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Category Archives: Ed

Imagine things Czech or Slovak …

21 Tuesday Jun 2022

Posted by ninevoices in Crime, Ed, Factual writing, Fiction, Historical, Short stories, Writing Competitions to Enter

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

British Czech & Slovak Association, Czech, Freedom, Me-Too, Slivovice, Slovak

The closing date for the British Czech & Slovak Association’s 2022 writing competition has been extended.  It is now midnight on Sunday July 31.  So that gives you and your writerly friends and relatives another month to come up with 2,000 words that will interest, amuse, irritate, educate or otherwise entertain the eminent judges. £400 lies the other side of those eminent judges – plus publication in the British Czech & Slovak Review. The runner-up gets £150 (plus publication).

This year’s suggested (but not compulsory) theme is Freedom – in any aspect.  The interpretation is yours.  Personal freedom, freedom in relationships, the freedom of nations, democratic freedoms, or just the ending of lockdown?  You choose.

The 2021 competition brought in some impressive creative writing, including such gems as:

An entertaining account of a Scot’s postgraduate year in Czechoslovakia in 1972, which included a wedding missed because he was drinking slivovice to celebrate the release from prison of the father of a hitchhiker he had picked up en route.

A topical entry on the Me-Too theme that took us to a trial of a celebrity accused of sexual assault, with the simultaneous thoughts of the judge and the two victims.

A moving account of a young Englishwoman’s visit to Slovakia for her Slovak father’s funeral. (This won a runner-up prize.)

You can feature here!   Fiction or fact – either is welcome.  What is essential is that all entries must deal with either (1) the links between Britain and the lands now comprising the Slovak and Czech Republics, at any time in history, or (2) describing society in the Republics since 1989.  Topics can include, for example, history, politics, sport, the sciences, economics, the arts or literature. 

Entry is free.  Submissions are invited from individuals of any age, nationality or educational background.  Entrants do not need to be members of the BCSA.

Entries should be submitted by post to the BCSA Prize Administrator, 24 Ferndale, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN2 3NS, England, or by e-mail to prize@bcsa.co.uk.  The closing date is now midnight on July 31 2022.

The submission guidelines can be seen on the BCSA website at https://www.bcsa.co.uk/2022-bcsa-writing-competition/ , or on application to the BCSA Prize Administrator at the addresses given above.

Books you’ve lent

22 Tuesday Feb 2022

Posted by ninevoices in Book etiquette, Ed

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

friends, Lending books, Margaret Atwood, Nerdishness, Ownership, The Penelopiad

What is the etiquette about getting back books that you lent someone a long time ago?  Asking for a friend.

My friend used to think that he would never forget which book he had lent to whom.  But it was the disappearance of a prized hardback copy of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad that undeceived me him.  None of the people to whom he might have lent it remembered (or admitted) that they had it.

So he started to note loans down in a special notebook.  But that has created its own problems.

For rereading it recently he saw that one book (signed by the author) had been lent to a friend a full five years ago.  

Put yourself in this situation: various embarrassments can arise. 

Does asking for it back after so long make you seem nerdish?  Untrusting?  In some way accusing your friend of carelessness?  Best to have some specific reason for needing it, rather than just wanting to reclaim a piece of property for the sake of having it at home and not in their house.

Your friend might deny having got it.  If it’s left at that, then the book will never be recovered.  If the denial is challenged – well, do you suspect them of lying?  Surely not – but that corrosive thought is in your mind now. 

Do you ask your friend to check their shelves to make sure?  If they do, and it can’t be found, why not?  Have they in turn lent it to someone else?  Have they lost it – left behind, perhaps, on some Spanish beach?  Has a zealous spouse bent on clearing space given it to a charity shop? 

