Living with books

Funny how a domestic upheaval can make you reassess your relationship to your physical books - both one's personal relationship with them, and their place in our newly digital book world. My relationship with my physical books had been - well, you know how it is after years without change: you get too comfortable, you start taking it all for granted, you hardly notice the accretion of the years or your habits, you even lose sight of some of the things about it all that matter, so it's not actually so comfortable, really, it's all sort of running away with you...

We have books all over the house - in the back room downstairs we have poetry, short-story anthologies and non-fiction; the room I write in is crammed with lit crit, feminist books and lit mags. John's a psychologist by profession and writes on linguistics so, naturally, the room he writes in houses his psychology and linguistics books as well as his particular poetry collection; there's a shelf of cookery books in the kitchen, of course, and I have a line of books published by Salt at my bedside. Our biggest collection, fiction, we have always kept on these shelves in the front room downstairs, and when we came to strip the room in the summer for fairly major building work and decorating, it took me a fortnight of afternoons to shift the books elsewhere. Painting the shelves was a pretty time-consuming job and took up gallons of paint, but spacious as they are I had begun to realise that they were no longer adequate for the books they'd been carrying: the books been double- and even triple- stacked, with others piled horizontal on top of the rows (you can see something of how it was in the sidebar in the videos of me reading from The Birth Machine). We hadn't been able even to see more than half of them and had forgotten we owned some of them, and the difficulty of getting to some of them had meant that they'd got more and more muddled as the years went by.

So what to do when I finally finished painting a couple of weeks ago and it was time to fill the shelves again? John suggested we limit them to classics and hardbacks. I wanted to know if he was mad: we wouldn't even fill the shelves and then we'd have nowhere for the modern paperbacks of which we have far, far, more. But I was wrong. We have far more of everything than I'd realised. Here below are the shelves filled as John suggested, and we still have boxes and boxes of paperbacks lining the landing, and we're going to have to go to Ikea for more shelving for the landing.

It makes me wonder: when, how did I acquire quite so many books? And what does it mean? Am I some old-fashioned fogey clinging on to an outdated way of life - because it is a way of life, the keeping of physical books: all that effort and time carting them around, all that thought, time and expense in creating places to put them... And they just disintegrate, don't they? The spines, I found, had started to come off the little leather-backed classics I was so thrilled to snap up from a secondhand-book shop when I was a student, some of the paperbacks had fallen apart, and those on the very top shelves, packed too tightly in a room inadequately heated before we set it to rights, were even going mouldy.

But I tell you what: I only found one plastic bag's worth that I was prepared to take down to the charity shop...

Catching up with Goodreads

Catch-up time. After six months of solid writing followed by a summer of immensely enjoyable but distracting family reunions and long periods of absence of internet, here I am with a study under drifts of papers, a hugely cluttered email box and much other business neglected: accounts in turmoil, submissions unmade, websites unattended. I hadn't been on Goodreads for a while, and what a lovely surprise, when I logged on again last night to add some new reading, to find some great new reviews of Too Many Magpies and Balancing on the Edge of the World. I really did think this book was brilliant, says one reader, 'Mew', of TMM, and another, 'Sisterimapoet', says: It felt mad and drugged, despite sharp details of external reality, colours and sounds. It felt doomed and dangerous but thrilling too. That really thrills me, actually: it's exactly the effect I wanted to achieve, and, quite frankly, how I felt while writing it. BOTEOTW now has several five-star ratings, and I'm more than chuffed that  Nick Perring who writes his own striking stories, recommends it highly.


And adding books I'd recently read but which were long-since written or published reminded me what a great site Goodreads is, facilitating serious consideration and discussion of books regardless of their publication dates and countering the sell-by-date situation into which the book industry has got itself locked.

