This is a report that the reader for the Penguins Publishers made of my
TORIES OF MOTHER GOAT
Hilary Johnson
Dr. H. Johnson 5 Sto Agnes Gate Wendover Bucks, HP22 6DP TeZ (01296) 623260 Fax (01296) 623601
.Mr. Manuel Pardo,
5, Ground Lane,
South Moreton, Didcot',
Oxon.OX11 9AQ
November 4, 1995
"Dear Manuel,
First, I am so sorry that you had to telephone and that I have taken so long to return your work. Pressure during September and October is always great and this year an urgent and major editing job on a novel for penguin had to be given priority, in order to meet the publication date and thus everything else became delayed Anyway, I thank you, not only for sending your typescript but also for your patience.
There is much about the STORIES OF MOTHER GOAT which is charming. The relationship between grandmother and grandson, with its touch of affectionate humour, is a delight. Mother Goat has a begui1ing narrative voice. She is at once wise, maddening and possessed of a lovely rhythm to her storytelling, which causes her diversions from her stories and the way in which she returns to the point accumulatively to develop a pattern well-suited to the fable style.
All this I enjoyed and, also, the pictures of rural Spanish life in the past presented through Grandma's memories and narrative. I liked the image of her closeness with nature and the animals she tended, while Manu’s mingled love for his grandmother and occasional exasperation with her are pitched exactly right. Altogether, the work has a great deal of gentle charm.
As regards the English, you will see that I have made what appear to be numerous pencilled corrections to the text, though in fact the majority are of the same type of error and in general your written English is of a good standard. Like many people for whom English is not the first language, you are confused by the proper use of prepositions and there are some problems with the tenses of verbs and their forms. I hope, though, that you will find my corrections helpful.
I have to say that you would probably encounter difficulties in selling this typescript, especially in the current very difficult market. Publishers are cutting their lists, dropping many of their existing authors and being extremely cautious about taking on new ones. They need to feel total confident about the sales potential of a new author and of the material he has to offer. There might be some interest in a collection of, say, Spanish country fables or something of that kind but these stories are on too limited a scale to be readily marketable. Another problem is that they are very gentle, leisurely stories at a period when the trend is towards crisp, fast-paced narrative.
In any event, a fair amount of work needs to be done on them. The opening pages present the reader with some solid blocks of prose - long paragraphs, no dialogue for several pages - and for some while very little happens. The pace is slow and there is a good deal of repetition. As it happens the patient reader, especially if he is able to fall into the narrative rhythm, is rewarded, but the risk is that by that stage the typescript will have been put aside. If a busy editor interest is not caught by the first page, then the typescript is more than likely to be discarded. . .
One way of treating your material is much as you have done here, linking a series of stories by means of the overall narrator and the narrator of the stories, without the stories themselves having much to connect them other than locality and perhaps the odd character who may crop up in more than one story. Rather like Bret Rabbit, I suppose. .
But another is to have a. much stronger theme and storyline running through the entire section. I am assuming now that this is a part of the larger work mentioned in your letter earlier this. I feel that you could put the main focus of the narrative on the story of the stag man - what a heart-breaking tale - and spend less time on the others.
There is a further point herein that if the first five books of the complete work add up to 220,000 words and if there are two more parts in addition to these, then that will make for a book which is so vast that publishers will be very resistant to it.(paper costs have soared by around 50% during the past few months.)To split the material into separate books would mean that some of these, by the present divisions, are much shorter than the usual novel length, which is a practical difficulty of another kind. ..
What I would advise, without having seen the other parts and judging on the basis of this one which could certainly benefit from some very severe editing, is that you consider a target of 100,000 words maximum. The narrative needs to be much tighter, the concentration being very much upon the stories themselves and, the element which is of particular interest, the way in which Mano responds to them. You have. caught the painful aspect of comedy in the boy's neglect of his duties while he strives to see the fairies and the awful consequences while the episode of the golden chickens makes for strong writing. Grandma has a good deal for which to be responsible!
