Laurie Graham, Author of At Sea

Well, it’s happened. You write the  novel, you edit it, it goes to press and then before you can get it onto the bookstands one of your characters escapes. Or in my case, two characters.

A Humble Companion is due out on June 7th, an everyday story of 18th century London, Royals and mere humans. You may imagine my horror when I discovered that my protagonist and narrator, Nellie Buzzard, has slipped her chains and begun Tweeting @nelliebuzzard. And as if that isn’t headache enough she’s taken with her her coachman, Dick Morphew, a blowhard if ever I met one, and has set him up Tweeting @dickmorphew.

I realise this is a lost cause. We’re 7: nil down and into injury time but I feel I can’t give up until the ref blows the final whistle. Which in my case will be when a doctor signs my death certificate. I’m talking about apostrophes, not for the first time and probably not for the last.

 Well, it finally happened.   Facebook. I knew I had to do it. I’d already managed Twitter, and as for Pinterest, I was addicted after five minutes. But Facebook is something else. I guessed it would be like being dropped from a remote Pacific island into Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and I was right.

After a couple of hours I had to call for oxygen and the assistance of someone at least thirty years my junior. So. I am there. Just not yet doing anything much.  

Word soon spread.

‘Laurie Graham’s on Facebook.’

‘Naah. Must be someone else.’

Five days away from my desk may not sound like a long time but I find it can take me another full day to get with the program. Do the laundry? No problem. Buy milk? Obviously. Remember where I was in the writing process? Erm….

 Research is something I aim to have done before I ever start work on a book. After all, how can the flesh hang convincingly if the skeleton isn’t firmly in place? I suppose it’s just a reflection of my grasshopper mind that I never manage to stick to this plan.

I start the working day needing to verify something and before I know it it’s lunchtime and I’ve wandered a long, long way from my intended path. Frinstance… this morning there were just two things I wanted to look up. The first was bricks. You want to know about bricks? Pull up a chair, cancel that trip to the landfill, join the British Brick Society. I mean, who knew?

My husband is currently reading my new book. In the past he would have read it at manuscript stage but lately he’s not been well enough to shuffle four hundred loose sheets of paper. I waited until I had a bound proof to offer him.

This is always a tense time for me. Naturally I want him to like it, just as I hope he’ll like my haircut or the dinner I put before him but when all’s said and done, it is what it is. A failed recipe can be scraped into the bin but a year’s writing cannot. One thing I have learned though – not to judge anything by his behaviour as he reads.

   Here’s that Daniel Maclise portrait of young Dickens I mentioned yesterday. He didn’t improve with age, but which of us does? 

Choosing a new Dickens to read proved to be fairly easy this morning. The bookshop had a long position on Nicholas Nickleby but no Barnaby Rudge or Dombey and Son. They did have Our Mutual Friend, which even in paperback edition turned out to be a potential toe-breaker.

Then my eye was caught by a lovely little Collector’s Library edition of Hard Times. When it first came out Macaulay apparently savaged it for its ‘sullen socialism’ and it became popular with left-leaners like George Bernard Shaw. So there I stood in a quandary. To buy Our Mutual Friend in spite of its weight or Hard Times in spite of its reputation.

I’d kind of been ignoring the Dickens bicentenary fest. Somehow the press these days doesn’t know when enough is enough and if I read one more Charles Dickens may have blown his nose here in 1835 type article I shall surely scream.

But then last Thursday Mr F and I went to an excellent lecture on the artist Daniel Maclise and that got me thinking.  Maclise painted a famous portrait of a rather pretty young Dickens and the pair had a long, if somewhat abrasive, friendship. It appears they were both given to huffy silences followed by needy whining.  How easy Maclise was to get along with I have no idea but I’ve noticed a lot of people commenting on Dickens’s personality flaws.

       Self-promotion is a horrible, fascinating thing. You kind of wish the person who’s doing it would stop but you kind of can’t stop watching them.

‘Dennis Arblaster,’ he says, shaking you limply by the hand whilst scanning the room for more profitable pastures. ‘Best-selling author of  The Shape-Shifters Conspiracy Enigma Papers.’

I mean, where do you go from there?

‘Anything new in the pipeline, Dennis?’

Too late. He’s spotted the editor of Where It’s At  magazine. Well, enough about him. Let’s talk about me.