Not such a tweetie-pie

I have tried.

I have tweeted.

I have tweeted 39 times in three weeks. And some of them were OK: -

a bad idea to have a sofa in my study. managed to oust one member of the family, and then another came in and sat down.

I asked D if I had any verbal tics. D: “You say 'How very odd,' in situations when you’ve just been proved wrong.” Me? Wrong? How very odd.

in Paris: I have all the French words, I just keep bringing out the wrong one

OH in my kitchen: "TWITTER? It's hard to step into this particular paternoster"

playing the sax with hiccoughs makes for interesting rhythms

OH in my kitchen:"I got no sleep and am feeling irritable. It's got nothing to do with you." "Ah-ha. I thought you might be." "What?What?”

And I have been following a list of people. But apart from @isaach and @wendyverse and @thebeean, (the only family members who tweet) and @jonsnow, @dianeshipley and someone called @greenberg, no-one else’s tweets have held any allure or spark of interest. I have tried different tweeters, but when I scroll down the list of tweets, I feel as though I am stumbling through an undergrowth of verbal brambles.

The majority of tweets I see are either meaningless, or trivial, or linking to items I have no interest in. So where are the people I would be interested in? And how the hell do I find them?

I can see that if all your friends are on Twitter, it must be fun – you can tweet asides about your day, or photos, or interesting links on the net, and you can joke and engage in tweeting banter. But NONE of my friends are on Twitter, so what am I supposed to do?

No. There is no way I can persuade any of them to join. So now I know what you’re going to say – make some new friends who ARE on Twitter – make them THROUGH Twitter – but how?

I have tried to think of famous people I would like to follow – Victoria Wood, Anne Tyler, Helen Dunmore, Garrison Keillor, and a host of others. It appears that they do not use Twitter – at least not publicly.

I do have a tweeting kind of brain – I do think of brief funny things I want to say – but I don’t think there is any future in building up a large following and getting the satisfaction from that. I have 8 followers (3 of these are 3 whom I follow.) Another is someone who tweets in Arabic, which I can’t understand. Why is this person following me? Is it because I tweeted once about Gaza? Another is someone called @dailychekhov, who I assume is following me because I once tweeted a Chekhov quote. If this last guy is waiting for more, he may have to wait for a very long time.

And another thing – why does Twitter want to show the world how many people I am following and how many people are following me? It is so shaming for the world to see that a writer has only 8 followers. The people who might see this have no idea I have only been tweeting for three weeks and have no real-life non-cyber friends on Twitter. They will just think – “God, she’s pathetic.” So play fair, Twitter – don’t show the number of followers for the first year. You should just say “Beginner.”

I will continue to try. I am not an easy quitter. But Twitter at present is offering surprisingly slim pickings for this blogging, slacklining, saxophone-playing 61 year old writer living in the English countryside, away from the hubs of techie and media life, who is utterly uninterested in celebrity gossip and mindless trivia, but who is interested in comedy, wit, reflective insights, writing, books, film, photography, social justice, a just settlement for the Palestinians, current affairs, new developments, flowers, countryside, family and friends. And who is a woman who has an overflowing life away from the internet.

p.s. It isn’t true that I am not interested in mindless trivia – I am interested in mindless trivia I share with friends and family.

p.p.s. ooh, ooh, ooh! I just got another follower and there are 200,000 people following him, so I must be doing something right!

© Sue Hepworth 2011

PR, pyjamas and wellies

(Hmm, the title of this post reminds me of the original title of Plotting for Beginners, which was  Red clover, rural chic and fairy lights.)

I am sitting here in bed with my laptop, reading through my “manuscript” one last time before it goes to press. You have no idea how tedious it is when it gets to this stage. How many times have I read this thing?

Oops! Bad PR!

What I should be saying is

Gosh, it doesn’t matter how many times I read this book it still seems fresh -  such riveting prose, such wonderful characters, such sparkling dialogue! It makes me laugh, it makes me cry! I love it! and what did that agent say about it? “…the novel is lovely - clever, funny, subtle, wry, sad and uplifting all at once.”  And who wrote the novel? Oh yes – me!

