The Catcher in the Networking Event

‘If you really wanna hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably wanna know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like….an all that David Copperfield kinda crap, but I don’t feel like going into it.’

Marcy

‘For Chrissakes Jerry you can’t do that,’ wailed Marcy choking on the dregs of her martini and stubbing a cigarette into an ash tray with all the lethal ease of a slaughterhouse despatcher on piece work. Marcy was my agent. I was her client. We hated one another.

‘You really can’t introduce yourself to people like that. These days people have to like writers, writers have to like publishers, publishers have to like writers, even agents have to like their clients, apparently.’

‘You are asking me, J.D. Salinger, the champion of adolescent alienation, a writer who is sickened by hypocrisy and corruption to go and schmooze with men in Brooks Brothers suits?’

‘They’re the ones with the generous inside pockets that accommodate the big fat wallets, deary.’

‘ Listen, I would rather jab myself in the eye with this new-fangled thing called a biro, than walk into a room full of jerks that I’m supposed to impress.’

‘Put the pen away Jerry.’

‘I mean;  people who can talk, talk – and people who can’t talk write – right?

‘Wrong Jerry.’

‘If I could talk why would I bother writing?’

‘I wish you’d shuttup. That’s why I arranged this coaching session.  I’m cirrhosing my liver in an attempt to make you understand that things have changed.  This, Jerry, is how you get published these days.’

‘Look Marcy.’  I  was losing this argument. I’d interrogated some bad bastards during my de-nazification assignments in Germany, besides Marcy they’d all  look like the flower girls at a society wedding.

‘No, you look Jerry’, she said pointing a vermillion nail at me and narrowing her eyes like a raptor about to eviscerate a pet bunny, ‘you’ve won this goddamn prize and the lousy reward is a networking event, which you will haul your ass to if it’s the last thing you do.’

‘Jeezus H Christ, Marcy.’

‘Shuttup Jerry,’ she said lighting another cigarette and inhaling like a vacuum cleaner on turbo. She exhaled all over me. I flinched but disguised it with a dismissive snort.

‘So, what in the name of a sonuvabitch marketing man’s wet dream, does one do at a networking event?’

‘It’s simple,’ said Marcy, pouring herself another Martini and siphoning vermouth and gin like a dehydrated ant-eater, ‘ You go to a hotel where you meet publishing industry professionals, you know, publishers, agents and you MAKE NICE Jerry. You talk. You smile. You act like you wanna get published, capische?’

Dehydrated anteater

I took a cab downtown. The driver was some kind of  wearisome crazy who claimed to know all about writing and stuff. I glanced at his license and saw that his name was Jack; Jack something or other. All the way he was telling me about his terrible compulsion to keep driving  to California and back for no discernible reason. And how he wrote  a novel on  industrial toilet roll with complete and absolute disregard for the semi-colon.  I asked him how come he was driving a cab, if he was such a great writer an’ all. That’s when he stepped on the brakes and turned round to fix me with a manic stare, and while all the cabs behind leant on their horns, he told me how his agent had made him go to a networking event.

‘Man, if that’s what it takes to get published,’ Jack said, ‘ I’d just as soon spend my life driving a vomity-stinking cab,at least I’ll have the company of people who I don’t have to pretend to like, I don’t wanna join all those phoneys, being phoney.’ 

‘Jack,’ I said, ‘you’re right, that’s what they are, they’re all goddamned phoneys; we are the authentic ones.  Are you into Zen?’

‘Am I into Zen?’ said Jack waggling his head as a great smile spread across his face, ‘do you dig The Bird?’

‘I like owls’

‘No the Bird, man; Charlie Parker.’

‘He isn’t a publisher or an industry professional is he?’

‘He’s a Boddhisatva man, he might even be God, I could take you to hear him play his sax.’

‘You know what  Jack, I’d love to hear God playing the sax,  screw Marcy, forget the hotel, but first I’ve got a driving job for ya.’

‘What you got in mind?”  Jack  asked tapping out a crazy rhythmn on a pair of bongos that he’d wedged between his knees.

‘Do you know a place where I could spend fifty years as a mysterious recluse riding on a slim output of novellas, albeit with a massive cult literary following?’

Jack executed a totally illegal U turn at this point and sped back down Fifth Avenue flipping open a cigarette case and offering me a handful of benzedrine.

‘First we pick up my buddy Dean Moriarty,’ said Jack, ‘then we aim this cab into the setting sun and go searching together for cheap wine and literary seclusion.’

‘Amen to that Jack,’  I said feeling my eyeballs execute a 360 and hit the base of my brain with a not unpleasant sensation, ‘Bye phoneys, hallo obscurity!’

