Pensées Françaises

Time  to introduce La Belle France to these pages. For those who don’t know, Margaret and I have the good fortune to own a small (very small!) house in the rural Vendée. Our year is pleasantly divided between France and the UK, therefore - the best of two worlds. We may get back to France in another blog. The reason for introducing it here, is the picture above, La Tour de L’Octroi, Fontenay-le-Comte. Now Fontenay (our nearest town when in France) is an astonishingly beautiful little Renaissance town of real dignity. L’Octroi (which doesn’t really lean like this) is a minor 19C addition to its architectural gems and sits beside the lovely Vendée river. Very pretty, I hear you comment: and, under your breath, so what?

Well, for the time being, L’Octroi is a bookshop, specialising in second-hand and rare English books and MS and run by the excellent Cid Jackson. Don’t ask why. I don’t know why a 19C monument in the middle of France should be an English bookshop run by a West-Yorkshireman. It just is so. Take my word.

Back to those words: book shop. Now I know that my novel is neither second hand (in spite of Amazon’s peculiar listing of it!) nor rare. But there’s just an outside chance that I might persuade Cid to carry a few copies - just to see if it sells. So how about this for an ironic oddity. My book, which I could not publish in the UK, is published in America. I can’t persuade any S.Yorkshire shops to carry it - but maybe - just maybe - the first shop into which you can walk and buy it will be 600 miles away in mid France.

Funny the way things turn out.

Anybody out there?

The abiding question, of course - for everyone. But especially important to those who commit their thoughts to blogs. Or to books.

And today I have a good feeling. There is someone out there. Books first of all: at long last my publisher has updated its website, and I can discover that people have been buying my book. OK, only twelve of them so far (so far = the first month) but that’s twelve people now reading my book. Which is what publishing is all about. We are under way.

And the Blog? Well, my email this morning brings a really warm mail from a former pupil who has caught up with me via the website and wants to tell me so. Wonderful! Google’s clever algorithm bridges the decades, and I have a voice from the past at breakfast time.

All good stuff.

The Blue Aegean Sea

... on, beside, in or under which is where we’ve spent the last fortnight. These two, mother and babe, were amongst some 30 or 40 dolphins that came to say hello as we cruised the Marine Conservation park, in the northern Aegean, about 10 days ago. They, and the staggeringly beautiful lesser Sporades, are the abiding and as yet unfaded memories of a beautiful holiday on Alonissos. The Marine Park was set up primarily to protect the remaining 300 Mediterranean Monk Seals - which we caught no glimpse of. They breed, the last few of them, on a tiny, remote island called Piperi, near which no boats at all are allowed. But we did get to cruise among the dolphins, to swim on the beaches of deserted islands, to see the delicate, rare white marine lilies that bloom in profusion on the beach of Psathoura - and generally to appreciate what a rare and fragile place we had fetched up in.

I sat, one morning after swimming, for an hour or more with my feet in the rocky water of the busy harbour at Patitiri, just gazing at the miniature wildlife garden around me. Those empty whelk shells, lying on the rock - surely they move? Of course they do - every one contains a tiny hermit crab, creeping around the crevices, fossicking for food. And the blue-black disks on that rock side? Little crabs, feeding with the delicate, almost fussy precision of a gourmet, on invisible water-born scraps - pincers as fine and polite as silver cutlery. Oh - and there’s a Blenny, stripe-camouflaged, easing its way across the bottom on elbowed fins between the glass-like shrimps. And around that rock wave, like medusa-hair, the water-woven tendrils of some sea-anemone. And these, only the animals whose names I know. Itinerant fish flash in and out of the scene, multicoloured tordepoes, or quivering, pale disks. All wonderful.

I never cease to be fascinated by the rich diversity of the world we inhabit - and I hope I never will.

In the harbour one day we saw the grim, black-robed, bearded form of an orthodox monk, waiting for his motor-boat to be fixed - presumably the solitary monk who lives, the only inhabitant, on Kyra Panagia over the strait. I felt sorry for him, stuck in a world that is not enough for him but only second best to some imaginary alternative. This one will do me.

A good week

OK - so who are these children got up in fancy dress?

This week saw our 43rd wedding anniversary, which we celebrated with a trip up the Yorkshire Dales for the day and then on to my brother and sister-in-law near Kendal, for an evening meal. Lovely day - but impossible to believe that it’s the forty-third such. Only when you dig out (as I just did) an image from the past do you understand quite how remote 1966 has become - we were what we looked, in those far off days. Children.

But what a fantastic journey into maturity it has been, and in what company! Margaret and I have spent getting on for 16,000 days together now, and they just get better ...

Love, as I am fond of saying, is not something you fall in. It is something you make - hour by hour, day by day, year by year, crafting it and changing it and growing with it. Wonderful.

We took a bottle of Chateau les Rigalets 2002 with us to Kendal. “Cuvée exceptionnelle, sur des fruits noir, trés suave en bouche, rondeur et finesse caractéristique du Château les Rigalets,” says one reviewer. We’d go along with that. It was one of a hoard of six dozen assorted Cahors and Bergeracs we brought back from our last foray into the Lot valley, and it was a fitting wine with which to celebrate the passing of one more very good year. Not, perhaps quite in the same league as the 1966 Pomerol our family bought us for our 40th celebration, but pretty fine.

Wine and marriage seem good partners: the more you discover about them, the better they are.

Made it!

