Farewell number twenty-five. Welcome number twenty-six.

This week Marcia finished work on the editorial notes and so the manuscript for book number twenty-five (I am ignoring the four she wrote as Willa Marsh in this count) was sent off to her editor at Transworld which explains the headline. Naturally she has had no time to brood about number twenty-six as yet so I cannot tell you anything about it. From my point of view it means coming to terms with a whole new set of characters so that I can make sense of our conversations for the next few months. This is always great fun but demands huge concentration and a good deal of brain-searching.

“Albert? Albert? Do I know anyone called Albert?”

“He’s Jossie’s mother. Do keep up.”

These names were not pulled out of a hat. We have a lamp stand called Albert (please don’t ask why, the reason is lost in the mists of time) and our last dog was, of course, Jossie.

Meanwhile over on the other side of the Atlantic things have been buzzing. As most of you will already know, Marcia is published in the US by St Martin’s Press who are domiciled in the famous Flat Iron Building in New York. Soon they will be publishing The Sea Garden and Marcia has a new publicity team at SMP so it was decided that it would be good if everybody got to know each. This was achieved by a conference telephone call. It was held at 11 am in New York (4 pm here) and it was attended – if that is the right word – by Marcia, Marcia’s London agent (Dinah Wiener), her US agent (Kathy Anderson) and the team from SMP.

The cover of the SMP edition of The Sea Garden

As a result of that meeting, plans for the proposed marketing and publicity campaigns in the US were discussed and it has been agreed that all the US titles will be in the “book shop” on Marcia’s web site (which means work for me).

This year St. Martin’s Press is re-issuing a series of six memoirs, beginning with All Creatures Great and Small, by James Alfred Wight better known by his pen name: James Herriot. He was, of course, a vet whose practice was based in Thirsk in Yorkshire, but which covered large parts of the Yorkshire Dales and the North Yorkshire Moors.  

St. Martin’s Press has asked Marcia to say something about the late author and his work to be shared on the James Herriot Facebook page – see link below. This is what she has had to say.

"It is always a treat for me to re-visit the world of James Herriot. Begining with "It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet" I reacquaint myself with the many delightful characters: young James starting out on his new job at Darrowby; the two Wagnerian brothers, Siegfried and Tristan; Mrs Pumphrey and her pampered pekinese, Tricki Woo; the Dalesmen farmers and their families, their livestock and their traditions.

Herriot's entertaining stories of his triumphs and disasters, and his evocations of the magnificent Yorkshire countryside – magical in spring, bleak in winter – never fail to delight."

Should you want to have a look at that page (which will not yet have Marcia’s comment on it) click here. 

Meanwhile, I have been having fun and games with animals down here in Devon. Apart from the squirrels (who continue to find ways of winning regardless of what I try) we now have problems with rabbits. 

Well, to be honest, one rabbit. The garden here is generally rather wild (which we like) but we decided that a bit of colour on the lawn (if that is the right word for a mixture of plantains, dock, dandelion, daisy mixed in with the odd blade of grass) outside our sitting room would not go amiss. So, I filled one of our wooden tubs with pansies and and a ceramic pot with nemesia.

You will be as delighted as I was to discover that bunnies LOVE pansies: flowers, leaves, stalks and even roots.

Why is this cat here?  There is no good answer to that question but he (or, as it may well be, she) was sitting on the wall of a garden up the road and I thought some of you might like a rest from dogs. But not for long.

Meanwhile, Marcia and I went for a walk around the grounds here in Dartington Hall yesterday and I took a few photographs. These are on the other blog: if you want to have a look click here. 

You will remember that I was out on the River Dart with my friend Roger a while back. As we came out of Old Mill Creek, there was a work boat bringing a catamaran up to put her on a mooring. Not terribly unexpectedly, the guy in the boat was another of Roger’s chums and with him was his dog, Roy.  

