This extract is taken from one of the earlier chapters, when she is still fifteen years old and being ‘brought along’ by one of her neighbours, Ray Kennedy:

The pleasantest experience Thea had that summer was a trip that she and her mother made to Denver in Ray Kennedy’s caboose. Mrs Kronborg had been looking forward to this rare excursion for a long while, but as Ray never knew at what hour his freight would leave Moonstone, it was difficult to arrange. The call-boy was as likely to summon him to start on his run at twelve o’clock midnight as at twelve o’clock noon. The first week in June started out with all the scheduled trains running on time, and a light freight business. Tuesday evening Ray, after consulting with the dispatcher, stopped at the Kronborgs’ front gate to tell Mrs Kronborg – who was helping Tillie water the flowers – that if she and Thea could be at the depot at eight o’clock the next morning, he thought he could promise them a pleasant ride and get them into Denver before nine o’clock in the evening. Mrs Kronborg told him cheerfully, across the fence, that she would ‘take him up on it,’ and Ray hurried back to the yards to scrub out his car.

The one complaint Ray’s brakemen had to make of him was that he was too fussy about his caboose. His former brakeman had asked to be transferred because, he said, ‘Kennedy was as fussy about his car as an old maid about her bird-cage.’ Joe Giddy, who was braking with Ray now, called him ‘the bride,’ because he kept the caboose and bunks so clean.

It was properly the brakeman’s business to keep the car clean, but when Ray got back to the depot, Giddy was nowhere to be found. Muttering that all his brakemen seemed to consider him ‘easy,’ Ray went down to his car alone. He built a fire in the stove and put water on to heat while he got into his overalls and jumper. Then he set to work with a scrubbing-brush and plenty of soap and ‘cleaner.’ He scrubbed the floor and seats, blackened the stove, put clean sheets on the bunks, and then began to demolish Giddy’s picture gallery. Ray found that his brakemen were likely to have what he termed ‘a taste for the nude in art,’ and Giddy was no exception. Ray took down half a dozen girls in tights and ballet skirts – premiums for cigarette coupons – and some racy calendars advertising saloons and sporting clubs, which had cost Giddy both time and trouble; he even removed Giddy’s particular pet, a naked girl lying on a couch with her knee carelessly poised in the air. Underneath the picture was printed the title, ‘The Odalisque.’ Giddy was under the happy delusion that this title meant something wicked – there was a wicked look about the consonants – but Ray, of course, had looked it up, and Giddy was indebted to the dictionary for the privilege of keeping his lady. If ‘odalisque’ had been what Ray called an objectionable word, he would have thrown the picture out in the first place. Ray even took down a picture of Mrs Langtry in evening dress, because it was entitled the ‘Jersey Lily,’ and because there was a small head of Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, in one corner. Albert Edward’s conduct was a popular subject of discussion among railroad men in those days, and as Ray pulled the tacks out of this lithograph he felt more indignant with the English than ever. He deposited all these pictures under the mattress of Giddy’s bunk, and stood admiring his clean car in the lamplight; the walls now exhibited only a wheatfield, advertising agricultural implements, a map of Colorado, and some pictures of race-horses and hunting dogs. At this moment Giddy, freshly shaved and shampooed, his shirt shining with the highest polish known to Chinese laundrymen, his straw hat tipped over his right eye, thrust his head in at the door.

‘What in hell -,’ he brought out furiously. His good humoured, sunburned face seemed fairly to swell with amazement and anger.

‘That’s all right, Giddy,’ Ray called in a conciliatory tone. ‘Nothing injured. I’ll put ‘em all up again as I found ‘em. Going to take some ladies down in the car tomorrow.’

Giddy scowled. He did not dispute the propriety of Ray’s measures, if there were to be ladies on board, but he felt injured. ‘I suppose you’ll expect me to behave like a Y.M.C.A. secretary,’ he growled. ‘I can’t do my work and serve tea at the same time.’

‘No need to have a tea-party,’ said Ray with determined cheerfulness. ‘Mrs Kronborg will bring the lunch, and it will be a darned good one.’

