Our next book together is going into production with Halsgrove publishers, to come out in early summer.
Wandering and Wondering in Wales
fact and fiction writing
All Too Human
Frailities and foibles, and the virtues hidden within the failings
It’s my contention that, however exaggerated a negative characteristic, there is a flipside that contains a virtue The nosy parker is the one who leaves the milk on the doorstep when you have covid. The chatterbox is the one who alerts you to the broken paving stone. In the 14 novels I’ve written, I have brought to the page about 64 characters, taking six people per novel as average. Where do they come from? I think there are bits and pieces of me and everyone I’ve ever met in my characters. I hope they are credible. I’m running a competition to find out.
Competition
I would love to hear from you if you have found anyone in any of my novels who has similar characteristics to yourself or to someone you have met. Give me a brief description of that real life person as well as the page number and title of the novel in which you found the broadly similar, fictional character. I may post your entry on my Facebook, Linked In or Twitter page. The person whose entry pleases me the most will receive a signed copy of So Far, So Good, the memoir on sixty years of marriage with Peter Barrett.
Send your entry by email to Susie.barrett@btopenworld.com. Closing date 31st January 2024.
Harriet Now and Then
Susan’s thirteenth novel is about two women who share the name Harriet. Alternate chapters tell their individual stories. The first Harriet lived in the west country in the second half of the eighteenth century; the other is alive today. The first Harriet wrote poetry and married a man who had a good reputation as a poet. The second Harriet is a cellist and, through meeting an American professor of literature, becomes involved in research into the life of the first Harriet. The circumstances of the two women’s lives may be different but the challenges they face as women artists are similar. The 18th century Harriet does as well as she can, within the confines of a woman’s life at the time. Today’s Harriet was widowed young and left with an emotionally disordered son. She might have become a talented composer and concert cellist but has to gain a steady income while giving her son, now adult, a home and care. Both Harriet meet men who may make a difference to their lives but fail to do so, for different reasons.
Now available on Amazon in paperback and as an ebook. Follow the link at the start of this blog.
thirteenth novel out now!
I tell myself sternly that I’m not superstitious. However, the fact that my latest novel is my thirteenth does cause a slight rattle in my ribcage. Just the number in a sentence casts a shadow on the other words. Still, here’s whistling bravely in the dark. I’ll do what I’ve done many times before and tell family and friends that I’m bringing out a new novel. Harriet Now and Then is now available in paperback and as an ebook on Amazon for anyone who likes reading mid-list novels; that is, entertaining stories woven around thoughtful topics that float between mass market popular genres and top rank literary masterpieces.
Shouting my wares doesn’t come easily. My early novels came out to resounding silence, as far as I was concerned. We were living on a Greek island at the time and we barely knew what month it was, let alone day of the week. I had no idea what my nice editor at Michael Joseph had put in place in the way of publicity or promotion for my first few novels. I was contentedly ignorant of any PR machinations going on for me in London. This nonchalant attitude was fine at the time. My first career as a novelist came to an end in the 1990s when I turned to using whatever talents I have with real people in the real world. I trained and practised as a counsellor and psychotherapist. When I returned to fiction in the 21st century, I was without a publisher and, since then, I have self-published my fiction. I may not have a fan base but I believe the people who do find and read my novels enjoy them, which to me is the whole point. If you are one of these precious people, I hope you enjoy this latest one.
It’s about about two women who share the name Harriet. They take alternate chapters to tell their individual stories. The first Harriet lived in the west country in the second half of the eighteenth century; the other is alive today. The first Harriet wrote poetry and married a man who had a good reputation as a poet. The second Harriet is a cellist and, through meeting an American professor of literature, becomes involved in research into the life of the first Harriet. The circumstances of the two women’s lives may be different but the challenges they face as women artists are similar. The 18th century Harriet does as well as she can, within the confines of a woman’s life at the time. Today’s Harriet was widowed young and left with an emotionally disordered son. She might have become a talented composer and concert cellist but has to gain a steady income while giving her son, now adult, a home and care. Both Harriet meet men who may make a difference to their lives but fail to do so, for different reasons.
At 83 I don’t think I’ll manage anything of novel-length again. Short stories next. So, if you read this latest, last, full-length novel, please let me know if you enjoy it. Thank you!