Poems and publications

Quite a few people in recent days have been asking Marcia about the poem from which she quoted in Forgotten Laughter. They want to know where they can read it. Well, the answer is here. The poem was written by Marcia's sister, Bridget, and has not been published. Very few people who write the occasional poem can get their work into print. Of course it is possible to make these available in this electronic age and so I decided to explore and see whether or not there are any web sites devoted to just that. I Googled "web site for poets" and came up with a few that looked quite interesting. However, you do need to know how the internet works to make this work for you and not all poets do (Bridget is one of these).  Anyway, enough: here is the poem.

DIFFERENT VIEW

I sat there in the window

Looking down below

At the cobbles in the courtyard

Dusted white with snow.

The scene was very peaceful

The air was very cold.

The lights from the windows opposite

In the darkness stood out bold.

I sat there in the window

In the evening without light.

I wished I were a grown-up

And could go out in the night.

I stood there in the courtyard

The cobbles wet with snow

The windows all around me

Had a welcome glow.

I stood there in the darkness

Wondering which way to go.

People hurried past me

Keeping their gazes low.

The night was very silent

The air so very cold.

I wish I were a child again

And had a hand to hold.

Thinking of snow, this last week we had the first frost of the winter. The lanes up on the moor were quite icy and so the time has come to bring into shelter some of the pots out in the garden so that what is growing in them has a better chance of surviving and a good start in the spring. It really is amazing how quickly time flies by for it seems as if it was only the other day that Marcia and I set off to start looking for the setting of the book she is now writing. That was one of those brilliant late spring days and so was months ago. Where have they gone?

Marcia with some of the readers after her talk at the Taunton Literary Festival.

We received an email from Chris Smale (Transworld's representative in this part of the world) yesterday with some pictures of Marcia at the talk she gave for the Taunton Literary Festival which is hosted by Brendon Books. This was, as you know, the last function in what is now last year's writing year (simply because the last function after publication day marks the year end) and so we now start all over again - except, of course, that Marcia has been working on another book since that day in spring.

Taken last spring from the corner of a field behind Torcross where
we spent many hours while Marcia connected with her new characters

Publication day is, in one sense, a double event: the arrival of a brand new book in hardback plus the paperback edition of the book first published last year. Readers who turn up at signings and talks have the perfectly reasonable expectation that Marcia will be able to talk quite intelligently about these two books without realising that this is quite difficult. Putting The Sea Garden to one side for a moment, since finishing Postcards from the Past she has written and finalised next year's book (to be called Indian Summer) which will come out in 2014 and is hard at work on the next one (it has a working title but that might be changed so it will remain a secret for now) which should be on the book shelves in 2015. Each book deals with a completely new bunch of characters - although we know that we often come across old friends as well. So, when Marcia looks blank when someone asks, "Will Oliver be able to work from the Tamar?" please understand that for a long, long and, for her, embarrassing moment she has no idea what the questioner is talking about. Really, no idea: she has moved on - which is how it should be.

This week we have Spike, a miniature poodle from the other
side of the Atlantic.

The four dimensions

As I write, Marcia and – by extension – I are living in four dimensions. This has never happened before: astrology speak you might call this conjunction. I understand that the planets Venus and Jupiter are about to be (or have just been – this is not my subject) in conjunction and that this is terribly important. It seems it has something to do with being a gift from heaven so from where I sit it obviously applies to my spouse.

Our conjunction comes from a different place – a very different one. It is all to do with timing, of course, which is, I suppose, self-evident. Anyway, the four dimensions are Postcards from the Past (down on Bodmin moor with meanders off to Peneglos on the north Cornwall coast), The Sea Garden (set mainly on the banks of the River Tamar with trips to Tavistock), Indian Summer (I’ll come back to that one in a minute) and Untitled.

We are on Bodmin moor in Postcards from the Past.
This was the closest we got to the "feel" of Mellinpons,
home to Edmund and Wilhelmina St Enedoc.