You say in the letter that the saga deals with a boy missing his grandfather, but in this entire section the grandfather is barely mentioned. Maybe it just happens that this is not the place for that and that the theme is stronger elsewhere, but it seems slightly strange that Mother Goat is so dominant a figure, with very little sense of Manu’s life outside these encounters. There is an occasional scene with his mother, but his home, family and friends scarcely figure in his thoughts. 1 wasn't sure of his age, whether or not he went to school, if he also had a father and/or brothers and sisters. It maybe that these matters are covered in the first part, but I mention it because there is a curious impression of the boy existing almost in isolation from the world around him and therefore all the readier to absorb the fancies and strange logic of his grandmother. (The way in which he gradually starts to question some of her statements is nice, as is the fact that the old woman always has an answer!)
There_ is certainly a pleasing flavour to the narrative, but for both practical reasons and literary ones it needs to be rigorously pruned. As a first exercise, go through the text and see what you can leave out. Look especially for repetition. Have you noticed how many sentences begin with 'Because'? whether it be of words, phrases or ideas. Also for excessive description, unnecessary adjectives or adverbs and anything at all which is not strictly relevant to. the story. Many writers have had to do this in the early stages of their career and have found it most instructive. And do bear in mind the importance of pace. Even though you don't want to 1ose the appeal which comes from the very fact that this is a gently paced narrative, nevertheless, neither do you want to risk the reader becoming lulled into boredom through lack of incident and forward narrative drive.
1 hop you have found these comments useful and 1 wish you well with your writing. It is a hard path you have chosen to tread,. One of the most important qualities for a writer to posses these days is determination. There is an originality about your work which can only benefit from your developing your technique to which end I would recommend intensive reading of recently published novels and indeed non-fiction, too, so that you can learn from other writers and thus form your own style.
Again, many apologies for the delay,
Yours Sincerely
Hilary Johnson.
viernes, 14 de diciembre de 2007
THE HAUNTED MIRROR
By Manuel Pardo
The mirror was an antique I bought in an old fashion building yard, one of those chaotic places of which there were few left in the country. The owner was waiting twenty years for planning permission to build offices in the site, but the planes never satisfied the council, so the yard was there as an ugly stain in the middle of the small but very classical Oxon town. During one of my visits to the yard 1 saw the mirror in a shed in the glass section. The mirror had about six feet height by four wide. The frame was mahogany, around five inches wide by three tick. It had elaborated mouldings all around and a few curved flowers on the top frame. It had been n1cely repaired, but even so one could see that the frame had been badly damage on the right hand side, near the top It was noticeable, too, that the wood worms had done some good work in that side, and the holes had been filled with some sort of putty. The glass had a large stain in that side of the damage frame. Those defects, more than taking merit to the mirror, it seemed to give it an added valued, as it happened with antiques whose imperfects give them personality, like wounds to the soldiers. 1 calculated that the mirror would fit very nicely in the dining room, because it would match the beams of the restaurant and give it an illusion of amplitude. 1 asked one of the employees if they would sell it, because the mirror seemed to be there doing nothing. 1 was informed that it was there to see people behind when they were cutting glass, an so to avoid any accident But, after a couple of months, that employee carne to tell me that the yard was closing down and that I could have the mirror, if still I was interested. It was really a heavy thing that mirror. We put it on the patio and there I employed many hours of my spare time to restored it. I used wood filler to mend the damage flowers and fill in some holes of the wood worms. Sanded down the green fungus from the frame, and then I polished it with the real French polish, and the result was a job of which I felt very proud. The job done, to avoid the weather undo what I had done, I put the mirror _with help- in a corner of the restaurant leaning against the wall, and there it stayed for a long time, waiting to be fixed in the place I had reserved for it. But the mirror never carne to occupy its assign place, because, when I was ready to fixed it, a few unexpected problems arouse. I found out that a radiator had to be moved to make room for the mirror, and to move the radiator the boiled had to be emptied, then refilled again, fiddle with the gas and the pump, and waiting for the water to be hot and then to bleed the radiators. Two men a whole day just to move a radiator. So the mirror stayed leaning against the wall in that corner for some time. In that corner was a table where we sat to have a rest when we could, a cup of tea or a meal, after closing time. It was in those occasions, when we would let the dog in. The dog would stay in front of the mirror, moving its head sideways and wagging its short tail. And all of a suddenly it would attack the mirror barking madly as if it had seen some strange person there. The dog was a miniature poodle, very intelligent, and it was for being intelligent that its stupidity in front of the mirror would make everybody laugh. In one occasion we laughed even more with Mrs. Sink. The woman was a Asher up, hence why we call her so. She happened to be one of those persons prone to small accidents, and who they blame the others for everything that happen to them. In one occasion, when we all were having a meal in that corner of the restaurant, in came Mrs. Sink in a terrible state of nervous telling us one of her disasters. Suddenly she looked at the mirror and, jumping ceiling high, shouted,
“Who is that woman?”
