National Poetry Day

I'm not doing anything much on NPD this year, but if you're in or around London on Thursday October 7th, this free poetry event is going on most of the afternoon at the Southbank Centre. 

Poetry Society and Southbank Centre presents

National Poetry Day Live

Thursday 7 October 2010

2pm-6.15pm

Free event

For the second year running, the Poetry Society has organised this lively event for National Poetry Day together with the Southbank Centre. Once again the event is entirely free. All welcome, including groups.
Discover poetry in the foyers and hidden corners of the Royal Festival Hall, and make yourself at home in the Clore Ballroom for live performances by a host of poetry’s famous names and rising stars. The day’s events are hosted by Ross Sutherland & Caroline Bird, featuring:

• Simon Armitage, Jane Draycott, Ian Duhig, Luke Kennard, Daljit Nagra
• Lemn Sissay performing Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’
• Joelle Taylor & SLAMbassadors
• Former Foyle Young Poets: Jay Bernard, Swithun Cooper, Holly Hopkins, Sarah Howe & Laura Seymour
• Forward Prize Poets: Robin Robertson, Fiona Sampson & Jo Shapcott

'Getting Published’- a Poetry Review workshop ♦ Foyle Young Poets of the Year ♦ ‘Pick a Poem’ ♦
Folk in a Box presents ‘Poetry in a Box’ ♦ Screening of Postcards from Home ♦ Prescriptions & quizzes

Venue: Royal Festival Hall foyers & Clore Ballroom, Southbank Centre, London SE1.

For more information visit www.poetrysociety.org.uk

Longhand v. Keyboard

Working on this Tudor novel, which is longer than anything I've written since an unpublished psychological thriller I grew, almost under laboratory conditions, in the early noughties, I've been returning to earlier ways of generating inspiration.

In other words, I've started writing new sections longhand, and then transferring them to the computer later in the day. I also rather cunningly expand and revise as I type up, so that 500 words by hand develops into 1000 on screen.

This seems an ideal solution to keeping up the daily word count, which does feel inexorable at times, especially since I occasionally become inexplicably blocked at the sight of my laptop. Association of object with activity.

It just seems nice and undemanding, kind of old-fashioned, writing a few carefully-chosen words by hand into a notebook. Those then grow, line by line, into paragraphs, and then pages ...

I couldn't write the whole book like this, of course. It would probably kill me, and take over a year to do so. Let's face it, I can type much faster than I can write longhand. Legibly, at least. But when it's cold and damp outside, as it is today, and I can curl up on the sofa with a notebook and ink pen, there's a Virginia Woolf feel to the process of writing a novel.

Shh, if you listen carefully, you can hear the birds singing in Greek.

Reading in Leamington Spa, this Sunday

The grim beauty of a deadline

I was chastened to see how long it's been since my last blog post. Many thanks to writer Talli Roland for leaving a comment on my last entry and reminding me that people do actually read this blog.

It's been an astonishing summer, work-wise. Things have just blossomed and ballooned, on a number of fronts. That's partly why this blog has been so silent, as I've been trying to spend some quality time with my three youngest children over their summer holidays at the same time as getting up to speed on some rapid developments in my career as a writer and editor.

I'll confine my comments today to my novel, since that's the least complicated situation. It's a long Tudor historical, set in 1575, and features Elizabeth 1st as a point-of-view character. Though the novel is not actually about the queen, per se. It's about one of her court entertainers. More I am reluctant to say at this stage. But the book is just over halfway through, and I've agreed to finish it by the end of the first week in October.

That's a tall order. We're talking roughly 60,000 words in just over 4 weeks. But it's not an impossible task. I need to knuckle down to a serious daily word count, improve my time management, and say 'No, thanks' to nearly all offers of other work.

What's brilliant in all this is that I'm up against it so severely, and have so many other things revolving about in my head whilst writing, that I am very unlikely to suffer from 'can't finish it' syndrome. That tends to strike when you have nothing else but the novel to consume you, and it's so large in the window the thought of waking up one day to an empty view begins to terrify you.

So you put off finishing for as long as possible, and keep polishing instead, or making 'necessary' changes, or suddenly get absorbed in some other non-writing activity that takes you away from the keyboard, or obsess about other, far better stories you could be writing.

