August Blog

Penzance held its Literary Festival in July. For a few days the streets and parks were full of people happily wandering between events, listening to visiting writers and poets and steadfastly supporting local writers. Writing workshops for aspiring authors of all ages and numerous children’s events were a great success.

None of this could have happened without the vision, imagination and dedication of a few, who give up much of their lives to organising this event as well the endless hard work of many volunteers.

Penzance is lucky to have a wonderful, thriving bookshop that contributes hugely to Penzance and wholeheartedly supports the Litfest. It loyally promotes local authors as well as visiting ones by consistently having buzzy little launches in the shop in the evenings.

For those of us who spend most of our lives shut up in a small room with a computer it is exhilarating to be reminded, if we needed it, of the armies of readers in love with books, with words, with communicating with the writers taking part in festivals. That sheer joy of reading and talking about the books they have discovered or are about to discover.

I was also warmed by the generosity of writers towards each other. It is a joy to get together and share experiences of our current work, as well as the good and bad luck stories about agents or publishers. Hilarious and self-depreciating jokes over put downs or run ins with the egos of well known authors unite us all in a mutual love of what we do and the sometimes hard realities of commercial publishing.

Communicating face to face is the oxygen that breathes fresh life into the necessary solitary life of a writer and literary festivals remind us of the abiding satisfaction of interacting with discerning readers.

Writers are people who spend their lives building a world other than their own, developing, slowly, step by step characters that become more real than real life. Immersed in our own imaginations we become obsessed with the thrill of a plot unfolding in ways we had not envisaged or rising from the subconscious in weird moments to startle us. We want our books to be populated with characters who are believable, who jump off the page and lodge in the memory.

The drive and excitement of creating a story is like weaving a tapestry and being unsure how the completed work will turn out. Writing is not a precise science. Writers control the narrative. Confront and drive and conjure from imagination and intellect a chosen world, a spread, a family of people.

We choose a place and a plan for these particular lives as they make their way through joys, sadness, violence or cruelty towards some sort of resolution. We know them. We are protective of them. We don’t want to leave them. We are fearful we have not done them justice or have left them to their fates at the wrong moment.

Then we write The End and hand them over. We give them up. They are no longer solely ours. Agent, Editor, Publisher carries our newborn away for inspection. They will suggest slashes of brilliant prose; ask us to cut our excesses and beloved descriptions.

Questions will be asked about character, plot and motive. We will be reined in and asked to examine in detail words that have flown or stuttered out of our head and heart. Our created world is swivelled and turned and angled with expertise, examined for a false note, a longueur, a pointless chapter.

Initial indignation and outrage, as we cut and paste and lose a thousand words, are lost as we acknowledge the flaws and gaps and applaud the editor we trust. Those important, vital experienced pair of eyes that make a re-write bearable. We sigh; we battle and despair until slowly, with renewed excitement, a subtle, honed deeper story emerges from the original. We experience the exhilaration and exhaustion of a book completed.

There have been many possible twists. Many possible beginnings and endings, but this is where the story starts and ends. It is now up to readers, maybe at some book festival, where, hopefully, they will peer down at our cover and carry our imaginary lives away with them.

Outside the rain is lashing against the windows. The sea through the rooftops is white capped and irritable. A small tanker is holed up in the lea of the land. My latest book is finished and with an editor. Now I must wait

Winter has been ferocious, endless, sodden and here we are longing and waiting for the late spring. The cliff tops are still closed and brown with few green shoots emerging but the gardens are alive with Camellia and Magnolia trees with swathes of late daffodils lighting up the grass.

Yesterday, the sun shone in a clear blue sky that made the day icy but delicious. I am unable to garden at the moment as I have my arm in a sling so I take off to look at all the wonderful gardens around me.  Frustrated by the limitations of what I can do with one wing I turn to all the things that bring me joy and a quiet continuation each day. The beautiful local pottery bowl and mug I use every morning made by  local potter Lincoln Kirby-Bell. The fallen magnolia bloom I found yesterday, blown by the wind into a rhododendron bush. Looking at my tree ferns out of my sitting room window. The sound of the school bell and the sight of small children scurrying past the kitchen window towards the small school. Lying, reading in a warm bed as the rain hits the window.

The euphoria of finishing a piece of work can be replaced by sudden doubt and dark thoughts. Concentrating on small everyday things is like a small meditation on what has value in our lives and makes a whole life, not just a body of work. Something us writers holed up in a room with our imaginations sometimes forget.

Smart phones with good cameras now give us a canvas that need no words to paint and catalogue the seasons and our part within them.

I sit facing the mountains as early sun heats my skin. There is a nest of sparrows at the top of one of the palms outside my bedroom window. The house lies in a valley of lemon and apricot orchards. Fat yellow lemons, impossibly seductive lie amid green branches and on the dry ground. I long to gather them up. The dry stony fields are circled by Cypress trees planted to shelter and protect the orchards and crops of onions and tomatoes from the sudden winds that blow in from the sea.

Pots of succulents and cacti lie around the garden, much like they do at home in Cornwall but here they seem to exist, like magic, in non-existent soil. There are English roses that have no smell and small pineapple plants with inner fronts startlingly like pale flesh.

The Tramuntana Mountains rise jagged, dominating the skyline. Mountains seem to captivate the soul with the random mystery of their being.  The evolution of rock face holds its own individual patterns, dark crags and hidden caves.It is easy to understand why men and women become obsessed with climbing or conquering them.

