September 2012

Thank you to Devon Marshall for generous Goodreads review of Spirit of Lost Angels

Many thanks to Teresa of Lovely Treez for her generous review of Spirit of Lost Angels

The Man In The Gray Flannel iPhone

In the 1950s there was a very popular book and movie called The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit.

It was a complicated tale, but one of the key threads was about conformity.

The icon of 1950's conformity was the suburban male office worker, commuting by train to "the city," trapped in an unfulfilling life of materialism, social climbing, and status anxiety.

Like all cliches, this had elements of

THE IDEAL CHAPEL

Last Sunday dawned warm and sunny, so we stuffed cheese, saucisson, baguettes and water into the backpack and headed up the track behind the house, into the foothills of the Monts du Lyonnais. After several hours tramping up and down valleys, and through forests, we reached the hamlet of Châteauvieux, with its wide view over the Yzeron valley on one side, and the city of Lyon on the other.

Châteauvieux boasts not only a history dating back to Roman times, but also an 11^thcentury chapel, which was my real motive for our day-long hike. For this medieval edifice seemed the ideal chapel for Angel of Roses – my current novel, set in this rural area west of Lyon during the 14^th century plague years.

As I peered into the chapel, I felt that twinge of excitement, anticipation and nervousness, when a story starts to come alive. It was as if, in that dim and dusty interior, I could see the villagers hunched on the straw-covered flagstones, the elderly and infirm lined up on benches along the walls, all eyes on the priest. I could hear the priest telling them that Black Death had come to the village because they were all such terrible sinners, and now they must pay for their sins, and repent. And, from her glorious pedestal, I shivered at the implacable stare of the Virgin Mary.

Not a single tombstone is left standing in the cemetery, but as I walked across the grass, the silence broken only by the gentle breeze, it seemed those ancient spirits were still there, crouched in the shadow of the stone walls, watching my every move, guarding their sacred site. I expected to see a wimpled face staring from a cracked, stained-glass window.

‘Who are you?’ she would say. ‘Where do you come from, dressed like that?’

In that instant, I wished for time-travel. I’d have loved to have been in their midst, experiencing their life and times, first-hand. But only for a few hours mind, then buzz me back to the safety of the 21^st century, thanks very much!

We left the chapel to its ancient keepers and their secrets, and continued on up the hill towards the village of Yzeron, calling in on some old friends along the way:

In Enemy Territory

A few weeks ago I was a speaker at a social media conference in Minneapolis. I was facing a ballroom full of social mediacrats and was surprised at the graciousness with which my ungracious remarks were received.

Best of all, I escaped with all my major body parts intact.

It was billed as a "fireside chat" between the excellent Jason Falls, leader of the conference, and me. I had imagined a

Maiden's Court Interview

Many thanks to Heather Rieseck for interviewing me on The Maiden's Court blog about writing Spirit of Lost Angels.

Speaking So As Not To Be Understood

Throughout history the purpose of speaking and writing has been to be make oneself understood. Not any more. There is a new way of speaking and writing in the world of marketing, the purpose of which is to sound like you're saying something without actually saying anything at all.

Welcome to The Golden Age of Bullshit.

Now writers, pundits and industry bigwigs write and speak so as to be

It Never Rains...

A big thank you to Tracy Terry for her review of Spirit of Lost Angels on her blog: Pen and Paper.

The Australian Bookshelf Blog Review

Many thanks to Jayne Fordham for her review of Spirit of Lost Angels on The Australian Bookshelf blog. Read as part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Strategy Versus Tactics

These days the tactical always drives out the strategic. Strategies are what businesses love to talk about. Tactics are what they do.

I don't care how many months of meetings, focus groups, and powerpoints it took to derive your brilliant business strategy. I don't care how many teams of C-suite knuckleheads you had to present to and persuade. I don't care how many millions of dollars they

A TALE OF THE FLESH

Stretched across the stone facade of the ancient village, a wide banner yawns into the soughing air:

Discover the bush peach in all its guises in Soucieu-en-Jarrest, where the Romans once roamed.

Snug in the twist of a Monts du Lyonnais valley, twenty-odd kilometers west of Lyon, the village of Soucieu-en-Jarrest minds its own business, and on the first Sunday of September its business is the bush peach.

Ruins of the fortified stone wall lost in the revolution, and a sign advertising soupe aux choux, herald the village entrance. Fearing a revolution of the intestinal kind, I decline the cabbage soup and head for the fruit, past tractors and harvest equipment––reminding me that this is, essentially, a farming community.

‘What’s the big deal about peaches?’ I ask a local farmer.