Mrs Dalloway Comes Out in Downton

Dear Virginia

Thanks so much for sending us your synopsis and what, according to our submissions policy, (readily available on our website) should have been the first three chapters of your book.

Unfortunately, I stopped reading after the first line. Virginia, I am not sure if you realise that a first line is crucial. It must engage the reader and pull them irresistibly  into  a story. The first sentence of your novel would appear to be,  ’Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’ Ask yourself, what does this sentence achieve? Does it engage? Does it intrigue? Does it conjure a landscape that a reader might long to inhabit? Or does it convey a mere whimsical inconsequentiality? What do we learn of Mrs Dalloway that would interest anyone other than a person gripped by some kind of floristry-based obsession?

Added to this, the fact that you have employed a rather juvenile tactic  in order to circumvent the usual submission requirement of three chapters, by opting apparently not to have ANY chapters at all, and on that basis submitting the WHOLE of your novel,  did you no favours at all.

I do not know whether you are unfamiliar with the concept of the synopsis, but I can assure you that thirty close-written pages outlining the thoughts of your main character really don’t fit the bill. Even two pages, I’m afraid Virginia, are almost too much for a busy editor these days. We need to know, at a glance, whether you have a story, if it is the right shape, that the characters have arcs. We need to see that you have hit all the plot points and have a satisfying denouement, preceded by a gripping climax, obviously.

The premise of your novel is sound enough; the idea of your main character Mrs Dalloway, preparing mentally and physically for an evening party which many of the important people in her life,  will be attending, including the Prime Minister, has great potential. But what do you do with this? There is little sense of pacing or rising jeopardy. In short, nothing, but nada, appears to happen.

Forgive me, but how Mrs Dalloway evades arrest as she  wanders  aimlessly through London Streets, darting back and forth between the past, present and future, I really don’t know. You, Virginia, appear to be equally lost, unable to  decide on your narrative style, switching  from omnicient description,  interior monologue, and even, egads, soliloquy. Please Virginia, you must think of your marketing demographic.

I think you would do better to drop this  ’stream of consciousness’  thing, that you constantly bang on about in your accompanying letter and concentrate instead on STRUCTURE.  Don’t forget, SOMETHING MUST HAPPEN ON EVERY PAGE, not just a lot of waffling about Big Ben chimes, sugared almonds and a kiss exchanged with another girl.  BTW, I think you are missing a trick by not bigging up the lesbian potential of Sally Seton. After all, if kissing Sally Seton was the happiest moment of Mrs Dalloway’s life then she really ought to come out, don’t you think? ; quite possibly at the party.

Think less, ‘stream of consciousness’ and more ‘Downton’.  Imagine that Julian Fellowes, (temporarily deranged by an excess of champagne cocktails and  Beluga caviar), had fox-trotted across  his  croquet lawn and taken a header into his aristocratic haha, thus incapaciting his writing genius, and YOU were asked to write your party scene as a culminating episode of this lucrative soap opera.  You could have Mrs Dalloway  kissing Sally Seton brazenly in front of the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Peter Walsh kissing the Prime Minister, implicating the government and even minor members of the  Royal family in a scandal,  eventually embroiling the entire country in a constitutional crisis. Now that’s a party scene. Think of the American serial rights!

I hope I have given you food for thought.

I am sorry that we were unable to help you on this occasion and I wish you the best of luck.

Best Wishes

Dido Bagge-Shawe

Editor

Hatchet Books

Strictly Hedda

Dear Henrik

Thank you so much for letting us read your latest play.

Here at the agency, I think we are all agreed that it is an extremely powerful piece which asks many penetrating questions concerning morality in modern life. In short, WE LOVE IT, although some of the subtlety of your legendary word play may have been lost to us – a Linguaphone record bought from a charity shop by one of our more enterprising interns,  entitled ‘Norwegian for Fun’, went some way to establishing a flavour of your native tongue, however as your main character, Hedda, never finds herself in the unfortunate situation of having to call room service to inform them that her lavatory is blocked, or inquire of a jolly grocer whether he has an adequate supply of pickled herring for immediately shipping to the United States, it ultimately proved to be of limited utility.

Although we are totally convinced of the quality of your dramatic writing, you did ask us for a  report, so we feel that we must point out one or two small reservations that we have about your current plot outline, and perhaps make some useful suggestions of how these tiny problems might be resolved.

