August, 2006

It can't be August. It is.

Spring had barely sprung when in May I jammed my knees behind the aircraft seat in front of me and was flung across the sky to Brechin, Scotland for the Angus Book Award. TWOC was short-listed and the jurors were several hundred teenagers, all of whom commanded full voting power, and who attended the award ceremony to cheer, stamp and whistle for their personal choice. It reminded me of my youth work days a quarter century ago, of empowerment by participation, and lo and behold the ceremony was fronted by young people from the various schools. A great evening and unlike any other literary award. In a polished speech highlighting the virtues of the novel TWOC was presented on stage by two beautiful and articulate young girls, Heather Robertson and Samantha Horton; a performance only marred by the fact that one of them (I won't name her) confided to me afterwards that her preferred choice was the Chris D'Lacy novel on the short-list. Harrumph! as they used to say in Victorian novels.

Though for the event I was also called upon to visit two schools, Brechin High School and Montrose Academy (no, not one of Tony Blair's religious-nut crony-cash academies), both seats of learning vibrant with terrific kids and warm, dedicated staff, all blessed with the coolest Scottish accents you'll ever hear. Anyway in my informal orations I remember saying something to the effect that stories are to be found anywhere. You hear that? Anywhere. One clever girl, unconvinced, arms tightly folded, jutted out her chin: "What stories are in Brechin?" she demanded. On the back of no information other than an earlier brief snoop round the little town I said, "Witchcraft." A frisson went round the room and the girls started talking about bits of local history and one or two dark legends concerning witchery. She'd called my bluff, but my intuition saved me.

For Brechin does have that aura. Angus county altogether is a very atmospheric place. The streets of its little towns have a whisper and the landscape is inspirational. The hills are just a breath away from the school, with curlews calling above the massive, abandoned Pictish ring-forts and down across the wild sweeps of heather. The ways too are punctuated with formidable standing stones, all carved with a perplexing blend of pagan and Christian symbols. Ferrying me between the schools and the award ceremony was my splendid guide/minder/chauffer Helen Shanks, generously taking the time to show me the strange stones and the mysterious ring forts. Grinding the gears of her car around the swinging bends and up and down the steep hills she recited to me in crystalline Scots dialect, bracing and limpid as peat-water, the poems of the inspirational Hugh MacDiarmid. 'The Bonnie Broukit Bairn' I believe was amongst them. Helen, worth the journey to Scotland for this alone:

Mars is braw in crammasy,
Venus in a green silk goun,
The auld mune shak's her gowden feathers,
Their starry talk's a wheen o' blethers,
Nane for thee a thochtie sparin'
Earth, thou bonnie broukit bairn!
- But greet, an' in your tears ye'll drown
The haill clanjamfrie!

Though another huge pleasure was to meet and spend time with my fellow short-listed authors Anne Cassidy, Catherine Forde, Beverley Naidoo and Chris D'Lacey, all of whom proved very fine company. We dined together and some of us were in such high spirits we ate haggis. And I did win the Angus award. (I always said, in my youth work days, that give them the chance and young people will make the right decision.) The handsome trophy sits on my shelf, a beautiful reproduction of the Aberlemno stone pre-dating the Picts and known as The Serpent Stone. http://www.ancient-scotland.co.uk/pics/aberlma1.jpg

Barely time to draw breath after that before jamming my knees in the back of another aircraft seat to be flung across the sky again, off to Cannes for film business. Awards, film festivals, yes, this is my life of relentless glamour. None of that staring at a blank computer screen for me. No fear. Well, not for six or seven days out of the year anyway. No no, it's up there on the yacht, tipping back the champagne and trying to avoid the question of why, exactly, I was there.