‘Not just a peach, madame, but our own succulent fruit with flesh the colour of blood. The bush peach is grown alongside the vines,’ he explains. ‘Susceptible to the same diseases as the vines but quicker to develop the signs, the vine growers plant peach trees next to their vineyards to warn them of potential problems.’ He smiles. ‘And voilà, the bush peach has been part of our arboricultural patrimony since the seventeenth century.’

So, with its questionable history as martyr, I ask myself if the humble bush peach can hold its head high as a separate identity.

My nostrils guide me to freshly baked chaussons––stewed bush peach turnovers––the golden pastries lined up like slippers in a dormitory.

Alongside the turnovers, a man toils over an army-issue cauldron of stewing peaches. A woman breaks up the fruit, and hurls it into the bubbling magenta mélange.

‘Thirty-five minutes to stew a peach, and an hour for jam, but don’t peel the fruit,’ she warns me, waving her wooden spoon like an off-duty martinet.

To avoid being crushed like the wine grapes, I dodge a purple clown on stilts, a troop of majorettes filing past in his ungainly wake. I skip out of the firing line of thrashing pom-poms and take cover in the stall selling bush peach nectar and wine.

‘You can smell those peaches, n’est-ce pas, madame?’ the man says, offering me a glass of white wine.

‘Delicious,’ I say, savouring the intense, yet charming aroma.

‘If madame would care to try the red? An exquisite blend of blackberry, blackcurrant and raspberry, and perhaps the rosé too?’

Nicely mellowed after three glassfuls, I thank him and leave the man to his serious buyers.

Slurping on a double bush peach sorbet cone, I see the Groupe Folklorique de Thurins is already swinging, the women’s traditional red and yellow skirts twirling as their breeches-clad partners spin them about the stage.

As the dancers flounce off, I head to the library where a storyteller––looking all the part in a toga––is narrating a Roman tale of intrigue.

‘In 43 BC, Lyon was the capital of Gaul, and called Lugdunum. The Romans got their water from aqueducts, the ruins of which we can still see all over the Monts du Lyonnais.’

The whites of the children’s eyes flash in the darkened room as the storyteller unfolds a tale of stolen jewels, culminating in a bloody sword duel atop an aqueduct tower.

Strategically placed near the bar, serious competitors are engaged in a pétanque match. The French take their bowling game as seriously as their wine, precisely measuring questionable distances. Soaking up the sun, I sip my tangy bush peach cocktail and watch them exclaiming and waving their arms as the metal ball lands where it should, or shouldn’t.

As I taste the surprisingly pleasant union of white cheese drowned in bush peach sauce, Mr. Loudspeaker orders the crowd to gather for the grande finale.

‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, Miss Bush Peach and Mr. Lyonnaise Hills Wines will be united.’

We enthusiastically applaud the chosen young girl and boy grinning under their dubious honour, a few wolf whistles ringing from the edges of the crowd.

The sun begins its westward arc towards the Monts du Lyonnais, the crisp cusp-of-autumn air nibbling at me. Mothers drag sweaters from heavily-laden bags, the party winds down and a playful breeze whispers centuries of farming secrets across the fields, orchards and vineyards.

This Just In: Advertisers Still Idiots

In case you were worried that advertisers had started to learn how to think straight, forget about it. They're just as dumb as ever.

This was confirmed in a recent article about TV on the Bloomberg Businessweek website.

A little background -- for years we have been writing about the stupidity of marketers who are constantly chasing young people. Just to recap, here are some numbers:

People

Many thanks to Anne Cater for her generous blog review of Spirit of Lost Angels.

A big thank you to Darlene Elizabeth Williams for her in-depth review of Spirit of Lost Angels on her award-winning Book Review blog.

Many thanks to Mirella Patzer for her lovely review of Spirit of Lost Angels on her blogs: Historical Novel Review and Great Historicals

The Story Of The Facebook Monster And The Wrong Weapon

Once upon a time, there was a thing called traditional advertising. The purpose of traditional advertising was to create demand for things.

People did this with funny television and radio commercials and pretty newspaper and magazine ads and billboards and blimps and butt danglers and hooter wobblers.

Sometimes it was darn effective. And hundreds and hundreds of brands of soda pop and toys

Strange Habits

Back when I was just a little baby copywriter, I used to have lunch most days at a bar and restaurant called Reno Barsochini's on Battery Street in San Francisco. Reno was a former baseball player and friend of Joe DiMaggio. He also had one of the great all-time names.

