sarah eve kelly

On magic:

(I’m writing this across the table from my marvellously autistic brother who looks exactly like me and who I love more than anyone in the world. John is working on a 500-piece puzzle, and every time he puts two pieces together, he claps and says ‘Good job, John!’ He also says ‘ICE LINEUP!’ and ‘PURPLE VACUUM CLEANER!’ and ‘ORANGE VACUUM CLEANER!’ - and, just now, ‘You’ve just had LOTS of oats.’ He will keep saying each thing until it’s said back to him. Look up ‘echolalia’ in the dictionary. So if this seems a bit disjointed, that’s why.)

Yes, I was one of those kids who waited until Mom had tucked me in and left the room before pulling out a flashlight and a coffee-table-sized edition of STORIES FROM THE BALLET. I thought I was supersly, but Mom was just winking at it: she loved that she had a kid who did this.

(She did, obliquely, warn me that my vision would eventually fail. To this day I have perfect vision, but I’m sure she’s right anyway.)

I believed in stories. I didn’t like that Sara in A LITTLE PRINCESS had a tiger-skin rug, because come on, poor tiger, right? (This was Little Sarah being present-centred, I suppose.) But I read my favourite stories again and again, loved them more each time. I don’t think I knew, then, about the magic of storytelling – but I think that itself is part of the magic, that you don’t know it’s there.

I didn’t discover magic until I started writing – really writing – myself. I was replete with arrogance, but I thought I was full of magic. My characters were Velveteen Rabbits, waiting to become real, and I – unlike the Velveteen Rabbit – was sure that they would become real.

When I began making a daily discipline of writing, I became a reactionary about magic. Stories, I’ve said any number of times on this site alone, are the result of sweated labour. It isn’t just love that makes the Velveteen Rabbit real, and certainly not magic: it’s his willingness to lay stifled under the blanket of a sick child, to become threadbare, to become ugly. Stories are work.

Now, today, I’m not so sure. I think magic might lurk after all.

This is what happens when you escape the vacuum in writing. You can either take what people have to say and incorporate it or not, or you can turn your story into a book-by-committee and stand paralysed before turning every corner, worried that there isn’t enough suspense, worried that no one will care, worried that the names aren’t right – and finally, worried that you don’t care.

This is what happens when you believe in the magic again, but are sure that you don’t have it.

(That author you think is a hack, though – she has it. The authors you admire – well, of course they have it. But you don’t, and you should stick to the typing pool.)

Most writing manuals written by earnest writers you admire tell you that most of writing feels like banging your head against a wall. It feels very much like despair, very much like pain. But then you have those days when you feel like you can fly. All of this is very true. When you try and nothing comes – or when only offal comes – it’s painful.

But I know what it is to fly, too, and I’ve come to distrust those days. That is often where my worst writing comes from, though I don’t know it at the time. Those days make me arrogant; they make me feel like my best work isn’t work at all.

So between high-flying arrogance and total paralysis, where do we find ourselves? What state of mind can we adopt so that we can work?

I don’t have answers today. I’m only asking questions. Because there’s a sense of having lost the joy of the thing, of having let the magic slip out of my fingers (not through: out of), if it was ever there. (Maybe the magic is just arrogance – maybe you need arrogance to keep going.)

(To this, my brother John says ‘SWIMMING!’ I say it back. ‘MUSHROOM SOUP!’ he bellows. I bellow it back.)

From listening to other writers, I learn one thing: I have to bend my mind so that I can be proud of all of my writing, of everything I commit to paper. X number of words make a draft. You have to have a draft. To paraphrase Anne Lamott very badly, I can’t let perfectionism stand between me and a shitty draft. I can’t let the memory of days when I could fly stand between me and a shitty draft. The minute you clap THE END onto something, you have something to work with. The last ten thousand words of my novel have been absolutely uninspiring, but it could be that they all had to be committed to paper for me to write one perfect paragraph. Who knows. The lesson is a daunting one. This isn’t the time to stop and think: this is the time to keep going.

(John puts two more pieces together and claps. Good job, John! And then: ‘STOVE!’ ‘FIRE ALARM!’ The puzzle looks like a mess right now, but it’ll make sense eventually.)

Till next time, &c. &c.

GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI. Tell me that’s a book you don’t want to read. Wait, I have a better idea. Go read the first chapter, and then tell me you’re not absolutely dying to read the rest.

Check this out:

After a one-night stand with a fallen angel and a bite from a vampire, forgettable Jackie Brighton has been changed into a succubus.  Now, she’s turned into a babe, needs sex to survive, and can puts people to sleep with a touch of her fingertips. Sounds great, right? Except for the fact that she’s caught between both the Heavenly and Infernal Host in an ancient turf-war, and now both sides want a piece of her…

How’s a girl supposed to save the world when the enemy is so hard to resist?

How can you resist that? (Quick answer: you can’t.)

Well, good news: GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI, the debut of paranormal romance author Jill Myles, was released on 29 December by Pocket. Today, this site is the stop on Ms Myles’s blog book tour, and I was delighted to be able to pelt her with all sorts of questions about the role of history and research in her stunning debut.

And readers, this is not only an interview, not only a blog tour, but a CONTEST as well: Jill’s agent, the gorgeous and talented Holly Root of Waxman Literary, is giving away a free query critique to one lucky commenter. Be sure to comment on each of Jill’s interviews (one comment per post only, please), and on January 27, Jill and Holly will reveal the winner!

SK: Welcome, Jill! Thanks so much for taking the time to answer all my fangirl questions. You must be so delighted about your new release! Now, to business: what role do history and historical research play in GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI?

JM: Inspiration, mostly! I took tidbits of history and yoinked them into my story, for lack of a better term. What’s in my book is not 100% historically accurate, and it’s not all factual, of course. But I used some historical bits as scaffolding for different storylines, especially the villain.

SK: Historically-inspired villains are always the best villains! You’ve said that you like to draw on Egyptian history in your research. Can you tell us a little about how Egyptian history caught your attention?

JM: Egyptian history has always appealed to me. I think I started my fascination with Egyptian history after watching (sadly enough) an Indiana Jones movie. After that, I checked out all the history books I could possibly find on Egypt. It was fascinating to think that so far back in history, there was such an advanced, intelligent civilization. Pyramids! Mummies! God-kings! How can that not appeal to you as a kid? And then when I found out that there were female pharaohs? I was a total goner. Been in love ever since. My favorite dynasty is the 18th, of course.

SK: Well, naturally. But the opening of GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI is full of hat-tips to urban life today - dumpsters, Burger King napkins, hotel key cards, and ‘beer beauty’. Was it a conscious decision to lay this on thickly to juxtapose the ancient mythologies of succubi, angels, and vampires? What was your approach to creating a setting that was both Jackie’s world and the world of these mythical creatures?

