October 2006

In this month's blog

Shoot the Puppy
Independent booksellers' website
Rocking horses, old and new
Googling for Marqua
In praise of John Ward
Trance by Stanley Morgan
The War For All The Oceans
New editor of The Author
The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

Shoot the Puppy

Our son has lent me his copy, bought from Amazon UK, of Shoot the Puppy, sub-titled A survival guide to the curious jargon of modern life by Tony Thorne, Head of the Language Centre at King's College, London.



Can it be true that "In the middle of business discussions we recreate the nursery or kindergarten with triumphant cries of bish bash bosh! (meaning roughly 'job well done'."?

The author goes on, "But when the boss exhorts members of the group to get your ducks in a row ('get organised, come to an agreement'), what exactly is he up to? Is he (it's usually a he) being patronizing? Is he trying desperately to bond, to flatten the pyramid momentarily so that everyone feels equal?"

Shoot the Puppy is an interesting book, but a £7 paperback would have been better than a £13 hardback, though I suppose, to most of the corporate types it is aimed at, £13 is small change.

Local bookshops go online

I clipped an article headed "Local bookshops go online to fight the giants" from the Daily Telegraph, which also had a leader headed "Bookshops fight back", and then paid a visit to the website "that could allow traditional local bookshops to rival the internet giants and large chains." Chris Conway, the MD of the site, was quoted as saying it could do everything Amazon and one of the UK book chains could do, but "potentially even better".

Have a look and see what you think.

Rocking horses, old and new

Usually, in September, I spend a week in London. This year I broke the habit to concentrate on research for what writers call the WIP [work in progress].

But last weekend I took an afternoon off to visit the Channel Islands Festival of Arts and Crafts at Guernsey's Beau Sejour Leisure Centre which provides many useful resources for islanders but, visually, is a bright orange blot on the landscape.

Describing the original Beau Sejour, an elegant neo-classical house built before 1815, in Buildings in the Town and Parish of St Peter Port compiled for the National Trust of Guernsey in 1974/75, the late Sir Charles Brett CBE wrote that the house was "due unfortunately for demoliton, to make way for a 'leisure centre' (whatever that may turn out to be: the term has some curious in-built ambiguities: deck-chairs? snooker? bridge? bingo? chemin-de-fer? Leisure means different things to different people.) …impending doom hangs over the whole building, surrounded as it is by wire-mesh fencing and bulldozers' footprints."

Why the original house could not have been restored and made the centrepiece of a less hideous modern complex is a mystery.

Of the 73 exhibitors at the Festival, most from mainland UK, the stand I liked best was Terry White's White Horses. Last year, exhibiting in Jersey, Mr White sold all the horses he had brought with him. I hope his trip to Guernsey this year was equally successful.



At his website I learned that he and his wife "have been designing and hand carving traditional rocking horses since 1983, creating individual, unique and timeless works of art. Oak, walnut and dapple horses emerge from our stables resplendent with real horsehair, hand washed and carefully groomed to achieve that unmistakable sheen, adjustable hand stitched leather work and nickel-plated stirrups."

On another page I read "Most of our horses are on a safety stand - invented and patented in 1878 by Philip J Marqua, whose design has altered little since - yet we also supply horses on bows if requested."

Googling for Marqua

Naturally I went to Google to find out more about Philip J Marqua, but only one link came up - to the White Horses site I had come from. It was the first time in many years of Googling that this search engine had disappointed me.

On Monday, at the island's Guille-Allès Public Library, I searched the catalogue for "rocking horse" and found that, as well as several stories for children, there was a hardback copy of Anthony Dew's Making Rocking Horses, first published by David & Charles in 1984, in the library's reserve stock. The same year a paperback edition was brought out by Sterling Pub Co Inc in the US, and Amazon UK has five of these for sale, but only from US booksellers.

On the way home from the library, I asked a Guernsey antique dealer, Sue Le Cras, if she had sold any rocking horses recently. Sue shook her head, but advised me to ask another dealer, Anne Drury, who turned out to have two late Victorian horses undergoing restoration. When I asked what they were likely to cost, she mentioned a price far lower than the cost of a new horse.

