Ice Dancing - The Story Behind the Story.

 

Cover image by Michal Piasecki

Of all the books and stories and plays I've ever written, I find myself going back to Ice Dancing again and again. It's a love story, but it also tackles a serious and troubling issue that never seems to go away. When I was describing it for publication, I called it a 'very grown-up love story' and that's certainly what it is. 

When he was young, my son learned to skate, here in Scotland, and then played ice hockey for a number of years. He only stopped because playing hockey 'just for fun' is difficult in this country, and the demands of school work and his other passion at the time - karate - meant that something had to go, and that something was hockey. He enjoyed it very much, but he knew that it was never going to be a career. Later, living and working in Sweden, he went back to it for a while, as the hobby sport he had enjoyed. 

As an adolescent, he had a fine Canadian coach, one who cared about all the kids, whether they were good or not, a coach who commanded the kind of respect that made the parents on the sidelines behave themselves - in short, a model teacher. 

At the same time, we were hearing about other kinds of coaches, in this and in other sports. Coaches who were not at all trustworthy. Coaches who would come to give the sport a bad name. 

The other day, a nice, kind, trusting person of my acquaintance remarked on social media that she would always trust people when they told her who or what they were. Having grown up in a loving and protective family, I used to feel the same. Unfortunately, life taught me, as sooner or later it teaches all of us, that there are people in the world who tell you only what they want you to hear. And then, when they behave badly, manipulate you for their own ends, you find it incredibly difficult to accept the betrayal. It's not nice to feel that you've been deceived. Not at all nice to surrender at least some of your trust in the innate goodness of people. 

I've written about betrayal rather often: sometimes a betrayal of friendship or love, sometimes the terrible betrayal of trust between adults and children. 

Many years ago, having had two successful and well reviewed full length productions at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, I submitted a new play which attempted to tackle this kind of betrayal, only to have it turned down. They were quite within their rights, and it may not even have been a very good play - but I was hurt at the abruptness of the rejection when I had worked so hard for them in the past. 'I hope they nurture this new talent' one distinguished theatre critic had written. Some hopes. 

I felt that I was surely owed a discussion of some kind. Perhaps questions about why I had wanted to tackle this possibly contentious and uncomfortable subject. None of that happened. What happened was that I got a short, abrupt, almost embarrassed note, saying 'not for us.' After which, I was 'ghosted' by someone I had thought of as a friend before ghosting was really a thing. When I look back on it now, I still find something disturbing about the finality of it. It was as though I had committed a terrible faux pas in writing about something unmentionable. 

Year passed, I began to write far more fiction than plays, and eventually I wrote Ice Dancing, set in a small lowland Scottish village - a grown-up love story that was about much more than the central relationship. It was a story that went back to that original play, and its themes, about male athletes in particular and what happened to some of them. 

Even then, no traditional publisher was remotely interested, even though they were publishing some of my other novels. So here it is, under my own imprint, and doing rather well. 

If you're curious, you can get it on Kindle for a bargain price of 99p for a couple of days! 

Hera's Orchard and Bitter Oranges.

They're here! - the first two books in my Canary Isles trilogy: Hera's Orchard and Bitter Oranges. 

As I told you in a previous post, these novels have had a long and chequered past. I first wrote the story - or something like it - many years ago, when I spent two winters with my husband, artist Alan Lees, living in the Canaries. Alan was skippering a charter yacht, a big, beautiful catamaran called Simba.

The first year, I lived aboard the boat and helped take care of our customers. I also got pregnant. By the time we came back the following winter, it was with our six week old son. We borrowed an apartment in Los Cristianos from a friend, while Alan worked, and I spent several blissful months looking after Charlie in a child-friendly place. My parents and then Alan's mum flew down to help. 

But our real love was La Gomera. It was where we had taken our visitors. It was where we went for sweet, clean water for the boat And it was a place we explored ourselves, loving everything about it. It was also where I wrote the first drafts of this story, which would become a radio play and an unsatisfactory novel that was published so badly that my then editor later wrote to me to apologise for the violence they had done to my subtle story of a cross cultural relationship. 

