Christmas in novels

A seasonal selection...

A Christmas Carol – written to pay off a debt, it sold 6,000 copies in the first week, and was hugely influential. Dickens is to blame for it all, the whole lot, turkey, relatives, spending more than you can afford on presents, it’s all his fault. Bah! Humbug! N.B. The Ghost of Christmas Present, who much resembles Father Christmas, wears green, and favours a bare chest. Chilly.

Emma - the terrific scene where she is confined in a coach on a snowy Christmas Eve with Mr Elton. Mistakenly thinking her in love with him, he proposes; then gets huffy when refused, and never forgives her. He and the vulgar new wife he petulantly acquires are Emma's enemies thenceforth.

Little Women – those pesky small females again – ‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents’. 'It's so dreadful to be poor,' (how true). But they discovered they could still be happy! And Jo made money from her stories… Those were the days.

Harry Potter - Harry getting dreadful Dursley presents – a single tissue – and a jumper from Ron’s mum, and having a great time with Ron and Hermione.

The Bachelor – Stella Gibbons wrote half a dozen novels as good as Cold Comfort Farm, the only one in print today. There's a lovely description of a wartime Christmas, capturing all the undercurrents of the characters' hopes and desires. 'Kenneth began to give out the presents and cries of "Just what I wanted!" began to sound in all their falseness upon the festal air.'

Courtesy of Lorraine: a Christmas song.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Calling Names

Names are REALLY important...

I bet everyone with a computer has, at some time, idly googled his own name. It's only when you hope to become well known that you realize being called Mary Jones or John Smith is not good. Not good at all. Though you can get away with it if you excel in your field - John Smith, briefly leader of the Labour Party, at the time transcended his bog-standard name.

I chose my writing name with this in mind. Google Lexi Revellian and it's all ME. Mwah-ha-ha-ha! (Though they do ask if you mean 'rebellion').

There is a magic in names. Yahweh was God's name in the Old Testament, so powerful that his worshippers were forbidden to say it. In an unacknowledged rite of passage, teenagers today often change their name when leaving home. Tessa becomes Tess, Elizabeth Liza, Mark Marc.

Back to writing; a critic once said that you could often guess the quality of a novel by the aptness and credibility of the characters' names. Bad names most likely meant a bad novel. This is especially true in fantasy, where writers have total freedom, and frequently abuse it. A hero called L'tru? Rramis? Gwaal?

Or children's fiction. Bobby Redbreast the Robin, Squawky the Crow, Mr and Mrs Blue-tit, Beady Eye the Hawk, Bobtail the rabbit, Ollie the Owl - the poverty of imagination makes you want to weep. (I did not make these up, by the way).

I've just read The Princess Bride, an eccentric but good read. Some of the names are excellent; Inigo Montoya, Vizzini, Fezzik. But others give you the impression William Goldman put down the first names that came into his head, then forgot to go back and change them. Buttercup, Westley, Humperdinck. Dear oh dear.

My new writing website

Fun to do, after the first few hours of teeth gnashing

I've just set up a writing website. I've had this writing blog since June 2007. I am a huge fan of Blogger - it's elegant, easy to use apart from a few line spacing issues, and free!

But I wanted a site for more permanent information. I'd made a note of Squarespace ages ago, as their site looks so cool. Contrast it with Godaddy. And you get 30 days free trial. I assumed, having had the experience of setting up my jewellery website with Freestart, I would find the process easy.

Wrong!

I spent hours getting cross, and not very far. In a temper with Squarespace, I signed up for a free trial with Moonfruit, only to find it much less easy to use, and less flexible. Every time I viewed my fledgling site, they nagged me to sign up. You can't load a whole short story. Also I kept calling it Moonboot, or Fruitsuit...

I went back to Squarespace, persevered, and am really pleased with the result.

Have a look at it here.

AND it's got a message board! Now this may not seem immediately useful, but I have a vivid imagination. Just suppose I started to become slightly known - through ABNA possibly - a fan could leave me a message! I could answer him!

As my fame spread, fans could chat on my message board about how great I am, and I could delight them by the rare personal appearance there, becoming ever more elusive the richer and more famous I became...

A girl can dream.

Inspiration

Now where did that come from?

As a child, I loved Enid Blyton, particularly The Famous Five, but it was a thwarted love that dared not speak its name. Parents, teachers and librarians were united in their disapproval of her works, and conspired to make them unavailable to middle-class children like me.

I managed to read only three or four Famous Fives; I can’t remember how I got my hands on them. Possibly borrowed them from other children, or gulped them down in visits to friends' houses (what an unsatisfactory guest I must have been).

When my daughter started to read, I bought her the lot. She devoured them. When she was older and we were having a clear-out, she began to read… They ended up back on the shelf.

For me, the moment has passed, the magic is gone. I am, alas, too old and cynical to enjoy the books now.

