ukpr – Page 16 – Peggy Riley

Amity & Sorrow

This blog started as a place to keep research for my second novel, but my first novel has often taken me away from that. As such, when you’re here googling “Nazi fairy tales” (and many of you do!) you sometimes bump into blog posts about farming or polygamy. I have been squirrelling away on edits for my first novel since the new year and I’m delighted to say that the edits are approved and it’s moving into production. There are so many amazing steps on this journey from first idea to stack of paper that it’s all quite dizzying. I am one grateful writer.

AMITY & SORROW, my book about God, sex & farming, will be published in spring 2013 with Little, Brown (US) and Headline Review (UK). Foreign rights have sold with Orlando (Holland) and Presses de la Cite (France). I thought it was high time I changed my Twitter bio, too. Now, back to the war – and book two!

Look, Ma – no laptop!

I write. And I write on my laptop, no matter where the writing is happening. Planes, trains – even on my lap. My laptop used to do everything for me, but it increasingly saw less email action with the invention of that gadget known as the iPhone. So far, so easy. Then that evil genius Steve Jobs went and wooed me with an iPad. I was powerless. I bought one. Maybe you did, too? And in one purchase, I turned into a virtual cliche’, juggling the constant charging of Apple products, phone, laptop and iPad, and having to buy more gadgets to boost the wifi – sigh…

The iPad is a thing of beauty, to be sure – but what is it actually for? I didn’t even know when I bought one. I use it to email and tweet. I use it to read magazines, mostly at that aggregator and app-of-wonder Zite (but not books. Can’t be doing with that) And then when it came time to pack for a weekend away of writing, I hefted the laptop in my handbag and looked at the slim creature I would be leaving behind. What if you could write – and I mean really write – on your iPad?

David Hewson blogged about software for the iPad, so I already knew that my beloved Scrivener was a non-starter, though I believe it is in development. Bring on the day, I say. David recommended Storyist, so after having a Google around, I plumped for the app. It’s straightforward to use, but not to edit in, which is what I wanted to do. It isn’t straightforward to import text into, but not impossible. The app says it will open emails in rich text format, but that didn’t work for me. Storyist didn’t like rtfs and didn’t recognise emails. Having a Dropbox app is a work around and once all your software is synching to Dropbox, you can import straight from there as plain text. A txt file is bug-ugly on screen, but once opened in Storyist, it looks formatted and fine – I don’t know how, but it does. Formatting in Storify isn’t as straightforward, and tabs won’t line up and things, but if that doesn’t get in the way of your editing, it’s plain sailing from there.

Some people are a whiz on the iPad’s keyboard. Not me. I end up jabbing with one finger when I am a touch typist. (Thanks, Ma, for insisting on those high school typing classes – oh, and Happy Mother’s Day!) I may not be picky about a lot of things, but, apparently, I am about keyboards. I had no idea I was so opinionated. The key action has to be “just so”. The keyboard must be full-sized, have return buttons on both sides, as well as a delete key in the correct place, and it must have a wide space bar, just like a “real” keyboard. When looking for travel keyboards, you’d be surprised what they try to fob off on you – from fiddling round with key placement to dinky space bars, as well as messing with the whole QWERTY system, which will, no doubt, go the way of the dinosaurs once all we touch typists have popped our clogs.

After days of obsessive googling, I found the travel keyboard of my dreams. It’s the Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad. It connects via Bluetooth to your iPad and ships in a nifty, rigid plastic sleeve that folds back on itself to make a secure easel to tilt the iPad upright into position, like a laptop screen. Lambda Tek shipped it with its four necessary AAA batteries – make sure you have them on hand or it’s tears all round – and after visiting the Logitech site and pushing one little “connect” button, I was off and running. The key action is perfect and there are only a few, random double strikes now and again, which are probably due more to my over enthusiastic typing than to the Bluetooth. I typed happily on the train, on cafe tables and beds. In fact, the only place I couldn’t type happily was in the writing workshops I had packed to travel to, the room of which only suffered from a lack of tables. Perhaps the only drawback to this system is that it isn’t a laptop – it really doesn’t work on your lap, because there’s no where to put the iPad. In the writing workshop, I was forced to use notebook and pen – a drawback for someone with chicken-scrawl like mine. Fortunately, I can read most of what I wrote, so all was not lost. If you have an iPad and want to go commando from your laptop, why give the keyboard and software a spin?

