Miserable cynic that I am, whenever I see those award badges in a blog’s sidebar, I can’t help thinking of Boy Scouts or those chain letters we passed round as children. (Who would not be swayed by the promise of 6⁶ picture postcards or the threat of a pestilential curse on the whole family? The fact that I was lucky if I received one card in return didn’t stop me from diligently making six copies of the instructions and names and addresses in my best handwriting when the next incarnation of the chain letter appeared.)

Yet my adult cynicism doesn’t prevent me from craving one of those shiny things for myself. In the early days of this blog, when the modal number of comments accruing to my posts was zero, I even toyed with the idea of creating an award of my own – well they’ve got to come from somewhere – to bestow on the kindly few who deigned to visit. All that held me back was my husband’s refusal to knuckle down to the necessary artwork and the lack of a suitable moniker.

I’m pleased to announce that my moment has come and I’ve been recruited to that glorious congregation of lauded bloggers. Norah Colvin has passed on the Liebster Award, designed to recognise those beavering away with fewer than 200 followers. Having enjoyed interacting with Norah on Twitter, and reading her passionate posts about early-years education on her blog and her generous comments on mine, I’m honoured that Annecdotal is one of the blogs she wants to recognise. It’s all the more welcome when Norah isn’t a woman to deliver empty praise, but engages with the attentive curiosity which must be the blogger’s truest reward.

Even so, I’ve had to overcome my inbuilt anxiety about falling foul of the rules (so many ways to get it wrong) to embrace this with the appropriate sense of fun. But I’m looking forward to selecting another ten worthy recipients and setting them my own set of questions.

The index for my debut author interviews is the only place I’ve knowingly arranged anything booky in alphabetical order by author surname.  It just doesn’t work for me out in the real world: when I’m scanning my bookshelves for a particular book, the name of the author is often the last thing that comes to mind.  My collection of novels is ordered geographically – since you’re asking, by setting of the book rather than author location – two shelves for Britain (subdivided into the various regions); a woefully inadequate single shelf for North America; one for Europe; another for Asia and Australasia; one for Africa, South America and the Caribbean.  It’s totally bonkers – I’m constantly reassigning the underrepresented parts of the globe when I run out of shelf space, and in rather too many novels the exact geographical setting is left unclear – but it’s the best system I’ve come up with so far.  I only wish I could persuade my husband to donate his shelf of thrillers to the charity shop and give me more room.

Of course there are more eccentric systems: I’m sure Leila, in Lottie Moggach’s debut Kiss Me First, isn’t the only woman to arrange her books by colour.  Is that really so wacky?  If book covers are designed to look attractive, why not give the same level of attention to their patterning on the shelves?  With a block of dark green Virago here and a patch of orange Penguin there, you’ve got a do-it-yourself Mondrian painting. If you really want to go for style over function, you could intersperse the books with interesting objects, but where do you put the rest of your books?

So come on readers, it’s time to fess up: how do you arrange the novels on your shelves? I'll be posting next on Friday with a look at Samantha Ellis's virtual bookshelves via our review of her literary memoir How to be a Heroine. Do join me.

I recently published a post – no, I’m not saying which one – which I knew was a bit muddled. I had something to say, and it was timely to say it, but I couldn’t marshal my thoughts to express that something in a sufficiently coherent manner. For weeks it had festered on my To do list. I’d bring out my draft now and then to add bits and chop bits and move bits of it around, but it still wasn’t anywhere near how I’d hoped to get it when the idea had first lodged itself in my mind. It wasn’t so dreadful that I wanted to consign it to the scrap heap, but I had to accept I hadn’t the time or the talent to make it zing. So I clicked on Publish and left it for others to judge its worth.

Do we demonstrate a lack of respect for ourselves and our readers when we send out work we consider below par? Or are we being realistic in recognising we can’t perform at our optimum level all the time? Where do we draw the line between acceptable and sloppy, and how do we recognise such a line when we see it?

We need our standards but, as Emma Darwin points out, too much self-criticism and perfectionism is counter-productive as it stops us even trying to create. Yes, we must kill our darlings, but we mustn’t abort them before they’ve had the chance to see what they might become.

