sitting typing alone in a room

Lee's, Lee's! Lyrics won't please.

2012-03-01T10:24:00.002-08:00

Hiya,

I'm guest-posting today on dying for chocolate with a recipe for macaroon bars. I made them for a literary salon at Janet Rudolph's recently, because Val McDermid was the guest of honour and I thought she might be missing them. You know because it had been days and days since she'd been in the UK where they're sold. (Sense is optional.)

Now, macaroon bars are made in Glasgow by a firm called Lee's and when Val bit into one she burst out in a spontaneous round of the Lee's song. I'd forgotten it. Blocked it out perhaps. But I'll share it with you here. It's not on Janet's site because when you're invited over as a guest there really are limits to what you should do.

Ahem.

Lee's, Lee's, more if you please.
All of us beg on our bended knees.
For piccaninnies and grandpapas,
It's Lee's for luscious macaroon bars.

Yes, really. And the thing is, being written in Scotland in the 1960s, not only is the word offensive but it's so gratuitous there's no way to explain how gratutious it is. Scotland - even Glasgow - in the 1960s was about as mono-ethnic as it's possible to be. Even now, in large parts of Scotland you look around and all you can think is "Where's everyone else?" So it was an offensive reference to people who weren't even there and didn't need to be referred to.

Maybe the good people at Lee's like the sound of the word. Like pernickety and rambunctious. Some words are fun to say. And being unfettered by any sense that maybe Black kids (when they were actually there) could just be called . . . you know . . . kids, they bunged it in.

Maybe. But consider this: nobody in Scotland says Grandpapa either. And in a Scottish accent it doesn't rhyme with bar anyway. So what was going on?

I think the song might have been written by someone who had been observing our earth and was ready to make contact. Lee's was a front. They thought they'd slow us down with a sugar offensive and then swoop in.

They picked the wrong country. Macaroon bars are admittedly quite sweet, but to a nation of children brought up on sugar sandwiches as a healthy lunch, rhubarb sticks dipped in egg-cups of sugar as a fruity snack, and tablet for treats, they didn't have a prayer.

Anyway, check out the recipe at dying for chocolate, won't you. But be warned. Your kitchen will end up looking as if the sugar aliens have landed.

Writers retreat.

2012-02-18T15:21:00.000-08:00

No, I didn't forget the apostrophe; it was a sentence. Sometimes writers need to retreat, to retire from the world and do two things. Here is the award-winning and generally fabulous Spring Warren doing one of them:

And the best-selling and also generally fabulous Eileen Rendahl doing the other:

I've never been a retreating writer, mind you. I'm all alone in a house, looking out at the fields and hills every day. My whole life is a retirement from the world. What I need to do sometimes is advance into it, to coffee shops and libraries and book groups. But I'm open to persuasion and when Eileen and Spring asked me to join them on their latest retreat, I got right into the spirit of the enterprise:

And something about it was oddly familiar.

I'd never been to Petaluma before.

I don't think I'd ever stayed in a Sheraton before - Hilton Garden, Radisson, Hyatt, Holiday Inn - yes. Somehow, Sheratons had eluded me.

I know I'd never been asked what would happen if someone was being chased through a desert by haunted oxen.

But something about being in a room with other females, eating sweeties and helping each other with our homewo-

Aha! That's it. It's been a long time since I lived with Sheila, Audrey and Wendy but a big bunch of girls still feels like home. Sheila, Audrey, Wendy and me were a slightly bigger bunch, but we were considerably smaller girls. We could all have sat on the end of a hotel bed without it collapsing:

(No writers were harmed on this retreat and many words were were written.)

Oh, yeah . . . books!

2012-02-02T16:29:00.000-08:00

Amongst the kindle vs tree discussions, death of the midlist articles in professional magazines, plagiarism scandals blowing up all around and - I'm not kidding - a blogpost on how to write how-to articles, I managed to spend the first month of 2012 writing 2000 words a day and sitting by the fire in the evening reading books for pleasure.

As follows:

At the end of the Christmas holidays, - 12th night; I know how to stretch a feast! - I was still reading Meat: A Benign Extravagence by Simon Fairlie. Fascinating stuff as a famer and omnivore sets out to get to the facts behind the slogans about meat eating, social justice and sustainable food production.

Straight on to Alan Bradley's I am Half-sick of Shadows and then one I've been looking forward to since last September when I met the wonderful Donna Andrews and found out that as well as her bonkers birds series she's written four mysteries featuring Turing Hopper, an artificial intelligence program detective. The first -You've Got Murder - is just splendid. Turing herself is an engaging character and the limitations and frustrations of her life make for a claustrophobic atmosphere throughout the novel that fits perfectly with the mounting tension of the plot.

At this point I found out that Val McDermid was coming to Berkeley and decided to re-read The Mermaids Singing. I'd forgotten how good it is, especially the structure and pacing. For me structure (and pacing) are like film scores. If they're terrible, they ruin it; if they're pretty good, I don't notice them; only if they're fantastically brilliant do I ever think "Boy this is fantastically brilliant".

This book is a masterclass on handling tricksy structure without it seeming tricksy, just exactly what you need to read when you're writing a new book. It made all things seem possible. And so I decided to go back to the first Kate Brannigan novel Dead Beat and re-read that too. Also a great book, not such a great idea. Inspiration tips over into intimidation so gently you don't know it's happened until you're sitting at your computer eating chunky kit-kats dipped in salt (a taste sensation) and asking yourself why you should bother.

A third tip-top crime novel would have finished me off at this point, so I read Tracy Kidder's House, Tawni O'Dell's Sister Mine (risky move, almost bought more kit-kats) and John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash, after hearing a review on R4's A Good Read. It's 1929 in Dandy Gilver's world now, so I thought I should know what happened. I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did and also - cover of the month, hands down.

And then all buoyed up with research and non-fiction and a book about Pennsylvania mining communities that there was no point getting jealous about, I finally went back to a book I started last August staying overnight in the writer's suite at the home of McKenna and Brenda Jordan of Murder by the Book in Houston: Denise Mina's Garnethill. It was hard work not to steal it to finish on the plane. Well, I finished it yesterday and it's fabulous. Just delightful. The best fictional family I've read about for as long as I can remember. And the best fictional best friend ever. How can I not have read this trilogy before?

And yet, I'm not sure it's book of the month. It's definitely novel of the month, but I think book of the month might be

even though Shug looks scarily like Vic Reeves with the new hair-do. This book's running at 3/3 so far: the roasted beetroot soup with horseradish cream was scrumptious, the parsnip and ginger soup was incendiary, just the way we like it, and last night's sweet potato and peanut gratin was a revelation. I was ready to love it anyway since it had three tablespoons of peanut butter "lightened" with half a pint of double cream and a slug of olive oil, but it was mermaidssingingly, garnethillishly. you'vegotmurderously great.

Hmm. Quite a lot of food for a blog about reading.
.

Winner o' the puddin' race

2012-01-26T10:05:00.000-08:00

So yesterday was Burns' Night, the 253rd birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet and most beloved son. Officially her most beloved son, by the way: he beat Mel Gibson - I mean William Wallace - to be named greatest Scot of all time.

On Burns' Night, Scots get together to eat haggis (great chieftain o' the puddin' race) drink whisky, toast the immortal memory of Rab, toast one of his other great interests in life - The Lassies (ooh, he was a one!) - and recite poetry. Or if your Supper isn't until the weekend (see above, re. whisky) at least we all have haggis for our tea.

For Scots in Scotland, this means a trip to the local High Street butcher or a trip to any chain supermarket to buy a haggis. For Scots in California, it means digging deep into their pockets and mail ordering a McKean's haggis from Maine. I did this last year, in a state of some trepidation having invited ten people for a Burns' Supper in my house.

Well, it was delicious, easily worth the delivery charge, light, fluffy, peppery, savoury - everything a haggis should be. I can't recommend it enough. If you'd asked me yesterday, though, I was ready to damn McKean's and all their works. My haggis wasn't here. It didn't come. All I got in the post was a phone bill.

Then I checked in with the undergardener and guess what? He thought I'd ordered it and I thought he had. This would never have happened in the good old days when men were men and women flirted with the butcher.

So. Early afternoon on Burns' Night, no haggis, 7000 miles from Scotland. What to do? I could have given up and had a burrito if I hadn't started the day with Val Mcdermid's Burns guestblog for Jungle Red Writers. I had wept with homesickness and now needed haggis like oxygen.

And I had a recipe for it.

In a book with tablet on the cover - got to love that.

So I made my own.

Sort of.

Eleanor Cowan's easy haggis calls for lamb's liver, suet, oatmeal, onions, salt and what another Scottish chef Nick Nairn calls "insane amounts of pepper". I had oatmeal, onions, salt, and insanity and I knew I could get liver - maybe not lamb's liver (more of this later) but hey.

I knew not to even try to get suet, having hauled myself round the local meat counters last Christmas looking for suet to make mincemeat to make mince pies. However, I thought maybe egg and breadcrumbs would have the same lightening and binding effect. And of course I knew from the kick-off not to try the difficult haggis recipe - liver, lungs, heart, and pluck (instestine).

Back from the supermarket, with my calves' liver and a lamb chop (very untradtional but I had to get some mutton in there somehere), I fried the onion in chicken fat (considered snipping in a bit of bacon just to hit every animal in the farmyard) then followed the least hopeful seeming recipe step I've ever seen.

