Numbers Game

National Railway Museum

A trip to York has been an excellent excuse to neglect Authonomy where The Water’s Edge is now sinking down the rankings. And if I am ever to get on with my rewrite project I’m afraid that sink it must. Even maintaining its current position requires too much effort in finding and swapping reads. But I have made some good writing friends on Authonomy and hope I’ll catch up with them when the novel is put back together again. (Ali, Jane, Diana, Elinor, Lellie and Sandrine – this means you!)

 Ironically, as I withdraw from the fray, I am just starting to understand some aspects of how the ranking system works. It turns out that points allocated to a book when it’s backed vary according to the ‘reviewer rank’ of the backer. Reviewer points are allocated depending on the progress of a book after you have backed it, i.e. backing a ‘best seller’ book  will do little for your own reviewer ranking; backing an ‘unknown’ that subsequently shoots up the charts will boost your own rank – and consequently makes you a more effective backer of other books. Very cunning, methinks, and does something to mitigate the idea that it’s purely a numbers game.

 If anyone is still paying attention, I can tell you that The Water’s Edge has been backed by three ‘top reviewers’ so far. More perplexing is that while my book rank is hovering just outside 600, my reviewer rank is a tidy 375.   Okay, I think it is a numbers game after all. Or does this mean I should give up writing and become a professional editor?  

 While ignoring my read/review duties I also found a useful article on writing historical novels, which makes a clear statement that the story, rather than the research, is the thing to get right So all that research, however useful, is just a way of putting off the inevitable.  

 I think I knew that really.

Middle of the Road

My Library Thing widget should update soon to show I’ve been on a reading fest – three books in three days is a lot for me! – and only happened because a neck problem has kept me off the golf-course and also the P.C. So far this week I have clocked up  a racy historical novel, a contemporary family story and a fictional biography (which I haven’t yet finished).

How would I summarise my literary tastes? Not sure, but I was disconcerted to see Monica Ali described in the Telegraph as ‘middle-brow’, as if that were a bad thing.  I haven’t read her latest books but I thoroughy enjoyed Brick Lane and I woud say it is roughly representative of a lot of what I read. And what I read is probaby what I aspire to in my writing.  So that makes me middle-brow too. But who wants to be low-brow writer (poor or formulaic writing?) and who would lay caim to high-brow (obscure and  with a limited market?) The whole ‘brow’ idea is clearly a lazy shorthand which lets us put someone down without explaining our real reasons. If I have to choose one, it’s still going to be the  middle ground.

 If for ‘high-brow’ we can read ‘literary’, my current read probably does fall in that category. Jill Dawson’s ”The Great Lover’  is about Rupert Brooke.  I chose it as an example of historical fiction that deals with a real (and not too distant) figure – something I’m about to attempt myself. I like the way it uses his maid at Grantchester (not just a servant but also the keeper of the honey bees) as the second narrator. As such it’s a good example of the technique of  ‘fictional minor character’ as a vehicle for historical fiction, something I’m thinking about too. In this case Brooke himself also has a voice which is convincing but so far less compelling – perhaps the problem with a hero who is, as he should be, a man of light and shade, i.e. he carries a lot of the narrative but I’m not sure I like him! Still it’s early days, and the beautifully evoked atmosphere (smell those scones!)  is beginning to pull me in.