Icelight

We now have a new title for Peter Cotton 3.

It is to be called Icelight. The cover is presently being corrected.

As soon as I receive a copy, I’ll put it up for all to see.

Do different titles affect the way people feel about a book?

There’s ‘Blacklight’ ... and then there’s ‘Black Light’.

A confession – I had never heard of the SAW franchise. That’s another way of saying I don’t watch horror movies. In consequence I hadn’t heard of Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton who wrote four of the movies. And I was unaware of Stephen Romano who has joined with them in a book called Black Light to be published in the UK by Mullholland Books (Hodder) in time for Halloween this year.

Two of the authors are quoted as saying “Black Light is a novel about a private eye (Buck Carlsbad) who gets in deep with a bunch of ghosts on a high-tech bullet train”.

Of course I wish them well.

The only small problem is that, for some months now, John Murray have announced my next Cotton novel as Blacklight. John Murray and Hodder are in the same building and belong to the same company. Black Light is coming out first in the US.

So my Peter Cotton title has to be SAWn off, or ghost trained.

For the moment then we are back to calling it Cotton 3. As soon as the new title is fixed I’ll report.

Apolaustic – And Other Words

One niggling business in editing is the sentence that just will not read right. There is nothing particularly wrong with the sentence. All its words are in good order, the sentiment is not complicated but a reader will trip on it. I include myself as one of those readers.

It can be down simply to how people see when they read. The word ‘inexpensive’, for example, should not end a sentence. In the run of reading, a lot of people, myself included, tend to see ‘expensive’. This is something well known to advertisers – ‘Not’ is a no-no in a slogan. ‘Not fattening’, for example. The opposite impression is left in the mind of a consumer.

I have had some relief from the necessary fiddle of editing because my husband recently gave me the Penguin collection of all five novels about Richard Hannay written by John Buchan.

The most famous of these is of course the first, The Thirty-Nine Steps. I had read two others, Greenmantle and The Three Hostages. The two I had not read were Mr Standfast and, the one I am going to mention here, The Island of Sheep.

In Chapter Six – Sundry Doings at Fosse – Richard Hannay calls in on MacGillivray and finds him reading Greek, ancient Greek that is. Though MacGillivray is in his rooms in Mount Street , he works at ‘the Yard’ (Scotland Yard). He refers to and translates from Herodotus and in his description of Lancelot Troth, the man Hannay is interested in says ‘- he leads the apolaustic life, and that’s an expensive thing nowadays.’

Vocabulary in those ‘nowadays’ was different from these ‘nowadays’. I think I’m on pretty safe ground in saying that not many thrillers published this year will include the word ‘apolaustic’ (devoted to pleasure). I have no idea how many high ranking officers at ‘the Yard’ now seek consolation and wisdom in the classics.

In any case I very much doubt that ‘apolaustic’ was in common usage in 1936 either, but presumably Buchan thought that his younger readers could always look it up in a dictionary.

No, I am not going to defend ‘apolaustic’ or say ignorance of its meaning will prevent a full and happy life. We get along reasonably well without it and not many of us want to suggest something short of hedonism but, as it turns out in the novel, the kind of enjoyment that involves having a six hundred ton yacht. I can think of other terms for a person like that.

It will happen to us all, of course with time, but one of the incidental pleasures of reading Buchan is the sometimes sniffy attitude of his hero Hannay. Forget the six hundred ton yacht, this is more from the first class lounge of an ocean liner:

“I pondered long over that letter. The first thing that struck me was that it was not written in Sandy’s usual fastidious style. It was frank journalism and must be meant to appeal to a particular audience.”

And I am particularly fond of “the most sumptuous of Lombard’s possessions” – referring to Mrs Lombard. “As a girl she must have been lovely, and she was still a handsome woman of the heavy Madonna type – a slightly over-coloured Madonna. Being accustomed to slim people…I thought her a little too ‘fair of flesh’, in the polite phrase of the ballads.”

Now in Washington Shadow, I let an African character give Buchan something of a going over, particularly as regards Prester John. Buchan could be and was, as someone has limply said, ‘as racist as his time.’

Buchan’s fluency of style and wide vocabulary are a saving grace? I admire them but that’s not my point here.

History is a tracing back to see how we are what we are. To deny the inconveniences of a text – as in the new, modern version of Huckleberry Finn, (see here and here) in which vocabulary and expressions from the original text were changed - is a mistake. It’s particularly a mistake in Mark Twain’s classic because it bowdlerizes the text of Twain’s irony.

It is even more patronizing to the reader than Buchan could be to some characters.

Getting Branded - ASLA day and John Murray Authors Party

I’ve been very busy editing Blacklight recently – a consuming occupation - but in between, I have taken a couple of forays out from behind my laptop.

