Alison May

In which I pitch my awesome movie based on the super-glam life of the writer

Yesterday the lovely Tora Williams had a very marvellous blog post about the ridiculous way writers are depicted in films and on tv. That got me thinking. Tora is, of course, absolutely right. Actually being a writer involves hardly any old-fashioned typewriter work, very little moody staring into the middle distance wearing only outsized designer knitwear and your knickers, and hardly any fighting crime. I find that last part particularly disappointing – Jessica Fletcher lied to us all, and, I’m at least 85% sure, was also a serial killer. Doing writing in real-life involves zero crime-busting, and you’re only allowed to bump off the made-up people.

Anyway, as I said some time ago before I got distracted by serial killing, Tora’s post got me thinking. What would a movie depicting the realistic writers’ life look like? All the best movies (and most of the worst) follow a basic three act structure, so what would the key plot points in our writer’s life be?

ACT 1

THE SET-UP/STATUS QUO:

Hermione Scribbler is just a regular ‘girl next door.’ There’s nothing special about her. No indeed. She has limbs, and very often bothers to wash her hair rather than just tie it back and hope for the best. That’s just the sort of crazy chick she is. Go Hermione!

THE INCITING INCIDENT

Hermione is made redundant/goes on maternity leave/gets fired for inadvertantly instant messaging a picture of her boobs to the whole office. Whichever it is, the point is this Hermione has time on her hands. She is temporarily disheartened, but then it hits her. She will write a novel, and then she will be rich like JK Rowling and Dan Brown and Zoella.

Initially Hermione is a flurry of writerly activity. She makes a little home office space in the useless bit of dining room that’s half under the stairs. She reads A LOT of blogs and webpages about How To Write a Novel. She googles writing courses. She sets up Word to do first line indents and 1.5 spacing. She opens her new document and…

TURNING POINT 1

Hermione stops. What Hermione has omitted to come up with so far is an actual idea for a book. Hermione has a cake instead. During her cake Hermione has an awesome idea about a clan of cake-fetishist vampires. The plan to write a novel is Back On!

ACT 2

This is where our heroine’s situation becomes increasingly complicated and emotionally fraught. This is the sort of stuff we can expect to see:

Hermione gradually stops wearing proper clothes. They are pinchy, and you have to think about which ones go together. This is hard. Pyjamas are much much easier.
Hermione watches a lot of youtube videos. She tells herself this is research. It isn’t.
One day, in a moment of high drama, Hermione finds an interesting brown stain on her pyjamas. She sniffs it. It smells like chocolate. Hermione resists the urge to lick the stain for at least 14 seconds.
Hermione googles literary agents and makes a list.
Hermione spends a whole day planning her outfit for when one of those literary agents takes her out for cocktails. It is, after all, only a matter of time.

THE MID POINT/POINT OF NO RETURN

Hermione has a brief golden period of writing. Everything falls into place. The cake-fetishist vampires behave exactly as she wants them to. The words flow out of her fingerless-gloved writing fingers. It is a window of perfect joy. It’s lasts 27 and a half minutes and produces 417 words, 250 of which are terrible, but it’s too late. Hermione is hooked.

ACT 2 CONTINUES

Hermione joins a writing group and then makes plans to meet other members for coffee on a regular basis. This is important because spending time with other writers feeds the creative instinct. It is almost like actually spending time writing. Almost.
It strikes Hermione that there are also writers on twitter, who she can chat to without ever leaving her writing desk. That is definitely almost like actually spending time writing. Almost.
Hermione develops a tricky condition known as ‘writer’s bottom.’ She resolves that, in addition to definitely always writing 2000 words per day, she will also go jogging.
Hermione searches for stylish jogging clothes on the internet.

DARKEST MOMENT

Hermione realises that it is now quite a long time since she was made redundant/went on maternity leave/did the booby instant messenger thing. She also realises that at no point during this story has she had a baby, so it was almost certainly either redundancy or the booby thing. Whichever. The point is her money’s running out. The book isn’t written, and she needs to get a job. Or, thinks Hermione, she needs to get her head down and finish the novel which will then make her rich.

