There is a really sane and perceptive article by Mohsin Hamid in last Saturday’s Guardian Review Section. He looks at the flickering moral compass in Pakistan, the USA and Britain. he has the experience and the right to speak for all these countries. Go look, even if you only read as far at the poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
Or Threadgold Press up the creek with not much more than a couple of lollipop sticks.
When you decide to self-publish it’s a good idea to remember that what you are taking on is at least six people’s jobs. You have to park the fact that you are the author and settle down at your desk. First you become a typesetter, an editor, a designer and a proofreader. Then your Office Manager gets down to the practical stuff of commissioning the printing, and getting it sorted and delivered (and hiring heavies to persuade everyone you know to proofread… again), then the Catering Manager organises the launch party and the Publicity Manager takes care of the press releases and the local newspapers and talks. The Marketing Manager emails every person you have ever met and persuades them to buy an advance copy. At which point the office supply personnel get busy with the packaging, the stamps, while the Accountant keeps records of sales and the paperwork to go with the orders. The IT Advisor sorts out (or fails to sort out) the glitches with the Amazon system for uploading e-books and images.
What have I left out?
The office staff let the author out this morning for a ten minute run around the garden. She got a little over-excited by her ‘Maple nursery’ (seedlings of Matzsukaze and Sengokaku) in autumn glory. And some brave autumn crocus mixed with primroses (!) 
But she is back at her desk now, happily parcelling up an order for three more books (and worrying about whether the print run will last until publication day).
It’s even more DIY than last time round. The City newspaper, has asked the author to provide her own article ‘From the Author’s Mouth’ and supply book-cover image and author photo. The local farm shop is kindly allowing her to sign books in their cafe on the release date. Ah well, she can now drink the ginger wine – a thank you yesterday from the group at the sheltered housing in the village who, in spite of multiple challenges, listened sweetly to her babbling on about the joys of writing.
I have just finished Nawal El Saadawi’s epic, short book. This was inspired by an encounter in 1974 with a female prisoner, Firdaus, condemned to death for murder in Egypt. She had indeed murdered her pimp. This is written as a novel, a monologue of a short life. But the woman existed and the encounter is true. The brutalisation of this woman by all the men in her life who she should have been able to trust, shocked her countrymen, because it was instantly recognisable. When years later it was published abroad, it shocked the wider world. The life Firdaus had led was the normal experience of an ordinary women in Egypt and in the wider Arab world. I am not sure how much it has changed since then.
On the other hand this is also a true story:
Way back in 1965 two girls, aged 17 and 20, went hitchhiking round Europe. They were very careful because they had promised their parents not to travel this way, but they ran out of money. In Basel they managed to get a job working in a what would now be called a burger bar. The 17 year old was just out of boarding school, absurdly trusting and naive to a fault. She took a liking to the handsome young Egyptian cook, and was happy to indulge in the odd kiss and cuddle in their time off.
After a week or so, the girls had to leave their youth hostel – these were meant for travellers and not for long-term stays. Struggling to find somewhere to stay, they accepted a temporary home in the cook’s apartment, where a single sofa was the only available spare bed. The 17-year-old found herself cuddling on the bed with cook, who after a little while sat up. He explained very gently that she should not have accepted his offer to stay and must never do such a thing again. Her presence in his bedroom, he continued, would be regarded by most men as consent to sex. He was probably no more than 20 years old.
This kind and honourable young Egyptian left me with a respect, not only for himself but also for his countrymen, that I have never forgotten.
Saturday was wonderfully surreal. Although the Border Line pre-publication launch party was intended for local friends, very dear old friends and my daughter and partner came to stay, and a dear friend from Ireland and dear writing friends from Wiltshire also stayed nearby.
I was very grateful for messages of support from my blogging friends and also this wonderful card made by the multi-talented young singer Charlotte Hoather.
We had more than enough food. A tithe of it is visible in this photo.
