The museum occupies the house and studio where Hepworth lived and worked. It is a clean and crisp white space, laid out much like a gallery of her work, but there is still much evidence of the artist – pieces of her furniture, her mantelpiece still in place.

(As I write a middle aged Yorkshire couple have stormed through the main gallery, looking cursorily at the pieces whilst muttering ‘It escapes me’. Likely not an uncommon response to Hepworth’s abstratct style. They do not give a lot away, and there is very little or no meaning for the mind to latch on to. But if you can manage to stop thinking for a while and let your consciousness take them in, their real beauty starts to appear. Watching the other visitors is always half the fun of galleries and museums for me. The responses to art are as revealing as art itself, from the knowing nods to the angry frowns.)

The sculpture garden itself is a zen Buddhist paradise. Hepworths monolithic forms are so fascinating to the eye that a few moments gazing brings on a trance like state of wonder, accompanied by the ever present screaming of the gulls that saturates St Ives.

(The gulls are in no way adorable, being thuggish creatures that only let the human population alone because we are bigger than they are. If I ever need to put myself in the mind of a pterodactyl, I will think of sea gulls.)

All of the sculptures have large signs nearby shouting PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH. All of the comments left by children say such things as, ‘Dear Miss Hepworth. I love the scultures but was terribly tempted to climb all over them!’ and it’s not just the kids, wherever you look you see hands being consciously restrained from touching the appealing stone and bronze surfaces.

At the far end of the garden is Hepworth’s main sculpting studio, which has been preserved untouched for over 30 years, although from it’s cleanliness we guess someone hoovers out the cob webs now and again. The artist might have just stepped out for a few moments to by a new chisel.

But how long can these sculptures, finished and half finished, remain preserved? What catastrophic event will bring time back into this space? Or will it be a thousand small events, each chipping away another piece of the whole. The life that created these sculptures was as transient as all lives. They came from that place of imagination where nothing is the same from one moment to the next. And yet here we all are, desperately trying to cling on to these things.

Which might all just be a roundabout way of saying I think they should give over a few of the big sculptures for kids to climb on.

I’ve been listening to audio and video recordings of Australian aboriginal speakers for the story I am researching. I would love to find a phonetic transcription so I can see the dialect represented on the page. If anyone knows of such a thing, please let me know. I’ve also been reading about the Stolen Generations. I’m wary of touching on a subject like this without any personal connection to it, but the story has taken me there so I think I have to trust it.

Stories in dreams and dream time stories. A strange Sunday.

There is a lot to like about the Gemmell’s. I loved David Gemmell’s novels as a teenager and was sad when he passed away. I can really enjoy a rollicking good heroic fantasy, mark my consistent praise of George R R Martin as evidence. And any award that harnesses popular opinion and gets 10,000 votes for its shortlist deserves mighty praise.

But all that considered the Gemmell’s have managed to score a mighty home goal when it comes to their aim of getting non-genre readers to take genre seriously. From the Guardian article:

“Genre fantasy is often dismissed as being simply gung-ho or macho, as people outside genre circles tend to imagine it’s all about epic battles, weapons and warriors – in fact, it is all of those things and so much more. Contemporary fantasy fiction is about far more than escape to other realities. Freed of the constraints and preconceptions of other kinds of fiction, it holds up a mirror to reflect on this world and time through the prism of vivid characters and enthralling drama that engage the imagination like no other genre.”

I would be the first to agree that there are many examples of contemporary fantasy that hold up a mirror to our world. Unfortunately the Gemmell shortlist are not among them. Thats not a condemnation of the books. They are good, exciting ‘F’antasy of the epic and heroic kind. I like Joe Abercrombie’s series particularly for its slightly knowing attitude to its subject matter and sense of humour. But these are not books of great reflection on the world as it is. And they are definitely not books to win over non-genre readers to the cause, as they will tend to confirm rather than dispell most of the prejudcies those readers hold.

The truth is that really great epic Fantasy, that creates an immersive secondary world and fills it with compelling characters and complex stories is VERY difficult to do well, and all to easy to do poorly. The great names of the genre like Tolkien, Gemmell and Martin each in their own way mastered the many tools that great fantasy writing requires. Unfortunately, the somewhat cynical way that publishers churn out epic Fantasy sagas means that much of the writing in the genre today falls very far short of mastery. Too many of these novels lack the great leaps of imagination that Tolkien achieved when he created Middle Earth. And where the imagination is present, the author lacks the years of experience George R R Martin accrued before turning his hand to fantasy. Certainly the ‘chuck it at the wall and see what sticks’ attitude of the publishers will turn up the occasional gem, but most readers will quite rightly not bother looking for them in the mess.

