Thread 26 : To feel disappointed - and disgusted and vindicated now too - after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 25 IS FULL

Please see the OP of Thread 25 for all the links to The Observer's reporting and podcast series, our threads one to 24 and so on.

After 25,000 posts there are still new things to discuss:
BBC Sounds - Secrets of the Salt Path - Available Episodes
If you are posting about a podcast, please start your post with the episode number you are commenting on, for clarity and to help others avoid spoilers if they wish to do so.

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse are welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from at least some of the Observer exposé items before posting. The Observer's excellent podcast series The Walkers (link in Thread 25) covers most things.
To all - Please be extremely cautious when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no direct connection to the story, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Remember, even Hollywood rabbits attract the odd flea: please do not engage with drive-by scolders who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail. Avoid @'ing and quoting them as - from experience - this will only encourage them back to the threads. For over 8 months we have done amazingly well together for 25 very interesting, very serious and very silly threads so far. I can't be here as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion walking along in our usual reasonable and respectful fashion is very welcome.

As ever, as we embark on our 26th thread riding the community charabanc, keep to the path, no saltiness, eat fudge and drink cider.

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 25 IS FULL: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5485730-thread-25-to-feel-disappointed-and-disgusted-and-vindicated-now-too-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Agreed. I assume if JMC had stopped representing SW, she wouldn't still be on their website. Obviously, even discredited and revealed as a thief and scam artist, she's still earning Jennifer Christie significant sums...

If you scroll right down to the bottom, it lists other prizes TSP was nominated for, other countries in which it and the sequels were bestsellers, and all the languages all three books have been translated into.

https://www.grahammawchristie.com/talent-library/raynor-winn

She seems like a bit of an outlier in terms of their other authors in some ways.

They seem to mostly be psychotherapists with various specialisms (insomnia, breathwork, trauma, burnout etc), life coaches, people who've done something inspirational and are in demand as speakers at events, campaigners who have written a book on their cause (termination for medical reasons, looked after children, painkiller addiction etc).

Their other memoirists seem to be mostly entrepreneurs, a teenager who survived the Manchester Arena bombing, an architect writing about living in a house about to fall into the sea because of coastal erosion, and joky 'so we bought a small holding' types.

It's clear that most of them very much have portfolio careers, with a professional life as therapists or psychologists or running businesses or charities or journalism, and that writing is just a small part of it. Some are speakers and podcasters rather than writers.

If you look at their RW page, while obviously it starts with the best-selling books, it very much constructs her as a 'prolific speaker', and a 'regular long-distance walker who writes about nature, homelessness and the health benefits of walking.'

It's over 10 months since any photo of RW has emerged (30 May on her IG feed). Longer for Moth. Why? Is she hiding? Is that in itself a tacit admission of guilt? Easier to hide behind words than current images of reality. She still has 75k IG followers. So why no photo update? We are hanging tough despite the media frennzy. Smotyn, Monty dog and the tent appear in the IG feed but not the main dramatis personae... Part of a cunning plan or just blind funk? Maybe Moth is enjoying his down time and just looks too darned healthy for a 20+ year CBD sufferer and, finally, RW has realised that the game is up.

Thank you for this. You’d think from reading that, that Raynor Winn’s career should have spanned decades with her being fully involved in all those areas before writing TSP. You’d think that her writing of TSP was just one small occurrence within an already illustrious career or vocation. In reality she was nothing of the sort and these credits that are boasted about hang precariously now. Is she a long distance walker? All she did in TSP was ridicule those who were, who had the equipment and were dedicated to walking challenges. She writes about nature. Mmmm. Did she before? Homelessness was something she touched upon by pretending to be homeless. It’s not a good look. The health benefits of walking, yes, but she was pertaining that these walks were cures for “Moth’s terminal CBD”… which of course she denies now.

@HatStickBoots : "Is she a long distance walker?"

The person who wrote "Raynor Winn"'s Wikipedia entry describes her as such. The page (with editing notes visible) says that she is "{{Short description|English author<!please do not insert anything hostile or humorous here, it's not acceptable> and long-distance walker".

You may remember that I've had this discussion with a Wiki editor on this thread before. There is no evidence at all that she is a long-distance walker. The editor explained to me that because she is described as such, in a book review, then that has been accepted. This is such a circular argument as she says she is in fake books, and interviews, so people then review her books and accept her description of herself. Wiki editors then include it. Baffling to me.

I did notice that there's no mention whatsoever on the GMC 'talent library' RW page of her as a fearless campaigner for CBD.