Probably Mrs. Sink didn’t recognised herself for the stain that there was in the mirror, but being Mrs. Sink as she was, everybody laugh. But we laughed too soon, for something similar happened to me once and later to my wife. It had been one of those days when nothing seemed to go right and, under pressure, I had a bit of an argument with my wife, then, when we finished working, she went up to the flat without having supper. I didn’t feel hungry either, but, to unwind I sat at the usual table with a bottle of wine, cheese and biscuits. After a while, and as I was lifting a glass to my lips, I saw a woman in the mirror, but I could no see her face because of the stain in that side of the glass. I presumed that she was my wife coming down to smoke the pipe of peace with me but, as I look back to the corridor, nobody was there. As I didn’t believed in ghosts I blame the vision on my state of mind, because I was worry and sorry for the argument with my wife. Then, a couple of days later my wife said to me,
“I laughed of Mrs. Sink and the same happened to me today. I saw a woman in the mirror that she didn’t look like me.”
When a last everything was ready to fix the mirror in its place, one Sunday, the day we closed the restaurant, armed with all sorts of tools, screws and so forth, I put hands to the job. At first the wall seemed harder than stone, and I had to push the drill .with all my strength. Then, of a suddenly, the bit and the drill went through the wall and, as I was pushing so hard my head crashed against the wall and I almost fainted with pain. At the same time I heard a horrendous scream, as if it was the wall the one that cried and not myself. Was that me? I asked. But then, as I pulled the drill out, I realised that it was the wall the one that was screaming. I apply my eye to the hole and saw on the other side what seemed an open oyster with a black pearl in the middle. The crooked object was opening and closing in a rapid sequence, and it soon declare itself to be an eye.
Looking from outside one could guess that, at one time, the adjoined house and mine had been both one and only large house. I thought that nobody was living there, because in six months since I had the business I never saw a soul coming or going there, and neither I heard any noise from the place. For that reason my surprise was greater to see an eye there, because 1 presumed that the eye had to belong to somebody. 1 ran to the street and knocked at the neighbour’s door to apologise for what 1 had done to whoever soul was hibernating there. It happened to be an old lady who lived there alone with her cat She was covered in dust, white as a baker and shaking with fright. She looked more like a ghost than a woman.
“My God, look what you have done” she shouted at me.
“Calm yourself, lady. Let me in, to see the damage and 1 will mend it for you”.
She aloud me in and took me to the kitchen. Soon 1 understood why the woman got such a fright. On that side a large piece of the wall had fallen and the plaster, dry as flour, was spread as far as the front door. The cat, that 1 found out late was brown, at that present was white. The cup of tea was covered with the stuff from the wall, and so was the kettle and everything else over the sink and the cooker.
“Look, look what the devil you have done” cried the woman.
1 couldn’t give credit to my eyes before such a disaster.
“Please do not worry, lady. This is nothing. 1 am going now to the yard for plaster and 1 will leave this wall better than new, you will see. If 1 broke something 1 will pay it.”
