The #LetBooksBeBooks Campaign; an Open Letter to The Book People

by

Today, with the might of well-known authors Philip Pullman, Malorie Blackman, Carol Ann Duffy, Joanne Harris and Victoria Lamb behind me, not to mention the huge coverage of @LetToysBeToys ‘LetBooksBeBooks campaign, I tweeted The Book People again about their stocking of gender-specific and sexist titles. Would they still ignore me, I asked, now that these well-known names were supporting the cause?

Very quickly they tweeted me back, thanking me for my feedback and asking me to email them at social@thebookpeople.co.uk. I thanked them for the invite, had some lunch and set to…

Hello Book People, and thanks for asking me to email you. I would love to have had this dialogue with you earlier, and did attempt it, but unfortunately it seems it took other people taking up the baton – particularly famous names like Malorie Blackman, Joanne Harris, Victoria Lamb (aka Jane Holland/Elizabeth Moss) and Carol Ann Duffy – to grab your attention. This makes me sad and a little cynical, but frankly anything that brings this important issue to your attention is worthwhile.
The concerns I’ve been tweeting you about for some time have now been neatly encapsulated by the @LetToysBeToys #LetBooksBeBooks campaign, and their petition can be found here. No – don’t click it yet! ? Hold on and I will explain to you why this is important to me –and why it should be important to you too.
Here we are in 2014; and what a journey it’s been. Over the last 100 years, voting rights for women, changes to employment law and of course the Equalities Act of 2010 have been markers on a journey that’s changed the social landscape of our country. Today, men and women have equal rights and equal choice – don’t they?? Nothing that is permitted for one gender is withheld from the other. I’m sure that at the Book People you have male and female staff, and that some of you are parents. How lucky your children are to be born in this era. Your sons know they can be nurses, and realise it’s a worthwhile profession all of its own; they don’t have to be doctors ‘instead’. Your daughters, on the other hand, are never asked if they want to be a nurse, but asked if they want to go into medicine or healthcare; because it’s made clear to them all the time that they can be doctors OR nurses, right? The choice is theirs. The choice is everyone’s.
Everything that a girl or boy could want is available in several colours, so that hopefully they can pick their favourite. It’s fine for boys to wear pink shirts and girls to wear camouflage trousers. Boys can like butterflies, flowers, rabbits and dolls. Girls can like astronauts, soldiers and skateboards and everyone buys them pirate and Buzz Lightyear costumes. Girls and boys both have similar expectations of the future: how far their career might progress, how their behaviour will be judged and how much of the domestic burden will fall on them. Boys and girls know that some Dads stay at home to care for their children, and that some Mums go back to work after having babies (and may be the biggest wage-earner in the house). They respect that. Hopefully they also know that some boys and girls have two mums, or two dads. And they respect that too.
My, what an idyllic world we live in! How far we’ve come!
Or have we? Unfortunately, it seem that this journey of ours towards equality has taken a little detour. In true Bugs Bunny style, someone’s dashed ahead and turned the sign round so that we’re now heading down Double Standards lane.
Although the majority of parents – including all of you there in the Book People office – would say that they want their sons and daughters to grow up feeling they can do anything, BE ANYTHING, what’s the reality? What do children see around them?
Daughters are told that women have equal rights. They watch as their bedroom fills with butterfly stickers, craft activities, baby dolls, pink accessories, toy vacuum cleaners and ovens – just in case they were foolish enough to believe what they were told, they and their expectations have been put firmly back in place by the time they’re five. Yep, by the time they’re at school, mentally those doors are already clanging shut. What they COULD do and what they expect to do are already two different things. Sons can choose caring professions, and should be involved fathers, they’re told… as their world becomes filled with macho, action-packed superheroes, soldiers, racing cars, pirates and astronauts, while domestic play equipment, dolls, animals and anything connected with caring or beauty is relegated to being weak and ‘for girls’ (because obviously those two go together). Not to mention that any liking for these ‘girls’ things’ might make people think – shock horror – that they’re gay. Best keep those impulses locked away… until the misery makes them another teenage suicide statistic.
Books have always reflected our world and sometimes, show us a better one. Their role in shaping children’s beliefs and expectations is every bit as vital as that of toys and other forms of media. The Equalities Act becomes just a piece of paper if we are not living our lives – and writing, designing and marketing our books – to support its principles and ensure our children can expect to live and be judged by them.
Girls need to know that pink is not the only colour – and to lose the expectation that everything pink is aimed at them. They need to open a book and be surprised by the contents, not already condemned to expect page upon page of butterflies, fairies, make-up tips and tales of princesses who got everything they wanted – once a guy showed up to sort out their life for them. Boys need to know that they are ALLOWED to like pink, and butterflies, and rabbits, and dolls. They don’t have to be an astronaut, builder, soldier or train driver, and they don’t have to live with the pressure of expecting to be the breadwinner, rescuer, knight on a white horse. They need to know that sometimes THEY will need rescuing – and that’s okay. If we adults do our job well, perhaps those boys will realise that the person who rescues them might be a girl; a girl with no make-up on, riding a Harley Davidson without a pink pony in sight.
If you want freedom of choice for your own children, and value their right to keep an open mind – and see only open doors in their future – then surely you want the same freedom for all children. So come on Book People, what do you say? You don’t need to stock gender-specific, sexist titles entitled ‘stories for girls’ or ‘cooking with mummy’. You could choose not to. You could be the first retailer (because we only have publishers so far) to make a stand and say no. I can assure you, with all the major newspapers reporting on this campaign and radio and TV taking an interest now too, if you make this stand today everyone will know about it by tomorrow. You will be Equality Heroes – and have the satisfaction of knowing that you used your power for good. Join us!

