'William Shakespeare's Don Quixote' : Drat - someone's had that idea already

Have you ever been thinking about an idea for what you just know would be a great novel - hell, the great novel - and then find someone's just gone and done it?
Maybe not exactly the story you were going to write, but the theme's so close to your idea that your novel would look like a lame copycat?

I've written in a previous blog that I love the rare and the obscure. One idea that fascinates me is that there could be the discovery of a lost Shakespeare play sometime. Heck, maybe in his own handwriting!

Don't scoff, they're out there, or at least they were.'The History of Don Cardenio' is one such work. A joint effort with a chap called John Fletcher, it was registered at the Stationer's Office, and even performed by the Kings Men in 1613. Various 'improved' versions have abounded since the 1720s, supposedly based on the original.

Don Cardenio is a character from 'Don Quixote'. That's Shakespeare and Cervante's in the same play. Pretty mouthwatering. And wouldn't the discovery of the play be the basis of a fun novel? Plenty of scope for Hitler Diary type mayhem and reputations on the line. I've an idea Paul, the PR agent anti-hero of my first novel, could have the discoverer of the claimed lost play as a client.

But you may well have read J L Carrell's ripping yarn 'The Shakespeare Secret'. She has the lost play as the McGuffin that all the murder and sleuthing revolves around. And there's even a fascinating novel out there called 'Shakespeare's Don Quixote' by Robin Chapman. It's a very literary work based around a staging of the lost play.

So that's my 'William Shakespeare's Don Quixote' stuffed. Just a William between them. Except... Where there's a Will there may be a way. I  mean Shakespeare wasn't exactly averse to pinching other people's plots. Or at least sharing. Many of his best plays are based on earlier works, some still well known when he wrote his version. In fact 'The History of Don Cardenio' is a case in point, lifted straight from Cervantes' 'Don Quixote'. Steal with pride was our Will's motto. If Shakespeare wasn't above borrowing a few plots, who am I to be so particular? One day I might still have a go. If I'm not too busy reading 'The Shakespeare Secret' again.

Somewhere out there it's possible there are a few more plays by Mr William Shakespeare to add to the album, including The History of Don Cardenio - Shakespeare's adaptation of Don Quixote.

Up close and personal with a dodo

I met up recently with two old friends, dodos actually. They live in the Natural History Museum, South Ken. The odd thing is that one of the two dodos exhibited there has been proven never to have existed! The Reunion dodo stares out at you, bold as brass, but he's no more real than a unicorn. Of course both of them are simply reconstructions. If you've ploughed your way through The Dodo Tree you will know that even stuffed dodos are extinct.
It's reasonable enough to still have a reconstruction of your common or garden Mauritian dodo to cheer everyone's day, but odd that the Reunion Island dodo, Raphus Solitarius, is still posing proudly, as the latest thinking is that the flightless bird on Reunion was an ibis.
Here is is, in the (non-existent) flesh.

Good to see good old Raphus Solitarius again of course. But they might give a hint he's no more real than the Phoenix of Arabia.
Here's what the Reunion Island, or white dodo (the species Marie claims to have with her on her voyage in my novel) has to say for itself:
'A close relative of the Mauritian dodo, the Reunion Island dodo is known only from personal records.This is not a real specimen, only a modelled reconstruction.'
Nice to see it there still, anyway. It's something of an old friend. After meeting it I took myself off to see if they have a Jaberwocky on display anywhere, or perhaps a Bandersnatch in the mammal display.

The dodo comes alive

Welcome to this, my first blog about my new novel, The Dodo Tree, stick with me and we'll be chatting about dodos, other equally obscure and arcane subjects, and writing in general.

