Writing Neuroses ... mine are rare, yours may be legion

2012-01-07T11:34:00.000Z

Martin Pippin quest: Adversane

Adversane on a raw, windy day in December bears little resemblance to the village Farjeon writes about. The cottages from which the children would have come to play are still there, although with several rather sinister looking vehicles parked outside. The road is busy: no parent would allow young children to become absorbed in a game alongside the traffic that roars past now.

There’s a conference centre, several liveries, and studs and riding schools. At least three gardens have trampolines and two have treehouses, showing that there are still plenty of children, although the conkers on the ground on one of the green areas in the village suggest that they aren’t allowed to play out in the way that Farjeon describes, with mothers calling from windows in the evening light for children to come home to ‘warm milk and cool sheets’ – about as delicious a description of the summer evening diminution from awake to asleep as I have ever read.

Adversane is definitely low-lying. The willows make it clear that the water table is high and both sides of the road along the village have humpy low ground and black swamp puddles. There’s a selection of ponds to choose from, but this seems most likely, to me, to be the duckpond Martin Pippin travels over to banter with Joan, Jane, Joscelyn, Joyce, Jennifer and Jessica.

Maybe in April Adversane looks like the idyll Farjeon depicted, but between Christmas and New Year it’s bleak and bland. Bleak in the way the wind whistles, the ground squelches and the traffic blares through it. Bland in its unemphatic landscape, its intermittent (when traffic free) silence and its lack of obvious community centre.

Except for the pub. The Blacksmith’s Arms offers a glimpse of the past – not just a glimpse, more of a long reflective backwards stare. It’s beamed and plastered, flagstoned and panelled and smells of beer and long-departed ashtrays: the malodour of many misspent youths, wasted middle years and gently declining old ages. I grew up in pubs like that, and everything—from the gravy that trickled onto my plate of liver and bacon with all the languor and richness of honey, to the expressionless face of the well-kempt barmaid who’s seen it all before—took me back to childhood in a rush of clattering emotions like dropping a bucket down a well.

So this quest starts promisingly: I meet my eleven-year-old self in memory in a way I never expected and she brought with her a sidelight to the book I had never considered. While the children were playing on the green and their mothers were heating milk and shouting from windows, where were the fathers?

Right where I was – in the pub. And the story rounded out for me in a new and fascinating way. I was where the missing part of the cast had been, and that almost made me a part of the book.

2011-12-11T15:52:00.000Z

Well, here’s a new idea!

On the other side of several little surprises, like being nominated for an award and then being shortlisted for the same award (many thanks to all who voted) I was reminded to go back to that book of childhood memory: Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard, that I mentioned in September.

It’s a really peculiar book, part local folklore, part children’s story, part tales within a tale (like Chaucer) and part play (like J M Barrie) and with a sophisticatedly mercurial protagonist linking the plot, sub-plots and sub-sub-plots.

What’s utterly strange about the book is the parts do not add up to a whole. The eponymous Martin tells six tales – one of them truly surreal: a dream sequence that could have been written by a psychiatrist dealing with a romantic psychosis – to persuade Gillian to marry Robin who loves her. But several of the tales, not just the psychiatric dream one (which includes a drowning, an abusive father and a daughter who appears to be both autistic and reclusive, in modern terms) are reversals of romance; they deal with the unfulfilled, the unconsummated and the unbearable forms of love. Not exactly what you’d expect from a children’s book.

I first remember reading it when I was seven. Between seven and eleven I kept the book with me most of the time, which was odd, because it was a school library book and I was constantly being sent notes through my class teacher to ask me to return it. I then wasn’t allowed to borrow it again for 24 hours and if anybody else got their hands on it during that time I would suffer for a fortnight before it appeared on the shelf again. You might have thought my parents would have bought me a copy but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. In truth, my book-reading was pathological – they may have felt it was better not to encourage my obsession.

So, a couple of years ago I bought a copy. Not the library copy, which had some kind of line drawings adapted from the original, but the December 1926 edition with the lush original paintings by C E Brock, RI. Brock was obviously in his conflicted phase at the time he drew these; wavering between his prim Victorian approach and his detailed (and somewhat grotesque) coded sensuality – look at Proud Rosalind’s hands on the Red Smith’s weapon!

Anyway. I re-read it. And a penny dropped with a big, 1926 style clang, not a modern tinny tinkle. The book is set in Sussex. And I live in Sussex.

So I have a quest for 2012 – to try to find every place that Farjeon mentions in the book; I already know some: Nyetimber is Newtimber, one of my favourite haunts, for example. But others I have never heard of, and it will be an exercise of history and ingenuity to locate them. The first place name in the book is Adversane, so that’s where I’m starting. At the time Farjeon wrote it had a thriving community with a strong local folklore (or so she claimed). Now it has a pub and a breaker’s yard (or so Google claims). I shall go and find out for myself and I shall do it between Christmas and New Year!

I am intending to rope friends into this bizarre pastime, so if you fancy a bit of sleuthing, along with a trip to a remote Sussex hamlet, let me know, and I shall sign you up for Pilleygreen or Earthen Wood, Tegleaze or Malecomb …

2011-11-09T16:21:00.000Z

Um.

Sorry I haven't been around much. Life you know, and all that ...

Actually you don't know. So, OH has had operation. All very successful but having a somewhat intense and bored man underfoot 24/7 is not conducive to deathless prose - or any other kind that wouldn't normally be ****ed by a pre-watershed censor.

Lovely little van was totalled by driver who fell asleep at the wheel of his BMW. My van written off, BMW towed off, driver (sober and unrepentant) went off to work a night shift and self ****ed off and in process of trying to buy a new vehicle will very little money, or - to be frank - interest in the proceedings. It's my view that writers generally (excluding the Papa Hemingway school and rogue journalists like Jeremy Clarkson) are not mechanically inclined. This one certainly isn't.

In the meantime, "Minding ..." has been nominated for an award. Yes really. It's a votable award so you can play along if you wish: click here and register your preferences for all kinds of things from TV presenters to tools - all with a horticultural leaning, obviously and entirely without puns.

2011-09-29T19:23:00.000Z

Havant

Plenty of scope for puns (sorry I Havant a clue etc) but I shall ignore them. Havant is a beautiful little place and The Spring is an excellent arts centre in a truly stunning setting. I had a fine time reading there and hope the audience enjoyed it too. I can't recommend this literary festival too highly, it was friendly, inclusive, well-organised and had a great blend of writers, craftspeople and artists taking part.

This is an untreated photo (not sure what that means, presumably that I haven't been airbrused to perfection) of me reading - I'm not sure what it proves, except that I'm not photogenic, but there you are, it proves (perhaps) that I am real. That's shocking pink nail varnish by the way - this year's challenge (to grow my own food in a well-groomed fashion or maybe just to never again be the woman who short-circuited her house by trying to pamper herself with the foot-spa she'd previously used as a propagator) is still going strong. It's nearly October and I have managed to manicure myself all the way from January!

Image courtesy of Terrmite

Thank you to all who came along - it was fun!

2011-09-16T09:00:00.000Z

Reviews and fan mail

Tricky situations:

1. A very kind and thoughtful review of my book by another blogger.
2. A lovely message via my website from a grateful reader. (Never thought I would type that particular sentence as you’d have to be peculiarly twisted individual to be grateful for most of the short fiction I write!)

For the former, I have a simple acknowledgement – thank you for letting me know, your review is much appreciated. It sounds very cold, doesn’t it? But I don’t respond to reviews in any way, simply because I’ve learned over the years that it’s not a good idea. Nice reviews are lovely but can lead to obligation (ie I then owe somebody a review of their self-published five volume opus on the symbolism of the owl in the Ring Cycle and its relationship to Harry Potter) or refusal (when folk ask for free tickets to readings that I’m not in charge of; for free copies of the book for their Mum and aunties; for me to pitch up and present prizes at their village fete in Northumberland …) Also there’s the vexed question of nasty reviews and if I respond to the nice ones, I feel it would be wimpish not to engage with the less nice ones, and that means eventually, by a process of folly, I would end up talking to the trolls and the trashers who are always out there and who delight in being unpleasant about things other people find pleasant. So I have a blanket policy and it works for me.

For the latter, a personal reply. When somebody has read something of mine and comments on it, I try to reply as fully and helpfully as I can – not because I feel obligated, nor because my ego is stroked (although there is some of that, to be honest) but because as a writer it’s invaluable for me to know how people found my work; what they thought of it; and what prompted them to make contact with me. This is not just ‘my audience’, it’s my research panel, my only group of advocates, and it will be my sternest bunch of critics if my standards start to slip. These are the people who work the magic – they read words on a page and turn them into life by virtue of exercising their imaginations within the bounds I’ve set on the page – they are alchemists and I am just the laboratory – but when I get the mixture right, and they report back on how that potion worked for them, a miracle has happened for me.

Sorry this is all a bit wizardly, but I am thinking right now of myself aged eight, reading Eleanor Farjeon’s Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard and feeling transported to a different world. Farjeon died when I was three, but even if she’d been alive it would never have occurred to me to write to her, because I thought books were made by magic.

I have the incredible luck, as an adult, to be in occasional communication with two women whom I believe to be the great writers of my generation and the idea that somebody writing to me is writing to me as a writer—as part of that band of creative humanity that makes new worlds or makes the old world new—is astonishing, humbling and not a little terrifying. So today I am sending out one form reply and one considered response, and I feel that this, more than holding the first copy of my first book, is the day that I truly become a writer.

PS - yes it's a baby owl in a bucket. No it's not cruel. This is how owlets are kept happy in owl sanctuaries.

2011-08-26T17:43:00.000Z

Workshops and writing practice

We’re back to a thorny issue. I’m putting together the workshop outline for ‘Grow and Tell’ in September. It includes a memoir exercise, a ‘taste and write’ based on home-made preserves, and a horticultural section on how to preserve, conserve, and otherwise hang on to, your edibles.

So what’s the issue? Daily writing. I do write every day – it’s my job. I don’t write fiction EVERY day, although most days I do, but I do write every day (except Sundays, as I am now learning to have a day off) and it works for me. What doesn’t work (for me) is the daily journaling or free writing process outlined in ‘The Artist’s Way’. I know it does work for many, but I think there’s a significant minority, like me, who discover that if they give their first writing of the day to morning pages, they end up with second-rate later work. On the other hand, the Artistic Date does work for me and is a profoundly important part of my creative practice. Every time I say this though, somebody in the room will huff and mutter as if I am dissing Ms Cameron. I am not. There are no rules. Really, there are no rules. THERE ARE NO RULES.

The Artist’s Way is a brilliant process for those for whom it works. For those for whom it does not work, it’s deeply frustrating to feel that you are the only person who doesn’t ‘get it’. In saying that I am simply stating the experience of one writer – and I just don’t understand why being non-representative in this area is so controversial. If I said I didn’t get heterosexual love (I do) or sushi (I don’t) or baseball (I don’t) or ballet (I do) nobody would be terribly upset. But as soon as I say that while many find morning pages a great creative spur, some, like me, don’t, this susurration of infamy begins somewhere in the room and spreads like a cold breeze.

Hmph. I shall still say it. And I just hope everybody thaws out when we get to the plum curd, blackberry butter and sloe and apple jelly ….

2011-08-18T16:49:00.001Z

I will always miss what I Havant …

Which is a truly awful pun (or as the great master, Terry Pratchett, is wont to say, pune) but I had to make it, as I shall be in Havant and it was too good an opportunity to waste. Actually, as a writer, I think I have an obligation to pun – it’s definitely in one of the contracts, somewhere, possibly the one I signed in blood when I was a sulky teenager busily failing all my GCSEs (don’t worry if you failed all yours, it’s not your last chance to make anything of your life, despite what teachers have been telling you for months).

Anyway, back to Havant. I shall take some seeds, obviously, to swap or give away or sprinkle on roundabouts like the good fairy of gardening that I am. Maybe some jam … I wonder if the nice folk of Havant would like to do a jam tasting? Or does that sound a bit Women’s Institute? I wouldn’t like to trespass on their territory: the WI enforcers are fearsome!

Perhaps I should turn up in my gardening gear. Although that would seem both a bit arch and rather as if I didn’t value the lovely people who paid for tickets which is not my intention. But if I turn up as me, I always fear I’ll be a disappointment – surely they’re expecting some kind of Percy Thrower with breasts?

The thing is, I never set out to be a writer on things horticultural, and so I don’t have a template for the person who pitches up to talk about Minding My Peas and Cucumbers at events literary and social. It’s all a bit peculiar.

Maybe I should take pumpkins …

2011-08-09T16:15:00.000Z

Oh lord and blithering hell – where did the last six weeks go?

I’d love to say that I’d been thrashing out some fabulous new piece of novel length fiction but I haven’t. I have been wading through the setting concrete of the umpteenth rewrite of my novel, but that’s not news, in fact it’s the opposite of news.

Rebus has had a serious operation and is disconsolate but that hardly takes up all day every day (it has been taking up quite a bit of the nights, especially when he howls like a coyote, making me sprint down the stairs and open the door of the room he’s settled in, after which he sprints past me, collar and all, up the stairs and throws himself on my bed like an operatic soprano dying onstage at La Scala. Sometimes, by the time I’ve turned off the lights, cursed the book I stubbed my toe on, and made it back to bed myself, he is snoring gently. I’m not sure if that’s genuine or not but either way, it’s deeply annoying) and we did get second place in the ‘Most Creative Allotment’ competition but we only got it today so I can hardly use that as an excuse.

The truth is … I’ve been busy doing nothing. I shall try to be a better blogger. Thank you for listening.

2011-06-24T20:30:00.000Z

The writer exultant

But not sure if it's bad form to talk about things. One is British after all! And the British do not discuss religion, salaries or other embarassing subjects. And this could come under 'salary' or under 'boasting' or possibly both.

Still, what the hell, I only get to say this once. The first print run of Minding My Peas and Cucumbers has sold out, so it's being reprinted.

I never expected that to happen, let alone happen four months after publication. Discombobulated doesn't begin to cover it. I wish I could give sweet peas and asparagus to each and every one of you who purchased a copy!

2011-06-05T17:50:00.001Z

The Hummingbird and the Bear: novel review

There’s something very interesting about meeting a writer after you’ve read their work, although meeting somebody immediately after reading their novel can be a little disjointing. For years I’ve despaired of readers who have the misguided impression that I am the character(s) I write about. This can be particularly laughable (for me) and galling (for them) when what they’ve been reading is erotica.

And then I did it myself – not as entirely or blindly as my readers sometimes do, but I finished Nicholas Hogg’s The Hummingbird and the Bear just the day before I met him at the launch party for Photo Stories (sorry, but it’s not every day a writer has her work exhibited in the Saatchi offices so I’ll brag for as long as I can). And in talking to him I found that I was beginning to elide the gap between writer and character and look for evidence of Sam Taylor’s life in the biographical details of his creator: Nicholas Hogg.

Sam’s life seems to have struck some reviewers as a little unlikely, but from what I know of city high-flyers, it really isn’t. Raised by a single mother and then with a violent step-father, he becomes one of the many young men who are thrown out of their ‘family’ homes by a man who usurps the role of head of householder without choosing to serve as father. After a few years of roughing it, Sam turns his life around, at least on the material level, and becomes a self-made man.

But the self-made man, with a superb standard of living, ‘perfect’ girlfriend and every possible advantage, is unmade when he meets a woman whom he cannot resist and who can’t resist him.

From the moment Sam and Kay meeting at a wedding they are compelled towards each other, regardless of risk. For Sam the risk is the collapse of his beautiful, but precarious lifestyle but for Kay the risks are greater: she’s already married and to a powerful man who doesn’t like losing anything, least of all his wife.

As the story unfolds we see similarities between Sam and Kay – both have fracture lines in their family histories that they have concealed but which bring them together in a mutual and ultimately destructive love affair. The collapse of their fake lives is set against the collapse of the finance industry in which Sam works and where Kay’s husband is a major player to create a micro/macro scenario of loss, damage and spiralling madness.

Not much of Sam’s story fit with his writer’s life; Nicholas is altogether a better-sorted and more balanced individual, so it didn’t take me long to sort out my initial conflation of the two, but then Nick and I got talking about the banking industry, culture and risk and how many of the guys in that industry had a culture of risk-taking that, when you dug a little deeper, was based in their past and in some problem: childhood deprivation, loss of a parent, early drink and drug abuse and so on that gave those ‘big swinging dicks’ a skewed perspective on risk and the ability to lie with confidence and style, even to themselves.

The Hummingbird and the Bear is an unusual book – written by a man about themes usually reserved for ‘women’s literature’ (up yours, VS Naipaul). It’s not what I would usually read but I enjoyed it and would recommend it to anybody who enjoys reading love stories, those who like fast-moving thrillers but are also interested in relationships and anybody who wonders why men don’t write love-stories: they do, Nick has, and it’s a damn good read!

2011-05-19T19:28:00.000Z

Rapture syndrome (or flu) and launches, reviews and writerly things

For the past week I have either had precursors of The Rapture or flu, depending on where you are based in the world and how credulous you are. I think the voiceless, joint-aching, temperature-rocketing condition is a virus, but certain American states appear to believe I have the symptoms of the end of the world. Fair enough, it does feel that way.

On Sunday I shall either be reading from ‘Minding My Peas …’ or miming it, depending on the quality of voice obtained by 2pm. You can find me at 16 Hartington Villas, Hove, as part of The Wolf at the Door Open House and the delightful Jane Napp will also be making furniture look gorgeous, The Garden House will be selling lovely saved seed and my talented friend Jill Tattersall, who hosts this open house, will be present to introduce guests to the various artworks on display (Jill’s collages are beautiful – don’t miss them).

On 26th I am going to The Smoke to see my story in the Saatchi offices. Am I excited? You have no idea how much so. Hope to have more voice and less evidence of runny nose by then but I shall go nonetheless (trying to find a snot-green frock just in case …)

And I have read and will be reviewing Nicholas Hogg’s novel ‘The Hummingbird and the Bear’ – it’s rewardingly hybridised, sort of romance meets high finance. Maybe it’s the love-child of Ann Patchett and Iain Banks, or maybe that’s my fever talking but it’s definitely not quite what I was expecting and much the better for it. So look out for that, and me, bearing tissues and tokens of literary endeavour!

2011-05-03T16:28:00.000Z

Just a quickie - this is a really exciting project in which I'm proud to be playing a minor role. Kudos to the amazing organisers. Go and read Nicholas Hogg's taut microstory right here and be amazed. Can't wait until my gloriously beautiful and surreal photo is revealed ... ekphrastic writing is alive and well and being readied for exhibition in the Saatchi offices!

2011-04-14T15:21:00.000Z

Devil-Devil - a novel review

Graeme Kent’s book arrived on my desk as one of those twitter-calls to the universe by somebody at his publishing house for reviewers. I am a total addict of the crime novel in all its many forms, and have a particularly soft spot for what I call ‘anthropological crime’ (I’m sure the trade has a much nicer term for it) so this book seemed likely to hit the mark for me.

Did it? Yes, actually, it did. I have my caveats: no glossary which is damned annoying when you’re trying to understand a wholly unfamiliar culture, and a certain perturbation over the divided narrative, but all in all, this is a very fine book, especially as it’s part of a series which often leads to a paring of the richness to share over several planned books – none of that here. Devil-Devil is set in the Solomon Islands and my complete ignorance of the region is what made me wish for a glossary, but it would have been an advantage rather than any kind of necessity, so perhaps I’m overly picky.

I wasn’t clear about the role of Sister Conchita. Sergeant Ben Kella is definitely our protagonist, a troubled man with a variety of roles to play (policeman, peacekeeper in the tribal sense, and to a degree, a communicator with the other world of spirits and ancestors) but Sister Conchita pops up and down in the narrative like a nun on a stick (quite literally as at one point she’s a kind of moving target for a gunman) The book is set in the 1960s and I would have expected a little more inner monologue from her, exploring her role as a nun at a time of massive social change, but I didn’t get it and that was the one weakness of the novel for me.

Otherwise, this is rounded, well-paced and fascinating. The cargo cult descriptions are nuggets of rich interest and the whole area of indigenous rights, tribal tensions and mild unrest against colonial powers would serve as good reading material for the current crop of politicians wrestling with, and failing over, the issues of Libya, Syria and so on. Although by the time it comes out in June, they'll have thoroughly bollocksed the whole situation.

Highly recommended, especially to fans of Tony Hillerman, this novel is definitely going to make you want to read more!

And I'm off to rural Crete for a week, without much internet access, to work on revisions of my own novel ...

2011-04-05T15:58:00.000Z

Writer as Performer.

Well, I spent Monday sitting in the window of Waterstones, Crawley, writing a complete science fiction story on a theme that I was given when I turned up at 11:00. I was part of Crawley WordFest and a thoroughly good event it seems to have been.

Actually it wasn't me, it was Ren Holton who did the writing. Ren was glared at by several dozen people who obviously thought she was a shop window dummy until they got close enough to see how fast she types.

In my own persona I recieved two Creme Eggs from a loyal fellow writer who will be reading this (thanks David!) conducted a quick tutorial on mind-mapping a story brief with somebody I'm mentoring, and got @tweeklet (who found me via my twitter stream) to name the antihero in my story.

Also, almost incidentally, wrote 5495 words of quite coherent prose and finished my story with 'the end' at 16:02, two minutes after my (highly movable) deadline. The story is called 'The Planet That Couldn't Lie' and is very definitely an homage to the classic school of scifi promulgated by Asimov, Clarke and more recently Niven and Pournelle - which is odd, as I almost never write that kind of thing. Anyway, I am very happy with it.

It was really odd to be performance art, and yet I wrote much more than I would usually have done. Weird.