What Pleases The Human Eye

by

Dara O Briain: "People are tired of nonsense-peddlers"

I caught just a part of Dara O’Briain’s School of Hard Sums the other night. It’s a great show but what interested me about this particular one was their discussion about spirals – a logarithmic spiral in particular. I could see the shape they were coming up with in their drawings, but couldn’t think what it was called.

There’s something about this shape I find very pleasing. Why? I have no idea. I’m no mathematical genius (words are my thing!), so when I’m told it can be described using polar coordinates, I have only the flimsiest grasp of what that means. I did know that this particular form of spiral crops up in nature, and couldn’t remember where I’d seen good examples, so I looked it up. This geometric form has been used by Mother Nature in some of her smallest and largest creations.

File:NautilusCutawayLogarithmicSpiral.jpgThe one that was lurking in the back of my mind was the lovely Nautilus shell, probably from my evolution-studying days.
“Having survived relatively unchanged for millions of years, nautiluses represent the only living members of the subclass Nautiloidea, and are often considered “living fossils.”
Wikipedia

 

To me, these really are things of beauty.

File:Fractal Broccoli.jpg

Even this Romanesco broccoli looks  more attractive than its more tradition bound cousins.

I mean, I like eating broccoli, but I’ve not really though of it as something to look at – have you?!  But this geometric formation makes it more appealing.

 

Many of us will be familiar with lograithmic spirals – even if we don’t realise that’s what they are – from watching weather forecasts. Those swirling areas of low pressure often form approximately logarithmic spirals.

File:Messier51 sRGB.jpg

But way, way above those weather systems are logarithmic spirals that we need a telescope to appreciate; the spiral arms of galaxies. This is the Whirlpool Galaxy, around 23 million light years away from our own Milky Way.

Gorgeous, isn’t it?

And talking of gorgeous…

File:Mandel zoom 04 seehorse tail.jpgThis is a logarithmic spiral, but also a part of a Mandelbrot set. Don’t know what one of those is? Nor did I… 

“The Mandelbrot set is a mathematical set of points whose boundary is a distinctive and easily recognizable two-dimensional fractal shape.”
Wikipedia

Well now we know. But this is the bit of the article which interests me:
“The Mandelbrot set has become popular outside mathematics both for its aesthetic appeal and as an example of a complex structure arising from the application of simple rules.”

Aesthetic appeal. But why should a pattern – a mathematical visualisation – be appealing? Most of our human preferences have been developed over time by evolution; even though it can sometimes be a murky area, we can usually see logical reasons for why we like or avoid certain things – homage to the survival instincts of a species that, by some lights, has done rather well for itself.

But what is the evolutionary value or reason for certain shapes catching our eye? What makes one pattern or a combination of colours pleasing, while others revolt us?

Cyclones, the hunting flight of a hawk, a Californian beach, a set of corneal nerves – logarithmic spirals are to be found in all these places, formed by the forces of nature. But this still doesn’t tell me why I find them so beautiful. Will an appreciation of them make me likelier to survive or live longer? It’s hard to see how!

