A little bird told me...

...about Donna Tartt's new novel 'The Goldfinch'.  The beginning describes a terrorist bomb explosion in a New York art gallery.   It feels so real, and is so relentless that it literally made my ears ring.  The writing is superb.

Tartt's prose reminds me a bit of Hilary Mantel's.  But where Mantel's writing is like a piece of antique treen, mellow and polished smooth by experience - Tartt's has protuberances - phrases and passages of such beauty and clarity that make me weak-kneed with jealousy. 

If you enjoy virtuoso literary fiction, I heartily recommend The Goldfinch.

Photo courtesy of my 'little bird', book doctor and writing guru Andrew Wille.

You can find him at  www.wille.org.

The triumph of hope

I take the dog for a walk every morning along the river.  The path is made of grit and gravel, and yet I always see a dozen snails bang in the middle of it, trying to get from one side to the other.  It must be agony on their tender little bellies.  So why, I wonder, do they do it?  Do they just set off in a straight line, and stick to it, come what may?  At what point does tenacity cease to be a personal asset and become a liability?  At what point does it become stupidity?

Or is it really about hope?

Do the snails simply hope that there is something better on the other side of the path, and keep going, buoyed up on a slime of optimism?  I can tell, of course, from my lofty point of view, that the vegetation on the left hand side of the path is no more likely to satisfy snail-y appetites than the vegetation on the right.  Does that necessarily invalidate the snail's quest? Who can say?

I guess it depends on your point of view. 

Rewriting wrongs #2

Anything happened in the last few weeks?  Heatwave?  What heatwave?

Have just emerged blinking and bloody from my rewrite of The Alchemist's Heir, that was more gruelling than I ever believed possible. I suspect it's now in worse nick than it was when I started.  What I'd really like to do is put it out of my misery by burning it ceremonially on a bonfire, but I suppose I should put it away for a while and return with fresh eyes and a slightly less hysterical gameplan.

In other news I've just got a contract through for my first-ever paid screenwriting gig, working on a bio-pic for Equation Pictures. They're a newish company, headed up by Diarmuid McKeown, associate producer on some of Danny Boyle's films, including Trance and 127 Hours.

Spookily, Diarmuid started out as assistant to Neil Jordan (see my last post).  I LOVE synchronicity, don't you?

Fact or fiction? Who cares?

Yay!  The Borgias are back!

Monday evenings have perked up no end, now that Cesare, Lucretia et al are back on Sky Atlantic.  I love it.  I love its energy.  I love the acting (Jeremy Irons seems to have no vanity at all.)  And I love the way Neil Jordan and his writers don't let facts get in the way of a good story (there's no historical evidence that the Borgias resorted to poisoning, murder and extortion to support the Papacy - or of incest either, for that matter.  But who would want to see that on tv?)

'The Alchemist's Heir' is set in Florence some 40 years after the Borgias had Rome by the throat.   There are similarities.  One of my main characters is a ruthless Cardinal who uses his daughter - and everyone else - for his own nefarious ends.  And, of course, there are poisonings, stabbings and seductions galore.  It is Renaissance Italy, after all.

Telling any kind of historical tale inevitably raises the spectre of research.  How much do I need to do to bring it alive?  How much should I actually show in the writing?  I'm having to feel my way by trial and error. 

The novel features some real historical characters - Benevenuto Cellini, Cosimo di Medici and Michelangelo - so I can't ride completely roughshod over the known facts.  And of course I've discovered lots of delicious little bits and pieces that I'd love to shoehorn in there  (Renaissance ladies, for example, used to bleach their hair with nuns' urine.  True.  Ok... maybe not true, but it should be.)

There have been times when the whole story has got horribly bogged down by fact.  The only solution was to sluice it out, see what was left sticking to the walls, and hope that was going to be enough to give the novel the right flavour (er... scent?)

So... I'll continue to tread that line between fact and fiction, taking lessons from Jordan the Maestro on a Monday night.  

Bring it on, you bloody Borgias!

The Borgias Season III

Rewriting wrongs

Now that Monday's euphoria (and champagne headache) has worn off, reality is setting in about the work that needs to be done to 'The Alchemist's Heir' to get it publisher-fit.

It reminds me of an old (and possibly apocryphal) Ad Agency conversation...

Account Exec (to Creatives) - 'The client LOVED the concept using Max Wall and the parrot. He'd like us to look at it again - without using either Max Wall or the parrot.'

It wasn't quite that bad, but... it's fair to say that it won't be a 'clap a sticking plaster on it and hope for the best' type rewrite, but a 'let's get bloody up to the elbows and hope the patient doesn't die on the table' one.

Bring it on. 

A decent proposal

The very nice man at A.M.Heath did indeed pop the question.
To which I answered 'I do' (natch!)

Cheers, Charlie! 

Meet my trainer

I'm violently allergic to Lycra. And to sweating in public.  If it wasn't for this little lady my backside would be the size of a 4-berth caravan.  Thanks to Bonnie, it's only the size of a 3-berth one.