Old Loves

George’s wheelchair bumped the swing doors open, a little too forcefully for his liking and for the comfort of his arthritic knees. He lifted his walking stick from his lap and waved it in the air to show his displeasure but Annie took no notice as she pushed it along the corridor. All new residents were treated brusquely from the off, the better to prepare them for the home’s routine as they sat the remainder of their lives away. George was prepared for this moment, although his knees weren’t. The Home meant he could give up the struggle. He’d told both boys not to worry. It was all very natural. He was settled in his mind, except for the one thing. He hadn’t seen her for almost thirty years and it still gnawed at him, as it had all through his married life, although he’d tried his best not to let it show, for Marjory’s sake. It wasn’t her fault, after all. But a promise was a promise, to a lover if not to a wife. The first one to go into a home would let the other one know and then there could be forgiveness. Even now it hurt, worse than his knees ever could. He supposed it would hurt right up to the end, and beyond for all he knew. He had written a letter. Her address was right. A friend of a friend had checked it out. She was a widow. Had been as long as George had been a widower but… well… pride and all that. Neither of them could bring themselves to say sorry. But they’d agreed when they parted that going into a home would signal peace after all these years and that the one still able to would visit the other. George had cried burning tears. She said it was all for the best. Really it was. He lay on the bed and waited. Later, there was a knock on the door and an old lady entered. She cried quietly. She was still beautiful. She leaned over him where he lay. She kissed his cheek and told him she loved him. Her tears ran freely and they burned. They were too late. Too late by thirty years and one hour.

Book-buyers beware

This appeared in today's Sunday Times (UK):

£50,000 to get a book on recommended list
Robert Winnett and Holly Watt

BRITAIN’S biggest bookseller is demanding payments of £50,000 a week from publishers to get books on its supposedly impartial list of "recommended" reads in the run-up to Christmas this year.

The WH Smith scheme is the most expensive in a range of confidential deals being operated by retailers to promote lists that consumers believe are based on independent assessments of a book’s quality.

No authors appear on recommended lists unless their publishers pay the fees, and those refusing to pay may not even find their titles stocked.

Other big booksellers which charge for places on schemes such as "book of the week" or "recommended" are Waterstone’s and Borders, which owns Books Etc. The most expensive is WH Smith’s "adult gold" scheme, which is currently being presented to publishers who are expected to pay £50,000 a week per book for a place.

This guarantees a prominent position in the store’s 542 high street shops and inclusion in catalogues and other advertising. For the critical four-week Christmas sales period, it would cost a publisher at least £200,000 per book.

With WH Smith selling between 30% and 40% of the most popular books in the run-up to Christmas, titles securing a place on the scheme are assured a successful sale.

The schemes were first exposed by The Sunday Times five years ago but, with fees having risen as much as ten-fold, publishers say that it is getting "out of hand".

A director of one leading publisher said: "If you pay this fee in December your book will be a bestseller. But only a handful of the biggest publishers can now afford the fees so the book charts are totally skewed."

WH Smith is understood to run up to 25 different endorsement schemes at any one time in its stores. These include charging £15,000 for a book to be named "read of the week" during the year and recommended tags on certain titles.

For example, last week Londonstani by Gautam Maltani was described as a "must-have novel . . compulsive, page-turning", while Getting Out of the House by Isla Dewar was a "delicious and unputdownable read".

Waterstone’s charges £10,000 for its "book of the week" and offers a range of recommendation schemes. Its stores are peppered with tags which boast "we highly recommend" or "we love this book" with mini-reviews.

Borders also charges fees for a range of recommendation schemes including "fiction buyer’s favourite" and the "new in" range. However, in both Waterstone’s and Borders local "staff picks" are not thought to be paid for.

One publisher claimed yesterday that he had books "recommended" and positively reviewed in marketing literature by bookshops before the books had even been read.

A spokeswoman for WH Smith confirmed last week that publishers paid for endorsements. "The publishers present their books to us and we present our packages," she said. "The purpose is to drive sales for customers. We negotiate who takes the places in the adult gold scheme which is over- subscribed. This is standard across the book industry."

A spokeswoman for Waterstone’s, which also charges fees for inclusion in its "three-for-two" deals and to be named as "book of the month", said: "Publishers come to us with books they think are worthy of book of the week or book of the month. Our buying team then select the titles from those put forward. I can’t give you details of the costs."

Yesterday shoppers in central London expressed surprise over the schemes. Jennifer Hewitt, a 54-year-old civil servant, said: "I’m shocked. That information should be disclosed to readers. You trust bookshops but now they seem to be behaving like supermarkets."

Last week leading publishers confirmed that over the past few years they had quietly built up multi-million-pound warchests to pay the bookshops. Their disquiet has emerged in evidence submitted to competition authorities.

The Publishers Association, a trade body, said that 70% of promotional budgets were now spent on the so-called "below-the-line" schemes operated by bookshops rather than the more traditional advertising and posters.

The chief executive of one medium-sized publisher said: "You have to pay heavily and you pay for visibility and better positions in the stores. But we’ve got to play by the rules because we need them. The stores say that they’re doing you a favour if they offer you these slots."

Another medium-sized publisher, Profile Books, which publishes titles by Alan Bennett and Lynne Truss, said that it was "suicidal" to turn down the bookshops’ demands for recommendation fees.

Its bestselling book Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Truss was initially ignored by the leading bookshop chains and was offered promotional paid-for slots only after selling well in smaller stores.

Stephen Brough, a director of Profile Books, said: "We, the small independent publishers, simply do not have access to the resources to fund the marketing budgets, and it is therefore even less likely that we will have our books promoted and sold."

Steinbeck

John Steinbeck is one of the USA's national treasures. I can recall that Grapes of Wrath, which I read as an impressionable teenager some few years ago, was the first book to move me over the plight of others - the downtrodden, the exploited, the wage slaves.

I'm reading Travels With Charley at the moment and am nearly at the end. JS has just recounted, in his inimitable and understated fashion, a harrowing tale of racism in New Orleans. He went there to witness it and wasn't disappointed by its clarity of comment on things vile about some members of the human race. He tries to explain it, but doesn't excuse it. He couldn't even if he had wanted to, which he plainly didn't.

But another passage strikes me as Steinbeck at his economical best. It's something and nothing, I suppose, but it seems to me to be typical of him. He was a truly great writer.

'I see. You're of that breed. I'm glad you stopped by. I used to know St. Loius, even collected epitaphs.'

'Did you, sir? You'll remember the queer one, then.'

'If it's the same one, I tried to memorise it. You mean the one that starts, "Alas that one whose darthly joy...?"'

'That's it. Robert John Cresswell, died 1845 aged twenty-six.'

'I wish I could remember it.'

'Have you a paper? You can write it down.'

And when I had a pad on my knee he said 'Alas that one whose darthly joy had often to trust in heaven should carry thus sudden to from all its hopes benivens and thought thy love for off remore that dealt the dog pest thou left to prove thy sufferings while below.'

'It's wonderful,' I said. 'Lewis Carroll could have written it. I almost know what it means.'

Like Vonnegut, Steinbeck loves a punchline.

Who you gonna call?

Ghosting is an interesting form of writing, I find. It requires a very different ‘head’ to my other writing. It’s useful to think of the originator of the story – whether fiction or fact - as the author, myself as the writer. Although I put a certain amount of creativity and imaignation into it, I am always guided and constrained by the imagination, or if it’s a family history, the real life events, of the author.