New reviews and Reading Roots

I'm coming to the end of a big push (excuse the pun) letting people know about The Birth Machine, and getting back to the WIP. Some nice responses are coming in. Rachel Carter writes a moving post on her blog after reading the book, describing an experience of her own which very much endorses the protagonist's situation, and making some very nice comments about the book. While Rachel responds to the childbirth theme of the book, and several birth trauma groups are showing great interest, there's also another new 5-star Amazon review which says this:

I don't see it as a polemic about hi-tech childbirth, but rather a nightmarish parable about power and secrets. Zelda can make no sense of her surroundings, and is deprived and imprisoned, because of a Kafka-style conspiracy between a sinister authority and her loved ones.

It concludes: 'An excellent and unusual story. Highly recommended.'

My relationship with the WIP is still a bit wonky, I'm afraid. This week I spent two mornings putting back an episode I'd dropped for this draft - I must have been mad to drop it, I decided: it was so colourful, and it illustrated something important about my protagonist's situation. But as I was showering to go out yesterday evening I saw that I'd been right before: no, including it made a less streamlined story! So I spent this morning rewriting again to get rid of the episode - only to move on in the typing and decide that, in view of what happens in the story later, it did need to be there after all... Basically, you could say I've lost the flow, but I'm hoping to be able to concentrate on it a bit better from now on.

And if you're interested in my childhood reading habits, today I'm in the Reading Roots spot on Carina's Reading Through Life blog.

Trying to keep the balls in the air (and the knots out of the stomach)

Well, that's not worked out perfectly so far: last night I woke up with the realization that I'd left something off the flowchart that was meant to save me sleepless nights thinking about all I had to do for publicity and trying to remember it. And I couldn't get back to sleep...!

Sue Guiney, who has a new novel coming out this month with new independent Ward Wood, has said on my Fictionbitch blog that she is planning to take a whole year off writing in order to promote the book, A Clash of Innocents, and maybe that's the only sensible way to go. But having done no really solid and sustained writing between the publication of my story collection Balancing on the Edge of the World in October 2007 and April this year when I got down to work in earnest on my novel in progress (with the publication of Too Many Magpies in between last autumn), I've decided that I really can't afford to stop altogether for the reissue of The Birth Machine next month. For one thing, if I did, I'm sure I'd lose the thread of the current novel. If at all possible I'm going to try and keep going while simultaneously working hard on the publicity.

So how's it going, you may wonder? Well, yesterday and today I managed two solid mornings of work on the novel from nine in the morning till one-thirty, and later yesterday I fulfilled the requirements of my flowchart by designing posters for my Didsbury Arts Festival reading and talk on 27th September and creating a Facebook event for it. (Today I'll have spent a good chunk of the afternoon getting back to blogging.) Can't say, though, that yesterday was easy. Although it's true that I'm at a tricky point in the novel, where I'm juggling several threads (and trying to make it look seamless and simple), I can't help feeling that the peace of my Wales retreat, where the connections and sequences seemed just to present themselves to me, would have been more conducive, and that there I'd have had to wrestle with it all less hard. And it's a point in the novel where I'm alternating between two different time levels and different psychic states for a character (while again trying to make it seamless) so it's taking a lot of mental and emotional energy.

And then, quite honestly, after a morning of doing that, I could hardly face sitting at the computer and designing the posters, a job that in other circumstances I can really enjoy, and I really had to force myself to do it. And I'm not sure I had the proper concentration. I thought I'd finished, and, in a hurry to get the job over with, I printed them out before realizing I'd left out some vital information, and will have to print them again...

By then, 4.30, I'd really had enough of the computer and just couldn't get my head around any more publicity collation and blurb, and anyway we needed food for the evening meal, and I'd promised myself a proper break and some exercise (because in the last couple of years glued to the computer I've got so unfit), so out I went shopping and walking. When I got back, I felt refreshed and was keen to get creating my Facebook event, but by the time I'd done that (and had a stupid problem loading up the image) it was 8.00, and we still had the evening meal to prepare and eat, and I still hadn't been on Twitter properly, as I'd intended. Just as I thought I'd finished, a nice email came through from Waterstone's Deansgate about my official Manchester launch for the reissue on 27th October, asking for some publicity blurb, which I really appreciate.

