Win a copy of “Short Circuit: a guide to the art of the short story”

I’ve written a chapter for this guide on how to write short fiction. Lots of interesting stuff here and all of it by published writers. To win one of 5 copies, try your luck HERE

WordPress

At the day job, I use a grandiose and self-important web content management system, one that lends itself airs and post-justifies big bills to clients by declaiming that it is an “enterprise solution”.

Does it have a spellcheck? No.

Does it have a wordcount per field? No.

Does it think that users need their lives made easier? Apparently not, to judge by the complicated way things need to be input.

As standard, WordPress has:

• spell check
• grammar check
• word count
• an easy-to-use interface

And lots more is constantly being added. So, time to say well done and thanks.

Reading students’ work

Assignments had to be handed in just before Halloween, so at the moment my evenings are taken up with marking them. I’m really enjoying this, the only trouble so far has been some slight unhelpfulness on the part of my computer…

What I like, actually, is when a few people select the same topic to write about. I’m fascinated to see how many different slants they can find. It’s not just that no two assignments are the same: no two are even vaguely similar. It’s something like a voxpop, only with each person delivering 750 words of crafted text. Whereas if they’d been door-stepped by a TV crew, the probable end result would have been fifteen seconds of crushing embarrassment.

Repetition vs textual cleverness

Repetition was something English teachers told you to avoid. ‘Vary your expressions’ they’d say, or, ‘Can you think of another way to say that?’

Repetition is unpopular with a lot of writers too, but when writing for the web it’s OK to use the same term several times. Repetition helps make it really clear what you’re talking about. It doesn’t mean you think your readers are stupid – only that you accept that they haven’t time to hang around, they just want to quickly skim-read the page and get on.

In a magazine style web page that’s a trusted source – a space they visit regularly – online readers tend to slow down a little, but on most factual sites they want to:

1. get in
2. find what they’re looking for
3. get something done

And they don’t want any textual cleverness to trip them up along the way.

The Bells at Christchurch by Lane Ashfeldt (reading, c5 mins)

Writer friend Samuel Taradash dropped by one sunny lunchtime with his portable recording gear, and we went for a walk and recorded an outdoor reading of my story The Bells at Christchurch. We thought we’d picked a nice quiet spot, but we were right by the train tracks. ‘Cessed la Vye,’ as my sixteen-year-old friends would have said, once upon a time. Anyway, here it is if you want a listen.

Sam’s story ‘King for a Day’ is published in What We Were Thinking Just Before The End, the same collection in which ‘The Bells at Christchurch’ appears. More on What We Were Thinking Just Before The End at The Green Press.

The underground library

I will have become a real commuter the day I start religiously bringing a book with me. Not to read, but to carve out a space on the train, to ward off the noise and the spurious intimacy of rush hour. No wonder so many books are sold in London – they are sword and shield, blanket and magic potion.

London’s reading bedroom

Been going into work early, sometimes even early enough to get a seat. The Tube is very bedroomy then. No one speaks. Some women paint on make-up, hold out little mirrors to check they’re doing a passable job. But that’s rare. Sleeping or reading are the usual things. Mostly people read books. A guy next to me is reading history: the Age of Europe. 1600s, I think. He turns the pages incredibly slowly. I ask if it’s the Age of Asia now, but he says no, today we are in the Postmodern Age. He closes his book and gets off at Mornington Crescent, leaving me thinking, Funny that, because Postmodern sounds so old… Like aeroplane or Hi-Fi Stereo. Hovercraft, Information Superhighway. So what age do we live in? Perhaps the Age of Plastic. Yeah, still.

Dead Angels: reading with video (BBC, 1.5 min)

(If the video screen isn’t the right shape, just click on the post title to see a version with a full-size screen.)

I went over to west West London (White City tube) to record the sound for this, and I’m told it had an airing as part of a bluetooth radio venture over the summer. The recording is an extract from the story  ’Dead Angels’, published in Down the Angel and up Holloway. Someone at the BBC provided the video images, which are pretty authentically Angel-like. It was fun. I wouldn’t mind doing more of this some time.

