The world's smallest accountant

HB: Just received this from WW editor John Dougherty, who's keen to stop the government attempting to turn our children into tiny proto-accountants at the age of 4 1/2.

"If you're worried about the increasing 'schoolification' of children's lives (especially the under fives), please sign up to this petition: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/OpenEYE/ - and please circulate this link to your colleagues, friends and family.

If you want to know more, you can visit the 'Open EYE petition' page. And remember - if children grow up to hate reading because they've been forced into it too soon, we'll all be out of a job!"

I've signed the petition. It takes about 40 seconds. Why not do it now and then feel satisfyingly smug all through Christmas? It doesn't even cost a penny.

The sexiest industry

HB: Now why do the good things of life always escape me? According to this article, publishing is the sexiest indsutry in the world for the unattached (or just sleazy) male. My agent doesn't throw a Xmas party. Not even a rotten Xmas card. He certainly doesn't arrange for roomfuls of langorous & slinky women asking if they can inspect my notably well-formed gerundives. Wrong agent, obviously.

Website praise - we're blushing

HB: We get zillions of nice comments on our website, but the following one (take a bow Paul Chronnell) struck me in particular. Paul - who is a pro author himself - wrote:

"... your site has wasted more of my time than any other. In a really good way. I'm a great advocate of tone - great information stated in a dreary way is simply dreary. Your tone is fabulous. I have never had an agent and am now craving one rather like a smoker at a very long church service, then stumbled upon your 'getting an agent' pages rather by accident. And I'm going to do exactly what they suggest. Because your honesty rings so wonderfully true. I think it's a kind of 'kinship' that has me wanting to write your site a Christmas card. I have been so sick and tired of reading about agents wanting sole access to a spec script. It has always irritated that agents know how necessary they are! Now I'm going to send it to lots!

I'm as insecure as the next writer. A cheque no sooner clears in my account than I'm sure I'll never sell another word. But, and for want of sounding like a teenager penning a first short story, your site gave me a confidence and renewed enthusiasm for what I (and we) do."

I think Paul really hits the spot. Yes, we try not to write boring crap, however great the info. And yes, we are on the side of writers, first last & always.

Agents are fine & necessary, as are drainage engineers & HGV drivers. But the idea that we should be cowed by them? Ridiculous. We pay em. They should call us 'sir', 'madam' or simply bow.

Wizards & warlocks

HB: In the foaming intellectual cauldron that is the WW tea break, the following question arose. Is there an adult fantasy novel, which is both

(i) a genuine fantasy novel (rather than, say a Jonathan Strange / Dr Norrell type book which true fantasy afficionados would hardly count); and

(ii) of real literary class?

It's pretty easy to find kids' literature which meets both criteria. Philip Pullman is a clear contender. So too, perhaps, is my own childhood favourite, the Wizard of Earthsea. But what about genuinely adult fiction?

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast might be a strong contender. There's also plenty of sci-fi ish stuff which certainly meets the second criterion, but probably not the first.

Think dragons, oh blog-readers. Think elves, warlocks, magic, rings, knights. Anything where the word 'jerkin' crops up more often than the word 'water'.

Any suggestions? The prize on offer? You get to be crowned Christmas King (or Queen) of the WW Tea Break. Americans and Republicans can get to be Seasonal President, instead.

Stop the world I want to get off

HB: So Lily Allen, the 22-year-old pop star and an 'enthusiastic reader', is to judge the Orange Prize for fiction. She's not thick. She probably really does like books. She might be a good judge.

But, well, I just think that people who write books are probably best placed to judge whether books are any good. Would Ian McEwan be asked to judge the Brits? Doris Lessing act as compere to the MoBos? All bloody sad if you ask me. In my next life, I want to be an accountant.

Books Under Water

HB: Just received this appeal for money to rebuild the New Orleans public library, and thought I'd share.

Personally, this ain't going to have me reaching for my wallet. I sort of figure that the wealthiest nation on earth can jolly well look after its own. It may not care to do so, of course, but I still fancy that my wallet needs better reasons to venture out into the cold & frosty air.

Bah, humbug. More generously disposed bloggees will put me to shame, no doubt.

