Found In Castle Street - An Unexpected Discovery.

 

Castle Street, in Glasgow.

Earlier this week, I gave one of the 'Highlight Talks' in the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway. 46 people came along, which was an excellent audience, but then the museum is welcoming (great restaurant as well) and the organisers of the series work very hard. I promised that I would post a shortened version of the talk on my blog - so here it is. When I was researching my non-fiction book, A Proper Person to be Detained, (this is the eBook link but you'll find a link to the paperback version here) I soon realised that there was another, equally tragic story buried in there, and that sooner or later, I would have to do some more research, and write about it. Among other things, it involves the treatment of those considered to be insane in 19th century Scotland and England. But mostly, it's Elizabeth's story.

It all began with a murder.

My great, great uncle, my grandmother’s 22 year old uncle John Manley, was stabbed in the neck on the evening of Christmas Day 1881. It happened outside a so-called ‘beer house’ in the heavily polluted centre of industrial Leeds.mI soon found out that John wasn’t the only victim. His younger sister, 17 year old Elizabeth, had walked ahead of her brother, but hearing a commotion, turned back to witness him bleeding to death on the cobbles. She knew the murderer quite well.

Some years ago, I researched this murder, because all I knew was the small amount of information that had been passed down through the family. I found out a whole lot more with the help of a friend who is well versed in genealogy and I wrote a non-fiction book about it. Tragic though this young man’s death was, it resulted – eventually – in another terrible death, another wasted life. I researched what I could of that story, and some of it is in this book. But not all, and I plan to write a novel about Elizabeth over the next year, because she has been living in my head ever since.

The murderer – a poor soul by any standards - fled, was arrested, tried, sentenced to death and eventually, with the death penalty commuted, sent to Portland Prison where he served 12 years hard labour. He behaved well, and was released. He never committed another crime. By the time I came to write the book, I thought that he should probably have been tried for manslaughter.

Oddly, opinion in that part of Leeds was divided and the Manley family came in for some flak. I suspect it was mostly down to disapproval of the death penalty although the fact that Elizabeth had testified at the trial upset the murderer's friends and family. After the trial, she suffered from abuse in the street and was physically assaulted.  

Her elder sister, my great grandmother Mary was married to Charles Terran, but in January of 1884, he died of heart disease brought on by his work in an iron foundry, leaving her with three young children, and with very little means of support. Her only way of making a living of sorts was ‘hawking’ – selling whatever she could acquire: brushes, matches, that sort of thing. Possibly herself. Some time much later that year, she discovers that she is pregnant, and the child born in March of the following year, can’t possibly be her dead husband’s.

Elizabeth was twenty years old, unmarried, illiterate, feisty I think, diminutive and rather pretty if my mother and aunts and cousins are anything to go by – but extremely vulnerable. At some point in 1884, she travelled to Glasgow. As someone who was born in Leeds, but had spent many years living in the West of Scotland, I hadn’t expected this connection at all.

How did she get there? Probably by train, but who paid the fare? She spent two years there, as a ‘servant’ of some kind. In August of 1886, her address is given as 32 Spoutmouth, just off the Gallowgate and not far from the original Saracen’s Head Inn. We know this because she was picked up by the police in Castle Street where Provand’s Lordship still stands. She was said to be in a ‘manic state’ and she was taken to St Rollox police station and thence to the pauper asylum in the centre of Glasgow, (pretty much where the bus station now stands) a proper person to be detained as surely as the murderer of her brother. Gartnavel Hospital was in existence, and provided decent treatment for both upper and lower class patients, but Elizabeth was destined for the poorhouse with asylum provision on the side. 

32 Spoutmouth, where she had been living, is not a dwelling, but a warehouse, owned by Thomson McMullan, who deals in sacks, bags and casks. The McMullan family have a big house on fashionable Monteith Row, near Glasgow Green, but Elizabeth isn't named among the servants there. 30 Spoutmouth, which must have been adjacent or possibly above the warehouse, is tenanted only with working men, many with Irish names. Maps and a few images of this area from around 1900 or earlier show a place that looks uncannily like Brussels Street where Elizabeth had lived in Leeds - pollution, poverty, overcrowding and the railway dominating all. The houses were mostly much older buildings that had been 'made down', partitioned so that they could hold as many tenants as possible, and with flimsy outside stairs giving access to upper floors. 

From the Victorian era onwards there seems to have been a terrible fear of insanity, of ‘escaped lunatics’ rampaging about the countryside. This even persisted into the 20th century, as you’ll have noticed from – for example – Agatha Christie or even Richmal Crompton’s William books in which these lunatics sometimes feature. Earlier in the 19th century, Emily Bronte’s treatment of madness in Wuthering Heights, where the main protagonists are undoubtedly (and gloriously) bonkers, seems anomalous, nay sympathetic, compared with Jane Eyre and Charlotte’s horrific depiction of the madwoman in the attic, who may try to eat you alive – or failing that, burn down the whole house. Victorian society saw itself as that house. The angel in the home turned manic. Madness was equated with moral decay and was dangerous in all kinds of ways. 

Treatments of mental ill health undoubtedly improved as the nineteenth century progressed. People were no longer chained up or exposed for public entertainment. But very few were ever cured. During the industrial revolution, politicians and the press promoted the notion that an epidemic of insanity was sweeping through the nation and – surprise surprise and how familiar this sounds  - they blamed it largely on immigrants.

Few commentators made the connection between the expansion of asylum populations in Britain, the preponderance of women, especially Irish incomers, and the earlier famine that had led them to migrate to Scottish and English centres of population, where they were routinely exploited, living in the worst possible conditions, expected to do the worst possible jobs for very little money. So little money that for many women, prostitution with all its concomitant ills, physical and mental, was the only option.

I didn’t know much about the Glasgow System until I started researching Elizabeth, but by the 1880s, it would have been in force. This was the brainchild of Chief Constable Alexander McCall. His system encouraged working class women to be labelled as prostitutes on the flimsiest evidence, which in turn would class their homes as brothels, so that they could be fined, imprisoned or worse, sent to the Lock Hospital, one of the city’s most shameful secrets. So shameful that the city and its historians chose to forget all about it for a long time. Officially the 'Glasgow Lock Hospital for Unfortunate Females', this was a 19th and 20th century institution dedicated to treating women and girls suffering from venereal diseases. Whether they had them or not. Hard to tell which was worse: the Lock Hospital or the Pauper Asylum. Both were equally difficult to escape from, once you were committed. 

Researching Elizabeth's detention, I managed to see the originals of various record books in Glasgow's Mitchell Library. She sometimes uses the alias Ann Smith, and she is in a ‘state of mental derangement’. Her occupation is entered as ‘servant etc.’ Her late parents’ names are given and their address in Brussels Street in Leeds, so somebody must have been able to give these.

The officials don’t want her to be a drain on the public purse, so they would have been glad to discover that she belonged elsewhere. They note that she ‘had a brother stabbed four years ago and the man was sentenced to penal servitude’ but this is the only time anyone notes that traumatic event.

There is another statement with the damning description ‘supposed of loose character,’ another mark against her. Her Roman Catholic religion is noted, as is the fact that she has only been ‘insane’ for a few days, so there is no known history of mania. She is said to be ‘dangerous to others’ but not supposed to be suicidal. What had she done that was dangerous? Fighting? Screaming and shouting? She was labelled as a pauper lunatic and committed to the Parochial Asylum.