On some French Fashionable Novels, with a plea for romances in general

(from The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh by William Makepeace Thackeray)

Tea-parties are the same all the world over; with the exception that, with the French, there are more lights and prettier dresses; and with us, a mighty deal more tea in the pot. There is, however, a cheap and delightful way of travelling, that a man may perform in his easy-chair, without expense of passports or post-boys. On the wings of a novel, from the next circulating library, he sends his imagination a-gadding, and gains acquaintance with people and manners whom he could not hope otherwise to know. Twopence a volume bears us whithersoever we will;—back to Ivanhoe and Coeur de Lion, or to Waverley and the Young Pretender, along with Walter Scott; up the heights of fashion with the charming enchanters of the silver-fork school; or, better still, to the snug inn-parlor, or the jovial tap-room, with Mr. Pickwick and his faithful Sancho Weller. I am sure that a man who, a hundred years hence should sit down to write the history of our time, would do wrong to put that great contemporary history of “Pickwick” aside as a frivolous work. It contains true character under false names; and, like “Roderick Random,” an inferior work, and “Tom Jones” (one that is immeasurably superior), gives us a better idea of the state and ways of the people than one could gather from any more pompous or authentic histories.

Citation needed (Wikipedia)

Incidentally, I love it when Wikipedia says ‘citation needed’ – evidence of the multiple personalities behind the machine.

Conjunctionitis

One of those mornings (at the day job) when I’m wrapped up in my work and keen to write more. There’s a faintly anachronistic discussion about whether or not conjunctions may be used to start a sentence, but it’s nice to be working somewhere that considers such things, I’m thinking, as I walk to the market to buy lunch. And yeah, there was a time when received wisdom ruled this to be one of many things you ‘couldn’t’ do, which you knew people did do, really. But that was way back before the accepted usage argument gained credence….

What Wikipedia says:

“Authorities do not all agree on the status of sentences that start with coordinating conjunctions. Some [citation needed] consider these to be grammatically incorrect. Others consider it an issue of style.”

Crowding and Leaping [Ursula Le Guin]

“Crowding is what Keats meant when he told poets  to ‘load every rift with ore’, … never use ten vague words when two will do…Vivid, exact, accurate, concrete, dense, rich: these words describe a prose that is crowded with sensations, meanings and implications…

“But leaping is just as important. What you leap over is what you leave out. And what you leave out is infinitely more important than what you leave in. Listing is not describing. Only the relevant belongs. Some say God is in the details; some say the Devil is in the details. Both are correct.”

from Steering the craft by Ursula Le Guin, in a chapter called ‘Crowding and Leaping’.

launch of ‘Dancing with Mr Darcy’ at Foyles

‘Dancing with Mr Darcy’ editors Sarah Waters and Lindsay Ashford were there to celebrate and endorse the book, which is a collection of short stories inspired by Jane Austen, published by Honno.

The authors gathered together to hear a reading of the winning story by Victoria Owens (pictured here in the centre). It was my first time having a story published in a collection in which all the authors were women, and I don’t know if that is why, but there was something extra nice about it.

Later I caught up with fellow London author Andrea Watsmore, and a few of us took Jane  (and The Little Stranger) to the pub. I wonder what Jane Austen would have made of the girl with the bright blue hair?

Writing for the web

So many things about writing for the web are different from writing for print. As part of the day job I’m churning out topical pieces that disappear in a barrage of tweets, each crafted to exacting criteria. There’s even a fixed word length per sentence that we must not exceed. It’s a production line of words for a service that gets a big readership. It’s just, I worry that I’ll not be able to write the way I used to any more; that the rules will become so internalised that I’ll forget how to have fun with words.

Words I learned today:

Purdah, Darwinopterus.

My hairdresser friend

is coming to town for some kind of hairdressing show, and I am so pleased that I happen to have had my hair cut recently. Unless you too have a hairdresser friend, the enormity of my relief may be lost on you. It’s those puzzled, almost pitying looks, accompanied by the kind assurance that he’d love to cut my hair, if only he had the time…Then I see myself in a shop window on the way to the Tube: although my mop was scissored last week and I witnessed great chunks of it lying on the floor, it’s growing back superfast. By next week when he gets here, it will be wild as ever.

Scariness at the checkout

Have women’s magazines got worse? Once, I would only get depressed by them if I read every page. Now, I only need scan the front cover at a supermarket checkout, and I’m feeling ill. Extreme weight-loss sagas, incest, murder, self-harm, near-death experiences. Oh, and the inevitable calorific recipes, offered perhaps as ammo for the weight battles. Very scary. Perhaps it’s time to get to grips with self-checkout.

.

