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‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie and the Bulgarian Carrot

For various reasons I’ve been incredibly pushed for time over the last week — principally related to a suspected outbreak of an unpleasant type of virus in the household. While it didn’t affect me directly, it had quite a knock on effect but I won’t go into the gory details. I was also quite addicted to watching every news programme and political discussion going that read the runes of the post-election negotiations — and I got most indignant at times about one potential outcome. Also, while it’s wonderful at this time of year, especially where I live, to see the trees coming into leaf and the days lengthening, it brings all kinds of tedious jobs in the garden like lawn mowing and weeding. I got nearly 200 little bedding plants delivered in plugs during the week which needed potting up, which I couldn’t do until this evening, so I lost quite a few. I also got five chilli plants delivered — one has the great name of ‘Bulgarian Carrot‘.

While I was otherwise occupied time was running short all week and I had a couple of novel course related pieces to produce. Most worrying was my looming tutorial with Alison on Monday for which I needed to send up to 3,000 words ‘by Friday’. I also have a major stage looming in my MSc dissertation and had to postpone my regular Skype chat with my supervisor by two days. I hastily revised the ‘problem overview’ section of the dissertation (2,000 words in all) and sent that off for review by Thursday afternoon (I’m very behind on that). This meant I had about 300 words written by about 3pm on Thursday for my tutorial. With the liberal assumption that ‘by Friday’ would mean by about 5pm on Friday I sat down to write a chapter as quickly as I could.

I wasn’t particularly well disposed to writing towards the end of the week. In Emily’s class we were reading extracts that we had potentially chosen for the evening event in June. I wasn’t sure what to use and hadn’t had time to write the Prologue idea (see previous posting). Alison had helpfully responded to an e-mail that I’d sent out bemoaning my inability to choose and she suggested a section from Chapter Two where Kim pelts Nic with paint from the roof of Village Underground. I quite like that bit too but it was over 900 words. I managed to pare it down to just under 700 in an editing session on Wednesday afternoon and then read it a few times for timing — marginally over 4 minutes.

Because of the virus issues, I had to miss the class I’ve started doing on Wednesday afternoons at City Lit and drive instead to London. I set off late and got stuck in traffic, due to an broken down horsebox, and then it took twice as long as on Monday to get from Finchley to Islington. So I arrived about 25 minutes late for a 90 minute class.

We had quite a few readings to hear and I happened to sit at the end of the row and was last in the reading order. I spent most of the class wondering if time would run out before it was my turn as well as being very impressed with the quality of the material that everyone else was reading. Some people read familiar stuff we’ve already heard and others read out reworked pieces that were significant improvements on the originals. A couple of people read completely new material — and it was all good — frighteningly so.

We ran out of time before Simon and I could read. I wasn’t in a particularly good mood anyway but I knew people had to have their tutorials so I asked Emily if I could mail the piece to her as I really wasn’t sure whether it was the right one. She then took pity on the two of us that hadn’t read and let us run on late. Simon read his novel’s opening of his — which had impressed us all the first time he’d read it.

I read mine but found what seemed to work ok on the page tripped me up as I read it out, although I’d generally managed it ok when I practised it — mainly stumbling over tongue-twisting alliteration. A few people in the class had read this chapter but most hadn’t — including Emily — so the location and situation were new to them as well as one character. I got a few laughs as I read, which was good, but the feedback afterwards seemed to be somewhat underwhelming. People seemed to think other scenes might be better. Emily said it was a good scene — very visual — but perhaps I should use something about when James and Kim go on a bender together — had I written that yet?

I came back home in a pretty foul mood. I think Emily had a good point about the choice of scene — I want something that features both my main characters — but I brooded over whether that meant I’d not yet written anything good enough to read out yet. The readings had also shown me how much progress other people were making on the course and made me think that somehow I was regressing. Almost as soon as I got home I went upstairs to bed and wouldn’t talk to anyone.

So I wasn’t in too much of a hopeful mood to set down writing for the tutorial the day afterwards — but nothing focuses me like a deadline. I wrote most of a first draft on Thursday night — about 2,000 words — then got up at 6am and added another 500 or so — and I added in the 300 I’d previously done. By 10am — when I Skype’d my MSc supervisor, I’d got a first draft of 2,800. I printed it out and made many corrections on hard copy then revised in Word. I then printed it out again, read it out loud, and did a further revision. By 3.45pm I was able to e-mail it off to Alison.

I was very pleased to have been able to write so quickly although in retrospect I think the piece is flawed by a few misjudgements about plot and tone more than there are problems with the writing. I ran the risk of planting issues in Alison’s mind before she read it by asking ‘is it too melodramatic?’, ‘are the main characters sympathetic?’, ‘is the balance between humour and dramatic action ok? ‘.  Some of the description is a bit clunky but what can I expect?

Part of the reason why I feel happier with the writing is that it’s moved back into a situation where I’m very at home — a pub. Kim works at a pub that I’ve based very closely on a spit-and-sawdust boozer in Hoxton that I’ve visited a few times, the last being a couple of months ago. I’ve tried to describe the varied clientele and the down-at-heel ambience. Before Kim goes in to work she winds James up by telling him he’ll be unwelcome if he looks like ‘a City arsehole’. He then asks her if it’s the Blind Beggar that she’s taking him to. This, unknown to Kim, is a pub notorious for its connections to the Kray twins (it’s also where the Salvation Army started, which is ironic for a novel about a pub) — click on the link to find out more.

This immediately made me think about how the Krays and their associates are such an ingrained part of popular folklore — but something that’s probably not very well-known to people who’ve only been in the country for the last few years. Even though the events were 45 years ago and these people were in reality unpleasant, violent criminals, the exotic names of some of the players in the Kray story have entered a collective cultural consciousness — Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie is my favourite but also ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser and ‘Nipper of the Yard’ (though he was on the good side).

In a section that no-one but me will probably like, but that cheered me up writing it no end, James reels off these bizarre nicknames to Kim, who is utterly bewildered. It also brings to mind the brilliant ‘Cockney Wanker’ cartoons in Viz which features some hideous East End boozer — which has two framed portraits on the wall — one of Winston Churchill and the other of Hitler.

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Prologue?

Rick from the course had a look at some of the first chapters of The Angel. He made quite an interesting suggestion regarding the selection for the reading event that’s had me thinking.

At the moment I have an opening with the two principal characters facing up to some life-changing events but James’ scene is the one that is most dynamic — we  see him getting fired — but there’s not so much action in Kim’s scene — she wakes up feeling crap and sends and receives a text message. I’m quite happy with writing a scene in which so little action happens but I’m now having doubts if that should be the opening.

We were talking about openings on the way back to the tube station on Wednesday in relation to the piece we should select for the reading and the consensus was that your opening should be the best part of your novel — to grab the reader (and commissioning editor/agent, etc.) — and that the best part of your novel should obviously be what you read out at our event.

