Writing, everywhere - but not a story writ -with apologies to the Ancient Mariner - Linda Strachan

At times it seems the only kind of writing that doesn’t get done is writing the book I want to write.

‘Can we have 100 words about when you were ten? Can we have a short biography for our website or a blurb for the event you are doing for us next year- we need it next week!’ Updating my website, or writing a blog, or a guest blog or emails, (I don’’t twitter… yet) but still the list is pretty much endless.

Writers are always being asked to write this or that, the day to day little bits of writing that we agree to because they don’t seem like huge tasks but eat into the creative writing time. When you are already feeling pressured to meet a deadline these little pieces that need to be right are enjoyable just because they are short, and often they are challenging also because they are short.

Personally I am sure it is often because despite being desperate to get down to writing the novel (or whatever it is I should be writing), and I do often wake up in the morning with ideas buzzing in my head, by the time I get to my desk I get distracted and before I know it an hour or two has vanished so it is time for another cup of coffee, to put the washing out and try once again to make it out to ‘Tuscany’, my shed, where I long to be.

I can imagine those who have a ‘day job’ wishing they had that freedom to choose but it is so much more difficult to drag myself away from my ‘house desk’ where all these distractions are, than to go straight out to Tuscany – however delightful that sounds.

Some months ago I joined in with some other SAS writers to try a Na No Wri Mo (ie write a novel or 50,000 words in a month) and I did find the challenge of putting up our word count on a specially designed site was good for making me start each day, or at least get to the shed each day. Because of other commitments I only managed to do it for just under three weeks, but the 30,000 words I wrote formed the basis for my new teenage novel which is coming in the spring of 2010, so it really did work.

So with renewed determination I am starting off with a challenge to myself, to get to Tuscany every day - BEFORE I do anything else – for the next three weeks. Starting tomorrow of course, because today… you see, I had this blog to write…

Find out more about Linda on her website www.lindastrachan.com

Garbage storytelling, by Leslie Wilson

I’m in a school, but not as visiting author this time. I’m with a group of waste management specialists (including my husband) who are visiting the Recycling School in Moqattam in Cairo. It’s an unusual, but exciting school. It caters for the boys of the Zabbaleen community of informal recyclers – they used to be informal garbage collectors – what we’d have once called rag-pickers - but things have moved on.

The Zabbaleen originally came to Cairo from the countryside, and started to work sorting through the refuse of the more prosperous neighbourhoods, picking out whatever could be recycled, and selling it to middlemen. They lived in shanties, with heaps of waste lying in front of the dwellings. Here the families sorted the refuse and the pigs rootled through to pick out the organic matter and eat it. It wasn’t a bad system, especially not the input of the pigs, who produced both meat and fertiliser, but it wasn’t very healthy, and child mortality was high. Enter Laila Iskandar, who started off the girls’ school here. The girls recycled clean paper and textiles and learned, at the same time, literacy and basic hygiene. Nowadays, you may well buy the handmade paper they make in outlets in the West – lovely paper in beautiful colours and patterns. Their textile products – recycled from industry’s offcuts - are selling to fashion outlets in Europe. The Zabbaleen are intelligent, resourceful people who have taken every opportunity that’s been given them and run with it. Some of the first graduates from the girls’ school have gone on to university.

So, twenty-seven years on from Laila’s first visit, things look very different. The Zabbaleen now have brick-built houses, from whose windows and balconies hang beautifully clean laundry. There are still people sorting refuse, but that is done, largely, in workshops, separate from the dwellings. And now much of the actual recycling is done in Moqattam, which means the Zabbaleen can sell plastic pellets on to factories, though in some instances they make plastic products too. We visit one of the recycling workshops, where a £50,000 machine melts the plastic into an endless sausage of curiously pleasing hot gunk and feeds it into an extruder, from which plastic spaghetti spews out into a cooling trough. The plastic pasta is then chopped up into pellets. This work was initiated, twenty years ago, with a grant from Oxfam.