As I said, it is all to do with timing. In a few weeks time Marcia will be carrying out the annual book-signing tour (see schedule below). Two books will be involved: the paperback of TSG and the hardback of PFTP. The first was written in 2010/11 and the second in 2011/12. Readers will want Marcia to talk about those books but those two worlds are, to her, a distant memory. Both of these dimensions will need some intense exploration before those signings if Marcia is to be able to deal reasonably intelligently with questions.

The River Tamar, the setting for The Sea Garden.

There is a nice story here about trying to remember books about which you are going to talk. Marcia was to be interviewed by Judi Spiers on Radio BBC Devon to discuss, or so she had been told, The Way We Were. She spent a few days boning up on the book and arrived at the studio at the appropriate time. Almost every room in the Exeter studios is fitted with a loudspeaker which keeps everyone aware of what is being broadcast. As usual, when one discussion ends, an announcement is made regarding the next talk and then a piece of music is played. So it was that moments before being live on air, Marcia heard the announcement, “Next we talk to one of our favourite authors Marcia Willett about her new book The Prodigal Wife.”

Marcia told me afterwards that her mind went completely blank – Prodigal Wife? – what Prodigal Wife? Needless to say she was the only one to know that she was in a state of panic: by the time the microphones were switched on she had pulled herself together. I have a feeling that this experience is one of the reasons she prepares so hard before these signings.

Here we are on Dartmoor again but not up on the open moors
but in the farmland  that adjoins them.

The third dimension was given a title earlier this week: Indian Summer. Finding titles for books is oddly extremely difficult. We have seen before that Marcia gives her books a “working title” that the marketing department rejects. This is fair enough: it is their job to sell books and they don’t want the title to turn people away but to attract them. Often Marcia is more than happy with the suggestions that are made although there are a couple of times when she has been less so. She always felt that the working title Stony Sanctuary was better that the published title Forgotten Laughter. The book, after all, was set in a granite long house on Dartmoor – a long house in which quite a few of the characters took sanctuary at critical moments in their lives. Anyway, the last couple of weeks have been somewhat overshadowed by the need to title the book that is now in production – and which I will be telling you all about next autumn.

This is in The Dandelion, a coffee shop that is attached to the Moorland Hotel at Haytor.
You will have to wait until 2014 to know why this is important.

Then, of course, there is the book now in the planning stage – dimension the fourth. This is when Marcia drifts away from everything else and enters almost completely into the world that she is about to create, as I have often described.

I suppose four should be five. Somewhere, usually on the periphery, there is a thing called “real life”. It tends to be considered of little importance although there are the usual requirements – food, clean clothes, etc – which do need a certain amount of attention.

This week’s blog dog lives in the United States of America and belongs to one of Marcia’s readers. Sally Gingerbread, as she is called is a cross between a Sheltie and a Chow.

Signings as of today (all signings last 1 hour):

Friday, October 11: Totnes Bookshop 2 pm

Saturday, October 12: The Harbour Bookshop, Kingsbridge 11 am

Friday, October 18: Bookstop, Tavistock 10.30 am

Saturday, October 19: The Torbay Bookshop, Paignton 10.30 am

Saturday, October 26: Waterstone’s, Plymouth 11 am

Saturday, October 26: Waterstone’s,, Roman Gate, Exeter 2 pm

To be scheduled: Waterstone’s. Truro and The Bookshop, Liskeard.

Badgers and Swans

This week it’s all about links. To be honest, when I woke up this morning I was in a bit of a panic. What on earth would I write about this week? Mind totally blank. Coffee helped to dispel the sheer blind terror but did little to provide a theme, a subject, anything!

The Marcia said something about a member of the family. Nothing of any real consequence, just the idle comments that most couples throw to and fro - the small change of conversation , the contact calls that hold everything together rather like the delightful chattering you get with a flock of long-tailed tits. Out of that comment, and I now have idea what it was, came that thought. Links - I shall talk about links.

