White Lies, my latest novel, will be out in paperback on Amazon within a few days.  It’s a story about an adoption seen from three angles.  The image continues on the back cover but in the Kindle version, shown above, the white band for the title makes it look as though it’s floating in space.  Maybe it’s appropriate for a white lie to float.

I’ve also discovered that several writers before me have called their novels White Lies.  Will this help or hinder potential sales?  I should have researched more carefully before deciding on the title – but never mind.  The much more problematic doubling-up is with my name.  I’m not the only fiction-writer called Susan Barrett.   Perhaps the other SBs are as put out as I was when I realised a doppelganger had snuck up beside me.

The story:-

Beth is a guest at a wedding.  The bride is Tess, her natural daughter, who’d been adopted as a baby.  During the moments leading up to the marriage ceremony, Beth recalls the lifetime events that led to her present state of sick fear.  Recent revelations have made her suspect that the bridegroom is the first child she’d given up for adoption, and therefore Tess’s half-brother.  Will she speak of this impediment to matrimony or, as invited by the priest, forever hold her peace?

White Lies gives the answer in a way that reveals the complexities of truth-telling in the context of adoption.  It is a story told from three perspectives: that of Beth, the natural mother; Liz, the adoptive mother, and Tess, her adopted daughter.  The reader’s sympathy is engaged with each woman in turn, as the intricacies of the plot demonstrate the joys and sorrows of adoption and how nature and nurture interplay in the formation of personality.

How is it possible to check and re-check and check again and still find mistakes in printed material?  I’ve found 42 errors in the proof copy of White Lies, the novel I’m bringing out on Amazon.  Forty-two!  The number is so huge, it needs spelling out.  I’ve now corrected the proof and it’s quivering on the brink of publication … but maybe there’s a 43rd typo still lurking there, a grinning little gremlin of a mistype or stupidly blind mistake.

This latest novel is a story of adoption seen from three angles.  The fictional adoption in question took place in the late 60s as that’s the period I know from personal experience as an adoptive parent.  I’ve dedicated the book to our children, now middle-aged:

For Sophie and Ben

who are not in these pages

but in our lives

with love, gratitude and respect

How lucky we were.  Nowadays, adoptive parents take on the far greater challenges presented by older children, often with histories of neglect or abuse.  In fact, in some cases, parenthood is an impossible task.  A severely damaged older child needs special care, beyond the means of a parent to provide it.   The burning wish to heal and love such a child causes heartache without possible resolution.  As difficult as it may be to say, some children should not be placed for adoption.  They will do better in foster homes where the expectations are not so weighty, so intense, on both sides.

 

A villanellian song : “Let’s gather our friends.”

Let’s gather our friends while we are able,

For no-one knows if our days will grant us

Many more evenings around our table.

 

I’ll weave, as though in a magic fable,

Our talk into these verses curious:

Let’s gather our friends while we are able.

 

The lives we lead mix white and sable,

In dark days we doubt Fortune allows us

Many more evenings around our table.

 

Good friends, in wine we may mimic Babel

And in villanelles delve into poems spurious.

Let’s gather our friends while we are able

 

For we are bound with the lightest cable

That links all the friends who’ll come to dine with us

Many more evenings around our table.

 

Sing out, as you can from the highest gable,

The song we’ve sung with voices glorious:

Let’s gather our friends while we are able

Many more evenings around our table.

 

26.8.16, with salutes to Dylan Thomas

“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”

and for Christine who googled the pattern for me:

 

A1 b A2

a b A1

a b A2

a b A1

a b A2

a b A1 A2

 

and for those around our table on August 24th 2016

Peter, Lu, Tony, Marcus

Arthur Koestler asked Freud if he could answer the first question of this post’s title.  The second question is the one I thought I might lodge, in some form of words or other, with the bishop of our county’s cathedral (see previous post).

The answer that fits both questions is “Human nature.”  This is an answer that begs many other questions.  What was it that made our species so different from our closest relatives, that we are capable of horrific atrocities, human on animal, and human on human; that we wage endless wars, and insist on the truth of so many, varying and unprovable beliefs?

I am about to order a book which was reviewed in last Sunday’s Observer.  It’s written by Richard Holloway – “famously a bishop who stopped believing in God”, says the reviewer Peter Stanford.  Holloway was once the head of the Episcopal Church in Scotland.  Now he’s agnostic.  I’ve always been relieved to call myself agnostic.  When I say the word, I think of it in Greek:  άγνωστος,  unknown, obscure, unverified.   Gnosis is knowledge.  The ‘a’ in front makes it ‘without’.  I am without knowledge.

