In the epistolary tradition

Looking for light, easy reading on the recent (sunny!) bank holiday I reached for a book a friend gave me last year. It had that pleasing newness that I rarely experience (reading mainly ebooks and second-hand or library copies), and it was slim (230 pages). Just the size and form a paperback should be, somewhere in the recesses of my idealised memory.  The book itself was actually two even slimmer (non-fiction) volumes in one: 84 Charing Cross Road and its sequel The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff. I zipped through the first with little effort and a sort of drowsy amusement in the early evening sunshine, and instead of starting the sequel, I began to think.

84 Charing Cross Road consists of the letters exchanged between Helene Hanff (a writer in New York) and the staff (and assorted relatives) of a bookshop in London, at irregular intervals between 1949 and 1969. In one sense it’s mainly made up of orders for (usually antiquarian) books but because of the length of time, and the familiar tone of Hanff’s letters from the start, there is a certain amount of friendship that grows up, and there are glimpses into various lives at a particular point in history. There’s also a mild curiosity as to whether she ever gets to visit England, and the bookshop in particular, as plans are made and money is saved along the way.

Lazing in the last of the sunshine I began to wonder how the book came into being. Who thought that the reading public would enjoy reading the correspondence (some of it missing, as this is real life and papers go astray) between a writer and her favourite bookseller? Not that I’m knocking the book, it was just the thing for the mood I was in on Monday evening, but in 1970 when it was published there wasn’t even the curiosity value of history (typewriters! The Coronation! Postal orders!) wrapped up in it so what was the thinking behind it? Is it just that the reading public are scandalously nosy and can’t resist a peek at someone else’s letters?

Plenty of novels have been written as an exchange of letters, but in my personal opinion the form works best for comedy. Not necessarily laugh out loud comedy, but the kind of thing that’s easy to read, that you want to breeze through with a close-to-permanent smile. It lets both writer and reader get deep into the mannerisms of a character, allows glimpses of other aspects of their life, and lets the reader fill in their own jokes or scenarios based on a passing reference. While I think it’s true that plots too slight to make a good story have been successfully rendered in letters, it’s probably advisable to start with a good plot and work from there.

I had gone on to wonder if there were any good versions using emails rather than letters, when I remembered one of the most consistently funny radio comedies in recent years (I haven’t read the books), Ladies of Letters by Carole Hayman and Lou Wakefield. Part of the appeal is undoubtedly the marvellous delivery from Patricia Routledge and Prunella Scales but the writing is strong as well. There have been a number of series now but the core is the long-standing friendship between Vera and Irene, which allows them to get away with saying all sorts of outrageous things to each other, and of course using email means there are the inevitable missives written in haste or anger, late at night after a little too much sherry, and the ones sent before they were finished or riddled with typos.

Not only did 84 Charing Cross Road provide a couple of hours’ light entertainment this week, it’s got me fired up to try an epistolary story. I suspect it might be harder than it looks.

The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy

A crime novel a little off the beaten track for me, but I enjoyed the film LA Confidential, so when I saw that novel plus a couple of Ellroy’s others in a charity shop, I thought I’d give them a go.

The Big Nowhere is not for the faint-hearted, though I did appreciate as I read it that some events were put across in a couple of matter of fact sentences, when in a more salacious setting they could have been lingered over in awful detail. Even so, there’s a fair bit of violence, some nasty murders and a couple of forensic scenes, not to mention bizarre sex crimes. I kept marvelling at the fact I was still reading, but the power of the writing and characterisation was such that I had to know how it all worked out, I had to know who was responsible for what.

Set in the first days of 1950 in Los Angeles, The Big Nowhere follows a murder investigation seemingly linked to gay men, and an investigation into Communist activity in the motion picture industry, at a time when being gay or being Communist were about equally likely to turn you into a pariah. This is the scuzzy underside of the city, rife with corruption and blackmail, victims no-one cares about, and rivalry between city and county police. It seems there are no good guys or bad guys, only bent cops and gangsters with half an eye on justice. Sometimes they’re the same person.