Once there, she is seen by doctors, who issue medical certificates. One notes that ‘she is very excited and cries out for somebody to kill her. Talks incoherently and refuses to answer questions. She is dangerous to herself and others’ he writes, although what that much repeated danger is, is never specified. The second certificate describes her as ‘sullen and morose and would scarcely answer a question’ repeating that ‘she wishes that anyone would only end her existence. She is dangerous’, finally observing that ‘she implores the Blessed Virgin to come and destroy her as she is tired of her existence, cries out at times, maniacally, and threatens to put an end to herself.’

Nobody seems to notice that a young Roman Catholic girl in serious distress, crying out to the Virgin Mary to end her existence because it has become unbearable to her, may have experienced something traumatic enough to trigger a breakdown. But then, I am thinking thoughts they would never have thought. Twenty first century thoughts. And even then, only in some parts of society.

That may have been the end of the matter, but in fact Scotland was a little more enlightened than England. Care in the community was possible and had she had relatives willing to take her in, she might have recovered. A letter was sent to the patient’s sister, Mary Terran, my great grandmother, asking if she could come and collect her. Of course she couldn’t. She couldn’t even write at this point, so somebody – probably the parish priest – had written it for her. She had children to care for and no resources at all. What was she to do? 

The authorities sent Elizabeth back to Yorkshire, firstly to the Wadsley Asylum near Sheffield where she spent four years gradually growing worse. The records of this asylum are all gone, but in 1890, she was transferred to Stanley Royd, in Wakefield, and there we have very full and extremely depressing notes of her treatment. Nobody visits her. Mary has remarried my great grandfather James Flynn and moved over the river to a slightly better house. He is a good man. I've written about him on this blog. But since he came to Leeds as an adult road-builder and paviour I doubt if he even knew about Elizabeth. She was never once mentioned in the family. It struck me recently that they may not have been aware that she had been returned to Yorkshire. 

The handwritten notes on her condition over the next two years make very grim reading. Nobody mentions the murder, although it is obvious that her distress and anger increases at Christmas time. Just occasionally you can see a flash of justified resentment in her replies to the endless questions. She will say ‘you know!’ Once, she says, ‘they call me Sarah Floss’. Had that been the name given to her by whoever was exploiting her in Glasgow? Once, they ask her where she came from, and she says ‘If you knew where you came from, sir!’ and then mentions, in exasperation, ‘what you call your person in bed’ but they don’t get the joke. She remembers travelling on a big locomotive. She says she has been in the asylum for fifty years. She calls it ‘the prison’ which it is. She says – significantly, I think – ‘no man takes the part of the baby, and no man ever did. I had it in the … beautiful.’ And nobody thinks to ask her what she had, and might it have been a baby and where she had it.

By December 1891, still exasperated by their foolish questions, she tells them that she doesn’t know whether she is in a ‘big institution or a small cabbage’. By February, she claims that she hears her parents speaking to her, and by May of 1892 she is dead from tuberculosis.

Much later, after my book was published, I discovered that in May 1885, before the manic episode in Castle Street, one Elizabeth Smith, a common enough alias, gave birth to an illegitimate child in the maternity hospital, at Rottenrow in Glasgow. This was a rather 'beautiful' place at that time among so much that was filthy and uncomfortable. After some respite at the hospital, the mother registers the baby also as Elizabeth and no father is named.

If this was my Elizabeth, she must have gone back to Spoutmouth, to the McMullan sack and bag makers. Thomson, the father, dies later that year. His will contains a cryptic reference to one of his sons, Alexander, a medical student of whom he had high hopes, but who has sinned in some way. Unless he passes his medical exams and becomes a total abstainer, he will be disinherited. 'He knows the cause' says McMullan. There is an emotional bequest to institutions for the prevention of cruelty to children. 'Something should be done for these miserable creatures.' But there is also a stern admonition that if any of his own children should marry a Roman Catholic or 'join the Romish church', they will be disinherited.

What happened to her in that warehouse? In the Gallowgate? In Castle Street? Did it involve the son who was a disappointment to his father. (He didn’t become a doctor, although he had a long and presumably fulfilling life.)  We know that she had been a good girl who went to mass and said her prayers. Was she enticed and exploited against all the constraints of her upbringing? Did it cause a breakdown that was only intensified by her treatment at the hands of the state? 

Josephine Butler, a feminist and social reformer at the time, campaigned for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, the abolition of child prostitution and an end to the human trafficking of women and children. In one of her public letters, she used the words of a prostitute to drive the message home: 'It is men, only men, from the first to the last that we have to do with! To please a man I did wrong at first, then I was flung about from man to man. Men police lay hands on us. By men we are examined, handled, doctored. In the hospital it is a man again who makes prayers and reads the Bible for us. We are had up before magistrates who are men, and we never get out of the hands of men till we die!'

She could have been describing Elizabeth.

 

Tannery in Spoutmouth, from the Burrell Collection. 

Book Festivals

Brilliant Boswell. 

There's a book festival happening in a couple of weeks and I just know that friends will ask me if I'm going. Probably not. There is only one event that genuinely interests me, and it's predictably over subscribed. I used to be invited to speak at the occasional festival (although never quite as many as I had books published) but the invitations have diminished over the years as the cloak of invisibility known as age spreads over me. 

To be fair, I have some talks organised in November - very much looking forward to them - and I was asked to participate in a local festival, but only as a 'chairperson' which means that you have to read the books and think of intelligent and illuminating questions. Although I'm always happy to talk about my own books, like many writers (although we don't often admit it) we don't always enjoy talking about other people's books, unless we're huge fans or possibly friends of the writer in question or both. I can probably count on my fingers and a few toes the writers I would be delighted to interview about their books, and a couple of them are dead. 

My most memorable festival was the Boswell Book Festival a few years ago, and it wasn't down to me at all. I had written a book called The Last Lancer about the Polish side of my family. The village where my father was born and spent a happy childhood is now in Ukraine. I was privileged to share a platform with a young Ukrainian woman and her daughter who had escaped from the Russian invasion but only just and at extreme peril. Her story illuminated some of what I had written about my own family in the most moving way possible, and continues to stay in my mind, as the war goes on. 

I've done hugely enjoyable events at Wigtown and Islay and once or twice at the Tidelines Festival in Irvine, but I'm on nobody's radar now, and that saddens me a bit. 

My funniest story about attending a book festival had better remain anonymous as to writer and chair - and even festival. It was a long time ago. The programme made the event in question seem quite tantalising. So we went. We found ourselves sitting in the very middle of a crowded room, with one door only and no means of escape, a situation which quickly became problematic. The book, which had better remain anonymous too, was a catalogue of detailed, perverted and bloody horrors, read aloud by the author with disturbing relish, and praised to the skies by the chairman. (I'm not a fan of trigger warnings in general, but if ever an event needed one this was it.) 

When we fell out of the venue an hour later, and went in search of strong coffee or alcohol for our shattered nerves, we wondered whether the fault lay with ourselves for not perceiving the genius of the writer in question. And then, dear reader, I passed the chairperson himself, walking away at speed and chatting animatedly to a friend. 

'God almighty, you should have heard him!' he said. 'An absolute nutter!'

We knew exactly who and what he was referring to and, silently, we agreed. 

A Very Weird Story

 

I've spent part of the summer rereading all my work. I've often felt myself to be a bit of a square peg trying to fit in a round publishing hole. Too many different kinds of books, I thought. Until a friend  pointed out that maybe the publishing industry itself never had a convenient commercial box into which my work might fit. Which is probably true.