Rick suggested it might be worth writing the events that cause Kim’s evident grief at the start of the novel as a counterpoint to the James scenes.

I noted that Bren Gosling had written a prologue to his novel which he read out for our feedback on Wednesday, which received positively, and which he intends to read at the event at the end of June.

So I’m seriously thinking of writing my own prologue which captures Kim’s source of dissatisfaction at the start of the novel. I know in my mind exactly what happens but it will be something of a challenge to distill this down into the 600 words that I’ve timed myself as being able to deliver in our allocated four minutes. One major problem is that I don’t have much use (at the moment) in the rest of the novel for the character that precipitates Kim’s distress — and if I read this out then it may raise expectations that he will be a major character.

The obvious answer to my dilemma is to write it and then see how it turns out. However, time is at a premium at this time of year — with the election intrigue, running five miles in Marlow plus planting a bunch of beetroot, lettuce, celery, cabbage and spring onions earlier today.

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Marlow 5

Not only do I have the election to distract me from writing at the moment but this morning I also ran the ‘Marlow 5’ — a race of 5 miles (or 8km in the more runner-familiar distance) around the streets of the extremely affluent town of Marlow in Buckinghamshire — part of the route goes up the High Street past Paul Costelloe’s boutique.

Marlow is a town with quite a literary heritage (see Paul Wreyford’s book ‘Literary Buckinghamshire’). Mary Shelley wrote ‘Frankenstein’ there apparently and her husband also write much of his poetry here. It’s also associated with Jerome K. Jerome’s ‘Three Men in A Boat’. I’m familiar with the place where T.S. Eliot lived, near the Two Brewers pub by the river, when he was commuting to his banking job in central London around the end of the First World War on the so-called Marlow Donkey (which is the railway branch line but also a pub). The Shelleys also lived on the same road.

I didn’t exactly prepare myself like an elite athlete for the race. Yesterday I went on a ‘brewery tour’ of Loddon Brewery (between Reading and Henley) where the very pleasant proprietor, Chris Hearn, allowed us about two and a half hours to sample as much of his excellent beer as we wanted while also having a really informative discussion about the licensed trade — great research, of course, for ‘The Angel’. (Loddon supply a lot of Wetherspoon pubs in London and the South East and their beer is well worth seeking out — particularly ‘Ferryman’s Gold’, ‘Hoppit’ and ‘Bamboozle’.

With this preparation the day before, I was quite pleasantly surprised with my time — 44 minutes 47 seconds (all electronically timed with a chip embedded into the race number — click here to see it) — which is about 10% faster than I normally run. I came 932nd  out of about 1,650. This puts my achievement in context: pretty rubbish compared with the ‘proper’ runners from clubs (like my friend Simon who was disappointed with his 33 minutes) but not quite as bad as the fun runners.

Occasionally I see running as a bit of a metaphor for writing a novel. I don’t really enjoy it while I’m doing it but it’s one of those things that gives you a sense of achievement when you complete something you set out to do. I’ve sent in an application to do the Prestwood 10k next weekend and then will do a much harder race towards the end of July — the High Wycombe half-marathon — no brewery visits the day before that one I think.

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‘I Agree With Nick’

Seems to the new catchphrase of the moment — and very apposite as both Cameron and Brown desperately try to convince Clegg that they do agree with him just enough to get him to drop his core demands and prop up their minority parties.

I find politics absolutely enthralling, especially when politicians aren’t in control of events, as in elections, and are unable to spin their way out of setbacks, compromises, about turns, revelations of hypocrisy and duplicity and so on. Election night coverage is fantastic as the politicians have to constantly adjust their positions to the results as they unfold. They normally have to try and pretend they’ve understood the will of the people and accept defeat gracefully through gritted teeth or try not to sound too triumphalist or relieved if they’re winning. Normally by the weekend after the election we’re into some refreshing honesty with the new government trying to dampen the expectations they’ve just spent weeks raising and some public back-biting and candid blame allocation in the defeated parties’ ranks. Not this time, though — the intrigue continues with plenty of politicians petrified of what their party leaders might sign up to and some coded warning shots coming out in interviews.

The aftermath of the election promises to be more fascinating than the election night itself. I stayed up for the whole duration of the BBC Election programme — 9.55pm until 9.30am the next morning. I caught myself nodding off only once or twice for five minutes at a time around 5.30am. I wanted to stay up to see if the Greens won their Brighton seat (who I probably would have voted for if they’d stood in my constituency — which was had no serious candidates as boundary changes have put me in John Bercow’s speaker’s seat). I set myself up with two laptops streaming Sky and ITV’s coverage and which I used in conjunction with the BBC and Guardian websites to do my own analysis on the seats as the counts were announced. (I used up all my remaining mobile broadband allocation for the month by using it to watch the Sky pictures).

Election Night 2010
Jeremy Vine augmented by Two Laptops -- Election Night 2010

Here’s the scene from my sofa with Jeremy Vine on the BBC with Sky on the laptop and ITV on the netbook. (Jeremy Vine is in my academic year — he shares a lot of cultural reference points with me when I hear him on his Radio Two show).

Those on the City Course and close readers of the blog will know that I have about 50,000 words written of a political novel. It’s gone on the backburner a bit for two reasons. One is that I’ve used parts of the City course to develop a new idea — and that’s gone pretty well as ‘The Angel’ is probably a better structured novel. The other is that I’ve been aware of events making my political angles in the novel obsolete or dated — one point being that it involves a New Labour minister. Politics isn’t the main driving force of the plot, though, and a rewrite could probably have made it appropriate to a Tory administration.

But a traditional change of government isn’t what we’re going to get — which means the legacy of Labour is likely to be felt for quite some time, either through their participation in a Lib Dem-Labour coalition or in their machinations if some alternative arrangement works. We’re also likely to have another election sooner or later.

Another interesting factor is the resurgence of interest in politics — with increased turnouts demonstrating the evidence.

So I’m quite encouraged that my political novel isn’t going to be obsolete or dated and might actually have something to say that’s going to be quite relevant to whatever happens in the next couple of years. Also, Oxford East, the constituency that my MP’s is based on stayed Labour against the odds. I just have to get writing the two novels — great fun as the election was it meant I wrote nothing myself.

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Top Bombing

A friend of mine sent me a YouTube link to the new John Smiths’ Peter Kay advert. His observation in sending it was that it picks up a subtle difference between the sexes in that often women try to guess which other women men find attractive — glamorous celebrities often being cited. This advert shows that this view is often very wide of the mark.

The advert is a model of economy but crams an awful lot about a relationship into its thirty seconds. It’s very much a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’ in terms of being honest with a partner (‘I won’t get upset. It’s only a game.’) Peter Kay’s character is very well behaved ‘There’s only one lady in my life’ until he’s pushed three times by his partner.