"Boil the liver for forty minutes". Here's what boiling liver looks like:

Yeah, it's mostly scum. I do have a picture of what boiled-for-forty-minutes liver looks like too, but I'm always going on about how they shouldn't put the corpses of fallen dictators on the news so in all conscience I can't post it.

And it gets worse. After the chicken-fat onions, toasted oatmeal, illicit lamb chop and seasonings were combined, the mixture was moistened with . . . you guessed it . . . the liver water. Yummmmmm.

And then the whole thing went in a pudding basin and boiled in a bain-marie for two hours.

I felt no great hope. But as my co-shopping-failure said when he came home: "it smells like haggis". And then when I undid the foil and spooned it onto a plate, I couldn't help but think: "it looks like haggis".

And fan me flat with a rinsed pluck if it didn't taste like haggis. And pretty good haggis too. Very good haggis, actually. Well worth an address. I'm now covered with glory. Bloated, but covered with glory and I might change my Twitter profile to novelist and haggis-maker.

For dinner tonight, of course, we'll have that other great Scottish speciality. Leftovers. Fried.

Stone Thumbs

2012-01-19T11:06:00.000-08:00

They say it's going to rain today. Finally. For the first time since Thanksgiving Day almost two months ago. And so I decided to get my little bit of necessary gardening done first, before writing.

Some real gardening - pruning and moving some roses, taking some pelargonium cuttings and putting the parent pelargoniums in the open ground. The cuttings are insurance: I still don't really believe in the concept of overwintering pelargoniums outside. I've got some cheat gardening to do too: potting up the primroses and daffs I bought at the garden centre.

Anyway, when my hands were nipping, covered with cold mud, I suddenly found myself saying what I always used to find myself saying, gardening in winter in Galloway. "Oh, I am stone thumbs, feet of glass", a line from one of my favourite poems: "Pruning in Frost" by Alice Oswald from The Thing in the Gap-stone Stile. (OUP,1996).

A wave of pure happiness broke over me. Here - let me slosh some of it over you:

Pruning in Frost

Last night, without a sound,

a ghost of a world lay down on a world,

trees like dreamwrecks

coralled with increments of frost.

Found crevices

and wound and wound

the clock-spring cobwebs.

All life's ribbon frozen mid-fling.

Oh I am

stone thumbs,

feet of glass.

Work knocks in me the winter's nail.

I can imagine

Pain, turned heron,

could fly off in a creak of wings.

And I'd be staring, like one of those

cold-holy and granite kings

getting carved into this effigy of orchard.

And the reasons the roses are moving? The flower bed where I planted them last spring is making way for a fruit orchard. Maybe one day next winter, I'll have trees like dreamwrecks, coralled with increments of frost. But for now . . .

A(nother) year in books

2012-01-06T09:38:00.000-08:00

The TBR pile today

A few years ago I started keeping a note of what I read because whenever anyone asked me in a Q&A I was stumped. It looks bad when a writer can talk about her own books without drawing breath for 20 minutes but can't remember a single book by another person.

It looks even worse when she (i.e. me) covers the lapse by saying "I don't really read any more: so many CSIs to keep up with". Maybe my delivery was overly deadpan but it turned out a few people believed me. (Note to self: say boom-tssh after every joke.)

And it wasn't even the first time that had happened. When I started working as one of four lonely linguists in a large and cold-hearted English literature department and someone - oh, probably a specialist in renaissance poetry but I honestly don't remember - asked what I read, I said "I read the TV Guide to find out what time Star Trek's on". This was in reference to my interview talk when I used Mr Chekov in an example sentence and they all thought it was odd that I didn't call him plain Chekov like everyone else does.

Aaaaannyway, it came back to me through the grapevine that some post-colonial drama theorist (or something) was shocked to learn that one of the new linguists watched television instead of reading. I dunno. You'd have thought that literary types would get irony.

So. Here's what I read last year, with some helpful links, * against book of the month, and explanations where needed:

Christmas holidays
John Steinbeck Cannery Row*
Spring Warren Turpentine
Stephen King Full Dark, No Stars
Anita Shreve Rescue
Garrison Keillor Life Among the Lutherans

January
Karen Campbell Shadowplay
Julia Glass The Widower's Tale*
Jill Paton Walsh The Attenbury Emeralds
Fannie Flagg I Still Dream of You (yes, really)

February
Jonathon Franzen Freedom*
PJ Tracey Dressed to Thrill (they're back! Yeay!)
Aline Templeton Cradle to Grave
Jenny Diski What I don't know about animals (one of my favourite writers, but not her best book. Start with Stranger on a Train or Trying to Keep Still)

March
George Pellecanos The Night Gardener
Garrison Keillor Pontoon
Lisa Scottoline Lady Killer
Stella Gibbons Nightingale Wood (a delicious suprise)
Spring Warren The Quarter-acre Farm*

April
Eileen Rendahl Dead on Delivery
Eileen Rendahl Do me, do my roots
Ellen Gutcheon Still Missing* (from the delightful Persephone books. How I love them.)
Frances Brody Dying in the Wool
Chris Hedges The Death of the Liberal Class
Eileen Rendahl Balancing in High Heels
Dave Eggers Zeitoun

May
Clare Davis Winter Range
Lisa Scottoline Save Me
John Lescroart Dead Irish
John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath*

June
John Lescroart The Vig
Michael Connelly 5th Witness
Annie Proulx Bird Cloud*

Oh, starting to lose reading time because of chores like going to Manhattan - poor me.

July
Kathleen George The Odds*
Stephen King The Tommyknockers (on a plane trip, whatever happens, I won't run out of book!)
William Landay Defending Jacob

Then I lost track completely. In August and September I was travelling and reading for panels, so these are not in order and I've probably missed some out:

Donna Andrews Murder with Peacocks and Cockatiels at Seven
Jess Lourey May Day and June Bug
Sandra Balzo Brewed, Crude and Tattooed and Bean there, done that
Sarah Shaber Louise's War and Simon said
PJ Parrish Dead of Winter
Gwen Mayo Circle of Dishonor
Carolyn Wall Sweeping Up Glass* (so fabulous it kept me up all night)
Clare O'Donohue Missing Persons
Russel McLean The Lost Sister
Ella Barrick Quickstep to Murder
Barbara Ehrenrich Nickel and Dimed

October
Esri Allbritten The Chihuahua of the Baskervilles
Rick Hutto A Peculiar Tribe of People*
Eileen Rendahl Vanished in the Night
Esri Allbritten A Portrait of Doreene Gray
Briggitte Aubert Death from the Woods
Rumer Godden An Episode of Sparrows
Abraham Verghese Cutting for Stone
Jess Lourey August Moon

November
Fiona Carnarvon Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey
Mary McDonagh Murphy Scout, Atticus and Boo
Erin Morgenstern The Night Circus
Tawni O'Dell Fragile Beasts*
Joy Fielding Kiss Mommy Goodbye (re-read)

Mary Higgins Clark We'll Meet Again

Then life got away from me - re-reading Joy Fielding's fantastic passive-agressive characters for inspiration and then curling up inside the comfort of the Mary Higgins Clark was an early sign that it was slipping - as I tried to get my own book finished. December was a haze of re-read chapters of Nancy Mitford, re-read pages of PG Wodehouse, snippets of Strictly Come Dancing on Youtube, Desperate Housewives DVDs, Ben Goldacre essays, Doris Day movies, Nigel Slater recipes . . . December was a blur.

So there's my 2011 in books. A good dose of crime, a lot of books by pals - so many by Eileen Rendahl that it looks a bit like stalking. I discovered a couple of new-to-me writers that I now look forward to reading everything by: Julia Glass and Barbara Ehrenrich. I only gave up on one book this year - and since it was by an author no longer living I'll say which one: Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows. Which is not to say that I loved everything else - in a couple of cases stopping reading would have been like turning away from a train wreck while it happens - but reading bad books can be quite helpful sometimes. Thankfully, none of the bad ones was by anyone I know.

And the year ended as it began with Stephen King, when I started 11/22/63 on Hogmanay. Can't be bad.

Last Christmas . . .

2011-12-16T20:09:00.000-08:00

. . . I gave you my heart, sang stubbly George.

In my case, last Christmas I tore down a house (not the Ugliest House in California - we kept that one - but instead the spare house, with more right-angles, less beige and, crucially, no building permit.)

Gasp, by all means, but note two things:

1. It was made of wood, not stone or brick.
2. I didn't do it single-handed - there were six of us for one day, four of us for one day, and then two of us for the rest of the time. Even so, it was the heaviest, least rewarding, stinkiest (the carpets fermented in the rain) job I've ever done and I'm never doing it again.

You know that bit in Die Hard when Bruce is crawling along a duct, bleeding and filthy, and remembers his friend saying "Come out to the coast, we'll have a few laughs"? Well, that was me last Christmas, dressed in yellow raingear, shovelling wet sheetrock/plasterboard into a dumpster/skip and remembering the undergardener (but head shoveller) saying "come to California with me, live in the sunshine and eat lotus blossoms".

Here it is in photo-form. These are the Christmas pictures I took, in order, just as they came off the camera:

There's a moose (and and an elf) loose about this hoose.

