Another Old (Book) Friend

          Does anybody else have this book? Has anyone ever heard of

it? 'Kallee and Other Stories' by F. G. Turnbull, and illustrated rather beautifully by Lunt Roberts. (An unfortunate name, but beautiful drawings.)
          I ask because I've just found this old friend during the great turning out of my parents' house before selling it. I seized it with a cry of rage at having found it in a box intended to be given away to charity, and carried it away to the safety of my own overcrowded bookcases.
          'Kallee' was a great favourite of my Dad's, became a favourite of mine almost in infancy, and yet I've never seen it mentioned anywhere, or heard of the writer in any other context.
          I searched on Google, and found out nothing.
          The publisher is given as 'London, Sampson Low, Marston & Co, Ltd.' I've just a Google search on this firm, and came on this rather interesting site.
          The book itself can be found on sale online, for £14 or $21, used, but not a word about the author, or any reviews.
          My copy doesn't give much away. The copyright page is blank, except for this: 'This book is produced in complete conformity with the Authorised Economy Standards. Made and printed in Great Britain by Purnell and Sons, Ltd., Paulton (Somerset) and London.'
          My Dad loved it because all the stories are about animals and birds, and he loved them. He began reading me the stories when I was quite small - certainly not much older than seven. He used to read me a story and then put the book away in the bookcase. I would sneak it out, feeling I was doing something very daring in filching one of my Dad's books, and read it for myself. (And I can hear a yodelling from Switzerland as I write this. If you're curious as to why, here's a blog I made earlier, that will explain.

           This is how the title story, KALLEE, begins:

          I will never shoot a partridge again; that is a vow I have sworn. I still hope to use my gun through many years to come; but when the coveys rise before me in root or stubble field hereafter, I will keep my weapon at 'trail' and let them go. My spaniel, Roy, will gaze at me, with wonder in his dear old eyes, but he will soon understand that the brown birds are not our game - now that we have known Kallee, that great cock partridge.

          They're not really children's stories, as you can see; and yet, over several years, I read them all, returning to the book again and again. Looking through them now, I wonder how I coped with the Scots dialect of the keepers, and with phrases such as, 'As the stoat continued to haunt the field day after day...' Did I think the story meant the ghost of a stoat?
          I know I used to guess at the meaning of a lot of words, and also that, if completely defeated, I used to trail off to the nearest of my parents and ask them, 'What does this mean?' Once they'd explained, I'd take the book away again and continue reading. (Calm down, Switzerland!)
          You can tell that I loved the book, because inside the front cover I've drawn this. The '77' in the shield refers to the number of

our house. It says: 'Susan Lucy Price By Claim' - so I was laying claim to this book, even though it belonged to my Dad. And if I find out who put it in that charity bag... 

          My Dad often read me the story 'Grumphie' which is about three boys entering their pet pig into a competition. Grumphie has a straight tail, and therefore has no chance of winning - but as they're trying to spruce him up, he eats the cake of perfumed soap they're washing him with - and his tail curls! So now they know how to win. 'Wullie; bolt oot an' get a cake o' scented soap.' All the stories are set in Scotland: I wonder if that has anything to do with my tendency to head north whenever possible?
          Dad was probably trying to find the lighter, funnier stories, as being more suitable to my age - but when I started reading them for myself, the harsher stories quickly became my favourites. I particularly loved 'Crossed Trails'. This tells of a fox and a stag. The fox, as a cub, is charged and trampled by the stag, and his hind-leg shattered. The story tells how the lame fox grows up and struggles to survive in a hard Highland winter. During a blizzard, the fox and stag find themselves on the same trail, struggling through heavy snow and strong winds. The fox cringes away whenever he glimpses the stag - what he doesn't realise is that the stag is terrified of the fox on his trail. The stag  races away in panic, falls into a

crevasse and is killed. Shortly afterwards, the snow-blinded fox falls into the same hole - and finds himself lying on top of all the food he'll need to survive the winter.
          Another great favourite was 'The Rebel of Glenlee.' This tells of, as Monty Python might have put it, 'that most dangerous of all things, an intelligent, rebellious sheep.' She's a trial to her owners, is Birkie, the black-faced ewe. She was a spoilt, pet lamb, but felt herself thrown out of paradise when she was demoted to a mere sheep, and from that day hated all men and collies. She charges the dogs, refuses to return quietly to the home meadows, and leads the other sheep astray.
          But she redeems herself one terrible winter, when the flock is lost in the deep snow. Birkie is harried by a fox, but deals with it as she does with collies. Then, as she struggles in deep snow, ravens blind her. In such dire trouble, Birkie starts to hanker for the safety of home, and makes tracks for it, regardless of any obstacles in her way. She happens on the rest of the flock, and they follow her. She guides them all home - and becomes the farmer's pet once again.