Googling for references to Anthony Dew led me to the information I wanted about Philip J Marqua. It was in a long and fascinating article at the Smithsonian Magazine from which I extracted -

"Queen Victoria's nine children insisted on bringing a dapple-gray on family vacations. Napoléon's young son, Joseph-Charles-François, treasured his painted pony. Sweden's King Karl XV and King Prajadhipok of Thailand rode rocking horses in their youth (as did the current heir to the British throne, Prince Charles, on a model carefully selected for him by Queen Elizabeth II)."
and
"An American also scored a safety breakthrough: in 1878, to guard against horse and rider going head over heels, not to mention scratching floors, bumping into furniture or squashing small fingers and toes, Philip Marqua of Cincinnati patented a safety stand to which the horse's legs are attached. (Purists, of course, disdain the stands.)"

In praise of John Ward

Like most people who have been extremely hard up at some stage of their lives, I'm not a spendthrift. But 15 years ago, when it was serious money, I splurged £40 [US $76, Australian $99] on a hardback which has given me endless pleasure : The Paintings of John Ward published by David & Charles.



This summer, this delightful book was re-published in paperback by David & Charles at £20 and is on sale for substantially less at Amazon UK where it is described as "a spectacular showcase of the art of John Ward, bringing together many of the artist's best and most familiar works. It includes the artist's famous portraits of the Princess of Wales and the Princess Royal. The commentary puts the plates into context with a wry and witty account of his career and the story behind each painting. It features work in the medium of pen and ink, pencil, oils and watercolours, all of which the artist is equally at home with."

I first encountered John Ward's work long ago in the pages of Vogue magazine. In 1988, in Trinidad, I had an unexpected real life encounter with him and his wife which I'm writing about in the WIP. John Ward was born in 1917 so is now in his late eighties. In a civilised world, the new edition of his book would have shot to the top of the UK bestseller charts instead of the ghosted celebrity biogs and misery memoirs too often to be found there.

Trance by Stanley Morgan

Anyone who has been involved with publishing world for several decades is forced to conclude that some, perhaps many, of the people in it have lost their marbles. The latest proof of this to come my way is Stanley Morgan's first rate thriller Trance.

I wrote about Mr Morgan last month under the crosshead 'The first million sales'. Since then, I have read his book as has Mr Bookworm. We both thought it excellent and are baffled by why the author - particularly with his Russ Tobin track record - was unable to find a mainstream publisher to take it on.

However, thanks to the existence of Twenty First Century Publishers and Lightning Source, the book has been published in a stylish paperback format with pages that don't need to be held open by force as is the case with a lot of current pbs.



Pencilled at the back of my copy are my notes, including a dialogue quote from p 126, "These people have power. They give power to one another in the guise of government regulations, military protocol. They operate in a twilight zone called national security where the rules of behaviour are as flexible as a potentate's whim. I suspect that more crimes have been committed against Americans by Americans, in the name of national security, than by any alien nation. And the same is probably true for all nations, your own included."
One of the reasons Mr Bookworm and I enjoyed this book is because it deals with matters which are increasingly worrying to all intelligent people.
Another note reads, "p 131 One of the best 'curtains', to Chapter 13, I've read.", followed by, "p 147 an even better curtain."

What I also liked about Trance was the relationship between the central character, Los Angeles hynotherapist Paul Drummond and a British-born L A crime reporter Karen Beal. This was handled in a far more intelligent way than the "love interest" in most thrillers.

The straight-backed, no-nonsense great-aunts who were my formative influences believed that most of life's problems could be cured by common sense and long walks. So usually I'm wary of all types of therapists, and cynical about hypnosis. However such is Stanley Morgan's skill at characterisation that he soon made me warm to Paul Drummond.

On p 157 Drummond says, "The word 'cause' has kind of fallen into disrepute lately, hasn't it? It sounds old hat, naïve, silly. This country, maybe the whole damned world, is in the hands of the grabbers. I get so sick of this 'Gotta win' mania…'number one is everything, number two is nothing. Christ, Dick, the world's full of number twos. Do they get nothing? Tom Keegan was made a number two by the grabbers, and that's what he got - nothing. Not even a life. I think it's time the number twos got together and made their presence felt."

The War For All The Oceans

On 10 August 2001, when this blog was a column in The Bookseller, it began, "Every time I see a spare tyre cover on a four-wheel-drive, I remember the one with the slogan "Everyone Is Reading The Keys of Egypt. Aren't You?", a photograph of which appeared in The Bookseller of 26th January. It struck me as the best book advertisement I had seen in a long time. Since then, the authors of the title, Lesley and Roy Adkins, have been expanding their website. I was impressed - its meta tags, navigation, content, graphics are all first class."

