A New Dawn for the Poetry Society

For those who fell asleep and missed it, yesterday saw a violently contested Emergency General Meeting of the Poetry Society in London's Royal College of Surgeons, an apposite setting considering the incisive nature of the debate.

On the one hand were the c. 500-strong requisitioners, who had called for the meeting following a recent spate of Board and staff resignations, and whose prime objectives were the discovery of the truth, and if necessary, the passing of a vote of No Confidence in the board.

On the other hand were the Board of Trustees and their apologists, such as senior poet Alan Brownjohn who chastised the requisitioners for 'obscenity' and recommended the members should not pursue a motion of No Confidence.

The EGM opened with an announcement that the Board of Trustees had decided to resign en masse, but only with effect from September, so that normal business could continue while members nominate and vote for new Board members.

A member then got up and asked from the floor why we should bother to continue with the meeting and our proposed vote of No Confidence, since the Board had already resigned.

Thankfully, this transparent deflection from the true business of the meeting - to discover what the hell had been going on behind closed doors - was disregarded by the majority of members.

In initial statements from the Board, we were told that the cause of recent resignations had been a 'personality issue' between the (now former) Director and the current Editor of Poetry Review, the Society's flagship magazine, Fiona Sampson.

Three hours later, when the meeting finally closed, it had become painfully clear that this 'personality issue' was indeed the crux of the matter.

We were told as the meeting progressed that some years prior to the current dispute the Editor of Poetry Review had demanded that her contract - originally for 3 years only - be amended to a permanent contract in line with new EU laws, notwithstanding the special circumstances of working for a charitable organisation in a job already agreed by the membership as of 3 years' duration only.

This was agreed by the Board, and it was not thought important that the membership be informed of this vital change to the Editor's tenure.

It was revealed by former Finance Officer Paul Ranford that the Editor of Poetry Review later asked the Board if she could work fewer hours for less pay and also to work from home. This was also agreed, but with her pay remaining the same, for reasons that were not entirely clear to me from the Chair, Laura Bamford's explanation. The Board decided, apparently, that it was 'not possible' to lower Fiona Sampson's wage, even though the rest of her requests had been met.

Meanwhile, the Director, Judith Palmer, was busy negotiating a vastly increased grant from Arts Council England for the Poetry Society, at a time when many poetry organisations were going to the wall through reduced or withdrawn funding. That her efforts were heroic and a triumph for the Poetry Society is not in dispute.

However, John Simmons of the Board informed us that 'increased funding brought increased responsibilities' for the Director. The Trustees soon became 'concerned by stress caused by Judith's hard work' and decided, apparently without consulting her, that she 'needed to delegate more' and to take some leave. The Director was excluded from meetings at which decisions were made concerning the Editor, with the result that after the Director returned from a two week holiday she found that the Editor no longer had to report to her, but could bypass her authority and report directly to the Board.

When asked for more details about this later on, it was blithely admitted by the Chair, Laura Bamford, that some of these decisions were first discussed 'at a party'. You can imagine the astonished noises, shouts and grimaces from the membership that accompanied this candid revelation.

In response to these actions, the Director resigned. She was immediately excluded from the building, her keys removed, her email account cancelled, and staff were told not to speak to her in any way or allow her access. Naturally irate, she allegedly made a 'verbal threat' of a legal nature to members of the Board.

In response to this 'verbal threat', the Board hired Harbottle & Lewis, the firm of solicitors currently also acting for the Murdochs in the phone hacking scandal, to 'protect the Poetry Society from legal threat'.

When asked about this decision, which they admit has so far cost the Poetry Society £24,000, over a fifth of their financial reserves accumulated over the past 100 years, the Board claimed not to know that, as a charity, they could have consulted ACAS and obtained free legal advice.

Nor could they provide any explanation for their continuing use of these lawyers, considering that no actual legal threat was or has subsequently been made in writing to the Poetry Society. The Chair gave some insubstantial account of 'other' occasions of this same verbal threat, but seemed quite unable to respond in any coherent manner to an accusation by former Chair of the Poetry Society, Anne-Marie Fyfe, that 'abusive' phone calls had been made to her and the content of private emails used in an alleged attempt to intimidate the Director into dropping her 'verbal threat'.