But I there’s one I remember as being especially riveting. I looked it up; it’s Five Fall into Adventure. The Five meet a plucky ragamuffin girl, Jo, whom they mistake for a boy. She’s the baddie’s daughter, but helps the boys rescue George. Chatting on the Youwriteon forum about early loved books, I had a revelation about Jo:

Good God, that’s where Tor came from!

Tor, my heroine in Rising Fire. Five Fall into Adventure went deep into my imagination when I was a child, to emerge all these years later…

RISING FIRE number 1 in YWO December Bestsellers!

Rising Fire wins professional literary critique on Youwriteon

A certain amount of dancing round the room is going on here. Yes! I can't wait to read my critique from a professional in publishing.

Not because I think it's likely to be ecstatic - I don't, I'm expecting it to be fairly harsh since I am aware there are still a lot of things that could be improved in the start of Rising Fire. It's not as well-written as Trav Zander. And not because I think there's any chance the critiquer will be so impressed he/she will sign me up! That is the stuff of fantasy, and has happened to fewer than 1% of those authors who've been critiqued.

No, I am interested to know if there might be a market for my books, and if I have any chance at all of getting published...

Final gloat (sorry): all four of my pieces (two novels, two short stories) on Youwriteon are now in the Bestseller Chart.

*

I need a new Achievable Goal!

Hamlet

Unusual facts about Hamlet, best of plays

(I could not resist this illustration of an alien Hamlet).

1. Do you know that you can buy Hamlet, translated into Klingon here? Now there's a novel idea for a Christmas present... I quote, 'You may think you've read Hamlet before, but you can't really appreciate it until you've read it in the original Klingon. Now's your chance. Enjoy!'

(Original Klingon? Shakespeare was a Klingon??? Didn't know that).

2. TaH pagh taHb? is To be or not to be? in Klingon. (No, I don't know how you pronounce it. This is a blog, not an evening class for nerds! Go away.)

3. One line synopsis by Adrien Arnold: Whine whine whine...To be or not to be...I'm dead. (Not too good in my opinion; repetition of 'whine'. I prefer the simpler: Mother, how could you?)

4. Women have often played Hamlet. Sarah Bernhardt played the prince in a popular London production. In 1900, she made a five minute film of the fencing scene, with music and words on records that were played at the same time. It was the first talkie.

5. The highest-grossing Hamlet adaptation to-date is Disney's Academy Award winning animated feature The Lion King, which enacts a loose version of the plot among a pride of African lions.

6. Thomas Betterton went on playing Hamlet up to the age of seventy-four.

7. Garrick 'improved' the play; he said, 'I had sworn I would not leave the stage till I had rescued that noble play from all the rubbish of the fifth act. I have brought it forth without the grave-digger's trick, Osrick, & the fencing match".

Nice.

And go here to see my all-time favourite YouTube short; Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hamlet.

Words, words, words...

‘The hallmark of every truly educated person is a wide and flexible vocabulary’

The above is a quotation from Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis, a book I loved as a child. Our orphaned eleven-year-old hero goes to live with his aunt, and she gets him to follow her about with notepad and pencil to improve his vocabulary.

Auntie Mame: Well, now, read me all the words you don't understand.

Patrick: Libido, inferiority complex, stinko, blotto, free love, bathtub gin, monkey glands, Karl Marx... is he one of the Marx Brothers? Neurotic, heterosexual...

Auntie Mame: Oh, my my my my, what an eager little mind. [takes the list] You won't need some of these words for months and months.

Mame was right about her nephew's vocabulary. I've been thinking about this, partly because of FreeRice, but also because of one or two comments on Youwriteon and elsewhere suggesting that a writer should limit the words he uses in case his readers are unfamiliar with them. One of Rising Fire's reviewers doubted teenagers would know 'monastic', 'elaborately coiled', 'dragon lore', or 'inscrutable'.

Can this be true? If teenagers really cannot cope with these words, then the sooner they learn to the better. Without going all Lord Reith over this, I write to entertain, but have no objection to doing a bit of informing at the same time.

There is no point at which anyone, of whatever age, has learned all the words he needs. Get out your notepads!

Rising Fire in at Number One on YWO

Top of the charts on Youwriteon!

I was thrilled this morning to find Rising Fire (revised) had gone straight in at number one on YWO with its first five reviews.

I know I am lucky. Plenty of excellent books on the site never make the top ten, for no very obvious reason. There is always an element of chance in whether you happen to be assigned reviewers who enjoy your work; next week my book may plummet, but meantime it's a nice achievement.

Rising Fire was the first writing I put on YWO, on 22nd November 2006. That version was pretty rough. Full of word echoes, lumps of backstory, tell not show, and POV switches mid-paragraph. I made a lot of changes.