I filed it away under bitter experience, but then, decades later, with my own imprint (Dyrock Publishing) as well as a good many traditionally published books under my belt, I thought I would try again. My two main characters - Luis and Margaret - just wouldn't sit down and shut up. I loved them far too much to let them go. 

A couple of years ago, I published the first part, under the title Orange Blossoms, but quite soon, took it down again, because I still wasn't very happy with it. If you look for the new version, Hera's Orchard, you'll find its previous title in the book description. I did quite a bit of rewriting and editing, although if you are one of the few people who bought and read Orange Blossoms, don't worry. If you want to know what happens next, you can pick up exactly where you left off, and find out what becomes of the marriage, in Bitter Oranges. 

You can also download a freebie of the eBook of Hera's Orchard from 9th - 13th April, so if you want to check out the new version, you'll be able to do that as well. 

Bitter Oranges is the sequel and you'll find it as an eBook or a paperback. 

I knew what I didn't want to do. I didn't want to write about a 'holiday romance gone wrong' or a scammer, or an untrustworthy foreigner, or all the other tropes that seem to crop up again and again in UK fiction and drama. I wanted to write a genuine love story, but more than that, I wanted to write a love story about two people from very different backgrounds. Luis says 'soy un buen hombre' and so he is. Let's face it - love and marriage can be challenging enough, even for good men and women, if they come from very different cultures. If they speak different languages. Languages that perhaps shape their thoughts differently. 

Brexit added yet another horrible layer of complexity and potential trouble, one I certainly didn't foresee when I was writing that first radio play, but one which I had to tackle head on in these new books. 

Does it work out? What do you think? 

Both these lovely covers images are by my talented husband. 

Things You Do When Writing Novels

I bought a Spanish guitar. This Spanish guitar, to be precise. It sounds as beautiful as it looks. Not that I can play it. But for the moment, I'm just admiring it. 

This has been the occasion of some debate among my Facebook and 'real life' friends. 

When I was in my teens, I knew a few chords, and I would often play and sing to please myself. But I can't really play and I know how difficult it is to acquire even a basic level of competence. It's like playing the piano, which I do play reasonably well. I started learning when I was seven, and carried on having lessons when we moved up to Scotland, only stopping when I went off to university at the age of seventeen, by which time I was on Grade Seven and tackling quite challenging pieces.

Much later, our son, then aged seven, had lessons for a year, until we came to a decision that it really wasn't for him, greatly to his relief, I might add! I took over his lesson for a few years. At that point I was the teacher's most senior pupil in terms of experience as well as years, and I thoroughly enjoyed being 'stretched' by her in what I could play. I still play - not half enough, but I do, and I enjoy it. I'm under no illusions about my abilities. There are lots of pieces that are way beyond my technical capabilities (most Chopin, for instance, although I can manage some) as well as pieces that I know I could play a whole lot better if I applied myself. 

But I know enough to know how little I really know - and that's a state profoundly to be desired for anyone embarking on any skill at all, whether it's playing a musical instrument, writing a novel or learning a sport. 

It goes like this. You struggle. Then, you think 'I'm getting the hang of this' and that makes you happy. After which comes a blissful spell of  'look at me, I can really do this' over-confidence. (I often wonder just how many politicians never get beyond that stage.) Then, you fall off a cliff edge and think 'I don't actually know anything about this at all!' 

After which you can really start to progress. All of which is to say that although I'm tempted to re-learn how to play a few chords, I'm never going to learn how to play the guitar properly. At the moment, I'm just looking at it, and touching it from time to time. The case is beautiful too - and that's made in Spain as well. 

I bought it at auction. I was in our local saleroom, hunting for the antique and vintage textiles I list and sell from our Etsy store, the 200 Year Old House. And there it was. The case was closed so I carefully teased it open and gazed at this lovely thing. When I ran my fingers over the strings the sound was mellow and beautiful. It carried me straight into the world of my novel. I told my husband about it and instead of saying 'you don't need a guitar' which would be true, he said 'Try to get it! I love musical instruments!' 