Accepting things as they are isn’t tantamount to passive resignation. It’s not the same as giving up. Yet isn’t it rather grandiose to think we have to get everything right? My blog post, along with the rest of my millions of sentences, is insignificant in the overall scheme of things. Good or bad – the universe doesn’t give a shit.

I like the way Justine Musk has drawn on the Icarus myth to illustrate how writers need to forge a path between reaching for the scorching heights of the sun and sinking so low our wings become waterlogged and we come crashing down to earth:

Don’t you love connecting through the internet? It’s great fun peering into other people’s shop windows and, if we’re really lucky, being invited inside. I get quite excited about the way we feed off each other’s ideas (with appropriate credits, of course) and can visit places we wouldn’t otherwise go. I’m just back from a virtual flight to Australia to pontificate on Norah Colvin’s blog. My post, exploring the psychoanalyst’s Stephen Grosz’s thoughts on praise, blossomed out of <140-character interactions with Norah on Twitter. Why not climb aboard your own magic carpet¹ to have a look at what our creative dialogue has spawned? Thanks to Norah for the invitation and the lovely way she has presented my post.

I didn’t have to travel quite so far when I did my other g**st² blog post at This Itch of Writing. The theme of that was writer’s block, with a bit of psychoanalytic theory thrown in, and, if you’ve avoided my plugs so far, you’d better have a look now!

Since Annecdotal’s inception, I’d wondered about playing host to other writers, but my attempts to persuade friends who weren’t already blogging didn’t work out. But it’s time to cast the net a bit wider and think about recruiting other voices to vary the tone. There’s so much knowledge and talent around, it’s hard to know where to start, but I want to keep the focus on reading and writing. Let’s see how it goes.

What’s your experience of fruitful connections in the blogosphere? If you’ve played host on your own blog or been invited to appear on another, do you have any tips for the novice?

My next post will (probably) be on writing is the second person – do come back this weekend to share your thoughts on the ‘you’ narrator.

¹ Apologies for the whimsy, I’m dancing back and forth between this post and one I’m drafting for International Women’s Day next month, where Scheherazade gets an honourable mention.

² If you’re wondering why I’m nervous about the g**st word, I read somewhere that Google was very snotty about it. It might be a myth, but don’t want to mess up those SEO’s.

Back in the summer, I had occasion to take the bus – not something I do very often and I’m acutely aware of my limitations in that regard. (How assertively do I stick my arm out for the bus to stop? Do I have to have the right change? Why don’t the passengers have seat belts?) This time, the bus stopped at my request and I paid my fare without incident, then looked down the aisle for somewhere to sit. It was rush hour and all I could see were pairs of commuters locked into their own worlds of music or text messaging on their phones. As I was resigning myself to having to stand for the next half-hour, swaying with each turn of the wheel, a boy stood up to offer me his seat. At more or less the same time, I spotted a vacancy towards the back, so I thanked the boy and made my way towards it.

I was surprised by the young man’s offer, and somewhat amused, wondering what had evoked it. Did he see me as old and doddery? Okay, I’m past fifty, but hopefully I’ve got a few more years in me yet. I might have grey hair but, in a certain light if I’m wearing a hat (which, admittedly I wasn’t), I look like a teenaged boy, only without the pimples. Yet I wasn’t offended. I don’t mind being an unflattering stereotype if it elicits acts of generosity and politeness.

I was reminded of this incident on reading a lovely article by Penelope Lively on turning eighty. Amid the aches and pains and indignities, she finds plenty of consolation:

Have you ever stamped on a good idea, told yourself I can’t write that, what will people think? It’s hard enough being a writer without censoring your thoughts before you can even get them down on the page or screen, and your prose is likely to suffer when you’re busy trying not to offend the judge that sits in your head. But shaking off these inhibitions isn’t always easy, especially when they stem from our childhood notions of what’s right and wrong. That’s why I love this quote from Paul Theroux via Thought Catalog:

Similarly, in an interview with Lisa Allardice for the Guardian Review, Alice Munro, the new Nobel laureate said:

Taking down one’s Athena posters or whatever’s the current equivalent and moving into a grotty flat with half a dozen friends is only the first stage of leaving home; psychological separation from our parents can be much trickier, and some don’t ever achieve it. How do writers break free of parental commandments to write as ourselves? Greg tells me Lorrie Moore told students to write to shock their parents and Emma Darwin sometimes recommends writers (see comments) imagine their parents are dead.

