Markham Shaw Pyle's Blog: Away down here....

Joyeux 100e anniversaire à notre petit moineau.

Many of y'all will I hope be aware that the UK had some floods of late. Played hob with farming.

Well, I have an announcement.

From today through Epiphany Sunday, 20% gross of all Bapton Books sales - mine (Markham Shaw Pyle) and GMW Wemyss' (G.M.W. Wemyss), and all spin-off merchandise at http://www.cafepress.com/baptonbooks - in that period, as and when we receive the proceeds, will be donated to farming charities in hard-hit UK areas, as outlined by Gerv here: http://baptonbooks.tumblr.com/post/13....

Govern yourselves accordingly.

(A cross-post, beginning an irregular series of words to the wise from Bapton Books, who have made many mistakes so that other indie authors and small presses can learn from the experience without paying the fiddler.)

No, it’s not about grammar. Or your grendfether, either. Or even spelling, a subject upon which I am something of a hidebound Tory. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist the gag.)

Item: You presumably have a decent cover on your Work of Deathless Prose. Wouldn’t it look good on a tee-shirt or a carry-all or a wall hanging for your legions of fans? Of course it would. Even if the book is nonfiction, or not fiction.

Item: Assuming you have any fiction out, it (again, presumably, and I sure-God hope, for your sake) has characters and places and scenes which appeal to your adoring fans. (Both of them.)

Let me take a Bapton Books example* – G.M.W. Wemyss’, as I don’t have any fiction out. In the Village Tales series, Cross and Poppy: a village tale and Evensong: Tales from Beechbourne, Chickmarsh, & the Woolfonts: Omnibus Edition and those to come, there is the local Free School. There are three parishes – plus neighbo(u)ring parishes, the latter including Canon Judith’s “progressive” parishes. There is (is there ever!) the duke; and there is the Duke of Taunton’s Hunt. There is a pub, and a hotel which is really an excuse for a highly regarded restaurant. There are Village Fetes and Village Concerts; there is the heritage steam railway; there is the community-run real ale brewery. The duke, being in part a Stuart, has a castle in Perthshire … with a singlemalt whisky distillery attached; his cousin the earl of Maynooth, in County Kildare, has a chi-chi Irish whiskey distillery.

We would be utter fools not to take advantage of that. The duke’s more outrageously witty and Thatcherite pronouncements make a great poster. Every trendy Anglican will like a tee-shirt with Canon Judith’s quip, on women’s ordination, that “I need your approval like a fish needs a chasuble.” (Every traditionalist, orthodox Anglican will want gear from Father Paddick’s parishes.) In the books, Teddy Gates, the Hipsta Chef, got a gag birthday gift tee-shirt from his friends, with the West Country version of “Hipster, Please”: “’Ow Bist, Hipsterrrrrr.” By a truly startling coincidence, that tee-shirt can now be purchased online.... The brewery and the distilleries and the labels from the booze and the beers make superb hoodies or throw rugs or blankies or what the hell. (Who can resist a seasonal dark mild called “Otterhound,” after all: “The Mild With The Shaggy Coat?” Or a bitter called “Canons and Fuggles?”)

To take another example: my late father’s Western, Claymore: a story of Texas. If the real King Ranch can brand (heh) and license everything in sight right on down to your pickup truck, why in the Sam Hill would you not sell hats and caps and sweatshirts with the Claymore brand and logo? What’s more, that’s a peg to hang your Stetson on for other Good Ol’ Boy gear: the duck and duck-blind tee, “In case of emergency, DUCK and COVER,” or the one with the sixguns behind the Texas map infilled with the Lone Star Flag, reading, “Y’All Talkin’ Trash About TEXAS … Triggers Me.”

All right. The Big Boys do their spin-offs with million-dollar ad buys and franchise-and-licensing deals with burger joints. The indie author and the small press have to grind it out at places such as Cafe Press or what have you. But it can be done. It ought to be done. Call it shameless commerce, call it cross-marketing, call me anything you’ve a mind to for suggesting it and clouding the unmercenary purity of your artistic vision; but do it.

Writing is a craft and sometimes an art.

Selling it is a business.

And Jesus Christ and General Jackson, people, if you – or your authors (if you are a small publisher. I’m 5’6” myself) – have done the work, built the world, made a cover, you are dumber’n a mud fence not to find other ways of making money off your work.

And consider this. One of your fans – and maybe there’s not a right smart of those … yet – buys your bag or your tee-shirt or your umbrella; and goes forth into the streets and byways therewith. It’s a good design. It has flair. If it’s one of your covers, or the cover art, it likely proclaims the title and the author’s name. Or it’s an advert for or a label from a fictional whisky or beer. Someone looks. Someone, once in a while – an avid reader, a beer maven, a whisky snob –, stops your fan and asks about this unfamiliar thing. And your fan evangelizes. And once in a while, the missionee comes to the mourner’s bench and becomes a convert. Maybe she buys a similar canvas bag with one of your logos or characters or titles on it. Maybe he gets a golf shirt with the brewery logo or that of the Beechbourne Free School or something. And one day, someone new notices, and asks, and....