I tried a second version on the site this summer, with a prologue in an attempt to get rid of some of the backstory. Its reception was cool. Finally, my writer friend Norm said he didn't like the prologue, and I removed it. He was right.

Grateful thanks to Youwriteon, and everyone there who has given me useful feedback.

Free grains of rice...

Test your vocabulary, send rice to the hungry, and it's fun!

Um...I seem to have said it all in the title and subtitle. Go to:

FreeRice

and all will become clear.

(Okay, the highest I've got so far is 49. No, it's 50. Yay!)

ABNA: over the first hurdle

My entry's been accepted by ABNA. Woot!

This morning I received the email from the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, telling me my entry (Trav Zander) was eligible.

This has nothing to do with its quality, it just means I followed the rules and my files got to them uncorrupted. So you may well ask, what's the big deal?

The problem was that it was not possible to check or change what you'd uploaded; the rules were not as clear as they might have been, and there was little help or advice from ABNA admin. So the anxiety on the ABNA forum last night reached fever pitch. We'd been told we'd hear on the 12th, but emails weren't sent out till the evening American time.

In the event, they don't seem to have been as nitpicky as people feared. Wrong spacing and margins haven't meant exclusion; just corrupted files, or the extract not being from the start of the novel.

If you go to the link above, you will see a countdown clock to the date voting begins.

And if I make the Chosen One Thousand, you all know what I want you to do when the clock hits zero...

The Golden Compass

2nd December 2007

I've been having huge problems with this - and while trying to fix them, somehow wiped the post. Then I realized the fault was almost certainly with one of my computers that a neighbour has been repairing, which is still in a transitory state.

So my thoughts on Philip Pullman and the film are lost in the ether...

And they seem to think my name is Undefined. Which it isn't.

Darn.

Five of the Most Annoying Characters in Fiction

Which fictional characters could you really, really do without?

Here is my list:

• Sarah Woodruff in John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman. In real life, no man would be attracted to a glum girl who moped about the place. Men prefer cheerful women.

• James Bond. This is a guy who has a PhD in Smugness, and is also an incredibly inept spy. Discovering a beautiful, naked blonde in his bed in a Russian hotel, and getting in with her without it crossing his mind it might be a trap of some kind?

• Little Em'ly. One of Dickins' few failings was an inability to depict good, innocent young women. Also Little Nell, Little Dorrit, little Beth from Little Women - indeed, any fictional female described as 'little'. (I must declare an interest here, being tall myself).

• Jonathan Harker in Dracula. Boy, is this man tedious. It's a wonder anyone got beyond the first page of the novel, where Harker describes the dish he had for supper, asks the waiter what it is called, and decides he must get the recipe. Far from riveting.

• Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park. Jane Austen never wrote a bad book, but does anyone like Fanny? So shrinking and mouse-like, while all the time privately judging and disapproving of everyone.

I'll stop there for now. This list may be continued in a later post...

Trav Zander gets gold star on YWO

My novel has made it to the Best Sellers Chart on Youwriteon...

How often does one get a really nice surprise? Nasty ones are much more frequent. But I had one today when I logged in to Youwriteon to discover Trav Zander had made it to the peaceful waters of the Best Seller Chart, where the strife and uncertainty of peer review is over and past.

You can read the first 9,000-odd words of it here, should you want to.

My ABNA Blog

Take a look in case it's removed by the authorities!

I'm the proud owner of an Amazon blog that I don't think I'm entitled to. They seem to be just for authors who have a book selling on Amazon, or the Chosen One Thousand in due course.

But I thought it would be a good promotional tool for my profile page. So I tinkered about, clicked here and there, filled in this and that, gave up - and it appeared on my page. Woohoo!

You can see it here.

The cartoon I use for my Amazon profile is by my daughter. I like it so much I'm putting it here as well.

Thinking about Mills & Boon...

What makes good writing good (and bad writing bad)?

I listen to the radio while I work; BBC 7, Classic FM and Oneword mostly, and today I happened upon the Mills & Boon serial, The Greek's Chosen Wife by Lynne Graham.

It was immediately obvious what it was, as I came in on the statutory bit at the end where the conflict between the hero and heroine segues into declarations of hidden love. And it was quite bad. Not just the predictability of the plot (arranged marriage turns to true love) with its stock characters - he gorgeous and commanding, she beautiful and feisty - but the quality of the writing, which was both overblown and inept.

Nick, the golden-eyed hero, seldom says anything; instead, 'Nick imparted wryly', 'Nick censured huskily' or even 'Nick slotted in'. 'He found her mouth' had me jeering at the radio, below her nose and above her chin, now there's a surprise.

The book was plain bad, just as Jane Austen's are plain good. But what about good bad books, like the Famous Five series, or Dracula? Or bad good books, like À la recherche du temps perdu?

Your nominations?

ABNA update

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award closes its list...