2011-03-29T17:48:00.000Z

Book launches and how to survive them

I wasn’t really looking forward to my book launch. There were aspects of it that were wonderful to anticipate: seeing some people I really love, eating some delicious chutney (Smy chutney, not my own home-made stuff) and enjoying some wonderful cheeses. There were some last minute surprises of a very positive kind, like Barefoot Wines pitching in to provide the superb Californian tipples that my guests were lucky enough to sample. I knew the good pots would be a hit, as they had promotional pens given by Gardening Tools Direct and lovely courgette seeds donated by Thompson and Morgan. And little bags of fruit and vegetable shaped sweets … that was always going to be a big hit! But, to be honest, I gave up sleeping, eating and enjoying life for about a week before the launch.

I’m not a natural self-promoter (very few writers are) and so the idea of standing in front of people and talking about my book was nauseating. And yes, I have done this kind of thing before, but never solo. Promoting an anthology is soooo much easier, because you can talk up the work of writers you admire who are published alongside you, rather than puffing hot air into your own collapsing ego.

Still, I did it. The venue was amazing. My dress was a triumph. The food was brilliant. Loads of people wrote limericks (two literary agents and a publisher got together to judge the limerick competition) and even more drew vegetable portraits. 72 people walked through the doors and 40 of them walked out again with a copy of “Minding My Peas and Cucumbers” – some of which got signed, but if you were one of the people who didn’t have time at the end to get a signature from me, just let me know and we’ll sort something out. There are pictures here of most of the evening and there’s even a YouTube Video although I don’t intend to link to it!

Having lots of things for people to do really helped – it stopped me being too much the focus of attention and allowed everybody to be doing things, rather than staring at me, expecting me to do something clever or entertaining. Allotment folk are quite competitive too, so the contests led to some good-natured rivalry which was fun to observe.

I loved most of the evening, panicked through some of it and really hope that the same is true of book launches as they say it is of childbirth – that you forget the pain by the next one …

Thank you to everyone who came along, you were all amazing, and I hope you had as good a time as I did.

2011-03-15T16:38:00.000Z

Blimey – book launch!

Yes, I’m still panicking. I do now have something to wear – a 1950’s sheath dress with an abstract fruit and vegetable print, plus some rather cute green leather shoes with floral buckles.

• I do have wine – donated by the awesome Ali of Barefoot Wines who is coming along to give lucky attenders at taste of California’s delicious wineries.
• I have chutney (my own) and real chutney – from the eminently tasty Emmerline Smy who is bringing her delicious relishes for folk to try.
• I have competitions: including a limerick competition to be judged by my own excellent literary agent (who, let me say, hates limericks, so this may be an ordeal for all concerned) and prizes … oh, you should see the prizes! The basket of crochet fruit, (the strawberries being but a single example), the beautiful circular strawberry bed, the honey pot …
• I have activity packs for littlies with fuzzy things and googly things and cute things and all that good stuff.
• I have (well, not yet I don’t but I know it will be there on the day) chocolate apple spice cake, made by my mother, a cook of almost unlimited talent.
• I have goody pots with seeds and sweets pens and all kinds of wonderful things inside and goody bags to take goodies home in.

And I have fear. Terrible, 2am fear. Suppose nobody turns up? Suppose too many people turn up. Suppose everything goes wrong?

So, for the last time, I promise, I’m asking you to join me to celebrate the launch of my book, “Minding My Peas and Cucumbers: Quirky Tales of Allotment Life”, 22 March 2011 18:30 – 20:30, West Blatchington Windmill, Holmes Avenue, Hove, BN3 7LE.

2011-03-07T17:35:00.000Z

Radio Adventures

This is what a radio studio looks like.

If you are likely to be on t'radio, it's a good idea to take a bottle of water so you can moisten your throat, to have a few key words written down so you can remember them (like the names of the people you are speaking to, sounds daft but that can go right out of your head) and to wear really comfortable shoes!I also had a little pot of Hotel Chocolate morsels, almonds and dried cherries, to keep me going, and a copy of my book, just in case anybody wanted to query anything I'd written.

My thanks to: Stuart at Radio Northampton, Sean at Radio Merseyside, Liz at Radio Cambridge, Stuart at Radio Stoke, Mike at Radio Hereford and Worcester, Simon at Radio Newcastle, Mark at Radio Wiltshire, Malcolm at Radio Oxford, Phil at Radio Humberside, Fitz at Radio Devon who made me giggle, Heather at Radio Manchester, David at Radio Gloucestershire, Andy the keen allotment holder who's just had to give up his plot at Radio Kent, Rony at Radio Sheffield, the lovely and totally unexpected last minute intervew with Ellie at Radio York and last, but not least, the charming allotment sceptic Sarah on Radio Sussex. To Yanina who calmed my nerves and made me a fantastic cup of tea just when I needed it, my eternal gratitude, and to Dean and the team at Summersdale for creating the buzz that made the interviews happen, much, much kudos!

And to anybody who was hoping to hear me speak in the next 24 hours - I don't have much of a voice left!

2011-03-04T14:12:00.000Z

Hubris, gratefulness, politesse?

I’ve spent a couple of days now, staring at the little heap of my books that was delivered on Monday.

They stare back.

I am paralysed by knowing what it is good, or fair, or right to do in this situation. I am sending books to people who have been instrumental in its genesis, and to whom I know it will be welcome as a mark of my esteem, if nothing else. These people include my excellent first reader, my best friend since High Shcool and my writing compatriot Bunny Goodjohn.

Then there are other people: important people, and ones that I would like to thank. Most notably A.L. Kennedy and Jonathon Porritt, both of whom gave generous and charming quotes for the book jacket.

But.

Is it hubristic to send people a copy of a book they’ve had an advanced read of? Does it look arrogant? Would they prefer something else or would that look as if I don’t have confidence in my own book, or that I didn’t rate them highly enough to send them a copy? Well, I think they both know I rate them rather highly: Jonathon has been a leading contributor to the environmental field since I first entered it more than 20 years ago, and I’ve valued working alongside him tremendously. As for A.L. … well I’m on record as saying she is a goddess to me.

And yet I’m terrified that sending the damn books will seem brash, and not sending them will seem ungrateful and ungracious, and as a result the books are sitting on my dining room table, next to ready labelled envelopes which seem to grin at me maliciously with their open flaps whenever I pass.

And then, if I do send them, what to write in them? And why didn’t my parents send me to calligraphy classes as a child so that even if I can’t find the ‘right’ words I can produce some nice-to-look-at ones?

So I distract myself by stuffing seeds, sweets and limerick first lines into the flowerpots that are serving as goody bags for the launch, which somewhat eases my mind until I start to worry that nobody will turn up and that I will have to take all the flowerpots home again …

And then I go and crochet something, to take my mind off the subject that I was using to take my mind off the subject of the books ... this publishing stuff is actually quite stressful, you know?

2011-02-28T17:27:00.000Z

The rarely wordless one becomes mute

I am struggling to know what to say on this blog at present. My book ‘Minding My Peas and Cucumbers’ is due out on 7 March, but people have already been in touch to tell me they have received copies ordered from the Book Depository.

There is nothing more guaranteed to send a writer into neuroses than waiting to hear what people think of his or her work. The truly ghastly part of this process is that you wait, and wait, and wait … and almost never get any feedback at all.

There’s professional feedback, of course. The kind, measured or sometimes scathing or schadenfreude-laden words offered up by other writers or professional reviewers, which can be soothing (or lacerating) and will usually remain engraved on the psyche of even the most robust personality.

But what the writer actually craves is feedback from the average reader. The person who picks up the book in Waterstones or Tescos or in the local library, and decides to read it. Why did they? What did they think when they did?

It’s difficult, and sometimes demeaning, to obtain this kind of information. Waiting for it can cause you to spin on your writerly axis until you develop a kind of mental vertigo. Seeking it out can make you seem needy, neurotic and possibly stalkerly. (Stalkerish?) Not getting it seems like writing into the void. Getting it often seems like a slap in the face with a frozen cod (yes, I’ve had one: it nearly hospitalised me, but this is not the time to tell the story, and it was only half a frozen cod, to be honest).

So I wait. Wondering. Hoping. Fearing that I am about to become that worst of all things – a writer whose written page might as well be unwritten …

And when I’m not doing that, I worry about the book launch. 22 March, 2011, 18:30-20:30 at West Blatchington Windmill in Hove, if you happen to be around. Competitions, chutney tastings, fun, goody bags and general good humour, or at least so I hope.
Yes, it really is in a windmill. Do come along and have fun. I promise not to ask if you’ve read the book, or what you thought of it …

2011-02-12T19:01:00.000Z

Charles Lambert - third time of asking

I’ve talked to Charles Lambert, on and off, for about five years now. I’ve read his work, published and unpublished and followed his progress. I enjoyed his first novel, loved his short story collection and felt that terrible pang that all writers feel when asked to read another book by a person they like: suppose I didn’t find it as satisfying as the debut novel? How would I say that?

So far I’ve never been pushed to that point, partly because I think I’ve done some clever footwork to avoid subsequent publications that didn’t seem likely to have lived up to their predecessors and Charles has allowed me to maintain my winning streak.

In Any Human Face he juxtaposes different histories, and different chronologies, to reveal the dark underside of contemporary Roman society. At one point in the book, wallpaper is peeled from a wall to reveal a surprising pattern underneath – so it is with Any Human Face: illusions are peeled slightly away from the surface to give us a glimpse of what is below but the whole pattern is never quite revealed, so we must conjecture about exactly what links the glimpses we are given.

If I make that sound complicated or hard work, it isn’t. This is an emininently page-turnable narrative. His protagonist is an unlikely character to win us over: Andrew Caruso is a homosexual attracted to difficult and antagonistic lovers, a book shop owner who makes no money, a transient in his own home and life, and a magnet for people who abuse him emotionally. Despite that, his shambolic existence has an integrity that makes him deeply appealing. Alongside Andrew we get to meet Alex, whose journey from self-pimping street boy to journalist is beautifully portrayed. There is a link between Alex and Andrew – the death of Alex’s lover is followed by the death of Andrew’s - but it takes decades for the two of them to realize that a box of photographs caused one death and may have contributed to the other …

I don’t want to say too much about the actual plot, although it’s definitely thrilling, but it’s a book in which all the ends are not neatly tied up – most are, but some aren’t just as happens in real life, and paradoxically, that’s one of the things that makes this so satisfying to me, because in reality we never really find out all of the who, what, when where and how that shapes our own lives, let along the lives of others.

It is a book that grounds itself in two things: the daily reality of life as one kind of outsider or another; and the unreality of society: the way we all agree to pretend that certain conventions are rules of nature until we are unfortunate enough to come across somebody or some organization that breaks those conventions and turns what we thought of as reality inside out, revealing the gory workings of our apparently hygienic societies. I thoroughly recommend it whether you like a good thriller, love books about outsiders, or enjoy being challenged in your assumptions. On any of those levels, this novel more than satisfies. As an aside, Charles has a new blog which tackles issues literary head on. It reminds me just how little mainstream attention is paid to literary fiction in the UK and how bloody annoying that can be when you see how other nations engage with their best literature.

Because it’s the third time I’ve asked Charles to answer questions, it began to feel a little interrogatory, but I persisted, with a certain righteous sense of entitlement to drag the man’s inner life into the light for the sake of a review. When I go back after his next book, I think I shall have to string him up by his thumbs and extract confessions, just to maintain the pace!

Here’s what I put to him:

This is your third book length publication in little more than two years. How does it feel to have written for so long and then have this relative rush of publications so close together?

Anticlimactic. What it’s made me realize more than anything – and I know exactly how galling this will sound to all those people who are seeking publication, as I did – is that the deepest pleasure continues to come from the actual writing process and that much of what follows from that is compromised, anxiety-ridden and, in a way, irrelevant, although, of course, it has its satisfactions as well. Which makes me sound very ungrateful… Believe me, I’m not.

What, if anything, has changed in your writing habits and practices between Little Monsters and Any Human Face?

On a strictly practical level, less than I’d hoped. I’d fondly imagined myself becoming a ‘writer’, my life divided neatly into three or four hours of creativity each morning and the rest of the day dedicated to reading, eating, drinking, conversing, etc. with a little travelling thrown in for inspiration. I’d imagined people coming round to photograph the desk at which I work and selling the pictures to one of the Sundays, and having to squeeze in interviews and the occasional book tour. That, and adapting everything I’d written for Hollywood…

Needless to say, this didn’t happen. I’ve carried on doing what I’ve always done – winkling the business of making money into a slightly smaller space than it’s comfortable in so that I can write whatever I’m writing at that moment, with the ratio between work and writing shifting according to the point I’ve reached in the book. The first third of Any Human Face was written in a fairly leisurely way, while the second two-thirds were produced, often between six and eight in the morning, at a regular rate of 1000 words a day, give or take a sentence.

That’s the practical, external side of it. In terms of what’s actually going on as I write, I’m not quite sure what to say. I think that before you’ve ever been published you have a sense that you can do absolutely anything you want because nobody actually gives a damn. I certainly never felt that what I was writing was being determined by anything other than what I wanted to write, by the direction the work itself imposed. In a deep sense, none of this has changed: I still can’t write anything extended to order, I’m still primarily alert to the work itself. But - and it’s a big but - the substantial process of being edited between the placing of Little Monsters and its final publication did make me think very hard about the ways in which narratives live and work beyond the original authorial – and textual – intention. There’s a Faustian side to it, and there were definitely moments when I felt that I might be selling the integrity of my book just to see it on the shelves. I certainly don’t think that now, and I’m immensely grateful to my editor, Sam Humphreys, for the trouble she took to make the book as good as it could be. But I think that the process did feed into the writing of Any Human Face, at a fairly unconscious level, and that there was an awareness not only of the book as it urged itself on me, but also of the kind of narrative that might work, in the sense of being ‘readerly’. The editing process certainly went a lot more smoothly than it had done with Little Monsters, and I don’t think this is just because it was a better book to start with; I think it has to do with some sort of taking-on-board of the editorial process as I write.

Let’s talk covers, an issue that I know exercises us both, and not always in a healthy fashion! How was cover art chosen for each of your three books? It seems to me that Little Monsters and The Scent of Cinnamon share an artistic sensibility that is quite different to the one that shaped Any Human Face and I wonder how that develops between writer and publisher?

Hah! One pre-publication dream that was soon squashed was that I’d be playing a major role in the choice of cover. Living in Italy, I’d grown to love the way the more serious Italian publishers use non-photographic images on books (I wrote a piece about this for the Guardian and I thought I’d be able to have something similar for my own book. I wasn’t against the use of photographs as such, but I wanted the cover to have a non-representational, more open relationship with the text (I hate the use of film tie-ins on covers for this reason). I made dozens of suggestions, directly to Sam at Picador and through my agent, Isobel Dixon, and they both, with their assistants, just about succeeded in fending me off. To give you an idea of what they were up against, one of my proposals was an installation by the Italian artist, Fabio Mauri, consisting of a wall of battered suitcases – brilliant concept, but maybe not the most eye-grabbing image! In the end, I was gently removed from the process and the final cover was chosen by Sam. I’ve grown to like it very much, and I was more than happy when Salt – who are wonderful at choosing cover illustrations, I think - decided to exploit it by choosing a similar image for Scent of Cinnamon.

When it came to deciding on a cover for Any Human Face, I made a few noises about preferring something graphic to a photograph, which were duly ignored, and then I stepped back and waited to see what they came up with. The actual cover was the first one to be suggested and I was so delighted to see that my name was the largest thing on it that I said yes immediately. There’s clearly a question of market placement in the choice of both covers though, and the disparity you’ve mentioned between them has a lot to do with the perception that the first book was aimed at a predominantly female readership – numerous people have commented on the ubiquity of headless women in bookshops a couple of years ago! – while the second has been marketed as a thriller. I liked, and still like, the cover of Any Human Face but it may not have done its job as well as we’d hoped, and we (I say, we…) are currently looking for a catchier cover for the paperback. I must say that I care far less than I used to do about what gets slapped on the front of the book. The ideal is to have a cover that not only reflects the contents of the book but is also an object of beauty in itself. Failing that, I’d rather have something that – crudely - shifts units than something that gives me an aesthetic thrill but doesn’t attract the punters. How Faustian is that?

What would you do differently writing-wise, looking back over the past three years (and bearing in mind that I have every intention of asking again in a further three years)?

Hmm. I think I’d need to be the sort of person who feels regret to be able to answer this question. I’m not, so I can’t. But I do look forward to being asked again!

Daniela is mistakenly described as a ‘friend’ of Andrew’s in the back cover of Any Human Face because she’s the kind of person who is incapable of friendship. Is she based on a particular person or type that is particularly prevalent in Rome? Or in artistic circles generally?

Well, the gallery circuit in Rome is an absolute scandal – petulant, corrupt, largely indifferent to talent and run by a clique of critics and galleristi who base what’s shown on the willingness of artists to stump up considerable amounts of money for wall-space and a slab of pompous, impenetrable ‘critical’ text for the catalogue. Without which, nada. In that sense, Daniela is typical. (And, yes, she’s definitely an acquaintance rather than a friend…) But I also drew on some of the people – usually, but not always, women - that I’ve worked with (as in ‘been subordinate to’) in Italian universities, shallow, talentless people who owe their extremely comfortable and privileged positions to others and to the generally anti-meritocratic way in which the system is organized. There’s an Italian expression – avere una coda di paglia (to have a tail of straw) – used to talk about people who suffer from insecurity and respond to potential attack preemptively, and it’s a characteristic of far too many Italian academics, particularly those employed in humanities faculties, to savage anyone they see as threatening to their wobbly and fiercely-protected self-esteem, above all those beneath them in the hierarchy (who obviously pose no threat at all...). This makes them unpleasant in many of the ways that Daniela is.

My new novel, incidentally, takes a rather hard look at the Italian university system…

The living of a gay life, not just sex and pornography but how relationships are constructed and how they founder, is central to Any Human Face. It reminded me a little (and I mean this in the best way) of Mary Renault’s The Charioteer, in that it’s about immersion in a culture, not mere depiction of a preference. What conscious intentions did you have when you decided to write a narrative where homosexual life and culture were essential and integral to plot development?

Any comparison with Mary Renault is to be treasured, so thank you, Kay. As you say, what makes Renault so extraordinary is that she sees people as part of a world, and I hope that’s what I’ve done – in a more circumscribed way - in Any Human Face. As far as life and culture go, though, I’m not sure I had any conscious intentions other than to make the characters work in the way that seemed most natural to them. A lot of gay fiction, even gay literary fiction, still seems reluctant to allow for failure and loneliness, as though it were letting the side, or ‘community’, down in some way (though Ed White, once again, is breaking new ground here…). And even the highest-brow writing often tends towards the priapic, for want of a better word, as though no gay man worth his salt ever has unsatisfactory sex or, even, whisper the words, no sex at all. I liked the idea of writing about people whose emotional lives were complex, often unsatisfactory, improvised affairs, because that’s basically what most people’s emotional lives are, regardless of orientation. It’s also true that the idea of writing about a middle-aged man wanking to some online porn, and not getting an awful lot of satisfaction from it attracted me: partly because it must be a hugely shared experience these days, and partly because it balanced the edgy but, in some ways, almost idyllic portrayal of the part the Birdman played in the production of that sort of material.

On a darker note, the death of Bruno in the first chapter is closely based on the death of a friends of mine some years ago, an American writer called Lou Inturrisi, whose murder, like those of many other gay men in Rome over the past two or three decades, remains unsolved.

2011-02-07T18:56:00.000Z

Just a quickie - in every sense of the word! Carmel has a story in Gotta Have it which has one of the sexiest covers I've seen for a long time... curb your impatience though, it's pre-order only until 24 March!

2011-02-04T12:07:00.000Z

February is another month and I’m not committed to running every day! Oddly enough, the one thing I really want to do every day when I should be writing, is run, when a few weeks ago the one thing I wanted to be doing was everything except running.

Still, I did run today – 4 kilometres round Hove Park (twice) in a wind that was like constantly smashing yourself into a sheet of plywood, bouncing back, and trying again. Now I’m virtuous, chilled and starving.

February is going to be creative month, but I’m not going to inflict my sketches on you. Thursday is life-drawing day, two hours at lunchtime, which is marvellously liberating and sort of preparation for my graphic novel project. Friday is random craft day – today I’m making cloud brooches and every other day of the week is a 30 minute sketch day, except Sunday which is a day off.

Why am I doing this? Well first, because I found the process of Janathon to be useful in shifting some blocks – although not the block I hoped it would shift. Second, because I really need to get some visual work under my belt before my graphic novel weekend. Third, I’m the kind of writer who likes to have deadlines, tasks and rewards, even if they are self-generated.

• Currently reading: The Road Home (Rose Tremain); Any Human Face (Charles Lambert); Portrait of a Lady (Henry James) – this last for reading group purposes
• Currently sketching: pineapples and tower blocks (not together)
• Currently panicking over: my book launch (will there be one?)

2011-01-31T17:17:00.000Z

Janathon Day 30 – they think it’s all over

It is now.

Inspired by Misty2k to do more than what I’d planned, which was a short lumber around the block but not wishing to Radcliffe, I remembered that a couple of years ago when I was training for the Bexhill 10k I worked out a PTR that was around 3k long.

PTR is a public toilet run for those who don’t know, and it’s a route that allows the hapless runner to feel relatively confident that they will make it to a convenience in time, if they have tummy issues.

So I PTRd today and it was fine. Didn’t need the PT bit at all.

Stats for lovely Jules for the last time

• Distance - 3.11k
• Time – immaterial
• Radcliffes – zero
• Things learned – if you run for 30 days in a row you end up with abs that would break Ray Winstone’s knuckles; a strict running regime doesn’t necessarily flush a recalcitrant protagonist out of hiding (although I am just starting to get a hint on how to proceed with the rewrite of the novel); challenges are fun; top quality chocolate is essential to active running (I already knew that but it’s worth restating); you meet nicer people out running than almost any other way.

PS - in fact my abs would shatter the knuckles of any action hero of choice, so I've given you three plus Spielberg to choose from ...

PPS - picture courtesy of TVSquadJulia

2011-01-30T21:25:00.000Z

Janathon Day 30 – the ouch day

Today I failed to run. Well I managed .3km which hardly counts as a run (let’s not talk about how many 60 m sprints that is or Mark Lewis-Francis will start to feel tired) for a distance runner.

