Tag Archives: BBC Radio 4

Sleep

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Sleep.  A short word.

Sleeeep! I can hear it. The sound is enough to make me want to curl up in a favourite chair and let the world pass by on the other side, while I drift off to nothingness.

Ha Ha!

I go to bed tired, with socks on, make sure my feet are warm, snuggle under my 13.5 tog Down and Feather duvet, with only my nose and mouth uncovered, then close my eyes and relax. I may drift off for an hour, some times two, but three consecutive hours seems to be my limit at any one time. I wake up FROZEN. Deep cold through my body, like someone has stolen my duvet , or placed me beside the open door of a freezer!

I remember Jack telling my mother, shortly after we married, that I frightened him one night. I was asleep, no sign of movement or breathing. He placed his face close to mine, but there was no sound or feeling of breath. My right arm was cold and felt like marble. It took him a full hour to massage the arm back to normal heat and softness.

Mammy informed him AND me, that I was like that all through childhood, She said she kept a small vanity mirror from a handbag in my bedroom, so she could hold it close to my nose & mouth for signs of breathing.

I remember her teasing me, that at times there was no need to remake my bed, I never moved to toss it about.

Radio is my answer with the voices low enough to just hear the sound.

Now if I do sleep, it is always after Sailing By* and I am regularly awake for the change over from BBC World Service to BBC Radio 4 at 05:20 each morning.

Reading is hopeless, My eyes get tired quickly and I lose concentration as the words dance about the page, re reading the same paragraph over and over is a pain in the proverbial.

I have tried audio books but the Narrator’s voice has to be right or I just cannot listen for more than a few sentences.

* “Sailing By” composed by Ronald Binge in 1963 and performed by the Alan Perry/William Gardner Orchestra, and below is the version used by the BBC for the lead in to the late night shipping forecast.

 

Sweet Dreams, my lovelies!

Selling your book?

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In Business, is a weekly programme of thirty minutes duration, on BBC Radio 4, produced by Kent DePinto and presented by Peter Day. This weeks programme was broadcast on Thursday 17 April 2014, with a repeat tomorrow, Sunday 20 April 2014 at 21:30 hrs. The topic for this week: Has the book a future?

The scene was the London Book Fair where Peter Day asked the question:

Can books survive, and if so, how?

The group of people proving answers were:

  • Philip Jones, Editor, The Bookseller
  • Tom Weldon, Chief Executive, Penguin Random House UK
  • Jon Fine, Director of Author and Publisher Relations at Amazon.
  • Jonny Geller, Joint CEO, Curtis Brown Literary and Talent Agency
  • C. J. Daugherty, Author, The Night School series
  • Nigel Newton, Co-founder and Chief Executive, Bloomsbury Publishing
  • James Daunt, Managing Director, Waterstones
  • Dan Kieran, Co-founder and CEO, Unbound

I found this weeks topic very interesting for several reasons.

To begin with, I want to divert you on a short tangent.

Over the years of my blogging life, I have written some blog posts in story form, normally picturing just one commenter sitting in front of me, and typing my tale as if speaking just to them. Somehow it works. The comments have been kind, some suggesting I join a writer’s group, others saying I should write a book. All very flattering. To me they may be stories, some might prefer to call them micro blog posts, while others will see them as drivel. Such is life.

800 words is not a book!

Some weeks back, I tried an experiment: A story that began life with an actual event. I was involved very much in the peripheral background, but actually only met two of the minor players, all I knew about the main participants was second hand and short in detail. Over a glass of wine one evening, I decided it was the kernel of an idea for a story, so I let my imagination take over and thus began:- The End is never the End

  1. Part one contained 1,668 words – Not a book.
  2. Part Two dried up after 800 words.
  3. Parts 3&4 and the as yet unpublished Part 5 are back on par with the first attempt.
  4. Total word count so far: 7,007. Still not a book. At this rate it might take until my dying day to finish it.

Back to the programme and I will mention just a couple of points.
Every week on Amazon, of the top 100 digital books, twenty one are self published. In the USA it is 30 and in India, it is 20%.

James Daunt, Managing Director, Waterstones said that pricing was important, depending on where you are. In a mass market shopping mall selling ordinary fiction of the John Grisham genre, they needed a really good offer, because the supermarkets are fighting for the same customers at greatly reduced prices.

C. J. Daugherty, Author of The Night School series, spoke of earning €17 per book in Germany, €18 in France and between £2.99- £5.99 in the UK. £2.99 for a book that she spent six months writing and four months editing? There would not be many parsnips buttered with that!

Now for the shocker: Huge amounts of the piled up best sellers are sent back to the publishers for pulping. Two and a half years ago, in January, Waterstones sent back £120 million worth of books not sold – FOR PULPING! This year it was down to £7 million. They are working on bringing that figure down to between 10 and 5%.

With the modern digital means of printing, it is possible to publish on a Monday and sell one million books to someone in Africa on Tuesday – if, and it is a big IF, you get your marketing right.

So, I’ll stick with my hobby and not worry about all that stress for a couple of pennies.

No longer all at sea.

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Book Club on BBC Radio 4, presented by James Naughtie, is a once a month programme that I like to listen to, when at home.

On Sunday 06 April 2014, Irish writer John Banville discussed his novel The Sea which won the Man Booker prize in 2005.

In this episode which will be repeated on Thursday at 15.30, I was more taken by the way the author spoke about his process of writing, than about the book itself.

John Banville explained how he painstakingly writes his novels over many years, creating sentence after sentence. He trusts the sentence. He writes by the sentence. He does not write by the paragraph or the chapter. If he gets one sentence right it will lead on to the next one.

He said “The sentence is the greatest invention of humankind. The sentence is what makes us human, it is what we think with, what we devise with, what we declare love with, what we declare war with, it is the essence of us”.

He is pleased with the way he handles time, He does it without trying, it happens and it works, he trusts his instincts.

Those two points struck a chord with me.

Everything I have read up until now, about writing, spoke of structures, outlines, beginnings, middles and ends. Never before had I come across a mention of working sentence by sentence.

It is the way I have always worked, be it a letter, an email, a blog post or a story.

I wanted to re-listen to the programme to make sure I had heard correctly on Sunday. Tonight was the first opportunity I had to do so, and it was as if someone had given me the winning lottery numbers…..

Thank you John Banville for the boost in confidence to keep plugging on.