From the writer's point of view, thoughts and ideas: plots and characters if the writer is a novelist, bullet points in other cases - these come somewhat out of the blue, hanging there invitingly, asking to be given due consideration and to be remembered come what may. That last is so important. It may well that this 'thing' will have nothing to do with the book or article or blog on which the writer is working. In such a case it can, usually does, cause distraction and muddle but it is there for a reason. It might not be for the next book/article/blog nor even the one that follows that but these are the nuggets of gold that will become the building bricks from which the final work is built.

It is the links that turn these nuggets into stories - and even the most mundane of non-fiction writing should tell a story and tell it in a way that holds the reader's attention to the bitter end. Suddenly it becomes clear that there is a link: to use Marcia's The Sea Garden to illustrate the point, a link between Kate and Joss. At this stage there will be no idea what that link is: only much later will another piece of information be revealed and we learn that Joss has won an award endowed by Kate's late husband.

Sometimes one of these nuggets is in storage for a number of years. The vision of a journalist living in a converted coastguard cottage waited in the wings for many years before Marcia realised that there was a link here with the Chadwicks and, especially, with Jocelyn. Meanwhile, Cordelia (for it was she in The Prodigal Wife) had to be kept firmly at bay until it was time for her to step forward.

I suspect that some of you are wondering why we have the badgers and the swans. Well, the link is that these photographs were sent to us by readers - the swans by Helen in Portsmouth and the badgers by Susan in Kent. Many thanks to you both for sharing them with us.

Now for a terrible confession: I have lost the notebook in which I have recorded the names of the blog dogs. Marcia and I were having a cup of tea in the community shop-cum-cafe in Holne on Dartmoor when we came across this most delightful person but I cannot give you a name. So, if you know this week's blog dog, please post a comment here to put right this terrible wrong.

I should add that they do serve some really superb home made cake  - so keep well away if you are on a diet.

Kate's Kronikles

When we first meet Kate, it is her last day at school and she is saying good-bye to her great friend, Cassandra. Although they do not know it then, their lives are to be inextricably entwined. Both appear in a number of Marcia's books. Just for the record, here are the milestones in Kate's life – indicating in which book the events occur. She was born Katherine Beauchamp shortly after the end of the second world war. In 1957 she was sent to a girls' boarding school on the Quantock Hills where she was to meet Cassandra Mackworth.

Those Who Serve

Cassandra invites her to the 1963 Summer Ball at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth. Cassandra is going with her fiancée, Tom Wivenhoe, and it is here that Kate meets her future husband, Mark Webster. Both Mark and Tom are studying at the college and both are to enjoy good careers in the submarine service.

Twelve months later both Kate and Cass are married and Kate gives birth to her twin boys in the September of 1965. She is to spend the next few years watching her marriage fall apart, a process exacerbated by Mark's mental cruelty not just to her but, and this is even worse as far as Kate is concerned, to their sons. Inevitably they separate and, in the March of 1976, she is back in Devon and working in a second hand bookshop. An intense affair with the owner of the bookshop ends when she fears that it is damaging her twins. Finally it is Mark who seeks a divorce, which he does in 1981, and for the next few years Kate is not only lonely but has difficulty in making ends meet as she has refused to take anything from Mark on condition that he continues to support the twins who, like the children of most naval officers at that time, are at boarding school.

Thea's Parrot

One of Kate's friends, Felicity Mainwaring, dies and, much to Kate's astonishment, leaves everything to her. Some eighteen months later she is to meet the famous artist David Porteous who is trying to find Felicity. He is taken aback to find a painting that he had given Felicity hanging on the wall in Kate's house. Gradually he tells Kate all about his relationship with Felicity which he had seen as a mild summer flirtation but she had taken far more seriously. To the surprise of both, they find themselves becoming more and more attached to each other. Finally, in 1991 and between books, they marry.