JM: No! But that sounds really clever and like I did it on purpose, so I’m going to go with that. I think I worked backward, actually. Jackie’s setting and world came first. Then when I started introducing immortals, I wanted them to be really, really old. So that’s when I dug back into history and started pulling out the bits that I loved and incorporating them into the story.

SK: So how heavily do you rely on research? Are established myths written in stone or do you bend them to suit the story?

JM: Totally bend. As for how much I research for the story, it depends. If I’m looking for something specific — let’s say a famous place in ancient Egypt that I can use for the story — I’ll start researching broadly, and usually by Wikipedia. Not as the end-all-be-all, of course, but as a good springboard for where to start. Once I start following something specific, I’ll reference more specific source documentation, university websites, reference books, etc. I was really fascinated by a piece of history mentioned in passing in Herodotus’s Histories, and I ended up reading half of the darn thing just trying to find more information about my one obscure character.

SK: Welcome to the story of my life! I’m glad I’m not the only one who can get sucked into a good story and watch the day fly by. What do you think is more important to your story, the romance or the mythology? If you had to write one or the other, which would you choose, and why?

JM: Oh… poop. That’s a really hard question. It… depends on the book? I wrote a heavily-mythology based urban fantasy (still in my trunk!) and I’ve written romances with zero mythology. So it really depends on what the story calls for and what I’m in the mood for.

SK: Ooh, really hoping for that manuscript to come out of the trunk one day! Sooo… do you ever… you know… use research to procrastinate?

JM: Oh, I’ve been in a Wikipedia trance many, many times more than I like to admit. You know when you go to look up, say, the population of Sheridan, Wyoming, and end up on a page about Edward III? Yeah. That happens fairly often, sad to say.

SK: Again, glad I’m not the only one, though my Wyoming census repertoire needs work. So, in conclusion, I have to say that GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI has renewed my faith in romance novels. Would you ever consider writing historical romance, succubi or no succubi? If so, where would you set it and when?

JM: Yes! I actually have a straight-up historical romance brewing on a back-burner. No succubi or vampires allowed. I really love the medieval milieu, but it’s hard for me to turn off the part of the brain that says “Using hay in the bathroom is not sexy! No dentistry is not sexy! Black death is not sexy!” so I was playing around with Victorian times instead.  Mostly, I think, because I am fascinated at how lewd some of the ‘innocent’ parlor games were. And bustles. Bustles are fascinating.

SK: Having worn a bustle on my wedding day, I have to agree that they’re fascinating, particularly in the sense of ‘how the hell do you go to the bathroom with one of those things attached to you?’ But hay can be pretty sexy.

Here endeth the lesson - again, thanks so much, Jill, and congratulations on this tremendous achievement!

Because a) it is a free market; b) you have excellent taste; and c) money can be exchanged for goods and services, you’re definitely going to want to order a copy of GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI or mosey down to your local bookshop and get in the queue. And when you’ve finished and are desperate for more of Jackie Brighton’s exploits as a newly-minted succubus, you can take heart, because the next book in the series, SUCCUBI LIKE IT HOT, will be released later this year (now available for pre-order!).

This site is only one of many stops on Ms Myles’s blog junket this month - if you want to read more (and you do), here are the interviews already done, courtesy of fellow writers:

• Jill talks to Amy Bai about inspiration and the joys of authorhood;
• Dorothy Windsor grills Jill about the harrowing hunt for an agent;
• Jen Hayley gets Jill’s take on the best way to nab a great agent;
• Kerri O’Connell delves into the world of mythology in GENTLEMEN PREFER SUCCUBI; and
• Jill talks to Stina Leicht about the role of mythology in urban fantasy.

Be sure to check out Julianne Douglas’s interview with Jill on the ever-vexing question of procrastination and a writer’s discipline, coming out tomorrow, January 8. For the full roster of Jill’s interviews, Shelli Johannes-Wells has kindly provided a schedule.

And remember to comment on every site for your chance at a free query critique from agent Holly Root!

Most importantly, run out and buy this book!

(I’ve never used this many successive exclamation points on this site. Thank you, Jill!)

Till next time, &c. &c.

Yesterday the news broke that Canadian science fiction author Peter Watts was detained by US Customs and ultimately arrested for assaulting a federal officer. If you feel the outrage that I feel, donate to his legal defense fund.

My recent stories are neither as serious nor as dire as Peter Watts’s, but given I’ve just returned to the UK (anyone who knows me will be staggered to know that I woke of my own accord at 6:20 and did not, in fact, stay up all night to be posting this early) and they are fresh in my mind, here goes:

Heathrow Airport, Terminal Three, London: Security, 24 November 2009

INT - DAY

Security Officer: Ma’am? Ma’am?
Sarah (small voice): Yes?
Security Officer: Can you provide a boarding card for this young lady?
Sarah (observing that SO is holding up Katrina, the teddy bear she’s had since she was five years old): …
Security Officer: Ma’am?

Sarah (thinking): Security officers don’t make jokes. You mustn’t make jokes to security officers.

Sarah: Please tell me you’re not serious?
Security officer: Wha-at? She’s a good-looking bear, ma’am. You can’t take a joke? Yeah. Cute bear. (Throws Katrina into the X-ray machine)

Calgary International Airport, Calgary: Security, 24 November 2009

INT - NIGHT

Security officer #1: Any liquids, gels, or aerosols, ma’am?
Sarah (distracted, pulling out laptop): Not that I know of…
Security officer #1 (holding up 200ml bottle of Superdrug-purchased astringent): What’s this, ma’am?
Sarah: Oh, thaaaaaaat. Right. I’ll get a bag for it.
Security officer #1: I’m afraid I’m going to have to confiscate this, ma’am.
Sarah (observing quarter-inch of liquid at bottom of bottle): Aw, come on! There’s hardly anything left in it.
Security officer #1: We have to go by the number specified on the bottle, ma’am.
Sarah: Look at my teddy bear! Isn’ she cute? Her name is Katrina. She doesn’t have a boarding card.
Security officer #1: Sorry, ma’am. I’m going to have to take this. It may contain dangerous materials. (Throws astringent bottle over shoulder)

On the other side of the X-ray machine…

Security officer #2: Mind if I have a look through your bag, ma’am?
Sarah: What if I say no?
Security officer #2 (opening backpack): Ha-ha.
Sarah: (maintaining studied silence)
Security officer #2 (holding up newly-purchased Dove aerosol anti-perspirant): Ah, deodorant.
Sarah: Right, that.
Security officer #2: I’m gonna have to take this from you, ma’am.
Sarah: The seal’s still on it! I’m only flying two hundred kilometres!
Security officer #2 (removing anti-perspirant): Sorry, ma’am.
Sarah: Jeez, man, why’d you have to go and do that?
Security officer #2 (leaning forward, whispering): Because we’re idiots, ma’am. I’m super sorry.

