Hidden London: Weeds of Kew Gardens

 The first heatwave of the summer means long queues in Kew. Finding a quiet spot for a picnic in Kew Gardens is, thankfully, quite easy.

Picnic spot

Picnic view - The Mediterranean Garden

Buttercups

Kew Gardens is in west London and is served by the District Line tube station. It takes about 35/40 minutes from central London.

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Getting Started in Ebook Publishing

Very pleased to be joining this collective of dynamic, friendly and interesting UK digital authors. Today's my very first post:

LINK:

http://authorselectric.blogspot.co.uk/

Back To Writing - New Habits

After two years of being stuck inside the flat, glued to the Mac setting up Blackbird Digital Books it's starting to bubble. The time is right to make space for writing again. But I need new habits. Habits that involve the internet, not.

© Copyright steve and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

A breakfast meeting in Pembroke Lodge café Richmond Park first, then I shall edit Draft 2 of my ghost project for the bulk of the day.

 © Copyright Stephen Craven and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Go for a little walk and back to the office for online business later. But you know what they say about plans...

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London Book Fair 2012

Excited to be joining the Authors Electric team. Will be blogging there once a month, kicking off soon with notes from the Fair. In the meantime, a few images.

The focus this year is China

Base Camp - English PEN Literary Cafe

 Good company. With wheelchair dancing star Diana Morgan-Hill and English PEN's Head of Programmes, Philip Cowell.

Tom Watson MP on his exposé of the News International phone hacking scandal - completely fascinating: Dial M For Murdoch (pub Allen Lane)

The English PEN Literary Cafe Where's Wally moment - spot the famous Booker-winning author.

Arvon  Foundation and The Literary Consultancy's Seminar on the role of the editor in digital age. Excellent panel, that's Blake Morrison speaking there. More on this soon.

Caitlin Moran talking about hairy armpits and ridiculously small knickers. Audience Q - has she ever thought of standing as an MP? - brought musings on standing against George Galloway dressed as Rula Lenska dressed a cat. DO IT!

Self-promo moment, organised by PR whizz E.

This was an interesting one - Has Anyone Spoken To The Author? Chaired by John Mitchinson of the fantastic UNBOUND.

The official programme. This came as a complete shock - on the digital page as well.  From last year's visit with my friend Writing Coach and author Jacqui Lofthouse. The first photo of myself wearing glasses I've ever seen.

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Hidden London - Holland Park

Took my sister and nephews for their first visit to central west London's Holland Park over the Bank Holiday weekend.

A smaller park than its close London neighbours Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, its charms are immense. 

  It never ceases to amaze first-time visitors. 

You can stay here very cheaply, especially for London, as it's now a Youth Hostel (not only for youths). There's opera in the summer and a rather good Marco Pierre White restaurant in the grounds. With the cash you save on hotel bills you could make use of one of London's prettiest and best dining rooms, right on your doorstep!

Built in 1605, Oliver Cromwell was a frequent visitor. Later it became one of London's central social gathering places for writers and artists. Wikpedia says "Under the 3rd Lord Holland and his wife, Lady Holland, the house became noted as a glittering social, literary and political centre with many celebrated visitors such as Byron, Thomas Macaulay, the poets Thomas Campbell and Samuel Rogers, 'Conversation' Sharp, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, John Allen."

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The Kindle Is The Perfect Editing Tool

The book sampling facility is a powerful incentive to get a Kindle. Instead of relying on reviews, if they happen, you can download the first few chapters of most new books and see for yourself if it's the kind of writing you're going to enjoy. I used to rely on my local library for my browsing and reading piles, and still do, but now have more new irresistible new books on my 'shelves' than ever before.

For writers and editors there's an extra incentive to get Kindled-up, and that's the editing tool. Be it a book, a dissertation, a company report, you can email your own work to your kindle with the special email you're given with your purchase. Or you can transfer it direct from your computer.  Your MS magically transforms into 'book'. A nice chunk of that all-important distance is added that doesn't happen when you read to edit from the screen, or even from paper. You can highlight text and add in notes as you read. When you're ready to go back to your next computer edit you can bring your edits up as a list. This is best used for fine edits, i.e. when you think (ha!) you've got a finished product.

If you regularly write any kind of document and you're thinking of buying a Kindle (nobody  I know, writer or otherwise, has yet to be less than delighted with theirs), consider the Kindle with the push-button keyboard rather than the touch-screen one, which I gather isn't so nifty when it comes to note-taking. I don't know how the Kindle Fire, only available in the US at the moment, performs.

To transfer a MS to Kindle via your computer, email it to yourself via your special kindle email.

Or you can do it via the free ebook management system Calibre.

Save your file as a PDF - PDF works perfectly for me but some report conversion difficulties. You may instead want to convert your MS to RTF (rich text format).

Import it into Calibre via the "Add Books To Calibre Library" Red book icon top L.

Plug your Kindle into your computer with the charger lead which adapts for this purpose.

Highlight the title in Calibre.

Click the brown "convert book" icon in the top toolbar, next door but one to the red icon.

Click the blue "MOBI Output" icon bottom left of screen.

When the file has transferred, click the Blue "Send To Device" icon in the centre of the top toolbar.

Voila.

To edit on your kindle click on that big, square button at any point in the text and start writing, a window will open up at the bottom of your Kindle screen. Click "save" in this window and continue reading until your next edit.

To view your notes click MENU, then "View Notes And Marks".