It’s a complicated novel, the pieces of the puzzles so intricate that I occasionally had to re-read to make sure I’d got it straight before I moved on. On the whole it had an urgent tension to it that kept me reading, but every so often the police procedural aspect of it slowed me down (lists of names, licence numbers, addresses that people read out over the phone to each other, for instance) but I’m not sure how else you’d be able to do it so that the reader sees the information and can put two and two together at the same time as the character. It has a gritty, dirty feel to it, and was depressing in places but I like the fact that it didn’t have a neat uplifting ending with all loose ends tied. Once I’ve cleansed my palate with something uproariously funny, I’ll be back for more of Ellroy’s harsh urban style.

Review of the week (it’s been an exciting one)

Apart from the release of my short story collection The Little Book of Northern Women (more of which in a moment), I’ve been listening to the new BBC radio version of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Richard Mayhew helps a girl in a London street and finds himself caught up in the disputes of London Below, with its fiefdoms and tangential relation to the London Richard’s familiar with. I enjoyed the TV series when I first saw it on DVD a few years ago, but it’s true the radio series had more scope and is therefore in some respects better. There’s a well of darkness in Neverwhere that can only fully be dredged when your imagination’s supplying the images (I was picturing most of the characters as they appeared in the TV series, but they weren’t being confined to scenery I’d actually seen them in). It remains a good story, which is the main thing, and though I knew the plot I was still finding it tense and unsettling at times.

The overwhelmingly positive reaction to The Little Book of Northern Women, which I self-published via Amazon at the weekend (though it should be easily convertible to non-Kindle formats; I’ve got it as epub on a Kobo) has given me a thrilling few days so far. Kelvin Knight has become a one-man publicity campaign on my behalf, a role which I neither asked nor expected him to play, but which is much appreciated. The other stalwarts of the Telegraph Short Story Club have, as usual, been most encouraging as well, tweeting and generally shouting about the new book’s existence. So far, the feedback has been good and people have been enjoying the stories they’ve got round to reading (which for some eager people is all of them), but I would love to hear what anyone else thinks of the collection or any of the stories in it – you could leave a comment here or write a review somewhere and point it out to me.

The Little Book of Northern Women, released today

The short story collection I promised back at new year is now available at last for the princely sum of 99p (or whatever Amazon translate that to in other currencies – it’s available on all Amazon sites) for 9 stories, 8 of them previously unpublished. The Little Book of Northern Women is, as the title suggests, a collection of stories in which women from the north of England feature rather prominently. Those women are young, old, middle-aged; coping with oppressive mothers or the passage of time; gentle, angry, strong, defiant, bemused. Some of the stories are light-hearted, others quite dark, set in the 1930s, 1980s and more recently. I decided to stick with non-genre stories (though I was tempted to include one about a female-slanted android in Bradford), but just because the central characters are all women, I sincerely hope the package doesn’t seem unpalatable to male readers.

As with Wasted Years, the e-book is DRM-free, which means (among other things) that if like me you don’t own a Kindle, you can convert the file to something more compatible with your hardware (epub for a Kobo, in my case). I’ll leave you with the cover image (featuring a photo my Nana took of her Nana), and I’d love to know what any of you think of the collection.

Magic Kingdom For Sale – SOLD! by Terry Brooks

An enjoyable, light-hearted fantasy novel that I’d somehow missed, by a well-known name in the genre.

When I was a teenager, Terry Brooks novels were everywhere, and it seemed to me that every one I picked up was book 7 of the Long-Winded cycle or part 2a of book 4 of the second quintet of the High Fantasy Epic. Undoubtedly if I look now I’ll find he’d only written four novels by then but in a way it doesn’t matter. The point is, I avoided his work. I associated him with Anne McCaffrey and David Eddings (both of whose prodigious output I had dipped into on the recommendation of a friend with whom I have overlapping reading tastes) and I assumed he wrote the sort of po-faced high fantasy I couldn’t stand, slightly wet with an unsubtle moralistic overtone, spread over a dozen volumes.