The pigs, alas, have gone, sacrifices to official fear of swine ‘flu, and in their place goats forage among the rubbish instead, attractive animals that look interestedly at us with their slot-pupilled eyes. The goats aren’t as good converters as the pigs were; I get the feeling they’re on probation. The death of the pigs has been a heavy blow for the community. There are cats and dogs everywhere, sleeping in the noon sun, waiting for the darkness when they’ll hunt rats. I see a rat, sun-mummified, plastered on the middle of the street. In western landfill terms, the dogs and cats are rodent control.
And there are children everywhere, quite small children, who are workers. Some of them are carrying racks of puffed pitta bread off to shops and small cafés, some of them are helping their parents. To get these kids to school, you have to give them an incentive. You can’t just drag them away from work and impoverish the family. That was why the first school, for girls, did the paper and textile recycling. Hence the Recycling School for the boys. The work the boys do is to sort plastic bottles. There’s a huge, crude faking industry in the developing world. Empty shampoo bottles get refilled with Nile water and detergent and sold as the original product. For this reason, if the bottles are ground up, it’s great news for the producers, and they’ll pay for this to be done. In addition, the school sells the plastic chips on to the recycling workshop.

The boys come to Recycling School when they can. They learn Montessori method, incidentally. Their incentive to learn to read is to enable them to read the labels on the bottles; ‘Head and Shoulders’ is their starting point. The incentive to learn maths is that they need to keep a tally of how many bottles they collect in order to get paid. But they don’t just add them up – they make Excel spreadsheets. Other learning happens along the way. It’s hoped that boys, too, will carry their education on to university level.

The first time I heard Laila Iskandar was in 2005, when she was talking to a conference in Sardinia about the Zabbaleen’s problems. The trouble is that the Cairo municipality would like to do away with waste pickers, with their messy carts (formerly pulled by donkeys) piled with mixed refuse, and replace them with nice clean refuse vehicles and wheelie bins. The foreign companies who are operating this system use a smart modern landfill and recycle, we’re told, less than the Zabbaleen, who achieve an 80% recycling rate (compare this with England’s average of 36.8% and best figure of 60%) This has put huge pressure on the Zabbaleen because their source material is being schlepped off to landfill. It’s also a huge shame environmentally and a shame to us in the industrialised North for the false ideas of what is desirable that we’ve passed on to developing countries. But with the help of a generous grant from the Bill Gates Foundation, it’s hoped that they will be able to negotiate with the municipality and establish themselves as viable contractors.

But why do I feel so excited about the Zabbaleen and concerned about their future? Because of Laila’s superb storytelling skills. I went on the trip to Moqattam because she’d engaged me when I heard her in Sardinia. Meanwhile her niece, Mai Iskander, has made a film about three of the community’s boys, Garbage Dreams which has won an Al Gore award. I’ve seen it and it’s totally engaging and fascinating. More storytelling. That’s why I’m blogging about them today, because it shows how important storytelling is, not just to entertain people, but to tell stories about people who’d otherwise go quite unheard. I hope I haven’t got anything too drastically wrong, but I’ve sent Laila the link for this blog, so if I have, she can correct me.

Photographs by David Wilson

Dare You Take The Brownie Challenge? Karen Ball

There’s something in the air. Actually, not just in the air. It’s printed on mugs, emblazoned on T-shirts, celebrated in blogs and adding to a certain nervous energy on the streets of my city. It’s NANOWRIMO month. Dark rings appear below eyes, colleagues stagger into work grasping lattes, questions are called across desks. Everyone asking the same thing: what’s your word count? Once a year, anyone from around the world can sign up to a challenge to write against the clock, finishing a 50,000-word novel in a month. ‘Thirty days and nights of literary abandon.’ No room for self-editing or navel-gazing, careful plotting or redrafting. The aim is pure – to get to the end of a first draft by midnight, November 30^th.

Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed the joy, energy, excitement, fear and fatigue of friends and colleagues as they scurry out of the office on winter evenings to retire to cafes or bars in a collective effort to create. I’ve seen the photos; people crowded around laptops, peering intently at screens or nervously smiling at each other over the top of their monitors.

