The Word Cloud

I thought it might amuse you all to hear how it went...
The vintage theme was a hit, although I realised after about an hour the high heels were a bad idea. Luckily we were right opposite the sausage stand, and the 'coffee lady', so we had breakfast (not to mention an early run to Just Brownies for 'supplies'.)
I had a bit of a panic at around 10am because the market was empty, and then the rain attacked until lunchtime, so not ideal. However the sun crept out for the afternoon, and we sold fifteen books, thank goodness. Some lovely comments of how nice it was to see local authors/publishers, and it was great to chat to so many other writers from the area. It was also great to meet Mike!  The press releases that featured locally worked well, and the goodie bag was snapped up, but several things I will do differently next time;
A bigger sign - MUCH BIGGER.
Bookshelves to the front. I thought I was creating a 'Bookshop' type stall, but when we had more than three people chatting, browsers couldn't see the books.
Not wear such high heels.
Author chats etc all in the afternoon, as I tend to forget
most people are not woken at 5am on a Sat by their kids...
More books.
As an exercise in networking, and publicity, this worked well. Financially not so! However I have the stall every month until October so will be there, flogging the books, and chatting; sausage in one hand, mug of tea in the other... ;-)

The Pop-Up 'Indie' Bookshop…    

 

 

Will be at Horsham Market in the Carfax on May 4^th!

“Bringing Independent authors to the high street, in a unique and innovative show-case!”

1000-1030 Historical novelist, BEV BEVAN, will be signing copies of his outstanding new historical work, ‘The Dark Rose’ and chatting to readers.

1045-1115 Editor/Proof-reader ABI TRUELOVE chats about self-publishing. Want to write a book? Want it published… ask Abi how to get that final polish!

1130-1200 Pop-Up Indie Bookshop owner/founder DAISY WHITE will be signing copies of her new teen thriller, ‘The Film Club’, set in Fifties Brighton, and answering questions about the Bookshop.

1230-1300 Our Pop-Up Vintage Make-up Team, led by top local make-up artist MARTINE FARRANT explain how they create those amazing looks, and answer your questions.

1330-1430 STEF LILLEY and CLARE MOORE, the duo behind the cover of Daisy White’s new book, ‘The Film Club’, answer your modelling questions… and chat about their search for models for the next book cover!

1500-1530 Local star author… Radio presenter CHARLIE PLUNKETT will be signing copies of her brilliant books, including; ‘The True Diary of a Bride-to-be’, and ‘The True Diary of a Mum-to-be’.

Also Featuring… ‘The Aviation Historian’ by Nick Stroud and Mick Oakey… ‘HYBRID’ by Vanessa Wester… ‘Dreaming of Dolphins’ by Claire Nicole Long

For more info, or to be a featured author www.daisywhiteauthor.co.uk

Inside the shop diffused an energy, a simultaneous attack and defense between protagonists and antagonists.

Amongst the midst of enticing displays, I stood hesitant, cautious to take one step too far from the inspiration that was buzzing.

The tips of my fingers tingled with anticipation and indecision. Which floor? Which alley? Which novel shall I choose?

The familiar sensation was of belonging. It felt good, it felt safe, and it felt like home. Hungry for recognition, my ego believed I was being watched.

Their whispers were mingling in the air, ascending and descending the spiral wooden staircase to the café on the second floor.

‘She’s one on them,’ one said.

‘Really? How do you know?’ asked another.

‘Look at her eyes, how they shine when she stares our way.’

‘It’s the way she smiles,’ said another.

‘And her feet, too overwhelmed to take a step,’ said the other.

‘Mark my words, one day her progenitor shall be on this shelf next to us. She’s a creator, for sure,’ said the book.

I had long since given up on my appearance since living locked inside my silent world of words. Although accustomed to believing I was invisible, I was noticed by the ones who cared: those for whom I now dedicated my life.

It was for them that I lost sleep and suffered through carpal tunnel, and because of them that I opened a new page each day and smiled.

