One head, 12 voices!

On May 1st, I took a break from promoting The Boy with Two Heads. My latest short novel for Cambridge University Press Cambridge English Readers was recorded at ID Audio in London. The actor who read it is Nadia Albina. She was dealing with more than 12 characters with accents from South Africa, Greece and Egypt. She had to distinguish between when a character was speaking in her or his own language and when they were speaking in English. A tour de force! I have spent 10 months on and off with my two teenage girl protagonists and it was a wonder to hear them come alive. Thank you, Nadia. Now I know why we are limited in the number of characters we can include in our stories!

My thanks also to John Green and the engineer (who I think is called Nick).

The book is called Better Late than Never and is scheduled to come out in the summer. So I look forward to the cover design expected soon.

Trafalgar Square, May 1st 2013.

After a day indoors, it was glorious to sit in Trafalgar Square and soak up some sun before calling it a day. Even Waterstones could not tempt me back indoors ... 

How many heads to make a book?

Yesterday I sent off the final proof of my latest Reader for Cambridge University Press (CUP) to the editor. 

Qaitbay Fort, Alexandria

It is a thriller about two teenage girls that begins in Alexandria in Egypt and ends in Athens in Greece. I started thinking about it this time last year. It is only 25,000 words, but in the past I have spent quite a lot longer than that working on stories of similar length. It will be called Better Late Than Never and should be out in the summer. The cover blurb will be something like:

"Alexandria, Egypt. Anika and Zaphira are sitting at a seafront café. Suddenly, there is a huge explosion which knocks them over and changes their lives for ever. Both teenage girls learn a lot about each other as they struggle to survive and to understand what has happened and why. And their combined strength is a surprise to the men they come up against."

In view of the Boston bombs, this is uncannily and tragically topical ...

Many heads (not just two!) have been involved in the creation of Better Late Than Never, and continue to be - two freelance editors, the publisher and her staff in-house at Cambridge, six people consulted about facts and settings, the staff of the recording studio and the actor who will read for the CD. And there will be all the marketing and legal staff at CUP from now on.

But I am now under doctor's orders to do less and relax more. How delightful!

And there are new reviews of The Boy with Two Heads on Amazon. Thank you to the two reviewers!

Moveable feasts - ancient and modern

Derwent Water and snowy Skiddaw

A further week of revisions began on March 11th, and then I was quite ill for a couple of weeks. I feel a bit like Suzanne in The Boy with Two Heads who, by Easter, was coming out of her coma and asking whether the hospital was real. I wasn't as ill as Suzanne, but I am suddenly aware that it is both April Fools' Day and Easter Monday today. (It is also extremely cold, in spite of wall to wall sunshine in Cumbria - minus three degrees Centigrade at night!) So an immovable feast and a moveable feast fall on the same day.

I am gently amused by the fact that in 2013 I am not the only one still confused over why our Easter is when it is. In the UK and most of the western Christian world it was yesterday. But in Christian Orthodox countries like Russia and Greece it will be on May 5th. It seems that we still haven't been able to agree on this point in spite of more than 2,500 years' deliberation as to when the lengthening of the days and the hope of new beginnings should be marked each year.

Niko Lang's diagram from Wikipedia

In the ancient Hellenic world, by 500 or so BC, some astronomers had already understood that the Earth was a sphere. They believed, however, that the sun, moon, planets and stars revolved around it. This is called the geocentric (Earth centred) system as opposed to the heliocentric (sun centred) system that we now know to be the case. They made careful observations and fairly accurate predictions of the sun’s equinoxes and solstices, as well as the normal phases of the moon and planets, and even some eclipses (“Herodotus, … who lived in the 5th century BC, cited that Thales (ca. 624-547 BCE), the Greek philosopher, predicted the solar eclipse of 28 May 585 BCE …”).

In Ancient Athens, as in most city states, the timing of religious festivals varied from year to year (see my page called Measuring time in Ancient Athens), and were arranged to take into account these differing movements of the sun and moon.