NANOWRIMO’s basic principle of clocking up a word count, quality be damned, is transparently liberating. It’s enabled a whole community of new writers to just have a go. And that word – community – seems crucial to this collective effort. I’ve heard so many stories of writers who spend years isolated from others striving towards the same goals. Then, through organisations like the Scattered Authors Society, they find soul mates. Oh, I’m not the only one juggling a day job and a novel? You struggle with the middle acts too? Hurrah – someone else eats chocolate at their desk! Now, NANOWRIMO has enabled many writers to connect and enjoy the support of others, cutting out those lonely first years. This can only be a good thing; writers no longer have to learn alone.

But do I think I’ll ever attempt 50,000 words in the space of a month? Are you kidding! I’m too old, too tired, too grumpy. If I write 4000 words in a stretch, I’m pleased with myself. 12,000 words in a week? No way! I know myself well enough to understand that I’d crumble under that pressure. I need the thinking time. I work best when left alone, to mull quietly, to stare into space. I’d be a total NANOWRIMO loser. So I’m really pleased that others are finding the motivation to write their first, second or third novels – but for myself? I’m thinking of setting up a National Brownie Eating Month (NABREAMO): ‘Thirty days and nights of calorific abandon.’ All I need is a sofa to loll on and a hotline to a supermarket. And after that? A girdle*.

* When DID women stop wearing girdles?

Photo courtesy of Albert Cahalan.

Visit my website at www.karen-ball.com

The golem – Michelle Lovric

In Jewish tradition, a golem is a monster brought to life by a magical force in order to serve its creator. In my opinion, this is pretty much an exact definition of doing publicity for one’s publishers.

In Hebrew legend, there are various recipes for making a golem. But they all seem to involve the modelling of shapeless inanimate materials into a form that approximates a human being. The result: a body without a soul. But when the name of God is invoked, the golem comes to life. When its mission is over, the name of God is removed and the golem returns to dust.

In publishing, you make a golem this way: an author labours in obscurity for months, even years, to write a book. ‘Shapeless’ certainly applies to the cardigans, dressing-gowns and other writing-wear worn by most authors when crouched over their computers.

Then one day the manuscript is pronounced ‘a live one’ and the name of marketing is invoked. ‘This book could really sell,’ is the mantra. ‘Get a good photo!’

How many authors really look like their publicity photos? My publicity golem and I stopped resembling one another about five years ago. That’s because the photographer’s secret brief is for an image of the author ‘that could really sell’. The author is peeled out of the shapeless cardigan and tucked into something he or she would never wear, because he or she is rather fond of breathing, and also because of the authorly tendency to spill coffee and pasta sauce on most garments. The author poses in positions of extreme unnaturalness, to get that natural look. The author gapes like a kitten, in order to achieve that thoughtful gaze into the profound nature of things.

The publicity department chooses the least embarrassing image from the embarrassing contact sheet. The golem is born: a creature that has vaguely human form but is not inhabited by the soul of the writer.

The golem’s body is tipped, blinking, out into the glare of the world. The publisher accompanies the protégée golem to launches and parties (see photo above from Paul Wegener’s 1920 film, Der Golem).

From talking only to the cat, the author must suddenly become proficient at entertaining 80 children and their teachers. The author sits in front of microphones in those tiny self-serve studios at the BBC, scintillating about the book to remote radio stations. If the book is a success, the golem appears on television. (This sometimes unmasks the golem: the publicity photo can come unstuck at this point.)

This blog is not blasphemous, by the way, because the author never really becomes the golem. The golem is a separate creation, son or daughter of publicity and marketing, animated by an arcane formula: a body without a soul.

And that’s probably ok.

On a long publicity tour, a soul is not much use to an author. My soul, had it been present, would have run away and hidden in the ladies' lavatories when I had to do a signing of my Love Letters book at Men’s Night in Lingerie at Macey’s in New York.

The modern Hebrew translation of the word ‘golem’ is ‘cocoon’. But there are other meanings. They are usually variations of ‘fool’.

Golems have been known to run amok. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague created a golem to defend the Jewish community against a blood libel. But his golem began to misbehave and so the rabbi had to deactivate it.

I guess this happens to authors too.

My golem went severely rabid, for example, when it was sent to Fox Studios to be interviewed alongside the true star-guest of the show: a dog who wore shoes.

But that’s another story …

Michelle Lovric’s website

Answering Back : Penny Dolan

One of the small problems about flying off next week to tell stories at Delhi's Bookaroo Children’s Book Festival(with surrounding holiday) is that . . . . er . . er . . . part of me quite wants to stay home here in Yorkshire working on Tome Two.

I’m behind on my personal deadline. This Autumn’s run of visits tore into the energy I need for my writing work. This is not a complaint, especially as the schools and libraries were really great, but the big fact in most author's writing/earning balance. Visiting is essentially “Out There”; Writing is “In Here”.

I know I should be up and at the Tome every spare second, but my creative mind doesn’t work like that, and before anyone quotes inspirational tales of Messrs Trollope or Archer or even the feted Miss Price, I have no servants, assistants or anyone else writing down my book words.

However, the enforced silence was useful. Returning to the Tome, I suddenly saw that a certain light and subtle story twist was actually constructed of a material somewhat heavier then lead. It required, and will require, strong and severe plot-wrangling.

There is also another problem to solve. The small matter of X, a secondary character: a pale, pitiful creature doomed to arrive at a poignantly early end.

X has decided to be nothing of the sort. In true Jasper-Ffordean manner, she is stomping on furiously, full of life and health and wanting to have her own way. Just now I can’t see how or if I can ever take her in hand, let alone what she will do to the main characters. So much for the power of the synopsis! She cannot be trusted alone.

So I have decided that in Delhi, home of the power-cut,I must keep writing, but it will be - aagh! - by hand. Even though that means facing up to my awful over-excited scrawl. Even though I need the protective “writing distance” my computer screen gives me. I considered the lap-top option, but that adds weight and safety issues. Hand-writing sounds so much more reliable, doesn’t it?

I fear it will all come back to me: the stained fingers, the gloom as the paper is covered in more and more deletions, the awful over-writing, the sense of homework badly done. Ho hum. I must try to be positive.

Will my back-to-scribbling plan work? It's essential that it does, because I’ve reached a significant point in the making of Tome Two, a moment that ABBA writers may recognise, and it is joyous. When I sat down to work this last week, the writing had begun speaking back to me.

www.pennydolan.com

REVIEWS by Adèle Geras

The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips (Virago)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceDxO50GVes

Before you read this review, just to get yourself in the right mood,please cut and paste the link above into Google (I haven't been able to make it live, I'm afraid!) and listen to this clip from Youtube of Gillian Welch singing a song called Annabelle from her album Revival. I had Gillian’s voice (and particularly singing this song) running through my head as I read The Well and the Mine. The book was published by a small press at first, having been turned down by several mainstream publishers and then went on to win the coveted Barnes and Noble award in the USA. Now it’s here and I’m recommending it highly to anyone who wants a novel that’s well-written, involving and full of characters we grow to love in spite of their flaws and weaknesses.
It’s the story of a family in hard times. Carbon Hill is a small mining town in Alabama and the book begins in dramatic fashion with a young girl hearing someone...well, here’s the first sentence: “After she threw the baby in, nobody believed me for the longest time. But I kept hearing that splash.” The whole novel, as well as solving the mystery of who threw the baby into the well, describes a community and the relationships between the individuals in it brilliantly well. The members of Tess’s family tell the story in a kind of relay of narration: handing the point of view baton from one to the other. The result is a slow-burning but consistently interesting and engaging story. The mother of the family in particular, is a wonderfully- realized character and the descriptions of such things as food and clothes and furnishings are outstanding. You really do come away from this novel feeling as though you’ve joined the family as one of its members and lived another life for a while. When you surface, it takes time to forget where you’ve been, and I went on remembering what it was like in Phillips’s world for a very long time after I’d finished the book. It’s a terrific first novel and I’m already looking forward to what this writer does next. Buy the book and also the Gillian Welch cd while you’re at it.

Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill (Profile Books. £12.99)

My top tip for Christmas for anyone who loves books is this small volume (HEIOTL from now on!) by one of our best and most reliable writers. Susan Hill writes everything, pretty well: literary novels, detective stories, ghost stories of course and essays too, as this book proves. She also blogs at the Spectator and runs a publishing house called Long Barn Books. HEIOTL began when Hill went looking for a book and, in the course of a search through the intricacies of her house, came across a whole number of volumes she either hadn’t read yet or else wanted to revisit. So she made a resolution to buy no new books for a year and simply read what she fancied from her own shelves. What she finds and how she finds it and what these discoveries bring to mind turns into a huge treat for us, her readers. It’s exactly like having a friend sitting with you, chatting about books in a most civilised and also gossipy and personal fashion. You find out not only about her tastes, but also about her education, her brushes with such people as E. M Forster, Edith Sitwell, Benjamin Britten and lots of others. You learn about her life, a little, and most importantly, you learn about the house itself. It is described in small glimpses, but by the end, you feel you know it, every corner. And just as you can envisage famous houses in novels, Susan Hill’s house comes to life as a character in these pages.
One of the best things about reading HEIOTL is that you are almost bound to disagree with some of Hill’s judgements and jump up and down and yell: YOU CAN’T THINK THAT! But yes, she can. Of course she can and why not? These are her books and her opinions and there isn’t a single thing in the world which pleases everyone. We all have our bêtes noires, don’t we ? And we each have our own taste. Most of the reviews for this book have been kind and more than kind, but I did see a sort of luke-warmish one which said something along the lines of: all very nice if you discount her Middle England tastes....or some such. I nearly exploded. You have the taste you have, and if you can write about it as well and as delightfully as Susan Hill, then that’s fantastic. You’ll find here, by the way, three pages of some of the best writing on Dickens that I’ve ever read and which nails completely and succinctly what it is that is so magical about his works.
As a bonus, the book is beautiful as an object. Hill is fussy about fonts and quite right too. Her cover is perfect and, as I said at the beginning of this piece, would look good gift-wrapped under a Christmas tree.

Alice in Love and War by Ann Turnbull (Walker Books, £6.99)

Ann needs no introduction to readers of ABBA, I’m quite sure, but for those of you who have strayed here from somewhere else, you ought to know that she’s one of the very best historical novelists writing today and has not had nearly enough written or said about her books, which are in a different class from most children’s historical fiction, and indeed most children’s fiction being written today. I should declare an interest here. Ann and Linda Newbery and I collaborated on the Historical House series of books and she’s a friend of mine, but even before I knew her, I admired her work and she’s kept up a very consistent standard. I ought also to point out that Leslie Wilson has written about this book before on ABBA, but (slightly adapting the words of the creator of another Alice, who advocated three times) “What I tell you two times is true.” In the words of Mae West: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”
Alice in Love and War is a good title. The book is about exactly that. It’s the story of a young woman called Alice Newcombe, and begins on a farm in the West Country in 1644. Alice can read and write. She’s the daughter of a herbalist. Her father is dead and she lives with her uncle and aunt, but her uncle is after her with his pawing hands and slobbering lips and she’s very unhappy with her situation. When the Royalist troops are billeted on them, she falls deeply in love with Robin and when given the chance to accompany him, with the other women camp followers, she seizes it and the adventures that ensue are heartstopping, moving and will keep readers turning the pages eagerly till the end of the story. Women have always followed armies, and Ann Turnbull’s depiction of the relationships and friendships among them is particularly well done.
I’m not going to give anything away, but will say this: any teacher who’s presently embarked on teaching the Cavaliers and Roundheads (do teachers still do that? Are they still called Cavaliers and Roundheads, even? ) would immediately interest her class in the politics, the dates and the battles with a book like this in her arsenal. We learn so much about the English Civil War and we learn it in the easiest and best way possible: through the medium of a cracking story told in prose that’s as clean and refreshing as pure water. This book is a real achievement and anyone who enjoys reading about the past will love it. It is also a crossover book, so one for adults too. Marvellous stuff.

