Tricia McGill--Childhood Memories

What is it about getting older? I can remember my first day at school clearly yet can’t recall what I did two days ago unless I look at my diary to check. As we get older we seem to dwell a lot in the past. I’ve never been one to live with regrets. We can’t do anything to change what has gone before.

My childhood was exceptionally happy, and I always say I am blessed for I have been surrounded by loving people as far back as I can remember. I was the youngest of ten and most of my five brothers and four sisters were adults or coming up to adulthood by the time I reached an age when I took notice of what was going on around me. My sisters taught me the alphabet and how to read before I attended school.

My two eldest sisters treated me like a doll and as they and our mother were all handy with a needle and sewing machine I was donned regularly in pretty dresses and with a white bow in my hair was carted off to have my photograph taken (which was done in a photo studio in those days). 

 

My book Remnants of Dreams is based on our mother’s life in that it follows the timeline of her life. She was born in 1895 and married our dad in 1914. Our dad went away to the war and our eldest brother was born not long after. Dad didn’t return until four years later, consequentially it was a while until the next child came along. But then there was mostly a one year gap in between. These children were reared during the hard times between wars. So therefore I was the luckiest as by the time I came along things were a lot brighter all round. I grew up on stories of the difficult years told to me by my eldest sister who has just passed her 91^st birthday and is still of sound mind and reads more books in a week than I ever could. 
 

I get angry with young people who complain about their lack of the finer things in life. We never had a telephone until our eldest brother had one installed. We lived in a six storey house in North London. Our mother’s sister, husband and two girls, had two rooms and a kitchen in the middle, our brother, his wife, son and daughter lived in the top two rooms with two attic bedrooms, and we had the bottom two floors. So, when we received a telephone call (we gave out the number to our friends) someone would yell from the top of the house for us and we would then climb five flights of stairs to answer the call in their living room. No one thought this odd in the slightest. Our lives were closely entwined. Our very extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins was spread far and wide, yet we kept in constant touch even before the telephone came along. There was such a thing as writing letters and waiting on the postman to call in those days.

For all our lack of amenities my childhood was full of happiness. It’s so true that what you never have you never miss. But I believe we were luckier by far. From an early age I was allowed to wander far and wide with my friends. We would be away from home for hours, only coming home when our stomachs told us it was time to eat. We played out all day every day, rain, sunshine or snow. We walked to and from school—a thirty minute walk each way. Our world was small. We had no idea what was going on in other countries or even in other parts of England, and ignorance is bliss. We never saw television until I was in my teens; and that was also my eldest brothers’. At times there would be about 15 of us crowded around his lounge room to watch this tiny black and white 9 inch screen.

But there was the radio, and the cinema. And always that close-knit family nearby.

Remnants of Dreams can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IA1XZ94

Remnants of Dreams moves from the horrors of the 1914-1918 war to the 1990s, and paints an unforgettable picture of a changing world and of working class people in North London whose only riches are love and the knowledge that they did their best.
Alicia’s indomitable spirit sustains her and her large family through two wars, illness, death and loss. From her mother’s example Sara finds the courage to escape an intolerable situation and forge a new life in a new country.

Tricia McGill’s Books We Love page: http://bookswelove.net/mcgill.php

Diane Scott Lewis - The Tribulations of Publication in the Eighteenth Century-or "Nothing much has changed"

Firstly, the Georgian author would struggle to find a publisher. Aspiring authors sought these prestigious men—for you’d be hard-pressed to find a lowly woman with their feeble brains in this profession—at the many booksellers’ shops that huddled in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. They would cart their precious manuscript to the Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row, where several stationers, booksellers and printers conducted their business.

If you lived in the provinces, too far from London, you had to use the postal service. The author would choose a bookseller, often after local advice, whose imprint he’d seen in newspaper advertisements or on a book’s title page. 