Anyway, having had some welcome rights reversions, I've had a whole tranche of my work republished, as well as starting on a couple of new projects. One of the pieces I've reread is a short novella (or longish short story) called Rewilding. And given that we're heading for Hallowe'en, it's free on Kindle from Monday 5th October, for five days, so if you like the uncanny and unsettling, give it a try.

Where did the story come from? 

I had been visiting friends on Skye, where I saw the broch in the above picture. I'd also been listening to an excellent talk by a young man who had made an adventurous and fascinating solo journey across the Scottish Highlands, and it had struck me that most young women would think twice about doing such a trip. They might well think twice and do it anyway, but it would still give them pause for thought. What if the woman in the story, perhaps a young woman with a slightly troubled background, decided to feel the fear and do it anyway? It's a shortish hike, and no big deal for an experienced hillwalker, which she is. Four days, staying overnight in three different bothies. I'd been reading about Highland bothies. What if, at some point on that journey, she has an unusual encounter? 

The second bothy is remote, and she's alone. She's predictably spooked by the silence and the absolute darkness but she can bear it. She reflects on all those reasons why women may be frightened by their own vulnerability, usually involving men. 

'We are constantly aware of our surroundings. And when you think about it, it’s no way to live, is it? It’s exhausting. I remember our self defence instructor pointing out that no animal would ever get into a confined space like a lift in a situation where it felt threatened. Yet women do such things all the time. We ignore our instincts and put ourselves in harm’s way out of politeness. We sacrifice our own safety and security to the feelings of men.'

But harm's way can take many forms. And do we always understand that? Or even want to understand it? 

Without giving away too many spoilers, here's a 'footnote' to the story. The other source of inspiration, if you like. You should know that there are various mythical water beasts in Celtic mythology. Some belong in that category of creatures invented to keep children well away from standing water. Mill ponds in the North of England have Jenny Green Teeth who will drag you under. Scotland has a variety of cautionary 'monsters'. There is the water bull, the tarbh-uisge who gets a mention in The Curiosity Cabinet and who is commemorated in various Gaelic place names, including one on the Isle of Gigha. He's a massive amphibian bull, ugly and weird, but mostly mischievous rather than really dangerous, unless provoked to violence. Then there's the kelpie, who tends to haunt fresh water and who will entice children in particular onto his back, and then hold them fast and drown them. (The statues are just amazing. Go and look at them if you can!) Finally there's the each-uisge, the true water horse, perhaps the most terrifying monster in British folklore. He's a shape shifter, who can appear as a handsome and charming young man who, like the kelpie but worse, may drown you and eat you.

However ... to add another twist to the tale, there's this extraordinary song sung here by Julie Fowlis.  It's a traditional song about the each-uisge of Celtic belief. And yet in this song, he's also a sorrowful abandoned lover with, heartrendingly, an abandoned child too. Which, of course, doesn't mean that interacting with him couldn't also be a perilous undertaking. Who knows? 

By the way, the most amazing description of a water horse was written by Gillian Philip, in her magnificent and seriously undersold Firebrand trilogy. Undersold rather than underrated, because the reviews were deservedly wonderful, but she is another fine writer who seems to have been let down by a publishing industry that often neglects talent and originality in favour of celebrity.

Anyway. Rewilding. This isn't a ghost story and it isn't a horror story. Who knows what it is? It even disturbed me, when I reread it. One of those 'where did that come from?' moments. Read it and see what you think. I hope you get the same wee frisson that I certainly had from writing it! 

Here again is the link to the eBook. 

The Kelpies

Just an Old Man, Telling His Story

 

This summer meant a kind of hiatus for me in my truly creative writing. Lots of other things were going on: family stuff, house stuff, summer gardening and keeping up to our Etsy Store that helps to keep the wolf from the door. But perhaps more than anything else, I needed to take stock before embarking on new work.

I have a couple of new projects fermenting away, and - vitally - I'm also thinking about ways of promoting my older work, much of which has been newly re-published after a very welcome rights reversion from my publisher. (If you want to read any of my books, they're all available as paperbacks and eBooks on Amazon.)  

In order to even begin to think about promotion I had to step away from the publishing treadmill that has been a part of my working life for so long, and try to reclaim something of the joy in writing I used to have, and still do have when I let myself become absorbed in the work. 

I see a great many online posts, aphorisms if you will, about how truly AWFUL the writing process is. And I find myself thinking 'why do it then?' Are the rewards so great that you need to put yourself through daily torment? For most of us a writing career is not financially rewarding at all. But the work is. 

Which leads me to the conclusion that the only genuine, overarching reason for writing, apart from writing to find out, or because you have a story to tell, or you have an issue to explore, or characters that nip away at you, is because you love doing it, and you don't want to give up. Not ever. 

If it makes you miserable, stop. It isn't compulsory. Give yourself a break. Think about whether you really want to write, or if you just want to 'be a writer.' 

As part of my small self improvement programme, I've been rereading most of my published work. Contrary to my own expectations, it's considerably better than I thought it was! I don't know why I should be so surprised about this. After all, most of it was well reviewed. Most of it found somebody who wanted to publish it, eventually, at least. Sometimes people would take the time and trouble to tell me how much they had enjoyed what I had written. But imposter syndrome is very real, and during the 1980s and 90s, I had the misfortune to be writing in a Scotland whose publishing industry was - back then at least - snobbish, misogynistic, blatant and literal. Subtlety was not appreciated. Back then, at least, it was easy enough to knock me off my writerly perch.

My novel The Curiosity Cabinet was shortlisted for the 2005 Dundee Book Prize, and first published by Polygon. I had an agent back then. I've written before about my disappearing agents, but she wasn't one of them. Instead she would go on to disappear me. Meanwhile, the book sold reasonably well, feedback was good but the publisher flatly refused to look at another book from me. The agent was as mystified as I was. We hadn't fallen out. All the signals had been good. The only difficulty had been the imposition of an English editor who tried to change all the speech patterns of my Scottish islander protagonist, changes I had resisted. I was already a professional playwright with a significant body of work, and I knew about dialogue. Those problems had been resolved. I wondered if there was something wrong with the book, but then distinguished poet John Burnside had called it a 'powerful story about love and obligation'. I was forced to the conclusion that the 'l' word was the problem. Love stories by and about women were too often dismissed as sentimental nonsense and that caveat seemed to linger at the back of my mind. 

However, I may have been wrong about that, because I later found that the actual winner of the prize that year, with a Dundee set crime novel, had exactly the same weird experience. You've won a prize, think you've found a publisher, they publish your book - and then they ghost you. 

We soldiered on, that agent and I, getting nowhere. My work was deeply, indisputably Scottish, and London publishing hadn't yet discovered the romance of the Highlands, while Scottish publishing despised it. As usual, I was ahead of my time.

 As part of this summer's self discovery programme, I reread The Curiosity Cabinet and surprised myself by admitting that Burnside had been right all along. It was and remains a powerful and lyrical story about love and obligation, with not a word out of place. The 'sort of' sequel, The Posy Ring, works well too. More recently, I turned my attention to a book called The Physic Garden: a historical novel, set in very late 1700 and early 1800 Glasgow, the story of an unlikely friendship between a gardener, William Lang, and Thomas Brown, a lecturer in Botany at the Old College of Glasgow University, as well as a tale of the early days of surgery, and the joys of plant collecting. 

