Jon Haylett

The Spirit of Adventure

The coastguard was called out on Sunday. It's a volunteer group, as is our fire brigade. There's considerable overlap in personnel between the two, as you'd expect in a tiny village like this. Clyde made a mess of calling us out - I think they must have forgotten we'd got pagers - so Rosemary had to get the truck out while, at the same time, phoning round to alert the team.

The cause of the excitement was three young kayakers. They'd rounded the point and were making their way along the north coast when the wind began to rise very quickly to Force 6. It's a wicked stretch of coast, black, vertical cliffs separated by sharp headlands with wonderful names like Rubha a' Phuill Chruinn and Rubha na Lice Buidhe, with the rare paths up, if you can find them, precipitous sheep tracks.

The three had done nothing wrong, not until the last few minutes, and then they made only one, tiny mistake. They were very well equipped, had VHF as well as mobile phones, and had plenty of experience. But, in their hurry to reach the bay where they were planning to camp the night, they allowed one, albeit the most experienced paddler, to lag behind. As the leading two surfed through the breakers to the beach they realised she was no longer with them. In the fierce cross-sea, she'd turned over.

I struggle to imagine, let alone describe, what the two girls felt in the following minutes. They could get a signal on neither VHF nor mobile. They couldn't fight their back through the breakers - that might have compounded the problem. Instead, they had the presence of mind to do everything absolutely right. While one climbed the hill until she raised a signal, the other hurried back along the clifftops to locate her friend. The nearest helicopter is at Stornoway, an hour away, but Fate repaid their coolness by providing a rescue helicopter not ten miles away, out on another job. By the time the coastguard came charging over the hill, two lifeboats were working their way along the coast and the girl had already been scooped out of the water by the helicopter and was on her way to hospital with severe hypothermia.

Job done? Not a bit of it! There are times when we footsoldiers feel a little redundant in a high-tech world but there's one thing a helicopter and two lifeboats can't do: deal with the emotional shock of those left standing by the shore.

Because I'm the oldest in the team and, therefore, the most in need of exercise, Rosemary sent me over the cliffs to collect the girl who'd run to find her friend. When I told her that she was fine she suddenly sat down in the mud.

How do you deal with a girl who is almost beside herself with self-condemnation? For Christ sake, it wasn't her fault! She recovered quickly enough - and a cheerful Irish girl she proved to be - but what grieved me was that she swore she would never go out in a kayak again.

In this armchair world it's imperative we encourage young people who are prepared to brave the risks of cold and sea. If, as sometimes happens, they find themselves in trouble, no-one in the emergency services begrudges them their time - it's why they do the job. It's rather different when ill-prepared idiots take thoughtless risks - and we've seen a few of them out here.

Our local laird was good enough to see the girls were put up for the night, then, yesterday, the team went back to retrieve the kayak from under the cliffs. The only thing we couldn't find was the paddle. So, when they left, the girls had lost almost nothing - but had gained a great story that they could tell for the rest of their lives.

Jon

Mangled

My wife has a deformed little finger. I rather like it. There's something endearing about a slight blemish on a beautiful woman.

Most of you out there have probably heard of mangles but, unless you're 60 or above, you probably haven't encountered one. In the old days, after the washing had been wrung out, it was pushed between two rotating rubber rollers. Originally they were worked with a handle, so you had to feed the washing through with one hand while winding madly with the other. Later, electricity arrived and the mangles were much more powerful. As a little girl, Gill had the misfortune to have her finger caught in a 'modern' mangle while helping her granny. They brought little girls up properly in those days.

After washing had been through the mangle - and often it was put through more than once - it looked flat and limp, and it was still damp.

I've just seen the printer's second version of Cry of the Justice Bird. The first one had errors in it - not many, considering there are so many opportunities for bugs to crawl in. I expected fewer on the second but they're still there. I have a horrible feeling that quite a few of them were hiding in there the first time but we didn't spot them.

It's when you read a book less for its content than for its technical correctness that you realise how much you skip when reading normally. Picking through a book word by word while checking its sense phrase by phrase and looking for inconsistencies is mind-sapping. You can't drop your concentration for a moment. You can't even enjoy the story, because it has a nasty habit of running away with you.

Anyway, it's done. I've sent off my list of mistakes to Keirsten. How she does this sort of thing day after day the Lord alone knows.

In a recent email she said how excited I should be at this stage, seeing the book ready for printing. Certainly, it looks superb. I really like the way the chapter numbers and titles are presented, and she's inserted very neat line breaks, little pictures of the Justice Bird. And, that cover.... Wow! But.... excited? Sorry. No. Just at this moment I feel.... mangled.

Jon

Cutty Sark

Watching Cutty Sark burn is a timely reminder of the dangers faced by the men who worked those thoroughbreds among sailing ships. In 1874, when Cutty Sark had been plying her trade for five years, the Cospatrick, a Backwall passenger ship, caught fire south of the Cape of Good Hope. Outward bound to Aukland with 429 passengers and 44 crew, with no means of summoning help and too few spaces in the lifeboats, only three, all crew, survived. The horrors of what occurred as that beautiful ship burned, and in the lifeboats that got away and disappeared into the Southern Ocean, do not bear thinking about.

