From Somewhere in Time

When my life gets clearer again, I'll be updating this whole site to include more of my current work and also make it more secure - it's been plagued by spam to the point that the ISP demanded more money for extra bandwidth!

I'll also be setting up more links and generally making it more user friendly.

Not yet, though: I'm still getting things together after the serious illness of my mother turned our lives upside down eight months ago - she has been making a gradual recovery with a lot of support since then.

Meanwhile, I found a good little movie on YouTube by children's writer Candy Gourlay about getting an agent for your fiction. Her daughter and their friends did it during their half term break and I love it. Candy has worked really hard for the UK branch of the Society of Childrens Book Writers and Illustrators and her book Volcano Child is going to be a sensation.

http://notesfromtheslushpile.co.uk/2008/06/why-writers-need-agents.html

I've been obliged to do other things lately and Lewis has taken the back seat. But the book has now been sold in the UK - to Haus Publishing - and I'm very pleased. Their website is www.hauspublishing.com and I'm looking forward to starting to put the book together.

I wrote a few entries back about W. Aytoun of Bon Gaultier fame (or at least, 19th century Bon Gaultier fame). I recently heard from one of the descendants of Lewis Carroll's brother Wilfred, who said Aytoun had died in the very house he now lives in, Blackhills, in Scotland. From its website Blackhills looks like a fab mansion and it had apparently been rented out from the Duke of Fife and belonged to the royal family until early in the 20th century

As Aytoun's verse so obviously influenced Carroll, Carroll would probably have been interested to hear he had died. How much more interested would he be to know that the house he died in would one day be inhabited by a member of his own family? That's a question - I don't know the answer to but I dare say that, being a teeny bit of a snob, he'd have liked the idea of the family owning a house which had once belonged to royalty!

I heard about Miss Snark's literary agent blog for years but I never read it because I didn't want to be writing fiction with publication in mind. Sounds stupid, but....after being a journalist for so long I was tired of looking over my shoulder and trying to suck up to those shadowy imaginary figures you have to please before your work sells. A bit like trying to write for a pantheon of not very likeable gods. www.misssnark.blogspot.com

I've been writing children's fiction for a while. I have shown some of the stories to agents (to no avail). If I'd seriously wanted to see them in print I would long ago have taken matters into my own hands and made sure that I got them out there somehow (even if I ended up writing them all out by hand and peddling them around primary schools in a handcart.) I've been preferring to sit here with my books on my own terms, all nice and private.

I once had a children's agent and my experiences with her put me off severely. I wonder how many other writers have a similar experience. She was a nice lady who specialised in children's fiction, but she was constantly trying to push me into writing stories with limited vocabulary to suit the various Key Stages at school. She also wanted me to create stories on subjects which would relate to topics in the curriculum: Ancient Romans, World War 2 and so on. Blah. I am afraid I hated it. But after a while I decided that she was the expert, and I shouldn't turn down opportunities she was finding for me, so I did agree to write a book on a subject I thought was boring. The work was badly paid, and the book had (in my view) no sales potential. After several wasted months I discovered I'd been quite right and it WAS a bad idea, even though the book was in fact published and made it into the bookstores.

So I bade farewell to the agent. I privately felt that if I became a children's author I would prefer to be the sort that Carroll was. He paid for printing and illustration, supervised everything himself and Macmillan simply published and distributed it under their imprint in the usual way.

Anyway, I've finally understood what this lady agent had been trying to do. Getting established is a good idea. I now think that some publishers would rather have an established writer with a poor book than any amount of glittering new but untried talent. I went to a talk recently by a well known children's author who said that her publishers had made her spend 6 months rewriting her latest book - yet these same publishers I know will not put any time or effort into encouraging new writers with potential and don't even operate a slush pile.

If the figures I have been seeing in "The Author" about the economics of publishing are correct, we made almost as much money publishing our small-run "Lewis Carroll In His Own Account" than many authors collect from legitimate publishing houses. Amazing.

So... should I be starting to write out those books by hand and investigating handcarts?

In my own writing for children I know better than to try and replicate anything Carroll did - "Alice" expressed who he was himself. You can't do a really successful imitation of another person's writing any more than you can copy that person's personal mannerisms. There's a little spark that's uncopy-able.

So that's why I'm puzzled about "Wasp in a Wig". It is a so called suppressed chapter from one of the "Alice" books, discovered in galley proof some years ago. It tells how Alice meets a sad old wasp who sings a song for her. The wasp is unattractive, and dull, the song is average music hall stuff. It's sort of like Carroll, but not really. And because the quality is so much worse than the rest of the book, many people think it's not his work.

However the annotations are in his own hand, and, having once studied handwriting analysis, I sneakily took a magnifying glass and checked some of the tiny little pen marks which we all make and are distinctive and unique to us. The tiny marks in the handwriting are definitely Carroll's. So I think he did write this chapter and it got as far as galleys before he pulled it.

