A place in the community
Easter Monday, and it was raining on the parade at Freightliners City Farm in Islington. But it didn’t matter. The cafe was replete with mums, dads and kids polishing off organic pasta. The yard was a -flutter with small beings transformed into butterflies by an invisible face-painter. And the place positively buzzed as the Easter egg hunt got underway: kids raced about collecting cards and searching madly for the picture that would win them the golden egg. Finally, we heard a small girl shriek, “Look! I’ve got the silver hen!!”
Two of us from IWFC ran a stall selling and signing our books. But we both have other, different memories of this place. They involve many visits with toddlers to favorite animals, well before the posh coffee machine was installed. I came with an entire class the day my son left nursery school. And years later, to visit him as a teenage volunteer on dung-digging duty.
Freightliners is currently under threat having lost its grant in the recent cuts. As the Easter bonnets appeared and a new generation of parents beamed in the rain, I found it hard to quantify how much would be lost if this place were to fold.
Marion Rose
Don’t forget your dictionaries!
When I was still at school my grandmother gave me her thesaurus/dictionary, it had seen better days and a large section of ‘C’ was apparently never printed in the book but nevertheless this modest tomb fuelled a love for writing. I was instantly enamoured with the pronunciation guide learning all the exotic symbols and the sounds they represented – ‘O’ as in POT.
I know that at some point the spine fell off that great book and it was discarded. Years later I regret that moment of hasty de-cluttering and wish I still had the book that filled so many of my school day evenings, spineless or not. I now have several stand alone dictionaries and thesauruses but I rarely use them! today I noticed that I almost entirely use online reference tools often having several tabs open at a time as I search for mouth-watering words with the yearned for rhyme, meter or stress. These free online resources are wonderful and so immediate offering up options for synonyms, antonyms, near rhymes and even a button to hear the word being spoken! However I do feel a small pang of sorrow for my poor books – gathering dust on the shelves, every year growing less up to date without their entries for “retweet” or “OMG”. What I miss most is the random flicking that you can do with a physical book – I would regularly turn to random pages looking for words I hadn’t come across before. I’m sure there are more high tech ways of having a similar experience today, word of the day emails and the like but its not the same as pressing your thumb against the pages and watching them blur until a spread falls open to reveal its delights. No doubt I am being a bit rose-tinted about all of this and I certainly won’t be giving up my online reference tools – but I think I may remember to press my thumb to the pages of the physical ones every now and then and see what treasures pop out.
Claws United v Rover City Rematch
JOHN O’LEARY
Great news! – well for me anyway. Claws United and Rover City are scheduled for a rematch next year when The Big Match is re-launched.
Everything will stay the same apart from a possible re-design of the cover and a change to the super static-electriciy game at the back which will now become a super blow-football game. The book was conceived as a type of football handbook, using natural enemies (or are they?), cats and dogs, on the opposing sides. It covers areas such as the fans, souvenirs, football skills and rules, and takes much of it’s inspiration North London where I live.
Look out for the book in April 2012.
And to see more background material, go to my facebook page here.
This blogpost also appears in n4sketchpad.wordpress.com
A French prize
Alison Allen-Gray
I’m off to Le Mans next March because the French translation of my teenage novel Unique has been shortlisted for the Prix des lecteurs 2012 du Mans et de la Sarthe. The book has been shortlisted for several major UK prizes and each occasion has been different and tremendous fun, so I’m looking forward to sampling a French approach to celebrating books. I’m also nervous. I’ll be spending two days on school visits – sadly, my French isn’t good enough for me to articulate my thoughts about writing (I’m not sure my English is!) so a translator will be on hand at all times, and this in itself will be an interesting experience. It will, I imagine, give added focus to the responsibility to be clear and concise!
I very much admire what the French publisher, Bayard, has done with the cover. I think it gives out the right signals about the book’s content – a very subtle skill!