Apart from a passing reference in The Dipper and a brief flash-back in Starting Over, the next time we meet Kate is in Echoes of the Dance. It is 2004 and life has just dealt her two blows and she is grieving for David and her golden retriever.

Roly, whose son looks after Kate's garden, lives on the northern edge of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. He is fostering a retriever bitch whose owner has died and he invites Kate down in the hope – one to be fulfilled – that she will give Flossie a home. It is during this book that Roly introduces Kate to Bruno Trevannion. We first meet Bruno and the mini-estate called Paradise in The Golden Cup. Included in Paradise is a row of four cottage, once used by boat builder, and one of these is empty following the departure of a tenant. Kate's house is now far too big for her and she has decided to sell but (and Marcia and I both sympathise with this) has no idea what she wants to buy. To give herself a breathing space, she decides to become Bruno's tenant, a move which is, of course, a drastic down size with the result that much of her furniture has to be left in store.

Now, in Marcia's next book, The Sea Garden, we revisit Kate – and Cassandra. You will, however, have to wait until it is published to find out how life has been treating her over the last four or five years. Furthermore, through some flash-backs, we learn more about what was happening to both girls between leaving school and marrying. Enjoy. 

The River Tamar at high tide on a rather nice day.
We are looking upstream from The Sea Garden.

The Jackdaw Jottings

One slight fear we had when we moved into our tree house was that we would miss the birds that had been such an important part of our lives. Certainly there was no evidence that any visited other than an empty peanut holder that hung on a bracket over the railing around the balcony. This we duly filled and waited – and waited – and waited.

Meanwhile the area was echoing to the harsh contact calls of the local jackdaws who spend their time up at this end of the village. They have a 'lookout' in the form of three tall conifers in a neighbour's garden. From there they fly out on forays, perching on roof tops and chimneys, peering into gutters, and dropping down to grab any small morsel that they can find. No one could possibly miss the jackdaws – or so I thought.

Thinking it would be nice to show you another photograph of one of these enchanting (if irritating) birds, I strolled down to the village with camera at the ready. A middle chap came out of his house, looking somewhat puzzled, and asked me what I was doing.

'I'm taking photographs of the jackdaws,' I explained.

'The what?'

'The jackdaws.' Seeing a look of utter bewilderment on his face I added, pointing, 'Those black birds'.

'Birds? Oh, them.'

Yes, them that you see here is two of them.

Sooner or later I shall take a picture which does not show them in silhouette against the sky. 

Now we are beginning to see more than jackdaws. With a bit of judicious feeding on the balcony we have a blackbird, a robin, a number of blue tits, a few great tits, one coal tit and, much to Marcia's joy because she loves them, a small flock of chattering long tailed tits that now call in twice a day – we have obviously become a part of their daily circuit. 

Blackbird

Robin

Blue Tit

Coal Tit and Great Tit at rear

Long Tailed Tit

And, of course, jackdaws.

Books and ebooks and book titles

Unpacking boxes of books has become a bit of a pastime recently. I had not realised that there were quite a few that I packed before we left this side of the moor which remained unpacked for the whole ten years or so that we were 'up north'.

That meant there were a few pleasant surprises and none more pleasant than coming across a publication in German which featured two novels: Die Mühle am Fluss (Hattie's Mill) by Marcia and Liebesnest mit Ausblick (Every Woman for Herself) by Trisha Ashley. Anyway, I thought you might like to see the cover so here it is.

Another forgotten book was also published in Germany. This was a Willa Marsh book Die dritte Schwestter or Sisters Under the Skin. The cover is, I think, wonderful so here you have three different “takes” on the same book: English, French and German.

* * * * *

Marcia had gone off to enjoy a reunion lunch with some of her old pals and so, after I had unpacked as many boxes as the old back was willing to tackle, I popped over the the pub for some grub. Being constitutionally unable to eat alone without reading, I took my Kindle with me. As he was leaving, a chap who had been sitting at the next table came over and asked, 'Is that a Kindle?'