Well - after all the trails and tribulations I can finally say that my book The Edge of Things is fully published on sale, and available*. Amazon.com finally got to list it yesterday night. I find, in fact, that its true publication date was 9th July, but since it's extremely difficult to buy from the publisher, Xlibris, the effective date is when Amazon list it.
So this is the end of one very instructive and often tortuous journey, just getting the book published - and the start of another one - selling it!
In my experience people either are, or are not good at selling. Every school staffroom I ever worked in always had one or two characters (where are you now, Phil Addy?)** who could be relied on to sell anything to anyone - and half a hundred like me, who curled up in embarrassment at the very thought.
And this is odd, when you think about it: after all, writing a book is an act of enormous egotism - let alone publishing it. So why should selling it be so different? Is it a form of residual, British snobbery - the aristocracy's historic distaste for "trade"? Or is it just that, like any other form of mollusc, writers are braver inside their shells, than out? Anyway Here we go!

* http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Things-Alan-Robertshaw/dp/1441530835/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249120479&sr=1-3

**Phil was a great teacher of Humanities who, as I recall, found selling so much more to his taste that he hung up his chalk and went off to manage a store in Paris: a life change I always marvelled at.

Spider

So there I was, cooking a couple of duck-breasts, flash-fried, hot over the gas-blue flame, deep in the unctuous fat of their own flesh. Kitchen hot and smoky and aromatic, full of the promise of rich, red meat, gold and pink and, in its heart, deep red.

In the corner of my eye comes the spider. Tiny bodied, long legged. Running. Displaced by my cooking fumes from somewhere above the hob. In flight.

I turn back to the flame, burning blue and hot over the enamel of the hob. Then suddenly, there is the spider again. Moving swiftly on long, impossibly thin legs. Looking for a better place to be. But running - yes, running now - across the enamel. Running straight for the flame.

Into the flame.

A single moment when movement stops and long, hair-thin legs stop, buckle, crumple in the heat.

And the spider is still and dead.

I do not, can not, comprehend what drove my fly-eating arachnid friend to self-immolate. And in such purposeful, driven haste.

Why?

Just thought I’d share that moment. Still don’t understand.

La Dolce Vita

.. which just happens to be the film I’m watching at this minute. The sweet life. Don’t know about the film - but life is certainly sweet as I write. The book - of course. Now technically published, though only available through Xlibris. But I have two copies, right here - and they look and feel very good indeed.

Now we wait ... for Amazon (not .co.uk I suspect, but .com) to pick it up. Then you can all buy it! (I wish)

In the meanwhile, as I say, life is sweet. Bricolage has broken out here (= France) again - as it does from time to time - more lambris to hide the damper bits of our walls. Hard work, and much fun. Soon our entire house will be made of pine cladding!

In the meantime, good wine (plenty) and sunshine (not quite so much) makes this a blessed country to spend time in. And food!

La Dolce Vita indeed.

Busy Busy

What an amazingly complex business it is proving to be, getting a book into print. All other activities have been suspended, now, for months, while files fly back and forth through the airwaves over the Atlantic – interior galleys, cover galleys, book-blurb, marketing texts – everything goes from me to the publisher, back to me for approval, back to them for revision. Words begin to dance in front of my eyes in the dark of the night!

But we’re almost there, now. Almost there. Somewhere in the USA a printer is, at this very minute, preparing to print off a single example of The Edge of Things. In a couple of weeks it will be plopped through my letterbox and I get a final chance to confirm that it really is ready for publication. Then – the first of August. Launch date. Finally the book will be beyond any further tweaking and revision, and will be out there waiting for readers.

I must have read it – oh, half a dozen times since it was first completed (or so I thought!) in 2004. And there have been many other readers – all encouraging – of the work in MS as it went through revisions. But real readers, who’ve parted with money for the opportunity to read the book ... Wow. There’s a thought. Slightly scary.

And very, very exciting.

So if you’re curious to read it, take a note of the book launch-date. First of August. Amazon should be carrying it from that day.

Here we go...

This is where I join the 21st Century - wish me luck.

I need to come clean to all possible readers. There is one thing, and one thing only that is driving my arrival in the electronic era - the need to let the world know about my novel, The Edge of Things. So if you don't want to know about its publication, read no further. But if you do ...

OK, first a potted history. I retired from the best job in the world*** in January 2001 and immediately set about writing the novels I'd always promised myself I'd write. seven years, and five novels later, I stopped. What, I asked myself, was the point in writing novel after novel if no publisher would take them on? And they wouldn't. Lots of people read my books, and they were all very positive and encouraging in their response. But the many headed hydra that passes for a publishing industry nowadays (many heads - only one Random body) didn't want to know.

If your work isn't likely to sell millions (and mine isn't) the one great publisher in the sky is not interested. Ideally your writing should be fantastic (mine is wholly realistic) light (mine is dark) blockbuster-long (mine are concise and swift) and endlessly replicable (mine are all one-offs).

I gave up. But good friends told me off most robustly for throwing in the towel (thank you Malcolm and Andra). And then it dawned on me that publishing started out, back in the early C18, as writers paying (usually by subscription) a printer to print and distribute their work. So why not now? And then I discover the huge and growing "print on demand" publishing sub-industry. So the door is open again.

The wonderful Sandy Cunningham (look out his poetry on Xlibris.com or Amazon) suggested I try Xlibris. So I did.

They are first-rate guys there, tremendously supportive and determined to make your book as professionally produced as possible. They had a little hiccup in adjusting to the idea that they'd need to market my book in the UK (they're USA based) but now everything has come together.

A short delay occasioned by the need to have a truly professional cover design (Thanks, Patrick - once again), and now we are ready to launch. I've proofed the galleys (see - I speak the language!) and now await the review copies (hard and softback - no corner-cutting). Then on 1st August we launch.

Wish me luck. Because if this one works, there are four more where it came from - and I firmly intend getting on with more. 65 is late in life to start - I have some lost time to make up ...

Watch this space.

*** Headteacher of a Barnsley Comprehensive school, if you must know