SJ Bradley

Leeds Print Festival 2012

2012-02-05T10:06:00.000-08:00

Last week, myself and Nick - collectively The Print Project - did 'some stuff' for the Leeds Print Festival 2012. Nick had worked really hard letterpressing their invites and talk tickets, and we had prepared some live printing demos for the opening on Friday night, as well as a stall for the fair on the Saturday.

It was an excellent weekend and our thanks must go to Amber and Aran for organising the whole thing. It was a really intelligently programmed weekend, and the exhibits and stalls all were superb.

Those of you who couldn't make it might be interested to see the pics in the Storify collection I curated below. The pics and links are from various twitters, instagram accounts and wordpress accounts. Enjoy!

Donna Parker Goes to Hollywood

2012-01-24T21:31:00.000-08:00

As before, with second hand books: I think they are brilliant. This one - Donna Parker in Hollywood - was bought as a gift by somebody who knows me well, and who knew what a kick I would get out of the trashy cover. It was written by Marcia Martin, and published in 1961 by the Whitman Western Publishing Company.

Now, though I have never read this book - my to-read pile of books is about 15 books high at the moment, and rising - I like to think it's a tale of a young woman moving to Hollywood in search of glamour, and getting herself into all sorts of bother with boys and drugs, like in Valley of the Dolls. "From the moment the handsome boy sat beside her in the plane", the blurb reads, "Donna knew this trip was going to be special".

Here she is sitting thoughtfully next to her suitcase as she prepares, tearfully, to move away from her childhood home.

This is what all the glam folk in Hollywood get up to of an evening: a spot of crafting and make-do with their old clothes.

Not really sure what is going on in this picture. Maybe this is one of the boys she gets into trouble with, trying to give her a comforting clothes-on back rub.

Alice in Wonderland

2012-01-04T10:00:00.000-08:00

There's nothing - well, apart from a good library, maybe - that I like better than a second hand book shop. The best ones are the kind managed by full-scale atomic book-nerds. These have books everywhere. I went in one once where the shelves reached the ceilings. Every shelf was full of paperbacks of every stripe: fiction, poetry, fantasy, horror, the classics. In the corner, they had a display case with old classics with trashy covers. At some stage, a publishing company or two must have liked the idea of putting out editions of Bleak House with a picture of a maiden, her bosoms out, swooning into the arms of a shovel-jawed gentleman in his undercrackers. My eyes, readers. My eyes.

Those close to me know about my secret (not at all secret) love of old books, and ply me sometimes with gifts that pander to my obsession. This was how I came to be in possession of a 1971 Bancroft Classic reprinting of Alice in Wonderland, with some rather spectacularly creepy illustrations.

Here's the rabbit in court:

Here's Alice upon discovering the 'drink me' potion:

...and here she is getting angry in court:

Currently reading

Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith

Letterpress graveyard

2011-12-21T03:21:00.000-08:00

This was a nice early 'Christmas present'; a set of five cool printing blocks, salvaged from a letterpress graveyard! Clockwise, from top: house, concertina camera, car, bunnies, vacuum cleaner (ERRR, HOW WOULD I KNOW WHAT ONE OF THOSE LOOKS LIKE - RIGHT?? RIGHT???!!!) sheep, centre: more sheep. These little babies will get some printin' use some time in the New Year. For now I am having one of those - r ... resch? - - rezzzit ?? - - oh, rest! - - things that people talk so much about.

In accordance with 'having a rest', I don't have too much time to update my blog just now. To compensate, here is a picture of a kitten.

More soon. (Words, that is, not kittens)

Currently reading

1Q84 Haruki Murakami
The Tiny Wife Andrew Kaufman

Great political writers of our time: George Orwell

2011-12-08T10:57:00.000-08:00

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” - George Orwell

Born 1902 as Eric Blair, Orwell at the age of 30 disappointed his well-to-do parents by abandoning a well-paid career in the Imperial Police in Burma for the unstable life of a writer. His years in the Imperial Police, along with years spent in poverty in Paris and London, contributed to his strongly-held political convictions: “[They] increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes,” he was later to write. He became a committed democratic socialist.

Like many writers, he struggled in the actual act of writing, finding it uncomfortable and difficult. Yet he felt driven to continue his work, and was determined to develop political writing into an art. Pushed by his ideologies rather than a desire to create artistic works, political allegory and injustices created by existing systems were always a feature in his novels.

1984 was Orwell’s last book. He had seen much suffering in his life, living through both world wars and fighting in the Spanish civil war, and was opposed to any form of totalitarianism, whether it came from the Left or the Right. Though many read it as a warning of a possible future, Orwell maintained that he always intended it as a warning about the mechanisms used by the state to exert control over individuals.

In the novel, the state controls everything. Citizens are allocated their work, where they live; the state even controls the language they use - and they are manipulated into respecting and admiring their government, which has as its figurehead the shadowy Big Brother. Conflict in the novel comes from the desires of individuals against the state, and in particular in the love story between Winston and his girlfriend Julia. When they are together, the freedom of the human spirit prevails. This - love - is the one thing that Big Brother can’t control.

When their affair is discovered by the authorities, the two are separated and tortured into betraying one another. Their love has to be beaten out of them; it cannot be tolerated that they should have greater loyalty to someone other than Big Brother. “Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity…” Winston is told by a state enforcer, towards the end of the book. […] “… there will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother.”

He is told: “Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.”

The novel is one of the greatest of the 20th Century. It came out to almost universally positive reviews and is still much loved today. At the time of its publication, the Book of the Month club in America wanted Orwell to cut out large sections of the book, including its Newspeak appendix and the long section on Emmanuel Goldstein’s “The Theory and Practise of Oligarchical Collectivism”. Orwell refused. The publisher speculated that, by declining to make the cuts, he stood to lose a minimum of $40,000. But Orwell valued the political aspect of the work too highly to do any different; and the Book of the Month club decided to take on 1984 anyway. Orwell: “So that shows that virtue is its own reward, or that honesty is the best policy, I forget which.”

Currently reading
IQ84 Haruki Murakami

The Book in my Head is now on the Page

2011-11-22T08:21:00.000-08:00

Last night, I went to see The Book in my Head is now on the Page, a collaborative performance piece by Matt Bellwood and A Quiet Word. The piece is set and performed in the beautiful surroundings of The Leeds Library, on Commercial Street.

The audience were greeted at the doorway by a mysterious man in a strange wig. "Trick or stunt?" he asked us, jiggling ping-pong balls around in his pocket. Bouncing them off the tiles, he threw them up in the air, then caught them in his mouth - all four of them. "Did you know that the Leeds Library was first started by King Olaf with three pieces of wood in 1485?" he said, waving us inside.

Librarians checked us in at the doorway. "We are lucky to have such creative minds with us tonight," they said, stamping us in. They gave us each a book and a coloured ribbon. A trio of beautiful maidens, dressed in black, tied the ribbons around our wrists. "You are all such talented and important authors," they said. "But is one of the pages from your book missing?"

A young man on the stairs, introducing us to the history of the building, ushered us into the reading room. The smell of old books greeted us as the head librarian, an eccentric woman in horn-rimmed glasses and hot pink lipstick, told us about the importance of her work. "I am custodian of the words," she said. "Without my care, they would be forgotten!" Overcome with passion for her job, she crawled away on all fours, climbing the stacks and stroking the books with desperate hands. "Save the library!" she cried, with ever-more impassioned cries. "Save the library! Save the library!"

Onwards, and a man sat in a darkened room, waiting to tell the visitors tiny tales of the city. Sitting in a semi-circle around a map, the participants listened, enraptured, as he read short tales of overheard conversation, and arguments in the chip shop.

As our experience drew to an end, we were invited to find, amongst the shelves, the missing page from our book. On the balcony of the back room, we searched amongst the shelves for odd pages sticking out into the air; voices, telling tales, whispered from hidden places behind the books as we went on the hunt for the final page.

Absorbing, witty, and very imaginative, The Book in my Head is now on the Page sent me out into the night thinking seriously about some of the questions it asked. By drawing the 'audience' in very adeptly to be 'participants' - but never in an uncomfortable way - it makes attendees think about the nature of creativity. It makes the audience think about whether they see themselves as creative people, and about the value of their own creative efforts; and what inspiration they can gain from the everyday.

The Book in my Head is now on the Page will be shown again in the evening of Monday 28th November at The Leeds Library. Performances are about 20 minutes long and run every 15 minutes from 7pm until 8.30. To book a place call The Leeds Library on 0113 245 3071.

Currently reading

Tim Binding The Champion
Best American Short Stories (1993) Various - Edited by Tobias Wolff

BUSY FACE

2011-11-14T09:12:00.000-08:00

I'm a bit too busy to update properly at the moment, so here's a picture of a nice dog.

More soon.

Currently reading

Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vonnegut
Things fall apart Chinua Achebe

Christiania: Free Town

2011-11-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

Christiania - Free Town is a small section of Copenhagen, not far from the city centre.

The community was established in 1971, when a group of well-organised anarchists moved into a set of disused army barrack buildings. Today, 40 years later, members of the original community - as well as 'incomers' from later generations - are still there.

Anarchy is often misunderstood. Many people perceive anarchists to be dangerous individualists who want to do whatever they want, to please themselves, all the time. That's not necessarily the case. Behind anarchism is a principle of personal responsibility: everybody has to take responsibility for his or her actions, and has responsibility, too, to the people they live with. Anarchists resist the interference of state and corporate institutions. In any society, even an anarchistic one, you still have responsibility, and Christiania operates under simple 'common law': No private cars, no weapons, no hard drugs, and no violence.

The whole area, miraculously, has managed to avoid gentrification. Around the lake are a myriad of amazing self-built houses, made from mis-matching window frames, pieces of wood, and tile. Some are better built than others. Along with resistance to state interference comes greater reliance on the self, and not every anarchist can be a great builder. Take a few steps away from the more 'notorious' parts of Christiania - and you will find something interesting and beautiful.

Aphex Twinset

2011-10-09T03:11:00.000-07:00

Knit a Bear Face, a guerilla knitting group from Leeds, collaborated with Circuit Ben to make a knitted piano that makes ACTUAL SOUNDS. It was first exhibited at Light Night in October 2011, to much hilarity from the general public. Here are some of the videos. I thought you might all get a kick out of them....

Currently reading

Sisterwives Rachel Connor
Work Crimethinc.

Cops & Robbers

2011-10-09T02:48:00.001-07:00

The October issue of Cops & Robbers is out now! Cops & Robbers is a free DIY listings zine. It is run by volunteers and survives on donations and benefit gigs from the DIY community.

This month the illustrations were done by me & Nick of The Print Project. The pictures illustrate a 6-line 'fact-haiku' (written by me!) about the nature of activism. Over the past couple of weeks we've been typesetting and letterpress printing the text and illustrations. This is one of the projects that has been keeping me from updating this blog.

You can pick up a copy of Cops & Robbers at the Brudenell Social Club, at Jumbo Records, or at any DIY gig in Leeds.

Excuses, excuses

2011-10-02T03:59:00.001-07:00

Sorry, but I have been

far too busy to

update my blog lately.

Currently reading

The Millstone Margaret Drabble
This Boy's Life Tobias Wolff

Cops & Robbers

2011-09-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

Cops and Robbers is a free guide to DIY gigs in Leeds. It's a long-standing institution which lists gigs that are for fun, not profit, and not as a stepping-ladder into mainstream music industry success.

Run by a couple of hard-working volunteers, Cops & Robbers is itself a non-profit - you don't pay to list your gigs in it, and it carries no advertising. It survives on money from benefit gigs and the generosity of donors.

In and amongst the gig listings are illustrations, usually drawn by members of the local DIY community. At the moment, Nick & I (the print project) are working on illustrations for the next issue. I've written a short 'fact-haiku' about DIY and activism, and the text is illustrated with text pictures using large wooden letters and typography, mostly courtesy of Nick. I'll post up pictures of the whole thing when it is done - but for the time being, you'll just have to content yourself with looking at part of the text and a letterpress forme 'word-cloud'.

Black Dogs: Next to Nothing

2011-09-14T10:09:00.001-07:00

Black Dogs: Next to Nothing, an exhibition of the price of nothing and the value of everything, opens this coming Thursday. The exhibition contains work from over 30 individual artists and contributors, whose work has arisen from a series of discussions around themes of worth and value. The exhibition is in a disused shop unit on the 3rd floor of The Light - which is one of Leeds' 'destination' shopping centres. Luckily, the manager doesn't seem to mind having a critique of materialism installed there for 2 weeks.

Leeds' DIY art collective Black Dogs have been active since about 2003. Completely self-organised, voluntary and non-profit, the ethos is one of non-corporatism and being non market-driven. The Next To Nothing exhibition will pose questions connected to those themes: "What is the radical potential of thrift and an economical approach? When and why is something cheap? What does it mean to be not-for-profit or operate in a non-capitalist fashion? How do we value our time and how does this find expression through the things we do or make? When are we working and when do we play?"

The preview evening will be on Thursday 15th September, from 5-8. The exhibition is open until the 1st October, and its opening hours will be: 4-7 Mondays - Fridays, and 10-6 Saturdays.

Currently reading

The Millstone Margaret Drabble
Three to See the King Magnus Mills

Next to Nothing

2011-09-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

This is the latest in a long line of current projects... two letterpressed short stories for the Black Dogs 'Next To Nothing' exhibition, which opens at the Light in Leeds, on September 15th. The exhibition, which will include contributions from around 30 artists, and non-artist reprobates like me, is sited in a disused shop unit in one of Leeds' most 'aspirational' shopping centres, and explores our conception of worth and value.

I have two short stories included in the exhibition, both of which I typeset & printed myself: Hourly Rate, and The Most Wonderful Time of The Year.

The exhibition's preview is on Thursday 15th September, with an after-party gig at Wharfe Chambers (formerly the Common Place). It will be open until 1st October and will be open Mon-Thurs 4-7pm, and on Saturdays during the day.

Doing It Yourself

2011-08-22T02:54:00.001-07:00

A lot of people in publishing will tell you that self-publishing is the mark of failure. It's the last ditch resort, they'll tell you, of anyone whose work is so terrible they have no chance of publishing through conventional means. Unlike a band who put out their own record, or a director who funds his own film on a shoestring, self-publishing is considered to be the last refuge of the talentless. Her work is so bad, the received wisdom says, that nobody else believes in it enough to put it out.

In the punk scene, it's the norm to put out your own record (or agree to let a friend do it for you). A large part of the culture of punk is the strength of feeling against mainstream culture, and the corporations who control it. Large entertainment corps like Sony EMI make millions of dollars from the exploitation of musicians. They own the creative endeavours of those who work for them - the music and words they write, and their performances. They can even shelve a band's album, and stop the band from releasing it themselves, if its in their interests to do so.

"Is the publishing industry really as bad as all that?", you might ask. "Surely it's not so corporately driven as the music industry." It's true that there are lots of small presses doing excellent work. It's often the small presses that take the risks; they're often run on a shoestring, by people who have day-jobs who run their publishing house in the evenings and at weekends. These sorts of presses are usually run for love, not money, and they don't make a lot. (One of my favourites is Nightjar Press, who have been putting out a series of short story chapbooks for the past couple of years now.) Big publishing houses, on the other hand, have a responsibility to generate profit for their shareholders, and that isn't always going to mean that they're publishing great literature. Katie Price biography, anyone?

In some cases, the publishing industry actively works against the wishes of its authors. Once the manuscript is sold, the writer may lose a certain amount of power over what happens next. You may not always have a say in how the book is marketed, or what the cover looks like. If you care about whether people will read your book, and whether the content of it is accurately represented by how it looks on the shelf, you will care about the cover. Some publishing houses (hello, Bloomsbury) are well-known for grossly misrepresenting their authors' work with egregious covers. As recently as 2010, Bloomsbury published novels by Justine Larbalestier and Jaclyn Dolamore, both of which had non-white protagonists, with white models on the cover. Why does it matter? Simple answer, it matters because it's racism. The same thing has been done to Ursula K Le Guin's work. There's a comprehensive article on 'whitewashing' on BookSmugglers here.

The tools for self-publishing are now within the reach of most authors. As Zetta Elliot says in her HuffPo article on self-publishing, "Writers today have options. We don't have to wait for someone else's stamp of approval".