But if you can actually read your own handwriting, why not stick with the notebook and pen? They’re still the lightest things to travel with and you’ll never risk leaving your charger in a hotel socket again.

On not writing

Right now, I’m not writing. And it feels strange. I have been writing for a long time. Specifically, I have been writing my first novel for a long time, and I have been editing it for a long time. One week ago, I turned it over to my editor and maybe I’m finished with it now. Maybe. Maybe changes will be required and, if so, I am happy to make them. We both want the book to be its best.

So, I’m not writing. I’m waiting and dreaming and sleeping in and wandering around garden centres and pulling weeds and reading fiction and staring. I’m not writing. And I’m wondering how I would fill all this time and this space in my head if I didn’t write. I can’t imagine.

Why I bring writers into my house

Picture this: a long lounge filled with writers – at all stages of their careers – and readers, crowded together on sofas and chairs, full glasses to hand, to hear a writer read from her/his work and to have a wonderful, literary conversation. Does that sound like your perfect night? Me, too. This is why I invite writers to come to my house, to my long lounge, because I want to be a part of these conversations. And if I don’t host them – who will?

It’s all Inua Ellams fault. This sparky poet visited my house as part of his whistle-stop tour of Britain (7 living rooms, 7 cities, 7 nights) to celebrate his latest collection. After hosting Inua, I had the bug and it continued to bite, with recent visits by Betty Herbert and, this past weekend, a reading to celebrate the paperback launch of Vanessa Gebbie’s The Coward’s Tale, as well as a sold-out workshop for 10 lucky local-ish writers.

Obviously, this system of producing events relies on the generosity of writers – writers who will expect to have their books available at your event. Any writer you approach can give you the name of their publisher’s publicity department; they, in turn, will put you in touch with accounts, so that you can arrange for ordering the books – often at a discount so that you can, in turn, pass the discount on to your audiences or use the “profit margin” to cover the writer’s travel costs. Local writers and writers with smaller publishing houses may opt to bring the books to you, so that you can sell for them. Really, all you have to do is ask with enthusiasm and a sense of how many books you might hope to sell as a result, so that the writer can gauge if it feels right for them. Writers are always looking for ways to meet new readers and no one is offended at being considered and approached. If it doesn’t feel like an opportunity they will say no, as is their right.

Once you have a writer in place and you’re done doing your happy dance, what next? How does it work? The main thing to stress here is – I have no funding. I used to have funding to produce live literature events, but I no longer do. However, you shouldn’t let a little thing like the lack of funding get in your way! All you need is a space. I use my living room because I don’t have to hire it and I don’t have to fit around other people’s schedules or rules or regulars. I have run plenty of events in pubs, libraries, arts centres, etc., and none of them is as cozy or inviting as your own house, whatever its size. Audiences are remarkably forgiving and resilient if they see that you are doing your best and have taken charge of the bum-to-cushion ratio. You might like to offer tea or put out a donations cup to cover the cost of offering wine. Jumbo glasses are available here for a pound, as well as pitchers of juice and (entirely gratis) tap water. You also need a way of getting the word out, so that you aren’t leaning on your friends to fill every event, and a way of vetting who’s coming – you are your own security if your house is your venue. Certainly, be cautious about posting your address anywhere via social networking – I communicate by email with everyone before they get my details.

