Hello to all of you who have come via Neil Gaiman’s blog. Well, hello to everyone, of course, but the blog stats suggest there are lots of new visitors today. Please say hello, or at least give me a wave in passing …
And let me tell you a little about SOMETHING BEGINNING WITH which is I hope what you have clicked through to hear about.
First of all, if you have come here from America, it’s called The ABCs of Love. It’s the same book, just a different title. I’d hate for you to be disappointed. I have written other books, I just don’t write the same book again and again and call it different names. Honestly.
ANYWAY…. Something Beginning With started as a short story, based on the alphabet. Twenty six bite sized chunks of the story, one for every letter of the alphabet.
But then I kept on writing just for fun until I had 18,000 words. Hey, I thought, why not try to turn this into an actual novel. Keeping to the alphabet format, keeping to the bite sized chunk form. The story developed and I even managed to add some subplots into it. Here’s a section from the letter B:
B
Baked Beans
My grandmother on my mother’s side was a young girl in Liverpool during the war. She can still remember the night the Heinz factory was bombed and how for days afterwards the city smelled of cooked baked beans. It made them even hungrier than they were already.
Her mother — my great-grandmother — once spotted an unexploded bomb caught in a tree near their house. For hours she ran around getting people out of their houses and down to the shelter where my grandmother was hiding. My great-grandmother wheeled the sick down, helped mothers with little children and reassured the elderly.
She must have saved many, many lives that night, so I can’t blame my grandmother for still being annoyed, years later, that they didn’t give her mother a medal for her bravery. Instead, they have it to the lady who was in charge of making the tea.
See God, Mystery Tours, NoddyBest Friends
At the age of twenty-five, my best friend Sally has become the mistress of a millionaire called Colin. This was not something that normally happens in our town. Just in films. She has given up her job, her nights out with the girls and living in her studio flat. Because Colin has set her up in a flat near his office, she has taken a lodger to pay the mortgage on her own flat. And all without a backward glance. Recently she spent five hours trying to find a dressmaker who was prepared to pick her jeans apart by hand and re-sew them so the tight seams would make no marks on her skin when Colin pulled them down. We are no longer such good friends. She says she can’t bear the way I look at her these days.
See Danger, Friends, Influences, Ultimatum, Yields, ZzzzBlackbirds, Robins and Nightingales
Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between how you sound in your head and how other people seem to hear you.
For instance, I have noticed that I can make what I think it a perfectly pleasant comment but it can still cause offence. I do not mean to have a sharp tongue; it is just the way the words come out.
Perhaps it is because I have such low self-esteem and do not think of myself as someone like Sally, for instance.
Personally though, I blame the nuns. At the convent school I went to, we were split into three groups for singing. There were the Nightingales who could sing beautifully, the Blackbirds who were all right, and the Robins who were what Mother Superior called ‘orally challenged’. I was one of only three Robins in the whole school, although I had a cold at auditions so it wasn’t really fair.
The Robins were hardly ever allowed to sing in public and particularly not if the song was anything to do with God. We had to mouth along instead, which got very boring, and sometimes it was hard to kept the words in. Once, an unidentified Robin joined in with an especially loud and lively Hymn, one we all loved.
In the middle of our Lord stamping out the harvest, Mother superior held out her hand for silence.
‘Hark!’ she said, raising her other hand to her ear. ‘I can hear a Robin singing.’ Everyone looked at me.
That moment has always stayed with me. One of the things I hate most about myself is the way I blush in public even though I’m not necessarily to blame. It is the same feeling that makes you itch every time anyone talks about fleas.
See Captains, God, Outcast, VoicesBlood
It used to be a craze at school to scratch the initials of your boyfriend into your arm with a compass and squeeze the skin until the blood came up. Then you’d rub ink over the graze so you were tattooed for life. Luckily it rarely worked.