2011-12-11T13:21:00.000-08:00

So, Catherine Lepreux, is my oldest friend. We've known each other since we were babies too small to know that we knew each other. See what good friends we are.

That was Mondavi Winery, Napa, on the 2nd of December. Now see how tenuous the friendship became during two and a half weeks of constant contact and design decisions?

Just kidding, the photographer wanted to get the wee boat in.

My living room (a pretty weird-shaped room even for a ranch house (but right at home as part of the Ugliest House in California)) looked, last month, like face with no eyebrows and too much lipstick. Lots of colour round the bottom and lots of nothing round the top.

But now, it's got brows:

It's got lashes:

And it's got a beauty spot -

- a wee mouse,hiding a bracket that was on show thanks to the wonky - make that organic - shape of the eucalyptus log. And isn't that just about the funkiest vintage barkcloth in all of eBay?

Not only that either. Catherine was roving the halls with a needle in hand and mouthful of glass-headed pins. There was no stopping her. Every dull corner of the U-est H in C has been spruced up.

The U-est thing in the U-est H - the aircon return pipe - has disappeared.

Spot the difference in this corner of my study.

Unfortunately the house-elf is on her way home now. But when I get back from dropping her off at SFO this afternoon, she'll still be everywhere.

101 things to do with a dead eucalyptus

2011-12-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

Well, okay two. Three - just thought of another one. Four.

To start with the last one: you can use a dead eucalyptus instead of a gym. God, it's hard. Here is the undergardener, peching like a bull mastiff, after sawing up a wheelbarrowful.

And once it's sawed and split and your arms have turned to jelly, it lights with one match and a barely scrumpled style section and burns hot and bright for hours on end. Here's a picture of the first fire we lit after moving in.

You'll have noticed what it's burning in. That, folks, is what we call The Flinstones' Memorial Fireplace. Or sometimes The Climbing Wall. Occasionally we call it The Ugliest Fireplace Ever Built (Also The Largest). And yet, and yet, I've grown to love it over the last year in the new house. I love it like you would a one-eared, three-legged cat with halitosis. Protectively. In spite of yourself.

So we decided to honour it with a mantelpiece. After a year of having nowhere to put a clock or prop an invitation, it was back to the cuddy for the undergardener and his boss/father-in-law. I somehow managed not to get any pictures of them actually working (funny that) but here they are doing the almost-as-important sitting down with a beer afterwards.

And here is the fruit of their labour. The Jim McPherson Mantelpiece, with clock. As fine a dod of eucalyptus as was ever hewn and oiled and placed atop a bracket or two.

It was no mean feat, thanks to the idiosyncrasies of Fred the Fireplace. There was a bit of trigonometry involved in getting it to fit.

And now there's no stopping him. Curtain poles? Pah. Curtain poles are for wimps. Crack out the chainsaw and get some pelmets worth the name.

If only I could sew I could match the effort with something to hang from them. I can't sew (or knit, or crochet, felt, quilt or tat) but luckily I have a friend who'll fly from Edinburgh to San Francisco to sew stuff for me. And she's a professional designer. Catherine Lepreux, my oldest and dearest friend.

Next week, I'll show Catherine's part of the project. By then, I'll still have the ugliest house in California on the outside but the inside will be dripping with original craft and design genius (and all I did was open the beer and make the tea).

The name's Kipling. Mrs Kipling.

2011-11-15T12:42:00.000-08:00

.I make bread.

I make biscuits aka cookies, shortbread, focaccia, and shortcrust pastry (but I don't take pictures of them).

I don't make puff, flaky or choux pastry (who does?) and until this last month I'd have said I don't make cakes.

Not that I haven't tried. With Delia Smith and Nigella Lawson at my side I've tried and failed and tried again. And failed again. And tried. And failed.

Until this last month my cakes were so flat they looked like Pearson's Nut Goodies that have travelled a thousand miles through the US mail. I choose my analogy for good reason. Relieving news, eh? If that was my idea of a good analogy plucked from the air I'd need a lot of luck to be making my living as a writer.

No, Pearson's Nut Goodies - or Jessiecakes, as they're known in my house - have been a bit of an obsession since I first came across a description of them in May Day by Jessie No.1, Jess Lourey. Her heroine's sojourn in rural Minnesota is . . . well, not lightened, exactly, but certainly sweetened by the ingestion of Nut Goodies every now and then.

I read of their toothsome (unless you're a dentist) sweetness and mountainous chocolately chunkiness and had to taste one.

Needless to say you can't get them in northern California where Michael Pollan comes from.

Enter Jessie No.2, Jessie Chandler, also of Minnesota, who took time off from writing her Shay O'Hanlan capers to send me a couple in the mail. They arrived, really quite sweet indeed - and this from someone with Tunnock's snowballs in her genes and Irn Bru thudding round in her veins - but not as mountainous as they should be.

Hence the analogy and from there back to the cakes.

My mother has just gone home after a month's visit and both our birthdays fell while she was here. So, for the first time in many years, ma mammy made me a birthday cake. Then four days later, under very close supervision but still with no great hopes of success, I set about making one for her.

Miracle. Wonders. Amazement. For the first time in my life I made a cake worthy of the name. Here it is in the tin.

On the rack, being measured.

I couldn't believe the airy heights it had climbed to. NB: the clown? He's behind it; not in it. I haven't got as far as integral clown-heads just yet.

Here it is, decorated, with butter icing and fresh local walnuts (take that, Michael Pollan).

And finally being cut open, with an ordinary knife. Not a hammer and chisel.

I went to bed that night trailing clouds of glory and lay awake going over and over what I'd done in my head until the recipe and procedures felt as if they were in there to stay. Needless to say, my mother's cake recipe isn't written down. She just knocks them together.

So do I now. Here's cake number 2, made for pudding for a dinner party the next weekend, under less close supervision but still with my magic mother in the house.

I took it out of the oven and thought "Could it . . . ? It looks . . . ? Could it possibly be . . .?"

Yes! It was even bigger.

But as I say, the master baker was still in the building, actually right in the kitchen. She made a break for the fireside at the eggs and flour stage, but I herded her back again. And there were still some bits of the process that felt shaky. Like listening to it to see if it's ready. Yup, my mother has no truck with clean skewers and disappearing dimples; she takes it out of the oven after an hour, leans in close and listens to see if it's ready.

So after she went home on Saturday and took her ears with her, I was all on my own.

Today is my undergardener's birthday. I took a deep breath, tied my pinny strings tight and went for it. No written recipe, forty years of failure, guru away across the ocean . . . I give you . . . cake number three.

And if it tastes as good as it sounds, I'll be very happy.

Oh, will ye no' come back again?

2011-10-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

Yes, I will. Next week.

This week I'm Q&Aing with the wonderful, writes-creepy-stuff-but-is-really-a-poppet, Todd Ritter on his fantoosh website cum blogspot. His questions were fun, my answers display the usual dignified reserve . . .

Thought I'd add the Q&A now (14th Nov), for anyone else whose connection is so feeble that Todd's amazing website gives it the hiccups.

Catriona is a recovering academic, now a full-time writer, recently transplanted from southern Scotland to northern California. The Dandy Gilver novels (six and counting) are set in a slightly imaginary time and place, made up of 1920s Scotland and the golden age of detective fiction. www.dandygilver.com

Q. Tell us about your book and what inspired you to write it.

The Proper Treatment of Bloodstains is the story I’ve been looking forward to as it came down the pipe towards me. I started writing about Dandy Gilver when she was in 1922 and I was in 2001. We were the same age then. Now, ten years later, she’s six years younger than me.

Anyway. The thing about 1926 was the general strike. Reparations from Germany/cheap coal/denationalisation . . . the trick is to do all the research but put as little as possible of the boring stuff in the book . . . all led to a walk-out by the coalminers and a huge supporting shut-down. For nine days, in May 1926, it looked possible, even likely, that Britain was going to see a workers’ revolt the like of which kicked off the Russian revolution. We know that didn’t happen , but I was excited at the thought of writing about characters who didn’t. Talk about tension.

Also, for once it wasn’t too bonkers to have a private detective solve a murder. During that nine days, anyone who stood still long enough got drafted in as a special constable to help the police. Dandy was one of them.

Q. Did you need to do any special research for the book? If so, what’s one of the most interesting facts you discovered?

Okay, so the other half of this story is that during the nine days of the strike, Dandy is undercover as a servant in an Edinburgh mansion house, trying (and failing) to prevent a murder. And it wasn’t so much that I had to do research as that I had to write the book to release all the research that I had done already. I do a lot of traipsing around stately homes, castles and palaces (and I have the cheek to call it a day’s work) but impressive as the state rooms are, it’s the domestic offices that fascinate me. Finally, in this book, I got to use all the treasure trove. For example, did you know:

That the staircase leading to the bedrooms of the male servants was wooden so the family wasn’t disturbed by their boots clonking on the steps, but the female staircase had a layer of slate on top so that the family would hear the boots of any men who tried to sneak up there?

Also, I discovered that although jam and honey were kept in the larder (US pantry?) with the rest of the food, marmalade was kept in the cupboard which housed the boot polish and laundry soap. I’ve no idea why. I put this snippet in the book hoping someone would email me and tell me. Nothing so far, but I’ll put it in my FAQs if I ever find out.

