Category Archives: Uncategorized

Democracy does work, if intelligent and directed. Like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Great Fish Fight. Born out of real outrage at fish discards, it raised half a million signatures, and has already begun to change European Law. So ‘a guilty secret, far out to sea,‘ has now become ‘a political hot potato’. I wonder if we should highlight our story to start the Great Book Fight! Of course Whittingstall had the benefit of already being a TV Celebrity chef, and being able to command Television access and coverage. Yet he has conducted the campaign against what he calls obvious ‘madness‘, with passion, intelligence and integrity. He does have the slightly fishy glint of madness in his eye, of single issue politics too, but that is his cause’s strength too. Find the causes that matter though, and try to direct attention.

In contradiction of the News comments about overheating August days, reminiscent of that heatwave that fed the flames of the French Revolution, it’s a cool, breezy evening in London tonight. Wide skies, lagged with bruising purple clouds, threaten thunder and rain, punctured with pools of golden sunlight flashing on the eyeless buildings. But the tension in the air is carried on the sounds of police sirens wailing and rushing everywhere. My little corner shop, in a region of Kennington which is very residential, is boarding up early. But then London is burning, after the looting that began last Thursday. If real social problems on the streets, and the reported failures of the Fire Brigade to get to burning buildings recently are anything to go by, there are real dangers threatened and ordinary people have already suffered.

Lewisham, Lambeth and Peckham are affected now and you wonder if those hooded youths who seem to be wanting to unleash their anger everywhere, or use the situation to show off, loot or destroy, have been using the same ‘social’ networks that have helped the Arabic Spring. One said ‘the police have too much power’. Perhaps they should go to those countries to know what a truly tyranical police force means. But without being too meritricious, you wonder how the frightening, confusing world news is feeding the action. The plunging markets in the US today, the fears in the Eurozone, the talk of a Double Dip recession. But there is one thing that can reassure us all – Boris Johson, Mighty Mayor and famous defender of girls against yobs on the street, is rushing home!

But in fact, with new footage it is no joking matter at all. Gangs were attacking police cars and looting, before night fell. In Croydon and Peckham buildings and cars are burning. An emergency Cobra meeting is being held tomorrow, and the violence has spread to Birmingham too. After three days, it does seem to be co-oridinated, or turning into a pattern, but Mark Duggam’s partner, shot dead by police on Thursday, has also criticised the violence, saying innocent people are getting hurt, while trying to defend her claim that her boyfriend was unfairly fired on. There are real questions about police tactics throughout.

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD by William Wordsworth

I

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;–
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
1803-6.

Since I was an animal author, and do want better stories lived and told, I’m going to ignore all those nasty tales, of Andders Breivik, of war, horror, Abrams, even of youngsters falling foul of a Polar Bear, and blog all the happy animal tales instead.

So to Budapest zoo and Frodo the wallaby. The poor thing fell out of his mother’s pouch, but the keepers have picked him up, are hand rearing him and nursing him back to health. Frodo, the ring bearer, of course, in that great classic about not holding anything but friendship as too precious, ducking the evil, single eyed will of Sauron, and returning magic rings to the cracks of doom.

There is much God stuff in fantasy writing, from CS Lewis to Tolkien, who of course were in that Oxford group called The Inklings. Not certainties, not even the obvious Christ figure of Aslan, but Inklings perhaps of something truly extraordinary inside the human psyche. Certainly theirs. I hope they are reading Frodo the Wallaby some great stories. DCD

What we blogged before about man knowing and respecting the wild still holds, but not really appropriate in talking of what takes the headlines, when it was a Schools Group involved. Maybe that’s a little meritricious, but it’s very sad after so many sad events.

THE LOVE SONG OF HARRY N ABRAMS.