I saw little of the party, as I spent most of it in my working den signing copies (and taking the moulah). I was aware of my husband and everyone working very hard, looking after about sixty thirsty people. Note the lovely rose, a gloriously sweet-smelling flower, cut and brought round by my next door neighbour. 
To a large extent this party was a thank you to friends, particularly this who have read, proof-read (free copies) and given feedback on the text and cover of Border Line. I’m not pretending that selling the book was not part of the aim, but you wouldn’t think that this is the recommended method for selling books. However I’m two boxes of Border Line down, six more to go. The bookmark I made, seems to have been a big hit too. Hooray for the old printer!
I brought the greenhouse pepper in after a frost scare last week, and left it as decoration for the party. I am absurdly proud of it and don’t know if I will be able to bear cutting and eating it. How absurd is that?
Our short story course at the Sainsbury Centre with Patricia Mullin is progressing nicely and everyone has the beginnings of a story inspired by one of the pictures in the exhibition Reality ( Modern and Contemporary British Painting). Being a fool, or simply greedy, I now have three stories on the go. The front runner at the moment is based on the intriguingly-titled Maid’s Day Off by Cecily Brown. 
I am finding the different styles and story subjects very stimulating and looking forward to the results.
My other delight has been the arrival yesterday of another book from Hercules Editions. These tiny publications give equal weight to text and graphics. This one, by Hannah Lowe, is poetry, photos and information about the precursor ship to The Windrush, The Ormonde, which arrived in Britain in 1947 and brought desperately needed workers to our industries.
Finally, tomorrow is the day of the local launch for Border Line, a ship with an unknown fate. 
The garden is happy but perhaps confused. I wanted to bring in some flowers the other day and found this charming combination of nasturtiums and winter jasmine. I also found some late blooms on the centaurea and and yet the hydrangeas have their autumn seed heads.
We still have cistus in bloom and below them autumn crocus are merrily flowering.
Then we have the winter iris stylosa – I usually start looking for a few flowers on this in mid-December and sometimes find blooms for the Christmas table and then throughout January and February. They are already blooming in three separate sites in the garden.
And late blooms have appeared on the summer-flowering non-clinging clematis Durandii.
A few feet away a primrose is feeling the air, while between these two Rosa Papa Meilland is throwing up yet another bloom.
Raspberries are still fruiting – they are autumn raspberries, but they are usually long gone before November. 
This is looking like autumn. 
…but what are the runner beans doing flowering at this time of year, and why can I hear the buzz of lawn mowers even as I write? And how come we had lunch in the garden in the UK on November 1st?
At least my general failure in the greenhouse has been redeemed by the late hot spell, and my magnificent sweet pepper is finally turning red. 
One of our favourite operas – the rarely-performed I Due Foscari (Verdi)* – is on at the Royal Opera House. We went to see it last Thursday and followed this up on Monday by watching the live relay performance in the cinema.
First off, the reviews weren’t great, but experience has taught us to keep an open mind, as performances often warm up. On the stage, as far as the singers were concerned, all was well. With Pappano in the pit and Placido Domingo, Francesco Meli and Maria Agresta giving us glorious music with high tragedy and great passion, we were very happy listeners.
BUT this is a maddening production. It is set in a what looks like a Venetian bomb site. Background figures move constantly, but very, very slowly and distractingly, throughout the performance, with some gruesome slow-motion torture thrown in. If you succeed in ignoring the figures, then the scenery – that is the narrow platforms for keeping your feet dry in watery Venice – also move frequently and erratically. (It brought to mind slow-motion table football). If you manage to stop worrying about whether the singers will fall off the platforms, you are dizzied by the Doge’s dining room and bedroom, which appear on a flying, sloped platform, on which the 89-year-old Doge (72-year-old Domingo) has to look stable AND sing his heart out. Then there’s the costumes; these are a sort of riff on Russian Eighteenth century costumes – with a few spare metres of brocade thrown in, the wealthy have electric colours, the poor are clad in grey, brown and dirty white. The Doge’s son, Jacopo, a prisoner, was the only soloist who didn’t have to drag a weighty costume around as he sang, so instead they hung him above the stage in a cage, or tortured him as he sang. In spite of all the drama, the pace felt slow, due, I suggest, to the staging not the conducting.
