Miscellaneous Memoranda

An anonymous author of children’s literature tells it how it is at The Bookseller:

“This whole business is founded on the desperation of children’s authors to be published and then their willingness to put up with terrible pay, because they want to be published again…This allows publishers to pay us a pittance, but it’s okay, because we will make up the difference in school visits. The publishers expect it. They even arrange free ones for us, hoping that we will learn on the job and convert that into an income stream.

But it’s exhausting […] Above all, it is not fun. For many of us, the physical and mental toll of turning up and performing can be debilitating. And that’s if we can even do it. Giving up your day job to visit schools isn’t easy, nor is parking your own children or dealing with health issues on the road. Some of us feel massively unconfident about it. We are writers, not performers. We are not teachers either, and yet find ourselves running workshops for keen and unkeen young writers.”

Also, publishers prefer to publish children’s books ‘written’ by celebrities and most of these books are terrible. But not all of them! Here Emily Gould rates the best celebrity children’s books at The Cut.

Not that things are much better for those who write for adults, as Kate Dwyer explains in Has It Ever Been Harder To Make a Living As An Author?:

“Without any other revenue streams, it’s highly unlikely that someone could make ends meet or support a family by writing novels. Most novelists have day jobs, and the majority of those who don’t are either independently wealthy or juggling a handful of projects at once, often in different mediums like film, journalism, and audio.”

But here’s some advice on how to deal with the depressing life of an author. Ask Polly consoles an author who’s devastated that her book barely sold:

“Blaming yourself for not selling books is like blaming yourself for aging. It’s irrational. Books don’t sell, period. Have you ever skimmed the best seller list? If a book is truly great, it’s almost guaranteed not to sell. You’re calling yourself a failure for things that are out of your control […]

But listen to me: You write because you believe in it. You still believe, even now. You crave love, and that part of you isn’t humiliating. It’s sad and pure and true. It’s a gift. So stop telling yourself lies and repeating this world’s bad noises. No one smart measures quality on sales. No one enlightened reduces art to commerce.”

To be an author, you need to be intelligent, creative and resilient. You need to be stubborn. You must never give up on your goals.

You need to be Stoffel the honey badger:

Author Alert: Has Your Work Been Used To Train Meta’s AI?

From The Australian Society of Authors:

Today The Atlantic published a search tool allowing authors to search for their books in the LibGen dataset, which has been used to train Meta’s AI system. The ASA is horrified to see that Australian authors’ books have been included in this pirate database.

(By the way, this was posted on the ASA’s Meta-owned Instagram account.)

From the US Authors Guild:

Meta and other AI companies knew exactly what they were doing but they did it anyway. Why? Because they needed books for their quality writing, style, expression, and long-form narration and would rather steal them than ask and pay for them as they do for all of the other necessary components of their AI, such as electricity and programming.   

From the UK Society of Authors:

The Atlantic says that court documents show that staff at Meta discussed licensing books and research papers lawfully but instead chose to use stolen work because it was faster and cheaper. Given that Meta Platforms, Inc, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has a market capitalisation of £1.147 trillion, this is appalling behaviour.

Six editions of my own books are on the list of pirated books that was used to train Meta’s AI program. As if it isn’t bad enough that my books are constantly pirated, Meta is now taking authors’ work for their own commercial gain, without asking for permission from the authors or paying the authors or publishers.

If you’re an Australian author, you can check if your books are on the pirated LibGen list here and you can inform the ASA about this using this form.

US authors are automatically included in a class action against Meta and you can find out more here. UK authors can find more information here.

Authors, publishers and readers – if you use Facebook, Instagram, Threads or WhatsApp, you’re supporting Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. If the Cambridge Analytica scandal wasn’t enough, Meta also announced in January this year that it would no longer use professional fact checkers on its social media platforms.