Track it down on Amazon Books – Harriet Now and Then, by Susan Barrett, paperback and ebook.
Proof checking fever
It’s almost like an illness, the state you can get into checking proofs. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t get feverishly anxious about the commas that have been missed or over-added, the mistypes and mis-spellings? Yesterday I fell into a dither over the inclusion or omission of an e in Acknowledgements. There’s a town nearby which I’ve learnt to spell Bridgwater without an e although I always want to spell it Bridgewater, like the surname of a childhood friend. In our latest book together, I had Acknowledgments without an e until this was queried. This led to panicked googling and more questions and indecision: whether to be old-fashioned or up-to-the-minute, Anglicised or Americanised, and — confusion growing by the minute — which spelling belonged to which option.
In the end, the Acknowledgements on the last page of ‘The Garden of the Grandfather, Life in Greece in the 1960s” has an e, and the whole thing, warts and all, is in the hands of the printers. Any errors still remaining are necessary oblations to the gods in acknowledgment or acknowledgEment that there is no perfection this side of paradise.
How do writers maintain morale?
A good level of morale is essential, I find, for writing. It’s like petrol in an engine. It fuels the hope, if not belief, that what I write will be read by more people than just my husband (he has to) and a few friends (depending on their good will). When morale drops, I sink into a “what’s the point?” attitude. Then I have to re-fuel with memories of previous successes.
A car we’d bought secondhand in Stuttgart in 1962 had no fuel gauge. When the tank was empty, you could flick a switch on the floor of the car to get petrol to flow from a reserve tank. That would, if you were lucky, get you to the next garage.
In my writing life, I’ve frequently had recourse to my reserve supply of morale. This morning I’m hovering near that floorboard switch. Will our second book on Greece ever see light of day? Will I get a positive reply from one of the many agents and publishers I’m approaching? Fifty years after my career began, I am back where I started – without an agent.
If I link this post to LinkedIn, will it be read by a literary agent? There must be one or two out there who would like to be involved with “Life in Greece in the 1960s”.
A new writing experiment
Aged 18, I decided that the first step on the way to becoming a writer was to learn how to type. So I did a secretarial course at Plymouth Technical College. We sat in rows in front of the epitome of a perfect secretary (grey-haired, retired and precise) and clacked away on tall and ancient typewriters. Each machine resembled the auditorium of a theatre in miniature: 1234567890-+~ in the Upper Circle, down the rows to \zxcvbnm,./ in the front row of the stalls. Clickety clack clack, at increasing speeds over the months, punctuated with the satisfying ding! at the end of lines, signalling the need to push the lever on the left to make the paper roll up a notch on the cylinder. Who remembers this?
Typing was easier to learn than shorthand. But the puzzles of shorthand held one compensation. There were wonderful letters in the book of exercises: polite but pained requests for attention, addressed to clearly recalcitrant Dear Sirs, referring to orders not fulfilled. The writers awaited the dear sirs’ earliest attention. I found that, even when I couldn’t read my squiggles, I was able to compose a letter from memory. This served me well when I was taking dictation from one of the editors of Thames and Hudson. “Did I really say that?” he would sometimes ask, with a quizzical eyebrow raised.
Unlike shorthand which I’ve never since used, the ability to type fast without looking at the keyboard has stood me in good stead. Even if I don’t need to glance at it, I find a keyboard is still vital for getting words from the brain onto paper via a screen. I cannot abide the virtual variety on smartphones and tablets. I watch with amazed admiration people who can hold a phone and pump out messages, using their thumbs like manic grasshoppers.
Although I’m not at home with phones, I’ve kept up with the developments in typing. In the mid 1980s I invested in something called a Screenwriter, which was a Rolls Royce of a typewriter which had basic word-processing capability built in. I found it useful for writing the text of the book Peter and I did together about the landscapes, flora and fauna of Greece.
Then came the Amstrad. In my memory it sits on my desk in our house in Papingo, north western Greece, looking like a squat, extra-terrestrial creature, blinking green messages from a screen the colour of butterscotch. During the 1990s, my writing tools became more sophisticated as computers developed. I’ve written on a series of desktop computers, as well as laptops taken to New Zealand and France.