Someone asked me what the private life of any artist, perhaps especially writers, has to do with anyone or anything. I think an artist should actually aspire to be the best anyone can, to be moral, but it shouldn’t, the art and the person are seperate, and as Bulgakov suggested, the facts are not ‘the truth’ of a person either. The point at Abrams is that it would have been irrelavant if my ex partner and senior firm representative had not so hypocritically slammed a door, but simultaneously invaded my life in London. Above all if they had accepted a personal apology, three years back, graciously and humanly, especially considering their negligence, hypocracy and then arrogance, and not left a self righteous accusation there that I beleieve was almost purely raised by the ‘politics’ already flagged at a firm, in my ‘threat’ to write to a CEO about it all. Certainly flagged by me, because someone’s brittleness and extraordinary control mechanisms had made it so difficult and heartbreaking to tour months before, but also because a soul was now ripping apart.

But by the time I knew I had lost someone, which had been the one thing that really mattered, rightly or wrongly, I was arguing with my own editor that at least I needed back the spirit that had been so creative at Abrams, before I ever walked into another editor’s office, in order to work properly there. She called them ‘wise words’, then did exactly the opposite, because of their bullishness, and because in asking for a new energy on a second book, and in fact some support from a man, not a woman, I challenged their ‘power over their list’. I actually turned to a publisher partly because I saw the mounting pressure on my editor, and was then accused of betrayal, though there was certainly an element of trying to ‘play’ a situation that falls badly on me. But she or my publisher though had no real right to threaten ‘positivity turning to negativity’ when I was under contract, no crime had been committed, and they were there to help my work, threatened purely to defend the privacies and position of their favourite employee, and sadly mine too, and it sent negativity everywhere. It made a personal issue a professional issue. They would not answer the whys of something so personal, but they would not release it either, or let me answer, as a later ‘enquiry’ partly did. They and especially an ex made peace impossible and it was ultimately horrible. I was already far too locked in though, on the edge, but when I tried to turn it positive through work and another book proposal, reaserting my ego out of such despair, that all got messed up by mistrust, and the presence on the scene of an agent who had no conception of the emotional depth and a longed for relationship to a firm. ‘You mention contracts and you will destroy trust’ she told me. But an ex had destroyed real trust with her ‘Hew, Screw and Glue’, not to mention always unilaterally seeking the place of greatest emotional safety for themself alone, and so did my editor, with her ominous warnings about ‘protecting our girl’, drying up support and contact with several people long before, or her talk of confidences then so obviously breached behind the scenes. There were several things involved in that battle, both about personalities and about politics, but in the end the defence of their rights of privacy over any of mine became ferocious and totally unjust. It is much to do with the ‘culture’ of American firms, and the aggression and fear inside them too. The ‘lock down’ on real editorial honesty and communication was equally awful, because of a ‘secret’ held inside a department, as was their consciously delaying, or so I believe, an edit in order to control me, and to shut me up about the personal pain left there by someone being so characteristically avoiding, and basically cruel and unimaginative. It had always affected the work too, because muses are very real.‘The relationship that never was, the editor that never was, the vanishing employee who has nothing to do with your books and career, ho, ho.‘ Another true contempt to a heart and spirit, and in fact two happy years together, that made it even more killing from people I knew so well. We’ll find the easiest label of YOU, our own supposedly valued author, to mask the real politics at work, and make damn sure we don’t take a good look in the mirror. How a CEO they all thought was a bully loved bullying me, or trying to, loved trying to hand down a guillotine ‘exit strategy’, or ‘looking forward to reading my work in future’, until I fought back into the place it’s the hardest to ever fight, the place of lost love. How he used it too to find his way into a department where he had been basically mistrusted. If that’s my ‘fault’, it’s first the fault of a women I loved, and an editor, not quietly having the grace to be sad or sorry about what was going on. Now I’m the author who never existed at Abrams either, and damn the books already there, or future work either.

What is it most private in ourselves we always fight to defend? Some essential vulnerablity, you might even equate to fundamental love and innocence, that is exactly about why people write young adult fantasy at all, and was put on the wrack at Abrams. Some Room 101 fear that might always break any one of us? Or was it because all that ‘grown up’ stuff, that is supposed to be what adults are made of, could not be associated with the maintained fronts in ‘Children’s publishing’, especially at a ‘polite’ and decent American firm? Like an editor who specialises in Rock N Roll books too, but was terrified of displaying any Rock N Roll openess either, and was the first to use an awful word like ‘evil’, in her fears and misunderstandings. I’ve said many times that what came out of my own psyche at times was nasty and very unhappy, in that boxed prison of their negatives, and their fears that created such fear, as I tried to work for and with them. With the same determination I have always had in getting it right, and so earning any advances right down the line, very honourably. But each time I tried to rise above the mess, and not one of them did, while I still believe at the most superifical level of consciousness, so ego driven, they still think they were somehow in the ‘right’. No, they simply do not give a damn, and they ‘won’, in a strangely American ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality, that really began with my own editor thinking herself so brave, at the cost of my whole life and work. Almost the climate of ‘terror’ we live in now too, that is as much generated in our own psyches and limited imaginations, as by horrible events and actions in the real world. There’s too much money and fun in what they do though, too many bigger business interests, and power wins the field. How nice for editors to enjoy it all, the reflected glory of art and success, supported by colleagues, salaries, shares, and official titles, how sad for authors who have fought for twelve years to write worthwhile stories and survive too. The essential link is writer to reader, but there is an energetic flow of creation in getting to that, that involves some kind of sacred trust too, and that was utterly mangled by my own publisher and editor, at source, and because of so called private lives, that was never allowed to be private for me. It had extraordinary and dark consequences, but perhaps they’ll see the light again one day too and be real human beings. The thing is, like Tuning Forks, they chime utterly to the horrid politics and the privalege of staying behind the scenes. Perhaps they should try writing books, and saying things, not just cutting or editing the awkward bits.DCD

Why try to talk to someone 3000 miles away, as I did, by sending a copy of THE SHIPPING NEWS, except in the belief that art really means something vital, my own and other people’s too. I had a belief that it might resonate at a publisher, among people supposedly there to cherish art, and its creators. It was about my kind of falling in between, certainly, but also about male ‘badness’ potentially in everyone’s past and lives, and the fear it generates deep in the psyche. A film basically about love and redemption, it is archetypal about the man finding full responsibility in action, and the ghosts of the past being swept away. Oh that people would listen to the whole story at certain times, and not the easy lock gates of the crititcal and defensive mind, because love and trust are all kinds of faith. I still can’t get tickets for Kevin Spacey’s Richard III at the Old Vic though! DCD

So, be a rebel publisher, talk about the cynicism and spinelessness of agents, the lovelessness of the machine, the public front, my bad, their bad, why real writers write books! Not just ‘children’s books’, but books for everyone, that have guts, mind and soul. Talk and try to tell some truths. At least say something meaningful about love and hate, life and death, nature and man, beauty and fear, truth and lies, and live or die by it (dying here at the moment). I became very weak, in the talk of politics, but my heart isn’t weak at all, and nor is my power to generate meaningful stories. Woof, woof, I can hear Fell, but really it’s about being fearless, and wanting to see the wonder of everything again. A radical innocence. DCD

This is a letter that really makes me sad, and I had enough sadness over a love story and publishing horror in New York. Lynn, if I could have raised investment in Phoenix Ark, or Abrams had not done what they did, it would be coming out in Hardback. I agree, writers and readers love real books and all they mean. Since it has been my month of secrets, I’ll let you into another secret, I don’t really want to be a publisher at all, nor should I be, I just want to be allowed to write and create. DCD

I have waited so long for Scream of the White Bear to come out, so dissapointed
that it is not coming out in hardcover. I have read all your other books and
truly enjoyed each one. It’s still nice to sit down and hold a real book in
your hands that take you places you’ve never been, new technologies are good but
not for everything. Please bring it out in hardcover.
LynnAnn
Littleton, Colorado