THE XANADU MANUSCRIPT

I really enjoyed reading John Rowe Townsend's The Xanadu Manuscript both for its Cambridge setting and also for it's clever time travel story. It  was first published in 1977 and has been re issued by Oleander Press, a small publisher of books with a Cambridge interest. The Xanadu Manuscript, however, will interest young readers far beyond Cambridge as it has such a popular and universal theme.

    John is a very good friend, living close by and I'm delighted to see his book back in print again with its new, eye-catching cover.

4 DECEMBER DIARY ENTRY

For most of my life I kept a diary. I used to like to compare my own day, especially if it had been a bad one, with the days of other diarists in The Faber Book of Diaries edited by Simon Brett.  Now the blog has replaced the diary with posts that are not quite as personal as diary entries. Here are the entries of  The Reverend John Skinner, Jane Welsh Carlyle , George Gissing and Joan Wyndham for 4 December in 1823, 1855, 1893 and 1940 respectively:

And here's my own for 2011:

Woke at 10.30 after a bad night relieved it was Sunday and not Monday.  The last few days have been manic; trying to get Zoë’s Boat off to China for printing with the worry the huge files are still stuck somewhere out in cyberspace - hopefully nearer to Hong Kong than Cambridge.

     It was all so old fashioned and easy last year when Lavenham Press printed The Little White Sprite and the printer drove over to collect everything from my house; staying for tea and cake. But all that costs money and, now we’re in 'a time of economic crisis', costs have to be kept down. Though yesterday, 'the economic crisis story' didn’t ring very true at Hitchin Waterstones – or for that matter the ‘death of the book story.’ I’ve never seen so many people in a bookshop before and I’ve never had such a good signing session before – 47 copies sold.

  

PUNCTUATION

Commas, full stops, colons, semi-colons, hyphens and dashes are like the bones of a skeleton lying beneath the meaning of a sentence.

    As a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, I have to help students at Essex University with their writing. Last week, a very able student from Pakistan brought along a close reading of an excerpt by Dickens from Sketches by Boz. It would have been a first class essay except the student had not looked closely enough at the length of Dickens’s sentences nor thought about the way those sentences were punctuated. 

  On my non RLF days, I’m proof reading Zoë’s Boat before it goes to press. Looking at my own writing is somehow a much harder task than looking at someone else’s - all those punctuation marks and how they affect the rhythm of the page, not to mention the wider punctuation of the page turns in a picture book when you have to imagine the reader, a Mum or Dad, reading aloud to a child and turning those pages; quickly or slowly or deliberately holding back the page turn where there’s a cliff hanger.

SMALL CHILDREN ON THE 5 NOVEMBER

Last night was bonfire night and we watched the fireworks reflected in the river Cam at the bottom of my garden. Despite austerity times, Cambridge didn't skimp on its firework display or its bonfire; the explosions of colour were as bright as ever, the bangs were as big as ever and the smallest children were as scared as ever  - just as they would be reading this poem:  Please to Remember. Small children on 5 November

THE SEA IS BIG AND ANGRY

'The sea is big and angry. It's taking away my things.'  From Zoë’s Boat.

For weeks I've been painting that sea. I thought it would get easier and I'd get the hang of it. But I never got the hang of it - right up until the final spread it kept changing. And now it's all done. The illustrations for Zoë’s Boat are complete leaving that washed-up feeling one always has at the end of a project.

WATERSTONES SIGNINGS

I’ve been doing quite a few Saturday signings in Waterstones stores recently and I'm still learning the ropes. Unless you’re an author with celebrity status, these sessions amount to hand selling over a period of 4- 6 hours. Independent bookshops seem less keen on this active type of signing session – maybe because their floor space is smaller than that of most Waterstones shops and the author is rubbing shoulders with the bookseller, or maybe because they don’t want loyal customers upset by over zealous or inept selling. You tread a fine line between being intrusive and a nuisance and being unobtrusive and going unnoticed. With the gentlest of nudges and some eye catching artwork you have to be able to point a customer towards a book they weren’t originally looking for and convince them that it was just what they were looking for.

    Six hours sounds an awfully long time but I find it passes quickly and there’s plenty to observe and learn about a bookshop when not actually signing. There’s an ebb and flow rhythm to the day; a flurry of customers entering the shop with all the book sellers at the tills, then a lull when books are replaced on shelves, stickers taken off past offers and time for a chat.

   You have to bring something to eat discreetly in one of these lulls or you won't survive the day and as for the toilet - it's usually somewhere very inaccessible in the back area of the shop, up winding staircases, past  store rooms and boxes that send a chill down an author’s spine: returns, on-going returns, confirmed returns.

   I usually sell 30 copies in a day but occasionally events beyond my control upset this. On the Saturday of the great October heat wave I sold only half that number of books. Children just didn’t come into the shop and I spent most of the day shivering under a very efficient air conditioning vent, looking out at the wonderful heat wave and all the three and four year olds tripping past on their way, no doubt, to the paddling pool in the park.

TEXT FRAMES

Zoë’s Boat has been designed as a read aloud picture book for very young children in graphic novel style. Now, the coloured artwork is nearly complete, I have handed over to typographic designer, Lisa Kirkham, to ponder the style of the text frames – should there be a frame with an outline, just a faded rectangle or  simply text on image? I think I prefer the faded rectangle used here as it integrates enough with the picture frames and stylized trees and water yet isn’t over emphatic.