There are loads of different ways to self-publish, from e-publishing to offset printing to print-on-demand; each has their advantages and disadvantages. Time spent researching the various methods to decide which will suit you, and your work best, will definitely pay off here. In short, as writer Hamish MacDonald says in his article Do-It-Yourself Book Press (on the No Media Kings website), "Generally, self-publishing involves an inverse relationship of work to money: The more work you’re willing to do, the more money you can save; the more you want to just skip to an end product, the more it’ll cost you".

Self-publishing isn't by any means an easy route, and to my mind if you're going to do it you should endeavour to do it well. There's nothing worse than a self-published book that looks self-published - dodgy formatting, spelling errors, unbelievably shonky sentence construction. You shouldn't look upon this route as a quick route to publication because the simple truth is, if your work is bad, nobody will want to read it. Your work should be the best it possibly can be before you bring it out into the public eye. There's an excellent, if somewhat acid, article by the writer Chuck Wendig on common errors that self-publishers make on his blog terribleminds: "You think publishing is full of mean ol’ myopic gatekeepers and you can do it better? How is anybody supposed to take you seriously when you can’t even approach a fraction of the quality found in books on bookstore shelves, books put out by publishers big and small? ... [if] you’re going to put something out there, make it count."

In other words, make sure your work is ready. Rewrite it, edit it, keep on polishing it the same as you would if you were trying to impress a 'professional'. Going down this route requires much more dedication and self-discipline than does a conventional route. The person breathing down your own neck is you. You must be the one horse-whipping yourself into creating something great, into something that other people actually want to read; and once it's out, you have to be the one who gets around, who networks, who gets the book into shops and libraries. It's not an easy route, but it gives you more control, and maybe more satisfaction.

More information on self-publishing on the No Media Kings website

Next to Nothing

2011-08-18T01:39:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy summer. The second rewrite of the novel is almost done, and as well as getting ready for a spoken word appearance at the sadly cancelled Beacons festival, I've also been preparing some flash fiction for an exhibition. Next To Nothing, a collaborative project by art collective Black Dogs, will open on September 15th in a disused shop unit in The Light in Leeds. It will contain works by various artists, performers and musicians exploring our notions of worth and value. My contribution has been to write and letterpress two short stories on the theme. Above you can see some of the words from the story 'Hourly Rate'. The typeface, Secession, is one that I bought on a recent letterpress expedition. I like this typeface because it's got a nice Art Deco look to it. Have a look below at all of the copies I printed!

Currently reading

The scheme for full employment Magnus Mills

Bringing home the bacon

2011-08-10T01:24:00.000-07:00

Recently, I've had a couple of strange conversations about how much I make from my work as a writer. Having these sorts of conversations always reminds me of that David Sedaris joke: at parties, when people find out what he does for a living, people ask: "You're a writer? You've written a book? Oh, I might write a book. How much do you get paid?" The joke isn't always obvious to non-writers. They don't see how many hours of toil go into working on a novel, nor how little money you'll ever see back from those hours. Very few writers make money, and there are lots of great writers who worked their whole lives, leaving behind works of massive importance, who never made any more than the minimum wage.

Commercial success isn't necessarily a great thing to aim for. The problem with writing for money, as the saying goes, is that you'll have to write for money. But if you remove the burden of having to generate profit through your writing, you can devote yourself to writing whatever you like. That doesn't mean you dash off whatever crap comes into your head, and never push yourself to improve. All it means is that you're writing the work you think is important, the work that matters to you. It doesn't matter whether or not it has commercial potential. It matters that you care about it.

When you decide you want to be this kind of writer, you also have to figure out how you're going to do it. Above all else, you make sure you write, and that you've got as much time as possible to do it. It's not always easy, but there are a couple of ways to make sure you can write, and still have enough money to live.

One way is to find a job without much responsibility, where you can spend most of the hours you spend at the day-job writing. Raymond Carver, (ONLY ONE OF THE 20TH CENTURY'S GREATEST WRITERS, IN CASE YOU DIDN'T KNOW) spent many years as a hospital porter. He used to get all his work done in the first hour on the job, then spend the rest of it clacking away on his typewriter. (Or scribbling in his notepad, I don't know which method he used). That's RAYMOND CARVER, one of the greatest writers of OUR TIME. He wasn't above working in a hospital, and it will have given him a great deal of material to write about, too. Go figure.

Another way is to find a job well-paid enough to allow you to only work part time, so that you've got a couple of days a week to spend at your writing desk. Charles Ives, one of the forefathers of American composition, worked as an insurance clerk - AN INSURANCE CLERK - his entire life, and in the evenings composed some of the most groundbreaking works in the American musical canon. You didn't catch Charles Ives bitching, "Ohhh, I think I'll give up my day job as an insurance clerk to take a job writing advertising jingles, just so that I can truthfully say I'M A COMPOSER!" No! Charles Ives did not write music for money! He dutifully worked away in the evenings at his work, never allowing his lack of commercial or critical success to deter him from getting on.

In any case, an imaginary third option of making as much money as Dan Brown, and rolling around in bales of bank notes on a yacht, isn't really available to most of us. And if it were, would you really want to take it up? (Remember, when you give your answer, that you would have had to have written a book as bad as Angels and Demons). You'd basically be writing books for people who don't really like books very much. You think about that, and you get behind your desk, and stop worrying about being poor, and bloody well get on with it.

Currently reading

In American with Greenday Aaron Cometbus

Untitled Books - August 2011 issue

2011-08-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

Too excited about it to post in detail just now, but my short story Things that are Lost, and things that are Broken has just been published in the August 2011 issue of Untitled Books. Last night, on my way back from holiday I received a lovely text from them to say that they thought my story was excellent and that they would like to include it in the next issue. Would I mind terribly? No I would not. In fact, only being cased in the steel body of a car stopped me jumping all over the place in excitement. Click the link above to read it.

First experiments at making bookmarks for The Leeds Library...

2011-07-31T08:16:00.000-07:00

Currently, I'm embroiled in several projects in which art, literature and letterpress collide. This is one of the newest: a potential commission for letterpress bookmarks for The Leeds Library. Opening in 1768, the library is one of the country's oldest subscription libraries. It houses a marvellous book collection, which is chosen by and reflects the interests of its members, and recently they were kind enough to allow us to host Fictions of Every Kind there.

The library has a range of merchandise ranging from book bags to postcards and bookmarks. When Geoff told me they were thinking of having new bookmarks printed, I leapt right in to offer to letterpress some. (Everything looks amazing when you letterpress it). He lent me an old printing block that they have, and I got to work typesetting their address and contact details. Above, you can see some of the prototypes. The completed versions should be available before too long!

Currently reading

The Wayward Bus John Steinbeck
Collected Stories Raymond Carver

Letterpress nerdery

2011-07-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture of a nice dog I saw yesterday whilst on a print-related adventure.

Yesterday, I went to a strange place - a letterpress graveyard, if you will - with my letterpress conspirator, Nick. He had his eye on a proofing press, and I wanted to perv over many different kinds of type.

At the moment, I'm working on several letter-press projects. One is a collection of micro-stories for an exhibition themed 'Next to Nothing'. I'll letterpress print the stories and show them in the exhibition, which is going to be in a disused shop unit in Leeds later on in the year. There will be three stories, and my aim is to print each using a different typeface... so I needed to get my mucky little paws on some more of those lovely letters!

The chap who runs the strange place used to work with computers, and has gradually moved, bit by bit, into the world of antiquary. While we were there, he mentioned in passing that he would never go back to working back with new technology again. The mainstay of his business is in repairing and moving printing presses, but incidental to that has a massive collection of trays of type, printing press spare parts, and everything that goes along with it. Cases reached from floor to ceiling, each full with type trays. There were lots of rare typefaces, in all shapes and sizes, and I spent a pleasant hour standing on chairs and climbing over printing presses to look at them. I came away with two trays of an 20s style art-deco typeface which so rare it isn't in any of the books. (This is what I'll be using to print one of the stories).

In addition, the guy was looking after two of his friends' dogs and they were both running around the yard, yapping and getting excited. Here's a picture of them in action.

What does it take to be a writer's other half?

2011-07-08T09:14:00.000-07:00

Most of the column inches in this blog are taken up with me complaining about being a writer. The hours suck, it's poorly paid, and nobody ever says "well done". In fact, they are much more likely to say, "Would you please stop filling the house with scraps of paper, and get that bloody laptop off the kitchen table?"

It occurred to me lately that few of us would ever get anything done were it not for the support of our other halves. People of a creative mindset are wont to be flighty and inconsistent. Anything and everything interests us, and we can almost forget that the world is turning when we're absorbed in the act of creation. In my rush to get back to the writing desk, I'll often leave pans dirty and crumb-covered plates all over the worktop. Later on I'll come back downstairs and shout "WHO ON EARTH MADE ALL THIS DISGUSTING MESS", forgetting that in fact it is I who has the softest of hands from never bloody washing up.

Stability, that's important to us. The working life of any writer is filled end to end with discouragement. There is no steady ground beneath our feet. Every writer has her black periods. Quite apart from constantly doubting whether our work is really any good, we face discouragement from lots of other angles. A constantly growing pile of rejection letters or resounding silences, or sniping reviews can reinforce our belief that we're really not all that good at what we do. If we didn't have our other halves to support us when we're moping, or to remind us that we have to re-tax the car or break off to eat every now and again, we would probably be a bit depressed, as well as somewhat unproductive.

And the job of being a writer's other half is far from a rewarding one. You're attached to somebody who spends most of their free time staring moodily into a computer screen; and when they're not doing that, their thought processes are mainly taken up with the process of deciding What Happens Next. Your spouse's head is continually in an imaginary place - an imaginary place completely inaccessible to you until its creator has spent months of her life writing, rewriting, and editing it. On top of all that, what your scribbling beloved requires from you most of all is that you never, ever interrupt her while she is working.

So let's all give 'props' to our other halves - for putting up with our inconsistencies, for doing more than their share around the house, and for placing cups of tea unobtrusively just within reach of our hands when we are deep in the quagmire of a third or fourth edit. We would be nothing without them.

Currently reading

The Outsider Albert Camus
The Cossacks Leo Tolstoy

Now out!

2011-06-21T08:18:00.001-07:00

After months of hard labour, copies of my letterpress & handmade short story chapbook 'A Stranger Came' are now officially available! They're priced at £3.90 post paid to UK addresses - contact me for prices if you live outside of the UK. I'll accept payment by paypal, cheque, or the time-honoured method of sticking coins to a bit of card and sending them through the post and hoping for the best. Contact me at the email address in my profile, or leave a comment below, if you want one.

Let's get organised

2011-06-18T04:37:00.001-07:00

I keep promising myself I'll stop using the phrase, "Sorry I've been so rubbish at staying in touch lately. Things have been really busy at my end." I came out of my mother's womb saying it, and despite numerous resolutions to stop getting involved in things, I somehow always manage to fill every moment of spare time with doings. Whether it's organising, writing, going to the library, having meetings, or typesetting and printing, there's always something to do. It'll be on my gravestone: "Here lays Sarah Bradley. She wished there could have been more hours in the day."

Comma Press is seeking submissions to a structurally-based anthology called 'The Reveal'. Entries ought to be between 2000 & 8000 words in length, and entry is free if you've bought one of their previous anthologies. Entering is a bit complicated - you have to email your entry to two email addresses as well as sending a hard copy through the post - so look carefully at the guidelines.

Mslexia magazine, the magazine for women's writers, is running an unpublished novel competition for the first time ever! Entries can be of any genre, and the prize is a generous one - £5,000. To enter, send them the first 5,000 words of your novel; the entry fee is £25.

There's an exciting arts in the public realm festival in Chapeltown, Leeds, next week. Under the Paving Stones, the Beach aims to encourage interaction with creativity, and to offer different opportunities for the public to interact with different kinds of art away from traditional gallery spaces. There are all kinds of events from a pop-up art pub, to an interactive mobile phone experience that gets participants involved in the running of the "Independent People's Republic of Chapeltown".

As for me, I'm going to get my head down and get some work done....

Currently reading

The Crystal World JG Ballard
Sunset Park Paul Auster

Fictions of Every Kind now has its own website!

2011-06-08T10:39:00.001-07:00

Fictions has grown up. It's gone through a teenage phase of shouting "I hate you!" and "I didn't ASK to be born!", slamming the doors off all of the hinges and inviting it's mates around to run up and down the stairs like a herd of baby elephants, and now it's moving out.

Please go and visit Fictions of Every Kind in its new internet bungalow to see its baby photos, and to find out what it'll get up to next.

Fictions of Every Kind: Procrastination

2011-06-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

Photo by Nick of The Print Project

Fictions of Every Kind: Procrastination is our next event. It will take place on July 5th at The Leeds 'Secret' Library and will feature screenings of specially curated films around the theme of 'procrastination'. Award-winning shorts from Canada, the US, the UK and Ireland will be shown, and boxed wine will be provided. Entry will be free, although donations towards the cost of the boxed wine will be welcomed. There will be time and opportunity for writers to share their work. It'll start at 19.30 and will end around 21.30.
The 'Secret' Library - also known as 'The Leeds Library' (for that is its real name) is the city's oldest independent subscription library. If you live in Leeds, you have probably walked past it hundreds of times without even noticing its there. The doorway to it is snuggled between Britannia Bank and Paperchase on Commercial Street, Leeds, opposite LUSH. It was opened in the 1760s and boasted Joseph Priestley as one early member. Annual membership costs £25 for young 'uns between the ages of 18-25, or £75 if you are starting to get wrinkly, like me. However, you do not have to be a member to attend the 'procrastination' event, as one of us will be able to sign you in.

There are lots of things to love about this library. It has a beautiful tiled entrance hall and stairway, and old-fashioned library ladders, and is filled literally floor to ceiling with really, really old books. The collection is idiosyncratic and reflects the interests of its members. Any member can request for new books to be added to the collection; accordingly, it has a large collection on the occult, following the interests of a member who was evidently a casual Satanist, and rich sections on topography and American classic literature.

Behind the original library is an extension to the original building, which was completed in 1900. They call this 'the new room'. This is where you'll find all the books on travel, topography, and the occult. Every week, on a Thursday afternoon, specialist book preservers in white lab coats come to fix the old books. It is thanks to their work that the library is able to continue to hold a collection of marvellous old tomes.

Thanks for reading, and we look forward to seeing your lovely faces on July 5th!

A Stranger Came: Out Shortly!

2011-06-04T02:15:00.000-07:00

A close up of those bound edges

'Tis nearly finished! After months of labour, A Stranger Came is now (almost) completely bound, cut and ready to go. It will be out later on this week. Two things remain to be done: the pages trimmed, and for each copy to be numbered. I am sure I won't get writer's cramp doing the second one.

Let's have a look at those different-coloured covers in full.

L-R: White with ltd edition silver binding; cream; brown; pale yellow

Pale yellow; cream; brown; white with ltd edition silver binding

Currently reading

Trust me, I'm a junior doctor Max Pemberton
The Crystal World JG Ballard

What a bind!

2011-05-29T03:18:00.000-07:00

These are the pages of my short story 'zine A Stranger Came. Those of you who've been following my blog regularly will know that I've been typesetting and letterpress printing this story for the past few months. It's been a bit of a painstaking endeavour! The text is set in Morris Gold 8pt type, and because I didn't have enough of it to set a full page at a time, I instead spent many weeks typesetting two paragraphs at once, printing those, breaking up the type, sorting it, and then setting the next two paragraphs....

The last of the printing itself was finished about a month ago. (Special thanks at this point must go to Nick at The Print Project for teaching me how to typeset and print, and for letting me come over every week to print more bits of it.)

This week, the pages will at last get bound together. The rather marvellous Alice Rix is going to come around to lend a hand, and to help me work out how to bind it. Hopefully, by the end of this week, 86 copies of A Stranger Came should be bound and cut and ready for sale.

Here are the things you need for binding:

Clockwise from top: Craft knife costing £2.69 or less; hole punching device; hammer; embroidery thread.

More to follow.