Introduce the writer and take charge of when the event starts and ends. The writer just wants to do what she does best and doesn’t want to worry about logistics. Take charge of when and how books get sold, keeping track of how many are sold and remembering to have a float for change – everyone will turn up having just come from the cash point. Consider having some diversity in your programming – invite a fellow local writer to “open” for the writer, or have some kind of “ice breaker” activity – we have shown short films on topic as well as run non-threatening writing exercises, so that non-writers can take part, anxiety-free. Inua suggested magicians and belly dancers were nice openers for poets – who am I to disagree?

The real reason why I bring writers to my house is to be a part of their journey and to help it along as best I can, whether I know the writer well or not. As publishers struggle to market the full output of their list, especially during the transition from hardback to paper, we writers and readers can work to fill the gap. In fact, it is reclaiming an old tradition of literary salons, which featured hosted gatherings of cultural and intellectual folk for debate and edification. They used to take part in drawing rooms and coffee houses – now, they take place in grand hotels and venues across Britain – as well as in humble living rooms, like mine. If you’re looking to make a difference in your community – or in a writer’s professional life – why not consider hosting your own salon? And if you haven’t the where-with-all to use your home, partner with your library or a local bookstore, who will be grateful for the support and the help in attracting an audience, or a function room in your local pub, which will welcome a crowd of drinkers on a slow night. My thanks to Vanessa and to Bloomsbury, her publisher, who made this weekend easy – and to friends, old and new, who came into my living room and left with new books and new ideas for their own writing and reading. What more do we want than that?

As for me, my own book is due at the end of next week. No more from me here until I press send!

On Editing

You are editing. That is all that you are doing. You are editing a novel. You are drawing red lines through sentences and words and double-checking tenses and strands of story and holding your breath each time you press save in MS Word, for fear of crashing. You are thanking the MacBook God for the screen save command and the force quit buttons.

Editing is no walk in the park. You knew it wouldn’t be, but you somehow thought this edit would be the easiest, this last or nearly-so draft. You have tested your plot and characters. You feel confident about what you have. You have editors now, brilliant people who can see your book, because you suspect you can no longer see it. You are walking through it, arms out, editing by touch, by sense, by gut. You are trusting your story, and yet… yet…

All you are doing is editing. You are looking so carefully at what you have done and telling yourself you do not have to unpick the whole of the thing and put it together again, because that is how you tend to edit. You are trying to look hard and fast at the thing and to trust it. Trust the work you have done and also to know when it is not your best. And to make it your best. And when you find a whole chapter that you do not need, even after all these drafts, all this looking, you are not worried when you press delete. You are thanking the MS Word God of track changes, too. Look at how the universe conspires to help you. Go, red pen, go. You are only editing.

The Slippery Slink

“They seek by day. They seek by night.
Those Nazis seek with all their might.
Of sleep they cannot catch a wink,
Nor can they catch the Slippery Slink!”

This comes from “Adventure”, a wartime comic book dated May 4th 1940. It’s issue No. 966. According to the cover, which features “The Human Torpedo Lands in Britain” and “Free – War Savings for Boys Named Inside!”, it comes out every Monday and is priced at 2d. Inside, you find “The News-Rangers Round-Up”, a story “How the Heroes of Finland Fought On!” and “The Nazi Torpedo – How a Nazi skipper scuttles his ship – in a Suffolk creek”. But my favourite has to be The Slippery Slink and the tale of how clever British actors and musicians, assembled as The League of Slinks, rescues scientist Paul Grunow from his Unter den Linden shop window prison, guarded by the Gestapo and “Gasbag Goebbels”, who is ultimately doped and swapped for the prisoner. At the story’s end, next week’s story is plugged and the boys are asked to make a guess how the Slink’s next daring exploit will come out.

