Hodge-Podge

Made by Serif

HODGE-PODGE

Definition:

1 A confused mixture, a jumble. 2 A dish of many mixed ingredients. 3 A page I can fill with random thoughts for sharing...

Time and Chance

Posted October 22, 2008

Here’s a little secret I can share about the writing business: Luck plays a much greater role than a lot of us like to admit. Making a sale often comes down to finding the right editor at the right moment of the right day - a task on a level with picking which horses will win a trifecta. And it doesn’t always get easier. Editors come and go, leaving your book at the mercy of others who don’t always share that initial enthusiasm... someone’s bestseller blows your little book off the shelves and review pages... lots of things happen that you can’t control. I, for one, had a book come out just as the Net Book Agreement collapsed in the UK, sending shock waves through British publishing and bookselling and making my then editor-in-chief proclaim aloud (while standing right beside me, as it happened, at our Christmas party) that she pitied any author who was being published just then, since their book would be doomed to sell poorly... Still, luck swings both ways. Whenever a book does have good sales or win an award, while I’d like to believe it’s because of the writing, it’s more likely I’ve just had awfully good luck. I suspect that it’s always been thus. More than 2,000 years ago the writer of Ecclesiastes must have suspected it, too, when he sat down to comment that: “...the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” True words, in this business. The trick is to let it all go and not worry about all those factors in publishing you can’t control; just get on with the next book and make it the best that you can, and the next after that, and the next, and the next. That’s what you can control. All the rest will just happeneth as it plays out.

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The following entries are now archived. Click on any one you want to read.

What Happened Next...

Posted September 19, 2008

What You Give Me

Posted August 20, 2008

In My Own Words

Posted July 31, 2008

The Kindness of Strangers

Posted March 31, 2008

Up With Romance

Posted February 13, 2008

Beginnings

Posted January 13, 2008

Old Friends

Posted December 22, 2007

Hollywood Dreams

Posted October 30, 2007

Creating Our Characters

Posted September 24, 2007

On The Shore

Posted August 30, 2007

The Mysteries of Memory

Posted April 09, 2007

Richard Halliburton

Funny and fearless and like no one else, he died young doing what he loved best – living life on the edge. The books he wrote of his adventures opened up whole worlds to me, and I will never think about the Marathon the same way after reading his own re-creation of the run... Here’s a small taste of his life and accomplishments.

Daphne du Maurier

A Grand Master of romantic suspense. I love Jamaica Inn the best, though The House on the Strand runs a very close second. There are many good web sites to visit, but here’s one to start with.

Lucilla Andrews

Her beautifully-rendered and memorable novels are snobbishly dismissed as ‘hospital romances’ by people who don’t know better, but they’re much more than that. I absolutely love her book The First Year, and am happy to see that Corgi has reissued her autobiographical No Time For Romance, the book that controversially inspired many of the scenes in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. With the film version of Atonement coming out, I thought it only fair to shine a little of the spotlight where it properly belongs. To learn more about the woman, her work, and her link to Atonement, read this article first, then this list of the similar passages, Ian McEwan’s rebuttal, and this final word on the subject.

Jan Cox Speas

I still remember every detail of the rainy afternoon when, looking through my parents’ bookcase, I first found Bride of the MacHugh and took it to my room to read it. She was an amazingly gifted writer. Her My Lord Monleigh ends with one of my favourite last lines. Sadly, I haven’t been able to find out much about her, other than that she was from Greensboro, North Carolina. If anyone out there can lead me to anything more, I’d be grateful. (Note: I’m pleased to report that Jan Cox Speas’ daughter Cynthia has been in touch with details of her mother’s life and work, which I can now share with you here).

Gregory Clark

There was a time when virtually everyone in Canada turned to the back page of Weekend Magazine to read Greg Clark’s weekly columns - gems of a few hundred words that touched the heart and funny bone with equal skill. Though I was of a later generation, I discovered these stories in my own turn in his many book-length collections, all of which are now in my own bookcase, and among my best-loved treasures, especially his May Your First Love Be Your Last. In addition to his columns, he was a reporter, feature writer and war correspondent, and in his day was considered the most widely-read writer in Canada. I couldn’t find a link that did him justice, so I made my own. Click here for my tribute.

(I’m pleased to report that, since I wrote this, a listing for ‘Greg Clark, journalist’ has appeared on Wikipedia.)

Nevil Shute

A wonderful storyteller. Read A Town Like Alice, then try to forget it. You won’t.

To find out more about the man and his books, just click here.

A blog, to be a proper blog, needs to be updated every few days. So this isn’t a blog. It just looks like one.

My parents ran a bookstore when I was little, and while I love all bookstores I admit my favourite ones remain the little independents, with their cozily eclectic shelves and owners who do what they do for love, and let it show.

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A favourite indulgence when I’m travelling round on my tours to promote a new book is ordering up meals from room service in my hotel. I always think it must be a throwback to my ancestors who lived in more luxurious circumstances, and had servants to take care of them!

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A favourite new web site to visit is this one, newly created by fellow Mary Stewart fans. Drop by and take a look.

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One of my favourite love stories is The Ghost and Mrs Muir. R.A. Dick wrote the novel in 1945. I fell in love with the TV series starring Hope Lange and Edward Mulhare, and then, a little later, with the original movie that starred Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison. A truly timeless classic, tailor-made for those like me who still believe at heart that love can conquer anything.

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Another poem this time - one I was reminded of just recently, when I was being hit by a whole slew of book ideas and was worrying I might not have the chance to write them all within my lifetime...reading Keats’s Sonnet, written two centuries ago, made me feel a little better.

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One of my favourite indulgences is going to a movie matinee. I spent most of my childhood Saturday afternoons sitting in a dark theatre, happily lost in another world, and there’s still something about the sensation of walking out afterwards into the daylight that makes the whole thing seem like magic.

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Of all the movies that have been made with a lead character who’s a writer, from Sunset Boulevard to Stranger Than Fiction, my favourite still has to be Romancing the Stone. The little scene during the opening credits where Joan Wilder finishes her novel and sits down alone to celebrate is so wonderfully true to my own experience (though I don’t have her cat) (or her New York apartment....)

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Anyone reading my books knows I’m addicted to poetry. Most of my titles, in fact, come from poems. Here’s one of my all-time favourites:

To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence

By James Elroy Flecker