My present desktop I’ve had for many years. Its box – tall and black – hums beside me, holding a labyrinthine memory of all my wild goose-chases. It’s recorded everything I’ve written since the 21st century began. I rarely bother to back things up. I print out any work I would hate to lose. Now I’m experimenting with a new way of writing in parallel with the old way. Each time I complete a section I print it out. I also copy and paste that section onto a page on my website. The text of my present book – The Garden of The Grandfather – is mounting up on a Page of that name on my site. As yet, I’m not sure how this will work out.
I can see the dangers. It is a first draft, so perhaps it shouldn’t be shared publicly like this. (But who’s going to read it? Just a few special friends. I don’t expect my website to be found and followed by many). Another risk is that I can never run my eye over anything I’ve written without wanting to make it better. That means that my website copy may not be exactly the same as the one on my computer or the one I’ve printed out. All this could lead to an unholy mess. But never mind – all can be corrected when I’ve arrived at the end of this piece of writing. Whether it will ever be traditionally published is a question with a large question mark. I’ve been writing too long to be really bothered about that. What I have in mind as an end product is something interactive – something that can be played, read, listened to, looked at. A new kind of book. That is my new experiment.
A creative hot-spot
The Garden of The Grandfather
I’ve never delved deeply into ley lines. Today I’m wondering how people with creative energy might kick off extra creativity in themselves and others at particular points in the compass; that is, over and above the usual energy that’s generated between creative people when they meet. This thought comes from a recent coming-together of three people – Yiannis Angelopoulos, Peter and myself – in Lourdata, Cefallonia. The conjunction of the three of us on one particular spot set something exciting in train. Here’s the triangulation. Peter found something he wanted to sketch. Yiannis video’d Peter sketching. I was hooked by the sign on the gate of the garden Peter was sketching.
The sign gave me the title for the book I’m working on: The Garden of the Grandfather. This will be a picture of Greece in the 1960s, a narrative of our life there illustrated by black and white photographs. Conversations with Yiannis have expanded our ideas to include colour – Peter’s work in oils, ink, and watercolour. Yiannis’ video is now on youtube. Something good to share publicly must surely come out of this triangle of ideas.
p.s. I have now added a page on the site for the first 10,000 words of the book.
http://www.youtube.comwatchtime_continue=2&v=awD0DGJEAcs
Brainwaves in the sea
The Garden of The Grandfather
While gently floating in the Ionian sea – or was it in the midst of a nighttime dream – the title of our present Greek book came to me.
The Garden of The Grandfather
These words – Ο κυπος του παπου – are written on a sun-bleached sign hanging from a padlocked gate behind the beach in Lourdas Bay. Beyond lies the garden, a fenced-in enclosure where an old man grows potatoes, tomatoes and green peppers. At the far end there’s a small, white-painted shelter on stilts with a magenta-coloured bougainvillea framing its roof against the backdrop of Cefallonia’s Mount Enos. Peter sketched the scene and I began to write in my head the introduction to our book of Greek life as it was in the 1960s.
This morning, at ten o’clock on July 11th 2017, I am at my computer in Devon. But in my head I am overlooking the bay of Kamares, Sifnos, in 1963. I am summoning up memories of the summer when I wrote my first attempt at a novel and Peter painted large canvases in oils built up with sand from the beach. These were exhibited at the Drian Galleries, London. (I want to track down the catalogues of his four exhibitions at the Drian. Can anyone help?)
The workings of the brain and the memory are in a world of their own, very hard to grasp. I plan to re-read “The Human Brain, a guided tour” by Susan Greenfield. I used my brain in an attempt to understand what she wrote. My memory of the details of her book is hazy. Yet I know I took in her expositions and they inform my views. This brings me to consider the difference in Peter’s memories and mine of the same events. I remember, if not the exact details, then the general drift: the atmosphere of a scene or the personality of a person. The way I remember is, I think, more typical of a female, but it’s also a writer’s way. Peter’s memory works in a masculine, fact-focused way. Being an artist, his memories are also visual. These differences work well together as we remember our life in Greece in words and pictures. The eventual book, I hope, will evoke that delicious, sad-happy feeling of nostalgia, appealing to lovers of Greece of any age: the past still visible in the present.
