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…