Former Finance Officer, Paul Ranford, a man of great integrity, stood up and confirmed that he had been asked about overdraft possibilities and also if 22 Betterton Street, the current Poetry Society London headquarters, had been valued. The obvious inference to be drawn from such questions is that the Board was preparing for a protracted legal battle which would eat into or perhaps entirely consume the Society reserves to such an extent that further sources of revenue would be necessary for the Society to continue functioning.

By the way, if I was on the Board, I'd want to ask Colman Getty for a refund on the additional £3000's worth of PR advice they also allegedly sought. This whole fiasco, after all, has been a PR disaster.

Eventually, a motion of No Confidence was called for by Laurie Smith and a simple show of hands asked for. Various shenanigans were then immediately put in play by pro-Board members to delay and confuse the voting procedure. Once these had been dealt with, we moved to a poll vote, which resulted in a resounding victory for the requisitioners of 302 votes for the motion, 69 against, and 11 abstentions.

The membership was so exhausted by this stage that the news that the requisitioners' motion had been carried - and easily too, after all the manipulative games and obstructions of the preceding weeks - was received with complete silence.

The Board was then presented with the names of four members willing to stand as interim Board members. Despite the fact that the Board have resigned and undergone a vote of No Confidence from 302 members present at the meeting or represented by proxy, under our own constitutional rules they are apparently required to stay in office for the next few months at least, and also to make their own decision on which three of these four members should be allowed to join the Board as co-opted and additional members.

There were repeated and very loud and passionate calls for some of the Board at least to step down immediately, and therefore make room for more members to be co-opted on. The Board absolutely declined to do so, however, and showed no observable remorse for their actions.

And now to my title for this blog post.

I have entitled this 'A New Dawn for the Poetry Society' because I know that many members feel utterly betrayed by what has happened. They either feel betrayed by a Board of Trustees who have been reckless and cavalier with our very meagre resources, or they feel betrayed by the requisitioners themselves, for daring to call this Board to account for its actions, thereby highlighting to the outside world that the Poetry Society is unable to govern itself appropriately.

We cannot pretend that potentially far-reaching divisions have not been created by this scandal, nor can we hope that people will soon forget who took which side in this, and why. We cannot ignore the sad fact that ACE has apparently decided to withhold the successful grant bid put together by the now departed Director until it is convinced of the Poetry Society's fitness to govern itself and continue in its proper business of promoting poetry to the nation. Even with a vote of No Confidence carried, and the Board on its (treacle-slow) way out the door, poets cannot hope to escape this unscathed.

But we will soon have a new Board to elect, and a new chance to impress Arts Council England that our house is back in order.

I therefore urge everyone involved in poetry in the UK not to allow this dispute to continue on after this week, with ordinary members discouraged from renewing their membership or becoming involved in governance and decision-making, and non-member poets considering the Poetry Society a mismanaged collective of egos whose interests are too far from their own to make any difference to their world.

There may be, and certainly has been recently, some truth to the latter. But this is no time for apathy and disaffection, or for giving up and walking away from the Society. This is an opportunity for a new lease of life for the Society, and for a new openness and transparency in the Society's dealings that can only benefit us all.

It's also an opportunity for us to see ourselves as a collective of committed individuals with a common cause rather than many different people pulling in different directions and getting nowhere. Many of us have come together as one for this issue. Let's not drift apart again, but stay together and see what we can achieve en masse.

So get involved and stay involved. Even if you don't intend to stand for Board nomination - and we need nominees with sound administration skills and expertise rather than good poets - do at least make sure you keep renewing your membership, that you visit your local Stanza group, that you read, write and support poetry at all levels - and don't lose touch with any new acquaintances you may have made over this requisition.

We know now that we all care about poetry deeply enough to come together at a time of crisis, some of us at great cost and from opposite ends of the country.

Even if we were on different 'sides' yesterday, let's put those divisions away now, and use our collective energy to achieve something wonderful together.

Resignation from Embrace Books

Yesterday afternoon, I resigned as Executive Editor for Embrace Books, the popular fiction imprint of Salt Publishing.

I wish all the writers there long and successful careers, and have thoroughly enjoyed the process of running a small independent fiction imprint, from commissioning writers through to helping to promote their books.

I've learnt a vast amount about writing and editing fiction from my work at Embrace Books. Editing is not a job for the faint-hearted, nor indeed the brutally honest. I had to develop skills as an editor that I'd never needed before as a writer - like being tactful, for instance!

