You write not for children but for yourself, and if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then, you are a writer of children’s books … no special credit to you, but simply thumping good luck.
– Arthur Ransome

“I think of the past as the ultimate holiday destination,” Geraldine McCaughrean told the BBC History magazine last year.

“Life today is pretty safe and anodyne: adventure doesn’t abound for children. But in the past there were any number of ways you could meet a horrible end before the age of 12. So it’s possible to write a plausible-sounding, danger-packed adventure involving children in war, pestilence, fire and/or flood. That’s the only reason I go there.”

Philip Pullman agreed.

“It’s hard to put modern children in an adventure story because there would always be a parent or a policeman or social worker to tell them not to do things. So one way to put children in an exciting adventure is to set it in the past and arrange it plausibly.”

Quite so. But in the plausibility mentioned by both lies a thicket of modern and historical dilemmas for the author and dangers for the readers – particularly, I think, for adult readers who are the gatekeepers of the books children read.
For the writer of historical fiction, something that has been extensively researched and is perfectly plausible in an historical sense might appear to be utterly incongruous to the modern reader: either because it is so other-worldly that it seems almost fantastical; or conversely, because sometimes historical truth is stranger than fiction.
As readers we project the values of their own lives onto the past as well as the logic of 20th to 21st century thought – the unconscious knowledge of a whole raft of meanings, such as Freud or physics or atheism or racism/anti-racism. You might suspend disbelief when you read a book about a 12-year-old girl pirate, but you don’t suspend your entire world view.
We forget, for example, that until quite late in the 20th century (and today in many parts of the world) children worked at a very young age, girls got married off as soon as they hit puberty, people died in middle age as a matter of course, and everyone grew up much earlier than we do now.
Only last week, marine archaeologists in the US discovered the remains of John King, who was 11 when pirates captured the ship on which he and his mother were sailing in the Caribbean. John joined the pirate crew, led by Captain Sam Bellamy.
290 years later, John’s remains have been found in the wreck of Bellamy’s ship, the Whydah, 460 metres off the coast of Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The research team said, “While teenage pirates were common in the 18th century, John is considered to be the youngest ever identified.”
Gosh, people said to me when this appeared in the papers, you mean there really were kids who were pirates? Well, of course. Nelson went to sea at 13, Bligh at 9. There were eight-year-old farm hands and milkmaids, and ten-year-old fishermen and housemaids. Romeo and Juliet were kids. So are many of the characters in nursery rhymes and fairy tales, who have working lives, go to the market, milk cows and tend sheep and sleep in the fireplace and put kettles on – and are so often hungry.
This particularly applied, of course, to poorer families; that is, almost everyone. But most of the books we read in the past were about aristocratic children who had the luxury of growing up at a more leisurely pace. We must not confuse the fictional world of The Secret Garden with the harsh world of kids like Dickon.
So the writer has to know this is going on in the readers’ mind, anticipate her own projections, and sift through them all to see which ones are helpful and which should be avoided or addressed.
And then watch it all happen anyway.

I’ve lost count of the dilemmas list and Blogger search isn’t working, but here, I think, is the previous post: Historical fiction dilemma #4: Character.

A dazzling layer of ice on the car, and frost in the valley, this morning. (That might not sound very impressive to those of you who live in colder climes but Australians are dreadful wimps when it comes to winter.)
Today I have to drag myself out of 17th century Amsterdam and back to 18th century Maltese pirates, as I’m working on the edited pages of the second Swashbuckler book, The Pirate’s Revenge. It’s been so long since I last read it, I get to laugh at my own jokes – and notice things I was too close to see before. But at least I know the ending.
It’s due out in September/October.
Just heard that the first book, Ocean Without End, is going into its second print run, as it’s nearly sold out – fantastic news.

The New York Times looks at product placement in a new YA book from Running Press:

In Cathy’s Book, a young adult novel to be published in September, the spunky eponymous heroine talks about wearing “a killer coat of Lipslicks in Daring.”
As it turns out, Lipslicks is a line of lip gloss made by Cover Girl, which has signed an unusual marketing partnership with Running Press, the unit of Perseus Books Group that is publishing the novel.
Cover Girl, which is owned by the consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, has neither paid the publisher nor the book’s authors, Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman, for the privilege of having their makeup showcased in the novel. But Procter will promote the book on Beinggirl.com, a Web site directed at adolescent girls that has games, advice on handling puberty and, yes, makeup tips.

Apparently they decided against a similar mention of Tampax, for which we can probably all be grateful.
We’re used to blatant product placement in films and on TV, but in kid lit?
It’s an extraordinary development, although I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised. Thin edge. Wedge. Shoulda seen that coming.
But surely as authors for children we have a particular duty of care to ensure authenticity, transparency – not to mention reader credibility. Surely we ought to be on the side, as Maxwell Smart would say, of the forces of goodness and niceness?
Or am I just bitter because you can’t do product placement in historical fiction?
“She grabbed her Wilkinson Sword replica chromed cutlass and shoved it into the Tiffany scabbard that hung from her stylish-yet-practical DKNY belt.”
Maybe I should try chick lit instead?