The thing is, I woke up with three kinds of ill this morning: migraine (instantly treatable with wonderful sumitriptan); a cold (so it’s just a blocked nose and a sore throat, that doesn’t stop anybody running) and a stomach bug. Stomach bugs stop you running. Well, they let you run 300 metres and then they stop you and you walk back very slowly and carefully and spend the next hour or so in the smallest room.

I did manage to get to the allotment, where I put in a hearty 20 minutes painting the inside of the shed, and then I had to go home to the smallest room again.

My janathon is about to end ingloriously … and today my end is pretty inglorious too!

2011-01-29T16:27:00.000Z

Even Mickier Run

Shorter, dirtier, Mickier and Rourkier!
1.2 k

Had to shove this run in betweeen a meeting, coffee with lovely friends, son's birthday present opening, and heading for cinema.

Thanks Mickey ...

2011-01-28T14:31:00.000Z

Day 28 – the ‘wind like a scythe day’

That’s external wind, not internal, by the way. (Stats at the bottom for the lovely Jules.)

We (Rebus and I) went up to the windmill to run. The ground was frozen, which makes running slightly easier up there, when quite a lot of the year the ground is churned mud, and the wind was the kind of wind that you could just lean on and not fall over, except that if you did lean on it, you’d probably end up with a permafrosted front.

It was so cold and windy that even the dog tried to slip stream – usually he runs 50 metres ahead of me. Several disgruntled crows were hanging around in a huddled fashion that suggested they would be cuddling up to each other if they didn’t have to maintain their street cred.

My piriformis decided that this was the time to introduce a slow hot ache to the proceedings. For a kilometre or so I welcomed this, as the only warmth to be found in the proceedings and then it got too much and I decided to turn round and head back the short way. Such bliss to have the wind behind us!

Distance - 1.4 k
Temperature – Siberian
Crows – chilly
Windmill – spectacular.

2011-01-27T20:35:00.000Z

Day 27 – another lottie runner day

Stats at the bottom for lovely checkers.

I ran to the allotment on the basis that when I got there I would get changed into my boots and jacket (stored there) and do some work before friends turned up to collect some mirrors and walking sticks (don’t ask!) and then I would run home again.

First mistake. I forgot we’d taken the roof off the shed because it was made of asbestos, and replaced it with a tarpaulin until we can get a proper roof. As a result, my boots had been dripped on. I wasn’t going to wear my Sauconys to dig in so we feet it was – urgh. Second mistake, in pulling on my old leather (actually somebody else’s old leather, then my teenage son’s leather, then my leather, so at least third hand) I pushed my arm up in the air and hit one of the pockets of water that had gathered in the tarpaulin that is acting as the shed roof, managed to hit it hard enough to either create a new hole or to dislodge something (dead leaf?) that was acting as a blockage, thus showering myself with icy water, right down the sleeve of my jacket.

I started to plant out the alpine strawberries and as I did, it began to snow. Seriously. Wet feet, wet arm, snow.

Can’t tell you how glad I was to take off my wet boots and socks, pull on my running socks and Sauconys, hang up my sodden jacket (now smelling of dead wet cow) and run home.

Distance – 1.98 k
Weather – snow
Mood – disgruntled
Strawberries planted – 7.

2011-01-26T17:40:00.000Z

Janathon Day 26 – another 'running with friends' day

This is the second Wednesday I’ve run with my friend who is new to running. Sadly she had some hip pain from an old injury (could be piriformis, could a labrum problem, suggested she goes to her GP for some advice) so we walked a little more this time. She enjoyed it though, and has definitely improved her overall fitness as she’s been doing some of the stretches I showed her last week and her shoulder movement is much looser and more efficient.

We managed 2k again, including a detour to play with a couple of those body weight machines that they have installed in Hove Park. They are quite good fun and for a new runner in particular, they make a great stopping point to restore breathing to rest levels.

As for me, I also have piriformis pain, but I’m doing my physio twice a day and keeping it at bay. I think I’ll need some ultrasound if I’m to get back into race training but that’s for once Janathon is over.

2011-01-25T20:39:00.000Z

Janathon success, computer fail

stats - 1.89 k run

computer, borked all day. First a virus, then a network adaptor problem, hence plenty of time to run, no time to work or blog.

Phew. It's. Been. A. Tough. Day.

Bed.

(Actually, bed with Bill Sienkiewicz. Not actually 'with' but with Stray Toasters, which I am currently loving to death, crumbs and raven, although I wouldn't say no to actually 'with' either)

2011-01-24T19:00:00.000Z

Day 24 - the pulling parsnips run

Another 1 k run.

I am starting to feel that my runs are just being squeezed into the corners of my day, which is sad, but it just goes to prove that even if it were physically possible for me to run every day (which it’s not) then logistically it would be impossible. Roll on 31 January.

Anyway, today’s run was followed by parsnip curry. The parsnips, leeks, shallots and coriander seeds came from the allotment, but the red onions and the orange pepper were from the supermarket because we've used up all our stored onions and our frozen peppers. I fried previously cooked wholemeal basmati rice with cashews and crushed coriander seeds to give fragrance to the mixture – next year I hope to be able to use home-grown lemongrass to make my own jasmine rice instead.

It was delicious.

2011-01-23T20:37:00.000Z

Janathon Day 23 – the ’squeezed into the day’ run

Today is another day that my run got squeezed. In fact at around 6pm I thought I was going to have to declare it a non-running day.

We started by going to a local garden centre to buy seed potatoes. Then to the allotment to move loads of strawberries to their new home, transplant lavender and have an enormous bonfire.

It was gigantic. It could probably be felt the other side of Hove. Between digging up and replanting, moving barrowloads of manure, finding several marble work surfaces buried under the ground and having to dig them out (in pieces) and generally hauling wood around for the fire, I was exhausted by the time we got home at around 5pm. But somehow I dragged my unwilling carcass out of the door for a 1 km run. It took eight minutes. That’s it.

2011-01-22T17:28:00.000Z

Janathon Day 22 - Thongs and other issues

Stats:
• Distance 1.89 k
• Time -immaterial
• Weather – parky

So once again I ran round Hove Park. OH got to do the bit today that I did yesterday as in I drove there so he could run at race pace down to the park, round the park and then be driven home. All very nice.

On the way – running in opposite directions so as not to annoy each other – he saw a Cairn terrier and stopped to say hello to it. I saw a thong.

It was a pink and black thong, in the undergrowth at the Engineerium end of the park. That’s the kind of thing—at this time of year—that makes you take a quick detour to check that they aren’t any other garments: or worse, body parts, lurking out of sight. Well, it makes me detour, you might be more dedicated a runner, more sensitive a soul, or less ghoulish an imaginer.

• I once saw what I thought was a set of finger bones in the mulch under trees on the Waterhall road: it wasn’t, it was one of those glow in the dark creepy hands, probably thrown out of a car window, but it inspired a story (which I haven’t sold yet) about a woman who does find a skeletonised hand in the woods but has her own reasons for not telling anybody … (that's one of Ren Holton's stories if you happen to be a horror mag looking for a suspense filled psychological tale)
• And I once found a pair of seamed stockings on a run – they were tied, lovingly, in a bow, around one of those yellow utility markers you find on the side of the road. That led to a story (which appeared in an erotica anthology) about a young woman who ‘earns’ a pair of black market silk stockings on Victory in Japan Day. (That's one of Carmel's and it's in the Breast Cancer antho put together by Xcite Books)

There was nothing in the undergrowth of the park other than the thong, and it has obviously been there for a looongish time. Two or three weeks, maybe even before Christmas, which would make a certain kind of sense, given that it was a piece of party underwear if ever I saw one: by which I mean it looked incredibly uncomfortable and faintly tacky.

It reminded me again that my mind doesn’t work like other peoples’. Possibly the Cairn terrier had left the park before it crossed my path, or I would definitely have said hello to it too. But OH did not see the thong. From the pristine condition of the mud under the trees, nobody else but me had bothered, if they did see it, to explore whether there was anything else to be seen. I often think it would be nice to have the kind of mind that didn’t build ghastly worst-case scenarios out of random objects, but then, what would I have to write about?

PS - this is not the thong. The thong I saw was tackier, dirtier and quite a bit saggier!

2011-01-21T20:09:00.000Z

Day 21 – the ‘just for the love of it, day’

Stats at the bottom for checkers.

Today was always going to be a horrible crunch, even before I added in a random side trip to complicate things. I knew that fitting in a run would be difficult so it worked out like this:

Drive dog to groomer, do quick shop for essential groceries (that was the side trip), drive home, leave car and run to allotment, work for two hours digging up strawberries from one plot and replanting them on another plot several hundred yards away amongst other things, run home, drive to groomer, pick up dog, drive home, leave clean dog at home, walk back to allotment, work for another hour, get lift home with OH, have shower, put on clean clothing and respectable face, pick up friend in car, drive both of us to The Garden House in Brighton, spend several hours being made to feel delightfully inadequate by the elegant, compact and highly winter-scented garden there, eat cake and drink tea, drive friend home, have cup of tea with her, drive self home, walk dog, cook dinner (using essential groceries to make chocolate and mandarin bread pudding) and collapse …

• 1.98 k
• And just a tiny boast here … my km time on the outward run was 6.07. Not bad eh?

2011-01-20T19:38:00.000Z

Janathon day 20 - the height of feebleness

1.2 kilometres jogged.

What can I say? The day got away from me: I frittered it away in idle pursuits and pleasure-seeking, felting clouds, talking to cats (this is the Siamese who talks back) and buying beads and by the time I remembered I had to run there was ham cooked in cola waiting to be eaten and mandarin and chocolate bread needing to be buttered for afters, and I did the bare minimum of exercise to meet my Janathon commitments.

I am a lazy cow today - so bite me!

2011-01-19T19:27:00.000Z

Janathon Day 19 – the ‘like a virgin’ day

Today’s run was a 2 kilometre run/walk around Hove Park with a new runner. In fact, rather oddly, she’s somebody who might be hiring me as a running/yoga coach. Me!

Although it’s not as odd as all that. I qualified as a yoga teacher in 1987, and I’ve taught on and off ever since. Mainly off, to be honest, because I prefer to perform my asanas alone. But nobody has ever suggested I could coach them at running before.

Still we started with a gentle approach to fartlek and took it in turns to set a landmark to run to, and the pace we ran at. Her pace when running was faster than I would have set, which is what I expected, as most new runners start off faster than they can continue to run at. We explored running at a pace you can talk at, and running too fast to talk and then allowing the breathing to return to normal before increasing the pace again. It seemed to go well and she was very surprised (and pleased) to find she’d covered 2k without really noticing. Then back to her place for a couple of stretches that I hope will work to prevent her hip problem (sounds vaguely sciatic) recurring and we’ll see how she’s feeling tomorrow.

As for me, I feel great! It’s humbling to realise just how much I take my ability to run and do other forms of exercise for granted, and that I simply don’t appreciate, very often, how lucky I am to have the time, space, ability and training to indulge my various physical activities to the full. For the rest of the month I shall try to remember that running is a privilege and to enjoy it as such.

2011-01-18T17:56:00.000Z

Janathon Day 18 - the miraculous properties of new kit

As a writer I know the power of the new notebook – sometimes beneficent, sometimes malign. A fresh notebook can spark a new project, or condemn a writer to the blank white shyness of the empty page through writer’s block.

For me it's always the former with writing - new notebook, and the words just pour out. Not necessarily good words (my first drafts are excremental) but still, lots of them.

So it is with running kit.

Yesterday’s knee twist kept me awake all night with intermittent bouts of pain subsiding into just twinges and then flaring up again. But this morning my shocking pink do-rag (officially named a multi-purpose headgear) arrived in the post and there was no way I wasn’t going to do it justice. I tied it in a pirate, because I can, put on my iPod Nano, and went for it.

End result?

• Distance – 2.78 k
• Time – actually pretty good, considering
• Pain – eminently bearable
• Mood – happy
• Music – AC/DC Back in Black, Caravan Palace La Villette and Hassan Abou Seoud’s classic Shik Shak Shok.

2011-01-17T17:20:00.000Z

Janathon Day 17 – are we there yet?

Sadly not. Today’s run was a bit of a bugger. Stats at bottom of blog-post.

I decided that today I would run early in the morning with Rebus the dog. Rebus approved of this as he didn’t get taken for a long walk yesterday, and was as raring to go as a ten-year-old Cairn terrier can be.

So we drove down to Benfield and immediately I knew that I should have been wearing spikes. Not that I’ve worn spikes since I was fourteen, but the slippery, cold, tractionless mud that was lurking under equally slippery, slightly rotten and very wet long grass suggested spikes would have been a good option.

But what the hell, I went for it. And all was going extremely well until a pair of wood pigeons came racketing out of a blackthorn bush right under Rebus’s nose (if you know the size of a Cairn you’ll realise that the pigeons were more running with their wings out than flying) and the poor dog, totally disconcerted by this, reared up on his hind legs, barking as if he’d run through broken glass. This happened once at Benfield and it was a bloody experience in every sense of the word, so I immediately tried to stop on the spot, and – of course – my front leg locked out and skidded across the mud and now I have an odd, nagging, imprecise pain on the outside of my right knee.

I am RICE and hoping I can still run tomorrow.

• Distance - 1.82 km
• Time – no idea
• Accidents – one
• Mud – copious
• Mood – belligerent. If anybody has an email for Dastardly and Muttley, I’d like to introduce them to some pigeons …

2011-01-16T19:47:00.000Z

Day 16 Long Ralk with lunch in prospect

Stats at the bottom for janathon checker-person who should get double-karma-blessings for working on a Sunday.

Today was a run-walk (a ralk, in our house) with @pinkyandnobrain. Also lunch. When I woke up it wasn’t raining. When I walked the dog it still wasn’t raining! I was so surprised by this that I crocheted a cloud.

The cloud has to be felted, have some raindrops attached, and then be joined by another little cloud, and then I will have two cloud brooches to wear. Alternatively the whole experiment may go horribly wrong (as often happens with freeform crochet) and you may hear no more about it. We’ll see.

Before @pinkyandnobrain arrived I marinated a chicken in lemon juice and rubbed the cavity with zest. Then it was coated in butter, olive oil and a little water and cooked in a very hot oven for 20 minutes while we chatted and got changed. The oven temperature was lowered and we set off. We walked from the bottom of 3-Cornered Copse to the top, then ran Green Ridge to the windmill and back to 3-Cornered Copse (the return journey being against a stiff wind) and all the way back down. It still wasn't raining.

When we got home I beat two eggs with some Greek yoghurt and some more water and poured it over the chicken. After 15 minutes this forms a thick and rather ugly looking omelette affair which tastes utterly delicious. It’s a Cretan recipe, apparently. Well done those Greeks!

Well done to us too, as we managed:

• Distance - 4.1 k
• Time – quite reasonable, considering
• Conversation – serial killers; administration of charities; running shoes; travel agents; solitude; Nietzsche; fashion; dog walkers; MA studies; family gatherings; Moomins
• Pudding – chicory essence and walnut mini-muffins with vanilla ice-cream.

2011-01-15T17:40:00.000Z

Day 15 – non-running but high impact exercise day

So I gave myself a day off running. Not a day off, just off running. And there were three reasons for this:

1. Yesterday’s mmmph was a sign that I’m getting bored. Boredom has killed the runner in me many a time and I don’t want to get so sick of running that I get to the end of January and then don’t run again until September
2. I had a packed day planned for today and the only run I could have fitted in would have been a rubbishy rushed and pointless one
3. Tomorrow I am taking a nice long ralk (run/walk) with a friend, weather permitting, so my legs were about due a rest day.

Sort of a rest day, anyway. Instead of running OH and I tackled the thing at the top of the blog post. It was once an elder tree, then the stump of an elder tree on our allotment. We cut it down in June and have been lighting fires over it from November to kill it off properly. Now it was time to make it part of the grand design!

The grand design is circular, mainly because said elder is just one of five trees that we’ve had to remove from the allotment, and that means that planting in rows is impossible: just about every inch of soil has at least one tree root in it, and some areas will be unplantable for years, until we’ve managed to dig out the huge roots that spider across the ground. Planting in the areas that can be used is going to be a little haphazard, but now this elder is an ex-tree, I’m going to use it space between the roots to plant strawberries and herbs in this round planter thingy.

The circles can’t be concentric because of the roots, so they will have this eccentric pattern that’s hopefully making the best use of the available soil but also interesting to look at. The execution of this particular project required five barrowloads of topsoil, two of manure and a bag of sand, plus a lot of heavy digging. In between bouts of digging and barrowing we moved one old incinerator, some sheet metal and a rotten old carpet up to the skips in the centre of the site, and then went for a little walk with an allotment neighbour to see a plot that he’s working on. We spent two hours on site, with one break for tea, so I’d say 100 minutes of intense load-bearing, cardiovascular exercise. Sorry, dear stat checker, not sure how to bullet point that!

2011-01-14T17:10:00.000Z

Day 14 – janathon meh

Stats only today. I’m fed up with everything.

• Distance - 2.65 k
• Time – unknown and uncared about
• Mood – grumpy.

Grumpy cat by jonnykeelty

2011-01-13T20:23:00.000Z

Day 13 – the 'danger of magical thinking during a run' day

Stats at the bottom, such as they are.

Magical thinking – many of us are guilty of it. In one of those serendipities that can seem miraculous, I was writing about the process of magical thinking in alcoholics for a client today and then found myself indulging in the same process myself. That, in itself, is a bit of magical thinking.

Magical thinking is when we mentally connect two (often closely occurring) events as though one caused the other, without a logical or empirical causal link. For example, if you walked under a ladder and then your granny died, you might associate the ‘bad luck’ of ladders with death. Alcoholics often ‘reward’ themselves with drinks for something they’ve done that was difficult, because their magical thinking suggests that drinks that are ‘earned’ don’t count.

So, I have some magical thinking habits, one of which is that when things are going really well for me, I can ward off the bad luck that must inevitably be heading my way, by ‘investing’ in some ‘bad luck’ through choice.

So today, when life feels pretty good, my excellent agent has said nice things to me, my also excellent editor has said good things about my soon-to-be-revealed book cover, my very cool publicity person has come up with a potentially great opportunity to talk about the book, and my lovely friend has had good news about her severely ill father, I look at the weather, which is rainy, foggy and windy (a combination that should surely defy meteorological likelihood) and with some satisfaction, put off my run until it is also dark, on the basis that running through dark, foggy, windy, rain is likely to earn my whatever the opposite is of the good events that have happened recently, so nothing unexpectedly bad will happen because I’ve planned the bad into my schedule. Yeah, like that's going to work!

• Distance - 1.53k
• Time - unknown
• Weather - atrocious
• Magical thinking – indulged.

Witchdoctor photo courtesy of Bogdan Migulsky

2011-01-12T11:54:00.000Z

Day 12 – the ‘run misty for me’ day

Stats at bottom for checkers

There’s something really magical about running through mist. Or is it fog? I never know which is which.

Anyway, I ran early today and enjoyed the muffling, mysterious experience of having the sound of my footsteps softened, the streetlights haloed by opal light and the crows cawing discontentedly and invisibly. To lower the tone, I really hate the way my hair does an impression of an elderly and weather-damaged bluebell when the humidity is high. It clings to my head and then springs out in random directions as if I’d been the victim of an attack by violent curling tongs.

• Distance - 1.56 k
• Weather – misty.

2011-01-11T20:41:00.000Z

Janathon Day 11 – the keeping company day

Stats at the bottom for the lovely Janathon checkers.

Today I ran with @janathon_ - a shortish loop from Jew Street (where we left our non-running kid with the excellent folks from New Writing South: you know you belong to a really good membership organisation when they act as bag-minders so you can Janathon!) down to Old Steine, along the seafront by the West Pier, and then back.

Because we couldn’t get a signal we aren’t sure about distance, and we were also meeting for the first time, so it had to be a slow enough run to talk. We ate lunch at Bill’s and then went down to Boho Gelato for pudding (chocolate and blood orange ice-cream for me, half and half of chocolate chilli and mince pie ice-cream for Cathy) before a swift walk back up to the train. It was fun!

I get really nervous about running with people I don’t know, but once I start it’s usually great and this time was no exception. The West Pier looked particularly fine today, although the photo is from Sunday because I didn’t have a camera on me.

• Distance 2.2 k (but we think it was really 3 k at least because it took so long to get a signal)
• Time – very slow
• Mood – nervous becoming relaxed
• Food – lots!

2011-01-10T20:56:00.000Z

Janathon Day 10 – the ‘don’t bloody ask’ day!

This is how bad it was – I’m giving you a choice of my janathon misery or a good laugh and I’d strongly recommend the laugh.

Stats:

• Distance - 1.45k
• Mood – frustration turning to fear, becoming fury and veering hysteria-wards later
• Backstory – complicated.

To begin at the beginning. I actually managed to forget I had to run today, until a tweet reminded me. As I’d planned an entire day without time for a run, this was a bit of a bastard. Frustration arrived.

Then, in faffing around trying to work out how to fit in a run, I accidentally invited another Janathon participant to run with me before we go out for lunch. So this is running, with a stranger, who’s intimately involved in the Janathon project, through central Brighton. I must have gone insane. But by the time the momentary insanity wore off she’d agreed and I’d found a place for us to leave our bags so we could run unimpeded. Hello fear.

So to reset my mood, I ran. I picked 3-Cornered Copse for two reasons: 1 – it is out of the wind and Brighton has become gale city today and 2 – it’s a steep hill and I always feel better if I run up there. But when I got home, I discovered I’d run through dogshit, and as I only have one pair if running shoes at present, this meant I had to scrub my shoes clean because I have to wear them tomorrow. Fury took up residence in my soul.

And while I was scrubbing my shoes, outside, over the drain, it started to rain. An icy, sleety, bitter-stinging rain. And I wanted to howl at the sky but I feared that if I did I would end up in Mill Hill (local mental health facility) and that would mean the end of my Janathon. So hysteria (the silent kind) moved in.