On the basis of Magic Kingdom For Sale – SOLD! it seems I may have been wrong (it does happen occasionally). It was a quick and easy read, laced with humour (by no means comic fantasy, but definitely not always straight-faced) and with a few original twists to its comfortable tale of dragons, fairy magic and quests.

Ben Holiday is a lawyer in Chicago with a successful career, millions in the bank, a flash apartment (this being the 80s, that means a lot). Trouble is, his wife died a couple of years ago, he’s staring 40 in the face, and he’s beginning to wonder what the point of it all is. The answer’s either suicide or a long break from his old life, so the advert in the Christmas catalogue offering a kingdom (complete with dragons, fairies, wizards and knights) for a million dollars seems too good to be true. And we all know what they say about things that seem too good to be true.

It hasn’t made me rush off to read all those Terry Brooks books I dismissed out of hand all those years ago, but if you’re a high fantasy reader who also doesn’t mind the odd Terry Pratchett or Tom Holt, you could do much worse than to read this novel. (If you’re wondering how come I picked it up in the first place, a friend mentioned it then I noticed it in the library a couple of weeks later and thought why not).

Thomas More’s Utopia

I’ll refer to it as Thomas More’s Utopia because, despite the modern meaning of the word, it wouldn’t be for everyone. For a start, they have slavery. However, given it was written in the 16th century there’s still a lot in there to learn from, and if you replace the word ‘prince’ with ‘prime minister’ I would endorse a big chunk of his advice to anyone ruling a nation (Messrs Cameron and Osborne, please take note. Or perhaps someone could give Ed Miliband a copy).

If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s couched as a conversation taking place between More and a well-traveled man who has found through vast experience that the most contented and best-governed nation in the world is the (fictional) nation of Utopia. He then explains to More and his friend why it is that Utopia is so great, and how it differs from England or other European nations of the time. This includes its justice system, foreign policy and welfare system, parts of which are now in place, parts sound ludicrously old-fashioned, and most of it I’m sure would have been thought mad (or subversive, or both) in the 19th century, let alone the 16th.

I believe it may have been written in Latin, so possibly depends on the English edition you get hold of, but I found it surprisingly easy to read, of great historical interest, and it shone a light on the great constants of socialist thought (for Utopia is a recognisably socialist nation, for all its oddities of antiquity).

Utopia is a book I vaguely intended to read in my late teens, but put off by the idea that it might be hard to read because of its age, and potentially long and dry (it turned out to be neither), I never got round to it. Being of Yorkshire birth and ancestry, naturally the prospect of free e-books piqued my interest so when I did get my e-reader a couple of months ago, I went straight to the online repositories of out of copyright books. A combination of resurgent interest thanks to Jonathan Rose’s book (The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes), and the ease of carrying several long books at once, plus a novel for light relief, means that I’ve been reading all sorts of books I never quite got round to at nineteen, as well as ones that weren’t on my radar back then. I’ve particularly been enjoying John Ruskin lately, and for that alone I salute the rise (but never the domination) of the e-reader.

A constant drip wearing away the stone of literature

No, I am not referring to myself as a constant drip. The title is supposed to conjure images of gradually breaking down a formidable structure. Keeping on chipping away. Little and often. That sort of thing.

Since I got my e-reader for easier, lighter reading material on the daily commute, I’ve been leaving the doorstop books for reading at home. Except the daily commute is my main reading time, and for a while I wasn’t getting very far. Then I took to reading a chapter last thing before bed. Half a chapter while dinner’s in the oven. A couple of pages while OneMonkey’s left the room mid-conversation to let the cat in. Before I knew it, I was zipping through.