It's also challenged me to grow in social terms. Being an editor isn't all about staring at a computer screen for hours or scribbling on manuscripts. Writers can get away with that kind of isolated lifestyle but editors can't. Needing to go out and meet authors in person, do the rounds at the London Book Fair, write long chatty emails, talk at conferences, and generally behave like a normal social creature has been immensely good for me. In fact, I may never slink back into my cave again!

I shall be concentrating on my own writing from now on, largely as Victoria Lamb, and can only hope it has benefited from a year spent on the other side of the desk.

Many heartfelt thanks, meanwhile, to all the lovely authors with whom I've worked at Embrace, and to the team at Salt who supported me in my work there. It's been an amazing year!

SOLD! My Tudor Witch series is acquired by Random House Children's Books.

It's been a fantastic, fast-moving day here. My agent phoned at around lunchtime to say that a publishing deal was on the table for my Tudor Witch Young Adult series. I discussed the finer details with him, hung up, and tried not to get too excited about the whole thing - though of course I was!

I tinkered with one of my manuscripts and answered a few emails, tidied my desk, sauntered out for a coffee, occasionally glanced at my inbox.

Then I got the very exciting call I'd been waiting for from my agent.

Random House Children's Books have acquired the first book, WITCHSTRUCK, and the next two books in the series. The series should launch next summer under the name Victoria Lamb, a few months after the publication of my first adult Tudor novel, THE QUEEN'S SECRET, with Transworld, also part of the Random House Group.

I'm hugely pleased and want to thank everyone who's been so supportive of my efforts on Facebook and Twitter and here on Raw Light over the past year. I know it can get confusing when I keep posting under different names, and people have been very patient and understanding about that.

I'm really looking forward to meeting the team at RHCB now. Which I shall do later this summer. And I expect a Victoria Lamb website and blog will be launching in the autumn.

To quote one of my favourite films, Almost Famous, "It's all happening!"

The Guardian takes up the Poetrygate story again

You can find more on the Poetrygate scandal in today's Guardian.

Great photo.

Will it work, though? The Guardian reports:

"I have a horrible feeling they are wriggling," said Clanchy. "It's really difficult to get 10% of the Poetry Society together. It's like herding cats. But here we are, and they have to listen."

Herding cats. That's an image to take away with you.

The Red Wheelbarrow Gang

Photo: Roderic Vincent

Today, at 3.30pm, poetry history will be has now been made. [Updated with photo at 16.40]

A shiny red wheelbarrow - thanks for the concept, William Carlos Williams! - will arrive at the Poetry Society HQ in Betterton Street, London, this afternoon.

It will contain the following official requisition to which well over 400 Poetry Society members have now put their names:

We, the undersigned, constituting as we believe ten percent of the members of The Poetry Society, having learnt of the resignation of the Chair of the Board of Trustees and the Director, the Finance Manager and the President of the Society, and in order to determine whether, in these extraordinary circumstances, the Board of Trustees has our continuing confidence, require the Board to hold an Extraordinary General Meeting, with a Chair elected by that meeting, to provide an explanation of the practices, policies and changes in policy which led to these resignations, and to answer questions on this matter from the floor. In order to avoid unreasonable expense to the Society, we require the Extraordinary General Meeting to be held before or instead of the General Meeting called by the Society at 2pm on 22 July 2011.

Feeling is strong, expectation is high. If you haven't a clue what all this kerfuffle is about, Ms Baroque in Hackney has made several good stabs at an overview.

To join the intrepid gang delivering this historic demand, meet up at the Cross Keys pub in Endell Street at 3.15pm today, Tuesday 5th July 2011.

Rock-Paper-Scissors: Week Two of Poetrygate

Today's official message in the ongoing Poetry Society scandal - now five resignations, no explanations - came from Laura Bamford, Acting Chair of the Board of Trustees:

NOTICE OF GENERAL MEETING

The Poetry Society (Incorporated)
Company Number 01557657

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN  that a General Meeting  of the above-named company will be held in Lecture Theatre 1, The Royal College of Surgeons, 35-43 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PE on Friday 22 July 2011 at 2.00pm for the following purpose:

To outline the future strategy of The Poetry Society and to receive members’ input

Dated 30 June 2011
By order of the Board

Laura Bamford
Acting Chair

Yes, we wanted a meeting. But no, this is not the one we wanted. We want to know WHY five people have now resigned from the Staff and the Board of Trustees of the Poetry Society. Not what the Board hopes to achieve in the aftermath of those resignations.