And now I’d advise you to go and have a laugh while you can, because if this is my ‘don’t ask’ day, and you haven’t had yours yet, it can only be just around the corner.

2011-01-09T12:23:00.001Z

Day 9 – Landscape with runners (after Brueghel)

So much I want to write about today! The picture, and the fact that I am lucky enough to have four windmills within running distance of my home; the joy of running on a crisp morning; the horror of piriformis syndrome, and why Iain M Banks is my go-to author for this particular problem.

So let’s try and be brief (who am I kidding?) and take it chronologically. Piriformis first. I knew part-way through yesterday afternoon that I was in trouble. Attending big events is fun but it does mean sitting in airless and windowless rooms, which makes me antsy, but that wasn’t yesterday’s problem. The problem was those little gilt and velvet chairs they give you to sit on, which look cute but are ergonomically hazardous. I got up and stood around for a couple of hours but there was still most of the evening to go and I was getting that hollow aching pain that told me that my piriformis did not love me.

I should have gone home and done physio exercises until I was sobbing with pain and exhaustion but I didn’t want to. I compromised by finding an empty room and doing half an hour of stretches, but there’s a limit to what you can do in your going-out clothes, particularly if random strangers are going to keep bursting through the door looking for the toilets, or the cigarette machine, or the person they’ve made an assignation with. (Or possibly, by the third one, simply being tipped off that there's a female contortionist warming up in that room over there and if you nip in you can get an interesting eyeful!)

So this morning my piriformis actively hates me. The good news is that piriformis syndrome is easily treatable with sports massage to break down the tissue damage and excruciatingly painful physiotherapy.

Which brings me to Iain M Banks. Today’s plan is a short run and five bouts of physio. During the run I saw this lovely line of other runners looking like a Brueghel painting brought up to date, and was very glad to that I usually run alone. I’m sure they were having a great time (although I know I wouldn’t have been) but I was thankful that I was a solo runner and could do my piffling run (details below) while chanting my mantra for the pain to come. The pain is not the run, you see, it’s the physiotherapy, and to prepare myself for its particular torments I mutter ‘Use of Weapons, Use of Weapons’ to myself.

Those who don’t read science fiction may now wish to skip to the bullet points. For everybody else’s benefit, and without spoilers, if you’ve read Use of Weapons you will already have guessed why I chant that particular novel’s title when contemplating pain, but if you haven’t read it, one weapon used in the book is a chair made of human bones.

I’m never sure whether I’m threatening my body with a fate worse than physio or reminding myself that there are people out their with minds as bad (if not worse) than mine (see day 1) who would probably find some creative value in the pain I’m about to put myself through. Whatever the logic or lack of it, the chant, which is actually more of a mumble, has become a habit, and I use it for shin splints, piriformis syndrome and leg cramps. Also when I bang my funny-bone, but only after I’ve said some much riper things, much more loudly.

• Distance - 2.34 k
• Time - immaterial
• Air quality – like a chilled Bolla Souave Classico – less fizzy than a champagne but definitely in that region of crispness
• Pain – distinct but bearable
• Windmill – Patcham (the others are Blatchington mill and the paired mills, Jack and Jill, at Clayton)

Now to the physio …

PS - you're all clever enough to know I mean the photo was reminiscent of the Brueghel school of mass participation events in a landscape, aren't you? Not that the runners are chasing somebody called Breughel? Yeah, I knew you were, really.

2011-01-08T08:45:00.000Z

Day 8 – the Mickey Rourke of runs

Why Mickey Rourke? Because it was quick, short and rather dirty.

The details:

• 1.03 k
• Very early in the morning
• Orchestrated by Aphex Twin (Outside Kick Ass Violin Solo to be precise) and The Commitments (Mustang Sally)

So here’s the reason. I have to be in Brighton – coffee with the author of this excellent blog wherein intellectualising music choices is neatly parsed, then a convention all day. I could have run at lunchtime but that would have been (a) poseurish (as in ‘excuse me while I take my exercise in public thus sending all you drinkers and smokers to the naughty corner) and (b) required me to carry my kit into town and then ask somebody else to watch my stuff while I ran and that’s not fair when everybody’s trying to eat and socialise (and maybe hook up or have a fag or whatever, who am I to judge?) and so on. Also, it would have meant being sweaty through the afternoon.

It was actually 2.04 k because I walked it first with the dog, then ran it while he ate his breakfast at home. And I did it at race pace (for me) of nine minute miles.

Now I’m off to have fun!

Mickey by David_Shankbone

2011-01-07T20:28:00.001Z

Janathon Day 7 - the demotivation Dalek strikes

Motivation was a problem today. This couldn’t get me out of the door, even though I wasn’t going to let myself eat it until I got home – it’s a Hotel Chocolat 5-second Chilli and it was delicious although, if I’m being totally honest, I think the praline was just a little too heavy for the chilli warmth and impeded the full value of the spicy burn. It was morning, the sun was shining, I had forty minutes to spare and I just couldn’t be arsed to run.

Nor could this, which is a less elegant but more substantial inducement in the form of a mandarin cupcake. I made them last night and they masquerade as healthy treats (okay, healthier treats) having half wholemeal flour, unrefined cane sugar and half a pulped mandarin in the sponge and the mandarin zest in the icing. Nope, still didn’t inspire me with the desire to get up and run. By now it was early lunchtime, and sky was clouding over, and the temperature dropping, but I wasn’t in the right headspace to run, I told myself.

By three-thirty it was chucking it down. I logged onto twitter for some tough love, got it, and ran

I ran 2.9 k in driving rain. A more sensible runner would have run in the sunshine but there you go, nobody said I was sensible. And why all this running resistance? Had I hit the wall? Nothing like that. And those who are runners rather than writers might want to stop reading now, because it’s going to get weird.

The thing is, I’m using Janathon, or trying to, to force a character to stop hiding from me. It’s the third major rewrite of my novel, after discussion with a very distinguished editor, who had eminently intelligent things to say about the plotline. I’m at just over 60,000 words and the protagonist has stopped cooperating. She liked her previous life, I think, with a warm and honourable love interest and only one death on her conscience while in the new life her love interest is somewhat warped and twisted and there are two deaths, one of them emotionally brutal, the other physically so. So she keeps sliding back into the character traits of that previous persona, which makes a nonsense of the narrative arc as I’ve reconstructed it.

The reason I know she’s hiding is that I’m not dreaming as her. Yes, that’s right. As her. I’ve discussed this with the inimitable Hilary Mantel who hears her characters’ voices and given a choice of the two I’m happy to dream as my characters. Dreaming as men is really rather interesting if physiologically dislocating …

So the hard work of running and the hard work of daily blogging, is supposed to push me into a state of exhaustion where I hope that my subconscious will flush the protag out of her nocturnal hiding place and get her back on track. I would like to finish this novel’s new incarnation before the allotment book gets published, but so far all that’s happening is a nagging pain in my knee and some rather odd nightmares about sheep which I know are being caused by the fact that I’m reading a sheep-based story at Sparks on 1 February.

And my disgruntlement is why I didn’t feel like running. Perhaps now I have my protag will pitch up tonight and let me get some quality words down, to go with my quality miles.

The cake was awesome, by the way.

2011-01-06T12:44:00.001Z

Janathon Day 6 – chocolate is my fuel of choice

Today’s blog is brought to you by Sainsbury's Taste the Difference Milk Chocolate Costa Rica Coffee, all 100 grams of it!

Yes, I eat therefore I run. It’s always been that way for me. Not necessarily running, but something aerobic. And I’ve never, ever, been on a diet.

When I was little I studied ballet (very, very, badly). As a teen it was swimming (until Jaws arrived at Sandown flea-pit: like many an Island-raised kid in the summer of ’76, I developed a phobia of the water that lasted right through the hottest summer on record) and in winter, school cross-country. I started yoga aged 12, when I gave up ballet, and have – pretty well – performed some asanas every day of my life since then. When I have a garden I spent most of my summer in it, and now I have an allotment, I spent most of my winter there, digging. I run, I walk the dog twice a day, I don’t drive when I can walk … does that make me sound like a sanctimonious health-freak? Probably. But I’m not.

I don’t know how people live without exercise. This blog is not called writing neuroses by accident. If I don’t get regular endorphin-inducing exercise I become miserable, faintly paranoid and deeply neurotic. The less exercise I get, the more narrow minded and unhappy I become. I don’t choose to run: I have to run if I want to be happy. If I get injured and can’t run, I have to do something else, exercise-wise, or sink into lethargy, despair and unhappiness. Five days is my limit – six days of inactivity begins my downward spiral.

On the other hand, I eat whatever I like, always have. My six foot one and a half inch tall OH and I eat the same amount. I’m five foot six and a size ten which is the size I’ve been since I was 12 years old. Since I was about 14, people (mainly women) have been telling me (somewhat sourly) that one day all the calories that I’ve consumed will ‘catch up with me’. Well I’m 48 and they haven’t so far, and as I generally only run 11 minute miles, I’m not exactly outpacing them, am I?

I eat chocolate every day. My passion is cherries in alcohol: whether it’s those cheapie ones you get in a quid shop, the Elizabeth Shaw cherry brandy liqueurs that tend to have crystallised into brandy sugar, or my top two: Montezuma’s kirsch chocolate cherries and Hotel Chocolat’s kirsch cherries. I will do anything for a packet of either of those (but I haven’t written the post about running, endorphins and orgasm yet, so you’ll have to take my word for it, for now). Denied top-quality cocoa-based products, I settle for Toblerone (or anything by Lindt) then the Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference range. If it comes to the crunch, then crunch is what I take: Crunchie from the Texaco garage on the corner!

Oh yes, I ran today. 4.26 k in the driving rain, with a blood test to punctuate the distance at the mid-point. It was absolutely bloody glorious – I loved every minute of it. I got home soaked to the skin, insanely happy, and starving. Two mugs of tea and one bar of chocolate later I am still insanely happy. Happy enough, in fact, to shove up a soaking-wet, grinning-like-a-maniac, post-run picture of myself just to prove that the calories still haven’t caught me …

2011-01-05T16:33:00.000Z

Janathon Day 5 – the bad karma day

An old running friend rings me.

Her: I saw your blog about runners and masochism.

Me: Good. The point of writing is for somebody else to read it.

Silence

Her: Oh. Right … So … I liked it a lot.

Me, graciously: Thank you.

Her, apprehensively: But…

Me, frostily: But?

Her, even more apprehensively: Well, when you first mentioned sexual deviancy and runners you said you were going to write about runners, sexual deviancy, and chocolate.

Me: And your point is?

Her: You didn’t include the chocolate.

Me: Did you READ the post I wrote yesterday?

Her, now with quavering voice: Yes, of course I did, every word!

Me: And do you consider yourself to be somebody who knows me?

Her: Urm. Yes?

Me: Yes – question mark?

Her: Yes, no question mark. Yes, I know you.

Me: And what did I say that people who knew me would be thinking as they read it?

Her: Urm … that you weren’t a masochist?

Me: That’s right. So, given the theme of the post, what does that probably make me?

Her, obviously wondering if she should say what she’s thinking which is ‘a patronising bitch’: Urm …a sadist?

Me: Well done!

Her: I don’t get it.

Me: Think about it.

Her: Urm … oh, right. That’s nasty.

Me, smugly: Never said I wasn’t nasty.

Her: So are you going to write about chocolate?

Me: You really don’t get this sadism stuff do you?

Her, puts phone down.

Today’s run: 1.8k downhill in the stinging rain to the doctors’ surgery and 1.8k back in similar rain but up the godforsaken hill, so two runs really or a split run with added hanging around in the middle, stinking the GPs’ waiting room up. GP used to be a runner and is now a swimmer, so he didn’t mind, or was polite enough to say he didn’t.

Why run to the doctors’ surgery? Because OH’s van failed its MOT. He has my car, so I have no vehicle today and lots of words had to be banged together so that was my only chance to run. Disgruntled is not the word for my mood right now.

So I am going to the cinema to see a film – on the bus. Today has been a lousy running day – tomorrow I have to do the same run again but in the morning, for a phlebotomist’s appointment, and I think that is my bad karma (for being a cow on the phone) catching up with me. Therefore tomorrow’s blog will contain fulsome amounts of writing about chocolate, okay?

PS - look closer, some of those flowers are made of chocolate ...

2011-01-04T14:40:00.000Z

Older, Colder, Slower, Tireder (or not as the case may be) Janathon Day 4

Today’s run is brought to you by:

• Solo Gamalat (Gamal Goma)
• Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (Daft Punk)
• Weapon of Choice (Fatboy Slim)

I didn’t expect today’s run to be any fun at all, for the reasons in the title plus:

1. The piriformis syndrome (which, sallyshurdles, is a hollow, aching pain from the buttock down the outside of the thigh, sometimes to the knee [my version] sometimes to the ankle. Caused by overuse, or by sitting for too long – as I do both it’s not surprising that I developed piriformis syndrome last year)
2. It being Day 4 and me not having slept well
3. The run being my ‘default’ run: out of the door, past St Peter’s church, round by the greyhound track and the big Co-op, back up Nevill Avenue and home past the Texaco garage – not a thrilling prospect is it?

Even so, even so. Back to the postponed point about sexual deviancy – notably, masochism. There’s a line in my about-to-be-published book about allotments that says that digging becomes a worryingly addictive masochism. My editor asked me what I meant. One of the publicity team asked what I meant. My copy-editor asked what I meant … so I thought I’d explain here.

Let’s start by saying I am not a masochist. Those who know me, and have read this far, were already giggling like hyenas at the idea that I might have any acquaintance with the world of the submissive sufferer of pain and carefully inflicted humiliation. Even so, even so.

Runners are masochists. Correction – distance runners are masochists and sprinters are sadists. Those who choose to get up before it’s light, pull on unpleasantly cold clothing, grudgingly stretch tired and aching muscles (or not: the devout masochist will in fact ‘run off the pain’ by just pushing their body into action without giving it any form of preparation), and then force said tired and aching form into long, cold, dark, lonely, painful and sometimes miserable activity are surely the very definition of masochism. They make the pain, they take the pain, and they suck up the pain and come back for more.

On the other hand, sprinters are sadists. They put up with pain, for the sake of making those who lose races to them suck up humiliation and even more pain. Sprinters thrive on causing pain to others, and having to endure some pain themselves is acceptable only because they are (or at least they believe they are) causing excessive pain to other sprinters.

Digging, by the way, is much like distance running. It’s addictive because you dig a row and your back aches, your knuckles have begun to burn with pain, the arch of your foot, where it hits the fork or spade, is a small hollow ache that is going to become an intense agony by bedtime, and you’ve found seven broken beer bottles, a huge lump of concrete that may have given you a hernia, and something that looks suspiciously like the body part of a deceased human being. And yet the row you’ve dug looks satisfyingly tidy, so you decide to dig another. Just one more, before you pack it in for the day. And then you find the groove of digging and when you next look up (back screaming in pain, knuckles feeling like they’ve been brazed by an oxy-acetylene torch, and the arch of your foot throbbing as if you’ve trodden on a tetanus-ridden rusty nail) you’ve only got two rows to go. So you dig them too, don’t you?

That’s masochism. That’s what distance runners would just love to do, if it didn’t interfere with their training programme. And because I am an allotment-holder as well as a runner, I am a crap runner because I divide my pain between my addictions.

Even so, even so. 2.65 k today, no fit young men to smile at me (just the lovely old chap who used to run with his Cairn Terrier, but doesn’t seem to have the dog any more) instead a pavementy, unpretty, decidedly grey plod spent dodging smirking kids from the school, mums with buggies and miserable codgers with their shopping from the Co-op waiting for the bus) but still a good run. Actually, a great run.

Sometimes you suck it up and it turns out not to be pain after all, it turns out to be sheer pleasure.

Masochist fruit image courtesy of Malinki at Flickr

2011-01-03T14:47:00.000Z

Janathon Day 3 – when the going gets tough …

Who am I kidding? It hasn’t even begun to be tough yet. Not physically anyway. Mentally – maybe.

I had a blog post all planned out in my head about running, sexual deviancy and chocolate (and I might still get round to writing that one, as it’s a good bundle of topics to spend pondering on a long run and most runners are interested in running and in chocolate, sexual deviancy perhaps not so much) but I woke up this morning feeling grumpy and with pain in my piriformis and the whole day spiralled downwards from there.

By lunchtime I was downright miserable and I knew I had to run, so it was over to the cheap psychological tricks department for a tried and tested cure for the Bank Holiday blues: upbeat music selections, a new hat and a poseur’s running route. Which explains why I was in Hove Park, listening to The Four Seasons (1963, Oh What a Night) and Shaggy and Rayvon (Summertime), wearing my old (as in purchased several years ago) but nearly new (as in virtually unworm) Pearl Izumi blue beanie because it’s the posiest thing I own, running-wise. I was also wearing a bright yellow jacket in case you were there too.

This time I didn’t bother with the Garmin as I know the distance (1.88 km) so I have no idea of the time in which I ran it, but it was fast. The pictures are from August 2009, as I forgot to take the camera. Today I looked just like that, but wearing more clothes and a much better hat.

• 1.88 k
• Time unknown (but swift)
• Route = Hove Park circular
• Poseurs passed = 0 (a pretty rare experience in Hove Park, I must have timed it right)
• Friendly women runners on the route = 3 (two on the slow side: possibly sticking to New Year’s Resolutions to run/lose weight, one very fast and with excellent gait)
• Westie puppies stroked = 1
• Moods changed = 1 (from bad to good)
• Fit young male runners who smiled at me = 1 (he smiled twice, each time we passed, so it wasn’t an accident)
• Piriformis stretches performed = 5.

2011-01-02T12:13:00.000Z

Janathon Day 2 – with added hill

• 2.12 k
• time unknown (because I can’t be arsed)
• route – Waterhall

This is what the hill in Waterhall looks like. That’s Rebus the Cairn Terrier pretending he’s not ten years old, by the way. He’ll sleep for the rest of the day now, and probably for most of tomorrow too.

When I was running cross-country as a teenager, they used to say a foot in the country was a yard on the road: that sounds rather obscene, now I reflect on it.

I ran cross-country because I hated organised sport but had to do something. The training route went past Sandown train station (bacon butties) and the Railway pub (vodka and Tia Maria) and I could stand in the underpass and smoke and still get back with the final group. This may not have been the kind of incentive our PE teachers thought they were offering but they were gits and bitches so their preferences weighed little with me then and less now.

So a foot on Waterhall, this morning, was muddy and churned by the rugby and football teams who train on the lower pitches, and grass made with slippery with rain on the upper area which rises from the playing fields to the golf course. The sky was glorious and apart from a woman walking two black Labradors, we (me, OH and Rebus) had the upper stretch to ourselves. It was only 2.12 k, and a slow 2k at that, but now I’m off to the allotment to put in several hours of heavy labour, so I reckon each of those feet is easily going to be several yards of physical effort by the time today is over.

PS – I no longer drink or smoke.

PPS – I still tend to get back with the final group on any run, and it still doesn’t bother me.

2011-01-01T14:01:00.002Z

Janathon Day 1 – runner interrupted

Let’s get the details out of the way:

• 5.25 k
• time unknown (to be explained below)
• route – Hove seafront from King Alfred past West Pier and back.

So … the first problem. I decided to borrow OH’s Garmin (not having one of my own) but as a result of a culinary incident involving hot fat (and the best pork crackling ever) on Xmas Day, I couldn’t wear it on my left wrist, meaning that I looked like Tommy Sheridan, disgraced Scottish socialist leader, who (in)famously wears his watch on the wrong wrist too.

Second problem. OH offered to run with me. Not a problem really, although he’s suddenly decided to train for the Brighton marathon, for which he’s long had a place but had sort of decided he couldn’t fit into his schedule. Now he can, apparently. And he’s a faster, stronger runner, so I spend a lot of the time we’re running together talking to his receding back, or pushing myself past my comfort zone.

Third problem. We stopped to get a drink at the volleyball café (okay, it’s not called the volleyball café, but it’s the one with the trophies opposite the volleyball court and I can’t remember the proper name) so I turned the timer off and forgot to turn it on again so I have no idea how long the run actually took.

Fourth problem. My imagination. I saw the shoe and thought Cinderella – given the time of year I would say that’s a natural and almost logical thought.

Then I saw this shoe, about a yard away, and I thought abduction. Which may not be natural or logical but it’s definitely how my mind works.

Slight aside, not my mind, Ren’s. Ren Holton is the name under which I write horror and science fiction.

Another slight aside. OH spent two decades patronising me because I can’t watch horror films. Like a lot of people, he assumed that my fear was based on the film itself, but it never was, it was based on what the film released into my head. Then, in 2006, somebody told me that women couldn’t write horror, or dystopias, or snuff. Well I’d never wanted to write snuff, but I don’t like being told I can’t do things, so I wrote a story called The Amphitheatre, published in Lullaby Hearse, and building on the concept of bio-retribution featured in Stephen K Donaldson’s Gap Sequence. OH read it. He had nightmares for weeks. WEEKS! Since then he has never taken the piss out of me – he understands that I have good reasons for refusing to let things into my psyche that mutate hideously to become night terrors.

Anyway, the shoes got me thinking. If I was going to abduct a young woman on New Year’s Eve, here’s how I would do it:

• Find out what she was planning to wear (favourite routes for this information: either following facebook conversations with her friends or – if I shared a house with her – going through her credit card slips)
• Buy a joke villain costume plus a T-shirt and beret that matched her dress. Also purchase a joke straitjacket, and a real ball gag. Rohypnol would be useful as a back up option.
• Wear costume, the camper the better, with false moustache etc, and coordinating items and be seen around town quite a lot in the hours before the abduction, ostentatiously trying to fit unlikely items into a swag bag (that already contained the gag and straitjacket). Make several swings into the young woman’s orbit, without actually making contact.
• After midnight, when people are much more likely to be on a downswing emotionally, approach girl in a location likely to be CCTV free (the seafront is quite good for this purpose) and try to doctor her drink. If that seemed unlikely to work I’d ask her directly to play out an abduction charade with me, explaining that I wanted to play a trick on a mate (best if you have mutual friends) and wanted her to be my ‘victim’. Given that alcohol lowers inhibitions, that I'd been acting like a prat all night, and that she would have got used to seeing me in my costume so her stranger-danger response would be well and truly switched off, I think I'd have a reasonable chance of persuading her. With any luck, she might actually let me put the gag on her, after which she'd have pretty well handed herself over for degradation and death. Put swag bag over her head, walk or carry girlie to location of white van. End of girl – beginning of nightmare.

The coordination between my outfit and hers would tend to imply, to any observer, that we had some kind of relationship, a collusion, so - given that it's Brighton and New Year and street theatre is perpetrated all year round here - I think I'd stand a good chance of actually carrying a kicking young woman past any potential onlookers without comment.

One of my first acts, even before shoving her drunken form into the straitjacket (and securing her wrists with a nice pair of real cuffs) would be to take off her heavy and potentially dangerous shoes because a kick from those babies would be totally demoralising, not to mention potentially disabling. Yeah, I’d leave them on the seafront because it could imply a Jaws scenario (drunk totty goes swimming) or that the young woman just took her shoes off and left them because they pinched her feet. In either case, as long as my DNA wasn’t on the footwear, it wouldn’t affect the police case as far as I can see.

And because all this was spinning through my mind, I forgot to restart the timer on the Garmin and that’s why I’m a writer and not a runner.

Later addendum: this may be what actually happened ....

2010-12-29T16:38:00.000Z

Challenges for writers

I have signed up for Janathon. It’s a challenge that runs through the month of January (hence Jan) and is based on running (as in (mar)athon) therefore Janathon. Those who undertake the challenge will try to run, or take some other form of exercise, every day for a month, and blog about it.

Even before I signed up I knew that I would log the least mileage of all the runners – even the ones who get injured on 1 January will probably have covered more distance in their first run than I will in a month. But that’s not the point, as least for me.

I’m doing it to force myself to blog daily for a month, to exercise daily, for a month and to prioritise those two aspects of my life for a month that, frankly, I loathe. January is a great time to try new things, but I shy away from making resolutions, never having kept one, so far. I do like going for challenges though, and as long as I’m allowed to bend the rules almost to breaking point, I generally enjoy taking part in group-based ones.

So in the month ahead you can expect lots of musings on the relationship between exercise and writing, some thoughts on how I use running to solve plot problems, sidelong meanders into the world of the Runner’s High and its relationship to the production of good erotica, and brief updates on my actual running process – I might even manage to find my old Garmin and start logging how many miles I run!

2010-12-15T20:51:00.001Z

Where to begin?

There was a time when I had things to blog about all the time – now, just when I know that I should be building my ‘platform’ (which my mind insists on translating to ‘scaffold’) I have almost nothing of interest to say.

The thing is, I no longer ruminate on the practice of writing because I’m worryingly busy doing it, which makes for a boring to non-existent blog.

This week I have:

• Found 67 words suitable for use as positive synonyms when describing cruise ships. I found about 40 others that weren’t so positive and therefore had to be ignored.
• Received my copy-edits. Looked at my copy-edits. Panicked very slightly.
• Been shortlisted for something
• Been not even long-listed for something else (I got those two completely the wrong way round: which pleases me greatly as the one I expected to place in was a kudos only contest while the one I didn’t expect to place in has some cash for the top three as well as kudos for all.)
• Had an odd inspiration that took me from writing about things marine, as in my last blog about the Shaun Levin workshop, to crocheting a sea anemone muff which has been extremely pleasant to use in the recent cold weather
• Filled about 50 seed packets with seeds to give away to promote ‘the book’.
• Remembered that I am allergic to lupins only after packing up a dozen packets of lupin seed and therefore managing to give myself the equivalent of a collagen implant lip at zero cost.

It’s not exactly high–performance is it? Maybe after Christmas I shall get some coruscating literary insights to share … in the meantime I hope you’re all keeping your hands warm.

2010-12-04T14:55:00.002Z

Googlism

Somebody has been in touch with me (hi Matt!) because he found me through Googling – not so surprising, perhaps but what he Googled was having his window hit by a snipe and that led him to me. His snipe (in Birmingham) also flew off fairly soon after the shocking impact with plate glass. He, like me, was shocked by the experience. It just goes to show that there is nothing quite a strange as reality. Also, and not particularly surprisingly, it shows that if you share details of your life online, you may find the Venn diagrams of your existence intersect with the lives of others in some very unlikely ways.

Back to book promotion, or not, as the case may be. "Minding my Peas and Cucumbers” seems to be a popular title – in the sense that people tell me they like it, as a name for a book and in the sense that people are placing pre-orders on Amazon. Terrifyingly, the first pre-order was placed before I had actually delivered the final copy. Even more terrifyingly, the copy has been accepted and the book is unstoppable save (presumably) by Act of God. I have now stepped back from the writing frenzy and reflected on the truth: while I have changed names and locations, and in some cases nationalities and genders, I have been writing about real people who may try to indentify themselves in the narrative.

Excellent agent breezily pointed out that this could be A Good Thing as it could encourage sales and A Better Thing if it leads to the material for book 2. I envisage myself waking up with a horse’s head in my bed. Actually it wouldn’t be a horse’s head, as I don’t have a horse, it would be the decapitated tops of my prize globe artichokes, set to flower edibly for the first time this summer. She points out that a book about me having to start again on a new allotment site having been hounded out of my old one could be quite funny. My laughter is hollow.

In an attempt to remind myself that I also write fiction, I took an excellent workshop last weekend with Shaun Levin, organised by New Writing South. It dealt with all things marine, from sea creatures to sociological observation of tourists and was a fascinating and dense exploration of what the sea can mean in literature. It certainly unlocked some insights into Max, the unreliable hero of the 1920s novel I am supposedly revising.

I am also rewriting my eco-thriller, although slowly. And you know what? I’m really bad at re-anything. Except re-reading, which I have also been doing this week, as Sarah Salway’s book, Something Beginning With has been reissued and rightly so – it’s one of those rare books that defies easy categorisation but lends itself to seductively easy reading. I’d forgotten just how pleasing a journey it is to read a really well written piece of fiction and I recommend it to you if you’re looking for a Christmas gift book.

2010-11-17T14:04:00.002Z

Literary hubris, squared

It is hubristic to start thinking about your next book when you haven’t heard back from your editor about the first one.

It is hubristic to make a pudding to take to your friend’s house when you have a secret agenda of road-testing said pudding for the book that you shouldn’t even be thinking about. Blackberry and redcurrant crumble cake, in case you were wondering, and yes, I do know that I'll never make it to Masterchef with my crappy level of culinary presentation. My food tastes good, but it doesn't always look as good as it could - so bite me!

Above all, it is hubristic to think anybody cares about your hubris, let alone cares enough to make it worth blogging about.

But under all that there’s a serious element of being a creative person. We are, by and large, funnelling and channelling the blood of our hearts and the light of our spirits into our endeavours. Those endeavours may be creating a cow for the Magic Roundabout, writing a sestina about drug addiction, carving old elm trees into dormouse-shaped door wedges or crafting a short story about miscarriage – it doesn’t matter what we do, it is the fact that we are willing to continue to do our best at it, regardless of what others may think, that makes us creatives. Process and not outcome and all that guff.

So in moving from allotment book #1 to thinking about allotment book #2, I am freeing my free-floating creativity from the activity of being neurotic about the outcome of #1 and encouraging it to harness itself to the more productive pursuit of #2, even if #2 never happens. I am also doing the thing that many would-be creatives never do, which is giving the free-floating part of creativity a place to alight: by focusing on the recipe and its reception, I am pointing the way to ‘here’ when ’here’ is the eventual banging of one word into another until the words produce a coherent, if inadequate, account of what it means to grow and cook your own food on an allotment. This is the only way I have found to keep myself anchored and working. Think, plan, write - every day.

I cooked the pudding twice, once on Monday for OH (he approved) and again on Tuesday evening to take to dinner tonight. I hope it will be good to eat. My editor has been in touch today to say the book is okay (actually she said it was gorgeous) and my hubris is laid out for all to see, because this is what it is like to be a writer. Actually there’s even more hubris, because I was going to write a post about Hilary Mantel’s astonishing essay on illness and writing in the LRB but actually, when it came down to it, while Hilary has said it better than I ever could, I thought my own neurosis was interesting enough to write about too, so hubris cubed, perhaps?

2010-11-04T12:49:00.003Z

Book marketing – grow your own readership

Well that’s what I’m hoping. I knew that I would have to do some of that scary stuff called marketing, and I knew I would find it difficult.

The really difficult bit is calling in favours and asking for endorsements – it’s absolutely cringe-making to go out there and request that people you admire or love (or both in some cases) come up with a promotional phrase or two that can be used on a book jacket. Once I’d done that bit, and the first generous and lovely sentences had come back to me (and my hopefully happy publishers!) it was time to think creatively.

I have some files lurking on my computer with names like ’15 ways to market your novel using bookmarks’ or ‘100 ways to sell your book’ – they are, to be honest, horrifying. I cannot imagine what dire change in my circumstances could ever cause me to litter my GP’s waiting room with bookmarks exhorting people to buy my book. The idea that I might wander round bookshops, accosting people who are looking at similar books to mine and then force a business card on them offering a 10% discount on my own effort is just mental. As for hiring a stall at a local craft market to flog my words … I’d rather sell a kidney, should such a thing be possible.

Undoubtedly there are people in the world for whom these techniques work. I am not one of them.

Postcards and flyers and bookmarks struck me as a little pedestrian. I wanted to do something to thank people who’d already bought Minding My Peas And Cucumbers, and encourage those who might buy, so I’ve invested in some seed packets, a rubber stamp and a vast number of bowls and saucers containing seed saved from my allotment.

Grown your own, anyone?

2010-10-21T20:46:00.002Z

Interdisciplinarity (or doing what you want and getting away with it)
You are probably getting the idea by now that I didn’t expect to launch myself on the world in book-length prose, by writing about allotments. The fact that I am is a source of constant confusion and amusement to me. I had thought this confused pleasure was a strictly personal deal, until I heard Audrey Niffenegger speak earlier this week.

Niffenegger was charming and erudite with an extremely dry wit that caused the occasional delayed reaction giggling fit in the audience, and she spoke with authority about the role of interdisciplinary art and the value that being in an interdisciplinary department had brought to her writing, as well as her artistic development. She also has utterly beautiful handwriting, like art deco wrought iron.

Inspired by Audrey, I spent most of Tuesday night working out how to resurrect my long-deferred dream to write a graphic novel. I was writing one, and even had a publisher interested, and then something happened to the artist I was working with …

So I wondered if I could create an entire graphic novel myself? Insane idea. But worth trying. So I think I shall give it a go, but don’t watch this space, as it will quite likely come to nothing at all except lots of furious sketching on my part.

As I said, I never expected to be writing a book about allotments, so who knows where this could lead!

2010-10-12T16:18:00.003Z

Growing up

When I was a teenager I used to walk to school past a bakery that sold hot toast, dripping with golden butter, and it was butter too, none of your silly supposed substitutes.

I grew up in a tourist resort and at least a third of my schoolfellows were the children of restaurateurs, hoteliers and guest-house owners so we couldn’t be fobbed off with imitation saturated fat: it had to be the real thing, from its lacy white borders to the salty tang of the puddle in the middle of the slice (and we never let anybody cut our toast in half, because the butter runs off the cut edge).

I too was the child of hoteliers, and left behind me a kitchen full of breakfast chefs, short-order cooks and even waiters and waitresses who would have made me some toast, if I’d asked. Perhaps they wouldn’t have done it willingly, but you don’t turn down requests from the boss’s daughter, that’s for sure. I could have had French toast, or toast and honey, or even toast with a little pot of jam like the guests got with their continental breakfast. But that wasn’t what I wanted.

I wanted to BUY my toast. I wanted the ownership to be mine, the choice of French bread, white bread or brown to be mine and the responsibility of eating it walking along the road (and dripping butter on my school tie) to be mine. I wanted to ball up the paper bag it came in and throw it in a bin. I wanted to be a grown up.

And so it is with books. I was happy to have anthology publications, don’t get me wrong, I loved, and still love, anthologies – I’ve met some great people through appearing in print alongside them, and been to some incredible readings with fellow anthologists. But a book all to yourself is a far more grown-up thing. You get to make choices: will you contact this luminary person to try and get a quote from them, or will you leave it to your publisher? Who will write the blurb for the back cover? How much do you want to reveal of yourself in the author’s note? Which photograph shall you supply for jacket purposes and how will you feel when you see yourself postage-stamp-sized, beaming like a horsy lunatic, clutching an appropriate prop and looking as if you are about to commit a peculiarly gruesome murder in Midsomer (or is that just my response to my jacket photograph?) Is your current clever marketing idea clever or just daft and should you run it by somebody at the publishers or just go ahead anyway? (Jury still out on both aspects of this one)

So I am growing up – sometimes happily, like eating toast in the street, and sometimes kicking and screaming like a two-year-old having a supermarket tantrum, but either way, it’s definitely a fascinating experience.

PS - guess which one is me?

PPS - yes I do know I seem to be channeling Nigel Slater - there are worse things to channel, believe me!

2010-09-23T16:06:00.003Z

Meeting publishers: my experience

So … in the many years I’ve imagined the first meeting with ‘my’ publishers, it never included cranberry biscuits, hilarity, discussion of dalliances in Berlin garden colonies, joining the Nigel Slater mutual appreciation society and a complete failure on my part to take any notes or be even a bit literary.

I’d always had a much more frightening scenario in mind: Armani suits, views over the Thames, thimbles of Italian coffee, abstruse gossip about literary luminaries. What actually transpired: mugs of tea, discussion of the relative merits of Wellingtons and hiking boots for digging allotments and lots of laughter added up to much more pleasant and relaxing experience. I felt at home. I liked the team. I very much liked the team! Finding points of engagement with the people who will be editing, publicising and selling the book was much easier than I’d ever expected, perhaps because this book deals with a subject that I’m passionate about, and they were fascinated by.

There were a couple of moments when I had the surreal experience of stepping outside myself and realising that yes, this was it: this was me talking to my publishers and it wasn’t daunting or tense, but those moments soon passed.

Publishers are people too – and mine are extremely nice. Who knew?

PS - the picture shows crochet lavender hearts, on sale this weekend at the Weald Allotments Open Day and Open Sheds, Hove (actually). Proceeds go to the RSPCA and I will be there if you've ever wondered what I do when I'm not writing (or making crochet hearts, obviously).

2010-09-17T16:09:00.003Z

Dinner party writers

Following on from an excellent suggestion at Nik Perring’s blog and because food is still much on my mind (which would you prefer, dear reader, a recipe for purple-sprouting broccoli hash or a recipe for slow-cooked potatoes and mushrooms? These are the questions that currently torment me) I thought rather than recommend some books, I’ll recommend some writers.

If I could throw a dinner party (with somebody else doing the catering, obviously) for the writers I’d most like to meet, living or dead, I would invite:

Beverley Nichols – dear Bev was the first garden writer I ever read, and possibly the best. His life was a fascinating and complex one, including a declaration of homosexuality in the Albert Hall (on stage!) at a time when he could have been imprisoned for his sexual preferences, ghosting Nellie Melba’s autobiography and then falling out with her in ‘handbags at dawn’ fashion and a battle with alcohol that crossed generations and led him to write an appalling (and largely untrue) biography of his father. I’ve written a radio play about this demanding, frustrating and charismatic man and wish I’d met him. Beverly loved a dinner party as long as there was plenty of champagne so I think he’d make the evening fun. Merry Hall is one of his best books about gardens and gardening.

Barbara Kingsolver – one of my favourite writers about food, life and the environment (not necessarily in that order but you can see how food is dominating my thoughts), Kingsolver has become iconic for her warm but incisive characterisation of the best and worst of American life. I think she’d make a great guest and might even help with the washing up. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a fantastic story and an example of how female writing can be domestic and yet transcend the mundane to deal with the big issues of how we live, and why.

Stephen R Donaldson – not sure this pick would be a perfect guest, but I love the Gap Series so much that I’d put up with him chain-smoking at the table and being rude about everybody. Anyway, Beverly would probably be a match for him and Barbara used to play in a band with Stephen King, so they wouldn’t be at all fazed. If you know Stephen Donaldson in the UK it may well be because of Thomas Covenant, but the bravura approach of writing a space opera (literally) based on the Ring Cycle and featuring the most terrifying aliens ever means that he gets a place at the table even if he does piss everybody else off.

Emily Bronte – would probably be quite taken aback by Mr Donaldson, or would she? She coped with Branwell after all, and the imagination that produced a Heathcliff might be more elastic and malleable than I imagine. I’m not sure what I’d expect of Emily but just sitting across the table from her and being able to stare into that pale, reserved face would be enough.

Peter Hoeg – because he’s been a consistently demanding and rewarding writer since I first read Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow and because Tales of the Night, which was his first published book, but late into English translation, does remarkable and complicated things with narrative. His writing about parties and dinners suggests he's got a very good handle on the nuances of social life and I'd love to see him and Kingsolver debating food miles.

A.L. Kennedy – bit of a cheat, this one, because I’ve actually sat across the dining table from Alison six times, at an Arvon course but I think I could easily repeat the experience weekly for the rest of my life. Day is the novel that I would recommend as a starter, only because it’s the one that I think best demonstrates the combination of cool observation and compassion that makes A.L. Kennedy one of our best living novelists. Her short stories are brilliant too. And I know that Alison is a fantastic dinner companion, so that's a no-brainer.

The writer I wouldn’t invite is Hilary Mantel, because if I was having dinner with Hilary I wouldn’t share her with anyone!

2010-09-03T20:21:00.003Z

What I am not doing is procrastinating

Okay, I am. A bit. Although it’s less procrastination than fear that I may have entered a form of mad neurotic writing overdrive that will lead to a Back To The Future improbability that could cause the end of the world. I am writing about 2,000 words a day. Oh yes!

Whether or not they are good words is another matter. First reader, who possibly reads this blog, is probably being too kind. No matter, editor person, who also may read this blog, but it’s not very likely, is it, given how busy editors are etc, is not going to be too kind and is going to require the best possible book. So that’s all right then.

And road-testing recipes. The inimitable Kate was press-ganged into eating the apple and blackberry sponge. She’s still alive and still talking to me, so I assume it was okay. I’d rather hoped it would be superlative but you can’t have everything. Friend of short-standing (as opposed to short stature, she is of average height) has been sampling grape-thinning and redcurrant jelly. She said it was ‘yummy’ which I think is an imprimatur of excellence. First reader, who is coming in for a lot of odd requests, also road-tested the plum curd, and described it as delicious, so that’s all good.

I sound like a little hive of productive activity don’t I? But part of that a cappella murmuring is my neuroses having a field day, which is induced, in part, by imminent birthday and evidenced by the frantic exploration of the outer limits of cupcake invention. There are not going to be any cupcakes in the book, and that makes it difficult to explain why there have been six different kinds of cupcake in my kitchen this week.

Finally, after all that effort, Friday’s inspiration turned out to be the best, so I shall be celebrating my natal day with walnut and vanilla cupcakes with brown sugar fudge icing.

At which point you will realise that this post has almost nothing to do with writing because I am heartily sick of said subject, but still, let me try to creep up on the it in a roundabout fashion.

Saturday was Book Club day. We discussed Brick Lane. I admitted that I had failed to read the book three times previously and only got through it this time because it was Book Club. Another reader admitted she’d not got far into it the first time she read it either. We both agreed that we were glad we’d persevered this time, as once the first three chapters are over, the book really picks up both depth and pace. The humour, touted on the back of the jacket doesn’t really evidence for a bit longer but when it does, it’s delicious.

I still think this novel has a mediocre opening chapter, but from 25% of the way into the narrative, it’s the kind of book you’d carry on reading in an earthquake. I found some of the characterisations mordantly vicious and some of the characters utterly lovable and might even go and read some more Monica Ali. When I’ve finished baking, that is …

2010-08-23T15:07:00.003Z

Malcolm’s mother’s Pyrex dish

This isn’t what I was going to write about today. I was planning to pontificate about the structuring of non-fiction and how issues that you had no idea even existed can leap up and bite you hard enough to draw blood, like the contents list.

Today I was/am supposed to be creating a contents list. I have done something, although it doesn’t look like the model contents list I was sent, and that depresses me.

So I went to make a blackberry and apple sponge instead, for three reasons:

1. It’s comfort food
2. I have the ingredients to hand (picked kilos of blackberries at the plot yesterday)
3. I want to use the recipe in the book.

And in making the sponge, which is a small whale of a sponge (like a cetacean of average size if sponge puddings were sea creatures) I found my hands cradling this dish. It’s old, kitsch and not at all elegant. It’s big, which is one reason I still have it, but there’s another reason. It’s Malcolm’s mother’s Pyrex.

Once we were homeless. Sounds like the beginning of a story, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t a story, it was bitter and real and sordid. Our baby son was a day old when a supposed friend told us that if we brought the baby back into her home, she ‘wouldn’t be responsible for her actions’. We’d been staying with her while we tried to find a place to live, on returning from Europe, but London in 1992 was not a good place to try finding a flat when one of you is nine months pregnant and both of you are unemployed.

So I was kept in hospital until a place was found for us in a hostel. The hostel housed people who locked each other out of rooms, with the locker-in screaming abuse through the keyhole while the locked-out attempted breaking in with fire axes or car jacks. Our baby son had to have an emergency stomach operation and the ambulance men refused to come up the drive because the place had such a bad reputation.

Malcolm was the friend of a friend and he let us live in his natal home. His parents had both died, and their terraced ex-council house in Dagenham became our nest. We tore down the wallpaper and ripped up the carpets and made it our home for a year.

That was probably insensitive of us. I don’t know how Malcolm felt about us destroying the (literal) fabric of his life – I do know he never said a word. We dug the garden over and I planted everything I could afford. Our baby son grew fat and happy and we acquired a kitten who’d been dumped.

I got a job. A good job. We moved to a house of our own, half the size of Malcolm’s, but in Tooting, which was as much as we could afford then. We were on our way to being normal people again.

But I took Malcolm’s mother’s Pyrex with me. To remind me that once I was homeless…

Once a virtual stranger gave us the chance to put ourselves back together and I hope our lives have in some way repaid his generosity. We lost touch with Malcolm – I think that was probably a necessary part of the process: how could I bear to be in contact with somebody who’d seen us in that extremity of vulnerability and need? Now I’d love to hear from Malcolm again, because the wounds have healed and anyway, I was never ashamed of homelessness, just of my own inability to be properly gracious in thanks.

And I still think of that house whenever I make a blackberry and apple sponge.

2010-08-13T17:06:00.003Z

They do things differently here …

‘Expect the unexpected’ is a truism. Like most truisms, it seems banal until it has meaning for you, the individual, or me, the other individual.

My life looks very weird from where I am now. To start with, I am a contracted writer. Oh yes! Of course, I need to say immediately that being a contracted writer is a nice long stride towards being a published one, but it’s wise not to cheer until you land on the other side of that particular hurdle. Publishers do reject books they’ve contracted for, or require massive, time-consuming rewrites of same. They do (rarely) ask for writers to return advances, and I am hearing that this rare occurrence is becoming slightly more common, a bit like some exotic equatorial bird being found wintering on our shores, it’s the heat that makes it happen, but in this case it’s the heat caused by the pace of economic descent that’s causing the friction around the advance.

So … caveats and all that. I am still contracted. But not for what I thought I would be. I had assumed I knew the trajectory pretty well:

1. Spend years writing a novel
2. Get an agent
3. Rewrite novel to please agent
4. Get rejections via agent while writing second novel
5. Get acceptance of novel
6. Get advance
7. Rewrite to please publisher
8. Get published
9. Get excited
10. Work like stink to promote novel while rewriting second novel to please agent

Repeat from 3 to end of life.

But no. I am contracted to write a work of non-fiction, which means that my NaNoWriMo training is coming in very useful, because instead of having a finished work to faff with, I have a lot of new words to write between now and my deadline. Some of those words are recipes which I need to road-test for publication because I have never bothered to write down all the steps that are in my head that turn X raw ingredients into Y dish. So it’s a twin track approach of bake and write, write and bake, while worrying about imminence of deadline and being discovered to be a total fraud.

Best friend advises me that I am not a total fraud and that having spent twenty years doing the thing I am writing about, and thirty years cooking from scratch, is qualification enough. I am not entirely convinced about this.

They do things differently here … and I am frightened and exhilarated to be doing them too.

2010-08-05T15:13:00.003Z

Book Review: The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery, published by Gallic Press

Oh the joys of Proust! I had to go and re-read this book after talking to a friend about it. Said friend contended that it wasn’t a novel and while I concurred (it had never occurred to me that it was a novel in the first place) I didn’t think it mattered.

Actually, it matters. But it’s the ‘where’ of it mattering that is intriguing. Barbery is a French writer, her characters are often obnoxious, none more so than Pierre Arthens, the eponymous protagonist, and that’s okay by me.

Is it okay by the British novel-reading public? I’m not so sure. There’s a tendency here to want to like characters, and Barbery doesn’t write about likable people. There’s also, in the English-speaking world, a trend towards giving pre-eminence to shelf categorisation of books, so knowing who you would ‘shelve’ next to has become a requisite of pitching your work to a publisher. Barbery shelves next to nobody I’m familiar with in this generation, except perhaps Bauby, not because they are both French (although that might be a necessary condition of their enshelvement) but because they both explore ideas, rather than people.

In The Gourmet we are invited to consider what talent, hard work and ego do to a young man who becomes France’s greatest food critic. And what that young man, as he grows in ego, power and disdain, does to those around him – ranging from his cat to his wife and through all his human and possessive relationships. This is a philosophical journey and if you know your Proust, the end is visible from the beginning, although its exact topography may still surprise, and that is fine because what Barbery is doing here is dissection – and she does it ably.

So it’s not a novel, it’s not a memoir, it’s a creative (non)fiction treatise on the role of talent and power in shaping life and an immoral fable on where that life ends. The humour is black, the description of food lyrical and the intention laudable – but I think this ‘novel’ unlike The Elegance of the Hedgehog – will sit less comfortably with the shelvers. And bravo to Barbery for that!

2010-07-26T13:16:00.003Z

A quickie

My copy of Fractured West arrived today – it is gorgeous, truly so! This fact pleases me immensely as I have an ultra-short story in it, called Billie on Sunday. Kudos to the team that put this first edition together, long may their work continue.

Mini reviews

Broken by Karen Fossum, published by Vintage – what an excellent novel this was. I’ve had issues in the past with translation of Scandinavian works, but no complaints about this one – a powerful but subtle story, balancing the disintegration of the life of an ordinary man with the surreal relationship between that man as a fictional character and the writer of the novel ‘Broken’. Sounds a bit fey, doesn’t it? Trust me, it’s not, it’s a sinewy novel, strong in the details of power relationships and uncompromising about the nature of exploitation. Recommended to anybody who likes well-written conflict, psychological insight and spare but intelligent prose.

A Snowball in Hell by Christopher Brookmyre published by Little, Brown – a little Brookmyre goes a long way, if you ask me, but the long way that it goes is extremely good. Reading one of his novels is like drinking shots with a lounge lizard; you know bad things are likely to happen to you but you are enjoying yourself too much to stop. A Snowball in Hell is like Tequila Slammers – raw and incandescent at the same time. Some of the soliloquies are utterly sublime: funny, self-justifying, brutal and stylish. Recommended for those who have strong stomachs (the details of the murders are gruesome) and an interest in genre fiction, especially of the ‘caper’ variety.

2010-07-18T17:44:00.004Z

Novel Review: The Noise of Strangers

Robert Dickinson and I have workshopped together quite a lot, and I was delighted to discover that he has had a novel published by Myriad - with typical modesty, he hadn't told me!

What can I say about The Noise of Strangers? Well, that's more difficult a question than you might imagine: it's a novel very difficult to describe, but for good reasons, rather than bad ones. It's dystopian fiction, but not apocalyptic. It's set in the future, but not science fiction. It's political, but not exactly a thriller, and it's set in Brighton.

Yes Brighton. My own lovely, gaudy, city-by-the-sea has become, in Robert's writing, a dim and severe place, full of paranoia, council departments become monolith power blocs and individuals trapped in sinister jobs, with hapless friends and a creeping sense that both jobs and friends are worse, in almost all ways, than they seem ...

I recommend it to those who like complex fiction, who enjoy the demands of reading material that makes them think, and those who have a dry sense of humour - at the heart of this bleak, dark and all-too-believable novel of a near future we should fear to live in, is a joke so mordant and black, and so beautifully constructed and clever, that it will make you laugh out loud.

I asked Robert to unpick some of the complexities of his novel with me:

KLS. There's a tension in the novel between the 'domestic' and the dystopian. It's like watching somebody putting the kettle on the stove in a house that's had its roof blown off by a bomb. I know somebody else asked about JG Ballard as an inspiration, but I'm wondering how you view Orwell - there's a transparency about the prose (if not the plot) that seems very Orwellian to me.

RD. I first read 1984 when I was twelve, and working through the science fiction carousel at my local library. I remember reading the embedded essays about IngSoc and newspeak several times. It was the beginning of my political education, supplemented a few years later by the four Penguin volumes of his essays and journalism, which, for several years, I read and re-read until they became part of my mental furniture. When I started to write this novel I had to look at 1984 again just to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently included any direct quotations.

As for the influence on the style – yes. I took to heart his ideas about the use of plain language, not so much because of any moral authority he possessed but because they seemed reasonable. Obviously, with a novel you have more latitude than with a political tract, and there are occasions – such as the interleaved documents in The Noise – where different styles are required. I used a pared-down style in the narrative chapters to serve as a frame for the conversations and also because it seemed appropriate for the world it describes: a kind of austerity prose, formal and a little threadbare.

KLS. The novel has multiple points of view and, in truth, makes the reader work quite hard to fill in the gaps. I am entirely in favour of this, as I think reading shouldn't be a passive experience, and I also think you get the balance about right between 'showing', 'telling' and 'letting the reader work it out' - how difficult was it to plot the novel so the reader had to exert themselves, but didn't get lost on the way?

RD. In some ways it was the most difficult part. Here, after all, is a novel in which there are many off-stage characters, and the main characters are never described and are rarely present at important events. My intention was to evoke the claustrophobia and paranoia of the society, though I was aware it might just seem perverse and alienating. My hope was that the individual sections would be interesting enough to lure readers to try the next one, and then find they were caught up in the story. I spent what seemed a ridiculous amount of time changing my mind about which document (and which kind of document) should follow which chapter, and wondering about how little exposition I could get away with without becoming wilfully obscure.

KLS. You write from the point of view of several female characters in this novel (and I know from work-shopping with you, that you use the female pov quite a lot) can you explore what helps you decide why to view a scene through a male character's eyes or a female's?

RD. This could be a disappointing answer, but usually the perspective comes with the idea of the story. I started with a list of characters and ideas for scenes. My first instinct – certainly not yet a fully developed thought – was that the scenes, if I told them from any perspective at all, would be told from the women’s.

Looking back, I can claim that telling the story from their perspective gave me a more interesting angle of approach, or made a sharper contrast with the surrounding material, or added to the atmosphere of impending violence. It may have done all those things, but the starting point was hardly more than an intuition.

KLS. I think we have to talk music, just because it never appears in the novel! And the feeling this novel gave me was of a Tom Waits album, with a story being played out in a variety of tempi and through a range of instruments. Is that anything like the concept you had in your head, or am I being a pretentious reviewer (actually those are not mutually exclusive) and what did you listen to - if anything – while writing this novel?

I usually try not to listen to anything while I’m actually writing. If I’m typing up a draft or changes to a draft I will have music on in the background, sometimes actually by Tom Waits, who I’ve liked since Swordfishtrombone. Or something loud and fast. Elsewhere my tastes are classical and fairly conservative.

The musical analogy that occasionally occurred to me while writing was that of a baroque suite of characteristic pieces, where a Courante follows a Gigue or a Saraband and the only connection between them is the shared tonality. Or a set of variations where a fragment of melody can become a Viennese waltz, a foxtrot, or a funeral march. There may also have been a subliminal influence from works like Bernard Stevens’ Cello concerto or Elizabeth Maconchy’s string quartets – austere, astringent mood music. For all these putative musical considerations the only tunes that get a mention in the novel are hymns, some of which I imagine would be sung in a style not unlike Waits’ best drunken tramp manner.

2010-07-07T13:01:00.002Z

Absence much lamented (by me!)

I’ve just got back from having a hot stone massage – it was truly relaxing (apart from the corrugated mark on my forehead where it was resting on a towel and which looks absurdly like somebody tried to strangle the top of my head with a very thick rope) and as the hotel was stuffed with short, square-suited Russian men accompanied by tall and sculpted, blonde Russian women … an interesting mix that has definitely led to the glimmerings of an erotic short story. Carmel often finds situations, characters or plots in hotels – it’s a natural concomitant of so many bedrooms: fertile territory for an erotic writer!

And yes, I am sorry I haven’t been here much – I have been writing but not blogging, and that’s just a fact. There are interesting things afoot, but I can’t say anything about them as yet.

In the wider literary sense, Writers At Large, as organised by New Writing South, was a fascinating event for me at least; I hope the writers who had advice sessions with me enjoyed themselves as much as I did. One of the more interesting points about such sessions is that many writers already know the answer to the ‘problem’ they pitch up with. What they lack is confidence in their own intuition or good sense or even in the good news they are being given about their own writing … it’s a situation that seems to plague many of us. Maybe we should have some kind of support group like those lovely feminist networks that no longer seem to exist but did when I was a teenager.

Did I say that the excellent Ether Books took some more stories for their incredible iPhone app? Well they did. Five, in fact.

And I’ve been spending much time in cafes with some extremely lovely writers: Lou, James, Laura, Jo and Kate. That’s a terrible thing to say when I’ve been neglecting my blog, I know, but I cannot tell a lie - I have been en-cafed and enjoying it.

2010-06-15T15:50:00.004Z

Upcoming etc

Why is upcoming such an ugly word? It almost seems Chaucerian, but not. I used to believe it was one of the nastiest words in the English language, but now its place of loathing in my heart has been replaced by the hideous phrase ‘going forward’. What does it even mean? I think it’s ‘in the future’ but essentially it’s a meaningless banging together of two perfectly serviceable words to make a phrase of extreme vileness. And it seems to be everywhere at present, driving me utterly insane.

Mini book reviews

The Valkyrie Song – Craig Russell, published by Hutchinson. An engrossing police procedural set in Hamburg. What can I say about this without falling victim to spoilers? Well, if you like Stieg Larsson, then Russell is a good author for you, although the violence against (and by) women in this novel is extreme, and can cause the same unsettling response that many people have felt to Larsson’s work (misogyny or empowerment – each reader must decide for themselves). Hamburg stands squarely, and not particularly beautifully, at the centre of this novel and if you want to explore cities through fiction this is a great depiction of the often less than lovely nature of much of Hamburg. Above all it’s a page turner, with some stellar plot elements that made me simultaneously sigh in frustration and smile in satisfaction. Recommended.

A Reliable Wife – Robert Goolrick, published by Abacus. An interesting voice here, with an omni point of view reminiscent of Poe or maybe Wilkie Collins. It’s described in the blurb as a gothic work, but actually the gothic elements do not exist as such, it’s the somewhat heated tone of the novel, set against the icy scenery that frames the narrative, that creates that heightened sense that often accompanies gothic tales. I found the voice fascinating, the plotting good, the characters a little stereotypical and the denouement unsatisfying, in that it uses several of the devices that appear in literature of the period it mimics, but without the shock value that their use would have offered at that time. In other words the ending felt a little clichéd to me. Still, you won’t waste your time on this one, it’s interesting writing and a richly textured take on a range of themes from love to redemption to life in the American hinterland at the turn of the century.

Upcoming (reprise)

On Thursday I'm looking forward to the Myriad Books Suspense event at Hove Library, 18:30 for 19:00 - free entry, should be brilliant! Readings from some great local authors recently published by Myriad.

Then I’m with New Writing South at their Writers at Work! event at Jubilee Library on Saturday 19 June – I think that counts as an upcoming event, going forward?

2010-06-08T11:53:00.004Z

Writers at Large!

This all-day event at Brighton’s award-winning Jubilee Library on Saturday 19 June 2010 will present the chance for aspiring/emerging writers to meet an exciting array of speakers and guests, including literary agents, publishing professionals and professional development guides - all aimed to help get their work out into the world.

Joining New Writing South on the day will be representatives from: THE LITERARY CONSULTANCY, THE WRITERS' GUILD, SALT PUBLISHING, RANDOM HOUSE, CURTIS BROWN LITERARY AND TALENT AGENCY, MBA LITERARY AGENTS and UNITED AGENTS.

Writers at Large! will provide a range of 50-minute sessions to help writers learn about effective marketing and networking strategies, how to get the most out of the web and social media, and a chance to learn about copyright law. The day will also offer writers 1:1 sessions with professionals, a session with top literary agents and how mentoring and manuscript reading can help their career.

As part of the day there will be an opportunity to network with other writers and to hear a keynote panel debate State of the Industry, where those within the publishing/bookselling world give us their thoughts as to what is happening in the publishing industry today, where it is heading and what authors should know about the business (and future) of publishing.

For more information, contact Mark Bryant, Operations Manager on 01273 735353 or email mark@newwritingsouth.com

(and should you wish to learn how to write erotica, or how to produce publishable work under different names in a range of fiction genres, or what it takes to write a prize-winning short story you can - apparently - book a session with me!)

2010-05-27T18:10:00.001Z

Dissolving into words

I don’t know how writing affects anybody else – but when I’m writing and it’s going well I vanish inside the piece I’m working on. It’s great, because the dialogue of my characters is more interesting than my own, and their situations are generally much more fascinating (and perilous) than mine. But it does mean that I have very little to say for myself when the writing is good.

So … I’ve sent off a sample – four chapters, a chapter by chapter outline, a very short synopsis of how the individual novel might become a series of four books and now it’s more or less out of my hands. I’ve done the best I can and what happens next depends on all kinds of things: whether the editor likes the work; whether it fits with her view of how the material should have been developed; how the market is looking; what her colleagues think of the idea – a lot of things that are little or nothing to do with how well I’ve written my requested material.

And yet, in my head, it’s all about me. It’s all about the words that I’ve put one next to another and whether they could have been better chosen, better placed. So I’m off to focus on my crochet as a bit of a break before heading back to completely revising the wolf novel, and if I vanish inside that one, you’ll know it’s going well.

2010-05-16T16:37:00.003Z

Distractions from being a writer …

… are numerous. Few though, are as enticing as this vixen and her four cubs. They live on an allotment site near us and are remarkably unfazed about visitors, although they have a definite flight distance and are only around in the early evening, which can make getting good photos rather difficult, as the light is just that bit too low to work with – the vulpine equivalent of Marlene Deitrich/Greta Garbo?

Anyway, foxes are not wolves, but vulpine behaviour in urban settings is fascinating and watching how the vixen adapts to her environment with the four undisciplined cubs to supervise is an interesting sidelight on how the alpha female wolf in my novel might manage to cope with her own cubs as they begin to explore their less urban, but still man-made, home.

2010-05-08T16:16:00.003Z

What writers need and what they want (again)

So the things that I want are an iPhone, so that I can download the Ether Books app, not because I have stories on it (although I do) but because, having seen it, I would love to have essays and stories downloaded to my mobile that way – it’s like having a portable literary sweetshop!

And the other think I want is Jill Tattersall’s painting of Hove Seafront which I saw at The Wolf At The Door open house last week – it was so exactly like Hove on the cold still days that are the best days of winter that I could almost feel the champagne sting of the air as I breathed it in.

But …

I am the kind of writer who has to work in a corner of the room, with no pictures on the walls. Above my desk I have a bookshelf. On it are my backup files, my accounts files and some dictionaries. There used to be novels there, and a thesaurus, but I just keep taking them down and reading them instead of working. If I had pictures in my sightline I would spend all my time gazing at them instead of writing. And if my phone had predictive text (let alone apps) I’d probably create longer texts than I would sentences in my work in progress.

So while I want these things, I shall not have them, because however lovely they are (and they are lovely) I am the kind of writer who can’t be trusted with even the tiniest distraction, let alone great big gorgeous ones!

The photo is lavender lemon cupcakes, just to prove that my procrastination is also creative ...

2010-04-28T09:54:00.004Z

Why writers need technology

Here’s the thing – I’ve had a story published! Yippee and all that. Well, more than one story actually. I’m tempted to use the term several in relation to the number, which is something that as a beginning writer I could never have imagined. Who could ever say, airily, ‘Oh, I’ve had several stories published this week’ and how would they ever survive the drubbing that the literary gods would give them for such hubris?

But there you are – several stories have indeed been published. Bizarrely, I am having to beg a virtual stranger to meet me for coffee so that I can verify this truth for myself. Because they have been published by iPhone.

Oh yes. Ether have taken some of what a Guardian reviewer described as the ‘maiden aunts’ of the literary world (not just mine btw, everybody’s short stories are maiden aunts, apparently) and made them sexy. I am keeping company with Hilary Mantel and Paul McCartney, at least in the world of iPhone apps! Makes me want an iPhone just to show off …instead I am meeting a twitter-friend for the first time to see my stories on her phone. And if I hadn’t been twitterate, I wouldn’t have known that she had an iPhone, and that’s why writers need technology and should get on with writing and stop panicking over whether the book is gently decaying into honourable decline. It’s not our business to stress over what form our work appears in, it’s simply up to us to write the best work we can.

And also I met an artist, Jill Tattersall, on Greencycle with whom I struck up such a good conversation that I ended up going round for coffee and to beg some flower seeds from her and now I’m going to attend the preview of her collective’s Open House at The Wolf At The Door (regular readers will know why the title of the show gave me a frisson of magnificent proportions) which is part of the Artists’ Open Houses taking place in Brighton & Hove in May. It looks utterly delicious, right down to the iron wolf in the front garden …

How could any of that have happened to this recluse if technology hadn’t made it possible?

2010-04-20T16:27:00.003Z

Is the Eyjafjallajokull eruption my fault?

Well, not mine. The fault of the Sunday Times short story competition judges, in fact.

Seriously, a friend of mine, I’ll call her Ursula, because that will make her laugh, thinks it may be true. Ursula is … let’s say she has a different world view to me. Hers includes astrology, homeopathy, astral healing and so on. She’s said I can tell this story as long as I include the statement that in her view I’m amazingly narrow-minded and stultified for somebody who’s supposed to have a good imagination. Consider it recorded.

Anyway, a couple of days ago, Ursula emailed me to ask if I thought the eruption and ash cloud could have been caused by my story (about an Icelandic volcano) not having won the Sunday Times comp. ‘No,’ I replied and forgot about it.

Then this morning she emailed me again, saying that in light of the opprobrium that was being heaped on the actual winner, did I want to reconsider my view?

‘No,’ I replied. Then I had a moment of weakness and rang her to ask how on earth she came to the conclusion that it could.

According to Ursula it’s simple. The Icelandic volcanoes probably don’t get a lot of stories written about them these days, so feel a bit neglected. When ‘their’ story doesn’t win a competition they might have a bit of a rumble in complaint, but when the actual winner is then given a rough time in his own country of origin over the nature of his story, that disgruntlement might spill over into an eruption.

Very simple. Almost logical, if your worldview coincides with Ursula’s.

One problem

The volcano I wrote about is imaginary – there is no volcano upriver from the Gulfoss waterfall, and Eyjafjallajokull isn’t anywhere near the location of my short story.

So you can’t blame me if your flight’s been cancelled, okay?

2010-04-17T08:24:00.003Z

Judge, so that ye can be judged …

But only in the literary sense.

This week I’m reading the entries for the West Sussex Writers’ Club ‘opening scenes of a romantic novel’ competition. It’s an interesting spread of entries with very different approaches and I’ve chosen to pick out several areas to compare and contrast the works so that I can choose a winner.

The elements I’m focusing on in particular are: the synopsis, which the contestants have to provide along with the first 1500 words of narrative; character development; and dialogue. What I’m not looking at in any great depth is the title or the ‘beauty’ of the words – that complex and impossible-to-describe-but-clear-when-you-see-it element of literaryness on which a lot of contests are judged.

I’m ignoring the title because titles for novels go through so many evolutions and iterations during the process from first draft to publication that they seem, to me, to be outside the parameters of competitive judging. And I’ve chosen to ignore the quality of the words (in terms of beauty that is, not in terms of sense or pace or development of narrative) because I do think that in genre novels it’s a little less important to achieve passages of loveliness and a little more important to create a powerful narrative that keeps the pages turning.

But that’s just me, and another judge might (and next year will) approach the subject in a different way. The point about being a judge, to me, is that it clarifies the process so that I can look at my own work with all the maudlin appreciation removed and the hawk-like discernment enhanced – which means I produce better competition entries myself. Also, it’s great fun!

And that's a sweetshop window in the picture, and you're supposed to envisage me as the kiddy let loose in it ...

2010-04-10T20:56:00.003Z

This is not a blog post

Because there are some things you cannot do well if you’re tired and writing is one of them, or at least if you’re me, you can’t.

As to why I’m tired, my OH has a recurrence of cluster headaches. If you don’t know the condition I won’t bore you with it, suffice it to say that the sufferer is woken up to half a dozen times a night with intensely painful headaches and the other name for cluster headaches is ‘suicide headaches’ and you’ve got the picture.

So … he does try not to wake me, but I’m a light sleeper at best, so between us we’re getting just about enough sleep for one person – it’s like being a new parent again, but with none of the compensations like having delightful babies to cuddle or people bringing bunches of flowers.

It coshes my ability to write anything decent and although I can read, I wouldn’t describe it as ‘quality’ reading, so I’m not even able to review any books for you.

About all I’m good for is ironing and eating chocolate, so if you have some of each, feel free to drop them off at my house!

(Mind you, even in my current state of exhaustion I can spot a dangling modifier, which is more than the staff of Costa coffee can ...)

2010-04-01T16:59:00.003Z

Reading and writing

My mate James Burt, recently returned from India, posted a thought-provoking blog here – The Polysyllabic Spree which does raise a lot of questions. What do we want reading to be? That’s reading, the solitary activity, not reading the berkshire town as written by an inveterate texter, by the way.

Well it’s a good question. I’ve always tended to think of reading as an elite activity, possibly because when I was modelling I used to read Tolstoy and the other models used to read knitting patterns (yes, seriously, lots of glamour models could knit for England) which gave me a feeling of superiority related entirely to literature as I knew damn well that was not in any other way superior.
Time rolls on, breasts roll down and become flaps. I become a writer. Now I want reading to be a mass participation activity – the more people read, the more royalties I make and the more likely I am to get my pellucid prose published. Okay, those feelings of superiority appear to have extended to writing as well, somebody slap me!

And then James tells me that Nick Hornby (Nick Hornby?) makes the provocative argument that if the reading age is thirteen, we should accept that point, not get sniffy about ‘good’ literature.

Hmph.

And yet … I am the world’s slowest runner. But I do run. And should I be sniffed at because I run slowly? I think not. I suspect Paul Tergat would guffaw if asked to run at my pace; he probably couldn’t walk that slowly. But does that disenfranchise my claim to be a runner? Again, I think not. The fact that he’s elite and I am sub par doesn’t disallow my claim to be doing what he does (only for shorter distances, and slower, and much less gracefully).

Does this mean that Dan Brown is a writer? Um.

I think I’d better think it out again …

Mini Book Reviews

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon – my book club completely and unreservedly loved this book. Comments ranged from ‘it gave me a real insight into autism’ through to ‘there was a lot of humour in the novel that surprised me’. The only negative point made was that everybody seemed to swear a lot. There was a bit of debate about whether the neighbour should have intervened in the way she did (no spoilers here, folks!) but generally there was a highly positive response to the novel.

Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates – well, I’ve finished. What can I say? I have doubts and dubiety about the process of fictionalising real life (or lives) because I think the grey area of creative non-fiction is close to jeopardising both the richness of fiction and the purity of non-fiction. But this book set aside my doubts and managed to wipe out my dubiety. It is a dense exercise in imagination, breathtakingly powerful, sad and angry and, above all, detailed. The veracity of the account doesn’t matter once you settle into the idea that if Marilyn Monroe were to emerge by Ouija, she would sound like the Oates’ creation. I recommend it. Actually, my literary elitism says that even Tergat style readers might need to pace themselves on this one, but don’t let that put you off if you’re more of a plodder – the journey alone is worth it, and the destination is astonishing. You will never think about Marilyn the same way again.

2010-03-26T10:02:00.005Z

What a writer needs is …

Good question, isn’t it? Love, fame, chocolate, a good kick up the arse, a publication contract …?

Virginia Woolf famously said that a female writer needed money and a room of her own. In a provocative article Matt Shoard argues that discomfort in one’s living arrangements is more conducive to the great novel than the Hosking Trust offering of a rural idyll in which to write.

I am inclined to agree with him, but for different reasons. I spent a disproportionately painful part of my life running charitable trusts – I do believe being a bullfighter or a bailiff would have been less stressful and vicious, but that’s another story. Let’s just say that the disbursement of funds and the making of grants, the awarding of scholarships and the other bits of giving money to good causes was the dirtiest, most compromised part of the whole business.

It was never, ever, about the good cause. Never ever. It was about who’d got their way last time, or some new trustee who wanted to be noticed by launching a coup, or which special adviser or celeb endorser had a pet project that had to be funded or they’d huff off; it was all about which projects might get us column inches in the press and which – of course – ticked all the Charity Commission boxes that kept our charity status intact.

So when you let a committee of people who have spare time in the middle of the day make decisions about worth, you end up with a compromised set of agreements, based on horse-trading and pork barrel negotiations, that always reward the safe and sensible, not the dangerous and insane. These are nice people who do good things in warm rooms – they are not talent spotters. Talent spotters are generally chain-smoking despots with toxic personal lives and a completely unbending sense of what is good in their field. Talent spotters compromise like Vlad the Impaler did – ie they don’t.

If you want great literature to emerge from a rural idyll, go grab a random dub poet and force them to live in the worst web-fingered wilds of the country, with a sulky wood-burning stove and mad livestock for company. Don’t tell them they have to write to get out – just leave them there until they do. It may not turn out to be great literature, but duress, stress and anger are as likely to produce work of calibre as any committee-based judgement.

Mini book reviews:

Belle de Jour – the intimate adventures of a London call girl, published by Orion – I went back to this after the revelation of Belle’s real name. Still enjoyed it just as much the second time: zingy writing and a truly superb sense of pace make this autobiography a romp in both senses of the word – you emerge from it laughing and a little bit breathless. Best of the best in erotica, this one in my view.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Hammond – this is book club book this month, so I’ll report back on the group discussion next week.

Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates – still reading this one. Whether you buy by subject matter (Marilyn Monroe) or by the inch, this book is BIG! I hope to have finished it in the next fortnight, but it’s not a book I want to rush, which gives you the hint that it’s quite a read, I hope.

The picture shows the Cream Tea cafe in Brighton, excellent hazelnut roulade, which is obviously what every writer REALLY needs!

2010-03-18T09:17:00.003Z

Book Review: Hector and the Search for Happiness

This is one of those self-help books that masquerade as narrative. Reading back the sentence above, it sounds a little dismissive and it shouldn’t. Most people need help at differing points in their lives – fulfilling potential is rarely something that the average human achieves alone. Self-help books meet a real need and I’m in favour of people reading them, and taking what works from them. Flavouring self-help with the condiments of narrative is fine by me.

When it works.

Hmm. So to Hector. Actually, not to Hector. Let me tell you a story about Heloise.

Heloise is a psychiatrist. She’s good at her job, with a healthy practice and has a lover who’s a high-flyer in (oooh, let’s say finance) but Heloise realises most of her patients aren’t happy and sets out to discover why not. She visits a friend on another continent who turns out to be a Head Honchette in (oooh, let’s say advertising) and who’s rich and powerful but perhaps not very happy either. During this trip Heloise meets a man in a night-club and despite having a lover at home, spends a steamy night with him, only to discover the next day that Head Honchette hired this gigolo to show Heloise a good time. She’s a bit crushed by this, but can’t get Mr Gigolo out of her head because … well, he’s good at sex.

Heloise moves on, visiting another friend in another ountry where she finds herself in a top class hotel. In the bar she gets talking to a Big Bitch who is involved in some shady business (possibly drugs) and who reveals that Mr Big Bitch is suffering mental illness. Heloise – being in the mental illness business – checks out what Mr Big Bitch is being prescribed and realises it’s not doing the job for him, so gives Big Bitch advice on how to get the right drugs for the man at home.

At this point Heloise goes through a whole bunch of weird experiences, including being kidnapped, and ends up at the house of her friend again, where she very nearly falls into bed with another hot guy, related to her friend, but after a smooch session manages to restrain herself. After all, she’s got a man at home and a crush on Mr Gigolo, tongue-tangling with Hot Guy 3 seems to her to be as far as she should go. One of the things that gets her out of her kidnap situation is being able to throw Big Bitch’s name into the conversation, which gives her kidnappers the fear that BB will come and make their lives hell if anything happens to Heloise.

Skip on, skip on … Heloise learns all kinds of lessons about happiness and goes home, still half in love with Mr Gigolo. She doesn’t tell her lover about Mr G, nor about the tongue-tangling Hot Guy 3. She does use Head Honchette to get Mr Gigolo a real job where he doesn’t have to sell his bits for money. She settles down with her lover and starts a family.

Aw.

So … this psychiatrist sleeps around and doesn’t tell her partner (Safe sex? Honesty? The right to information before making a lifetime’s commitment?), she messes with somebody else’s patient at third hand by reviewing the man’s prescription WITH HIS WIFE and then suggesting WITHOUT MEETING HIM that he should be taking some other drugs (Right to self-determination? Privacy? Professional ethics? Professional courtesy? Fact-checking [maybe Big Bitch wants to kill off her man and is using Heloise as a patsy to get drugs that will do the job and make it look like suicide or overdose]?) and she hoiks a guy out of his lifestyle because she thinks it’s wrong for him, using the old girl network to turn his life into something that makes her feel happier about his situation – do I need to do the brackets here or can you work it out for yourself? Of course you can.

So … I couldn’t work out what made me uncomfortable about this book until I recast Hector as Heloise and his male friends as her female ones and then it became clear to me that what I was responding to was a high level of implicit sexism that allows Hector to mess in the lives of others: call girls, the wives of criminals he meets in bars; and to lie to others: his girlfriend back at home, with impunity. And when you swap the genders of all the characters in this little narrative it becomes clear (to me, maybe not to you, your mileage may vary) that this book is about patriarchy disguised as psychiatry – trust a man, he can put you right, even if he has to ignore your rights and abrogate his responsibilities to do it.

It's engagingly written and simple and easy to enjoy. But I’m not recommending this one. I liked the cover though.

2010-03-10T14:50:00.003Z

Wishing I was eighteen again

Not because of the ‘rejection’ of not making the Sunday Times shortlist. Not even to relive my misspent youth, become a notorious tart and then write a book about it (see review of Belle de Jour later this week), but because I had lunch with Louise Halvardsson earlier in the week.

Lou’s one of the writers who really makes me step back and look at writing as a career, as a life-style choice, and as a challenge – whenever I sit down with her I come away with a new clarity about my own desire to write and the roots of the compulsion to produce fiction.

And on 15th March she’s leading a Creative Writing Workshop for Young Adults at Hove Library. You have to be 13-19 years old but you don’t need to have any particular writing skills or experience. Also, the workshop is absolutely free, but you do need to book a place in advance by ringing 01273 293312 or emailing pauline.freestone@brighton-hove.gov.uk

The workshop is part of Brighton & Hove's Aqua Festival which celebrates the hosting of the London 2012 Games and inspires people to join in and try something new. And I wish I could take part because I think it will be utterly brilliant …

2010-03-04T21:14:00.002Z

Why success changes writers

Okay, first define success. Is it a success to have been long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG competition? Shortlisted for the Willesden Herald when it was still a £5,000 prize? Runner up in the Guardian flash fiction comp which brought nothing but glory (and precious little of that)?

Yes. And I’ll tell you why. Because things change. That’s how you know something’s happened to you, or the world, or both. Example – of the nearly 200 emails I got (and if you’d told me beforehand that 200 people knew my email address I’d have laughed), at least a third were from folk I haven’t spoken to for over a decade, and a few were individuals I really hoped I’d never hear from again. Funnily enough, I got an email from a former neighbour who went to prison after the Willesden and one from a former schoolmate who went to prison after the Guardian. Wonder what recedivist crim is going to pitch up if I make the shortlist on Saturday?

And many emails, and some phone calls, asked questions I’d never been asked before. Not ‘do you have any photos of yourself as a model’ which was the only one I’d prepared for and was rather miffed about when it didn’t come up, but weird, complex writerly questions or simple, irreducible business questions. So I had to think differently about myself and the world, and that was dislocating. Dealing with those questions, being fair to good friends who deserved my time while also trying to be good to new contacts who deserved my respect and attention was knackering. I emailed the wonderful Hilary Mantel who understood exactly what I was talking about and didn’t remind me to write first thing in the morning, because I think she knew I knew that I should, and I think I knew that she knew I wasn’t. So I returned to the habit of writing as soon as I woke up and it did restore some proportion to the world. But it was just a bit debilitating to deal with so much ‘stuff’ and I wonder how serious writers with big reputations ever get anything done.

Of course it was great to be long-listed and I shall be gutted if I’m not short-listed - but only for about ten minutes. I’ve learned something interesting about the discipline of writing under even the mildest media awareness and let me tell you, it changes you, it does.

Mini Book Reviews:

Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, published by Vintage Classics – book club loved this, apart from one person who found it a bit boring. We spent a lot of time talking about the quality and nature of Isherwood’s observations, the way he managed a combination of dispassion and wryness, and how the one or two times he slipped into emotional revelation (Sally’s departure, the likelihood of Rudi being tortured for his beliefs) were so much stronger for that quality of passive reporting. We talked a little about his homosexuality, quite a lot about the state of Germany at the period in which the stories are set and only fleetingly about Cabaret. Overall the club enjoyed the exposure to short stories, which delighted me, as a writer of short stories, and thought it would like to try a similar, thematically linked, collection again in future.

Learning to Talk, short stories by Hilary Mantel, published by Fourth Estate. Loathed the cover of this one: a vase of daffs against a rainy windowpane seemed to me to be a cop-out of the worst kind, given that Hilary Mantel’s writing is the opposite of the kind of genteel, domestic drama that such a cover suggests (well that’s what it suggests to me, you may feel menaced by daffodils for all I know). These stories are generally of the kind labelled ‘coming of age’ although they are much more nuanced than such a label implies and they contain hints of the menacing figures that are to be so brilliantly realised in Beyond Black. Yes, I’m an unabashed fan, and I went to this short story collection because I wanted to be reminded what it means to be a writer of short fiction. I cannot recommend it too highly for craft, for emotional range, and for that peculiarly British ability to make the frightening ridiculous and the ridiculous truly terrifying.

As for the publisher that’s supposed to be sending a book for review – nothing yet!

2010-02-28T14:53:00.004Z

This month I’ve had an essay entitled Losing the Space Race published in Gastronomica. It features my mother, purple mini-skirts and the Smash robots and has made me very happy. Just call me Nigel Slater …

And yes, I am also very happy to have been longlisted for the Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award.Of course I am! If I’ve failed to thank anybody for their good wishes, please accept a public apology – I did get an awful lot of emails and calls and I might have slipped on responding – it’s not intentional, and I’m really grateful to everybody who congratulated me. but ask me again how I feel on 7 March when the shortlist is made public, then I might be a bit less chipper, or maybe, even more so!

Mini book reviews:

Betrayal by Karin Alvtegen published by Canongate - yet another book that’s feeding my current addiction to Nordic writers. Sadly, it’s not been a vintage 2010 for me and the Nordic crime scene. I struggled more than a little with The Quiet Girl by Peter Hoeg and I’m going to re-read it because I’m pretty sure that being migraine-walloped in the middle of the reading process might have cocked up my ability to master the narrative chronology. On the back of this novel the blurb compares Alvtegen with Highsmith, a view with which I would concur although regular readers will remember that Ms Highsmith is not one of my favourites. So … this novel is interesting, cold, analytic and well-paced, but either a translation error or an editorial hole in the final quarter destroyed my suspension of disbelief. It relates to one of the three protagonists thinking about something that neither she, nor we, have been told about. I had to re-read the previous two chapters to be sure it hadn’t been mentioned and that I’d missed it. It hadn’t, I hadn’t, and the narrative fell away from me then as I spent the rest of the novel wondering what else might have slipped out of the story that would have helped it make more sense. Also, there’s a pov jump at the very end which is somewhat disconcerting. Allowable but not smooth, is how I’d characterise it.

All in all, I can’t recommend the book, at least in this edition, because of this small but irritating plot lacuna, but I enjoyed it enough to think that I’ll seek out another of her novels.

Fury by Salman Rushdie, published by Jonathan Cape – Rushdie at his best is superb, but this book, rather like some Philip Roth, is more evidence of how a great writer can conceal the blankness at the heart of a novel than a novel in itself. There are quite heart-stoppingly lovely and clever riffs in this narrative – especially on the nature of duality, but Solly Solanka, the protagonist, is a rather hollow construction that (in Rushdie’s world) appeals to a series of beautiful and talented women but manages to lose them all. The central conceit is that of the furies, but I have to say that Rushdie makes them a bit more like furries!

Cadillac Jukebox by James Lee Burke, published by Phoenix Editions – if there’s a special pleasure to be found in the episodic adventures of crime novels, with the slow unfolding of the personal lives of the ‘hero’ or ‘anti-hero’ then there’s a truly perverse pleasure to reading such a series out of sequence. And I am confused to find that one reviewer says this is the sixth in the series, another the ninth. No matter, James Lee Burke has an almost hallucinogenic beauty to his prose when he describes Louisiana, which sits perfectly beside his terse but complete descriptions of the appearance and life histories of the various criminals who cross the sight line of Dave Robicheaux: policeman, AA member, Vietnam veteran and general good(ish) guy. While the body count piles up and the deaths get more and more gory, the moral underpinning of this story holds true and, as far as I can tell, the procedural elements are flawlessly described. Burke exposes both the nitty and the gritty of life as a criminal or crime-stopper in a small town in a rural area where Klu Klux KIansmen used to ride. And his scenery, whether pastoral, human or inhuman, is elegantly exposed to our view.

2010-02-19T17:35:00.001Z

Mini book reviews and other literary things

I had the most amazing time at West Sussex Writers’ Club! If the assembled members enjoyed themselves even half as much as I did, then a good evening was had by all. Now I’m looking forward to judging their romantic novel opening competition.

I do have something I wish I could talk about, but I can’t yet, so I won’t. Prepare to be amazed at my reticence when I finally can though!

Books I’ve read this week:

Anarchy and Old Dogs by Colin Cotterill, published by Soho Crime

A thoroughly entertaining crime caper, with deft dialogue and fascinating insights into the revolutionary cycles of Laos, a country of which I know nothing but with which am now enamoured. It’s sharper and more cynical than Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana crime novels, but similarly affectionate in many respects. Dr Siri is the only coroner in Laos, a (reluctant) shaman of sorts and a rather disreputable old man, which makes him an excellent central character for a crime novel. I found the beginning of the book a little over-larded with back-story (it’s the fourth in a series) but by a third of the way through I was actually laughing out loud – not a normal behaviour for me when reading fiction! Highly recommended.

50/50 Killer by Steve Mosby, published by Orion

The premise of this novel is at first hard to accept – a serial killer who captures couples and makes one partner declare that the other should be the one to be tortured to death, but Mosby certainly makes it work via some complex head-hopping and deft reveals and twists. The narrative becomes progressively darker and is definitely not one to read if you’re in doubt about the quality of your relationship or hearing strange noises from your loft! The pace is excellent, and the final scenes are beautifully handled, and nothing like the usual ‘case closed’ denouement that often feels a little pedestrian. Highly recommended.

Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord, published by Gallic – full review to follow next month.

Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, published by Vintage Classics – book club assigned book for discussion next week, review to follow after club meeting.

2010-02-08T15:13:00.002Z

Why small presses don’t get many books reviewed

Today I am not happy. I have the comet’s tail end of a migraine, complete with weird black floaters and the sense that if I didn’t have my wonderful medication, I would also have pain. A world of pain. On Friday I had the full-blown, shutters-down start of a migraine, during which even my own breathing hurt my ears and my own pulse irritated me so much that I tried to work out how to suffocate myself with a cushion. So I missed hearing my story being read aloud at the New Brunswick Theatre. I am, to say very little, disgruntled about this.

Saturday was lost to slow motion movement and medication. Sunday was mainly spent talking like a Dalek (side effect of tablets) and staring at things that wouldn’t come into focus properly.

Monday is the day I get all my senses back, more or less, just in time to start work again. And as I have plenty of unhappiness to spread around, I am going to start with small presses.

I review books for small presses. I’ve never asked to do this, and often turn down proposed books because I think they would be a waste of my time. I also review self-published books which people insist on sending me, although the author who invites me so to do is a pretty brave author, and most decline my review when I contact them and say that I can’t be positive about their book.

And I know that small presses complain about the quantity of reviews they get compared to the big publishers, so I try to be sensible and positive about the subject, because I am a writer and I’ve been published by small presses so I know how tough it can be to get any kind of coverage.

But why do small presses dick around so much?

• Press 1 – emails me to ask if I’ll review an anthology. Of course I will. They don’t send it. I email, querying. They reply that it’s in the post. It doesn’t arrive. Repeat this sequence four times. I give up.
• Press 2 – sends me a short story collection. I ask if they can convey some questions to the non-English speaking author. They say they can. I email them the questions. Nothing happens. I email, querying. They reply, offering to send me another copy of the book. I beg them not to, asking if they can (a) send the questions to the author or (b) confirm that this isn’t possible so I can post my review without author commentary. No reply. I give up.
• Press 3 – sends me a book I didn’t ask to review (fair enough, I don’t have to review it) and a list of books I might like to review. I email, saying I’d like to review one of the books on the list. Nothing arrives. I email again. No answer.
• Press 4 – rings me (ooh, a telephone call, how exciting!) to ask if I will review an anthology of short stories. I will. Nothing arrives. I call to query (ooh another telephone call!) and can’t speak to their PR person. I get an email - as I am not a professional reviewer, would I accept a pdf instead of a printed book. No I bloody wouldn’t: my eyes are my livelihood and I don’t read pdfs unless I’m being paid for it. I reply, saying that I’m happy to take a ‘proof’ copy or a printed galley if they are worried that I might try and flog the book on Amazon and do them out of income. No reply.

Can you see a pattern emerging? A pattern that mainly involves me, a writer, who is trying to help other writers, being quietly ground down by small presses who whinge about not getting publicity.

I review a couple of dozen books a year that I have bought with my own hard-earned writing income, because I believe in supporting good writing. I review about another eight or ten that are sent to me because I think they are well-written and should be better known. No, I’m not a professional, but I’m giving my time in reading the material, my intellectual capital in constructing the review, and my support in blogging about, for free. And I feel dissed, I really do.

So from next month, a change. I will review books that I enjoy and I will review small presses and publishers that fail to deliver on their promises. I suspect this may make me unpopular in some circles, but writers need to know if they are being let down in the tough world of publishing and I’m miserable enough right now to have decided that I’d rather be unpopular than put upon. Watch this space …

2010-01-28T18:59:00.001Z

What I really wanted for Christmas

And have been wanting for years, is something like an atlas of physiognomy. I want to be able to judge, definitively, whether the character I have in my mind’s eye really has hooded eyes, or not. What, exactly, is a Roman nose or a Grecian brow and if I say a woman has the square lower lip of a Pre-Raphaelite model, does anybody actually know what I mean or does it just go straight over everybody’s head.

So maybe I am strange – maybe everybody else has a much clearer sense of what these terms actually mean, or maybe nobody cares, but it has always really troubled me that while I can identify a retrousse nose without the faintest difficulty, I can’t possess the same absolute certainty about the squareness of a square chin or the scale that a forehead must possess to be considered broad.

Perhaps it only matters if you’re writing historical fiction (that’s a subtle clue as to what’s absorbing my hours right now) where the convention of describing characters is more developed than it contemporary literary fiction where it seems the convention is much more to describe sexual characteristics or grotesqueries of feature. Hmmm … so has anybody ever seen or heard of that kind of reference book or should I be getting myself some kind of therapy for over-literary exactitude?

2010-01-21T10:23:00.000Z

2010 is a better writing year already …

Last year was depressing beyond expression (which is probably why I spent the year writing a novel about autism, suicide, adoption and race! Art imitating life etc) but already I am enjoying 2010 more because:

On 5th February a story of mine is being read aloud at New Venture Theatre’s From the Heart evening. I am really looking forward to it – I love hearing others read my work aloud.

On 11th February from 7pm at Field Place, Worthing, I’m talking to West Sussex Writers Club about writing sex for fun and profit. Tickets a fiver on the door if you’re a non-member – feel free to come along and get the low-down on what good sex can do for you (in the literary sense, of course!)

And I’ve had a story accepted by Fractured West - a new literary venture that looks exciting and fresh.

What a joy to start the year on a few high literary notes.

2010-01-16T11:35:00.003Z

Writing about unattractive characters

I’m wading my way through A Game with Sharpened Knives by Neil Belton and thinking about how people write unlikeable characters. When I say wading, I don’t mean that the book is badly written because it’s not; it’s an allusive, complex, disjointed narrative that opens up the lives of Erwin Shrodinger and his associates to scrutiny.

The issue is Shrodinger – he was a peculiar, weak, oddly ego-less but selfish person. His strange personal life (not to give anything away to those who don’t know his story) might have passed with less notice in a different age, but as a man whose scientific career straddled the two world wars, who spent some time looking like (but perhaps not actually being) a Nazi apologist and ended up marooned in an Ireland seeking an identity in its own neutrality during World War II he acted, bluntly speaking, appallingly. And I am finding Belton’s depiction of him painful, ugly and depressing.

On the other hand, I love the late and much lamented Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen – granted Zen is fictional, he appeals to me so much that I feel a tiny pang each time I remember that there will never be another Zen novel. Aurelio is equally weak, strange and badly behaved, but I adore the way Dibdin drew chis character. And yet … Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley leaves me cold. I know Ripley has an actual fan club, has been much adapted for film and TV etc, but I just find his kind of unpleasantness unbearable. And yet … I do love Hannibal Lecter – a serial killer with few redeeming features (as an aside, both he and Ripley love forms of music which do little for me so it’s not that) who has become an international film figure too. And yet ... and yet ...

So how do we write these nasty types? It seems to me that there’s a warmth to Lecter and Zen – not so much a warmth of depiction but a warmth within them, which is lacking in Ripley and Shrodinger – or perhaps the warmth isn’t in them - but they have a kind of warmth that resonates with me, while whatever warmth there may be in the other two (and surely there isn’t any warmth in Ripley?) doesn’t.

As I’m revising – with hideous slowness – a historical novel in which my lead character is pretty nasty in many ways, I’m trying to unpick what makes some unlovable characters work for me, while others don’t – but I’m coming to the conclusion that liking and hating may be more visceral than intellectual and that means that I should write my dubious hero for myself and hope that there’s enough other people out there who feel as I do if he ever sees print.

Aurelio Zen's Venice courtesy of ezioman at Flickr

2010-01-07T21:57:00.004Z

Snow interrupts play

Or rather, it interrupts work. I have just finished writing a commissioned erotica (paradoxically, featuring a parasol and a tropical waterslide, very inapposite to the snow outside) and spent several days turning over a pile of short stories, deciding what to send where.

It’s a thankless bloody task, as any writer will tell you, and reflecting back on the year behind me, I’ve realised just how competitive a business the short story world can be. And competitive is okay, but there’s something rather disturbing about the stories that I’ve read this year (and that’s hundreds and hundreds of stories, believe me) which is that they all seem to fall inside some kind of ‘rules’.

These rules are sometimes well-established eg start your work in media res and sometimes seem to be massive extrapolations from a current success – why were so many stories in the second person published in the past year or so? Because one or two high profile writers produced good work in the second person, obviously, and editors thought they’d like to have something like that too.

Quirky stories always seem to involve drugs and/or urban settings. Bleak stories end without resolution. Stories set in exotic locations always feature bad, grasping, culturally blind Americans or Europeans.

This is an exaggeration of course, but I have read almost no literary short fiction in the past two years that was quirky and rural, bleak and had a clear ending, exotic and featuring sensitive Americans/Europeans. So that would rule out Willa Cather, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene if they were writing today, which of course they are not, but you take my meaning I hope.

And I know I sound curmudgeonly, and I’m not the only one to be bleating about the narrow range of short fiction that gets published today, but I’d love to hear of some magazines, zines and journals in the literary genre that are pushing the boundaries by accepting short fiction that falls outside ‘the rules’. Please? Because I seem to have an awful lot of it on my desk …

(winter jasmine in my garden - full bloom in the bitter cold, it's got to be a metaphor for something, right?)

2010-01-02T15:40:00.004Z

Book review: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

One of the issues I end up debating quite a lot with other writers, and with readers too, is whether it’s better to read an ambitious book that’s flawed, or a flawless book that’s pedestrian in scope. And of course the question, in part, depends on your definition of ‘ambitious’ and ‘flawed’.

I would use both words to describe The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, published by Gallic and excellently translated (as far as I can tell) by Alison Anderson. This is a fiercely French novel, in the best possible senses: it’s rich with ideas, highly textured, focused on the value of the lived life and clearly posits the idea that philosophy should not just be a subject of study, but an element of everyday life. The unapologetic way in which Ms Barbery condemns people who live banal lives is refreshing – and when her two protagonists indulge in the quiet luxuries of thought and observation she manages to make us share in their belief system.

In my view though, the book is still flawed, as many ambitious books are. While it may be a personal prejudice, I found her preteen protagonist Paloma to be unlikeable and unpleasant. On the other hand, Renee the fifty-something concierge who has ‘the elegance of the hedgehog’ (ie she conceals her autodidactic profundity behind the imbecilic front that is superficially the uniform of any Parisian concierge) is quite delightful and rewarding to experience, right up to the moment when she experiences a ‘life-shock’ of the kind that the average therapist dreams of delivering, and is apparently set free of her inferiority complex by a simple sentence spoken by the rich and worldly Mr Ozu who has recently moved into the building she looks after. At which point this reader felt she’d moved from the reading lectern in a forbidding French library to the couch with Oprah. And the ending is simply sentimental. I won’t spoil it, but brace yourself for an Amelie moment.

So would I recommend it? Unreservedly yes – while it’s definitely a French pastime to write intellectual books for the masses (Alain de Botton has done well enough from it) such books often lack the charm that this one has in copious dashes. And when Barbery is good, she is very good indeed, eg when thinking about the difference between European doors and Japanese sliding ones, Renee muses ‘I was fascinated by the way the Japanese use space in their lives, and by these doors that slide and move quietly along invisible rails, refusing to offend space. For when we push open a door, we transform a place in a very insidious way … a door disrupts continuity without offering anything in exchange other than freedom of movement’. It’s exactly this kind of potted intellectual exercise that has had some critics foaming, but I think potted exercise is better by far than none and all and I’d take a hundred books like this (were they on offer, which, sadly, they currently are not) over all the grimly realistic, reductionist, Carveresque offerings that currently dominate popular literary culture.

A final word. The cover of this paperback is simply divine. If you have ever sat on a train, looking at the lighted windows of houses along the track, pondering the flashes of life that you see from your vantage, the illustration alone is enough to give you hours of pleasure. I am rarely won over to books simply by their covers, but in this case the perfect harmony between content and image is remarkable and noteworthy. There appear to be two covers on offer - make sure you get the one I've featured, it provides your money's worth, almost before you open the book!

2009-12-22T16:25:00.001Z

Sorry, sorry (but not that sorry)

The thing is, I’m whelmed by something – an idea, or a project or possibly (whisper this) even a novel.

And I believe that if you’ve got an inchoate idea you should focus on it, follow it around, play with it, but not talk about it. Never share it until you could pick it out of an identity parade without hesitation as being the suspect in question. Why?

Because other people’s views, no matter how well-meaning, colour our own intellectual exercises. I once had an utterly fantastic idea for a novel, and mentioned it to a dear friend, who replied ‘Oh that’s been done already’ and told me about a book she’d read that was, indeed, quite similar in theme and content. I thought about it, and felt the idea was still strong and compelling, but every time I tried to formalise it to a novel’s structure, I felt uncomfortable, as if I was on the verge of plagiarism, even though I hadn’t read the novel in question - so I abandoned the idea completely. Only to see a newly-published book with a similar theme and content win a fairly substantial prize this very year …

So I’ve got this idea and I’m living with it, but it does make me rather uncommunicative blogwise, because when a big idea enters your head, it rather crowds out all the other things that you might usually have talked about. And that’s part of the process of being a writer, so although I’m a bit sorry, and feeling as if I’m letting folk down, I’m profoundly happy to be gripped by a new idea that’s so exciting it’s shoving everything else to the margins.

Also there’s been this snow and I’m a snow maniac, so I shall wish you a very merry Christmas and a deliriously happy New Year and leave you with a picture of the snow to enjoy.

2009-12-05T11:26:00.004Z

‘Platform’ and how to think about it

We’re told that all writers need a platform. This is not the creaky stage on which the Women’s Institute sings Jerusalem, but the underpinning material of a marketing strategy.

The very word makes most writers cringe like slugs threatened with salt because it sounds so very ugly to call the people you hope will love your book a ‘platform’. It also implies you are a mean and grasping cad who stands on the backs of your supporters to reach higher. No wonder then, that writers dread the ‘platform’ question.

There is a different way to approach it though. Think of your platform not as ‘your’ readers and supporters, but as your desires. This stops it being a hollow construction of materialistic greed, symbolised by the impressive Beijing 'flowerbed' and makes it into a trip through your hopes and visions.

For example, part of my platform is first time novelists. I don’t expect the ones I’m in touch with to dash out and buy my novel (although, hey guys, I dashed out and bought yours, okay?) but I wanted to understand how having a first novel published actually worked; to understand the business; to discover how it affected the writer; to brace myself for the good and bad when it eventually happens to me.

So although I do hope some of many writers whose first novels I’ve read and reviewed, and with whom I’ve corresponded over the past few years, will go and buy my book, will offer me a reciprocal review (if only on Amazon) and will, therefore, be ‘platform’, my purpose in engaging with them was not marketing, but wisdom – they had it, I didn’t. In return they wanted publicity and support and in a very small way I could provide it. It did not feel bad to engage in this relationship, in fact it felt very good to get to know excellent writers and people such as Charles Lambert and Sally Hinchcliffe, who turned out to be superb companions, whether in real life or online, and whose journeys in literature give me a vicarious thrill which will, one day, be a real thrill as I follow them up the path to noveldom.

Another part of my platform is environmentalists. I believe that the big issues for the world are environmental ones, and that good literature has to push them right to the front, by writing fantastic, gritty, sexy, demanding, thrilling and lovely stories about, or shaped by, what is happening to the natural world. But how to do that? Well some people have gone far down this road, like Barbara Kingsolver and – in a very different way – Cormac McCarthy - and others are making the journey, especially in genre fiction like the eco-thriller and the eco-scifi novel. Finding the best of these writers, talking to them, meeting their readership at events on online and seeing what their readers like and dislike is part of my platform.

It’s also fascinating and I’m learning a lot about how one weaves such themes into fiction in a way that doesn’t seem preachy or defeatist. And one day, maybe, the literally thousands of readers whom I’ve met in forums and with whom I’ve debated, and argued and laughed will see my novel … and there will be a familiarity (and, I hope, respect) that will cause them to reach for their wallet or paypal button. But that’s not why I got involved with them, I got involved because this subject is important to me, and it’s fun (for me) to argue about whose post-apocalypse world is more likely to come about: Cormac McCarthy’s or Margaret Atwood’s? And it does count as platform-building, even when you’re having fun.

2009-11-26T17:06:00.004Z

Writing workshops, words and weariness

I have a cold. A really stinking, streaming, vile and intractable cold. So if you were expecting to hear from me, and haven’t, this is why.

But even if I’m not up to much, the world moves on. Todd has produced the first pictures for our graphic novel pitch, and very fine they are too. James Burt, over at Literature Network reminded me of why I have my doubts about the value of writing workshops, and missed one point that really concerns me – these workshops are only ever about ‘literary’ fiction and if you want to write genre fiction you need to find a specialist workshop, or – gods forbid – commercial fiction … don’t bring that tainted phrase to the workshop because you will probably be stoned, or at least verbally pummelled. Lest we forget (although I had to get James to remind me) Dan Brown and David Foster Wallace were in the same writing group – but I’m willing to bet Mr Brown didn’t pitch up with bits of ... da Vinci ... for group crit!

There’s another reason I really don’t like workshops in the long term. It’s the long term. If you need a deadline, or a group crit, to get you to write, you’re not building a sustainable writing career, you’re building props and crutches. Your writing discipline might take the form of irresistible urges, or painful hours of nothingness (Flaubert). You may need to lock yourself in a room to write without allowing yourself to be distracted (Colette), or you may be the kind who has to be dragged away from your desk. What you shouldn’t be doing is teaching yourself that other people are expecting/waiting for your work – because, particularly for novel length work, unless you’re very lucky, that process happens rarely and not having anybody waiting for your work can destroy a beginning writer’s ability to write it! Building dependency on other writers is a very bad idea, because other writers are no more equipped with patience, kindness and clear sightedness than the population as a whole. If you’re lucky enough to find one or two people with whom you can exchange work on a regular basis that’s a different thing.

Workshops also breed what Zadie Smith called MFA Cookie Cutter fiction – which was a bit of a bastard, as she was saying it, in part, about me, and I’ve never taken an MFA or any other kind of writing degree. But if you read slush for any magazine of worth, you soon get to see the standard ‘workshopped’ story. They are good and clean and all seem very much alike … I wonder why?

So a workshop process is a good one, as part of your writing trajectory, or to dip into and out of at various stages in your writing career, and I do this all the time so please accept I’m not a workshop hater, I find dedicated workshops such as novel exchanges to be almost invaluable, but becoming a workshop junkie really isn’t good for you, or your fiction.

lolcat courtesy of stuffonmycat at Flickr

2009-11-19T13:55:00.004Z

Growing as a writer (and as a person)

I am doing something this weekend that absolutely terrifies me. Sketchcrawl is worldwide activity but in Brighton, at the Jubilee Library, at midday on Saturday 21st November, it will be happening to me!

I am a terrible sketcher (getting better, but very slowly) and my urban sketches are the worst of my work. So why am I doing this to myself?

Because when I signed up for it, I was the kind of person who wanted to grow, and I wanted to meet other artists because that would help me, and I wanted to draw Brighton, because I love it, and bringing those two together would make me grow, whether I wanted to or not.

But today I am not that person – today I am a shivering wreck of terror about the whole thing. I don’t want to expose my paltry sketch skills to the very much better artists who might come along. I don’t want to ruin anybody’s Saturday by having organised something that turns out to be dreck. I don’t want the responsibility or the pain or the humiliation.

But I do want to grow. So I’m going through with it. If you have paper and pencil, feel free to join me – as you cannot possibly be worse at this than me, and even if by some amazing chance you were, I will be kind and supportive and happy to see you, because that’s what I’m hoping to other, better, artists will be for me. And I'm already in contact with one accomplished, lovely artist who will be coming along, and that's a GOOD start.

So growing is painful. But necessary. I’m growing into a different form of writing too – two different forms, actually. Excellent Agent has me working on a book-length non-fiction. I feel quite odd about it: one the one hand, it’s making me a better writer, on the other I’m nervous that I could end up ‘doing’ non-fiction for life when I really want to be a novelist. So I’ve opted to grow in another way too –I’ve found an artist with whom I’ve very excited about working on a graphic novel, provisionally entitled Savage’s Steam Emporium.

Todd Alan is great, nearly as driven as me, and proving to be fun to work with. Of course I am not going to become a full-time graphic novel writer, but it’s been a dream of mine since I picked up my first Marvel comic, aged 12. And I’m equally terrified about this too: maybe Todd will put in hours of work for no purpose, maybe publishers will laugh at us, maybe Excellent Agent will blow her stack at me for doing this (EA, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry!) when I should be working on serious income-generating projects.

But I’m growing. And that is the only thing to do. What doesn’t grow, stultifies, and who wants to be a stult?

2009-11-16T11:05:00.002Z

Sooo… the things I wanted to talk about:

Jim Murdoch’s new novel, Stranger than Fiction. I really enjoyed this, and Jim’s profoundly idiosyncratic view of the world is always fascinating. I tried to come up with one of those pithy one-liners that you are supposed to use to encapsulate a project for the movie industry (which is popularly supposed not to be able to cope with more than a sentence of information at a time) and what I decided on was Alan Bennett meets Douglas Adams! The characters from Jim’s previous novel are resurrected, having died at the end of the last one, in a manner not unreminiscent (is that a word?) of Eoin Colfer’s continuation of the work of said Douglas Adams. I loved it. Jim’s novel, I mean, not Eoin’s – haven’t read that and probably won’t – I’m not sure why I don’t like writers picking up the work of deceased literary stars and taking it on, but I don’t.

Writers who won’t – don’t get me started! I have been talking to a writer for seven months (seven!) about a project that she’s capable of achieving and has all mapped out, but she just can’t bring herself to start. Way back in 2006 Fortune Magazine’s Geoffrey Colvin wrote an article highlighting research that shows that the gap between success and failure is filled by practice and consistent feedback on the quality of that practice. Now I’m not a great fan of workshops, because I think they become an end in themselves for many people, but if some writers just used a quarter of the time they spend thinking and talking about their work on actually getting words down, they would develop some of that practice and might find that not only did their ability to work improve, but the work itself did too.

But then there are writers who won’t stop. I feel guilt every November when I watch some talented writers diving into NaNoWriMo with flailing abandon. You see, when I was a NaNo coordinator I pushed a lot of these people into their November excess and now I watch in horror this one and only time of the year that they write anything at all. It’s an unintended by-product of NaNo frenzy that some writers find they can’t get into the habit of writing all year round, or writing without the plaudits and excitement of the massive social network that surrounds the event. And this means that in November they are happy to produce 50 or 70 or even 90 thousand words that they put in a drawer and forget about. It’s as if they store up all their writing stimulus through the year to splurge it out in one great orgy of unstoppable wordiness. Okay, it’s not my problem (I’m not a coordinator any more, for one thing) but it does worry me more than a little that NaNo might be destroying writers rather than creating them. Anybody else got any evidence, especially to disprove my theory that a few writers can only perform under NaNo stimulus?

And I was going to blog about an average day in my life, but it’s too depressing to contemplate the deadlines looming over me right now, so I shall save it for next time.

The picture shows Morgan, formerly known as Toulouse, but she wouldn't answer to it ...

2009-11-10T15:25:00.002Z

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 ...

2009-10-28T16:59:00.002Z

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

2009-10-20T14:42:00.005Z

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.

2009-10-15T15:12:00.002Z

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 ....