My favourite library

It’s quiet here, but busy too, and it’s a place where I feel I belong. Speech is rare because, like me, other people here are busy writing, making notes, or simply reading. Of course, life couldn’t be like this all the time – it’s a relief at times to go over the road for a coffee and hear voices again. But it’s great, I love it.

I was in a different library recently, one newly built with public funds… There were 50 people there, all quietly reading, when in walks this one guy yelling into his mobile. You know those ‘I’m-on-the-bus’ conversations? Well, this time it was ‘I’m-in-the-library’. The person at the other end didn’t believe him, he kept on saying ‘I’m-in-the-library’, louder each time. This guy didn’t want to use any of the library facilities except an armchair; he settled in one near me, still talking. After a bit I gave up and left. A librarian saw, and apologised. ‘I can’t say anything,’ she said. ‘Our new policy says it’s OK to talk or use your mobile phone.’ Weird. There are already so many places to use a phone. Why would we need another?

Offline for a bit

There’s been a gap since I last posted here. Been writing a fair bit of factual stuff for work reasons. Interesting to have a change of focus and hack out loads of really really short pieces on a range of one off topics, working to a rigid house style. The way things are going in terms of people getting fired for commenting on their jobs online, though, you won’t catch me giving away too many facts on who this is for, or saying much more about it.

Getting to the end

I met short story writer Helen Simpson once and asked her about the fact that Granta had named her as one of its Best of Young British Novelists a decade or so earlier. “Which novel was that?” I asked quite innocently, thinking that I ought to give it a read. But it turned out she got the nomination while the novel was still in progress, and in the end she never finished it. “It’s hard keeping all that story in your head,” Simpson said. “Short stories I can manage, but not novels.”

An interview

Chawton village

There is a little interview with me up at literary website Jane Austen in Vermont, whose editors have amassed a veritable treasure trove of all things to do with Jane Austen, past and present. Site editor Janeite Deb invited me to talk about the forthcoming collection ‘Dancing With Mr Darcy’, edited by Sarah Waters.

Just read a brilliant short story by Muriel Spark

It is called ‘Bang Bang You’re Dead’ and I point blank refuse to say what it’s about because it is one of those stories that packs a lot into a few short pages, and deserves to be read. Analysing it here would spoil it for anyone who wants to read it later.

I think Penguin reissued some stories by Spark recently. I wonder if this one is included or not? Apparently ‘Bang Bang You’re Dead’ was first published in 1961.

Election night remembered

So last year Steve Moran asks everyone to share their election night thoughts (yes, yes, the one in north America) and for some reason around nine months later it gestates into a web page. Here.

The literary remix – problem or not?

This thing of reversioning other people’s books is so complex and varied, it’s hard to have a consistent opinion on it. If it was down to me I wouldn’t want a rule barring all books of this kind but for each work to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. If it had genuine merit in its own right, let it pass; if not, then not. Only, who would decide?

Once upon a time, good taste or a good editor took care of this sort of thing and saved the rest of us from exposure to it. Now, where is either when you want them? That just isn’t how it works any more. Self publishing and web publishing leave the decision in the hands of the punters, who vote with their cash or their cursors.

But if JD Salinger cared enough to sue over ‘Sixty years later: Coming through the rye’*, the recent unauthorised “sequel” to his classic ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, then part of me is glad he won. And part of me wonders, would it have sunk without trace had he not bothered? The supposed sequel features as central characters one Mr Caulfield and one Mr Salinger, and its writer, perhaps as a marketing aid, took as his pseudonym the name JD California. It may be unfashionable to stand up for copyright just at the moment, but without wading around in the mire of side-taking I can say this – what is so wrong with originating your own creative work and taking your chances on whether it sells?

This applies as much to music as to fiction. So much ‘new’ music consciously emulates sounds that are 15, 20, or 30 years old (mostly between 27 and 32 years old just at the moment, but it all depends on what is selling). The trouble is, it can be hard to know if you’re listening to a recent remix or to the original. It is one thing to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’, another to lazily piggyback-ride them to death.

Death is of course an important consideration. It is a very fine thing for publishers if the author whose work is being revisited [or remixed, or mashed up, or perhaps as some might say, ripped off] is dead. Ideally they will be very dead, so dead in fact that copyright is no longer a concern; this reduces the risk of a court case somewhat. So, Quirk books will follow up the literary mash-up ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ with ‘Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters’ — ‘60% Austen and 40% tentacled chaos’. Other publishers have joined the goldrush and plan to release titles such as ‘Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter’ (subtitled ‘She Loved Her Country; She Hated Demons’) and ‘I am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas’. See the Guardian for more.