Now back to ‘The Garden of the Grandfather’, not the actual one in Cefallonia sketched by Peter this summer but to our work-in-progress. Back to Sifnos and lighting oil lamps at dusk in 1963 …
On the brink
(Just to add today, 13th June, I wrote this on June 1st and it stayed gathering dust as a Draft until today).
I expect we all know the feeling of being on the brink of something new. It may be only a minor change, or it may be something enormous like a life decision. The feeling links up the mind and the body to disturbing effect.
I experience this often. In the last few days I’ve been on the brink of making decisions about my work as a writer. Last year I set up this WordPress site, knowing I should do something public as a writer, having – after a long silence – self-published three books with Createspace on Amazon. I had decided to give up attempting to clamber back into the traditional publishing world. I would fling myself into the ocean of self-publishers and take part in all the activities – blogging, engaging on social media, and so on – necessary to promote myself, my titles, and sell some copies.
For some reason, which I’m sure I thought logical at the time, I established the domain name aliveinww2. This is the title of the non-fiction book, one of those three on Createspace, subtitled The Cousins’ Chronicle, commentary and memoir. It’s based on family wartime newsletters and of course some present-day cousins – at various levels of kinship – were interested enough to buy copies. Beyond them, did anyone fork out the eight necessary pounds or equivalent dollars to buy and read this book … very few, if any. I probably thought that by using the title as domain name I might help sales.
I set up this WordPress site with this URL and made myself explore the world of blogging. I began to understand just how every second person in the world thinks they can write. People sometimes tell Peter when admiring his work, that they’d dearly love to be able to draw and paint but they can’t. I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t think they can write. After all, they’ve done it ever since they learnt to hold a pencil. Of course a lot of people do realise that it is an art like any other. You need a certain amount of inborn talent to start with, then a lot of hard work, experiential learning and perseverance.
One of the things I’ve found hard is being part of this unregulated world. There is no quality control at all. When anyone of whatever merit, lack of talent or basic literacy can publish their writing, how can readers find a decent read? I learnt about book bloggers, and decided that this would be a way to reach the kind of readers who might like my kind of writing. A trawl brought up the name of Teddy Rose who organises digital book tours http://virtualauthorsbooktours.com. I signed on, full of hope. (I’m a incurable optimist). My ‘tour’ ended on May 31st after two months. As yet it hasn’t resulted in a single sale of the novel I was promoting.
In fact, I enjoyed all aspects of the tour save this non-sale result. It was fun to answer questions about the book ‘White Lies’. It started with a wild interview with very jolly Michelle Jordan’s ‘Indie Review Behind the Scenes Maverick Moment’ Youtube video. Teddy was a good companion during the strange tour of book bloggers. An early one objected to be use of the word ‘natural’ for the woman she’d prefer to be called the ‘birth’ mother, and removed herself from the tour. Apart from this blogger, the reviews were in favour of the book, eleven in all. I was pleased because they came from people who – I gathered – usually review novels that are easier to read at speed. They found White Lies needed greater attention but said that it rewarded their time. One of the last reviewers (on Amazon.com) said the story “paints a fuller picture of the emotional intricacies of adoption.” She has an adopted brother. “This book makes me think outside of the obvious.” She expresses the hope that, if ever they talk about his adoption, she will “navigate the interaction with compassion, empathy and a whole lot of sensitivity.” This comment pleased me. I always hope that my books will nudge people to think about and see their own lives and relationships in a new way, as well as entertain them with a good story.
But how much effect, if any at all, has this tour had on spreading the word about Susan Barrett and her work? I spent money on it. I would have liked sales to pay for it. I don’t expect to make money out of writing – very few authors do. But I would like to reach more readers. I also want to give up this business of working at promotion, and get back to writing the novel I’d begun before the bloggers’ tour. Its working title is Greek Gold. Today I began the third chapter. Alex, my main character, is on the brink of a parachute jump. In fact, he’s been on the brink since January. I kept him there, alive in my head in that quivering moment, for the intervening months. This morning I began to put into words my vision of the poor chap – and he’s still not jumped after one page of writing. I’ve been waylaid by this post because I have the idea that I will give a page of the site to writing this novel. That might be a good way of finding the path between promoting work and writing it.
I’m on the brink of a decision.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft-xXmaPsMU