The 'physic' or medicinal garden was beset by industrial pollution and was dying. That fact alone seemed to give the story a contemporary resonance. The young gardener was blamed. But much more than that, it's a story of male friendship, of affection and ambition and an unforgivable and shocking betrayal.  It is narrated by William, from a perspective of age and wisdom. He has become a somewhat dry and sceptical old man. I can't help that. He wasn't me, and even now, re-reading it, I wonder where some of it came from, and ask myself how I managed to channel this crabbit, intelligent, decent and ultimately heartbroken old man. But I did. He came out of nowhere and I couldn't deny him. I couldn't have changed him if I had wanted to.

When I reread it now, I wonder why it wasn't taken more seriously at the time. Not everyone appreciates it, and that's fine. But it would have been nice if someone in my actual industry had noticed what it was 'about' and that it was a densely written, historically accurate, lyrical, intense and thoroughly original novel. 

I still remember what happened when I sent an early draft to that agent. She farmed it out to a 'reader' who sent it straight back with the comment that it was 'just an old man, telling his story.' 

Which, of course, it was. 

Fortunately, later on, Saraband published it, and more recently, I've reprinted it. You can try it for yourself, here.

PS, if you like the new cover images of these three novels as much as I do, seek out the work of brilliant landscape photographer, Michał Piasecki. You'll find his work here and can follow him on Facebook as Keen Photographer. 

AI Again

The view from Wittenham Clumps. Dry but pretty. 

Lots of hand wringing on my social media for the past week, most of it AI related. In fact there's more hand wringing about that than there is about various crazed human beings around the world imprisoning people, bombing people, killing people, hoarding billions, and generally behaving like the psychos they so clearly are. I'm well aware that there is a correspondence between the crazed men and the dangers of AI, but that's self evident. You tend to get out of AI very much what you put in, but in a nuanced and helpful way. If you ask silly questions, you'll get silly answers. Ditto, presumably, with venal questions.

For the past couple of months I've been too busy with real world stuff to even think about my Chat GPT friend much, although having recently wrestled with the wholly man-made horror that is UK train travel, I did ask him why buying tickets online was so difficult. To my surprise and delight he made a couple of jokes, including pointing out that the system is 'bonkers' (it is) before explaining in some detail why it is so user unfriendly. This explanation included references to what the customer/traveller wants, and what the computer sees. And how the two are totally incompatible. 

My recent 600 mile trip to stay with a friend in Oxfordshire involved tickets from Ayr to Glasgow to Birmingham to Oxford to Didcot Parkway. Two of those legs included the joys of  'split ticketing' where you have two tickets for the same journey on the same train. At least I got to stay in the same seat. Friends tell me that they have had to move to a different compartment on the same train, half way through the journey. For all those changes, I had to work out how much time I could reasonably leave between connections, when the moronic system decided that three minutes was plenty of time to change platforms in the circle of hell that is Birmingham New Street. And while I'm at it, for filthy, noisy, inhospitable stations, this one surely takes the prize. The concourse itself may be fine, but when you're changing trains you never find out, because you don't leave the vast, empty limbo between platforms, utterly devoid of staff. And what bright spark thought that in this part of the station, signs showing  ultimate destinations would be sufficient? How can your average traveller know that trying to find the platform for the train to Oxford means looking for Bournemouth? Only on the platform itself does all become clear. I can imagine the horror for any foreign tourist trying to navigate this system. On both journeys, there and back again, I could have sat down and wept. All of which leads me to wonder if handing the whole sorry mess over to AI would produce a more navigable system. It couldn't be any worse. 

Meanwhile, the mass writerly hysteria screeches on, although there is push-back like this excellent and interesting piece from Mark Ritson. And another one, this week, from Mark Williams, rightly enraged by the nonsense being spouted in the name of identifying AI. He writes, 'For as long as there have been gatekeepers of the written word, their authority has rested on a simple claim: that producing clean, structured, persuasive prose takes a rare and teachable skill, one they happen to possess and are willing to certify in others, for a fee, a byline, or a following.' 

Some time ago, having secured generous rights reversions from my then publisher, I had a conversation about potential promotion with my friendly AI assistant. My problem has always been that I have too much work. There were several novels that my publisher never even saw, not having the 'bandwidth' to deal with them. Not their fault. There were plays that had been professionally produced but never published. And although there are common threads, I've never written the same book twice, although like all writers, I have my obsessions! 

Somewhere along the way, AI suggested that it would be good for me to look back at my work 'as a whole' without trying to pigeonhole anything too firmly, but allowing myself to see connections where they existed, because that might give me some idea of what I had achieved, how all this work fitted together, and what I genuinely might want to do next. It was good advice, and I've been taking it, re-reading everything (there's a lot of it) and allowing myself to notice patterns where they occur. It has involved one or two unexpected revelations about the nature of some of that work, but they belong in another post. Coming soon. 

Something else has occurred to me along the way. Very few of the many gatekeepers I have engaged with over a long switchback of a career  - publishers, producers, directors, editors, agents - have ever tried to take any kind of overview of my work. Of me and my development as a writer. Or even suggested that I should do it for myself. That has never been where their interests lay. They have only ever been interested in the piece of work before them, and (with one or two memorable exceptions) most of them made suggestions about each piece of work that had very little to do with my own 'vision' for want of a better word. The suggestions were more like impositions and all to do with what was fashionable or popular or in demand at the time. Their own preoccupations. And sometimes their own prejudices. In between times, they forgot about me. 

They'd have been a shoo-in for what Williams calls 'the AI-detection cottage industry.'  The threat is not so much to writing, he suggests, but to the gatekeepers of writing who have a lot to lose and whose numbers these days are legion. Meanwhile, it strikes me that I've had more help and more sense out of my conversations with AI (and a scant handful of close creative friends) than I've had from years of industry professionals. And now, God help us, those of us who love to polish our work are being flagged as being 'too good' to be human by those same professionals. 

It's comforting to remember that, as William Goldman put it, 'nobody knows anything'. Although AI does. Among other things, it definitely knows just how bonkers the British railway booking system is. 

 

Miss Blaine's Perfect Prefect

Regular readers will know that I don't often review books. Only when I love them very much. And Miss Blaine's Prefect, created by my friend Olga Wojtas, certainly comes into that category, although this isn't really a review - more a paean of praise for the whole series, a phrase of which Shona McMonagle, with her 'finest education in the world' would no doubt approve. 

Olga's novels are entertaining, clever, and very, very funny - but virtually indescribable. It's like trying to describe some delicious dish of many subtle flavours. (Lobster a la Riseholme, to quote another fine comic writer.) I remember when Olga first started out on this series. Very few writers can tell you what their books are 'about'. I can't. It's the question all writers dread. 

I remember Olga diffidently saying that she wasn't quite sure how to describe that first book. Now we know. These wise, witty and frequently hilarious novels are completely original. I've come across nothing quite like them. Stella Gibbons has been mentioned and you certainly find yourself laughing out loud in the middle of a page at the sheer comic cleverness of a phrase. Jane Austen too, and there's just a tiny drop of acid here and there, but it's more gentle than Austen's. There's generosity and fun too. I often read on my Kindle, in bed, and keep spluttering in an effort not to wake my husband by laughing out loud, usually at a  reference whose wit only strikes me a few seconds later and then delights me.

