Thaw: A cool way to say hello to a new book

I love interesting ways of doing things in the literary world, so I'm delighted to be taking part i the Blogsplash for Fiona Robyn's new book, Thaw. Thaw is published by Snowbooks, and you can order it here. You can also read a chapter a day for the next 3 months on the Thaw blog. In order to launch the project, Fiona has enlisted a whole host of bloggers to take part in a Blogsplash, for which we will all be posting chapter One today.


These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It’s a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.

The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they’re stuck to the outside of her hands. They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.

I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I’m giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it. I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.

So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I’m Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I’m sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?

Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat — books you have to take in both hands to lift. I’ve had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I’ve still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.

Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about — princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad’s snoring was.

I’ve always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I’ll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say, ‘It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for,’ before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It’ll all be here. I’m using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I’m striping the paper. I’m near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I’m allowed to make my decision. That’s it for today. It’s begun.
[read more every day here]

The View From the Shoe: Fiona Robyn

I met Fiona Robyn through one of my lovely previous Views From the Shoe, Claire Grant. What fascinated me about her work was her plan for the launch of her new novel Thaw. The plan, nicely monickered Blogsplash, is for as many bloggers as possible to put the first page of the novel on their website on release date, March 1st 2010. I would encourage all bloggers out there to sign up and take part. Anyway, here's Fiona, in her own words:

Fiona Robyn is a novelist living in the countryside in Hampshire with her cats and vegetable patch. Her previous novels are The Letters and The Blue Handbag, and Thaw is out on the 1st of February. Her main site is at www.fionarobyn.com and she blogs about being a writer at www.plantingwords.com.

Thank you so much for your time. So, Louboutin or Converse?
I just had to google Louboutin to find out what it meant, which gives you your answer. I can’t walk in high heels. I had my first pair of Converse All Stars at Uni… happy memories!

Why is there no one in the world who does it quite like you?
Nobody does it quite like me because nobody IS quite like me.

What do you really, really love about it?
About writing? There are lots of things I don’t love, but I do love bringing my characters to life and hearing their stories. I love it when my readers love them as much as I do.

A bit more time in the day, or a bit more money in the bank?
Time, every time. I wouldn’t turn the money away though.

Imagine you “make it”. You wake up, and imagine the day ahead. Tell us about breakfast.
I would have earl grey and a cinnamon and raisin bagel, outside in the sun as I watched the birds and listened to them singing. Exactly like breakfast now, then. Maybe I’d be accompanied by Johnny Depp.

What’s your Jimmy Choo? And what’s just cobblers?
Hotel Chocolat chocolates, especially the butter caramels. Thorntons is cobblers.

Tell us about the last time a fan made you feel 100 feet tall.
A reader in America emailed me to say she’d had surgery for skin cancer recently, and had lots of waiting time at the hospital between procedures. She said that Leonard from my novel ‘The Blue Handbag’ kept her perfect company. Which writer could ask for anything more?

Independent and poor, or under contract and rich?
Under contract and poor ; )

Do you remember that bit on Play Away where Brian Cant stood behind people and did the actions whilst they spoke? If you could choose anyone to stand behind you and do the actions to your sales pitch, who would it be and why?
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Frocks or socks?
Both, at the same time.

Thank you SOOO much