If it is found – aha!  They may claim (genuinely, let us hope) that it is their own copy.  How to resolve this?  Writing your name in your books is the obvious answer, but is that also nerdish?  Something schoolboys do (or used to, when they still read books rather than looked at screens)? Obviously the worst thing you can do is to write your name in the book in the presence of the person you’re lending it to …

Let’s hope that this ownership problem doesn’t arise.  It’s yours, and they’ve got it, and they’re giving it back.  Do you make the mistake of asking them whether they liked it?  For if they haven’t actually read it, how awkward ….  Would you agree to their hanging on to it so they would sometime get round to reading it?  Then you might have to go through the whole sorry performance again – but how can you politely say no?

This whole area is fraught with difficulty.  And when you look round your house, and see books piled on windowsills and on the floor, because there is no more space on your shelves, then maybe that’s the perfect excuse for letting this particular sleeping dog lie.

Neither a lender nor a borrower be …

Christmas book presents

27 Saturday Nov 2021

Posted by ninevoices in Books for Christmas, Crime, Ed, History

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

A Glass of Blessings, Barbara Pym, Boris Johnson, British Library Crime Classics, Calamity in Kent, Death in Fancy Dress, Death Makes a Prophet, Excellent Women, How Novels Work, John Mullan, Marital harmony, Mystery in White, National Coal Board, Rumpole of the Bailey, The 12.30 from Croydon, The Division Bell Mystery, The Sussex Downs Murder, Whisky, William Hague, William Pitt the Younger

How do you make sure you get the books you want for Christmas?  Asking for a friend.

The friend in question has a birthday in December, so this is something that looms large for him at this time of year.  He is known to like detective novels, especially from the Golden Age, so if things are just left to chance there is the risk that he will get any number of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series that he already has.  How many copies of Death in Fancy Dress and The Sussex Downs Murder can his bookshelf stock, when what he’d actually like is The Division Bell Mystery or The 12.30 from Croydon?

One answer is to drop hints.  But not everyone has a good ear for hints, or takes the further hint to pass these hints on to other potential donors.  This form of chain letter can easily get broken, or turn into a game of Chinese Whispers, in which what started life as William Hague’s biography of Pitt the Younger materialises under the Christmas tree as the National Coal Board’s Yearbook for 1975.

So my friend has adopted the practice of making no bones about it but distributing to his nearest and dearest a list of the presents he would like to see in December.  This list is mostly books, but the words ‘good whisky’ do appear there, as does a box set of the Rumpole of the Bailey TV series.  It is then left to the nearest and dearest to liaise, so that the aforesaid NCB Yearbook doesn’t jostle under the tree on Christmas morning with three copies of How Novels Work by John Mullan.

The list has to be specific.  For example, my friend has recently been introduced to Barbara Pym by a ninevoice, so the list reads, “Any novel by Barbara Pym except A Glass of Blessings or Excellent Women.”  This gets rather strange-looking (and off-putting to anyone getting the list who isn’t in the ‘nearest and dearest’ category) when we get to the aforesaid British Library books: “Any in the series of The British Library Crime Classics: I already have Mystery in White, Calamity in Kent, Death Makes a Prophet … [etc etc]”.

You may say, this prescriptive approach eliminates surprise, and the chance of being given something quite new.  In fact it doesn’t quite work like that.  Present-givers still do make their own decisions, which can prompt the “Why did they think I’d like this?” question.  And this way my friend’s library can get unexpected additions, like a biography of our present Prime Minister last year …

There is a related problem.  Asking for books mean that you get, well, more books.  You may run out of bookshelf space.  I find My friend finds that books he has recently been given have to share floor space with box files, unhung pictures, shoeboxes of what were once thought to be essential photos, and the like.  This can lead to friction in the marital home. 

How do you do it?  What advice should I, er, pass on to my friend?