So three days later, in some curiosity, we went to the
to see the same opera. In this case cinema wins, because the cameramen/women could focus on the singers and not on the distractions on stage, they can even correct for the sloping platform (see clip). Of course the sound is not as exciting as being in the same space as the musicians, but it was pretty damn good. In addition the singers responded to the extra stimulation of being on camera, and this performance was a couple of notches above the earlier one.
We just love the music, but I fear the staging of this production is such that we are unlikely to hear it again for a good few years.
*Plot: The Doge of Venice, now 89, is being forced by The Ten (his rivals and who actually rule) to condemn his last remaining son to exile for treason and murder. His daughter-in-law fights desperately to persuade him to use his power to release his son. The Doge is torn between his role as a ruler, who must uphold justice, and as a father whose, possibly innocent, son will be exiled until death.
[M-R look away now]
I had this great idea for my Border Line book launch, it would be an afternoon affair with tea, coffee and cakes… so simple. The only problem is that I really cannot bake cakes and I have more than sixty hungry people coming on November 8th and I do want them to feel good (and, of course, buy books). I have ordered some mini cakes from our village café (lovely but expensive), and my daughter will help. Still, I am a tad concerned. I have in the past made passable fruit cakes, and they keep, so I thought I’d start with these.
I found five suitable tins, did some maths, but stupidly did not really take in the quantities I was juggling with, and started mixing currants, raisins, sultanas, glacé cherries and candied peel prior to soaking them in brandy.
Of course, I didn’t have containers built for this scale of catering, but after a sticky 20 minutes, managed to mix the fruit fairly evenly for overnight brandy-soaking.
Next afternoon my task started with preparing the tins – I’m a dab hand at this, but it takes time.
I’m finally about to get started when the Broadband engineer arrives. We don’t normally keep the phone and the router in the kitchen, but our main telephone socket is there and and our internet provider is insisting we use this socket until the problem (now three months old and this is the fourth engineer to visit) is sorted. I clear the table. After an hour the engineer has (Halluljah!) taken router and phone to husband’s desk.
I assemble all the other ingredients and start measuring – we’re talking twenty eggs here and 2 1/2 kilos butter never mind the flour, sugar, spices etc. [The glass of wine is merely a kitchen aid]. So I run to a neighbour to borrow some mixing bowls and decide I’d better cream the butter and sugar in two lots. 
My maths is suspect as I have more fruit than I will ever be able to put into the two lots of mixture. 
By the time I have grated five oranges, five lemons, added all the final ingredients, filled the tins and put them in the oven, it is 8 pm and we are HUNGRY.
The cakes are supposed to take a minimum of four hours. I take some out at 3 hours and the others at midnight, I have a horrible fear that I have overcooked them (death to fruitcakes).
In the morning they at least look the part. I shall feed them with brandy and perhaps display them temptingly, but out of reach, on the day. 
I now have about a kilo of brandy-soaked fruit unused and a small bowlful of uncooked fruitcake mix.
Although I enjoyed the mud-pie side of hand mixing the dried fruit, I think, on the whole, I’d better stick to writing.
Not having blogged for a while, this post includes a somewhat random collection of subjects. There will be short stories and more paintings again next time.
First, can anyone identify the make of this English car of the 1920s? 
Next, while I blush at the years that have passed before I got around to reading Middlemarch (George Eliot), I finally accomplished this. If I had read it as a schoolgirl, I might have been a better writer, but hopefully it is never too late to have an improving influence. Eliot has a way of lightly skewering a character onto the page, with the result that they are forever real in your mind. There are no saints or villains to be seen; every character has strengths and weaknesses, can fascinate or disgust.
