I’ve been wanting to get back to semi regular blogging here since I finished my stint as writer in residence over at the Booktrust, where I blogged incessantly for ages. However I’d been having trouble starting. Partly because I really wanted to avoid that ‘Hey guys, I know you’ve been waiting with baited breath for me to write another entry, many apologies for your sleepless nights worrying about where I’ve got to’ type intro but mainly because nothing has grabbed me to moan write about.

However, last week, I received a very disgruntled email from a lady who said that while she enjoyed my novel, she found the language I used very upsetting, distressing and ultimately disappointing. At first I was nearly sick in to my hat, as I thought she was going to tell me that I’d got some aspect of the Australian dialect in the book completely wrong. Or at the very least, that she really didn’t like my description of a tree.
But it turned out, that her email was referring to swearing. Her main objection being that I’ve repeatedly used what she called the ‘F’ and the ‘C’ words. She went on to say that it wasn’t as if I was a 20 year old who had to show off to her trendy young friends. Clearly she felt that as a worldly-wise 30 year old, I should have moved beyond these ‘revolting’ words. She asked me please to write back and explain myself, and not to give any nonsense about a writer using swearwords because they’re trying to be realistic, because that was simply untrue: her father and his friends were men in Australia and they would never have used that sort of language.
Although she did admit that it wasn’t just books ­ society in general was becoming swearier ­she felt that authors have a responsibility to society, and that by using these words we are desensitising youngsters; anyway, a good writer should be able to put her point across without stooping to using these words. She ended by saying that if these words must exist in books, then she would like them to have a rating, like dvds or music albums do.

Now apart from the fact that her email probably had the opposite effect intended, of making me go into a word document of my novel and search for the C word and clap when I found it, I did feel slightly annoyed that my justification for any language used ­ that it be truthful to the characters and moment ­seemed to be so easily swept aside in her mind.

I was still reeling from that telling off, this morning as I read a new Amazon.com review which contains this sentence, ‘Unfortunately for most American readers, (and fortunately for everyone else) she didn’t remove the Australianisms. If you’re not familiar with the language of the outback, there is much to be misunderstood.’

My response to that would probably not have made the lady from the last email very happy.

So these are things that have propelled me back to my inconsistent blog, not outrage quite, just confusion, and perhaps a little fear, though of what I’m not quite sure.

I’d like to ask for comments please – is there an argument for adult rated novels, does anyone else get offended by bad language in novels and what is the answer to a person who wants a book set in Australia to be ‘translated’ into American? And how many letters does it have?

More interestingly, does anyone have any particularly good, or bad, examples of swearing in books?

http://www.booktrust.org.uk/Booktrust-blogs/Writer-in-residence-blog

Go there and see.

 The Independent suggests 10 different scented candles as Christmas presents. Just in case anyone is thinking of buying me a candle for Christmas, here is a selection of books that I’d much rather have.

Wild Rose by John Lewis, “It needs to burn for a while to get a strong smell going…” £5

OR

Why Look at Animals? by John Berger, “Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance…” £4.99

L’Occitane Provencal Landscape, “The compact tin is good for travelling…” £12.25

OR

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince.  £7.99. “Interweaving stories of encounters with nomadic Arabs and other adventures into a rich autobiographical narrative, it has its climax in the extraordinary story of Saint-Exupery’s crash in the Libya Desert in 1936, and his miraculous survival.”

AND

Ox-Tales Fire short story collection, with stories from John Le Carre, Ali Smith, Geoff Dyer, Vikram Seth and many more. £5. This pushes us a tiny bit over £12.25, but 50p from Ox-Tales goes to Oxfam.

Cowshed’s Moody Cow Candle. It’s a “Balancing candle.”  It’s £28.

OR
 

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Hoarold Morris Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton.  It’s a love story told with an auction of the couple’s belongings. It’s lovely. Time Out says ” Leanne Shepton has accomplished a small victory in the age-old artistic struggle to do something unprecedented.” £12.99

This one is green, but the one we have is red.

And

The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore. A beautiful thick brick of a book, ” The nearest thing we have to Chekhov.” says Alison Lurie. £9.99

AND

Days of Reading by Marcel Proust, £4.99. Very pretty little book. Proust writes, amongst other things, about losing yourself in books as a child.

Diptyque’s Beauty and the Beast, £55, “…a floral aroma…”

OR

Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco, £20 ” A complelling masterpiece proclaiming to the world the relevance of sequential art in recording modern history”  This is an important book, it’s also beautiful and terrible.

and

The Poetry of Birds, edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee, £25. ” Marianne Moore and David Wright on the Ostrich and the emperor penguin…Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens on the oriole and the red-winged blackbird.” Amongst many others.

and

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, £8.99. The Independent show that they don’t really mean for us to buy £55 candles: “Savagely comic, yet equally tender…This novel is an elergy for a generation.”

and you’ve still got £1.01 left to buy yourself a cake.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/03/2009_48_fri.shtml

Poor Jenni Murray had a dentistry problem, which my mother said was a good thing as it made me sound more normal.

