Time catches up with us all

Regular readers will know how exciting this is for me: today, for the first time in about eighteen months, I have been able to go into the University Library without an appointment and walk freely around the stacks – and then return to my very favourite desk, on North Front 5, among the German books which I cannot read and so am not tempted to browse, with a view of King’s Chapel (you might just spot its four towers):

I am, of course and inexplicably, hopelessly behind with “Plank 7” – no writing retreat for me this year, but you’d think, with the endless months of lock-down, I’ve have written at least three more novels by now.  But there it is, and I am making some progress: today’s task is the assembling of the timeline, as so far all references to time-frame are in square brackets, like this: “Goodness, is it really [[three weeks]] since I last spoke to him?”  As “Plank 7” sees the arrival of the Met Police, there are certain dates to which I must adhere – passing of new legislation, swearing-in of new constables, first cadre of men out on patrol, etc. – and it’s a pretty tight schedule (from passing of legislation, via recruitment and training of a thousand men, to first patrol was just over three months!).  So my ambition today is to check that it is physically possible, given the Met timetable and the other constraints on life at the time – journey times, court schedules, etc. – that my characters can actually do what I am telling them to do.  And you thought only modern life was time-pressured!

Back at last

Today I visited the Cambridge University Library – my spiritual home and happy place – for the first time since (I think) March.  It wasn’t the carefree immersion of old: I had to book my visit ahead of time and specify the maximum five books that I wanted them to leave on my allocated desk.  No wandering around the open stacks, no snooping around the special collections just to wallow in knowledge, no sniffing the air in the Rare Books Room.  But still, I was sitting in the vaulted Reading Room, with ten books at my elbow.  (Five book limit – pah!  Ask for something that comes in six volumes et voilà!)

I had planned to limit my research for “Plank 7” to the new things I intend to include – Crockford’s gambling club, and London’s sanitation system, for instance.  (Now you’re intrigued… And if you’d like to know more about that sanitation stuff, do sign up for my monthly research updates, as that’s my topic for the next one.)  But my perusing of the UL catalogue turned up a couple of publications on the history of policing that I had missed before and I couldn’t resist ordering them as well.  And I will admit that I opened them with trepidation.

As regular readers will know, I am a devil for historical accuracy.  It’s unfortunate, because I am both pedantic and unskilled as a historian.  But if it’s in my power to find it out, I will do so, and I will make sure that it is reflected accurately in the Sam books.  This means that I live in fear of discovering something new that makes my earlier writing inaccurate.  I don’t mind (much…) if my earlier writing has gaps in it, as I can fill those in as I go along, working them into plots of later books.  But if something is actually wrong – shudder!  Thankfully, today was a day for illumination rather than contradiction.  And my top three favourite facts I learned are:

• William Crockford – who owned London’s finest and most aspirational gambling club, which counted the (prudent and non-gambling) Duke of Wellington amongst its members – dressed like a poor country farmer and spoke with “rough cockney tones”
• The wine cellar below Crockford’s was 285 feet long, and contained 300,000 bottles valued at £70,000 in total [that’s about £4.8 million in today’s money]
• The new Metropolitan Police were given a recognisable uniform to wear partly to reassure the public that they were not government spies.

Writing by the hour

Like so many people, I have found my creativity nose-diving during recent months – constant low-level anxiety and uncertainty, it seems, are not conducive to imaginative thought.  But this cannot go on: if I don’t pull myself together, writing-wise, I am going to miss my own deadline and (much more importantly) lose confidence in my ability to write books.  I’ll look back on my novels as an historical anomaly: look what I was once able to do, but never again.