The title of Holloway’s book is “A Little History of Religion” and he starts his history from 130,000 BC, a rough approximation of the time when we first started burying the dead in a way that showed we believed in an afterlife.   With talismans, we could magick-up immortality.   Magic – imagination.  Can a chimpanzee imagine?  Yes.  It can imagine the consequences of an action.  With the widest possible spectrum of ability over aeons of evolutionary time we can go from hitting a lever that will deliver a banana to putting undesirables to death.  And our imagination can turn the sounds of raindrops on forest trees into symphonies.

The development of our brains has led us to imagine more and more extraordinary ways of using our animal abilities.  We can imagine a harmonious time when everyone around us will agree with us – so let’s get rid of those who don’t agree, right now.  We can imagine what it must be like to lose a leg or a parent and what it must be like to be flayed alive.   We empathise and give support but what will stop me flaying my adversary alive?   Oh, I know: God.  God will punish the bad and reward the good.  Without our idea of the revengeful God we might have destroyed ourselves, the human race, long ago.   War and God mean survival despite and because of our nature.

This notebook – these posts – are scribble thoughts, being tried out for size.  “I write to be read,” I said the other day, when I talked about self-publishing.  But that was in relation to my books.  Here, in these posts, I’m finding it liberating to write without any thought that my thoughts will be read.   Irresponsible, I know.

 

A neighbour walking his dog alerted us to the news that the county town’s bishop is coming to our village hall to answer questions.  The question I immediately thought of asking – that is, if I were to go to the meeting – would be “Do you believe in God?”   I imagine the audience would gasp, reel backwards, blench, go beetroot, with a host of different horrified responses to such a question coming from their midst.  The audience is likely to be drawn from the local church-goers, for one thing.  They must all believe in God.  They surely trust that their bishop also believes in God.   How could a fellow member of the audience ask such a stupid question?

Yet I think it is a valid question to ask of a religious leader.  It would surely elicit an answer that would go some way to explaining why anyone who has risen to a position of leadership in his chosen career in the 21st century can promulgate the thought patterns of a particular band of people from the extremely distant past.  It’s the question that tortured Darwin when he kept asking it of himself.  And that was more than 100 years ago.

I shall go on with these thoughts when I have the time.

When I’m in the middle of a thicket of my own creation, I berate myself for over-estimating my ability. I think I can do things. I plunge forwards and eventually come out the other side but only after tying myself in Gordian knots of difficulty. This is a serious character flaw. The danger comes from wanting to do things for myself rather than paying to have them done for me. Wartime upbringing? And a freelance lifetime spent not spending money if it can be avoided.

I’ve just spent days tussling with getting a novel onto CreateSpace for free. I can do that, I thought – no trouble. In the past I’ve done much more complicated, digital-type things. But, but, but…. The thicket grew around me. I could not get the margins right. It should have been so simple. The breakthrough came when, after checking and checking every detail, I discovered in a small corner of my Word doc menus a tick in a box which should have been unticked. I’d ticked it hours before thinking it would solve my difficulty. It didn’t. I’d solved the main problem in other ways but that wretched tick was still throwing the format. Stupid idiot, I hissed through teeth clamped as though in rigor mortis.

When eventually I’d got it right – not perfect, but right enough – and I’d got the format approved by the website, I spotted a glaring textual error on the back jacket. I’d called my main character Bess instead of Beth. Long pause for more hissing, gnashing, grinding. I can’t even get the names right! So what about the quality of the content, the actual writing? Ay, there’s the rub. I can write. I’ve been told that often enough. Yet here I am, giving up all idea of ever finding a publisher for my work, fooling around with margins and typos to self-publish my work. Do you mind if I go off and sob in a bush for a moment.

I’ve just booked our next year’s holiday. We and our good friend Christine will be joining our daughter Sophie and her family on the Greek island of Kefalonia. We’ve never booked anything so far in advance. The reason? We don’t want to miss the opportunity of a family holiday. It seems that certain places are so popular, they get booked from one year to the next.

The last time we were on Kefalonia we were there to join conservationists who were monitoring turtles. This was in 1984 or maybe 1985 when we were gathering material for a book on Greece. I find now what I wrote then. Here’s an excerpt:
…
“Most islands have at least one long sandy beach. In the past there might have been one or two fishermen’s houses there. Villages seldom grew in such places. They were too vulnerable to attack by sea, and rarely provided natural harbours and safe anchorages. Recently roads have been built to such beaches and hotels and villas have sprung up, answering our demand for places to sop up the sea and sun of summer. The turtles who have always used these beaches for laying their eggs now peer anxiously out of the sea at dusk to see if the last holidaymaker has left the sand for his supper. One such long sandy beach on the southern coast of Kefallinia is still untouched by building. In the daytime a few holidaymakers may find their way there, but at night the beach still belongs to the turtles. …