Fascinating though it will be to 'outline the future strategy' and deliver our input as members, there does not appear to be any room for manoeuvre in the Agenda of this General Meeting. 

And why on earth is this being called a GM, not an EGM? Is that so the Board can look as though it is not bowing to any external pressure by calling this meeting, but has done so of its own sweet accord in order to be helpful to the membership?

Members need to be aware that this is rapidly becoming a game of rock-paper-scissors. We hold out paper, they go for scissors. We produce scissors, they show us a rock. 

I, for one, intend to stick to my original purpose in signing the list of members who require an EGM to be called by the Poetry Society. 

And that is not only to ask for full and frank disclosure of the events leading up to the recent resignations of four Staff members and now the Chair of the Board of Trustees, so that I may be confident that everything has been done in accordance with the rules of the Society, but also to ask why so many of our administrators felt the need to resign.

These are questions that must be asked of the Board. Nothing less than the whole, unadulterated truth can be accepted.

I would strongly urge any remaining members who have not yet given their names to Kate Clanchy in support of an EGM to do so now, so we may get to the bottom of this travesty of democracy as soon as possible.

kateclanchy @ gmail.com

Mslexia Workshop: Encouraging New Poems

The next instalment of my writing workshops for the Mslexia 2011 Poetry Competition, judged by Jo Shapcott, is now up on the Mslexia website.

It's entitled Encouraging New Poems.

Poems beget poems. The more poems you write, the more you will find waiting to be written. So when you hit a rich vein, don’t rest after you’ve finished your first draft and put it aside to mature. Keep hammering away at the wordface. 

Ted Hughes believed that poem sequences are a good way of generating new poetry, particularly during a creative dry spell. Sometimes you sit down to write something new and the words won’t come. Linking poems together can help to maintain the momentum of previous inspiration ...

Read more and follow the exercises for this instalment.

Buy A Book

Grab me on Amazon.co.uk

I spend a few minutes each day tracking sales of the various books I've edited for Embrace Books. Some days it's good, some days I zip over to Twitter or Facebook to nudge the publicity machine along another notch.

Now and then, I also check my own sales.

Novel Rank, the excellent site I check most often and which tracks Amazon sales, has started telling me a sorry but familiar tale in poetry. Sales of my latest book, Camper Van Blues, have stalled after a promising few months.

So if anyone has not yet bought my latest poetry collection, Camper Van Blues, I'd be thrilled if you could give my sales a jump-start on Amazon UK, or over on Amazon.com for those in the US.

To read more about Camper Van Blues, or buy it directly through Salt Publishing, just click here.

What else?

Leaving a review on Amazon after buying, or sharing those Amazon links on Facebook or Twitter - such actions would be deeply welcome too. It would give me a warm glow to know I had garnered a few extra sales of my own book while the others I track are also selling.

"Poetrygate": your chance to stand up and be counted

There's trouble at the Poetry Society. A few weeks ago, the President, Director and Finance Officer of the Society resigned, without explanation.

Much of the ensuing controversy has been connected to a lack of clarity from the Society following these events. The resignations have been made public, yes. But members of the Society have not been given any clear explanation for why these resignations occurred, nor been allowed any official discussion of how we move forward as a Society. It seems a reasonable request for full disclosure to be granted to the membership if these resignations are in any way connected.

The Evening Standard came up with some further information, but no more than was already privately circulating between members.

Some bloggers and other commentators are now starting to discuss the matter, but timidly, most not wishing to find themselves sidelined later for having been one of 'the hardy few', as Ms Baroque puts it, who dared discuss the matter. A recent post went up at Carrie Etter's blog and was removed after a torrent of libellous comments appeared, the debate unceremoniously erased.

Now people are beginning to draw comparisons between recent events and the Poetry Wars of the 1970s, when barricades were manned at the old Po Soc HQ and poets huddled about the braziers for six long years, warming their hands on copies of each other's Selected Works.

The Evening Standard claims that all this furore has come about because "Fiona Sampson, editor of the Poetry Review, the magazine overseen by the Society, had asked for autonomy from the director, and has been pushing the focus of the society from education to promoting high-profile poets."

