The Affinity Bridge and Ruby's Spoon

A couple of very nice things yesterday... Firstly, the post van brought a lovely objet from Snowbooks: the slipcased hardback of George Mann's thoroughly enjoyable Steampunk Extravaganza: 'The Affinity Bridge.' This is the first of the Newbury and Hobbes novels, which promises to be a whole series of action-packed adventures set in the unnaturally-prolonged Victorian era. These special collectors' editions are wonders to behold. Snowbooks have done a fabulous job. They're numbered and signed and this one even contains a commemorative coin! Just like the ones they used to give out at school for jubilees and royal weddings. This particular special coin celebrates plague revenants stalking the metropolis and grisly cyborgs bent on disaster! Thanks, Snowbooks and George!

Also yesterday - I got a nice email from Anna Lawrence Petroni, whose first novel 'Ruby's Spoon' is just about to be published by Chatto and Windus. Remember how I mentioned I was thinking of doing some reviewing again? Spurred on by keeping up my blog? Well, the TLS sent me Anna's novel to read and I really enjoyed its murkiness and mystery, all tinged by magical realism. The review should be out pretty soon, I guess. Yesterday I get this email from Anna - and it's another example of randomness and serendipity at work:

"I'm so glad you enjoyed Ruby's Spoon.

"I thought you might like to know that you played a significant part in the writing process. You may know that the book started as a writing exercise on a short course I took back in 2003 (we had to take a few words at random and see what ideas we could generate: I asked my family for some words and they gave me 'button factory', 'spoon', 'witch' and 'fire'. Alchemy, magic - whatever! It makes me grin to remember this!). I was given the place on the course as a birthday present, along with 'The Creative Writing Coursebook'. I referred to the book again and again through the writing process and it's now heavily annotated. I started using it again last year when I started work on a second book... I recommend it to anyone who's starting to write, but I know it'll be at my side as a source of reference, encouragement and practical direction for years to come. It's such a well-formed collection - diverse perspectives with its own coherent narrative. Thank you so much!

'Best wishes,

Anna Lawrence Pietroni"

Isn't that lovely? I know Julia Bell, who edited the book with me back in 2001, will be pleased by that, too. Isn't it odd, how things come back round like this? And I love the sound of that random-plot-generating exercise with the list of elements. I use random-list exercises a lot these days in the workshops I teach - they really free you up to write, and I think there's a magical charge at work, too, in the way things get combined. It's like the elements of a story shuffle together while your back is turned...

Anyway - good luck to Anna with 'Ruby's Spoon'!

I was sad about Salinger last night. I was pointlessly cross about the tv news coverage, which was all about how many copies he's sold and stuff like that. I was thinking about those memoirs by his daughter and one of his girlfriends (was it?) and those amazing chapters in the Ian Hamilton biography, which all took us into Salinger's hard-won and hotly-defended private life. I was thinking about the uncollected short stories, which the online New Yorker seems to be making public. And I was thinking about first reading 'Catcher in the Rye' when I was sixteen. The whole German Literature class - including our teacher - bunking off from reading Schiller to race through Salinger's novel. And then, at twenty, when I belatedly learned there were three other books - and reading 'Bananafish' standing up in the books section of WH Smiths in Lancaster. As a student I let myself buy one paperback a week. I would let myself read one book a week that wasn't on any of my courses (for which I was already reading five a week..!) 'For Esme - with Love and Squalor' was my second week's choice - back twenty years ago, exactly, when I started keeping my Red and Black reading diary.

My fifties sci-fi movie last night was the original 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' It was stupendous - and colorized in the eighties, so that everyone looked pretty bogus, as it happens, not just those who had been bodysnatched. But what a movie it is! Some pretty gruesome stuff in the greenhouse there, when our heroes find their own replacements gestating amongst the potted plants. Last night I dreamed of a fifties america populated by Salinger creations - over-educated, awkward, chainsmoking characters shuffling listlessly through their apartments as the plots of a dozen b-movies rumble on unnoticed all about them. That would be my perfect read today - the film tie-in novelisation of The Day the Earth Stood (Relatively) Still by J.D Salinger.