NB: Finding yourself without deodorant is a touchy thing.

Vancouver International Airport: Security, 2 December 2009

INT - DAY

Security officer: We’re going to have to search you, ma’am.
Sarah (assuming the position): Right.
Security officer: Arms down, ma’am!
Security officer: (prodding Sarah’s arms and legs) OK, now arms up.
Security officer: I’m going to touch your waist now, is that OK?
Sarah: What if I say no, ha-ha?
Security officer: (pulling waistband of Sarah’s pants and feeling around) We can do this in private if you prefer.
Sarah: No thank you.
Security officer: Please turn around now. Arms up.
Security officer (feeling all the same spots with Sarah now pointed at the gawking populace): Arms down, please. Feet further apart, please. (Feeling the insides of Sarah’s thighs)
Sarah (thinking): My mother told me not to let people do this to me.
Security officer: Please lean against the conveyor belt, ma’am, and hold your right foot behind you with your right hand.
Sarah: (feeling pleased that she had the foresight to wear yoga pants today)
Security officer: Now lean forward.
Sarah: (feeling hand plucking at her underwire and roving up) Steady now!
Security officer: Sorry, ma’am.
Sarah: You ask permission to feel my waist, but not those?
Security officer: Left foot now, ma’am. (Feeling inside Sarah’s shoe)
Sarah: (now very late for her flight, feeling devirginated, about to say something rude)
Security officer (disappointed): Thank you, ma’am. That will be all.
Sarah: (grabs bag and runs, no doubt looking very guilty)

Edmonton International Airport: Security, 10 December 2009

INT - NIGHT

Sarah: Look, all my liquids, gels, and aerosols in a bag! Even my lighter. All there, in the bag.
Security officer #1: Thanks very much, ma’am. Move along.
Sarah: (walking through metal detector, smug)
Security officer #2: Is this your bag, ma’am?
Sarah: Yes…
Security officer #2: We’re going to have to run this again, ma’am.
Sarah: (clutching Katrina)
Security officer #2: Seems you forgot some of your liquids, ma’am. We’re going to have to do a manual search through your bag.
Sarah (reaching for backpack): I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if there’s anything, it’ll be in the cosmetic bag right in here…
Security officer #2 (bodyblocking): DON’T touch the bag, please, ma’am.
Sarah: (throwing caution to the wind and very visibly rolling her eyes)
Security officer #2 (empties backpack)
Security officer #2 (hands over tube of mascara)
Security officer #2 (hands over second, empty tube of mascara)
Security officer #2 (hands over one, two tubes of lipstick)
Security officer #2 (hands over lavender roll-on headache remedy half the size of pinky finger)
Sarah (stuffing items into airport-issued plastic bag) That stuff totally doesn’t even work.
Security officer #2: Careful with that, ma’am. The bag has to be able to close.
Sarah (dumping out contents of plastic bag and rearranging): These have never been considered liquids before.
Security officer #2 (swelling chest): They’ve always been considered gels, ma’am.
Security officer #2 (ramming items back into backpack)
Sarah (watching): If I’m now allowed to touch my own things, I’ll repack that myself, please. I like to have my things in a certain order.
Sarah (running to gate with backpack that will no longer close, Katrina in tow)

Calgary International Airport: Security, 10 December 2009

Security officer: Hey, weren’t you here like two weeks ago? Cute bear! Love it.

For the postscript, find Sarah sitting in a seat of her own choosing aboard a Boeing 333 aircraft destined for London Heathrow from Calgary (flight times 6:20pm MST-10:10 am GMT). File the following under ONLY IN CANADA. Sarah hears the following from the flight deck while the plane is still grounded (bearing in mind that everything, once said, was repeated in French, after the fine Canadian fashion):

6:15: We’ll be pushing back in about five minutes here. Flight attendants please prepare for departure and crosscheck.

6:20: This is your first officer speaking. We have to de-ice the plane. This will take about fifteen minutes.

6:30: Many apologies from the flight deck. The de-icing equipment has been taken by a flight bound for Frankfurt. We’ll be pushing back in about twenty minutes.

7:10: Pushing back. Flight attendants, please prepare for departure and crosscheck.

7:35: This is your first officer speaking. There has been a medical emergency to the rear of the aircraft. We’ll have to return to the gate to evacuate the passenger. Flight attendants, please prepare for arrival and crosscheck.

8:00: Please be patient and remain in your seats while the medical team removes the passenger from the rear of the aircraft. We’ll be taxiing out as soon as she’s off the plane. Flight attendants, please prepare for departure and crosscheck.

8:30: This is your first officer speaking. We’ve been informed that there are three pieces of luggage that Heathrow Airport will not accept because they contain dangerous materials. We have to return to the gate to remove the luggage in question. Flight attendants, please prepare for arrival and crosscheck.

8:55: This is your first officer speaking from the flight deck, and I have some pretty silly, pretty good news. Turns out the luggage Heathrow wouldn’t accept never actually made it on to the plane, so we’ll be taxiing out to the runway immediately. Please ensure all hand luggage is properly stowed. Flight attendants, please prepare for departure and crosscheck.

Ten minutes later, against all odds, the Little Boeing That Could actually made it into the air. The flight landed in London at 2:00pm GMT, your narrator had hauled her ass up about eight flights of stairs with two suitcases, a backpack, and Katrina in tow by 4:00, and, safely deposited home, has literally lived to tell the tale.

The visit was worth it, the people were worth it, but by golly I never want to fly again. Please donate whatever you can to Peter Watts’s cause. My stories were irritating when they were happening but funny in the retelling; his never will be.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

It is Agent Appreciation Day. Today we celebrate our advocates, re-experience our astonishment and gratitude that someone so knowledgeable, so hard-working, and so excellently beyond cool believes in our work, and generally raise a toast to the people whose zeal brings us closer to our dreams.

My agent, Jenny Bent, until recently of the Trident Media Group, hung up her own shingle in March 2009 and has been jumping from strength to strength since, as any subscriber to Publishers’ Lunch will know. The Bent Agency has been so successful, in fact, that Jenny’s recently hired on a new agent, Susan Hawk, to handle young adult  and middle-grade authors. Jenny’s online presence is gentle, encouraging, savvy, and very occasionally whimsical. (Ref. a tweet from 18 Nov: ‘So sad that I ate all the skittles. I should have bought the economy bag’, followed up on 2 Dec by this: ‘Because skittles may in fact taste better than skinny feels.’ A woman very much after my own heart.) Her love for writers and writing shines through in her blog posts, in her tweets, in her constant advocacy, and (most importantly) in her emails to me.

The truth is, though, that there are a lot of agents like that. What sets Jenny apart is her willingness to nurture her authors, her awe-inspiring patience in the kind of market that makes editors demand that manuscripts be more or less press-ready, in a market where there’s no time or money or manpower to take the rough edges off the best work we have to offer. Jenny flouts that trend and takes the time.

Believe me, I know. When I started querying I was an agent’s nightmare. I was terrible at pitches, terrible at synopses (my stomach still churns just thinking of them), and my novel - if you’re kind - was rough, rudderless, and not remotely agent-ready. I got a lot of requests for material and they languished until Jenny came along. I queried, got a request within an hour, and within four days I was on the phone with her, discussing at length what a colossal shipwreck my manuscript was.

Here’s the cool thing, though: she still wanted me. She saw the good in the manuscript and wanted me. And over the course of six months, she helped me turn an idea for a good novel into a good novel; she taught me what a story is and made me a better writer. She’s been patient with my questions and my blunders; she’s been effusive over my successes; she’s always written back quickly; and she hasn’t been paid a penny for any of it. With tenacity like that, with belief like that, it’s really no wonder she’s one of the best literary agents in New York.

So Jenny, I raise my glass to you, and hope you get some much-deserved rest over the holidays. It’s very easy for a writer to be colossally self-absorbed, and most of the time I am. But it does me a service to remember, every now and again, exactly where I wouldn’t be without Jenny fighting for me.

Hug your agent. Do it now.

Till next time, &c &c.

The month of October was lost. I didn’t write a word. (I took notes, arranged footnotes, read, made bullet points - but all for school.) I read a novel so toe-stretchingly good that I was paralysed under the squatting weight of my own mediocrity for an entire month.

What do you do with that? I never thought confidence was something you really had to have to write, because I never felt like I had a lot, and yet I was writing. It wasn’t just my confidence that was decimated, though: it was the notion that I could bring a new narrative to the canon. If I couldn’t be exactly as good as this author - or better - there wasn’t any point. So every day I opened my document, read a few paragraphs out loud, bit my lip, dusted behind the bookcases, emitted a long, jolting sigh, and closed it again.

Then, on Hallowe’en, I had an idea. I read a different book. Here was an author I admired just as much, and who writes with an entirely different voice. That these two voices could sit at either end of a spectrum, and be just as worthy as one another, convinced me to go back to my own pages.

I’m always leery of reading anything I know will be very good while I’m writing myself (which is just about always). I know I’m going to want that voice, want exactly that kind of detail, want to make my characters speak in exactly that way. So when Stephen King tells me that the first rule of writing is to write a lot and read a lot, I get confused: if other writers mess this much with my mojo, why should I let them in?

This paralysis was worse than any other paralysis. If I wanted to keep writing, I had to look for solutions. And my solution was this: if you’re writing, you shouldn’t shut your door on other voices; you should open it wider. Get a whole cacophony of voices in your head, not just one. Because all writers are thieves (I stole that saying), they should rob as many shops as possible. You’re never going to sound like Nick Hornby. You’re never going to sound like A.S. Byatt. You have to get over wanting to. The world already has those folks; it doesn’t have you yet.

Besides, I can’t imagine there’s a single writer I admire who hasn’t been through this - hasn’t wanted to sound like someone else. It’s usually why writers get into writing in the first place. The voice you so admire didn’t emerge fully formed from Zeus’s head: it is, like yours, a cacophony of other voices in other rooms, mixed in a specific but largely accidental way to create an individual. That’s you, too, and that’s me.

People who read my site are probably sick of hearing about Hilary Mantel, but she was the one who paralysed me. The one who got me moving again was John Irving. There couldn’t be two more different voices on the western English spectrum. John Irving is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the best writers alive. He is a dyslexic wrestler who writes longhand and has probably made me cry more times than any one person I know personally. He is a genius. Hilary Mantel is also a genius. These are wonderful influences, but I can’t read them one at a time or my own writing will collapse. I have to read them both, and I shouldn’t only be reading those two. I should be reading Sarah Waters. I should be reading Michel Faber. I should be reading Stephen King. I should be reading Michael Palin’s Python Diaries. I should be reading all of it. To do otherwise would be to try to bake a cake using only flour, or only flour and eggs: both important - can’t bake a cake without them! - but whither sugar; whither vanilla extract? The cake is your voice, and it needs all the ingredients.

That might be the worst metaphor I’ve ever made. I totally didn’t steal it. That’s all mine.

Conclusion: it wasn’t Hilary Mantel who paralysed me in October. It was the fact that after I finished her novel, I was too terrified to read anything else. I was trying (sigh) to bake a cake out of thin air. You can’t stop reading, because if you do, you’ll stop writing. And if for whatever reason you’re cocky enough to write without reading, what you write probably isn’t worth being read.

So read outside your writing. Read outside your genre. Read outside your language, if you can. Every single book you read - every chapter - will inform and evolve your own voice. Don’t be afraid: these books aren’t making you irrelevant; they’re making you better.

Or maybe I’m the only person who needed to be told that?

Till next time, &c &c.

Can you love a person whose beliefs are abhorrent to you?

The first thing a freshman historian is warned against is something called the Grand Narrative, sometimes called ‘Whig history’: the idea that history has served no purpose but to lead us to now, the grand apex of evolution. The past, we are told, should be judged within the context of the past, uncoloured by present-day knowledge, understanding, values, or experience. To judge the past in the context of today is called being ‘present-centred’, and it is Very Bad.

It’s difficult to put ourselves and our own worlds aside to understand history as objectively as possible, but we get the knack of it eventually. It poses a bigger problem in fiction. For a reader to truly engage in (for example) a novel, there must be a character to whom we can hitch our wagons - someone we feel sympathy or empathy for, someone we admire, someone whose fate we invest in. This is only a general rule, not an absolute one - plenty of novels reflect ideas instead of characters, and others read like a slow-motion car crash: every character is detestable, but you can’t take your eyes away. Still, though: the swiftest route to home base is with a sympathetic main character, and the easiest way to make a character sympathetic is for that character to share the reader’s values.

I’ve been watching a lot of Mad Men lately. Yes, I know, I’m coming late to the party. I always do: it means I can go on binges and watch an entire season in three days. And Mad Men got me thinking about values. Its critical acclaim has been almost universal: a gritty, unsparing look at the corporate world of the 1960s. As far as I know there’s only one really loud guy speaking out against it, and that’s Mark Greif in the London Review of Books. Of Mad Men he has this to say:

I suppose it does at least expose what’s most pompous and self-regarding in our own time: namely, an unearned pride in our supposed superiority when it comes to health and restraint, the condition of women, and the toleration of (some) difference in ethnicity and sexuality. Mad Men flatters us where we deserve to be scourged.