Thank goodness for deadlines, that's what I say. The sine qua non of novel writing.

Penguin open their doors to unsolicited mss - for 3 months only!

Just spotted that Penguin UK is allowing unagented writers to send unsolicited email-only ms queries to them through August, September and October 2010.

So if you have something they might be interested in publishing, and you haven't yet netted an agent to do all the approach work for you, this could be your big chance.

You can find out more details on how to submit your work by email here at Penguin UK.

Good luck!

Oft him anhaga ...

I was deeply flattered a few weeks ago when an old acquaintance and fellow lover of Anglo-Saxon poetry, Chris Jones, who lectures in the School of English at the University of St. Andrews, contacted me about my versions from that antique tongue. Chris was in the final throes of an academic article on modern poets who use or are inspired by Old English in their poetry, and wanted to include references to my various translations and other bits and pieces on OE.

His request is the kind of thing which reminds me why I became a poet. The thought of people out there reading about your work, and maybe going on to buy a book or two of it, or at least look you up on the net, is a very satisfying thing. I certainly didn't become a poet so my work could go unread. So any article which might flag me up to people with similar tastes and interests is excellent, by my reckoning.

If all this has whet your appetite for some Anglo-Saxon poetry, there are some odd pieces by me scattered about in various places on OE topics, but by far the largest example is my version of The Wanderer, a very famous Old English poem about a warrior adrift without a fixed abode, which can be found in my Salt collection, Camper Van Blues.

My version caused controversy when first published because the original was written in the voice of a man - or possibly several men - but I changed the narrator's gender to female, to match my own. But what are new versions for if not to test the ability of a poem to endure and reflect society's changes?

It took me well over a month to write that translation of The Wanderer, managing just 4 lines a day on average. But it was a highly complex piece of writing, and I wanted to try and reproduce at least some of the rhythms and alliterative sounds of OE verse - not just write a translation or even a version, in other words, but a poem which would work in its own right.

Anyway, I was very flattered to be included in Chris' article and hope it will lead other writers in the future to write their own versions, keeping OE verse firmly alive in the twenty-first century.

Embrace Books

For those who don't know, I recently accepted an invitation to edit Embrace Books, a new digital romance line coming out of Salt Publishing in the UK.

While I wait for the website to be ready, I've launched an Embrace Books blog so that prospective writers can find the necessary guidelines and details of how to submit work.

I'll be keeping that side of my career separate from my writing, so don't expect many posts here about my work as an editor.

Indeed, I write this surrounded by research materials, reference books, my thesaurus, and a rough handwritten draft of my latest chapter. Yes, the great Tudor novel continues to grow apace.

Warwick Writers Open Mic Night

I'll be hosting an open mic tonight on behalf of the Warwick Writers group, and encouraging local writers to get up and share their work at the microphone.

I'll be reading a short set myself, to kick things off, and probably one or two at the end of the evening too.

The open mic takes place at the old Kozi Bar just off the Market Square in central Warwick, across the road from the museum. I have a sneaking suspicion it may begin around 7.30pm, but I shall be there rather earlier, of course, to set up and get comfortable.

In case anyone here is going, I shall be taking copies of my brand spanking new paperback edition of Camper Van Blues to sell. So bring extra cash!

I'll also be reminding any poets in the audience to enter the Warwick Laureateship competition, for a shot at the title. The position is unpaid, but as a former Laureate, I can assure people that there are always a few well-paid poetry commissions and workshops available to you during the year-long stint - if you want them. I published an entire book of poetry off the back of my Laureateship - 'On Warwick', available from Nine Arches Press -  so it's well worth entering if you like public poetry.

Plus, of course, the wonderful fun of being Warwick Laureate, which is part of the package. See the Warwick Words festival site for more details.

SALT: Just One More Book

These are lean times for publishers, and my own publishers, Salt, have put out an appeal for people to buy some of their books - just one, in fact, could make a difference. Sales have been greatly reduced in recent months, probably as a knock-on effect from the continuing recession, and they very much need people to buy some of their excellent wares.

