Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad

It’s pretty much finished. The body, limbs and its beating heart are done.

(Sorry, there are plenty more metaphors where that came from. Prepare yourself.)

I’m talking about the near completion of Book Two of my trilogy, The Chronicles of Orphir.

It’s a huge relief to write down those words Even though I know that I still have many hours of work ahead, rereading, checking facts and continuity, editing – and adding more layers.

What’s nice about allowing it to sit, while I get on with other stuff and feel out the nuances as I go, is allowing room for it to grow, for its roots to nudge themselves a little more firmly into the ground and its leaves unfurl.

Instead of rushing to get it up on Kindle as soon as possible, this time I’ve forced myself to stop and process what I’ve done so far. Writing a novel – particularly part-time – it’s easy to forget bits and lose focus. I need to remember who my characters are, what they’ve been through and where they are going. From time to time I even give the same character two different names, and I forget their birthdays, their physical and emotional scars, what they’re wearing.

It’s not so different when I try cooking something for the first time – I usually overlook an ingredient – a spice, a herb, the sugar or the salt – and the finished dish won’t taste right unless I notice and remedy my omission.

I have found writing this second book in my trilogy a complex task. The story was already to pour forth when I wrote the first book, but this one needs not only to harken back to the previous story, but stand on its own, while also paving the way for the next volume. It’s a tough call, not to be underestimated, and as my imagination leaps ahead, it’s tempting to start writing the next volume before I have finished the last.

I’ve been audacious (or daft) enough to attempt local dialect for some characters. It’s another gamble – I don’t want a cast of West Indians sounding like Rastamouse, but I don’t want them to sound like the protagonists of an Augustan novel.

They are multi-dimensional, not just speaking scenery. I’ve raided Haitian and Jamaican culture and history for my story background, and I want the characters to reflect that.

And then there are the book covers. From the outset, I decided I wanted my own images. I couldn’t find anything exactly right in the stock photo archives. And as author and fiction-writing guru, Rayne Hall, points out, there’s always the risk that you’ll end up with a picture that’s on a dozen other book covers.

I wonder, though, perhaps that what people (readers) are looking for as they scan the pages of e-books– the familiar. When one is selling an unknown quantity perhaps the stock images of a headless women in period dress or disembodied hands clutching the hilt of a sword encourage someone to part with their dollars and take a punt on your book.

A few months ago, to discover how potential readers might regard my choice of artwork I solicited feedback in a discussion thread concerning gender stereotypes featured in historical fiction book covers  - something I hoped I have avoided on the cover of Tankard’s Legacy. But, instead of useful comments regarding the content and connotations of my cover artwork, the trolls crawled out, and from behind their generic photos and nom de plumes spewed scorn upon it before directing me to a photo library.

After I’d recovered from my hurt feelings, I was reminded of what Malcolm Gladwell argued in his book, Blink, that people don’t actually know what they want. And like the test screening of Hollywood crowd-pleasers, if you ask them, you risk producing the kind of anodyne mediocrity that aims to please everyone, but excites no one.

But, back to my almost-finished novel.

My progress to this point now frees me to read stuff that has nothing to with seafaring or pirates or the background to my characters. 

(Though somehow I find myself picking up a volume about esoteric Japanese spiritualism and its relationship to martial arts …)

And as you’ll see from my previous post, Willa Cather has been one of the latest objects of my focus, alongside my growing obsession for author and all-round fascinating person, Elif Shafak, whose brilliant, chaotic and vivid personality has me in a thrall. (For a quick fix, see her on TED, you’ll get the idea.) I’m tempted to wax lyrical on this newly discovered member of my most favoured writers, but … She deserves a post of her own.

If you fancy a bargain this weekend, Tankard's Legacy is available at 67% discount for a week starting December 28th.

American Woman: Willa Cather

When it comes to my favourite authors, it could be said that I get slightly obsessed.

When the writer is dead the supply of their books is, obviously, finite and so when it comes to my beloved Rumer Godden and Daphne DuMaurier, their bodies of work adorn my bookshelf like expensive boxes of chocolates that provoke a continual yearning - a yearning only to be indulged a little at a time.

But with those authors still inhabiting this mortal plane, Isabel Allende, Joanne Harris, Rose Tremain, Barbara Kingsolver, I tend to go for full immersion – book after book after book, biography, press, gossip … and now I can even top it off with Wiki, Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

But when a few months ago I rediscovered Willa Cather (1873 -1947), I decided to kick the habit. She was an author I had touched on briefly at university and her work whet my appetite, but the years that I had yet to reread her turned into decades, until a member of my reading group suggested My Antonia as our next book.