I have to say I like the show. It’s engaging in that chocolate box, ‘just-one-more-and-then-I’ll-go-to-bed’ kind of way. But because I agree completely with Greif, I’m trying to figure out why I like it.

Admittedly it’s tough not to be present-centred about the 1960s, a decade that suffers from a mountain of misinterpretation owing to the patina that the US poured all over the American Family after the Second World War. The people who thought they were conservative weren’t, in fact, conservative at all: the suburb was a very new thing, and a wife being stuck there was a very new place for her to be stuck. In this particular decade, though, it’s true that there was one generation trying to keep the world in 1952, and another generation - my parents’ generation - standing upside down in a corner on LSD, representing the kind of anarchic change that would destabilise and eventually alter the world.

So how do you make the 1952 guys the good guys? Why are we watching this show? On some level, of course, it’s because we’re mesmerised - in the second episode Paul Kinsey tells Peggy Olson that copywriters’ desks are furthest from the elevators ’so we can’t sneak out’, and I’m left wondering, with Scotch and cigarettes right at your desk, why you’d ever want to sneak out. It speaks (on one level, anyway) to a kind of permissive society that feels about as realistic to me as the underwater world in The Little Mermaid. I’ve certainly never been there.

(There is a post, by the way, to be written about how cigarettes have become a historical tag. Show where, what, and how often people were smoking, and I could probably tell you which decade you’re talking about.)

In a way, though, it’s like watching reality television: gazing into someone else’s office or living room and being able to feel smug. We’re more civilised than that; we’re more enlightened than that. It’s present-centred: the show invites us to view these lives from the point of view of our own lives in a way that The Tudors avoids by a country mile. There is something about the recent past that makes us long to believe that progress has been made, or what we call progress, because the very concept of progress is newer than you think. Greif is right when he says the smugness we feel is unearned. Being a woman in the workplace, for example, is still a tax - it’s just an invisible one now, like VAT. Tot up the numbers and you’ll see how little women are still being paid, and it’s remarkable how few women today are aware of that.

Anyway. Off the point.

Do you watch this show? Do you like the characters? Is there one you’ve hitched your wagon to? Or are they, as Greif asserts, a ‘toybox of tin stereotypes’? For my own part, I haven’t found one that I’m really able to like (always excepting Joan, of course, but she’s not in the show nearly enough) - the overwhelming feeling is one of pity. The wives are trapped, but so too are the husbands; the junior execs are trapped, but so too are the seniors. There is a constant undercurrent of being trapped, and that is present-centred. It’s not possible that everyone was that miserable in postwar middle America; if they were, they wouldn’t have been trying so hard to keep it exactly the way it was.

The setting of the more distant past seems, on some level, to sidestep this fascination with how They are not like Us. There are the little things - we’re tickled by the idea of women using white lead in their makeup in the same way we’re tickled by seeing secretaries smoking at their desks - but by and large, in the world of historical drama (as opposed to history), we’re able to take these characters and their worlds on their own terms. Or is that true? We cheer on the women in the past who jump out of their moulds (there is a reason that Anne Boleyn has been done and done again and can never be done enough: everybody loves her, or loves to hate her), and we scowl at the ones who say anything of duty or restraint. We want to hear all about the wife’s petty rebellions, and we don’t pause to consider that the sisterhood, such as it was, did not self-identify as oppressed until the eighteenth century or better - and certainly didn’t do it with any kind of consensus until the turn of the twentieth century. This wasn’t because they were betraying themselves, or because they didn’t believe in themselves. It was because they didn’t share our values. How could they? They didn’t live in our world. They had vocation, and more often than not (believe it or not) took pride in it. They were three-dimensional human beings, and we don’t realise that by only liking the mould-cracking ones - by feeling pity or contempt for the ones who lived according to the values and traditions of their own time and place - we do them a disservice, and offer them staggering disrespect.

Hilary Mantel speaks of hitching the camera of a story onto the shoulder of one character: it is through that character’s lens that you see the world while you’re reading (or watching). It is the author’s job to make you comfortable enough in that world that you stop thinking like yourself for a little while and start thinking like that person. More often than not we ascribe bigotry or ignorance to the behaviour of historical figures - the best we can say for them is that they didn’t know any better. Is it possible to step off our plinths and truly understand them, or are the best-loved historical novels always going to be about the people in the past who thought most like us?

I ask because I don’t know. I think it would be a tremendously difficult exercise to make any main character of mine pro-life or pro-eugenics or anti-Semitic or any of those things while still making readers love her. It would mean first loving her myself, and I think I could probably do that if I were more of an artist and less a creature of my own time and circumstance. This isn’t a rant; I don’t really have a point of view here. But I still wonder why I want to watch more of Mad Men - who am I invested in? Do I want them to learn something? Do I want to feel superior? Maybe I want to see what things might have been like for my grandmother - who knows. Until the show can make me root for someone (regardless of his or her values), I can’t help thinking it hasn’t done its job.

But now guess what I’m off to do. It’s been a harrowing day, readers, a harrowing day. I spent seven and a half hours fixing my computer (which is to say I yelled at it and pointed threatening cigarettes at it), and even now I’m not sure if it’s OK, and bloody hell, it’s hard to type with your fingers crossed.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

The ever-wonderful Editorial Anonymous posted this week about the fact that editors and agents shouldn’t be able to dash writers’ dreams by rejecting their manuscripts, the argument being two-fold: first, that it’s your manuscript, not all your dreams, that they’re rejecting; and second, that you have to come into this business armed with a better-than-average dose of confidence and thick skin if you expect to get anywhere. The premise is true, and the arguments are dead-on. Someone in the comment thread even likened the entire effort towards publication to auditioning for American Idol: you might feel a little sad for the brutal critiques these contestants are sometimes subjected to, but you must recall that they entered the arena with their eyes open - or, at the very least, should have done.

The only problem I have with this post is that it preaches to the choir. The people who agree are going to agree, and vociferously; and the people who don’t - the people who give all aspiring writers a bad name - are going to fight back with unintelligibly angry rants and manifestos about Talent and Callings and Publishing’s Missed Opportunities.