I'm working on a trilogy of novels set largely on the Canary Islands, mainly lovely La Gomera, but partly set in Los Cristianos on Tenerife and partly in Glasgow, of which more in another post. Like many writers, when I'm researching and writing something, I like to surround myself with 'stuff'  relevant to the book - pictures, maps, and even objects that are inspirational. It's a kind of immersion experience and it works for me. Even down to vintage perfumes, which I collect anyway - but right now, I'm favouring Embrujo de Sevilla (the Enchantment of Seville, launched in 1933) and Maja, launched in 1921, both by Myrurgia of Barcelona, both gorgeous old scents. 

Embrujo de Sevilla by Myrurgia

This need for immersion also explains why, years ago, when I was writing a novel called The Physic Garden, set in late eighteenth, early nineteenth century Scotland, I managed to buy a Georgian hand embroidered christening cape at auction - one that proved inspirational, and figured in the finished book. I decided to let it go a few years later, because it had done its work and it was time for it to move on. Like the guitar, it was a thing of great beauty, and I loved writing about it. Most dealers in antiques are well aware that we are only guardians of these old objects for a brief time. But with writing, it's a bit different.

When I'm writing a novel, whether historical or contemporary, I tend to go for immersion in the world of the book. Once you've sent the finished book out into the world, it can be very difficult to let go. It's as though the characters exist. They go on without you, even when you've moved on to something else but it doesn't take much for you to climb back inside that world all over again. Sometimes it can be a visit to an ice hockey game (Ice Dancing) or hearing somebody singing a song by Robert Burns (the Jewel) but sometimes it can be as simple as a spray of spicy, citrussy magical perfume. 

Georgian hand embroidered christening cape.

 

Canary Island Novels - Coming Soon.

 

Miel de Palma from La Gomera

Unusually, I've been neglecting this blog. 

We had a small interruption from Storm Eowyn when we lost all power, including heating, for three chilly days, played a lot of Monopoly and Scrabble by candlelight but eventually had to take refuge in a hotel for one happy night. We stayed in a wonderful old hotel in Ayr called The Chestnuts, and I can recommend it if you're ever looking for somewhere to stay or just to eat. They were beyond welcoming - even putting an extra heater in the room to thaw us out. The bed was incredibly comfortable, the food was fabulous and the staff were kind and helpful. I wish we could have stayed on for a few more nights, but Scottish Power turned up and switched everything on again so we had to go home. 

Anyway, the knock on effect of that was a certain amount of delay with my latest project, which involves the first two novels in what I hope will be a trilogy of books set in the gorgeous Canary Isles, but especially on one of my favourite places of all time - La Gomera. 

There is a long and complicated story to these Canary Island novels, which I'll write about in a later post. We had a couple of blissful winters there when my husband was working as a yacht charter skipper. I've spent the past few months editing the first two books in the series. And then editing them again. And again. Ever more reluctant to let them go.

Essentially, it's the story of a cross-cultural relationship and I suppose one of the other inspirations behind it was my parents' own long and loving marriage. Mum was from a working class Leeds Irish family. Dad was a refugee from an aristocratic landowning Polish family. They met at the dancing in Leeds. And they never ever stopped loving each other. 

Much later, when I wanted to write about this kind of relationship, albeit in quite a different setting, I started on these books. It was a rocky road and it has taken years and several incarnations including a radio play.  Latterly, I think I just couldn't bear to leave the people and the setting, so because I too want to know what happens next, there will have to be a third novel.

In many ways it's a simple love story - but with inevitable complications. 

Anyway, now that the files are off to the designer, they'll be coming out soon as eBooks and paperbacks: Hera's Orchard and Bitter Oranges. Watch this space for more about them.

Good friends have just come back from La Gomera, and they brought us a bottle of Miel de Palma - palm honey, which is a sweet syrup produced from the sap of palm trees - and delicious. A very fitting taste of the island where we spent some of the happiest times of our life and where - in some alternate universe - we might still be living. 

