The swings and the roundabouts

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Or: you win some, you lose some. With a dash of: what does not kill you makes you stronger. And a side order of: careful what you wish for, little girl, for you will surely get it. (Actually, I never really know precisely what that means, but I always loved Tom Berenger and William Hurt saying it in unison in The Big Chill, possibly the favourite film of my twenties.)

I am trying very hard not to stitch my entire sense of self into the fortunes of our book. Sarah is much better at this than I, having a practical, get the hell on with it streak in her. I, on the other hand, spend my time dreaming and pondering and fretting.

My current frets exist on three levels. The first and most dominant is that the book we are working on at the moment will be no bloody good and however many words I write each day (eight hundred this morning) they shall surely be the wrong ones. This is an occupational hazard. It is like rowers knowing that going out on the water each morning will cause them physical pain. (I used to have a bit of a thing for some of the rowers at university; how I loved watching them run down to the river each morning in their little shorts; I used to channel Anthony Blanche and think 'They are all Grace Darlings to me'. One of them, who competed in the Olympics, once told me that rowing induced the worst agony he could ever imagine.) Anyway, the point is I can't complain about the stalking self-doubt, because that is part of what I signed up for.

The second fret is that however old I get and however much I work at thickening my skin, I can never get over the fact that some people simply will not like the book. This is boilerplate law of averages stuff. Each to each is what we teach, and all that. Today I am stupidly upset because two British Amazon reviewers have accused Sarah and I of being anti-feminist. It is a knife to the heart. I have spent half my life annoying people by banging my feminist drum. I keenly subscribe to the sisterhood, and believe in it fervently. I have put up with stupidity and insults in defence of it. Possibly the best one was when a middle-aged gentleman told me: 'You will grow out of feminism when you meet the right man.' He was not being ironic.

The third fret should not really be a fret at all. Last week, Backwards was published in America. This is iconically huge for me. I have never come close to being published in America before (although there were the heady days when I was big in Cologne). It is a small release, but our publishers are very enthusiastic and charming, and on the US Amazon site the reviewers have been unbelievably kind. It feels almost impossible that someone in sunny Florida should be reading words I wrote in snowy Scotland. I do, of course, understand the concept of globalisation, and that the world is now a village, but even so, it feels like a miracle. It is all happy and good and I should be allowing myself unconfined celebration. That is much too straightforward. Instead, I am harbouring dark fears that our tiny little book shall sink like a stone into the unfathomable pool that is the United States. It is too big, and we are too small, and that's all she wrote. I shall undoubtedly be reprimanded, quite soon, for having ideas above my station.

Against all that nonsense comes the really enchanting thing about the internet, and the laws of serendipity that it seems to promote. Just as I was having my little festival of self-doubt, I wandered onto Twitter. I have not been there for a week or so, and was feeling that I was guilty of neglect. Just as I logged in, a tweet came up with my name on it. A charming woman I had never met in my life before, with the screen name workingorder, put up a link to the book and a recommendation that it is where people should go for common sense. Common sense. (If only she knew.) It felt like an unexpected present, flying out of the ether, to soothe my battered sensibilities.

The comments that come to this blog serve the same marvellous purpose. The loneliness of writing comes not from the physical fact of sitting alone in a room. I love solitude and regard it as a tremendous privilege. I have time to think and read and be still. The loneliness exists in the gap between my hope and my limitations, made real every morning as I stare at the empty screen, knowing it must be filled. The joy of the blog is that all that angst is mitigated each time an encouraging message arrives, as if there is a little army out there, cheering me on. It sounds slightly sentimental, but I feel it to be true. The old school media still likes to sneer and snarl about the solipsistic self-indulgence of the blogosphere, but, for me, it is like a grand public service. It should have a government grant, because it turns out to be a community in the best sense of the word, and I don't take it for granted for a single moment.

Here, for my cousins across the pond, is the American edition:

You can buy it here, for the slightly peculiar but undeniably bargain basement price of $15.61. It is a perfect present for Easter, even if I do say so myself. And we are feminists. We are, we are, we are. *stamps foot and pouts* Even better, we are feminists with DOGS:

 

Take that, patriarchal conspiracy.

The American Edition

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

There are twenty different things I have wanted to blog about this week, and I have done none of them, because all I can think of is the American edit of the book. So I do apologise for lack of the good meaty stuff.