This photo has nothing to do with the above. It is just an illustration of one reason I like living in the country. You can waltz out into the garden in your pyjamas and wellies any time you like and there is no-one to bat an eyelid. Except, perhaps, a bat.

Verbal tics

I like to make the dialogue in my books distinctive and interesting, so I’m a keen listener to what people say AND the way that I say it. I try to capture peoples’ verbal tics and give them to my characters.

Dave has a lot of verbal tics. They change over time. At present his favourite is to add “and stuff” to the ends of his sentences. Someone else in the family uses the word “obviously” a lot – often when it’s not obvious. One of my good friends frequently says “To be honest.”

I’ve been asking Dave for ages to spot my verbal tics, and he hasn’t been able to come up with any.

This morning he said “That’s a verbal tic of yours!”

“What is?”

“How very odd,” he said. “You say How very odd, usually in situations when you’ve just been proved wrong about something.”

Me proved wrong? How very odd. 

 

Roll of honour

Sometimes people give such great service, you want to shout about it, and today I am going to do just that.

1/ Thanks to my village shop – Caseys – for always being utterly reliable, helpful, efficient, cheerful, and for getting some pork scratchings for me from the wholesalers 

2/ Thanks to Geoff Fisher, sales manager of CPI UK, for being friendly, helpful, professional and unfailingly patient, in the light of all my requests for advice and information about the printing of my new book – BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU. I must be a source of huge irritation to him and yet he has never shown a hint of it to me.

3/ Thanks to Dylan of 121 IT Services in Sheffield, for calmly rescuing me from a fate worse than death yesterday, when I thought all my emails had gone to never-never-land. (I would have rung Isaac, but he was on the other side of the clock, in dreamland.)

4/ Thanks to Rowan Wools for being responsive to a complaint about wool I bought for Zoe, which she knitted up into a jumper which pilled badly. Rowan Wools refunded all the money – a year after purchase  - and added some compensation. Hooray for excellent customer service!

Roll of shame

1/ Boo to Pipex Homecall for providing a crap service and connection speed and then denying it, sending BT round to check the line and then denying they had, etc etc etc ad nauseum. Now we are with Plusnet, who answer the phone and talk good sense and who (so far) have given a good connection speed.

2/ Boo to Chatsworth Farm Shop, who promised on two separate occasions to write to me about a piece of grit which we found in a veggie sausage roll. They did not do as they promised. I am disillusioned, and also aggrieved in the light of the honourable mentions they got in both Zuzu’s Petals and Plotting for Beginners.

Impressions

I just got back from a great weekend in Paris with my big sister, Kath.

The main purpose of this briefest of brief trips was to see the Musee d’Orsay and the Impressionists.

Mission accomplished.

Wow.

I’m not a travel writer, nor an art critic, so apart from WOW, I would like to say

1/ I was very moved by Van Gogh’s La Nuit Etoilee, which I had not seen before,

 

2/ I thought the Musee itself was stunning (it wasn’t open when I was last in Paris in 1983.)

I would like to ask two questions

1/ Why do Parisians wear nothing but black, brown or navy in the winter? – It’s so dull!

2/ Why do hotels abroad offer you Liptons teabags in your room? (so far found in Paris. New York, Denver and Mendocino.)  Is it because foreigners don’t understand what constitutes good tea, or is it that Liptons  can only sell their stuff abroad, because self-respecting tea drinkers in the UK won’t touch it?

……..oooh, I am being contentious this morning……

Deleted scenes

Did you know that for litho-printed books, the number of pages in the book has to be divisible by 16? This means that if your book pages total 328 (as mine do) you are left with 8 spare pages.

I was brought up not to waste anything, so Dave’s suggestion to stop worrying and just to have blank pages at the end of the book did not appeal. But what could I put on those pages?

I thought about the scenes which Chrissie wants me to cut from the novel because she thinks they slow down the narrative drive, and then I thought about the deleted scenes you sometimes get on film dvds, and I thought ah-ha! I could put my deleted scenes in the blank pages at the back, and before I considered it further I fired off an email to Chrissie – what did she think?

Then I thought durrhh!  If I am cutting scenes from the book, I will be using fewer pages so if I stick them in the back I will still have roughly the same number of pages – 328 – and therefore I will still have 8 spares.