As ever I pounced on the lesson in there: this applies to writing, too. We can’t all write full-time (we wouldn’t all want to), but I’ve found before that it’s possible to get a surprising number of words on the page without it taking you away from other activities too much. Most of the time, I’m lucky enough to be able to write at lunchtime. If I’m quick about getting to the library I can get 45 minutes of solid writing in, without much in the way of distractions, and if I do it regularly so I can pretty much remember what I’d written last time, I can watch the wordcount grow quite quickly.

If you’re prepared (by which I mean, have suitable writing materials to hand and have thought a bit about what you want to say next) you can write a paragraph while you’re waiting for the kitchen timer. Or sitting outside your child’s after-school activity (or if they’re older, outside the party they swore they’d be ready to leave at ten). Or in the doctor’s waiting room, at the bus stop, during the interval at a theatre, in a long post office queue, or in the last fifteen minutes before bed. Each time you write, it might not seem like much. Eventually though, it could become a novel.

The Cult of the Classics

Working men making their own exploration into culture in the 19th century were often stuck in the past as far as their reading material went. They looked to Pope, Milton, Shakespeare, Carlyle etc. All of which I as a teenager, beginning to explore literature for myself, read or attempted to read, or felt guilty for not reading. The kind of books that featured on Sir John Lubbock’s Victorian list of books you ‘should’ have read in order to be considered cultured. Although for working men in the 19th century, reading the whole lot wouldn’t guarantee that. But I digress…

More than 100 years later, for GCSE in the early 1990s, I studied Shakespeare and Wordsworth. We have stagnated, or worse, we are regressing because every year that goes by takes us a year further from the time when any of those works was fresh and new. And as the list is added to (very slowly) the chances of anyone getting through the lot at a reasonably young age grow slimmer.

It is important to know what foundations your culture was built on, but at what cost? If you have to struggle with the language, delve into sideroads of history to understand what was at the time a passing reference to a contemporary person or event, doesn’t that lose some of the pleasure? Which is not to say you shouldn’t do that if you want to – overcoming the challenge may lead to a depth of enjoyment hitherto unknown – but I don’t think it should be expected.

These books or authors were held up at their own times and those just after as the best example of, in Dickens for instance, social conscience in literature. Haven’t we got any other examples yet? If not, we must be doing something wrong.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

I hadn’t heard much about this novel before I read it, but I kept seeing it in charity shops and the library and eventually I read the back because it had an intriguing title, and it sounded like the kind of thing I might enjoy. A historical fantasy novel in which Yorkshire is a key place, and one of the two characters named in the title is a Yorkshireman. Excellent.

English Magic is in a bad way. There are no practical magicians any more, and the Golden Age is long over. Mr Norrell strongly feels it’s time for a revival, but only if it’s done properly. Which is to say, by him. As a curmudgeonly old Yorkshire recluse, he doesn’t seem like the ideal candidate for a trip to London to interest the government in English Magic. Magicians are not quite respectable, so society feels. However, he must try, and when he gets himself a pupil in the form of handsome young Jonathan Strange, the fate of English Magic looks much rosier than it has in a long time. Nothing is ever that simple, of course, and by drawing attention to themselves Strange and Norrell evoke the envy and enmity of some powerful people.

I almost feel bad for saying anything negative about this book; the plot is entertaining and at times tense, the characters are well-drawn and the era is vividly evoked, not least by the writing style. The length, however… Well, the length in itself isn’t a problem (about a thousand pages in the paperback edition I bought), I have books that are as long or longer by Tad Williams and Stephen King. It could be the apparent lack of activity for long periods, but then I enjoyed Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past which is a longer book in which less dramatic things happen at less frequent intervals. I think in my view the very thing that makes the novel so unique has brought about its downfall.

The book is set in the early years of the 19th century, in fact the Napoleonic Wars feature prominently during one part of the book. The author has therefore taken the (at first glance brilliant) decision to write in the style of a Georgian or early Victorian popular novel; the spellings sometimes look odd (chuse, shew rather than choose or show) and the long-winded style with asides into gentle social satire or an examination of manners reminded me a little of Anthony Trollope (which, as regular readers will know, I intend as high praise). However, when it comes down to it this is a fantasy novel, a novel in which the stakes are lives and kingdoms and ways of life, not who will marry whom and when. While it was amusing to read of magic in England in such a commonplace manner, and much as I enjoyed the reply to a question on whether a magician could kill someone by magic (‘I suppose a magician might, but a gentleman never could’), ultimately I found it was too laid-back a style for what was happening.

