entitlement

Long ago when I was more easily bullied, the industry retitled In Viriconium for US paperback without my permission. Although the publisher kindly offered me a list of the usual fantasy phrases we might choose from together, I didn’t feel I could help betray the first book I was in any way proud of writing.

Climbers was originally called The Rock Garden, a title that referred metaphorically to the bijou satisfactions and limitations of UK outcrop climbing, and literally to the setting of a pivotal scene in the novel. It brought those elements together and acted to frame and present what is admittedly a complex text. The industry thought it might confuse readers because it was the name of a music venue in Covent Garden. I reverted to the working or placeholder title, which was anyway appealingly blunt.

There were no problems with The Course of the Heart. Not the first time an irony of mine has been welcomed into the bosom of fantasy.

Light wanted to be called Empty Space, but the industry thought that was too depressive, ie not bombastic enough. It also risked suggesting to the reader that nothing much might happen, in a book that began as it meant to go on, with a misogynist mathematician & a heavily armed spaceship suffering from BPD. As a title, Light, like Climbers, had the advantage of being direct, but it also conveniently suggested its opposite; and later I was able to use Empty Space after all, for the third volume of the trilogy. So that was a win. I still think of the whole work as Empty Space –a satisfying set of references taking in absurdism, physics and dramatic theory.

The placeholder title for my novel in progress is Anabasis. I was planning to call the finished object The Future, but that’s taken. Titles aren’t copyrightable, but you want to avoid a collision if you can, unless you’re using a monumentally cliche phrase or saying, as in Signs of Life or Travel Arrangements. One of the problems if you go for the banal (or even something from physics) is that your book disappears into the babel of start-up names which is Late Google, less a search engine than a directory of businesses near you. Another is that the algorithm generally doesn’t get sarcasm. So now I try to use distinctive, multi-word phrases like You Should Come With Me Now or Things That Never Happen.

the unconscious never lies

Reassessing one of your early female characters–who, you believed at the time, was based on performances associated with two or three well-known UK actresses of the late 1960s/70s–you discover that her signature characteristics were so clearly based on a suite of your own. This is embarrassing enough. But further: she existed in the narrative solely as a description, a summing-up presented less as an act of memory than a brief, difficult, pseudo-objective act of psychological retrieval and dismissal by her own son.

mysteries of the new

March, and I’m already re-reading a book I read in February.

I won’t say what book it is, or who wrote it, because that isn’t going to be the point of this entry. It would be a distraction. I’ll only say that reading it has had as distinct an effect on me as Wilde’s nonfiction read in adolescence; Genette’s Narrative Discourse encountered in a leaky one-up one-down cottage in the shadow of Black Hill in the late 1970s; or a late but electrifying engagement with The Anxiety of Influence in my early forties. That is, it has made me both think and dance about in elation, & that’s an astonishing, barely understandable gift to someone who’s seventy eight years old and has enjoyed rather more gifts like that in life than his life has warranted.

That’s not the point of the entry either.

I could list all the things I’ve been doing since Christmas last that rehabilitate the me I used to be. But the one that counts in this context is that I’ve returned to journalling, an activity the last three years or so left me no room for. This means renewing the dialogue with all the books I read rather than just thinking of ways to assess specific items selected by and on behalf of other people. It’s a relief that writing can, once again, at some point in every single day, switch suddenly and unprompted away from the production of fiction (or public commentary upon it) and into private commentary on absolutely anything. I feel a lot less constrained than I’ve been–as if the private arena with its very small stage and vast number of steeply raked & completely empty seats, is exactly where I need to be. I feel loosened up by engaging other people’s work rather than my own; even more by the freedom not to have to say something about it in public. I feel able to learn.

Ironically, the first gift of this rediscovery of personal space arrived last year, with the publicly-delivered Visions of Johanna, an essay you can read, if you want, in You Spin Me Round. I won’t stop reviewing, obviously, or posting here. But it’s nice to remember that public opinions are at least partly formed and refined in private, and that the first thing a human self learns is to make and defend its own boundaries…