Scotland the possibly brave

I don’t live in Scotland, have very little Scottish blood, and I won't be voting in the referendum, but… I have come to the conclusion that it’s really time to end the “union” that is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The thing about our union is that it came about, piecemeal, through conquest, repression, persecution, feudal genealogical alliances, bribery and incompetence among capitalist interests, hundreds of years ago, before any of our present values were remotely acceptable, let alone the norm.

When the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was at its height, Wales had been conquered, Scotland had been bought, Ireland had been starved, any English workers who wanted rights were transported, and democracy was a dirty word. So how about ending the Union, not so that little nation states of Scotland, Ireland and Wales can go off into isolationist ghettoes, but so that we can re-form, not a union, but an alliance, of modern adult societies who share civilised values, cultures, interests, and even a currency, who can agree with each other without having to submit perpetually to rule by an Eton-dominated public school ra-ra debating chamber in mock Gothic in the middle of London.

Kindling interest

So I have this book, A Time For Silence, which is published by Honno as a paperback and as an e-book, on Kindle, Kobo etc. I think I may have sold one through Kobo, and perhaps a couple through etc, but really I mean Kindle. People use Kindle. This still surprises me. A book is a paper thing, with pages you can turn, flip through, mark and scribble on, and why would anyone want an electronic device instead?

I discovered why they might, when I started reading Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell books and found my wrists snapping under the strain of wrestling with 24 kilos of paper. So I bought a Kindle. I still thought of it as a minor addition to the library and surely people didn’t them on a regular basis.

Having featured on the Kindle monthly deal, in June, I have concluded that people do use Kindle. Lots of people use Kindle, and even actively look for books to load on them. Better still, they keep an eye on such things as Kindle deals and buy accordingly. Not just dozens of them, but hundreds of them. Thousands, even. I hadn’t realised there were a thousand people with Kindles. We live a sheltered life in West Wales.

When you feature in an Amazon deal, you can pretend to be as blasé or dismissive as you like, but it is impossible not to become hooked on checking your rankings. There’s the general ranking of hourly Kindle sales, but there are also the genre rankings. It was hugely gratifying to find myself #1 in literary fiction. I would never have presumed to define my book as literary fiction, which is surely reserved for writers like Iris Murdoch or A.S.Byatt, but then I found it also contained Jeffrey Archer, which pricked the bubble a little. And I also did well as popular fiction, which is, presumably, the opposite of literary fiction, all with the same book.

I was listed too in Crime/thriller/mystery. This worried me. I never considered my novel to be a thriller, or even really a mystery. Would readers be disappointed at the lack of police procedure and car chases? But at least it does contain a crime. How I found myself as #1 in contemporary romance I can’t imagine. My book deals with domestic abuse, depression, suicide, murder, but not a trace of romance. Still, who’s complaining? Now that the monthly deal is well past, I have settled down to being #1, on and off, in Welsh Crime, which is almost as good as being the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

What I gained most from the monthly deal, apart from sales of course, was an astonishing harvest of reviews. There was one who denounced it as rubbish suitable for women, and another dismissed it as cheap and cheerful (cheerful?), but mostly they were written by people who liked it. Genuinely liked it, thought deeply about it and would like to read more.  People who don’t even know me. Which made me feel for the first time that I’m truly an author. Published. Promoted. Approved.

Very reassuring.

Now I can just concentrate on the next one.
Motherlove, out in February. Thought I'd just drop that in.

So fare thee well, Pete Seeger

I remember my parents buying their first record player. Or gramophone player. It was covered in cream and maroon vinyl, and it was placed in the dining room, where we all looked at it and wondered what it was doing there.

My brother knew what it was doing there. He seriously bought records, EPs and LPs – still has all the original Beatles records, and he followed the charts religiously.

I wasn’t really interested in music, and in this, I took after my parents, which is why I wondered why they’d bought it. The purchase did compel them to invest in some records. There was, as I recall, an EP of Ella Fitzgerald. We also had a few classical LPs stamped with ‘Fire Salvage,’ which might explain why the labels couldn’t be trusted. It was years before I discovered that what I’d thought was Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was actually Mendelssohn’s Violin concerto.  My parents really felt far more comfortable with the spoken words, so we had Dylan Thomas reading some of his poems, Under Milk Wood and several Shakespeare recordings. This is why I can still quote most of Henry V from end to end.

But there were music records that made an impact in the family: songs by Pete Seeger. We played them religiously, and every Sunday we would go to the pub at lunch time (long before serious campaigns about drink-driving) and come home roaring ‘The Banks are made of marble’ or ‘If you miss me at the back of the bus’ or, if we were too tipsy to manage complicated words, ‘We shall overcome.’ We were, of course, a radical left-wing family, which we demonstrated by singing Pete Seeger songs on our inebriated way home.

So perhaps, the best song to commemorate Pete Seeger, for me, is not one of his but ‘As soon as this pub closes, the revolution starts.’