I don't know what kind of ballplayer Reno was, but he wasn't much of a restaurateur. He made a good hamburger, though, and

Top 10 Ways To Improve Ad Industry Morale

On Friday, The New York Times had one of those pieces that makes you think maybe your father was right when he said you should be a plumbing supply wholesaler. The title of the piece was An Ad Agency Crowdsources Its Own Employees’ Morale. I think a better title would have been The Clowns Are Doing The Clownsourcing.

The story, in a nutshell, goes like this: a NY agency ran a contest giving its

Need inspiration for writing historical fiction? Meet Georges and his cutting-edge cycling

Perhaps because I grew up in Australia, a country with a past so young, I have always been awed by history. Twenty years ago, I moved to a rural French village and found myself steeped in antiquity, age-old culture and monuments. Writing about it became the next logical step.

Surrounded by history certainly gives me ideas for stories, but it is also the local people who provide inspiration for the characters of my historical tales. One such person is Georges, on whom I based Emile, my heroine’s father in Spirit of Lost Angels.

As he has done every Saturday morning for two decades –– so he tells me –– Georges lugs his strange-looking bicycle along to the marketplace. And there he pedals in earnest, all morning, amidst convivial banter, fruit and vegetables still glistening with dew, and boudins and saucissons displayed like plump limbs. But he never leaves his spot.

Curious, I am drawn to this cycling-sur-place, and learn that Georges is a rémouleur, (knife sharpener or grinder), vestige of a French profession dating back to 1300. Exercising his activity in the village streets, the grinder proposed his services to sharpen knives, scissors and razors, as a source of extra income.

‘I’m a carpenter by trade,’ Georges says, not stopping to catch his breath. ‘I had to sharpen my tools, so I taught myself, and adapted my own bicycle,’ he adds, caressing his slate block with a dangerous-looking Opinel.

The rémouleur’s equipment developed over time to become relatively sophisticated but, in the beginning, a simple frame fitted with a heavy sandstone grindstone was used. A wheelbarrow made transportation less tiring. The rémouleur added a water reserve to lubricate the grindstone, then the famous pedal made its debut, permitting him to work the grindstone with his foot.

‘How many kilometres do you cycle in a morning?’ asks a customer, stowing his newly-sharpened Swiss Army knife between punnets of fleshy raspberries and slices of pâté de campagne.

‘No idea,’ Georges replies, as he wets another blade, and passes it across his revolving grindstone. ‘But I must’ve been around the world twice in twenty years.’ With a rueful smile Georges then says he’s never been out of France.

Five minutes later, the grindstone having completed its work, Georges takes a break from his pedals to work the knife across his slate slab.

‘For the finishing touches,’ he explains, continually lubricating the knife from a pot of water dangling from the handle bars. ‘You see, stroke the bevel against the stone, at right angles, like this,’ Georges demonstrates, manipulating the knife with the same gentleness one would stroke a kitten.

George’s trade lived until the middle of the 20^th century until the quality of steel and its treatment meant there was less call for sharpening. Indeed, in today’s technological era, I wonder if Georges truly makes a justifiable contribution to his income. But the continual dribble of customers throughout the morning, at an average of 4 euros per item, answers my question.

As the church bell chimes midday, signalling the end of today’s market, a woman approaches perhaps one of the last members of a profession on the verge of extinction. She draws a large carving knife from folds of lettuce leaves and rhubarb stems.

‘Can I leave this with you?’ she asks.

‘It’s a bit late, come back next week,’ the knife-grinder says with a nonchalant wave of his hand. For Georges is not in a hurry. He may cycle all morning, but he isn’t going anywhere. Just yet.

OSCAR: Sometime in 1998 - 3rd September 2012

Well, my writing, and everything else, has been at a bit of a standstill this week, as my family come to terms with the loss of our beloved border collie, Oscar, aged 14.

We had 13 fabulous years with him... he grew up with my children and was their best play mate, never once growling at them when forced to dress up, jump on a trampoline, be a pack horse, etc...

Now there is no smiling face or wagging tail to greet my at the gate, no waterbowl to fill, no one to take for a walk...

Ah dear, so lovely to have pets, but so heart-breaking when we have to say goodbye.

Invisible Advertising

As media options for advertisers have become radically more complex, our ideas about the value of various media types have become concomitantly more esoteric.

We analyze media efficiencies based on very advanced ideas of consumer behavior. We try to understand how and why consumers use certain types of media and we optimize our media efficiencies by following those behaviors. We use highly

The Management Mystery

Since yesterday was Labor Day, and I'm supposed to be a contrarian, I thought I'd really go contrarian and write a little something today in praise of management.

I live in Oakland, California. It may be the most mismanaged city on the face of the earth. It is a city so teeming with incompetence that the police department has announced it will not respond to most crimes.

The city government has

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