 

Tam O' Shanter

Ae Spring, by my husband, Alan Lees

Back in June 1996, BBC R4 broadcast my play on the writing of Tam O' Shanter : the narrative, comic poem by our greatest national poet, Robert Burns. That was back when I was writing plenty of radio drama, and at that time, was lucky enough to work with an international award winning producer/director, the late Hamish Wilson. The play was commissioned to mark the 200th anniversary of the death of the poet, on 21st July 1796. 

A few days ago, a friend flagged up to me on Facebook that R4 Extra were broadcasting repeats of the production. It's still available online, and will be for the next 25 days, which I'm pleased about since we were in the middle of a prolonged Storm Eowyn powercut at the time! 

I wanted to evoke the older Burns, who seems to have been inspired to write the poem circa 1790, for the second volume of Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland. This was when he, his wife Jean and his family were living at Ellisland Farm, not far from Dumfries. The poet was farming and working as an exciseman, all while writing and remaining, by all accounts, a loving father.

I also wanted to look back to the inspiration behind the poem, when a very young Rab spent time in Kirkoswald, not far from his mother's home town of Maybole, learning 'mensuration' or mathematics, but also walking across to the nearby Carrick coast with his friend Willie Niven. It was there that he met Douglas Graham of Shanter Farm, about half a mile from the village of Maidens. Duncan was the model for Tam. He had a formidable wife, and a drinking crony called John Davidson - 'Souter Johnnie', the Kirkoswald shoemaker, whose house you can still visit today.

Essentially, this is a tale of a very drunken Tam setting off home to Shanter Farm after a successful market day in Ayr, riding his 'grey mare Meg'. Increasingly beset by stormy weather and the fear of ghosts and goblins, he is heading for the River Doon, that marks the border between Kyle and Carrick when ...

'glimmering thro’ the groaning trees,
Kirk-Alloway seem’d in a bleeze;
Thro’ ilka bore the beams were glancing;
And loud resounded mirth and dancing.—

Drunkenly determined to investigate, Tam advances on the ruins, only to see a dance of witches, 'rigwoodie hags' with the devil himself, Auld Nick, playing the pipes to accompany them. Unfortunately for Tam (or his horse) one of the witches, Nannie, is young and pretty, dancing madly in a very short shift, a 'cutty-sark', leaving little to Tam's imagination. He is so excited that he takes leave of his senses altogether and cries out 'weel done Cutty-sark!' whereupon - as the poet tells us - 'in an instant all was dark.' 

The 'hellish legion' sallies forth to chase him. 'In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin'. But witches and warlocks dare not cross running water and 'Maggie' is a noble steed. They 'win the key-stane of the brig' just as the athletic Nannie catches hold of Meg's tail. 

'The carlin claught her by the rump,
And left poor Maggie scarce a stump.'

It is a wonderful poem: witty and wise and perfectly structured, with a use of language second to none. I have always loved Burns's poetry and have written a good deal about him and his wife over the years - but I still think this poem is my favourite. 

In writing the play, I was keen to weave in some of the folkloric inspiration behind the poem, stories that the poet would have heard at his mother's knee and that his wife too would have been well aware of during her Mauchline childhood. 

I also wanted to evoke the poem's composition - not in the single inspiration that later commentators invented - but as a creative process. The poet clearly enjoyed himself, and it shows in the perfection and wit of the completed poem. 

The cast included, among various talented Scottish actors, Ayrshire lad Liam Brennan as Rab, Gerda Stevenson with a perfect voice to evoke Jean Armour's 'wood notes wild' - and an appearance by Billy Boyd who went on to play Pippin in The Lord of the Rings. You can hear Liam reading the whole poem, beautifully, at the very end of the play. 

Like all Hamish's productions, it was a happy project. He was skilful, talented, caring and kindly. 

As a postscript to this, you may want to read a little more about Hamish himself. After his death, I wrote a piece about him for this blog, later republished on the Sutton Elms Blog. Sadly the BBC decided that this award winning producer was surplus to requirements and made him redundant. Among much else, he had been a juror and jury chairman in the Prix Italia, Prix Futura Berlin and the Prix Europa - but he wore his distinction lightly. Perhaps too lightly for the BBC that jettisoned him as casually as they have jettisoned so many others over the years - myself included, some years later. My last radio production was in 2007. We were, as somebody pointed out to me much later, 'tainted by experience.' 