Five years on the Adkins' website is even better, and on the desk beside my laptop is their magnificent new book The War For All The Oceans: From Nelson at the Nile to Napolean at Waterloo.



It was published last month by Little, Brown with front endpapers showing the names of the sails on an 100-gun ship of the line and back endpapers showing the standing rigging, masts and decks.

Almost 500 pages long, and splendidly illustrated, this book is sure to be found in a parcel under many Christmas trees this year.

Long ago, I spent a childhood holiday at Happisburgh in Norfolk, but wasn't taken to see the stone plaque in the churchyard, photographed by the authors, recording the burial of many who drowned in the wreck of the Invincible in March 1801.

I see in this week's issue of The Bookseller that Roy and Lesley Adkins will be appearing at an Ottakar's Barnstaple event on October 4th. Details here.

New editor of The Author

Some published writers have a strange compulsion to advise and encourage would-be authors/prospective competitors in an already grossly overcrowded marketplace. The only advice I ever give is - "As soon as you're published, join the Society of Authors. It's expensive - a year's membership costs £85 or £60 for those under 35 - but worth every penny."



The Society's quarterly magazine, The Author, arrived the other day. I see that Andrew Taylor is retiring as editor, his successor being Andrew Rosenheim who is probably not as fobidding as the photograph of him, borrowed from his agent's website, suggests. His most recent novel, Stillriver, described as a powerful love story, is now in paperback, but with my customary caution with new-to-me authors, I shall request it from my public library where it is currently out on loan.

Unexpected parcel of Glass Books

Last month I received an unexpected parcel. The covering letter, unsigned, was from someone at Penguin Group UK. It began, "Welcome to the world of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. Sexy, fresh, addictive and enthralling, this world is hard to leave. Enjoy it. Each episode is in its own beautiful perfect-bound instalment. They are a limited edition and totally unique. These can't be bought in any bookshop, only by subscription, but are being given to you to welcome you into this world. Read them. Talk about them. Share them with others who are visiting the Glass Books world. But don't get trapped there."

The parcel contained ten paperbacks, their jackets shading from pale blue-grey to deep blue, each one a chapter of a book by G W Dahlquist. On the back of Chapter One is a line drawing of the author whose clothes,hair and moustache suggestion a late Victorian and who was said to have "served as a doctor in two major conflicts before putting pen to paper in a series of highly acclaimed plays. Turning his hand to fiction, he claims that his work is loosely based on events that befell a distant relative. The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters is his first known novel."

Before settling down to read, I went to the website www.glassbooks.co.uk where a notice came up "This content requires Adobe Flash Player 9. Would you like to install it?"

Those of you who read Bookworm on the Net when it was a column in The Bookseller may remember that I had several rants about site designers who require visitors to install programmes they don't have, or don't want, and expect them to waste time watching Flash screens. However first-time authors usually have to accept whatever their publishers' marketing departments inflict on them, so I didn't blame G W Dahlquist for this annoyance.

It was soon clear that he was writing American English, and while "she climbed off of the railing" [page 9] may be acceptable usage in the US, I'm doubtful about "who's" for "who has" [p 19] being acceptable anywhere. The opening scenes seem to take place in London at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century. The principal character is 25-year-old Miss Temple who not only goes about unchaperoned but more than once says "Beg pardon?" On p 25 the author writes "disinterested" when he means "uninterested".

In Chapter Three we meet a man who may be the hero, Doctor Abelard Svenson. "He sighed, opened his cigarette case, stuck one of the dark, foul Russian cigarettes in his mouth, and took a match from the bureau near the lamp, striking it off of his thumbnail."

The whole book is packed with unnecessarily long-winded sentences. What I found even more off-putting were the scenes towards the end of the first chapter when Miss Temple finds herself in the theatre of an isolated country house where another woman is being subjected to treatment which, far from exciting Miss Temple, would have made her faint with disgust and terror.