On Thursday (20 Jan) I attended a Professional Development Day: ‘Working as a Writer in the 21^st Century’, organised by ASLA (Association of Scottish Literary Agents), and held at Sandeman House, the home of the Scottish Booktrust in Edinburgh. I had taken part in an excellent ‘Web Workshop’ two years ago in London organised by my publisher for a small group of writers (just six of us), so I was interested to see what this one had to offer.

This was much bigger - there were about 60 people there – and covered more areas. Apart from the first talk on the new media by Julian Westaby from Creating Sparks, the day also included: a panel with representatives from Scottish publishers (Jan Rutherford from Birlinn and Polygon, and Jenny Todd from Canongate) and from a bookshop (Rosamund de la Hey, owner of The Main Street Trading Company in St. Boswells); an author panel with Barry Hutchison, Janet Paisley and Sara Sheridan, ‘discussing the merits, practicalities and impact of blogging, tweeting, linkedin, social web sites - and other income streams including ghost writing, copy writing etc, and finally a panel composed of Aly Barr (Creative Scotland), Alistair Moffat (BookNation and the Borders and Lennoxlove Book Festivals) and Caitrin Armstrong (Scottish Book Trust) on the different opportunities they offer authors.

A large part of the time was spent on how writers can use the new media to create awareness of their work and make contact with readers. Some of the authors there were very practised and media savvy, had websites, blogs, were on Facebook and/or Twitter and were expert on-liners. Others were still at the stage of thinking about it all. I consider myself to be somewhere in between. I have my website and my blog. I don’t do Facebook or Twitter, but have an author page on the reader networking site Goodreads. I’m not sure I would have time for anything more.

There were a number of interesting aspects for me that arose as I was talking to other writers. First is the question of what different writers aim for with their websites, and what people look for when they visit a writer’s website; the second is the question of the author’s ‘voice’. Obviously writing content for a website or a blog is not the same as writing a book, but Julian Westaby told us in his talk that ‘an author is a brand like any other’. From the shifting in seats and murmurs around me, this obviously made some writers decidedly uncomfortable. A ‘brand’ has the idea of creating an image – ‘manipulative’ muttered the person sitting beside me. ‘Just be yourself – you are your brand’ said someone else. ‘Which self?’ said another voice. The possibility of straying into philosophical notions of self hovered momentarily, - and marketing took over again.

A few days later, on 25 January, I went down to London to the John Murray Authors party held in their historic Albemarle Street house – the home and office of the original John Murray, publisher of many eminent names. The house is remarkable in itself as the room where the party was held has been preserved as it originally was, down to the paintings on the walls, the books on the shelves, the furniture and curtains – and the proof is there to see in a painting of the room including the first John Murray together with Byron and Walter Scott among others. An enjoyable evening, chatting to authors I knew and meeting others for the first time.

On my way out after the party I shook the hand of a slim, elegant elderly gentleman, who described himself as ‘the doorman for this evening’ – the present-day John Murray.

‘Princess Grace.’

After a flu-flattened opening to 2011, I have been cheered up by learning that I can now resume my account of nine hours of tapes recorded in Guadalajara between 2005 and 2007 -(See blogs from July and August last year)- with the ‘original’ of Peter Cotton.

I am very grateful that the Spanish lawyers contacted me to tell me this and, through his step daughter, Caroline, have learnt that ‘things have been settled’.

Our sessions were always held in his study with its glass wall facing north. On the book-lined south wall, I noticed there was a panel for an oil portrait of his second wife Helen. This was rather a fashion in Spain – in case you did not know whose house you were in a portrait was there to remind you. The portraits usually flattered – an old-fashioned sort of photo-shop in oils. It was not simply a matter of regularizing the features within a likeness. I once talked to a portrait painter on the Costa del Sol – he said ‘the camera adds ten pounds, I can take off up to thirty.’ His earnings were fabulous. And he worked very quickly. He had drawn, in pastels, separate portraits of a mother and three daughters in the morning and worked on the mother’s oil painting in the afternoon. His fee would have bought a medium sized car.

‘We were married in April 1973 in Chelsea. We were second timers and rather wanted a quiet wedding. It was, but Helen’s uncle took umbrage that he had not been invited, so he invited us to Cannes where he lived and gave us this portrait as a wedding present. Helen always called it ‘my Princess Grace moment’ – meaning Grace Kelly, then living along the coast in Monaco, and something of a yardstick. The Côte d’Azur is the Costa del Sol of France.’

We considered the painting. It showed a strikingly cool lady wearing a green gown and a string of pearls and brought to mind cheesy old expressions like ‘alabaster skin’ and ‘golden hair’.

Since there were several photographs of Helen in the study, the contrast between the vivacity of the snaps and the flattery of the painting were marked.

‘Have you come across the Picasso/Dali divide?’ he asked.

I had. In Spain, very generally, politics did not just divide into left and right but Picasso and Dali.

‘Helen’s uncle behaved as if we had planned our wedding to coincide with Picasso’s death. He was determined to correct an impression that only he had. We kept it partly because her uncle sometimes visited us here and partly because I became quite fond of it. It was so far from her.’ He shrugged.