ACT 3

Hermione prints out pictures of JK Rowling, Dan Brown and Zoella and sticks them up next to her computer for inspiration. She is going to Finish the Book. Cue montage of frantic writing activity. This will mainly be marked by Hermione developing a wild eyed look and an increasingly lax approach to personal hygiene. Eventually she emerges from the writing pit with 93,000 words about her vampires.

CLIMAX

Hermione prepares her agent submissions. This involves writing a synopsis. Hermione cries a lot. Hermione thinks bad thoughts about setting cake-festishist vampires on whoever invented the synopsis. Eventually her first submission is ready to send. Off it goes! Followed by another, and another, and another.

RESOLUTION

Hermione waits for a reply. And then she waits some more. Then she gets a flurry of rejections, including one that says that although the cake-fetishist vampires aren’t right for the agent’s list, she would love to read more of Hermione’s work. Hermione fails to realise that that is completely brilliant and has a long cry. Later she finds a cornflake in her bra. She has no idea how it got there.

The End.

And if you’d like some slightly more practical tips on writing a novel, there are still a few spaces left on my Developing Your Novel workshop in Birmingham on 28th March.

In which there are still three whole months until the general election

I generally consider myself to be a person who is quite interested in politics. I can usually generate a blog post about an issue of the day if pressured to do so. I have opinions on all sorts of things: page 3 – no; fox hunting – definitely not; same sex marriage – sure, if you want to. But I’m finding that three whole months away from the General Election I already have election fatigue.

I’m feeling, already, as though the bulk of the political news that I read or hear is washing over me like white noise, and, I think, the reason for that is simple – the news, as it is reported, is nebulous. There are precious few actual facts in there to get hold of. Take this story from the BBC as an example. The headline, technically speaking, offers factual information – David Cameron has been challenged about his claim that a new Tory government wouldn’t cut per pupil education funding, but the fact is simply that some people have said some things, and some other people have said other things.

The story itself jumps between announcements about per pupil education funding and announcements about numbers of schools becoming academies – yes those are both to do with education policy, but they are quite distinct issues. That’s not my problem though. My problem is that essentially the entire article is made of up X said, ‘…’ but Y said, ‘…’.

To be fair, there’s a handy video clip from the Prime Minister’s speech at the top of the article so you can see for yourself a little bit of what he actually announced. That’s good, but watching the clip just makes the article itself look worse. For example, take this paragraph: ‘Mr Cameron, speaking at Kingsmead school in north London, said that every secondary school in this “requires improvement” category would be expected to become an academy.’ Well maybe he did say that at another point in the speech, but in the clip attached to the article he talks about schools that can’t ‘demonstrate the capacity to improve themselves’ – that might not be the same as ‘every school’ at all, or it might just be waffle to obscure the ‘every school’ element. There’s no way of knowing from this article.

This isn’t BBC bashing. I just happen to have picked a BBC article. I could have gone for pretty much any newspaper, tv station or website, because what we have here is a very normal example of current journalism. It’s journalism without the skills, or time, or inclination, or incentive, or possibly backbone, to do very much actual journalistic work. It’s a process that goes something like this:

1) A politician makes a speech. A journalist picks out a few choice quotes, or possibly just accepts the few choice quotes picked out by the party in the accompanying press release.

2) The journalist knows that’s not enough. Their story needs balance, so they add a few quotes from opposition politicians disputing the thing the first politician said.

3) If they’re feeling really dedicated they probably have some notion that they should be looking into the politicians’ claims, so they add another quote from a relevant trade union or academic or random passer by who’s prepared to reckon something.

4) They publish their story.