A few words on Mr and Mr’s Vincy’s relationship with their daughter, Rosamund, tells so much about all their characters.
Vincy, blustering as he was, had as little of his own way, as if he had been prime minister,…
Rosamund… listened in silence, and at the end gave a certain graceful turn of the neck, of which only long experience could teach you that it meant perfect obstinacy.
And Bulstrode’s endless rationalisations are a total giveaway of sanctimonious hypocrisy.
… is it not one thing to set up a new gin-palace and another to accept an investment in an old one?
The fates treat everyone with impartial kindness or cruelty according to random whim. Yet the plot is tight, intricate, totally believable and immensely satisfying. This is exactly what the title implies, a novel woven round a community, and yet this is no old-fashioned pastoral, the individual stories still grab you today. People’s mistakes and aspirations are still recognisable today. I’d better stop. Basically, Eliot has all the skills I am striving to acquire and my envy of her is too blatant.
I started Middlemarch in high summer, but autumn has more than set in. The hedgehogs are still feeding; we almost tripped over one last night, snuffling just outside the back door. He scuttled off, but returned quickly when I put food out. They will not eat in the rain, so if it is wet we put the plate under the back porch. Finally, my favourite rose, Just Joey, has decided to have a final summer fling and the cosmos chocamocha is flowering madly. 
My reading has reached crisis proportions. Middlemarch, which I started months ago, has been cruelly and endlessly sidelined, though each time I pick it up, I am right back in there, the characters are old friends and I am in happy awe of Eliot’s every, exact word. Grabbing a volume slim enough for handbags and waiting rooms, I also started Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the story source of an opera. For iPad reading on trains, I have Carol Balawyder’s Mourning has Broken, a very moving and fascinating set of essays. Also downloaded months ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, which I foolishly started… just to see what it was like. Sandwiched between these, but finished, have been a list of nine books both light and heavyweight and ahead are another five books to read ‘immediately’.
So, I made a resolution, NO NEW BOOKS until all the above are finished, and I MUST carve out some real writing time.
I have just started a ten-afternoon writing course at the wonderful Sainsbury Centre, 
at the University of East Anglia (UEA). I signed up for this at a low moment when re-reading the final, supposedly fully edited, manuscript of Border Line, and having concluded that I still had everything to learn about writing.
The course tutor is Patricia Mullin, so I downloaded Patricia’s novel, Gene Genie, and have been reading that on the train.
The writing course is attached to the current exhibition of modern and contemporary British painting, Reality. This is a stunning exhibition (no photography allowed), but we have a free run of the exhibition for the ten days of the course. Many paintings have intrigued me, but one by John Keane (website screen grab), has set a story going in my head.
His other work is fascinating too and on his website he says:
I am interested in the process of painting, and I am interested in why human beings want to kill one another for political ends. These two apparently diverse preoccupations I attempt to reconcile by smearing pigment around on canvas in an effort to achieve a result whose success can be measured by how well it disguises the sheer absurdity of the attempt.
And what is the writing course homework? Trawling for great opening lines and writing our own story first lines. I spent a happy and feverish week reading old favourites: Kipling stories (The Maltese Cat, Without Benefit of Clergy, Little Tobrah, The Head of the District etc), and Salinger (For Esmé With Love and Squalor etc), Saint Exupéry (The Little Prince) etc, etc, etc I also opened all my most-loved books, only to find that the majority had nothing dramatic about the opening lines. They were often quite conversational. Though one of my favourites is Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine which opens:
When I was a young boy, if I was sick or in trouble, or had been beaten at school, I used to remember that on the day I was born my father had wanted to kill me.
Is it just me, or are others caught in the same reading maelstrom? How does one extract oneself, brain intact, from such a reading pile-up? (sorry about mixed metaphors.)
I shall go and sweep some leaves and pretend that my list of tricky phone calls to promote Border Line can just as well be tackled next week… I read this and then made myself ring a local newspaper.
Green Writing Room 