The first mountains I fell in love with were in Norway (where I spent a long winter in an empty log cabin used in summer by the Norwegian army.)

With only a baby from dawn to dusk I learned to map the moods of glorious snow capped peaks that swallowed and smothered us in silence.

I would walk my child in a sledge, perpetually wrapped in a papoose so he would not freeze to death. The only sounds were the plop of snow falling from the firs in the forest and the glittering mountains rising snow clad above me like stalwart and close friends.

Sometimes, driving, breath held, over a frozen mountain range we would stare mesmerised at waterfalls frozen in the act of falling. Cascades and twists and curls of rushing water frozen a bright iridescent green as it tumbled into the rivers below.

I looked down onto the parched mountains of Afghanistan as I flew to Pakistan and my stomach quailed as I thought of my son fighting somewhere down there with the British Army.

I walked in the sweet smelling forests of Northern Pakistan and gazed out across mountains tinged with gold, glimpsed the snowy peaks of Kashmir.  A sweet and cool climb that was made incongruous by security men with guns appearing suddenly from behind the trees as we climbed…  Startling each other in the shadows of trees filled with bird song and butterflies.

Below us, hidden, but near, lay the hotel with an English garden full of roses. A perfect backdrop (with hidden serpent) Aquamarine sky and the smell of roses set against the southern slopes of the Western Himalayan foothills.

I digress! I was merely going to jot my thoughts on the obvious… That travelling even a small distance to reassess life, find thinking time, can radically change ones perspective.

Life is hard for writers at the moment. It is so easy to get into a negative way of thinking. About the way publishing is going. How quickly the traditional way of producing books and promoting as well as reading them is changing.  The role of editors and agents seems to be changing too.

Most authors seem to be writing books without contracts and a publisher’s interest in synopsis and first chapters of a book will not always translate into actual acceptance on completion these days.  Publishers flounder too in this recession, somewhat cowardly and risk averse.

More and more writers are taking control and finding independent ways of getting their work published. There is a tsunami of advice and information on line to absorb and filter. Many writers are generous, passing on their acquired knowledge and the pitfalls they encounter along the way. Many have made a business out of giving advice and finding it gratefully received.

The perceived way of doing things is changing fast and as writers we have to adapt too and take control of our own future. In the current market we can no longer afford, hermit like, to shut ourselves away for a year, to the exclusion of all else, to write a book. The business of selling books means it is vital we engage more and more with the outside world, have interesting websites, build profiles, blog, twitter and do facebook.

A huge number of writers have always been media savvy. For younger writers, the facebook generation, sharing details of your life is a given.  A quick click informs. Promotion is, after all a vital part of producing a product.  A book is created (manufactured) and needs to sell like any other product to be successful. How else do people know you are out there?

Publishers rarely have money to spare for promotion even when you are published mainstream, so authors need to get used to promoting themselves in every way they can.  For some of us this has taken a little longer to sink in. Trust like we have floated along hoping for the best.

So, as I sit in the peace of mountains, rescue moths from the swimming pool, sniff the air full of honeysuckle and lemon I feel a subtle shift in myself. My mind is buzzing with creative ideas. Instead of mourning the waning of traditional publishing, the old and known ways I was comfortable with I feel suddenly able to celebrate the immense possibilities. To explore the huge and varied opportunities this technical age is now bringing writers like me. Not least there is simple pleasure of interacting with other writers and readers out there.

Who knows, life is circular and mainstream publishing might recover its nerve. Bookshops may flourish and thrive again one day, a lovely thought. Maybe they will be co-exist side by side with an equally thriving and respected form of publishing online. A place where writers began to drive and control their own destiny

As I write great goblets of rain are hitting the windows sideways in a ferocious gale, gusting around the house, finding every crack, filling the house with cold air and rattling the windows.

The sea across the rooftops has disappeared into a matching grey  sky. Yet in the garden my clematis Montana is beginning to flower as if in defiance. Other more delicate creepers have already bloomed fragile blue flowers then perished. The magnolia tree has great fat buds but not enough sun to warm them into life. The camellias are flowering but are wind burnt before they open and drop brown onto the ground.

A week ago I sat in the garden eating a crab sandwich in warm sunshine admiring my sweet peas who had decided they were everlasting, their greenery still intact after flowering into November. They are now just haystacks of beige clinging to the trellis.

One morning I photographed children being snapped  by their parents on the steps of the prom. A day later I watched the sea heaving itself  relentlessly towards the railings. This is Cornwall in all its variety.

After a huge storm with the wind wuthering around the house all night and tearing the shed door open and getting into every crack the day dawned in silence and beautiful light.

People gathered with cameras and mobile phones to take the unusual sight of waves screaming into shore meeting those backing out and hitting each other with a tremendous wallop.

There was excitement in the thunder of surf hitting the iron railings and making them rattle, then the sound of the water being sucked out in huge volumes to hit the oncoming waves with a great clap of thunder.

We stood, small people on a wall, clicking away trying to capture the elusive moment of water rising fifteen feet into the air and splatting down raining seaweed and rocks onto the prom.

The Jubilee Pool was serene but outside the water raged and every seventh wave brought a huge white spray over the wall.

Today wind and vicious rain batter Cornwall but yesterday in warm sunshine I began to put my garden to bed. Hidden in the foliage were these few last sweet peas- in November!