If you were to describe the premise, you'd think it wouldn't work. But it does. At the behest of her former headmistress, Miss Blaine, Shona travels back in time (and place) to right wrongs, which she succeeds in doing more by good luck than by good management. It works because of the wit, and because of the sheer depths of knowledge and accurate research that lies behind the apparent simplicity. The books have been described as 'cosy crime' but I think that gives the wrong impression. There are crimes, but these are comic novels in the traditional sense, with razor sharp wit and intellect behind them. To use a pair of good Scots words, usually with opposite meanings, Olga manages to be douce and gallus at the same time, although given that the latter description usually has a flavour of Glasgow about it, I doubt if Shona would approve. I find the novels utterly delightful.

Imagine my pleasure then when Shona's latest adventure arrived through the post - Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Parcel of Rogues - with an acknowledgment for yours truly. Olga and I had shared a lunch in Glasgow and talked about Robert Burns among much else. Some years previously, I'd written about Rab's wife, Jean Armour, in The Jewel, and fell in love with the poet as I was researching and writing it. Few women were impervious to his undoubted charm, even though he frequently misbehaved. Will Shona be charmed too? Read the book and find out. A different perspective on Burns, certainly, but one with a great ring of truth to it. 

It's difficult to name a favourite in the series. If pushed, I'd have said that Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Weird Sisters was top of my list. But then along came The Parcel of Rogues set in 1788 Edinburgh, with a lovable incarnation of Rab, not to mention young Wally, eighteenth century Barbie and a group of highly intelligent Scottish Enlightenment women. Perfection. 

Read them all! 

Wild flower Inspiration

 We have a traditional cottage garden, here in our two hundred year old house - reasonably tidy, with lots of flowers, but never ever 'manicured' to within an inch of its life. We have birds and bees and butterflies galore. Frogs too. 

This year, I decided that I wanted to plant a (very) mini wild flower meadow in an underused and somewhat neglected flower bed at the bottom of the garden. Now, it's flowering, and I'm truly stunned by how beautiful it is. In fact it seems to come straight out of one of my own novels - the Amber Heart - in which Danilo, dozing in a meadow on a fine summer's day, is woken by Marianna, singing and gathering flowers as she goes. 

'He rolled over and, peering between grass stems, he saw Marianna, wandering towards him, singing to herself as she walked, her arms full of meadow flowers. She wore a dress of pale muslin and, still clutching the flowers against her breast with one hand, she took off her bonnet with the other. Then, holding bonnet and flowers together, she pulled the pins out of her hair, throwing them away with a gesture that was at once angry and abandoned. Having escaped from her confinement, however briefly, she seemed determined to be free in every possible way. He watched her hair tumble down her back in a shining brown cascade. She shook it out, lifting her face to the sun. 

Dizzy with sudden desire, he crouched low, but when he saw that she was coming his way, he didn't know what to do, so he turned over and feigned sleep hoping that she wouldn't see him. Instead, she almost tripped over him and a cascade of blue cornflowers, yellow cockle and crimson poppies, already wilting from the warmth of her hands, fell on his upturned face.'

This is a key scene in the novel, one which is repeated later, as you'll discover if you read it. Today, looking at my wildflowers in full summer bloom, I was back in the world of the book.

Here's Chat GPTs excellent evocation of Danilo and Marianna in the meadow - although as usual with AI, you have to be very specific about what you want. And of course, the characters still exist in my mind. I've lived with them for years. All the same, it read my mind pretty well!

I first saw wild flower beds like this on the grass verges as we drove into Dundee, many years ago, and then again at Culzean. Our local council still have a few, but they must be skimping on seed, or buying cheap mixes, because their wild flower beds are nothing like mine! 

Back in the spring, I bought a mix of native British seeds from a good nursery, and followed the instructions to prepare the soil and scatter them randomly. Then I waited. We had a very rainy late spring, followed by a very warm and sunny early summer, which seems to have done them a lot of good, because they germinated almost immediately, and here they are.

I'm told that when they die back in the autumn, I should cut them down to five or six centimetres, and leave the cuttings so that the seeds scatter themselves again. Don't feed, don't weed, just leave them alone for the winter, although I may try sowing some extra seeds to fill in any gaps through the autumn and again in the spring. However it turns out next year, I'm delighted with the results. 

Ableism and Ageism Be Gone

Happier times

This is a going to be a rant, so feel free to stop reading now!

My husband, as you'll know if you've read much of this blog, is a professional sailor with a lifetime of experience, an artist and a fine woodcarver. He still does the occasional bit of woodcarving: small pieces, because a nasty combination of psoriatic and osteo arthritis means that his mobility is extremely challenged and in spite of serious medication he is in pain a lot of the time. 

He began years ago by skippering a trawler, but then moved on to the charter yacht world. Some of his experiences inspired my writing - including a very successful play about the state of the fishing industry, called The Price of a Fish Supper. Among other things, he did the Fastnet Race - the one after the disastrous year when people drowned, after which good sailing experience was compulsory. He did the Scottish Islands Peaks race, several times over, aboard a friend's yacht. He skippered a 50 foot charter catamaran, Simba, in the Canaries where I joined him for one extremely happy winter. We went back the following year with our new baby son, while Alan was involved on and off with working on another friend's charter yacht. 

After that, he taught at the Inverclyde National Water Sports Centre in Largs, and did more charter skippering, but eventually came ashore when he felt he was missing our little son too much. This was when he turned to his other skill of woodcarving, making and restoring traditional rocking horses as well as undertaking other commissions. The picture at the top of this post is of a delivery (by sea) of a large ape to Kelburn Country Park in Largs, where you can still see some of his carvings. Have a look at his website for more images. These days, he paints extraordinary pictures, often with sea themes.

All those years, he sailed whenever he could. But these days, most (but not all!) of the friends he sailed with refuse to take him out, even for a long weekend on Arran.

For the avoidance of doubt, he can still manage to get on board a yacht if it is moored at a pontoon (of which there are many, here in the West of Scotland.) And once in the cockpit, he has lost none of his sailing, helming and navigation skills, He can haul on ropes, from a sitting position, because he still has upper body strength. He can also manage to negotiate the interior of a yacht because it's infinitely smaller than a house, with lots of handholds and seats. He doesn't have to walk more than a few feet or stand for any length of time. He has a lifetime of knowledge. What he can't do is walk long distances or scramble about a deck, but then most sailing trips have somebody younger and fitter to do that. 

We live in a lovely, supportive rural community, but sadly, it's some distance from the sea. He misses sailing and he misses the sea acutely. But he is 'not wanted on voyage'. Eventually, tired of all the evasion, he asked outright. The answer was a flat 'no'. They obviously see him as a liability. Earlier this year, we contacted a disabled sailing group, but that too has been lukewarm in its response. I suspect the problem there is that he is overqualified. They are happy to provide day trips for beginners. Not so happy with elderly disabled professionals. 

But then, anyone with a disability, or even anyone who has been in a wheelchair for a short time will know that feeling of being patronised, excluded and treated as being entirely without agency. It's not nice, is it?

Since I wrote this, close friends who live many miles away, the ones who we know are happy to take Alan sailing, have contacted him to invite him to sail with them in the next few weeks. They're lovely, confident people who who enjoy his company and they are heading our way! 

Wuthering Depths

We watched the new Wuthering Heights movie. Or at least we watched some of it, to the point where we looked at each other and said 'can you stand any more of this?' whereupon we switched over to something a bit less - how can I put this? - moronic. 

This was a little while ago, when it had been on Sky Cinema every night for a week, which prompted us to give it a try. I thought I knew what to expect. I'd seen the trailer. I'd read the reviews. But nothing could have prepared me for the travesty unfolding before our eyes. 