A magician achieves something not achieved for hundreds of years, he’s alone and it’s dangerous, but because of the style this feat is described almost as though he’s dressing for dinner, and there is never any insight into whether he was afraid or what the consequences might have been. His wife does make him promise not to try it again for a while, but there’s no sense of her being terrified of what might happen. The asides and the scene-setting (amusing dialogues at society parties or in Cabinet meetings, for instance) do help place the story in time, but tension that has built up dissipates during these sections and I’d almost forgotten what jeopardy a character was in the last time we saw him, by the time he turns up again some chapters later in different circumstances.

OneMonkey started reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell but gave up after about 300 pages. He said he kept thinking something was about to happen, then it didn’t, and in the end he grew tired of the anticlimax. I persevered to the end of the novel because I wanted to know what happened to the characters (who I had been made to care about), and I was impressed by what had been attempted with the book (the setting and the style), but I confess I wasn’t racing through chapters in a dash to the end, in fact it took me longer to read than any novel has for many years. In short, I want to recommend this book for so many reasons, but I’m reluctant because 9 out of 10 of you will resent me for wasting weeks of your time.

Secret favourites

I was musing on favourite books, and wondering what I’d put as mine, but I dismissed it within moments as a ridiculous idea. Even if we allowed that it would change in half an hour, and probably every half an hour for the rest of my life (though some books would be chosen many times) I still couldn’t pick a favourite.

Spare a thought, then, for the editor, the competition judge, the slush-monkey. Over at the Short Story Club we’ve been reviewing the year of official existence (we will be continuing, at least for now, but this is a bonus) and specifically trying to pick our favourite winner of the monthly story competitions. We’re doing it for fun, and maybe as a chance to reflect on what we’ve learnt, but in each of those months someone has had to choose this story over that, all the way to a shortlist, from which Louise Doughty has had to pick the winner. How many times has she wanted to cry ‘Hang on, I meant that one. No, this one. What was the one about Bernstein again?’ Alas, once the winner has been announced, there’s no changing your mind.

If you ask me who my favourite band is I will probably still say either Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden or the Clash depending what mood I’m in, as I have done since I was 14. OneMonkey may occasionally goad me into admitting I listen to Half Man Half Biscuit or the Damned more than I listen to the Clash these days, and I do get very excited about Terrorvision, but I would be unlikely to cite them as favourites. Even less likely to cite AC/DC or the Dogs D’Amour, much as I love them both. Consider, then, the fact that I realised as I neared the end of my time at university that the only albums I’d had with me every term were one by AC/DC, and one by the Dogs D’Amour. There’s a lesson in there somewhere – if you find it, send it my way.

Books as art: the future of publishing?

I’ve made the books=vinyl, e-reader=mp3-player analogy before but it seemed to work so I’ll use it again: vinyl didn’t die out because of cassettes, or CDs, mini-discs or digital music collections. Books won’t die out.

OneMonkey raised an interesting question recently though: will they become pieces of art? If you can get the content of a novel electronically in a convenient form that many people have embraced, what will be the added value of owning the physical book? Aside from personal preferences on holding paper and turning real pages that smell of childhood memories, what? It’s the cachet, the exclusivity can be marketed but only if it is exclusive by some measure of the word.

Limited edition signed copies. Hand-written title pages, individual artwork, fine bindings. What if someone owned the original? What if by owning the original you could stop anyone else from being able to read it (like if you bought a watercolour from a commercial gallery and with it the rights to prints). Then you could charge for viewing; stately homes could charge the public to come and read in their library as well as see their Van Dyck’s in the long gallery. Writers could be commissioned by the wealthy.