There’s nothing actually wrong about it, but the process of filtering all those quotes through a professional news reporting organisation hasn’t added anything. There’s nothing that goes above or beyond what the people giving the quotes wanted to say. None of those claims or quotes get checked or probed, because the story is simply the reporting what each of the people quoted said, and it’s definitely true that they said it, so that’s all fine. The problem is that nobody reading these articles actually knows anymore about what is true than before they started reading. If anything, they know less because of all the additional white noise they’re now carrying around in their heads.

Of course we need reporting on what politicians say they’re going to do, and what rival politicians see as the problems with those plans, but the reality is that not everything that is reckoned, even when it’s reckoned by a front bench politician, has equal value. Lots of things fall into the grey area of opinion or projection, but lots of other things don’t. Some things are simply true or not, and without a mainstream media prepared to call anything at all as ‘true’ or ‘false’ it’s left to each of us to filter out the white noise. The danger with that is that the vastness of the range of information and opinion that washes over us leaves us overwhelmed and in a position where, when faced with a ballot paper, it’s very easy to wrinkle our brows and just give up on the whole idea of being able to make any sort of informed choice at all.

So maybe that’s a thing I could do to try to break through my election apathy – my own little mini fact checks right here in Alison Blogville. It’s an idea, anyway.

52 Weeks: 52 Books – January

So it’s the end of month one in the great year of reading many books. Here’s how it’s going so far. I steamed through Book 1: Mhairi McFarlane’s It’s Not You, It’s Me in the first couple of days of the year, and I’ve followed that up with:

Book 2: Terry Pratchett – Raising Steam

Book 3: Veronica Henry – A Night on the Orient Express

Book 4: Adele Parks – Larger than Life

I’m not going to do reviews on all 52 of the year’s books because a) life is short, and b) the whole idea of 52 weeks: 52 books is to rediscover a love of reading, not to add a whole new level of it feeling like a chore, but I do totally reserve the right to review the ones I feel like reviewing and offer general musings on the whole reading endeavour.

So, my favourite book from this crop was A Night on the Orient Express which I devoured in less than 24 hours. It was all the things I like best in a book – uplifting but with depth and interest. The novel follows five distinct storylines, linked by the setting of the Orient Express. I love a good multiple protagonist story but, even in the best, you often find that there are some storylines you could happily skip over to get to the better bits. That wasn’t the case this time, and, even better, Veronica Henry has written loads of books, so I get the additional joy of discovering an author I’ve never read before who has a back catalogue I can now start working my way through. Yippee!

It hasn’t been entirely reading plain sailing this month though. I started, but abandoned JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, for reasons that I think are only about 15% the fault of the book. The Casual Vacancy is another multiple narrator story, which introduces lots of characters very quickly. I think that would have been fine if I’d had a free hour for my first reading session on the book, but I ended up reading ten minutes here and there and forgetting who everyone was, a problem that was made worse by the fact that I was reading on my kindle. I love my kindle, but it is much harder to flick back and remind yourself who’s who on an ereader than in a paper book. Then I got sick with Weird Hacking Cough Disease* which was primarily eased by sitting in the bath, and used the ‘I don’t want to take my kindle in the bath’ excuse to abandon The Casual Vacancy, in favour of Adele Parks, who better satisfied the ‘I’m poorly – I need something fun to read’ impulse anyway. I suspect that over the year we may discover that I am generally more likely to abandon a book on kindle than on paper, which will be a mildly interesting thing to learn. This has also left me with a quandary about whether to go back to The Casual Vacancy. As I say I suspect the abandonment was more about my fuzzy poorly-girl brain than the book itself, but I’ve just found out that there’s a TV adaptation coming up in a couple of weeks. Given that I probably will watch the TV version, do I really want to read the book straight before it, or would it be better to leave the book until later in the year?

Anyway, I’m now onto February’s reading, kicked off with Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers. I’m not generally a crime girl, but part of the idea of 52 Books is to read as widely as possible, and January has been quite commercial women’s fiction** heavy. Strong Poison was a recommendation from my senior sibling who definitely is a crime girl (fictional crime only – she hardly ever does an actual murder), and I’m quite enjoying it, but technically it’s a February book, so more on that next time.

