theft is the thief of ig time

my first 'brief' substack

Hello there. I’m not sure how this will pan out! it may be my first and only substack! BUT at the moment I’m excited about starting this newsletter. For a while I’ve wanted more space to talk about what books I’ve enjoyed lately / author life / publishing secrets / my ongoing obsession with what’s going on with M&S (atm: all good) / what dahlias I should plant / why have I never watched MAFS Australia as it is amazing and most of all this question: how on earth you write a novel, something that still fascinates me, over twenty years after I started, with pallid mien and trembling fingers ((C) me, great writing there) to pick up my quill and transmit my thoughts to vellum, back when Tony Blair was Prime Minister and young people could afford to have dreams.

My desk, very much as tidy as it gets because unlike machines generating AI content authors have human brains they use to be creative so they can write stories from those unique wonderful brains for fellow unique and wonderful humans

Rage against the machine: So I’ve been meaning to do something about a newsletter, but carried on scrolling through instagram looking for content on Martin Short and Meryl Streep’s alleged romance instead. But then.

Last week we discovered that Meta have mined the evil LibGen data set (LibGen is short for Library Genesis, and it’s an extremely awful online pirated library systematically mining books and uploading them, and no one seems to know who set it up and maintains it (Russians)). Meta has used LibGen to train its AI machines using the work of all authors I know. And you know this news has finally made me stop scrolling and realise my simmering loathing for Zuckerberg and all his works has to result in some action. Not only have they uploaded all my novels without my permission, they’ve also stolen A BOOK OF MINE THAT ISN’T PUBLISHED YET. This is the Treasures, out 12th June from Viking. So they’ve stolen the text from - where? I don’t know. Netgalley? My own Word document? The cloud? This sounds vague, but that’s how big tech works. It is all vague to us, hidden down at the bottom of T&Cs or reliant on the apathy of us glued to our phones and trusting in governmental guardrails that aren’t actually there, and all the while Meta are illegally (reports in the Atlantic & the Bookseller say they knew it was illegal but just decided to go ahead with doing it anyway because what the hell) scraping away my work and the millions of words and ideas and thoughts and feelings I’ve had through my life and career that go to make up their soulless machines which will write a book for you in the style of Harriet Evans or whomsoever you should choose in a matter of seconds. Is that OK? NO OF COURSE IT’S NOT BLOODY OK. How did we get here?

I am on the management committee for the Society of Authors, I was elected in 2022, thank you fellow authors, and we have spent so much of last year working to try to protect authors against the effects of AI on jobs (translators, audio narrators and producers, copyeditors, editors, abridgers, and of course writers of all kinds are screwed unless we have proper legislation in place.) For me it’s my new book I keep coming back to. A book that hasn’t been published yet, that I spent eighteen months writing, travelling to America and Scotland and wandering round stone circles and Notting Hill and writing street plans and house floor plans and thinking of character names and then finally editing, cutting, adding, thinking - all the thinking, that my twenty years of writing have made me understand I have to do - this novel that isn’t even out yet for readers to enjoy has had its text uploaded somehow, to train a machine that will make Meta, a company valued at $1.5 TRILLION, more money.

Meta’s posturing about ‘building the future of human connections’ has nothing to do with human endeavour unless you count the human endeavour of their skeevy executives whose weaselly spider brains thought it was OK to do this. This is the main reason I’m keen to move away from Instagram and other platforms. Here is a link to advice the Society of Authors has collated about what to do next. More is coming. We won’t stand for this. Well I won’t anyway. *lies down for a nap* So if this is the only substack I ever write, that’s what I wanted to explain.

Already this is not short. Yikes. Where was I.

My plan is to do a weekly or fortnightly letter with one main topic on something to do with writing that’s concerning me this week. (I think we can see what this week’s is). And in addition, 3 or 4 short bits on what books, TV, cooking, radio, and other media I’ve enjoyed that week which has helped me with my writing and with my busybusybusy life.

Briefly let me tell you a bit more about myself. I am the author of 14 novels (give or take). My latest novel, The Treasures, the one that Meta has nicked, is out in June in hardback. It’s the first in a trilogy about a house and family over 50 or so years. I’m thrilled about it. I’m writing the second at the moment. Writing a trilogy is amazing! And terrifying! And fascinating, as it is the opportunity to really get into a family’s life and under their skin.

Before I was a full time writer I was an editor at Penguin and Headline and if you like stories of publishing days of yore and secretaries who are so incompetent but enthusiastic and badly paid you can’t get anyone to replace them (hint: me) stand by, because I got ‘em. Despite leaving prawn sandwiches in filing cabinets, Hugh Laurie idling in reception for 40 mins because I forgot to tell my boss he was waiting and routinely being told I shouldn’t come to work hungover and quite so obviously read Hello! at my desk instead of answering phones I rose through the ranks to eventually be a publisher, was appointed to the board of Headline for two years and published lots of bestsellers. And it was fun. There’s the time I met Lauren Bacall or had to overruled Nick Hornby on a question about music (!) during a literary quiz (my go to story people) or failing to recognise the CEO of Penguin USA and slagging off Penguin USA, or picking out covers with Roald Dahl’s widow and most of all London in the 90s and early 00s which was when seen through my lonely writing window now, 100% fun.

I’m also the author of one detective novel - so far. It is set in the 1930s, is called D is for Death, it’s just out in paperback and features the detective heroine Dora Wildwood and I would love to see more published and will update you when I can about that.

I live in Bath, and have two children. Living in Bath is as nice as you’d imagine it to be. In fact living in Bath keeps me sane, as it’s very hard to get too down about stuff when people are regularly walking past my house in Jane Austen bonnets.

Storytime: Writing is a job. It is not to be confused with a hobby. I am a writer to my absolute core and I think have been since I was very little. I will keep on writing even if no one pays me money to write my books because I am always writing for myself. So I hope you’ll join me as I hopefully shed some light on what it is like to write for a living and what the Lady Novelist sometimes has to put up with. One example:

Old friend of partner’s wife at dinner: Oh so you write books, what kind of thing?

Me: I write about families, secrets, relationships, that sort of thing.

OFoPW: Great! What’s your latest one called? I’m looking for something trashy to read.

Insert emoji with no expression here.

One of my favourite writer stories, please let it be true, is Margaret Drabble sitting next to a brain surgeon at a dinner party, and during a general discussion on retirement the following conversation ensuing:

MD So what will you do when you retire?

BS I thought I’d finally get round to writing that novel. How about you?

MD I thought I’d finally get round to training to be a brain surgeon *blows smoke out of mouth from imaginary cigarette, styles hair in mirror then stops like fonz, drinks large sip of wine*

She wrote the millstone, Brain surgeon dude. I mean i know you presumably know how to do surgery on brains, well done, but that still doesn’t make you Margaret Drabble.

Ah the confidence of men.

Onwards. Here’s what has featured in my life this week.

1. Good Read: Broken Country

   

   I enjoyed this soapy, compelling, saga about life on a Dorset farm or rather a love triangle on a Dorset farm. It’s twisty and full of surprises and it’s good fun even though there’s a lot of accidental death and farm machinery. It could be predictable but it’s not, and it’s quite unusual: freewheeling, pacey, quiet, fierce, joyful as well, and I love an unusual read. It’s being compared to Where the Crawdads Sing but one of the things I hope this substack will give me is the freedom to say when I didn’t like a book and I DID NOT like that book (sample quote ‘he enjoyed the foothills of her womanhood’) but please feel free to disagree as lots of people i know did. Anyway, this is worth anyone’s time.

2. Where my research lead me this week:

   

   I had to read up on 1940s fashion models *just briefly* so I thought but fell down a wormhole and ended up, as so often happens, losing a couple of hours to the padding required on the iconic Bar Jacket from Dior’s New Look but also this very delightful piece about the first fashion shows in Paris after the war by Rosamond Bernier, a journalist and art historian. Did you know you used to stop on transatlantic flights then for refuelling in the delightfully named Gander, Newfoundland? ‘You rested, fully dressed, in one of a line of cots in a kind of barracks. My immediate neighbors were a group of Dominican monks—Italian, no English. I had studied Italian a long time ago in college but had had no opportunity to practice. I could only remember a few lines of Dante, about returning from hell, not much of a conversational opener. I tried it out, anyhow, and got a gratifying response.’ It’s a deeply great piece, do read it.

3. What am I listening to / i love it / more please

   

   Add to Playlist, R4 - never heard this excellent programme which dissects why songs / music work and what’s great about them. It literally goes from discussing Tchaikovsky making scales werk and how he wrote the Nutcracker to a deep dive on the genius of Eminem’s Stan. I’m so sick of podcasts SAYS THE GAL WRITING HER FIRST SUBSTACK WITHOUT APPAZ IRONY. This is why radio is great.

This first newsletter is peppered with lies from start to finish as I have thrice mentioned its brevity and it’s anything but. Thanks for reading this far. I’ve had a blast. Please subscribe, and tell all your friends. And maybe see you… next week?

love from the Lady Novelist