Currently reading

Burma Boy Biyi Bandele
Not on the Label Felicity Lawrence

Fictions of Every Kind: Missing - two days after

2011-05-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

Gareth Durasow reading at Fictions of Every Kind: Missing

What a marvellous night we all had on Tuesday at the Library. My thanks go out to everyone who came out, making it such a success!

There were plenty of exciting newcomers to the open mic, and some brilliant contributions from our regulars. Many of the pieces were touching and thought-provoking. Approaches to the month's theme were diverse. The creativity in the air was palpable....

Catherine reads a piece on 'going missing' during the Open Mic

Our guest speakers were Gareth Durasow (pictured, above) and Nasser Hussain. We had been expecting Phil Kirby, but he was unable to make it at the very last minute. Gareth read from a set of poems, numbered 1 - 12, and the audience chose (by heckling) the order in which he should read them. It was funny and biting and inspirational, and we were really glad to have him. Nasser, an excellent addition to the bill, is a Canadian-born hip-hop influenced poet. His work riffed off and referenced Stevie Wonder and Run DMC, and his poems were read with fascinating rhythm. If you ever get the chance to see him perform, I really recommend that you go.

The night was closed by the marvellous 7 hertz, whose music perhaps can best be described as "improvised sound-paintings". Though it was late, and much beer had been drunk, the audience listened in a raptured silence, drawn in by the intertwining melodies and counterpoints.

Thanks again to everyone who came out ... hope to see you at the next one!

Late addition to Fictions of Every Kind: Missing

2011-05-18T12:44:00.000-07:00

Sometimes life throws you these curveballs. Sometimes they're curveballs that make you want to kick the nearest kitten, and other times they're the sort of curveballs that make you want to jump for joy - like that time I saw an elderly couple riding a tandem around Huddersfield city centre.

Pleasantly enough, I'm pleased to say that life has just thrown you, and me, a very pleasant curveball, in the form of Nasser Hussain. Nasser, a smooth hip-hop poet who graced the stage at the first ever Fictions of Every Kind, will make a very welcome return to Fictions... this coming Tuesday May 24th. He's a late addition to the bill, and we're all pretty bloody excited about it.

Appearing alongside Nasser will be West Yorkshire poet Gareth Durasow, and Phil Kirby, who is writer in residence at Temple Works Leeds. As usual there'll be a writers' open mic from 7.30 onwards, and the music at this event will come from the extremely marvellous, and spookily atmospheric, 7 Hertz.

The theme of the night is 'Missing', but don't feel you have to stick too closely to it. You won't get thrown out if you don't. It's at The Library on Woodhouse Lane, and entry is £3. See you there!

All the advice you have so far read is wrong: the importance of editing

2011-05-15T11:23:00.000-07:00

Advice on writing can be irritatingly contradictory. As if being consistently ignored, being paid below the minimum wage, and trying to train your partner to be quiet when you're trying to work wasn't punishment enough, writers also have to contend with a welter of opposing opinions on the web. You try browsing the internet for support and advice! You'll find yourself bombarded with ridiculous suggestions ranging from "make sure your work has commercial potential", to "make sure you disable your internet connection so your writing sessions can be more productive".

Well, luckily for you, I have read everything the internet has to offer the writer, and I have condensed it down into two points of advice, with two sub-sets of advice on editing underneath. It is yours, to use, for nothing.

1. Keep working. When you feel demoralised by rejection, by the feeling that you are writing into a void, that nobody cares about what you do, that nobody will ever be interested in your work, keep writing.

2. Be your own horse-whip. Every writer needs to learn to look at their own work with a critical eye; not to say that we disparage all of our own efforts, but that we learn to edit objectively our own work. We mercilessly excise that which does not belong, and we don't allow ourselves to get away with sub-standard work.

The importance of editing, for the writer, really can't be overestimated. More than half of the work of writing lays in the rewriting and editing. A writer doesn't only write: she rewrites, she edits, she corrects; she gets pernickity about sentence construction, about making subject and object agree, the consistent use of tense, the considered usage of active or passive verbs; she doesn't let herself run riot with the overuse of adverbs, or words repeated too closely together; she varies the way sentences start, the lengths that they go to, and the way they are punctuated.

Most of all, the skill of editing can come in useful when writing to word limits. Short story competitions and first chapter competitions are important for writers. Chances to get published are rare, and it can be hard to attract the attentions of an agent or publisher when you're not yet out of the starting blocks. Reputable competitions can be a worthwhile avenue for writers to pursue, as they give us chance to get our work recognition.

Many come with a word limit, and with good reason: editors and judges don't have time to read through thousands of words, from thousands of entrants. This fact can pose a dilemma for the wordier among you. When your work naturally runs lengthy, how are you to expunge all those words to get your work within the competition's parameters? Thankfully, I have a couple of suggestions for you wrestling with this very difficulty.

suggestion one: you do the math. If your story is 4822 words long, and the word limit 2,000, simply select the last 2822 words of your story, and hit 'delete'. Hey presto! Within less than one second, you've ensured that your work meets the criteria for the competition. Don't worry too much that the structure is now strangely-lopsided, or that the ending is missing. The sense of intrigue that the judge feels from only reading half the story will compel him to want to read more. Especially if it suddenly cuts off in the middle of a sentence.

suggestion two: remove all of the prepositions eh, who likes a preposition anyway? All they do is go around clogging up your sentences, throwing their weight around and making everything 'too obvious'. This is slightly more labour intensive than your first option, as it means going through every single sentence and removing the words one by one. The results will leave you with a distinct, and rare, 'voice', likely to leave your entry standing head and shoulders above those from the other contestants. If Leo Tolstoy had used this technique for War and Peace, the opening would read "Well, Prince, Genoa, Lucca are family estates Buonapartes. I warn you, you don't tell me means war, still try defend infamie, horrors perpetrated Antichrist- I believe he is Antichrist- I will have nothing more you, you no longer my friend, longer my 'faithful slave,' you call yourself!" The book would have been much shorter and less heavy to carry around; people would take it on holiday and read it on the bus. It would have increased 'readability' and sold a lot more copies in the long run.

I hope you find these advices useful. They're the result of many hard hours' labour and research on my part. Followed carefully, they should stand you in good stead for many successful and happy years' writing!

You're welcome.

Currently reading

Ngugi wa Thiong'o A Grain of Wheat

More letterpress!

2011-05-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

Fictions of Every Kind: Missing is on Tuesday May 24th. Our invited speakers are Gareth Durasow, a controversial poet with a strong West Yorkshire sensibility who collaborates with the audience to create a truly unique spoken word experience that alternates between the disarmingly endearing, the riotously funny and the blisteringly intense; and Phil Kirby, writer in residence at Temple Works, Leeds.

The music at May's event will come from long-time DIY improvisatory stalwarts, 7 Hertz. You may recognise them from former and other music projects including Madame Laycock and her Dabeno Pleasures, and Maquipacuna.

As ever, there's a writers' open mic at the start of the night, so get down early to sign up! The night starts at 7.30, and entry is £3.

A letterpress tale...

2011-05-02T04:24:00.000-07:00

Last week, I finished letterpress printing my short story chapbook, 'A Stranger Came'. I wrote this story last year. It's a tale of isolation and betrayal, all set in the picturesque heart of the Yorkshire Dales.

It's hard to explain the beauty of letterpress printing without getting helplessly nerdy about it. Letterpress is an old and obselete technique for printing which involves setting metal type - in individual letters - into words and sentences, and then printing them with an old and dangerous press. Since starting to learn to typeset and print in November last year at The Print Project, Bradford, I have only come to love letterpress more and more, even though it is a frustrating, time-consuming and sometimes teeth-gnashing process, with no shortcuts.

A lot of people have asked me "why bother with letterpress, when you could use a computer?" The answer is that there's no comparison between the end results. If you hold something produced using letterpress in your hands, you feel the impression the type and text leave in the page; you can literally feel the hours of human labour that have gone into creating it. When you touch the page and the impressions, you know that this is something made by another human hand.

Letterpress isn't used for large-scale commercial printing any more, and is slowly dying out. The machines and typesets that produce it are no longer made, and the techniques kept alive by being passed on from enthusiast to enthusiast. Many commercial printers are closing their doors as their businesses become untenable. The typeset that I used for this short story came to me from one such printer, in Sheffield. The man who ran the business no longer needed any of his typesets, and ended up as good as giving them away.

After I'd set and printed the first page with my typeset, I noticed what an unusual font it was. It had an upwards sloping e, and looked somewhat old fashioned. I wondered what it was; I trawled font sites on the internet without success, and nobody I knew could identify it. In the end, someone at the Briar Press letterpress community told me what it was: Morris Gold, a font designed by William Morris in the 19th Century.

William Morris, an active member in the Arts & Crafts movement, was a successful furniture designer for most of his career. Late in life, he got interested in printing and started the Kelmscott Press. Many printing houses of the time were using compressed types, because it used less paper and saved money. But Morris' aim with the Kelmscott Press was to produce beautiful books at affordable prices, and he didn't want to follow their example. Keen to distinguish his press from other outfits, he designed a font of his own, basing it on an old Roman type. It was used to print the first few Kelmscott Press titles, and earned itself the nickname 'Morris Gold'. I couldn't believe that I'd ended up with a tray of it myself, and completely by accident!

I used the typeset to print the entirety of 'A Stranger Came', printing it paragraph by paragraph as there wasn't quite enough type to do a full page at a time. As I reached the end of the chapbook, I noticed how worn the type was becoming. The act of printing wears the type down at the edges, and causes it to become blunt and unreadable; and so, with regret, I think this particular typeset will have to go into retirement lest it becomes blunt entirely. All the same, I was glad to have been able to use it to letterpress print a full short story with its use. I like to think that William Morris would have been proud to see some of his type be used for this purpose in its last ever outing before retirement.

Fictions of Every Kind: procrastination

2011-04-26T04:44:00.001-07:00

Flier typeset and designed by Sarah Bradley. Photo by Nick of The Print Project.

We all do it. Don't pretend you don't. Whether it's cleaning the house or perfecting your golf swing, every single writer has his or her very own perfected procrastination method. A writer can sit down in front of her computer, only to find three hours later that the house is mysteriously meticulously clean, the cat bathed and brushed, the windows washed inside and out, and there's a quiche baking in the oven. How did that happen? The sink and the bath are gleaming, and she still hasn't written a single word.

The theme of July's Fictions of Every Kind will be 'Procrastination'. It's a theme that strikes a deep chord in the heart of every writer. It's unlikely anybody will learn anything new by attending. Most writers could probably write a book on the subject, if only they could get started. (Curiously, the most popular 'words of encouragement' card is the one that reads, "Bloody get on with it". Now what does that tell us?)

Fictions of Every Kind: Procrastination is on Tuesday July 5th from 7.30pm - 9.30pm in The Leeds Library, a 'secret library' on 18 Commercial Street, accessible by a recessed doorway across the road from LUSH. Instead of invited speakers, we'll be showing a selection of short films around the theme. As usual, there will be chance for writers to share their work at an open mic. Entry is free, and there will be boxed wine and popcorn - donations towards the costs of these will be welcomed!

We have some rather marvellous films to show in a range of styles: animation, documentary, comedy, and the abstract, all around the theme. As usual it promises to be a thought-provoking evening, and we look forward to meeting you there!

Click here to go to the facebook event page

Fictions of Every Kind on facebook

Fictions of every kind: the future!

2011-04-26T03:36:00.000-07:00

Last Monday, the Fictions of Every Kind collective got together in the pub to discuss future events for the rest of the year. Little of the conversation went over to 'business', naturally. We were in the presence of real ale, and so at several points the conversation veered off variously, into: the summer festival circuit; what it would have been like working in the same post office as Charles Bukowski; and whether or not you look for potential exits in case of zombie apocalypse in every new place you visit. Apparently I am the only one in the collective who doesn't look for zombie-proof exits everywhere she goes. Still, at least it means I won't have to live out my days terrified in the top floor of a shopping mall, while the undead shuffle around in front of the shop windows, their flesh dripping from their bones in synchronicity with the piped music.

During the course of the afternoon, talk turned to 'Fictions of Every Kind', and what gives our night its personality. At the time we were talking about the kind of invited speakers we like to have. Over the past few months we've had some great writers speaking. The performances have ranged from literary fiction to horror, and science fiction to hip-hop poetry. So far we've been able to welcome a diverse range of speakers to our night, without ever losing the personality and soul of what we do, and long may that continue.

For us, ownership is important. In a very real sense, the people who come to Fictions of Every Kind are what define it and give it its personality. With help from Sam Francis, I originally started Fictions... because I know that writing is a lonely business. It's easy to lose perspective on what you do, and to not know whether or not what you're doing is any good. With that in mind, I wanted to start a night where writers could meet other writers, and gain support and encouragement from one another.

The way that we do things is important too. Sam & I both have a background in the punk rock & DIY music scene in Leeds, and we were keen that Fictions... should have the same kind of ethos. Therefore, involvement in Fictions... isn't a route to 'bigger' things. The aim of the night is never going to be to help 'launch' writers, or to make money. Although writers who speak are welcome to sell and promote their books - hell, they have to, because we can't pay them a lot to appear - we want to promote the idea that all writers are equal. Whether you've sold a million books, or whether you have a stack of unpublished, unagented novels in your desk drawer, the struggles you face as a writer are the same. Writers of all persuasions have the same 'dark times', and we all ask ourselves the same questions: "Is anybody ever going to want to read this?"; "Is what I'm doing really any good?"; "Why have I spent six hours cleaning the house instead of sitting in front of my computer, looking at a blinking cursor and an accusingly blank Word document?"

So the aim of Fictions... is simple. It exists to bring writers and writers together; to give us support and encouragement, and inspiration to get us back to work again. A combination of conversation and performances serves to break writers out of the dark spiral of neurotically-driven writers' block we all sometimes get sucked into. Sometimes its hard to speak to people about what we do, and a lot of the regular Fictions... community have found it almost mind-blowing to be in a room full of other writers. At last, we can find our counterparts, the people who understand how difficult it can be to be a writer.

I'm glad to say that out of the afternoon's meeting came some very exciting ideas for the next few months. Until we've got everything planned and firmed up, I wouldn't like to go revealing anything for fear of the others attacking me with an axe. I will say, though, that I think the next few months are going to be fun. And that we hope to see you there....

Working through psychoanalysis conference

2011-04-19T02:15:00.000-07:00

Last week, Dr Sam Francis put on a conference at the University of Leeds entitled Working through Psychoanalysis: Freud's Cultural Legacy. He and his colleague Dr Nicholas Ray were responsible for convening and calling the conference, so well done to them.

The conference was a two day mash-up of writers, thinkers, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists talking about Freud's legacy to the arts and culture. Everything from Tony Soprano's course of analysis in the HBO series The Sopranos, to viewing Facebook from a Freudian perspective, was discussed. The whole thing took place in the distinguished atmosphere of the University's English Department's buildings. (You cannot imagine how exciting this was for somebody who got their higher education at two former polytechnics).

On Saturday morning, Dr Sam spoke at the panel "Resisting and working through psychoanalysis in LIterary Fiction", chaired by Armela Panajoti from the University of Vlora in Albania. Dr Sam presented some of his work on JG Ballard, claiming that his paper was "cribbed from the book I've just finished writing" (The Psychological Fictions of JG Ballard, forthcoming from Continuum Books), and Naomi Booth presented a paper from her work about Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.

Both papers were really interesting - Dr Sam's in particular, made me want to go down to the library and take out everything JG Ballard has ever written. It was also interesting to think about Angela Carter's work through a Freudian lens. Booth said at one point that she felt that a table was needed, so integral and densely-woven were the allegories within the book. It was certainly interesting to hear Carter, one of the big feminist writers of the 20th century, discussed with reference to Freud.

I was left wondering afterwards how we as women writers/ thinkers / academics identify ourselves through this sort of lens. Somewhat a product of his time in many respects, Freud isn't always noted for his enlightened attitude towards women. Despite treating many women for 'hysteria', Freud seemed to view women as fundamentally being neurotic, and often complained even in his written work that he didn't understand the female psyche. (Men today often make the same sort of complaint). I wondered whether there was room for a feminist discourse around the idea that the beginnings of psychoanalysis was rooted in a very male discourse, and whether there's an allegory between this and any themes in Carter's work about women trying to find a voice in a 'male' world. It certainly left me with a lot to think about, and also made my 'to-read' list instantly ten or eleventy books longer.