I was alerted to this post, as to so many things, by Twitter. The tweet called attention not so much to the post itself, but to the ‘defensive, whiny’ nature of the comments. I clicked on the link bracing myself for the kind of mountain of offal that makes all writers look bad, but what I found was this: agreement. From writers. Respect; professionalism. And down at the bottom of the thread, some disgruntled bint opining on how publishing’s got it all wrong, how the wrong people are rejected, and how the industry doesn’t entreat the people who write celebrity memoirs to work hard and play by the rules. There were about forty comments at this stage, and exactly two of them could be classified as ‘whiny’ or ‘defensive’. I pointed this out on Twitter - and after a little back-and-forth that did not raise my heart rate by a single beat - was summarily told to ‘chill the eff out’.

I believe in the rules. Agents and editors, hear me: I’m one of the good guys. I worked hard to get an agent, I take rejection well, and I’m learning to work harder and to work better. My only point was that I’m not the only one. The web has largely succeeded in pulling writers into line, and - for the good guys, anyway - has perhaps even gone too far: most of the writers I know live in terror of offending their agents, and think the most arbitrary and tiny acts could reduce their fitness for publication. These are people who queried properly and respectfully, who followed guidelines, who are stoic, hard workers - and (she says in a tiny voice) are enormously talented. Can we all be published if we do everything right? Of course not; nothing works that way. It’s a painful lesson, but it’s one we know. And we’re perfectly aware too that agents and editors are professionals like anyone else - there are good ones and bad ones - and only the bad ones are asking for unquestioning worship and deference. We know all that.

So I can only imagine that professionals in publishing are perpetually moved to write opuses convincing writers to behave because they see things in their inboxes that we don’t see. There are a lot of idiots out there, and guess what: none of them is going to read an agent’s or editor’s reasoned argument that things are the way they are for a reason. And if they do read, it’ll only be to spit venom in the comment threads and (I say it again) make the rest of us look bad. These are people who are beyond argument, and it’s not worth any professional’s time to attempt to engage them.

Over the past couple of years I’ve started to exist in a world (an online one, anyway) that understands how publishing works: that there are ‘good’ passes and ‘bad’ passes - that being good enough doesn’t mean you get a million-dollar advance, but that you’ll get a certain kind of rejection: the kind that invites further work, the kind that takes a moment to tell you what doesn’t work about your novel. You know who doesn’t know that? Our families. Try saying ‘I got a good pass’ to your mother or your best friend. All they hear is a door slamming; a rejection means that you’re not good enough, full stop. It means ‘She says she’s a writer but she’s just titting around.’ Anyone who’s serious about writing has to contend with this level of completely understandable ignorance in their personal lives all the time, unless he or she makes a resolution (as so many do) not to talk about writing at all. The ridicule to which you open yourself up when you decide to pursue writing professionally - not from agents, not from editors, but from your family and friends - is such that you’d have to be totally crazy to do it, or very serious, very committed, and ready for anything.

(NB: I’ve been ridiculously lucky with my family and friends, who are willing to listen and to understand how this works. But anyone who’s not family, or not a close friend, thinks (at best) that I’m giving myself airs or (at worst) that I’m a criminal idiot.)

The best part of Editorial Anonymous’s post was at the end: ‘We are not your fairy godmothers; we are your colleagues.’ Once again, the stoic, hard-working, talented writers understand this and don’t need to be told. The dissidents will dissent: it’s what they do. And so: if we’re colleagues, we’re colleagues, right? Everyone in publishing deals with rejection, not just writers. Agents pitch and get rejected. Editors take a beloved manuscript to acquisitions and get rejected. Hell, a book gets sold and printed and gets rejected by the public. This happens all the time. Most of the time the rejection is the right decision; sometimes it’s the wrong decision. It’s never not heartbreaking. But we are, as the post says, colleagues. This doesn’t just mean that writers have to take criticism and rejection with grace. It means that well-intentioned writers who play the game and follow the rules have to be treated with respect, whether or not they’re being rejected.

Speaking for myself, I’ve always been respectfully dealt with in a rejection situation - agents and editors have been kind and encouraging, some of them well beyond their remit. I don’t think it’s that system - speaking from my own experience - that’s problematic. What’s problematic is all these ‘colleagues’ mouthing off at the slightest provocation about how unprofessional other people in the industry are: editors about agents; agents about writers; writers about everyone. It gets up my nose to open Twitter and find another lambast against my lack of professionalism, and that of my writer-colleagues. It’s true that one manuscript isn’t the sum total of our dreams, and that no one can crush our dreams but us. But we work so hard - we open ourselves up to so much ridicule - and although we must take rejection and criticism in the spirit in which it was intended, there are few other professions which force its aspirants to eat so much shit when they haven’t done anything wrong. When, in fact, the only reason that they’re bothering to read these abuses is because they’re doing everything right.

No writer is asking for a parade. I’m certainly not. I just want the flow of vitriol to slow a little bit. You don’t spank every bloody kid on the block because one snuck into the cookie jar or broke the hi-fi. Go after the idiots all you want, but cut the rest of us a little fucking slack, all right? With all sincere respect.

Till next time, &c &c.

I’ve just read an incredibly illuminating piece on the tenure system, both a defence and an indictment. As someone who, in two years (fingers and toes and everything crossed), will get to wear a t-shirt that says I ONLY ANSWER TO ‘DOCTOR’, the future of tenure and university life in general is of some interest to me.

The crux of the piece is the difference between being useless - which, let’s face it, most tenured professors are - and being valueless, which many of them aren’t. Utility is judged on a market scale; value is what keeps the world accountable and makes it a better place. If we’re not going to defend that, what is there left to defend?

But my alma mater is a state school, fighting its way up North American rankings. Relatively speaking, it’s a stupendously student- and service-oriented university. Having been a student at Cambridge, one of the most renowned universities in the history of the world, I can say this with some authority. In Cambridge it is a requirement that one be Cantabridgian, that one master the confidence and rhetoric with which Cantabridgians speak. For the most part, this comes naturally if you’ve been admitted. One of my reference letters was a however-many page riff on ‘She’s one of us’. If my referee thinks so - and he’s far more accomplished, mature, and clever than I am - who am I to say otherwise?

At the University of Alberta, you can be whatever-all-you-want, because the University of Alberta isn’t saddled with 800 years of precedent and overconfidence.

Nevertheless, tenure isn’t a thing in England, and it is in Canada. Despite the aforementioned student- and service-oriented nature of the U of A, tenure - as Kingwell points out - seems to be an outdated institution there, and one that isn’t doing the university, its research, or its students many favours. Kingwell compares tenured professors to Lear’s fool - bear with me a minute - by stating that it’s the duty of these people to hold a mirror to society, to criticise it, to make it understand itself. But the fool, he fails to point out, can be canned at any moment. Anyone who’s done any research on Henry VIII and Will Somers knows that. The fool knows it’s his job to come up with original thought and original jokes, to tell truths that may seem manifest to everyone but can only be spoken by him without fear of reprisal. The reprisal doesn’t come because that’s his job. And if he doesn’t do his job, why should he be any more or less protected than any other schmo who misses deadlines or quotas or doesn’t meet the dress code?