So perhaps I should just shut my science brain off; forget evolution, archaeology, anthropology, logic. Maybe I should just be glad that these perfect patterns exist, and enjoy looking at them wherever they can be found.

 

I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing (Or To Recognise The Big Issues)

by

Okay, I wouldn’t (want to teach the world to sing, that is – and nor would you, despite my rendition of Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ on Singstar once being labelled as ‘uncanny’ in its resemblance to the original). No, this  old Coke commercial song came into my head when I read this Plinky Prompt: ‘Your entire community is guaranteed to read your blog tomorrow. Write the post you’d like them all to see.‘ Do click on the link above if you want to discover what other Plinky followers wanted everyone to see. If you stay here, you’re stuck with me – and what I want everyone to see is irrelevance.

What am I on about? Well luckily, Twitter (through no fault of its own) provided me with a great example to give you this very day. I follow Bill Bailey on Twitter and was quite excited to see him publicising Consensus, a science event where he will be sharing a stage with, among others, Richard Dawkins and Richard Fortey.

Now while I think Mr D can go off the deep end a bit, and needs to learn a little respect for others’ beliefs (however misguided he thinks they might be), he is a knowledgeable man definitely worth listening to, and I read Richard Fortey’s Trilobite, several years ago and considered it a work of genius. I’m also a big fan of Bill Bailey, so I followed the link. It was at the ExCel! I would go! I would buy a ticket! Perhaps Arty Daughter and Techy Husband would want to go to! I ….

… stopped dead when I saw what it said at the bottom of the page. ‘All profits will go to complete the funding of the Alfred Russel Wallace statue appeal, with any excess being donated to related charities.’

Aaargh! Irrelevance, right there! Is there really no cause more relevant – or ironically more important for human evolution – that the profits could be given to? They’re going to give the ‘excess’ (i.e. money left over after they’ve paid Anthony Smith to make a bloody full-sized bronze statue of ARW) to ‘related’ charities. They don’t specify what these related charities are, which is odd; but could one of them be the Alfred Russel Wallace Memorial Fund, which I looked into in the hope that under their ‘projects’ tab there would be educational outreach programmes or the like?

Plaque for The DellWell I hope not.
Because it turns out that this Fund is dedicated to installing and renewing plaques just about everywhere that ARW drew breath, and maintaining his grave. Nothing else; just that. What a fitting tribute to a great scientist… not.
It’s the Medway Queen restoration project all over again; let’s spend £4 million (it may end up as more – just reconstructing the hull has cost £2.6 million so far) preserving a boat because it saved some lives at Dunkirk. Let’s ignore how many extra lives we might save with that £4 million pound. If I was a Dunkirk survivor, that would make me sick to the stomach; a far better tribute to the bravery shown that day is surely to fund some modern day bravery via aid workers or charities, or normal folk trying to survive life.

What about spending £1 million on malaria nets? Another £1 million helping schemes like The Big Issue to rescue people from poverty and homelessness, and five them back a bit of pride? Sending another £1 million to the Philippines? Another £1 million on dialysis machines, incubators, all those drugs our country supposedly can’t afford to give people because it’s not in their area – or our country’s – budget? We know what Alfred Russel Wallace achieved and we know what the Medway Queen achieved.

So old boats? Irrelevant.
Bronze statues? Irrelevant.
And they will carry on being irrelevant until nobody is dying for want of a few pounds. A warm bed. A decent meal. A vaccination. The right medicine.

Incidentally, if you would rather be relevant – would like to think that you’ve saved or radically improved the lives of other human being,s rather than paid for a custom-made, hand-crafted rivet on a rusting old ship or the bronze-rendered nostril of a long-dead scientist – you might like to consider donating your £24 (the price of a Consensus ticket) to The Big Issue Foundation or the Disasters Emergency Committee. Just sayin’.

I Dabbled in a Drabble

by

Yes, I dabbled in a drabble. That is, a teensy tiny story. And it was fun.

One of my fellow #100kwords100days members, Gerald Hornsby, mentioned an anthology that was looking for sci-fi and fantasy stories just 100 words long. As I had a bit of time on my hands that day and submissions were about to close, I had a go.