* Definitely its proper medical name

** Hate that term. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it.

In which I wish everything wasn’t so bloomin’ earnest

Movie award season is upon us, which means that cinemas are currently full of a steady stream of Oscar-bait movies, usually identifiable by the high likelihood of a stupidly long running time and an actor working some serious prosthetics. If you venture to your local multiplex at the moment you’ll be treated to trailers for Steve Carrell and Channing Tatum looking earnest on a wrestling mat, Miles Teller looking earnest with a drum kit, and Bradley Cooper looking earnest and bearded with a big gun.

Let’s be clear what I mean by ‘earnest.’ I don’t just mean ‘serious.’ Sometimes it’s good to be serious. If you’re organising the WHO response to Ebola, a bit of head-down focus on the job in hand would definitely be the right approach. Funerals, job interviews, big work presentations, court hearings – there’s a whole big range of situations for which, if you’re trying to pass yourself off as a functioning grown-up, you probably want to use your serious face.

But being overly earnest is a step beyond that. Now we’re talking about taking yourself, and everything around you far too seriously. We’re talking about wanting to be seen to be serious. We’re talking about the state of mind that leads us to look for reasons to take offence. Taking the little things too seriously leads us to a situation where a bit of playground bitchiness about a kid not turning up to a party becomes headline news to be pored over and debated. Allowing our earnestness to lead us into this sort of breakdown in our understanding of what matters and what doesn’t is bad in two ways.

Firstly, it sucks the fun out of life. Keeping a constant watch on twitter in case some person you’ve never met might say something you don’t agree with, or find offensive, is not a joyful way to spend your time. More widely, the feeling that seriousness is always better, takes the joy out of our cultural lives. On Saturday I saw the film version of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods. I love Into The Woods. I own the DVD of the Broadway production with Bernadette Peters as the witch and it is a thing of wonder. It’s also really really funny. The film is amusing, in places, but not in anywhere near the number of places that the show is; somehow in the transition to the big scene its lost its sense of the ridiculous, and given that it’s a story about a baker who has to feed hair, a cloak, and a shoe to a cow, then sense of ridiculous about it is kind of important.

Secondly, and more importantly, if every minor irritation and offence matters, then nothing matters. The more column inches are expounded on unimportant stuff like how the film version of Into The Woods takes itself a little bit too seriously, the more distracted we are from things that do matter. Comments thread on articles about nothing, and Twitter wars over little more are joyful only for politicians and vested interests who would rather we were all looking the other way. So here let me sum up today’s lesson – take offence sparingly, don’t take yourself too seriously, and understand that serious isn’t always better then silly.

In which I wonder about the whole rolling news thingummyjiggle

Ok. A bit of housekeeping before we settle down to some serious blogging business. First off, did you all have pleasant festive seasons, and are you now cheerfully embracing the whole 2015 thing? I hope you did, and you are. You will also notice that it’s Tuesday and there is a shiny new blogpost for your delectation. Well that’s the way we roll now. Tuesday is the new whatever day I was blogging on before. I remember – I didn’t really have a system, did I? So, Tuesday is the new slightly random and not terribly predictable day, but with the exciting development that it will be much much more predictable. It will come after Monday and before Wednesday like, well like Tuesday essentially. Mark it in your diaries, and feel free to start a sweepstake on how quickly I’ll forget.

The world’s attention, so far in 2015, has been largely focussed on France, after the attacks by gunmen at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, the subsequent shooting outside a metro station, and the two hostage sieges that followed. It’s been a bit of a bruising week for liberty, but it’s not the first battering that that ideal has withstood and it won’t be the last. The idea that the pen is mightier than the sword has been around long enough to become a cliché for good reason. Pens create ideas, which are notoriously tricky to kill off. They tend to thrive wherever there are people getting together, talking, writing and thinking.