The Mask

14 Friday May 2021

Posted by ninevoices in Bookshops, Ed, Television, Westerns, Writing conventions

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Champion the Wonder Horse, Corona virus, Masks, The Lone Ranger, Wagon Train

When I was little, watching The Lone Ranger, Champion the Wonder Horse, Wagon Train and the like, it was the convention that when a baddie pulled a kerchief over the lower half of his face he became unrecognisable.  Sheriffs, neighbours, even relatives would have no idea that it was he who was holding up the stagecoach or stealing the miners’ payroll or threatening the tellers in the bank.

Dutifully wearing my anti-covid mask I was therefore surprised on entering my local Waterstone’s the other day to be greeted with “Hello Mr Peacock”.

So either bookshop staff are unusually prescient, or the scriptwriters on those 1950s westerns were taking a short cut …

[Other bookshops are available.]

Help when writing

10 Wednesday Mar 2021

Posted by ninevoices in Ed, Punctuation, Style

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Unsolicited advice

I’ve started to get helpful messages from Mr Microsoft on improving my writing.  Little unsolicited bubbles appear when I’m hard at it composing on Word.  Sometimes, he thinks he can punctuate “better’ than me.   Most frequently he offers to help me be more concise, be more succinct, have a more condensed style, say what I want in fewer words, ramble less.  Such impertinence. 

More coronatime reading

23 Wednesday Sep 2020

Posted by ninevoices in Biography, Children's books, Comedy, Ed, Historical, Lockdown, Management, Memoir, Poetry, Romance, Thrillers

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

18th century, Alaska, Corona virus, Cotswolds, Czechia, Lake District, London, South Wales, Sussex, Zatopek

So, corona virus restrictions are being reimposed.  Less socialising, less going out of the house, maybe worse to come.  But the upside of all that is, you can top up your lockdown reading …   Your Books To Be Read pile might have shrunk in the past six months, but why not add to it now?  Why not choose something new, maybe something you wouldn’t normally touch?

Taking some books at, er, random – you can enjoy historical fiction, thrillers, comedy, romance, novels exploring relationships and the human heart; revel in the settings of London (in the 18th century and today), modern Czechia, Sussex, the Lake District, Alaska, South Wales, Devon and the Cotswolds.

Or you can read biography and moving memoir; and if you are a manager and your staff are all working from home, why not take advantage of their absence and bone up on management thinking?  And if you’re a parent or doting grandparent, get a lovely book for the little one.

Last, but not least, there’s poetry.  What better way to cope with today’s vicissitudes than settling down with some great poetry ‘the best words in the best order’, as I think someone said.

Happy reading!

 

 

 

Books lent long ago

27 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by ninevoices in Book etiquette, Ed

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

bookshelves, friends, Lending books

How do you ask someone to return a book you lent them literally years ago?  Without making them feel awkward, especially if they haven’t read it yet?  And if the reason you want it back is only because you don’t want to lose it, you just want to refill that gap in your shelf?  Asking for a friend.

Alphabetical stories

06 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by ninevoices in Ed, Lockdown, Writing games

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

alphabet, policemen, Twitter, xylophones

Can you write a 26-word story?  In alphabetical order?  That’s one game being played on Twitter during lockdown.

Here’s one, in reverse order.  Let’s have your better examples? If 26 words is too short, how about 52?

Zorba’s yellow xylophone was very ugly.  The squat, really quirky police officer never much liked kissing jaundiced instruments:  he groped for every dubious caveat before acting.

Homework # 1: Write about a villain you love to hate, or hate to love

24 Friday Apr 2020

Posted by ninevoices in Christine, Ed, Homework, Maggie

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Andrew Scott, Killing Eve, Moriarty, Pride & Prejudice, Rebecca, Sherlock Holmes

  1. Maggie

A Villain from the Pages of Literature : Elizabeth Bennet’s Father

Surely not, you protest? For Mr Bennet of Longbourn is initially an extremely appealing figure. Cultured and educated, we see immediately that he is shackled to a wife seemingly designed to make any man of refinement squirm. While feeling deeply sorry for him, we are amused by his quick wit. By his dry, acerbic humour. And by his frequent retreats from family life into the eighteenth-century man-shed of his study, with its much-loved books and a decanter of the finest Madeira.