Firstly, your main character, the eponymous Hedda, is a vivid, vibrant character but we came to the conclusion that she really wasn’t very likeable.  She  has  married her husband because as she says, ‘she had danced herself to a standstill’, but we only hear about this dancing,  we never witness it. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could see Hedda perhaps reviving her dancing career? As it is, she  is bored with her husband  and frankly,  so are we. He isn’t very likeable either, is he?  Ask yourself Henrik ; would a woman like Hedda, who has been the toast of some obscure Norwegian town, really marry a man who is devoted to his  Aunty, and obsessed by embroidered slippers?   We think that you should ditch the Aunty and the slippers and make  George into a lovable ‘professor distrait’ with a secret sexy side, which he shows when he whisks Hedda onto the dancefloor and lets her feel the strength of his critical treatise.

Hedda is also very tetchy with her schoolfriend, Mrs Elvsted, who seems very tense. Whether she is a victim of her hormones, or a disenchanted religious maniac,  we never discover, because you simply haven’t shown us what her problem is. Imagine if you wrote a scene where Hedda and Mrs Elvsted take advantage of Happy Hour at the Soused Herring Cocktail bar. They get absolutely rat-arsed, ripping into embroidered slippers and ridiculous academic rivalries. Later while they are sitting in the road wearing traffic cones on their heads, Mrs Elvsted confesses that she desperately wants to go in for gynoplasty, and Hedda gives her the name of a good surgeon. They cry, put their arms around one another and bond. Now we are really getting to know these characters.

But, in your outline Hedda simply doesn’t get any nicer, does she? Enticing her former lover Lovborg (isn’t the name  a little too obvious and a tiny bit silly?) to have a drink despite the fact that he is a reformed alcoholic, thus setting about his ruination, and then, lo and behold, burning his much vaunted ‘brilliant manuscript’. Isn’t this all a little far fetched? I mean Hedda must have a nice side to her too and we NEVER see it.  At the agency we always tell our authors that it  repays to make your characters well-rounded – no one is simply that nasty or miserable,  Henrik.

It goes on, when she hears that her ex- lover, Lovborg, (really got to think about changing that name) has shot himself in a brothel, what exactly does it add? Wouldn’t it have been better if he’d just had a minor traffic accident and then there would have been the possibility of Hedda nursing him back to health and a little redemption?

Henrik, we find this very hard to say, but we really don’t think that you are going to find pitching this very easy, if you insist of ending the story with the main character rushing to her bedroom and  shooting herself dead with her father’s pistols. It’s  such a downer. We can see publishers all over London just shaking their heads and flinging your masterpiece into the recycling. Please re -think!

Perhaps, after the surgery,  Mrs Elvsted and George get it together. Meanwhile Hedda has nursed Lovborg back to health. Then all four of them could take a holiday. In the final scene we see them  ’dancing to a standstill’ to some wonderful tune, on a balcony overlooking the Med.

The audience will leave the theatre whistling that tune and feel that they’ve had a life-enhancing experience, rather than going home to wrestle with modern morality and ultimately slit their wrists. Don’t you think you owe them that much after they’ve forked out 70 quid a seat in the West End?

Once again, thank you so much for consulting us at the agency and we wish you the best of luck with your play.

Regards

Fabia Glossy-Smarte

p.s. Just a thought… what about a change of title? Maybe  ’Strictly Hedda’?

Hideous Publishing Accidents #4 – Becoming Lotus Adams – Part Two

Two months had passed. Sally gazed into the mirror above the phone noting that the bruising around her eyes  from the rhinoplasty was almost gone. She tried to smile in order to assess her new teeth veneers and the laser enhancement of the rest, but feeling the slight pull on the scars behind her ears, she desisted. At least the mottled horror of the chemical peel that had given her the appearance of a jackal’s arse, had all but dissipated.

Over the past months, she had woken in the twilight of anaesthetic recovery rooms and wondered what her motivation was for inviting such pain and discomfort. Why was a plain and tired-looking woman, for whom menopause was merely a memory that had slipped below the event horizon, trying to transform herself into a photograph that she had stolen from Facebook? She looked at the photo that she had sent to Hilary Slade ; the  anonymous pneumatic blond  that she had passed off as the author of her own book, and thereby created a monster called ‘Lotus Adams’. This was the girl that Hilary Slade wanted to sign and make a literary star, not Sally.

‘Bring on the facial fillers and the blond weave’, she said, narrowing her eyes, as best she could, forgetting that the skin above her eyelids was now taut and unforgiving.  The frozen rictus of a smile from the unfamiliar creature in the mirror was a little alarming.  Sally wondered how much her yet unsettled surgery might frighten a hairdresser.  Perhaps she should give it a few weeks more.

Hilary Slade, editor at Brown,Brown & Taupe

Hilary Slade had Peppie, her assistant, call Lotus Adam’s mother regularly with exactly the same result. Some waffling reply about her daughter’s imminent return from the Himalayas. Hilary had begun to wonder whether the woman wasn’t stupid. Did she not understand the urgency of the matter? In her considerable experience, an offer of a publishing contract usually overcame all and any obstacles, both moral and geographical, to even the most scrupulous anti-materialist.  Evidently not in this case. Her fingers itched with the frustration of  ’The Impossibility of Finding Lotus Adam’. Mmnn, good title for her own book, perhaps.