The woman started calm down, to the point that she felt sorry for my distress. 1 ran to the yard and soon 1 came back with the material and the necessary tools. By then the woman had the place clean, and the cat already was white, and it was resting on a chair. The woman did offer me a cap of tea and 1 started the job to close the hole. Then 1 told the woman how 1saw her eye from my side and she told me how she saw mine from hers. That was so amusing to her that almost choke on her laughter. So, between cups of tea we talked a lot, being the woman the one who talked more. She told me that she have not talk so much since her husband died twenty years back. The woman had a pleasant way of telling about her life, for she was not boring, as can be the case with those stories of older people. She would put a pinch of salt to the sad bits of her life, helping with a humorous and tender smile. While she was talking, the cat, sat on the chair, would shake its head up and down as confirming that what the lady told was the whole truth. Among all the stories she told me, she said that, at one time her house and mine, were only one house, just as 1 suspected.
“The car park at the back and all the town gardens, used to belong to this house” she told me.
Then she told that those houses were a listed buildings, and she advised me to find out with my insures if the policy had that into account, because would the building burn down it had to be rebuilt again as it was, and that could be very expensive. That was something that my lawyer didn’t told me. The lady knew all .those details because she had work for the council, and she seemed to know everything about the town. She told me that the large property belonged to the same family for generations. The last owners were a middle age couple. They had a servant, a young pretty woman. The landlady suspected, for some time, that her husband was having an affair with the woman, but she could not proved it. One evening the land lord came from shooting game and he left the shotgun and the holster hanging on e peg in the corridor, and went to the dining room where the servant was laying up the table for tea. The land lord asked for his wife, and the woman told him that she was in town shopping. But the land lady was coming home, at that precisely moment, through the back door, and she caught her husband kissing the servant. She saw the gun hanging there and she loaded it and bang. It seemed that the gun was of only one barrel, otherwise surly she would kill both, husband and woman. But she shot dead only the woman. The shot caught her on the face, at so close range that her blood penetrated in the glass of a mirror, and that stain never could be taken out, for the most the tried. The land lady went to prison for manslaughter, and the property was sold the land lord went to live somewhere else. The house was divide into three duelling. Then, many years later, two of the houses were turned into one again to open a restaurant.
“They wanted to by mine as well, but we don’t sale. We lived here since we married and have here our remembrances” said the old lady, talking with a distant voice as if her husband was still with her, and she went on: “The hose in the middle was bought and sold dozens of times, and nobody would stay in it for very long, as if it was a hunted. And then it was known that that was the reason. The ghost was the servant that appeared in the mirror. The last owner got ride of the mirror and with it went the ghost.
“How that mirror looked like” I asked her.
“I don’t know. I never saw the mirror, but I being told that it was a very nice and large one.”
Back in my place I took a pointed knife from the kitchen and started to dig in the mirror’s wooden frame, the holes that supposed to be the work of the wood worms, and there it was, a lead, and then another... I didn’t look farther. I sold the mirror to and antics shop, and made a profit of it. Now, if someone who reads this story sees a mirror of those characteristic remember that you being warned.
The end of:
THE HAUNTED MIRROR
2,300 words.
