Yes, I’ve neglected the blog shamefully for the past couple of days, I know. I was going to write a piece about names, the magic and improtance of, but I didn’t quite get round to it for two very good reasons:

1 I’ve been watching the tennis from Australia, and am in a state of nervous collapse. I thought Djocivic vs Murry was nerve shredding enough, but I’ve just come out the far end of 5 hours+ of Djocovic vs Nadal, and I am, as my granny would have said, ‘like a jeely’. I was impressed enough Djocivic could still walk, let alone go all caveman and rip his shirt off. Not complaining though.

2 During the tennis-free hours I’ve been reading How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran. Well, actually, I had to stop reading it on the bus before I was a) thrown off for sounding as though I might be a deranged person or b) given cpr by some well meaning fellow passenger. It manages to be both howlingly funny and serious at the same time, which is quite an achievement. If you have ovaries, read it. Now.

Right, I’ve got to finish the final batch of marmalade (I should have said 3 very good reasons at the start of this piece). Normal service will be resumed in the next few days…

I took my own advice and tried a bit of living dangerously - writing-wise - yesterday, by taking part in the Alternative 26 creative writing workshop as part of the 26 Treasures of Scotland project at the National Musuem of Scotland.

After some creative warm-up excercises, each participant was assigned one of the 26 Treasures, and given an hour to come up with 62 words inspired by it. I was given (not literally, unfortunately) a beautiful 15th Century clarsach known as the Queen Mary Harp.You would think that would inspire me, wouldn’t you? But no, I couldn’t think what to do with it until I noticed the woodworm holes… One hour later, and I had a 62 word poem called The Song of the Woodworm.

The whole experience was terrific, because it was so far out of my comfort zone as to be in another galaxy entirely. To wit: I don’t do poetry. I don’t do short. I don’t do writing groups. I definitely don’t do reading my work out to people. It was very liberating to defeat so many don’ts at once. I can’t wait to do something like it again.

The pieces of writing that we produced should go live on the website in a few days, and I’ll put a link up to them when they do. There’s some great stuff there.

I’ve just finished reading The Help (totally brilliant), and was trying to persuade my husband and son to give it a try. Talk turned to To Kill A Mockingbird, which my son has read and enjoyed. Now, if you know my husband, you’ll know that he is not a great reader of fiction (No, I don’t quite understand how I ended up married to him.), and when I tried to persuade him that he really ought to read Mockingbird, he refused on the grounds that ‘Lots of people have read it already, so I don’t need to.’  How depressing is that??

He’s never even seen the film, and neither has my son. He made the interesting point that his generation wouldn’t even consider watching it, because it’s in black and white.

To me it’s an unimprovable film, but I suppose (current success of The Artist notwithstanding) he is making a reasonable point, BUT who could possibly play Atticus Finch as well as the beautiful Gregory Peck? The nearest contemporary equivalent I can think of is George Clooney, but maybe some of you out there have a better suggestion…

I have a problem. A big problem, which I’ve managed to conceal until now. This year though, I’m afraid it’s going to come out.

I can’t do Dickens.

I’ve tried and tried, really I have. I managed A Christmas Carol and Tale of Two Cities in my youth, and I battled my way through Oliver Twist as an adult, but I didn’t get a moment’s enjoyment from the experience. I got as far as loading The Pickwick Papers onto my new Kindle, then came to my senses and deleted it half an hour later.

Even more embarrassingly, it’s just Dickens in its written form I can’t cope with. Give me a good adaptation and I’ll lap it up; I was riveted to Great Expectations over Christmas (I loved Gillian Anderson’s Miss Haversham and thought she burned very prettily) and enjoyed Edwin Drood. I still have fond memories of an adaptation of Bleak House years ago, with Denholm Eliot in it. And as for the Muppets’ Christmas Carol…

No, I’m afraid the Dickens novel appreciation lobe of my brain wasn’t fitted by the manufacturer. It’s all just too grotesque on the page; I never feel I’m reading about real human beings.

Is there a cure for me, or am I doomed to be a literary outcast in Dickens bicentennial year?

Like another mllion or so people, I opened one of my Christmas parcels to find a Kindle inside. So, what do I think now I’ve had a couple of weeks to get to know it?

The reading experience certainly isn’t like reading from a computer screen, and compares pretty well with an ink and paper book. I love the fact that I can change font size, since I now need specs to read and somtimes forget to put them in  my bag when I’m going out!. It’s great for reading on the move, and is good for reading at a bus stop in a high wind (particularly handy in Edinburgh over the last month!).  I sometimes feel I’d like to be able to make the screen a bit brighter though.

Downloading is fast and easy and the battery is obviously going to last for ages before it needs recharged. So, am I a convert to the Kindle,  how will I use it, and should Edinburgh’s book shops be worrying about the drop in their profit margins now that I’ve got it?

It definitely won’t be replacing printed books for me. For all its ease of use, there are some things it can’t replicate. You can’t flick back to check on something, you can’t lend an ebook to someone else, and you can’t really browse properly. On the other hand, I am now protected from my tendency to take a peek at the last page, ‘accidentally on purpose’. But the biggest disadvantage to my mind is that it has a curiously flattening effect, since every book looks like every other book; no variation in thickness, smell, paper quality, ink or font. You don’t notice these until they’re not there any more.

