older sister as soon as I got in, and told her about my experience.  I waited for her to say, “Well!  Now that’s something that never happened to me!” but I waited in vain.

            “Oh yeah.  I did that,” came her voice, as smug and superior as ever.  “I think you’ll find some pretty clear advice on the whole re-enactment thing, round about page 87.  Look it up.  Bye!”

            No way, I thought to myself.  No bloody way.  She’s bluffing.  She has to be!  But she wasn’t.  When I turned to page 87, there it was, my older sister’s warning, staring up at me in big, black, undeniable words:

BEWARE GEEKS BARING GLYPHS ...

There are some competitions you are never going to win, and sometimes even taking part is a bad idea.  Choose your battles, my friends.  Choose your battles.

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Out of the Ground Comes Light - Dianne Hofmeyr

We all saw it… the power of storytelling. 


Who will forget the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony with children being wheeled in on brightly lit hospital beds, winged bikes flying through the air reminding us of the magic of riding our first bicycle, floating trees, the chimney stacks rising from the ground, the Child Catcher and Voldemort versus Mary Poppins, Evelyn Glennie’s wild drumming, the Queen arriving with James Bond, J K Rowling reading an excerpt from Peter Pan, Kenneth Branagh as the engineer Brunel, speaking Caliban’s famous lines from The Tempest…  the explosion of story telling… the moments of glorious insanity, the pandemonium, the sense of celebration?

  

And as writers we have reason to celebrate when the scriptwriter for the ceremony was none other than 2004 Carnegie Medal winner for his debut, Millions, based on his own screenplay for the film of the same name whose novel, Framed, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Book of the Year as well as the Carnegie Medal and his 2009 novel Cosmic was also shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal… and who in 2011 was commissioned to write a sequel to the Ian Fleming children's book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which was published in October 2011 as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again –  Frank Cottrell Boyce (I wrote about him in a previous post when he was guest speaker at our CWIG Conference last year)

He says he stayed eerily calm watching the event with his wife and two of his seven children. Its clear that for the planning, he and Danny Boyle and the other designers shared things they loved about Britain – the Industrial Revolution, the digital revolution, the NHS, pop music, children's literature and genius engineers. He bought Danny a copy of Humphrey Jennings's astonishing book, Pandemonium and the show's opening section ended up being named Pandemonium. He added a few very personal touches to the evening, like using the motto of his old school, St Helens: Ex Terra Lucem – out of the ground comes light, for the idea of the Cauldron.

He is quoted as saying: ‘For me the evening was like a work of art – it’s complex like a great poem or painting and as a result people can take different things from it and react in different ways.’

Someone else said of the evening. ‘It was enchanted. And it belongs to all of us. We are secure enough in our traditions to play around with them.’ 


Yes it was brave... very brave... creative and wonderful... story telling at its best. And the magic of it is probably rightfully summed up by Caliban's lines from The Tempest:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.

www.diannehofmeyr.com

Swimming the Daily Mile - Ambition at 57?

I don't want you to think I really swim a mile - or even half a mile - every day, as I did for a time when I was at school (well, every weekday, pretty much). I still enjoy swimming but my Olympic ambitions did not last long. I got as far as swimming for my (smallish) town, was beaten by the girl from Castleford, and that was pretty much it. Even if I'd had the talent, I don't think I'd ever have had the resolve and determination to do all that training day after day.

Like many others, I'm currently enjoying the Olympic Games and especially the swimming - marvelling at the performances, the dedication, the sportsmanship and the articulate interview responses of these inspirational youngsters.

My swimming ambitions fizzled out long ago but I do still have ambition of a kind, at least where my writing is concerned. In these last few weeks - a time of reflection following the sad and sudden death of my father - I've been trying to work out what ambition means, if anything, when you reach the age of 57. What exactly do I hope to achieve by all this writing I do every day? Is it really just a hobby, like going for an early morning swim or dabbling my feet (when I get the chance) in the sea? No, I think I'm fuelled by something more powerful than that - but what am I pointing myself towards?