Get to work, people. You’re wasting an obvious opportunity and burning daylight here.
__________
* I am not linking our site here. That would be crass and improper and not the point of the exercise. I will of course let anyone interested know the link.

It is not the purpose or role of a university to be a “safe space” as regards ideas, speech, contention, debate, and for that matter the giving of offense.

It is precisely the purpose or role of a university to be an unsafe space, an arena and a battlefield, as regards ideas, speech, contention, debate, and for that matter the giving of offense.

As G.M.W. Wemyss rightly says, students taking up places at university who don’t understand this – these precious, special snowflakes – are the academic equivalent of bed-blockers.

Or the Athenian mob, rioting over the fact that being asked to think has corrupted the Athenian youth. (“Hemlock all round, barkeep, and make mine a double!”)

Socrates (and Mill, and for that matter Milton), wouldst thou wert living at this hour; The puerile have need of thee.
_____
* With apologies to John Henry Newman

[A word from Bapton Books. With luck, this one will not be double-posted.]

People are … well, sometimes you simply smile, shake your head, and remark, like an old granny on the veranda sippin’ iced tea, “Bless yore heart....” (This is the expression used in the South in sympathetic commiseration of the honestly and honorably mistaken, the inept, the misguided, the awkward, and indeed the slower traffic, the sort who can’t always get the whiskey in the right hole. “Jim Ed done his best to get that fence fixed, and he like to done, just ’fore he realized he’d done penned them hogs out instead of in. Bless his heart.” The UK equivalent, I understand, is simply, “Bless.”)

We always welcome reviews, no matter what. They always teach us something. Even if, sometimes, that “something” is that some reviewers aren’t, perhaps, well-matched to some books (bless their hearts). There was, for instance, the reviewer who would have rather liked The Confidence of the House: May 1940 were it not that Herbert Morrison was described as a “conchy”: a man who’d been a conscientious objector in the Great War. Which would be understandable, as objections go, if that had been Gerv speaking, rather than Gerv’s describing what the back benches, and not only on the Government side, thought of the Rt Hon. Member for Hackney South.

Bless her heart.

One I cherish, though, is the review which gave Claymore: a story of Texas four stars and said it would have been five … except that the author, my late father, had died before finishing all the stories included with that novella in that edition, or continuing the Chattan saga after the manner of L’Amour.

I’m actually rather pleased that someone liked his work so much as to resent that death intervened before he could finish it.

And I have resisted the temptation to comment, there, to the effect that Dad – and his humble posthumous editor and literary executor, to-wit, me, his son, who misses him a fair bit – might be thought to be a right smart more disappointed than the reviewer (bless his heart) could conceivably be.

And I do honestly cherish that review. Because, in the end, it’s a compliment, in an odd sort of way, that readers can be disappointed that an author died before he could finish all his work. Bless their hearts....

Yes, it's been a while.

Yes, there are reasons.

Halloween this year will mark one year since my heart attack, hot on the heels of publishing Crafts & Assaults (which I suppose I must get linked up here in a day or two). 7 NOV will be the anniversary of my triple bypass: all as recounted in Tonight at the Morpheum: A Hospital Farce in Three Acts.

Obviously, all that put our 1915 book, on the July Crisis, on the back-burner. I haven't felt up to much, frankly, for what are, surely, obvious reasons. But with the 1914 book back-burnered, ol' Gerv - GMW Wemyss - felt he ought to redeem the time, by continuing the Village Tales series. Which he has done: in Evensong: Tales from Beechbourne, Chickmarsh, & the Woolfonts: Omnibus Edition. Which listing also needs some work this week, I reckon.

I don't think it's giving anything away to say that Gervase pestered me, while I was recovering, for what a heart attack and a CABG actually feel like, not just what the doctors say about them, all in the service of the hoops he intended to put some characters through. I suspect he intended all along that my answering those questions was a way to coax me back into writing. If so, it worked, as witness Tonight at the Morpheum: A Hospital Farce in Three Acts as aforesaid.

Sneaky little so-and-so, is Gervie.

I am also glad to report that our Bapton Books author George Knight is preparing a volume of nice, British ghost stories and horrors for us. I'll tell y'all more as that comes to fruition. (Meanwhile, Gerv is already hip-deep, at least by his account, in the next Village Tales book, and the one after that.)

As for me.... Shoot, I'm just happy to be here. Because after that heart attack and that triple bypass, I'm happy to be anywhere.

I'll keep y'all posted.

And as for publishers, well….

It’s been an interesting year (in the apocryphal-Chinese-curse sense of “interesting,” sometimes) for me, and at Bapton Books. In addition to our longstanding nursing of a biography and a history from two Shy Woodland Creatures, I mean authors, we have also been in negotiations for a novel and a set of ghostly short stories. The former is going to do everything Aristotle ever intended when he spoke of catharsis; the latter would keep M.R. James or Susan Hill awake at night, partly with delicious terror and partly with envy. And someday, God willing, I will actually be able to announce these works.