The great clippers like Cutty Sark and Cospatrick were built to service the most far-flung empire the world has seen. The men who worked them were hard men. Their passengers, people who chose to leave these shores for distant lands, suffered enough hardship as the captain pressed every sail short of ripping the masts out of the hull, yet what they endured was often a prelude to even greater privation in the lands they settled.

If you were to ask the man in the street today whether he was proud of what the British Empire achieved he would shrug his shoulders. Why? We have been schooled to be embarrassed, almost to regret it ever happened, yet it was an incredible achievement. Yes, the trade carried by Cutty Sark and her sisters made Britain rich but our people gave much in return. We should hold our heads up high. As we inspect the charred timbers of Cutty Sark we should be proud of our achievement.

Is it only me who thinks it: have today's Brits lost their balls?

Jon

You Can't Tell a Book....

The human brain is hard-wired to jump to conclusions. When you first meet someone you categorise them in milliseconds, not only simple things like their appearance, their colour, sex and age, but you use those visual signals to make a mass of guesses, even about such fundamental things as whether you trust them and whether you're going to like them. It goes back to the that primaeval human on the savanna lands of Africa. Then, you had to. If you made a mistake you were probably dead.

What's so terrible is that it takes a long time to overcome that initial prejudice. I freely admit that I've met someone and taken an instant dislike to them, only to discover, much later, a truly beautiful personality.

Estate agents say that punters decide whether they want to buy a house within moments of seeing it. I know I have. It goes for other places too. I vividly remember arriving at my senior school and knowing instantly that I was going to be happy there.

The first time I saw the cover for Cry of the Justice Bird was when it arrived as an attachment to one of Keirsten's concise emails. There were a couple of choices but all were basically the same format: black background, with a black-and-white painted face exploding out of it and the truck with fire behind and men running. Orange, black and white. African colours. In true, human form, I jumped straight to a conclusion: I loved it.

I loved it so much I re-wrote parts of the book to suit it. It reflects everything in the story: violence, horror, destruction, war, all set against the background of that darkest of continents. It's even got a bird on the cover, a feathered one to represent the lovely birds between the covers.

Sadly, I don't know anything about the person who designed it. I don't know whether Keirsten just gave him or her a brief synopsis of the book, whether she told him/her exactly what she wanted, or what. All I can say is that the cover's going to give the book a keen marketing edge, and I'm very grateful.

The old adage, 'You can't tell a book by its cover' may be true but I'm only too keen to trade on prejudice.

Jon

Primaeval Urge

What is it that impels us to write? What drives us to spend those lonesome hours in front of the flickering screen while everyone else is out there drinking and getting laid and generally enjoying themselves? There's some sort of primaeval urge in it, an addiction, an obsession. Perhaps it goes back to those ancestral groups of early humans out on the African plains, squatting round the fire at night with the hyenas cackling around them, and looking for entertainment. So, someone told a story. A good storyteller had status so the birds fancied him. Natural selection followed.

The horrible thing about storytelling is that you have to have an audience. You can't imagine that ancient storyteller sitting at a fire all by himself getting his kicks out of spinning stories to the hyenas. He had to have someone to impress, the more the better. So today's wordsmiths need a publisher, though I do wonder for how much longer.

The thing about a story is that, once you've created it, it's yours. It's unique, original. It's stamped with your ideas, with your experiences, with your hopes and dreams. It's a slice of your soul. T E Lawrence lost the script of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He wrote it again. I think I could do the same for Cry of the Justice Bird, some sections almost word-for-word. That's how personal a story is.

So you pass it to your publisher, and what's the first thing she wants to do? Change it! Jesus! I've sweated blood on this, I've passed hours choosing every word so it serves its exact purpose. I've read the whole thing through a million times, so many times I know exactly when to laugh.

So, to humour Keirsten and because you do want her to publish it, you tinker with one or two bits. What happens next? She sends it to her editor, a lady called Lorna, and what does she want to do? Change it! I'd sooner roll naked across red hot coals! Reluctantly, you re-write a couple of sections, even though they were so, so much better before you changed them.

Finally - and this happened to me yesterday - you get to see the final version, all laid out ready to print. Your, or rather, the committee's work, as good as finished. You hold it at arm's length, rather as you would a fish that's been dead for a week, and, sickened, read it.

The trouble is, it's so much better.

Jon

The Bird

Alasdair had a rude awakening the other morning. It was as if someone held a comb next to his ear and ran their fingernail along it. It went on and on but there was nothing he could do about it.

It was entirely his own fault. A couple of years ago he'd allowed himself to be persuaded by Scottish National Heritage to allow them to fence off a small section of his croft next to his house, an area he would not use for grazing his small flock of blackface sheep until late in the season. Of course they paid him for the privilege, but the main advantage was having the field fenced.

The grating, nerve-tearing noise was the cry of a corncrake. The corncrake is a small, insignificant brown bird the size and general shape of a small moorhen. You never see him because he's a great lurker but, by God, you hear him. In this season of perpetual daylight he's 24/7.