The metaphorical death of our parents is so essential to growing up it’s the stuff of myth and fairytales. The failure to separate can produce some interesting writing, too.

So what’s all this got to do with my newly published story, Had to Be You?  To say much more would spoil it; why not have a read and let me know what you think?

Given you’re still reading, I have to assume she hasn’t put you off. But would you have read on if Maeve were the opening of a short story or a novel? I don’t think I would. In those few sentences, I’ve prioritised an accurate representation of what happened – and it is absolutely true, apart from that Maeve isn’t her real name – over the form of the writing. It might serve as a provoking starter to a blog post but, were a piece of writing to continue in this vein, it would prove heavy going.

I’ve been unable to source many examples of fiction featuring hallucinatory states that isn’t jettisoned by treatises on illicit drug use or psychiatric
assumptions about psychosis. I’ve read a couple of good thrillers where it turns out that the jeopardy is all in the protagonist’s head, but to name them here would involve committing the sin of spoiling. There’s the shellshocked war veteran hallucinating birds singing in Greek in  Mrs  Dalloway, but I’m not so taken with stream of consciousness and multiple exclamation marks.

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:

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?

I'm not given to risk-taking, especially not on something as scary as the net where trolls can monitor your every move, so I thought long and hard before starting my blog. Mostly what I thought was: No, that's not for me. Quick, draw the curtains, you never know who might be peering in.
Then, all of a sudden, I had a new computer and a brand-new blog. Learning my way round both Windows 8 and Weebly at the same time, perhaps I should be grateful that it was the computer and not me that went into meltdown (miraculously only a couple of days shy of the end of the no-quibbles return period). Aside from the first post, which seems a bit pointless, but I'm leaving up as part of my ten-step programme for combatting shame (not that ten steps are anywhere near sufficient), I'm glad I've done it, but I'm still not sure what it's for. There's a part of me still thinks it's quite mad – but that might be the same part that thinks that any project not set up with the explicit purpose of pleasing my mother is mad, I'm not sure how seriously to take it.
Yet I’m seriously addicted and, I think, in a good way, so read on if you want to know the three reasons why I got into blogging and kept going.

Like sex, you can do it on your own, you can do it with one partner dominating the other, but when two people approach the business of editing with an open minded desire to do nothing but improve on the writing, it can be a truly creative process.  Having yet to publish a novel, I don't have a vast experience of being edited and, I must confess, I feel slightly panicked when an editor wants to suggest some amendments to my short story.  I don't know why – apart from the fact that it's not so common in the world of short stories – because my experience of this has been largely positive.  Someone who appreciates my work enough to publish it has now read it so closely they've thought how to make it better: what's not to like?
Well, bad experiences do linger in the mind: once I chose to turn down the chance of publication because an editor (I've conveniently forgotten the magazine) edited and amended my short story beyond recognition and wouldn't brook any discussion. 
I suppose everything hangs on one's understanding of the term editing:

That editor presumably understood her role as correction and was probably quite upset that I wasn't grateful for her hard graft knocking my story into shape.  But some time later another editor was happy enough to publish my original version, so it can't be all that bad!  I don't want to make too big a deal of this – it was only one short story – but it still feels like a missed opportunity: that if we'd been able to really work together on it, we might have been able to come up with an improvement on the original.
It seems I'm not alone in the experience of having edits imposed on me. And it doesn't just happen in the world of fiction.  Back in the days when I was publishing academic papers, I once had the laborious task of undoing the work of a copy editor who didn't understand what my text was supposed to be about, and I had to go through all those proofreading symbols to reinsert the meaning back into the piece. 
Fortunately, I've been able to work with other editors who have applied their creative and human relations skills to make this a truly collaborative process.  It might be sorting out a clunky sentence.  It might be nothing more complex than word order and punctuation.  Once it was rewriting the story's ending.
I find if I'm free to say no, I'm more likely to say yes to an editor's suggestions, but it's often when I say maybe that it gets interesting.  That's when we find the in-between space, the ideas that neither of us would have thought of on our own.
After the isolation of writing, it's lovely to find that connection through getting the work published, but it's especially lovely to have a positive editing experience first.  So here's to Annie Rutherford my latest valiant editor, and my short story A Man Is Swinging (it's in The Back of Beyond).

