A NOVEL EXPERIENCE

Squizzey - the bestest little grey squirrel in the world

"Why don't we meet," she suggested - "seeing as you live close by?"

"Why not?" I answer.  See you next Wednesday!  And lo! it came to pass that I met the lovely Kathryn Eastman from the Nut Press in Cowbridge's newly opened Costa Coffee shop this week.

But that wasn't all - oh no -  for who should have come along as well but Squizzey - 'the bestest little grey squirrel in the world' (though he does have a tendency to say so himself) - the cool dude with his name on his blue polo shirt.

He sat on the table, playing umpire as Kath and I drank cappuccinos.  Ominously I think he was taking notes.  He has a blog as well which you can find here.

Now it seems a universal experience that whenever blogging friends meet they find - not that they are total strangers meeting for the first time - but that somehow they have become old friends already, with a great deal in common and even more to talk about.  Thus it was with Kath.  She had sensibly suggested we exchange photographs, but I would have known her instantly the moment she walked in through the door.  Two hours flew by and I'm sure we might have continued for another two hours had life not got in the way.  But we have plans to meet again and continue where we left off. 

Kath has a lot of advice to give and she was most helpful in suggesting websites and publications that I might look at to develop my own writing.  Since entering a couple of stories for the Choc-Lit Short Story Competition in January, I seem to be beset by competitions.  I sent off a story about learning to drive in February to one Writers' Group that I have recently joined.  There's another local competition in connection with the Cowbridge Book Festival, but the biggest current challenge is the Good Housekeeping/Orion Books competition for an unpublished novel.  Write a chapter of about 5,000 words and a synopsis and get it to us by 31 March, they say.

I have never written a novel and have no idea whether I could write one, but - a bit like climbing a mountain - I'd very much like to try and having a competition like this is a great spur.  (I discount entirely any chance of winning: the competition is useful only in that it provides a pressing deadline).

If I find, thanks to this competition, that I can scribble out one tolerable chapter and synopsis, then I might conclude that it might be worth continuing for a few more chapters.  I have found myself thinking more and more about the interesting characters in my Choc-Lit story and asking what happened to them before they met (and what will happen to them afterwards) and who all the other people are that flip the levers of their particular pin-ball game.  Thus has evolved, I told Kath, a wider, more complex story: part romance, part history, part thriller and set partly in St Petersburg, the most northerly metropolis in the world and capital of the Tsars.

Conceiving the synopsis and sketching out these initial 5,000 words has been fun.  Fun because,  if you will excuse the pun, it is, for me, a novel experience.  It is fun because I have no idea of how I should proceed, so the learning curve is steep and challenging.  No two novels are the same, it seems,  even if they are by the same authors.  Some are descriptive, some are personal, some go on inside the protagonists' heads, some are like film scripts. The canvas of the blank page can, I admit, be terrifying, but to me it is like a seaside cove to a child, filled with rock pools in which lurk all manner of exciting wildlife.  I have only to close my eyes and my characters are there telling me what to write down.  In both cases there are so many unknown things waiting to be discovered. 

In some ways it has been remarkably easy, compared to what I am used to.  When you are writing non-fiction you have to find something to say that is reasonably researched and true, or at the very least have an opinion about something that is reasonably true. If you are writing fiction on the other hand, if you do not know what to say you can just make it up.  For that's the thing about fiction, as someone said once, it doesn't happen. 

I'm also finding it fun to be able to make characters do things.  Having directed plays I try to make the actors appear in a certain light and present their personalities in the way I want.  This doesn't always succeed: the actor may be stubborn or I may fail to make him do what I want.

What a relief then to know that as a writer I have the power - should I so wish it - to make my characters turn somersaults in at the door, or to stand on their heads, or to present an angry, a facetious or a woebegone face to the world whenever I so decree;  I can dress them however I desire, even make them appear in shining armour, and move them back and forth in time.  (Virginia Woolf did this with Orlando.  Poor soul, he found himself being dragged through four hundred years and changing gender in the process). I don't think I'll go quite that far,  but it's nice to know that one can. 

"How's it going to end?" asked Kath.  At this point, Squizzey, who had started to look a little bored as I had rambled on, pricked up his ears and licked his pencil. 

"I don't know," I said, and here I looked directly at the Squirrel.  "For it may of course never end, in the sense that the story may languish still-born at the end of the first chapter.  In one sentence I may move everything two hundred years into the past and give everyone cholera and that will be that."  Oh, the power!

