Missing In Action

That's what I am, and I apologise to you for it. But by next week I hope to be back with:

1. A book review
2. Commentary on a day in the life of a writer
3. A short rant about writers who won't start and writers who won't stop.

Until then, I beg your pardon, but I am working flat out on lots of things, ministering to the kittens (one of whom has been renamed) and just not having quite enough time to go round.

I'll be back ...

October – a writing Indian summer?

Right, final reminder for Fear of the Dark – should be a night to remember! Tickets are £5 or £4 for concessions available on the night or in advance from the Marlborough Theatre, Brighton or fearofthedark.eventbrite.com

Apart from that, I’m suddenly full speed ahead on Year of the Ladybird Plague again, after a pretty long stalled period related to research into the criminal justice system, working on a non-fiction project at Excellent Agent’s suggestion and playing around (again) with something vaguely Young Adult: based in Brighton and focused on love, lacrosse and leg length (no, I made that last clause up, everything after ‘Brighton’ is deliberate misdirection), I am going to pitch that graphic novel before the end of the month (better get my act together then, eh?) and that’s all, I think, apart from feeling bad about not doing NaNoWriMo this year, although Brighton (and Hove actually) is being wonderfully moderated by some truly wonderful moderators. I hope you all have fun with words in November …

Ladybird courtesy of Richard B-S at Flickr

Too many (or two many) things to write about

So, first and foremost – I’m taking part in an excellent event, called Fear of the Dark, organised by the lovely James Burt. He’s put together some information about the event, and I can’t do better than give it to you verbatim (as it were): Fear of the Dark is a special one-off spoken word night on Thursday 29 October 2009 at Brighton’s Marlborough Theatre. Beginning in a brightly lit theatre, the lights will fade with each successive act until the final act takes place in near-complete darkness.

The night is inspired by an old Sussex tradition of telling stories in the nights leading up to Halloween. It was said that the best stories would bring luck, with the ghosts leaving gifts for the tellers. Fear of the Dark will include strange and disturbing performances to amuse and entertain, as well as cake, apple-bobbing and a musical interlude.

• Glue Gun ‘91, have recently held a series of sell-out nights above the Victory Pub, featuring music, poetry, papier-mâché and live cake-making. They are also appearing as part of Brighton’s White Night event on 24 October.
• James Burt, one of the performers at Fear of the Dark, is a regular at Brighton’s spoken word nights and has appeared several times at literary event Short Fuse, as well as at Tight Lip and Sparks.
• Kay Sexton is a professional writer and blogger. In the five years she has been writing, Kay Sexton’s fiction has been chosen for over thirty anthologies. In 2008 she was commissioned to write a short story broadcast on British national radio.
• Bernadette Cremin is a well-known poet, whose book Speechless was published by Waterloo Press. She has an album due for release soon and recently completed a poetry tour of Ireland.

Tickets are £5 or £4 for concessions. They are available on the night or in advance from the Marlborough Theatre or from Eventbrite.

Okay, so the only claim I will make for myself here is that if you come along, you will see me as nobody has ever seen me before. I can laud my fellow participants though, because James is a great reader and Bernadette is simply wonderful – not to be missed. Glue Gun I know not, but look forward to with fear, trembling and a certain amount of excitement. Please do come along, and make it a thrilling night.

Writing for clients. What a nightmare October has been in some respects. I did actually break down and bleat about client stupidity on Facebook, but I didn’t even cover the half of it. This past two weeks has been notable for the varying quality of client responses to my input. Usually my business clients are calm and simple, while my fiction clients are much more demanding (perhaps because they care more, perhaps because words are their business as much as mine) but this month has been an object lesson in not assuming that the past can tell the future.

I’m working with (currently unpublished) crime writer Phil McCumskey and he couldn’t be easier to get along with, nor more fun. Not that he is going to agree with everything I say, but he’s determined to make his novel as good as it can get, and so we’re definitely working to the same end.

My latest business client (who has to be nameless, for legal reasons) is a nightmare. I edited a three thousand word document down to sixteen hundred words and he returned it to me with every it’s that I’d corrected in it’s [sic] content reinstated. I explained that it’s is an abbreviation for it is, not a sign that something belongs to 'it'. His reply was unconvinced.

But Saturday’s experience was the pit of my editorial experience to date. Said client, who is a ‘visual person’ (his words) texted me to suggest that as the appearance of his website was all important, he’d like me to ‘harmonise’ the usage of there and their as the page in question would look a lot better that way. Indeed it would – but it wouldn’t make any sense!

I pointed out that if he wants to win a client base, telling them that there image is safe in his hands [sic] is not a way to inspire confidence. ‘Y not’ he texted. I think he meant ‘Y not?’ and replied on that basis that somebody who doesn’t take care of the words they use to describe themselves won't look as if they are likely to take care of the impression they create of their clients. I expected to get another ‘Y not’ but there was a long silence – a weekend long silence, in fact, until this morning when my client’s business partner texted me to say that from now on, he’d be approving my work as the ‘visual person’ didn’t get the point of text.

Fair enough, and I wouldn’t have taken him on as a client if his work – in his chosen field - wasn’t really good, but I wonder who’s writing his contracts and whether he’s as casual about there [sic] wording as he is about the internet face he presents to the world?

That's Monty, hiding behind the kitchen bin. His sister, formerly (or formally?) Toutou, has been renamed Morgan. She doesn't seem to mind.

Why writers need help (and where to find some)

Back in the day, when I used to coach writers (before I discovered that coaching and writing were inimical, so if I coached, I didn’t write!) it came as no surprise to me that the main problems that writers had were not with their writing.

They thought they had writing problems, of course, or they wouldn’t have hired a writing coach, but what they had were the same, often apparently insuperable, meta-problems that send all kinds of people to all kinds of counselling. The only difference for them was that their performance anxiety was related to writing, not golf or passing their driving test or holding their marriage together.

And that’s why I was interested to receive a review copy of The Guide by Dr William Holden. Dr Holden has, amongst other things, been involved in sports performance coaching, and that’s an area from which I draw a lot of the techniques that I use in workshops with writers. Basically, these meta-problems usually relate to the way people see themselves (self-esteem) and they way they see the world (the Hobbesian view of it as being nasty and brutish tends to predominate) and I’m always looking for good books that explain where people are now, and show them how to get to where they’d rather be.

Seriously though, most self-help books absolutely stink. I think they stink for everybody because they are patronising and bland but they also stink particularly badly for writers because they are appallingly written tomes of turgid prose, packed with jargon and supposedly illuminated by bullet points but actually obfuscated by them.

As you can tell, my view of the self-help industry, as it presents itself between book covers, is pretty low. However, I was willing to give The Guide a read, and I was impressed by two simple innovations that make it a much more palatable tool. First, it neither seeks to seduce or exhort the reader, because it’s not about the reader, it’s about somebody else entirely. He's called Paul, and in following his journey we don’t get the finger-pointing that is such an unattractive feature of self-help books addressed to you, the reader (are you a woman who eats too much, are you a man without an emotional life? Why would anybody read further when addressed in such terms, I always wonder?) However, in learning what Paul learns, the reader gets plenty of opportunity to identify with his problems and understand the solutions.

Second, it’s a story! Wow! It’s not much of a story – it’s no epic saga of warriorhood, but it is actually a narrative, not a list of things to do to make yourself a better mother/lover/driver/salesman, and that makes it a much more enjoyable and attractive proposition for the reader to work through the book.

Of course, reading a book and putting what it tells in you into practice are two different processes, but my gut feeling is that Dr Holden has achieved what so many self-help authors never do; he’s applied his own principles to the book he’s written and achieved something quite outside, and quite beyond, the average.

There are things I would pick bones with: I hate the fact that the goal-setting section contains a template for the reader to use to write their goals, which drops the book back into the same morass as all the other self-help tomes; and I don’t buy into the mystic stuff at all, but I don’t have to, and you don’t have to, because it’s not necessary to believe in any of that stuff to gain the benefits of this well-explained and attractive guide to changing your thinking for the better.

Overall, if you’re going to buy a self-help book for Christmas, I’d say this one is the best I’ve read for a very long time, and it could even change your life ....

NaNoWriMo approaches …

Sadly I won’t be doing National Novel Writing Month this year, I’ve just got too much on. But I did complete it for four years and was Brighton (and Hove actually) coordinator for three of them.

If you want to write a novel but aren’t sure if you can, especially if you’ve become proficient at short fiction but keep falling down when you attempt the longer form, NaNoWriMo can be a fantastic way to develop the skills and techniques you need for novel-writing, at little cost. And local chapters (pun intended) make sure you have support and encouragment as you try to build your novel.

From 1 November you commit to writing at least 1666 words a day, every day, until 30 November. That gives you a 50,000 word narrative. It’s not exactly a novel, and it certainly won’t be pretty, but you learn a lot about plotting (or the lack of), character and world building, and bloody-minded determination along the way.

In the past I’ve used a number of incentives to get ‘my’ writers writing – one of my top tips to get through the task yourself is to become a coordinator as it forces you to deliver what you’re asking of others: there’s nothing like accountability to get those 1,666 words down on paper or screen. I’ve used threats, cajolery, tears and incentives to get Brighton’s writers to write with me! One of my favourite incentives was to get some T-shirts printed and give them out at the TGIO (thank god its over) party. One year I gave them to the fastest finishers, another I chose to reward the most wordy – doesn’t really matter, as long as people have a tiny tangible reward to aim for, as opposed to the big nebulous one of fame and fortune via publication, they perform much better. My printers are online T-shirt printing specialists: www.clothes2order.com and they will print as few as just one T-shirt (I generally get six) and their prices are great.

It’s a tiny outlay that can move people into productive writing, and I’ve always loved being a NaNoer … I shall really miss it this year, but I shall be cheering people on from the sidelines.

And I nearly forgot to say - I have an article about writing with a sense of place in November's Writer Magazine. You can buy it in Borders ...

... and, by request, kittens

Catching up

Those who know me best don’t want to know any of my writing news, they are only interested in the kittens! Toulouse and Montpellier arrived on Tuesday and are doing their best to destroy the house, my patience and the dogs’ nerve in about that order.

Other things have been happening that are not kitten-related. On Tuesday I went to
Jubilee Library in Brighton to be filmed for Wordia defining the word ‘row’. It was a lovely experience, thanks to James Burt and Rosy Carrick who were filmed too, and Rob Harper who was our able and charming video-person. But I do think I look like Joyce Grenfell playing a primary school teacher. The definition is linked to a short story I wrote for East of the Web who've been collaborating with Wordia on a fascinating story-go-round.

And in one of the longest-running sagas of my writing career to date, I’ve just signed the contract for my story ‘Miss’ to appear in Under the Rose - I started to write the story in 2003, tore it up (literally, three times) and then finally finished a completely different version in 2006. It contains a cross-dressing ex-policeman and a sentient tree, and quite amazingly found a home the very first time I sent it out! I’d really expected to be sending it around for quite a while …

But the while turned out to be our editor Hutch’s. He’s fought with time, nature, publishers and fate to get the anthology to publication and I’m thrilled to be part of it. Or Ren Holton is, as it’s one of his/hers.

And the moral of this story? There are two: don’t look like a primary school teacher unless you are one, and have faith in your editors …

Thinking in nine panels

There were a lot of things I wanted to drivel on about this week, but they have all been driven out of my head by graphic novels. Not only have I been reading them, I’ve been thinking about writing them – which is no simple thing, but a compelling idea to somebody who started reading Marvel when she was nine and has, since then, read everything she can get her hands on.

I’ve got to be honest though - until very recently the art wasn’t a key concern of mine. I had favourite artists and ones I didn’t like, but I chose my comics on the writer’s name, not the artist’s and as for the letterer and the colourist, I never gave them a thought.

Now that I’m trying to work out how to fit my own prose into a graphic novel, all those intersecting abilities have a completely different meaning for me. I look at a comic and see where they work together seamlessly and where they seem to jar against each other. I compare the smooth writing of Warren Ellis with the jagged work of his illustrator John Higgins on Constantine and the more edgy work of Alan Moore on Swamp Thing set against the smooth styling of Stephen Bissette’s art. It’s utterly fascinating.

Thinking in nine panels (or less) requires you to jettison all your tricks and tropes. The story has to be pared to the bone and characters have to reveal themselves as much through their expressions and actions as through their words or thoughts. And whatever instructions you give to the artist, their interpretation will overlay (or underpin) yours and create a hybrid, or maybe a monster, which is perhaps why comics are the natural preserve of the spooky and mysterious. I really hope to get to try out this kind of collaboration for myself but until then I am thinking in nine panels and discovering that I’m enjoying it a lot.