You can download The Dodo Tree read my Amazon author's page here http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Dodo-Tree-David-Jinks-ebook/dp/B00HNYIB8E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390149488&sr=8-1&keywords=the+dodo+tree

As someone who works in PR I really ought to have a better idea how to glue a blog together, but if you hang on grimly, I'll get there in the end.
A few people have asked me about the picture on the cover. It's a small detail from a bigger picture by Jacob Cornelius van Neck showing the first Dutch settlement in Mauritius. Produced in the 1590s it's the first known depiction of a dodo. It's standing under a tree which, to be honest, probably isn't the Dodo Tree, but hey, it's a tree and a dodo, and it's nicely out of copyright. That's a Good Thing.

The full image is pictured above, and you can see the particularly gawky looking dodo under a tree towards the top right. It's with a few giant tortoises that also went extinct. I'll bet the animal life on Mauritius really wished the Dutch hadn't started using the place as an Indian Ocean motorway services. Mind you apparently dodos were so bad to eat they are perhaps still being served in British service stations. That unchewable 'chicken' I had the other day was probably 'dodo in a basket'.

If you are curious about why I wrote the novel, there's a friend of mine who wormed it out of me pretty succinctly for her blog. Julia Thorley recently interviewed me for her popular author's site: Life, yoga and other adventures. Let's see if I can reproduce it here:


The Dodo Tree

Welcome to Friday, folks. Bit of a departure today. I've invited friend and colleague David Jinks to be my guest blogger to talk about his new novel: The Dodo Tree.

D: Thank you for having me inside your blog. I do like the bookshelves.

J: What was your inspiration for the book?

D: Oh, I’m obsessed with rare and vanished things: coins made with Edward VIII’s head on that couldn’t be used because he abdicated, for example, or lost works by Shakespeare that we know once existed. The dodo is the ultimate in extinction, because it’s the first creature mankind ever realised had become extinct. It was shocking. No one could believe God would go to the trouble of creating a creature and be careless enough to let it die. Now the tree that the dodo fed on looks like it might be going the same way.

J: How would you categorise your book – a historical romance?

D: Almost yes and almost exactly no. It’s about relationships, but not necessarily healthy ones! The dodo and the dodo tree had a symbiotic relationship. The dodo needed the tree: it depended on its fruit, partly because it didn’t have much competition for it; nothing else could eat it as the fruit’s pit was hard as stone. The tree needed the dodo to eat its fruit, because only the dodo’s gizzard was tough enough to split the seed and let it germinate. But what happened to the dodo tree when the dodo died out? Loads of scope for metaphors about fatal over-dependent relationships. Add the fact that both species only lived on the so-called ‘honeymoon island’ of Mauritius and you’ve loads of scope for irony.

J: Did it take you long to research?

D: Well, I started it in my 20s and now I’m in my late 40s! There’s a very good bit of advice to authors that I ignored: stick to what you know. I foolishly made the hero of the modern day strand of my novel a scientist working on genetically modified crops who turns his hand to saving the tree. Happily I eventually changed him into the PR guy who’s going to tell the story of the attempt to save the tree… Stick to what you know. [David currently runs the public relations team and publishes the journal of a long-established membership organisation.] In the meantime, I’d got married, moved from London and had a son, and my novel itself nearly became extinct.

J: What galvanised you to finish it?

D: Too much cheese! I got a bit out of shape and unhealthy and stressy at work last year and had to take it easy and lose weight! I watched one hour of daytime TV and I knew it would finish me off. Time to exercise (yeuch) and dust off the old novel.

J: Why did you take the indie route to publishing?

D: I fired the finished story off to a few agents - who didn’t exactly form an orderly queue. Their feedback was that it was imaginative and entertaining, but very niche for conventional publishing. I do have a sneaking desire to see a lavish hardback in Waterstones, but I took their point. Kindle Direct Publishing’s wonderful in enabling niche books of all descriptions find an audience.

J: What’s next? Do you have another book in the pipeline?

D: Maybe another outing for my deeply shallow PR guy – again, with some kind of historical bent. If I do start another, though, I’d really like to find a less drastic way to find the time to complete it!

The Dodo Tree is available from the Kindle Store here.

Thanks for that, Julia. Here's a link to her popular blog: