Gorgeous weekend at my own sacred place.

Final proof-read of the new manuscript. Think it’s OK. Then was too stupid to read anything but old gardening maagazines, Vanity Fair, and a Robert Harris thriller.

One day my reading brain will return to normal. I hope.

“It is tiresome to write a novel, and more so to read it”

~ Théophile Gautier (on whose words I have been hanging all day)

O, how I love Carol Ann Duffy, and love even more that she’s Poet Laureate (and even more that Anthony Brown, a Surrealist, is the Children’s Laureate, which just cracks me up – two of my heroes in one Laureate era).

But this takes the cake. Actually, it’s the cream on the cake: Duffy on Beckham’s Achilles heel, and apart from anything else it’s utterly gorgeous.

Myth’s river – where his mother
dipped him, fished him, a
slippery golden boy flowed on,
his name on its lips.

Read it all here: David Beckham Poem ‘Achilles’ by Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate | NowPublic News Coverage

Nearly there with the new book, Auto da Fe. Lots of editing to do but it’s there, in one fairly reasonable piece, I think.
Whew.
Just in time to start the next one.

The Guardian has published a few thoughts from people who really ought to know about how to write.
I’m not sure they are rules, as such. More like guidelines:

‘The two most depressing words in the English language are “literary fiction”.’
– David Hare

‘Only bad writers think that their work is really good.’
– Anne Enright

‘Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.’
– Helen Dunmore

‘You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.’
– Margaret Atwood

‘Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.’
-Elmore Leonard

You can read it all here.
I’m going back to my desk to deal with a few sloppy verbs.

Scrambling to finish writing one book at present, before I embark on another (for the PhD) in a couple of weeks.
My own fault. I could have finished this one a year or more ago. Lost my way. Got bored with it. Now I’m fired up and charging through it (pardon the mixed metaphor) but not taking enough time to look back over old notes and bookmarks.
Need a stern talking to.
Slow down. Breathe. Check your notes before you spend two hours finding out all over again the key dates in the history of the Book of Common Prayer…

(in no particular order, really)
1. Chooks
2. Wooden boats
3. My home-grown, home-pickled beetroot (arguably as good as Auntie Myrtle’s)
4. Drew Barrymore smiling
5. Fish and chips on Blairgowrie beach at sunset
6. Writing so intently I don’t realise it’s lunchtime already
7. Pink (not the colour, mind you, which would be on the list of things I hate)
8. Lots and lots and lots of books
9. Turkish rugs in a deep crimson and midnight blue
10. Mist on the river in the early mornings.

1. A sudden influx of blog spam
2. Australia Day posturing
3. Caterpillars
4. Celebrity updates masquerading as news (Brangelina? Sure. Corey Worthington? I don’t think so.)
5. “Untold story” revelations about topics on which anybody with half a brain can find a dozen books
6. Hysteria over any mis-steps in reporting climate science: if only other science (say, testing of drugs or pesticides, or perhaps climate change denial claims) were subject to such media scrutiny
7. Unattractive tennis outfits
8. Tony Abbott. Although I can’t think of a time since 1982 when I wasn’t utterly over him
9. Apple product releases masquerading as news
10. The 2010 exercise regime I haven’t even started yet.

Just finished my beach holiday.
These are the books I took with me to read:
– The Boat (Nam Le)
– D-Day (Antony Beevor)
– The Great War and Modern Memory (Paul Fussell)

This is what I actually read:
– Who Weekly
– Famous
– Old copies of the English Country Living (again)
– The Sensuous Gardener, by my new hero Monty Don (again)
– Elizabeth Jane Howard’s memoir, Slipstream (vague and disappointingly light)
– Enigma (Robert Harris)
– When Eight Bells Toll (or something like that) and Where Eagles Dare (Alistair MacLean)
– An entire Desmond Bagley omnibus some of which wasn’t very good
I nearly even read a Clive Cussler but my partner sent me off to the newsagents for alternatives just in time, including a rather annoying Alexander Fullerton WW2 resistance thriller the name of which escapes (pardon the pun) me already.

I never do that. I usually spend my holiday reading time catching up on the pile by my bedside that never seems to get any smaller. And I certainly don’t spend the whole summer reading things especially designed to be read quickly and compulsively. God, it was fun.

Anyway, I was halfway through the first Alistair MacLean and realised: I should write thrillers. Never mind this literary fiction bollocks.

That lasted a day, with all sorts of life-changing decisions being made, until I finally remembered: I already do write thrillers; it’s just that I write them for kids (it took a while to figure that out, I know, but I was very relaxed at the time).

But when I think about writing for adults, I get into this head space where I have to have Big Ideas. And convey Important Truths. Or some nonsense.

As if the ideas in my kids books (slavery, colonialism, violence, friendship, community, self-identify) aren’t Big.

So after that false alarm, mixed in as it was with other major decisions about what to eat next and what time to go to the beach, I plotted out my next thriller. It’s got boats, and spies, and danger, and late night death-defying escapes, and confrontations at gunpoint.
Just like Alistair MacLean.
And me.

A clear-eyed essay by Jim Holt in the NY Times on the joys and torments of Fowler, “the King of English”.

When it came to the notorious split infinitive (e.g., “to boldly go where no man . . .”), he observed that those English speakers who neither know nor care about them “are to be envied” by the unhappy few who do.

My favourite passages in The King’s English, written by Fowler with his brother in 1906, are about slang:

Awfully nice is an expression than which few can be sillier; but to have succeeded in going through life without saying it a certain number of times is as bad as having no redeeming vice.

Indeed only the other day I was worrying about “rather ordinary”.

* See section on “Words whose meaning is misapprehended without apparent cause”, in The King’s English; or perhaps under the wanton use of foreign words.