I have known Fiona Sampson a number of years. She is a fine editor with excellent and pleasingly eclectic tastes in poetry. Far from being elitist, as has been suggested, she has featured both well-known and small press poets in most issues, and has encouraged greater depth in poetry criticism by commissioning long critical essays for the magazine. (A bold move, even if not all those essays turned out to be equally gripping and apposite.) Whatever has gone on behind closed doors, I feel certain Fiona Sampson will have acted with the best interests of Poetry Review at heart, and that she does not deserve the vitriol that has been aimed at her in recent weeks.

Unfortunately, of course, Poetry Review is the flagship magazine of the Poetry Society. As such, it needs to fulfil quite a broad range of objectives, only one of which is to promote high-profile poets.

In light of all this, I urge members of the Poetry Society to lend their names to the call for an Emergency General Meeting, to discuss these recent events and forge a way forward for the Board and the Membership.

The reason I ask this is that we are currently experiencing a crisis in confidence among the more professionally active members of the Society, and that crisis must be addressed, not simply ignored.

I also ask that, until we have the full facts before us, critics of the Board and the editor of Poetry Review behave in a civilised manner. There is something deeply unpleasant about the sight of an angry mob hounding one individual above all others.

Apathy gives us the government we deserve. But at least members are being given the opportunity to step up and voice their dissatisfaction. But we can't do that without 340 names.

Will yours be one of them?

To Get Involved:

Anyone who is a member of the Poetry Society and would like to sign the following petition, please email Kate at kateclanchy@gmail.com and she'll put you on the list. She will not share your contact or publicise you until the list reaches 340 when it will be handed in to the Poetry Society, along with the following message:

We, the undersigned, constituting as we believe ten percent of the members of the Poetry Society, having learnt of the resignation of the Chair of the Board of Trustees and the Director, the Finance Manager and the President of the Society, and in order to determine whether the Board of Trustees has their continuing confidence, require the Board to hold an Extraordinary General Meeting to provide an explanation, in the transparent and accountable manner the members  expect of its elected representatives, of the events leading to these resignations; an independently chaired forum for the statements of members and for their questions; and a detailed account of how the Board will continue the business of the Society in accordance with its stated aims and purposes.

Latest Update: more information at the Guardian. The list of signatories currently stands at 323, as of 2pm Thursday 30th June 2011.

Roll up! Roll up! The Tin Angel rides again!

Back in the day, in the narrow-laned medieval streets of Coventry, we had a buzzing poetry open mic night called NIGHTBLUEFRUIT AT THE TIN ANGEL.

The Tin Angel was the name of the bar where we met on the first Tuesday of every month to recite and listen to poetry, stand-up and occasionally music. It was a tiny corner joint with dodgy toilets where everyone had to cram in and the windows ran with condensation by the end of the night. The evening was organised by Jon Morley of the local poetry press, Heaventree.

Then the Tin Angel closed.

For a while, Nightbluefruit drifted from place to place, homeless and unsure, bleeding regulars.

Now it's back on track, and playing out at Taylor Johns in Coventry's Canal Basin. If you're in the region, why not go along? The next open mic night is July 5th, 8pm.

The poster above is by the massively talented Coventry-based artist Colin Dick, pictured below. Click on his name to see an article about his work at Horizon Review, with numerous examples of his amazing paintings.

Five Things You Need When Writing A Novel

A Writing Space 
Virginia Woolf wrote an entire treatise - A Room Of One's Own - about the need for women to have a room of their own, not simply to develop as writers but also as individuals. Frankly though, it applies equally to both sexes. 

It doesn’t need to be an actual room – though my output has increased substantially since I rented myself an office downtown – but it must be established as your ‘writing space’, a place and maybe also a time you associate with settling down to write, even if it’s only that half-hour commute on the bus or train every morning. 

Try to establish a rhythm in association with these special writing spaces, and keep to a routine as far as possible. More than anything, writing responds to routine. Feed your novel regularly and it will grow strong and healthy. Forget to check in, and it will quite rapidly wither and die.

Stamina 

Some people call this will-power, focus, determination, patience, stickatititus, etc. If your novel is over 100,000 words long, it may feel as though you need an inexhaustible supply. Even if it’s a shorter book, like a novella, it will still need to go through several drafts before it’s publishable. So make sure your patience is on board before you type Chapter One.

Post-It Notes or Stickies

These are extremely useful for writers, as they can be instantly seized and scribbled upon when an idea strikes. No need to open a document on your computer or find a fresh page in your writing notebook which you will later leave on the bus. You just seize and stick. 