I spent far longer at the U of A - as a student and as an employee - than I care to admit. I worked with many professors, became friendly with some. Here’s what tenure does: it allows more potential for a three-dimensional life, a fulfilling life, than just about any other profession there is. I know tenured professors who use their tenure to essentially be on vacation for six months of the year; professors who use their office space as a place to print travel itineraries and little more. I knew people in my own department - people whose interest in their research had long waned - who used their tenure as a platform to pursue entirely different professions, professions that had little or nothing to do with academia. And during term, when they were teaching - when they were (hold your nose) dealing with students - how they complained! I liked these people as human beings, and when they were on form, they were very much on form. I wouldn’t be here without some of them. (Here being Cambridge, not here being at my desk surrounded by coffee cups and knitting paraphernalia and Diet Coke, with the laundry calling out to me.)

I understand why tenure came into being. Do you guys remember when free speech became a thing in the House of Commons? Way back in the early sixteenth century. Underlined by that guy I usually can’t stand, Thomas More. Those who advise the King must be able to speak their minds. But that was before freedom of expression was a thing. That was before political correctness; that was before people were protected to the teeth against punishment for anything except a lack of discipline or a lack of talent. In Canada, anyway, these things are now protected, so what tenure protects against, basically, is persecution based on lack of discipline or talent.

There are, of course, two reasons that this argument doesn’t hold water. The first is the market, and the second is the market. First off, the wide world is facing cuts. If universities didn’t have uniquely protected status, who would be the first to be catapulted off the payroll? The chick who studies the Elizabethan privy chamber (me) and the other chick who studies Anglo-Jewish midwifery (also me). Remember: the electron, when it was discovered and sussed out, was nothing more than an academic curio. (And no, I’m not comparing myself to Electron Guy. I’m a lot less cool.) Without the protection of a university - without tenure, essentially - what happens to these people when the market bottoms out, when, as Kingwell points out, they are most needed?

Because - and this is the second reason - these people could never make it on their own. Aristotle spoke of philosopher kings: he mandated that the first requirement of a philosopher king was that he be in a position wherein he didn’t need to worry about the roof over his head or where his next meal was coming from. Either he’s born into money, or he finds a patron. Quotidian concerns should not be his concerns. I bristle at the idea of tenure when I think of my own still-ongoing journey to publication: I have faced rejection, I have faced mockery, I have faced, in some small way, the crucible of public opinion. Between this and doctoral work, I haven’t gotten a paycheque in fourteen months. And if my novel sells, it’s no guarantee that the next one will sell: I will never reach a point (because 99% of authors don’t) at which I can say ‘I’m protected now; I don’t need to worry anymore.’ And what do writers do if not this, what tenured professors are meant to do: provide truth and beauty, priced above rubies? Why is what I do less legitimate than what someone with tenure does?

The answer is that it’s not. The problem is that I have to fight, fight, and fight some more to do something I love because it has market potential that the research of tenured professors does not have. It is - forgive the seeming arrogance; I promise I’m not arrogant - both useful and valuable. But value without utility is still priced above rubies, even if the court of public opinion doesn’t think so. A comparative study on the constitutional governments of Canada and the United Kingdom is never going to be a bloody bestseller, right? Does that mean it shouldn’t be written and bound? Does that mean it should never see the light of day? Of course not.

Publishing and academia are both of them far crueler than they used to be, and of necessity. Last week I finished reading The Water-Method Man, John Irving’s charming, insightful, and hilarious second novel. His first three novels were modest critical successes; their sales were nugatory. He had been a published author for more than a decade before The World According to Garp secured his legacy. Ten years doesn’t seem so long a time for a talented man to hone and perfect his craft, but an author doesn’t get ten years nowadays. I understand what the publishing industry is going through: even if it hadn’t been crippled by the economy, readers expect more and more and more, and faster and faster. There would be no place for a young John Irving in today’s publishing industry.

And that’s the killer argument, the one that agents and editors and everyone the world over says is irrelevant. There would be no place for a young John Irving in today’s publishing industry. Young, overlooked (and possibly overrated - by themselves, anyway) writers say, ‘Who would publish Dickens nowadays? Nobody!’ And who cares, right? He’s been published, he was published in his own time; he is a mirror upon his own time. Still, I can’t help thinking of the multitude of Young John Irvings out there who are being trampled by the need for less contemplation and more story. In fact, I bloody well know some of them. If we’re not careful, we’re going to compromise our place in literary history.

In light of the Young John Irvings, I’m less likely to be charitable to the tenure system. Universities exist to protect these people against public indifference to work that is valuable but not useful: it is one of the first mandates of that institution. Does this mean that one person with one good idea should be protected for life? That he or she should be subjected to internal scrutiny, but to no meaningful risk? Once upon a time I administered a Faculty Evaluation Committee; I know that professors - tenured and otherwise - are forced to open themselves up to rigorous review from peers and superiors every year. But I also know that the worst they’ll suffer if they haven’t performed at all is humiliation and no raise. Tenure is meant to protect the generation of new ideas; at its worst, it repels new ideas by keeping the old (or middle-aged, or mediocre) people in to the exclusion of people who are clever, terrified, and willing to work.

Fear of failure - and that failure having meaningful and practical consequences - is what keeps the vast majority of the human race productive. See what happens when that fear is taken away. We are all of us frightened, all the time, for one reason or another. But having been afraid of so many things, I can say with confidence that real pressure, real fear, is better for us than existential crises or fear of humiliation. It makes us better people; it shows us what we’re made of. Fear with no practical consequence is paralysing. It makes you sit with your fingers in your mouth in your heated kitchen with its fridge full of food, and as long as none of that’s going away, you might as well be existential and terrified and paralytic for a while longer.

So I’m not saying that tenured professors live the high life without working for it (although of course some of them do); I’m saying that I think they would genuinely be happier and more productive people if they thought their next monograph or teaching evaluation would get them canned if it wasn’t good enough.

And now: time for a second shift of real work.

Till next time, &c &c.

If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.

- Margaret Atwood*

OK, writerverse, I call upon you now not idly or over some curio, but because I need your help rather sorely.

I’m blocked.

I know, I know: I don’t actually believe in writer’s block. Words don’t manifest like offerings from the Lady of the Lake; they’re tools like anything else. Whatever the metaphor, though (let’s go with tools), there’s a rust problem, or my hands have gone to sleep, or something, because I haven’t committed a single word to my novel in two weeks.