A barkingly brilliant marketing idea from Amazon to sell used e-books and take a cut from every transaction. 
Thing is, a used e-book is no different to a new e-book. No dog-ears, no pages missing, no worrying stains.  The only advantage to a new e-book, is that you can read it first.
So if you've already purchased an e-book and read it, you can transfer the rights to it to anyone else via Amazon's Marketplace or similar.

And the author and publisher get nothing at all from this second transaction.
It's just like purchasing a used paper book, except for the perfect condition.

And so the only party to benefit, is, er, Amazon. Are they getting too big for their books?

How long before there's only ever one copy of every book sold? Which is then sold on and on.

WTF?

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/used-ebooks-is-a-ridiculous-idea-that-could-ruin-authors-publishers 

I should add that I was originally alerted to this by a tweet from Jane Judd.

I've had my Kindle for a year now and, although not fully converted, I've discovered the delights of free books. I'm not talking those new authors who generously give their works away for a limited period, but those books that are so old and obscure that they're given away. The literary equivalent of those mouldering mildewed volumes left over from the church bazaar.

My latest find was "Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England" by William le Queux, published just over a hundred years ago. How could I resist with a title like that and a handle like mine?

To give you a little taste of this forgotten masterpiece, here's the review I put on amazon:

An Infestation of Spies
In the early days of the 20th century, if author William le Queux were to be believed, the fair lands of Great Britain were infested with German spies. Lurking and hiding under every bridge or inside every vacant building, they were plotting and planning the "downfall of England" - cataloging the coastline and stealing the secrets of aeroplanes, ships and countless weapons and armaments.

Luckily, our three heroes, the alliteratively-named trio Ray Raymond, John James Jacox and Vera Vallance are at hand to tackle this horde of ingenious infiltrators. The two men are reminiscent of Holmes and Watson, and Vera is a plucky sort of "gel" - an Admiral's daughter, no less. Although the government seems blind to the threat, our heroes uncover numerous clever, crafty, dastardly and unscrupulous agents of the spymeister general, Hermann Hartmann.

The stories are somewhat formulaic - I have lost track of the number of times that the hapless narrator Jacox is either bludgeoned over the head from behind or slipped a dodgy cigar or drink - but it's all a lot of fun. There are foretastes of Bond here, with fast cars and femmes fatale (usually with alliterative names!).

It's all hopelessly un-PC but in that lies its charm. Take this sentence as a typical example:

"So different to the usual German," he declared. "There's nothing of the popinjay about him, nothing of the military fop of Berlin or Dresden, men who are, in my estimation, the very acme of bad breeding and degenerate idiocy."

To read in a leather armchair before a roaring fire, I think - but do be careful that no crafty spy has slipped something into your whisky!

So, which discoveries have you made on Kindle while trawling the musty mothballed attics of the internet? 

We've been planning our school trip this weekend.  This year I'm taking part in two, one to the south of Laos, where we will take the 12 year olds to Wat Phu, a temple that predates Ankhor Wat and practically oozes phallic symbolism, to the delight of the students, then on to 4,000 Islands, where the Mekong widens and, depending upon the season and the height of the water, becomes dotted with small islands.  There are white sand beaches and freshwater dolphins which we will take a boat out to view.  One of the activities is to imagine that they were the original colonial explorers in the region and to devise a plan to get goods out of this landlocked country, bearing in mind the Mekong's waterfalls that prevent the entire journey being done by water.  (In fact the French built a short train to take the goods from the Mekong, across the islands and back to where the river forms a tranquil border with Cambodia).  The train is still there, though the tracks have mainly gone and we'll take a detour during the dolphin watching to land on the beaches in Cambodia, though we won't actually enter.

En route back, we'll visit one of the many hydro power plants here.  The rivers here are dammed and provide the major source of income for this country (though it screws around with the ecology somewhat).  Power production has a tendency to do that.

For me, though the additional visits that we've decided on are going to be the real pleasure of the trip.  We are going to arrange to provide textbooks and reading books for students in some Lao schools we will visit.  These will probably mainly be in Lao, but we are probably going to take some in French and English too.