A week later, Dr Haar had talked Sally out of the facial fillers and persuaded her to go for a longer-lasting solution to reclaim  the plump skin of a twenty year old.

‘Do you know any twenty year olds whose plump skin we can claim’,  she had joked inadvisedly to the slightly paranoid Dr Haar.

The procedure normally cost well over two thousand pounds and with her funds receding like greasy water down a recently unblocked drain, she had sought out Dr Haar, who promised to carry out the  ’Organic Facelift’  for a fraction of the cost, due to the fact that he had very low overheads.

Sally could appreciate how he had kept his overheads low, when she had climbed the winding staircase to his clinic, above a fried chicken take-out in an unfashionable part of South London. But it turned out that her misgivings were misplaced, even despite Dr Haar’s insistence on her paying cash upfront. He had extracted fat from her backside and magically transposed it to her thinning temples and cheeks some days later. After sleeping upright on pillows, dosed on painkillers for several weeks,  Sally’s face had, as he promised, regained a youthful fullness.

One morning, the postman delivered verification of Sally’s official name change. Holding the documents in her hand, she gripped a hand-mirror and stared at her new face. ‘I am Lotus Adams’, she insisted truthfully, before having to lay back against the pillows feeling a little odd. She didn’t know if it was the painkillers or the hormone replacement therapy kicking in.

Peppie arrived breathless at Hilary Slade’s desk the same day, with the news that Lotus Adams had arrived back in the country at last. Hilary’s reaction was one that no one at Brown, Brown & Taupe had ever known before; she burst into tears, for at least five seconds. Then blowing her nose on a Hermès scarf , she gave an alarmed Peppie instructions to make an absolutely firm arrangement for a meeting with the maddening girl.

Arriving at Brown, Brown and Taupe a few days later, Sally or ‘Lotus’ stopped to admire her reflection in the glass doors. Blond hair extensions curling just below her shoulders, Lotus sported a long silk tunic and trousers with a fine silk scarf swathing her neck, achieving, she hoped, a ‘recently returned from Katmandu’  boho elegance. Shaking in the lift she  calmed herself by practising the rejuvenating exercises that her voice coach had promised would lift her voice several tones higher.

Hilary Slade had cleared her morning in anticipation of meeting Lotus Adams. The legal department had sent up the contract and it lay on her desk wanting only a signature. Then Hilary heard the tinkle of ankle bells and the much-longed-for Lotus was before her, all hair and silk, laughter and handshakes. Hilary noticed that she seemed a little unsteady as she sat down on the office sofa. They made a little light conversation about Nepal, which Lotus seemed quite hazy about. Peppie  brought in the coffee and biscuits and Hilary noticed that Lotus couldn’t hold her cup steady.

‘Jet lag,’ Lotus explained, laughing a high girlish laugh.

Hilary had suggested she take her gloves off, but Lotus merely replaced the cup onto the saucer with some difficulty. Hilary Slade was beginning to re-assess the situation, wondering if  Lotus was at worst a possible drug-user, at best, some kind of fashion throw-back; who wore gloves indoors? Ian came up from the legal department for the contract signing,  Peppie confirmed the restaurant booking for lunch and Hilary reminded herself of the night she’d sat up reading Lotus’ book. So, the girl was a little whacky, few of her authors were ‘normal’.

As Sally/ Lotus took a grip of the pen to sign the contract, for a fraction of a second she registered the fact that Hilary was staring at her hand. She had tried to sign wearing her glove but cursed the fact that despite having practised her signature as ‘Lotus Adams’, she had never thought to do so wearing a glove. It had been impossible to grip the pen. In her desperation she removed the glove and saw Hilary’s eyes instantly register the fact that her hand was fanned with sharp bones, mottled and sinewy; in short, the hand of a sixty year old woman. But it was done, the contract was signed, then everything went black.

It was 3pm when Hilary Slade  left the hospital and flagged down a black cab. It had been the best and possibly the worst day of her career in publishing. She had signed a fabulous debut author in the morning and then witnessed her death an hour later. She needed several strong drinks, if not a small dedicated private cocktail bar. When Lotus had collapsed after the signing Peppie had called an ambulance and Hilary had accompanied her author to the hospital. Bumping along in the ambulance Lotus had regained consciousness for a while and gripped onto Hilary’s hand.

‘You will publish the book, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’  Hilary had assured her.

‘Even if I die?’

‘People don’t die of jetlag, Lotus’  Hilary had said.

Then a few minutes later Lotus had gripped her hand once more.

‘Doctor Haar’.

‘Haar?,’ Hilary repeated.

‘Yes,’ Lotus tried to smile and croaked on her last outward breath, ‘Haar, Haar’.

Then she was gone. The paramedic started heart massage, in A& E Hilary winced as she heard them use the de-fibrilator, but all to no avail. Hilary rang Peppie from the cab and told her the news, then instructed her to meet her at a  bar in order to map out their pitch to the Marketing Department.

‘Peppie stop saying OMG and listen, ‘The Impossible Conjectures of Slime Mould’  now has everything, I thought Lotus was its USP… but Lotus’ death is even better.’

‘That’s an awful, despicable, morally abhorrent thing to even think, let alone say, Hilary,’  Peppie sniffed.

‘I know, but it’s irresistible, death is always the shrewdest marketing move anyone can make’.

The Impossible Conjectures of Slime Mould
A Postumous Debut Novel
by
Lotus Adams
(All Royalties to be donated to the Brown, Brown & Taupe Fund for Mature Unpublished Writers) £19.95

Hideous Publishing Accidents #4 – Becoming Lotus Adams – Part One

Hilary Slade of Brown, Brown & Taupe

Sally replaced the phone reverentially back onto its stand, ending the phone call  for which she had waited an entire lifetime.

Technically the phone call hadn’t been for her at all. The  silky tones of  Hilary Slade, the well-respected editor from illustrious publishing  house  ’Brown, Brown & Taupe’,  had wanted urgently to speak to someone called  ’ Lotus Adams’.

Hilary placed a trembling finger onto the  manuscript that lay before her on her desk . Her eye strayed to the letter that lay beside it, with a photo of the author clipped to the top.  Lotus was  perfect, so perfect that Hilary in her giddy state felt that she might almost have invented her.  She was not only the very image of Botticelli’s Venus but was evidently deeply intelligent, witty and wise beyond her tender twenty-two years.  She had a life perfectly shaped for a literary profile.

Valentine Adams, Father of Lotus and ‘Moving Spirit’ of the Adam’s Alternative Theatre Experience

Her parents were separated but Lotus had grown up in her family travelling theatre troupe, playing Ibsen to itinerant Mongolian sheep herders and Pirandello to irritated New Guinea tribesman . Her parents had separated and her mother ran a small-holding in deepest Sussex, whilst her father lived in a Buddhist monastery, deep in the Himalayas.

Hilary had read Lotus’ book through  the night, with a excitement bordering on hysteria before dashing, sleepless  into the office in order to talk to its intriguing author.

Sally had the unhappy task of informing Hilary that Lotus was spending time with her father and would, unfortunately be away for some time.

‘But surely she has a phone Mrs Adams?’

‘No signal in the Himalayas.’  Sally had quickly replied,

‘But this is impossible, she can’t  write a book of such brilliance and then just disappear’, huffed Hilary.

‘ Brilliance, you say’. Sally steadied herself against a kitchen cabinet as a flush rose up her neck.

The travelling theatre challenging in every possible way the orthodoxies of mainstream dramatic thought

‘Mrs Adams, I have been a literary agent for twenty years and I can say categorically that

‘The Impossible Conjectures of Slime Mould’,  is the novel that I have been waiting for  my entire career’.

‘But surely, if her novel is that good, you can go ahead, I’m sure Lotus would want you to publish.’

Hilary had gone on to explain, that Lotus’ youth, beauty and exotic upbringing would be the package that she wanted to sell.

‘Package?’ Sally queried.

‘Get her back here, as quickly as you can Mrs Adams’.

‘But did I hear you right, you did say that her book was brilliant?’

‘Yes, Mrs Adams, but I need Lotus’.

The tribesman had a moving and somewhat frightening empathy for early Twentieth Century Italian Drama

Sally having replaced the receiver looked up into the wall mirror above and searched for a solution. After all, the problem was a sticky one. It was so good to know that the book was brilliant and yet so bad to know that there was no such person as Lotus Adams. Sally had written the book herself and Lotus had been her own invention. After decades of unsuccessful submissions, Sally had stolen the photo of some anonymous beauty from Facebook to prove a theory that she had long held about the publishing industry.  For if Hilary had seen the true face of its author attached to that manuscript, would it have made it out of the slush pile?

After all these decades of duelling with bitterness, envy and out-an-out hatred for all successful writers both living and dead, Sally couldn’t let this opportunity slip.  She had some money saved, a little time and absolutely nothing to lose.  There was, after all,  no option but to become Lotus Adams.

Hideous Publishing Accidents #3 – Hogg’s Hobnob Demise

The Narrow Cleft by Valerie Scoresby

Geoffrey Hogg had been a stalwart of the Nether Gissing Writing Circle  since its formation in 1979. It had always been a comfortable group of friends, who rotated their meetings between each other’s homes on a fortnightly basis. Gentle criticism followed on from quiet unassuming readings of works-in-progress. The group waxed and waned with the circumstances of its members; illness, divorce and very occasionally, death,  had left an opening for a new member. Usually after an initial awkwardness this new member melded almost imperceptibly into the group and the old easy equilibrium was achieved.

Voices in the Stone
An Anthology of Poetry by The Friends of Norman Churches

Although ‘vaulting ambition’ was not a hallmark of the NGWC, they had nurtured the odd literary ember and blown them into flame. A case in point would have been the excitement engendered when Audrey Manners had some poems included in a small anthology on Norman churches.  And when a publisher very nearly took up Valerie Scoresby’s  potholing romance, you would hardly have guessed at her wild anticipation. She presented a very adequate offering of mixed sandwiches for the next meeting with hardly a nod to possible publication.  Equally, Maurice Coombe had come within a heartbeat of fame when his crime story, ‘Mandrake by Moonlight’ was a runner-up in a competition. That’s the way it was with the Writing Circle, modesty, quiet dedication and a love of words were the only required virtues, until Saul Pinochet joined.

Mandrake by Moonlight by Maurice Coombe

‘I can’t believe that is his real name,’ Audrey observed after the newcomer had left and she and Geoffrey were clearing away the coffee cups.

‘What do you think, Maurice?’ Geoffrey asked, tipping the remaining Hobnobs back into the biscuit barrel.

‘It certainly sounds like an alias,’ Maurice replied, picking up the bottle of Merlot that Saul had so mistakenly brought with him and scrutinizing the label, ‘and this appears to come from Chile’.

After that remark all three had exchanged glances, and although it was never given voice they shared the premonition that nothing in the Nether Gissing Writing Circle would ever be the same again.

As if in evidence of this, at the very next meeting Saul suggested that the Circle should have a group website. This was unanimously spurned. Then, at the following meeting, Charlotte Fothergill, whom Geoffrey had privately thought to be a little flighty, with an ill-disguised penchant for something called  ’Womens’ Fiction’, brought up the website suggestion and moved that the matter be brought to a vote. To Geoffrey’s surprise more than half the group voted in favour. Later Geoffrey shared his concern that Saul might have met up with Charlotte between meetings and persuaded her to win over the others. So the webpage was voted in and Saul offered to set it up.

Aethelwold’s Lament by Geoffrey Hogg

Two weeks later, Geoffrey was due to read the next instalment of his verse drama set in the household of an  exiled Anglo- Saxon King  ’Aethelwold’s Lament’. Soon after the reading began, there was a knock at the door and Maurice ushered in some new members. Geoffrey tried to re-compose himself. After only a few minutes of reading however, his face flushed red at the distinct sound of whispering and a prolonged snigger from one of the newcomers. He had closed his manuscript.

A month or so on and the Circle had acquired eight new members.  Three packets of Hobnobs had been demolished and Valerie had thrown in the towel, melodramatically announcing that she couldn’t possibly make egg mayonnaise sandwiches for so large a group. Before Geoffrey could get a handle on the situation, one of the new people suggested meeting at the pub, and to Geoffrey’s disbelief this was almost unanimously agreed upon.

It was years since Geoffrey had walked inside The Rose & Crown in the centre of Nether Gissing, but he found it horribly transformed. He remembered it as a perfectly ordinary pub full of horse brasses, copper kettles and worn carpets, where wheezing old regulars exchanged desultory banter with an ugly barmaid. Now it was  a Cuban-themed bar called confusingly, ‘The Goat & Curry’. When Geoffrey found the right table, to his shock he noted that there were now over twenty members. The new recruits barely glanced at him, so engrossed were they in chatting, their faces illuminated from the glow of their iPads. Audrey, Valerie and Charlotte  meanwhile all appeared to be drinking garish cocktails and  giggling. Sitting down with a double strawberry daiquiri Geoffrey lifted an eyebrow at Maurice and felt glad that he had left ‘Aethelwold’s Lament’ at home.

It was during that meeting that the Nether Gissing Writers’ Circle underwent a coup. Without a ‘by your leave’ Saul Pinochet had chaired the entire meeting and announced an exciting project. He’d found an online publishing platform where the whole group could post their work and get feedback from readers.

‘Platform?’ asked Audrey, ‘Are we going on some kind of journey?’

‘Oh yes Audrey, that’s exactly what we are doing’, replied Saul Pinochet.