One of the advantages of ploughing through Cather’s canon is that her novels are short. But there are plenty to get my teeth into, and fortunately my Brighton’s Jubilee Library has an impressive collection. I quickly followed up My Antonia with A Lost Lady.

So what does Cather write about that gets me so excited?

Nebraska! American pioneers at the end of the 19^th century!

Er … ho hum, not exactly wizards, or vampires or zombies, is it?

If anyone came up to me and said, “Hey – do you want to read a book about Nebraskan farmers?” Well, my answer would probably be the same as yours.

But stay with me.

A maxim that Cather aspired to was ‘Primus ego in patrium mecum deducam Musas’ - for I shall be the first to bring the muse into my country.  Cather’s lyrical muses conjure a vivid rendering of the wondrous, yet savage, environment of the newly opened West of America, a landlocked world far from many readers’ experience.

She was in love with the nature of Nebraska, its swathes of dancing grasses, gnarly old trees, untouched marshy meadows. Her lyrical descriptions are breathtaking. This seems to have prompted some critics to bridle at what seems to them a kind of naïve sentimentalism for an idealised past. Particularly in the 30s when America’s farming pioneers found themselves starving in the self-made dustbowl as stocks and shares tumbled in the cities, elegies to the ache of America’s agricultural heartland, such as Grapes of Wrath, seemed to render Cather’s more delicate, less epic tales all the more unpopular.

Like Zora Neale Hurston’s treatment by her peers during the Harlem Renaissance, the desire for more hard-core – ‘male’ – narrative made the more ‘feminine’ celebration of family relationships, local culture and environment seem trivial.

Yet, Cather was far from idealistic. She was cynical and certainly didn’t turn a blind eye to the many hardships suffered and sacrifices made by 19^th Century American pioneers. Her stories portray gritty, courageous and ambitious women, and her books refuse to judge the morals of their heroines, examining the motives and morality of those characters who dare to do so.

At this time in America migrant mothers sacrificed their own small comfort of remaining in their homelands and often their own health and well being to sow the seeds for their daughters’ liberation. Daughters who then had the right and the access to education and opportunities that propelled them into a life that must have seemed worlds apart from the freezing dugout shack where they had been born.

And Cather herself was no shrinking violet. In an era where every woman wore her hair long, she sheared off her locks to spare herself and her ailing mother the trouble of washing, brushing, braiding and dressing it. (I’ll bet she had better things to do than mess with her hair). And she chose to keep it short until she reached college.

As a girl she indulged in the kind of ‘all about you’ quiz that girls still do today. Favourite colour, favourite writer … and what trait did Willa Cather foresee as being most desirable in a husband? “Lamblike meekness”! What quality did she most despise in women? “Lack of grit”!

Do you fancy reading her stuff now?

Unfortunately, even a century later, there are still those in the world who regard the things women have to say as trivial, as if having invisible gonads seems to nullify the validity of the female voice.  And while women in countries like the UK can take for granted a culture of equal regard, there are plenty of places not so very far away, where that is simply not so.

As contemporary arguments about gender swirl into a vertigo of vicious circles about whether sexual precociousness is sexual degradation, the fundamental issue has to be that a woman should have choices about her body – how she chooses to dress and adorn herself, how and whether she wishes to reproduce.  The seeds of these choices were sown by the women who made the sacrifices to earn them in the first place, and for American women they can look to Willa Cather and her ilk for that.

Almost a century ago in her novel My Antonia, Cather created a character, Lena, who makes an extraordinary transformation - from a barefoot cowherd to a finely dressed seamstress making clothes for the cream of society. Speaking of marriage, she says: “Men are all right for friends but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones ... I prefer to be foolish when I like it and be accountable to nobody.” And, the narrator reflects, Lena “ … remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.”

Cather, who chose never to marry, also writes critically of marriage via her protagonist, Jim Burden: “This was a fine life certainly, but it wasn’t the kind of life he had wanted to live. I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two.”

So can a woman of 2013 really turn the pages of Fifty Shades or listen to Blurred Lines without blushing - not with embarrassment at the clumsy sexual titillation - but the fact that women’s sexual domination is still celebrated and fetishized by mainstream culture. 

Are we still so afraid of the battle we face to be taken seriously, so horrified to be identified as ‘feminist’ that we retreat to infantilism? Are we really happy buying into such a value system with its double standards?

'You know you want it. Good girl.'

Let’s not dance to that tune.