The Unkindest Review Anne Cassidy

Twenty years ago, before I was published I spent two years writing an adult book. I was a great fan of ‘Hill Street Blues’ at the time and structured my book in a similar way. It was a complete day in a secondary school and involved the lives and loves of a group of teachers. (No need to guess what my job was at the time). It had a host of main characters and a number of intersecting story lines. It was big, baggy and never to be published but I learned a lot from doing it.

After several rejections I began to realise that the returned ms looked as though it had hardly been touched and therein, I thought, lay the problem. Editors clearly found the first few pages dull. If only they could persevere, I thought, they would see what a terrific novel they had on their hands.

Someone suggested that I send the novel to a professional ‘reader’. This would be someone who had experience in the business and who could give me objective advice on what was good/bad about the novel. This seemed like a good idea to me and I duly paid my fee and send off my ms along with return postage.

Then I waited.

If I’m honest those days of waiting were some of the most exciting days I spent. Like in the early days of the lottery when I bought a one pound ticket and spent hours working out what I would do with the winning millions.

I waited.

I pictured this ‘reader’ discovering my novel. She would read it through with a growing realisation that here was something really good. She would recognise the few odd things that needed to be improved (the beginning, certainly – I accepted that). She would talk to friends in the business about this first novel by an unknown but promising author. She might even know an agent and give them the heads up on this new talent. Finally someone would actually read my novel through to page 296 and gasp with admiration and it wouldn’t be long before I had an agent and a publisher.

Then one day the postman handed me the returned ms. My hands shook as I opened the package. On the top of my book was a seven page letter. It started with the words,

This is no better or worst than any other first novel I have read.

I read the sentence over several times. What did it mean? Then I read the next paragraph which informed me that if I wanted to read the positive comments about my novel I should turn to page seven of the letter. I did and read the positive paragraph. Then I went back and read eight torturous pages which tore my novel to shreds comparing it (unfavourably) to Dickens. Perhaps the embarrassing criticism was that my sex scenes were like a cross between Mills and Boon and Masters and Johnson.

I tore the seven page letter into shreds. I cried.

Later my husband picked up all the pieces and put them in an envelope and stuck it down and put it away in the bottom drawer of my desk. He told me to keep it until the day I published my first book and then read it again.

Years later my first book was published (1990). I held a copy in my hand and decided to get the envelope out of my bottom drawer and reread the letter. It took me an hour and lot of sellotape to stick it back together. Then, with the confidence of a newly published author, I sat back and read the whole seven pages again. I cried again. I tore it up again (harder this time because of the sellotape). I threw it away. Again.

This time my husband did not retrieve it.

StarLit!

Amanda Craig, writing in her own blog bought up the subject of literary festivals. I wanted to talk about a brand new one piloted in October in my own London Borough of Hackney. The festival, StarLit, was organised by two enthusiasts of modern children's books, Jo Di Guia of Victoria Park Books and Dylan Calder for the Shoreditch Trust. They handpicked books and authors they knew would work for their audiences of inner city readers, and invited authors and illustrators, including Geraldine McCaughrean, Michael Rosen, David Lucas and Elizabeth Laird.
Tents were pitched in leafy Hoxton Square, four event tents and one bookshop, a sort of mini Edinburgh.
Book sales in inner city schools are not usually anything to write home about, and Dylan and Jo wanted to make sure that StarLit wasn't an hour with an author and a packed lunch, so they secured sponsorship with a city firm, Linklaters, who paid for every child to attend to buy a book of their choice. Elizabeth Laird, said to me that she had never sold so many hardbacks (it was her excellent new novel The Witching Hour) in one go.
It wasn't all about the newest titles either, some authors were asked to discuss old favourites with reading groups. The audiences I saw had all - at least - read the book I was talking about, some had dramastised bits, or painted pictures.
Alongside the festival there was a whole heap of research, too, about reading habits and books which will be made available soon. The most wonderful statistic was that of the children polled, three quarters primarily read 'because they liked stories'. Well, who'd a thunk it?
StaLit went down well, although a few of the evening events did have to be cancelled at short notice rather than go ahead with titchy audiences. But this was a pilot, and I know the organisers will do even better next year.
So if you are lucky enough to get an invite to StarLit for next October, go!