Sarah and I were ecstatically happy to get an American deal, something that seemed beyond our most crazed dreams. We were lucky enough to be taken up by a great independent publisher, and to have a kind and understanding editor. This week, the marked up manuscript arrived, and I volunteered to do the edit, since Sarah has an entire newspaper to write and a family to look after, and I am the one who is famously anal about the semi-colons. It should have been a straightforward and satisfying week of work. The manuscript was relatively clean, with only one chapter that needed serious reworking to make it understandable to an American audience. And yet it has sent me into a frenzy.

At first I thought I was just taking the thing seriously, as I should. It is my job, after all. But when I found myself getting obscurely grumpy about the fact that sceptical suddenly had to be spelt with a K, I knew that there was more here than met the eye. There is a whole section in Backwards about how one gets furious about Object A when in fact the real cause of one's anger is Object B. I could not really mind that much about cutting a reference to Dame Mary Warnock because she would not play in Peoria, surely? (And that one was not even an editorial decision; I cut poor Dame Mary all on my own. Also Julian Clary and Graham Norton.) I found myself over-reacting in the most intemperate manner when I found sliced carrots in the recipe for Irish Stew had been replaced by grated carrots. 'No, no, no, NO,' I wrote in the margin. 'Grated carrots would be an abomination.' My poor editor, what must she think?

I can't quite work out what Object B is. Even though the work is done, rather more quickly than I expected (I thought I would be bashing away until ten tonight, but it suddenly came together and I have now a blissful free afternoon to listen to Test Match Special and indulge my new and entirely unexpected obsession with The Ashes), my shoulders are still up around my ears with suppressed tension.

I think it is a messy complication of different things. There is probably a dose of raw terror: will our poor little book just sink without trace in the wide open spaces of the vast continent? There is the emotional switch that always comes with any kind of editing, however clever and subtle and gracious the editor is. When you have worked at a manuscript until your brain is about to fall out of your ears, done the eighth and ninth and tenth drafts, lived with it for a year or more, any mark on it can feel like a violation. Even though you are a pro, and you understand this is part of the process, and you know that it will make for a better piece of work, there is a part of you that screams: get off my baby. (I have a horrible feeling that when I use the general You in that sentence, in fact I mean the very specific Me; I am not at all certain that Martin Amis flies into tiny little hissy fit because omelette must be spelt omelet.)

I think too that there is the slight sense of dislocation in being conscious of talking to such a different audience. I like to think I know about America because I watch all the politics programmes on MSNBC, and can recite large chunks of The West Wing off by heart, and have spent my life loving American literature. I believe that, beyond cultural differences, the universal emotions and needs and wants are pretty much the same for all women. I like to think myself a citizen of the world. And yet, doing this edit, I suddenly realise how very British I am. The idioms and history and emotions of this island people are so stitched into me that I cannot tell where they end and I begin. I am steeped in Shakespeare and the BBC and the Romantic poets. I got extremely testy with my poor hapless editor when she wanted to change very heaven to pure heaven; it's from WORDSWORTH, I wrote, pretentiously, in the margin. I suddenly realise that even though the British sometimes startle and surprise me, I know them in a way I can never know the Americans. We all grew up together; we have in-jokes and code words and things that require no explanation. I felt obscurely upset when I had to take out a line about sticky back plastic, because in the US there was no Blue Peter, and no BBC impartiality which meant that references to Sellotape were forbidden. I am afraid that however much I change Inland Revenue to IRS, or BBC to NPR, the American women will not get it, in the way that Sarah and I knew our British readers would.

More tangentially, I realise with stunning force how little Britons figure in the American imagination. It is not that they like us or hate us; it is that, in their eyes, the Brits are Oscar Wilde's Woman of No Importance. The Special Relationship is really only special on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Jingoistic bombast is one of the things that makes me crosser than almost anything except a dangling modifier, so why should this matter to me? It is a plain truth; it does not carry any deep meaning. I think it disturbs me because it stirs the muddy waters of national pride, something which can so easily tip into horrid superiority or chauvinism. But as I have to cut little asides that only my compatriots will understand, I find myself acutely conscious of all the things I love about British life.