‘I think of it as art subverted to social aspiration. Some art reveals, some closes things off, presents an idealized front. The painting is worthless but it is worth something to me, mostly as a contrast to my own memories.’

Helen’s daughter Caroline has told me they don’t know what to do with it. ‘It’s like an aged piece of Angel Cake. I can’t help feeling my mother’s uncle was a sentimental misogynist. You know, the kind of man who uses words like ‘fragrant’ for some women and wants all to be lady-like and contained.’

‘

Winter Waterloo

Last Sunday we celebrated my mother’s 90^th birthday. Given the weather in the UK, this turned out to be rather brave. We had to get from Edinburgh to Guildford – and then back. We were luckyish – some slight delays, walks in minus 8 temperatures due to lack of taxis. But our trains there and back were among the few not cancelled.

My brother and his partner tried to get the 20.30 Eurostar back to Paris on Sunday. They arrived at mid-day on Monday. On our way to King’s Cross we saw the queue waiting to get into St Pancras. From families with young children to elderly people, several thousand were being made to wait outside in sub-zero temperatures.

At King’s Cross we were frequently informed the weather was ‘inclement’ and that everything was being done for our ‘security and comfort.’ The ‘comfort’ part was notional. King’s Cross has been a very small station for generations – doubtless all this will change when the building work is finished.

The ‘security’ part was more obvious. The unfortunate police were out in force at St Pancras and they were keeping an eye on King’s Cross as well. My brother says potential passengers were each given a bottle of water and ‘a bag of chips’ at about 5.30 in the morning after the police had been called in and someone arrested and restrained for protesting at the lack of information and the order that everyone go out and through security again after someone else had left the building, apparently for a cigarette.

From Guildford the London train goes to Waterloo, named after a famous battle. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have attributed his success to a lack of rigid planning or, more accurately, to tying a knot in a rope when it broke.

My suspicion (I am being nice) is that companies no longer do knots but summon the police, instead. Perfect storm patrol? I would hope the rail companies are charged for this service but suspect they simply add it on to fares. there is no Plan B. As they say at King's Cross, platform zero is to the left of platform one

I was also reminded of John Buchan’s career, based on cracks in the thin veneer of civilization. If Richard Hannay had tried to get a train on Monday 20^th December 2010, he’d definitely have died.

Snow Strikes

I recently delivered the completed manuscript of Blacklight – Peter Cotton book number 3 – which is set in London in the long, freezing winter of 1946-7. Rationing was worse than during the war. The coal ran out. Water, whether in the Thames, water pipes, or outside loos, froze.

In what I hope was an entirely unrelated event, it began to snow here in Edinburgh. The first day, my ninety two year old father-in-law told me how calm and pristine it looked from his East Lothian window and that afternoon, he even ventured out in his walking boots, thick coat and balaclava helmet, stout cane in hand, for a short stroll in the quiet white.

The view from our front windows overlooks some gardens, which soon became filled with Lowry-like figures of children (schools all closed) tobogganing down the slope on what looked like brightly coloured plastic tea trays.

The next day I put on my own boots and went out to meet a Spanish girl, recently graduated as a vet, called Rocío, for lunch. I knew all her family years ago in Cadiz – where it almost never snows, being almost entirely surrounded by sea. I believe a few flakes fell in 1968. But I knew that her grandparents lived in Granada, so she would have seen snow before in the Sierra Nevada. ‘Yes, she said, ‘but I love this. It’s the first time I’ve seen falling snow!’ The tone of wonder in her voice took me back, and I remembered how Spanish parents in the south of Spain would, like the father of the protagonist in ‘A Hundred Years of Solitude’, make expeditions with their children so that they could ‘conocer el hielo’ – see ice and snow with their own eyes, as a wonder of the world.

Over the following days, in Edinburgh, the wonder creaked and froze. A note of disquiet began to creep into my father-in-law’s voice. ‘What if there is no food in the shops? What if there is a power cut?’

I reassured him as cheerfully as I could, feeling pleased that our local supermarket was in charge of delivering our weekly shop (and my father –in- law’s) – and pleased that (barring power cuts), heat and facilities such as indoor loos were commonplace now.

As soon as I put the phone down, the supermarket texted me to say that they had had to cancel my delivery due to the road conditions, and that I should reschedule my order. This I did, but it still left me with having to negotiate my way down a snow and black ice slope – past people trying to dig out their cars – to stock up while waiting for my delivery.

Rocío’s plane back to Spain was postponed due to the weather conditions at Edinburgh airport – but I hope this didn’t prevent her from taking back her ‘falling snow’ feeling to Cadiz.

She also had to contend with the air controllers’ strike in Spain. Thirty five years after his death, the Spanish government had recourse to a measure employed by Franco. They ‘militarized’ the strikers.