Falcon books, hot springs in CA and Nv

Sometimes I pick books with the same ‘flavour’ to follow each other because I don’t want to leave the place the first book has taken me, sometimes it happens by accident. Reading Miss Garnett’s Angle (Sally Vickers) right after In Cold Domain (Anne Fine) brought out similarities in two very different books. They both have characters trapped in being who they are, not happy but with no thought of considering whether who they are is who they want to be. In both cases they’re redeemed into happiness or at least experience (passion or suffering – passio either way). It would be crude to say they’re redeemed by Catholic men; Miss Garnett’s Carlo and the Monsignore in Venice, Barbara’s Spanish fiancé Miguel-Angel are quite explicitly Catholic and that’s part of the plot but more as a functional element than a signifier. Really, they’re redeemed by otherness – and by an openness to the possibility that they can be other than they are. Barbara says to her brother William that she likes his boyfriend Caspar because he knows what is right for William and what makes him happy and her Miguel-Angel asks her to change her obsession with her dysfunctional family and her passive-aggressive mother not because he doesn’t like it but because he doesn’t like who it makes her be. No-one tells Miss Garnett what’s right for her but she discovers what’s been wrong for her, as she finds a luminous sense of wonder about angels and the people she meets and love (human and divine).

Both books have that very English attention to large emotions trapped in small situations, like Barbara Pym or Orwell in the Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying or Stella Gibbons in the books that aren’t funny; a badly cooked cutlet or an unwelcoming reception of your donation to the jumble or your unworthy wish not to take the communion cup after someone with wet lips or the subtle cruelties of bringing someone ‘down to earth’ ‘for their own good’ are at the time, everything there is in the world. The larger situations - breaking relationships, suicide and deception - are behind the smaller situations, pulling them out of shape but they’re not addressed. It’s emotion denied, turned in, constrained as a weapon or hoarded as a defence, parcelled out in fear or ground down by dreariness, but suddenly flashing out as a gleam of gold – turning the tables or just seeing for the first time what’s on them . A turning in of energies instead of out, as the Goot Doctor tells Judith Starkadder (one reason Cold Comfort Farm is so biting is that it takes this convention and shreds it completely). Both books have fairy-tale elements; quests, treasure hunts, the frog discovered to be a prince, the unexpected legacy. Those give a sense of lightness and wonder to a story that could be dark or grim, but it’s the opening to emotion and possibility and the eventual truths and lettings go that make the transformations.

In Cold Domain has more bite, more sex and more wheelchairs; Miss Garnett’s Angel has more Venice. They both have a lightening sense of seeing, and moving beyond, human frailty .

apart from Ms Mars, with whom we keep an appointment most days (working through Season One again filling in the odd episodes we msised, in preparation for watching Season Two again, this time not missing episode 13), I was thinking the only other Veronica I've come across was Matilda Veronica Goodnight in Faking it, the sequel to Jennifer Cruise's Welcome to Temptation, also known as Betty, Celeste, Vilma Kaplan, Bundle of Lust, Scarlett Hodge and eventually ( presume) Mrs Davy Dempsey. But Simon reminded me we actually met a Veronica in France a couple of years back - or at least Veronique. Veronique Tanaka; I think she was French Japanese, but her English was better than my French or my Japanese.

It was after an Apple event in Paris and the blue canapes at the Pompidou Centre were getting me down so we jumped on the metro and went across to the larger of the Iles to this tiny bistro we'd found a couple of years back, opposite a shop selling the most fabulous stones (I got a big chunky amber necklace). It's a small neighbourhood bistro, but given the neighbourhood it's pretty upmarket and the snails are drowning in garlic. The american couple at the next table were deeply shocked that they were real snails and we translated the rest of the menu for them just in case. When we went to pay at the bar on the way out Veronique said something about the snails, because she recognised his Cat and Girl T shirt (obscure comics-R-Us); she's a big fan of Dorothy Gambrell. I think that broke the ice because she seemed extremely shy but we got on pretty well. We ended up sitting at the bar for a while with an armagnac. We told her about our choclate, cassoulet and comic runs where we bring an empty wheelie suitcase so we can head home via Galleries Lafayette and Album. She told us about the exhibition she'd just had in a small gallery, called Les Nuages. I was saying how different the BD market is to the UK comics market, with everything from kids comics to (very) adult titles alongside the superheroes, much more like the range of Japanese manga, and she mentioned she was planning a series of paintings trying to bring the French and Japanese erotic styles together, for another exhibition.

And Verionica Mars does remind me a bit of Veronique. Something around the eyes, the way of looking up and sideways, when she's not sure what people think but she's going to say it anyway. Veronica toughened up and got sassy ('a little bit Buffy, a little bit Bogarde' as the DVD says). I hope Veronique hasn't.

I've spotted at least one writer posting beginnings of unfinished work lately and I know that beginning has to grab when when I start writing. But how many of you look at the beginning when you decide to read a book? I look at the writer, the publisher (Avon Horror, just say noooooooooooooooooo!), the back blurb and a random page in the middle where I start reading to see if I like the style. But it never occurs to me to look at the beginning - possibly because then I'd have started reading the book and wouldn't be able to stop...

"It's the perception of being in control, not the reality, that determines our success in navigating the world... In short, successful writers are rats with islands. They can't see the island, they have no logical reason for thinking there's an island, but as God is their witness, they know there's one somewhere and they're going to keep swimming until they find it. "

Jennifer Crusie on How to Survive your Publishing Career

when we helped tamaranth clear out her shelves for moving, she gave me Welcome To Temptation, recommending the scenes about writing sex scenes; personally I like the water tower that looks more phallic every time they repaint it to stop it looking phallic. I picked up another 3 or 4 Crusie novels in San Francisco and have been binge reading them ever since. They're smart, sassy and loud-mouthed ('spaghetti-spined weasel' is a typical insult), but they also remind me of Georgette Heyer - in terms of conflic, resolution and character, as well as in the irony. And the sex scenes are nicely written. Following a link from a link from a link I found her Web site, including this column from Romance Writer's Report, talking about how facing reality isn't necessarily a good thing, especially for fiction writers, and using examples from Half Empty, Half Full. Like the experiment where they take two tanks of opaque liquid, one with an undersea island and one without. Sunk rats are rescued, but rats who've found an island in a previous tank swim for twice as long before sinking.

Her conclusion is a variation on 'writers write' combined with 'no surrender' - which sounds good to me. But it's making me think about what is coping and what is a coping mechanism; what are the things to be worried that I do and what are the things that may seem weird but are a good thing for me to do because they help. For me half empty is when I'm drinking and half full is when I'm pouring and days when I remember that are always better than days when I don't.