In 1759, Laurence Sterne, an obscure cleric in York, sent his unsolicited manuscript of Tristram Shandy to Robert Dodsley on the recommendation of John Hinxman, a York bookseller.

Sterne’s accompanying letter assured the publisher that his book had both literary and commercial value. Dodsley wasn’t impressed. He refused to pay the £50 Sterne requested for the copyright. The novel was rejected by a few publishers, but eventually achieved critical acclaim.

Whether the author approached a bookseller or used the post, his reception was usually chilly.

The arrogance if the bookseller was a common grievance among novelists, as depicted in Thomas Rowlandson’s drawing of 1780-84.

Though booksellers like Edmund Curll abused their position and their writers, many in this profession were honest and prudent men. They bore the burden of publication and profit and were inundated with manuscripts, most of which had no commercial merit. The sheer volume of submissions made it hard for them to discriminate. Most stayed with established figures rather than risk their money on an unknown author.

The hapless writer often resorted to appealing to the publisher’s personal interests, such as politics, religion, children’s literature or poetry. The astute author needed to research whom he’d submit to.

From the booksellers’ perspective, the letters Robert Dodsley received over thirty years showed authors as exacting and demanding in their requests, extolling their works as the perfect creations whose publication was eagerly awaited by the entire world, and they would "allow them to pass through his firm."

Aware of the fragile ego and financial status of writers, a few booksellers formed literary circles where authors could slake their thirst with food, alcohol and conversation. Brothers Charles and Edward Dilly, who published Boswell’s Life of Johnson, were famous for their literary dinners.

When an author approached a bookseller, he could also verify the merit of his work if he found a famous author who would publicly endorse it.

Dodsley

Dodsley’s literary career was promoted by Daniel Defoe. Despite bickering and competition, brother writers stood together to brace one another up in this risky endeavor.

Literary patronage—via a rich gentleman or the Court—was another way for an author to find publication, though this was fading by this century. Still, some thought of patronage as prostitution. Poet Charles Churchill proclaimed: "Gentlemen kept a bard, just as they keep a whore."

Subscription was another way to secure publication: collect pre-payments for a book not yet published. Dr. Johnson organized many subscriptions for unknown writers that he admired. He wasn’t always successful.

Constant rejection drove several authors to self-publish their works, which mirrors the Indie authors we have today. The uncertain road to publication over two hundred years ago seems much the same as the present.

Information garnered from: The Pleasures of the Imagination, English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, by John Brewer, 1997.

To see my extensive research into the eighteenth century, read my historical adventure set in England during the French Revolution: Betrayed Countess, available from Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Betrayed-Countess-Historical-Romance-ebook/dp/B00AS4CET8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357304063&sr=1-1&keywords=diane+scott+lewis


Visit my website for more info on my historical novels.

http://www.dianescottlewis.org




　

In Very Good Company

By Victoria Chatham

Picture if you will a cold, wet afternoon in December. A strong south-westerly, not quite gale force wind drives gray, low lying clouds racing inland. Winter-bare tree branches twist and writhe and rain sluices over rooftops and slaps against windowpanes. In one house, its three hundred year old walls easily withstanding the onslaught, a family sits in front of a blazing log fire.

The mother has just finished reading a book she has written for her daughter’s fifteenth birthday. Sitting side by side on the sofa are the daughter and her two brothers.

For a moment there is silence.

“Wow, Mum,” says the daughter. “That’s great. Thanks.”

“So that’s what you’ve been doing with your Sundays,” says the eldest son.

“If you get it published, you won’t use your own name, will you?” asks the youngest son.

“Why ever not?” asks the mother.

“Well, hell,” says the youngest son. “We wouldn’t want our friends to laugh at us because you’re a writer.”

This thought had not entered the mother’s mind.

“A nom de plume, that’s what you need,” says the eldest son.

With that, the youngest son fetches an honest-to-goodness opera hat, the collapsible type out of which magicians produce white rabbits, and Fred Astaire made use of in the movie ‘Top Hat’. The eldest son gets paper and pencils and the daughter smiles and says, ‘we’ll invent a name for you.”

