Scope for Improvement

The trouble with any writing project is that there's always scope for improvements. I shouldn't look at my work any more because every time I go back to it I come up with more requests for changes. I'm probably driving various people mad at Bradt, making suggestions to avoid word repetitions or adding the odd extra word to explain some exotic concept. And this is as we strive to get the book ready to go off to the printer this month, well next week actually. It is almost ready to go, although I'm not sure the back cover blurb is settled quite yet.

The new cover is vibrant and I feel it will attract quite a different readership to the towering mountains on the Australian edition, and my lovely editor, Caroline Taggart who is an author herself, has done a brilliant job of tightening up the prose. This has allowed me to sneak in new material, and even so end up with a book of a mere 390 pages, compared to the orginal 432. The colour section and new maps also add to what promises to be a really pleasing memoir. launch date is mid October.

The Power of Words

I’d perhaps almost forgotten just how powerful words can be, but I had a reminder at the end of last month. I was invited by a good friend to give a talk in the fine market town of Hadleigh in Suffolk. The subject was the Crocodile Caves expeditions to Madagascar. It is quite a while since I revisited those experiences, and this time thought I’d read a couple of snippets from LEMURS OF THE LOST WORLD. One was light-hearted, capturing the Malagasy capacity of games and laughter, while the second was the sting in the tail. Reading it out loud brought back some really nasty feelings of an agonising 36 hours, and I was surprised just how powerfully the emotions affected me. I’ve heard it said that people don’t remember pain – maybe that’s true, unless you write about it.

You’ll be pleased to discover that the scorpion didn’t kill me although the sensation in my stung finger STILL isn’t normal. I also survived the experience of the reading and, more importantly, so did my audience. What made them squirm more, in fact, was a story contributed by Claire Verlander who was in the assembled company; she described an unfortunate ring-tailed lemur being swallowed by a boa constrictor. The saddest part was that the victim was a mother, and her infant was left screaming in the treetops.

This weekend I have returned to editing A GLIMPSE OF ETERNAL SNOWS. My new editor at Bradt is helping me to tighten the original writing a bit – reducing word-count is almost always A GOOD THING but this too is a painful process. A local GP colleague who is also an author, Mary Selby (aka Joanna Bell) describes the process as like scooping teeth out with a spoon. It really hurts. So far I’ve managed to cut 6500 words from what was a 141,000 word book, but I suspect more must go. The problem is that this memoir covers our years in Nepal and this was the time when I’ve experienced the very best as well as the very lowest points in my life. The challenge as an author though is to entertain my readers. Glimpse is a joyous book and what I’m working towards is making it even more uplifting than the original read.

I'm expecting

It was almost as exciting as an antenatal scan... seeing outline drawings of the cover of the new, northern hemisphere edition of A Glimpse of Eternal Snows. The artist, Neil Gower, had cleverly evoked Tharu designs, as well as lots of other elements of the story. Gratifyingly Bradt Publications listen and are interested in their authors (not all publishers are like this) and responded to my feedback. I asked if the designs could be slightly simplified, to mirror the almost child-like style of Tharu artwork making it look more ‘primitive’, more like the stylised forms we were used to seeing in western Nepal. I eagerly awaited the artist’s reaction to my suggestions (I wondered if he might not like what I said), but he absorbed my ideas and made lots of changes including turning the sunflowers into lollypops. THEN I couldn’t wait to see what this would look like once colour had been added.

I didn't have to wait long. The artist added suitably rich colours, in combinations of green, orange, pink and blue that conjure the vibrancy of the Gangetic Plains. It is finished and I'm delighted.

The crazy thing about publishing - and about anything to do with publishing - is that there are bursts of frenetic activity than total silence, until the next mad phase. Today I sent the tweaked typescript of the book to the lovely Commissioning Editor at Bradt so that an independent editor can go through it and see how it can be further improved. Now I predict that there will be a lull while the new editor gets to work. Meanwhile I continue to slowly sift through photos from our six years living in Nepal and have posted more in my Glimpse photo-gallery. I've organised them so that the order of the pictures follow the chapters of the book.