Added to the 'to-read' list

The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman Angela Carter
The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter
The Atrocity Exhibition JG Ballard
The Kindness of Women JG Ballard
Civilisation & Its Discontents Sigmund Freud
Envy & Gratitude Melanie Klein

Heartwarmers

2011-04-10T07:18:00.000-07:00

I don't know how you're getting on for weather in the unfriendly, capitalist south, but here in t'glorious north we've had a beautiful weekend. It has been cause for many a ramble up park and down dale, and for men of all shapes and sizes to have an excuse to take their tops off (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PUT IT AWAY). It's likely that this is going to be the only summer we get. You may as well enjoy it, because come June and July we'll all be moping about in sodden shoes, with out-turned umbrellas, looking miserably out at long days of downpour and unseasonably low temperatures. You heard it here first.

Anyway, the weekend out & about has provided me with sights of some of my very favourite things. Contrary to the impression you may get from reading my work - that of a black-hearted, misanthropic cynic - I am actually, in real life, a big romantic softie. True Fact. Here are some of the lovely things I've seen in the last couple of days.

Item one: an old couple holding hands

Is there any sight better than that of an old couple holding hands? I tell you there is not.

Item two: a little tiny dog carrying a big massive stick

This dog knows this stick is too big for it. Yet, with the determination of the tiny dog, it is resolute that it will not put the stick down. Sir, we salute you.

A sign whose missing comma entirely changes its meaning

This one's for anyone who was thinking of trying to scale a mountain and eat a sandwich at the same time.

Baby animals

The only thing that could possibly ever top the heartwarm of an elderly couple holding hands.

Fictions of Every Kind: Missing

2011-04-07T02:08:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to say that planning for Fictions Of Every Kind: Missing is now all complete, and the full line-up can be revealed (whoop whoop!) You can expect yet another evening of engaging performances,exciting words and ideas, and getting drunk and pretending that it counts as "being cultured". It's on May 24th at The Library pub, on Woodhouse Lane, and runs from 7.30 - 10.30pm.

The theme is "Missing". Whether you're missing somebody, or don't know where one of your favourite socks is; whether you've missed the boat, the bus, or the point - Fictioners are invited to engage with this month's theme in whichever way they see fit. As usual, the theme is by now means strictly enforced, and divergers will not be strewn out.

Our guest speakers this month are:

Gareth Durasow an award-winning poet with a strong West Yorkshire sensibility, Gareth "collaborates with the audience to create a truly unique spoken word experience that alternates between the disarmingly endearing, the riotously funny and the blisteringly intense".

Phil Kirby Temple Works' writer-in-residence collaborates with artists and writers to create something rather new and exciting, exploring the fringes of fiction and art. Currently working on works of Imaginative Life Writing / fourth genre, Phil is likely to be full of surprises.

This month, music will come from the rather marvellous 7 Hertz. Long-standing troupers on the DIY scene, 7 HERTZ create fascinating textures and interweaving lines of melody through improvisation on violin, violin, and double bass.

The open mic will start between 7.30 and 8.00; please sign up from 7.30 onwards. Entry is £3.

Currently Reading

King Crow Michael Stewart
They Knew Mr Knight Dorothy Whipple

Precarious working...

2011-04-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of weeks a friend of mine, Grace Harrison, and her friend Rachel Cloughton, have been running an art project in a reclaimed arts space called Alternative Strategies. For two weeks there have been lively debates, discussions, screenings, and workshops around the subject of self-organised learning:

The project intends to expose the many alternative educational platforms active in the city, bringing together groups and individuals with art as its departure point.

Many local arts groups and organisations have been involved in the discussions and workshops, and the subject of how we can educate ourselves seems now more pertinent than ever in a month when many universities have announced that they will charge the maximum capped fee of £9,000 a year for their courses.

I went along one night this week for the discussion on 'precarious working'. Precarious working is usually defined as the kind of work that is by nature insecure (it comes without a permanent contract or rights), poorly paid, comes without benefits, gifts its labourers no rights, and cannot financially support a household. Examples of precarious working can include work under zero-hours contracts, fixed-term contracts, and enforced self-employment. I was interested in this because I define myself as a precarious worker: although I'm in employment, I don't have a permanent employment contract, and haven't had one for a few years.

Precarious working can benefit the worker, as it gives her greater autonomy. But it's more likely to benefit the employer, as it means their workers have few or no employment rights - for example, right to redundancy payouts or maternity or sickness benefits, and little protection from stress or harassment at work. The effect of precarious working upon the worker is to give her no security, no 'safety net' - many precarious workers will force themselves to go into work when they're really not fit to work, because they won't get sick pay and can't afford to take the day off - and to make her feel isolated and alone. It's cheaper and easier for employers to offer this kind of work; it means less responsibility for them, and - if you want to be a cynic - it often means they can treat their employees poorly, and minimise the risk of being sued under employment law.

It was an enlightening discussion, and the people who participated were a diverse bunch. Less did we discuss the benefits of 'precarious working' (I think we were all agreed that precarious working is generally pretty lame), than its existence being a symptom of a larger problem.

There's a lot wrong with public sector cuts, and if I wanted to I could type about it all day; but I'll leave that for now, and come back to it another time.... needless to say, though, that one of the effects of the cuts has been to force millions out of work. Mass unemployment has a depressing impact on the labour market in any system. The effect of it is that those who want to work will gladly do it beneath their level of skill, experience and qualification, for less money than their skills demand, and sometimes for free. One of Tuesday's attendees summed it up well by saying: "What does an unemployed academic do? He just goes away and works harder somewhere else."

The drive to work isn't confined to academia, though. Lots of us will go on working regardless of the expectation to be paid for it. Writers, for example - yes, you lot, writers, I've seen your 39p royalty cheques - artists, musicians, and newly-graduated students who need experience. If we're not 'working', we're 'preparing for work' by training, studying, or doing an internship - and yet the points at which people are reimbursed for their efforts become rarer and rarer.

So what can we do? One of the conclusions of the discussion was that the concept of a union for precarious workers could be problematic. Many of the large unions that exist have histories in manufacturing, or in certain industries and sectors. If precarious workers are in a union at all - and many only join when they feel their job is in danger - it is in one aligned to their sector. It might be that there's little awareness amongst precarious workers that they have more in common with other precarious workers than more securely employed workers in their own sector; and there isn't an existing union specifically for precarious workers. Yet all were agreed that one of the effects of precarious working is to make the employee feel alone. We wondered whether precarious workers would feel able to band together in their places of work, to collectivise their resources and gain strength in unity. A lot of those attending were left with a lot of food for thought about how precarious workers could do this in their workplaces.

Someone told a heartening story about mill-workers during the industrial revolution. The term 'cottage industry' comes not from a person owning their own business and working for himself, but from people who were forced to work at home for the local millowner. Such workers had to pay to borrow looms from the factory owner, and often weren't paid for their work until it suited the factory owner. Angry homeworkers banded together with other angry homeworkers to hire many looms, and held them to ransom until the masters paid. Or, if they had hammers, they smashed them up.

I should state, by the way, that I do not agree that smashing machines with hammers is a good solution to the problem of precarious working. We are no longer in the 1800s, and I like machines, especially laptops. It is merely an illuminating tale about the possibility of strength through collectivisation.

Again, I should thank Grace for all the work she did at Alternative Strategies, and to Art In Unusual Spaces in Leeds. They have supported a lot of really interesting exhibitions in Leeds recently.

Currently reading

The Shadow of a Smile Kachi A. Ozumba
They Knew Mr Knight Dorothy Whipple

Fictions of Every Kind: Cuts

2011-03-23T08:11:00.000-07:00

Michael Stewart reads from his novel, King Crow, at Fictions of Every Kind; Cuts

People in the DIY community, people who put on shows, often speak of the 'nervous hour'. It's the time of night between you setting everything up for your night, and people showing up to pay in on the door. It's an awful time of night, and my 'nervous hour' normally lasts from about 3pm in the afternoon til about 9 at night....

Enough about that, though. Let's have a post-mortem of last night's Fictions of Every Kind.

It was a marvellous night. Bloody marvellous. Michael Stewart read from his new novel King Crow, and he was followed by Noah Brown, who read a specially-written piece, perhaps best described as a gory revenge fantasy against the bankers. Each set was different and unique, and they made great guest speakers. We were very lucky to have them.

Noah Brown reads his specially-written piece about the 'big society'.

At the end of the night, we were treated to some absolutely marvellous and very danceable klezmer from the superb Maquipacuna. Here's a picture of them klezmer-ing it up.

"That's not my sweater!" "IT'S BROWN!!"

2011-03-22T07:43:00.000-07:00

Over the last few weeks, brain and body having largely been occupied in trying to fit 28 hours' worth of 'stuff' into 24 hours' worth of day, there hasn't been much time for left over for reading or writing. If only I could waste less time sleeping, perhaps I could get a bit more done.

Since watching television is one of the things you can do whilst doing other things e.g. knitting, sorting and setting type, taunting the cat, I have recently been re-watching Seinfeld. For me, watching really well-written television is a good substitute for being able to actually read. Also, I am fed up of freeview, because it's only ever repeats of Come Dine With Me and I have now seen them all. All of them.

No post on Seinfeld could possibly be complete without tribute to the very marvellous Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who plays Elaine. This clip, in the episode The Busboy, had me laughing so hard my insides nearly fell out. I hope you enjoy it too.

I can't embed it because of stupid youtube, so follow the link here to watch it.

Currently re-watching

30 Rock seasons 1 & 2 while I wait for season 4 to arrive in the mail
Seinfeld seasons 1-9
Mad Men season 1
House season 1
Arrested Development season 2

It's not the winning that etc

2011-03-18T10:22:00.001-07:00

Apparently it's competition season, or something. There are currently three big, reputable competitions that I know of open; get to work, because it's anybody's game. And when I say, 'anybody's game', what I mean is, 'anybody who's a really good writer'. Don't go scribbling teenage angst poetry on the back of a fag packet and send it in, because it won't win. Don't blame me, I'm only trying to save you a bit of hassle.

The Bridport Prize, which describes itself as "the richest OPEN prize", is being judged by AL Kennedy and has categories in short stories, flash fiction, and poetry. It closes on 30th June at midnight so get to work. No, June is not "ages away". It's a strong competition, so you might like to spend day and night obsessively writing and rewriting your work between now and then.

The Manchester Fiction Prize is also now open, under the direction of poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. This is an extremely serious and literary competition so you will want to be serious and literary too. Again, the rewriting. It closes on Friday 11th August. So that gives you an extra five weeks over and above the Bridport Prize to spend day and night obsessively writing and rewriting your work.

Lightship Publishing is running a first chapter competition. The prize is bloody brilliant (a year's mentoring from Tibor Fischer, Simon Trewin of United Agents, and Alessandro Gallenzi of Alma Books). Lightship's patrons include Hilary Mantel and Sir Andrew Motion, oh my days, so get to work. The closing date is June 30th, please insert your own joke about writing and rewriting because I've used all mine up.

Currently reading

They Knew Mr Knight Dorothy Whipple
A Mercy Toni Morrison
Man In The Dark Paul Auster

Fictions of Every Kind: Cuts

2011-03-05T05:43:00.000-08:00

There's not much to look forward to at the moment, is there? Times are hard and getting harder; every day seems to bring more bad news. Thousands of public sector workers are to lose their jobs, public services like libraries and leisure services are being mercilessly culled in an ideologically-driven scythe-happy free-for-all, and charities, voluntary sector organisations and arts organisations are losing their funding right, left, and centre. The coalition government has acted swiftly in cutting benefits and services to those who need them the most, and in devolving government responsibility from running schools onto the schools' shoulders themselves. The things they're doing are unfair and are going to take years to put right, and if ever you were going to pick a time to emigrate... it could be now.

March's Fiction of Every Kinds has the theme 'Cuts'. Writers and readers can choose to respond to the theme however they like; perhaps you prefer to think about physical cuts, or emotional cuts; perhaps you prefer to think about the act of cutting, whether that relates to hair, or bodies, or trees. Or perhaps you prefer not to stick to the theme at all (many don't.) You will not be thrown out if you don't.

At this month's FOEK we are very privileged to have readings from invited speakers Noah Brown, previously MC of Yes Boss!, and Bradford-based author and screenwriter Michael Stewart. Stewart is a multi-award winning author whose novel, King Crow, has recently come out on Bluemoose Books. He is senior lecturer of creative writing at Huddersfield University, and is director of the Huddersfield Literature Festival. We are very pleased to have him appearing.

Fictions of Every Kind: Cuts is on Tuesday March 22nd at The Library Pub on Woodhouse Lane, Leeds. It costs £3 to get in, and as ever, letterpressed "Words of Encouragement" cards (see illustration, above) are available as gifts for writers who brave the open mic. The night starts with the open mic at 19.30. See you there!

Letterpress errors [ " Letterprerrors " ]

2011-03-01T09:48:00.001-08:00

Regular readers of my blog might know that I've been learning to Letterpress over the past few months. Letterpress printing is an old technique which involves setting lines of metal type, putting them in a printing press, and then imprinting and inking the whole shebang onto paper. It produces beautiful results quite unlike any other - the metal type often leaves a slight imprint into the paper, so that you can 'feel' the text with your hands. It's a lengthy and laborious process that used to form the mainstay of printing, but with the advent of computers, has fallen into disuse. These days it is mainly used by enthusiasts and diehards, and wordy nerds like me.

Currently I'm in the process of setting and printing a short story I wrote last year entitled 'A Stranger Came'. Letterpress seemed to be the ideal way to present this story - I'm doing a short run of about 90, which I will then bind myself once all the pages are printed. I expect the books to be finished some time in early May.

It's been an interesting few months, and I've learned loads. Here, in this blog post, I'm going to post a few of the mistakes I've made while printing, so that you can avoid making the same mistakes yourself - if you're going to try and operate a printing press, that is.

This is what happens when your lovely, expensive paper falls off the press and into the rollers.

And this is what happens when skin from the ink gets onto your typeset.

This is what happens when you don't line the paper up properly....

...and this is what it looks like when you do it right.

Currently reading

A Mercy Toni Morrison
The Hell of it All Charlie Brooker
Travels in the Scriptorium Paul Auster

Being a writer sucks!

2011-02-20T05:54:00.000-08:00

Whether you're an impoverished student driven by art and creativity, or a bestselling writer with a series of successful film adaptations living in a mansion in California, writing sucks. It sucks in a myriad of ways that never go away, regardless of how successful you are, or how many times you've been on the Richard & Judy book club. The hours are long, the pay and conditions are terrible, and your boss keeps muttering words of discouragement to you under his or her breath. If there were a union, we'd all be on the phone to it right now.

Last winter, I was complaining about the need to wear fingerless gloves to work. People who do normal jobs (hello Librarians, hello office workers) get to work in lovely warm offices. The heating is always on; not for them the indignity of working in a room where ice drips from the ceiling, nor the need to drink endless cups of tea to keep hands and fingers warm enough to stay mobile. Only the writer, working as romantic tradition has decreed she must, works in an upstairs garrett room with icicles forming on the end of her nose, and the wind whistling through her hair. Readers, for the writer, a harsh winter can be hell.

But I've discovered something worse than writing in winter, and do you know what it is? Yes, that's right: writing in summer.

Writing in summer is the grown-up equivalent of taking a GCSE on a balmy summer's day. As you sit at your desk, worry crowding your head and your pens lined up neatly on the wood before you, you gaze longingly out of the sports' hall window at the golden fields of wheat bending in the breeze, reflecting hot yellow in the sunlight. Children, playing joyously with hula hoops and paddling pools, taunt you with their carefree enjoyment of the beautiful day. And where are you? Indoors, trying to write a bloody novel.

Only a lunatic would attempt writing outdoors. There are wasps out there. And you can't see, anyway; no matter where you sit, the sun is going to bounce off your laptop screen and BLIND YOU. And in any case, most writers, unfortunate owners of that occupational writing hazard the bad back, can't write without a desk. All those hours hunched over scribbling in notebooks or on napkins balanced on their knees have done for their back and shoulders. You cannot take your desk outside. It makes you look mad.