But this is all I know about the mysterious Slippery Slink and his British band, foiling the Nazis at every turn. It’s another example of how the war was “sold” to children, from Nazi board games whose “challenge” was to make a town “Jew-free” to “Mein Kampf comic books” and Hitler paper dolls. Adventure readers are urged to cut out a war stamp in the comic book and post it to Fleet Street in the hope of winning a War Savings Certificate – “every one helps to fight against Britain’s enemies.” In an era of “total war” it’s no surprise that the war is everywhere that children look. But I can’t help wonder if it made it easier for them to understand the war by feeling that they were a part of it. It wasn’t a discussion had in the next room, after they’d gone to bed. It wasn’t a war that was just for grown ups. Even Adventure tells them, “Come on, Boys! Do your bit for Britain!” Meanwhile, do you know anything about the Slippery Slink? If so, do let me know.

Lucky

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Good thing, as they’d all be dashed by now. Who needs to create opportunities for failure?

But I do like the clean slate of a new year. And mine’s still pretty clean. I like all those empty squares on my iCal. I would like all those empty pages in my 2012 diary if I could remember to buy one. But this week, I have been trying to fill them up. This year, I’m lucky enough to be doing some travelling. I have a couple of weeks in Berlin coming up, and I am filling a notebook with places I need to visit or revisit and putting lots of notes in my work-in-progress to remind myself to write a sequence once I have seen them/heard them/smelled them. I know I am lucky, for you can do nearly anything with Google maps – and paper maps, for that matter, as my character is in 1920s – 1930s Berlin. I am lucky I get to visit, so that I can come up with my own descriptions and not worry I am regurgitating Hans Fallada. First on my list are museums that have been moved, due to bombing. But my character will have needed to go to them before the war – before the bombing. I’ll talk more about these museums, once I find them!

I’m also putting in writing deadlines, committing to when I’d like to be done with the second draft of this second book, as well as the edited draft for my first book. Again, I am lucky to have all those empty squares to fill. And then I’m writing into squares when I will take a writing break, because I know I’ll need transition time to move back into the second book once everybody’s happy with the first one. I’m lucky that Susan Elderkin had room for me on the last workshop she will be running in her inspirational Dorset home, and luckier still to have good friends to write with during, and after, so that I get back into the swing after editing.

They always say that there are two types of writers – planners and pants-ers. I’m definitely a planner, and Scrivener lets me create folders for these chunks of time that I’m writing in, so that it’s easy to move around in them, when what happens in 1925 affects 1941, etc. I plan a framework – I know what the arc is – but I have no idea how I’m to get from one event to another, let alone one year to the next. In that respect, I’m a pants-er – I don’t do index cards for events or plot points – I’d rather wait and see what emerges from the writing. And perhaps that is how this year will be structured: a rough plan on an iCal grid, a year stretching out before me, and a rough idea of where I’m going by the end of it – but what will emerge is still a mystery. If so, that makes me very lucky, indeed.

Big Love

The bulk of this blog is about my second novel, but I hope today you’ll forgive a post on my first. It is very much on my mind these days, happily. One of today’s bits of “work” was watching the final episode of the HBO series Big Love, which followed the plural marriages of DIY mogul-turned-senator Bill Henrickson and his three wives: the long-suffering first wife, Barbara, who was not raised as a polygamist; Nikki, daughter to the prophet of notorious fundamentalist compound Juniper Creek; and Margene who, in series five, threatened to bring all the marriages down through her youth and inexperience.

