The Silence Between the Notes

Someone, it might have been Claude Debussy, described music as ‘the silence between the notes’.

Anyone who works at art for a living, in its widest possible interpretation, will know exactly what that means. As a writer, the words in this blog are just simple tools that I use to try to convey sometimes quite complex emotions and opinions. Whether I succeed or not depends on your interpretation of the silence in between.

If this is a series, then this is its 314th blog. At an average of 700 words per piece, this means that you have politely read, (and I have freely given), three or four books’ worth of effort, effort that has varied from my having to climb into a skip in my best suit in order to retrieve the car keys that I had accidentally thrown into it, via many things in between, to a personal description of the cold hand of sexual abuse.

For various reasons, and don’t read too much into it, the enthusiasm for writing it waxes and wanes, so this will be the last one for a time. Partly this is the sheer difficulty of writing honest words into a vacuum. Partly it is the understanding that there is also virtue in silence, and a living to be earned.

Back in the late spring.

In the meantime, please go to my website from time to time to check out the events that are building up for the launch of the new book, Across a Waking Land, to see if there is one near you. (www.rogermorgangrenville.com). To make it easy, the current list is presented below. If your local bookshop or book festival would like to organise something, please encourage them, and ask them to email me (rmg@dexam.co.uk) and Icon Book’s publicist, Ruth Killick (publicity@ruthkillick.co.uk). These events are bread and butter for an author, and I love doing them (except the one I did for nearby bookshop that had forgotten to advertise it, and to which precisely no one turned up.)

Final thing. Reviews, (especially but not exclusively nice ones!), are really important to writers who aren’t called David Walliams or JK Rowling. If you enjoy the stuff I write, please do tell others, and write something nice about it on one of the review sites! The most enjoyable one came last summer from someone who read my bee book (Liquid Gold) and described, in saying how awful the book was, that it was the first time he had demanded his money back from the audiobook supplier. The most heart-warming one came from someone who had read Shearwater to his dying father, and said what comfort it brought.

Meanwhile, enjoy the crocuses and get out as often as you can to enjoy the wonder of a British spring!

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• April 4 at 6.00. Launch event at One Tree Books, Lavant Street, Petersfield. All welcome.
• April 14 at 6.30. Book event at Petworth Bookshop, Petworth. Booking is essential because of small size of the shop, but tickets are free. Call 01798 342082.
• April 18th. Details TBC. Book event at Wells Bookshop, Winchester.(01962 852016)
• April 20 Details TBC. Book event/campaign event with Mark Cocker at St Michaels and All Angels in Macclesfield. (Save Danes Moss Action Group)
• April 21 at 7.00pm. Book event at Mainstreet Trading, St Boswells.
• April 22. Afternoon event at Hexham Literary Festival. (details available in HLF website after March 1)
• April 23. Event in Edinburgh. TBC.
• May 3rd. Evening event at Travel Book Company near Shaftesbury. (01747 898247)
• May 4th. Waterstones Winchester. (01962 866206)
• May 6th. 2 pm. Swindon Literary Festival. 
• May 10th. Farnham WI. Curlew Talk (private)
• May 13th. FarmEd Literary Festival. Shipton-Under-Wychwood, OX7 6BJ (01993 402403) 
• June 20th. Evening. highland Bookshop. Fort William.