Bellybuttons are like opinions

I read it somewhere last week. Bellybuttons are like opinions, everybody has one which is fine until you discover that people are writing reviews of your books and you don't like them. At first I thought, gosh, somebody has read it and as Abraham Lincoln said, 'you can please some of the people some of the time and the rest of the people the rest of the time but you can't please all of the people all of the time'. It's wise to remember this before worrying about the reviews where somebody didn't like your book.
All right, so you sweated blood and guts and spit and whatever over it but after all, it is only a novel.
You've heard 'This novel changes lives' well, believe me, I don't think any novel ever changed anybody's life. It might have made them feel uncomfortable or ecstatic for a couple of hours but lifechanging, I don't think so. People read for pleasure. If they don't then dear me, what are they doing it for?

Which is not to say that I was happy to hear that one of my books was deemed to be 'predictable', at least parts of it. Ouch. 
'A good beach read.'    It wasn't intelligent then?
'Has a happy ending'    It ain't literary folks
'I wanted to bang their heads together.' ( hero and heroine and after all they went through and I went through with them. Oh dear)

Actually I am not grumbling, I am really bragging because I never thought I'd get so far that people cared enough to say what they thought about any book I had written. I love writing. After my kid it's the most important thing in my life and it pays the bills which is great, something has to and there's only me around.
Lots of novelists are thought worse of because they appear to be writing the same book over and over. We do. We don't get it right so we have another shot at it. Not necessarily a better shot just a different one.

Iris Murdoch said  'Every novel is the traincrash of a good idea.' Actually she didn't say that, she said something slightly better than that, I just like the word  'traincrash' but it means the same.  You finish it and then think it's okay and then you decide it isn't and then you have another idea and you think, if I could just have one more go at this I might get it right so in a way I hope I never do get it right and I hope readers keep on caring about whether it's a decent beach read because I really care that somebody bothered to to buy it or borrow it, took it with them, sat down on their holiday and read my book by the pool or under an umbrella and then they wrote a review about it. God love them every one. ( And that's close to something Tiny Tim said and he knew about these things.)

The Demise of the Dining Room

This week there was a short and interesting discussion on Radio 4 about the fact that people don't have dining rooms any more, or rather they don't use them and they are not advertised by estate agents.They had two people discussing why it was and inevitably a discussion of  table manners.
I am reading one of Jennifer Worth's books which led to the television series, Call the Midwife. This book is Shadows of the Workhouse. It made me want to cry. There are photographs in the middle of what the workhouses were like, of people without hope, children in despair. A lot of them are sitting at tables in regimented rows. The children are ragged, shoeless and miserable.
The workhouse as she says was the first stab at welfare and stab is the right word. Such places were run by bullies and sadists.
I read a lot of history for my work and I know that a hundred and fifty years ago - and let's face it that's only two lifetimes ago, many people in big cities like London didn't even have a fire. Their houses had no fireplaces.
Tables at that time were saved for those were rich and perhaps that is why we baulk against such things.
Does the woman who has just done a stint on the checkout at Sainbury's come home at nine, cook pork parcels  and gather her family around the table at ten?
My daughter and son in law work in retail. Yesterday he was at home in the evening. She was working until ten. This happens almost every day. People's lives don't fit around dining tables.They never did.
On the programme we had this myth about how people's table manners were getting worse and how one should stop one's children coming to the table with mobile phones. When I was a little girl I would watch men pour their tea into their saucers and drink it like that because they didn't want to wait for it to cool. You don't see it any more but that's not to say it wasn't good manners at the time.
In fact manners are really how you treat and consider other people, not about whether you spoon your soup away from you.  I can remember my mother once going to stay in a good hotel and one of the woman with her dropped the silver salt cellar into her tomato soup. The waiter apologized and then fished it out with a snowy napkin. Mother was appalled. But really it was a matter of common sense. A fresh dish of soup was the point.
Food has become such a contentious issue. I wish that for a month nobody would preach at me about how much or what I should eat. The best meal I have had lately was to celebrate my daughter's birthday.  We went to the coast, bought fish and chips and sat in our car ( it was freezing outside with a howling gale behind it) and ate them from the paper and she had brought glasses and a bottle of pink champagne. Now that's what I call a meal. As for good manners, the lady in the fish and chip shop was all smiles and that's the best kind of good manners of all.

Getting away

Matfen

I took my laptop with me, of course, I was determined to write every day, until I got there and determination became a thing of the past. As writers we are always on duty.  I feel as though I have to be a writer every minute of every day, it's like a chocolate ball and chain, it's always there and no matter how much you eat, the bloody thing's still there but you love it so much it doesn't matter, most of the time but it did last week.

I have one book just out, and one book which needs a lot of editing and one book I have just started. Now I know this seems an enviable place to be but it scares the hell out of me. Will it last?  What will I do if it doesn't?  What wil I do if it does?  I've been catapulted into social networking and everything that goes with it  and to my horror this week I bought the most beautiful telephone the world has ever seen.  I have never fallen in love with a telephone before but this is happy valentine's day for me and my new phone. It weighs nothing, it is supposedly pebble blue. I never liked blue before. Now I am a goner.