For the next half hour the children giggle and guffaw as they write names on paper slips, fold them, and place them in the hat. The mother, slightly puzzled by the concept of her children being embarrassed by the fact that she is a writer, skewers thick slices of bread onto the prongs of a long handled fork then holds it over the glowing logs to toast the bread. The stack of golden slices on the hearth grows as steadily as the pile of slips in the hat. Finally the hat is full. The children butter their toast and, when they are full, tell their mother to withdraw only two slips of paper.

The mother shakes the hat and fearfully reaches in. She has heard words that sounded suspiciously like ‘wafflemonger’ and ‘poohbaba’ but she breathes a sigh of relief when she opens the first slip of paper and reads the name ‘Laurel’. She reaches in again, and again breathes a sigh of relief when she reads ‘Freemont’.

And so Laurel Freemont was born and became not only the butt of many a family joke, but also the nom de plume, or pseudonym, behind which my children could hide their supposed embarrassment - although that has yet to be tested. Laurel Freemont is now a registered pseudonym with the Canadian organization, Access Copyright and whether she is ever employed has yet to be determined.

The reasons for the use of pseudonyms are many and varied. A floating pseudonym is available to anyone who wants to use it. A publishing house may create a house name to publish separate contributions from the same author. Two people writing together can create a collaborative pseudonym, as did Judith Barnard and Michael Fain writing as Judith Michael (Acts of Love, Pot of Gold, A Ruling Passion), Serge and Moira Stelmack writing as S.M. Stelmack (RONE award winners for Undertow) and Books We Love authors Tia Dani (see post from 07/08/2014). From the earliest times pseudonyms have been used to hide a family name and disguise gender, to conceal the identity of the originator of strong political opinions and to further the aspirations of authors, actors and singers.

Sir Reg Dwight does not have quite the same ring as does Sir Elton John.  Archie Leach, born in Bristol, England, might not have become as renowned as an actor if Paramount, in 1932, had not changed his name to Cary Grant. Charles Dickens wrote as Boz, a childhood name for his brother Augustus and we all know the tale of Samuel Langhorne Clemens who spent ten years as a Mississippi river steamboat pilot. ‘Mark twain’ was the technical phrase that the leadsman called when sounding a depth of two fathoms.

In an age when women were supposed to be seen and not heard, let alone write books, both Amandine-Aurore-Lucile, Baronne Dudevant and Mary Ann Evans achieved fame (and notoriety) by writing as George Sand (Indiana, Valentine, Lelia) and George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, Silas Marner) respectively.  Answering her critics, Sand wrote: ‘The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not matter greatly. I shall have opened the way for other women’.

And open the way she did. Today women write freely under whichever name they choose, their own or a pseudonym.  Smart marketing may have an author use their own name in one genre and a pseudonym in another, thereby building a readership in both genres and keeping the readers and the publisher happy.
Eleonor Alice Burford Hibbert wrote romantic suspense with gothic elements as Victoria Holt, romantic fiction as Philippa Carr and historical novels as Jean Plaidy. The Nora Roberts we know and love was born Eleanor Marie Robertson but also writes as J.D. Robb. Linda Lael Miller appears at times as Belle Lin or Georgianna Bell. Jude Gilliam-White writes as Jude Deveraux and Jayne Ann Krentz may be better known as Amanda Quick or Amanda Glass.
Whatever the reason for it, a pseudonym becomes as much of a tool as the pen, paper or electronic device the author uses with which to write. Should you choose to use this particular tool, then know you are in very good company.

Victoria Chatham's latest release is On Borrowed Time, Book Two in the Buxton Chronicles Series. Find this title here: http://amzn.com/B00IWGKQWG

and find Victoria here:

www.facebook.com/AuthorVictoriaChatham

www.bookswelove.com/chatham.php

www.victoriachatham.webs.com