Giddy lounged against the car, holding his cigar between two thick fingers. ‘Then I guess she’ll get it,’ he observed knowingly. ‘I don’t think your musical friend is much on the grub-box. Has to keep her hands white to tickle the ivories.’ Giddy had nothing against Thea, but he felt cantankerous and wanted to get a rise out of Kennedy.

‘Every man to his own job,’ Ray replied agreeably, pulling his white shirt on over his head.
Giddy emitted smoke distainfully. ‘I suppose so. The man that gets her will have to wear an apron and bake the pancakes. Well, some men like to mess about the kitchen.’ He paused, but Ray was intent on getting into his clothes as quickly as possible. Giddy thought he could go a little further. ‘Of course, I don’t dispute your right to haul women in this car if you want to, but personally, so far as I’m concerned, I’d a good deal rather drink a can of tomatoes and do without the women and their lunch. I was never much enslaved to hard-boiled eggs, anyhow.’

‘You’ll eat ‘em tomorrow, all the same.’ Ray’s tone had a steely glitter as he jumped out of the car, and Giddy stood aside to let him pass. He knew that Kennedy’s next reply would be delivered by hand. He had once seen Ray beat up a nasty fellow for insulting a Mexican woman who helped about the grub-car in the work train, and his fists had worked like two steel hammers. Giddy wasn’t looking for trouble.

Thea Kronborg is blessed with a beautiful singing voice, but its quality and possibilities could easily be overlooked in the raw Colorado town in which she is born.

Song of the Lark follows the genesis of an artist and the quality of the writing is such that I found myself following her successes and failures with equal fervour and anticipation.

*

The Swiss assisted suicide group Dignitas, which was evicted from its flat in Zurich after complaints about bodies in the lift, has opened what neighbours have labelled a ‘death factory’ on a business park next to the country’s biggest brothel.

*

Michael Jackson, really weird pop star, has plans for a new album and tour . . . Moonwalking away from his debts?

Sheryl Crow’s music is the sound of soccer mom nation. It’s not just the kind of music your mother would like, it’s the kind of music your mother would make (and maybe does at the local weekly coffee house in the church basement): midtempo rock, sing-along choruses, strummed acoustic guitar (the very sound of which is enough to inspire a conditioned revulsion response in many Americans [and Europeans] below the age of 18), and, on Crow’s latest album, explicitly political lyrics.

*

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, with its themes of possibility and aspiration, speaks to a new generation of immigrants from China and elsewhere.
Sara Rimer in the NY Times reports on teachers who say students can see themselves in Gatsby.
Many are inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for. “Green color always represents hope,” says Jinzhao Wang, 14, who immigrated from China two years ago .
“My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”

*

Nick Fraser in The Observer writes about the rediscovery of the dark genius, Richard Yates.

My characters all rush around trying to do their best, trying to live well within their known and unknown limitations, Yates explains. Doing what they can’t help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can’t help being the people they are.

*

THE prototypical computer whiz of popular imagination — pasty, geeky, male — has failed to live up to his reputation.
According to Stephenie Rosenbloom at The New York Times, research shows that among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) are not misfits resembling the Lone Gunmen of “The X Files.” On the contrary, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls.

There are too many guns in the USA.
They are too easy to get.
I’m sick of the NRA.
I’m sick of listening to blathering shills telling me over the airwaves that this is the price of freedom, that gun control won’t work, that the Second Amendment means any idiot can get a gun, and decide when he’s had enough he can take innocents with him.

It doesn’t make any sense. Those of us who understand this need to speak out.

If you click on your chosen category in the sidebar, say, art, for example, you will immediately be whisked off to the latest posts from A Welsh View (Egg City – An amazing piece of artwork created entirely from stacked eggs); or from The Daily (Maybe) (Louise Whittle’s excellent guest post on the place of women in the art world. There are currently thirty-six entries from a wide variety of blogs under the art category.

If art isn’t your scene, try books instead. Here you’ll currently find pieces from Harry’s Place on the life and death of Norman Mailer; from The ThunderDragon on Harry Potter’s politics – Is he really a Left-Winger? Or Baggage Reclaim’s cogitations on a Doris Lessing interview.

You may, of course, prefer to wander through the categories on current affairs, Wales, Scotland, Lib Dems, the environment, software, television or public relations.

You can spend a lot of time British Blogs.

There is a fully functioning search facility together with a constantly updated list of the most popular searches. And the site also lists top posts and the most popular links.

I don’t know how many sites British Blogs are currently aggregating, but the categories covered are numerous and at busy times of the day the site is updated every couple of minutes.

But go visit yourself, I’ll be very surprised if you don’t find something to capture your attention and imagination.

For me the creation of text depends on my reading and experiences. Since all of my books for adults have been based on historical events in foreign lands I have considered it essential to go there and ask questions. Initially I just walk around imagining what it must have been like to be there.

Then I visit museums, I make notes, I conduct interviews and I try to become the person I am writing about. I watch videos, I read books – lots and lots of books, I go on courses, I try to learn different languages. It is quite intensive. I like to have as many different experiences as possible. For one book I learnt to become a shaman because I wanted one of my characters to have that sort of spirituality and the only way to fully understand was to try to become one myself and learn some of what it is like to go on shamanic journeys.

I suppose I try to immerse myself but I don’t actively think about writing, not at first. That comes eventually on its own. I think all these experiences are like filling a room. Eventually, by the time I am ready to write, this room is packed with ideas and sensations all jumbled up together. But they are diffuse things and I know they won’t last long because my memory is so bad. I have to accumulate them quickly and all at once so I can make distant connections otherwise they fade. The best connections are between things which have never before been connected. They make the most powerful original metaphors.

I’ve also found that the process of finding these metaphors cannot be forced. They come on their own without my actively looking for them. Eventually a sentence might come to me in the middle of the night when I’m half asleep and I know immediately that it’s ‘the one’ – the sentence that will start it all and I have to force myself to get up and write it down otherwise it will go. Then, once I am at my desk, I have to force myself to keep going until that mood is gone and I can go back to sleep. That’s how it is for the writing that I like the best – the lyrical stuff. Then the writing flows and it seems to come more readily if I am a little tired because I am less inhibited.

A lot depends on mood, I think, and one way I have sometimes found useful in summoning up this creative mood is to use music. I think it makes me relax and allows my emotions to surface and then the writing can start to flow.

Other times I have to work to a structure and I worry more. The writing I produce then has a slightly different character from the other sort of writing since it is more obviously directed towards the plot. I usually have the outline worked out in advance and when I do this sort of writing I tend to stick to that. This sort of writing has the hardness of bones without flesh and it more obviously propels the story forward. It depends more on logic and less on metaphor and connections. But sometimes I allow myself to stray – I stray so much that new subplots and characters develop and the other sort of writing then takes over.

So there are two sorts of thinking leading to two different sorts of writing in my work: the softer writing depending on research and experiences and the production of metaphors, and the harder writing of action and dialogue which depends on the logistics of the plot. I find it useful to have both because when one fails I can go back to the other and there is always something I can do. Most of the time it precludes writer’s block.

Clare Dudman is a writer, her children’s novel Edge of Danger won the Kathleen Fidler award; her other books include Wegeners Jigsaw and 98 Reasons for Being. Her website is Clare Dudman and she blogs at: Keeper of the Snails.

When a substantial idea occurs to me it occurs in what I call a cloud. The cloud includes a few images, a few words, a few thoughts (as different from words), even tunes of songs. Immediately I write it in my notebook that I carry for this purpose. Then I reconstruct it as an essay or short story or poem.

No, I don’t think there is a formula or a single idea. It’s rather a grouping of ideas, which is as nebulous as a cloud (this analogy is because it is raining here rather heavily). Then the whole tenor of the piece may change when I sit down to write it. I may change it a lot depending upon the mood I am in: cheerful, dour, bitter, etc.

The process of writing is for me something that innately wants to express me and my thoughts as the perfect written solutions to the chaos, confusion and sounds that exist around me. I have found a sanctuary in writing, and I feel for those who haven’t.

John P Matthew writes prose and poetry; he blogs at: http://johnpmathew.blogspot.com