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.

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.

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?

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.

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].

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.

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.

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…

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. 

Six-month blog birthday

This blog has now been online six  months. Happy birthday, Lane7. I think it’s fair to say the complete absence of posts in recent months suggests I am far from the world’s most diligent blogger. Here I am, turning up like a bad penny, mainly thanks to a comment about Hawthornden from children’s writer Joan Lennon. (Hi Joan, congrats, I hope it goes really well for you. I am sure you’ll like the location. Who wouldn’t?) Well, I’d not really planned on writing a post today, and am finding the new WordPress layout good but distracting, so I’ll keep it short. Will be back soon with some updates on the fiction front.

To teach creative writing, or not?

A chance came up recently to do a bit more teaching. Coming at it from an editor’s as well as a writer’s perspective, I hope I have something useful to add. BUT… have just been reading The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland and, well, have you read it? Those creative writing exercises he slags off, where the narrator is a piece of toast, getting buttered…? And the character who is the author of five critically acclaimed, but unread, books. Very scary.

OK, funny too, but scary. Try this for a longer and better-argued review, all I can say is I kept having to stop, then start again… in appalled fascination. So: go for it, or run for it?

—

later

“Go for it if it is not too time-consuming”, says Women Rule. Agreed, it is rewarding to help people improve their writing, but yes it does take up time. And on a per-hour basis the pay is modest. Last month I skimmed Rodge Glass’s biography of Alisdair Gray, in which Gray was blissfully scathing about his time as a teacher of writers, at a Scottish university.

Still, the way the subject is taught can vary a great deal, and after surveying the course materials I’d be using (and reassuring myself there were no buttered toast exercises to be handed out!) I decided I’d be happy to give this another go.

LitCamp London 2008 in countdown mode

Been too busy to post, lots of emails, phonecalls and meetings and so on about LitCamp. I am glad it’s billed as an unconference because no one (including me) knows exactly what to expect. Don’t want to jinx it by going on too much here, but it’s been really good to find so many writers with strong ideas to contribute. All happening Fri 12 September at London Metropolitan University. Programme up, and final few tickets on sale, via the LitCamp site.  

Payment in kind

I’ve hired myself out freelance to a weekly magazine where my job is to pretty up other people’s sentences for a fee. All very well except that, as with all freelance work, there will be the inevitable wait to process a payment. I’m sure the magazine can afford it, though. Their West London office seems swanky enough, as does the parade of shops it’s set on. On lunch break, I feel instantly poor: at the organic deli next door they are selling gorgeous but unaffordable sandwiches and a face cream that costs £120 for a tiny tube. I try the sampler and my skin feels great. A quick calculation. That was about £5-worth of cream –  earnings for the day just went up.