I have tried several tacks.  I took a whole fortnight off from thinking about writing and told myself that even if I wanted to write, I wasn’t allowed to – you will recognise the reverse psychology, and it didn’t work.  I spoke to some writer friends about it, and they all agreed: these are strange times for “creatives”.  But some of them said they had given up entirely while others said they welcomed the lack of distraction from holidays and waiting out and had been wildly productive – neither of which helped.  I thought that perhaps the familiarity of the location was a problem, or the use of a computer, so I armed myself with a spiffy notebook and pen and went to sit on a park bench, hoping that the muse would come and sit with me (at a safe social distance), but it didn’t work – I watched people playing tennis and feeding ducks and eating picnics, and I daydreamed and wrote not a single word.  I can’t even fall back on my usual creativity-boosting ploy – a day in the University Library with a cheese scone at elevenses – as it’s still shut to almost everyone.

So I have gone back to basics.  I am tired of pandering to the elusive muse, and instead I will beat him/her into submission by simply turning up and staring at him/her.  I have undertaken to write for thirty minutes a day, and I have even mastered the timer on my phone so that I can measure it.  If I want to carry on for longer that’s fine, but I have to do at least thirty minutes.  It’s been three days so far, and I’ve managed it – and am even starting to feel the writing muscles loosen up a little.  I’m a very routine-y person and am good at sticking to commitments, so maybe this tactic will play to my strengths.  Fingers crossed – and now to set the timer for today’s session.

Happy publication day to me

As an indie publisher, I am responsible for all aspects of my book’s production – including celebrating its launch day.  So today’s the day, folks: “Heir Apparent” is now officially launched!  Hurrah!  To mark the occasion, I have taken the day off work and devoted myself to matters cultural and, specifically, bookish.  My first port of call was the Cambridge University Library, where I dropped off a copy of the book to be added to their collection (posterity and all that) and visited their current exhibition: “The Rising Tide” looks at the history of women at the university and is terrific.  I particularly enjoyed discovering that women who campaigned to be awarded degrees (the cheek – of course we should have been happy to do all the same work but not get the recognition at the end) were condemned as “nasty forward minxes”.  Anyway, here’s the front of the UK with its wonderful book bollards – you can spin the books around and make them as neat or random as you want.

I then toddled along to Heffers – the university bookshop – and admired the display of “Heir Apparent” on the ledge in the crime fiction department.  For those who do not know Heffers, “the ledge” is a fab place to be, as it’s just at eye-catching and browsing height.

After that it was an excursion to the Fitzwilliam Museum to inspect the recently renovated ceiling of their main gallery – just look at that moulding.

They also had an exhibition of Rembrandt’s sketches of nudes, and I reckon that this one is ignoring him because she’s reading in bed.

And through it all I wore my most celebratory wet-weather footwear: red Fly boots.

All by myself

You know that saying, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”?  Well, I am really struggling today with that first part – accepting things I cannot change.  One of my reasons for publishing “Faith, Hope and Trickery” on the date I did was to have my own big box of books from CreateSpace in my grubby paws by today, because tomorrow I am off on holiday for a week (hurrah!).  In order to do that, I paid handsomely for super-duper-über-speedy delivery.  And I waited.  Last Thursday I had a little email from CreateSpace to say that my parcel had been dispatched, and giving me the UPS tracking numbers.  Of which UPS had never heard.  And – skipping over the boring bits – yesterday I heard from CreateSpace: “I researched your account and found an unexpected delay in the shipping process.  We’re working to resolve the technical issue and will ship your order as soon as possible.”  With the best will in the world, that parcel is not going to arrive today.  And breathe….

On the positive side, two bookshops have already said that they want to stock the book – one is taking three copies, and the other is taking ten.  I have three reviewers lined up, champing at the bit to get their books, and of course I want to stroke my vanity by submitting a copy to the hallowed archives of the University Library.  All of this, however, will now have to wait until CreateSpace remembers that its role in life is to print books and send them out.  I bet this doesn’t happen to John Grisham.

(On the matter I raised the other day – about whether to keep “Fatal Forgery” as a bargain Kindle book – one friend has said this: “My instincts around your 99p question is that if you price something too low, then people may cease to value it.  I find myself not buying really cheap books in the supermarket because I imagine they must somehow be ‘bad’ books if they are that cheap.  I am probably wrong in that assumption but it stops me buying.”  Any other thoughts?)