I will carry on searching for my next Fantasy fix, and if it holds up a mirror to the world all the better. But until the publishers of Fantasy take their books more seriously, its unlikely a broader readership will.

To date, self publishing has been a bad idea. People without the necessary skills and experience full prey to vanity publishers. Writers with some talent but who are still learning can expose their work too soon. Excellent writing can find itself swamped among the dross that is self published every year and no one bothers to go looking for it. The general wisdom on self publishing for anyone who aspires to become a professional author has been…don’t.

But over the last few years advances in printing technology, ebooks and the internet have started to change the viability of self publishing. A small number of very talented writers – Kelly Link and John Scalzi spring to mind – have self published at strategic moments in their career and benefited massively from doing so. The podcast and audio fiction revolution has allowed writers like J C Hutchins and Mur Lafferty to build a considerably larger following than many conventionally  published authors will ever achieve, and podcasting poster boy Scott Sigler has transitioned into a conventional publishing deal. And while no major authors are yet self publishing, many are making their work available online in ebook format.

At the same time, traditional publishing has been sliding into crisis. Book sales are down. Advances have gone from small to worse, and marketing spend is so low on all but the top authors on a publishers list that the benefits of getting a book deal are increasingly hard to spot. The pro short fiction markets are on the verge of extinction, and the profusion of semi-pro markets offer so many outlets for stories that few can muster more than a handful of readers. Similarly, the valiant indie and small press have filled the gap that the major publishers left behind when they abandoned the mid-list, but while some are of very high quality many more are back room operations with limited or no distribution and often no discernible business plan.

Authors face one simple and ongoing challenge in all of this. How to get what they write in front of people who want to read it. Building a readership is the only real test of a writers work. If people engage with what you are writing in enough numbers you will find success, whether you have a book deal or self publish. If people don’t engage with what you write it doesn’t matter how big your advance or how well you self promote, you will ultimately fail. The question then is what role self publishing plays in building a readership?

The answer will be different for each author. No doubt many writers will continue to find their readership purely within the framework of the publishing industry, in whatever form it emerges from its current difficulties. But it seems almost certain that for many authors  self publishing will play an increasingly large part in the equation. It may well become accepted practice for emerging writers to self publish their debut collection or novel and find a readership before major publishers invest in them. At the other end of the scale, big name authors may well find the financial rewards of self publishing merit the associated risks. In between the two will be a range of authors publishing directly to niche audiences of maybe only a few thousand readers, enough to support the writers work but not enough to reward the involvement of a publisher.

If the general wisdom about self publishing has been ‘don’t', its likely that wisdom may change to ‘do – but with great caution’. There has always been a role for self publishing, but as that role grows, the provisos that accompany self publishing will grow all the more important. Authors will need to be aware that self publishing means more than just having a book printed. It means being an editor, a distributor and a marketer of your own work. It means investing in yourself in exactly the way a good publisher invests in their authors, whilst taking the risks a good publisher also takes. It means understanding the arc of your own career as a writer in the same depth that good editors and agents do. And most of all it means having an honest and accurate understanding of the quality of your own writing, maybe the hardest thing of all.

For most self publishig will continue to be a mistake, but for writers with enough talent and determination it is already becoming an important part of building a readership, one that for many writers it will be a mistake to simply dismiss.

*****

Harvard names it a low risk run once too often. The fence makes his fat lipped grin as Spaceman memorises the number at a glance. He should take a walk up Main Street, get lost in the plate glass maze of store fronts and rich women, he knows it. But work is work, and besides, he always gets a game on when he visits the Algerian.

Spaceman steps off the tram two stops early, skips across four lanes of traffic and the central reservation, expert navigator of this outpost of the monoculture, this anyplace cloned from the flesh of London, New York, Beijing. He comes up on the tower from behind, sliding in through a fissure in the rusting chain-link.

They answer the buzzer fast. The Algerian and his boys toke hard and sleep late, but this morning the door opens quick. They do not even ask his name. Spaceman’s feet go heavy like lead. He could be standing on the surface of another planet, mass three times as great, weighed down by a crushing gravity. A girl shoulders her way out of the tower, pushing a buggy in front. Spaceman looks at a baby swaddled in pink, bright and grimy nylon. The girls eyes return him a dead addict stare. No more thinking Spaceman, time to go to work.

And he is through the door.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,,2284587,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=10