I love the sense of humour and the irony and, even in these days of reality television, the understatement. I love Radio Four and fish and chips and our own dear Queen. I love Blue Peter, and memories of collecting milk bottle tops to send to children in Africa (quite what they were going to do with them, no one ever understood). I love Hamlet and rain at Wimbledon and The Two Ronnies. When I listen to the cricket and hear Henry Blofeld call a middle-aged man 'my dear old thing' I want to die with happiness, for absolutely no reason that I can identify. Perhaps it is disconcerting to find that all these things for which I carry such profound fondness almost certainly mean absolutely nothing to a woman living in Duluth.

I can't draw any conclusions from any of this, which drives me a bit mad, because I love a good and complete conclusion. Maybe the conclusion is an echo of the central message of Backwards itself, which is: our psyches are always a little messier and more complicated and unexpected than we think, and there is nothing wrong with that.

And now, my dear old things, it is time for the cricket.

Utterly shameless bit of self-promotion

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Dear Readers,

Please excuse this filthy commercial intrusion into the otherwise perfectly pristine blog. I really would much rather be posting another picture of Tom Batman Force. (See comments section of post below.) But for anyone out there who is thinking of buying the book - and you know you really don't have to - it is only on special offer on Amazon for another two days, at the amazing price of £6.74. Considering cover price is £14.99 this is truly the deal of the week.

That is quite enough blatant advertising, and now I am going to go and sit in my room and think pure thoughts. Thank you for your exceptional patience.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: please only buy from Amazon if, like me, you live in the middle of nowhere and do not have lovely local bookstore to hand. Otherwise, go at once to excellent independent bookshop with personal service and a soul, in the manner of that of the incomparable Lucy Fishwife.

Now I really am going to stop.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Backwards-High-Heels-Impossible-Female/dp/0007273835/ref=amb_link_83331353_2?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=right-1&pf_rd_r=100JFR74TYYBCZR24Z0Q&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=466555613&pf_rd_i=266239

A very strange day

Today, at around three o'clock, the telephone rang. There was no one in the house. Outside, the rain was racing across the lawn. The sky was the colour of old bath water. My publisher said: 'The book has gone into the Sunday Times bestseller list at number nine.'

I said: 'Are you making this up?' (I may have shouted.)
She said: 'No.'

Still, I shall not believe it until I see the actual newspaper in my hand on Sunday. It has such a whiff of strangeness about it that I can't understand in any rational frame that it might be true.

It is so strange that I am frowning as I write this. There are so many conflicting thoughts in my head that I can't make sense of them; they are all jockeying for position, like crazed shoppers on the first day of the Harrods sale.


The ones I can get any kind of grip on go something like this -


First of all, this is almost certainly a mistake. Second of all, Billy Connolly has a book out this week, which means all bets are off, because he is the most loved man in Britain. Third of all, one of the central tenets of Backwards in High Heels is how really professional success is all very well but it is not the answer to everything and actually the love of your female friends and the joy of having dogs and learning to make really good chicken soup are all much more important, and now I am obsessing about professional success. Fourth of all, I really must learn to be a bit more cool about this; I bet Julian Barnes doesn't go wiggy when his publisher rings him up and tells him he is on the Sunday Times bestseller list. I expect he just says, 'Well, that is nice,' and gets on with his day. I should not imagine that he shouts down the telephone.
Fifth of all, I have never used the expression 'go wiggy' in my life until today, when I used it four times, including just now in actual print. I cannot explain this in any way.


My co-writer rings up. She says: 'This is very strange.'
I say: 'Yes. I can't really explain it.'
I say: 'It can't all be my mother.' (My mother bought twenty copies on Amazon and has given them to all her friends. She signs them herself. My stepfather says that soon copies not signed by the author's mother will be vanishingly rare.)
My co-writer says: 'It's very strange.'
We ponder the strangeness of it for a while. There is a crunching noise.
She says: 'I am eating a crisp.'
I rally. I say: 'There really are complete strangers out there who are not related to us or anything who are buying our book.'
She says: 'We are no one. No one knows who we are.'
I say: 'Sometimes even members of our own family don't know who we are.'
She says: 'I can't explain it.'


We are both struck by the utter oddness that strange people who do not know who we are are going out there and buying our book in big enough numbers to make it be number nine on the Sunday Times bestseller list. We are both professional writers. We worked hard on this thing, for a long time. The agent, who does not get excited, got quite excited. It should not be so operatically strange. And yet, to us, it is. We are not Julian Barnes. There is no way we are going to begin to be cool about it.