Finding My Happy Place

On NOT selling my books

Hi Everyone, as promised this week, I’m including an extract from the beginning of my final draft of the new novel - A Little Madness in the Spring. But first some thoughts about how it feels to arrive here at the end of a project, in a strange, uncomfortable place, in a weird kind of limbo without a project, a condemned soul without the joy of writing.

I never did like the idea of limbo, even as a child, on the fringes of Catholicism - my father was lapsed but the priests never stopped coming to the house trying to persuade him back into the fold. The souls of poor unbaptised infants on the border of heaven and hell. Only the Catholic Church could dream that one up and I wasn’t going for it. Probably because my father didn’t.

Of course, it’s not the end of A Little Madness in the Spring. Next comes the back and forth editing between myself and my editor. And after this, once the book is published and out in the world there is the promotion, which frankly I am hopeless at. Crap. No good at selling. Let me repeat - I do not want to have to sell my book. I do not want to try to persuade people to buy it. I’d like them to buy it if they think they’d enjoy reading it, I’d love them too, but that’s about as far as it goes. I’m willing to sell someone else’s book all day long. But mine, I shudder. I just don’t have that confidence. Self-promotion feels dangerous for me - it’s something I learned not to do, long ago, at my mother’s knee. Could be a memoir there, somewhere.

Books like mine, published by small presses cannot compete with the big publishers. Linen Press writer, Ali Bacon, puts this much better than I can in, Of Crawdads and River Songs, where she talks about the similarities between my novel, Sometimes A River Song and Where the Crawdads Sing. About how one is barely known, the other a huge bestseller. (I might add, River Song was written before Crawdads). I don’t dwell on it, that way lies madness. I think about it and I think about how I might promote my new novel and then when that gets too much, as it very quickly does, I think about my next creative project - what will it be? Invariably I feel my mouth shifting into a smile. This is my happy place, dreaming up new ideas, writing fragments, reading, reading. More on reading soon..

Now to Tabula Rasa - poetry by women - an anthology from Linen Press. I’m excited to be launching it along with fellow poets, Anna Barker, Mary-Jane Holmes and Jackie Litherland at Collected Books in Durham next Wednesday 15th 6.30 pm (I believe tickets have sold out.) Forests and mountains, Ukraine, birth, death, miscarriage, IVF, ageing and grief, our gardens, our clothes, our knickers, friendships, schools, daughters and birds - and much much more

Now to the promised extract:

The Asylum

To the north, a wild and uncultivated fen, where paths vanish under water and hollows fill with winter rain. Where reeds lay down in the wind and bittersweet hides. And deep in the black soil, the fossil beds, ammonites as big as a man’s fist. To the south, chalk downland, a covering of lady’s bedstraw and a spring-fed stream flowing into the Cam, gin clear and mineral rich where brown trout nose the watercress. To the west the pumping station, where the new steam pumps move water, day and night. To the east Keeper's Wood.

The purchase, three hundred acres known as Long Meadow, is made by the agent John Tiplady in November 1855. The Asylum is to be situated a good distance from city and village boundaries so as not to trouble their inhabitants. Yet, as the walls, chimneys and water tower of the new County Pauper Lunatic Asylum rise they come to dominate the view. There is not a soul in the County who does not know the name, Long Meadow, who does not wonder what might transpire behind its walls, or what power lie in the hands of its newly appointed officers. Truth be told, there are none who do not fear incarceration there with no prospect of release, who have not dreamed of the darkness that lies in wait on their doorstep. Except perhaps those who work there, good and bad. Those who make a living from madness.

September 1875

The air is ripe with the scent of rotten apples and damp earth. Seed heads rattle in the grass and the wet, yellow leaves of willow, stick to the boots of eel catcher Michael Cory as he makes his way to the river.  Above him the sky is autumnal blue. The smoke from Long Meadow’s chimneys and the low throb of the pumps hang in the air. He is hoping for a good catch to sell in the town market. For wicker hives and griggs fat with silver eels. And enough left over for chopped eel, fried in best butter, for tea when his mother comes home from attending the mad women of Dormitory Twelve, women who believe they speak with Jesus, who claim to be the Queen herself. Women who believe that eels have taken root in their stomachs and suck their lifeblood.

The newspapers had championed it, ‘to better the condition of lunatic paupers,’ the Chronicle said. But now he wonders at it. This parade of the afflicted seen in the fields and along the river though never alone, always accompanied by their attendants. A circus of lunatics. Are there not better places for such a project, the filthy disease-ridden cities for one? It should never have been built on their land, so the locals say, and he agrees though he is mindful that the land is no longer theirs. It has been parcelled up and sold off. Now there are new ways to make a living, as in the Asylum, ways that pay as much as thirty-five shillings per annum for a mere attendant.

Michael Cory steps onto the riverbank, wades in among the rushes and reaches down in anticipation for the first hive. But his hand alights on something softer than wicker. There is cloth beneath his fingers and there is flesh. A limb. An arm he thinks, full grown, half-hidden in the reeds. And there is more.

With all thought of eel and hive forgotten, he wades further in and begins to heave and drag a body up through the mud and onto the bank. The shock and the effort leave him breathless. He looks down on the corpse he has pulled from the river. It lies green and swollen in the grass. He puts his hand to his chest. His heart is alive and beating fast, thank God. He takes off his hat and offers up a prayer…

After this extract we step inside the Asylum and its a longtime before we come out again…

Thanks for reading - See you next week x