We believe, of course, that good work takes the time it takes. No complaints there. And let’s face it, commissioning good work, signing an author, cajoling a manuscript, really is a lot like fly-fishing. Not only in matching the hatch and gently dropping the fly upon likely water, but in delicately playing your trout until you can reel him in.

But consider this. It’s 2014. For all the splash occasioned by Cross and Poppy – and rightly: it is a magnificent book, and if you haven’t read it, go now and do so; this post can wait – for all the splash occasioned by Cross and Poppy, I repeat, we are an imprint thus far best known for critical editions of classics, and for history. And it is 2014. Obviously, the Great War is lowering over us. Gerv and I are hard at work on a history to match. At the same time, he and I both in our respective spheres are, through our authors, hip-deep in the post-war; the American Civil War; the joy and drama of human relationships; and the subtly spine-chilling atmosphere of the proper British haunting. Atop this, Gerv is hewing and adzing and planing smooth the structure of the sequel to Cross and Poppy, the next in his Village Tales series; and I am amongst those who is casting a first-draft eye over the great themes and small quotidian doings of life in the Woolfonts parishes, that fictional Arcadia … in which “et ego” is never far away.

This is the marvel and the high responsibility of the writer, the reader, and indeed that inky wretch the publisher. To open a book or leaf through a manuscript is to pass through a doorway that is Blake’s door of perception, to the infinite; to step onto the road that, as Bilbo knew, goes ever on, and that can sweep one to far and dangerous places. This is the magic, that – at once – one can be “in Heill and [in] Gladnes”: this the magic of the “maker,” and those who lament the makars as Dunbar could lament them. This is the magic that allows one – being one, undivided – to dwell at once in all times and none, in every place at once. The Maker is a sub-Creator; and in books, through books, for the maker, the reader, as for God, all times are one, and omnipresence is dead easy.

It’s exhilarating. But it can also be a bit schizophrenic. Spare a thought for the writer, the editor, the small publisher (I’m five foot six and a half, and Gerv’s barely five foot five) – let alone those who are all these things at once – who may at any moment be forced to divide hither and thither the swift mind (and Odysseus, lucky stiff, had Athena helping him) between, say, the romantic entanglements of Cambridge undergrads; the post-Sarajevo tunnel-vision at the Ballhausplatz; Evensong in Woolfont Crucis, and which setting to use for the Mag. and Nunc; the bloody shambles, fly-swarmed and noisome, of Jesse Grant’s tannery, and young Sam recoiling from blood; the political ferment of the 1920s in the Trentino; and the cauld grue of a Jamesian haunting.

The doors of perception must be opened carefully: humankind cannot bear very much reality. If we’re all a bit mad, we writers and publishers, bear with us: for we on honeydew have fed, and we’ve drunk more of the milk of Paradise than was good for us, and we’re never quite certain if we’re in this world or the next, in Woolfont Parva, Selwyn College, the Wilderness, the Alto Adige, or the Western Front.

No, not Koufax.

When I went to Darien to lecture on When That Great Ship Went Down The Legal and Political Repercussions of the Loss of RMS Titanic, I ended up staying longer than planned, thanks to Hurricane Sandy. One of the things that kept me - well, not sane, but no crazier than usual - was, in addition to my kindly hosts, running across a monograph on an e-reader (which was all the reading there was) that mentioned, in passing, the correspondence between George Washington and his distant cousin, Selina, Countess Dowager of Huntingdon, the "Queen of the Methodists" - and her plan to send missions to the Native Americans (and, more to George's liking, send settlers to the back-country).

After a right smart of months, the result of that passing reference's having sparked my interest is now before y'all: Benevolent Designs The Countess and the General George Washington Selina Countess of Huntingdon their correspondence the evangelizing of America. Piety and power-politics make strange bedfellows, but I like to think they made an interesting tale. You may want to look and see if you agree.

Specifically, with '37: the year of portent. (It can be ordered now; it'll propagate over the next few days through the Usual Channels, Amazon included; and there'll be a e-book available soon.) Churchill, FDR, Earhart, Bohr; the New London School Explosion, the Ohio River Flood, the opening of Buchenwald; the Rape of Nanking.... One thing about history: it makes even this miserable year look better. Except that Snow White isn't about to hit the cinemas for Christmas, Count Basie isn't jumping at Woodside, and The Hobbit isn't newly out.

Less like Koufax than a combo of Sal the Barber and Don Drysdale. With some Walter "Big Train" Johnson tossed in.

I survived, although I stayed a lot longer in Connecticut than expected. (Only I could get through hurricane season on the Gulf Coast without a fresh breeze and end up riding one out in Darien....) And - due to the incredible hospitality of the good people thereof, a hospitality so rigorous I began to fear for my liver and my constitution - I had a lovely and informative time.

Yes, there will of course be a book out of it, in time. For now ... back to 1937.