Q. Many people are content to just be readers. How did you become a writer?

So many different ways to answer this question . . . I’ll choose the one that makes me sound like an idiot, I think. Right. I revered writers, envied them, imagined being one ‒ all that. I just had no idea how they did it. I also spent a lot of my life in the midst of day-dreams of unbelievable length and complexity, with settings, characters, scenes and dramatic twists. It took until I was 35 for me to realise that writing these down was how it was done. See? Moron.

Q. What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

Prepare to be amazed:- I read a lot. I also garden. I used to garden pretty well in Galloway; now I garden very badly in California. I’m slowly turning my gardening vigilance from frost-protection to drought-proofing. But it’s a humbling experience to know nothing again. I love cooking (and the resultant eating) and so, because I’m vain, I run and cycle and swim. If I could grow a tapeworm, I’d happily never run again. It’s not about health: it’s all vanity.

Q. What are you reading right now?

Bugger. It’s never something obscure and impressive when you’re asked that question, is it? Makes me think of when I went for a sign-up visit to my new doctor in Galloway and he asked “What did you eat yesterday?”. I said “Ahhhh, yesterday’s not a good example, as it happens”. He said “Exactly”. Clever man.

I’m reading Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, which is perfect reading matter while I’m pounding out a first draft because I could no more write an epic about an Ethiopian/Indian surgeon than I could grow a watermelon (it turns out). So it doesn’t interfere.

There are some writers I daren’t look at while I’m writing a first drat – chipping it out of the ground without breaking bits off, as Stephen King puts it. PG Wodehouse is horribly infectious. So is Raymond Chandler. And it’s depressing to write a crime novel while reading one written by a genius, so Ruth Rendell is out.

Q. If you were stranded on that proverbial deserted island, what five books would you want to have with you?

Right, well, BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs spots you Shakespeare and the Bible. I always thought I’d take another copy of one –Shakespeare, it’s longer – in an exotic, unstudied language. Then, falling back on my training as a linguist, I’d use the two texts to decode the new language and write a monograph. When the shipload of burly rescuers hove into view around the headland, I’d have a completed work to wow the world with. Well, to wow a few dozen grammarians with. This plan might need some work.

Seriously? 1) Pride and Prej 2) John Irving’s The Water Method Man 3) Sunset’s Western Gardens (and I’d be up to speed for my return) 4) Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and 5) – are we allowed collected works? – Dickens. For the length. I panic if I’m in a waiting room with nothing to read. I’d go nuts on an island.

Q. What’s your favorite movie?

What’s that you say? My favourite five movies? Okay 1) North by Northwest (except for the cheesy last shot) 2) Moonstruck (worst plot-envy of my life; it’s perfect) 3) Calamity Jane (I don’t care; I love her) 4) Mildred Pierce (the Joan one) 5) The Station Agent – this is a recent addition to my list of favourites, but I adore it.

Q. What’s your favorite food?

Leftovers. Especially leftover Christmas dinner. Specifically, very clear cold turkey gravy, set to a stiff jelly, chopped onto hot buttered toast made with home-made bread, for breakfast, on Boxing Day. Quite a lot of salt and insane amounts of black pepper. With a strong cup of Yorkshire tea with whole fat milk in a white cup. (Fussy, moi?)

Q. Cats or dogs?

Cats, cats, a thousand times cats. I’m always surprised that people happily admit to preferring dogs – “Yes, I like an animal who looks up to me with slavish devotion”. Although, now I think of it, American dogs don’t understand my accent so when I say their names they treat me as a cat would. I like it.

Q. Name one thing that people would be surprised to learn about you.

I dye my hair? Kidding. Ummmmm – there’s been a lot of accidental nudity. I met the art director of an important UK publishing house when I had no knickers on. And I once went to work without my skirt. On a third occasion, I wore this weird-shaped dress to a party that was easiest dealt with in the bathroom by taking it off and hanging it up on the door hook then putting it back on again afterwards. I forgot the last bit.

One starrrrrr, shining in the darknesssssssss

2011-10-20T09:02:00.000-07:00

I'm out and about again, guest blogging at Jungle Red Writers - eight smart and sassy women who write crime: it's like The View/Loose Women, with corpses.

http://www.jungleredwriters.com/2011/10/starry-starry-fright.html

If you've ever been laid low by a one-star review on Amazon: step right in, the doctor will see you now.

It's not a cozy if you nail a kitten down . . .

2011-10-15T20:58:00.000-07:00

. . . is the title of my blog this week, but it's not here. It's on the Lipstick Chronicles site, at the kind invitation of the brilliant and beautiful Hank Phillipi Ryan.

But you know what? Nailed-down kittens, schmailed-down kittens - controversy arose over the true nature of the turnip.

. . . is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains recipes or graphic or gratuitous violence

2011-10-04T10:15:00.000-07:00

I changed one word in this excerpt from Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities Para 3. Item 7.

Can you guess which? No prizes.

Can you guess which word I took out? What else is like graphic or gratuitous violence? Just as shocking, just as pernicious, just as corrupting.  Why, it's nudity, of course. As construed in the West. Ankles are in, women's faces are fine, but breasts, bottoms are fiddly bits are out. Facebook save us from pictures of what's under our own clothes.

I've never been able to get all that exercised about nudity one way or the other. I'm amazed and amused to find out that breastfeeding mothers in my new country fling a tarpaulin over themselves in public (even the prudish Scots in the chill winds of home don't do that). It never occurred to me to wear clothes in the Turkish baths, or to turn my back in communal changing rooms. I've even been on a naturist beach. Once.  It was nice not to have to do the beachtowel marenge to get dried and changed after swimming, but in the end I decided I'd rather wear bikini bottoms than sunblock.

One odd moment that afternoon in Norfolk was when a power-boat-ful of male morons came whomping across the bay to leer and jeer and do that bellowing noise that makes you think evolution has started running backwards. They were having great fun until a little girl of about five, who'd been crouched filling her bucket at the water's edge, stood up and stared back at them, clearly wondering what all the noise was for.
The leering and jeering snapped off like someone had pulled a plug; they fired up the engine and took off around the headland again.  I often wonder if they managed to reassemble the experience into a funny story in which they *hadn't* suddenly found themselves wolf-whistling at a naked little girl, or maybe an outraged story in which her naturist parents were the villains and they were just regular guys. I hope not.

Anyway, back to Facebook. Nudity is defined in a clear, no-nonsense way. Photographs, paintings, cartoons, sketches: nope, no way, a strong and steady no.

And now I get to my point, possibly even slower than usual. Facebook doesn't take the same steady line when it comes to hatefulness, threats, and incitement to violence.   There's a page on Facebook called "I know a silly little bitch that needs a good slap". And that's one of the milder titles of pro-rape/violence pages to be found.

What's that creaking noise?  Ah . . . it's our old friend the free speech, censorship, humourless women wagon rolling onstage.

But here's the thing. Facebook doesn't offer itself as a platform for unconstrained free speech. It holds out against hateful, threatening or pornographic speech (I know a silly little bitch that needs a good slap). It refuses to publish incitements to violence (I know a silly little bitch that needs a good slap). It's against nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence (I know a silly little bitch that needs a good slap).

I think the nudity clause is the only part of 3.7 that this page doesn't violate.

If you'd like to see Facebook abide by its own rules even when it's only women who are the target of the hate, threats and incitements to violence, you can sign the petition at: http://chn.ge/paURxW

Next week, light-hearted fun. Promise.

New cylon model spotted at Bouchercon 2011

2011-09-20T14:27:00.000-07:00

Since I forgot to take a picture of my lovely panel on Thursday, I spent the second half of Bouchercon stalking them and pouncing. Here they are at last.

PJ Parrish (for all your adrenalin needs) and Jess Lourey (Minnesota Tourist Board's Public Enemy No1).

Donna Andrews (a hard woman to hate, but if I did hate her it would be because her suggested cure for procrastination is to write more books - seriously).

Sarah Shaber (a glittering example of how to write historical fiction stuffed to the gunnels with perfectly researched details . . . and have none of the research show (would hate her too if I could (but I can't))).

And Sandra Balzo (who else has ever set a snow-bound, Christie-esque locked room mystery . . . in a strip mall?).

Ands as well as these wonderful women, there was -

Michael Ayoob, who won the first novel Edgar for In Search of Mercy (Minotaur Books - yeay!). How can anyone so young have written a book, you say? And bear in mind this photo was taken at a party, well after midnight, when all the rest of us could have gone on without make-up as extras in The Name of The Rose. Well, he only looks young; actually he's fifty-four.

Other kindred spirits included -

Esri Allbritten, another Minotaur author, whose Chihuahua of the Baskervilles, introducing Tripping: a paranormal tour company, (yeah, I know, yet another paranormal tourist chihuahua book; they're worse than vampires) broke my self-imposed B'con rule. I told myself I wasn't buying anything. I was noting down names and buying them at home afterwards in The Avid Reader. But Esri's cracked me.

With Esri is Debi Huff, super-reader, good egg and wise woman.

Doesn't everyone look happy? For balance, then, here's the tartan contingent on Sunday morning.

Val McDermid, Russel McLean and me, looking miserable, belligerent and hammered (variously) and so covering all ethnic stereotypes between the three.

hanging out with murdermongers . . .