And yet we still all do it, and why? When we have a sneaking suspicion that nobody will ever love us, and when we worry that our books will end up crowding out the shelves of the local charity shops like so much Da Vinci Code? We do it because even though being a writer sucks and YOU, yes YOU will never be as rich or as successful as Dan Brown or Doris Lessing or even Julie Otsuka, we're compelled. We love it and we're driven and we can't stop ourselves.

Now stop looking longingly out of that window and get on with it.

This week, I have:

Finished planning for FICTIONS OF EVERY KIND: CUTS
Begun my first rewrites of a new draft
Worked on preparing a first chapter for a first chapter competition
Knitted a bit of a cardigan.

Save our Libraries day!

2011-02-05T11:45:00.000-08:00

Today, Saturday 5th February, was Save Libraries Day. And what a day it's been. All across the country, book-worms have been staging read-ins and protests at their nearest libraries.

Libraries are brilliant. Free, informative, and truly egalitarian, they provide an oasis of calm for the harassed city-dweller, and knowledge and information for the eternal students among us. A librarian friend told me about the range of services that are offered at her library: reading groups for people with learning disabilities, weight watchers groups, advice for job-seekers, internet access, writer's and gardener's groups, yoga - yes, yoga - and of course, the mainstay of the modern library - internet access, and inter-library loans.

Because they are generally frequented by bookish, unassuming types, it's easy to forget how important libraries are. And for councils looking to make savings, they can become an easy target for spending cuts. But sometimes our councils underestimate just how much people value their libraries.

This afternoon, a crowd of protestors gathered amongst the stacks in Leeds Library. Those who didn't have library cards gathered together the two necessary forms of ID to get one; and those of us who did, spent a pleasant couple of hours browsing the shelves, and then bringing our finds back to the floor for a good read. Protestors had their noses in books of all kinds. All over the floor lay novels by Solzhenitsyn, Plath, Carter, Auster, and Dostoevsky; and everywhere climbed piles of reference books covering subjects as diverse as knitting, psycho-geography, radical politics, and experimental physics. In our quest to stamp out our full allowances of books, no stone went unturned, and no corner of the library unplundered .... not even the Mills & Boon section at the back.

For a couple of hours, the library floor resonated with the sounds of laughter and pages turning. It was heartwarming to see that there are so many who care so passionately about library services that they will spend literally hours on a Saturday afternoon sitting on a cold floor, staging a sit-in.

I will leave you with a photo of Jess of The Travelling Suitcase library. Amongst the Stephen Kings and M Knight Shymalans, she found a real horror story.

Shhh!

2011-02-01T11:03:00.000-08:00

Like most other writers, I loves me a good library. A good library is a true escape. The door closes behind you as you go in, closing the bustle of the city centre behind you; and you are, at last, in an oasis of calm. The hubbub of conversation and banality fades behind you as you take those first vaunted, expectant steps up wooden stairs and tiled hall.

Even in the public city libraries, room and corridor smell of books. Their scent, dusty and hallowed, overpowers the smell of freshly-ground coffee from the tea shop and staff rooms. Walk up the steps into the reading room, and you can feel yourself enter another world: a world where there is quiet, and calm; a world where all the desks are old and wooden, and the librarians all dressed in twinsets and slacks.

Every shelf, from end to end, is stacked with books. Not every book is popular. Some, like the nerdy kid in PE class with the unfortunate co-ordination of a clumsy monkey, will always be the last to be picked. They remain on the shelves, the tops of their pages thick with dust, for months, while their more popular neighbours go out and come back again, their pages thumbed almost to the margins by the hands of many. But whether stamped out daily or monthly, the fact remains the same: a good book can take you anywhere. Held by its spell, the reader finds herself transported away to far away lands; she follows its characters wherever they go, sympathising with their struggles, resonating at the injustices they suffer - turning the pages lickety-split, desperate to know what happens next.

Yet books are not only there for escapism. They're also there to edify, and public libraries let every reader educate himself. Whatever you're interested in, whether it's animal husbandry or anatomy or particle physics, you can learn about it in the library - for nothing.

It's disappointing (infuriating? enraging?) to hear that many local authorities are starting to seriously consider closing down their public libraries. Many are starting to feel the bite of government belt-tightening, and are looking to see which of their services they can cut, or at least give a sizeable trim. In a time where massive job losses are already a reality, this seems seriously unfair. Libraries allow everybody - regardless of situation or background - to gain information and knowledge free of charge, and at the moment that seems more important than ever.

All across the country, people are protesting in new and creative ways - from banding together to take out all the books to demonstrate demand to the council, to staging read-ins and protests. The Guardian is running a blog on planned protests at libraries around the country: see their interactive map for details.

Happy protesting, everyone!

Currently reading

Invisible Paul Auster
Looking for the Possible Dance AL Kennedy
Cloud Atlas David Mitchell

Around on the internet: news, facts, competitions

2011-01-14T09:33:00.000-08:00

Get with it, January: give me your gloom, your grey skies, and the ever-present threat of snow. Slippery pavements, icy ground, imminent local authority cuts and job losses, and BRITAIN'S TRANSPORT CHAOS.

Never mind, readers. Here are three reasons to be cheerful:

"In America, it appears that certain ink-friendly literati are so into their books that they're getting tributes to them engraved on their bodies." Read the story and goggle in disbelief at the fact that people are willing to get tattoos in order to get free books. Just join a library, you buffoons.

Lightship publishing has launched a first chapter competition. The aim of the competition is to encourage new writing talent, since there's little encouragement to be had in these tight times (BOO YOU DAVID CAMERON). They're hoping to find some of Britain's brightest literary talent, here, and there hasn't been a new writing competition this exciting for a while. The whole thing is Andrew Motion-approved, and Tibor Fischer is one of the judges. The closing date is in June this year, so get your nibs a-squeaking and get to work.

In other Hot News, the Bridport prize is open for 2011 entries. The judge this year is the completely smashing AL Kennedy.

Happy new year, everyone!

The waiting never stops, and: We Are All In This Together

2011-01-05T08:42:00.000-08:00

AL Kennedy is Living Proof that the trauma of being a writer never quite ends. By whichever measure you gauge success, the job of being a writer comes with its very own set of particularly distressing pay and conditions. Even Stephen King - yes, STEPHEN KING - sometimes wistfully thinks about getting a job in a garden centre. In today's Guardian, AL Kennedy is articulate on the matter of waiting during the Christmas holidays, hoping to hear back from her editor over a book which took her three years to write.

"This is only the 13th time that I have footled about, gone for walks, tried to start other things, sketched hollow-sounding plans for the coming months, stared blackly at the ceiling and generally failed to avoid the constant, low-level nausea generated by waiting to hear.... try to imagine one of those insultingly-lengthy TV elimination round pauses which somehow elongates over days or weeks, blends with your driving test outcome, the announcements of every important exam result upon which you have ever relied, every time you've asked someone lovely to have a coffee, or hold your hand, or subject you to intimate forms of relaxation and every naked-on-the-roof-of-Sydney-Opera-House-while-your-parents-and-in-laws-and-primary-school-teachers-render-you-in-watercolours anxiety dream you've ever had. Only it's less pleasant than that."

Published writers are often heard to pipe up that "being published isn't all it's cracked up to be". Here, in the full article, AL Kennedy explains exactly why.. You're still skint all the time. You're still in the waiting game. And you still can't get anybody to return any of your phone calls.

Facebook quote of the week:

"SYSTEMATIC DESTRUCTION OF SOCIETY COURTESY OF PRIVATELY EDUCATED MILLIONAIRES, COME ON 2011, LET'S HAVE YA." - Noah Brown.

Noah is making an appearance at Fictions of Every Kind: Cuts on Tuesday March 22nd. Looks like he's getting his teeth into the theme already! Good work, Noah.

Fictions of Every Kind on Facebook
Fictions of Every Kind: Cuts Event Page

Happy new year!

2011-01-02T07:37:00.000-08:00

Look at these beautiful "words of encouragement for writers" cards! Made on the Arab Platen Letterpress at the 1 in 12 club in Bradford, there are four different slogans to choose from; and they will be available as gifts for those writers who brave the open mic at the next Fictions of Every Kind.

Fictions of Every Kind: Hungover and Underwhelmed is on January 11th, at The Library pub in Leeds. It's £3 in and is all open mic, all night - although there will also be a short set from visiting vocal harmony group and barbershop quartet These Men. The night runs from 19.30 - 22.30.

Fictions of Every Kind: Hungover & Underwhelmed

2010-12-16T06:22:00.001-08:00

Planning is afoot for the next two Fictions of Every Kind nights.

What is Fictions of Every Kind? Well, it's a spoken word night with a DIY ethos, aimed at encouraging writers to bring and share their work, and to come and meet other writers. Every writer knows how lonely writing can be... so come and meet a bunch of other people who spend all their spare time locked in a quiet room, alternately bashing away on a computer and swearing, and making things and people up in their heads.

The next Fictions of Every Kind is on 11th January 2011, at The Library Pub in Leeds. The Library is very near the University, on Otley Road. (Make sure you come to the Library Pub, and not to the actual library. The Library Pub is the one with the bar with all the drinks in it.) It starts at 19.30, and runs till 22.30; please get down early to put your name down for the open mic. Entry is £3.

The night has a loose theme of "Hungover and Underwhelmed", but there is no need for you to stick too closely to the theme if you can't manage it.

As an added bonus, there's going to be a musical treat from 4-part vocal harmony group (BARBERSHOP QUARTET) These Men.

Fictions of Every Kind on Facebook

Hungover & Underwhelmed event page on Facebook

LETTERPRESS

2010-12-12T09:57:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago, I did a little 'post' about The Print Project, who have a working letterpress in the basement of the 1 in 12 Club in Bradford. Last week I went there and had 'a go' on it myself.

Here are some pictures.

In letterpress, the printing is done using typeface made of ACTUAL METAL. ACTUAL METAL that you set yourself, using ACTUAL HANDS. (I got covered in a lot of ink doing this). In the picture above, you can see the trays full of typeface bits. Above the trays, but just out of shot, there's a little card showing you which letters are in which compartments.

Apparently, once you get used to setting type, you don't need to refer to the card any more, since you get so smart about knowing where the letters are kept. This is not me.... yet. Maybe one day.

This is a line of text. Look at the little metal letters! In between each word, you insert 'spaces'; little slivers and blocks of metal that separate the letters from one another. You have to be super-careful lifting it out of the tray, otherwise the text spills all over the floor and you cry bitter tears of regret, like a big clumsy baby.

This is the line of text in 'the chase'. Its secured into place using 'furniture' (bits of wood) and then tightened up with 'quoins'. It has to go in good and tight, otherwise the letters will fall out when you put the whole shebang in the press (see above, 'crying bitter tears of regret like a big clumsy baby'.) You do not want the letters falling out. Aside from the fact it takes ages to set everything, you don't want to be scrabbling about under the machine trying to retrieve all the bits of typeface. That's like a public safety information video waiting to happen.

This is what it looks like when you set the typeface backwards, like a big bloody idiot. Ahem.

....and this is what it looks like when you do it right!

I had such good fun using the letterpress - thanks very much to Nick for showing me how it all worked, and for helping me get the chase into the machine right. I'm hoping to set some more text and print some more 'words of encouragement for writers' cards in the near future.... watch this space.

In the meantime, you can visit The Print Project on the internet.

I am having a go on one of these later...

2010-12-09T09:07:00.000-08:00

It is a letterpress.

More later (providing I don't crush all of my fingers and thumbs in it).

"....but my idea is a guaranteed best seller!"

2010-12-02T07:38:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Jumble

2010-11-29T03:12:00.000-08:00

I was at a jumble sale on Sunday. I tell you this not by way of shaming you with my glittering, exotic lifestyle, but as a prelude to boasting about one of the bargains I picked up.

Amongst the paperbacks of Carol Vorderman's How To Do Sudoku, and a cassette audio book of Women in Love, was this: a large hardback edition of the edited letters of Kingsley Amis, which would set you back over £12 on Amazon. It was hidden underneath a silk peg-bag and an old Dorothy Perkins t-shirt and I nearly didn't see it, except for that my friend Amy was rummaging impatiently through everything in an attempt to find the bargainous, and legendary, 'knit your own monkey' kit.

Amy never did get to knit her own monkey, but I did get this beast of a book, and for a pound only. A POUND! You see? Who says jumble sales are all doddery old ladies and worn-out handbags?

Fictions of Every Kind

2010-11-29T02:54:00.001-08:00

I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that last Tuesday's Fictions of Every Kind was an unqualified runaway success. There were superb readings from Matt Bellwood, Nasser Hussein, "Dr" Sam Francis, and Mason Henry Summers. Every single reading was amazing, and all of these performers had the audience hanging off their every carefully-chosen word.

There was a set of beautiful music from the very wonderful Invisible Cities, and in addition the standard in the open mic section of the night was especially high. Who knew there were so many talented writers hiding out in Leeds?!

The next Fictions of Every Kind is planned for the 11th January 2011, with a theme of 'Hungover and Underwhelmed'. It takes place at The Library Pub in Leeds, from 7.30 - 10.30 pm, with an entry fee of £3; and if I have anything to do with it, it'll be a devil of a lot of fun.

Watch this space to find out who the guest speakers and musical act are....

Befriend 'Fictions of Every Kind' on Facebook

Hell is other people's music choices...

2010-11-22T06:31:00.000-08:00

Lately, mainly because it is colder inside my house than it is outdoors (how can this be?), I've been doing a lot of writing in the local coffee shops. There are many advantages to working in a coffee shop, chief amongst which is that it is warm there, and there is no need to wear fingerless gloves while you type. There are fewer distractions in a coffee shop; your average writer is less likely to procrastinate by suddenly noticing that the skirting boards need ironing, or that there's a mucky teaspoon in the sink that needs washing up right away. In my nearest coffee shops, I can't even get an internet connection. Add to this the frequent availability of coffee and cake, and you have a recipe for excellent writer productivity. In the last week alone, I have finished six novels, eight short stories, and an hundred-line ballad written in iambic pentameter, just by dint of sitting in the nearest Costa. (Only joking.... I don't write poetry).

But srsly though coffee shops of West Yorkshire, what is UP with your music choice? A few days ago, I was rendered rampantly KILLY and ENRAGED by the abuse to which my ears were subject. Coffee shops of the world seemed to have turned to filling their stereos with CDs of pastel coloured, twinkly, no-cunt, irritatingly twee music, designed to offend nobody. There must be a special shop that sells this stuff; I imagine that only coffee shops buy it - for the love of God, I hope that nobody willingly listens to this stuff at home.

This kind of music is meant to promote a self-consciously cool, laid-back atmosphere within the environs. Recently, I've heard versions of 'Tainted Love' sung by a woman with a child's voice backed with what sounded like a music-box, 'Sweet Child O' Mine' gently tickled to death with a xylophone and an accordion, and a version of 'When Doves Cry' played in a jaunty rhythm on a Spanish guitar. I imagine the aim is to reassure your average coffee-shop customer with music with which he or she is familiar, presented in a way that promotes a kind of slow death by passivity: a sort of lift music for the post-modern ironist of the 21st Century, if you will. It's irritating and its twee, and every time I hear one of these dreadful, knowing cover versions, I am filled with an almost uncontrollable urge to punch a kitten to death. And I really like kittens.

Please, coffee shops of the local West Yorkshire area: I AM TRYING TO WRITE A NOVEL AND THIS CAR ADVERT MUSIC IS NOT HELPING.

Jeez, and in the middle of winter, too?

2010-11-11T12:04:00.000-08:00

There's only one decent way that any right-thinking person can react to the news of Nathan Bransford's exit from the world of publishing:

For the longest time, Nathan has been astonishing writers and agents around the world with his ability to fit all of the following into the same 24-hour day that the rest of us squander on drinking cups of tea and fannying around on LOLcats: being a top-flight literary agent, writing one and many novels, regularly updating a blog, keeping the rest of us know-nothings up to date on how to write a good query and on what's new in the world of publishing, and yet even so, still managing to be an all-round nice guy. I can't speak for any of the rest of you but I would literally need an extra seven hours in every day even to accomplish half of this stuff (which, incidentally, is what I'm going to be asking Santa for this year).