We laugh at his waggish humour and at his impatience with what he sees as trivial female concerns:

‘No more lace, Mrs Bennett, I implore you.’

‘If he had any compassion for me, (Mr Bingley) would not have danced half so much! For God’s sake, say no more of his partners. Oh! that he had sprained his ankle in the first dance!’

At the same time, we admire his acute social perception and good humour.

‘For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours and laugh at them, in return.’

Yet this is also a man who is publicly dismissive of his wife, frequently in front of their children and, as we come to know him better, his sarcasm – coldness even – begins to grate. What twenty-first-century wife would not chuck a heavy china ornament at a partner who delivers such careless rejoinders to legitimate concerns about the future of their girls, and what will happen when she and they are eventually evicted from their home?

‘You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.’

‘Let us flatter ourselves. I may be the survivor.’

Eventually, however, considering Wickham’s treatment of the Bennet daughter, Lydia, – seducing a sixteen-year-old and only making an honest woman of her after being handsomely paid off by Darcy – we see how badly his moral compass is skewed:

‘Wickham’s a fool, if he takes her with a farthing less than ten thousand pounds. I should be sorry to think so ill of him, in the very beginning of our relationship.’

Pride and Prejudice, as Jane Austen signals from the beginning, points a beady eye at marriage and how essential mutual respect is to marital happiness. Through dissecting the Bennet’s own shaky partnership – based, we learn, on little more than youthful passion and imprudence – Austen highlights, as evocatively as only she can, the realities of marrying in haste and repenting at leisure.

Disappointment has made Mr Bennet cruel and results in making this reader sigh for the man he might have been, had he either chosen a more compatible wife or made an effort to be more understanding of the fallible woman to whom he has tied himself.

Even Elizabeth, the closest of his daughters to her father, has ‘never been blind to the impropriety of her father’s behaviour as a husband.’ He loves her (being at least prepared to stop a marriage to the ridiculous Collins), and she him, but the soundest lesson he is able to pass on to her is that love alone is rarely enough. And that being a bad father can have dire consequences.

Oh, to be able to create such complex characters as Mr Bennet!

 

—-0000—-

 

2. Ed

The villain speaks

At least that simpering whining little thing has gone to London.   She’s out of my sight, thank goodness – I can’t bear to see her creeping round this house, this lovely mansion that isn’t hers and never will be.  I do get some pleasure in tormenting her and frightening her but that doesn’t make up for the ache I get when I think of the real mistress.

But the master has gone to London with her.  Why does he stick with her?  And why marry her in the first place?  His wife had been dead for only a year.  How could he fall for her in Monte Carlo?  I suppose he was lonely.  Maybe she just happened to be there and simple male desire made him go for her – men are so stupid that way.  But I can’t think that she would satisfy him in that respect – you can’t imagine her doing anything but just lying there and waiting for it to be over.  Now the real mistress, she’d be lively, adventurous, exciting in bed!   I bet she taught the master a thing or two, for all his debonair man-of-the-world appearance.

Was it because this one is so different?  She’s got no spirit: she doesn’t stand up to me, and she lets that overseer Crawley take advantage of her.  Timid, she is – one example: she hasn’t even asked me what happens to all the food that’s not eaten at breakfast – I know she’s curious about that, but she just hasn’t got the nerve to ask!  How feeble.  And when I showed her her writing desk, where she’d be writing her letters – well, the look of dismay on her face!  The real mistress, she had friends in high society, in London, in foreign places, everywhere.  But this one doesn’t know anyone.   No-one to write to.

The master has to see that he’s made a dreadful mistake in trying to bring this one here.  She’ll never take the place of the old mistress in this house.  I’m seeing to that.  I thought I’d managed to drive him away from her at the ball, tricking her into trusting me and wearing the real mistress’s gown: the look on his face, that was magnificent!    The shame, the horror on hers!  I really thought I’d broken them then.