The setting is also quite subtle — some upmarket restaurant pub and the other couple’s presence, although they don’t speak, is essential to the drama. It also cleverly bridges the gap between the fantasy of showbusiness and celebrity (Kelly Brook, Tess Daly) and people’s own lives: ‘Clare from work’. (Great choice of name to bring out the northern vowels — Peter Kay’s from Bolton, not too far from where I come from — Rochdale.)  The shot at the end with the photocopier is one of the truest representations of interior characterisation I’ve seen for a long time. ‘Oh aye’.

Some of the books that examine men’s and women’s different behaviours in relationships from an evolutionary psychology perspective make the point that availability and proximity are  often more prescient factors in a typically male assessment of a mate than the attractiveness. (And this tendency is amplified by alcohol — the infamous ‘beer goggles’).

It’s very much in the vein of James’ point of view in The Angel in the scenes I’ve written with Emma and Kim. These promoted one coursemate to suggest that the log line for my novel should end ‘can James keep his mind off sex for long enough to stop the business falling apart’ — a line that everyone found rather hilarious though I’m not sure if poor old James would.

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Wordles


Wordle Chapter Three
A Wordle for Chapter Three of The Angel

A fellow student on an online course I did last year with Lancaster University (and now a Facebook friend) introduced me to Wordle. This is a bit of Java code that runs on websites (doesn’t seem to work with Firefox but works for me on IE) in which you paste in a load of text and it counts the frequency of words and then redisplays the individual words in a random order with the most frequently used words having the largest font size. They can come out very artistically and there are options on the site to play around with colours and formats.

I produced the above Wordle from the 2,550 words of my Chapter Three reading.

The most commonly used words like ‘a’, ‘the’ and contractions like ‘nt’ are removed by default. Sadly my extract seems to fail the literary fiction test as most of the words are pretty common — ‘looked’, ‘cash’, ‘think’, ‘hand’, ‘floor’. It allows analysis of the most frequently used words and the two that stand out for me are ‘sorry’ and ‘work’ — even though I edited a few of these out while redrafting there are a lot left. I think ‘sorry’ is perhaps good as it emphasises their awkwardness in initially meeting. ‘Work’ is understandable in two ways. I think the word must be currently something pre-occupying my subconscious and it’s coming through in both the plot and the character’s diction — James has obviously been fired but there’s a lot of reference to creating art as being Kim’s work. I’m perhaps reflecting on my own view of the novel writing process in this too?

I put the text of the first two chapters as well into Wordle so it had about 10,000+ words to work with. The graphic below is what resulted: rather sadly most of the words would be appropriate for a reading age of about seven years old– ‘might’, ‘something’, ‘table’, ‘street’, ‘time’ and so on. There are a few that set the location and characters: ‘paint’, ‘Shoreditch’, ‘carriage’, ‘London’, ‘vodka’. The very few there that seem to be interesting are ‘shoes’, ‘metal, the frequency of ‘looked’  and, perhaps my trademark word, ‘hand’. Fortunately ‘sorry’ doesn’t seem to recur too much in the opening two chapters.

I’d be fascinated to see the Wordles that could be generated by the work of others on the course — would they also be so full of ordinary words?

Wordle Chapters One to Three
The Angel: Wordle Chapters One to Three

The less frequent words might be difficult to make out on the web graphics. Wordle can be used free by anyone for any purpose but it is subject to the creative commons licence which means that any representation of a Wordle must also credit the original website — which is http://www.wordle.net/.

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Revising Chapter Three

I’ve spent quite considerable time over the past week revising the chapter three that I read at last Monday’s workshop. As previously I’ve had lots of really useful comments written on my manuscripts by the other students. It’s also quite difficult and time-consuming to keep track of the changes marked in a dozen or so annotated scripts but I’ve been careful to go through all of the comments, note the parts where there’s obvious consensus and weigh up the different perspectives.

It’s quite difficult as people have different preferences and in more than one place I’ve had someone cross out a sentence that has been ticked or praised by another person. It’s the fourth time I’ve had the feedback now and I’m coming to know various people’s preferences, which unsurprisingly tend to mirror their own writing style (lean and taut in some cases, lyrical and colourful in others, empathetic and intense and so on). Having had a few days to mull it over, I’ve probably found the harshest feedback the most useful. I eliminated about 100 words out of the original 2,600 mainly by deleting adverbs and unnecessary bits of speech, such as ‘not really’. Some of the mistakes that I had in the extract are pretty obvious errors in retrospect. My thirteen year old daughter saw Rick’s corrections and told me off about ‘stared briefly’ as well — ‘you can’t stare briefly’.

I also managed to restructure some of the more troublesome sentences with some help from people’s suggestions. For example, this long sentence now reads better than previously, although I’m still not sure if I have it completely right: ‘As she breathed, her chest pushed forward and the outline of her breasts stretched the previously slack material, jolting James a little as he realised that hidden underneath her sexless clothing was a distinctly female form.’ (I’ve just revised it yet again while posting it here.) This was the passage was that caused the previously-mentioned controversy about James — whether he was outrageously judgemental about Kim’s appearance or just ‘doing what men do’.

While I’ve pruned it quite a bit I’ve also added in about 50 extra words to address other concerns. One was about emphasising the Kim’s German background. I’ve replaced one of James’ slightly lame phrases of approbation with ‘Wunderbar’ (actually the name of a Cadbury’s chocolate bar on sale in Germany). I also had Kim respond to James’ declaration of passion for food’s favours and textures by her saying that it didn’t really apply to German food — all sauerkraut and currywurst. (I’m quite an expert on the sort of food Germans eat, having had countless meals in the works canteen of a DAX-30 listed company and eaten in restaurants all over Germany as well as eaten plenty of beer-soaking-up food in Biergartens and Weinachtmarkts.)

One question I have that I’d be interested in having answered is whether if you’re writing a German noun in an English piece of writing whether you retain the initial capital letter — as in Biergarten.

While revising Chapter Three, I went back to Chapter Two of ‘The Angel just to check for continuity and it’s a good job that I did. Alison marked this over the Easter holidays and perhaps it’s no wonder she commented that the payment of the money for the painting was too long and drawn out in  Chapter Three: it had already happened in the Chapter Two that she’d read. She must have had at least a sense of deja vu.

Alison and a couple of other people also wanted Kim a little more agitated and stressed. I’m not sure if I’ve achieved that but I wanted to try and give James the effect of disarming other people — being quite good at putting people at their ease, mainly through his ability to not worry too much when he’s making a prick of himself. (I have an inspiration for this in mind — a famous TV presenter whose Tweets I follow and with whom I occasionally converse myself via Twitter.) I’m not sure about whether I’ve tightened up the pace a lot. This was something Alison commented on after hearing it read aloud but others had said it had gone quickly when read somewhere like a plane (good sign perhaps?).