I am fascinated by polygamy and by indigenous American faiths like Mormonism. There is polygamy in my first novel. It is about the first wife of fifty, and her two daughters, Amity and Sorrow. It has little to do with Big Love, I suppose, but Big Love is only one way that popular culture is currently looking at the concept of polygamy, as well as how much government anyone wants in her faith. For most handmade faiths, like Mormonism, the answer is – not a lot. The history of polygamy in the Mormon church sprang from the revelations of founder Joseph Smith. His wife was less keen on his revelations and never accepted that her husband should take other wives, but take them he did. It was polygamous Mormons who walked the Nauvoo trail to the great Salt Lake after his murder. And it was polygamous Mormons who renounced the practice when the US government gave them an ultimatum: did they want their faith to remain polygamous or did they want their Utah to become a state? The majority became monogamous while a small percentage remained true to Smith’s revelations, becoming Fundamentalist Mormons or FLDS. Mormons “proper”, the Latter Day Saints or LDS church, may not acknowledge them as Mormons but there are at least 40,000 practicing polygamous Mormons in Utah alone, roughly 2% of the population, as well as polygamists in Arizona, Texas, Colorado, Idaho, Mexico and Canada. And if polygamists have been in hiding since their 1890 criminalisation, they have been out and proud in the new Millennium. There have been a handful of novels, from The 19th Wife, a Richard & Judy book, to Betty Webb’s popular mystery series whose plots of revolve around such themes. There are also a number of nonfiction books available, from reprints circa-Joseph Smith to more recent follow ons from Carolyn Jessop’s compelling Escape, including the recent memoir published by the polygamous Darger family, Love Times Three. Is it polygamy’s time to shine or are we simply, in the words of Brady Udall, who published The Lonely Polygamist, only interested in polygamy because of, ” one word, sex”?

Big Love was not about sex, which probably proved a great disappointment to many a HBO viewer. Big Love was always more interested in how the characters interacted, pulling together, pulling apart, grappling over matters of faith and responsibility vs. the right to choose. It was always more interested in how the three wives, who would not be likely friends in the real world, found a way to be married to each other than to how any of the women spent the night with their shared husband. Big Love was also interested in faith and, in the later series, how the Mormon faith, fundamentalist or no, would serve its women, its wives. FLDS members argue that the early church afforded great rights for women; it was Utah who granted the right to vote to its women fifty years before the rest of America. Fundamentalist chapels might be choked with wives, but you do not see them on the dais; you do not see them in charge. This despite a Mormon doctrine on “the Mother in Heaven” that is perhaps only second to pagans and Wiccans for “goddess worship.” Again, this doctrine is disputed by the LDS, though feminist Mormons are quietly aware.

What fascinated me most by Big Love and what my novel is also interested in is the conflict between the duties of a family and the rights of an individual. Does having a wife (or many wives) afford a woman more individual freedom to pursue personal interests? Or does being part of a plural marriage only serve to heap on the guilt and obligation in some kind of familial perfection? Does having several mothers for your children help you to care for them better? Or is a mother incapable of treating a sister wife’s child as her own? In the final episode, husband Bill has his day in court, pursuing the reformation of polygamy and the legalisation of plural marriage. But before the issue can be resolved, there is a shocking and tragic incident (no spoilers here) and we are reminded that the series is not about political activities either. It ends, as it begins, with three women trying to be family to one another, trying to be wives to one another.

In a side note, because whenever I write about one book I find a strange parallel in the other, Nazi Germany also flirted with polygamy. Bormann and Himmler argued that there would be a surplus of women after the war, due to the loss of soldiers. Decorated soldiers should, therefore, have the right to marry and make children with these excess women. Hitler said, “The greatest fighter deserves the most beautiful woman … If the German man is to be unreservedly ready to die as a soldier, he must have the freedom to love unreservedly. For struggle and love belong together.”

Hitler aside, it seems to me that modern polygamists are only interested in big love. There are laws about the age a woman should be at marriage and they are there to halt the greed of men like the imprisoned president of the FLDS, for child sexual assault. But when the adults are of the age and mental capacity to give consent, I cannot see how it serves a government, or a church, to say who may be in love. We are all in unorthodox families these days, families often crafted from those we choose rather than those to whom we are born. Who is to say that our choices are any better than anyone else’s? Does it harm me for someone to have more than one wife – or more than one husband? No. But as my character was, ultimately, imperiled in her marriage, do I also think a plural wife has the right to leave without fear? Absolutely. But I would expect that for any woman in a monogamous marriage, too.

If you’re intrigued to learn more about the state of the polygamy debate today visit The Polygamy Blog for the Salt Lake Tribune and the now archived The Polygamy File, whose writer left to work on Love Times Three. Those blogs were not part of my research, but it didn’t stop me from being endlessly fascinated with the twists and turns of the numerous cases against Warren Jeffs, whose reality is far stranger than my fiction. And even now, working on book two, I can’t help but continue to watch and wonder.