Will Self famously plasters his study walls with these sticky notes when planning a novel, so you’ll be in good company. (How on earth does he get them to stay on, though? Mine always fall off after a few hours, even the expensive sort. Grr.) 

They’re not very durable though, and tend to end up littering the floor under your desk, so it’s a good idea to transfer any important notes to computer later on, when you’re not actually in mid-flow.

Index cards

These are the thick paper notecards students often use for exam revision. You can buy them in bound books, which I don't think are flexible enough as a tool for writers, or little boxes to store them in, alphabetically or as you will. Some people use them to plot out their story, but I use index cards for research rather than planning. 

You can order index cards online or buy them at places like WH Smiths

When I take notes during research, I often find later that I’ve forgotten where I put them or I can’t find the right note quickly enough because it’s buried inside a giant notepad or folder. So index cards, filed in categories in a box, can be a real timesaver. 

Index cards tend to come in plain white or a selection of pastel shades. If you need categories in your note-taking, try using a different colour for each category. This can shorten the hunt when looking up a particular fact halfway through a scene.

When researching, one drawback is having to note down on each card where you found that particular fact: page number, book, author, publisher, date etc. But you could use an abbreviation and provide a key at the front of the card box. If you’re organised enough.

Large Whiteboard

This is an absolutely vital piece of equipment for me as a writer, and my personal favourite. Some years ago I homeschooled my kids, and that was when I learned the beauty of the whiteboard. 

It’s versatile and non-static – you can clean it off and start again every day, every week or every month. It’s large, so you can use it to plan a multi-strand novel with all the different character streams and their plot arcs. It can be placed above or beside your desk as a reminder while you work, and can be used over and over again for future projects. 

The large whiteboard can be a writing tool or a motivational tool. It can allow you to tick off books or internet sites you need to check out. It can plot monthly sales on Kindle or remind you about the ham sandwich you left in the office fridge. It can be used to plot complex graphs in full colour if you like that kind of thing, and it can take up useful time when you need to procrastinate. 

You can get one with a corkboard area too, but I prefer to buy a separate corkboard and use the whole space of the large whiteboard for my notes. 

Writers! What would you add to this list of writing essentials?

My Editor Is Moving On

Sorry to see my lovely and very talented editor, Selina Walker, moving on from Transworld to Century/Arrow.

But I'm sure she'll make a great success of the new job!

For those who are interested in my fiction activities, here are the details of her move at the Bookseller today.

Meanwhile, I'm still working on the second novel in my Tudor trilogy for Transworld, HIS DARK LADY, which is stuffed full of intrigue, politics, espionage, theatrical goings-on, courtly splendour, grisly high-profile executions and, of course, forbidden love.

THE QUEEN'S SECRET will be out in March 2012, under the name Victoria Lamb.

The Writing Spark

It's that time of year again. Mslexia, the women's writing magazine, are holding their annual Poetry Competition 2011, and have asked me to provide another series of online workshops to accompany it. Deadline for entries to the competition is July 18th.

These particular workshops guide you through the process of writing a poem from the initial spark of an idea through to submitting to a competition or magazine.

Apparently, the workshop series I created for Mslexia last time was a very popular feature of the website, which is highly gratifying. It's always good to know you've helped someone else with their writing, and even better when it's several someones!

Anyone interested in following the series this year, you can find workshop number one here. It's entitled THE SPARK OF A POEM.

The next few workshops should follow soon. Once that happens there'll be links in the Mslexia sidebar to guide you through to them. The last series are also still on the site. Just search for "Holland Workshops" and a list of previous writing workshops should pop up.

Southern Writers Conference

I'm off next weekend to speak as a guest at the Southern Writers Conference in Chichester.

I'll be talking about poetry, and even reading some of my own if they can't stop me quickly enough. If you're in the area next weekend - Friday 10th to Sunday 12th June - and are interested in writing, there may still be day tickets available.

I'm speaking on the Sunday morning, I believe.

Here are some of the other speakers' details:

Raffaella Barker, author of nine novels and contributor to the Evening Standard, Spectator and Elle, amongst others.  She is also an experienced teacher of creative writing.

Simon Hall, crime writer and (appropriately enough) the BBC’s crime correspondent for the South West.  He also narrates his own audio books.