But it didn’t work.  He still seems to want her. She should’ve got rid of me after that.  But she’s not brave enough.  So I’m still here. I’ll have to do something else, something that will drive her out even if it doesn’t make him kick her out.  This may take a little time, I must plan something even better than the ball gown trick.  I know she’s afraid of me, but I’ll become her friend again, then she might be so pleased, I could do anything.  I’ll do nothing for a few weeks, lull her into a false sense of security.  Yes, that’s it.  Be all smiles when they get back, and for a couple of months …

Can I smell burning  … ?

 

—0000—-

 

3. Christine

The trouble with fictional villains is that they don’t always translate to the screen.

Moriarty is a straight bad egg in the books, a moustache-twirling crazy-clever enemy of Sherlock Holmes.  Conan Doyle designed him expressly to meet the need to challenge the ridiculous intellect of Holmes.  We respect and fear Moriarty, but don’t have much in the way of mixed emotions about him….in the books.  Put him on screen, and cast Andrew Scott, and we are confronted with a boyish, gentle psychopath, one with a soft Irish accent and melting eyes…and we kind of want to mother him as well as run away from him.  We see his genius, we admire his suits…we slightly fancy him.  I thought Scott was awful casting when he first appeared, but gradually I grew to adore him.  He wasn’t the villain.  He was the star attraction.  He was hardly a villain at all.

I haven’t read the Villanelle novels that arrived on screen as ‘Killing Eve’.  Perhaps Villanelle is written just as Jodie Comer plays her, but I can’t imagine anyone could get down on paper what Comer does on screen.  She’s the coldest sociopath, who kills on a whim for mischief, in hideous (but often blackly hilarious) ways.  Yet she’s also wonderful, a riot of convincing accents and disguises, who find endless pleasures in life, who is by turns childlike and hostile with her handler Konstantin.  We understand why Eve is so fascinated with her.  We don’t want to be fascinated ourselves, but somehow, appallingly, we are.

But the most unsuccessful translation of a villain from book to screen, for me, remains Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones’ Diary.  In the book he’s an out-and-out sh*t.  We feel his villainy ooze from every paragraph.  Dump him, Bridget! we silently implore. Run to Mr Darcy!  But on screen, they had Renee Zellweger forced to choose between Colin Firth and Hugh Grant.  Both utterly butterly, I’m sure we agree.  But Daniel’s charm was supercharged by Grant.  Watching him, I felt I could almost overlook his dishonesty, ruthlessness and lechery.  The producers didn’t think this through. After all,  there’s not much chance any of us will ever need a suitor to spring us from a Thai prison.  But a man who can make us laugh and fancy us because of our Big Pants? A man who makes us feel sexy at all times?

You begin to understand the attraction of Wickham.

Congrats to The Servant

14 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by ninevoices in Competition Win, Ed, Fiction, Historical, Maggie, Writing Historical Fiction

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

18th century, London, squalor

The Servant – the book we hope to be reading soon!  Many congratulations to ninevoice Maggie Richell Davies, who has won the Sharpe Books/Historical Writers’ Association Unpublished Award 2020.

The other eight ninevoices have heard this book progress (and change form) for some time now and we know how good it is.  We’re in 1765: and, to quote the HWA website, “Fourteen-year-old Hannah must go where she’s sent, despite her instincts screaming danger. Why does disgraced aristocrat William Chalke have a locked room in his house? What’s sold at the auctions taking place behind closed doors?”   The story evokes 18th century London and its squalor and brutality and also its redeeming features. 

It’s clear from the descriptions of the short- and longlisted novels how strong a field the judges had to choose from.  Our congratulations to all those authors in those lists!  See http://www.historiamag.com/hwa-sharpe-books-unpublished-novel-award-winner/

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