Books can be art but they also contain ideas and I’d worry about anything that blocks the flow of that. But to stretch another analogy, I’d be much happier about a few rich collectors owning originals if it facilitated the sale of a load of cheap postcards, allowing art into every home.

The highly predictable review of the year, and a preview of 2013

With one mince pie and a heel of stollen left in the tin, it’s time to turn our attention to the changing of the calendar. A moment to pause and reflect on the twelve months behind, and start planning the next batch.

2012 saw the release of my first novel Wasted Years, as an e-book costing £1.99. It also saw, back in January, the free electronic release of the graphic novel I wrote a few years ago, Boys Don’t Cry. If you’ve read those and are eager for further output, you might not have to wait too long: plans are afoot for a small collection of my short stories (I would call it a slim volume, but it’ll be an e-book), mostly unpublished ones, to be called The Little Book of Northern Women. I’ve been designing the cover this very morning.

In case anyone’s interested, my submission level for 2012 was higher than ever before, but since it mostly consisted of competition entries I have very little to show for it, at least in the way of publications. In the way of fun, friendships, silliness, and mentions in the Telegraph (here and here), there’s been quite a bit, thanks to Louise Doughty and the SSC. Apart from Kelvin and JulieT, I don’t think I can point you at any of my SSC comrades, I don’t even know most of their names, but I can point you at one of the best stories to win the monthly competition, which happens to have been written by possibly the most active member of the SSC: go read ’76 by Kipples, I’ll be here when you get back.

I hope you enjoyed that story, I did. Anyway, apart from SSC output, I’ve been reading the usual mix of Doctor Who novels, crime, fantasy, sci-fi, writing manuals, and literary fiction this year (and a history of British trade unionism). I got an e-reader for Christmas (Kobo mini, since you asked) and I’ve already started filling it with Anthony Trollope novels I haven’t yet enjoyed (he did write an awful lot of books). So many books, so little time, as ever.

May you all have a year filled with all the books you most want to read, all the story acceptances you warrant, and some understanding relatives for when the deadlines are looming. See you on the other side of midnight.

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

Thanks to friend T, I’ve read another Kate Atkinson book recently, and enjoyed it every bit as much as Behind the Scenes at the Museum; Human Croquet may even be better. Like Behind the Scenes at the Museum it’s a well-crafted story of Northern dysfunctional families, with a mystery at its heart and suffused with dark humour, but it has a fairytale feel to it (and in a sense, it is – you’re left at the end with a version of events but no telling whether it’s ‘true’ or not).

The novel is narrated by 16 year old Isobel Fairfax.  The Fairfaxes had money, once, just as Isobel and her older brother Charles had a mother. Legends have grown up around the loss of both. As with Behind the Scenes…, there are historical chapters filling in backstory and giving clues to later situations and behaviour, emphasising the patterns and repetitions in families and communities.

At the same time, it’s a story about a teenage girl in 1960 – concerned about boys, parties, and Biology O-level, while her friend Carmen is the same age but already engaged and working at a cheese counter in a department store. Wryly observed domestic disharmony and eternal hormonal truths blend well.

There is a revelation towards the end that might leave some readers feeling cheated or misled. However, if you’re prepared to shelve your desire for solid facts and stability in a story, Human Croquet is well worth a read.

Cheap editions and the end of perpetual copyright in 1774

I am a writer, but I’m also a socialist and as such a great advocate of universal education to as high a level and in whatever form possible. Perpetual copyright, while ensuring that you and your descendants retain control of your work in perpetuity (and of course continue to rake in the royalties), precludes the kind of cheap editions that allow someone on low pay to read freely and, by extension, educate themselves outside of school. In 1774 when perpetual copyright ended in Britain there wasn’t a network of free lending libraries in every town (of course, that’s ceasing to be the case now, but that’s another story) and for a worker to read a book, they or one of their circle had to have bought it.  The cheap editions of older works that were suddenly possible due to the change in copyright law allowed that to happen.