Then I got a reply from Chrissie, who pointed out:

My immediate response is that I don't think it is a good idea for a variety of reasons. But mainly because readers don't want to be reminded that this is a novel - they know it is, but they want to think of these people as real people whose lives go on when the novel is over. Having bits stuck on the end disrupts that and forces them to acknowledge that you made all this up.

A better idea it seems to me would be have these on your blog - but after publication - so that if readers want they can have more scenes from the lives of Fran and Sol. But, Sue, don't let your Quakerly thrift get the better of you. Just because you've written it, YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE IT. In the end some things just have to be thrown away.

……..It might be interesting for other writers to see what didn't make the cut, but you are writing for readers. Be proud that you had the courage to delete the bits that didn't work and leave it at that.

Oooh, doesn’t she talk good sense? You can see why it’s hard to resist her suggestions about my novel, can’t you?

p.s. and now I am off to Paris – so if you comment, please be patient till Monday.

The planets

Don’t tell me that astrology doesn’t work.
Yesterday I had Mars (energy/conflict)  opposition (in difficult aspect to)  Mercury (communication).

1. I woke up from a nightmare in which someone was saying nasty things to me
2. I spilled a full mug of tea all over the bed and the floor
3. I crashed my laptop
4. I went to the local library in Bakewell with my 5 page permission request to fax to David E Kelley Productions in Los Angeles, and when I got there realised I had forgotten the fax number
5. so I Googled it at the library and sent the fax
6. then got home and checked the fax number and found I had used the wrong one so had to go back to the library to fax again
7. came home and had a spat with the family member who declines to be named.

Fortunately after that, things improved. I got to see Zoe and my grandsons. The six year old showed me the book he had written about the planets (astronomy is his latest craze) which has a contents page and what he calls a “blurb” on the back. How does he know what he knows? He is a marvel.

Things I have learned

One of the good things about this self publishing lark is how much you learn in the process.

Did you know that you have to purchase ISBNs in batches of ten? (Not good if you only have one book in mind.)

Or that people still use fax machines?

There’s a  quote from an American TV series in my novel, and yesterday I rang up the production company in Los Angeles to ask for a name to whom I could send my request for permission to quote it. Guess what? They don’t accept email requests. They told me I had to fax it. Why do you suppose that is? I have no idea, but I have no choice. I’m on the hunt for someone with a fax machine who is also discreet.

Progress report

After a hiatus while I’ve been ill, things are getting exciting again on the publishing front.

Several weeks ago my sister Jen went through the book and made her comments and suggestions for improvement. Thank you, Jen  - especially for your help with crossing out commas, and also for your no nonsense bullshit-detecting.

Now I have got my typescript back from Chrissie, who has had it for a couple of weeks for proofreading and copy-editing. She’s done rather more than the brief. There are pencil marks everywhere and not just where she’s crossed out commas (of which I am apparently over-fond). The margins are full of suggestions and criticisms and questions. I’m grateful to her: she’s spent a lot of time on it and done a thorough job. (Thanks, Chrissie.)When we crit each other’s work we always say to each other – “Take what you want and ignore the rest.”

I have accepted 90% of her micro edits and 10% of her macro ones. It has been a challenge to weigh her comments and to see if I agree with them and if I want to make her suggested changes. Sometimes I think her macro-suggestions come from her crime writer’s stance (where plot is king), sometimes from her personality (which is different from mine but which necessarily informs her characters’ motivations) and sometimes I embrace them as what works best in my novel. I could be wrong of course. Chrissie is better read than me and has a good eye: it could be that I should be embracing them all. But it’s my novel, and what I say goes!

Thankfully, now Dave and I are publishing it, what I say goes for the cover too.  (People outside publishing don’t realise that the writer usually has no control of the cover. And just for the record, when the publisher sent me the pink frilly one for Zuzu’s Petals I cried, because I think it makes the book look frothy and shallow.)