I had decided to go away. It's always a bad idea. I should be at home, I should be working. The laptop case is not that reassuring and anyhow I don't need a break. My book is out and I'm grateful and - dear God, I was tired.

The lions and the walkway which lead to the garden and to the two golf courses and to the view of the several hundred acres which belongs to the house.

Fifty minutes into the north here is lovely Northumberland with its endless fields and big stone farmhouses and best of all, a hotel which I had not heard of before now, the home of the Blackett family, Matfen Hall. I didn't know such places existed. Please God let me go back.

But really it wasn't just the hotel, it was the feeling of not writing. I took my new Kindle, that's another thing I am enslaved to and I read in front of a log fire. What I did the rest of the time I'm not sure but none of it was constructive. A lot of drinking and a good deal of eating and passing the time with the lovely staff and saying what a wonderful place Hexham was. I ventured into the village which is about two dozens steps away behind the church and had hot chocolate in the village store and I went into the church on Sunday to discover nativity scenes just this side of the altar. I think they were marble, half a dozen figures in each one. I really wanted to bring them home and also the two paintings in the hall of Matfen which were of shooting dogs but the Blackett family were very fond of the dogs so I didn't but I did bring home a semi renewed me and now the sun is shining and the snow has gone and I think oh gosh I am still a writer and I like it.

Inspirational Animals

My dogs, George, my labrador, pictured here when old and Timmy, springer spaniel and Jasper -I'm going to put him on now,  half and half

were  the inspiration for Hector and Ulysses the two black labradors who are big characters in Miss Appleby's Academy.  They play a very important part, well, Hector does anyway, he's one of the main characters, just as my three dogs were main characters in my life. I dedicated my book to them, they made us so very happy.
When I was a child we had dogs, cats, chickens, cattle, mice, rabbits and probably others which I have forgotten. I have not forgotten the day that my mother's cattle invaded the main street. There was only one big street. How they got out of the field we do not know. And the people who lived in the bungalows nearby were always complaining that our hens wrecked their gardens.
I hadn't known that such a rich childhood was going to be so very useful for the books I am writing now. I have had animals in my books before but none which played a major part and Emma Appleby understands dogs because she too had them in her childhood.
I can also remember one particular day when I was walking Timmy around the fields beyond the school where Katy went and there was an irish setter chasing some sheep in a field and the woman, its owner, was saying something like, 'Come to Mummy,' and instinctively somehow I stood there, all five foot four of me, let my voice fall as far as my boots and I shouted across the field,
'Come back here, you bloody dog!' and the dog got such a shock that it stopped immediately and came over and sat down beside us. I felt so clever, not something that's often happened.
Emma Appleby, my heroine in my new book, knows such things.  She knows that when a dog threatens you you don't run, you get down to its level, look it in the eyes and beckon in a soft confident voice. You get it to come to you. I've never known this to fail. It isn't a trick, it's knowledge. I saw my husband do such a thing a dozen times and people always thought there was something special about it and I suppose there was, he always adored dogs and understood them.
I was bitten twice when I was a child because I used to go up and cuddle other people's dogs and sometimes the dogs weren't too keen on it and my mother told me repeatedly not to and here I am in Durham City and every time I meet a dog I can't help being happy and if you give them half a chance they like you too. I get down and talk to them. Dog owners never mind and we are such doggy people here it probably takes them hours to get anywhere when they go into the city. And the dogs love all the attention.
It made me very happy too to revisit my dogs in Miss Appleby's Academy. They have been dead for a long time and my life has moved on but Hector and Ulysses restored just a little of it as I remembered how dear they were to me.

Publication week, er fortnight

It was never like this for Jane Austen. She didn't have to say, 'I can't come for dinner yet, Mother, I'm busy tweeting.'  She never had her blog refuse to upload her photos or worry that she would be an egg on twitter forever. She can't have hesitated over requests from strange men wanting to be her friend on facebook.
Did she have to create a Facebook Fan page?  No, she definitely did not. Her constant interruptions were probably things like 'Jane, what did you do with the pink vase?' and  'hurry up, we've going to have tea with Mrs Composmentus' who was ubdoubtedly the most boring person in the world.

Links have become the very bane of my life, sometimes they land, sometimes they disappear between Facebook, me, twitter and wherever the hell else they should be. I am hopeful that sooner or later I will upload a picture of one of my books which is the right size. At the moment they are either so small that they can't be seen like postage stamps or so big that my friends on Facebook feel obliged to make comments because they can't see around the image. The small ones people are tactful about, God love them. I have never been quite so grateful to my friends and keep ringing them, asking stupid questions and I can hear the patience in their voices as they think, 'can this woman not do anything on her own'?  I can milk a goat, so there. Very useful of course.

This is the problem, all my skills are old. I touchtype, I can light a fire, I know how to gut mackerel. I should be doing one of these programmes on telly where people go off into the wild and live off the land. Okay, so I live in the middle of town these days and never venture further than M&S. Is it my fault I have to try and live in the modern world? I was so good at the old one.