Happy News

Today’s happy news was listed this afternoon in Publisher’s Weekly:

Clain Makes First Buy at Little, Brown

Dec 13, 2011

“In her first acquisition as editor-in-chief of Little, Brown, Judy Clain pre-empted world rights to the debut novel from Peggy Riley, Amity and Sorrow. Joy Harris at the Joy Harris Literary Agency brokered the deal. An LB rep said the book is about a mother who escapes a polygamous cult, with her two daughters, and winds up at the Oklahoma farm of a man caring for his ill father. Clain likened the book to titles like Kim Edwards’s The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and The Girls by Lori Larsens; Amity and Sorrow is scheduled for 2013.The deal also marks another first–the first deal made by a female editor in chief at Little, Brown. The LB rep noted that Clain is the first woman to hold the position at the Hachette division.”

As for me, I am over the moon, thrilled and delighted. I felt lucky enough to have a champion in the book with my new agent, Joy Harris, and now doubly lucky to have found a home for it with Little, Brown and Judy Clain. I am one happy, grateful writer.

The Bridport Prize

I have not done a blog post for a month now. And what a month it has been! I last blogged from New York City, crouched on a dining room chair in the one room that husband and I lived in while he rehearsed and I rewrote what I hoped would be the final draft of my first novel. One month later, I am back in the UK, and back from the pleasures of the Bridport Open Book Festival and the Bridport Prize. I was told that I was a winner a couple of months ago, but they swear you to secrecy. I am nothing if not obedient, where writing prizes are concerned. The lovely folks at the Bridport prize kept sending back edited copies of my short story, Methlahem, which would be published in their anthology. I am not known for my photographs and, sadly, this is the best of the ones I took. Here is writer and judge AL Kennedy being lovely and generous about each and every winning piece of fiction and flash fiction. She announced that my story had broken her heart which, promptly, broke mine. I gambolled up to shake her hand and managed not to fall back down the stairs. There was an elegant lunch and glasses with bubbles in. I even had a date, my lovely friend Jo, winner of Bridport’s Dorset Prize – twice!

But I don’t want you to think it was all seriousness and glamour. There was also quite a lot of fun: an evening of readings by past Bridport winners Vanessa Gebbie, Judith Allnatt and Adam Marek, a fantastic flash fiction workshop/workout by Vanessa and Tania Hershman, and one of the best live literature performances I’ve ever seen, AL Kennedy and the magic of words. Meanwhile, there were line edits to do. Having finished the New York rewrites, I staggered through jet lag, combing my own words in between the words of others. I have not felt so full in a long time. It wasn’t just the indulgent breakfasts at The Bull Hotel, scoffed while crossing out and changing tenses. It was being full of words, full of writing, full of the company of fine, fine writers. In what other world would we wish to live? The people who run The Bridport Prize, the new festival, and the marvellous arts centre are wholly wonderful, gracious and careful, thorough and hospitable. I’m already thinking I need to write more short fiction, just in the hope that I can go to more of their wonderful events. I also need to point out the generosity of Canterbury Council, who gave me a grant toward the costs of my travel and accommodation. I feel utterly supported and very, very fortunate. Thank you.

The anthology has been published. My copy is still by my bedside, lest it vanish like a dream. You can pre-order it in places like Amazon, when it will be available 8 December. In the meantime, Vanessa did a round-up of her Bridport adventure over on her blog – why not pop over? And, while you’re at it, why not start on a story of your own for next year’s Bridport? The deadline is in six months time and the 2012 judge is Patrick Gale.

As for the rest of my last month, my new agent is happy with the rewrites and I am trying not to hold my breath until I learn if the line edits are OK. And then there will be a whole new and different kind of waiting ahead. I can’t wait! Well, I can, actually. I can wait for as long as it takes.