The Salinger case proves that when borrowing heavily from another writer’s work, it’s not enough for the author concerned to be merely old and reclusive. They really do have to be dead. And preferably, they should not have a powerful estate taking care of how posterity perceives their work.

What would reduce the risk further, I’d suggest, both to publishers and perhaps to readers, is for the writer to bring enough new material to the project for it to genuinely “belong” to them as author. For example reviewers who decribed the 2007 Booker shortlisted novel Mr Pip as “Lloyd Jones’ imaginative riff on a classic Dickens novel”, did so safe in the knowledge that Great Expectations was just one of the many flavours running through the novel. Lloyd Jones did not rely upon it so heavily that his readers needed to have read Great Expectations in order for Mr Pip to make sense.

Rendered as a percentage? Hard to say, but not more than 2 or 3%.

Personally I’m not sure a 60:40 ratio of old to new is fair, even if on the face of it, it’s legal. The author (or publisher) doing the borrowing ought to bring more collateral to the equation than that.

Jane Austen with zombies

When I said what came next might be something Jane Austen would hate, I didn’t mean the video in that last post — which I have a feeling she wouldn’t really object to. No, I meant Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which people may have noticed in their bookshops recently. It is anyone’s guess how Jane Austen would react were she brought back to life to comment (the most annoying aspect, from her point of view, might be that the writer responsible has probably minted more than she ever made from the sale of her own books). But I suppose I’m slightly concerned that if this is a hit, we’ll be treated to a ‘literary’ diet of zombies with everything (which here means, everything classic with expired copyright). Like chips with everything, that could be a little dull. The one person I know who has a copy of this book is saving it for when she goes on holiday, so if you’ve read it or have strong views, do get in touch.

Jane Austen in Chawton

Two hundred years ago, in July 1809, Jane Austen moved to Chawton village in Hampshire, where her brother had inherited the local manor house from a cousin. Jane lived with her mother in a cottage on the estate, now the Jane Austen House Museum. Here, she revised the manuscripts of ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Northanger Abbey’, and wrote ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘Emma’ and ‘Persuasion’.

I am not sure whether to be surprised it is as much as two centuries since Jane Austen’s work began to be published, or surprised that it is only two centuries. Her work has had a massive influence on literature and on attitudes to life in these parts. And she is big in Bollywood too. What next? Well, it may be something she’d hate… but if she was around today, who knows?

A big fat zero

The noughties are nearly gone.

Just as we got used to writing and saying the word ‘Noughties’ in unembarrassed fashion, the decade is about to be over. And what a nothing of  a decade it was. A decade in which the art, music and writing of other decades was endlessly recycled, a decade in which an attack on two buildings became the justification for a so-called ‘War on Terror’ in which many thousands were murdered and others went hungry, while in countries geographically (but not otherwise) far removed from all this, we became overly interested in food and ate far too much of it, then dieted or went to the gym or the doctor to remove the resulting fat, and spent our time watching celebrities do the same thing. Technology allows us to connect with people anywhere on the planet, but those who have advertising money to spend keep trying to herd us into mass market spaces where we will endlessly watch and listen to just those same few people that we are all on first name terms with and about whom we already know far too much.

What is a drabble?

Narrating a tale in six words is a tall order, but 100 words is a great length to work with.

The hundred-word story been popular among science fiction writers since the 1980s, and is sometimes referred to as a drabble — no, not after Margaret Drabble, but after a usage coined in Monty Python’s 1971 Big Red Book.

The success of Dan Rhodes’ Anthropology, which contains 101 101-word stories, testifies to the fact that it is a length that can be popular with readers as well as writers.

Here are a couple of  sample 100-worders:

Mould by Dan Rhodes

I’m hopelessly in love with a bland girl. She has never said or done anything interesting. I spend hours trying to work out why I’m so deeply attached to her. I can’t find the answer. Her hair is boring, her face is boring and her body is boring. Every time I come home from work to find her slumped on the sofa, surrounded by used yoghurt pots, my heart explodes and I feel giddy, like I’m walking on air. I take her lifeless hand, kiss her pale cheek and say, ‘they broke the mould when they made you’. She rarely responds. —From ‘Anthropology and other stories’ by Dan Rhodes, (Canongate, 2000).