2011-09-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

. . . and loving every minute of it, here at Bouchercon 2011 in St Louis. It's a rough crowd, but we all look the better for being in this gorgeous old Grand Hotel.

And don't think I'm not working. Look at all these bags full of books:

Okay, I didn't fill them, or stack them, but look at me balancing on them for a photo!

And yesterday, I spent an hour - a solid hour! - asking questions that interested me of sharp, funny, talented women that I really like. (Of course, being without identified use so far, I forgot to take a picture of them.) But Donna Andrews, Sandy Balzo, Jess Lourey, PJ Parrish and Sarah Shaber gave me the easiest job in the world when I moderated their panel.

And as though that weren't enough toil, today I spent another hour - another solid hour! - in conversation with more of them. Them and their generosity, and their advice, and their gorgeous accents and their couldn't-make-it-up life stories:

LtoR - Gwen Mayo, an inspiration, Carolyn Wall, wise woman, DM Pirrone, making it look soooo easy, and Charlotte Hinger.

Yeeeeees, Charlotte Hinger, who's given me probably my favourite quote of Bouchercon so far. She recounted the time when her mother was dying and got to talking about past times. Another relative asked Charlotte to put a question to the old lady. "Did Aunt X kill Aunt Y?" Her mother answered, "Well . . . I always thought so. Ask Aunt Z." (Imagine all of this in the softest, sweetest of Kansas accents.) Charlotte asked Aunt Z who answered: "Charlotte, honey. We may be murderers but we are not gossips."

Other contenders for Quote of the Conference come from SJ Rozan, talking about her feelings re. the fact that a really good crime novel is often described as transcending the genre: "they take the cream off the top and then complain that the milk is skimmed!" Don't you love that? Doesn't that sum up everything wrong with snootiness and indeed snottiness about genre fiction?

And finally, Todd Ritter, talking about Alfred Hitchcock yesterday, said: "he taught me that it's okay to write entertaining books about murder. We're not committing it; we're just enjoying it."

Of course, I'm saying nothing about what Val McDermid reported overhearing in the Harrogate Turkish bath, but having spent many steamy, eucalyptus-scented hours in there myself, I believe her.

Nor am I talking about what those two women said they'd like to do with Russel McLean. Yet.

Fruits of the diving season (dumpster, that is).

2011-09-08T17:30:00.000-07:00

And a fine season it was too. Here's the haul.

Trip 1
Steelcase office chair, washing-up basin, wooden rack, rug - all for the porch or potting bench

which brings me to Dumpster-Diver's Rule No.1: any fabric you can wash on a hot setting is fine.

On the second trip, I netted and landed . . .

Trip 2
Bathmat (DDR1), plate, cutlery, two plant pots.

This is a good time to mention DD Rule 2: if it looks like someone's grandma gave them something to take to college and now the ungrateful wretch has hoyed it into a skip, take it home for grandmas everywhere. This pretty old plate with the parrot tulip on it fell under DDR2.

Trip 3
Bookcase (for use as shoerack in scullery), genuine ancient Roman column (wired for a lamp, but destined for the garden), garden table, garden bench, humungous plant pot, Bellotti coffee pot, oven mitt/flannel glass-cloth/paisley tablecloth (all DDR1), 2 glasses, ceramic pot, safety goggles.

Now, the safety goggles almost fall under DDR3: no hats, hairbands, combs, wigs or earrings. But they looked brand-new and when you're wearing safety goggles you're usually more disgusting than anything I've ever found in a skip so . . .

Trip 4
(which lasted so long it was dark when we returned so the pic of the catch was taken in the garage)
2 chairs (possible DDR2), 2 cache-pots, 2 cushions (DDR1), 2 diner mugs, garden lantern, watering can, wrapping paper, scissors, t-shirt (DDR1) and Bill Clinton and his Family Dressing Dolls.

The t-shirt passed DDR1 and also came under DDR4: good clothes in bad places should be saved. This top wasn't in the clothes donation box from where it might have gone to Goodwill. It was in a dumpster with oleander clippings. And I liked it. And it fits me. I don't care. I do know; I just don't care.

Trip 5
Garden table, enamel frying pan with lid, colander, chip clip (for if I ever open a big bag of crisps and don't finish it (unlikely)), fly-swatter, knitted creature (DDR1 & DDR2) and . . . a green Toile de Jouy armchair.

Now this chair fails DDR1 (boilwash), clearly. And it would be a stretch to say it qualifies under DDR2 (grandma). And since you can rest your head against the high back, it probably fails under DDR3 (nits) but . . . it smelled okay, it was for the porch, I love Toile de Jouy, so home it came. I'll happily tell fastidious friends to let me sit in it instead of them: it's quite incredibly comfy.

So, that's it for Davis Dumpster-Diving 2011. Favourites? In third place:

which matches the free-cycled chairs, which face west in the garden. Somewhere to put feet and cocktails while the sun goes down.

The runner-up has to be (since I bent so many rules for it):

But the winner, by a clear margin, is:

No, I haven't forgotten that this isn't a garden blog. And no, not the colander. The winner of the "Great Free Stuff Stakes 2011 is a late entry, not actually out of a dumspter at all, nabbed on the way home yesterday.

Now DDR5, which should possibly be DDR1, is NO FOOD. But it doesn't cover road-kill tomatoes. Last night, a lorry took a corner too fast coming out of a field and suddenly the tarmac was a sea of red. I hopped out with my Wigtown Book Festival book-bag and picked up four pounds; another woman pulled off going in the other direction and filled her boot. When I passed again this morning there was nothing left but the squished ones. I roasted them with garlic, chillies, basil and courgettes (of course) from the garden and they're in the freezer now, waiting for a winter's evening when pasta and spicy tomato sauce will remind us of summer and its dumpsters.

And if I see a lorry full of cantaloupes going along at a good lick, I'm following.

NOT sitting typing alone in a room (for once)

2011-08-26T12:59:00.000-07:00

I love my job. It's the best job in the world. It was the happiest day of my life, just about, when I finally accepted that I was never going to be a square academic peg in a square university department and decided instead to be a round writer. Almost literally for a while: working at home is a trapdoor to the biscuit tin.

Or maybe the happiest day was when I realised that my decision wasn't as crazy as it must have seemed. The day I got a publisher to agree with me that I was round.

However, as the title of my blog hints, this wonderful job is mostly typing. And crying.

Except for one glorious day every year when you get to put on a dress and stand up and talk and tell jokes and read out the best bits and you get flowers and presents and cards.

(How terrifying is that Dandy doll? My good friend Louise has a line in such things: you should see the finger puppets for Bury Her Deep. I love them all but if the books were that dark they'd be shelved in a different bit of the bookshop)

So Dandy Gilver and The Proper Treatment of Bloodstains was launched in the US last Friday and a good time was had by all.

For quite a few of the people who kindly came along to the Avid Reader bookshop in downtown Davis, CA, it was their first book launch party. I could have done anything and they would have gone along with it. I could have assigned parts and got them to read it. Unfiortunately, I didn't think of that until afterwards, but maybe it's for the best - this way some of them might come back next year. And besides, my new friends and colleagues-in-law have been life-saving bricks (which isn't a happy metaphor, I know) and deserve better.

So here are some of them:

From right to left: Eileen Rendahl, fantastic romance and suspense and romantic suspense writer (whose Melinda Messenger series gives me bad premise envy), me, Sarah R who gives "friendship" a new meaning (I lived in her house for five months and didn't even get ejected when my cat scratched her dog becasue her dog dared to eat his own food from his own bowl - the noive!), Kelly S whose son is my only known teenage male reader so far, and Carol K, one of two psychiatric professionals on hand during the evening. Hey - Celine Dion has two eyebrow ladies.

But nothing sums up California like this picture of me and Spring Warren, another Davis writer, whose excellent book The Quarter Acre Farm has taught me to garden in this alien place where it never rains and gophers eat your tree roots.

Talk about stand-offish, eh? There's no way Spring could be from Edinburgh and I'm very glad she's here not there.

And the best thing about this launch party was that it was uterly illicit, because I've already had a launch party for Bloodstains, in the UK, last year.

What's that you say? That proves nothing? it's only a picture of me with some books in a different dress? (Except it was clearly taken before the year of Mexican food - yikes). Well, here's better proof then:

A book cake, clearly being cut by a left-handed person in my parents' house. How can you be sure? Because that implement is my mother's musical cake slice and she (right-handed) and I are the only ones who ever use it because everyone except the two of us hates it with a passion. What's to hate? It plays Jingle Bells, Happy Birthday, Here Comes The Bride, and Have a Jolly Good Book Launch.

I did. Two of them. And now it's back to typing, all alone in a room. I still love my job, though.

140 characters to 100,000 words: spoilers, investment and brainache.

2011-08-19T13:15:00.000-07:00

Well, my most miserable, least generous, snarkiest tweet ever came back, jumped up and bit me on the bum today when Jeffrey Callison of Insight called me on it. Well, not really - he'd never - but he did ask me to explain why I tweeted:

Oh no, not again! I never thought anything could make me unfollow the Ed book fest. Or am I just a miseryguts?

The issue was the 140 character stories appearing under the hashtag #UnboundEd. But the problem wasn't unknown and possibly even unpublished - oh, my dear!- writers daring to ask for attention. Nothing like it. It was just my bumbling, fuzzy, permanently-set-at-novel-length, brain trying to keep up.