“A sliver of moon, three days old, grows bright in the sky and with the stars throws light on sea and sand. The cool of a deep well, and the silence of a church, settles over the great expanse of night sea, sky and land. Every so often, in the scrub at the back of the beach, there are secret scurryings – perhaps stone martens – and at intervals all along the beach, some 10 metres from the water’s edge, clutches of eggs, the size of pingpong balls, have been laid by turtles over the summer months and buried beneath the sand. After 63 days in the warm of the sand, the tiny turtles hatch and with vigorous flippers and the unerring strength of instinct scrabble to the surface, over the sand and into the sea. This summer, the hatchlings emerge to find themselves in a wire cage, marked carefully and clearly in Greek and English ‘Please do not disturb. Scientific experiment in progress.'”
…

At the time it seemed impossible that conservation groups could persuade councils and governments – in Greece and Turkey – to limit development in the turtles’ traditional egg-laying grounds. Lights from hotels and restaurants would confuse the turtles coming ashore to lay eggs, and disorientate the babies trying to reach the sea. The economic benefits from tourism would win over conservation, and turtles would disappear. Yet the reverse has happened. Tourism has flourished and so have the turtles. Hillsides behind sandy beaches have become resorts, and tourists at waterside tavernas watch flotillas of turtles swimming among the boats.

Doom and gloom turned turtle.

A number of years ago, when I realised that I wasn’t the only previously-published writer finding it hard to get fiction accepted by traditional publishers, I set up an ebook publishing website for people like me. It was satisfactory to be doing something towards getting good, or good-enough, writers read. Anyone who produces ideas and writes a novel is in the position of sitting on a spring – I mean a spring of water, not a bedspring (hideously uncomfortable), yet nowhere near as painful as the psychic hurt of being a fount of new ideas without an outlet.

Rejections from publishers are hard enough for writers who’ve never yet been published. Even harder, I reckon, for those of us who have had success in the past. It’s taken me years to accept that I will (I have to put in the word ‘probably’) never be traditionally published again. I think in the last week – yes, as recently as that – I have accepted this. With the acceptance has come a release. I am going to embrace self-publishing.

Not for the first time. In 2006 I self-published a novel called “Making a Difference”. I used an American print on demand publisher called Trafford. I worked out that if I could sell 100 copies, I’d cover costs. Which I did. But I don’t find it at all easy or pleasant to treat my friends like potential buyers. It’s like being a pavement artist on your own doorstep. I’d much prefer not to have to do it. But the alternative is to put work in the bottom drawer and never bother to write again. We might as well exit this world.

So let’s let the spring bubble. Self-publishing doesn’t mean your book is poorly written, poorly put together – though it may be. There is no guarantee of quality, nor is there a guarantee of quality in traditionally published books. A lot of bad books get published by big name publishers. A lot of good books never see the light of day.

So ever onward … More of this another day. I’m involved at the moment in uploading the file of a novel which I abandonned by the wayside when I started “The Cousins’ Chronicle”. This one is called “White Lies” and it’s about adoption. I’ll have more to say about that —- and it may be to resounding silence. Who’s out there?

If anyone reads this, just leave me a hello in a Comment. Writers don’t fully exist unless the equation is completed by Readers.

Can you imagine asking a whole lot of primary school kids if they want to remain in school or leave it? Even at that age most of them would realise that the choice was too starkly simple for the complexities of the question. Would you trust the majority decision was the right one for everyone in the school?

As David Mitchell – clever, funny writer – said in his Observer column during the run-up to the referendum, he didn’t feel qualified to form an opinion on the question. The politicians had reneged on their responsibilities. After all, they are voted in to parliament to debate difficult questions of national importance.

Left to our own devices, many of us kept asking for the facts. But there could be no valid facts about a situation as hypothetical as a future exit from the EU. Besides, facts are rarely served up from an unbiased source.

The choice was as simple as between red and black on a roulette wheel. We were left to question our guts and vote accordingly. A couple of friends spent the weeks before the vote on opposing sides. Each day they swapped positions and voted against each other on the crucial day.

The referendum acted like a giant screen on which we hapless citizens could project all our hopes and fears, whether they were relevant to the hoped-for outcome or not. I noticed that many of the same arguments were used by each side. If we remain, this will happen. If we’re out, the same “this” will happen. An Alice in Wonderland world. Now we are to live with the result, created by a tiny majority of the small proportion of the population who voted.

Let’s cross our fingers – and wish Theresa May good luck.

Was the driver of the white truck who mowed down hundreds in Nice mad or bad – that is, entirely evil? It’s the same question that people asked when Anders Behring Breivik shot 69 campers on a island in Norway in July 2011.

Breivik wanted all Muslims deported from Europe. He was not a member of a group. The white van driver was not part of a jihadi cell. Lone wolf killers with obsessive ideas are the hardest to detect by the security forces before they kill. But their mental peculiarities may have brought them to the attention of, first, families, then neighbours, then mental health teams. Should everyone be more alert to danger signs?

Terrorism – violent death promulgated by fanatic believers in a creed – provides territory for the mad to be bad in.