Roaring Water Bay by Lane Ashfeldt

Auntie Rose was the vintage of the oldest penny buried in the garden: 1892. She wore her hair in a white bun. She made bread and scones, she planted hyacinths and forsythia, she scolded and comforted, clucked and sweetened. In her late nineties she went ‘home’ on a visit. Within weeks she was dead and buried in the cramped family grave, as if the very land itself had killed her. Only then did I learn of her lost child, the ‘sin’ that made her leave, and understand why she would say to me, defiant, “they can scatter my ashes over Roaring Water Bay”. —Published in www.the-phone-book-com

[this post was adapted from a longer article by Lane which was previously published by Arts Council England].

Reading at Respect Festival, NW London

Ooops, meant to add a link earlier for this event tomorrow – at Respect Festival, Willesden, where I’m reading along with several writers who contributed to the heftily titled anthology What We Were Thinking Just Before The End (aka ’WWWTJBTE’  — and no, I don’t know how to pronounce that either. Maybe I am not East European enough.) Anyway, all that is happening 6pm-7ish, at the Shh tent, Respect Festival, Roundwood Park. Entry is free, and there will be music and other entertainments in the afternoon and into the early evening, and hopefully some more sunny weather, too. How to get there.

And the winner is…

I put this up late yesterday as a comment but then it seemed to vanish into nowhere. Thanks for both public and anon entries to the “what is Romantic” tiebreaker. Good answers all round (this includes the one that came anon). I like the way Mr Taradash brings Mills & Boone into this. Reading his and Ossian’s definitions, it does stretch the brain a little to figure out how we get from the Romantics to Chick Lit. But I think the phrase “limp-wristed heroism of the Celtic twilight ” swings it, really. So the winner is….    Ossian.

Well done Ossian, will be in touch to schedule delivery of your copy of Punk Fiction.

How long is a short story?

Someone asked my advice about this the other day — which prompted this post. It is a question many people ask themselves when they write their first story. But “How long is a short story?” is not always a helpful question, as short stories don’t have to be a set length. “How long do I think this particular story needs to be?” might be a better place to start.

There are norms, however. In the UK, most published short stories are upwards of 2,000 words, and rarely more than 5000 words. Chekhov is often referred to as a master of the short story, but his stories can seem surprisingly unbrief to a modern reader, clocking in at often upwards of 10,000 words a tale. A random example, ‘On the Road’ (1886), is nearly 7000 words long and opens with a 500-word description of the setting and main characters.

Since Chekhov’s day (most of his stories were first published between 1883 and 1903), story lengths have shrunk dramatically, perhaps to fit shorter attention spans, and perhaps also to fit newly available means of delivery – including screen, phone, blog etc. Readers have also have become more sophisticated “users” of narrative, capable of speedily picking up subtle narrative clues.

Hanif Kureishi’s story ‘Weddings and Beheadings’, controversial runner-up in the National Short Story prize a few years back, weighed in at just 1007 words. And going shorter still, the hundred-word story has been popular among science fiction writers since the 1980s. It is sometimes referred to as a drabble — no, not after Margaret Drabble, but after a usage coined in Monty Python’s 1971 Big Red Book.

There are a number of online outlets for very short fiction, referred to in order of decreasing size as flash fiction (approx. 1000 words or less), micro-fiction or one-page stories (usually 250 words or less) or nano-fiction (how short can you go?). Ernest Hemingway is among the writers who have played with the six-word story, with the following: “For Sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”

Other six-word miniature stories include William Gibson’s, first published in Wired online: “Bush told the truth. Hell froze. And AL Kennedy’s, (from the Guardian): “He didn’t. She did. Big mistake.”

Such admirable brevity is not always a plus in the marketplace. Stories published in print magazines in the UK will rarely fall below 800 words (or exceed 3000).

An answer as imprecise as “probably between 800 and 3000 words” may not be what you’re looking for, but for writers working in the UK it is a quite a useful answer. If targeting a particular publication their own guidelines (typically listed under ‘Submissions’ where the publication is a website) will narrow this down.

Win a copy of Punk Fiction

Tie-breaker Q: Who were the Romantics and what defined them? NB this is a no-google question, please just answer Rorschasch style with the first thing that comes into your head, sending your answer as a comment. The winner will be contacted by email and the book sent to them by post. Deadline to enter: 21 June 2009

Punk Fiction reviewed in The Guardian: “You leave its pages realising that being a punk really just means being young, high on the fumes of freedom and puffing your lungs up big enough to breathe life into the world.”