Once I was doing it with Sally, but as neither of us had a boyfriend at the time, we just dug the compass randomly into each other’s arm. It made me think of the time I punctured my aunt’s favourite leather sofa one Christmas with the screwdriver from the toy carpentry set I’d got from Santa. I did that again and again too.
It was Sally’s idea to mix the blood drops together. She kept flicking her cigarette lighter and we sang ‘Kumbaya’ as we did it to make it seem more meaningful. Sally said that were sisters now and nothing could separate us, not even a boy.
See Codes, Mars Bars, Vendetta, Yields, ZzzzBosses
The only trouble with my job is the bosses. My current one is possibly the worst I have ever had. He is called Brian. He is from Yorkshire and has a short bristly beard which he is always fondling and if I don’t manage to look away, I can sometimes see his little tongue hanging out, all red and glistening.
Brian won’t leave me alone. He seems to think we have a special relationship. He’s always telling me that I mustn’t mind if he teases me, that he does it to everyone he’s fond of. ‘It means you’re one of the family, Ver,’ he says, putting his arm round me.
It’s funny though that while Brian is always standing too close to me, when it comes to work he likes to dictate his typing for me into a machine, rather than face to face. He’ll leave little messages to me which means I have to hear them twice. Once he said into the machine: ‘so I called across, ‘Thank you, Brian’ and he told me off for spoiling his dictation. He said he’d have to start again now. I left the room and when I eventually listened to his tape I noticed that this time he didn’t say I looked nice.
Another time he dictated a rude joke to me. A man in an office asked to borrow another man’s Dictaphone. The other man said no, he couldn’t. He should use his finger to dial like everyone else.
I listened to this through my headphones with a stone face because I knew Brian was watching me, hoping I would blush.
See Ambition, ZeroBoxing
I didn’t tell Brian that Sally and I had started going to a Boxercise class at the local sports centre. It would only have turned him on.
I wasn’t very good at first. The instructor was American, a big man with a ponytail he was too old for. He followed me over to the punch bag and shouted out loudly that I was too much of a girl to box. He said it was because I was English and had been brought up to be polite. ‘Who would you like that punch bag to be?’ he asked. ‘Who really pissed you off?’
I couldn’t think of anyone. I wouldn’t really want to hurt Brian, even. Anyway, I told the instructor that I was half Irish. On my mother’s side. He said in that case I definitely had to hit harder. Harder, harder, harder. Eventually, I swung at it so hard that I kept on spinning even though I’d thrown my punch. The instructor clapped me on the back and called me a champ. He even started to sing ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’.
Sally and I couldn’t stop laughing afterwards. When we went for a drink, I noticed that we didn’t hang back as we sometimes do at the bar. We made sure we got served straight away and then we took the best seats in the pub. When a man came to talk to us, Sally didn’t flirt and throw her hair over her shoulder. She told him straight to go away. That she wanted to talk to her friend. ‘You gave it hell, Verity,’ she kept on saying, toasting me with her beer. ‘You gave it hell.’ The next day, I walked sharper, straighter. As if I wasn’t a girl at all.
See Gossip, Lesbians, Moustache, Weight
Verity is the first person narrator of the story. And everything is going sort of well until she meets John:
John
I can’t wait to tell Sally.
The most amazing thing has happened.
I have fallen in love. I feel glowing. I feel fantastic. I have just walked down the street and everybody smiled at me. Men whistled at me. I feel like a goddess. I look down at my arms and my skin looks as if it has sprinkled with diamond dust.
Everybody is so much nicer, funnier, prettier. And so am I.
His name is John.K
Kate
John has a wife. Sally told me first. Well, she didn’t know exactly but what she was if he e-mails you from work, he is married. If it is always him who has to call you, he has children. If he doesn’t have any hobbies, it is because he has a family life, not no life.
I asked John but he was going to tell me anyway. Straight after we talked about it, he asked me to tell him a joke, so I believe him when he says being married isn’t a problem.