Best of luck, Nathan: we'll miss you.

Fictions of Every Kind

2010-10-31T05:07:00.000-07:00

November: season of fireworks, dark nights, writing in dark garret rooms wearing fingerless gloves, and of large swathes of people attempting to write a novel in a month. Interesting fact: writing Inception took Christopher Nolan 10 years, while Stephanie Meyer wrote Twilight in a matter of 2 months. You can make of that what you will, because I am in no way casting aspersions about the sustained hard work and detailed attention that ought to go into writing a worthwhile novel.

November also brings us the first ever Fictions Of Every Kind night. The inaugural FOEK aims to celebrate national short story week, and it will do it with a wide range of interesting performers - with readings from folk story-teller Matt Bellwood, to hip-hop poetry with Nasser Hussein; cyber-punk and speculative work from Sam Francis, cutting-edge dark science-fiction from Mason Henry Summers, and fiction from me too. Readers, I haven't read aloud to an assembled audience since that unfortunate incident at primary school, and I don't mind telling you I'm a bit scared.

In addition, there's music from the very wonderful Invisible Cities, and an open mic story-telling session at the beginning of the night.

"Where is all this happening?" I hear you cry. "I'm champing at the bit to go to there!"

Well first of all hold your horses, because its not until the 23rd of November. Its at The Library Pub in Leeds, it starts at 7pm, and its £3 in (all this information is on the flier above if you squint your eyes hard enough.)

Hopefully these kinds of shenanigans will become a regular event, but until then you'll just have to content yourself with this one, dear readers. Hope to see you there.

The Print Project, Bradford

2010-10-31T04:53:00.000-07:00

Letterpress. I loves me a good letterpress: it makes me go weak at the knees. In letter press, metal plates are used to impress text and ink deep into card. Every single page in letterpress needs to be made by an actual human being, operating several tons of weighty machinery. It's beautiful and it's unique and it doesn't get used very often any more, so three cheers for The Print Project in Bradford who are working hard to resurrect it.

This project is based at the 1 in 12 club in Bradford. The art of letterpress is centuries old, and this lot, Fred Dibnah-style, are doing what they can to keep the skills and expertise necessary to run one alive. With the increasing development of other methods of printing which are cheaper and more convenient, the art of letterpress - which produces something very beautiful and memorable - could be in danger of dying out.

Unlike items lazer-printed or photocopied, the marvellous thing about letterpress is its texture. In picking up a letter-pressed item you can feel, in your very hands, the sweat and skill that has gone into making it. A letter-pressed booklet or flier feels a little weightier in your hands, and with the text sunk and pressed into the card, you can actually feel the texture of the words you're reading with your fingers. (fact fans, this is very much not the sort of thing you can get from an app on your iPhone.... I'm just sayin'.)

At present The Print Project can produce leaflets, stationery, CD packaging, booklets and leaflets, but welcome contacts to discuss other commissions. If you're interested in letterpress, or even if you just have a bit of a 'thing' for different printing techniques, it's well worth a look.

The Print Project's blog
Print Project on Facebook

Things that go by the wayside for writers

2010-10-12T10:29:00.000-07:00

There are lots of things that writers are good at. Sitting still for long periods of time with only their own thoughts in their head for company. Inventing whole new worlds. Making pretend people come to life. Making a reader see a picture in their mind using only a collection of well-chosen words. Typing. Procrastinating. There are all sorts of things at which writers do regularly, and at which only a writer can excel.

But... there are also many things that writers are bad at. When you're busy trying to write novels / stories / terrible pulpy romance novels, there are so many things that necessarily have to go by the wayside. So few of us can make a living from our art that we instead spend our free time holed up in a semi-darkened room with only a laptop, a notebook, and a mug of tea for company: friends, what effect does that have on us? What, in other words, do we 'miss'?

Socialising. My friends still wonder why I glance around shiftily and make excuses when they invite me out. People never understand when you tell them, "I've got to write". "WRITE SCHMITE!" they shout. "YOU CAN ALWAYS WRITE TOMORROW BUT THIS INVITE TO COCKTAILS IS A ONE-TIME ONLY OFFER." Not that it matters, even if you do go out, because the next thing that goes by the wayside in the writer's life is...

Having normal things to talk about. People at work always want to talk about last night's telly, and I DIDN'T SEE ANY OF IT, because I was TRYING TO WRITE A NOVEL. But you can't tell people at work you were writing a novel: they won't understand, and anyway it only makes you look like a pretentious wanker. So instead you tell them, "Oh no, I must have missed it, I was painting the bathroom." And then your workmates think you are weird because you, apparently, have spent every evening for the past 3 years painting the bathroom. "How big is her bathroom?" they must think. "Does this woman live in the Golden Gate Bridge?"

Having normal social skills. You spend your evenings missing conversational telly, and having conversations with imaginary people who, by the way, most definitely did not exist until you made them up. It makes you a bit twitchy when people talk. For one thing, you find yourself mentally editing everything they say; and for another, you start obsessing over whether their character really would say that sort of thing, or is she just saying it to drive the plot forward at the expense of realistic characterisation? Viewing every human interaction as an extension of your plot quandary starts to make you look a bit strange. If you didn't already look strange enough.

Currently Reading

In Pursuit Of The English Doris Lessing
The Complete Maus Art Spiegelman
Twilight Stephenie Meyer (my friend lent me it, and I didn't want to be rude)
Soho Keith Waterhouse

Friends, who among you has never bought a copy of her own book from Amazon?

2010-10-03T06:19:00.000-07:00

Come on, you've all done it at least once. Don't make me feel like a pariah here.

A couple of weeks ago - over a year since first receiving the good news that my words were to appear in print (IN PRINT) in a book that people could BUY - in a book shop - my words finally were printed, and the book that they were in came out, and a copy of it was brought to my door by the postman.

Well, I say one copy. It would be more accurate to say 'a dozen copies', since that's how many author-copies I insisted on the publisher sending. (Thanks, Stu). Because it's never too early to start buying Christmas presents, right?!!

No. I am not going to start giving people a copy of my own book for Christmas presents. What am I, David Hasselhoff? No, the idea was to send them out to anybody who has supported me in the long and torturous road to getting published. Its a road that's taken in a lot of perseverance, a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, lots of blank glassy stares and going red in the face from frustration, and many many tears. The nature of 'help' my long-suffering pals and boyfriend have given me is wide-ranging. It encompasses not complaining too loudly when I take up the entire kitchen table with my notebooks and bits of paper; it includes silently bringing cups of tea when I'm in the midst of a midden. It includes friendly chats and afternoons spent companion-writing around a friend's house. It includes not laughing at things I've written, even the attempts that were very rubbish. On the part of the long-suffering boyfriend, support has included not only putting up with long periods of black, moody silence, lots of shouting and stomping around the house, wiping my face on the cat and crying, but also building me a desk and long-term lending me a laptop to work on.

So there were plenty of people to thank, and I wanted to send each one of them a copy. But guess what? Nobody wanted to be given one. Readers, the support of my nearest and dearest was so extensive that they wouldn't hear of being gifted with a copy of the book; they all insisted on buying one. To this very day, I still have a dozen copies of Even More Tonto Short Stories on my coffee table at home.

The book is also available on Amazon. So I had all these copies on my table, and then allegedly according to the Internet, you could buy it off Amazon. I almost couldn't quite believe it. I wanted to check that it worked. And so, one day (and I am pretty embarrassed to admit it), I bought a copy of my own book.

Unconvinced that there was a book publicly available with my words in it, I clicked "buy", and remained mildly cynical until the day when the postman came to the door with it in his hands. (Friends, don't try this it at home. It probably technically counts as 'shilling'.) Thinking that the whole thing might be a product of my fevered imagination (apparently a necessary trait for authors), I tore the cardboard wrapping off with shaking fingers: and there it was underneath, a thirteenth copy of Even More Tonto Short Stories, to go with the other dozen I still have sitting on the table in my living room....

Let's get lit-ical, lit-ical....

2010-09-13T05:27:00.001-07:00

Here's two up-coming literature festivals: Ilkley Literature Festival, between the 1st and 17th October; and the Morley Literature Festival, between the 11th and 17th October. The two towns are within train-catching and bus-catching distance of one another, so if it was your wont, you could watch Will Self in Ilkley and then get the bus to Morley to watch him again. At one or the other of these festivals you can: write poetry with Simon Armitage; hear about Iain M. Banks' new novel from the man himself; hear the best new from emerging writers, courtesy of The Cadaverine magazine at the Ilkley fringe festival; and sing along with John Shuttleworth.

Currently reading

Memoirs of a Geisha Arthur Golden
Agnes Grey Charlotte Bronte
The Shooting Party Anton Chekhov

Thoughts of the day...

2010-08-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

I'm still in the enviable position of having plenty of writing time at the moment. I know it's enviable because I told a writer-friend how much I'm getting done at the moment, and his face turned green and he tried to scratch my eyes out, right there on the pavement, in front of the library. The ensuing injuries explain why I haven't had much time to update this blog lately.... sorry.

This week I have mostly been watching (on ghetto Sky+, also known as "Freeview Plus"; apparently kids these days call that "Pov TV", Pov being short for Povvo or Poverty rather than point of view), a show called In Their Own Words: British Novelists of the 20th Century. This is a series currently being shown on BBC4, about writers of the 20th century. It uses archive footage of interviews with the authors themselves, so you get an eclectic mix of writers from Barbara Cartland to Christopher Isherwood and from Jean Rhys to Robert Graves talking about their own work.

It's a fascinating show, partly in terms of the revelations about attitudes of the times in which writers lived (you see Evelyn Waugh being interviewed by a female journalist in the 60s, find out that he only agreed to do the interview on the specification that he was interviewed by 'a pretty gel', and that off-camera he asked the production crew "When is she going to take her clothes off?") but also about the writers themselves. There's much encouragement to be had in the knowledge that even EM Forster suffered from the writer's gremlin. Even after writing some of the finest novels of the early 20th century, books which were critically acclaimed and massively popular at the time, he didn't consider himself to be a great writer. Of his own capabilities, he said: "I don't consider myself to be a great writer because I have only really managed to get down onto paper 3 types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I would like to be. When you get to the really great people, like Tolstoy, you'll find they can get hold of all types." It speaks volumes that even a great writer like EM Forster had crippling doubts about his own self-worth.

So I really recommend this series, even if just for the fact you get to find out Top Facts like that Robert Graves mainly wrote I, Claudius to pay off his mortgage.

Currently reading

One Big Damn Puzzler John Harding
The Language of Others Clare Morrall
Blankets Craig Thompson
Shortcomings Adrian Tomine (FIVE BLOODY STARS, although come on Adrian, stop being such a bastard to your girlfriend).

Too busy to update properly

2010-08-16T07:51:00.000-07:00

From Better Book Titles

Sorry, readers. I'm too busy to update properly at the moment. More soon.

Have you got a story to tell?

2010-08-04T09:23:00.001-07:00

As part of the first ever National Short Story Week in November, I'm in the process of organising an event that celebrates the short-story teller in all of us. After all, there's nothing the British pub-going public like better than a good old yarn, right?!

This event is loosely themed for "Myths and Legends". (Hence the picture of Thor). But you take this theme as lightly as you like: there's no need to get all studied up on Norse mythology before you come, or to know the name of every single Roman God. You will not be thrown out bodily if your story is not to do with ancient myths. Your story could be to do with a myth from your school-days, a living legend you've met, a legend or myth you yourself have created... the theme is really yours to riff off as you like.

Additional musical accompaniment will be provided.

In addition, (although this, also, is not compulsory), you are welcome to dress up as your favourite myth or legend. Whether you're going for Artemis The Hunter or Peter Beardsley, all costumes will be judged as equal, except for when it comes to prize giving at the end of the night when the winner of the costume competition is revealed.

If you've got a story to tell and you'd like to speak at this event, share it! Please get in touch with me at s dot j dot bradley [at] hotmail DOT com.

You can join the facebook event for "Have you got a story to tell?" here.

Even More Tonto Short Stories

2010-07-26T04:09:00.000-07:00

Here is a book called Even More Tonto Short Stories. It features one of my very own short stories, and it comes out on August the 5th. It features not only stories from new writers, but more established ones too. You can buy it off Tonto Books, or you can buy it from Amazon.

As you can imagine, this is very exciting news not just for me, but also for my long-suffering boyfriend who I would like to thank for all his patience and help (like that time when he built me a writing desk in the corner of our living room, using just pieces of wood and his BARE HANDS, and I never used it very much, but did long-suffering boyfriend complain? No he did not. No, I don't know why he puts up with it either). Also I would like to thank Pig Destroyer who likes to 'help' with the typing sometim55555555555555es.

2010-07-21T08:20:00.001-07:00

Every writer knows the transformative power of books, right? They change the way we see things, open our eyes to others' experiences, and take us away from our own lives. In a spectacularly enlightened move, the state of Texas has also recognised the rehabilitative powers of literature: it is sentencing (GEDDIT?!!) offenders on reading courses, instead of throwing them in prison. The programme is called Changing Lives Through Literature and has reduced reoffending rates from 42% to 19%. Rather predictably, the programme does come in for some stick, but many of those who have attended the programme say it has quite literally changed their lives.

Elsewhere on the internet, Le Rejectionist is running a one-year anniversary uncontest on the theme of What Form Rejection means to me. Fellow bloggers are invited to blog on this topic this Friday, then post a link to their post in Le Rejectionists' comments box. Five specially selected winners will be awarded a mix CD made by Le Rejectionist herself...!

Elsewhere, in real life news: I have a cat to feed, a greenhouse to water, a curry to spice, six Sky+'d episodes of Project Runway to watch, and a novel to write.

Currently reading

The Long Firm Jake Arnott
Scoop Evelyn Waugh

Get your pen and your tarpaulin: this patch of grass is now your office

2010-07-14T07:57:00.000-07:00

The urge to write can bite any time, like a blood-hungry midge wreaking itchy havoc on a set of campers. For your average writer in the street there's nothing worse than being struck with an idea, and being desperate to realize it - but not having the time or paper to write it down. It's the curse that strikes all writers on a more or less weekly basis. It's part of the reason why all writers pockets are full of scraps of paper, scribbled-upon napkins, bus tickets crammed with microscopic writing, and notebooks. You never know when the ideas are going to hit you: that's the devil of it.

Just like that, the desperation to realize an idea can catch us scribbling away in the strangest of places. Anywhere that has room enough for a notebook and pen becomes the writer's office. I admit, I've done it myself, on occasions where that idea just couldn't float around my head a second longer...

On a train. We're not talking 40's style romanticism here. I was heading away for a rowdy weekend of karaoke and booze-facedness that absolutely wasn't conducive to the Big Project I was planning. Consequence: rattling along with my pen in my hand and the smell of catering-car Croque Monsieur in my nose, making strange marks on the page every time the car jumbled over "the wrong sort of leaves" on the track.

Sitting on a wall outside a community centre, in Hastings. Long-suffering boyfriend enticed me into coming away on one of his working trips. He thought I was going to make myself useful: I thought I was going to work on my novel. About halfway through the day, realizing I was holding his flash stand in a sulky and entirely unsatisfactory manner, LSB snapped: "You're no use at all! Go and get on with your writing and stop making my life a misery!" Result! With no way of getting to a lovely warm coffee shop, I instead plonked myself on the nearest wall, pulled my fleece warm around me, and got to work.

Under a tree. I'd read somewhere that CS Lewis used to do this, and so I thought if I did it it would be well literary. However, instead of producing a series of seven children's books that have endured through the ages, I got grass on my skirt and bird poo on my head. It didn't really work out the way I'd hoped.

I know I cannot be the only one parking my office wherever inspiration strikes....

Progress slow: cats to blame

2010-07-11T04:17:00.000-07:00

Good post over on Le Rejectionist about how authors' cats impede the creative process. They are, after all, not interested in whether you get listed for The Booker Prize, or whether your work will end up on future 'A' Level Syllabuses (Syllabi?). All your cat is interested in is where the next can of tuna is coming from.