Pretty faces, ethnic pasts

HB: Was talking to an agent yesterday - a particularly nice version of the breed. (I know. Damn with faint praise, why don't I?)

We were talking about the kind of authors she was particularly looking for. We covered all those good things about genre, voice, subject and so on. Then she started to say something and stopped, adding, 'Well, of course I suppose every agent is going to say this.'

Say what, sez I.

'Well, you know, anyone younger is always welcome. And ethnic for preference. But I'm sure you hear that all the time.'

I don't actually hear that all the time, but that's mostly, I think, because when I talk to agents about a writer I'm naive enough to talk about their manuscript. I don't personally give a monkey's whether a writer is young or old, pretty or not pretty. Indeed, I often don't know. We don't meet our clients and I'm not about to start asking people for photos. But her comment is another one of those straws in the wind. In a PR driven industry, then back-story matters. Faces matter. Books? Sheez! How last century can you get?

Messy Play

HB: The Writers' Workshop has a smart new office - a converted garage with very rough whitewashed walls and a bit of carpet laid over a rather bumpy floor.

All very snug & fairly businesslike compared with the ramshackle arrangements of the past. But what about decor? One large blank wall really demanded a substantial work of art to fill it, but a Rothko was definitely out of the 07/08 budget.

So we got a 8 x 4 ft sheet of MDF and cut it down to 8 x 3 - basically the size of the wall we needed to fill. Painted it a nice off-white, then filled 4 empty fairy liquid containers with paint. (One mauve, one green, one orangey-red, one yellow). And squirted.

Master of ceremonies was Tommy who, with an M.St. in History of Art, was the definite expert among us. The meisterwerk took about 10 minutes to create and is now drying on the living room table. (The floor's no good because of dogs). Since the paint is about 8mm thick in places, it may be some time a-drying. We'll put a photo up as soon as the picture can safely be tilted.

But first impressions? It's bloody amazing.

Commissions taken, naturally.

I held Dick Whittington's will

SB: Gary Haines, the archivist at the The Guild of Mercers showed me Dick Whittington's will on Friday. It was in a grey cardboard box in a climate controlled cellar opposite Bank tube station. It was written in 1426 and I held it in my hands! It looked like a large notebook. It was written on vellum in an amazingly regular zigg-zaggy script and it was written in English so if you concentrated hard enough you could make out some of the words. On the frontispiece they had drawn a beautiful picture of him on his death bed. He was propped up on his pillows exposing his skinny skeletal chest. Around his four poster bed were about ten colleagues in thier fur trimmed merchant's coats with pink tinted faces and in the background was a doctor holding up a flask of wee and gazing at it in an analytical sort of way.

Four hundred years ago Richard Whittington left a bequest of £6,500 to be administered by the Mercer's Guild. Last year the Mercers gave away aproximately £8 million in charity and that was all started by Dick Whittington's will. I came away in awe.

What about this one?

SB: Has anybody tried Snow by Orphan Pamuk? He's not some poxy, cheap and tawdry, fly-by-night Booker Prize winner, he's a proper grown up Nobel Prize winner and the book is terrible. I couldn't finish it and I really perservered - I thought it must be me, thought that I was a vacant ninny whose brain had been rotted by child care. In the end I decided that I might be all of those things but Snow is still a bad book, mysteriously made posh.

Who is this Scott Trade anyway? I don't believe that's his real name, it's much too glamorous for the book world. I think he's actually called John Bishop but this is his screen name and he's about to star in an ironic reworking of a Western with River Phoenix and Renee Zellweger.

Congratulations!

Well done to David Boswell. He's an 84 year old who came to us with a kind of miscellany of non-fiction pieces that he'd hoped to publish as a collection.

We told him that publication in book form was out of the question, and that he should make some changes to his style before submitting his work to magazines. He took our advice and worked on the construction & style of his writing. He's just written to say that he's now got a regular slot with a magazine, who 'seem to want to accept everything I can offer'.

I know from my own experience that making the grade as a freelance journalist is only a little easier than breathing underwater. In the past, I've tried getting my foot into the door at the Times, the Guardian and now the Telegraph. I' ve scored some successes, but it's all been pretty frustrating stuff. So David, you have my admiration and (just a little) envy. Well done you!