I thought I was aiming to earn enough from my books (some hope?) to buy myself a little seaside retreat. But, as it turns out, my wonderful father, who never earned a high salary in his life but never spent much either and invested wisely, has left me enough to make this dream come true. So, all being well, I will have my seaside hideaway, which I hope to share with family and friends. But where does that leave my writing ambitions? Intact, I'm sure of that, but the question remains - why I am working so hard?

It's not for fame, I know that much. I'm old enough to know that fame is not what Rosalies like best (not this one, anyway). Not that I've ever experienced it, but you know what I mean. I hate attention, being stared at, having my photo taken, being expected to behave in certain ways and having things to live up to. Nor is it for money, since I'm also old enough to know that fortunes bring troubles of their own.

I suppose it all boils down to wanting to write the best books I can - and wanting people to read them. I think my deepest ambition is to go on being active, both mentally and physically, for as long as I possibly can. And never to stop trying something new, especially where my writing is concerned.

Alongside that is a wish to be part of something wonderful - something that involves inspiring young people both to read and write. When I hear youngsters enthusing over books - and when I see them having a go at writing for themselves - it makes me happier than just about anything else. Yes, of course it's extra special if they like my books and engage with my characters, but, leaving ego aside, to be part of the tradition (beautifully enacted in that Olympic opening ceremony) of writing for children and YA - is a wonderful privilege. So I guess my ambition has to be to try to find better ways to connect with my readers through my books, and maybe to get some children reading who might not otherwise have thought of it. And to try to support, as well as be supported by, other writers, teachers, librarians, publishers, etc, who are doing the same. Not very original, perhaps, but enough to keep me going for as many years as I have left!

So I will continue to write my daily mile, and try to keep up the swimming too.

Happy reading, writing, swimming, whatever you enjoy!
Ros

My blog - Rosalie Reviews
My Facebook page

My YA novel - 'Coping with Chloe'
Follow me on Twiiter @Ros_Warren

CAT MAGIC - Ruth Symes

When I visit schools I often tell the children how I had whooping cough when I was 8 and had to have a whole term off school. As it was pre-computer days, and my mum didn't want me watching too much TV, every week, and usually more than once a week, she'd bring me home all the library books she could and I’d read them all, along with lots of adult books including Reader's Digest versions of ‘A Town Like Alice’ and‘The Devil Rides Out’.

When I went back to school and took my end of year exams instead of being near the bottom of the class for English as I usually was I was pretty near the top - thanks to no schooling and tons of reading (I still had to have remedial maths for a term but then I caught up.)

 One of the books that sticks most clearly in my mind from that time was about a girl who's wandering round a market at the start of the summer holidays and somehow ends up with a magical cat. I don't know who it was by or remember the rest of the plot but it must have been shortly after I stopped being contagious and was allowed to go to the library by myself and choose my own books and what I can still remember most clearly was the tingle of excitement I felt when I found the book and realised it was about a real life girl who went to a regular school and lived in a normal sort of house, not a princess from long ago, a girl just like me, set in the present day (the girl in the book even looked a little bit like me) and it was about MAGIC. It seemed to be saying that magic could happen to anyone at all however ordinary your life. I didn't know it was called magic realism then. I just knew this was the book was for me.

        Years later I'm writing my own books about magic. The Bella Donna books started off as an idea for an adult TV series about a white witch who moves to a stuffy village, then became a book aimed at the teen market. before finding it's rightful place with a younger audience.

        It’s the first series of books I've written and there's something about coming back to the same set of characters and telling new stories and learning more about them which is very satisfying. A bit like when I write episodes for children's TV.

        I thought I might be asked to write 2 or 3 books but my fourth one ‘Cat Magic’ comes out today complete with the most wonderful illustrations by Marion Lindsay and I'm working on the first draft of the fifth one.

        There’s something that's just plain fun about writing fantasy and being able to invent your own magical world and then throw whatever appeals to you most into it - a unicorn here, dragon there, magic buffet table laid out with all your favourite foods.

