Alliterations

I saw a tweet recently: How to Write Good

It's humorous, yes, but point #1: Avoid Alliteration. Always, has oft been repeated in more serious writing tip lists.

Far from meaning 'non-literate', alliteration is where words start with the same sound or letter. There, that was one. And another.

Impossible to stop once you start. I just don't see why people have such a downer on it. Alliteration is bloody beautiful. It takes quite a bit of effort to do it badly. I was reading a Booker Prize nominee last night that came out with the line:

...in the whole wide white world of winter they have only each other.

Now, even I'd admit that's slight overkill. Possibly due to additional adjectives, rather than alliteration.

Sometimes it can be fun to see how far through a sentence you can get using only alliteration:

Thomas took that telescope to track tomcats trying to take treacle tarts to transient tramps talking together, taking turns troughing through the trash to take out turnips.

Or try out the traditional tongue-twisters, like:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

She sells sea-shells by the sea-shore

Used sparingly, alliteration lends a lyrical quality to prose. Besides, where would the Wicked Witch, Mad Max and Postman Pat be without it?

Bad Sex Award

Just in case you haven't heard, this year's winner of the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award went to Nancy Huston for Infrared. According to Amol Rajan of The Independent: Sex Doesn't Get Worse than This.

Last year, David Guterson won it for 'an over-reliance on coy terms such as "family jewels", "back door" and "front parlour".' The year before, AA Gill found the news that he was odds-on favourite to win 'irritating' and didn't turn up to collect this prestigious prize for "most embarrassing passage of sexual description in a novel."

This year's winner beat off stiff (oo-err) competition from the likes of J.K. Rowling and E.L. James to clinch it with her 'vivid imagery.' Congratulations!

Touretteshero Christmas Message

Wonderful Christmas animated message from Touretteshero.

Make a Flake

Stuck for something to do over the break?

Make a Flake

Happy holiday goodness!

The Crone of Winter

Celebrating Winter Solstice with my poem The Crone of Winter. You can find the text version on my website.

Reading List: booQfest

Last September I did my first turn at a literature festival: booQfest in Northampton.

There's some pictures on my Events Page, and memories earlier in the blog.

Perhaps I'm a late developer, but it was the first time I'd put together a reading list. Usually I just grab whatever's closest on the bookshelf. This time I came away with a set of books, all of which I knew that I'd read.

It took you three months to read three books? I hear you ask.

Well, no. Not quite. Soon after putting that list together, I went for a more ambitious 'Charity Shop List'. I've been alternating, one book from each pile, since then. I've got one book left from the Charity Shop pile, so I've read seven in total. Which makes me feel much better about myself, as I always thought that I was a particularly slow reader, and I only read at bed-time. That's a fairly respectable number, I feel? 

Anyway. Here's what I thought, in the order I read them...

The Trapeze Artist by Will Davis 

Will was giving a reading on the opening night of booQfest. He's an absolutely lovely guy, and more talented than anybody rightly deserves to be. He doesn't just write about trapeze artists - he is one. Click his name above for pictures.

He won the Betty Trasker Award in 2007 for his debut novel, My Side of the Story. He's since developed the main character from that and turned it into a free online serial called How Not to Survive.

We've done a bit of a book swapsie. As a result, I owe him a copy of Georg[i]e next time I'm in London. Hoping it'll coincide with a performance.

I absolutely loved the book. Left my review on Amazon, under the title Cirque De La Vie. Thoroughly recommend it, and think that I fell in love with Jethro the Clown, perhaps, just a little bit. I'm always drawn to the deeply damaged, rough-diamond, thwarted-in-love and suffering in embittered silence characters, but they're rarely written so well.

Vampire State of Mind by Jane Lovering

Jane won the 2012 Romantic Novel of the Year for Please Don’t Stop the Music.

Popped in to see Jane talk about VSoM at the festival, and enjoyed getting thoroughly sloshed with her and daughter, Vienna, at the opening night after-show party. That was certainly a night to remember... if only I could! 

I must admit, this is not a genre I'd usually browse in a bookstore. Hand on heart - I judged it. I took one look at the cover and thought Twilight. 

I should have had more faith. It was bloody brilliant. Vampires... in the civil service. York Council, to be precise. Thoroughly, thoroughly British, with enough originality to carry you through. Romance, with a bite.

Still, she sealed it for me at the Veyron. She gave her lead character, Sil, a Bugatti Pur Sang: "I hardly dared touch the immaculate chrome of the door; this was less of a car and more of a machine for taking your fingerprints," going on to describe it as being "strapped inside a bullet." 

Look, the devil's in the detail, and I like cars. Okay?

I'm easily pleased.

I guarantee you, if anyone's going to turn you (into a vampire lover!), it's Jane. Great fun.

Gateway to Heaven by Clare Summerskill

A work of non-fiction thrown into the mix.

Its full title is: Gateway to Heaven: Fifty Years of Lesbian and Gay Oral History, named after a famous lesbian bar in London. It spans a 50 year period in LGBT history in the UK from the 1940s-90s. Spanning the period before decriminalisation in 1967, through to the battle for equality that followed.

I saw Clare give her reading from this, and it was excellent. She delivered each of the contributors' voices, from a broad Scottish accent through to German and Geordie. Born performer. Extremely poignant piece of work.

I've recently been following the progress of SMUG (Sexual Minorities Uganda), after corresponding with GayUganda back in 2008, shortly before the government there proposed a 'Kill the Gays' bill. I have very fond memories of Uganda, and it was a bit of a shock when that happened. There were a couple of sections in this book on the influence of the press and legal persecution of gay people that seemed to parallel certain things going on in Uganda at the time of reading. So, I packed up a couple of copies and sent them off to Kasha Jacqueline, head of Freedom and Roam Uganda and leading rights activist. Looking forward to hearing what they make of it.

It really was astonishing reading, to think how very far we've come in 45 years. People in Uganda often look to the UK with an attitude that we have always been liberal here, and that equality comes naturally on this matter. Yet I learned from reading this that it was only 55 years ago that our own Home Secretary declared homosexuality to be a 'plague,' and the media suggested it would be the downfall of Britain.

Non-fiction, yes, but broken down nicely into topical sections and short, interesting accounts. Very nicely done.

If you have trouble sourcing it through Amazon, you can buy it via her website.

--

So, that was my first reading list. I don't think I've done it before because I'm worried about finding one book that I just can't finish, which would feel a bit like 'failing' the reading list. OCD? Err, yes, just a little.

But it's been a fun exercise, and I've almost finished by second pile. This was certainly a special list to start with, having met each of the authors, however briefly. I was reminded of Ian McEwan at Cheltenham Literature Festival this year:

He said that he never gives books to friends, and went into the different experience readers have when reading a book by someone they know, or are about to meet. How the temptation is there to look for clues to that person's psyche in the book.

Not so much with Clare, because her book was all about other people's stories, but certainly with Jane and Will, I could almost hear them between the pages. I'm not sure whether I would have enjoyed the books any less if I hadn't met their authors, though perhaps I would never have come to read them in the first place.

Very enjoyable, all three.

You can find Jane and Will on Twitter: @janelovering / @WilDavis2012

The Incantation

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.

The above picture and verse were shared by a friend on Facebook the other day. I thought it was rather beautiful. The verse itself is Byron. It goes on:

    From these our interviews, in which I steal
    From all I may be, or have been before,
    To mingle with the Universe, and feel
    What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

With such love of nature, it sounds more like Shelley, a man Francis Thompson described after his death as having: 

[T]he child's faculty of make-believe raised to the nth power... [Shelley] is still at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the dayfall. He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. - Wiki

Shelley is the guardian of what we aspire to be. Byron bears testament to what we probably are: mad, bad and dangerous to know. Why else would we love him but for his Darkness? Irresistibly dystopian and poetic in vengeance:


    When the moon is on the wave,
    And the glow-worm in the grass,
    And the meteor on the grave,
    And the wisp on the morass;       
    When the falling stars are shooting,
    And the answer’d owls are hooting,
    And the silent leaves are still
    In the shadow of the hill,
    Shall my soul be upon thine,       
    With a power and with a sign.
    
    Though thy slumber may be deep,
    Yet thy spirit shall not sleep;
    There are shades which will not vanish,
    There are thoughts thou canst not banish;       
    By a power to thee unknown,
    Thou canst never be alone;
    Thou art wrapt as with a shroud,
    Thou art gather’d in a cloud;
    And for ever shalt thou dwell       
    In the spirit of this spell.
    
    Though thou seest me not pass by,
    Thou shalt feel me with thine eye
    As a thing that, though unseen,
    Must be near thee, and hath been;       
    And when in that secret dread
    Thou hast turn’d around thy head,
    Thou shalt marvel I am not
    As thy shadow on the spot,
    And the power which thou dost feel       
    Shall be what thou must conceal.
    
    And a magic voice and verse
    Hath baptized thee with a curse;
    And a spirit of the air
    Hath begirt thee with a snare;       
    In the wind there is a voice
    Shall forbid thee to rejoice;
    And to thee shall Night deny
    All the quiet of her sky;
    And the day shall have a sun,       
    Which shall make thee wish it done.
    
    From thy false tears I did distil
    An essence which hath strength to kill;
    From thy own heart I then did wring
    The black blood in its blackest spring;       
    From thy own smile I snatch’d the snake,
    For there it coil’d as in a brake;
    From thy own lip I drew the charm
    Which gave all these their chiefest harm;
    In proving every poison known,       
    I found the strongest was thine own.
    
    By thy cold breast and serpent smile,
    By thy unfathom’d gulfs of guile,
    By that most seeming virtuous eye,
    By thy shut soul’s hypocrisy;       
    By the perfection of thine art
    Which pass’d for human thine own heart;
    By thy delight in others’ pain,
    And by thy brotherhood of Cain,
    I call upon thee! and compel       
    Thyself to be thy proper Hell!
    
    And on thy head I pour the vial
    Which doth devote thee to this trial;
    Nor to slumber, nor to die,
    Shall be in thy destiny;       
    Though thy death shall still seem near
    To thy wish, but as a fear;
    Lo! the spell now works around thee,
    And the clankless chain hath bound thee;
    O’er thy heart and brain together       
    Hath the word been pass’d—now wither!

                                                     - Incantation, from Manfred