Apparently, the corncrake is endangered, in the UK at least. They've hundreds of thousands of them in Russia, but they've suffered from loss of habitat here, so they need a little support. The trouble is that supporting the corncrake entails some poor bugger having to listen to him.

I based the Justice Bird on the corncrake because I wanted a bird you couldn't ignore, a bird that's loud and insistent but invisible.

Alasdair can complain but, as I said to him, he's lucky he isn't running his croft in Tanzania. There, for the benefit of rich, foreign tourists, it's lions they're trying to persuade local farmers to preserve. At least corncrakes don't eat you.

Jon

21st Century Publisher

Keirsten Clark, the publisher of PaperBooks, is rather unusual in the British literary industry in that her interest seems to be entirely in.... a book's merits. She's about to publish a novel and she's never met the author. In fact, she has only spoken to him twice, briefly, on the phone. She hasn't required him to attend at her office for what is, effectively, an interview. She hasn't had a long literary luncheon with him. She hasn't been desperate to know whether he's famous for some irrelevance that will help her sell the book. She seems to be focused entirely on the book, in improving it, in presenting it, in its success in the market, and in what it can do for both author and publisher.

In an industry where, in my 18 years' grim experience, procrastinaton is an art form, this lady works fast. Compare these facts:

1. PaperBooks Ltd. Author's proposal received 7th November 2006. Request for whole book, 30 January 2007. Indicates interest in making an offer, 28 March. 20 April, contract, amended, signed. 29 May, publication of Cry of the Justice Bird.

2. Pollinger Ltd, Authors' Agents. Proposal sent: 22 January 2006. Proposal lost. Proposal re-sent 16 May 2006. 28th November, requested whole book. Today, after emails, telephone calls and an appeal to - please - return the manuscript, Pollinger still hold it. Perhaps procrastination is too kind. Arrogance, better?

I could bang on about Literary agents for hours but I'd better not.

With the publishing industry facing unparallelled change, with ebooks set to do for literature what the iPod did for music, a lean, efficient organisation which deals quickly, fairly and respectfully with its most important resource, its authors, deserves success. Good luck to Keirsten's brave venture!

Jon

Of Tortoises

In the race up the publishing mountain, I'm the tortoise. I'm one of the thousands who slog away trying to win that elusive publisher's contract and keep failing. I'm here to prove that persevering on the long, broken road is worthwhile, that every rock that looks like a boulder can be climbed, that the lonely, waterless slopes can be negotiated, that the deep, dank chasms can be escaped, that the peak can be reached and - you know it - when you get to the top, when you look out at the view and see your book out there - Wow!

I'll give you my statistics. I've been writing novels for 18 years. I've completed seven, the longest 500,000 words. I've sent 232 letters, with accompanying sample chapters, to agents. Yes, 232. I can prove it - I've kept them all. I've also sent 55 proposals direct to publishers. The 55th went to PaperBooks.

I knew I could write. After a long struggle, in the last few years I've won two prestigious international short story competitions, the Bridport Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's VS Pritchett Prize. They thrilled me because the judging is anonymous - none of that celebrity stuff. I've always found good short stories difficult to write, more challenging than novels. The Crossing, which won Bridport, was only 2,500 words, took about an hour to write - to quote a man called Armstrong, it came out faster than puke after ten pints and an Indian - and an ocean of hours to refine.

So, to any other tortoises out there, you may be like me and have short legs, short sight, and, mercifully, a short memory for adversity, but remember, tortoises are tough, and we have even more waterproof backs than a duck.

Jon

Yet another contract!

I signed yet another contract on 20th April 2007.

I've signed hoards of contracts in my time.  We all do.  Most of us do it carelessly and pray the consequences never catch up with us.  The plastic cards I carry in my wallet all have contracts but I was buggered if I was going to read the pages and pages of microscopic print before I signed.  I've blithely signed job contracts that included a clause promising faithfully to do 'anything else the manager may from time to time require' - and you should meet some of the people I've worked for.  I've scribbled my mark on contracts for hire purchase on cars, bank accounts, insurance policies, and the purchase and sale of houses and a business.  In an inebriated moment I signed one piece of paper after which a very attractive young lady started accompanying me everywhere.  I've even signed a contract with Her Majesty: it threatens to hang me if I break it.

I didn't sign that contract on 20th April carelessly.  I had to take a glass or two of Tobermory Malt to steady me.  The glasses we use for drinking uisge beatha were given to us by a wonderful Scots aunt and uncle.  I think they were trying to ensure that we would always be equipped to provide a warm welcome in our particular glen for it takes half a bottle just to wet the bottom of the glass.

After reading the contract several times I still couldn't believe what it contained so I asked some friends to help.  I even sought professional advice from the Olympian heights of the literary world but that was pretty useless.  Befuddled, I signed.

I've been writing for 18 years.  In that time I've won thousands of pounds in short story competitions - Bridport, the Royal Society of Literature - but it has always been my fierce ambition to have a novel published.

The contract was a three-book deal with PaperBooks.