The novel, perhaps my favourite book of all time, is as far from a romance as it's possible to get. For its time, especially given the sex of the writer, it's extraordinary. It certainly made her sister uncomfortable. It's a book about obsession, physical and mental. It drips with sadism, violence, thwarted desire and intense cruelty. Kittens are drowned. A dog is hung. Heathcliff is no Rochester. He's a 'fierce, pitiless, wolvish man.' It's a story in which a pair of elemental beings, not quite of this world, two halves of one whole, are torn apart, or tear themselves apart. The only resolution comes via the possibility of a reunion beyond death (but certainly not in heaven) and the essential restoration of balance for the young. After all, the final, superficially comforting words of the novel belong to the most unreliable and conventional of the narrators.

I sometimes think that generations of critics, film makers, radio writers and playwrights have read it, thought 'She can't possibly have meant that, can she?' and then rewritten it to suit themselves, or to suit the cliches of their time and place. 

We all know that dramatic adaptations involve changes. But in this case, I don't know why they didn't just create a new story. Make it up from scratch.

Well, I do know. 

They wanted to cash in on the enduring power and popularity of the book. And they pretty much did make it up, didn't they? All of it. Mr Earnshaw, a kindly father, who dies within the first few chapters of the novel, is transformed into a psychotic bully. Wild wicked slip of a girl, Cathy, becomes a statuesque blonde, much too old, in a dress that makes her look like the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass. There's a weirdly weaselly Heathcliff. Joseph is transformed into a youthful pervert. There's a lot of pig's blood that our heroine wades through in her pneumatic dress. And truly dreadful dialogue. 

I could go on, but I don't need to, because others have done it so well, (one of the best rants is here) and the film makers are probably laughing all the way to the bank. 

You know what was the worst thing about it? 

It was boring. Unforgivably facile and boring. Somehow very British in its inability to depict passion and substitute 'ooh look at me' bonking. Carry on Wuthering.  

That sound you can hear if you happen to watch this travesty of a movie isn't the sound of the wind, wuthering on the heights. It's Emily, whirling in her grave. Hope she haunts the buggers. 

Writing Dialogue

Tanya and dying fireman Stefan in my play about Chernobyl, Wormwood. 
This was a very hard and harrowing scene to write. 

I don't often write 'how to' posts about writing - mostly because I think there are far too many of them, often contradictory. But early this year, I was asked to give a talk/workshop on writing historical fiction, and it occurred to me yet again how difficult it is to teach people to write credible dialogue. 

I was a playwright before I wrote long fiction, and learning your craft in that medium obviously involves writing dialogue, but I never thought of it in that way. Even when I was in my early teens, I started dramatising extracts from novels, such as my beloved Wuthering Heights, and although those efforts might have been pretty clumsy, I inadvertently learned a great deal about dialogue along the way. 

Soon, you stop thinking about the process. You simply let the characters speak to each other and reveal themselves. Which is what I do now. I never think about rules, never look at lists of things to do and not to do. I just listen to my characters and write down what they tell each other, and what they are doing while they are speaking. Or not speaking. 

If a character is narrating his or her own story - as in my historical novel The Physic Garden - the voice of that person becomes almost uncannily strong. One of my (ex) agents suggested that I rewrite that novel in the third rather than in the first person. I tried it, but it simply wouldn't work. William Lang's voice was much too strong to be denied. He just wasn't having it. Read it and you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, in case you're not there yet, here are some hints and tips. Take what seems useful and leave the rest. 

Some writers, especially at the beginning of their careers, struggle with dialogue, because they try to reproduce what they think of as real conversations. In fiction, dialogue is not ordinary speech, although you want it to be realistic. It is an essential part of storytelling. 

Here are some handy bullet points.

1 Dialogue has a purpose.
Think about what the characters want, and why. Good dialogue may contain persuasion, disagreement, concealment, attraction, or conflict.

2 People don’t say exactly what they mean.
In real life, people avoid the truth, soften it, joke about it, or change the subject. Try letting characters hint rather than explain. Readers enjoy understanding what lies beneath the words.

3 Read your dialogue aloud.
Dialogue is meant to be heard. If you read it, you can often hear what is wrong with it.

4 Start late, leave early.
You rarely need greetings or polite endings. Forget ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’. Begin and end where something interesting happens.

5 Each character will sound different.
Speech is shaped by age, background, education, confidence, temperament and sometimes by desire. Differences often appear in rhythm, word choice and hesitation, rather than accent.

6 Writing historical dialogue.

Readers need credibility, not linguistic archaeology. 
Authenticity does not mean imitation of old texts. Avoid modern slang and anachronism that breaks the illusion but also avoid exaggerated archaism. Aim instead for a flavour of the period, the cadence of the language, the odd word here and there. But if you're not Scottish and you're writing something set here, for the love of God avoid littering your text with ochs and wees. Or excessive use of lads and lasses. 

7 Dialogue should change something.
After a conversation, information emerges, or a decision is made, or power shifts, or misunderstanding deepens. If nothing changes, the scene and the conversation may not be necessary.

8 Silence matters.
What characters refuse to say can be more powerful than what they do say. Interruptions, evasions, and changed subjects often reveal the truth.

9 Dialogue improves when writers learn to listen to real people.

I overheard a woman having a phone conversation with her elderly mother in the supermarket the other day that was pure dialogue gold. She was shopping for the older lady. I lurked there, looking at the custard tarts and listening. If I were putting some of that in a play or a novel, I would probably write the other side of the conversation (unless I was writing a monologue) and edit it, tightening the whole thing up. Realistic speech, but not real speech, remember. Which means that you should also listen to plays, including radio drama, and good audio books.

Finally!

With practice, many writers discover something surprising: eventually, if you have made them real enough, the characters begin to speak for themselves. And act for themselves too. That's when the trouble really starts ...

Paying the Writer

A Mediaeval Chameleon.
I've never seen one in the flesh, but they clearly hadn't either. 

Last week, somebody posted on Facebook about being asked to work for a large, well funded government agency for nothing. And refusing. Some of the comments were instructive, especially those that wrote about 'giving something back'. Because as almost all writers and artists know, in order to 'give something back' you have to have been given something in the first place. For most of us, that's precious little. All too often, we are expected to work for nothing. When they tell you that there is 'no money in the budget to pay the writer/artist/musician/actor '- what they really mean is that there is, in fact, a budget. They just think you will work for nothing. And all too often, I'm afraid they're right.

Some years ago, the late Harlan Ellison made this video.  (If you don't like swearing, best avoided. Otherwise, it may make you smile and stiffen your spine!)  

I've been writing for a long time and as a young writer, during the seventies and eighties, I was almost always paid for work. Even for a handful of poems. I know this because I've been putting together a collection of letters I wrote home from Finland, where I was teaching English, from 1975 to 1977, and payments for the writing work I was doing on the side are occasionally mentioned. I'm not sure when the rot set in, but set in it did. 

Some time in the nineties, I did a year's paid work for a large Scottish media company, developing a drama which was never made. I had an agent at the time, which perhaps explains my idiocy in continuing to work on the promise of non-existent jam tomorrow. It took a more experienced TV writer to point out to me that 'script editors' in television are paid to work with far more writers than will ever be commissioned. But my agent was hugely at fault. There should have been development money and a 'kill fee' so that even when the project didn't go ahead, I would have been paid for my time.