At Amazon.com I found 28 reviews, most unfavourable. This is from Publishers Weekly. "Debut novelist Dahlquist aims for a blockbuster with a mishmash of Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre and Eyes Wide Shut that never quite comes together. Three months after 25-year-old Celeste Temple travels from "her island" (a Bermuda-like place) plantation home to Victorian London, fiancé Roger Bascombe breaks their engagement. Driven more by curiosity than desire, she follows him from his job at the foreign ministry to Harschmort House, where, with little prodding, she quickly finds herself in silk undergarments at a ritual involving masked guests and two-way mirrors…Meanwhile, through science and alchemy, evildoers capture erotic memories and personal will in blue crystals. Dahlquist introduces so many characters, props and plot twists, near-death experiences and narrow escapes that the novel has the feel of a frantic R-rated classic comic book-if comics were arch."



Far from getting trapped in the Glass Books world, I found even skim-reading an effort. Porn-addicts might find it readable, but this is not a book for admirers of Patrick O'Brian, the Waughs and Elizabeth David whose A Book of Mediterranean Food I bought for 60 pence in a charity shop last week. Long ago I owned one of the earlier editions but it disappeared.

In Mrs David's introduction to the 1988 edition, which I hadn't come across before, she has some scathing things to say about publishers, apart from the late John Lehmann of Penguin New Writing who, in 1949, wrote to say he was interested in publishing her. But she writes that Macdonalds "proved a sorry exchange for John" and "From the hands of a publisher called Robert Hale, of whom I shall say no more than it seemed a singular misfortune to have had my books acquired by his firm, I was rescued by Messrs. Dorling Kindersley…"

PLEASE NOTE

I'm not sure where I shall be on November 1st. With luck, settled down in winter quarters, or at least within reach of an internet café where I can access the text of the November issue of this blog and hit the Publish button. But anything might happen on the 1,000-mile drive from A to B. If the blog isn't "up" on its due date, please be patient.

Stanley Morgan's tale : Part 1

As promised, here is Part One of a story emailed by Stanley Morgan, see photo.



I've added some links but, after much searching, have failed to find a picture of Morton Lowry who died in San Franciso nearly 20 years ago.

"Dear Anne,
Your smoke-belching Spanish fuse box brought back a vivid memory - and a torrent of empathy.
A quick anecdote, if I may.
In 1959 I was cast in a film titled 'The Sleepwalkers' (how apt that turned out to be!) to be shot in Portugal. In the month of December I travelled to Lisbon accompanied by a veteran British actor, Morton Lowry, a likeable soul who had tons of greasepaint but not a single practical cell in his ageing body.
The weather was appalling. Required to stay overnight in a Lisbon hotel, Morton got nicely sploshed on vino and fell off the tall stool in the hotel bar. I put him to bed.
At 4am I was awakened by a battering on my door. It was Morton, telling me he'd gone down to the bar for a 'nightcap' and on return discovered his room, his luggage, and all his possessions had 'disappeared'. He was terrified. I managed to calm him and eventually found his room, and possessions, on a floor different from the one he'd reached after his 'nightcap'.
The following afternoon and into the blackest night imagineable, in torrential rain, we travelled by train in a southerly direction, to a location we had never before heard of.
(It turned out to be Portimao, now extremely well-known). Morton managed to consume a quantity of beer en route, and he, at least, arrived happily at 9pm.
We were met by the producer's assistant, aged seventeen, and driven to a large, unoccupied villa located, from the close roar of the pounding sea, on a cliff edge. Suddenly, there were Morton and I, abandoned, in this creepy, cold, practically unfurnished house. What to do? Go to bed.
We each chose a room, said goodnight. I tested the rock-hard straw mattress, wondered how life could possibly get worse.
And then it did.
The lights went out.
Utter blackness.
A wail from Morton's room. 'STAAAAANNNN!!'
Fortunately, Morton was a smoker and possessed a box of matches! It contained six.
It took five matches to locate the fuse box, set in a wall in the cellar stairwell. I opened the cupboard. Eureka! A stub of candle. We lit it with our last match.
Smoke drifted from the fuse box. I could see the reason immediately. Littering the floor of the box were lengths of wire - no, not fuse wire- electrical cable of varying thicknesses. Someone, obviously as practical as Morton, had experimented with different colours and had decided brown would be nice.
I chose the thinnest wire, managed to peel off the insulation, and wrapped it around the terminals. Shoved in the fuse. Flicked down the switch.
LIGHTS!!
I think Morton cried.
In a state of euphoria we mounted the stairs, reached our rooms, turned to say a relieved goodnight.
And the lights went out.
I think Morton cried.
May you and your husband dwell in a smoke-free zone eternally.
Best wishes - Stanley"

Part 2 of this adventure to follow.