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
– Henry Ward Beecher

Oh, I’ve clearly always been on the cutting edge of style.
Decorating With Books, by Marie Proeller Hueston, contributing editor at Country Living magazine, is reviewed today at Publishers’ Weekly: it “demonstrates how a display or library of books can enhance the look of almost every room in your home … and add color and texture to a space.”
Hueston encourages readers to keep books “stacked on an ottoman, piled on the floor, lined up on a bench, or … draped over a ladder,” in addition to keeping books “confined to shelves and tabletops …”
You see? It’s not an obsession, or even absent-mindedness – it’s style.
The review goes on to discuss Hueston’s methods of “judging books by their covers, as it were – as objet d’art, without regard to content.”
How fabulous.
I might spend the next week rearranging the house. I see the error of my ways. Rather than organise books by genre and then alphabetically, I should have them sorted by colour.
(Yes, you may sneer, I hear you say, but you’d love that book and will snap it up at the next Dymock’s sale.)

The NZ Woman’s Weekly has ten copies of Ocean Without End to giveaway.
Competition is open to NZ residents – get your entry in before 24 June.

While we’re on the subject of lists, here are the most expensive books ever sold on my spiritual home on the web: Abebooks (all prices plus postage and handling, of course).
Number one is not hard to believe but it doesn’t seem right, given the place-getters, and Tolkien would be horrified:

1 The Hobbit
JRR Tolkien
Published in September 1937, this first edition first printing is in its original dust-jacket. Only 1,500 copies of the first edition were printed, and they were sold out by mid-December. Purchased by a buyer in Arizona from a New York bookseller.
$65,000
2 Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing To the Parliament of England
John Milton
Published in 1644, this pamphlet by the author of Paradise Lost defended the freedom of the press. Purchased by a UK buyer from an American bookseller.
$65,000
3 (Utopia) De optimo reip. statu, deque nova insula
Sir Thomas More
This 1518 fourth edition outlines More’s ideal state, and pleads for religious tolerance and universal education. Purchased by a UK buyer from an American bookseller.
$60,000
4 Poems with elegies on the authors death
John Donne
Little written by Donne appeared in print in his lifetime but hundreds of manuscript copies were circulated by hand. This 1633 first edition was the first collection of his poems. Purchased by a buyer in Pakistan from an American bookseller.
$60,000

Read the Top Ten here.

There’s a bit of huffing and sniffing going on, after JK Rowling was voted the Greatest Living British Writer by readers of The Book Magazine. Some commentators, and no doubt other writers, are gnashing their teeth.
I suppose if the question asked was about readers’ “best loved author” there would be little doubt, but the word “greatest” holds so many elevated and broad-ranging implications.
The writer with the greatest influence? Arguably so.
The greatest technician? As opposed to Rushdie or McEwan or Byatt or Ishiguro? Well…
At any rate, for my money the real surprises lie in the other rankings. Terry Pratchett is second. Nothing wrong with this, of course, but it makes me wonder about the age of the respondents.
But Nick Hornby, for God’s sake, is at #8 between Pinter and Byatt. Rose Tremain doesn’t rate a mention. And the list is almost entirely English novelists (apart from the Poet Laureate and a smattering of playwrights and a couple of token Scots). Cast your eye down the list. Fascinating.
My picks from this selection?

Novelists in no particular order:
Hilary Mantel
Pat Barker
AS Byatt
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ian McEwan (sometimes)
Salman Rushdie (most of the time)
Julian Barnes

Kids/YA:
Diana Wynne Jones
Michael Morpurgo
Philip Pullman
JK Rowling
Neil Gaiman
Anne Fine
Jacqueline Wilson

Peter Ackroyd was the only biographer/history writer listed – no mention of:

Simon Schama
Antony Beevor
Claire Tomalin
John Julius Norwich
Niall Ferguson
John Keegan

Let alone…
Jan Morris

It’s years since I’ve read Lessing or seen a Stoppard play but I feel they ought to get a run in the A team. The young crowd (all those Smiths, for example) can wait their turn.

A morose Frank Moorhouse has written a series of features for The Australian on the country’s literary landscape – sort of. His conclusions are mixed, but there’s some interesting analysis:

“There is a literary logjam. Many doomed books, especially novels, pass by unnoticed in ghostly procession, never reviewed, never mentioned in the media, often barely stocked by bookshops, hardly selling a copy.
In their 1994 survey, Throsby and Beverley Thompson found that among the writers surveyed, 47 per cent had published a book but only 7 per cent had been reviewed.
Research I had done for the CAL showed that, among other things, in the Sydney Morning Herald in November 1964, 142 books were reviewed or mentioned: in November 2004, only 88 books were reviewed or mentioned.
While a review is not the only way to find out about or to evaluate a book (there are also word-of-mouth and browsing, although I’d hate to depend on these alone), it is the primary way. Furthermore, book reviews are the intellectual news of our society.”

I think that makes me feel better – and yet…