A Passion for Pinterest

Pretty much everything's on Pinterest.

I blogged about my passion for Pinterest for Authors Electric this month - and since it elicited quite a big response I thought it worth reblogging here. I just love Pinterest. But I think it’s one of those sites you either love to bits or don’t get at all. Whatever your passion in life, whether it's art or cookery or costume, you'll find something to enjoy.

It's an interesting fact that women use Pinterest more than men. I don't know if things have changed over the last few years - perhaps they have - but in 2012 it was skewed 70% / 30% in favour of women and anecdotally, I still find that my female friends 'get' it more than the men. Moreover, this fascinating little piece of analysis here suggests that 'women use it as a wish list while men use it as a shopping cart.'  If we can't have the thing or person or place - and demonstrably we can't - a little fantasy will do, whereas male users eye things up rather more covetously. It seems a fairly sweeping statement, but there may be a germ of truth in it. 

.Poldark, what else? I've included a heroine in the interests of balance. 

Equally beautiful Luke

No surprise then, that our 'wish lists' often include heroes. Especially if we're writers. But many readers seem to enjoy collecting heroes too and as writers, we forget that at our peril. Beautiful Aidan is repinned constantly. As is equally beautiful Luke Pasqualino from the Musketeers.

I am, however, using that word 'hero' fairly loosely in the sense of main protagonist or main character, but if you write 'grown up love stories' - as I often do - it certainly helps to have a hero that you, as the writer, can fall in love with too, however flawed, however troubled.

Perhaps in some sense Pinterest has evolved into a safe space where women can indulge their fantasies, whether they come in the shape of chocolate cakes to die for (perhaps literally) or fit young men ditto. Is that an uncomfortable thought? Men sometimes find it so. The women of my acquaintance, not so much. But of course it's much, much more than that.

Chocolate cakes to die for.

Visually, it’s a feast. Displacement activity central. Millions of images, ideas, foods and recipes of course, costume, people, places, interiors, exteriors, links to websites – you name it you’ll find it on Pinterest. The idea is that you set up virtual boards, name them and post pictures on them. I can already hear some of you saying 'what's the point?' But does there have to be a point? Pinterest is for casual browsing as much as anything else. It's serendipitous. You find out about things you never knew existed. Like the Dragon's Blood Trees of Socotra.  I’ve got twenty three boards at the moment: pottery, textiles, ice hockey, my own doll’s house ... some are purely for fun. Some are incredibly useful for a writer. And some are a mixture of both. You can search on the site itself and whatever your project, you’re almost certain to find something useful. Or you can upload pictures of your own and help to inspire other people in turn. I should add that you don't have to 'look after' these boards in any way. They are there, like albums, for you to browse if you want to. Or track back through links to read more: recipes, costume history, gardening hints.

This only works, because you can borrow images from people and they can borrow from you, and pin your pictures to their boards. Again, if you don’t like this idea, you'd be wise to steer clear. But you’ll often find fascinating boards in this way because other people’s obsessions may well coincide with your own.

Something from one of my 'secret' boards.

You can also have ‘secret’ boards that nobody else can see. This facility is very useful for a writer who might want to amass all kinds of images, but not necessarily for public consumption. Not immediately, anyway. Later, of course, a secret Pinterest board can be made public and can become a promotional tool. It may be helpful for communicating with a cover artist, but – once the project is up and running – readers may also find a Pinterest board more engaging, more inspirational than a dry and occasionally daunting list of ‘questions for reading groups.’ 

 You can find one for The Amber Heart here,  for Orange Blossom Love here and a small but interesting board for Bird of Passage. I’ve also made a huge board for Jean Armour, my current project, This is the first where I've consciously and consistently used Pinterest as a research tool and a place for storing lots of miscellaneous images whose relevance may not be immediately obvious to anyone except me. It's positively stuffed with images: costume, old pictures, jewellery, furniture, people and places - but for the moment, it's 'secret' and nobody else will get to see it until I’m ready.

A little bit of inspiration for The Amber Heart

Why is it all so compulsive? 

I’m not sure. But whenever I start on a new writing project, I like to surround myself with all kinds of visual images and prompts, sources of inspiration, books, maps, pictures and I think this is the online equivalent of a series of ‘mood boards.’ 

You either like that – or you don’t. And if you don’t then Pinterest probably isn’t for you. Many artists and craftspeople find it invaluable. Gardeners too. And interior designers. If you’re into baking, there are pages and pages of mouthwatering images and recipes. And obviously it’s a great research resource for costume in particular where you can find collections of vivid images from a multitude of times and places, often with helpful notes and links back to extraordinarily useful blogs and websites. Where else could I have found out exactly what a 'lutestring silk' gown might look like?

Happily, once you start to look for and gather images, the site will respond by showing you lots more. When I logged on just now, it was to find a mouthwatering collection of beautifully preserved antique dresses, because that’s what I’d been looking at earlier. I could have used Google but it would have taken a whole lot longer and thrown up less interesting and targeted results. 

It's research,  Jim, but not as we know it. 

Orange Blossom Love - Holiday Reading (and an apology!)

I've spent at least some of the last month or so (in between working away at the Jean Armour novel) revising a novel called Orange Blossom Love in a fairly drastic way. When I first began the project a couple of years ago, I thought it was going to be a trilogy of novels - a Canary Island trilogy in fact. There were two books, Orange Blossom Love and a sequel called Bitter Oranges. With the possibility of a third. But the more I thought about it, the more the idea niggled away at the back of my mind that this really wasn't a trilogy. It was a single big book, a fairly mammoth beach read.