Currently reading

The Long Firm Jake Arnott

Fantasy part-time jobs for writers

2010-06-28T10:09:00.000-07:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged throughout the writing world that no writer ever makes a killing. It's just not a profitable industry, this. Most writers spend their lives hunched bitterly over cramped desks in the corner of their bedroom / living room, cursing the day they ever lifted up that fountain pen, wishing they had taken up economics instead. And then they die, penniless, forgotten by all but a handful of faithful readers, leaving behind debts that run to five or more figures.

So much for making a living from writing, dear readers. But how are we to make our living, if not from the words we produce? All of us, to a man, most have a soul-crushing day job, if not to stop the landlord from throwing us out from under their roofs, carpets and all, but also to provide us with the actual time and material one needs to keep writing.

Readers do not despair, and behold: for I bring you a comprehensive list of the best possible day-jobs a writer can have.

Job one: librarian Most writers write for one solitary reason: words. Words, and maybe books. We love books. They smell funny. They've got notes written in the margins, curved, battered spines, and pages with the corners bent over. Their covers may sometimes look hilariously out-dated, but the words within will stand the test of time. They say what they mean obliquely, with a language unique to each writer, and they transport us away from our miserable little lives, one sentence at a time. Writers love books, they can't get enough of them. What better way to enjoy the company of books than by surrounding yourself with them? (The odd bit of book-stamping and interaction with members of the public notwithstanding).

Job two: Filing clerk The problem with most day-jobs is that they actively take time away from what you want to do, viz. writing. What better way to combine the dual pursuits of earning money to live, and finding time to write, than by finding a job that practically pays you to write your novel? Filing rooms are strange places. Filled with dust and bizarre categorisation systems, the filing room provides the young filing clerk with everything he needs to complete his first magnum opus. The smartest file-clerk arranges his filing-den into a colour-coded, labyrinthine system which nobody else in the building can fathom. This stops anyone else coming up to look for things themselves. The writer & filing clerk has done well: he has found a job that pays him to write, and he won't get interrupted while he's doing it.

Job three: Sales assistant in B&Q All human life finds its way to the hardware store. The young couple in the act of putting up shelves in their new home; the embittered, ageing old couple who no longer have anything to say to each other, buying a shed to enable one of them to escape into the garden. Hardware stores, even more than supermarkets, are a breeder for disagreement between husband and wife. Trawl the aisles of any branch of Sainsbury's Homebase and you'll find at least two divorces brewing somewhere in between the latticed trellis-work and the self tapping screws. No assistant in B&Q could ever find himself wanting for material for the newest novel; and when there's a quiet moment, he can escape to the display sheds in the garden centre section to go and write it.

Bridport Prize

2010-06-16T09:14:00.000-07:00

It's summer. My car is hot. The dress code at work means no visible tattoos, and therefore long sleeves. While my colleagues drift about wearing cute cap-sleeve blouses, I'm tugging at the neckline of a little cardigan. (But do they have a large tiger crawling up their shoulder? No, readers, they do not. Therefore, on balance, I win.)

Yes, it would be smart to buy shirts. They're comfortable, they're cool. They let the air circulate. But like any other right-thinking individual, I resent spending money on clothes that are only to be worn in the workplace. That, dear readers, is why I rock up at my desk, with oft-worn threads hanging loosely from my elbows, and the seams of my trousers running threadbare at the thighs. I consider it my role in the workplace to play the part of the eccentric, crumpled hobo. This is also the reason my colleagues daily send me hilarious emails saying things like, "Don't worry, SJ, I've got an iron you can borrow".

Instead of buying appropriate workwear, I insist on wearing knitwear, which is also the reason why I come home most days smelling like a teenager after a Motley Crue concert. Summer is less good for writing than winter. The light reflects off your laptop screen and there's less romanticism to be had in writing in shorts and flip-flops than an aran jumper and a pair of fingerless gloves. It's a bit like cheating: if you can't see your breath solidifying in the air in front of you, how can you possibly expect anything you write to be any good? If you write in the afternoons and evenings after work, like I do, it's more or less a given that you can smell somebody's barbeque through the open window. The smell of charcoal and charred meat reaches your nose, and hark! - there's the sound of chinking beer bottles. Who on earth are these people, these so-called "neighbours", and who do they think they are, going around having so-called "fun"? DON'T THEY KNOW I'M TRYING TO WRITE A NOVEL??

All this can mean only one thing: it's Bridport Prize season. This year, there are categories for short fiction, flash fiction (1000 words or less!) and poetry. For those of us who are a bit wordy around the edges, it's also one of the more generous of the short-story competitions word-wise: 5000 words or less! Any subject!! Get your pens at the ready, it closes in two weeks (the 30th June). Judge this year is Zoe Heller.

Currently reading

The Long Firm Jake Arnott
Pratt A Manger David Nobbs
The Corner (yes, still)
When The Door Closed, It Was Dark Alison Moore, Nightjar Press

Bury your nose in your notebook and pretend you're not earwigging

2010-06-08T09:14:00.000-07:00

Bugged blog wants you to listen in on other people's conversations. I want you to listen in on other people's conversations. Why not? I do it myself all the time (don't tell anyone).

Based on the idea that we can find inspiration in everyday incidents, the competition they're running closes on August 15th. Submissions of flash fiction, short fiction, short screenplays, and poetry, are accepted. The only condition is that they must be based on something the writer overheard. (Wait, isn't that all fiction?)

What an ace idea to run a competition with such a widely-themed remit. The competition's open to established and new writers alike, and the winners will be published on their blog.

Get your ear-trumpets out, scribblers: it's overheard conversation season.

Super Ninja Power Brontes

2010-05-21T06:58:00.000-07:00

"What? No-one wants to read books by girls! Get outta here!"

Writers In Prison Network

2010-05-09T11:06:00.001-07:00

The Writers In Prison Network are currently recruiting four Writers in Residence for new projects in Prisons and Young Offenders Institutions around the country. The writer in residence complements the role of the education departments in the prisons, although is not part of the education department.

Describing creativity as "the only legal way to escape", one of the aims of these projects is to enrich life in prison. Literacy levels amongst prisoners are shockingly low (around 60% of prisoners below level 1 literacy, making them eligible for less than 4% of jobs...), and having access to a 'real' writer enables them to harness some creativity, and learn valuable basic skills, better preparing them for life on the outside.

Applicants don't need to have experience of having worked in prisons before, and nor do you have to be a 'published' writer, although anybody who understands how publishing works and who has at least one article or story published is likely to have a bit more credibility with the prisoners.

The four new projects are at: HMP Castington, a young offenders institution in Northumbria; HMP Drake Hall, a young offenders institution for female foreign national offenders; HMP Hewell, an amalgamated prison which houses prisoners in three categories, including an open prison; and HMP Warren Hill, a young offenders institution in Suffolk.

The working day can be diverse enough to include anything from helping prisoners prepare a weekly newsletter, to helping prisoners tell their life stories in a storytelling group. Some writers in residence run workshops on topics from grappling with the short story form, to developing characters; and one currently-running project has one writer in residence helping prisoners who have written a play to prepare and perform it. So there's plenty to get your teeth into for anyone who really wants to make a difference to peoples' lives through creativity.

More information here and here.

Lesson One: Not to become bitter

2010-05-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

This post first appeared on my Red Room profile

Bitterness, much like eccentricity and corpulence, appears to be somewhat of an occupational hazard for writers. Just as sitting on your rump all day writing is guaranteed to make you fat, and spending whole days inside your own head sure to make you a bit weird, the challenges writers face are likely to make them bitter.

It often begins when writers try to find recognition for their work, only to find themselves competing against legions of other hopeful writers for the attention of agents and publishers. The journey from writing to publishing can be a long one, and in itself this can be a cause of great grudge-bearing even for the best of us. But bitterness does not end once writers publish, and not even when they win awards and become successful: even many of the greats were caught up in long running feuds and sniping that not even their success could ameliorate.

The British writer Anthony Burgess could not bring himself to write an obituary for his contemporary, the writer Graham Greene. Burgess had for years simmered with resentment that Greene was popularly, and critically, considered to be the better writer of the two. This ill-feeling apparently continued for Burgess even after Greene's death, so embittered had he become by virtue of his competitor's success.

And bitterness is not a trait uniquely British. The American writer Truman Capote famously bitched of Jack Kerouac, a contemporary of his with a high daily productivity rate: "He says he writes up to 2,000 words a day. That's not writing, that's typing."

Recently, a friend and I were discussing the tendency for writers to become self-occupied and bitchy. He had recently been on a train journey back from a literature festival, and been involved in a conversation with two other writers. The conversation had in content mainly been critical: of agents, of publishers, and of other writers and their process. He had been struck by how quickly writers become embittered by everything they face. Thankfully, my friend and I have both recently celebrated recent successes, and I hope there will be many more to come: but it seems that even success itself is not a bar to bitterness. My new ambition as a writer, other than producing great work, is to become more stoic...

The Corner

2010-05-02T05:51:00.000-07:00

Writing advice is there to be ignored. It's the baying of the overly-prescriptive to the uninformed. I don't like it, I don't agree with it, and I generally find that most of it is fit only to be ignored. To wit, the oft-given piece of advice that no writer should ever read fiction alongside writing fiction, lest the voice of the author they're reading should creep into their own work. It's impossible, it's untenable, and anybody who goes around telling people this sort of rubbish ought to have a quiet word with themselves.

Everybody knows the single most important thing any writer can do to keep honing his or her craft is to read. And I mean, read a lot. We can learn a great deal by osmosis: good structure, tight pacing, believable characterisation. Hell, you can even learn how to write books where a teenage vampire is torn between his love for his girlfriend, and his crushing desire to eat her, if you're that way inclined. And the second most important thing any writer can do to keep honing his or her craft is to write. A lot. Like, every day. So how can both be true? Either you write, or you read, according to this dictum: you don't do both at once. (God forbid).

On the contrary, I firmly believe that any writer who has developed a strong enough voice can read whatever they like, whenever they like, alongside writing. If you choose your books smartly, it's going to help your writing process. Take that, opinionated advice-givers!

At present, I'm working on a ridiculously complicated, and very large, project. Even before beginning, I had a notebook full of characters - and not a weedy little notebook either, I'm talking about the type that's got pouches and seperate sections of coloured and graphed paper, the type that's so big it won't even fit into a handbag - and sheets full of diagrams. This project is so complicated it wasn't enough to draw a simple linear storyline, or even two or three simple linear storylines. What was required was to draw several pictorial diagrams, including Venn diagrams, and spider diagrams, and all sorts of stuff that have left the back pages of my process book looking like something from a very creatively taught secondary school Maths class. The central conflict and deceit is based around three main characters, with two important characters on the periphery around them; and, because of where the novel takes place, there at least another dozen less important characters, without whom the novel could not exist.

It was a doozy to get started. I didn't know where to begin at first. Intimidated by the scale and complexity, I procrastinated rather by drawing several more diagrams than I needed, strictly speaking. This gave me comfort in thinking that I was doing something 'important'. It gave the illusion that I was working on the book, even though I wasn't really working on the book. Anyway, in the end, I ran out of differently coloured pens for drawing the graphs, and realised I could excuse myself no longer. It was time to get started, dammit, and start I must, somewhere or other.

Overwhelmed by the complexity of what lay before me, I stuttered over knowing how to tackle the project. To help me along, I took my inspiration from other works with very heavily populated, complex storylines. I noticed how the writers began somewhere, concentrating on small vignettes of story, little illuminating flashes of character and incident. The scale of the novel was not given away in the detail - the detail was what made the complexity manageable, and the story intriguing for the reader.

Of biggest help in this project has been The Corner (A Year in the life of an inner-city neighbourhood), by David Simon & Ed Burns. This is the book upon which the television series The Wire is based. Although the subject matter of it is very different from the subject matter in my project, it has a similar scale of complexity and inter-tangled storylines. Technically, it's not a work of fiction, thus negating everything I have said earlier on in this blog post, but it certainly reads like a novel. Most importantly, despite the scale of it, it is not intimidating for the reader. Thirty pages in, I was hooked. How do they do that? I'll tell you how: with vivid detail, interesting characters, and sympathy. As an aside, I can't advise highly enough that you watch The Wire, all the way from the beginning of Season One, all the way until the very end of Season Five, without missing any out. Do not dismiss this series as "a cop show". It is so much more than just a cop show. Witness:

Only by reading The Corner could I see how to get started on my own project. By noticing how Simon and Burns allow the bigger picture to emerge, slowly, from the smaller details, I was able to let go of my anxiety around writing something more complex than I would usually attempt. This has really helped me get started on my own work. Genuinely, I don't think I could have started it without this kind of 'help'. And that's why, (she said, extrapolating furiously), I'd recommend that others also find things that will help them with their current project. Reading is not only something to occupy your mind in the downtime. Its something that can fill you with inspiration, and knowledge about form and structure.

Currently reading:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Haruki Murakami (Can't help myself, this is the fourth or fifth time now)
The Trial Franz Kafka
Arthur and the Women Kingsley Amis
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

Anti-fact of the day:

2010-04-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

Arrived home this afternoon to find that long-suffering boyfriend had thoughtfully sieved through the takeaway fliers and useless local-electioneering gubbins that daily come through the door, and put aside the BNP's election flier for me to enjoy when I came home from work. He knows I like this sort of thing. Well done, boyfriend.

Like most right-thinking people, I am against the BNP, and everything they stand for. Readers, I know you do not need me to ennumerate the many reasons why it is wrong to support or vote for the BNP. However, from time to time, when the steam has finished pouring out of my ears, I enjoy reading their policy leaflets, for their tangled morass of bollock-thought, and outpourings of gibberish.

On the one which came through the door today, the BNP are leading with the policy: "Let's look after our own instead of giving China and India 18bn a year to combat the effects of non-existent 'Climate Change'." Leaving aside the (fictional, by the way) figures, it's nice to see that the BNP have expanded their horizons from hating Africans, Muslims, Jews, Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese, asylum seekers from any nation or continent, and British-born and British-identified ethnic minorities, to include scientists and all of their work. Because after all, who knows better about the effects of man's activities on the environment? Scientists, with their silly white coats, and their fancy ideas, and their peer-reviewed journals, or a bunch of racists with Combat 18 tattoos?!

In the bottom right hand of this flier, there is a picture of Nick Griffin, superimposed by one of Winston Churchill. Whoever painstakingly designed this flier on Microsoft Paint (Windows 92 version) has made attempts to find pictures of both men wearing similar expressions, and sitting in similar poses, in order to alert the idle browser to the similarities between them. As we know (pay attention, history fans), Winston Churchill was a hugely popular statesman who led the country in a troubled time of war, during a time when Hitler's regime threatened to colonise all of Europe. Churchill led Britain to triumph against the threat of fascism, liberating other occupied nations in Europe, and putting an end to Hitler's death camps, in which over six million Jews were systematically gassed and murdered during the second world war. Nick Griffin, on the other hand, is a former member of Combat 18 who has never led anything more sophisticated than a riot at a football match, and a big fat holocaust denier.

w00t w00t

2010-04-22T12:40:00.001-07:00

The lovely InkyGirl quoted me! That's what you get for spouting your opinions on writing, rewriting and planning to anyone who'll listen.

Yes!

Too many hours spent at the day job...

2010-04-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

I dream of the day when, somewhere amongst the cabbages and turnips, a man by the name of Mr Pan-Macmillan, or Mr. Harper-Collins, approaches me in the supermarket, and whispers: "Psst! Hey lady!".

I, not being the kind of person who uses the supermarket as a pick-up joint, would ignore him at first. But the "hey, lady!"'s, and the insistent hissing grow ever louder, to the point where I have no option but to pay attention. And so I say, "What?!" testily, because I am always testy in the supermarket. If the fact I could be at home writing isn't enough to set me off, the people bovinely wandering across the aisles as though they've never used a shop before will.

And Mr Pan-Macmillan, (let's use just that name for the sake of brevity in this wishful anecdote), says, "I've got this advance burning a hole in my pocket, and I'm desperate for some writer to take it."

I say, "How do you know I'm a writer?" and he says, "because your basket is full of notebooks and pens".

In my dream, Mr Pan-Macmillan writes me a cheque there and then, and waves me off home to get on with writing my novel, unencumbered by the travails of having to hold down a day job. [Pedants, I know that no publisher operates in this ridiculous manner. Stay with me here]. He is such a thoughtful man, he even provides me with a long-suffering assistant, whose sole job is to do things that I hate, so that I'm free to write. Poor assistant. Fancy spending your whole day doing somebody else's housework and errands. Sorry, imaginary assistant, for making your life suck.