You can read their Just One More book appeal here at the Salt blog, with a link to Amazon and the Book Depository, where I believe Salt prefer you to buy their books.

Other writers and bloggers are supporting the Just one Book campaign across the internet. Here's one example from Tom Vowler.

This appeal comes just as Salt announce a brand-new imprint called Embrace Books, to be edited by me. Embrace Books will publish romance ebooks in various categories; we plan to launch the first titles in Spring 2011.

Anyone who was thinking of submitting a category romance manuscript to Embrace Books (first 3 chapters and synopsis to jane AT saltpublishing.com), but is now uncertain, should understand two things.

1. Salt has weathered this kind of storm before, using precisely this kind of appeal to its readers.
2. Embrace Books is a new imprint, a digital fiction imprint, and will be run almost entirely separately from its parent company, Salt Publishing.

The poet Andrew Philip, on his blog Tonguefire, makes the valid point that independent publishers like Salt are vital, and that buying a book from them now, to help them keep afloat in this recession, is 'about you – the reader — and making sure that you continue to have the opportunity to expand your imaginative horizons in fresh and unexpected directions, directions increasingly denied you by the chain bookstores.'

I recommend Wena Poon's brand-new 'Alex y Robert', a brave and stunning novel about a woman who wants to be a matador, against all the odds. It's also a very beautiful looking book.

Support exciting, independently published fiction and buy Wena's novel ahead of the crowd here at Salt (not available from Amazon until its official launch in 2011).

RNA Conference, Greenwich

Like a typical fiction martyr, I've been writing solidly for months now, on one project or another, and saying 'No thanks' to invitations to escape the house.

This coming weekend, however, I'm off to Greenwich, London, to attend the annual RNA Conference. It's a three day extravaganza where romantic novelists congregate and exchange advice and industry news, and spend rather a lot of time propping up the bar in ludicrously high heels.

This will be my first time as a residential attendee, though I've dropped in before for day-only events. I'm massively looking forward to it, and have even bought some new clothes in honour of the occasion!

My mother was one of the best-known romantic novelists of her time, and I do love romances myself, though the historical I'm working on right now is straight fiction. So there's a strong family connection. But it's also a great excuse to escape from the house for a few days, as I've become something of a virtual hermit in recent months, only talking on the internet.

Anyone else going to the conference, do please come up and say hi if you see me wandering about - looking or actually being lost. I know plenty of novelists online, of course, but have only met a small number in the flesh. That's all going to change this weekend!

Ridi, Pagliaccio, ridi!

I was born with a strong inner critic, so I'm never surprised or offended when someone says 'Actually, this doesn't work' about my writing. I'm usually there before them, already wondering how to fix it or improve it, and I'm often grateful to have those doubts spotted by someone else in the trade, as it demonstrates that I'm not imagining things.

If they tell me such things with a laughing sneer, or an obvious agenda, or if they have almost no experience in that line, then I probably have a right to be suspicious. But if they are experienced and have no reason to speak up except in the interests of helping people understand the work better - and that includes the person who wrote it - then why should I not take what they say at face value and examine it with an equal mind?

Sadly, that response to criticism is beyond some writers. They would rather believe the person pointing out the fault is wrong - either incompetent or deliberately nasty - than believe they might need to correct an imbalance in their work.

It's like throwing a line to someone who's in trouble in the water, and having them flail about angrily and question your motives in stopping to help, rather than grabbing on.

I am convinced that this aching sense of self-importance and rightness is connected to an inability to laugh at themselves.

Self-mockery is a necessary correlative to success as a writer - or a lack of it. Without humour, you rapidly lose perspective on yourself and become either an egotistical monster, convinced of your divine right to crow from the top of the dung-heap, or a twisted creature in the dark, bitterly blaming others for your lack of success.

Naturally, the opposite is simultaneously true.  A strong writer must have an absolute sense of mission and purpose, and be able to shrug off criticism at will. But without perspective and humour to temper that side of the creative process, all that is created is more ego.

Mothers, wives, poets.

Horrified today to see, via Arc poet Jackie Wills' blog, that an 'unknown' - as Jackie puts it - American poet called Eleanor Ross Taylor has been recognised for her talent with the Ruth Lily Award.