Medina Hill - Sally Nicholls

I'm writing this blog a day early in order to take part in the blog tour of Trilby Kent's 'Medina Hill', which came out last month. Trilby's book will be travelling across blogs in Britain, Canada and America, receiving reviews (wonderful idea, Trilby) and today it's visiting the Awfully Big Blog Adventure.

'Medina Hill' is the story of eleven-year-old Dominic, who has suffered from selective mutism since his mother became ill. In the summer of 1935, Dominic and his sister Marlo are sent to stay with their Uncle Roo in Cornwall while their mother is in hospital. As with many classic children's books, we suspect that everything is about to change ...

Everything changes through the unlikely medium of a small green book entitled 'Incredible Adventures for Boys: Colonel Lawrence and the Revolt in the Desert'. Dominic quickly becomes entranced with Lawrence of Arabia and dreams of imitating his hero - of becoming part of a strange culture, being accepted into a foreign tribe and freeing them. He gets his chance when he meets Sancha, a Romany girl whose family are in danger of being turfed off their land. Can Dominic - like Lawrence of Arabia before him - overcome his shortcomings and liberate his new friends?

'Medina Hill' reads very much like a traditional children's book. All the elements from the books of my childhood are there - the ginger beer, the 'bathes' in seaside coves, the gypsies in 1930s caravans. Trilby Kent has worked hard to avoid stereotypes, however. Her Romany are well-researched and interesting - their romance is still there, but the hardness of their life and the complexity of their language and customs are emphasised. Similarly, the parts dealing with T. E. Lawrence are fascinating - we learn that he was originally refused entry into the army, and that his usefulness to Britain stemmed not from his military might but his knowledge of Arabic. The characters are great too - Dominic's sister Marlo is very well-observed, and I would have loved Uncle Roo's artists colony as a child.

There are times where the storytelling falters - the end is a little too neat and predictable and the pace a little too fast - we are told about Marlo's friendship with the Reverend, for example, rather than see it develop. I would have liked Dominic's problems to be a little harder to solve - the main quest is acheived in several chapters and the hidden treasure found in the first place he looks.

All in all, however, this was a great read, and one which made me interested to find out more about Lawrence and the Romany. Lawrence is an inspiring hero for this age group, and I loved that Dominic's victory is given as much weight for the reader as his hero's. A clever, richly textured book, both for modern children and traditionalists like me.

www.sallynicholls.com
www.waystoliveforever.co.uk

Screaming and Screaming Until I'm Six - Charlie Butler

Like many writers I go through periods of wondering whether I’m not really a complete fraud – not least when, as now, I’m in the middle of a prolonged dry spell. In those circumstances it’s comforting to run one’s finger along a row of spines and remind oneself: “I did that!” But it’s difficult for that thought not to be followed closely by another: “But suppose that’s it?”

That’s why it matters to me that I have six novels under my belt. Six is an important figure. When my first book came out, my euphoria was punctured slightly by my agent saying to me, in a way she intended to be encouraging, “No one thinks you're a one-book writer!” From that day forth, the fear of being a one-book writer haunted my footsteps like the Ancient Mariner's frightful fiend. I wouldn't even have the slight comfort of being a flash in the pan, since my first book was signally failing to ignite. Flush down the pan, more like...

Eventually I completed my second book. But, within a few days, I heard an interview with Gore Vidal in which he carefully distinguished those dilettante authors with “only one or two books” in them, from true professionals such as himself who had been born “writers for life.”

So, out came books three, four and five, forced to light at least in part by the volcanic power of my own insecurity. But all the time, I held to my breast the precious fact that Jane Austen and E.M. Forster, two of my favourites, had published only six novels each. And no one doubted that they were real writers, right? Possibly even realler than Gore Vidal! Okay, so I hadn't got Addison's disease, or fallen in love with a policeman, but I did have my own problems to explain my relative lack of prolificity... I decided that, if I could only make that quota I could relax, and treat anything else as a bonus.

I will slide over the inevitable comparisons between my Book 6 and theirs: Persuasion, A Passage to India and The Lurkers do not make a natural threesome. But never mind the quality - just count them!