Anyway, a little while ago I unpublished the sequel - fortunately, it has only ever been an eBook and only ever been on Amazon's Kindle store - and set about the task of joining the dots to make this into a single long novel. Which is what it now is, and - I hope - all the better for it.

It needed an edit in any case. There were things about it that I needed to tidy up and that's what I've done. But there was also a bit more polishing and pruning to be done, even though I had done masses of polishing and pruning already. I now hope and believe that it's a much better and more satisfying novel, mostly because it doesn't break off at a crucial point but carries the reader on to a satisfactory resolution.

My humble apology is to anyone who bought both books - but to be honest, neither of them was expensive and the single long version isn't so very different that you would notice much as a casual reader. And it hadn't sold that many copies, which I suspect is also because it didn't 'feel' like a series.

It's a big, very sexy, sunny, vacation read. It's about a holiday romance that turns into something a lot more permanent and what follows after - the challenges and joys of a cross cultural marriage. It's set on Tenerife, and La Gomera and - some of it anyway - in Glasgow. If you're contemplating a holiday in the sun this year - or even if you're planning on going somewhere a bit damper - you could do worse than download it onto your eReader. At about 160,000 words, it will keep you going for a while. The good news is that it's also available on Apple, and various other platforms as well as from Amazon.  This is problem the most romantic novel I've ever written, or am every likely to write!

Meanwhile, if you'd like to see some of the images, landscapes - and heroes - that inspired the novel, have a look at my Pinterest Board: Orange Blossom Love Inspirations.

On La Gomera

Writing About the Canary Isles: A Handsome People.

Teide in the snow.

There has been a small gap in my Canary Island Winter posts, mainly because I've been so busy with the first in my Canary Island trilogy of novels - Orange Blossom Love - that I've had very little time for blogging. The result has been that I've been neglecting Wordarts a bit in favour of my regular Authors Electric blog post (on the 18th of every month) although I'll sometimes reblog it on here if I think it deserves a second outing.

Writing about the Canary Isles has brought the place back to me with almost heartrending immediacy. I want to be there right now although it doesn't look as though that will be possible for a little while at least.  Luis, my hero in the novel, is a 'Gomero' born and bred, fiercely proud of his heritage, a guitarist and a chef. A slightly quirky combination, I know, but that's the way he turned out and whom am I to challenge him? Every writer knows that there is a stage in any novel when a character decides to be what he or she wants to be and there will be little you can do to change it. It's one reason why writers react so badly to other people saying 'can't you make him do this or that?' Many of us don't feel as if we're 'making' anyone do anything. We can shape the story, of course, change the structure, polish and prune and even change what happens, but there's a sense in which the characters make themselves, and that's an uncanny feeling. So, Luis is who he is. And good looking with it.

Earlier this year, when I was in the middle of doing some additional research for this trilogy, I discovered two fat volumes about the Canaries written by one Olivia M Stone, an Englishwoman who had visited the islands back in 1884. This was wholly thanks to Amazon. I didn't know about these books at all. A Canarian academic friend, who had helped me with the translation of some traditional poems, confessed that she didn't know about them either, but then they had been written in English, published in England in 1887 and had long been out of print. The re-emergence of facsimile editions on Amazon was only very recent. I typed 'Canary Islands History' into Amazon and these two volumes instantly popped up, with a long, engaging and informative review by a previous reader. I ordered them and was enchanted by them. Olivia had obviously fallen in love with the Canaries too.

Back when we were living there for that short time, it had struck me what good looking people the locals were. Olivia thought so too. She found the men handsome, especially their guide, the divine Lorenzo, and was not afraid to say as much. Even though she seems to have been a happily married woman, accompanied by her photographer husband, she was also quite a young woman and her obvious appreciation of a handsome and mildly flirtatious man seems curiously modern. She also noted several times that the island girls too were unselfconciously beautiful.

All of this is still true. Spaniards are a handsome people, but there is a fair mixture of the DNA of the original inhabitants of these islands - as recent tests have proved - especially on La Gomera. This isn't too surprising. Historians used to posit the idea that the Spanish invaders had massacred all the original inhabitants, but wholesale genocide is (mercifully) rare. Youth, life, sexual attraction tends to have its way. Like the early Scandinavian invaders of Scotland and Northern England, it seems as though those Spanish invaders - as well as shedding a lot of blood - did a lot of what we had better call intermarrying, although initially at any rate I doubt if it was as benevolent as that term suggests. But these were young Spanish settlers on a fertile land with a kindly climate and the surviving Guanche women were a handsome people of Berber ancestry. And sooner or later, men grow tired of war. The DNA evidence suggests that a great many of those incoming Spaniards must have taken Guanche wives, settled down and raised families, becoming Canary Islanders themselves.

This seems to have resulted in a happy combination in more ways than one. The Canarians are still a handsome, sunny natured people. It's as though the fierce energy of the incomers - but one which could all too easily tip over into cruelty - was tempered by the more peaceful qualities of the indigenous people. This is to oversimplify, of course. The Guanches were as capable of brutality in a brutal age as their conquerers. But it doesn't seem to have been their natural inclination. Whatever the truth of it, it does seem as though a partiality for artistry, cultivation, music, courtesy, peacefulness and a natural appreciation of beauty have to a large extent prevailed on these islands so that the old perception of them as 'blest' - as the garden of the Gods - is not too far from the truth.

www.wordarts.co.uk