      And I love the letters I get from children who the books appeal to - and even a photograph of a hand-made Bella Donna doll.

        This year the first of the foreign editions are being published. Germany's book, kindle and audio versions come out in September.

The German edition is called Bella Donner because Donner means thunder in German and they felt it would be a more dramatic name.

        I haven't seen the covers for the Polish, Hebrew, or Chinese editions yet but am very much looking forward to doing so.

        But most of all I like to think that maybe somewhere a reader will pick up a Bella Donna book and have the same tingle of excitement I had – and know that now they're going to read about MAGIC that could happen to someone just like them.

Ruth's website is www.ruthsymes.com  Bella Donna now has her own website www.belladonnaseries.com.

Welcome to the Audio Entertainment Center - Andrew Strong

Imagine you’re taking a group of ten year olds to the cinema. The film is eighty minutes long, and you've promised them it’ll be good.

Because it’s a special occasion you buy cartons of popcorn and other forms of mind altering confection.  Now your ten year olds are ready to be entertained. 

However, now let’s imagine it’s not an eighty minute film that awaits them but something else.

“Kids,” you announce, “I hope you won’t kill me when I tell you, but this isn’t actually a cinema.  It’s a brand new entertainment centre, and you are the first lucky visitors!”

Mouths spill with sticky-sweet gunk, eyes are wide in sugar-fuelled readiness.

“What is it?” they squeal and spit.  They imagine some form of multi-dimensional kaleidoscopic virtual reality.

“Kids,” you say, hardly able to contain your excitement. “This is the world’s first Audio Book Entertainment Centre!”

There is silence.  A peanut M and M can be heard hitting the carpet. 

“What?” says the first child.  “Audio book?”

“Yes!” you exclaim, “a whole book! Don't worry, it's the same length as a movie!”

“We’re just going to listen?” says a second.

The notion is preposterous, isn’t it? That any child, or any human being, would wish to sit in an audience and listen to an audio book for close to an hour and a half.  This difference shouldn’t astonish any of us.  But it demonstrates the supremacy of what we look at over what we listen to.

Could it be that since the advent of cinema and TV many of us have lost the ability to sustain listening with attention? And does it get worse with each generation?  Is listening attentively that much more demanding than watching a DVD? 

Here’s a bit of science: auditory nerves develop in human beings around the sixth prenatal month. The equivalent visual nerves are not fully developed until the sixth postnatal month. Our brains want us to listen first.

Maryanne Wood, in her excellent study of reading “Proust and the Squid”, states that by the age of five children from ‘impoverished-language environments’ have heard ‘32 million fewer words spoken to them than the average middle class child.’

Something needs to be done to plug the gap. Teachers could do it, but they are encouraged to use whiteboards and other wizardy pyrotechnics and visual magic. No one is allowed to just talk to children anymore. 

I believe listening is fundamental to children’s development, and as I am the sort of person who likes to believe serious, scientific things, I’ve decided I’m on a mission to create a form of listening that closes the gap between the dominance of looking over listening.

I’m not going to open the world’s first Audio Book Entertainment Center (TM), but I am in the middle of developing a project that hopes to make listening as instinctively enjoyable as watching. It’s as much for myself as for the participants, who at this stage will be schoolchildren.  We, the storytellers, must reclaim aural storytelling over visual. 

But because I’m a full time headteacher, and with very limited time during the school term, and because I want to see what school life is like elsewhere, I thought I’d start in Scotland, where the term begins earlier, and use some of my summer holiday to trial the project. To begin with I’m offering it free to primary schools in or around Edinburgh.

I may be wrong, and am yet to find out, but the Scottish curriculum seems more enlightened than Wales or England.  It hasn’t become the straightjacket of testing and assessment. 

I’ve already received several very interested replies  - and as soon as complete this blog, I’m going to get on with noodling, creating weird bleeps and bloops, a soundscape for a storyworld.  I will make it happen! And I may sell a few books on the back of it, too.