This put me in mind of a wonderful organisation here.  Big Brother Mouse wanted to do something about the lack of interesting reading material in this country and the fact that few people read for pleasure.  Reading Lao script is an interesting exercise.  It is completely phonetic, so once you've learnt the characters, you can read anything.  Vowels are unusual in so far as they may appear before, above, below, after (or any combination thereof) the consonent, though this is always consistent.  My name, for example is effectively written OJ in the local script.  This isn't a big problem once you are used to it.  The big problem is that spaces denote paragraph endings.  There is no other punctuation. 

 Tryingtoreadscriptwhentherearenospacesisnoteasy

Big Brother Mouse is a children's publisher which uses bright colours, simple language, spaces between words, and most books are in Lao plus another language, generally English.  They sell these books in cities here but also ask trekkers to take some with them under their motto,

Take only photographs, leave only books.

Somebody once asked me which literature character I’d like to be if I could. Tom Ripley would surely be in the top 5, and I know it doesn’t speak too well of me!

I first read this book in November-December 2011, during my long commutes between Greater Manchester and Lancashire (it was during that brief period when I had no secure home or job and my immigration status was being decided).

I know it was not that long ago, but I have unusually vivid memories of clasping the hardback book, my hands wrapped in mittens, as the bus dragged me to my (then) dead-end job. Surrounded by freezing cold and not the best of the Manchester crowd, this book was, ironically, like heavenly escapism.

Tom is constantly drinking martinis in the Italian coast, riding his scooter in Rome, chatting on espressos ‘til three in the morning, gossiping at cocktail parties in Paris and Venice… and manipulating everyone at will.

The story has very clever, complex twists all along. The games Tom plays when he steals Dickie’s identity are work of genius, so much so that at some point everything he does and says gives more and more credibility to his lies.

I watched the 1999 film soon after I read the book and loved it just as much.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s Marge is much smarter and appealing than the original… although I am not sure I like that. The Marge in the book is aloof, hedonistic, lazy and rather dumb – as an aspiring writer, she is pretending to work on a book about the Italian village where she lives, but then spends her mornings sunbathing at the beach and her evenings sipping (again) martinis and espressos (which made me so jealous, thinking how she wasted the chance of writing full time!). When Tom fools her and plays games with her mind I could not help grinning.

I loved the scene with Freddie, although I would have liked them to include my favourite line of the book:

"Freddie Miles, you're a victim of your own dirty mind.” Class.


Genius as she was, Patricia Highsmith was a bit of a coo-coo… Actually I shouldn’t say that; she was a complete nutcase. Apparently she kept pet snails (somehow I can picture her letting the slimy things crawl up her fingers), and her mother once casually told her she’d tried to abort her by drinking turpentine.

It is not strange that she came up with such dark stories. In her writing she could commit crimes she perhaps dreamed of, and so she shows us her murderers under a more understanding light. She really makes the readers like Tom, even though he is a monster – He is much more concerned about the cut of his suits than the moral implications of murder. Some critics have called him a psychopath, but I don’t think that’s entirely right as Tom doesn’t kill for pleasure; murder is entirely utilitarian to him, and he even bemoans when he realises a murder was not entirely necessary.

And it is no coincidence that we get to understand him. We all have a little Tom Ripley whispering at our ears.


Also published in my website:
http://www.oscardemuriel.com/blogging/20121006a.html
@oscardemuriel

See what I did there?

Not quite a list before I die, more that the pun was too enticing to not use.

I usually have a stack of books beside my bed to work my way through, but life gets in the way. At the moment my list consists of:

• Medieval Times by Terry Jones
• Woman in Black by Susan Hill
• Bletchley Park People, Churchill's Geese that never cackled by Marion Hill
• A Madman dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin
• Buried Prey by John Sandford
• To Defy a King by Elizabeth Chadwick
• Watercolour Landscape techniques by Ian King

Better get my beehind into gear!

Do any of you lot have a list like this? Or indeed a list to read before you die?

A x

In light of recent conversations, I saw this list and pondered how tastes change over time, and that acceptablity, is elastic.