But I don’t actually want to talk about the gunmen, not least because being talked about, and having the idea of the terror they created fed and nurtured with each retelling, is very much what they would have wanted. Today, I’m not even going to talk about the cartoonists, police officers, and shoppers who were killed, because they deserve much better words than I’m able to offer. Today I’m going to talk about another group who help to create the ideas we all share. Today I want to talk about the rolling news channels.

Twenty-four hour news isn’t a new phenomena. Sky News started broadcasting in the UK in 1989. The BBC’s dedicated round the clock news channel started in 1997. In America, CNN dates back to 1980. So it’s not new, but the world around the news channels has changed, and I don’t think the news channels have changed with it. Or in fact, I think they have changed, but not in the right way.

When the BBCs news channel started the internet was a baby. Nobody in their right mind would have expected to use it get updates on what was actually going on in the world right now. If they tried what they would probably have discovered that what was mainly happening right now was that their modem was making a weird crackling noise that sounded like it was trying to send a fax. I sort of feel I ought to footnote the terms ‘modem’ and ‘fax’ for our younger viewers. I’m not going to. They’re enjoying all the lovely benefits of youth – I don’t see why they should get to actually know stuff as well.

Obviously, the internet has grown up a bit since then, in terms of technology, if not in content. Now you can read live updates on the butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the planet, when the resulting tornado on the other is still pottering around at ‘light breeze’ levels. The 24 hour news channels are fighting to keep up, pushed by the immediacy of social media sites to report what’s happening right now this very second. And that’s a problem because what’s happening right now this very second is usually confused and confusing, and that confusion leads to the breakdown in the very important journalistic distinction between ‘things that are actually demonstrably true’ and ‘random speculation.’

There is, I think, still a major role for TV news in the internet age, but it’s role shouldn’t be to try to ape the worst of the internet, by feverishly trying to keep up. Instead, the TV news channels need to accept that there is no way that they are going to be able to ‘reckon stuff’ quicker or more pithily than twitter, and that’s ok, because that isn’t news. I’m weighing in in support of 24 hour news channels that are largely made up of a picture of the newsreader drinking a cup of tea whilst the scrolling update across the bottom of the screen reads, ‘It’s a bit unclear what’s happening at the moment. Bear with us.’ These would be news channels with no speculation, only news – that can definitely include explanation of the facts behind the news, but absolutely no people just reckoning stuff (even if the stuff they might reckon is hysterically funny and absolutely terrifying in equal measure).

So there you go – that’s my radical idea. News that is only made up of news: no speculation; no guessing what’s going on as it’s happening; maybe even some actual journalism that amounts to more than reading out what other people have said on twitter. My alternate plan to ‘fix’ TV news, which will absolutely and definitely be brought in just as soon as I am Queen, is to make it a legal requirement that all news broadcasts flash the word ‘NEWS’ or the word ‘SPECULATION’ across the bottom of the screen at all times, depending on which is currently being offered. It wouldn’t stop them just reckoning stuff, but at least it would be nice and clear.

So there you go. That’s my thought for the week. Come back same time next week and I’ll try to have another one.

In which I make some new New Year’s Resolutions

So it’s New Year’s Resolution time again. Traditionally at this point in the year I tell you that I’m going to lose weight, get over my terror of driving and probably do some writing. That’s pretty much what I did at the start of 2014, and 2013, and 2012. This year I’m going to take a different approach. Well slightly different. I shall still definitely do much writing, but that’s kind of what I do now (hurrah!) so it doesn’t merit a whole resolution, and there’s no driving resolution this year either. That’s not because I’ve got over the fear completely, but I’ve managed to dial it down from a fullblown phobia to a strong dislike.

So my All* New Resolutions for 2015 are:

1. I will read more books.

Something very distressing has happened to me over the last few years. I’ve found myself reading less and less. There are reasons for this. Partly it’s to do with writing more, which a) fills up the bit of my brain where stories live with the story I’m writing, rather than the one I’m reading, and b) means that I read much more critically. It’s also partly to do with twitter and facebook and smartphones and the general proliferation of stuff that you can read on the train or while you’re waiting for a bus, without opening a book.

Recently this has started to change though. I’ve read three or four books recently that have really got under my skin, and the love of reading is slowly coming back. My goal for 2015 is to read at least 52 books. That’s a book a week. You probably all knew that, didn’t you? You probably also know how many minutes there are in an hour and how many paracetamol you’re allowed to take in 24 hours. That’s just the class of blog reader I attract.

Anyhow – 52 weeks: 52 books – that’s the plan. It can include fiction and non-fiction, but not books that I’m reading for work (either as specific novel research or for other paid work). If I’m organised I shall blog from time to time about how it’s going and what I’ve read. But I’ve never really been organised before so don’t get too invested in that part of the plan.

There is one other thing, before we move on from this little resolution, and it involves me stating a slightly inconvenient truth. Picture me looking all like Al Gore, only being a lady and doing a bit more awkward staring at the floor. The other reason my reading stalled, was that my To Be Read pile got too big. Overwhelmingly big. Big to the point where I couldn’t even begin to justify buying more books until I’d started to make a little bit of a dent in the existing TBR mountain. I’d stopped looking at the book mound as a potential source of excitement and joy, and started seeing a task that had to be worked through.

Now here’s the awkward bit – a lot of those books in the intimidating TBR pile had got there because they were written by somebody I know, not because they were books that I desperately wanted to read. The reality is that writers tend to know other writers, and we tend to be supportive types who want to buy each others’ books. And that’s lovely, but doing this too much left me in a position where I felt guilty about my failure to read all the books by all the lovely people I’d met. That has to stop. In 2015 I’m going to get tough. There’s no way I can read even all the new releases from writers I know either personally or via the modern interwebs, let alone making a start on all their back catalogues. From now on I buy books only if I want to read them, and if you’re a writer chum and I don’t read your book, I’m sorry. You’re still marvellous. Your book is probably marvellous too. It’s just that there is so little time, and so many books, and I just have to accept that I may not actually manage to get through them all.

2. I will get fitter

OK – this is totally a variation on all the previous years’ fitness/weight loss resolutions. But this year I totally have a specific plan. It goes like this.

I will eat 7 portions of fruit and veg every weekday.

I won’t eat cake/biscuits/chocolate during the week (apart from super special occasions. Like a birthday party, for example. ‘Tis churlish in the extreme to turn down birthday cake).

I will work out at least 4 times a week.

And from these three simple steps, great health and fitness shall flow. Probably. If I actually do them.

So there you go. Those are my resolutions for 2015. Obviously I shall achieve them both in full and everything shall be peachy.

*partially

In which I review the year gone by 2014

As is traditional at this time of year, this is the blogpost in which I summarise the highs and lows of the year gone by in a slightly premature New Years Eve TV sort of a way.

We shall start with the things that have made me irritable/sad/discombobulated during 2014. They were as follows:

David Cameron. Irritable Bowel Syndrome. The distressing realisation that not really doing paid work leads fairly directly to not having any money. Nigel Farage. The inexplicable fact that there seem to be people who don’t think Nigel Farage is a knobber. David Cameron. David Cameron’s large shiny forehead (I don’t know why – it’s not by any stretch of the imagination his worst quality but it offends me with it’s large, smug, shininess.) The lack of left-wingness amongst the traditionally left-wing bits of Parliament. Throwing away 50,000 words of novel 2. David Cameron some more. Getting a chest infection during the RNA Conference for the second year in a row. Cold sores.

But enough of the miserablism. Here are the things that have made 2014 awesome:

The Commonwealth Games. The Edinburgh Fringe. The general wonderfulness of family and chums. The exciting realisation that not really doing paid work leads fairly directly to having loads of time. Finishing the draft of novel 2 (at the third attempt). Getting through my presentation at the RNA Conference without having a major coughing fit. Laughing so much with my senior sibling at reviews of NessieLand on the TripAdvisor that I almost peed a little bit. The publication of Truly, Madly, Deeply and of Cora’s Christmas Kiss. Being a contender for the RNA’s Joan Hessayon Award. Taking part in Rowan Coleman and Julie Cohen’s excellent writing retreat. Spending my birthday at Edinburgh Zoo, where you could almost totally see a panda if you squatted a bit and sort of looked sideways through the fence. Actually getting the new kitchen we’ve been talking about since about 2009. Not decorating the living room, because, you know, decorating is tiresome. Being invited to be involved in some fab short story collections. Almost perfecting my Giant Chocolate Fondant recipe – I’m so close, I tell you, so close. Zumba. And cake.

So there you go – some highs, a few lows, and no doubt lots of stuff I’ve missed out. That was 2014.

No blog next week because it’s Christmas Day and I shall be busy opening presents, and eating all the food. So have a fantastic Christmas/Hanukkah/Winter Solstice/time of just sitting quietly not observing any particular festival, and I’ll be back on New Year’s Day, full of resolutions and plans for 2015.

In which I reread an old classic

I’m currently rereading Emily Bronte’s masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. It’s probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve read the book – the first was when I was about 17, and the most recent was seven or eight years ago when I read it as part of my Creative Writing degree course. Having read it so many times and studied it at university I would have said, with confidence, that Wuthering Heights was a novel I knew pretty well, but here’s a newsflash from the current rereading: it’s absolutely nothing like I remember it. There are whole sections that I don’t remember at all, and some of the bits I thought I did remember are quite quite different from how I remembered them. This is odd, because it’s, obviously, still the same book. In fact, in this case, it’s physically, literally, actually the same book that I’ve read before, but the experience of reading it is completely different.

I think there are reasons for this, and I don’t think any of them are that aliens have come to earth and rewritten bits of Wuthering Heights, which is a shame, because that would have made an awesome blog post.

The non-alien related reasons are twofold:

1. I’ve changed

Well given that the book hasn’t changed, that leaves the reader as the only remaining variable, so if the thing I’m looking at isn’t different, but the experience of looking is, then that must be down to me. The things I’m picking up on during this reading are far more to do with the characters and far less to do with the brooding atmosphere and oppressive moor. This might be because I’ve moved on as a writer since I last read the book, and am currently fixated by character in terms of how I plot and revise my own writing. I’m noticing, for the first time, how complex, and essentially unpleasant, the minor characters are. Joseph, Nellie Dean, Mr Lockwood are all astonishingly self-involved in their own different ways.

I’m also noticing how dated the prose style is, and how slow the opening chapters are, which I don’t remember picking up on before. I’m actually quite impressed with my seventeen-year-old self for sticking with it. Again – that’s the writer in me coming through, and noticing deviations from the contemporary received wisdom about how to start and pace a novel.

It’s not the first time I’ve had a book change in front of me on rereading. I started Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day about eight times and couldn’t get past the first chapter, until one random day when I sat down and read about two-thirds of the book in one sitting. The book hadn’t changed, but something about my mood on that one given day married with the story and away we went together.

2. Some novels end up bigger than the novel itself

Wuthering Heights is the poster book for novels that exist in the public imagination in a completely different form from how the are on the page. Wuthering Heights has been adapted and retold in films, on TV, in musicals (thanks for that Cliff), and nearly all the retellings underplay the bleakness of the original novel. Somehow that perception of Wuthering Heights as a romantic story of star-crossed lovers on a windswept, but ultimately picturesque, moor, seeps into our consciousness, even if we’ve read the actual book and know it isn’t really like that. The idea of Heathcliff and Cathy as a slightly more consumptive Romeo and Juliet is stuck in our collective memories, even if none of us actually remember where it came from.

So there you go. Wuthering Heights – it’s not at all how you think you remember it. After this I shall be going to see Romeo and Juliet again with fingers crossed that I might have misremembered that ending. In the meantime, feel free to chat to me in the comments. What do you think of Wuthering Heights? Are there any books that have surprised you on rereading, or have turned out to be completely different from your expectations?

And finally, a quick reminder that my new Christmas Kisses novella, Cora’s Christmas Kiss, is out now for kindle.

In which I have a shiny new book out

Waaah, and indeed, yippedee-do-daaa. It is beyond exciting to be able to confirm that my new novella, the second Christmas Kiss story, Cora’s Christmas Kiss, is now available for kindle pre-order. It’ll be live and properly available from 4th December.

Hurrah! Let the festive, romantic, joyousness be unrestrained.

And just for you lovely blog reading types, here’s what the cover looks like.

Like all my covers, so far, it was designed by the awesome Berni Stevens. Thank you Berni for doing such a great job.

So there you go, that’s lovely Cora launched into the world. I hope people enjoy reading about her.

In which I sing the praises of casual fandom

So Missy is The Master. For those of you who have no idea what I’m rambling on about, Missy is a character in Doctor Who. In fact she’s the latest regeneration of recurring Timelord character, The Master. You know how Peter Capaldi used to be Matt Smith, who used to be David Tennant, who used to be etc. etc. all the way back to William Hartnell. Well The Master is exactly like that, only evil and with different actors.

And the latest incarnation of The Master, is known as Missy, because this time around the character has regenerated with lady parts, and is played by, Green Wing and Bad Education star, Michelle Gomez. However, the gender switch has caused mightily mixed feelings amongst the Doctor Who fandom. This range of views and comments on the Kasterborous site is a good example, but this list is way funnier so read it first.

Now I’m definitely on the side of the pro-Missy people. I love the Master – he/she has always been my favourite Doctor Who baddy. A dalek is all very well, but their dialogue is kind of limited. And Michelle Gomez is universally awesome and entirely suited to the part. In fact, I’m struggling to think of a TV programme that wouldn’t be improved by Michelle Gomez playing a mad woman somewhere during each episode. If I was in charge of the world (which, rather upsettingly, I am still not), I’d have Michelle Gomez, in character as Missy, presenting Question Time. I don’t think anyone can claim that wouldn’t make the world more fun.

Anyway, my liking for Missy is not the main reason I gathered you here today. The reason I gathered you here today is to point out that even if I hated the idea of a lady-Master (like a StairMaster but with boobies), that wouldn’t matter one little bit. I’m a fan of Doctor Who. I don’t own every existing episode on both VHS and DVD. I don’t quote old scripts as a leisure activity. I don’t spend large chunks (small chunks maybe) of my free time reading fan forums. I just like the TV show. I’m that sort of fan.

And that’s ok. There is, in fandoms off all kinds, a tendency to look down on the casual fan – the ‘I watched the whole series, but I ain’t paying that for the special edition boxed set’ fan, the ‘I’d love to go more often but it’s quite a long way and a season ticket’s nearly a grand’ fan, the ‘No, I didn’t buy the special platinum re-release of the album; I already own the special gold release from six months earlier’ fan. There’s a tendency for fans to try to prove their fannishness (totally a word) by showing their greater knowledge of the trivia of the object of their fandom, and there’s a tendency for fans to think they own the thing they’re fanning over. Well, you don’t. And us casual fans know that. We know that it’s fantastic to find a thing you really really like. It’s even fantastic to find other people that like that thing too. And that’s enough.

Casual fandom is ace. You get all the joy of really liking something, and none of the angst that more serious fans have to deal with when that thing develops in a way that they don’t like. You’re enjoyment isn’t ruined by scripts getting leaked on the internet, because you’re just not quite interested enough to go and read them. If someone tries to chat to you during an episode of one of your programmes you don’t have to kill them (well I say you don’t have to kill them – if they’re a repeat offender and it’s like a series finale or something, then maybe.) Casual fandom- it’s awesome. You should try it.

And here endeth the lesson. Tatty-byes.