Anteros

Ahem. nodbear and I have a wee announcement. Despite the fact that we are really just a pair of disreputable fangirls, astonishingly, we have been commissioned to write a book about the young gentlemen of HMS Indefatigable. Following our presentation at the New Researchers in Maritime History conference earlier this year, we were approached by the academic publisher Boydell and Brewer who expressed an interest in publishing our researcher. We've spent the last six months drawing up a proposal, which has now been approved by an academic reviewer and accepted by the publisher's editorial committee. So this weekend I went down to nodbear's to sign the contract :)

The current title of the book is a bit of a mouthful:

Naval Careers in the Napoleonic Wars - Hornblower's Real-Life Shipmates
The Lives of the Young Gentlemen of Pellew's Indefatigable
As an academic publisher, Boydell and Brewer's main criteria for their titles is that their subject matter will be immediately obvious to librarians and indexers! Hence the catchy "Naval Careers in the Napoleonic Wars" bit ;) We originally made no mention of Hornblower in our proposal and were surprised and very, very chuffed, when the academic reviewer suggested including Hornblower in the title. It also gives us a legitimate excuse to try and get a picture of Horatio and Archie into the book! :D

We now have two years to complete our research and write the book, and it will probably take another 18 months before it's published. So if we meet all our deadlines, we should be in print by....summer 2016. So don't hold your breath :} Also because we're signed up to an academic publisher, they will produce a vanishingly small hardback print run with an astronomical cover price. There's no such thing as advances in academic publishing, the royalties are minuscule and we have to cover all image licensing and indexing costs ourselves. That aside, we're over the moon about this and still can't quite believe that we've managed to pass ourselves off as "proper" naval historians.

So, huge thanks to everyone here who has already been so encouraging and enthusiastic about our research, we would never have got this far without the support of all you wonderful AoS fans. Wish us luck, in fact, wish us Ned's own luck!

Earlier this week I spent three days doing a book sprint with a some of my work colleagues. A book sprint is basically a short facilitated writing retreat that aims to produce a book from scratch in five intensive days. However we only had half that time and to add to the challenge one of our team was called away on jury service :} As it was, three of us managed to write a 20,000 word book in two and a half days, which is not bad going. It was an interesting experience, and the technique seemed to work well for collaborative technical publications, though I am curious as to whether it would be suitable for creative writing.

We stayed in some converted farm steadings at Swanston on the outskirts of Edinburgh, close by Swanston Village where Robert Louis Stevenson spent some of his youth. Years later on Samoa, shortly before his death, Stevenson wrote of his longing to see the hills around Swanston one last time.

The tropics vanish and meseems that I, from Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir or steep Caerketton, dreaming, gaze again.

It's a pretty spot right enough...

This is a rather long summary of the talk Dr Stuart Allen gave last weekend in Edinburgh on the influence of Admiral Thomas Cochrane on naval adventure fiction. I've been trying to upload pictures to go with this post all weekend but the pesky hackers have crippled LJs scrapbook again. I do wish they'd bugger off. Annywaaay....

Allen, the head curator of the National Museum of Scotland's current exhibition on Cochrane was introduced as "Senior Curator of Military History, with a life long weakness for naval history" :)




Dr Stuart Allen, and a fine collection of boarding weapons

( Admiral Cochrane - The Real Master and Commander )

I'll try and post a summary of Cordingly's lecture on Cochrane later in the week.

I was having a quick look over my Hornblower Remix draft this morning while having coffee. Daughter, who was wanting a shot of the laptop to play princess games, was peering over my shoulder and wanted to know what I was reading. I told her it was a story about sailors and she asked me to read it to her. So I chose a couple of reasonably innocuous paragraphs and started reading. Two paragraphs in and daughter told me to stop because it was "boring" and it was an "old dusty story". I am crushed! Crushed I tell you! I only hope the person I'm remixing will be a bit more enthusiastic about my creative endeavours. *grumble grumble*

This week sees the centenary of the birth of the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig, 14th November 1910 to 23 January 1996. This poem is a perfect illustration of his lyric style; spare, vivid and evocative. And I don't think I need to explain the image this poem evokes for me.