Jane Holland, award-winning poet and novelist as well as being an ex professional snooker player.  She hasn’t offered any lessons on the Earnley table, but I’m sure that’s just because we haven’t asked.

Catherine King, well known author of popular romantic novels set in 19th century Yorkshire. Catherine will be well known to a lot of regular attendees at SWC.

Kathy Gale, with over 20 years of book publishing experience including editorial, marketing and sales management. She should make for a fascinating Saturday afternoon speaker.

Feeling Political?

This arrived today from Jody Porter at The Morning Star: 

 

Dear poets, publishers and editors,

I have recently taken over as poetry editor for the daily UK newspaper The Morning Star [link] and I'm looking for submissions of new or previously published poems.

Under the stewardship of the late and esteemed John Rety, Well Versed developed into a widely-read forum for new and established writers. It appears every Thursday and submissions will also be published and archived online.

Please send submissions, with biographical information, to: wveditor [at] gmail [dot] com

Poems need not be overtly political, but space is limited so they must be short to medium in length.

Please forward this message on to anyone who might be interested in submitting work. Any tweets or blog reposts spreading the word would be greatly appreciated.

The Latent Power of the Diary

I don't keep a diary these days, though I did keep one sporadically when I was younger. Which means my children and posterity will have little clue as to how I was feeling on a day-to-day basis, nor what I was up to.

In some ways the blog has taken over the role of the diary. Our diarists are bloggers. But how intimate is a blog, really? Our most private thoughts can rarely be voiced in a public, or even semi-private, blog. Which means the deep dark secrets of the diary must remain forever locked away in our hearts. That may be a good thing for some. For others, it's a pity.

My mother (the novelist Charlotte Lamb) kept a diary for a large swathe of her life. Some years there is a full page entry for every day, regardless of the fact that she may have also written as many as 17 novels in the same year. (For yes, that was how many novels she wrote in 1977-8, and other years in the Seventies were not too dissimilar in output.)

It's odd to read these diaries, and sometimes disturbing too. It's an eyeopener to get a more rounded view of a parent who wasn't forthcoming about her private thoughts and feelings, and it's also useful for me as a writer, for my mother reveals many of the typical issues and doubts as most other novelists - despite her success.

Much of her innermost thoughts are about her writing rather than her family. It's very much a Writer's Diary (she loved reading Virginia Woolf's diaries herself).

But now and then I get a mention, which is comforting. (Though sometimes not!) My memories of my childhood are pretty cloudy, but I do remember this day below. It was fantastic to come across it in her diary and remember the actual events, from Saturday 2nd October 1976:

We went up to London at noon to have lunch at Luigi's and then went to the British Museum so that Jane could look at her favourite Egyptian rooms. She loves them. Then we went to Islington to St. George's to see Richard III. Jane really loved that. She caught Alan Badel's eye & he began to "ham" in her direction. The more she laughed, the more he played the pantomime demon-king. 

The following month, my mother was diagnosed with a "massive tumour", after months of illness, and successfully underwent surgery to remove it.

I was completely unaware of this until I read her diaries, though I remember her disappearing into hospital for a few weeks around that time. I suppose, in the Seventies, in middle-class families, such problems were not openly discussed. Even today illness is rarely discussed in much detail. People 'die suddenly' or have 'long illnesses' which are otherwise unexplained. Perhaps we're still not very far removed from the Victorian aura of silence around the family in that respect. That may be a good thing. I can't decide.

Top Ten Bestseller!

Quick - look now before it updates!

My most recent collection of poetry, Camper Van Blues, has somehow managed to creep into the Salt Publishing Top Ten Bestsellers' list. You can find the list near the bottom of the Salt front page.

Just land there and scroll down.

I may need an alcoholic drink to revive me after that shock ...

London Book Fair

Had an amazing day yesterday at the London Book Fair, sited at Earl's Court. Sorry this photo of the exterior is a bit thin. Taken on my iPhone.

Apologies to all those friends and acquaintances who were also there yesterday but I didn't manage to catch up with. I know many Twitter and Facebook friends were about, and I did spot some and wave or have a quick chat - such as Danuta Kean, Carol McGrath, Kate Allan, and Lyn Vernham among others - but I missed a whole bunch of that crowd by failing to make the London Book Fair Tweetup.