What intrigues me is that it feels and reads like a copy of his work. It entirely lacks charm and life. It is as if it were written by someone copying him. People often say Carroll had two distinct personalities and reading "Wasp in a Wig" makes me think this might indeed be so. Thank goodness his creative side managed to pull the chapter in time.

I'm still busy with other things. But I was thinking that standard, straightforward biographies of Carroll tend to recycle the same old stuff without looking behind the surface at the kind of man he actually was. I am trying the whole time to imagine what he must have been like. What would I have felt if I already knew him and he walked into the room? Would my spirits rise, fall or stay the same?

He saw life so differently from most people that those who had the chance to creep behind his stiff exterior seem to have been delighted to have the chance of his company. I imagine that he would have frozen me out though - probably because I'd want to know so much about him. These reflections can become rather circular....

I haven't felt like writing the blog lately because I've been involved with trying to sell the old family home in SW London - rather sad to clear it out. It's been in the family nearly 100 years and is full of memories. It's more like getting rid of a dear old pet than a mere house. I've known it since my earliest memories and am familiar with every inch, in the way a child is - even the bits around the skirting boards.

My sister tried to buy it to live in it but property prices in London being what they are, she just couldn't raise the cash even by selling a larger house in the Midlands and raising over £100,000 of extra cash. As I am not a beneficiary of the will, I can't help her out.

I'm still thinking about Carroll. Sometimes I feel as if Carroll is my brother - if not my incubus) - it's easy to forget that other people don't know anything and probably don't care either. So it's been a matter of pitching the proposal in a way that will interest not only those who ARE intrigued by him, but also the others who vaguely think he wrote "Peter Pan".

There's also the problem of giving a crash course in history. Carroll was such a one-off that he had some difficulty in fitting into his own society. (He might have had difficulty fitting into ANY society, although the 18th century might well have suited him more than the 19th).

But, to see how he dealt with his society, you have to know a bit about that society, and I can't assume that the reader knows, of course. It's fairly safe to guess they're not familar with the Oxford Movement, but shouldn't a reasonably educated person be able to make a guess about what Victorian genre paintings are? It's hard to get it right.

On an Angry Old Woman note, I was also shocked to find that a professional who read my proposal and reported on it, constantly misspelled and misused words in her report. She used "hoards" when she meant "hordes", was a fan of "greengrocer's apostrophe's" and consistently used "it's" as the possessive of "it". My inner schoolteacher was brandishing an imaginary red pen all over her report. She was a lovely lady, and perhaps her teachers felt that learning grammar and punctuation stifled creativity... but I confess that if I were making a career in publishing and couldn't spell or punctuate, I'd buy myself a book or go on a course.

Having said that, Lewis Carroll, for all his love of literature, was no great shakes in the punctuation department.

As a child, I never got into WInnie the Pooh. Guess I was too old. The adventures of Pooh and all the animals seemed very childish - and Christopher Robin seemed like a ridiculous boy, not at all like the boys I knew, who spent all day rushing around pretending to be fighter planes. But recently I found a First Edition of "The House at Pooh Corner" in a bargain box, and, in looking through it for damage, I found myself reading it. And it was wonderful. It may not have appealed to me as a child but certainly does as an adult.

Then I happened to spot Ernest Shepard's biography - he is of course the illustrator. He wrote two volumes and I have read the first, which is charming, and, as you'd expect, beautifully illustrated. He remembers his life until the age of 7 with such clarity and affection that you can quite see why he was the ideal illustrator for Pooh.

I'm still working at getting the book proposal right. It's fascinating to hear what various readers have to say, but it's tricky to know just how much attention to pay to them. I always, ALWAYS listen to criticism, because any feedback is useful to a writer, however bad or stupid I may privately think it is. But these professional readers don't know what I want and what I'm like, and they may suggest things I don't want to do at any price. I hope I'm treading the fine line between listening to them and retaining my independence. So far the proposal doesn' t have the right "voice," but I am sure it will come in time.

In Carroll's personal scrapbook is pasted a poem from "Punch" of 1859 called "The Bards of Burns". It's all about a competition for the best Scottish poetry in the style of Robert Burns. This competition was a three day event in the Crystal Palace. (Yes, three days! Some people in those days had way too much spare time) Once I figured out what he was going on about, I enjoyed it very much, and it contained some great turns of phrase and interesting words. In fact I conjectured that it might be a previously unknown poem by Carroll.

On checking it out, though, I found it was by William Aytoun, who was one of the judges of the competition. I also learned that Aytoun wrote a very popular, but now almost-forgotten collection of comic poetry called the "Bon Gaultier" ballads. It looked to me as if Carroll had deeply admired these ballads and modelled some of his own poetry closely on them: there were so many stylistic similarities. So out of interest, I bought a copy of Bon Gaultier - a lovely little First Edition for less than a fiver. It's illustrated by Leech and Doyle, which is a bonus. The ballads are not to modern taste but they're good parodies and very witty, and to my slight surprise I have been enjoying them.