          
          How I loved this book! I'm going to enjoy reading it again. My guess is that the stories originally appeared in a newspaper or magazine, as they're all the same length. But I really know nothing about F G Turnbull at all. Do the initials, perhaps, disguise a woman writer?
          Does anybody out there know anything more, about writer or artist? 

          May 9th 2013. I'm adding a line, and a link, to this blog, at Carole's request (see comments below.) I recommend her blog to book lovers! Here's the link.

          And for those of you wondering where Blott has wandered off to...

Head Mangling with the Sterkarms

Always a cheerie chappie

          Orwell said writing a book was like enduring a long drawn out bout of illness.

          When I first read that, as teenager, I didn’t believe it.  I thought, ‘What an old moan. He’s earning a living by writing instead of in a factory, and all he can do is grumble about it.’

          Now, much older, I realise what a true word the man wrote: and I’ve been learning how true all over again.  Somehow, you always forget.

          I’ve slogged for three years on this Sterkarm book, just working out a plot, and I’ve finally figured out – I think – how it’s to end.

          And I kidded myself that I was now on the downward slope.  One final rewrite , to knock it all into shape, right?

          Right?

          Wrong.

          I’ve been rewriting this past week, with two windows open on the computer – one for the slog version, and one for the new and, I hope, final version.  Copying and pasting from one to the other, and re-ordering, rewriting, changing, improving…

          And it’s been even more head-nipping than before.

          With almost every sentence I’m having to jump back to earlier chapters or pages, because, I find, I’ve thrown in something crucial on the fly, promising myself that I’d sort it out later.  Well, the later is now.  I have to go back and work out where it should have been introduced and, when I’ve found the place, I have to do the work of finding the words to actually blend whatever it is in, without it seeming too obvious.

          Or I realise that I’d forgotten all about an important character – who should be in this scene – but isn’t.  Who would have important and interesting things to say – if I go back and work him or her into the scene – which may mean going back a considerable way to establish their presence.  And then I have to find the words for those interesting and important things they would say, and the right tone – in fact, work out what they’re feeling at that moment.

          Or I find a character in a scene who really isn’t necessary and has to be written out… and the scene patched up around the hole they’ve left.

          I’d forgotten how much thought and concentration – and referring to research notes - this all takes.

         And this is saying nothing about the moving around of whole scenes, the writing of new ones, the new decisions on where chapters should start and end, and the rewriting required to make those changes work.

          Head-nipping?  It’s head-mangling.

          It makes me think of my old headmaster (a maths graduate), who infuriated my art-teacher by telling him that ‘art requires no intelligent thought.’  I am certain my headmaster had never tried to write a novel.

          It’s given me a fervent love of Word’s navigation pane (called document map in earlier versions) which makes it possible for me to skip about, from heading to heading, in seconds, instead of spending an age scrolling backwards and forwards, or opening and closing lots of files before finding the bit I want.

          In fact, I find myself giving thanks again for computers in general.  If I’d had to do all this with paper and pen, or with an old typewriter and loose paper, I would have tipped myself into an empty paper box and had myself buried by now.

          Blott is particuarly relevant this week, as it seems authors are being plagued by a specialist species of internet troll, as Kathleen Jones tells us here, at Authors Electric.

The End of the Sterkarms

     I’ve worked hard on Sterkarm 3 for three years and until a couple of days ago, never knew how it would end.

     I had a vague idea, a mood – but nothing more.

     I’ve asked myself many times: How do I want it to end?  And also, How do my readers want it to end?

     This hasn’t been a lot of help.  For myself, I drew a blank.  I didn’t know.  I wanted it to end right – that’s all I could say.  And, of course, that’s subjective. What I feel is the right ending, someone else will think wrong.

     Much as I appreciate my readers – and I do – I suspected that many of them wanted S3 to end with a big wedding for Per and Andrea and ‘happy ever after’.  And all their dogs and horses happy ever after too.  And it’s not that I’m against this, so much as it never felt right. The Sterkarms’ world was violent and unsympathetic. They wouldn’t know what to do with happy ever after.

     Wouldn’t it be easer to just give my readers what they want anyway?

     No! Because if I didn’t feel it was right, I couldn’t write it.  Its lack of rightness would nag at me with every word.  It would be like trying to swim the Channel in a meringue wedding-dress (and I’m not a good swimmer anyway.)

     But where could I find the right ending?  Will those shops that stock ideas sell it?  Will they deliver?

     I considered story arc. I looked at twists and turns – I think ‘reversals’ is the fancy term.  I constructed coloured diagrams and looked hard at them, noting how the colours parted and joined.  I consulted the runes.

