I’ve had an exhausting and exhilarating day with H. J., one of my writing friends. We’ve talked almost non-stop since the moment she arrived yesterday evening, sharing our struggles with our different writing projects.

H J loves walking as much as I do, and this afternoon we had a three hour walk around Sutton Park. It was (apparently) a gift from Henry VIII to the people of Sutton Coldfield in perpetuity, so what ever else he might have done, I’m grateful to him for preserving this beautiful space. It’s one of the largest enclosed parklands in Europe – 2,400 acres of heathland, ancient woods and seven lakes. I feel so lucky to have this a mile or two away from on my doorstep.

It’s funny how a solitary activity like writing can extend one’s chances of meeting new and interesting people – anyone who’s read some of my earlier posts will know that my first residential writing course (at Arvon’s Lumb Bank Centre) opened up new opportunities not only for developing my poetry and novel writing skills, but also for creating new circles of friends. It’s been one of the unexpected joys of ‘coming out’ as a writer.

Once you’ve settled into adult life with a steady job and children about to leave home, it can be only too easy to trundle along in your comfortable rut, as horizons shrink, and you hardly notice that your eyes are fixed on the same old view. I joined the MA in Writing course because I knew I needed to be challenged – that was nearly twelve years ago and I’m still being challenged by some of my then-fellow students, and many other writers I’ve come across since then.(H.J. is one of the most challenging and inspiring -she’s a whirlwind of energy and a talented writer and artist.)

This afternoon, as we skirted muddy puddles, treading layers of last year’s leaves under beech and oak, holly and chestnut trees, I knew which of my poems I’d be posting today:

Down to the Wood

The table has grown smug. It smirks
at her, winks in the lamplight
as she lifts her fork.

It came with the house: dead wood
wedging itself between them, her
back, closer to the wall each

year as he inserts another leaf.
Mahogany. She hears it settle
dreaming of forest.

Sometimes she hushes it with damask,
the way a cloth drapes silence
over a parrot’s cage.

The fabric slides onto the floor, letting
the table hold her hands and face
in its deep sheen.

She’s lost her appetite for balanced
meals on a polished surface. She’ll
forage in the wood,

lips and fingers grained with
blackberry and juniper, no table
but the tawny floor of leaves.

This poem was first published in Poetry Nottingham International 2004, and in my own collection Single Travellers (Flarestack 2004) Since then I’ve changed the ending, and it’s this version which appears the anthology, A Twist of Malice (Grey Hen Press 2008)

I was delighted to have the chance to cut out the final stanza, as by that time, I’d felt that it weakened the whole poem. Here’s the original below in italics. See what you think!

lips and fingers grained with
blackberry and juniper, no table
but the tawny floor of leaves she’ll ruffle

with her palm and blue-veined wrist
the way she used to on the
tangle of his chest.

Following on from my post last week (About the most welcome phone call of my life),
when Nikki Read from Transita said, ‘We would like to publish your book.’ here’s what came after the magical words, ‘But our marketing person feels that the title will have to be changed.’

This was a surprise, because so many of the rejecting agents and publishers had been intrigued by the unusual title: The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society. But at that moment I was floating on cloud nine, and the loss of my treasured title seemed a very small price to pay for publication. I soon learned that it was Transita’s Editor, Marina Oliver, who had felt that some people might be put off by the word Euthanasia. She might well have been right, but now, over four years later, I still believe that more people were attracted by it than the reverse.

After my feet had eventually settled on solid ground once more, I attempted to find a suitable alternative title, but anything I managed to think of seemed very weak in comparison, and I became more determined to keep to the original title. I gathered a selection of agents’ and publishers’ favourable comments on the name, including one from Sara Maitland of The Literary Consultancy, and Nikki and her publishing partner, Giles Lewis, were persuaded to keep it. ( I got the impression that they were almost as pleased as I was to have received what turned out to be compelling evidence in favour of The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society!