Yesterday it was announced that entries had reached the 5,000 mark. Writers who missed out could go on a waiting list, and hope a registered writer would fail to submit.

The competition forum has been seething; anxious people unsure how to interpret the rules, and trying to help each other out in the almost total absence of Amazon admin. We won't be told our submission has 'qualified' until November 12th. No-one knows how rigidly the rules will be enforced; will you be disqualified for not having one inch margins? Or inadvertently leaving your name in the header? When they say 'a thousand-character synopsis' do they really mean a blurb? You can't check your submission, or go back and change it.

I wonder if they expected so many entries that the list would fill two weeks before the deadline?

Now it's just wait and see...

Single Point of View...grrr..

A sacred cow of our time?

Can anyone tell me why we are all told to stick rigidly to one POV in each scene, with the limitations that entails? The idea took hold quite recently, towards the end of the last century. Why is it such a good idea? Whose idea was it? (My theory is that the person responsible was a thwarted writer running a class for other unpublished writers).

Switching POVs is something that doesn't bother a reader unless he's studied writing. My daughter (a voracious reader) is fine with it, though she pounced on my one bit of authorial intrusion like a terrier on a rat, despite the fact that she’d never heard the expression. ‘You’re telling the reader what to think,’ she said.

My favourite authors use multiple POVs. In Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault there is one scene at a horse fair where the POV goes all over the place; Philip, Alexander, Hephaistion, the royal horse trainer, the slaves, the horse seller and even the horse. I'd never thought there was anything wrong with the scene. A more recent example of an author who ignores the ‘rule’ is Philip Reeve, in Mortal Engines.

I switch POVs in scenes between two people, where I want the reader to know what each of them is thinking. Sticking to one POV impoverishes the scene. In the episode where Jervaid is intent on seducing Tor, while she plans to enlist his help with stealing a dragon egg, I want the reader to be party to the thoughts of both, and root for Tor and Jervaid.

And don’t tell me it’s confusing. If you genuinely find it confusing, all I can say is, you’re very easily confused and should probably not be allowed out on your own.

I think it’s a rule made to be broken, unlike say, rules for apostrophes, where you are either right or wrong. (Switching topics, it astonishes me that so many would-be authors don’t bother to look up and learn the few, simple apostrophe rules).

I suspect that one day, single POV will go out of fashion like the dramatic unities theory that had such a crippling effect on French drama, while Shakespeare didn’t give a damn about it.. Swap Shakespeare for Moliere and Racine? I think not…

Aspiring writers' quiz

Have you got what it takes to be a writer?

It's been a while since I've redirected my loyal readers to a quiz. This one is by Holly Lisle, an American author with an extensive and very useful website. I learned a lot from it when I started writing. And she doesn't mention single POV once.

Go to Are you right for writing? and see how you score. (Disregard the repellent colour scheme of beige and pink. And the decorative photo to the left of this post, which is clearly an actress pretending to be an author. Probably Jane Austen).

Oh, since you ask, I got 47. She says: 30 - 49 points -- There's hope; you suspect some of the darker truths about the profession, and have an idea of what some of the rewards are. If you really want to do this, you'll face some disillusionment, but also stand a good chance of finding the real joys of the profession.

Now I think this could be fun...

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest

If, like me, you have a novel that, unaccountably, has not yet been pounced on with cries of delight by the publishing industry, this may be your opportunity.

They will accept 5,000 entries; you send your completed novel, and the first 5,000 word extract. Up to a thousand writers will be selected for the short list, then the extracts will go online for the public to vote for. Eventually, three contestants will go to New York for a prizegiving, and the lucky winner will be published by Penguin. It sounds as though Penguin will consider publishing the runners-up, too, if they are good enough.

Take a look at Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest (not the snappiest of titles) for details.

I say, there's a huge hole in that chapter...

Oh. Didn't notice that. Rats.

Have you ever had someone point out a huge improbability in your plot? Small ones are okay, you can usually put them right by a sentence or two deftly inserted before the dodgy bit.

Something like, Alice mused that she had been fortunate indeed, having a father who'd insisted she take Tae Kwon Do classes to black belt standard, so that, should she ever be attacked by three men, she would win. Phew. So much for the doubter who said a girl would never have been able to defeat the baddies single-handed in Chapter Ten.

But what about the ones that wipe out your plot? In Lord of the Flies, Piggy's spectacles become crucially important as the only means of making fire. However, and isn't it lucky that no-one pointed this out to William Golding, Piggy is short-sighted. His lenses would have been concave, and useless for focusing the sun's rays.

Similar thing in the film Casablanca. The 'letters of transit' that guarantee the holder free travel anywhere in German-occupied Europe, that everyone is desperate to get their hands on? No such thing ever existed.

As for the plot holes that have been drawn to my attention in my two novels...you didn't think I was going to tell you what they were, did you?