Film business, oh yes, that's why. That youth work thing is beginning to haunt me, however, because an old youth-work-era mate of mine film-maker Anita Lewton turns out to be on the Executive Board of the New Producers Alliance. Anita and I ran a few political-education training sessions together in the awful Eighties. (Funny, that period seems in retrospect like a cold Narnia, with Margaret Thatcher as the ice-queen, and Tony Blair was supposed to be Aslan but when he pulled off his lion mask he was just another bloody frigid ice queen. How does that work?) Anyway when she offered to rent me sleeping space - Anita, not the Ice Queen of Narnia - in a large rented apartment in Cannes it seemed too good an offer to refuse. Not that I expected Anita and the three other women producers resident - Maggie, Mel and Mirka - to ALL snore so loudly at night that the collective vibration brought the kitchen crockery crashing to the floor. Hell's bells and thin walls! Female snoring is not like the male variety. With the four sets of nostrils going off at independent, whining rhythms it was like being camped between a high-rev motorcycle race track and a llama sanctuary. All glamour, that Cannes.

Though it did have its high spots and celebrity moments. I was still slightly boss-eyed from lack of sleep at the East Midlands Media/Screen Yorkshire lunch when, tucking into a tasty red mullet, I was surprised to find Patrick Stewart being introduced to us. We all politely set down our knives and forks, because he was really there to promote the X-men movie, and very good of him it was to take a moment from his busy schedule to offer us words of encouragement. Of course, Patrick Stewart will always be a middle-period commander of the SS Enterprise for me, but really he's a trained Shakespearean actor of the old school. Even in ordinary conversation he speaks in passionate, perfect, iambic pentameter. Whatever it was he said to us putative film-makers - and I'm sure it was all good - all I heard was I see you stand like greyhounds in the slip straining upon the start. The games afoot. Follow your spirit, and upon this charge cry God for Harry, England and Saint George! Bloody inspiring stuff. At least, when the applause died down I picked up my fork and bayoneted my red mullet.

Film business then. I sold an option on Dreamside to a French film producer who is quite optimistic about getting the film made. Though I would love to, I can't script the thing - see previous discussion about the halting quality of my French. Maybe I'll get to do the sub-titles. Joke. I offered a couple of ideas I have about the ending in the book, which is currently somewhat unsatisfying. It's taken me fifteen years but I have found the solution, not that you want to hear it.

Meanwhile there is further progress on the Tooth Fairy project to report. The script writing is going rather well. Nick Brandt is such a talented guy, and when he comes back with his (bloody interminable) new ideas I don't experience the catalogue of rage, bitter hilarity, despair and incredulity that characterised my previous experiences of adaptation. I wonder if the secret is to always try to work on an adaptation with a Director rather than a Producer. A process of creative translation can go on between a Writer and a Director. Directors speak and have recourse to a visual grammar that responds naturally to narrative; whereas a Producer who may be a genius at putting deals or talent together will sometimes be unable to think about story in anything other than clichés (which is why they have to hire a Writer in the first place). Anyway whether or not this film gets made - and I dare to hope that the prospects are good - the collaboration is fascinating. For the record, I've now been living with the Tooth Fairy, in various incarnations, for over a decade.

On the subject of other fairies I reviewed a book called The Stolen Child for the Washington Post. You can see my review here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/06/AR2006070600983.html

Meanwhile Do The Creepy Thing, my follow up YA novel from Faber & Faber, is out. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0571230350/026-5688004-1320407?v=glance&n=266239

So is school. Out, I mean. Joe and Ella have the glorious summer ahead of them, free, while I remain chained to my smoking and sooty PC . Joe has finished at infants school. I'm haunted by the idea that I've done wrong by my kids by sending them to school before they were seven. I'm deadly serious. They shouldn't have been subjected to that grinding routine so early. Routine will want them for the rest of their lives. But the pressure to just go along with what everyone else does is enormous. I should have been stronger minded. But while Joe refuses to get a hair cut Ella reads and reads and reads. I can't seem to find her enough stuff. Sharyn November sent her a pile of novels, and Ella burned 'em up two a day. I tried to get her interested in some short stories, but she was sniffy: "The endings come round too soon." Long-haired hippy-kid Joe meanwhile is on a Laurel & Hardy jag. Even from my lofty eerie on the third floor I sometimes hear him cackling and howling. He even laughs in black 'n' white, that kid.

So do I in the summer. Which is always like the short stories that end too soon.

Graham Joyce can be contacted by emailing graham@grahamjoyce.net