Lunch break [online] reading

I didn't intend to blog again until Monday when I planned to regale you with an amusing story told to me yesterday by Stanley Morgan.

However in today's lunch break I read Richard Charkin's and Grumpy Old Bookman's blogs, and a GOB link led me to this. Note the last sentence.

"Books, especially fiction, are unfortunately something that many, many people want to write and relatively few people want to read, at least not in commensurate amounts. (See last year's NEA survey, "Reading at Risk.") People tend to point their finger at the part of the process where the book they've written has gotten stuck. If it doesn't make it to the agent, it's the agents' fault; if it doesn't make it to a publisher, it's the publishers' fault; if it doesn't get reviewed, it's the press. But, in reality, the whole system is overloaded. Everything that most people dislike about the system really derives from this fact. If people were as enthusiastic about reading (or rather, buying) books as they are about writing them, the industry overall would not be in the poor economic situation it's in now."

That comment was made by Laura Miller, a journalist who frequently writes reviews for Salon, and published in Finn Harvor's blog on December 20.

I am, as you know, extremely enthusiastic about reading, but in recent years only a handful of titles on the bestseller lists have appealed to me.

More and more often I'm re-reading books bought years ago. What is the point of spending money on new authors who are not a patch on their predecessors?

Stanley Morgan's hilarious tale [prompted by my recent "scary Sunday" blog, will appear here shortly.]

Right now I must stick to my new Day Plan which includes half an hour's housework every day. How long this good resolution will last...quien sabe? But I'm sticking with it for the time being.

Stanley Morgan booked for [James] Bond event in Germany

An interesting private email came from Stanley Morgan last month. [If the link doesn't work, check the January archive for my previous blog about him on Saturday, January 13, 2007].

On 18 March – and I have his permission to quote – he wrote,"Linda and I had a most interesting weekend at the Radisson Hotel, Heathrow 2/3/4th March. We met many delightful people, most of whom are featured in the attachment. Never imagined that one day we would chat with astronauts and a Dambuster bomb-aimer."

The photo of Stanley, playing the concierge in the James Bond film Dr No, is borrowed from the Autographica site attached to his email.



His email continued, "I have enjoyed your recent blogs, particularly, perhaps, the piece about Arthur Hailey. He exemplifies, par excellence, the advisability of 'writing what you know', and of 'coming to the subject fully prepared', the theme of my offering, you may recall in Part 1 of The Boss Articles.

It did not surprise me to learn that he received cool critique of his books. No author that commercially successful could avoid the viperous vituperation of the literati.

When I first arrived in Ireland, driven there by excessive taxation, I was interviewed by the Irish press who advised me, as a successful yarn-spinner, to 'avoid the local literati like the plague, they'll eat you alive'. I took their advice, yet still managed to attract a wickedly snide piece on signing £100,000 contract with W.H.Allen.

I have just received an invitation to attend a Special Bond Event in Germany in August, linked to UNICEF. Incredibly, it has been suggested that I read from and talk about my books! I replied that I'd be delighted to do both. But doubtful sufficient interest since my books are not published in Germany. I have this awful vision of myself, on stage in a vast auditorium, with Linda in the only occupied seat."

Buying Bond books in the Fifties

I'm sure that won't happen and there will be a full house. I should love to be there. I started buying Ian Fleming's Bond books [in hardback] in the Fifties, after the first was serialised in the Yorkshire Evening Press at York while I was a YEP reporter. Another staff reporter was Vivian Brooks, who wrote detective books under the pen-name Osmington Mills.

The only information I can find about her is in her father's Wikipedia entry. She was born in 1922 and died in 2003. I remember her as a large, jolly, but perhaps sometimes lonely, woman in her early thirties who sometimes came to lunch with us. Afterwards, the three of us and her dog would walk on the nearby flood meadows beside the River Ouse. When I left the YEP, we lost touch.

Bella Andre's comment on current discussion

Commenting on the Julie Cohen/sex with a stranger discussion, Bella Andre wrote, "You said it yourself--why can't novels can be fantasy?--in your recent post about the MISERY category for new books. "Who wants to read those books?" you asked. Well, not me. And I don't want to write them either. So that's why I, too, write very sexy contemporary fiction.