_
By Manuel Pardo
The mirror was an antique I bought in an old fashion building yard, one of those chaotic places of which there were few left in the country. The owner was waiting twenty years for planning permission to build offices in the site, but the planes never satisfied the council, so the yard was there as an ugly stain in the middle of the small but very classical Oxon town. During one of my visits to the yard 1 saw the mirror in a shed in the glass section. The mirror had about six feet height by four wide. The frame was mahogany, around five inches wide by three tick. It had elaborated mouldings all around and a few curved flowers on the top frame. It had been n1cely repaired, but even so one could see that the frame had been badly damage on the right hand side, near the top It was noticeable, too, that the wood worms had done some good work in that side, and the holes had been filled with some sort of putty. The glass had a large stain in that side of the damage frame. Those defects, more than taking merit to the mirror, it seemed to give it an added valued, as it happened with antiques whose imperfects give them personality, like wounds to the soldiers. 1 calculated that the mirror would fit very nicely in the dining room, because it would match the beams of the restaurant and give it an illusion of amplitude. 1 asked one of the employees if they would sell it, because the mirror seemed to be there doing nothing. 1 was informed that it was there to see people behind when they were cutting glass, an so to avoid any accident But, after a couple of months, that employee carne to tell me that the yard was closing down and that I could have the mirror, if still I was interested. It was really a heavy thing that mirror. We put it on the patio and there I employed many hours of my spare time to restored it. I used wood filler to mend the damage flowers and fill in some holes of the wood worms. Sanded down the green fungus from the frame, and then I polished it with the real French polish, and the result was a job of which I felt very proud. The job done, to avoid the weather undo what I had done, I put the mirror _with help- in a corner of the restaurant leaning against the wall, and there it stayed for a long time, waiting to be fixed in the place I had reserved for it. But the mirror never carne to occupy its assign place, because, when I was ready to fixed it, a few unexpected problems arouse. I found out that a radiator had to be moved to make room for the mirror, and to move the radiator the boiled had to be emptied, then refilled again, fiddle with the gas and the pump, and waiting for the water to be hot and then to bleed the radiators. Two men a whole day just to move a radiator. So the mirror stayed leaning against the wall in that corner for some time. In that corner was a table where we sat to have a rest when we could, a cup of tea or a meal, after closing time. It was in those occasions, when we would let the dog in. The dog would stay in front of the mirror, moving its head sideways and wagging its short tail. And all of a suddenly it would attack the mirror barking madly as if it had seen some strange person there. The dog was a miniature poodle, very intelligent, and it was for being intelligent that its stupidity in front of the mirror would make everybody laugh. In one occasion we laughed even more with Mrs. Sink. The woman was a Asher up, hence why we call her so. She happened to be one of those persons prone to small accidents, and who they blame the others for everything that happen to them. In one occasion, when we all were having a meal in that corner of the restaurant, in came Mrs. Sink in a terrible state of nervous telling us one of her disasters. Suddenly she looked at the mirror and, jumping ceiling high, shouted,
“Who is that woman?”
Probably Mrs. Sink didn’t recognised herself for the stain that there was in the mirror, but being Mrs. Sink as she was, everybody laugh. But we laughed too soon, for something similar happened to me once and later to my wife. It had been one of those days when nothing seemed to go right and, under pressure, I had a bit of an argument with my wife, then, when we finished working, she went up to the flat without having supper. I didn’t feel hungry either, but, to unwind I sat at the usual table with a bottle of wine, cheese and biscuits. After a while, and as I was lifting a glass to my lips, I saw a woman in the mirror, but I could no see her face because of the stain in that side of the glass. I presumed that she was my wife coming down to smoke the pipe of peace with me but, as I look back to the corridor, nobody was there. As I didn’t believed in ghosts I blame the vision on my state of mind, because I was worry and sorry for the argument with my wife. Then, a couple of days later my wife said to me,
“I laughed of Mrs. Sink and the same happened to me today. I saw a woman in the mirror that she didn’t look like me.”
When a last everything was ready to fix the mirror in its place, one Sunday, the day we closed the restaurant, armed with all sorts of tools, screws and so forth, I put hands to the job. At first the wall seemed harder than stone, and I had to push the drill .with all my strength. Then, of a suddenly, the bit and the drill went through the wall and, as I was pushing so hard my head crashed against the wall and I almost fainted with pain. At the same time I heard a horrendous scream, as if it was the wall the one that cried and not myself. Was that me? I asked. But then, as I pulled the drill out, I realised that it was the wall the one that was screaming. I apply my eye to the hole and saw on the other side what seemed an open oyster with a black pearl in the middle. The crooked object was opening and closing in a rapid sequence, and it soon declare itself to be an eye.
Looking from outside one could guess that, at one time, the adjoined house and mine had been both one and only large house. I thought that nobody was living there, because in six months since I had the business I never saw a soul coming or going there, and neither I heard any noise from the place. For that reason my surprise was greater to see an eye there, because 1 presumed that the eye had to belong to somebody. 1 ran to the street and knocked at the neighbour’s door to apologise for what 1 had done to whoever soul was hibernating there. It happened to be an old lady who lived there alone with her cat She was covered in dust, white as a baker and shaking with fright. She looked more like a ghost than a woman.