It turned out to be a good thing for me. After an initial period of mourning for the radio career I once had, I moved on to many other enjoyable and successful creative projects - and a writing career is always a switchback. Not quite so for Hamish, sadly. I've often thought that if these things had happened just a few years later, he would have been able to go it alone, much as so many writers like myself do nowadays. He was one of the best and I still miss him.

Meanwhile, if you can visit Ellisland, probably the most atmospheric of all the places associated with the poet, don't forget to walk along the River Nith, where the poet walked and remembered his youth and imagined  the first drafts of the tale of Tam o' Shanter. You might like to listen to the play as well! You can find it here for the next three weeks or so: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027csp

River Nith near Ellisland

How Not To Be A Writer - Part Thirteen: Accept That You Are Running a Small Business

 

When I was first starting out on a writing career, I wish that somebody had sat me down and pointed out that I was about to set up a small business. That I was about to be a sole trader and that I had better believe it and act accordingly, rather than imagining myself to be some kind of acolyte, knocking at the doors of literature.

Actually, if I'm honest, they did. Or tried to. I joined the Society of Authors but over the years, they seemed to chicken out of the kind of robust advice they had once offered. Somewhere along the way, I remember booking an advice session with the Cultural Enterprise Office in Glasgow. It still exists, but back then it was proactive and well funded and you could book one to one sessions with people who knew what they were talking about. I also attended a few information days and events with my freelance woodcarver and artist husband, all aimed at prompting us be more businesslike. Although sometimes those sessions consisted of wildly successful people telling us how wildly successful they had been, rather than giving us any concrete advice about how they had done it. 

A few things are preying on my mind as I write this. 

1 I use Amazon a lot, both for shopping - we live in a rural area, and their deliveries are very good - and for publishing eBooks and excellent quality print-on-demand paperbacks. I don't make any fortunes out of the publishing, but Amazon pays me every month, on the nail, with tremendous regularity. They also supply me with data that I can understand. If you've never engaged with a traditional publisher, you will have no idea how rare this is. Hen's teeth doesn't even begin to describe it. 

2 Over the Christmas period, I noticed that most, if not all, of my various Amazon deliveries were accompanied by a small note of some kind. Like this one, from PetShop, the company that supplies me with No Mess Bird Seed, to feed the ravening hordes in my garden:  'Our company was founded with the help of a Prince's Trust loan in 2010.' The letter goes on to describe how one of the founders had moved back home and saw his mother, who had arthritis, struggling to carry pet food. The company aim to supply and deliver pet and wild bird food directly to the customer. And they do, efficiently and at a reasonable price. Another company, supplying my husband's acrylic paint added a cheerful leaflet announcing that they are 'new to Amazon Marketplace' even though they have bricks and mortar stores in the south and are eminently contactable in other ways.

3 Many of my writer friends routinely and very vocally boycott Amazon. Some of them have publishers that sell books on the platform, so I never quite know how they square this with their consciences, but they do. And yes - I'm well aware that most traditional publishers are no fans of the big beast for various valid reasons - but then the whole 'sale or return' set-up that persists for book sales is pretty faulty, wherever they are sold. Most artists and artisans will have discovered by bitter experience that any kind of sale or return deal with a store is a very bad idea. My woodcarver husband once loaned out a hand carved rocking horse to a supposedly reputable shop, only to have it returned with coffee mug stains and scratches all over the stand. On another occasion we had to execute a 'sting' to recover a large rocking horse from a store that we had been reliably informed was about to go bust, taking £3000 worth of his hard work with it. These are extreme examples, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that businesses don't value what they haven't paid for.