And, I'm not ashamed to say, I hope you and your readers do go to my web site. A little self-promotion is not a bad thing. After all, if it gets one more reader to pick up a great love story--that, indeed, happens to begin with some extremely hot sex--then I say hooray for all of us. I get to write more fun books for Simon & Schuster and my readers get to vicariously experience fantastic love and sex through the pages of my books as well.

In fact, it's time for me to get off the internet for the next few hours. I've got a sex scene to write."

Book world equivalent of sleazy mags

I had a quick look at Bella Andre's blog where I read -
"Monday, January 31, 2005
Erotic Romance: A how-to guide
Ever thought about writing erotic romance? Me either, [sic] until I found out what a hot market it is. Which got me wondering, "Can I do it?" So I sat down one Saturday with an idea in my head about two erotica authors who meet at a writer's convention and lo and behold, three chapters flew from my fingertips. Seriously, I had written 8,000 funny, sexy words before I so much as looked up at my computer."

I have nothing against born writers writing for money rather than literary acclaim, but I don't approve of the thousands of not-born writers who are currently cluttering the market with largely second-rate stuff.

This writer also contributes to a blog called RedHotRomance described as "The best in SIN LIT from 9 red hot Bay Area writers!"

This sort of thing strikes me as the book world equivalent of writing for those sleazy magazines on the top shelves in newsagents' shops. I'm amazed that a wife and mother, which I gather Bella Andre is in her private life, would demean herself by writing borderline porn. The market for children's books is also booming. She would do better to turn her talents to that field.

More comments on your comments tomorrow.

Advice from an oldie to a newbie

In today's blog

Advice to a not-so-young aspiring author
Stanley Morgan's adventure : Part 2

Advice to a not-so-young author

"Housework" is not a word one would expect to spark a response. But on January 12 Liz Fenwick posted the comment "I'm doing the same on the housework but there is no joy in it."

Clicking on her name, I found that she has a website where I read -

"I am a writer or I always have been in my heart but now I am taking it more seriously. You can only say to yourself for so long this is what you really want to do and then find ways of avoiding it like earning a living, getting married, having kids, moving around the world etc. One day you have to wake up and just do it. That day happened on 1st January 2004. Since then I have written two books and had two rejections. Do I see a pattern here? No. I am learning so much that soon those rejections will turn to acceptance. So watch this space."

In my view if someone is born a writer, or an artist, or composer, their creative gene should dominate their life, even if they have to modify their daydreams in order to pay the rent. Which is why, at 17, I became a cub reporter, combining earning a living and improving my writing skills.

Liz seems to have made a promising start. Her bio tells us -
"I discovered early on that my best friends could be books. As an only child growing up just outside Boston, I filled many childhood hours lost in their pages. I went onto to study English literature at Mount Holyoke College where I obtained my degree in 1985. While on a waitlist for a Masters in Theological Studies at Harvard, I moved to London to see if life looked different from the other side of the Atlantic. It did. I soon fell in love and married an Englishman then embarked on a new life as an expatriate."

At this point Liz's urge to write seems to have been side-tracked. I can empathise, up to a point, because love is another of life's top priorities. When Mr Bookworm made me choose between marrying him and going abroad for a couple of years, or sticking with my career, it would have been insanity not to go.

But for Liz Fenwick love and marriage was a long-term distraction which makes me wonder if writing really was/is her vocation.

She writes - "As an expat, I became Global Coordinator of an award-winning, grass-roots expatriate spouses association for a 13 billion dollar international corporation. Twelve years and eight international moves later, I am now residing in both London and Cornwall with my husband, three children and a big fluffy white cat where I have rediscovered the joys of writing fiction again."

That word "residing" bothers me. Why not "living"? Also, when I read the blurb for Liz's novel August Rock there was a spelling mistake in the second line.

"American, Judith Chambers leaves one man at the alter and flees to Cornwall. Tristan Trevenen has just lost his father and is now stuck with an historic estate on the Helford River that he doesn't want. In order to sell the estate he requires the specialist help of Chambers, a PhD in History, to catalogue his father's papers."

I'm pretty sure that "alter" for "altar" must be a typo, and I would have pointed it out in a private email to Liz Fenwick except that she doesn't have an email link on her web but one of those maddening forms which require the visitor to fill in first name, last name, email address and comments.