I'd read a tweet and try to attach some bit of it to the news, an earlier message, someone I knew, something already in existence . . . and then get to the end, see #UnboundEd and think "Oh, right, okay, it's self-contained." Then read the next one. And the next one. And after fifteen my brain was melting and dripping out of my ears.

Which is exactly why I can't read short stories. I can't get my investment level down from where it would be at Chapter 1 of a novel. And then fifteen pages later it's all over and I'm whirling in the dust, like a cowboy who's thrown a punch at an disapparating alien.

This is my problem with the recent survey from UC San Diego on spoilers, or at least with the reporting of it. (Thanks to fellow crimewriter Laurence O'Bryan for the link.) The study was done on 12 short stories. The finding was that, by and large, spoilers didn't spoil them. This is why is was reported, right? A finding that spoilers spoil things wouldn't be news (but let's leave the dangers of positive results bias in published science for another day).

So far, so interesting. Surprising even . . . if you could see me you'd be able to tell that I have my but-face on now (one T) . . . but the report from UCSD News Center concludes that perhaps people who flip to the last page of a book have got it right.

Guys! Gu-uys? Short stories aren't books. Novels are books. A study on spoilers in short stories says nothing about books or about novels. Or films (by the time the results were on the radio, it was films too).

Stephen King knows this better than anyone. He first envisaged Misery as a short story, but then noticed when he was finished it that it was 300 pages long - I'm making up the details, obviously; I have no insight into the actual methods of prolific geniuses - and so he had to change the ending.

S
P
O
I
L
E
R

as they say. In a short story, crazy Annie Wilkes could kill Paul Sheldon, feed him to Misery the pig and bind the Wilkes Edition of Misery's Return in Paul's skin. In a novel, the man had to live and the pig had to go. As King says "no one likes to root for a guy over the course of three hundred pages only to discover that between chapters sixteen and seventeen the pig ate him." On Writing p.132.

Short stories aren't just really short novels. Novels aren't just really long short stories. Nobody has published any results on spoilers and the novel (or film).

As an aside, have you ever noticed that people who read short stories are often proud of it and people who don't are often ashamed of it? What's that about?

Back on the main track, though, I am very glad that readers, critics and reviewers take plot spoilers seriously. My new book is out this week:

and there's a twist at the end that could be completely ruined - spoiled, in fact - by the mention of just one specific word. (There's proof of my belief in the basic goodness of humanity, eh? Talk about tempting fate.)

Thank you, early readers, and to any new readers about to embark on Dandy Gilver's below-stairs adventure, I say this: if you are one who flips to the end before you read the beginning, don't blame me.

But how high is an elephant's eye?

2011-08-11T23:57:00.000-07:00

Not having to hand an elephant who was willing to stand beside my corn as a measure, I had to make do with a cat.

It's pretty impressively high compared with a cat's eye, I think you'll agree.

And it's just "beginning to crop" as they say on Gardener's World and Question Time, back in the old country. I don't say anything so laid back. I say: "Corn! Look! Sweetcorn! In the garden! Is it ready? How do you tell if it's ready?" frrllrrlllrrrff (that's the sound of Sunset's Western Garden's pages turning). "It's ready! Frabjous day! Corn!!!"

Not to mention the tomatoes (she said, thereby mentioning the hell out of the tomatoes). Here are today's pickings.

And beside them are the daily takings from a row of zinnias planted in the veg patch just for cutting. (I always wanted a cutting garden and this is the start of it. Zinnias, in a spirit of tribute to Ma Larkin. (I used to be a terrible garden snob, but I reckon a row of mixed zinnias is proof that I'm over it now. There's a hanging basket of petunias too (Ma Larkin, again), but it was a present and so I can't claim the glory.))

So far, so abundant. But now we must turn to the courgettes aka zucchini and there abundance turns to something more bloated and alarming. First, there was a bit of a glut.

Then I turned my back for seven minutes and there was a lot of a glut.

And now my freezer looks like this:

Some ice, some bread and eleven pints of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's roasted courgette and garlic mush. Eleven pints or, in other words, boil enough pasta and I've got a light lunch for fifty.

But it's more than balanced by the chickpea/garbanzo bean harvest. Six little plants, $3 the tray, produced this:

Five chick peas. Or 50c each and a 50c tip. Not even in the organic, macrobiotic, Fairtrade, giftwrapped section of the Berkliest Food Co-op imaginable did anyone ever buy chickpeas at 50c each.

And not even in the height of the eighties in the depths of Kensington was a course ever served in a Michelin starred restaurant as nouvelle as the cuisine I prepared with my entire chick pea harvest.

Ah, but what about the flavour? Well, the best way to describe it is to say that they tasted like boiled chickpeas. The slice of tomato was nice, though.

Just give the Booker to Lilian Jackson Braun and we can all go home.

2011-08-03T11:41:00.000-07:00

Fight, fight, fight, fight!

We're at it again. Is crime fiction literature? Are thrillers crime? Is literature fiction? Is reading entertainment? Is that a wasp?

Sorry, got distracted there.

And then sooner or later someone will say "If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing [insert example of low-brow genre chosen for its shock value]"and we all have to turn off Twitter, spin three times and spit.

Philip Hensher started it this time with an article I hesitate to paraphrase in case I make it worse but here goes:

Thrillers have infiltrated the Booker. Thrillers are conservative and comforting in that they offer . . . Well, I've never heard it put better then what Jill Paton Walsh said once (about crime novels, strictly speaking) . . . they offer "a dream of justice". Science fiction is doing better, more interesting things than thrillers.  It's disappointing that people's tastes are sometimes so narrow.

I agree with that last point in large shovelfuls. It's a shame that anyone can spend a lifetime reading and not at least even try a murder, a western, a romance, a spot of magic realism, a saga, a Victorian doorstop like Middlemarch, a graphic novel, Anita Brookner, Brad Thor . . . I wonder if Anita Brookner's ever read Brad Thor.

More seriously, it seems to me that when readers move from looking for something interesting to read into the realms of looking for (eg) a crime novel, urban, procedural, plenty violence, not too pat an ending or a murder, no swearing, not too much gore, rural setting . . . something had been lost. One of the most depressing Amazon reviews I've ever seen began with "A new author is always a risk . . .".

Okay, not strictly true. All of the most depressing Amazon reviews begin "This is the worst book ever writen. So boooooring I literelly had to gouge out my eyes . . ." and are about The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird.

But readers' narrow tastes (which make them morons, in Hensher's view) also make for some enormously entertaining cultural moments. Like the Dan Brown effect a few years back, when people who never normally read thrillers read The Da Vinci Code to see what the fuss was about and then sneered at the short chapters, the metronomic cliffhangers, the dull characters. It was like someone going to their first opera and leaving at half-time because everyone just stood there singing.

Anyway, I do have a point. I have two points. I just chose a slow build to get there. Hey, this is a quality literary blog. If you want slam-dunk action go and read a different one.

1. You can write a thriller/mystery/crime novel with terrible prose, flat characters, a sketchy setting and nothing to say about the human condition and have it published. It might even be a bestseller.

2. (This isn't the second point; maybe best call it 1.b.) You can write a literary novel with no story, flat characters, a sketchy setting and nothing to say about the human condition and have it published. It might even win a prize.

1.c. But a crime novel with no story or a literary novel with terrible* prose are going nowhere.

1.d A beautifully written novel, with a cracking story, rich characters and a lush setting that tells you true things about life is better and all genres - including Literary Fiction - will try to claim it as one of their own. If the story is about a crime, the CWA, MWA, ITW, SinC and Malice will lick it so's no one else gets it. (You can still tell I'm a kid from a big family, eh?)

*where "terrible" means hasty, thoughtless, pedestrian and tin-eared. There are plenty of literary novels with over-wrought, intrusive, show-offy terrible prose. Children's pastry, I call it. Lots of fun for them to make but you wouldn't want to eat it when it's done.

So maybe literariness is just a kind of longevity - no more than the plain fact that you can only read a story once for the story itself, but you can want to read that bit where Lizzie Bennet smacks down Lady Catherine in the garden again and again (and punch the air every time).  Beautifully written Austen smack-downs are more lasting than aha! moments at the end of crime novels.

Doesn't seem like an oppurtunity for sneering, though.

And so to Point 2. I chose LJB for the title of this blog because she's no longer with us and because she wrote about cats who solve murders. She wrote sharp, funny, bonkers stories with a character - Qwilleran - to love, about cats who solve murders. And there's nothing more reminiscent of a dahlia grower sneering at a crysanthemum grower in the flower tent at the village show than a crime novelist whining that they should be taken seriously for writing what they write and then in the next breath sneering at writers like Lilian Jackson Braun.

Newsflash: cats don't solve ingenious murders and neither do private dicks, feisty attorneys, maverick cops, or jaded reporters. It's just pretend.

Click your heels and say three times: there's no such thing as writer's block

2011-07-21T15:00:00.000-07:00

I do truly believe that. But I have to say, I've never had this much trouble writing a story before. This is the twelfth time I've done it and something is different.