Stonehenge, June 21st 2005 (Wikipedia)

But even then, the equinoxes and solstices provided an incontrovertible structure upon which to hang the more moveable feasts.*

Strangely, we can be more fickle today.

In present-day western Christian churches (Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, and many others), Easter is set according to a formula based on the Gregorian calendar, as the Time and Date website states:

“In 325CE, the Council of Nicaea established that Easter would be held on the first Sunday after the first full moon occurring on or after the vernal equinox. From that point forward, the Easter date depended on the ecclesiastical approximation of March 21 for the vernal equinox. Easter is delayed by one week if the full moon is on a Sunday.”

This year the full moon after the equinox was on Wednesday, March 27th. The first Sunday after that was yesterday, March 31st, Easter Sunday in 'the west'. 

However, Greek and most other Orthodox Christian Churches use the older and less accurate Julian calendar to set the date of Easter (though not always, confusingly, of Christmas). The Julian Calendar decrees that the vernal equinox falls 13 days later than it really does, on April 3^rd. Through some calculation I am unable to verify, this results in Greek Orthodox Easter falling on May 5^th this year, 2013.

So a large part of our modern Christian world manages to be less accurate in the timing of a moveable feast that depends upon an equinox, than those pagan and 'unsophisticated' Ancients...

* In case, like me, you are not 100% clear about such things, the equinoxes are the days when the sun is above the horizon for 12 hours resulting in day and night having equal length (usually March 21st and September 21st). The solstices are the days that are either the longest (June 21st) or the shortest (December 21st) in the year. In the Southern Hemisphere the solstices are the other way round.

Literati in the Lake District

The Theatre by the Lake, Keswick

Derwent Water from just outside the Theatre

a local resident

Derwent Water from Friars Crag

Words by the Water finishes tomorrow. It has been a busy 10 days.

Some very well-known people have been wandering around the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, Cumbria. My husband chaired talks by Jeremy Bowen and Matthew Parris, among others. There was a time when I went back to the dressing room to change and found Tracey Chevalier drinking tea and preparing to talk about her latest book, 'The Last Runaway'. Phyllida Law had people wondering whether to laugh or cry about her mother's dementia. And Alexander McCall Smith had everyone in stitches about many things, including the Ladies No 1 Opera House outside Gabarone in Botswana, that seats all of 52 people. I lunched with Melvyn Bragg and Cate Haste, his wife, and compared notes about walks in the area with Lindsey Hilsum. Many more household names were there, too, but name-dropping is pointless unless you have spicy little stories to tell about each one. And I was far too starry eyed to gather gossip.

I was also quite busy. I chaired four talks myself. This involves reading the featured book, introducing the author with a short biography, and having some questions ready in case the audience are so shocked, bemused or dozy that they have nothing to ask at the appointed time. (No one ever needs these fallback questions - the audience in Keswick is always alert, astute, and sharp as The Needle.) 

'My' authors were Sarah Wise (Inconvenient People), Mike Berners Lee (How Bad are Bananas? - the carbon footprint of everything), Harriet Sergeant (Among the Hoods - my years with a teenage gang), and Gerard Lemos (The End of the Chinese Dream). 
So, in spite of almost no fiction on offer, and almost no mention of International Women's Day on Friday, I've had a stimulating and invigorating time.

But it is clear that we must all join lobbying groups to (among other things) prevent media company monopolies, improve the care services in the UK, oust the criminal bankers, and cut the carbon emissions of the human race - especially this last. There's a book about it called 'The Burning Question: We can't burn half the world's oil, coal and gas' coming out next month. I've ordered a copy. Frightening stuff.

Last day of the festival tomorrow - then on to the 4th draft of my latest Reader for CUP... After two gorgeous weeks, the weather's awful again, so staying indoors won't be a problem.

The Boy's 1st anniversary

 Youth of Antikythera

It is one year today since The Boy with Two Heads was published. 

Connie Jensen of Trifolium Books and I liked the idea of launching The Boy on the world on February 29th. And as there isn't a February 29th this year, we're celebrating today, March 1st.

Which highlights an age old problem of measuring time and using calendars - and a tenuous connection between two ancient artefacts and The Boy. 