What horrified me was not the poet herself, or her poetry, or indeed the award, but the apparent equanimity with which some people seem to accept without question the US critic Kevin Prufer's description of her work (taken from a recent blog entry on the NBCC Award shortlisted finalists):

Her speakers are most often mothers and wives thinking about their grown children, the complexities of marriage, and (increasingly in the later poems) their responsibilities to the dead and their own impending demise. Sometimes these voices emerge from an ostensible past, as in “My Grandmother’s Virginhood, 1879” or “Motherhood, 1880.” More often, they take place in an undefined domestic present.  Occasionally, they rise from more surprising places, as in “Kitchen Fable,” where the flatware itself takes on the consciousness of a frustrated wife.

Wow, and there I was thinking we'd got past the ludicrously sexist 'Look, a woman who writes about domestic issues! Quick, let's give her an award and encourage other women to steer clear of politics and the 'big' issues, and write about their children and husbands instead.'

Granted, for some women, writing about being a wife and mother is all they want to do as poets. And for some women, writing a poem about being a woman is a political act in itself.

But let's at least stop and examine why Eleanor Ross Taylor has been so suddenly plucked out of obscurity to be given this award, if it isn't to suggest - perhaps at a subliminal level - to female writers that good girls who keep their heads down and only write quiet, domestic poetry will be recognised for their modesty and humility in the end.

Even if it's only with a pat-on-the-head style encomium from some highly placed male critic.

New Paperback Edition of CAMPER VAN BLUES

Yes, the moment you have all been waiting for has arrived!


Salt have just reissued CAMPER VAN BLUES as a deliciously glossy paperback, priced at £9.99 - though it appears to pack a 20% discount if you buy it from the Salt website, rather than Amazon.

So if you held back from buying the rather more expensive - though equally delicious - hardback version, now is your chance to own my latest book of poetry for roughly the same price as a modest round of drinks in a London pub.

There are also a few available at Amazon, along with some very kind reviews.

Fifth and Final Creative Redrafting Workshop up at Mslexia

I had some absolutely fantastic and heartwarming feedback today via the women's writing magazine Mslexia - people finding my recent series of Creative Redrafting workshops on the Mslexia website useful and full of practical, hands-on advice for reworking those old and abandoned poems.

The fifth and final workshop in the series is up now at Mslexia, a special series run in support of their annual Poetry Competition, to be judged by Vicki Feaver this year, with a first prize of £1000.

Pulling Aside the Curtain: The Beginnings of Story

Being faced with further revisions to my novel, I currently find myself rewriting the opening scenes. In fact, I have to completely change the opening scenes of my novel and begin from a different character's perspective or narrative point of view.

This may sound simple, but the character in whose mind or presence a novel opens is utterly crucial in terms of the narrative skew of that story.

If we open with the internal monologue of a brick, the whole novel becomes brick-flavoured from that point on. Whoever else speaks, be it air, dust, stream, periwinkle, dog, human, alien - everything comes to us served alongside that underlying idea of brick.

Hardy understood that when he opened The Return of the Native with a lengthy description of 'heathy, furzy, briary wilderness', a landscape as much metaphorical as real.

An opening scene needs to introduce a world and a narratorial mind-set, not merely a character in a situation.

It might also suggest what lies ahead through the idea of conflict and opposition, i.e. if our opening character is naive to the point of absurdity, she may have grown cynical by the last page of the novel. Or if cynicism was her abiding state, then her faith in human nature may have been restored. A violent man may find death - for each world has rules, and consequences for breaking them - while a peace-loving man may stand over the body of his enemy blowing smoke from the barrel of his Smith and Wesson.

In other words, this is the reversal we hear talked about so much in writing classes and manuals. The reversal is inherent in the 'ordinary world' in which the story begins, built into the trigger or 'inciting incident' which signals the start of our plot. For a story is not a plot. Plot only begins when something actually happens. Until something happens to knock that first domino into its neighbour and so set the whole row tumbling, the story remains inert.

And within the visual and mental picture conjured by an opening scene should lie the seed or kernel of the plot. The opening narrative should be, or at least come to represent, the story as metaphor.

That's what I'm trying to do right now. Find the correct metaphor for my story, and open the prologue or first chapter with it. I had the perfect metaphor in my original first draft, but the story has moved on from that point in terms of character development, so I can no longer start there. It has to be something which perfectly unites all my ideas about theme and character and conflict, and which also points ahead to the resolution of the story without giving any details away.

The opening scene in the movie Twilight - also a kind of prologue in the book - is of a fawn, or young deer, running innocently through a fairy-tale forest, with the underlying sinister implication that it will soon meet a violent end, as all such vulnerable, beautiful, but ultimately mortal creatures must in their journey through the dark forest of life. It's a clear metaphor for the story, and combined with a heavy-handed voiceover by the main character Bella, it points ahead to the dangers and possible consequences of her choices in Twilight without giving away the details.

This metaphor has no connection with the next few scenes, however, and so feels clunky and out of place. It's not until later, when the real-life forest with its dangerous, unearthly inhabitants is encountered, that it becomes more acceptable to the viewer as an opening scene. In searching for my opening metaphor, then, I'll be looking to avoid that slightly awkward join to the rest of the novel.

Making the Century?

No, not years, but followers on Twitter.

I only have a piddling 56 followers to date - though thanks to all of you who have clicked Follow! - and am really keen to get my first century.

I can offer my followers wit, comment, information, and regular retweets. I can also follow you back if you're looking to build your own community of followers there.

Genuinely interesting content is not guaranteed, of course. But that's Twitter for you.

If you're on Twitter, or would like to be, or think you maybe ought to try it, and you're not already following me, I'd be thrilled if you'd go to:

http://twitter.com/janeholland1

and click Follow. Thanks!

More Mslexia Workshops now available

Interested in Writing as Genetics?

Or redrafting your poems as Building a Family Tree?

My third short article based around the theme of Creative Redrafting is now up on the Mslexia site.

Get it while it's hot!

 

"Didn't we have a luverly time the day we went to Bangor?"

Off to Bangor in North Wales this afternoon, to pick up my second eldest from university ... along with all her bags and general rubbish.

It's a long trip, but I shall be driving along with several happy thoughts in my mind:

• How I'm going to open the next intrigue-ridden chapter in my historical Tudor novel

• That I now have a most excellent literary agent to represent me in fiction.
  

We were in rainy Folkestone over the weekend, visiting my father and his sister's family down there in Kent. Tonight I'll be staying in a hotel near - hopefully sunny - Rhyl. On Friday and Saturday, Steve and I will be in Hayle for his daughter's birthday party, staying in a caravan near the sea, not many miles from Land's End.

That's three coastlines in one week. Not bad going, for someone who lives at the dead centre of England.

Mslexia Poetry Workshops

Just spotted that the first two instalments of my series of five linked articles on Creative Redrafting are now live on the Mslexia website.

Some of my weary but faithful regular readers may remember my first tentative blog posts on Creative Redrafting a few years back. Some may even have survived one of my workshop sessions using the technique. Well, this is an updated and expanded version of the same theory of poem revision, which will hopefully be useful for someone out there.

This particular incarnation of Creative Redrafting is a poetry workshop series specially commissioned by Mslexia to accompany their 2010 Poetry Competition, the idea being that you hone your competition entries by working through my suggestions - and those of fellow poets whose advice I solicited for this series - and improve your redrafting skills at the same time.

Experienced poets, writers and editors who contributed their know-how for these articles include Helen Ivory, Alison Brackenbury, Sophie Mayer, Annie Finch, Zoe Skoulding, Anne Berkeley and Nuala Ní Chonchúir.  

Many thanks to you all!

Small Publishers and the Prize Machinery

Elizabeth Baines, fellow Salt writer and blogger, discusses the latest problem to face the world of small publishing.

This discussion all came about after some Facebook posts by various people in publishing - including my own Salteeny Jen Hamilton-Emery, and Neil Astley, editor of Bloodaxe Books, who published my debut poetry collection - criticised the introduction of fees for publishers to enter publications for the Guardian First Book awards.

Prizes and Book Club recommendations: are these more of a curse than a benefit, at least for the publishers, who end up spending huge sums on providing the books involved and accepting vast discounts on sales at the same time?