Cath Staincliffe

Recently I was invited into Radio Leeds to do a One on One programme with presenter Liz Green.  This involved an hour’s in depth interview, talking about my life and work and choosing a number of pieces of music that had special importance or significance for me at particular times.  A little like Desert Island Discs.  I could only pick 10 and that was so difficult but I winnowed it down and I’ve listed them below – without the associated memories.  What would your ten tunes be?

(On another very vaguely related note, I am sometimes asked if I write to music.  The answer is a resounding NEVER!  I would have to work hard to block out the sound if there was music playing, even if it was instrumental.  And it would interfere with me writing dialogue which I frequently speak aloud, playing all the parts myself.)

1. Getting to Know You  (The King and I: Deborah Kerr/Marni Nixon)

2. My Boy Lollipop – Millie

3. Twist and Shout – Beatles

4. Ride A White Swan – T Rex

5. Sitting on the Dock of the Bay – Otis Redding

6. No Woman No Cry – Bob Marley and the Wailers

7. White Man at Hammersmith Palais – The Clash

8. The Wedding – Abdullah Ibrahim

9. Warm and Tender Love – Percy Sledge

10. My Baby Just Cares For Me – Nina Simone

I think copyediting is really, rally important an one of the drawbacks of self-publishing (witch I have done) is if your not choosing to use a professional copy editor who can make all the right changes tot he manuscript.  Theirs nothing worse than seeing speech marks in the wrong plaice or having too characters called Mark, or getting the daze mixed up.  And a good copy editor will help you a void repetition to as well any contraindications.  There the best,    Sew if you are self-publishing try and fined someone who can help you with this.  (I didn’t bother here: because this is just a short peace.  Good look!?

Trio is a novel about adoption (and very different from my usual crime fiction titles).  I wanted to write it because of my own experience as an adoptee and to reflect other stories I’d come across from people in the adoption triangle.  Originally published in hardback by a small publisher it soon went out of print.  Feedback on the book was very positive and as it was close to my heart I wanted to keep it in print and available to people.  So I set myself up as a small press, got my partner Tim to design a cover and found a printer.  I paid for a very small print run because I couldn’t afford more and storage was a problem anyway.  For the next eight years I sold the book (out of boxes under my bed) via Amazon and to the wholesalers Gardners and Bertrams as well as at talks and events.  Sales were in very modest numbers and due to my naivety and total lack of business acumen every single sale I made lost me money – I’d paid a high per unit cost for the books, postage was more than I’d imagined (and kept increasing) and Amazon took a large percentage of each sale.  Then came ebooks.  I paid someone to help me convert Trio and list it on Amazon for Kindle.  I selected a low price (£1.53) but one where I’d make 70% royalties.  And I watched in amazement as Trio sold many, many times more copies than it ever had done as a paperback.  Last month the paperback version went out of print.  If money, time and space were no object I’d keep it in print as a physical book in order to reach people who don’t have ebook readers but for now I’m not re-issuing it.  And I’m still quite dumbfounded by the difference in the economics.

I heard an item on Radio 4 a while ago about enhanced eBooks.  Andrew Motion described how a soundtrack had been created for his book Silver, the sequel to Treasure Island.  From what I could gather it was background/ambient noise that was added – so if a scene was set in an inn, there’d be the sounds of people talking and tankards chinking or whatever, or a chapter in a storm would have fitting weather noises.  I had contradictory responses (often the way with me – I blame the Libran brain architecture).  On the one hand it was an amazing idea technically and artistically to add that aural texture, and on the other why would I want anyone ‘interfering’ with my reading by inserting some interpretation between the word and my imagination?  A book demands so much of us as readers, we actively construct our view of the characters and action, the setting  and atmosphere, filling in the spaces that a good writer gives us.  (That’s why an adaptation of a book we love into film or TV often frustrates – because it can never be how we imagined it).  However Andrew Motion argued studies show that enhanced eBooks actually improve the engagement of the reader and that they remember and retain even more of  what they’ve read than someone reading a ‘normal’ book does.  It’s probably not fair to say more until I’ve tried it for myself.  But it makes me wonder what’s next.  Smells?  Texture?  Taste?

A Human Perspective

From space

The coast of Madagascar

Frills sweet lace

Across the cobalt

Of an ocean’s sway.

Daybreak over arced horizons

Light rims the curve

Rays split across the globe.

The world turns.

 

From space

The thin blue shell of atmosphere

Washes rose

Sudden sunrise

Bursts across the backbone of the Andes

Pours into lagoons

Paints atolls in coral

Warms the earth.

The world turns.

 

From space

Storms flash across

The Malaspina glacier

Dance down to Manitoba

Skate over the ice

Leap above forests

Traverse waters bright then deep

Tumble around the vast Pacific.

The world turns.

 

From space

Behold

The veined continent of Africa

Gold, green and brown.

Volcano, savannah,

The red-ribbed dunes of the Namib desert

Rocked on the cradle

Of steady blue waters.

The world turns.

 

The cosmonauts, the astronauts,

Have seen it all,

And weep.

 

©Cath Staincliffe   Originally published in No Earthly Reason (Crocus) 1989