It’s amazing how much editing you can do on a 100 word story, which is ironic (you’ll see why in a minute). But I sent off my drabble, entitled Valhalla, and hey presto! it was accepted into 100 Worlds: Lightning-Quick SF and Fantasy Tales . I got the ebook for free but didn’t get a chance to look at it – anyway I fancied the paperback, which arrived today.

And after all that editing – I find that they’ve replaced a painstakingly positioned semi-colon with a comma,  changing the whole feel of the sentence. Oh, it’s a hard life…

Money & Morality – The Freelancer’s Dilemma

by

You may think that the professional life of a freelance writer is free of any soul-wrenching moral dilemmas. After all, you think, surely these freelance writers choose what work they do? The clue’s in the name!

Well you’re right. Mainly.
A freelance writer can choose the work they do, although work that they might refuse to do when they’ve just finished their third lamb roast dinner that month might look much more appealing when they’ve just opened their cupboard to find only a solitary tin of Tesco’s Everyday Baked Beans.

(I’m in no way dissing Everyday Baked Beans; I buy them. I merely mention them for comparative purposes). But what might interest you is what freelancers get asked to do – regardless of whether they say yes or not.

Firstly there are the jobs that have ‘You’re going to be involved in a slander or libel case if you take this’ written all over them. For a sample of these fine professional work opportunities, sign up to Freelancer.com for a month of so and you’ll soon have a selection to study. Nearly all these spring from the USA (sorry, it’s a fact). Often written by someone who is borderline literate, they usually tell a tale of woe, often involving a family member, and ask that you write their ‘true’ story so that they can get justice via memoir publication /going to the national papers/taking the ‘guilty’ party (often a daughter, son, ex-partner, ex-boss) to court.

I only look at these because many are just entitled as ‘need ghostwriter for my memoir’ (or ‘ghostwritter for my trew storey‘). Any writer who wades in and writes a ‘true’ account of such emotive and controversial topics with only one side of the story available to them, must surely have a death wish or be desperate for money. Probably both.

Illustration of two bats and a ghost

The second category of avoid-like-the-plague jobs is perhaps best explained with a real life example – in which the names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent (depending on your moral standpoint). Recently I came across an opportunity to write a ‘professional literature essay’. Being the proud owner of a first class BA Hons in this area, I took a closer look. The fee offered was $30 and this was the description:

Num. of words: 1250
Topic: Hansel and Gretel
Tone: Instructional/Educational
Extensive research needed: yes

Ideal! One of my specialist subjects had been children’s literature, and fairy tales had been a major topic. I could do this with my eyes closed! However, a little wary already due to the use of the word ‘essay’, I sent as message:

Hi X, Could you tell me what the context, title and purpose of this essay is please? Many thanks.

X replied:
Mrs. Alison, (??)
We studied how to create an arguable claim and write specifically and persuasively about literature. For this paper, you need to draw on the work, finding themes and morals in the Hansel and Gretel’s story to create an argument about a fairy tale and to prove it using the story itself. Is it clear?
Thanks, X

Oh yes, X. It’s crystal clear. You’ve uttered that fatal phrase ‘We studied’. You want me to do your homework – possibly your final assessment piece; it’s probably for an A level at the very least, and far more likely with this topic to be for a uni diploma or degree.

____________________________________________________

See that line? That’s where I draw it, you see. I’ve managed to get my GCSEs, A levels, Pharmaceutical Science qualification, various Education qualifications, a uni Diploma and a BA Hons, often in circumstances far from ideal – and many of them were gained while holding down a job and looking after two children. Blatant requests from Great Big Cheats asking me to help them Cheat Cheat Cheat make me see red. However, I felt my response explained my point but was civil – nay, t’was politeness itself.

Dear X,
Thanks for your reply. I’m afraid that having worked so hard for my own qualifications, I make it a rule not to do work for other people’s, as I believe this devalues the work of people who achieve their qualifications through their own efforts. Therefore I won’t be putting in a proposal. Many thanks, Alison

There. I’d said my piece, bowed out gracefully without personally attacking X. The end.

Wrong! I got a reply – most definitely personal, and most definitely not polite!

Hi Alison
I assure you that almost every other people I see around (including me) works so hard for their own qualifications. In order to make money, you must do work for orther people’s. Contrary to your argument about devaluing, I think this improves the value of people who achieve their “qualifications” through their own efforts. Your mind of thinking won’t make you more valuable in the long run, and no one needs your advice on how to write stuff as every sort of information is available online for free of charge! If you are part of this community, and want to make money, you must use your qualifications and give people what they need. Your job is not to tell people what kind of principles you have, and believe me noone cares about it. 
Regards, X

I confess I nearly had a urine-based accident when this popped into my inbox. But it confused me on several points.