I’ll write in more detail soon about my experience of the various stages between that phone call on 19th February 2005 and the publication date in October of the same year – I’d thought that it would take at least a whole year, (maybe even two years) , but Nikki and Giles weren’t the types to stand around while the grass grew up around their feet.

That April, they brought out their first four novels, and over the following months, they kept up the comet-like pace of publication. They’d already gained their expertise from their other publishing venture: Howto Books, and I’m glad to see that this is still flourishing, in spite of the sad demise of Transita after the publication of thirty two novels in the eighteen months or so of its short life.

But I’m running ahead of myself. I haven’t yet come to the launch of my book – probably the best evening of my life!

Anyone who’s been dipping into this blog on Writing Matters will have noticed that the first few lines often stray far away from my intended subject. But I won’t talk about today’s torrential rain - and I’ll wait till Sunday, when I post my next Poem of the Week, before I tell you about my radio interview on Chris Morgan’s Poetry Show this evening.

Now it’s back to the next phase of my novel’s journey towards publication. I imagine the package being opened by someone at The Literary Consultancy, who glances through the synopsis and decides which of their team of Readers to send it to.

Time was doing its usual trick, and had already swallowed the rest of September and the whole of October before I’d even noticed they’d come round again. Then, half way through November, a letter arrived from Sara Maitland , the well respected novelist who also works as a Reader for TLC.

She remembered reading my previous novel, In The Lamb-White Days, and how beautifully written it was. After some more encouraging words, she moved on to the book in hand, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society.

I was delighted with her initial comments :

In the first place, I think that the idea behind the book –the “concept” – is delightful, enormous fun and surprisingly original
She then paid me the complement of commenting in depth and detail for several pages about the aspects she liked and those which she felt could be developed or altered. I respected her suggestions, but at this stage, after all the cutting back I’d done in response to Leigh Pollinger’s suggestions, I knew that the book was now set in its own shape – it was a finished product.

But the crucial part of her report was this:

I don’t know if you have noticed but there is a new press setting up in Oxford to publish novels, called Transita (www.transita.co.uk) specifically to publish “grown up” novels-so they obviously think there is a market out there.

She went on to explain that Transita had just taken on a novel by a friend of hers which had been stigmatised as being about “middle aged people”.

‘So I think there is a good chance that novels on themes like yours are going to be coming into fashion, and this will obviously be an enormous advantage in selling DSES.’

The next package I took to the post, contained the synopsis and first three chapters of The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society. It was addressed to Transita.

I’m snatching a morsel of time for this post before I have to go to work. In the last few weeks I’ve had to choose between my almost daily pre-breakfast dose of endorphins at the gym or jogging, and working on my Writing Matters.

I’ve got so much to write about my writing history that I’m constantly torn between my novel writing and my poetry. In my last post I introduced my ‘Poem of the Week’, so now it’s fiction’s turn:

My last mention of The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society was in the post ‘Devon, Torrential rain and my novel’

One of the questions I get asked about writing a novel is,’ How long did it take you?’ My answer for my first published novel is ‘Two years,’ but there’s a lot more to it than that. It depends on what you mean by ‘writing a novel’. For me, it’s a lot more than finding myself at the ending of the story, because that’s when the intensive re-writing begins. Paradoxically, a major part of this process involves ‘un-writing’ – i.e. cutting.

My original version was 120,000 words, from which I cut about 6,000 before I started sending it out on its long journey towards publication. As I’ve already said in a previous post, in some ways, I enjoy the re-writing more than the first draft(s).

I was well aware from my previous attempts at getting novels published, that publishers are very unlikely to look at your manuscript if it has come directly from the author, rather than an agent. But this time, I had a direct introduction to a publishing house, Orion. Helen Cary, my tutor on my first creative writing course on the Greek island of Kithera in June 2001, was a personal friend of Yvette, a reader/editor at Orion.