My computer is objecting hugely to the way I am now spending hours a day sitting in front of it demanding it go back and forth to internet sites like something demented. My back isn't terribly happy about it either, now we come to mention it. Last night my computer kept assuring me that if I didn't want to look at stuff it wanted me to look at it was going to close down forever. The only thing which prevented me from throwing it out of the window is the fact that the window has been there since 1927 and has stained glass in it.

I did once build a house, with help of course. I had a child, let's not go there. Won't  be doing either of those things again. So why do I just not get technology?  I'm not that old, I think really there is no techie in me. And as being idle I don't do that. I think what I need is to become rich so that I can get somebody else to do all these things - oh, and the housework and pay the bills, and take the car to the garage and plan holidays. Don't you just hate that? All that detail.

Writing novels is all about detail and the hardest thing of all is editing where you go back and forth and back and forth among a hundred thousand words, wondering how long a character has been pregnant, whether Mr Standalone really did have brown eyes and why the important scenes have been put in twice or totally disappeared and that a certain character was introduced at the beginning and not mentioned again for a hundred pages. Then there is the problem when you write historicals as to the year Peter Pan came out, I got it wrong by a year when I wrote about it but some eagle eyed editor found it, thank the Lord.
Or which street in St Andrews had plane trees on it in 1900?  And as my agent pointed out just a couple of weeks ago, people in Durham did not sit outside tower houses on the river and drink chilled Chardonnay in 1910. Well, most of them anyway. On that note I shall leave it and no, I am not going back to the internet, I'm going into town probably to pick up a bottle of nicely chilled Chardonnay. Some things about the present are definitely good.

My Six Ebooks

Out today, published by Quercus books my six big sagas that ruled my life for several years.
The first one, The Singing Winds, named after a line in an old folk song, is set over on the Durham coast not far from Sunderland.  I was inspired to write it after I visited Seaham, the old pit town where my grandmother and her family lived before she left the bakery in which she worked and travel to Weardale. There she met and married my grandfather who was a tenant farmer.
Seaham, when I knew it, years ago, was a very dramatic place, the pit wheel set beyond the little town, the rolling sea crashing up the beach and three big pits close together. The man in the book is called Jon Armstrong. I rang my sister, after I finished writing it, I told her, 'I have created the perfect man'.

The second, Far From My Father's House, is named after a line in an old Irish poem and tells of the Lowe family who were tenant farmers and of their joys and sorrows before and during the second world war. How things changed there  because of the war and how the death of their loved ones affected their lives.

The third book is called Under A Cloud Soft Sky. The title came from a poem by a local man, George Leslie Lister.  It's set in Tow Law, the tiny pit town on the Durham moors where I was brought up and is about two boys and two girls. When it was first published my daughter and her friends read it because it was about people their age. My teenage novel!  It's also about an love affair which an older woman has with a young man and how a beautiful girl is seen as nothing more than a pretty face.

The fourth book is The Road to Berry Edge and is set in the steel town of Consett which was originally called Berry Edge and is the story of a young man who comes home to put right the steelworks and how he feels that he has to to marry the woman his brother couldn't because his brother died and Rob feels responsible for his death.

The fifth book is called Snow Angels and I got the title from the children's game of lying down in thick snow and pushing your arms and legs to their furthest extent. When you get up the imprint looks like an angel.  I worked so hard on this book. It's set in Newcastle upon Tyne where I was born and is the story of a shipbuilding family.  I did huge amounts of research for it, as I do for all my books.

The sixth book is Shelter From the Storm, originally Black Prince and is the first of a trilogy but it stands alone as well.It tells the story of two young women who marry the wrong men and of men who are outsiders in insular society.

What Not to do on Facebook and Twitter

I feel I haven't met up with half of them yet but the first problem I found was that I accidentally let some man on my facebook page, who will be nameless, actually it probably wasn't his name, trying to tell me his wife had died and he had a little girl and he obviously knew we had so much in common. I thought oh-oh, how very odd and wrote him a very polite note, saying how awful for him and how I hoped he found somebody nice and then I got another message and talked to friends and realized this happens all the time.
So, point one, be vigilant but you can get rid of people
Point Two  Don't write on other people's timelines. I wrote a long piece and then realized I was in the wrong place and quickly deleted it.
Point Three.  We all know publicity is useful but try to not to brag too much, it makes people mad. Me, me, me darling. Yes, well we all have that problems and it's rude to muscle in on somebody else's space. I'm big on my own space.  I keep dreaming other people move in with me and wake up covered in sweat.
Point Four. Other people might not be interested in facebook and twitter. I've only been here a fortnight and already I'm boring on about it to the people I see.
Point Five.  It can take over your life.  Help!
Point Six. Too late.
Point Seven. It isn't mean to be a contest. How many friends have I got? My daughter says you are supposed to stop at five thousand so I have long way to go.
Point Eight. I am supposed to be writing books.
Perhaps I should stop now and go off and do that.