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Ebooks Get Thumbs-Up From New York Review of Books

Alexis Madrigal,  senior editor at The Atlantic, writes about The New York Review of Books' wonderful essay on the value of ebooks:  

The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children's books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.


Read Alex's full piece here. Glad to see others on the same page (sorry), ref my own post of the other day Ebooks and Creativity - Why Jonathan Franzen Is Wrong To Hate Ebooks.

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Ebooks And Creativity: Why Jonathan Franzen is Wrong To Hate Ebooks - Conf 685

 c. Jacqui Lofthouse

In her latest post 'A Different Definition of Success', the novelist and writing coach Jacqui Lofthouse asks why so many writers eat themselves up with feelings of envy, disappointment, a sense of injustice and fear of being a failure. 

"Why? When we feel this way, it may be frustration - because we haven't finished a book yet. Or because we haven't got an agent yet. Or we haven't got a publisher yet.  Or we haven't sold enough copies to pay the bills. Or it's not a bestseller. Or it's a bestseller but it didn't win a literary prize. Or it won the Booker but has been slammed by the critics.  Or it won the Booker but the sales were the worst ever for a Booker winner. Or we've won the Nobel Prize for Literature but still somehow, life just didn't pan out the way we'd hoped..." 

Insecurity plays a big part. The sheer marathon number of hours it takes to write a novel that may never see the light of day. That may be rubbish anyway so maybe it's just as well. The tenacity that's needed to complete a full-length novel and then go back and edit it to its core, over and over is thus applied to the next stage of its life and we watch developments - and those of other books like ours published at the same time - like a hawk. As Steph Swainston points out in her piece linked to by Jacqui, the one book a year deal doesn't help at all. When your first book does come out, the shadow of having to complete another novel for publication in 12 months' time takes the sheen off a bit. That's how it is so you get on with it. For many writers deadlines are a necessary part of the process. But for just as many others more time would produce a more satisfactory end result. 

Digital publishing has eased the burden and put the control back into the novelist's hands. There have been a few big pieces in the press lately by authors who fear ebooks. Yes, it's a huge shake-up of the established systems, and the currently-successful are going to feel it in reduced royalties for electronic sales. But I'm convinced digital publishing will be good for creativity in the long term. As the Monty Python team have repeatedly pointed out over the years, originality flourishes when commercial interests aren't at the heart of the commission. Publishers had become vehicles for the big PR machinery of TV stars, models - anybody who had already made a name for themselves in another field was allowed to 'write' and publish a novel and have it displayed prominently in the High Street bookstores. I don't blame the publishers for this at all, publishing's a gamble and they needed sales to stay in business. It's just how it was.

Jonathan Franzen isn't keen on ebooks. His take that words have to be anchored to a page is nonsense. It's the ideas that are conveyed by the words, the feelings and new depths of understanding that a good book instills that is permanent. I've never felt the need to own a book, once I've read it, if it's any good its resonance will remain forever, even if so deeply in the subconscious that I don't know it's there. The book will probably get 'lent' and I'll never see it again. When I moved from a house to my partner's flat a few years ago I had to get rid of nearly all of my books and it didn't really bother me (the albums were harder). The books that stayed were my friends' books, the cookery books (which I rarely look at) and the poetry books. 

I feel for the independent bookshops who are having such a hard time at the moment but am convinced that, once all the fuss has settled down, print and ebooks will thrive side by side. Independent bookshops and libraries will be a major part of the new flush of originality, replacing the generic bookstores we have at the moment where every display option comes at a price. I understand the fear but feel the excitement far more. As William Boyd said at an appearance at my local library, velcro didn't replace buttons.  

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Hidden London: Madonna At The Supermarket...

Film premieres aren't exactly hidden, but, living right next door to a cinema which occasionally throws them, I've stumbled across them a few times on my way out to buy the dinner. Then hung around a bit to watch the pazazz.

They can be really good fun. It's a great way to people watch - completely and utterly unashamedly STARE at people, because that's what's expected on a red carpet. Gofugyourself come to life, with a lot more going on around the edges. People trying to look cool can be funny. Anyway: I'd wandered out to the supermarket for a few bits and pieces in the afternoon to see this: 

and the cinema completely fenced off with great big screens. The public area down the side of the building was already full, several people deep. I thought about taking a mini-ladder but there wasn't room to set one up. Skilled gatecrasher that I am, I went around the back and found the place where the cars would be stopping. There was nobody there at all except a few security guards. That seemed our best bet if we wanted a glimpse of her. I saw a moment in the presence of the Material Girl as a prime educational opportunity for my teen daughter so we set off for the back entrance. But on the way, as we passed the front screens, the cinema manager was shouting for all those who had stamps to come forward. Some fans had been there since early in the morning. They have a system of stamping their hands so that they can come and go to get food and go to the loo and all that. We hung around a bit and when they'd all gone in he said right, now there's room for a few more. And we got in! This is where they put us:

And the show commenced.

 Dress by Cos, daughter told me. Note the ever-watchful, coat-carrying, note-taking, water-carrying PA in b/g. That was me a few years ago. Daughter found that v funny.

The leading man. The interviewer lady was lovely too. "Wetting her pants" she said at the thought of meeting Madge. The buzz in the air just kept growing and growing... and then:

We were the closest fans to the interview!

 See how the lipstick exactly matches the gloves. And she Didn't Have A Manicure! Liked that.

NOT something I expected and all the more fun for that.

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Harry Potter Plot Sheet

Fascinated to see J.K. Rowling's hand-written plot spreadsheet for The Order Of The Phoenix. Courtesy of The Story Museum:

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