Do that with a Kindle, I dare ya!

It’s taken seven years from planting for the Williams to mature enough to fruit – there is some truth in the old saying ‘pears for heirs’. In previous years we’ve had plenty of blossom but that’s been it. The Conference crops heavily in alternate summers; this is its third ‘on’ year and the fruit is so heavy the lower branches are barely inches from the ground. This making it somewhat awkward to reach the shed . . .

Here is Ellie’s to-be-read pile, in no kind of order, just how they came off the shelves. That’s over six feet four inches of books. Yes, I have just measured it; no, I do not think that is remotely sad.

This mountain of words does include some books I was given as presents Quite Some Time Ago, and a couple of them I’ve started and put down for whatever reason (Tad Williams’ River of Blue Fire, I’m looking at you here – and Trudi Canavan’s Magician’s Guild, don’t think you can hide at the back).

What it does not include is all the books I will have to re-read before I attempt to conclude various series, like the Dresden Files, and The Wheel of Time. What can I say, I have a terrible thing for completeness.

Whimper.

Still, they do say that the first step in overcoming addiction is admitting you have a problem.

If two knives crossed on a plate, she’d spend the rest of the day waiting for a fight to start – and heaven help anyone who spilled the salt, or opened an umbrella indoors. Just as well I never told her Rob had seen The Dress before we got married, or I might never have heard the end of it.

But me? Not a superstitious bone in my body. I’ve never had a lucky pen to do the lottery, and if ladders are in my way I walk under them without a qualm. Dropped a teaspoon? I pick it up. If I’ve just come in from the rain, I leave my umbrella open to dry in the utility room because if I close it up wet it’ll go funky and smell bad.

I don’t even have any writing rituals. Some habits I’ve got into, maybe, like writing notes longhand, but not what you’d call rituals. Or so I thought.

Last night, making a cuppa, Rob fumbled the coffee jar and dropped it onto my favourite mug. This one:

and took a gurt chip out of the edge. And what was Ms Rational’s first thought? Sheer horror: how am I going to finish writing my books now?

[This space intentionally left blank for your gales of incredulous laughter]

I’ve had this mug a very long time. My best friend gave it to me years ago, for my birthday I think. I used to use it at work; first for its intended purpose, then, when I got sick of the horrible over-boiled taste of the water from the work kettle, as a pencil-pot on my desk. When I gave up the day job I started using it for tea again: it holds much more than the everyday mugs in the kitchen, which meant fewer trips up and down the stairs to refill it, and the handle was comfy to hold.

Now I am bereft. I know it’s only a thing, and things are not important, but I hadn’t realised just how accustomed I’d become to having it to hand whenever I was writing. Fortunately, it’s not terminally cracked and I can still use it, but clearly, its days are now numbered. This will not do.

Perhaps I can exploit my husband’s feelings of guilt and get him to buy me one of these:

Fantastic lots, many of them pure unobtainium, including critiques, artwork, stuff signed by really cool people like Neil Gaiman and Joe Abercrombie, your name in a book, Stephen Deas to do with as you will (more or less) for two whole days,  . . . and personalised ARCs of M D Lachlan‘s Fenrir and Songs of the Earth from, er, me.

If you’re a writer, a reader, connected with genre publishing or just a fan, you should check this out. Follow @GenreforJapan on Twitter or visit the website, and get browsing, get donating, get involved.

And get your bloody wallet out!

I have to say, it’s impressed me. Beautifully engineered, it is light, readable, vastly more portable than the chunky hardbacks in my library, great for train/plane/long stay in hospital. But it will not replace the paper book in my heart.

Why? An e-reader doesn’t smell right or feel right and has no substance.  Reading an ebook is just like reading a technical pdf (and I had quite enough of them in my last job, thank you very much). It’s utilitarian. It has no soul. And I can’t take it into the bath.

Picking up the Kindle is nothing like walking into my library and seeing the rows of old friends on the shelves, each one of which instantly evokes a fragment of the story, or the holiday where I first read it, or the birthday for which it was a present. An e-reader to me is a tool, and as unromantic as a screwdriver.

We all need screwdrivers sometimes, but we don’t keep them on display like the best china. We bring them out when we need them, then put them away again. And so it will be with my Kindle, I think.

I’ve just finished reading my first ebook, and if the author wasn’t a friend I would feel no compunction whatsoever about deleting it from the device. Yet every paper book I’ve ever bought remains on the shelves in the library – even the ones I didn’t really enjoy that much – and anyone who tries to get me to part with any of them is liable to get hurt.

Oh, come on. Which of these two would you rather pick up?

People know this, and buy me things like that one up there as presents. They’re gorgeous to look at and lovely to handle, and I imagine myself under a cherry tree on a sunny summer’s day, writing in them (with a fountain pen, naturally – I have eight or nine to choose from, including a Parker 51 that’s older than me), and what I write will be beautiful. It can’t be otherwise: on those pages, anything but sheer poetry would be an offence against nature.

And then, after I’ve oohed and aahed over them, I put them back in their fabulous presentation boxes and put them carefully on the shelf in my office and never open them again, except once in a while to admire the printed endpapers or stroke the butter-soft leather.

Why? Because they are so beautiful I can’t bear to sully their pages with something so crude and permanent as ink. I just can’t.

My husband’s bought me several Cartesios, two Rossis, and the most unspeakably gorgeous InTempo, shipped all the way from Florence (click on that picture on the left, I dare you. Go on, click on it – you will not leave the site without spending money). He’s also responsible for a large part of my fountain pen collection.

And when I try to explain to him how much I love the journals he’s bought me, and that’s why I can’t bring myself to write in them, he doesn’t understand, and looks vaguely hurt, and I want to cry.

“But you’re a writer. Writers need notebooks, don’t they?”

“Yes, but–”

“But what? They’re just paper; they’re meant to be written in!”

“I know, but I can’t!”

“You’re a freak, do you know that?”

And I nod miserably, and go back into my office, take out my fountain pen, and don’t write in them again.

It’s a widely-held view that fantasy as a genre is one in which the writer can pretty much dispense with research. It’s all made up, so as long as you make sure there are certain natural laws by which your world functions and you stick to them, you can do what you like. It’s your sandpit. You make the rules.

Except it’s not that simple. Even in fantasy, there are some elements where a little research will prevent your reader frowning and thinking “That’s not right.” I mean, they might write to you and complain.

For example, there’s likely to be horses in the book somewhere, so it pays to know the hairy end from the end with the teeth. How to get on and off. How far you can ride one in a day.

If the blokes on the horses are knights, you’d better know your hauberk from your pauldron, and where to find the vamplate (it’s the bit which guards your hand as you grip your lance, in case you didn’t know).

So I was sitting at my desk, putting the finishing touches to the second book of The Wild Hunt series, and I had a sudden thought. An epiphany, even. One of those moments of realisation which is often—nay, almost inevitably—followed by “Oh, shit.”

What I realised was that I have spent mumblety-mumble years thinking, dreaming and writing about folk for whom a sword is a part of everyday life, and I’ve never laid hands on one. Seen a few in museums and so on, but never actually wrapped my hand round a hilt.

My imagination’s done the work up to this point. I knew not to pick it up by the pointy end, for instance, and was fairly confident I could score at least 6/10 on a naming-of-the-parts pop quiz. I also knew that they don’t weigh nearly as much as people imagine, but even three pounds is going to feel like it’s ripping your arm out of its socket after half an hour’s earnest use.

What I didn’t know, and had to rely on my imagination for, was the specifics. Which muscles does it pull on as you start to tire? Where do you get the calluses, and what does it feel like in your hand when the sweat—and worse—begins to run? What does it feel like in your hand, full stop?

So I bought one. A replica of a 15th century longsword (also called a hand-and-a-half, or a bastard sword, depending on your era of origin and local preference). Not a lightweight copy of Andúril that comes with a fancy plaque to hang on the wall, but a traditionally-made, full tang, edge-ready, functional sword. And it’s sharp.

Well, I’m not going to know what a real sword feels like in my hand unless I’m holding a real sword, am I?

Apologies for the crummy pics–it’s pouring with rain and even with the lights on I can barely see what I’m doing. Click to make them bigger.

This morning, I discovered that Mme had fallen under her own weight, and was drooping forlornly into the hellebores.  I say “fallen under her own weight” because I wouldn’t dream of implying that my neighbours had pitched her back over when she scrambled clean up the 6ft dividing fence and made determined advances on their trellis, rather like a dark green, many-armed Napoleon across Europe.

Besides, I planted Mme nine years ago; she’s been here longer than they have lived in that house, so I reckon that gives her dibs on the fence.

So now I have to untangle the 8-10ft long stems and somehow tie them in to the acres of clematis netting I provided for Mme, which she has studiously ignored thus far.  As anyone who has ever grown a clematis will know, they are largely self-supporting.  This means they will grab onto and coil round whatever they touch; in Mme’s case, this is usually herself.

Picture the scene, if you will.  Yours truly, unsteady of foot at the best of times, waist-deep in hellebores and flag iris behind the pond (yes, that pond), attempting to untangle this monstrosity without snapping too many bud-bearing shoots.  It’s like trying to knit a Fair Isle sweater without a pattern.  In the dark.  In reverse.

However, I’ve managed to achieve some sort of order.  Mme’s many armies have been separated and espalier-trained across the aforementioned acres of netting.  Casualties were limited to one finger (a Swiss Army knife related injury) and one leading shoot, that is now hospitalised in a jam-jar of water on the kitchen windowsill in the hope it may root as a cutting for next year.

Even though I know full well what I am nurturing, I can’t bear not to give it a chance.  Where the hell I’m going to plant it, though, I do not know–give Mme free reign and she’ll annexe Poland before she’s three years old.

Freddie Spencer Chapman is one such. Worked behind enemy lines in the Malaya campaign of WWII, cheerfully blowing up the enemy with bamboo-and-gelignite bombs and inflicting so much damage with two comrades that the Japanese thought they were being taken on by 200 crack commandos. A life that, if it was fiction, would be dismissed as unbelievably far-fetched.

Read his obit, and I dare you not to be moved, inspired, uplifted, and also saddened that we don’t seem to make ‘em like that any more.