The second bit of progress is that the original artwork which Zoe designed and crafted so beautifully in Sheffield

has finally reached Isaac in San Francisco (phew, I thought it was lost in the post)

so he can begin to work on the photography and the layout for the book cover. He emailed me his first photograph yesterday and I was blown away by the clarity and luminosity of the photo and yet again by his immense skill. I am VERY lucky to have such a talented, helpful and generous family. Thank you, dear Zoe and Isaac.

And as this post seems to be full of thanks, I also should say thanks to my friend Ella of deadasweknowit for the original idea which Z and I are making real.

This is sounding more and more like a Bafta speech.

Now I need to get the words tweaked and  perfect and ready. Onward and upward.

 

One of the twitterati

I’ve done it. I’ve done that thing that I said I wouldn’t. I have tweeted. Why has it taken me so long when my son Isaac works for Twitter and even my 6 month old granddaughter

has her very own twitter account - @thebeean  ? I explained why I didn’t want to  last October.

So why have i succumbed? I am doing it to promote the book – discreetly and subtly, of course, as befits a writer published by Delicately Nuanced. If you want to follow me, I am @suehepworth. I am going to give it my best, though I have to say that right now it’s freaking me out. I hate the fact that I can’t go back and edit my tweets. I have to make all my mistakes in public.

 

A new view

I went to see Rabbit Hole last night at the Sheffield Showroom. The film was about a couple grieving after the accidental death of their 4 year old son. When I told the family I was going to see it, they said “Why would anyone want to go and see anything so miserable?” which is possibly why my friend and I were the only ones in the cinema.
But the film did not make me cry. Nor did it move me. I was watching the characters and not engaged in their drama. And I came away wondering if that was what the writer intended.  And if so, why?

It was an interesting view of bereavement and grief, and an exploration of the loneliness and the damage it can do to relationships. My problem with the film may have been the lack of grit and earthiness. The people were beautiful and their house was beautiful. And everything was so clean. It didn’t feel real. Their glossy life put distance between them and me.  There was baking in the film and there was gardening, but there was no convincing earthiness. Was that why I didn’t feel engaged? Or was it because their four year old son did not appear apart from a  2 second video clip on a mobile phone?  I have a lot of questions.
Seeing films these days is rather different for me from how it used to be. If the film does not emotionally engage me, or inspire me or make me laugh, I can still get something out of it by thinking about it from a writerly point of view, and considering what does and doesn’t work. I don’t think this film worked – at least, it did not work for me.

Pet hate

A family member who declines to be named has lent me the entire box set of Frasier and I am working my way through them in a post-virus haze. But I’m not so hazy that I can’t  recognise that Daphne Moon’s Manchester accent is decidedly iffy. It’s always bothered me…is she even English? never mind is she from Manchester?

Now I’ve looked her up on Wiki and found that she’s from Ilford. That explains why some of her accent sounds OK and some sounds dodgy and over-hammed. (Like the genuine but over-played Geordie accent of the dreadful Ruth on The Archers – 

why didn’t they kill her off instead of Nigel? But that’s another story…and yet another story is how liberating it is to write on my blog these days in such an ill-disciplined manner with brackets here and dashes there and sentences that don’t begin with capital letters. I have been dotting i’s and crossing t’s on the typescript of my new book and so it’s great to break out of the straitjacket here.)

Anyway…my current pet hate is American films and TV comedies/dramas that have English characters with fake English accents. You would think that there were sufficient English actors in the US for casting directors to find one to play the few English characters that appear in their films and their programmes – and with the correct regional accent. Daphne’s ex-fiance (Clive) has just appeared in Series 4 and he is supposed to be from Manchester, yet he has a distinct south-eastern accent. And last night Dave and I watched a MASH episode in which there was an English character who was supposed to be upper class/posh and had the attendant airs and graces and verbal tics, and yet he had flat Northern vowels.

Ooh, maybe there’s a job for me in Hollywood – I could vet English accents for casting directors.

 

Shattered

I’m sorry for the lack of posts at the moment. I am still feeling awful after that virus. Last week the virus was a bit like that one in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon story, The Speeding Ticket -

It’s the usual flu with chills, fever…achiness and personal guilt, but it’s accompanied by an overpowering urge to put things in order. Before you collapse into bed, you iron the sheets. Before you vomit, you plan your family’s meals for the upcoming week.