Instead I had a look at her blog started in September.

In my view - and many will disagree - unpublished writers shouldn't waste their creative energy blogging. If and when they do start blogging, it should be a subject blog, not a personal diary or heavily self-promotional as so many authors' blogs are.

All this may sound a rather unkind response from a veteran writer to a newbie. But, as you may remember, recently I quoted Laura Miller's comment "If people were as enthusiastic about reading (or rather, buying) books as they are about writing them, the industry overall would not be in the poor economic situation it's in now."

A day or two ago at the BBC site I read, "How about spending the most boring month in the year, February, doing something crazy and creative? In February 2007, you could be writing the novel of your dreams with Write Here Right Now, Radio Scotland's 'write a novel in a month' project. Last year 1000 writers all around the world signed up to take part."

And to cap that The Times has a piece about a book on how to write chick lit…a genre already overcrowded to bursting point.

Many of the published members of the Romantic Novelists' Association, which Liz Fenwick has joined, fall over themselves to be helpful to unpublished members. It doesn't seem to occur to these self-appointed fairy godmothers that, if the unpublished people have what it takes, they will succeed unaided.

My advice to Liz Fenwick is to forget about romantic fiction and look for a relatively uninhabited region of the book world... if there is one.

Stanley Morgan's adventure : Part 2

Stanley writes -
"What followed the episode was two months of utter chaos and disaster. Mine was a 'leading man' role, playing opposite a very young Dyan Cannon (later to become Mrs Cary Grant). A very promising role for me. The film was shot entirely outdoors, on the beach and on the cliffs of that lovely coastline.

Shortly after shooting commenced, Dyan contracted a poisoned thumb from fossil grains, and went to local hospital to have it treated. That evening, we, a group of actors, were sitting in the Fortaleza Restaurant courtyard having a meal, when Dyan suddenly keeled out of her seat and struck the stone floor with her head. We got her back to the villa (the same villa Morton and I lived in), and called a Portugese doctor. He arrived, I kid you not, swathed in a black gaucho cape, wearing a black-and-silver Zorro sombrero, and smoking a cigarette through a long black holder. Could you make this up?

Dyan awoke from a partial coma, unable to speak, and scratched her feelings of terror on the plaster wall beside her bed with her finger nail. Although not hospitalised, she was unable to work for a week or so, during which time she lost so much weight that when she eventually began to work she looked quite dreadful in the rushes. There followed a litany of disasters that beggar belief and the imagination. Homosexual relationships developed among the crew that triggered jealousies which threatened the technical stability of the shoot; the producer offended the local populace by driving like a madman through the villages; Dyan became increasingly unhappy with her contract and discovered that the producer had not been telephoning her L.A. agent, as promised; the producer was running out of money; the weather turned cold and made outdoor shooting difficult for everyone (I spent quite some time in the sea, knife-fighting with dear old Morton who, mostly in his cups, was so potentially lethal that eventually I had to refuse to do the scenes!)

And the story? Now, promise not to laugh...oh, all right then, go on... We were a band of shipwrecked individuals who, in the opening scenes, drag ourselves ashore from a wrecked yacht, and find ourselves on a beach entirely land-locked by towering cliffs. Thus imprisoned, frustrated by many failed attempts to climb the cliffs, our relationships begin to disintegrate. But then - hold the phone! - on the verge of murdering one another, we spot a band of gauchos on the cliff top! Hurrah! We are saved! No, we are not. For they are not really gauchos, they are...yes, you've guessed it...they are ALIENS from a distant planet! Oh, was it really that obvious? Anne, I don't know who conceived the initial script. I do know that we all sat around daily, before shooting commenced and tried to repair the damage. But it was unfixable. The sad ending to the story is that the film 'The Sleepwalkers' was never distributed. The producer ran foul of the English unions by employing cheap Portugese non-union labour to haul the heavy equipment up the cliffs, and the unions shut him out. For me, it was particularly frustrating because it was my first major role, teamed with Dyan who was a Warner starlet. But everybody lost on that one. Anyway, it has been fun relating it to you, and thank you for listening."

Thank you for telling, Stanley. I was interested to learn that when Dyan married Cary Grant she was 28 to his 61. Not surprisingly it didn't last long.