Meanwhile all the time at the moment there's the great mound of washing, including bedding, which we brought back after several weeks in Wales without a washing machine, into which I have to keep trying to make inroads. As for reading, that's confined to half an hour in bed at night: in Wales I finally began reading properly Jenn Ashworth's A Kind of Intimacy, and was really enjoying it, but have had to abandon it for the moment for the book we'll discuss in the reading group next Thursday. This once-voracious reader is now getting about 10 pages read a night...

We don't go out much nowadays, and I guess it's no surprise. And I'll probably forever regret confessing this, but quite frankly when there's so little time in the day, showering and washing your hair begins to seem like an expenditure of time you simply can't afford...!

The glamorous life of a writer, eh?

Well, maybe I'll get on top of it all. After all, I know I'm luckier than a lot of other writers, who have 9-5 jobs and young children or other caring responsibilities...

An unconventional review of Too Many Magpies

Jim Murdoch writes an unconventional review of Too Many Magpies on his blog The Truth About Lies. Instead of using the conventional approach, he chose to write a kind of diary of the reading process as he read the book, and the result is interesting - to me, anyway, as the writer. When you write, you are constantly thinking about the effect on your readers - what will they think here? Will this rack the tension up nicely, or just confuse? Will they remember it when they need to later? etc etc., so it's very interesting to hear this in such detail from a reader, and most unusual: conventional reviews are written with hindsight which glosses over such reading experiences.

He begins reading late at night, and in the early hours records his impressions of the book's non-linear beginning, which it seems he did have some problems with (damn!), and then, sitting down to write again at lunchtime next day writes this: Thinking back the overall feeling I've got from this book is of a story coming into focus - exactly the impression I was aiming to achieve (hooray!), since the book is about looking at the complexities of things and meanings which are often missed. He shares his feelings at the cliff-hangers: Now, what the hell does that mean? and then when he takes the book up again: Ah, so that is what she means!
Well, I'm not so sure that in the end he's overboard about the book's glancing nature - he seems a man who likes the concrete: he has a problem with the female narrator's 'restlessness' as he puts it, and the character he really warms to is the baby, who stands in the novel for the sensually simple which the narrator yearns for but knows is not the whole story. However he calls the book 'beautifully written' and recommends it, I'm very pleased to say. And I appreciate greatly the trouble and thought Jim puts into his reviews - linking even to web examples of the scientific definitions (eg 'Hormones' and 'Cholesterol') which the narrator feels can be used to gloss over the complex truths.

Prague

Sorry not to have blogged for so long: I've been tremendously busy and elsewhere. I was in Prague for almost a week, invited to read on the Monday at the great anglophone bookshop and cafe, The Globe, for Alchemy Prague, a series of literary and musical events run by Ken Nash for the Anglo-American literary society there. It was a good event, very full, and here's a pic John took with some of the audience reflected in the mirror:


After I read, there was an open mic session revealing some real talent which I also witnessed on the Thursday at a new poetry reading series (set up by some of the people who had read on the Monday). Quite made me want to move to Prague! We stayed in a lovely flat in Nove Mesto which we'd been lent for the duration, arriving quite romantically at midnight (our plane had been delayed by the weather) in a snowfall. One of the people at the Monday reading was Zuzana Hronkova, the Anglo-American University librarian, and she invited us to look around the very peaceful and cosy university library next day (and took copies of my books for the library).

Then we had a good few days tramping around the city. It was very cold and in the sidestreets the ice was packed hard - I slipped and fell on the way to the reading on the Monday! The most compelling thing for me, though, was a visit we made to Terezin, (Theresienstadt), Jewish ghetto, an hour's bus ride north of Prague. Really, words fail me so far to express the impact of this experience, and in the meantime I guess I can do no better than refer you to WG Sebald's wonderful, searing novel Austerlitz. And here's my photo of the railway track which brought the Jews into the town:

An interesting experiment

Here's a very interesting experiment in close reading which anyone can take part in and which I'd love to if I get the time.