December 2009

I have been very busy this autumn promoting Remarkable Creatures, and welcome the month-long  break in December. While everyone else is holiday shopping (buying books, I hope - they are the best gifts!), I can get back to the part of writing life I love best: researching and making up stories.

I don't want to say much about my next book as it's still in its infancy. All I'll tell you is that it's about a Quaker family working on the Underground Railroad in 19th-century Ohio. Any Ohioans with research tips, please email me!

I am also working on three similar projects for the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of London. Each approached me independently and asked if I would write a short story based on items in their collections. So I am writing two short pieces about two portraits of unknown people for the NPG, a story about a 19th-century quilt for an upcoming quilt exhibition at the V&A, and a story involving letters written on toilet paper and passed between suffragettes while in prison. All appear in March 2010 - details to come.

 

November 2009

So, Hilary Mantel wins the Man Booker Prize (the UK's most prestigious book award) for Wolf Hall, and suddenly historical fiction is fashionable again.

I have been asked many times why I write historical novels, and I have never been able to give a satisfactory answer. I know it's got something to do with getting away from myself. In contemporary settings my characters sound too much like me, with Tracy-like preoccupations. Leap backwards, however, and I'm forced to think and write more carefully. I can't fall back on my own experience, but must really engage my imagination to create a world I've never lived in.

That's only one part of the answer, though. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but contemporary life feels at times a little one-dimensional. Looking to the future gives it a second dimension. But it's when I look backwards, and find a context for this life, that I become part of a bigger whole, and feel like a complete, three-dimensional person.

History as the new religion? I can live with that.

 

September 2009

I am not long back from a book tour of New Zealand and Australia, six cities in 11 days. It was hard work but a lot of fun too, especially as I'd never been Down Under. Here are some of the high spots:

Best food: Melting Moments (vanilla sandwich biscuits)

Best drink: New Zealand Pinot Noirs

Best event: Fullers Bookshop in Hobart, Tasmania. So packed that just being part of the crowd was an event in itself. Plus it felt so strange talking about my book at what felt like the end of the world.

Best city: Melbourne. Who would have guessed it would beat Sydney? It was like an American city except with trams. I felt right at home.

Best interview: Fran Kelley on ABC breakfast radio. Smart woman. To see or hear it click here.

Best run: Christchurch along the river, in the frosty dawn.

Best jetlag behaviour: On the first day, several hours after 24-hour flight, I walked into Wild and Woolly Yarns in Auckland and bought yarn and needles, though I haven't knitted in 30 years. I finished a scarf during the tour.

Best scary moment: Surfing at Bondi Beach and finding out afterwards about the sharks! 

 

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August 2009

 Memory does play funny tricks. If you look at the Inspiration page in the section on Remarkable Creatures, you'll see that I've described finding out about the fossil hunter Mary Anning at the Dinosaur Museum in Dorchester. I had a vivid picture in my head of the display I saw there several years ago: I knew which wall it was on and what sketch of Mary I saw.

Yesterday I went back to the museum for the first time since being inspired, and was shocked to find that the display was completely different from how I had remembered it. It was in a corner rather than on a long wall, it didn't have the sketch I'd remembered, and there was a mannequin of Mary I'd forgotten all about. In the photo above you can see the display, and also what sort of things I get up to in the name of promotion!

It's odd - and humbling - how wrong I got it. I try hard to get details right in my books, but this has made me wonder what else I might have misremembered!

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Years ago when Girl with a Pearl Earring was about to be published, I discovered another novel about a Vermeer painting had just come out - Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Plus Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever, which was about a Dutch painter, had been published and done well. I was horrified, sure that my chance of success was ruined. How many novels on Dutch painters are people willing to read?

Several, as it turned out. The synchronicity ended up benefitting all, the way cafes clustered together can all do well rather than eat into each other's business.

Now it's happening again. When I started writing about Mary Anning, a little-known English fossil hunter, it never occurred to me that others might be following the same trail. But with Remarkable Creatures' publication I've found out that both a biography and another novel about her are coming out. I realize the other writers may be just as horrified as I was years ago with the Vermeer glut.

But I hope this will be another case of mutual support rather than rivalry, much the way my two heroines support rather than compete with each other. (Two male scientists of the era, Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen, chose to tear each other apart.) Maybe that's a female response, but it's always worked for me!