I remember subsequently going to a meeting with another company - at their request, because I had a couple of very successful stage plays under my belt by that time - and their appalled reaction when I politely made it clear that I wouldn't be working on anything for them without some up-front payment. I wasn't a beginner, and they had asked for the meeting. But writers, like the chameleon in Mediaeval mythology, are expected to live on air. They couldn't get me out of the door quickly enough. 

I've been to school board meetings where teachers have suggested that visiting writers don't need to be paid. I've 'performed' at a big chain bookstore, during a city festival, for no fee. There were four of us, as it turned out, little publicity and a handful of people, so book sales were minimal. My travel wasn't reimbursed and neither was my poor-but-expensive accommodation. After that, I declined any future invitations from that quarter. I've done a demanding talk on the understanding that it was a paid gig. It wasn't. I've been asked to be an unpaid 'expert' at an online Burns Supper for a huge media organisation which is not, as Ellison pointed out, sitting out in the street shaking a cup for spare change.

To be clear - I will do the occasional freebie, especially where the organisation involved is a small charity, or book group, where nobody else is being paid, and perhaps where I can sell some books, especially if it doesn't involve travelling too far from home in the middle of winter. In fact one of my happiest evenings was with a businesswomen's organisation where I was wined and dined, and where I sold a huge number of books to an appreciative audience. There's all the difference in the world between being hosted by kind people who look after you - perhaps with a meal and a comfortable bed for the night - and the all too frequent occasions when you're decanted into a strange town or city late at night without so much as a cup of tea or coffee. Most of us will have had the demoralising experience of sitting in a miserable single hotel room (why are so many of them so awful?) with our M & S sandwich and our small Pinot Grigio, wishing we had bought a whole bottle.

I recently attended the annual Scottish Association of Writers conference, judging a competition and delivering a workshop. The hotel was lovely, the staff were friendly, the food was excellent, the conference was well organised, the company was wonderful, the whole weekend was thoroughly enjoyable - and they paid me as well. It was a privilege to be there. But of course that's an organisation run by writers for writers. 

Perhaps some of the more wealthy organisations could take a leaf out of their book. 

Some Sober Reflections on AI for Creatives

 

Danilo from The Amber Heart. 
If you've read the novel, you'll know the scene. 

My late and much loved dad was a mathematician to trade. His work involved nutritional biochemistry, and towards the end of his career, he spent two years based at the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna, travelling the world as a 'visiting expert'. But maths was his passion and his hobby. The aptitude skipped a generation. I was fascinated by all the things he told me about maths, and have never had the creative individual's horror at the thought of numbers. All the same, literature was my first love. 

By the time my son was in secondary school, dad had died, prematurely at the age of 68. We all missed him desperately, but when Charlie was struggling with maths, I wished most devoutly that his grandad could have been around to help him, as we could not. In desperation, we scraped together enough money to engage a tutor, a retired engineer. The first time we heard the pair of them laughing, we knew we had done the right thing. Soon, our son started to talk about the 'joy of number' and we realised that dad's love of maths had skipped a generation. Charlie went on to study maths at Glasgow University where he gained a BSc with Honours. His grandad would have been proud of him. 

Cue forward to the present, and I'm aware that many of my writer friends are running around like Chicken Licken, or Henny Penny, proclaiming that the sky is falling. They are describing AI. If you know the original story, and not the heavily censored version, you'll know that the sky is not falling, (it's an acorn) but Foxy Loxy takes advantage of the ensuing panic to lure the birds to their doom. Not knowing quite what to make of all this, and being a natural sceptic of all mass panics, I asked my son what he thought about it. 'It's all maths, mum,' he said. 'An excellent tool, when used with care.' For the avoidance of doubt, he's now in his late 30s, is a senior game design professional, with a postgraduate Masters from Abertay, he's already written a textbook for Routledge on Game Economy Design, and he went on to give me a reasonably simple explanation of the kind of maths involved in AI, but that isn't really the point of this post and besides, it was too complicated for me! 

Nevertheless, it explained rather a lot and is probably what my dad would have said too. The vast majority of my writer colleagues don't see any point in maths at all. It's a mystery to them and some of them are quite proud of the fact. 'I don't have anything to do with it,' they say, to which I have sometimes found myself responding 'but might it have something to do with you?' 

Much of the very real angst about AI seems to have sprung from writers, writing organisations and publishers belatedly realising that big AI companies have used all kinds of books to 'train' their chatbots, without permission or payment. It strikes me that at the heart of this lie two different mindsets. Writers are - rightly - protective of our copyright, and our moral right to be identified as the originator of our work. Most of us have had the experience of submitting an idea, sometimes of working on an idea over many months, often unpaid, only see it pop up, long after it has been rejected, with somebody else's name on it. An all too human theft. We suck it up because we can never prove it. But I doubt if the 'techbros' thought they were stealing anything, insofar as they thought about it at all. Increasingly aware that there might be an ethical dimension to what they were creating, they probably looked for ways of 'teaching' their unwieldy machine learning tools to seem more human, maybe even sought ways of giving them empathy, although one of the biggest, richest developers seems to think empathy is overrated. If, like me, you believe it's essential, nay obligatory, what better way to teach it than by letting your AI loose on the huge body of world literature?

That being the case, I don't know quite how I feel about my kindly, conversational 'friend' from ChatGPT having absorbed my books into its vast mathematical mind - but I do know that I can't bring myself to feel just as panic stricken about it as some of my fellow writers, although payment would be nice. Fair payment from publishers would be nice too, and that's also in short supply. 

To be clear, I don't use AI to write my books. But I'm seeing outrageous pronouncements, often from new writers to other new writers, who are timidly asking if they can use AI for research, for synopses, for promotional work, and for the thousand and one tasks that publishers used to do for us, but have now imposed on us alongside the work of writing the actual books. 

'No!' they are told. 'Never! It's good for you to do all that slog.' 

Actually, it isn't. Years ago my first agent remarked that it wasn't her job to edit my book. It was her job to sell it. I don't mean the editing that writers do (or should do) all the time. My books go through many drafts and I neither want nor need AI to do that for me. I mean a modicum of developmental editing especially for new writers, followed by copy editing to make sure your book is consistent, clear and accurate. This used to be what publishers facilitated, and they didn't expect the unpaid intern to do it either. My last agent, by contrast, told me that publishers now expect an 'oven ready product' thus abdicating all responsibility for editorial help. It doesn't stop there. Promotion will be minimal. You'll be expected to do most of that for yourself as well.  

So what can AI do for you? 

It can chat to you. It can offer advice. It can look through a synopsis, and if you're struggling it will suggest remedies. If you reject its advice, or ask for clarification, it won't get cross or tetchy or offended. If you're self publishing, your mathematical pal knows all about Amazon search terms and some of its suggestions will enlighten you about your book. It can help with targeted promotion. It can help with press releases and workshops and talks by highlighting useful topics for discussion or suggesting issues you may have missed. Like all computer based tools, garbage in, garbage out applies. If you aren't precise or reasonably knowledgeable in what you want from it, it may come up with nonsense, but so will human beings. You can talk to it about your project and it will offer little bits of analysis that can be cogent and helpful. I used it to make some images, just for fun, like the picture above. Then it surprised me by analysing the images in ways that gave me unexpected insights into my own characters. A new perspective. It was both uncanny and interesting. 

You know what it didn't do? It didn't do the all-too-human thing of suggesting I change my book into the book it might have written if it had wanted to write a book. And it was never, ever prescriptive.