Question about a writers ‘movement’

Does anyone reading this know who the Romantics were? Or why they were called that?

This is WITHOUT Google, without any other online search or phone-a-friend, just what you KNOW. I am just as interested in wild guesses as I am in the truth. Who you think they are? Or might be? If you cannot hazard names, hazard a century or a theory about how best to describe them. Imagine there is a huge prize to motivate you (there isn’t).

Actually there could be a prize, will have a rummage and make an offer tomorrow…Answers in a comment box please. Anonymity guaranteed if wished – just say Not for publication in your comment. Ta very muchly…

I’m reading tonight

at the Pulp Net Short Story Cafe (which is at Costa Lower Regent Street, London and runs from 7pm to 8.15ish approx).  Nicholas Hogg and I will read from Punk Fiction, Lynsey Rose and Bilal Ghafoor from WWWTJBTE. A chance to have a look at both books, maybe buy a copy if you like what you see.

Poetry just got interesting

Looks like new poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy is not the type to go gentle into that good night. Her first move in the job as state poet has been to bite the hand that feeds — unlike the guy in the job before her (what was his name again?) whose poetry was so spectacularly inoffensive that no one remembers much about it, or him. With ‘Politics’,  Duffy shows she has her finger on the pulse and is not afraid to say her bit. She has also donated the stipend for the job to a Poetry Society prize fund. Just as well, perhaps — whoever pays it out might have tried to claw it back.

What we were thinking just before the end

Just launched: What we were thinking just before the end. The end of what exactly is not clear, but all the same something about this book of writing by London based writers seems in tune with the times. My piece in the anthology, ‘The Bells at Christchurch’, is set in my all-time favourite (surviving) Dublin pub, O’Neills. Incidentally, I do hope the end of O’Neills is not nigh… it has stood on Suffolk Street for 300 years – roll on the next 300.

Green pages

Things are hotting up over at The Green Press who are gearing up to launch their first book in about 10 days time…It is great to see as new small press come online, full of ideas and enthusiasm. If you are in or near north west London, why not mosey over to the launch event on 28 May. See their site for details.

Chocolate, fiction and chance

Apparently the publishers of ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ discovered by chance that it’s no bad thing in sales terms for a book to have a thematic link with chocolate. This was not uppermost in my mind when I wrote a story — part fiction, part travel memoir — set in a squatted German chocolate factory. Had I been thinking sales, my story might not have contained dodgy, going-off chocolate  – unlikely to have such a positive impact! 

The curious can find an extract over at Identity Theory. But to what extent  a writer should be thinking sales is another story… When commercial appeal comes naturally, great — but it’s a hard thing to fake. Lots of good writing would never have been published — might never have been written, in fact — if all writers and publishers chose their projects on the basis of sales predictions.

Predictions can only apply to cases where there’s a precedent, hence the copycat trends you see in fiction. (Which incidentally operate in spite of common-sense factors like boredom: just because a customer bought X book, does not mean they’ll buy X + 1. They might actually have got bored with the whole subject of X.) In cases where the writing is genuinely new, then chance is the operative word. Chance, or risk-taking, may not be very fashionable in an overly spread-sheeted economy, but this is what what the publishing industry was built on.

Book party in Soho

Saw a copy of Punk Fiction for the first time at the launch in Soho the other night. Guess what? It’s a hardback. A first for me. Publisher Portico has made a smart-looking book, and a wild time was had by all  -  the only way to clear a path to the bar was to shout out that you’d just got off a plane from Mexico and needed a hot whiskey for your throat. Here’s a few of the assembled literati at Dick’s Bar, editor Janine Bullman, and one more outside on the Soho streets.

Building with words

I’ve been asked to write a chapter for a book on the short story   – a project put together by writer Vanessa Gebbie. My chapter , ‘Building a World’, is mostly about writing and research. Oh, and cakes. I’m having fun with this… In another life I am a builder, and wear a leather belt that has deep pockets filled with hammers, pliers, chisels. I suppose this would have to be not just another life, but an alternate universe in which the mere fact of women working on building sites was neither a cause for alarm nor a media event. 

Launch event for Punk Fiction

The launch event for this anthology (which features a story by me), is Monday 27 April at ‘Dick’s Bar’, The Green Fingernail, 23 Romilly Street, Soho, London W1D 5AQ. Romilly St is that little one just south of Old Compton St, and entry is free so if you are in the area why not drop in….just ask for the Book Club Boutique. There will be readings, music and hopefully a little bit of rowdiness.

More here.

Another Girl, Another Planet

A story by one of my co-writers in the Punk Fiction anthology is up online at the Independent. The story’s called ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ (after the song by The Only Ones) and was written by Paul Smith from Maximo Park. If you want to hear the song, on the other hand, you should find it here…  Thought I knew this song, but the version in my head was more poppy, with less guitar– someone else must have covered it?

No 4 bus story: the lost laptop (2)

So your laptop is gone. Panic, nastiness etc. What do you do? 

You ask around, and someone tells you about the place where the No 4 bus goes to sleep at night. It’s a ten-minute walk away, or a four minute jog in this case. You follow the directions you’ve been given. The further you get from the high street the less sure you are that this secret building actually exists, but finally you round a corner and it looms ahead of you like an overgrown brick shed. 

They pack a lot of buses in here, and how do you know for sure that  your No 4 bus is one of them? You don’t. It could be driving down some other road entirely…It’s a tense search, up and down a lot of stairs in 17 identical No 4s in search of THE one – but in the end, you find the right bus. How do you know? The bag is still there, exactly where you left it. 

If you don’t like happy endings, tough. When your laptop goes AWOL, just like when your hard drive gets fried, a happy ending is exactly what you need.

No 4 bus story: the lost laptop (1)

[OK, this is not the story the BBC recorded - but it is a true No 4 bus story.] It’s about the time I left my laptop on the bus.

It’s your worst public transport nightmare, isn’t it? And you can’t imagine how anyone would… Well, here’s how: the No 4 rambles around north London like a free sightseeing tour, and by the time you reach the last stop you’re nearly asleep. Downstairs the driver helpfully flashes the lights a few times to signal to passengers that the last stop is coming up. He leaves the lights off in the end for some reason, so you stumble downstairs in the shadows, neglecting to notice the bag with your bits and bytes in it. Of course you’re some way down the road when it occurs to you how nice and light you feel, walking along without… without your bag!

Panic, nastiness etc…. (to be continued)

No4 fiction – short stories on the bus

If you catch a No4 bus in London soon, you could hear one of my stories on your mobile phone. Just switch on your phone and it will text you an option to download some blasts of short fiction as you travel. There’s a piece set in the Angel by me, one in Highbury by (guess?) yes, Nick Hornby, and rumour has it they’ve roped in a bloke called Pepys to cover Fleet Street. All this free storydom is thanks to BBC.co.uk. More on this as soon as I can grab a No4…

No 4 bus route on a map

Numbers game

If you’re in the business of writing short fiction, let’s face it, it feels great to get paid anything. So this week, rambling round London and seeing cop cars all over the place for the G20 thing, well, it’s done my head in a bit trying to understand the £1 trillion dollar rescue plan. I mean, what is a trillion, anyway? So me and a friend sat down with no calculator, just pen and paper, to work out how many seconds in a day. My bet was a million. Nope – only 86,400. The good thing about that is, maybe I dont waste as much time as I thought…

How to win 100,000 dollars for short fiction

1. Write some great stories 

2. Get them published

3. You then have to win the Sami Rohr prize

If steps one and two did not defeat you, then go for it – but you will need to have chosen your mother carefully. Click on the prize link to see why. Congrats to Sana Karasikov who is this year’s winner with her debut short story collection One More Year. And thanks to Tania Hershman who told me about this.

What nationality is punk?

I’ve been thinking how much longer things used to take to spread from one country to another. By the time I heard of punk I expect it had pretty much crashed and burned in London but it was still reverberating in other places. My story in this Punk Fiction book is set in Germany and the music is from America and Ireland. So when I saw a union jack on the front cover, I was a bit surprised. Seeing it on my blog looks kind of strange, too.

Punk Fiction

Here is the jacket for this Punk Fiction collection that I’ve a story in, which seems to be on its way out some time in the next month or two. It has lots of stories by writers with different viewpoints on the whole punk thing. Author royalties are being donated to the Teenage Cancer Trust. Here’s what Johnny Marr has to say in the introduction: 

All punk was about a story. It was about living the story in your own head. Good or bad, fact or fiction, it didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t boring. This book brings together stories with the punk spirit in the hope that it might inspire, provoke or simply entertain, as punk did. 

Long fiction

So yeah, I did finish ‘Solo’, in spite of the hefty page count. It’s billed as a hundred years in one life, but this doesn’t quite feel like what you get. Still… What I like about this novel is, it’s not afraid to be a little bit weird, to take an idea and run with it, maybe go a bit over the top here and there. Its anarchic structure means you sort of end up with two books – different yet connected, flipsides of the same tune in different styles.   

Reading Solo

I must admit the sheer size of this book scared me a bit. It’s not that I read short stories for attention deficit reasons — if I get into a good novel I’ll stay up all night to read it. This particular book, though, would take more than one all-night stint to finish. It’s about a man who is a hundred years old, and his attempts to make sense of all the changes (political, cultural, scientific etc) he lives through in his lifetime. The other night at Costa, while waiting for things to kick off at the Pulp Net Short Story Cafe, I asked Rana if he knew the Costa Book of the Year award was recently won by another novel with a 100-year-old narrator. He laughed and said he’d been on a panel at a literary festival the other day, and the guy next to him was Sebastian Barry. That is when they discovered the link between their novels. More on Solo later, if I finish it.

What word rhymes with ‘banker’?

The other morning when I took this photo, the other tube passengers bristled as the flash went off. But once they realised I wasn’t photographing them, they didn’t say anything. (Doubt they would have, anyway…. Northern Line, in the morning? Don’t think so.) Besides the sticker says it all really. Without offending nearly as much as the average free paper that people on the tube were busy reading.

 

 

2009 winner – Willesden Prize

Inspiring night at Costa Coffee for the Short Story Night, with writers Jo Lloyd, Jill Widner, and Margot Taylor. Wise words from Rana Dasgupta who this year replaced Zadie Smith as judge of the Willesden Herald prize and awarded top place to Jo Lloyd (pictured) for her story ‘Work’.

After praising the shortlisted stories Rana offered the advice that: “Short stories don’t have to be small in their scope.” Brains behind the Willesden Herald Stephen Moran arrived on cue with a box of books fresh from the printer. How he published it so fast remains a mystery, but he had a smart-looking anthology ready double-quick, and in the counter-recessionary spirit blowing round people chose not to go out for dinner, and spent on paper instead. Every last book was sold (Rana’s new novel as well as the Willesden Herald anthology). It was fun to meet the writers, all of whom came a long way to read. Big thanks to Rosemary Gomez who worked wonders with sound, and Steve who took photos when my camera battery dried up. (Perhaps it’s time to trade in the indestructible Nokia brick for something fragile that doubles as a camera.)

In April the short story night would have fallen Easter Monday, so a break seems highly probable. Check Pulp Net for more info on future events.

Willesden Herald + Rana Dasgupta

are at the next Pulp Net Short Story Cafe – Monday 9 March, Costa Lower Regent Street, Piccadilly, London Town.

Reading from their stories shortlisted for the Willesden Herald Short Story prize are authors Jo Lloyd, Margot Taylor and Jill Widner. The 2009 judge of the international competition, Rana Dasgupta, will announce the winners of the prize. Rana will also give a brief reading from his novel, Solo. It is hoped the anthology will be on sale.  Time Out   Map etc

Insomnia and lit crit

Could not sleep last night. A writer whose work I like sent me a present of a lit crit book maybe a year ago, and about 3am I found it and started reading it. It was about 4, I think, before I stopped. Maybe next time I should try maths — could work faster, on the sleep-inducing front.

Mini-recording

Recorded a scrap from a story the other day. All very mysterious as it won’t be out for a while, but it was fun. Will post a link when I get one… Had to read quite slowly. Took this pic on the way home…

Fiction Espresso

Last night was the first of The Pulp.net Short Story Cafe, held in the warm and cosy environment of Costa Lower Regent Street. An hour of stories and good company, with doses of caffeine to ensure it was not so cosy that we fell asleep on the sofa…. Here are a few pics…Stars of the show were Helen Simpson, Chris Killen, Stephen Moran and Davy Spens.  Thanks for their help to Daniel, Amanda, Bud McClintock, Anne Mulleanne, and to Jules Rayne and many others in the audience simply for being there and being in a good mood. Whoever said writers need to be miserable, you’re wrong – some of the time, at least.

Short Story Cafe

At Costa Piccadilly.

Next Monday (12 Jan) and 2nd Mondays (9 Feb, 9 March).

With Chris Killen, Stephen Moran, Davey Spens and Helen Simpson. Cool writers, hot drinks, good company. More at Time Out. And a map.

Be there if you can.