“My God, look what you have done” she shouted at me.
“Calm yourself, lady. Let me in, to see the damage and 1 will mend it for you”.
She aloud me in and took me to the kitchen. Soon 1 understood why the woman got such a fright. On that side a large piece of the wall had fallen and the plaster, dry as flour, was spread as far as the front door. The cat, that 1 found out late was brown, at that present was white. The cup of tea was covered with the stuff from the wall, and so was the kettle and everything else over the sink and the cooker.
“Look, look what the devil you have done” cried the woman.
1 couldn’t give credit to my eyes before such a disaster.
“Please do not worry, lady. This is nothing. 1 am going now to the yard for plaster and 1 will leave this wall better than new, you will see. If 1 broke something 1 will pay it.”
The woman started calm down, to the point that she felt sorry for my distress. 1 ran to the yard and soon 1 came back with the material and the necessary tools. By then the woman had the place clean, and the cat already was white, and it was resting on a chair. The woman did offer me a cap of tea and 1 started the job to close the hole. Then 1 told the woman how 1saw her eye from my side and she told me how she saw mine from hers. That was so amusing to her that almost choke on her laughter. So, between cups of tea we talked a lot, being the woman the one who talked more. She told me that she have not talk so much since her husband died twenty years back. The woman had a pleasant way of telling about her life, for she was not boring, as can be the case with those stories of older people. She would put a pinch of salt to the sad bits of her life, helping with a humorous and tender smile. While she was talking, the cat, sat on the chair, would shake its head up and down as confirming that what the lady told was the whole truth. Among all the stories she told me, she said that, at one time her house and mine, were only one house, just as 1 suspected.
“The car park at the back and all the town gardens, used to belong to this house” she told me.
Then she told that those houses were a listed buildings, and she advised me to find out with my insures if the policy had that into account, because would the building burn down it had to be rebuilt again as it was, and that could be very expensive. That was something that my lawyer didn’t told me. The lady knew all .those details because she had work for the council, and she seemed to know everything about the town. She told me that the large property belonged to the same family for generations. The last owners were a middle age couple. They had a servant, a young pretty woman. The landlady suspected, for some time, that her husband was having an affair with the woman, but she could not proved it. One evening the land lord came from shooting game and he left the shotgun and the holster hanging on e peg in the corridor, and went to the dining room where the servant was laying up the table for tea. The land lord asked for his wife, and the woman told him that she was in town shopping. But the land lady was coming home, at that precisely moment, through the back door, and she caught her husband kissing the servant. She saw the gun hanging there and she loaded it and bang. It seemed that the gun was of only one barrel, otherwise surly she would kill both, husband and woman. But she shot dead only the woman. The shot caught her on the face, at so close range that her blood penetrated in the glass of a mirror, and that stain never could be taken out, for the most the tried. The land lady went to prison for manslaughter, and the property was sold the land lord went to live somewhere else. The house was divide into three duelling. Then, many years later, two of the houses were turned into one again to open a restaurant.
“They wanted to by mine as well, but we don’t sale. We lived here since we married and have here our remembrances” said the old lady, talking with a distant voice as if her husband was still with her, and she went on: “The hose in the middle was bought and sold dozens of times, and nobody would stay in it for very long, as if it was a hunted. And then it was known that that was the reason. The ghost was the servant that appeared in the mirror. The last owner got ride of the mirror and with it went the ghost.
“How that mirror looked like” I asked her.
“I don’t know. I never saw the mirror, but I being told that it was a very nice and large one.”
Back in my place I took a pointed knife from the kitchen and started to dig in the mirror’s wooden frame, the holes that supposed to be the work of the wood worms, and there it was, a lead, and then another... I didn’t look farther. I sold the mirror to and antics shop, and made a profit of it. Now, if someone who reads this story sees a mirror of those characteristic remember that you being warned.
The end of:
THE HAUNTED MIRROR
2,300 words.
_