This week i don’t want to do any of that. I want to sit around and watch old episodes of Frasier. And I have a recurring yen for plates of roast meat and gravy – like my mother used to make.

Not my bag

Every day last week a friend or a family member phoned to tell me that Jon Snow – anchorman of Channel 4 News – was going to be on Desert Island Discs. Why were they calling to tell me that? Do they think that because Frances, the heroine of my new novel, hero-worships Jon Snow, it means that I do too? Why would they think that?

Yesterday I caught up with the programme on iPlayer and it was interesting to hear Jon Snow talk about his life and times. But his choice of music left me cold, so his new wife has nothing to fear -I shan’t be running away with him (and neither will Frances.)

Weird that he didn’t grin

Look away now if you are not interested in the niceties of editing and the pedantic predilections of writers..

My good friend Chrissie has been examining my manuscript with her beady eye and her critical brain, and writing lots of notes in the margin with her sharp sharp pencil.
Yesterday I came across a place in the text where I’d described a character as looking “pretty pleased” and she’d suggested I make his reaction more specific. This was a good suggestion. The phrase “pretty pleased” was lingering from the draft of the book that I had written in the first person, so that the  first person narrator was saying her husband looked “pretty pleased” about something. Now the book is written in the third person, “pretty pleased” does not sit well.
Chrissie suggested that instead of “he looked pretty pleased” I should say  “he grinned.” This is a perfectly valid suggestion and “grinned” is a perfectly acceptable word. But when I read the word I mentally shrank away. No-one ever grins in my fiction. They smile, they laugh, they smirk, they might even do a fake guffaw, or put on an evil pantomime laugh, but they never ever grin. Or…at least…to be more precise…I never describe them as grinning. They may, just possibly,  have an evil grin – so I may use the word as a noun, but I don’t ever use it as a verb.
Why? There is no straightforward explanation. I think it is because when I read that a character grinned, it makes it seem like fiction and not like real life (and thus breaks the fictive dream) because in real life I don’t describe (in my head) people as grinning. That may be it. Or - who knows? - maybe I just don’t like grin as a verb. It isn’t in my writer’s voice. People may grin in Chrissie's novels. They don’t grin in mine. Weird, isn’t it?
p.s. if one of you can prove me wrong by finding grin used as a verb in my fiction then of course I will give you a prize! ( this antipathy to grin as a verb may be very recent.)

Truths and untruths

The snowdrops are not out in my garden yet, but I did take the picture I’ve used for my February header in February. It was five years ago. And one day soon the picture will be true again.

I didn’t have flu. I had a nasty virus that has left me looking and feeling awful. Everything is a struggle, including thinking of things to entertain you. But I have just discovered some achingly funny sketches on Youtube. Try this one. You’ll have to watch past the advert.

Colour break

I think I have flu, and I don’t have anything to say except – urrrgghh. If you like colour and you like tests, try this colour discrimination test. I got a score of 70. What did you get?

Publicity and Marketing

The PR subcommittee of the management board of Delicately Nuanced has just had a brainstorming meeting on how to publicise the book – THE BOOK – BUT I TOLD YOU LAST YEAR THAT I LOVED YOU - when it comes out in May. Dave was very helpful. I kept saying to him – Is it all right if I say this about you? Is it all right to talk about that? and he said -

“Short of modelling in my underpants, I’ll do anything to sell your book.”

What a sweetie.

Who is the man…?

…of whom my friend Mary said:
“I can’t hear what he says any more, because every time I see him on the telly I just want to smack him.”
and of whom Philippe Sands QC (professor of law, University College London, and a barrister at Matrix Chambers) said:
“[he] took an early decision to support President Bush in the quest to remove Saddam, assured him repeatedly of his unequivocal statement of support, ignored the law, and deprived the cabinet and parliament of key information.In short, [he] managed to skilfully lead the entire machinery of government - attorney general, cabinet, parliament - into a place from which British involvement in the war became inevitable. [He} has paid a big price for delivering his commitment to President Bush: his legacy is an unlawful and disastrous conflict that continues to cause misery and claim lives, shredding public trust in government, diminishing Britain’s role in the world, and undermining the rule of law. To the Chilcot inquiry falls the task of picking up the pieces.” from The Guardian, 22 Jan 2011.
The man’s name has been removed, as I won’t have it on my blog.