I was delighted when she replied to my package of the usual first-3-chapters-and-synopsis, asking to see the complete manuscript, and even more delighted, a few weeks later when she said that she really liked the book and would recommend it to the editing team.

I was rather puzzled when she wrote again, saying that the others had considered it to be a ‘difficult subject’ and would therefore not be publishing it. This was my first introduction to what is now, increasingly, an essential ingredient in being published: the crystal clarity of the category into which your book will fit like a glove. No fit, no publication. The most important people in the publishing house, the Sales and Marketing Team, will find it ‘difficult’ to sell to the book-sellers – they wouldn’t know what shelf to put it on.

My book couldn’t be placed on the shelves of any of the following: Crime, Romance, Thrillers, or any other nice, clear category (certainly not ‘Sport’ in spite of its title). And I’d made the most naïve mistake of all: creating a main character who, instead of being young and feisty and beautiful, was merely feisty. And how was a marketing person going to promote a book about a seventy-five year old woman in search of her grandchildren, who invents an unlikely life-saving society when she’s prevented a lonely, retired barrister’s clerk from throwing himself under a high speed train on Birmingham’s New Street Station?

Our extremely large and heavy tabby cat, Heidi, is curled up on a cushion on my lap, purring like an engine. Without the cushion, I’d be at risk from her long claws – the slightest sound of footsteps in the kitchen, and she’ll be digging her claws through my thin summer skirt as she hurls herself halfway across the floor and out of the door with the speed and agility of a much smaller, lighter creature, determined to greet the real love of her life, my husband.

Now that she’s stopped gazing up at me, asking for her head to be rubbed, and appears to be asleep, I can get on with my Writing Matters. I’ve been finding it strangely helpful to look back on the various stages of my writing ‘career’ over the last 25 years. Reflecting on the pattern of my ‘two-steps-forwards-one-step-back’ journey, confirms for me what I already (partly) knew – persistence is even more essential when times are difficult, and, you never can tell what’s round the corner.

Although at the end of my last post, I said that I’d be talking about novel writing and the events leading up to the publication of my book, I’ve let myself be side-tracked to my other passion: poetry. At Erdington Library last Wednesday, I was being asked lots of questions about my poems, and I’ve just been browsing through some older files on my computer, and my small collection, Single Travellers; Flarestack 2004 –there’s a story behind that, and I’ll come to it sooner or later.

I’ve dabbled in writing poetry since I was a child, but it wasn’t till my Arvon Course at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire that I ‘came out’ as a poet.(see my post: an Arvon Course and a Poetry Prize….)
I think that some of these poems have stood the test of time and ‘work’ on me the way they did when I wrote them – others, are just not ‘me’ anymore. I probably wouldn’t write those poems in that way these days - my circumstances are different, and I’ve developed some different techniques, but they’re part of my writing history.

So I’ve decided to start a new category, ‘Poem of the Week’ where I’ll give an airing to some of my poems, old and new. I’ll aim for doing this every Sunday. I expect this’ll be a fairly random selection, based on something in my day or week that’s triggered a memory of the poem itself, or the experience that led to it, or simply because it seems in keeping with the weather or season.

This is a fairly recent poem, inspired by a wonderful creative writing course, led by Mimi Khalvati in Crete in June last year. I was delighted when it was selected by Penelope Shuttle for inclusion in the second edition of ArtemisPoetry, published this May.

In this hot weather, I’ve thought about that beautiful place, and how grateful I was for the patches of shade on a long walk up the mountain side.

Climbing to Livaniana

I thank the hands
that balanced
these small cairns
at each turn of the track

and the owners
of the olive trees
for their caves of shade
and those who tend
the hairy goats
for ripples of wind-chimes
in this airless heat

not forgetting
the keeper of the bees
that stream from their
white hives
each morning
to graze the purple
cushions of thyme

and I thank the thyme
for its crushed scent
the way it nudges
against something
I can almost
open