Citizens, readers and writers, gather round, for I bring you an important update!  Alone or with friends and family, in your offices, at your kitchen tables, on the commute to work: boot up your computers, flip open your laptops, wake up your smartphones and focus your attention on The Great Annecdotal Book Review!

If you're going to be traumatised by a novel, it must be a good one.  If you're going to go to bed, anxious at what monsters your dreams will churn up, let it be on account of a story worthy of the Pulitzer Prize.  After nearly 600 pages in the Democratic Republic of North Korea, at least you you can go back to your own life when it's over.  Such a pity the same can't be said of the novel's protagonist, the orphan, Jun Do.  Or should that be Commander Ga?

The book can be read as a love story, a thriller, a dystopian political satire, a heart-warming tale of the endurance of the human spirit or, as Johnson himself has described it, a trauma narrative.  Yet, for me, it’s about the wasteland of a world where the individual is divorced from his/her own story and fiction is an instrument of control.

It’s not that there are no stories in this imagined North Korea.  Like children in nursery school, or the days of single channel TV, everyone must attend to the year’s Best North Korean Story, broadcast into their homes and workplaces through the ever-present loudspeakers.  Orphans, the lowest of the low in this society, are taught, through an allegorical story, that their lives have been saved by the eternal love of Kim Jong Il.  Even the hardened interrogators can quote of their favourite lines from the moralising movies of the state cinema.
 
Yet these aren’t stories I’d be proud to write, or look forward to settling down to read.  In a society where orphans are scapegoated rather than pitied, stories don’t seem to facilitate empathy in those who hear or read them. In a country where creativity is stifled, stories are designed to keep people in their place.  Children, weaned on a diet of propaganda, are confused on being told a tale in which nothing is glorified.  With little personal autonomy, character is without meaning.  Stories don’t reveal a deeper truth, but turn it upside down, yet no-one dares acknowledge the emperor has no clothes:

Only in Division 42 do officials express any curiosity about individuals, recording accounts of the prisoners’ lives.  Before hooking them up to the autopilot that will deliver a pain so vast it obliterates any last vestiges of personality, they transcribe the biographies of those who have fallen foul of the state, not to be read, but as a form of possession:

My husband bought a limited-edition print and went to get it framed. 
Not being particularly enthused by the frames on display, he asked if there was anything else on offer.  I only stock what sells, came the reply.  The framer might just as well have said, I only sell what stocks.  So much for customer service.

I can see the picture now as I sit at my desk and it looks fine to me, outlined in plain beech, but my husband wanted something more inspiring to complement his purchase.  And, in an age when we can choose who supplies our electricity, and when a trip to the supermarket constitutes an exercise in decision-making, he should have been able to get it.

As it happens, our car is black, and I'm with Henry Ford on the unimportance of some consumer choices.  Even I'm not so stupid as to blame a mechanical breakdown on plumping for the wrong colour.
But when it comes to aesthetics, in matters of art and literature, it's an insult to be fobbed off with second-hand choices.  Tastes differ, that's what makes us human, yet it sometimes feels as if the book world thinks we're all clones of some zombified Stepford-wife reader, drooling over the latest ghost-written celeb novel. 

Some may want to lay the blame on publishers, others – like Howard Jacobson's alter ego in his novel Zoo Time – readers who would rather be writers themselves.  I don't know, maybe we've got what we asked for, maybe this is just how capitalism works.  Like it or not, we're all complicit: as readers, buying our books at knockdown prices; as writers, however reluctantly, turning ourselves into a brand.

Said husband (of course it's the same one, I'm not a bigamist) was appalled when I bought The Night Rainbow for less than half price at Sainsbury's, but, with the nearest independent bookstore fifteen miles away and my pathetic boycotting of Amazon, I didn't consider it a compromise too far.  (He doesn't know I went back later to snap up a couple more as presents.)  And at least they were stocking something a bit more inspiring than Fifty Shades of Grey.

But it shows that good books are still out there, it's just different to how it used to be.  And, in consequence, I'll soon be bringing you the annethology interview with Claire King, author of The Night Rainbow.  Here on annecdotal, I'll be blogging soon on what looks like my read of the year, a chilling account of a state that doesn't do capitalism, Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son.

What do you think of the muddle that is early twenty-first century publishing?  As a reader, or as a writer, have you sussed how to navigate your own way through?

The sun and rain have delivered a magnificent harvest in the garden.  When I took this photo, it looked as if the self-seeded marigolds would be my most successful crop, yet now we’re overrun with home-grown lettuce, cucumber, beans, courgettes and mangetout peas.  Like the gardening fanatic in my story, I can eat potatoes fresh from the soil.  I’ve frozen tubs of spinach and baby  broad beans, roasted beetroot and cobs of sweetcorn and whizzed up my basil into a delicious pesto sauce.  True, the slugs have taken their share, and picking bucket-loads of red,
white, and black currants sometimes can feel like more trouble than it’s worth, but it’s deeply satisfying to reap the rewards of all that backbreaking planting and weeding and eat the food I’ve grown myself.

Over on The Creative Penn, it’s time for a mid-year writing review.  It’s good to be encouraged to take stock and I’m gratified to find I’m not the only one nerdy enough – or when someone else does it, sensible enough – to transfer that real-work objective-setting stuff into my writing.  As with the garden, I can sometimes be too focused on the jobs undone to  recognise what I’ve got.  The seeds that didn’t germinate are like my stories that didn’t get written.  The tedium of harvesting the soft fruit is like the sometimes Sisyphean task of sending them out into the world, but, if I don’t make the effort, my words, like the berries, will rot on the stem.  Looking back at where I was six months ago can help remind me how much I’ve achieved.

Yet we need to avoid being overzealous with our goals, remembering
that, like the weather, the outcomes of our writing are often beyond our
control. Aside from the whims of editors, at times even internal factors
like motivation and enthusiasm will elude us.  So we’ll always feel like failures if we let our drive for improvement obscure what we already have.  And even achievable goals require goalposts and one sure thing about metaphorical goalposts is they keep on moving and those writerly satisfactions of external recognition in whatever form will leave us craving a bigger dose.

I make no apologies for signing off with the much-quoted Kipling's If.  Sometimes words become clichés because they make such good sense.

If I could cultivate such equanimity in relation to my writing, turning into a man (see last line of the poem) would be a small price to pay. 
How about you?

There's an opportunity to pitch your novel to an agent for free.

Are there no bounds to my capacity to grapple with internet technology?  Last month it was Facebook, now I'm making my first foray into - or should that be onto? - YouTube.

Okay, it doesn't quite do justice to the wondrous sight of the butterflies feeding on the buddleia in our front garden but, when summer's long gone, it will serve as a lovely reminder of what was.  We'd been bemoaning the fact that it was rare to see more than a couple of butterflies in one place in England these days when, all of a sudden, swarms of peacocks started sunning themselves on the walls and using the paths through the long grass as an airport landing pad.  They're joined now and then by a painted lady and a comma, along with the silver Y moth that flaps its wings as eagerly as a hummingbird, and the pesky small and large whites that lay their eggs inside my cabbages.
I know I can't compete with dancing kittens – and nor do I aspire to – but I'm pleased to have a record, albeit a shaky one, of this beautiful phenomena, and grateful for the background music courtesy of YouTube to play over the rumble of the traffic.  And, of course, if I ever need to upload a more writerly video, I've got a head start as to how to go about it.
Do share your own experiences, as well as what you think of my tentative first steps.

Why do I feel such a need to distance myself from my creation?  We all know a writer is not her characters, and her main duty is to bring them alive and speak their truth, however distasteful it may be.  Some novelists have no hesitation in washing their dirty linen in public, sacrificing the secrets of the marriage bed for the sake of a good story.  Am I less of a writer if I hesitate, if there are some areas where my keyboard will not go?

We have to fight to make space for our writing if it’s to flourish.  Sometimes this is on a practical level, shutting the door on friends and family to give us the time to write.  Sometimes it’s a battle of the mind, freeing ourselves up from our inner critics telling us we can’t. Perhaps I’m afraid if I get too deep down and dirty, the muck just won’t wash off.

Yet a writer needs to have a life away from her fiction, and to fight for that just as hard.  Isn’t it reasonable to want to avoid the one contaminating the other?  Especially in the age of Twitter, when a writer is required to promote herself as well as her words.

I guess I’m in the process of working out how far I’m prepared to go. 
What about you?  Are there topics you shy away from for fear that people will misjudge your motives or do you have the courage to follow your ideas where angels fear to tread?

Still a baby relative to many, my 50th post slipped by last month while I was still resting on the banks of Oldshoremore.  My visitor stats began to surge around the same time; you're all very welcome but I wish I knew where you'd come from all of a sudden!
If you'd like to read the earlier posts, you can go to the archives, or check out some of my favourites on my Facebook page.  (As an old dinosaur, it took me a while to see the point of FB, but now I just love those cute little boxes with the icons and taglines, and all I have to do is paste in the link!)
Big thanks also to those who've tuned in from the early days (gosh – I make it sound like I've been doing this for years rather than a matter of months); I do appreciate your support.
Barring illness or disaster, I can promise at least another 50 posts, on writing, in the widest possible sense: on the inputs and outputs; the hows, whys and why nots.  I do hope you can stay with me for the journey, and maybe call in at the comments box and let me know how things are going for you.