A wave of excitement broke over the writing circle accompanied by renewed orders for mojitos. The new members were flicking at their iPads distractedly.  Geoffrey gulped at his daiquiri and winced, then looked towards Maurice who was deep in conversation with Saul. He sighed.

In the next few weeks, Geoffrey was forced to use words that impelled him into the horrible mainstream of the present. Like an Anglo-Saxon confronting some effete Norman expression, he wrinkled his nose in displeasure as he was forced to say ‘upload’ and ‘online platform’. He could hardly acknowledge the fact that Saul had persuaded him to publish a small section of ‘Aethelwold’s Lament’ on the beastly site.

A Trimphone Circa 1970

The telephone woke him from a deep doze ten days later. It was Charlotte. In his dazed state it was hard to make out what she was saying; something about the online publishing site and the ‘thrilling’ way that the number of reads appeared beneath her story . Charlotte had apparently had over 2000 ‘reads’  for a story called somewhat appallingly, “What’s a girl to do?”. Geoffrey wondered at Charlotte’s powers of recall, as it had been many a decade since she had laid claim to the title ‘girl’. More irritatingly however, was his inability to understand how people were reading her story.  Charlotte obviously caught a hint of his confusion and explained, as though he were a particularly dense child, that these anonymous ‘readers’ were downloading it onto their phones. For a fraction of a second he regarded his seventies trim-phone before jolting himself back into the present.

What’s a Girl to Do? by Charlotte Fothergill

‘But that isn’t why I rang,’ Charlotte continued, ‘guess how may reads Athelwold’s Lament has got.’

He didn’t really want to know. He felt terribly exposed by this bogus ‘publication’, as well as misunderstood. He hated the fact that he had given way to Saul over the matter of his comprehensive footnotes.

‘But Saul, without my foot-notes no one will know that an ‘acbearo’ is an oak-grove.’

‘Believe me Geoff, no one’s gonna notice,’ Saul had replied thumping Geoffrey on the back.

Geoffrey shuddered at the remembrance and then became aware of Charlotte’s excited voice saying something incomprehensible to him.

‘What did you say?’, he asked

‘Aethelwold’s Lament has been read 20,000 times, Geoffrey, Geoffrey…are you there?’

Geoffrey sat with the squawking telephone loose in his hand, as a horror too deep to express crept over him.

Geoffrey Hogg was absent for the first time ever for the following Writer’s Circle. His body had been found by Audrey lying on his kitchen floor, a half-eaten Hobnob in one hand and a letter in the other. Audrey had prized the letter from his cold hand and seen that it was from a publisher interested in offering Geoffrey a deal for the publication of  ’Athelstan’s Lament’.

A minute’s silence  was observed at the Goat & Curry and then the mojitos arrived.

*Geoffrey Hogg would have wanted me to elucidate the fact that a ‘Hobnob’ is a type of plain or chocolate- coated crunchy British biscuit or ‘cookie’ as  our North American friends insist.

Hideous Publishing Accidents #2 – The Pornification of Primrose Peake

Primrose Peake was penniless and not a little depressed;  halfway through her PhD, as well as a sack of time-expired lentils, bought from a wholefoods store at a knockdown price, life appeared unrelievedly bleak. Her long-term boyfriend, had just qualified as a doctor and been posted to a hospital up North. They had agreed to a relationship break. Was it this that had compounded her misery or the fact that her thesis,  ”Despair, Stupidity and Cupidity in Madame Bovary’, had lately lost impetus? Added to this, her supervisor, the gorgeous Dr Fabian Branwell, an acclaimed Flaubert expert, had become strangely distant at their meetings. Previously scornful of the shallow Emma Bovary, lately Primrose had experienced a surprising pang of  empathy at Emma’s growing knowledge that life and youth were passing her by. Where once she identified with Emma’s  good but clod-hopping husband,  Primrose had begun to have dreams in which she became Emma Bovary, whilst Fabian Branwell featured as Rodolphe,  Emma’s  glittering but callous seducer.

The old sentence polisher himself – G.F.

Was it the indigestibility of those beastly lentils that had induced such dreams ?  Recently that sack had begun to serve as a metaphor for her life; joyless, economical and possibly past its best.  The notion that those mean and worthy little legumes would work their way inevitably through her gut over the course of the next six months, leaving only an absence of pleasure, had become  insupportable. The knowledge that her doctorate and future life as an academic lay in the hands of Fabian, who was showing signs of dissatisfaction with her thesis, made her fate begin to look as doomed as that of the  tragic Madame B herself.  So it was that at this precise moment of howling vulnerability, her phone rang and with a dip of  Flaubertian despair she noted that it was her older sister calling.