How many of them have you read? Can you think of any others?

http://uk.lifestyle.yahoo.com/top-10-banned-books.html

I'd like to add two more to the list:

11. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
12. Riotous Assembly - Tom Sharpe (at least it was banned in South Africa - and my copy has 'recently unbanned' stamped on the front. It's a scream, but I can see why some thought it contentious.)

I'm amazed that so many censureship boards have read 'Ulysses'.

I've read 6/12 and seen the film of 'The Handmaid's Tale', so I'm making that 6.5/12. How about you?

I wonder if 'Origin of Species' should be added to the list. Was it banned at one point? I think it might have been.

To make life easy, here is a c&p of the article:

1. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932
This book was banned in Ireland when it was first published and continues to be challenged in some US states today. Explicit sexual scenes caused controversy as Huxley imagined a world where birth control and reproduction were controlled for society rather than by individuals. For Catholic Ireland, the idea was just too much!

2. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

This is the tale of literary scholar Humbert Humbert and his sexual obsession with ‘Nymphets’ and in particular 12 year old Dolores (Lolita) who becomes his step daughter. Nabokov had trouble getting the novel published due to its contentious material and though there is little that is explicit in the novel, the themes of paedophilia and incest were enough to ban it in France, England, Argentina, New Zealand and South Africa.

3. And Tango Makes Three, Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, 2005

Based on a real life penguin family, the story of Tango the penguin and his two dads was written to teach children about same-sex parent families. It was revealed to be the most banned book at the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, mostly having been removed from US libraries and schools.

4. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini, 2003
Now a major film, the Kite Runner was banned in Afghanistan, where the story is set, for its rape scene of a young male character. It’s also banned in some parts of the US because of the sexually explicit scene and offensive language.

5. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, 1985

Describing a bleak future where women are sexual slaves, the Handmaid’s Tale regularly appears on most ban request lists and was removed from the English curriculum in Texas after complaints by parents that it was anti Christian.

6. The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall, 1928

An early lesbian novel, Hall’s story, thought to be a thinly veiled account of her own life, was feared by the authorities for introducing ideas of homosexuality to women. It was banned soon after publication but this probably only served to make the British population far more aware of lesbianism.

7. Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922
Banned in the US in 1928, the UK in 1926 and named a prohibited import to Australia in 1933, Ulysses was considered ‘obscene’ by the authorities thanks to a scene where the main character masturbates. In 1933 it was ruled ‘pornographic’ but not obscene and the ban was lifted.

8. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller, 1934

Miller’s book has been credited with giving literature the free speech we now take for granted. Its US publication in 1961 tested American pornography laws but in ‘obscenity trials’ the tome was declared ‘non obscene’. Loosely based on Miller’s own life in Paris, the protagonist’s sexual experiences are recounted in detail and the book is considered one of the most important in 20th-century literature.

9. Fifty Shades of Grey, EL James, 2011
Banned in libraries in the states of Georgia and Wisconsin (Florida lifted its ban), the rather badly written sexual exploits of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey have been dubbed ‘mummy porn’ for their popularity with older women. Despite being banned by these conservative states, the book topped the best seller charts in both the US and UK.

10. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill), John Cleland, 1748
When it was published, Fanny Hill was ignored by the authorities, but a year later its publishers were charged with "corrupting the King's subjects". Sold underground, it was also banned in the US in 1821. Strewn with details of sex acts, the book depicts prostitution, lesbianism and mutual masturbation. The ban was lifted in the 1970s after the book was decided to be a historical source and of literary value.

Fellow clouders...

Today only HYBRID is free to download from Amazon... So please grab your copy.  The paperback will be out soon but for now it is only for kindle or kindle devices (sorry...)

Check out my blog...  www.vanessawesterwriter.blogspot.com ... For all the details.

I am also promoting another author, Liz Long, with her book Gifted.  This will be free all weekend. 

Thanks a lot for your support,
Vanessa Wester :) xx

Links for Hybrid...
AmazonUS http://ow.ly/1OcnC9