I'm at a different desk, in a different room, in a different house, in a different country. Could be that. I've now got two editors, at two publishers, in two different time zones and mine makes a third. Could be that.
But . . . all that was true when I wrote Dandy Gilver No7. last winter.

Since then:

I've plunged into online life, blogging, tweeting, and posting on Facebook. Could easily be that. This story occurred to me here not there, although the people in it belong there not here. Sounds vaguely plausible. But . . . there have always been distractions - estate agents' websites with virtual tours, Pet Rescue, Youtube - and I wrote DG2 in Ohio.

So who knows? Maybe this story is a turkey. Maybe I should scrap it. Maybe I've exhausted whatever it is I've been drawing on and I need to get a job now. I'm still writing; don't get me wrong. But usually by this stage of the game it feels as if some thermals have lifted the weight of the story off my shoulders and I'm just along for the ride. This time it's like shovelling setting concrete just a bit too slowly so that it gets harder and harder as you go.

To turn to happier areas of life, then. This month I've been reading Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx (house-doing-up comfort/schadenfreude), The Odds by Kathleen George (best family of kids since Noel Streatfield, with the social grit of The Wire) and Defending Jacob by William Landay (wow), and am now reading The Tommyknockers by Mr W. Block himself, Stephen King. Book of the Month for July is going to be a tough choice.

And in the garden, all is well and all is well and all manner of things are well. My only disasters so far this year are the chick peas. Out of a row of fifteen, two plants are alive and they're looking pretty dodgy.

And at least I can't ever get gardener's block. In fact, my devotion to the garden is boundless: I just drank a full half-pint of dark purple spinach water. Here's what happened. The beetroots needed to be thinned and couldn't wait. Dinner tonight is being brought to us courtesy of the courgette glut and no way to incorporate a wheelbarrowful of leaf beet thinnings. So I cooked them all up and froze them all down. And just before freezing comes squeezing. And so there was half a pint of spinach juice and I thought of stock and soup and even of pouring it away, but spirit of Granny Greta McPherson moved across the kitchen and . . . now I have the strength of Popeye and won't need any more iron for days.

An Empire State of Wallet

2011-07-11T07:02:00.000-07:00

So. Thrillerfest was fabulous, New York is fabulous, I have no money left now.

To deal with the first one last then. A three dollar banana? A sixty dollar walk-in manicure? An extra fifty cents for ice in your club soda from a cafe? New York has it all. Plus tax, of course. I'm a great fan of tax, let me say. Paying tax is one of the privileges of living well in a civilised country, but it does drive me gently nuts that a vendor won't tell you how much money you're going to have to hand over (which is all you really care about, right?). Instead, it's a taxi from the airport that's $50 + tolls, a hotel room that's a bargain + 8.875% sales tax, 5.875% city sales tax, $1.50 NYC hotel unit fee and $2 occupancy tax. I'm going to a book event tomorrow. If someone asks me how much the paperbacks are, I think I'll say they're 75 cents + a little something for the bookseller, printer and publisher.

Anyway.

Thrillerfest was worth it. Thrillerfest was wonderful. I met a crowd of inspired and inspiring writers - Kate Brady, Kathleen George, Sandra Brennan, Dani Brown (with an i), Jonathan Maberry, Jim Macomber, Matt Hilton, Steve Forman, Deb Lacy, Rick Helms, Rick Hutto, Karen Nikkel . . . and Willy. Here are some them.

It was great to listen to the keynote speakers - John Lescroart, Karin Slaughter, Ken Follet and the incomparable RL Stine. All were funny, charming, still grateful, still striving, apparently without a shred of ego amongst the lot of them. RL Stine was the biggest surprise of all. I'm going to admit that I didn't know Goosebumps was a series, didn't know Stine was a person. I thought Goosebumps was an imprint and assumed that "RL Stine" was about twenty writers. Nope. He really has written 600 children's novels. I wish I were twelve now. Or maybe I'll just read some of them anyway.

And after the end of Thrillerfest, as an unearned treat, I get two days in one of my favourite places in the world - Manhatten. My hotel window looks out onto this:

My publisher, St Martin's Press, is in here:

And looks out at this:

And perhaps most thrilling of all to a wee girl fae the 'Ferry, I sat next to a scary, skinny woman in a pale green suit who stabbed the buttons on her phone and snarled: 'I biked those affadavits over yesterday'. A sentence I've never snarled in my life, and never will.

all is forgiven in the garden

2011-07-05T15:12:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I know I've been mumping on a bit about my new house and garden but suddenly a corner has been turned.

All twenty outlying acres are dealt with for the year: the big field - about fifteen of them - has been eaten down to ankle length by the cow lodgers, who've now gone somewhere shadier for the summer; the meadow - 3 acres - succumbed to the gentle ministrations of our midget tractor; the five paddocks - 2 acres in all - succumbed to a combination of the midget tractor, the strimmer, a rake, the old warhorse of a push-along and some wrestling and cursing (wrestling with hidden fence wire and cursing people who hide fence wire in long grass).

As to the garden: the digging is done; fourteen pick-up-truck-loads of muck have been applied (people get quite excited about the idea of gorgeous free compost until they hear that you have to shovel it up into your truck yourself, bring it home and shovel it out again (not me, I got my Dickies tucked into my wellies, spat on my hands and . . . met the events organiser of the Vacaville Borders who was shoveling from the same pile one day)); trees are planted - fig, pomegranate and gingko; trees are felled - sweetgum, eucalyptus and pine (all either dead or planted in the septic line) and best of all . . . the vegetables are growing.

The terraces at the back of the house that were dead and brown last August:

are now home to aubergines/eggplants, tomatillos, zinnias and marigolds for cutting, sweetcorn, courgettes/zucchini/thin-skinned summer-squash, okra, tomatoes, peppers, chillies, lettuce, rocket, beetroot and strawberries.

(sorry the before and after aren't from the same angle - I hate that too). And there are watermelon, cantaloupe, Hallowe'en pumpkin, pattypans, butternuts and cucumber swelling up in little pots ready to go into the lower bed.

So as ever, it's Calling All Courgette Recipes time. I used to plant six courgettes every year in Scotland and the glut nearly buried us alive. Here, this year, I planted six green, six yellow and six crookneck. That's eighteen courgette plants. To feed two people. Who're also going to be tackling what comes of the 91 sweetcorns I put in.

And it's started already. One of them doubled in size overnight last night, but at least it was a yellow one. It's the sneaky, green, leaf-coloured ones you have to watch for. They can grow to the size of houseboats and the only clue is the way they snigger as you go past without noticing.

But that's what it's all about - eating what's ready to be eaten instead of what's on BOGOF in Tesco. Here's the first pre-dinner haul, from last week.

It made me very happy. True bliss won't come until I go out in the rain to dig up potatoes once the water's boiling, but a few courgettes, two kinds of lettuce and some rocket flowers was pretty good too. The second best thing that's happened in the garden since we came here.

The first you ask, reluctantly, hating the manipultion? Why of course. It's this.

My new potting bench, the seat of garden power. It's a dumpster-dived table, nailed to old fenceposts to give it some height (and a faint Wallace and Gromit look, to my mind), with a $2 bookcase on top and sidey-bits made of planks from an emergency refectory table (we had to build when we invited too many people to a Burns' Supper but then dismantled when we found a better one in a yard sale) to stop the compost falling off.

You can keep your rattan sectionals - that's my kind of garden furniture. I love both it and the undergardener who knocked it together for me.

I live in the ugliest house in California

2011-06-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

And can offer the following exhibits to support my case. Here is the view from the kitchen window:

Yes, the view from the kitchen window is the bathroom wall. The first time I came to look round this place I assumed it was a prefab that came in two bits and that someone had measured something wrong. Apparently not, though. It's a real house designed by an architect (who might have got their degree at Joe-bob's School of Architecture and Ribs-to-Go).

Now that summer's here, though, it occurs to me that the peculiar setting of this window might be "designed" to keep the kitchen cool by cutting down the amount of direct sunlight hitting the glass. That could also have been achieved with a pretty, vine-clad pergola of course but Joe-bob's School of Landscaping and Mufflers While-you-wait must have been away across on the other side of town.

And while we're on windows . . . if you've got a stretch of wall and you need a window in it, where do you put that window? In the middle, right?

Wrong.

But if you've got a stretch of wall and four windows to go in it, two big ones and two little ones, you space them out evenly and balance the sizes, right?

Wrong.

And if by some fluke you happen to put two doors side-by-side leading onto the porch, symmetrically arranged on a step, you make these two doors the same, right?

Wrong.

Every opportunity for symmetry, balance and order that this house offered has been wilfully ignored in favour of an architectural approach I like to call "fling the windows at it and where they stick, they stay".

Except one. This one.

Two windows, the same size, the same design, on either side of the apex of the roof, which is halfway along the length of the wall, giving the whole elevation the character of being "eye-sweet". And where was this care taken? Where were these simple classical rules of building design applied? Look closely; note the wheeliebins and the fuse panel. Yup, it's the garage. Just to rub salt into the wounds.

I'll spare you the inside (for today). The sunken chocolate-brown bath with carpet up the side and gold taps. The collection of centre-light/ceiling-fans, each one different and every one hideous (ripped out of Saddam Hussein's palace, perhaps, for being too ornate), and the Flinstones' climbing-wall of a fake fireplace.

So why did we buy it? Well, here's the view from one end of the porch.