Napoleon's penis, Shelley's heart

Also in today's blog
Misuse of blog comments
Dot com address theft
Helpful anonymous comment


An interesting article [link from Arts & Letters Daily] about these famous owners' organs here.

It was written by Judith Pascoe, a professor of English at the University of Iowa and the author of "The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors."

She tells us that the penis had "supposedly had been severed by a priest who administered last rites to Napoleon and overstepped clerical boundaries".

I was more interested to read : "After Napoleon's capture at Waterloo, his possessions toured England. His carriage, filled with enticing contents like a gold tongue scraper, a flesh brush, "Cashimeer small-clothes" and a chocolate pot, drew crowds and inspired the poet Byron to covet a replica. When Napoleon died, the trees that lined his grave site at St. Helena were slivered into souvenirs."

Professor Pascoe goes on, "If, as Freud suggested, the collector is a sexually maladjusted misanthrope, then the emperor's phallus is a collector's object nonpareil, the epitome of male potency and dominance. The ranks of Napoleon enthusiasts, it should be noted, include many alpha males: Bill Gates, Newt Gingrich, Stanley Kubrick, Winston Churchill, Augusto Pinochet. Nevertheless, the Freudian paradigm has never accounted for women collectors, nor does it explain the appeal of collections for artists like Lisa Milroy, whose paintings of cabinet handles or shoes, arrayed in series, animate these common objects."

I went in search of Lisa Milroy who was born in Vancouver but lives and works in London. Not sure what to make of her painting 'Handles'.

Misuse of blog comments

On Thursday, February 15, 2007 I wrote a blog headed Flower Confidential. By chance, yesterday, I saw that it had attracted 10 comments which I hadn't read. They turned out to be all advertisements for commercial sites.

On Monday, October 03, 2005, Grumpy Old Bookman wrote the following about Comment Spam.

"You will probably have noticed that this blog offers the chance to make a comment on what the blogger has written. Some people read these comments, some don't. And some of you, of course, go to the trouble of writing a comment.

Well, it seems to be an unfortunate fact of life that any blog which attracts even a modest number of readers will also attract the attention of people who put out what is known as 'comment spam'. That is to say, the spammers make a comment (of sorts) and then add a link to some other site which they are being paid to plug.

Much of this comment spam is done by machine, and until yesterday it wasn't a problem. There was only the occasional fake comment, which I deleted by hand. However, yesterday there were 37 fake comments, and this morning there are 384."

I hope Bookworm is not about to become a target for this form of spam.

Dot com address theft

If so, it won't be this year's first unpleasant online experience. In 1999, I signed up with a US domain name, email and website hosting service, thinking it wouldn't be long before I launched a website.

All went well for seven years, although the website didn't materialise. [It went through a lot of re-designs and I hope is nearly right.] Then the email forwarding to anneweale.com began to have problems. At the end of 2006 I decided to cancel the contract.

Foolishly, as it turned out, I didn't sign on with another host but switched to my Yahoo email address. Then - shock, horror - I discovered my dot com address was being used by a range of commercial firms.

On March 31 I received the following alert.

"Google Web Alert for: "Anne Weale"
anne weale homes for sale at anneweale.com
used cars car accessories cellular cell phone deals download"

The same day I emailed to the legal department at Whois. No reply. Maybe the next step is to ask the Society of Authors if any other members have had to deal with this problem.

Helpful anonymous comment

Some kind person who prefers to be anonymous left a link to "The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club"

I went to look and at the About Us page, read the following -

"The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club has been in existence for over 110 years, having celebrated its centenary in 1994. It has a membership of over 350, most of whom live in or around Edinburgh and Glasgow, but there is a considerable number from other parts of Scotland, and also from England and overseas.

The object of the Club is to foster the name of Sir Walter Scott through meetings, lectures, publications and excursions and to advance the education of the public concerning his life and works.

The Club is the senior and most active of its kind and has numbered among its Presidents distinguished statesmen, novelists, historians and men of letters, including Stanley Baldwin, John Buchan, James Bridie, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Macmillan, David Daiches, and more recently, Allan Massie, Edwin Morgan, Dorothy Dunnett, Paul Scott, Magnus Magnusson, Tom Fleming and James Robertson. In its centenary year we were honoured to have as President of the Club the Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern.

Our 2007/8 President is A.N.Wilson."

I haven't read any of Sir Walter's books for years and now feel inspired to re-read him.