This is a bits and pieces post. The next one will be a review.
Guidance from my publisher has resulted in a change to the book’s title and to that of its protagonist. The novel is now called Hapless Ally and its protagonist is Alison. This is partly a stylistic issue – that is, Hapless Annie doesn’t sit so well with Anna on the cover – but it is also important for me, as author, because the new title helps to make it clear that this is literary fiction and not memoir. It is also helpful from the point of view of clear genre and, moreover, because the book does describe and entertain real people in the public domain – Shirley Bassey, for one – I’m emphasising that any conversation with her is imaginary and had in the head of an imaginary character. Well, actually, it’s all a bit more complicated than that, but enough on the subject. And I hope you like the disclaimer which runs,
Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction and, while real authors and musicians are characters in the book, they are in the role of imaginary friends and are the author’s interpretations only; any celebrity or individual in the public domain who features in the text in no way endorses it or is associated with it; any dialogue is an invention of the author and resemblances to anyone else living, dead or undead but still quite lively, are drawn as literary creations only. I did, however, write regularly to Tony Benn and once sent him some rock cakes.
WARNING: this book contains bad language, graphic accounts of suicide attempts, self-harming, sex, funerals, deaths and some brutal culinary episodes.
What else happened this week? Well, somehow, I managed to work through all the editor’s comments and requests for changes. There has only been one big change and, oh my, was she right. But I won’t say what happened! Also, I got permissions back for quotations from Kavanagh and MacNeice and I completed requests for Johnny Cash, Dorothy Rowe, Larkin, Plath and Auden, which latter preceded a very nice email from Faber and Faber correcting me: Curtis Brown NY office holds the Auden rights. Oops. Now, should you ever be seeking literary permissions, there is one very quick way to check who holds the key:
http://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/watch//
This site lists writers, artists and their copyright holders, so you know to whom you should write. Don’t assume it’s the publisher (which I had, with Auden) and don’t assume it’s the first publisher of a text – as I had been advised for Albert Camus, hence my applying to Gallimard (I now know it is his daughter, Catherine, I shall be writing to). Then there’s the issue of whether or not I use my own translations….We’ve got round the issue of translation from Dante’s ‘Inferno’ because my wonderful, bilingual publisher did the translation for me; easy to attribute that!
And, finally, I have drafted a plan of Life of Almost (that’s the Next One) and written the first chapter. It’s a YA novel based on Great Expectations. I’ve enjoyed corresponding with various writers and spoken to someone about working on a collaborative YA piece (clue: genetics; off-world colonies, replicants: I realise that all sounds rather ‘Blade Runner’…) There is a great supportive community out there. Also, because I’ve had, shall we say, a bit of a dip, I’ve had some great exchanges with Mind and with the extraordinary MH survivors I have made contact with through social media. Some of them were contributors to Dear Stranger (Penguin/Mind) – which I will review in the next post. It’s brilliant. Here are some links to it; one from Mind and one from the Penguin blog. I have asked one of its contributors to write the foreword to my own book.
http://penguinblog.co.uk/2015/07/02/dear-stranger-a-letter-from-rowan-coleman/
And, I was pondering: in my book there is a GP called ‘Dr Krank-Werden’, who is ‘possibly the best loved doctor in Albion.’ I was thinking about this earlier. I have talked to a lot of people about the kind of care they have received, over the years. Some have had no continuity of care at all; not all have a GP they find supportive. But I have been lucky. Together we have been down various routes: some things have worked; some have failed. Sometimes, somebody else lost the paperwork or support came to an end without any explanation at all: I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But she never gives up on me. So, while my book might be fiction, Dr Krank-Werden has some elements of my GP in her – and I thought that, if Dear Stranger could ever gain a second volume, I’d like to write a letter to her. It is partly for her that on the acknowledgements page of Killing Hapless Ally there is a thank you, ‘to the kind and determined people in our NHS which on many occasions has made me cry with pride, gratefulness and not a small amount of embarrassment…
Night night.
Anna Vaught Writes 