‘Two parrots were on a perch,’ I said. ‘One said to the other, “Can you smell fish?”’
Sally told me this joke. It made everyone else laugh but I can’t really understand it. I think it might be surrealist. When I asked John this, he told me I was funny and he loved me. He couldn’t tell me why that should surprise him so.
John’s wife’s name is Kate. I don’t like the way they’re next to each other in the alphabet. My name is Verity so I’m right at the end, out of the way.
He doesn’t love her. He never has. They are together just for the sake of the children.
See Women’s Laughter
And the novel continues to develop until Verity finds her own particular way out of this particular relationship. Or at least until the alphabet ends.
This structure was amazingly interesting and exciting to do. When I was a kid I used to love those books where you would suddenly find a message in the text: If you would like xxx to happen, turn to page xxx, but if you would like xxx to happen, turn to …. Remember those?
So in the extracts above, you will see the footnotes. I designed the book so that it was possible either to read straight through and ignore them. OR you can follow the footnotes around and read a completely different novel. There’s even a reading index at the end:
Reading Index
Animals Ants – Blackbirds Robins and Nightingales – Dogs – Elephant’s Egg – Indecent Exposure – Revenge – Tornados – Vacuuming – Zoology
Body Blood – Breasts – Ears – Foreheads – Glenda G-Spot – Hair – Indecent Exposure – Mirrors – Moustache – Nostrils – Rochester – Startrite Sandals – Thrush – Visible – Weight – Withdrawal – Wrists
Colin Best Friends – Colin – Foreheads – Jealousy – Love Calculators – Rochester – Sculpture – Sex – Ultimatum – Why? – X-rated – X-ray Vision – Yard – Youth
Deceit Dreams – Elephant’s Egg – Engagement Ring – Horoscopes – Lesbians – Mars Bars – Memory – Mistaken Identity – Money Even More of It – Mystery Tours – Nursing – Old – Phantom Emails – The Queen II – Utopia – Withdrawal
Entrepreneurs Ambition – Best Friends – Firefighting – Kisses – Money Even More of It – Objects – Promotion – Ultimatum – Yields – Zest
Fathers Ambition – Ants – Houses – Illness – Lust – Mistaken Identity – Orphans – Outcast – Poverty – Routines – Thomas the Tank Engine – True Romance – Voices – Women’s Laughter – Xenophobia
Gastronomic Baked Beans – Crème Caramel – Elephant’s Egg – Ice Cream – Liqueur Chocolates – Mars Bars – Oranges
And so on.
It was a fascinating structure to work with. And so so hard to get right. I won’t deny it. During the time I was writing it, I would wake up throughout the night and scribble things on the pad I kept by my bed. In the morning, I’d find notes such as Xylophone, Vengeance, Ice Cream. Freud would have had a field day.
One of the main problems I had was that, because of the type of character Verity was and because of the relationship she was having, not one of the entries before J (for JOHN) could mention him BUT not one entry after she’d met him could not. Also it is no coincidence that John is next to his wife, Kate in the book – as Verity says: ‘ I don’t like the way they’re next to each other in the alphabet. My name is Verity so I’m right at the end, out of the way.’
Something else I put into the book (although I don’t want to tell you everything – please read it! See I’m shameless this time round!!) is
based on what I have noticed and loved in novels – which is that first line of the novel corresponds with the last. Have you noticed how many that works for? I’m going to do a list soon. And my novel is mostly about female friendship, in this case Verity’s real love for her friend Sally. And so the first three words are: ‘My best friend’s …’ and the last two words: ‘Just Sally.’
But as I’ve been banging on about, of course you can read it in every and any way you like. Amazing what you can do with the alphabet!
I hope you will buy it, but most of all, I hope that you enjoy it. But most of all, thank you for stopping by.
ps I will do notes for book clubs if you like, or skype interviews if I can, or if you live somewhere nice in the UK and are willing to pay my travel and expenses, why not ask me along!