     It did help. I mentioned the difficulties with the time-line last week.  Although I’d been aware that the time sequence of the book was perhaps, well – a bit approximate – it was the mapping that made it apparent how and where.

     None of this helped capture an ending. 

     So I was watching stupid-telly the other night when my hand reached for a note-book and my favourite fast, scribbly pen.  (A pentel energel, recommended by Davy, which floats over the paper and gets thoughts down almost as fast as you can think them.)  The daemon had tapped my shoulder and I started writing almost without stopping to think.

     I scribbled down what I thought the first book in the series, The Sterkarm Handshake, was about.  Not what happens in it, which is mere plot, but what it was about.

     I think it’s about treachery and betrayal.  The Sterkarm badge, the Handshake, is an emblem of their treachery – but they are treacherous because they see themselves as alone in a hostile world.

     The Company makes what seems an honest deal with the Sterkarms, but knows it is selling them short – indeed, as a capitalist business, it must, to make a profit.

     Joe, the 21^st Century homeless man, has been betrayed by his society – but finds a home with the treacherous Sterkarms, who see him as one of their own, and, like the Devil, they look after their own.

     And A Sterkarm Kiss? – Treachery and betrayal again.  Andrea thinks she will be returning to her love affair with Per, but finds herself betrayed both by the Company and her own fantasies – and, in leaving the 21^st for ever, betrays the loving partner she leaves behind.

     The Company broker an alliance and a marriage between the feudal enemies, the Sterkarms and Grannams – but it is all a huge, deliberate deceit which leads to murder.  (Pure fantasy, of course: this kind of political manipulation never happens in the real world outside of conspiracy theory.)

     Marriage, murder, deceit, treachery - as I scribbled, the ending of Sterkarm 3 leaped into my head.  Calloo!  Callay!  Glasses of   Festival Ale all round!  Boil a haggis!

     Of course, I’m not going to tell you the ending; but I will give you this assurance – No dogs or horses were harmed in the concluding of this novel.

You wouldn't lose your place on a Kindle, Blott!

So What Do You Do In Schools Anyway?

In full story-telling flow: 'Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum!'

          A friend asked me this the other day.  It’s not the first time I’ve been asked it.  My friends seem deeply puzzled by the amount of time I spend in schools.

          I can understand, I suppose.  After all, unlike many other writers, I’ve never been a teacher.  I have no qualifications.  I know lots of little bits of odd things, but I can’t claim to be an expert in any one subject.

          My partner, Davy, who phoned while I was writing this blog, insists that I put in here that my education came from ‘voracious reading’ (his words.)  He insists that I add this, with his usual relentless Scottish persistence, in case people think that I’m "thick and only managed to write a book by a fluke. You shouldn’t keep telling people you’re unqualified, you should stop that now."

          Sixty-odd books, Davy?  Some fluke.  But now, when he reads this (and he will read it, just to check, I ken the cheukster) here is his correction, [almost] as dictated over the phone.

          Despite being thick and flukish, I’m always telling friends that I’m off to some school in Yorkshire, or South Wales, or Scotland.  I’ve even been into schools in Germany, where one boy asked me breathlessly (in beautiful English) whether I’d met the Queen.  He and his classmates gasped with shock when I replied, “No: and I don’t want to. I think Britain should be a Republic.”  Seeing astonished expressions on all sides, I added, “Not everybody in Britain adores the monarchy.”

Soon to be available for download

          The head thanked me later, saying that was exactly why he wanted British visitors – to counter the impression of Britain that his pupils received from television and magazines. (The ever protective and vigilant Davy doesn’t like this part either.  He thinks I’ll lose my monarchist readership: as if I ever had one.  Honestly, love the man, but if I listened to him, I’d never open my mouth or write a word. And when Davy reads this, he will cry – his constant refrain – ‘Suzzie, you never do as you’re told, Suzzie!’)

         Countering impressions received… That’s pretty much the answer to my friends’ question.  As a writer in school, I – and other writers, such as my SAS friends – are giant teaching aids. There are thousands of children who’ve never given much thought to where books come from, or who think they’re only written by – well, by people like the Queen, perhaps: distant, rich people with private educations and plummy accents. And then I turn up – an ordinary woman, with a Black Country accent, and read from the books I’ve written.

Tales of the Underworld on Amazon

          It makes writing a book suddenly seem like something ordinary people can do - something that living people you can talk to can do.  I tell them about the slum I was born in, and the council estate I was raised on, the comprehensive I attended.

          I tell stories, which I love – and because I read an exciting story aloud from one of my own books – well, suddenly, books are exciting and worth investigating.

          And that’s what writers are doing in schools near you.

          Here, you'll find SAS members, including me, reading from their books.  And I daresay one or two might two might pop up in the comments.

          Blott's come down from the roof....