I do love the way fiction can take me to unexpected places, not just as a reader, but as a writer, too.  A couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to find inspiration for a short story in Margaret Thatcher's funeral.  Now I'm hanging out with mediaeval nuns.  I'm greatly enjoying the company, but I feel a terrible fraud, seeing as I'm totally unqualified as a historian.  I think I've got an O level in history, but that would've been on the industrial revolution and, even as someone who believes my computer works by magic, it's hard to imagine the lives of people in a pre-mechanistic age.    Except, I remind myself, in some parts of the world life is still like that, and I have had the privilege of passing through some such communities and catching a glimpse of what it's like to live without running water or electricity.  So maybe I've got more to draw on than I thought.
Nevertheless, not having previously delved into history any further back than my parents' childhoods, it is quite a different experience for me having to constantly check my facts (and, if it weren't for the internet, it would be far too arduous a task for one short story).    For example, I knew not to have my nuns growing potatoes (although spuds were on my mind having just, belatedly, planted mine in the garden), but what other vegetables that we now take for granted would not be available in the Middle Ages?
Fact checking was fairly straightforward, however, but what about the language?  My dictionary does give a rough date for when various words were introduced, but how authentic did I have to be?    How authentic was I capable of being, without immersing myself in contemporaneous documents for a couple of months?
Where I stumbled most was with verbs as metaphor, or muscular verbs.    I balked at using the word drive to indicate motivation or compulsion, because of its automatic association with motor transport for modern readers, even though I'm sure the word would have served equally well in the Middle Ages for driving cattle.
I don't think this issue is unique to historical fiction, more an extreme case of something we need to think about in all our writing.  Have we got the facts right, or near enough that they won't derail the story, and is the language consistent with the character and setting?    Or perhaps I'm just trying to cover myself for straying into territory where I have no right to be?
Interesting also how the blog leads me to the unexpected, not just the fun stuff I find on other people's, but what I choose to post.  In other words, I hadn't expected to do this one, but the other two I mentioned last time (on identity as a writer and on blogging) need a little more polishing and there's bank holiday sunshine promised here in England, so I'll give them a bit more time to ripen.
Meanwhile, whether or not you have delved into historical fiction, as a reader or a writer, please share your views.

A lot of my fiction is transformative: I'll take a disturbing event from my own life or what I see around me and, by re-authoring it, make it more manageable.  It tends to be a retrospective process, the idea for the story coming long after the event has taken place.  But something different has being happening with a short story I've been working on last week.  I'd never have imagined I'd have written a story with a backdrop of Margaret Thatcher's funeral.  I'd never have imagined I'd be following the events on the telly.  Yet shortly after her death was announced, the seed of the story had been planted inside me.  Then, in place of the rage that the government could fritter away £10 million of taxpayers' money for a not-quite state funeral when they are so mean about disability benefits, I'm calm and curious.  Sometimes it's hard being a writer but it makes sense for surviving these topsy-turvy times.
But that was the state of play as far as Thursday.  You know that thing about too much research?  Never my problem, generally, as I take a lazy/pragmatic attitude and do as little as I can get away with.  I had enough for my story with what the funeral might mean to people who feel their lives been blighted by her political career.  Yet even as an extremely passive researcher, I couldn't shut out the other things that were happening, other reactions and protests.  So now I'm left wondering whether somehow I've got to fit that Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead song into my story.  I won't really know until next week when all the pomp and protest has died down if my story has been killed or not.  Don't you ever wish real life would just shut up and go away?

My next post will probably be on author bios and the published novelist's itinerant lifestyle.  Do come back -- I promise you the writing will be sharper than these photos.

I can't make up my mind about novels about writers and writing.

On the one hand, it seems a bit of a copout for a writer to make her (or more often his) main character another writer, a way of sidestepping the fact that a year of waiting tables, colourful or arduous as it might be, has little bearing on the working lives most of her readers, constantly updating their CV's. Who cares about the writing life anyway, except for other writers (although I confess that there seem to be enough of us about to make this a big enough market to target)? Despite, through this blog, I'm buying into the current requirement for self-promotion, and I'm sure Shelley Harris was being modest when she protested she was ordinary, generally I believe we writers are less interesting than what we write.