Mind you, I don't know whether it was ever there, but certainly lots of GMC's other clients are activists or campaigners of some kind, and their books, if they've written books, or their speaker events, are very much part of their activism for a specific cause, so I suppose it's more conspicuous by its absence than it would be in other company...

Looked on Amazon to see if there is any change on the publishing date for OWH and found this:
"On Winter Hill: A Journal" by an author named Antony Rycht. Described as "A mystical journal. In this gorgeously illustrated handwritten journal, the ancient wisdom of Kabbalah and Tarot unfolds as a living map for transformation."
There is also another "On Winter Hill" by Ellen Grice which is a poetry collection exploring the role the natural surroundings play in the healing process inspired by rural Wales.
Both sound more interesting than SWs (especially the Ellen Grice one).

I find myself wondering what OWH can possibly cover...

Sal has denied that she ever said Moth had CBD - so she can't write plaintively about how poorly he is, and they now have made enough money from the other books to be able to make most problems, apart from chronic health ones, go away.

So if she has used the extra time she's gained from the postponement of publication to rewrite in line with her new reality (Moth was never diagnosed terminally ill, 'mistakes were made', now living in a very large, posh house) she's lost all the USPs that made her writing so compelling for those who fell for it the last time round.

So, apart from some fairly straightforward observations on nature, likely ripped directly from guidebooks - what has she got left?

I wonder if she is going to cover the scandal from the perspective of the blameless victim.

I think we did ponder this a few threads ago, but agreed that since Sal has so little insight, she might just as well put 'THE BULLIES MADE IT ALL UP!!' in big print on every page.

There's so much evidence that has stacked up against her that there's no possible spin that she can put on things to make herself seem innocent, and she's not capable of mea culpa.

Would she care though? I would have thought PRH would insist on her at least acknowledging the scandal in some way, in exchange for their continued support. There are probably enough people who are still fans / curious about the scandal to see what she has to say to make it worth her while financially, especially if this is her publishing swan song.

Yes, surely that ship has sailed back in the Autumn. She deleted her IG post about the way she was editing OWH and every reference to it including this:

Raynor Winn on Instagram: On Winter Hill is coming ....
On Winter Hill is coming this autumn and will be on the shelves for October 23rd. I'm very excited to finally share the raw, elemental beauty of the wild north of England in the depths of winter.

It sounds like the usual clichés and purple prose so nothing new there then. Her observations on nature do not stand up to any scrutiny - remember the "drawn north like a migratory bird"? She knows very little about birds and refers to them incorrectly being in Cornwall at the wrong time or a species that does not visit here.

Regarding, the Coast to Coast walk - @SaltyTea said that Blake Morrison had liked Jenn Ashworth's memoir of walking that route. There was also the David Nicholls novel of the hikers doing the same path. I think Sal would have to start from scratch.

Hard to know, isn’t it? I vaguely expected OWH to be her last walking-adjacent nature book, which would be followed by a pivot (back) into fiction, as her agency represents several authors who moved from non-fiction onto writing novels, and, bluntly, she’s run out of non-fiction material.

However, she’s already spaffed away huge chunks of lightly-fictionalised life experience on HNTDDD, and doesn’t strike me as someone with much facility for pure invention of character and plot, so I would have been fascinated to see what emerged.

I suspect it might have been very odd indeed, based on the three ‘memoirs’.

She’s a total misanthrope who defaults to being spiteful about and suspicious of other people, and as literally everything and everyone is viewed through the lens of her glumwashing, there’s a weird saminess about her characterisation of other people. It’s as though she can’t really see them because she categories everyone in terms of relative power, relative to her. Consultants have ‘tight, smug lips’. Women in sailing coats prod you with their foot and call you a drunken tramp. Even on the rare occasions she feels benign, they never emerge as individuals. ‘Dave’ is a Gruff Nothern Cliché, Julie ‘small and tough’. That’s all you get.

And her dialogue is tin-eared past belief. Literally nothing sounds like anything anyone would ever say.

Unless it’s the lying, covering up and scamming that is preventing her from writing well, I don’t see her as a novelist who invents characters and plots and manages to convince the reader that they’re real.

I think Sal is basing her entire life going forward on NOT acknowledging the scandal. The time to come up with acknowledgement and reasoning has long gone now, anything she says is going to sound as though she's had to think about what to come up with. I'm pretty sure she's hoping that the whole thing will just die down and people will forget, brush everything under the carpet and give her the benefit of the doubt.

She is wrong.

@NervesofSteel - I don't think she will be able to write fiction either. She's basically reiterated the same plot over and over in her non fiction, so I really don't see her coming up with believable plots and characters that she's made up, given how bad and inconsistent she is writing 'real people'. Her only hope would be to be 'given' plot ideas by her publisher or agent, but I don't think she can build a character arc to save her life.