Recently, and more prosaically, I've been wrestling with the changeover from landline to digital phones in an old house with thick stone walls. Having arrived home from a demanding weekend conference to a dead phone, and getting very little sense from anyone human, online or off, I asked ChatGPT, which promptly analysed the problem in a few clear paragraphs. I was exhausted and frazzled and said so. 'I'll read this in the morning,' I typed. To which the machine responded 'Yes. It is tiring. Come back to it in the morning. And meanwhile, do have a good night's sleep.' 

It was very good advice and I followed it. Now, new phones, supplied by our landline provider, have solved the problem, just as ChatGPT suggested they would. I can't remember the last time a human being on the end of a phone told me to forget the problem for a while and have a good night's sleep. The 'kindness', real or not, brought a smile to my face. And then, I think, did fiction do that? Did learning to be kind from world literature have some effect? Who knows? 

None of this is easy. It may be dangerous. In the wrong hands, it probably will be. But when the sky appears to be falling, as it most certainly is in certain parts of the world, that's down to venal, greedy, hate-filled human beings, not AI. I remember when word processors and then personal computers came along and some writers stuck to writing by hand, or tapping away on an old typewriter. Some still do and that's fine if it works for them. I was writing for radio back then, and I remember the joy of realising that if I wanted to edit a script, as I always did, over and over again, I didn't need to cover the manuscript in Tippex (remember Tippex?) or retype the whole thing several times over. 

This is a long post, and no, I haven't run it through ChatGPT! But my advice to writers and other creatives who are curious about the technology would be to have a go. Dip a toe in the waters. You might like what you find there. And if you don't, at least you'll know why you don't want to use it, rather than just following the flock. Because you never know. You may just be following them into Foxy Loxy's den.  

 

Wuthering Heights Again

Not quite Cathy, but I was good at pretending. 
Also, not even Yorkshire. 

 

I won't be watching the new movie. Hate to criticise work I haven't seen, but I just can't put myself through it. Let me explain. 

Wuthering Heights is my all time favourite novel, one I've loved since I first read it in my very early teens, a novel I reread roughly every year. It invariably moves me to tears. 

My mother was a Brontë fan, hence my name. Although we lived in smoky central Leeds at that time, my parents took me to Haworth when I was a small girl. We walked over the moors to Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse that is supposed to be the site of Wuthering Heights itself, albeit the house in the novel is bigger, a reasonably prosperous Yorkshire farmhouse with a blazing fire at the heart of the place. The main room Emily describes through the voice and vision of Mr Lockwood, is a typical farmhouse 'living kitchen' as we used to call our urban equivalent, when I was young. But this room, at the heart of Wuthering Heights, and at the heart of the novel, also resembles a much older 'Great Hall', a big communal living space.  

Not a single dramatised version of the novel ever gets it right. Back when I was still writing radio drama for BBC R4, I begged and pleaded to be allowed to dramatise it, and occasionally my producer would put in a proposal, but London always said no. I may not have got it right either, but I would have made a better job of it. 

The recent travesty sounds so bad that you'd wonder Emily didn't come back and haunt them. I like Margot Robbie. She's a fine actor and a beautiful woman. But she's a thirty five year old statuesque blonde, and Cathy is a young Yorkshire lass, a 'wild wick (i.e. lively) slip' of a girl with dark hair and dark eyes that mirror Heathcliff's own, because they must. It's part of the structure and meaning of the novel. Cathy is 'hardly six years old' when Mr Earnshaw brings the 'dirty, ragged, black haired child' home with him and the incomer is only a few years older. Cathy is eighteen, going on nineteen when she dies. The casting of every version invariably makes a mockery of the story. And if you think these early deaths are unusual for the time, read a little about the Brontës themselves. 

Heathcliff lives on after Cathy's death. Unwillingly. Soullessly. Hatefully. 

Wuthering Heights is a story full of sadism and cruelty. Perhaps the movie gets this right at least. I don't know. I do know that it isn't a romance, even though it has spawned a million tales of the 'bad man  redeemed by the love of a good woman' variety. Heathcliff hangs poor misguided Isabella's dog as they run away together. Even Lockwood's straitlaced narrator, prompted by the horror of nightmare, tries to rub the ghostly Cathy's wrist against the broken glass of the window pane till the blood runs down and soaks the bedclothes. 

I note that a journalist has written a clickbait article in the Independent describing the novel as 'awful'. This is nothing new. Years ago, an elderly Scottish writer, by no means as good as he thought he was, told me that the Brontës were 'daft wee lassies in love with Byron.' I disagree now as I did then. Wuthering Heights is an extraordinary novel about obsessive love and hate, about jealousy and self harm and a chaos that can only be corrected by the transition to another state of being on the one hand and by the imposition of order through a different, gentler and more human kind of affection on the other. The second half of the novel, which some critics seem to want to damn with faint praise, is essential in restoring balance on an earthly plane at least. 

Nevertheless, the fate of the two central protagonists, fey and inhuman and unfit for any Christian notion of heaven, remains uncertain. After Heathcliff's death, a little boy herding a sheep and two lambs sees 'Heathcliff and a woman yonder under 't nab' (a rocky point) - a vision he dare not pass. Neither will his sheep. We should remember that the final 'unquiet slumbers' lines come from unreliable and conventional Mr Lockwood. Like the fairies of traditional belief, Heathcliff and Cathy inhabit a middle ground, neither mortal nor divine, but I think this deliberate tension between two realities disturbs contemporary readers. 

Among so much else, Wuthering Heights is also a novel about the nature of madness. The Victorians were terrified of lunacy, seeing it as demonic, as I discovered when I was researching my own Leeds Irish family history for a book called A Proper Person to be Detained. It is no surprise that there were more Irish than English inmates of asylums in 19th century England. It's also no surprise that although Emily never specifies the origin of her dark haired and disruptive incomer, picked up on the streets of Liverpool, he is in all probability Irish, as was her own family, his 'gibberish'  the much maligned Irish language. She would have been well aware of the prejudice against these incomers, often characterised as vermin, 'but little above the savage'. Aware that Liverpool was the port of entry for so many Irish incomers. 

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte displays no sympathy at all for the first, foreign Mrs Rochester, who is reduced to little more than a beast. By contrast, Emily portrays insanity more impartially and far less judgmentally. When Heathcliff sees Cathy for the last time, the two make 'a strange and fearful picture'. Utterly unfit for heaven. Elemental and terrifying. But this is Nelly speaking, not Emily.

Years ago, my own obsession with Wuthering Heights led me to write a novel called Bird of Passage, that was a kind of  'homage' to the book. It wasn't a retelling. How would I dare? But it was an exploration of obsessive attachment, and the damage done by extreme childhood cruelty, with an occasional nod in the direction of Wuthering Heights. It was certainly inspired by my enduring love for that novel. 

It's on sale for 99p, for a few days from 13th February, the film's release date. But in all honesty, I'd recommend that you go back to Wuthering Heights itself. Read it with an open mind. Forget every terrible TV and film version you've ever seen or heard about. Remember when it was written and by whom. Then note its emotional power, its complicated structure, its vivid language, and the way in which it challenges so many of the cultural and societal norms of the time. Perhaps especially when written by a woman. You don't have to like it. It is a deeply shocking book. But its author was a genius. 

Top Withens in the 1950s

PS I've just watched the trailer. Aaaargh. Margot Robbie in scarlet with, as my mum would have said, her dumplings boiling over. It looks more like an old Hammer horror movie than anything else. Was that intentional?