Anyway, that chat made me realise that a lot of people may not understand how ebooks and Kindles work so I thought I would explain. If you know all about them, skip the rest of this section.

The Kindle is really a very specialised hand held computer designed to enable you to carry hundreds of books with you in a piece of equipment about the size of a paperback book but very thin.

You can buy a Kindle from Amazon or from Waterstones. You can download 'Kindle for PC' onto your computer (PC or laptop) and then register your Kindle to your computer. That way you can order books from Amazon as you usually do but now you would order the Kindle version of the ebook and it is 'delivered' straight to your Kindle. If you want to be able to read it on the computer, you can do that as well. You will find your 'library' (list of books on your Kindle) on the computer and by clicking on a title, the book will download to the computer and (this is quite clever, really) your computer will know how far you have read it on your Kindle and ask you if you want to go to the last page you have read. Then, after reading some on the computer, when you go back to the Kindle you will have the same option: your Kindle and your computer are 'synchronised'.

What does all this cost? The main outlay is buying the Kindle in the first place. There are various options: the basic one is £69. With that you will also find you can download for no charge (or pence at the most) old books which have long since gone out of copyright: all of Dickens, Conan Doyle and so forth. Books still in copyright (such as Marcia's) will cost you almost the same as the paperback and, yes, Marcia will receive royalties on the sales of Kindle books in the same way as she does when you buy a normal book.

There is no regular subscription: once you have bought the Kindle you pay only for the books you download – which are also available from Waterstones if you prefer to deal with them.

So why did I buy a Kindle? The answer is simple: when I was having problems with my eyes I was unable to read books without using a fairly powerful magnifying glass which was, to say the least, a bore. With the Kindle you can choose what size the text is which made reading once again a pleasure. Now, even though things have settled down and I have reasonably good reading glasses, I prefer reading from the Kindle as it is easier than reading a book. The trouble is that I still love books and absolutely need to be surrounded by them but now quite a few of my collection are duplicated on the Kindle so that I have the best of both worlds – at a cost, of course.

The downside to ebooks is that this new technology is making life even harder for the small independent bookshops who are struggling against cheap offers from supermarkets and online stores such as Amazon. We do all we can to support them and we hope that you will too.

* * * * *

More emails in this week from people very upset – and rightly so – who buy what they thought was a new Marcia Willett only to find that it was one they already had but with a different title.

Poor Marcia gets equally upset but the title is up to the publisher. If two publishers, both publishing in English but in different countries decide to use different titles, there is nothing that can be done about it. We try to make it very clear when this happens but there is another dodge that you might find helpful. Except in the case of an author's primary publisher, you will find that on the copyright page (just inside the front of the book) the name of the primary publisher and, most importantly, the title of the book under which it was first published must be printed.

The same thing applies to sites such as amazon.com in the US where Those Who Serve was published under the title First Friends. If you go to amazon.com and search for Marcia Willett and then click on the cover of First Friends there will be nothing on that page to warn you. BUT, underneath the book illustration will be a link: Search inside another edition of this book. Click on that and to the left you will see another link: Copyright. Click on that and scroll down and there it is: First published in Great Britain by Headline Book Publishing, a division of Hodder Headline plc, as Those Who Serve.

I know it is a bore but if you live in the US and are thinking of buying any book first published in the UK – or the other way round – it is worth checking out as above before you buy. If the first link (Search inside another edition of this book) isn't visible then there isn't a problem.

There is no real reason for this picture except that this is Sea Garden country. It was taken late one evening looking over the River Tamar from the Devon side with the village of Cargreen, in Cornwall, sitting in the shadows. The tide is creeping in and it is as if everything is holding its breath for there is a deep silence: a silence that was broken by the call of a lone gull flying overhead. Seconds later a tractor drove along the road behind us and the moment passed.

Time for a mug of rejuvenating coffee. Marcia has said she will write something for you next week.