What I’ve Been Reading

Cover of 'The Secret To Superhuman Strength' by Alison Bechdel with illustration of woman doing yogaThe Secret to Superhuman Strength is Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic memoir. It’s a characteristically funny, thought-provoking read, but also makes me very glad I’m not Alison Bechdel’s friend, relative or partner because she splatters everything on the page. It’s probably small consolation to them that she’s even harder on herself than she is on everyone else. This memoir, her third, is about her obsession with exercise—skiing, cycling, strength training, running, yoga, karate and trying out every exercise fad since the 1980s. Her focus on a healthy body does not prevent her from abusing alcohol, recreational drugs and prescription drugs, and having the worst sleep habits ever, just as her desire for secure love does not stop her incessant chasing after unsuitable women, even when she’s already in a relationship. She attempts therapy of various kinds, investigates Buddhism, and seeks wisdom in the lives and works of Kerouac, the Wordsworths, Shelley, Coleridge, Emerson and Margaret Fuller, until she finally realises:

“that you can’t repress pain and still expect to feel pleasure. And that feeling pain compared with the gray dread of avoiding it, was actually almost a kind of joy. In fact, joy was only possible because one’s existence—all this!—was going to end. What a tedious slog life would be without death!”

Cover of 'The War of Nerves' by Martin SixsmithI also really liked The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War Mind by Martin Sixsmith. It uses psychological analyses of Cold War leaders, from Churchill and Stalin to Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, as well as whole-population studies, to examine how the fear, tension and paranoia in both East and West changed world history. The author studied Russian and psychology in the UK, US and USSR, and worked as a journalist in Moscow at the end of the Cold War, so his perspective is well-informed and fascinating. The edition I read was published in 2021, before Putin invaded Ukraine, so it would be interesting to read an updated edition (although I now see that he published a book last year about Putin).

Cover of 'The Thursday Murder Club' by Richard OsmanI know everyone has already read The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, but I avoided it because something that popular written by a television celebrity would have to be bad, right? I was wrong. It’s a clever and very amusing mystery set in a retirement village, in which four elderly residents solve crimes with the reluctant help of a depressed detective inspector and his cheery sidekick. The plot does go completely off the rails towards the end, with three unconnected murders getting solved, several deaths, a Murder Club member reuniting with her estranged daughter, and the depressed detective gaining a girlfriend. There were just too many characters, too many red herrings, and not enough space devoted to the four main characters, who were all fascinating and funny.

I preferred the next book in the series, The Man Who Died Twice. The plot is still complex, but at least this time, the crimes are all linked and because they are related to the Secret Service past of enigmatic Elizabeth, the elaborate plot twists seem more plausible. There’s more attention paid this time to the relationships between the Murder Club members, which is very satisfying. Ibrahim is attacked and the others take revenge; Ron gets to act out his thuggish fantasies; Joyce’s narration is laugh-out-loud funny and her badly-knitted friendship bracelets become not only a running joke but an important clue. I’m looking forward to reading the other books in the series—although of course, there’s an enormous waiting list for them at the library. Apparently a film of the first book is being released this year.

Animals At War

First published on the Centre for Youth Literature website, Inside A Dog, in 2012.

The declaration of war in 1939 was heartbreaking for British pet owners, with hundreds of thousands of dogs and cats being put down. Pets were not allowed in public air raid shelters, and there were fears that there wouldn’t be enough food during the war for humans, let alone animals. However, many animals did their bit for the war effort.

For example, dogs were used to search bomb sites for buried victims, with seven dogs being awarded the Dickin Medal for ‘conspicuous gallantry or devotion to duty while serving in military conflict’. One of the most famous dogs in Britain was a St Bernard called Bamse, who was the mascot of the Free Norwegian forces stationed in Scotland. Bamse was an official crew member of a ship that managed to escape the Nazi invasion of Norway in 1940. While stationed in Scotland, Bamse rescued a Norwegian sailor who’d fallen overboard, and saved another from a knife-wielding assailant (by pushing the villain into the sea). The crew bought Bamse a bus pass, which hung around his neck, and he would take the bus into town by himself to round up any crew members who were late returning to the ship. Bamse would often have a bowl of beer with the men, and he was an enthusiastic goalkeeper and centre forward when they played football on deck. When he died of a heart attack in 1944, Scottish school children lined the streets to watch his funeral procession through the town of Montrose, where he was buried and where a statue of him stands today.

Horses also did their bit during the war, taking the place of tractors, delivery vans and cars after petrol rationing began. However, for the military, the most valuable animals were pigeons, who acted as messengers in circumstances when it was impossible to use radio communication. Thirty-two pigeons, including Commando, Winkie, G.I. Joe, Flying Dutchman, William of Orange, Gustav and Paddy, were awarded the Dickin Medal for their services during the Second World War (and you can watch pigeons Gustav and Paddy receive their medals here).

And that’s the end of my Inside a Dog posts! Before I return to my usual irregular Memoranda posts, here’s a set of links to all the Inside a Dog posts:

How To Write A Historical Novel In Seven Easy Steps
1. Think Up A Good Idea For A Story
2. Do Lots of Research
3. Get Organised
4. Write Lots of Words
5. Edit, Edit, Edit
6. Gaze Upon the Efforts of the Designer and Typesetter
7. Admire Your Finished Book

Planning vs Not Planning
Real People in Historical Fiction
Same Book, But Different
Keep Calm and Carry On
Looking Good in Wartime, Part One
Looking Good in Wartime, Part Two
Eating Well in Wartime
Blackout
Animals at War

Blackout

First published on the Centre for Youth Literature website, Inside A Dog, in 2012.

Even before war was officially declared, the British government banned anyone from showing any lights after sunset. This was meant to stop Nazi bomber planes from identifying targets on the ground. There were no street lights allowed. No illuminated advertising or shop signs. Cars, buses, trams, and even ambulances had to mask their headlights. You weren’t allowed to light a cigarette when you were outside. Only very dim lightbulbs were available (partly to save electricity), and every window, skylight and glass door in every house, apartment, factory and business had to be covered with heavy curtains before any indoor lights could be switched on. Often ordinary curtains weren’t thick enough, so people had to buy special blackout fabric and make new curtains. Not everyone could afford this, so some poor people had to paint or wallpaper over their windows, and they lived in darkness for the rest of the war. The rules were vigorously enforced by police and Air Raid Precautions wardens, who’d hammer on people’s doors and shout, ‘Put that light out!’ if the merest pinpoint of light was visible from the street.

Going out at night was very dangerous in the first months of the war, even though not a single German plane had been spotted. If you’ve ever gone for a walk during a power blackout, or in the depths of the country, you’ll know how it can feel, stumbling around in the pitch black. At first, pedestrians weren’t even allowed to carry torches, although after a while, this was permitted, provided the torch was aimed at the ground and was masked with two layers of paper. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of injuries. People fell down steps, onto roads and got run over by vehicles that loomed out of the darkness without any warning. Road fatalities doubled in the first months of the war. As one doctor pointed out, the Nazis managed to kill six hundred British people a month without even sending any bomber planes into the air.

Alice Roosevelt with her little white dog, 1902

There were a number of suggestions for coping with the blackout. People were advised to carry luminous walking sticks, untuck their white shirts, pin luminous flowers to their lapels or carry a white Pekinese. (It was recommended that the Pekinese wear a luminous dog collar and gleaming white blackout coat, plus a bell and a shiny identity disc.) (Note that the photo above was not actually taken during the war. It’s actually Alice Roosevelt, daughter of the US President, in about 1902. Also, if you want to get really picky, that isn’t a Pekinese she’s carrying, either. But I couldn’t find any photos of women walking around the streets of London during the war with their Pekineses, so sometimes, you just have to Make Do.)

A particularly annoying cartoon character called Billy Brown appeared on posters to give (rhyming) advice such as:

‘When Billy Brown goes out at night,

he wears or carries something white.

When Mrs Brown is in the blackout,

She likes to wear her old white mack out.

And Sally Brown straps round her shoulder

a natty plain white knick-knack holder.

The reason why they wear this white

is so they may be seen at night.’

Unfortunately, all these precautions didn’t help very much when the bombing started. The German bombers killed 50,000 British civilians during the Blitz. On moonlit nights, cities and towns were clearly visible from the air, and factory furnaces and lighthouses continued to burn brightly throughout the war. Besides, the Nazis had radar, and later they used pre-programmed robot bombs and rockets launched from the Continent. However, the blackout rules stayed in place until the final months of the war.

Next: Animals at War