When I was in my teens, the Wordsworth Classics range was launched: a pound for works of Dickens, Tolstoy, and a host of other, mainly 19th century, authors. At the time I’m sure I could have borrowed any of them from the library but for less than the cost of a return bus fare into town I could have my own copy to keep coming back to. Most of them still grace my shelves. The paper may have been thin and the spines plain grey but the words inside were the same as if I’d inherited a copy with a tooled leather binding. Back in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries that revolutionary cheapening of old books would, if any formally educated man was willing to engage, have enabled me to debate those contents with my supposed betters. It would have let me creep into the citadel of learning.

Detective novel as history lesson

As a follow-up to my post in January about the detective novel as geography lesson, I thought I’d point out an article in last week’s Guardian, which my dad has steered me in the direction of. Mark Lawson, it seems, has made a series for Radio 4 about post-war European history as seen in the pages of detective novels. I haven’t listened to it yet, but it does sound interesting and the article mentions a few names I haven’t come across before and should probably go in search of. As Lawson points out, possessions and circumstances are particularly important in crime novels and they serve to catalogue the changing norms in society.
The Guardian also seems to have noticed the existence of NaNoWriMo, which of course starts tomorrow. I won’t be taking part this year (still sorting out those short stories from my mad March experiment) but good luck to all participants and we’ll see you on the other side.

Size isn’t everything

Over at the Telegraph Short Story Club, Louise Doughty has been talking about short novels and novellas. Various works have been mentioned and measured, but what makes something a novella rather than a short novel? And what is a novelette (I long for it to involve eggs and a frying pan. And paper napkins)? It can’t all be down to length – I have read short stories by Stephen King longer than some people’s novels. I have seen novellas as short as a (long) short story. Someone suggested it’s down to marketing – if a publisher’s happy to promote it on its own, it’s a novel. Which leads to two questions.

The first is: What happens with self-published e-books? It can be as short as you like, and as long as the story feels satisfying and the reader doesn’t feel like they’ve been overcharged, does it matter how it’s classified? Will there be more ‘short novels’ where once they may have been padded to reach some acceptable wordcount, or cast aside as too short to bother with? And might we find the time to read more, from a wider pool of authors, that way?

The second is: Is there something about a story, its structure or content that makes it a novella rather than a novel? If you read two books of 125 pages, could you confidently say one was a novel that was a touch on the short side, and the other was a full-blown novella? I ventured (knowing next to nothing about it) that subplots or the lack thereof may come into it. I wondered if the novella may be intermediate in complexity and cast-list, between the short story and the novel (again, what about that novelette?).

I wonder further if any of this matters, to the writer? Unless you’re an author with an agent, who has to think in terms of pitching your new work to an audience, do you (should you?) think about the length of a story before you sit down to begin? Do you sit at your desk thinking ‘I fancy a novella this time’ or do you conjure a world, a character, a scene and find within that the kernel of the story that will let you know how long it needs to be? Perhaps that’s only an insight into my chaotic creativity.

Thoughts on the topic would be most welcome. Or if anyone has a recipe for a nourishing novelette.

Life-changing reading

Glancing through some blogging prompts, one which caught my eye was ‘name a book that changed your life’. The usual responses, the ones that go on show to the outside world, are something generally considered spiritual or inspiring, perhaps a biography or great (and usually old) work of literature. For me the candidates undoubtedly include The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat by John Gribbin. And maybe the British Hit Singles book. But did any of them change my life, or just confirm the path I was already on? A while ago I said to OneMonkey ‘if only I’d read Neuromancer when I was 15′, then we looked at each other and laughed – the 15-year-old me was ripe for Neuromancer, but reading it back then wouldn’t have changed anything, I would just have appreciated it even more than when I eventually read it years later.

Books can definitely have a profound effect on life, for better or worse, but is a single book life-changing? Maybe I’m just missing out, or don’t have the right sort of personality to experience that kind of sudden alteration, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book and had my whole outlook on life shifted. Feel free to tell me what I’m missing out on.