I can see it’s going to be very useful indeed for travelling, and on holidays: no more worrying in case I don’t have enough books to last me a week. I’ll be able to pack far more clothes when I go away now. I’ll also use it as a ‘tester’ to decide if I like a book enough to want to read it more than once. For instance, since Christmas, I’ve read three new books, two of which are only available in hardback at the moment. I’ll be buying two of them in paperback, and know I’ve escaped wasting money on the third. 

But if I like a book, I’m still going to want it  to be a physical presence on a shelf in my house, so fear not, booksellers of Edinburgh!

One of my annual treats is the Christmas reading binge, and 2011 was no exception. I didn’t read as many books as I sometimes do, but that was mainly due to the fact that I began by re-reading the colossal (in every sense) Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle. 1100 pages of mediaeval warfare and Heisenberg’s uncertainty proinciple: bliss!

The other books I’ve read over the holidays have been brought to me courtesy of my new toy: a Kindle. More on the e- reading experience later…

Florence and Giles, by John Harding, is a riff on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, but seen from the point of view of the children. It’s narrrated, in a marvellous and unique voice, by 12 year old Florence, a self-taught bibliophile. I thought it was a terrific read; creepy, cleverly plotted,  ambiguous and unpredictable.

Being a enormous fan of Jane Austen and P D James, I’d been looking forward hugely to Death Comes to Pemberley, but was very disappointed by it. What’s the point of having Elizabeth Bennett as a character if she hardly says anything and when she does, it’s desperately dull? The crime plot wasn’t very good either. A bit of a clunker, I’m afraid, and a waste of all those marvellous characters.

The same cannot be said of Dark Matter by Michelle Paver however, a chilly and terrifying ghost story set on Spitzbergen in 1937. It’s hugely atmospheric, deeply unsettling and the perfect winter read. With all the lights on. And a whisky.

Okay, here’s something to think about…

In Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Rebecca herself is a major character, but never appears. That got me wondering if there are other ‘absent characters’ in books. I came up with a couple from TV shows, namely Maris, Niles Crane’s wife in Frasier, and ‘Er Indoors’, Arthur Daly’s wife in Minder. (Interesting that they’re all wives… )  Ican’t think of any more from books, but I’m sure there must be some. Anybody out there know of any?

This is inspired by Scottish Book Trust’s marvellous Christmas idea: Which literary character would you invite to Christmas dinner?

I’d ask Hamlet along. He needs a bit of cheering up, and a chance to chill out in front of a big fire with a couple of glasses, or maybe bottles, of good malt. As a present, I’d give him a cracker containing a paper crown (obviously) and a trick dagger with the blade on a spring. In case he needed a bit of extra jollying along, I’d ask Elizabeth Bennett as my other guest. She’d soon sort him out, and she’d be much better for him than that wet nelly, Ophelia. I think they just might hit it off, especially since Hamlet potentially has access to a whole kingdom, not just a massive estate. However, my present to Elizabeth would be enough money to live happily on her own, if that’s what she wanted, for the rest of her life, so she never felt pressure to marry anyone. I’ve always thought she’d have made a wonderfully disgraceful maiden aunt; the sort who smokes cigarillos and drinks gin and corrupts all her nieces and nephews…

So, who would YOU ask along to share the turkey and mince pies?

 

Santa has filled my stocking a few days early this year. I’ve just seen the layout for my picture book Lost at the Zoo, which is looking absolutely wonderful. My novel Winterbringers is being featured as the Kelpies Book of the Month, and, best of all, Floris Books will be publishing a new novel featuring the same main characters as Winterbringers, which has the working title Witchcraft, and is going to be very creepy indeed…

At this time of year, if you live in Scotland, your mind spends about 80% of the time on one of two topics: Christmas or weather. Christmas seems to be sort of under control, so I’m mainly obsessing about the weather. We’ve had some snow, though not the Arctic quantities of last Decmeber, so it already qualifiies as a proper winter. It’s the wind that’s been the real feature of the last week or so though. This got me thinking that I often use cold weather in my books as part of setting or plot, and occasionally hot weather. Mist and fog, thunder and lightning have walk on parts as atmosphere creators, but I’ve never really written about wind.  I must give it some proper thought, since it’s got lots of potential for moving a plot along – boats sinking, wind fanning flames, carrier pigeons ending up on the wrong continent, fairies smashed against jagged cliffs… Maybe not the last one, but you get my drift. So, for next year, perhaps a wind-assisted story?

I’ve been a very bad person, and haven’t blogged for two whole weeks… This is mainly because the day job (teaching) has been insanely busy, but I’m through that now, and gently coasting towards the end of term. Unfortunately of course, being so busy at school means there hasn’t been a lot of action on the writing front, but all that’s about to change as I put in a sprint finish to the year and try to finish off a couple of redrafts of novels and do a bit more work on the fiction-with-science project.

I have managed to read How To Build A Golem And Terrify People though, and loved it! Funny, quirky, genuinely creepy in bits, and with unexpected twists to the plot. I’m already looking forward to whatever Alette Willis writes next.

Had a long talk about writing with a fellow author over dinner yesterday which made me realise a) how rare it is to get the chance to do it (really talk about writing that is, not have dinner) and b) how incredibly useful it is in making you see what you’re doing in a different way. Very therapeutic on many levels, especially the mascarpone and strawberry ice cream. Must do it more often.