Marnie Peake had recently left her career in magazine journalism to devote herself full-time to writing, on the strength of  signing a three-book contract with ‘Lacy Thong Books’. The first book had been a breeze; so easy had Marnie found the plot and writing that it had been mostly wrapped up whilst she was lying by the pool on holiday.  At first, her editor at ‘Lacy Thong’ had been delighted with the imaginative locations, (an Antarctic Scientific Station) the sex (abundant) and the characters (uncharacteristically beautiful boffins, a rampant yeti and some penguins). Then everything had stopped and ‘Lacy Thong’ had gone oddly limp.

Primrose reluctantly answered her phone. Ten minutes later she had been apprised of the fact that there had been a sea change in the ‘Erotic/Romance book world – a fact that would normally have aroused as much interest in Primrose as an update on Pork Belly Futures. Marnie was good at erotica – she had, after all, a lot of background knowledge. After her signing with ‘Lacy Thong’, she had rung Primrose to gloat, but my, how things had changed. ‘Lacy Thong Books’ were apparently no longer interested in ‘Goosepimples’ (working title).

‘Was it the inauthenticity of  finding a sexually uninhibited yeti in Antarctica?’ Primrose asked.

‘No,’ Marnie replied  ’they’ve completely changed tack, all they want now is literary classics re-written to be sexually explicit.’

Primrose  made a gutteral sound indicative of her scorn for the utter fickleness of the publishing industry, then wished Marnie  good luck with a good deal of insincerity. 

‘Don’t hang up’, Marnie almost shouted into the phone. And then the reason for the phone call slowly began to  emerge. Marnie’s three book deal was on the line. She couldn’t inject explicit sex into the classics because she’d never read them.

‘Well, that’s easy, read them.’ Primrose suggested, but Marnie protested that she had tried and failed to reproduce the required prose style.

‘That’s why I’m calling you.’ Marnie said.

When Primrose realised that she was being asked to ghost-write the erotic version of Madame Bovary, she hung up. Several days went by, during which she cast reproachful glances at the sack of lentils and her thesis lying untouched on her desk.  Lying awake at night unable to find a position in which she could sleep,  Marnie’s proposition played over and over in Primrose’s mind. She was prepared to go better than fifty-fifty on the fee. Primrose’s stomach growled.  She willed herself to ignore her hunger and think instead of  Flaubert’s syntax.  Then, around dawn, her stomach began growling again. On an impulse, Primrose grabbed her phone and rang Marnie.

‘I’m in’, she said.

Months later, after  Primrose had sent off the final draft of  ’ Madame Bovary Re-loaded’,  Marnie rang to say that ‘Lacy Thong’ were ectastic and that the sex scenes hadn’t disappointed. This came as no surprise to Primrose who had merely transcribed her erotic fantasies of Fabian Branwell, which had proved to be surprising in both variety and duration.

A few months after that, a fat cheque came through the post accompanied by a proof copy of ‘Madame B Re-loaded’ which bore, to Primrose’s amazement, her name rather than Marnie’s. That’s when the doorbell rang and Primrose answered it in a haze, only to find Fabian Branwell on her doorstep. He had confessed his love for Primrose. Having resisted so long out of some mistaken sense of propriety, he had finally given in. Her thesis was first class and he even thought that there could be a book in it, not that it would earn her much money but would pretty much establish her career as an academic. Then his eyes had strayed down to the book in her hand.

That had been an age ago. Primrose was alone at her desk, her thesis relegated to a bottom drawer and her mind full of tribulation, when once again her sister rang. Marnie had returned to her old job, explaining the relinquishing of her contract with’ Lacy Thong’  in favour of Primrose as an act of of sisterly love.

‘The magazine want to do a feature on you, darling, you know, academic turns into ‘Erotomaniac slut’. Academic world turns on author of best-selling erotic masterpiece; that sort of thing.’

‘OK, fine,’ said Primrose.

‘You don’t sound happy.’

‘No, really I am.’

‘You want to find yourself a man.’

‘I’m too busy,’ said Primrose, casting an eye over a stack of classic literature on her desk, wondering whether it would ever be worth the effort of  explaining  to Marnie the exigencies of eroticising Martin Chuzzlewit.

*******************************************************************************************

A week later, a woman’s body was recovered from the Regent’s Canal. Police were confused by the fact that the young woman, even in death, seemed to maintain a firm grip on the corners of a sack.

‘I don’t get it ‘, said the uniformed policeman to one of the forensic team, ‘do you think she fell or did she jump?’

‘Hard to tell.’

‘What’s in the sack?’

‘I’m not sure,’  the detective replied.

‘You know what it looks like?’

‘Suicide?’

‘No, it looks like lentils.’