I had quite a strange attitude to workshopping this piece. It was a piece I hoped I’d write past and so have something more filled with action to present to the group. When people were critical of certain aspects I was a bit non-plussed but I’d not had particularly high expectations for it. Perhaps I was hoping to ‘wing it’ a bit and hope that this part didn’t get scrutinised too hard — but found I was being picked up on things I’d tried to avoid thinking about, which was quite uncomfortable but necessary. In the end, I think I’ve got a pretty decent 2,500 now — quite a lot better than before the workshop and something that will better stand on its own rather than be a bit of a dump for setting up plot elements.

I’ve found it pretty difficult to get started again after this — partly events over the Bank Holiday (potatoes crying out to be planted) and the election is an incredible distraction. I’ve been staying up too late after debates and on other nights to take in all the coverage — good research for Burying Bad News, though.

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Oxytocin

There’s another story on the BBC website about the benefits of the ‘cuddle hormone’ — oxytocin. I referred to James’ view that human attraction was based on a whole mix of chemicals in the reading I did before Easter — and there was a quite a lot of feedback on whether the various things I’d referred to were hormones or not.

The story had links to an old web page from 2006 which caught my attention because it promoted something that was guaranteed to prevent fear of public speaking — which would be very handy for our reading evening on 30th June. It was titled ‘Sex “cuts public speaking stress”‘. It goes on to say ‘Forget learning lines or polishing jokes – having sex may be the best way to prepare for giving a speech. New Scientist magazine reports that Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley, found having sex can help keep stress at bay.  However, only penetrative intercourse did the trick – other forms of sex had no impact on stress levels at all.’ It’s all to do with something called the vagal nerve, as well as oxytocin apparently. (Maybe James can do some reading up on it?)

It doesn’t say how far in advance of the speech you have to engage in this therapy to make it most effective, though.

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Three Universities in Two Days

I seem to be visiting a lot of universities recently. On Monday I went up to the Open University, where I met my MSc. supervisor and my ‘specialist advisor’ — both are a married couple of academics who work on the same area of research. My supervisor is Italian but has obviously lived here a long time so listening to her speech, which I tend to do on a weekly basis, is quite good practice for writing Kim’s dialogue. Strangely I was one of the few students (perhaps the only one) on the Milton Keynes campus because, despite having perhaps millions of students, none of them actually attend the OU itself on a regular basis — it’s all done at a distance (or in summer schools and the like).

Then it was straight down the M1 and A1 to City University on Monday.

Last night I went to the Wheatley campus of Oxford Brookes University. This was to go to an Association of MBAs networking event on creating a cv. Most of the other people there were students on the Brookes Business School MBA, most of them full time. It was quite interesting to chat to some of them afterwards about why they were doing the course — quite a few had enrolled due to redundancy and were looking to do something completely different (a little like James).

While I was there principally for non-writing purposes, it was also good background as the speaker, Corinne Mills, is a careers specialist. According to her consultancy’s website she’s been the careers expert on Chris Evans’ Radio Two show, Nicky Campbell’s Radio Five, on the Six O’ Clock News and in all sorts of print media. Unsurprisingly, she has an human resources background so I got myself re-familiarised with HR speak. I talked afterwards with someone who was MD of a leadership development consultancy (employing 18 people) whose business is to work with these terribly (self) important executives with massive egos — the world from which James has just been removed.

As it turns out, my existing cv seems to tick all the boxes already — probably linked to my ‘excellent written communication skills’ (as it no doubt claims dispensing with any modesty — as it must). Apparently 80% of cvs have spelling mistakes and 13% are seriously flawed in written content or presentation. There were a few classic, true-life errors quoted that passed the spell checker level of proof reading. One could apply to James though I might have to invent something original along the same lines if I wanted to use it in the novel: ‘My hobbies include cooking dogs and interesting people’.

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The Eve of St. Agnes

I bought a copy of the latest Magma poetry magazine when I was in London last week. Its cover article was ‘Favourite Erotic Poetry’. I was interested to see how I poem I took along to the March meeting of Metroland poets was selected by a couple of the poets making their selection, including Blake Morrison. It was ‘They Flee From Me’ by Sir Thomas Wyatt, a 16th century poet who allegedly had an affair with Ann Boleyn.

One of the choices of the other poets was Keats’ ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’. The erotic element of this poem comes with the legend of the Eve of St.Agnes — a time when apparently young virgins would dream of the man who was going to sweep them off their feet in later life if they lay naked on their beds on that night (or some other tradition approximating to this). Keats is one of the most sensuous poets — I remember having ‘purple stained mouth’ from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ being explained to me when I was doing him for A-level.

It was quite a revelation to come back to the poem after years — for some reason its phrase ‘a dwarfish Hildebrand’ has popped into mind quite regularly in the intervening time although I didn’t realise where it came from. In the poem Keats uses a couple of star-crossed lovers  — Madeleine and Porphyro. Madeleine is some sort of aristocratic girl, whose chambers are guarded by old nurses. The eroticism happens when Porphyro manages to wheedle his way past Madeleine’s protectors and hides unseen in her room while she strips off and prepares herself for the St.Agnes ritual.

Perhaps it was latent all along but I’d been toying with the idea of something similar at the start of The Angel. The idea is that Kim and James end up together in a similar sort of situation (except facilitated by the after effects of a drunken night out). I think I’ve worked out plot devices for both to be in the same situation. I won’t add more, partly because I need to think it through a bit further, and partly to keep a bit of suspense.

On a related subject, one of my coursemates — whose blog (Bren Gosling’s ‘Evolution of My Novel’ is referenced from the sidebar — wondered whether I was giving out too much of the plot of the novel on this blog. If anyone has any comment on that I’d be interested to hear it. I don’t think I give out enough information for my ideas to be copied and ripped off but it might be possible that anyone be following instalments of the novel (or even just waiting to read it when it’s finished in its entirety) might find some plot spoilers in here. (I’ve probably given the biggest plot spoiler to people on the course already with my short fire scene from last term.)

Here are a couple of stanzas of Keats’ ‘Eve of St.Agnes’ that allude to what might happen later in The Angel:

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,

As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon;

Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest,

And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

And on her hair a glory, like a saint:

She seem’d a splendid angel, newly drest,

Save wings, for heaven: – Porphyro grew faint:

She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,

Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;

Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;

Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees

Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:

Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,

Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,

In fancy, fair St Agnes in her bed,

But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

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My Penultimate Workshop Reading

I read out my Chapter Three at our first evening workshop last night. I’d actually forgotten many of my misgivings about the piece and now I wish I’d ploughed ahead more over Easter and been able to submit the next chapter — which will move fast from place-to-place and start to build a bit of intimacy between James and Kim.

The first two chapters were comparatively much faster paced and had a lot more action as well. However, it seemed to be necessary to use the third chapter to slow the pace to seed a lot of plot elements and themes: Kim was given more reasons to get away (health, debts), it established James liking of cooking and explained why Kim would be a good person to try and get to run a pub. I also tried to dampen the reader’s expectations of a possible romantic involvement between the two in the next chapters.

I was concerned that I might have been accused of homophobic stereotyping as I added at a late stage an idea that James might think Kim was a lesbian, based on the ‘a little knowledge’ principle. I actually did quite a bit of research on body piercing (which James had supposedly read about in Time Out) and one person wrote on the script — ‘like a Prince Albert’. Obviously Kim wouldn’t have one of these (click if you want your eyes to water like James’ did) but she may have slightly less spectacular piercings. (I did once know someone who had a Prince Albert.) There was a discussion about whether James would be quite so ignorant of gay culture as perhaps he came over but no-one objected to sowing this seed of doubt in his mind as a plot device, which was a relief. I’m still not sure whether I’ll continue with it but my objective is to have them both bond together without cranking up the sexual aspect.

I took the attitude that if I sent out a piece of 2,600 words that was basically just two characters in a confined space then I’d be doing well just to sustain people’s interest to the end.

I deliberated about sending out one of the first two chapters, which had both come back from Alison with positive feedback, but I thought that might have the effect of both wasting her time by going over familiar work and it would also perhaps be fishing for compliments on work I knew she generally liked.

Maybe I should have done this as, in the event, I felt I got quite a negative reaction to this new piece from Alison. I think her comments were generally fair in that the piece was probably too long to sustain pace and that Kim’s voice didn’t come over as distinctly German — I was a bit annoyed with myself that at a late stage I’d cut and pasted a bit of Kim speaking German (translating musical chairs) out of the extract it  to use in the next chapter. However, at least one person had picked up on parts of the dialogue where she is struggling to find the correct vocabulary and the speech patterns of young Germans who are fluent in English are not actually that different to many native speakers — they’re quite close to American English.

So I think the way that I’d read out the extract probably did no justice to any subtleties in the dialogue.  And I’m not much good at reading aloud anyway so me rushing it must have been really bad — and I was hampered a bit by wearing contact lenses that are not good for reading close up — at times I was struggling to read my 12 point Times New Roman, even though I’d written it myself!

Paradoxically the pace would probably have come over better if I’d have added in some dramatic pauses and the like. On the other hand, I was quite struck by the number of comments, both written and spoken, that said they’d read through it quickly and easily and thought it had a good pace but then seemed to have second thoughts on hearing it read out.

I’m not sure it’s going to help people write novels, though, if we get encouraged to write prose that sounds better read out loud than on the page — you could understand that with poetry or drama. I’m a bit perplexed by that aspect of the course — it’s not much good for someone writing prose fiction if someone says ‘now I’ve heard you read it out then it seems better’ as the ordinary reader will never hear it read, they just have to go with what’s on the page. Perhaps it’s to prepare us for the reading event at the end of the course?

An average reader isn’t going to read the prose three times over in order to fully appreciate it or have the experience of the dialogue being brought to life by a lively authorial reading. That’s why I find the written comments enormously useful as they generally tend to be more individual observations. I find we don’t really get long enough to hear others’ comments and my tactic is to hear people out and listen as much as possible, although I was dying to say ‘yes, but wait for the next bit’ or ‘that was explained in the chapter before’ a few times.

I respect everyone’s opinions, though I don’t necessarily agree with everything. I think I was quite loose with the use of adverbs in some parts of the extract but I’m not sure that a zero tolerance policy towards them is entirely necessary — sometimes they can be used very effectively in the free indirect style to establish a character’s POV.  I think perhaps I have a prose style which makes the odd bit of ornamentation stand out.

One point I was very pleased about was that the rest of the students were very divided about James. One or two people loathed him with a passion while others thought he was potentially quite nice. Some thought him a blundering clown and others a straight banker. This shows that he’s got contradictions and people seem to be reacting to him like a real person. Also, a lot of that chapter was very close to his point-of-view and some objected to him looking at Kim supposedly as a sexual object and how dare he make judgements over her appearance — but this is all going on in his mind. Unless he’s being very unsubtle in his observations, she isn’t going to know any of this unless he cares to tell her. The controversy is such that I even got an e-mail of support from someone the day afterwards in support of him.

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‘Sweat Me Garlicky’

We had to take along a published poem (by someone else) to Metroland Poets last night on the theme of ‘Poems to Read Aloud’. There was a very varied and entertaining selection ranging from ballads by Walter Scott to Edwin Morgan’s famous ‘Loch Ness Monster’s Song’.

I made a choice in about five minutes flat but was quite pleased with the poem that came to mind. It’s ‘Cooking with Blood’ by Linda France, which is featured, along with an interview with the poet, in the Open University’s ‘Creative Writing’ course (A215). Click on this link for the poem and an opportunity to hear her read it out.

Again there’s a link with The Angel as it’s all about cooking (in the section I’m workshopping on Monday James tells Kim about his passion for food). It’s also dedicated to Delia Smith in a way. Delia is someone I’ve loved even more since her famously tired and emotional appearance on the pitch at half time at a Norwich City game.

I get the feeling she’s far less prim and proper than supposed ‘edgier’ cooks like Nigella and Jamie Oliver (who I think, to use Kim’s vocabulary, is a bit of a tw*t).

‘Cooking with Blood’ was inspired when Linda France was looking through the index of a cookery book, probably Delia’s, and found all kinds of exotic names for dishes and techniques. What people found quite remarkable when I read the poem was the amazing use of these names as verbs in the poem. ‘Wouldn’t we sausage lots of little quichelets’, ‘She played en papilotte/for just long enough to sweat me garlicky’, ‘I’ve stroganoffed with too many of them’, ‘[I] triped
myself into a carcass’.

Making imaginative use of verbs (and, in fact creating new verbs like this) is something that I don’t really do enough of in my own writing — probably because I do it too quickly. I’ve got the opportunity to experiment a little in this way in my next chapter when I get James and Kim completely plastered. I’d like to try and hint at their altered states of consciousness by attempting to play with language in the same sort of way.

The poem also appeals to me as it’s very sensual. There’s clearly a link between food and sex in the poem (even as far as talking about procreation) but it’s amusing and thought-provoking: ‘After I’d peppered her liver, stuffed her goose/
and dogfished her tender loins, she was paté/in my hands’ and ‘We danced the ossobuco;/her belly kedgeree, her breasts prosciutto.’ I think this poem must have tapped into my subconscious quite deeply as I tend to return to similar elements in my writing: people say it’s quite physical. I tend to write a lot about what people do with their hands and their body appearance.On Monday in the workshop I’m sure it will be noted that James is something of a compulsive breast watcher (well, he’s done it twice once with each of the women). I’ve played this up deliberately for mild amusement but I’m starting on the journey to finding my writing ‘voice’ and I think I’m always going to have a theme of the physical and sensuous. I’ve done the same in ‘Burying Bad News’ with Frances imagining herself and other people with physical attributes of grape varities. It’s interesting as I’m not a touchy-feely type person in normal life at all — I just seem to write about it.

One of the women poets was surprised that ‘Cooking with Blood’ was written by a woman as she thought its tone was quite male. Perhaps that’s down to the physicality of its approach as opposed to the more metaphysical, spiritual tone she might have expected in a poem with a similar message written from a more conventionally ‘female’ point of view. I’m not so sure there really is such a gender bias in reality between male and female writers. At least three of the male novelists on the course are writing from female points of view and Eileen writes in a very convincingly masculine voice in her novel extracts. However, there’s no doubt that many readers form expectations about reading a novel just by reading the gender of the author. That, famously, is why J.K.Rowling is known by her initials — the publishers didn’t think their initial market of teen boys would want to read a book written by someone called Joanne.

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Metroland

In another interesting, perhaps subliminal, connection with the underground, I’m a recently joined member of a group called Metroland Poets. As might be inferred, this is a group of poets from Metroland: the area made famous (or perhaps notorious) as being opened up to development by the Metropolitan line in the early 20th century, when it stretched way past Aylesbury up to Brill (the village that Tolkien used as the inspiration for Bree in ‘The Lord of the Rings’). The poets come from a bit wider afield — mainly Bucks and adjoining bits of Berks, Herts and north-west London.

Metroland is associated with John Betjeman and there are many famous advertisements were displayed on the underground to try and encourage people to relocate to the expanding suburbs and commute into London. Vast swathes of north-west London were developed into oceans of semis between the wars although a little further out of London the commuters had higher aspirations. Places like Chorleywood, which were described by Betjeman as the “essential metroland” and the “gateway” to the Chilterns, are typified by detatched, mock-Tudor mansions.

I was thinking of writing a transition chapter between inner city and countryside and the Metroland associations help, especially with confirming the geography that I want to use. The novel is absolutely not about the suburbs or suburbia but they can’t be totally ignored. James will have commuted through the suburbs for several years but Kim will be quite unfamiliar with them.

I want to write a bridging chapter where she sets off from Marylebone, in itself a small outpost of country values in central London (ironically Chiltern Railways have been owned by Deutsche Bahn for a few years). She won’t know what kind of a place she’s going to visit and she’ll look out of the window at the inner-Metroland of dense development around Harrow, which she’ll sort of understand. Then when the train gets out towards the more affluent suburbs like Moor Park and Rickmansworth she’ll start to become horrified and not a little intimidated by the huge gardens with ornamental pools and rockeries the size of small mountain ranges — real Jerry and Margo Leadbetter territory. As she gets towards Amersham she’ll be grabbing the odd bit of relief when suburbia eventually gives way to genuine fields but she’ll still be quite let down that it’s all one commuter dormitory after the other even 35 minutes or so out of London.

But then, once the underground signalling cables eventually stop after Amersham (where the Metroland poets meet), she’ll have a moment of epiphany: she’ll see a view somewhere around Great Missenden that will take her breath away and from then on she’ll realise she’s left suburbia and the metropolitan consciousness behind. After the exit from London was so long and drawn out she’ll be astounded that such beautiful countryside can be found relatively close to the capital. (This is what the government has just announced it wants to plough its HS2 High Speed Rail line though.)

She’ll be met off the train by James (and perhaps Emma) at the nearest station to The Angel: Wendover. Ironically, this was described (according to Wikipedia) as the “pearl of Metroland”. So a nice piece of circularity seeing she starts off in a tube carriage. (I’ve also already written a scene for ‘Burying Bad News’ that’s located at Wendover station where Frances is pursued by journalists when she goes to get a train.)

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Sneaker Pimps

More odd musical/novelistic connections: one song I belatedly discovered is by a little known band called The Sneaker Pimps. Even though I only heard it properly on a compilation last year it dates back to 1996. Given my recurring themes in The Angel it’s probably not a surprise (but one I only just realised) that it’s called ‘6 Underground’. It’s more than just the title that resonates — it’s also the general feel of the track (a sort of soporific shuffling beat) and the lyrics.

There’s a bit of a refrain alternating ‘underground/overground’, which is quite apt but I particularly like the sense of contempt hidden behind a veneer of patience. I especially like the couplet:

‘Don’t think because I understand that I care/Don’t think because we’re talking that we’re friends.’

And I like the nihilsm of:

‘Talk me down, safe and sound/Too strung up to sleep/Wear me out, scream and shout’

The intonation of the singer, who’s now called Kelli Ali, fits in my mind the sort of attitude that I’ve tried to depict in Kim in the extract that I’ve written to send out for my reading when we come back after our Easter holidays on Monday. She’s massively in debt, been betrayed by someone who she thought was her boyfriend, is hungover and has to entertain this City banker type who she thinks feels quite sorry for himself as he’s just been fired — but she needs his money. She’s only really prepared to be as civil to him to start with as is strictly necessary (‘don’t think because we’re talking that we’re friends’) but he disarms her by his childish enthusiasm and honest compliments to the point where he wins her round and actually manages to get her to drop a lot of her front too.

I’m not too sure what I think about what I’ve sent out to the rest of the class overall. It’s 2,600 words (a little over so Alison might shut me up again) and it’s just two people in a confined space in real time from one POV. It sows a lot of backstory and primes the rest of the narrative though, after the initially more dramatic scenes of the first two chapters. (Most of the class haven’t seen these but Alison has — and she’s given me feedback on them so I’m not going to get her to sit through me reading those again.) The reader will find that James is into cooking, that Kim is in a bad state (asthmatic. in debt), that she works in a pub part-time, that James doesn’t find her very attractive (bloodshot eyes, dirty clothes, spotty) — he’s surprised at one point that she has a female shape.

Yet the two of them both want something from the other. James wants some sort of validation and approbation of his appreciation of art and music. Kim wants to keep her head above water professionally and financially: she’s also in a situation from which she could be persuaded to escape.

I found the video for the song on You Tube so here it is. (Note the nose piercing.)

I came across an autobiography of Kelly Ali, the singer in the Sneaker Pimps (at the time of ‘6 Underground’ anyway). It’s quite fascinating and she has the same kind of voice and philosophy that I imagine Kim to have, with a few important differences. Seems the other pimps were posh kids from the north east — one of them and his father were accomplished fine wine tasters and could identify reds from tasting them (more echoes of my writing there, especially from ‘Burying Bad News’.).

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Life is a Rollercoaster

Actually I’m not such a fan of Ronan Keating’s song (even though it was co-written by Dido/Belinda Carlisle/Stevie Nicks Svengali Rick Nowels) but I was struck on a visit to Alton Towers on Friday about the parallels between rollercoasters and narrative in fiction.

Theme parks are strange places: they’re physical manifestations of the human desire to be entertained that is normally fulfilled mentally by books, films, TV — even other art forms like painting and music. It’s probably no co-incidence that theme parks tend to re-use the narrative of familiar stories and fairy tales to bridge the gap between engineering and customer experience. The most successful rollercoasters and rides have some sort of story invested in them — whether it’s a general theme, such as riding the Congo River Rapids,  or something more specific, such as the recent rebranding of Alton Towers’ Spinball Whizzer as Sonic (the Hedgehog) Spinball. (This involved the theme park painting the ride blue and putting up a statue of Sonic the Hedgehog outside the ride — and they had the nerve to describe it on their park maps as ‘New’.) There’s a genuinely new ride at Alton Towers, which has a strong narrative theme — they brand it ‘Th13rteen’ and it apparently has some associated story about wraiths. (I don’t know the story to that one as I’ve not been on it).

Disneyland in its various manifestations is an obvious example of the connection between stories and narrative and these kind of rides.

On first thoughts, it seems like it’s an unlikely connection between the engineering of a steel rollercoaster and a narrative story but there are many parallels. Often novels are analysed by sketching a simple line graph that might represent something like intensity of plot events. This often looks like a sine wave on an oscilloscope but also quite like a rollercoaster: a narrative needs some variation in its pace so there are peaks and troughs. The classic Hollywood screenplay is constructed with plot points about 25% and 75% of the way through the script so conforms quite well to the pattern.

A rollercoaster is similar but must also work within the laws of physics, which tends to mean that it starts with a steep climb to charge the cars with potential energy, which is then discharged through drops with gravity bringing the heights of the curves closer to the ground as the ride goes on. However, this is not always the case and several rides will use traction in the middle to supplement the energy — as log flumes tend to do. The best rollercoasters will play tricks with the riders’ expectations — either by some sort of disorientation or sensory deprivation (like being in the dark).

The thrill element of the rollercoaster will exploit the riders’ sense of physcial danger. I’ve not been on Oblivion at Alton Towers but this seems to be a classic example of fear as the car teeters for a second or two sixty feet above a near vertical drop into a tunnel that’s about another 60ft deep underground before plunging  down underground. While the people on these sort of rides are obviously physically involved, they also know that there should be absolutely no danger. I would guess that a lot of a novel’s (or film’s) appeal is the vicarious engagement the reader has with the characters who will usually be in some dangerous predicament (physical or emotional). In the end the reader knows it’s only a story, in the same way that they know a rollercoaster is safe, but the skill of the author/designer is in trying to conceal that artificiality.

There seem to be a lot of parallels between coasters and narratives — they’re a continuous line of events designed to thrill or entertain by managing and subverting expectations that are quite primordial in the human psyche. The riders of a rollercoaster and readers of a novel will willingly surrender themselves to the skill of the designer or writer in the expectation of receiving gratification that derives from being temporarily removed from the ‘real world’ and having their norms and expectations challenged.

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Transvestite Roofer From Banbury

Truth can be much stranger than fiction and I heard a superb example tonight. I’d driven up to a pub in a village called Stewkley, which is almost in Milton Keynes (though people there would not like to be associated with MK too much).

I was chatting to someone who’s a regular at the pub and he and his wife told an amazing story about a transvestite roofer (with huge hands) who used to come all the way to their village pub from Banbury (probably a good hour’s drive) to hang out in his provocative and skimpy clothing. (The logic he used was that he wouldn’t be safe, in various senses of the word, nearer his home — he apparently had a wife and three children who were in the dark about his alter ego.)

I ended up having a first hand account told to me by the landlady of an incident that ended the chap barred from the pub — and it wasn’t a case of prejudice and bigotry as he’d obviously been made to feel welcome in the pub for quite some time before the inciting incident, as novelists say. I may re-use this story for ‘The Angel’ in some form. It shows there’s nothing quite like getting out into the field to do your research.

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Themes and Influences

Going back to Emily’s point about how themes emerge the more that one writes, I’ve realised I’ve unwittingly used some fascinating influences. I’ve just been writing, very slowly, a scene where Kim paints in her tube carriage studio and decides whether she likes James or not. Watching artists at work is not something I’ve properly researched yet but I found myself writing about gestures like her putting a brush to her mouth and nodding her head from side-to-side. I’ve realised where my mind dredged this up from — a rather famous Cadbury’s advert from the 1970s which can now be seen again on You Tube.

I’ve also given Kim a liking of religious choral music, partly because I have some of it on the computer and it’s randomly played as I’ve been writing. I did, however, buy the Classic FM CD ‘Music for the Soul’ last week which has Vaughan Williams’ ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’ (apparently the third best loved piece of classical music in the country). I’ve seen this performed twice now — once at the Proms for the fiftieth anniversary of RVW’s death (in 2008) — and this really is music for the soul. Heard live, the bass strings resonate through your body. What’s special about the CD is that before the Fantasia is the original theme by Tallis which RVW used as the basis for his work — called ‘Why Fum’th In Fight?‘. It’s quite extraordinary to hear the theme sung and then elaborated by the string orchestra.

I may have Kim be inspired by the Tallis Fantasia later in the novel. I wanted to write it in the current scene but it’s getting quite long and I need to get the characters moving. Instead she plays John Tavener’s ‘Song for Athene’ (the 20th century Tavener, not Tallis’s contemporary). Of course this is most famous from being the music to which the Princess of Wales’ coffin was carried out of Westminster Abbey and was accompanied by the most striking images of the black and white tiling on the abbey floor. There’s also another connection between Tavener, Tallis, Vaughan Williams and Westminster Abbey. The part of Westminster Abbey where the choir sang ‘Song for Athene’  is where Thomas Tallis is buried and Vaughan Williams’ ashes are interred, which I’d not known until I did a bit of research.

I realised that I’m spontaneously generating quite a lot of references to cathedrals and other religious themes. St Paul’s is going to play a part in the story and so will the village church and churchyard (think about Emma). But it’s probably no co-incidence that this is happening with a novel that’s called The Angel — whether the title is a symptom or a cause of this is an interesting question but it all seems to tie in quite uncannily.

I also read on the Guardian’s Book Blog that angels as a general literary theme are meant to be the Next Big Thing, replacing the current vogue for vampires. I’m not sure this is a great thing for my title, seeing as my angels are on pub signs and are symbolic — not the scary sort made notorious by the likes of the famous Stephen Moffat Doctor Who episode — ‘Blink’. I do like the title, though. I’ve even worked it into the dialogue — from recently written chapter two:

He shrugged.

‘Yes, sorry about your job too,’ Kim said.

‘I’ve got the cash for you, though.’

‘You’re an angel,’ she said. ‘Come up and take a look around.’

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HR People

I’m a fan of Scott Adams’ ‘Dilbert’ cartoons and I particularly like his view of HR people. One quotation goes something like ‘I hired a new director of Human Resources to handle the downsizing. I needed somebody who acts like a friend but secretly delights in the misery of all people.’ I know people regard the transformation of personnel departments in the 1980s into Human Resources departments regard this as a metaphor for a shift from paternalistic employers of the post-war corporatist era into Thatcherite sweatshops that regard humans as machines (or resources). All the while the managers (and HR people) proclaimed ‘people are our greatest asset’ (until they don’t want them when they become an expensive liability). I liked the Dilbert cartoon where the pointy-haired boss suddenly admitted that people weren’t the company’s greatest asset — they were sixth. When asked what was above people, he revealed it was carbon paper.

I guess most HR people go into the career with the best of motives but they must get pretty brutalised by the calls on them made by many managers. At the top level they are often drawn into highly secret board level plans to take an axe to the workforce (and to advise how to do it as cheaply and quickly as possible while remaining within the law) but at a lower level they will have to work to expedite the petty vindictive feuds of bad managers who decide to persecute someone they don’t like. In this case they’re between a rock and a hard place — incur the wrath of the manager if they don’t sack someone or join in with the bullying. No wonder they’re so keen to try and do the nice, fluffy things like dreaming up company-wide motivation programmes where employees (usually managers) are sent away to hotels for interminable Power Point presentations, after which they are given the opportunity to either drink themselves stupid in the free bar or engage in casual sex with each other (or both).

I think my somewhat cynical view of the typical relationship between employer and employee — or between the serfs and global capital — is showing through here! (This is a view, by the way, that has been confirmed by having done an MBA ). However, it’s all great stuff for a character in a novel. Emma will work in HR and the requirement for her to go and stay over to organise these shindigs in country house hotels will allow a bit of freedom for James and may also give her an opportunity to get a bit of revenge in kind for what she suspects (wrongly, at least at first) her husband is up to with Kim.

I was able to give Emma a bit of thought as I happened to attend a workshop run by The Corporate Infrastructure Forum on ‘Involving the Business In IT’ (something that IT people, generally being more sensitive and reflective souls than other professions like accountants or lawyers or HR people, often sit around navel gazing about: ‘Why does no-one love us?’) This started with a presentation by a chirpy researcher (with a PhD) who’d been working on a project called ‘Sustainable Organisational Performance: What Really Makes the Difference’ for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), which is the professional organisation that any self-respecting HR person belongs to (Emma will, of course). It’s all very admirable stuff, which will probably come as a revelation to many managers, about how happy and motivated employees will tend to work harder and so their employers will have consequently better businesses — aligning objectives, balancing short and long-term objectives, concentrating on the employees’ ‘locus of engagement’.

While the presenter didn’t look particularly how I imagine Emma, it gave me quite an opportunity to pick up on the vocabulary of the field, current thinking, even things like how she would use her hands to make points quite empathetically, as the speaker did. Overall, despite her faults, Emma will be professional, conscientious and good at her job — even if does involve delighting in all human misery. I had another thought, which I must add was entirely unrelated to the woman making the presentation, that Emma may have a fondness for having sex in public places — which will be good for a plot device and I think she’ll also be quite voracious. Also, it may help James introduce Kim (and the reader) to the geography of the village and its locality — I’m thinking of places like stone circles or iron age hill forts as Emma will also have a bit of a new-age side to her and like to tap into the energy of these places.

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That Big Shiny Thing in the Sky

Not sure what happened but there was this huge, bright, shiny thing in the sky, which was strangely blue itself, over the weekend. I’m sure there was something other-worldly about it as it attracted me outside and away from any work on my novel.

Actually, this seems to be the worst thing about this time of year. I had great intentions about how much I could do this weekend but various things like the Grand National, the village horticultural show (at which my cheese straws got 20 out of 20 marks!!!) and the weather in general meant that I got sod all done in terms of words committed to paper/disk.  However,  I did a lot of thinking about novel writing. I have quite a lot now written in my head.

I watched the end of the South Bank Show Revisited where Melvyn Bragg went back to interview Ian McEwan on the occasion of his new novel ‘Solar’ being published and comparing it with an earlier interview from 1981. In the earlier interview, when he would have been around 33, McEwan came over as rather ostentatiously cerebral and pretty unlikeable — something he admitted himself now he’s mellowed into middle-age (61). He also turned up on an edition of The Book Show on Sky Arts with Mariella Frostrup that I got round to watching. It’s quite a good programme and features an impressive guest list of writers. Joanna Trollope was interviewed on the same programme (I was quite interested in this as someone on my course described my novel as a kind of male Joanna Trollope, which was compliment but made me wonder if describing it like that would make a publisher run a hundred miles).

There was an interesting discussion after a feature on Sally Vickers’ study (I have one of her books, ‘Mr Golightly’s Holiday, which was well-reviewed in the Economist but I’ve yet to read it). It’s not a tiny, dark, massively cluttered small space like mine which is barely possible to enter, let alone work in, but seemed huge and light with windows giving panoramic views overlooking most of London. Her method of writing was to get up in the morning and sit in her study, still in her night-dress and work until she thought she’d written enough and then get dressed and get on with the rest of her day: her logic being that she was more in touch with her  unconscious, creative side having just rolled out of bed. She also said she didn’t ever plan her books: she just started with a scene and wrote. Joanna Trollope was fascinated as her methods were exactly the opposite. She treated writing like going to work, having to get everything together and in order for the day before starting, and she is also a detailed planner. I guess the styles of the two writers reflect their different approaches. I think I’m more in the Trollope camp of planning and having an idea of where I want to go and also feeling like I need the discipline of deadlines, etc. However, when I can manage it, I do like getting up very early and writing. I think I tend to write more easily then and late at night, although this may be more to do with having less of the sort of distractions around that so displaced my efforts over the weekend.

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Masterchef

It’s Masterchef final day and I watched it after Manchester United’s referee-induced ten man capitulation to Bayern Munich — which might bring a smile to Kim’s face but not mine (btw she supports Chelsea).

I watch the programme occasionally with a morbid fascination — partly due to the stilted formulaic presentation where Greg Wallace and John Torode always have to shout at each other about one finalist. The other reason is to why these mad people actually want to be chefs. One of the finalists is a paediatrician who, no doubt, earns a six figure salary from working about three and a half hours per week, twenty weeks a year for the NHS while running a private practice at £1,000 an hour. However, it’s good that there are crazy people like for whom food is a passion as that’s what James is going to have a go doing at The Angel so they’ll make his decision — to invest his redundancy in a pub — quite credible. (In fact, he’ll tell Kim that he’s been a failed contestant on a programme like Masterchef — and he won’t be lying.)

Yet all these people maintain they have a passion for doing a job that is inherently financially unstable, involves very anti-social hours and requires high levels of skill for little guaranteed financial reward. I’ve always thought these people must be barking mad.

Compare them with those who would-be novelists — the people who expend huge amounts of effort sitting in front of a computer screen on their own, investing time, most of which involves anti-social working, in something that may never be seen by more than a handful of people — even if it defies the odds and is published.

Makes you wonder who’s really the most crazy doesn’t it?