Here's the view from the other.

Tell you what, though:- I'd rather be me, in here looking out at the view, than be some poor jackrabbit or coyote out there in the view looking in at this eye-sore.

deleting and weeping alone in a room

2011-06-09T14:21:00.000-07:00

I was going to write about writing this week, but actually putting into words the process of trying to get a new story up and humming - the deletions, the pages of useless notes, the procrastination, the casting about for someone to blame, the realisation that if I blame my undergardener (he whose job forced this recent 7,000 mile flit) I'll basically be saying "I can't write in this quiet, comfortable house in this beautiful sunny valley" and I'll feel like a fool, the checking of email, the pouncing on and meticulous execution of any scrap of admin, the guilt of thinking about my characters sitting there cramped and abandoned in fewer than 20,000 words of story, the profound desire for a powercut or a heavy cold . . . laws, sausages and suspense novels, people, and I've decided to spare you.

So.

To turn to reading, then, since I don't have anything like the same trouble there: I'm sure the talented and delightful John Lescoart wouldn't mind me saying that even though I read two of his wonderful Dismas Hardy/Abe Glitsky novels last month - one of life's true pleasures is the discovery of a series with a dozen and more titles waiting to be read - neither The Vig nor Hard Evidence is my book of the month.

That's only because, mind you, I also read The Grapes of Wrath. Right here, in California, surrounded by fields and farmworkers, newly blown west myself (although thankfully not by a dust-cloud), so that I felt like the Joads' long-lost sister. And get this: at the end of the month I'm going to read East of Eden in Monterey! On a wee holiday by the sea. EofE and the new Michael Connelly, I'm thinking.

I'm sure, since I'll be on holiday, both of them will be utter bliss and not, as is more usual, bliss and torture mixed. The torture is- Hey! (I just thought of this) I can blame John Steinbeck for the fact that getting my current work in progress into top gear is like pushing a bus up a ladder. Quite simply, reading TGofW infected me with a case of the why-bothers.

Stephen King does that to me every time; so does Joyce Carol Oates. Both of them are such big-hearted writers - tellers of stories as well as wordsmiths - and they invent such fantastical tales with such honesty. Most of all, they are quite clearly -even after their astonshing outputs so far - still as enthralled as they are enthralling.

I'll never be Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates but I do the same job they do and that's a blessing I'd be wise to remember. Right, must dash. There's a bus and a ladder waiting.

California 5 Scotland 0 (Garden Paradise #2)

2011-05-31T11:39:00.000-07:00

To be fair, then, here's what's happening in my garden today.

There are tiny wee green tomatoes on the Sungold tomato plant:

And since it's a Sungold tomato plant - ie yellow when ripe - green is halfway there. So, to recap for anyone who hasn't had their heart smashed to rubble and their hope ground to dust gardening in Scotland, there are tomatoes on the way to ripeness, in May, outside, in the ground (not in a greenhouse or in a Gro-bag on the landing window).

Also, this:

Unimpressive, you say? Small and boring? Sidey-ways? Okay, I'll give you sidey-ways, but this - gardening friends - is a row of sweetcorn. And for Scottish people old enough to remember when sweetcorn grew in tins (like peaches) this is a choir-of-angels kind of thing to see outside your back door.

Not to mention this:

It's an orange, in a tree, and unlike in my childhood it didn't get there because someone sneaked it out of the fruitbowl and flung it into the branches to see if it would stick and then got a bad row for wasting food. For instance.

Which leaves the two big ones. Beyond exotic, the closest gardening ever gets to glamour, worth immigrating for, I give you . . .

. . . a prickly pear cactus, newly transplanted from a rooted cutting, bursting into blossom. A prickly pear, I tell you. A fruit so exotic it was never even tinned. A cutting not withering in the May frosts. A plant blooming days after being moved (instead of paying you back for your presumption by rotting and stinking and giving you something to skid on and break your ankle). I'll report on the pear harvest in ten days, I expect.

And finally. . .

. . . okra. [fanfare] Okra! It should always have the exclamation mark, like Oklahoma! Okay, I only eat it once every five years when it's on a no-choice menu and I have no idea how to cook it and every time I've ever had it's been slimy. But . . . Okra!

Toto, we're not in Kilmarnock any more.

Three sex scandals and a crime series

2011-05-19T16:06:00.000-07:00

Try as I might, I haven't been able to concentrate on writing stories, reading stories and growing plants this week. (I mean, I've done it: the new book is underway, the adrenaline-soaked Save Me by Lisa Scottoline got read and my nasturtiums, sweetcorn, courgettes and okra have all germinated) but the newspapers and radio broadcasts have been full of sex scandals.

First, the ex-governor of my new state apparently had an affair which produced a child. He kept it secret from his wife until his stint was done, then he told her so she dumped him and at last the story broke. Pretty shabby behaviour. A scandal. But not one of the three that got to me.

Elsewhere, a businessman allegedly attacked a chambermaid in a hotel suite, attempted to rape her, leaving her injured, and checked out in a hurry to rush off to the airport after she got away. She reported it, he was arrested, and now he faces trial. This isn't a sex scandal. This is an (alleged) violent crime. The scandal is the deluge of articles calling it a sex scandal and calling him a charmer/seducer/womanizer who, this time, went too far.

Over the years, some priests in the Catholic church have attacked children, attempting to and succeeding in raping them, leaving them injured, and then running away. Sometimes the children reported it. Eventually some of the priests were arrested. There have been trials. These were terrible crimes. This week a five year study by Catholic bishops in the USA concluded that poor preparation and poor monitoring, stress, and the social and sexual turmoil of the 60s and 70s led to the abuse. This conclusion is a moronic, pitiful scandal.

Every day, men sexually abuse children, both boys and girls. They attack them. They rape them. They injure them and then they run away. Crime after crime after crime. This week, a British MP stated that if girls were taught abstinence there would be less sexual abuse. That any sentient human could say such a thing is a stinking, shameful scandal.

Which brings me to the crime series, at last. What I loved most about the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson was the escape into a cosy fantasy world where I'd love to live. Others have called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels dark and disturbing. I don't see it.

In Larsson's world, all consensual sexual behaviour between adults is absolutely fine and dandy and all coercion,violence and paedophilia is wrong, is 100% caused by the decision of the perpetrator to do it and is 100% his responsibility. In Larsson's world, rape isn't caused by stress and hippies. Abuse isn't the fault of little girls who don't say "no" properly, and (alleged) attempted rapists aren't just charmers who went too far one time.

Next week, gardening and picures of kittens, Maybe even a recipe or two.

garden paradise

2011-05-13T11:22:00.000-07:00

So when we moved to California - the salad bowl of America, the tomato ketchup bottle of the world, the pickled walnut jar of the universe - it was with certain expectations.

Yeah.

Here's my undergardener in May in Scotland:

And here he is, taking it as easy as possible in May in California:

But it's worth it for the overflowing cornucopia of abundancy goodness, right?

Yeah.

Here's my veg patch in May in Scotland:

And here's my veg patch today, 12th May 2011, in California:

And now in close-up. Look - it's a salad. Look harder.

I've got a sneaking suspicion that all the "local" produce in markets and roadside stands all over this state is secretly imported from Aberdeenshire.

Sitting typing alone in a room

2011-05-03T16:16:00.000-07:00

Hmmmmmm . . . blogging about being a writer . . . (see title). It's going to be thrilling stuff. On the other hand, when I'm not writing, I'm (drumroll) usually gardening. Or even (hang on to some sturdy fixture) reading.
So, if it seems to you that the precious online time you could use to watch Top 60 Ghetto Names on Youtube again would be better spent reading about my books and garden, this could be the blog for you.

To be fair, I will report from Thrillerfest in NYC and all that, and gardening these days does include killing the odd rattlesnake, and one of the questions people ask most at book events is "What do you read?".

It's an odd moment in my writing life right now, in that lots is happening but I'm not the one making any of it happen. My UK editor is reading Dandy Gilver No 7 (working title: The Trouble with Young Ladies), my US editor is reading DG6 (An Unsuitable Day for a Murder). My agent is working with my last stand-alone modern novel (working title: Open the Door). As for me, I'm thinking about preparing to plan to start to grope my way towards the initial stages of a new one.

Hence all the gardening. I moved onto twenty neglected acres in Northern California last autumn and, even though cow lodgers have come to eat and fertilise about fifteen acres of it, there's still a lot of waist-high weeds to deal with in the short Ca spring before everything dries to biscuit again for the summer.

And reading. I started keeping a reading diary a few years ago, getting tired of sitting with my mouth hanging open and my brain dripping out of it whenever anyone asked me what I read. I don't make notes or anything - it's not homework - but I always pick a Book of the Month. BoftheM for April, which might well turn out to be BoftheY was the astonishing Still Missing by Beth Gutcheon. Published in 1980 but newly re-released by Persephone. http://www.persephonebooks.com/ It's not at all a typical Persephone - think Miss Pettigrew, Dorothy Whipple etc- boy oh boy but it's good. (Except for the puzzle of a weirdly graphic sexual episode late on in the book that feels out of place and unbalancing (compared to earlier descriptions of sex all done in the best paahhsible taste)).

Hey, I did it. I blogged.

And the world is exactly as much richer as I thought it would be. I dunno, do you?