A day late, catching up slowly

Some seasons seem to be hard-wired into us. It’s the start of a new year around here, and while there haven’t been any fireworks (that I’ve noticed), there are plenty of kids in new school uniforms, teenagers forming new cliques, and students filtering into the city for freshers’ week. It’s been some time since I started afresh in a new academic year but that doesn’t seem to stop my mind whirring away as though I was in the midst of major upheaval. Suddenly I have no time for anything: I’ve missed several writing competition deadlines, pulled out of a writing project, and I’m juggling family get-togethers, theatre trips and writing workshops in increasingly squeezed weekends.

Partly it’s lack of organisation (but if I sent an entry to a writing competition two weeks before the deadline, mightn’t I miss out on sending a better story which was already finished but still needed to be forgotten about for a week and redrafted?) but also we’re heading into festival season. Morley, Ilkley and Sheffield are tempting me with their literary delights. There’s a large crossover of guests, but each has something unique to offer, something I know I’d kick myself for missing.

I know someone who’s started an MA in Creative Writing this week. I don’t think I’ll be rushing to follow in his footsteps, but this time of year does make me want to learn new things and begin journeys. I’m reading one non-fiction book, one collection of short stories and a sci-fi novel at the moment, I’ve got 2 almost-written detective novels in my work-in-progress folder, plus a whole host of short stories. I’ve got ideas for collections, new stories, and a series of blog posts floating around. And this is before we mention the time spent exercising and chatting down at the Telegraph Short Story Club. Don’t expect me to know what day it is for a while.

The modern ease of literary indulgence

I’ve been thinking lately about how much I take reading and writing for granted. It was sparked off almost as soon as I began to read The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose. I had a similar moment of insight when I read a book about women in the 17th century but to read of people in the 19th and early 20th centuries (some recent enough to be contemporaries of people I’ve met, not just a faceless part of history) being looked on with suspicion, shunned by their communities or losing work just because they wanted to read more than the bible, or dared to try and write, is shocking. And yet, in the face of all this they pressed on and did it anyway.

There’s a man who built up a whole library for himself, when each book cost the equivalent of his pay for 10 hours’ work; a full-price novel now costs less than a couple of hours’ work on minimum wage and even a popular non-fiction book would most likely be no more than four or five hours. There are those who set up literature-discussion groups in their village, when everyone assumed they were stirring up revolution and reacted accordingly. Factory workers were sneaking a glimpse at books when no-one was looking, weavers were propping books on the loom so they could read while they worked, scullery maids were skimping on sleep to catch up on another chapter.

It’s so easy now (for as long as the libraries stay open, at least) to read books of so many kinds no matter how low your income, and to write poetry or fiction or essays on blogs like this, never mind privately for your own amusement. I can only look to the past, my ancestors and their contemporaries, and salute them.

A writing career kindled

My name is JY Saville, and I’m a self-published novelist…

Yes, it had to happen eventually, I’ve released Wasted Years (the one that used to be known around here as the serial novel, when friend T was reading it in instalments) for the Kindle. It wasn’t as easy a decision as it might have been – why charge for that (£1.99) when the graphic novel’s free to download, for instance? There is no simple answer but I came to an agreement with myself, and there it is. I’m pretty sure you can sample the start of it for free so do go have a look, give me feedback, and if you feel you may enjoy it you could always buy a copy. You don’t even need a Kindle, so I’m told – there are apparently .mobi readers for PC, Linux, smartphones etc.

The novel is set mainly in West Yorkshire (well of course it is) and is about lasting friendships, trying to work out what you want out of life, and realising there’s more than one measure of success out there. Alternatively it’s about 16 years in the life of 2 accountants as they stumble through love, loss and Christmas parties. You can read more about it here.

I’ll leave you with a tantalising picture of the cover I made using the ever-useful GNU Image Manipulation Program: