Newsletter

Newsletter – February 2024

One of the hazards writers of all genres face is the contentious issue of plagiarism. Since earliest times many famous and not so famous people have faced the hijacking and copying of their work. Sometimes this is deliberately done, and sometimes it is accidental. In whatever way a piece of work is plagiarised, reputations and careers suffer from the damage.

In our modern age the internet, with its sheer abundance of and accessibility to the written word in all its many areas, has vastly increased the incidence of plagiarism. As we grapple with the mounting problems of a leviathan internet and the further complications brought to the monster by the advent of AI, it is difficult to know where to turn.

Recently, all this has come home to me personally in a new and distressing way. Some weeks ago, I had reason to check one of my books on Amazon. I have written a number of novels, and all of them are for sale on Amazon. I scrolled down the column of familiar covers but was shocked to discover below my novels, a series of five bright and garish looking volumes entitled, Romantic Dating Colouring Book by Meira Chand. On a second Amazon page were another five books in the same series. Ten books in all. These books were prominently up on all the global Amazon sites I searched.

Almost all the delinquent books had ‘currently unavailable’ written beside them. A friend found one that could be ordered and sent off for it. It arrived on the promised day, entitled as on Amazon, Romantic Dating Colouring Book, but without my name anywhere on the copy. It had been printed in Las Vegas on the day it was ordered, and the ISBN number, when checked, appeared to be fictious.

I sought help from my publisher, and they wrote to their local Amazon rep, who failed to reply to their written complaint. I wrote to Amazon and received a cryptic reply saying, it was nothing to do with them if someone else had my name. I consulted a lawyer who specialised in Intellectual Property Rights. He said he could send a letter the Amazon Legal but that I would probably be spending a lot of money to little avail. After further letters to Amazon, a reply appeared that said, the offending books were being taken down. I know a cache takes time to clear but, as of now, several weeks later, the books are still up on all Amazon sites in constantly differing numbers.

I am glad the actual Romantic Dating Colouring Book is not emblazoned with my name, but already I am having to defend myself when asked in surprise by people who have come across these books on Amazon, why I feel the need to produce a crude and tasteless colouring book.

I am not the only person infuriated by the false use of my name in this way. Many authors are facing the issue of fake novels or other books in their name, written by AI and falsely posted up as their work.

This problem is only going to get worse. It is time for Amazon to take better responsibility for their huge domain and address the dilemma of misinformation in ways that safeguard authors and their work in the uncertain new times ahead.

Newsletter – October 2023

Where do novels come from, and why would anyone want to write one? As I sit down to begin yet another, I am asking myself these questions. No matter how many books an author has written, it does not get any easier. Each feels like the first, a terrifying and tentative exploration of a mad impulse.

Margaret Atwood describes writing as a high wire act. Up in the air on a tightrope the writer turns cartwheels and rides a bicycle. Look down once and all will be over, the magic will vanish and the unfolding novel along with its creator will come crashing down.

Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant has a wonderful description of the mystification all writers feel about their craft. She says, ‘I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist…. How to account for the overriding wish to do just that, only that, and to consider it as rational as riding a bicycle over the Alps?’

The imagination is bold and free obeying only itself. It does not listen to the carefully ordered plans devised in the head of the writer. This liberty of the imagination is a writer’s most precious possession. Through it a novel, once it is underway, must take on a life of its own, demanding the writer take risks, pushing out in all kinds of ways, putting in complications or characters not in the original plan. Lke an aircraft taxiing down a runway, there will suddenly be lift off, the craft miraculously flying free of the earth, soaring up on its journey. The novelist too must take a leap of faith into the world the other side of the looking glass, a place more real than the reality about one.

Young writers are invariably concerned with plots, but I have found it is my characters who come to me first. They emerge as if out of a mist, and the story and plot develop from their needs and problems, their interaction with each other. As I sit down to work out a blueprint for a new book, all I have is two women. They have been living in my head for the last few years. They refuse to go away, and I am still trying to understand what they want of me, what is the story they are urging me to tell, and why have they chosen me to tell it? As always at the beginning of each new book, I am left wondering if I will have the daring and the stamina to tell their story. Only time will tell.

Newsletter – April 2023

At long last, I have collected together my Indian, short stories for publication in a volume. I call these stories, my orphans, because they have lived many years in obscurity. Every writer has things that live in the gloom at the back of a drawer, whole novels, short stories, articles, poems, that can get published long after they were written, sometimes even posthumously.

Many of my stories have been published individually, yet I have never gathered them together in a volume. You will probably ask me why, because it seems like a no-brainer, the most obvious thing to do. Yet, I have found, it is not so easy.

Publishers, especially large Western publishers, do not like short stories. Every time I offered my agent my collected stories, I was told, ‘give us a novel, and then maybe after that…’

Although short stories are easily picked up and put down, and short bursts of reading fits in with busy schedules, it seems they are difficult to sell to the reading public compared to novels.  People prefer to dig themselves in for a long read, where they can experience another world for a period of time, get to know a new set of people, have exciting experiences in unknown places. In the end I gave up and thrust my stories into the darkness of a deep drawer.

So why am I taking the step right now? Because time moves on, and I do not want my stories posthumously published, so I am having another try. And in bringing these stories out into the light and reviewing them once again, I have realised how much I love the form.

The short story is deserving of the deepest respect. It is a pristine little thing, rather like a dewdrop in which the largeness of the sky is reflected.  It may not use the great trundling trainload of words the novel requires, but its brevity does not mean it is easy to write. Short stories are complete miniature works of fiction with all the same devices found in a novel, plot, setting, character, conflict, and theme. At their best, they are exquisite jewels, whole worlds found in just a few pages, and as deeply rewarding and enlightening, as a great novel.