OWH was supposed be about her escape from the reality that Moth is now in final stages of dying. I assumed (before the truth came out!) that he was receiving palliative care at that point. I also assumed that he had encouraged her to do this solo walk for both of them. I’d also assumed that TSP was about filling in a bucket list wish amongst other things. I expected OWH to further the relationship between author and reader with us acting as a listening ear for her thoughts and feelings. We already know that their relationship is special, exclusive and has survived where others in our generation have not, so I expected this to be a lament from Raynor Winn as she leaves Moth. We believe Moth to be selfless in this act. He has pushed his wife to do this, perhaps because he can’t cope with her brittle emotions but also because it’s something he wants her to do and to be able to retell while he’s still alive. As TSP was supposedly to keep his memory jogged (yeah right), OWH could serve as an opportunity to be Moth’s eyes on the journey.
Unfortunately, it became clear that Moth in that same year was not receiving palliative care leading to an imminent demise. The book has to be re written with that in mind.

The encouraging thing is she lost around 400 followers after that post. Every time she posts she loses more. I think it's close to 10k she has lost since OC's exposé. Nevertheless, she still has a large following of 75.7k...

Thank you for keeping an eye on this. I don’t have instagram and this is really useful information.

GMC do represent a number of ghostwriters, as has been noted on previous threads, including at least one I noticed yesterday who was listed as having ghostwritten a number of celebrity memoirs which couldn’t be identified for confidentiality reasons, as well as her own novels.

I just looked her up. Cathryn Kemp, who has excellent hair, ghostwrites and also writes historical novels and cheery books called things like A Fish Supper and a Chippy Smile (which sounds not dissimilar to the ‘romp’ Three Mountains and a Ceilidh).

Maybe she could do the plotting and characters and leave blanks for SW to do the nature filler.

Otherwise I suspect we’re back to ‘pure souls’ adrift in the world of Welsh small holdings and financial skullduggery and romantic leads who dress snappily and dunk their chocolate bars. She might switch things up this time and depict him as using his Twirl as a straw to suck up his Ovaltine.

Is it that many? I knew it had gone down from 80 something K…

There’s no other way. She has to start keeping him on a remote island in a bunker or something, while circulating a forged death certificate, claiming he’d died abroad, in exile from his beloved salty headlands, because People Were Mean.

Then she can say ‘I told you so!’ and continue her career as planned with OWH rejigged as On Winter’s Hill: The Widow’s Walk.

@NervesofSteel - I actually got approached with an offer to ghostwrite (I don't know who for as I would have had to sign an NDA before they told me; it was fiction and NOT Sal). I turned it down as I am too big headed to want my writing to go out without MY NAME on it, and can only admire anyone who ghostwrites (a couple of my friends have done a few). But anyone who ghostwrites something which goes out with Sal's name on it had better have a one way ticket to a nice isolated desert island for a while until the fuss dies down! They had also better be really good at copying her style (which I feel would end up more like parody than straightforward writing!)

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat I really don't understand the publishing industry. Would PRH go ahead with OWH without getting SW to at least to address the scandal in a forward or epilogue? They can't all be burying their heads can they?

the gentle relief of knowing there is nowhere else you need to be tonight

I think they need to be in HMP Dartmoor. The splendid isolation should suit them and, as they are so very special, it could be reopened especially for them. All their victims would feel gentle relief and I like the idea that we could all be warned by the ringing of the bells should they ever escape at a slow walk. It could be their windswept moorland wellness retreat just for two.

They can do whatever they think will sell. Publishing OWH without any reference to any of the scandal might serve them well - there seems to be a fairly wide subset of readers who know nothing about it, and then there are Sal's rabid supporters. They would all buy the book and not care.

Publishers want to make money. They are not interested in redressing any balances or addressing the scandal if they don't have to, and they really don't HAVE to do anything.

Interesting. So really it’s up to the reader to decide if they want it or not. Penguin have addressed all they’re ever going to address because as far as they’re concerned they were duped as well. Penguin have turned their faces into the wind also it seems because they are not re-marketing these books without all the bells and whistles and “honest” tags, and that is something I think they should do and I’m guessing they’ve had legal advice which says they don’t have to and why would they self sabotage like that? Is it a neutral stance and one which will always attract criticism or will people view TSP as a glitch in an otherwise worthy publishing house? Maybe “lessons will be learned” from this when they look at future authors, but regardless, Raynor Winn was a success for them and brought in a lot of capital during that period.