The Chesterfield Lecture
I’ve just given the Annual Chesterfield Lecture to the Friends of The Ranger’s House, Blackheath, London. It’s always a real pleasure to talk to such a knowledgeable group and in such a classy venue – a superb early 18th century red brick mansion, once the home of Lord Chesterfield, statesman, wit and letter-writer. In 1728, he became British Ambassador inThe Hague. Whilst there, he acquired a superb collection of Dutch paintings, and then had to add a wing onto the house in order to show 
them off them.
First we had a delicious buffet dinner, provided by the Friends, in the basement of the house and then we trooped upstairs to the crimson gallery – not forgetting to put on our coats – there is no central heating. Well, the Friends put on their coats and, in some cases, their scarves, but I felt that, as lecturer, I couldn’t go that far. I hoped that the adrenalin would keep me warm.
The crimson silk gallery, where I was speaking, was magnificent with its fabulous paintings, glittering chandeliers, superb plasterwork, and a couple of classical nude marble statues flanking me on either side.
The talk I was giving was one I’d given before – how I became an historical novelist and it included snippets from my juvenilia – the six novels I wrote between the ages of ten and sixteen. I knew that Lord Chesterfield had also written: his famous letters to his illegitimate son are a mixture of worldly-wise pieces of advice and cynical and witty observations on the world. Surely they could provide me with a quotation to act as an introduction to my talk. After all, I was giving the Annual Chesterfield lecture, I felt I owed him a compliment or two.
What did he have to say on women, I wondered.
This is what I found: Women, then, are only children of a larger growth: they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid reasoning good sense, I never knew in all my life one that had it, or who reasoned or acted consequentially for four and twenty hours together.
He goes on to advise his son: A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them … but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.
Hm. No, I decided, I would not be paying Lord Chesterfield a graceful compliment. I would give him a courteous but neutral mention and hope that his portrait in the next room didn’t crash to the ground in the middle of my talk in horror at hearing a mere female giving a lecture in his name.
Fortunately, the talk went very well and there were no untoward intimations of spectral disapproval.
Elizabeth Hawksley
Picture The Ranger’s House, the front entrance: courtesy, The Ranger’s House, www.friendsofrangershouse.org.uk
Writer in Residence by Elizabeth Hawksley
In August, I was Writer in Residence for a week at the Dillington House Summer School. (I was also tutor on the Creative Writing – the Novel course.) Dillington is Somerset’s residential centre for adult education – and it’s seriously classy. The house, once owned by Prime Minister Lord North, is spacious, comfortable and set in wonderful grounds; the staff are friendly and helpful and the food is good.
Historian Michael Wood said of it: ‘The programmes are exceptional. The company is delightful, the food and the ambience add to the pleasure and all set in a magical landscape…’
That week, there were sixty-six students and a dozen courses on offer, ranging from The Joy of Spanish and a Stained Glass Workshop to The Arts and Crafts Movement and my Creative Writing – the Novel.
I was the first Writer in Residence they’d had and I was anxious to make my mark. I had envisaged myself sitting in the library under the splendid chandelier topped by a pineapple, quill pen in hand, ready to help anyone with sonnet or prose. But most of the courses were nothing to do with writing and the students were already busy. I swiftly realized that I needed to be more pro-active.
I decided to write an article entitled A Week at Dillington and put word round that I’d welcome contributions. There’s plenty to inspire: the Jacobean house had a Gothic makeover in the 1830s; the family portraits are still there together with some interesting 20th century paintings – a covetable John Piper, for example. The park has magnificent trees and places to sit and admire the view.
My course was in the afternoon so, in the morning, I hitched a lift with the minibuses going on The Artisan Trail, The Arts and Crafts Movement and the Exploring Somerset Villages. I was anxious to meet the students and persuade them to write something or at least interview them for my article. I also took photographs.
Word spread and some interesting pieces came in. When I got home, I sent the organizer, Roger Priest, my article incorporating the pieces I’d received, plus photographs. I also included my thoughts on the Writer in Residence position and how it might be enhanced, together with a suggestion for a Creative Writing for Pleasure course which I felt would suit the Summer School better than the novel course.
Last week, I heard from him. My A Week at Dillington would be sent to all prospective 2012 students and would I like to come back next year?
Gillespie Park Festival
Workshop Roundup
School year is finished and so ends another round of author/illustrator visits and workshops. I found it really rewarding to work with Creative Partnerships (now sadly gone) and also with schools directly.
The life of an illustrator can often be insular, so doing school projects gave me the opportunity to get out there and meet some great people – teachers, pupils, fellow practitioners, creative agents…
Below are some of the best bits!
Enjoy the Summer, everyone – I’m off back to the drawing board.
This is a shortened version – to see the full post including details of the projects
and the schools involved, please go HERE
E-publishing
I’ve just returned from a writers’ conference and the usual things were on offer: sessions with publishers, with agents, and talks on various writerly subjects. However, it swiftly became obvious that the subject of the conference was the rise of ebooks and what it means for authors.
In the USA, which is way ahead of the UK, 25% of all sales are now in ebooks, and that’s expected to rise to 50% by 2012. Simon Petherick of Beautiful Books, a new independent publisher in the UK, said that his sale of ebooks is already 15% and he expects that to rise rapidly.
The general consensus is that long-established British publishers have been sticking their heads in the sand about this. But it’s not going to go away. As my friend Janet Gover, who is published in the UK and now lives in New York, pointed out, UK publishers are going to have to raise their game. In the States, publishers are very aware that, for the first time in thirty years, they now need authors more than authors need them. As a result, American publishers now employ digital experts whose sole job is to keep their eye on Twitter and tell authors if their name comes up, to set up blog tours, to target review sites, and so on. Authors, of course, could do this for themselves, and some do, but it take up a lot of writing time. A publisher who can offer these services will attract big name authors.
Almost all American publishers now want their authors to have a website and expect them to be prepared to do ‘blog tours’ and tweet. It will happen over here, too.
We all noticed the huge advertising campaign for Kindle in the lead up to Christmas. Fellow authors at the conference, whose work is already in ebooks, reported a spike in their sales in January and another in June. Ebook sales, it seems are going up and up. Janet also reported that Young Adult fiction is huge in the States, and reminded us that teenagers are very computer savvy.
At the moment, sales of younger children’s books are mainly ‘proper books’, and, of course, children’s books can take quite a battering: hurled from a cot, pages scribbled on, or left out in the garden overnight. That remains a problem and technology hasn’t yet found a way to do high quality coloured illustrations. But that is only a matter of time.
I learnt a huge amount and I now have a plan of action. I’ve got back the copyright of my back list and I’ve just sent all my old Amstrad disks to be re-formatted for Word. Ebooks beckon. Wish me luck.
Elizabeth Hawksley
- I was eaten by the devil at the Royal Opera House in 1992. But I got regurgitated.
- I am a fan of ‘Doctor Who’ and have been ever since I was four.
- I don’t drive. I almost wrote ‘I can’t drive’ but I sure that can’t be true.
- I am afraid of spiders; of their agility, their many legs, their unpredictable speed… I admire them though.
- I love Japan and in particular the youth hostel in Hiroshima.
- I have a terrible weakness when it comes to Pringles.
- I am both extravert and introvert and can switch from one to the other like a roadrunner.
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Me in Zippo's 1993
I am a fan of ‘The Apprentice’ and secretly want to be on it.
- I have written over a hundred songs. Some are so close to the bone I just can’t play them anymore
- I have just completed my Grade 6 piano, 28 years after I took my Grade 5!
- When I was 27, I ran away to join the circus. I left when I found myself banging stakes into an icy carpark inReading in the last weeks of November, just to put the tent up.
- My older brother saved me from drowning when I was 7.
Buzz about Books 