  • If people who obviously can’t achieve qualifications by themselves get other people who can do the work, and do know their stuff, to do their work for them – and end up with a certificate that looks just like the one owned by us poor saps who slog away for years – how can this possibly ‘improve the value’ of the people  who ‘achieve their “qualifications” through their own efforts’?
  • If ‘no one needs [my] advice on how to write stuff as every sort of information is available online for free of charge!’ – why do other people do it so often, and why was X asking for someone to write his essay? X could just have looked it up. Simples!

    Anyway, this concludes this post because as you can see above, ‘[my] job is not to tell people what kind of principles [I] have, and… noone cares about it’. So I won’t.

You Want Me To Do WHAT? OR, Meeting Your Public

by

So we all know the deal these days. Whether your début novel is published by one of the Big Names and sails into the best seller charts, or whether you’re trying to sell copies of your self-published book to anyone besides your neighbour, aunt and grandma, you need to promote yourself and your work. And for most writers, the onus is on them to contact local papers and radio, tweet, set up a Facebook Page, blog, link, vlog about their writing journey, do guest posts about what their study looks like, share links to their Pinterest account, get LinkedIn… and generally put themselves about a bit.

If you want advice about how to promote your book, look no further than ‘self-confessed media tart’ Jane Wenham-Jones’ book, Wannabe A Writer We’ve Heard Of,  her brilliant follow up to Wannabe A Writer. You can find info about them both on the link.

But say, after urging from your publisher and/or advice from Jane W-J, you now find yourself in front of a crowd at a village hall, in front of a pile of books at your local book store, or in the studio of a local radio station wearing big headphones, with the producer counting down to your cue while sweat pools in between your shoulder blades? Few of us come purpose-built to deal with those situations gracefully and productively. That’s where Skillsstudio could come in handy. They offer corporate, group and one-to one coaching on presentation skills, public speaking, communication skills, voice training, interview skills and media training, plus e-learning, and their website offers some great tips. As radio interviews are often the first media-facing exercise writers have to endure, those are the Skillstudio tips I thought I’d summarise and share.

Tips for Radio Interviews
“When you are interviewed on radio you have an incredibly short amount of time to make an impact.  So it’s important that you don’t waste a second or mess up – as you probably won’t have time to recover from a mistake.”

Definitely true. A good friend of mine was suddenly told she would be interviewed on the radio, via telephone, about the services provided by the family centre she ran. I tuned in and listened while she pelleted poor Barbara Sturgeon of Radio Kent with a super-speed burst of facts. Barbara had no chance of getting a word in edgeways and was falling about laughing by the time my hapless friend finished. It was certainly a memorable first radio interview, but not a good one. Her message wasn’t clear because she rushed – hence Studioskills golden rules:

  • use the time before an interview to focus on what the presenter is saying beforehand.  You may pick up some useful background information or context that you can use in your responses.
  • DON’T RUSH
  • Speak in short sentences – one thought per sentence.
  • Take time over the first three words of the sentence – so that you don’t rush into the sentence.
  • Don’t rush any syllables – make sure each syllable in the word is pronounced
  • Don’t butt in to the question – wait for the presenter to finish asking the question before you respond
  • Focus on understanding the question, rather than rehearsing your response in your head
  • Buy yourself time at the start of your response with a phrase such as “that’s a very interesting question” – if you need time to think about how to start your answer
  • Tell a story – if you imagine each of your responses are a short story – this will automatically inject more energy and expression into your voice
  • Emphasise important words – these are the key words that make up the essence of your sentences and will help you to sound more convincing
  • Smile – when you smile your voice smiles and it comes across more appealing and personable to the listeners. 

If you want more tips about how to face your admiring public with confidence, pop over to Skillstudio and take a look. And next time one of your loved ones is short of a present idea, why not ask them to buy you a course? Especially as at the moment, if yours is a personal booking, you can get 25% off the advertised prices – just include the promotional code PERSONAL when completing the online booking form. You must also pay for the course within 5 days of making the booking.

Now… first question… where did you get the idea for your book? Don’t rush your answer! 😀