A collection of columns

I’m in a bind: I have come up with a Top Tip for writing, but I can’t implement it myself, except in the short term.  Here it is: live alone.  My husband is away on a two-week business trip; we’re halfway through, and this has given me time to revert to my natural sleep/wake cycle – wake at 5.30am, lights out at 10pm at the very latest – and so gets lots and lots of writing done in the early morning, when I am at my most productive.  Of course I can’t wait until he gets home, but in the meantime, I am now writing two books.

Yes, two.  There is “Plank 5” (formerly known as “Plank 6”), of course, and I had the luxury of a WHOLE DAY in the University Library yesterday, researching early nineteenth century cults (weirdos and wackos, to a man).  And now there is “Susan in the City, best of”.  For ten years – April 2016 to January 2017 – I wrote a weekly column, called “Susan in the City”, for our local newspaper, the Cambridge News.  And then came budget cuts, and I was out on my ear.  Lemons, lemonade and all that, and a writing friend (Debbie, that’s you) suggested that I could gather my favourite columns into a book.  I suggested it to my (ex-)editor, and he agreed – and so I have been reading all six hundred (six hundred!) plus columns in order to select the eighty that I want to go down in history as the crème de la crème of Susan.

But I do need your help – it’s that blasted title.  The column was “Susan in the City” and I probably need to retain that in order to attract the, oh, dozens of regular readers who will remember me.  I was thinking of “Susan in the City: The Best of Ten Years of Writing for the Cambridge News” – but is that too clunky?  I think I need to get the name of the newspaper in, for people who know it but not me.  And it would be misleading to leave out “Best of”, in case people think they’re getting all six hundred columns.  Ideas please!

“Portraits” is published!

Yes, yes – I know that the official publication time is 9am, but I couldn’t sleep.  It’s not quite the star-studded, champagne-fuelled launch party as seen in “Bridget Jones’s Diary”; rather, I am sitting here in my dressing gown, with the cat willing me to serve her breakfast rather than fiddling about with that screen thing.  However, I am celebrating later today by having lunch with my godmother (although she doesn’t know that’s what we’re celebrating) and by giving a copy of the book to the curator of miniatures at the Wallace Collection – one of the inspirations for “Portraits of Pretence”.  Next week I will savour the delivery of ceremonial copies of the book to the University Library and the Cambridge Central Library; as I child I lived in libraries, and always hoped that one day I would contribute to as well as borrowing from their stock.

And so, lords, ladies and gentlemen, I declare “Portraits of Pretence” officially published!

The thrill of history

Yesterday I treated myself to a whole day of research in my beloved Cambridge University Library.  I am at that delightful stage of “Plank 4” where I give myself permission to roam freely with my reading, to follow any story that interests me.  It’s not a stage that can last for long – although ideally it would last for the rest of my life – as I need to home in fairly quickly on my core plot so that I can be as discerning as Sam is in my enquiries.

But yesterday – ahhhh!  For reasons that may or may not make it into the final story, I spent time in the Rare Books Room (so rarefied that only pencils can be used within its precincts, and all books must be rested on cushions as you read them).  I asked for two publications: a French language guide from 1826 and a customs manual from 1829.  Let me just repeat that: a French language guide from 1826 and a customs manual from 1829.  And they handed me the actual items – both nearly two hundred years old.  I held them in my hands, put them reverently on their cushions, and lost myself in their world.  Who knows who owned them originally – perhaps one of Sam’s colleagues down at the docks, employed in levying excise duties on incoming cargo.  Or maybe a friend of Miss Lily Conant fancied learning French in order to increase her accomplishments in readiness for marriage.  But to think that these books have been preserved and are still cherished and protected, and that I, a jobbing writer, can take hold of them – I’m still reeling.  And that’s why I write my books set in the past – where’s the thrill in describing email and spin classes and Range Rovers?  But discovering that in Sam’s day duty was payable on pickled cucumbers, and the first word of vocabulary taught to new learners of French was “Dieu”, well, I feel richer for it.