Winning the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize last night brings back happy memories.

Thanks to everyone who came and made it amazing.

Here are the top 5 books I plan on giving over and over this winter – they are not only awesome, they’re the kind of books you want to read with a rug and a sleepy dog on your lap, and with a large glass of whiskey nearby. Dog is optional.

In fiction:

Legend of a Suicide by David Vann

The Wild Things by Dave Eggars

Martha, Jack and Shanco by Caryl Lewis

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

For a far more comprehensive list of the best books of the 2000s see Stuart Ever’s blog here: http://stuartevers.blogspot.com/2009/11/50-novels-of-2000s-part-one-50-to-40.html

 Tomorrow I’ll post a list of short stories, the next day some non-fiction etc etc. That ought to fill up a bit of space anyway.

Alternate lists? Suggest away.

“In a word, awful. This has to have been one of the worse books I have ever read…”

It’s from the Goodreads website, read the rest of it here:

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/75939203

It really is a beauty.

Thanks Mel, and thank you Janie, who goes on to agree with Mel and say

“I absolutely insist on a book’s having a point. “ 

A smiling face right back at you Janie.

http://www.peckhamliteraryfestival.co.uk/

I’ve done this sort of thing before, and I’m starting to feel alright about it. Taking part in the Melbourne Writers Festival in August pretty much flogged out all of my worst nightmares. We had to wear Madonna style headsets instead of using a microphone, and I had a cold. I got a massive tickle in my throat, which I couldn’t clear because of the headset which made the room vibrate when I coughed, so I had to sit there with my eyes streaming, looking to the audience like the pressure was just too much for me.

I also managed to turn an elderly audience against me in answering the question ‘Would you ever write about your English family?’ by saying I’d have to wait until my Grandmother died. It was sort of a joke, but it was met with a sharp communal inhalation and a hard and beady look from the white haired lady who had been nodding along with everything I said up until then.

So what else could go wrong? The worst would be if no one came, and I had to fill an hour by just prattling on to my parents. I’ve also woken up with a cold this morning, so I might be reading in an awful adenoidal voice, and hacking into a handkerchief. Or I might have a terrifying nosebleed like David Frost did that time:

frostbleed

My main problem though, which is the same one I face every time I do something like this, is how to start. I have become no better at describing what my book is about, in this past year. I sometimes feel like I want to start flapping my arms and just say something like ‘it’s all about stuff and things and that. And lots of it.’ A cab driver in New York asked me what it was about, and I told him ‘It’s a thriller about men not speaking to each other.’

It’s hard this bit, I’ve spoken to other authors who say they have the same problem, you’re so close to the story , it becomes about how a character ties his shoes, how beer tastes, what a headache feels like. What you want to be able to say at the beginning of an event like the one on Wednesday is, ‘I’ve written a book about three men living together in a caravan in Uzbekistan, and how they feel about organic farming’. Instead, on Wednesday, I’ll be stammering and trying to make sense of a list of stuff that will be written in tiny writing on the cover of my reading copy of the book. It will say: Australia, 1950s, Sydney, East Coast, men, landscape, Vietnam, conscription, PTSD and cake decorating.

Any worst ever public speaking stories? Things to watch out for? Even better, has anyone who has read my book got a succinct one-liner on what the book’s about? If you have there’s a stubby cooler in it for you.

Hope to see you there.

I don’t know if it’s from a kind of  awkwardness that comes with walking into a quiet space,  but I find it really strange when people come into the bookshop singing to themselves. 

 Today it’s been particularly noticeable – perhaps singing makes people feel warmer in this cold weather? One guy sang the intro to Fever, without ever getting to the words, complete with clicky  fingers and a bouncy little walk,  for a good four or five minutes, until his girlfriend very softly, and not unkindly said ‘Why don’t you just shut up?’

Mostly though, people sing little ditties they’ve made up, tuneless things that might just as well be them reading out the words ‘der dum der dum de dee dee’ as there is no attempt to make them sound at all musical.

What I’d really like would be if someone would swing open the door and really go for it, some sort of fat man opera, ideally. Then I could stop what I was doing, and enjoy the distraction rather than just getting unreasonably annoyed by the low level noise.

 My favorite moment of today though, was when a harassed mother whose young daughter was singing Postman Pat at the top of her screech, called her a ‘noisy arsehole’ by accident. She explained to me that she’d meant to say ‘noisy article’. I was very pleased, either way.

Published by Faber and Faber

SO, I’ve managed to get Peter Hobbs to sign three of his beautiful books and I will be giving them away to the best Clement Freud style comeback to “Yeah, I don’t like short stories, they just don’t engage me,” or to excellent suggestions of short story collections. I can’t write that without it rhyming, sorry.