But if I should ever get to chapter seventeen, eighteen, nineteen: what then?  I just don't know.  (Well maybe I do know - sort of - but that far ahead the crystal ball is still a little cloudy).  I hope nevertheless that it will all end happily.  For the goodies anyway.  Baddies (and there are some) will just have to take their luck where they find it and hope they catch me on a good day.

(Otherwise they might just end up being liquidated by squirrels).

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

I was in France at New Year and,  thanks to the foul weather that made walking almost impossible, found that I had spare time on my hands; so  I wrote a short and romantic story to send off to the Choc-Lit short story competition where they were soliciting stories in which chocolate featured as a central theme. 

I came to know a little about Choc-Lit from Chris Stovell whose compelling debut novel Turning the Tide they published last year.  Choc-Lit writers also publish an Authors Corner blog in which they talk, sometimes about their books and sometimes about other entertaining matters of relevance.

In another life, Chris may have been a sheep dog, for she has been assiduous in rounding up her friends and pointing them in the direction of the Author's Corner, encouraging them to leave comments.  Being of a sheep like disposition I dutifully responded to her instructions and, in what seemed an eye blink, found that a comment I had left (about mice, as it turned out) had won me a book.

If I could win a book for a comment then who knows what I might win for a short romantic New Year story about a lugubrious Russian, (I think it right to stress the 'might' for I have never ever had any success with such competitions, but they are fun to enter all the same), with a practical fondness for chocolate.

The lugubrious Russian in my story was not the person in the picture, though he might well have possessed similar good looks;  I am sure anyway that Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, the great Russian poet, whose picture* it is, wouldn't really mind.  He is quite handsome after all, don't you think? (and the story is a romantic one), though if it were left to me I should be inclined to advise him to shave the whiskers.  Anyway they like sharing pictures of handsome young men on the Choc-Lit blog to whom I offer the image if ever there should be a lack of hot talent from the present era.

As well as being handsome Pushkin was a romantic.  Indeed, he becomes even more romantic when you know that he was fiercely addicted to duels. For he was both a duellist and a poet.  I put the duellist first because he almost fought more duels - twenty-nine in all - than he wrote poems.  Most of the time he was lucky (I daresay he was a very good duellist) but one hundred and seventy five years ago - almost to this very day (10 February 1837 to be precise) - his luck deserted him and he was killed by the French officer he had challenged, leaving literature bereft because, if he was a good duellist, then he was certainly an even better poet and writing the poems and plays and novels which he turned out seemingly without effort from his St Petersburg desk is a more rewarding activity than duelling (and getting yourself killed). 

As a teenager I was as lugubrious and full of depression as the Russian in my story, wrote a deal of very bad abstract poetry and consoled myself by reading the great Russian authors - Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the like.  Then, when we were told that we could only spend two thirds of our school time studying for 'A' Levels and we had to spend the rest being 'educated,' I opted for a Russian class.  They threw us in at the deep end and we found ourselves translating, before even mastering the Cyrillic alphabet, Pushkin's famous poem that begins 'I Loved You.'

                I loved you; even now I must confess,

                       Some embers of my love their fire retain;

                       But do not let it cause you more distress,

                      I do not want to sadden you again.

                     Hopeless and tongue-tied, yet I loved you dearly

                    With pangs the jealous and the timid only know;

                     So tenderly I love you, so sincerely,

                   I pray God grant another love you so.

I regret I do not know who translated this; certainly it wasn't me for I stumbled badly in that class and left it after a term, thinking that Russians were much better when rendered in English by competent persons.  But I went on loving this poem and keeping a nostalgic and romantic perspective on nineteenth century Russia, reinforced, of course, just at the time when it might have been waning by the absurdly romantic film of  Dr Zhivago.

I happened to be in Germany when that film came out and watched it, dubbed into German, in Hannover.  Then I caught a train that rumbled across Europe to catch a midnight boat from Calais, disgorging its weary and sleep deprived passengers on to the Victoria station concourse early the following morning. I breakfasted with someone I had met on the train and as Dr Zhivago was playing opposite the station and both of us had a few hours to kill, saw the film again.  It all seemed remarkably romantic at the time. 

*The picture of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin painted by Vasily Tropinin is courtesy of Wikipedia.