~ Small Boy ~

He picked up a pebble
and threw it into the sea.

And another, and another.
He couldn't stop.

He wasn't trying to fill the sea.
He wasn't trying to empty the beach.

He was just throwing away,
nothing else but.

Like a kitten playing
he was practising for the future

when there'll be so many things
he'll want to throw away

if only his fingers will unclench
and let them go.

From Voice-Over, 1988.

xkcd putting things in perspective.

It took me a while to find LJ on this map. It's down there in the south west, a small island west of the Sea of the Opinion and north of the Bay of Drama, lying between the tiny outcrops of Dreamwidth and fanfiction.net. Personally I'd have put LJ closer to the Bay of Grammar Pedantry but we can agree to differ ;)

There's an interesting article on the Guardian book blog by Meg Rostoff about writing fiction about real historical characters: Tackling real-life characters in fiction is fine – as long as you do it well. The article seems to have been sparked by objections raised by the Anne Frank Trust about a fictionalised account of her life by Sharon Dogar, Annexed. Rostoff namechecks a wide range of other fictionalised historical characters including Shakespeare's Henry VIII, Hilary Mantell's Thomas Cromwell and Alan Bennet's Queen Elizabeth II. Interestingly she also goes on to briefly discuss spin-offs of literary classics:

All of this doesn't even begin to consider the literary (as opposed to historical) parasites. The zillion spin-offs of Pride and Prejudice could easily be considered a stain on the memory of Austen's classic

However although Rostoff is clearly no fan of literary adaptations she does conclude:

although I might not like what Dogar writes, I would defend to the death her right to write it.

I'm not even going to attempt to summarise the comments but there are some interestingly contradictory opinions put forward. Fanfiction does get a mention but only briefly. Several of the commenters express very strong objections to authors attributing historical events to fictional characters:

I blogged earlier this year about the author who took real life events and 'allowed' children the honour of doing the brave deed (in WWII) in place of the courageous men and women who actually did it in actual real life. Some paying for it with their lives. I thought it stank then, and it still stinks, as far as I'm concerned.

Which of course made me wonder, is this any different to what authors like O'Brian and Forester did by taking inspiration, and in some cases actions, from real characters such as Cochrane and attributing them to fictional characters such as Hornblower and Aubrey? Do O'Brian and Forester stink? I don't think so.

Another commenter suggests that historical novelists should acknowledge what they borrowed and what they made up.

Personally I read fiction for pleasure and history for fact, although the two are by no means mutually exclusive! I also think one of the great joys of Age of Sail fandom is being able to read a body of historical and contemporary accounts, literary fiction and fanfiction all of which complement and enrich each other wonderfully.

I freely admit I know bugger all about writing. I tend to find it happens or it doesn't. I have no idea why, and I've never been greatly inclined to learn more about the process. I worked briefly as a web editor for a newspaper and it confirmed my suspicion that any job that involved writing on demand would be my idea of hell. And despite having spent most of my life working in higher education I have always managed to avoid posts that require you to publish or die.

Having said that I do enjoy writing, especially about pretty sailors or stuff other more talented folks have written. So although its not the kind of thing I would usually read I did rather like today's Grauniad article Ten rules for writing fiction which invited a bunch of authors to share their personal dos and don'ts. Here's a few of my favourites:

• Using adverbs is a mortal sin.


• Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.


• Don't go near the online bookies – unless it's research.


• Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said".


• Don't write in public places.


• The first 12 years are the worst.


• Try to be accurate about stuff.


• Don't have children.


• It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.


• Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.


• Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.


• Never use the word "then" as a conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose.


• Don't drink and write at the same time.


• Don't take any shit if you can possibly help it.

All advice I shall follow to the letter of course ;)

With thanks to Jonathan Franzen, AL Kennedy, Richard Ford, Anne Enright, Geoff Dyer, Roddy Doyle, Margaret Atwood andElmore Leonard.