(I’m a slow writer, mind, but absolutely nothing for two weeks is bad, even for me.)

It’s a combination of two things. The first is that I read a really good novel recently, can’t get it out of my head, and can’t seem to find any good thoughts of my own. (Three guesses as to the title of this novel.) It’s very hard to settle for your own voice when you read a book and you think, ‘Yes, yes, that’s what I want to sound like.’ You can’t; you’re not that author. You’re you. So, as Nick Hornby says, how do we cope with our own badness? I’ve banged my head against this particular wall before, but never concussed myself quite this badly.

The second thing is that I’ve reached a tangle in my story. Say you’re me, and say you’re writing a novel in which the poet Edmund Spenser is a minor character, and you need him to be in or around London late in 1580, but it turns out he was actually (and famously) in County Cork at that time - and yeah, you could fudge it, but history isn’t your soft pretzel and fudging that kind of factoid doesn’t sit well.

This latest problem - and Spenser being in Cork in 1580 is just an example of the bigger upset that’s beginning to take shape - is sort of like blithely knitting a scarf and realising after a few rows that at some point you dropped a stitch, or added one by mistake. Suddenly what you have is no longer a smooth, growing rectangle, but a trapezoid that makes you grit your teeth whenever you look at it. The lucky thing with the scarf is that you know exactly how far back you have to unpick to right the wrong. The bad thing - for me, in writing as well as knitting - is that I don’t know how to start again once I’ve unpicked.

There are many parts of history that are fixed and immutable; there are many others that are open to interpretation. All the same I can’t imagine that historical novelists are the only ones who come up against this problem. In fact it’s little enough to do with history at all: all at once, the story doesn’t work. Something about it doesn’t make sense. I want to unpick far back enough that I can make sense of it again, but I’m desperately afraid of unravelling the whole thing and having to start from scratch.

So: advice? Thoughts? Funny stories about writer’s block? Tragic stories about writer’s block? I welcome them all. EXCEPT THIS: don’t tell me to take a break. It’s sound advice, and works a lot of the time, but that’s the thing I’ve already tried.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

*Yeah, perfection is sort of what I want. But I’ll settle for words. Preferably in piles.

Ask anyone resident in Oxbridge about something called the X5 and you’ll get two things in rapid succession: a shudder and an anecdote. The X5 is a bus service, the only direct means of conveyance (failing a car or a coach and pair) between Oxford and Cambridge, and follows what’s known as the Misery Route, running through countless roundabouts and stopping in such cities as Bedford and Milton Keynes where, at 6:00pm, if you ask where you can buy a sandwich, the response you’ll get is, ‘What, at this time of night?’

The train is more comfortable, but requires the following (if you’re going from Cambridge to Oxford): a train from Cambridge to London King’s Cross, a tube ride to Liverpool Street station, and another hour’s train to Oxford. A return trip on the X5 is £15; the train will run you closer to £60.

All of this is in aid of saying this: I was in Oxford a month ago for a doctoral workshop. I had gotten there on the X5.

There is a Borders not far from the coach station, and I thought I’d indulge myself with a book for the perilous return journey, so in I went. Sometimes I buy a book, sometimes an audiobook; sometimes I just go into bookshops to survey the landscape. I usually traverse the entire shop some three or four times before I’ve taken everything in and can make a decision, if I make a decision at all.

One reason I take so bloody long in bookshops is my shallow attention span, coupled with the general character flaw of paralytic indecision. The other reason is that about half the time, I’m looking for good historical fiction, and it’s fucking impossible to find in any shop bigger than the palm of my hand.

A friend who used to work at Chapters-Indigo, a major bookshop chain in Canada, told me that historical fiction doesn’t have its own section in bookshops because there is no real consensus on what constitutes ‘historical’ fiction - how far back can you go? Should a novel, written now and set during the Vietnam War, be considered ‘historical’?

(Yes, if.)

Now, I’ve had to have a crash education in publishing, and I confess I know very little of what there is to know. But I’ve gotten this far in life without putting the palm of my hand on a hot element or trying to lick a flagpole in subzero weather, so I credit myself with some minimal measure of common sense, and it strikes me that it would behoove authors, the consuming public, publishing houses and major bookshop chains for said presses and chains to agree on a few simple definitions.

Historical fiction is, very simply, this: a story set before the author’s lifetime. Novels don’t become ‘historical’ novels just because they get old - Jane Eyre is not historical. The Picture of Dorian Gray is not historical. Nevertheless, A Tale of Two Cities is historical, as is Barnaby Rudge - both were set (during the French Revolution and the Gordon Riots, respectively) before Charles Dickens’s lifetime. A simple rule, yes? So a novel set during the Vietnam War could legitimately be called ‘historical’. If.

See, this is what bothers me. Agents invite queries from authors of historical fiction, a solid category of fiction. Agents then pitch to editors who invite pitches for historical fiction, still a solid category. A historical novel is sold because it meets a given standard and sparks interest or pleasure in an editor at a press and his or her superiors. Throughout this entire process - writing the novel, the query process, the pitching process, and the acquisitions process - the work itself remains a work of historical fiction.

The happy ending for this novel is that it goes into bookshops and gets lost.

Philippa Gregory has done historical fiction an enormous service by sparking renewed interest in the genre with her novels. Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel, both nominees (and Mantel the winner) on the Booker shortlist this year, have performed similar feats. Historical fiction is a big genre right now. But what if the reader’s interest is sparked and he or she wants to read something else? Where to turn? People who like historical fiction are no different from people who like crime fiction or science fiction or fantasy fiction (all understood categories in bookshops), and yet they have to sift through massive FICTION sections in bookshops to find something that might maintain this interest. The end result is that it’s very difficult to break out in historical fiction, because people know to look for Gregory under G, but can’t browse for anyone else without getting lost.

The reason I started this post with a pointless anecdote about Oxford is that in the Borders I browsed through (ultimately buying nothing), there was a section taking up half of one wall called TEEN VAMPIRE NOVELS. I can tell you I just about lost my shit. I am friends with people who write books which will end up on that shelf; I respect them and like their writing. I also understand that ‘teen vampire novel’ is a category not requiring a lot of deduction or ingenuity to define. But seriously: historical fiction doesn’t require that much more ingenuity. If an author and a press together decide to market a book as historical fiction, doesn’t it just pants everyone involved if the book can’t easily be found by its target audience once it’s on sale?

The best readers of historical fiction can do at the moment is share their finds: my favourites, for the record, include Suzannah Dunn, Hilary Mantel, and Patricia Finney. Historical fiction isn’t by any stretch all I read, but when I want to read it, I’d like to know where I can find it.

And so ends my shabbos rant. Till next time, &c &c.