With any luck, and if I have chosen the commission wisely, the plot, real or imagined, is an interesting and well-constructed one in the first place. That makes my job more enjoyable. What is also enjoyable is wondering how much of the plot, in the case of a life story, is real, how much imagined…

For me, the writer, presented with the framework and bare details, writing each scene feels a bit like painting by numbers, except that I choose my own colours. And even then I have to be prepared when I’ve finished the picture for the author to say: ‘I don’t like that bit of sea-green over there, I think it should be pink.’ Then it’s down to a discussion of artistic interpretation and effectiveness between the writer and the author. But at the end of the day, if agreement or compromise can’t be reached, the author is always right.

Unbound Press Progress Report

Well, we are all thoroughly excited about this new venture and at least one of us is feeling a little faint as a consequence.

The Blog Review now has a subject, thanks to all those who sent in suggestions. I won't tell you the name of the 'Chosen One' but it a well known blog and extremely popular, judged by the number of nominations alone. We love it.

At the moment, we are writing a website for the journal and, at the same time, trying to work out how best to produce the hard copy and distribute it. Like most things, it's not as easy at it appears. Oh well...

But at least we have some excellent content, including contributions from France, England and the USA. Short stories, book reviews, great images and artwork, a theatre review... and MORE, MUCH MORE (as all the best advertising says!).

Oh, and for all aspiring and mercenary writers (is there any other kind?) there will be a writing competition - no entry fee and a small monetary prize plus boundless bragging rights to the winner, as selected by the editors after much dirty fighting!

OK, back to the red hot keyboard!

Oh, and it s beautiful day again here in Glasgow.

The Wordsmith Project

We'd like to thank everybody who submitted suggestions for a title for the infamous Wordsmith Project. It was quite fascinating to see just how many permutations could be wrung out of the words 'olives', 'nihilist' and 'geese'.

Madame Editor has selected a title and the Project, with very minor changes, will feature in the fist edition of the Unbound Press Words and Images Review in June. All contributors will be acknowledged and some might even be blamed for the resulting literary debacle :o)

I don't know about anybody else, but I thought it was fun and would like to kickstart another one, perhaps in June after the Review is published, when we have a bit more time. I'd like the next one to be SciFi so that full rein can be given to some of the wildcap imaginations out there. I might amend/refine the processs slightly too in the (perhaps vain) hope of making the whole thing suitably coherent without assistance from geese.

So, that's by way of a warning: Wordsmith II is coming. Aaaaaarrrrghghghghghghg!

charlie

Split Personality

I’m currently suffering from a touch of writer’s schizophrenia, as I am at one and the same time ghost-writing a novel, ‘The Tabernanthe Visions’ which looks at how the 1st World War and the Gulf War affect two generations of the same family, and also working on a non-fiction book with the catchy title of ‘Where and How to Get Married in Scotland.’ Chalk and cheese or what?

I find great difficulty switching my creative brain over between the two. My original plan was to write one in the morning, the other in the afternoon, but it just didn’t work. I found there was just too much time-wasting going on, as I settled into a new mode of thought, a new bit of research. Like any physical exercise, you have to warm up the writing muscle before you really get a flow going (for instance, in my case, by playing lots of games of Spider Solitaire on the pc – which I can and do justify to myself as warming-up, rather than procrastination…) Add to this the faffy stuff of finding my notes on the relevant bit (my desk looks like a World War I bomb site even when I’m in the thick of a Scottish wedding) and thinking time before I have it clear in my head how to proceed, this can take up to an hour out of the writing schedule on each book. My flow was just too disrupted through jumping between the two genres.

So now I work on one book over a number of days, however long it takes, to finish the section(s), chapter(s), or whatever ‘wodge’ I have identified to complete next. Then I’ll move back to the other book for the next few days.

Seems to work for me. It avoids the problem of finding myself thinking about war when I am piping the bride and groom to their romantic castle wedding – or pondering the ideal make-up of a bride’s bouquet just as the hero is getting shot at by the Jerries.

Mind you, there is a Scottish wedding due to happen later in the novel, so perhaps there’s not such a great gulf between them after all!