As I have mentioned in this blog before, in 1900 a wreck was found by sponge divers on the sea bed off the island of Antikythera to the south of the Peloponnese on the main route from Ancient Ionia (present day Turkey) to Rome. Among the many artefacts discovered were the pieces of the statue that is now the Youth of Antikythera (we used his face on the cover of The Boy with Two Heads) and a mysterious 'mechanism' in a wooden box. 

Antikythera Mechanism from Wikipedia

It is thought that the purpose of this device was to predict lunar and solar eclipses based on Babylonian arithmetic-progression cycles. The inscriptions on the device also support suggestions of mechanical display of planetary positions.*

There is a long and detailed article about the Antikythera Mechanism on Wikipedia (from which this quote comes). And on Tuesday 12th February 2013 on BBC4 there was a fascinating documentary about it called The Two-thousand-year-old Computer. This is sadly not available on BBC iPlayer, but there's an older, more emotive, 50 minute film about it on You Tube.

The ship was probably wrecked in about 70 BC and the mechanism is thought to have been made around 100 BC. From its complexity, it seems unlikely that it was a prototype and may have been the result of hundreds of years of engineering skill.

So it seems (accidentally) fitting to me that my Boy with Two Heads has his 'anniversary' on February 29th, a day added to our calendar to correct it in relation to the movement of the astronomical bodies that the Mechanism was made to predict. And both the statue we used to represent him and the Mechanism were found in the same shipwreck.

Perhaps that's labouring it a bit, but I love to find patterns in this messy and magnificent chaos we call life ...

... which is one of the themes in The Boy with Two Heads.

*M. G. Edmunds, et al. “Decoding The Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculator Known As The Antikythera Mechanism.” Nature 444.7119: 587-591. Academic Search Complete. Web. 15 Nov 2012.

5 stages of rewriting - with a toothbrush?

Re-writing is “like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush." (Pete Murphy)

I am celebrating, because three weeks ago my task was to rewrite my teen thriller of nearly 30,000 words in 24,000 words without losing any of the plot or characterisation.  

I also had ten areas of doubt expressed by my editors to take into account. In my view, three weeks is not a realistic deadline for such an activity and I felt it was a good excuse for panic. 

Every writer has their own way of dealing with that kind of panic. In case it's helpful for my readers to know, mine involved the following stages:

1
Make a copy of the 'original' to work on. File the original.
Start slowly on page 1, take into account: 
-   the editors' doubts/comments
-   the removal of as many characters as possible (I have a tendency to include lots of 'bit parts')
-   these questions at each 'scene change': 
    What is this scene for? 
    What are the motives of each of the characters in it? 
    How does it progress the plot?
-   Check the details. Use the toothbrush. Don't panic.
2
This slow revision gave me a good idea where conversations or actions could be squeezed or dispensed with altogether (the ones that had to go were, as always, the ones I loved most).  Change the text colour of these passages.
3
Print out and go through again, rewriting the coloured bits (for me this is much easier on paper).
4
Go through again on screen and incorporate the rewritten bits. The main problem at this stage was remembering what was still in the plot/characterisation and what had been ditched. 
5
Go through again (!), trying to read it as a reader would, who knew nothing of the story. I was looking for any unexplained motives or non sequiturs in the plot.

And, after 21 days of being convinced there was no way I could pull it off, I sent off the new draft manuscript by email at the weekend. 

Phew! Panic over. Basement floor (almost) pristine. Toothbrush thrown away. (Thanks, Pete)

horses on Solway sands

Now I have emerged from my three weeks of self-inflicted solitude (with a couple evenings off to see friends and a walk on the beach nearly every day). 

skeins of geese flying north up Solway coast
(they are there, in the pale blue bit of sky!)

And the sun is shining (this is the Cumbrian riviera, don't forget!), the geese are arriving, and the pigeons are cooing. The garden is full of snowdrops and the fields of lambs. 





Just in time! This weekend Words by the Water begins in Keswick (I am chairing four of the author talks) and The Boy with Two Heads is a year old! 

Life is amazing ...