As far as Amazon is concerned, the animus is mostly to do with corporation taxes, avoided (but not evaded) by the giant, but many of my colleagues seem unaware that Amazon hosts thousands of small businesses, (2 million small and medium enterprises at the last count) many of which would not survive without the efficiency of the site underpinning their sales. And these days, most UK SMEs, hit hard by Brexit and the near impossibility of selling to the EU without incurring spiralling costs, need all the help that they can get.

These are small businesses that submit tax returns and pay their taxes. 

If you think Amazon itself (as opposed to those selling on the platform) should pay more taxes, lobby your MP.  And bear in mind that if you are aiming to publish and sell your creative work in any way, you are also running a small business. Act accordingly. Look out for yourself. Don't fall for the sob stories.

I should add that I wish I had followed my own advice years ago. But then, years ago, the option to self publish didn't exist as it does now, in various forms. I only wish it had.

Poor, Dear, Unfortunate Jean.

 

 

It has been brought to my attention that the National Trust for Scotland is holding a Jean Armour Supper in Burns Cottage on 24th January. Presumably in case potential attendees are otherwise engaged on the Bard's actual birthday on the 25th. Tickets are £100 a pop, so it's only for 'those and such as those' as the locals would say. 

Back in 2016, I researched, wrote and published what was generally accepted to be the definitive book about Jean Armour, albeit in novel form  - The Jewel. It's still available, both in paperback and as an eBook, which you will find here. Until then, she had been a mere footnote in the life of the poet. In the historical note to my novel, I point out that 'too many Victorian scholars seem to have been content to maintain the fiction that in marrying Jean, a reasonably prosperous stonemason's daughter, the poet was somehow marrying beneath him.'  Catherine Carson went so far as to call her an 'unfeeling heifer'.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. 

The poet called her his muse, in this loveliest of songs - O Were I On Parnassus Hill - one that another poet would later dismiss as a 'strained and vapid lyric.' He should be so lucky as to have somebody write such splendid words about him. 

In spite of living some eight miles away from Burns Cottage, in spite of the fact that the Burns Museum sold my books, and I had actually done a talk for them - admittedly on a different subject - last year, I found out about the event only when it popped up on my FB feed and when a few people asked if I would be there. If there were invitations, one of them wasn't for me. But perhaps it's just as well. 

Here's the publicity for the event. Can you spot the problem? 

It’s time the ladies had their own supper! Celebrate the life, love, and legacy of Robert Burns through the eyes of his muse, Jean Armour.

So it's not about Jean at all, is it? It's about the life, love and legacy of her famous husband with Jean as an also-ran. A 'ladies' addendum to Burns night. Because we can't possibly celebrate this fine woman in her own right, can we?

Back when the book was first published, I attended a particularly wonderful Jean Armour Supper. It was held in Troon's Lochgreen Hotel, it was organised by the Ayrshire Business Women, and the only men in the room were the waiters. I toasted the Immortal Memory of Jean. It still stands out as one of the high points of my working life, one of the most enjoyable events I've ever participated in. 

I sometimes wonder if my big mistake was in writing Jean's story as a piece of fiction. Well, I don't regret it, because I am first and foremost a novelist, and I wanted to get inside her head. But I'm a historian as well, and everything in the novel either did happen or could have happened. Mostly the former. A little while ago, I found myself chatting to somebody on Facebook who had been doing some research on his family's own connection with Jean. Much of what he was saying was what I had discovered as well. When I innocently asked him if he had read my book, his reply was 'LOL no!' 

I'm still not sure what was so funny about the notion of reading a well researched, glowingly reviewed book, fiction or not, about the very topic you're researching.

All this is on my mind because, among other things, I'm currently working on a play about Jean, one that will involve dramatising parts of my own book. There's a definite likelihood of a production. And perhaps we can make it a celebration of Jean herself, without placing her firmly in the long shadow cast by her husband. Who after their marriage, and even though he had once called her his 'poor, dear, unfortunate Jean', always gave her her due. 

'Then come, sweet Muse, inspire my lay! 

For a' the lee-lang simmer's day, 

I couldna sing, I couldna say, 

How much, how dear, I love thee.'

Ellisland near Dumfries, where Jean is properly celebrated.