Not my fault, I hadn't realised events would be on so late and booked my train for 8pm, then found that to change my Advance ticket would cost over thirty quid. Which seemed a bit steep, even for the undoubted pleasure of a LBF Tweetup. So I trundled home instead, and my sore feet thanked me for it.

Had a productive day, meeting people in independent publishing and discussing Embrace Books, and my role there as editor. I took along Rachel Lyndhurst's Storm's Heart beautiful glossy print edition as a sample, and allowed people to fondle it jealously.

And as an author myself, I met up with both my editors at Transworld, and also with my lovely and fantastically talented agent, Luigi Bonomi - who is very excited about the Young Adult novel I'm currently writing.

I received back some line edits on my forthcoming novel - in paper form, no less, egad! roughly 550 pages to carry home - and met some new faces in publishing as my alter-ego, a historical novelist.

It was a brilliant day and I thoroughly enjoyed it. A massively busy place though - must have walked about ten miles just going round and round the hundreds of stalls!

York Festival of Writing 2011

Going to the York Festival of Writing on Friday was an oddly exhilarating experience, rather like emerging into the light from a narrow, grimly-lit tunnel.

 I'd been living alone in a remote cottage on the edge of the North Yorks Moors during the week beforehand, writing the first 25,000 words of a new novel, so had enjoyed little contact with anyone - bar a few hours when my iPhone suddenly decided it had a signal, and I was able to send and receive tweets and a few Facebook messages.

But on the Friday, I left my rural retreat and drove through York - a lively, crowded city with many attractions - and on to the university campus, where the Festival of Writing was taking place.

I met so many industry people, it's hard to explain just how enormously useful this particular festival has become for writers.

I was a speaker - talking about my other incarnation as a romance editor at Embrace Books - and also took some pitches from writers. So I met plenty of interesting people that way, and hopefully gave my best pointers on writing romance in my talk.

But it was in the informal interactions - at meal or break-times, or in the long glamorous evenings at the bar - that the Festival really came into its own. We all had name badges, and soon knew most of each other's names, despite there being several hundred people there.

Which was a good thing, as it's embarrassing to be forever peering at your neighbour's breasts.

Those who made a big impact on me are too numerous to mention, but a good starting list would include Philippa Pride, who is Stephen King's editor and also a renowned Book Doctor; Lorella Belli, a London agent and incredibly glamorous, besides being a great conversationalist; Donna Condon, commissioning editor at Piatkus; Patrick Janson-Smith, formerly MD at Transworld, now at HarperCollins with the Blue Door imprint; Ashley Pharoah, the utterly gorgeous creator of cult TV series like Life on Mars, and an extremely funny man; Carole Blake, brilliant literary agent; and writers Jean Fullerton, Debi Alper, Kate Allan, Jane Lovering, Tim Murgatroyd, Louise Allen, Toby Frost, Julie Cohen, and many, many other wonderful authors, agents and editors who wandered in and out of my conversations all weekend, handed me manuscripts at meal-times, in the ladies' toilets or during seminars, and even stood me numerous drinks at the bar when I was looking thirsty.

Such a hard life, being an editor ...

I would heartily recommend the York Festival of Writing to anyone thinking of getting into writing, or improving their lot there, for such a stellar cast would be hard to better.

The Endless "To Do" List

It often feels these days as though I have an endless and bewildering "To Do" list, which keeps rolling and threatening to overwhelm me.

Everything goes onto my "To Do" list: my daily editing jobs, my own writing goals, children's dental or clinic appointments, my husband's weekly shirt wash, bills to be paid, general housework, gardening, food shopping, the car MOT, book reviews I've foolishly offered to write, family birthdays, personal letters I keep putting off, and even interviews I've agreed to do.

What keeps me on top of most of this multi-tasking? (I do fumble the ball occasionally, it can't be denied.) Believe it or not, it is this humble product below: the Pukka "Things To Do" book. 

 

I have not been paid to say this, but this little notebook has saved my bacon on more than one occasion. I fill it out religiously every evening, listing jobs for the following day, with any tasks left undone rolling onto the next day. Then I cross each one off the list as I achieve it.

My memory is so rubbish, I genuinely need something like this. It has 115 daily planners, with a large notes section opposite each list, so can contain far more information than could be squeezed onto an office whiteboard and, as long as I don't lose it or other factors intervene, it keeps me on track with all my various jobs.

Right. Now I can cross off "Update my blog at Raw Light". Phew.