Launch Party part 2

Posted on | June 3, 2010 | No Comments

3rd June, 2010 11am

First reviews just come in – hurrah! Looks like the weather is a good augury after all.

A nice mention in Good Housekeeping, and an even nicer one in London’s Stylist: “No one writes historical fiction more evocatively than Hickman…… The Pindar Diamond will keep you utterly entranced.” So, not a deafening silence after all…..

The dishwasher has chosen today of all days to pack up, but I will not let this phase me…. am totally bostered by these first good reviews. The friend who was reading The Pindar Diamond at the yoga retreat rings me and raves. This is an important moment. A real person (as opposed to people in the trade: they do count, of course, but in a different way) has read it and liked it. No – what am I saying – not just liked it – but loved it. Really loved it.

I feel as though this book is being born.

It is a wonderful feeling.

The sun is still shining. I have managed to keep Dog out of the garden – most especially off the newly turfed (extremely small) square of grass where I’m hoping my guests will be standing later on – she chewed up the last bit of lawn in about five minutes. She looks at me mournfully through the gates, but I’m standing firm….

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Launch party 1

Posted on | June 3, 2010 | No Comments

3rd June, 2010 7.30 am

Four days to go till publication.

Woke up at 6.30 this morning to brilliant sunshine streaming in through the windows. Can’t quite believe it’s true – my launch party is tonight – but when I get up and look outside, it is true. This is going to be the most perfectly beautiful early summer’s day. A good augury, surely…?

Something very strange has happened. All my nerves seem to have gone. Is it the sunshine? This has something to do with it, but not entirely. There’s nothing much you can really do about a book at this stage, so – as someone has pointed out to me on this blog – there really is nothing for it but to relax and enjoy it.

Category: Pindar Diamond

Hay on Wye

Posted on | June 1, 2010 | 1 Comment

Ist June, 2010 Hay on Wye

That’s it then. One more year, one more Guardian/Hay-on-Wye festival.

I don’t think there’s more fun to be had anywhere else on this planet than in this one small and muddy green field in Herefordshire.

Love doing my event – always do at Hay which always has a great energy about it, and incredibly interested and engaged audience – it’s the first time I have talked about The Pindar Diamond. I was performing with Stephanie Merrit (who writes as SJ.Parris), and Sian Busby – both of them lovely, sympatica women who also write ‘historical fiction’ (I hate this term, but apprently there is no getting away from it – can anyone think of an alternative that does not imply some kind of bodice-ripping somewhere along the line?).

This teaming up can be a bit of a lottery – so much depends on personal chemistry – but they prove a fascinating pair to talk with. We compare notes on all sorts of issues – from how we do our research to where the boundaries lie between fact and fiction – and the hour flies by, despite the rain drumming down on the canvas tent top so loudly it almost drowns out the sound of our voices (this is Hay, after all, and it always, always, but always rains)

Thanks, ladies, you were great.

As for the rest of it, well, all the usual fun of the fair: (Husband’s dancing abilities at the GQ/Soho House party much twittered about this morning – how weird is that?), dinners, the Guardian debate, a fantastic hour listening to Kazuo Ishiguro, visits to book shops and to Giffords Circus of course (more of that later), a Mexican cocktail party complete with a mariachi band and lashings of mescal (this, one of the more surreal things I have ever seen at Hay), about 1,000 friends coming in and out of the Green Room, and perhaps most extraordinary of all a meeting out of the blue with a second cousin whom I never knew I had (the second most surreal thing that has ever happened to me here).

Hay at festival time is rather how I imagine the old medieval fairs must have been. You wander round the town and little stalls spring up everywhere: an enterprising pair of school boys busk by the side of the road; someone else has opened their back yard as car park, a couple who live on the road on the way to the festival site have set up a tea shop in their back garden (I recommend this one); someone else is selling bric-a-brac – and so on.

The atmosphere is wonderful, everyone in a good mood, I’ve talked so much over the last 48 hours I feel as though my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth.

Am completely and totally exhausted – more tomorrow.

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panic attack

Posted on | May 28, 2010 | 2 Comments

28th May, 2010

So much for the yoga breath.

Had a very bad moment yesterday afternoon. Suppose the calm before the storm is actually the calm before the absolutely deafening silence? The fact is that you simply never know what is going to happen at publication – certainly not as far as reviews are concerned.

A good friend of mind – now a famous writer, loftily above such mundane things as reviews – recalls how when his first book came out (a rather obscure academic text book) he rushed out on the day and bought every single newspaper and magazine to read his reviews. And – you’ve guessed it – there were none. Not one. Not one single review.

He laughs about it now, of course. But that story has always remained in my mind. Supposing that should happen to me? It never actually has happened. But there’s always a first time……and supposing this is it?

I ring my publicist at Bloomsbury. She is divine about it. She is used to the that ‘nervous author’ moment and says all the right soothing things.

I am consoled. The subscription into the book shops is great. I’m doing lots of events and all the major festivals. Every one seems bullish.

But the fact of the matter is that fiction is much more difficult to publicise than non-fiction. When I was writing non-fiction (Daughters of Britannia, Courtesans) even the travel books, my books were reviewed everywhere. But literary editiors, for some reason, are not so keen on fiction (one prominent editor told my publicist that he finds it very hard to get good fiction reviewers, partly because of the axe grinding that goes on – novelist are not the most generous of souls sometimes) and devote far less space to it in their pages.

What to do? I’ve done my part. I’ve written the book. Possibly the best book I’ve ever written. I’ll just have to hold my nerve (more yoga breathing perhaps?) and hope for the best.

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yoga breath

Posted on | May 27, 2010 | 2 Comments

Thursday 28th May, 2010

Exactly a week to go until the launch.

This is probably the worst part of publishing a book – the part when nothing seems to be happening, the calm before the storm (or so you hope) of reviews, events, lectures, the book finally appearing in the shops.

One of my events has been cancelled – very depressing. But my blog on the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook website has been posted this week and has attracted some great comments – feel much more optimistic. Ordered the wine for the party – seems horribly expensive. But a cheque has come in from the Royal Opera House for my article about courtesans, which amazingly is almost exactly the amount the wine has cost…. And so on and so forth. Up and down. Up and down. ‘The Pindar Diamond’ is the seventh book I have published, but it still seems as nerve wracking as the first.

I have been away from home all week on a yoga retreat, hoping that this will take my mind off things. We practice a good deal of meditation and breathing, all of which is good for stress, and – I hope – a certain quality of detachment. Amazingly, it does help. A bit. I speak to my agent, and to my publicist at Bloomsbury, who are very upbeat, but now I wish I had resited the temptation and not called them. It only pulls my mind back to all the things that I have been trying to forget about for a few days – cancelled event, expensive wine etc etc .

I’ve given a friend who’s with me on the retreat a copy of my book. I know she loved ‘The Aviary Gate’ and so she starts reading it straight away, in between our sessions. I have to force myself not to stalk the poor woman, reading the expression on her face for her reaction every five minutes……

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