Losing a parent

“Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces.”            Saul Bellow

Busy Day

1/ worked on PR campaign for new book
2/ practised sax
3/ attempted to deliver manuscript to copy-editor while en route to my daughter's house but was so engrossed by feature about Hattie Jacques on  Woman’s Hour on car radio that drove right past copy-editor’s house, and forgot until much too late to turn back
4/ admired my daughter’s jumble-sale booty that she bought on Saturday for use in her craft work
5/ went to Waterstones in Sheffield to check out book covers and fonts used on same, receiving expert advice from daughter on which fonts appeal to which socioeconomic strata
6/ chatted with (very helpful) Darren behind the counter about my new book
7/ complained to the Rowan Wools lady at John Lewis (Coles to Sheffielders) about the way daughter’s home-knitted jumper has pilled. Rowan lady receptive, charming, helpful and effective. Hooray for Rowan lady and Rowan!
8/ pleasant lunch with daughter
9/ advice to daughter on current craft project
10/watched  Neighbours on the net while recuperating on bed
11/ watched Koala Brothers and Little Robots on TV with my younger grandson(4)
12/ played with fire engines, camper vans and air ambulances  (and younger grandson) on the stairs
13/ talked to elder grandson about the Pioneer space craft and the meaning of the plaque on the side of it

13/ played exciting game of hide and seek and became so tightly wedged between the piano and the wall I thought I would be there till daughter came home and yanked me out. 
14/ played hilarious game of all-together-land with my younger grandson which entailed being tied tightly to each other with a red rope and attempting to walk
15/ tasty tea with daughter and family
16/ monthly discussion group at friend’s house with three close friends
17/ bed
18/ phew

They were armed with nothing but love and hope

If you’ve been reading my blog for two years or more you’ll remember that when the Israelis spent a month bombing Gaza in January 2009 I was so outraged and upset that  I blogged about it every day. During that time, I mentioned a Palestinian doctor called Izzeldin Abuelaish whose family home in Gaza was bombed. Three of his daughters were killed. Immediately after the attack, he rang a journalist friend in Israel, who was live on air, to ask for help. This is what happened. 
Dr Abuelaish had always been a passionate advocate for peace, for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in mutual respect. He himself worked in an Israeli hospital.  After his personal tragedy, he continued to speak for peace, and refused to hate the people who had killed his children. "Violence is never the right way,” he said. “My daughters and I were armed with nothing but love and hope."
This week, two years after their death, his book I Shall not Hate has been published by Bloomsbury.

A storm of commas

Both of my proof readers/copy editors think I use too many commas. This may be true. It is also true that I am very busy with Delicately Nuanced and I have been way too tired to blog.
If you are as old as me you will remember 1950s television and how the BBC used to have interludes between programmes (they had not thought of trailers – how delightful!) and in those interludes they either had a speeded up film of the train going from London to Brighton, or one of a kitten playing.
Here is my interlude – Lux learning to sit up.

New app required

Did you know that in the front of modern paperbacks printed in the UK, the publisher generally tells you the font used in the book. But as far as I can see, American publishers don’t. Why is that?

And why is it that Garamond is lovely, but italic Garamond is horrid? We’ve been typesetting the book in Garamond, and only now do I realise how much I hate the Garamond’s italics. (Also, I never realised how often I use italics in my writing.) I am hunting now for a serif font I like that has attractive italics, that aren’t too squashed together and ornate. Any suggestions?
The iPhone should invent a new app that enables you to point your phone at some text, and find out what font it’s printed in.

Binding, fonts and covers

I’m sorry not to have blogged for several days. My mind is taken up with publishing and everything that goes with it.

For one thing, I can’t pick up a book now without assessing the cover design, checking  what font they have used, and looking to see if it has perfect binding or is “sewn limp.”

We are having fun – the best thing about self-publishing is being able to choose my own cover. I am looking at a lot of designs on the net for inspiration. There are a lot of stunning ones out there. This is one I like a lot – though mine will be nothing like it…