It's long days at work, and weekends full of commitment that bring me to this sweet day-dream again and again....

MATHS and LITERATURE.

2010-04-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

Friends, what is the author's best friend? The dictionary? No, friends, not the dictionary. The notebook? No, friends, not the notebook. The long-suffering other half who respectfully stays away while we stare furiously at the empty Word document in front of us, patiently paying the rent while we wait for our writing career to generate those millions of dollars we foolishly hoped for? No, friends, it isn't the long suffering other half. (Sorry, boyfriend.) No, friends, the author's best friend is the calculator, whether it be real, virtual, or internal. Why the calculator? I'll tell you why the calculator.

In days of slow progress, when developments can be measured in millimetres rather than miles, our internal calculator can be the agent of movement. See, today, I got started on the extremely complicated and lengthy Big Project that I have now been procrastinating over for several weeks. In my head, this morning, I heard the once-feared voice of my old University tutor, intoning: "That dissertation won't write itself, you know," and "Believe me, you just need to get started. After that, everything is simple".

I sat down and got to work. Keeping at bay the dark thoughts about the long and arduous task that lies ahead, I got writing. What do you know? Ol' Dr. Fox was right! Once I'd got started, the narrative came pouring out like a lovely, tinkling little stream, only where I say "lovely tinkling little stream", substitute "dark, harrowing, over-emotionally involved narrative that is mediated only by substantial gallows humour".

This is only the beginning, and there's a long way to go. I'm under no illusions whatsoever about how difficult the rest of the project is going to be to write. But I was encouraged by my word count: almost 2,000 words, when I expect the finished book to land at around 100,000. I did myself a small bit of mental arithmetic and worked out, "2,000 words a day? Writing every day? I can get this thing written in 50 days, EASY." (Heh.) It's not true. I most certainly won't get the first draft finished in 50 days. Maybe a hundred... but being able to make a start, and to see the word count creeping steadily up in front of me: that was a big booster, when as recently as only yesterday all I had was fear and paralysing inadequacy. Let this be a lesson to you all, or something.

PS. I have got a "book" coming out soon. (and when I say "book", I mean "short story").

Things: and things.

2010-03-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

Things I resented for getting in the way of my writing time last week:

Evening classes It seemed like such a good idea when I signed up for it. "I will learn such a great deal", I told myself, nobly. "The awkward interactions between a group of strangers will be good source material." Well, readers, it wasn't. All it was was the cause of great resentment that I wasn't at home, starting work on a new project. Curse you, thirst for learning: you took two hours away from my writing time this week.

Cleaning the kitchen What's the point? You only have to do it again three days later anyway. You develop good immunity if you never wipe the worktops. Seriously, I read it somewhere on the internet once. Look it up.

Socialising Damn you, friends, for inviting me to things I want to go to. Damn you, and damn you again. That was some fine karaoke, wasn't it?

Crap Tasks Within the realm of Crap Tasks, I encompass such activities including but not limited to: grocery shopping, going to the post office, listing second hand cars on eBay, filling forms in, looking for keys, and the myriad of other little tasks that add up together to waste literally hours of your precious life-span that otherwise could be used for something useful, for example getting started on your next novel.

Currently reading:

Sag Harbor Colson Whitehead (Five bloody stars, readers, five bloody stars)
Dawn Of The Dumb Charlie Brooker
Flying Solo Roald Dahl

Writer's inspiration playlists!

2010-03-18T14:24:00.000-07:00

You know how sometimes your character just won't come alive? When they're hiding cheekily behind gauze-coloured mist, throwin' shapes that somehow look indistinct? You can't make those two central protagonists fall in love like you need them to; you can't convincingly render up the heartbreak, the regret, the emotional reaction to major life events like having a baby, moving house, or getting married? WORRY NO LONGER, for I have created not one, but THREE, inspirational writers playlists on Spotify! (Oh, I am so good to you. I gave up about 4 hours of my writing time in cause of this pursuit).

Just click the links and before you know it you'll be churning out a veritable Mills n' Boon flavoured love-fest / heartbreak odyssey / historic epic. You will need Spotify to run these playlists, which is easily and freely downloaded here

Writer's inspiration: Love

Writer's inspiration: Regret

Writer's inspiration: Life

Interestingly (or not, depending on your perspective), the "love" and "regret" playlists took a lot of evening up. The whole time I was making these, the Regret playlist was almost twice as long as the Love one.... make of that what you will.

Enjoy, there's plenty more where they came from!

FICTIONWATCH: Day 236

2010-03-08T09:44:00.000-08:00

Reading Col Bury's post on writing time got me thinking about the extraordinary coalition of good circumstance one needs to write a novel. Seeing as nobody is ever going to come up to you randomly in the supermarket and go, "Hey, here's ten grand, why don't you take a year off to go and get that novel written", CURSE IT, you've gotta do the best you can in the circumstances you've got.

I've been writing my second novel since summer last year, and am now into my favourite part of the process, the rewriting and editing. Do not ask me why I like this part so much. I can only tell you that it somehow appeals to my inner pernickety.

Over the course of the past year, I've realised that being a hobbyist as regards writing is a hiding to nothing. You've got to be serious about it, and you've got to have an understanding and supportive partner (oh, such an understanding and supportive partner). So, with the knowledge gained from my extensive work on the Big Project over the last 9 months or so, here are my findings so far about what you need to write a book.

Time. It's going to weigh heavy on your hours, this writing a novel business. Bank on 1000 hours at least. WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO GET THEM? Maybe they could come out of your social life, or the time your employer is underpaying you to sell your soul to him, or the hours you'd normally spend sleeping. I can't decide this shit for you.

Discipline. To get in front of the laptop when you'd rather be watching Come Dine With Me.

Complete lack of interest in maintaining a social life. People will forget what you look like. People will begin to suspect that you hate them. Get used to it: you're a writer now.

Extremely nice, but long-suffering, boyfriend / girlfriend / wife / husband / partner. Get this: my LSB built me a desk (built me a desk) in the alcove of our living room, so that I'd have somewhere to work, and I spurned it in favour of sitting on the bed upstairs. I've now even spurned that in favour of the newly-spare room. My LSB is not allowed to listen to music, or talk to me, or approach me, while I am busy ignoring him in favour of a bunch of imaginary people. Readers, I do not know why he puts up with it. I can only say that I think he deserves to be canonised. Thanks, boyfriend.

A wordprocessor. Fairly self-explanatory, this.

Notebooks Regular readers of my blog will know that I am (a) a compulsive notebook hoarder and (b) that I'm not in favour of overly-prescriptive writing advice. But my opinion on (b), I think, is changing a bit. I'm coming to the opinion that authors skip researching, character work, and outlining, at their peril. If you don't have a good outline, or strong character sketches at the start of your book, you'll end up with a load of unreadable tosh that no amount of editing is going to put right. Just sayin'.

A kettle. Yeah, even if you don't drink tea or coffee.

BNP in "being vile fuckwits" shocker.

2010-03-02T09:09:00.000-08:00

Here's a heartwarming story for you: the BNP hate women as well as jews, blacks, asians, and all other ethnic minorities! (Way to go, BNP! Where do I sign up??)

In a fabulous new instalment in their "making yourself look like a tit without anybody else needing to make an effort" saga, (other episodes include Nick Griffin saying "there's no such thing as a black welshman", and senior party officials being convicted of race hate crimes), senior party official Nick Eriksen has made moves to alienate women voters with his view on rape. Yes, I know what you're thinking, but the BNP really do have female supporters. There was an ITV2 documentary on them once, called BNP Wives. It was like a less glamorous version of Footballer's Wives, but set in Bolton, and with added doses of Holocaust denial.

Eriksen was outed by a journalist at the Evening Standard, who discovered that Eriksen had been spouting vile views on a far right-wing blog, under a pseudonym. Far be it from me to suggest that BNP officials have to hide their views from the public eye in a pointless bid to try and fool the British public into thinking they're not a bunch of massive racists, but a cynic might think that.

Eriksen's views on female liberation, which include the frankly superb "the vast majority of domestic [assaults] are initiated by the woman" and the opinion that women who want to go out to work have got something wrong with them.... you know, in the head... extend also to the idea that rape isn't all that much of a serious offence - comparable, say, to getting your handbag stolen:

"I've never understood why so many men have allowed themselves to be brainwashed by the feminazi myth machine into believing that rape is such a serious crime ... Rape is simply sex. Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal."

Eriksen also seems to believe that if a woman is raped by somebody she knows, then that doesn't count as rape either.

If this isn't a good reason for everybody to register to vote to keep the BNP scum out, I don't know what is.

Thanks to Mason Henry Summers for bringing this to my attention.

Good writing advice

2010-02-20T07:09:00.001-08:00

The internet is full of writing advice. Much of it is nonsensical, overly-opinionated, and overly-prescriptive bollocks, live, "always use active verbs" and "never begin a sentence with a gerund". So how about some writing advice from, you know, actual writers as opposed to some twat with a computer, an opinion, and an internet connection?

Thankyou, The Guardian, for bringing us Ten Rules for Writing Fiction, a collection of words of wisdom from people who actually write for a living.

Personal favourites:

"Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page." (Margaret Attwood)

"Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue." (Helen Dunmore)

"The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page." (Anne Enright)

"Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov." (Geoff Dyer)

And, truest of all...

"Only bad writers think that their work is really good." (Anne Enright).

Reader, I should have married him!: The case of Marry Him! and the disgruntled ex-boyfriend

2010-02-10T11:41:00.000-08:00

Dear Ex-Boyfriend,

Here's hoping you have the time to read this letter, because I really want chance to make things right with you. I realise it's been a while since we last spoke. Is it ten years now, or eleven? Funny how the time flies!

Well, you might have heard on the grapevine that I'm still unmarried, and yes, still childless. Those are facts I didn't really notice myself until the other night, hearing the closing theme of Eastenders, it hit me like a ton of bricks: I'm in my mid-thirties! Surely I ought to do something about this state of affairs!

When you knew me, I was still a young woman, still blooming and carefree (oh, so carefree!). I thought that life would be fun forever. I cared little for commitment, instead preferring to spend my time going deaf at gigs, and getting pissed up and drunk on booze. My life was my own to pursue as I wanted, and I thought I could keep it that way forever. I could learn a profession, I thought, and become independent. I could be financially stable in my own right, I could live in a nice house, I could go where I wanted, see who I wanted, and eat what I wanted. I assumed I would write a novel and get a lovely little kitten. These things, I thought in the foolishness of my youth, would make me happy: being independent, and having the wherewithal to make my own decisions.

But time will not relent in its inexorable march, and I am still without a set of wedding photos to show visitors and my puzzled grandmother. Most of my friends are married and I, a fact that became crushingly apparent to me as I last danced to Come on Eileen with a glass of champagne in my hand, am still a spinster: unwanted! Unloved! On the Shelf!

I tried not to let the others see my tears. By that time, they were all doing the conga anyway, and didn't notice when I darted out of the line into the corner of the room to have a little cry. A voice in my head was nagging: "Doing what you want does not make you happy. Financial stability, fulfilling work, a social life: these things will fade away into the yawning abyss of middle age." I don't want to be 45 years old, looking around appalled at the emptiness of my life, and in the state where I no longer have the option of snaring a man because my face looks like an old bin bag.

The next morning, regretful and hungover, I dashed into the nearest bookstore to find an answer to all my problems, and thank goodness I found Lori Gottlieb's book, Marry Him!: The Case For Settling. "I've got to get out of these disgusting habits," I said to myself, "of keeping nocturnal hours and eating ice-cream in the tub. Lori will tell me what to do." Thank goodness, she did. Through the medium of print, I mean: she didn't just suddenly show up and sort me out.

Anyway, turns out I was wrong to keep seeking a man who complements me perfectly, and whom I make happy. Really, what I ought to have done is to marry the first guy who'd have me - which brings us to you, dear ex-boyfriend.

You might remember that you asked me to marry you once and I, full with the arrogance of youth, snorted "No way! I don't want to be tied down!" [I had these stupid ideas about going to University and having a bit of fun. What was I thinking?] I am sorry for that, dear Ex. What I ought to have done is accept immediately, and unconditionally, because, as Gottlieb points out, it doesn't matter if your husband has halitosis, or a beard, or is rude to waiters. What you have to do is compromise. Marriage, after all, isn't about compatibility, or making one another happy: it's about never being lonely again.

On the face of it, I can see why a sceptic might think you and I shouldn't marry. I'm a social butterfly, you're introverted and pathologically jealous. You love listening to Radio 4, and I love watching The Hits! on cable TV. We have so little to talk about that when we were going out together, we literally spent hours sitting in the same room in silence, boring one another to tears. But this is the beauty of settling - you and I could quite easily sweep these minor niggles aside (and they are quite minor, right? What's a lifetime of awkward silences between friends?) and be together forever! That's the beauty of 'settling'. You don't even have to love each other, or even like each other very much. All you have to have in common is the fact that you don't want to be alone!

How about it?

Yours,

S J (Your loving Ex.)

I Don't Hate You, It's Just That I'm Writing A Novel

2010-01-27T09:02:00.000-08:00

This post first appeared on my Red Room profile

Writers notoriously have a reputation for eccentricity and bizarre, anti-social behaviour. The late Harold Pinter was notoriously bad-tempered, and how many of us, whose hours are spent in quiet darkened rooms inventing imaginary people, imaginary places, can honestly say we feel completely comfortable when required to socialise with actual people? When I'm dragged out, against my will, of a weekend, I may stand at the party with a drink in my hand, but inside I'm glowering. All I can think is, "You bastards, you took me away from my project." Don't get me wrong, I love it when people desire my company, and I'd hate for my friends to stop inviting me to things. [Please, don't stop inviting me to things]. It's just that my mind is often on the Project: how soon can I decently make my getaway, and get back behind the laptop?

For those of us whose writing does not currently pay, weekends are inevitably the finest opportunity we get for hours of quiet, uninterrupted work. During the week, it's a couple of hours a night at best. At best, and often not that. For there are Crap Tasks to be done, and it is wrong to neglect the other half in favour of a bunch of imaginary people.

So in view of that, I would like to publicly apologise for my behaviour, and explain myself to everybody. I've been acting a bit weird lately, and I think it's only fair that I explain myself, and apologise to everybody affected. I don't doubt that there a lot of people in my life wondering what the hell is going on. Why I've developed all these strange tics, why I barely speak, and why I never go out any more. Wonder no more, friends, for I do not hate you: it's just that I'm writing a novel.

Housemate: I am sorry I disappear upstairs with the laptop every time you want to watch TV in the living room. It's not that I can't bear your company, or that I despair of your choice of TV programme. It's just that I'm writing a novel.

Friend: I am sorry that I didn't come to your gig last night. I know there were bands playing that I won't get chance to watch again in a hurry, and I know it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. And I'm sorry that we haven't had chance to talk in months. It's not that I hate you, it's just that I'm writing a novel.

Long-suffering boyfriend: I'm sorry that I get all twitchy when I go for too many days without writing, and that I act a bit weird when we spent the evening on the sofa together watching TV. I'm sorry that I've annexed your computer for my own use. I'm sorry for refusing to talk back to you when I'm working. I'm sorry that sometimes I go a bit quiet when I'm in the supermarket sometimes. I'm sorry that sometimes, I go into these long protracted silences when my eyes glaze over, and I appear to be in another world. It's not that I hate you.... it's just that I'm writing a novel.

JULIAN BARNES.

2010-01-23T06:01:00.000-08:00

New Julian Barnes short story, "Sleeping with John Updike", on The Guardian website.

YES!

Huddersfield Literature Festival

2010-01-23T04:16:00.000-08:00

Fact fans, the Huddersfield Literature Festival is 5 days long and starts on the 10th March. You're going to want to go to this because it features Simon Armitage, flat of vowel and tasty of words, Jeremy Dyson of The League Of Gentlemen fame, and many others. It is also fully endorsed by Patrick Stewart off Star Trek, who is honorary patron of Huddersfield University. The festival features, among other things, "poetry karaoke" and a "Manga masterclass". I do not know what either of these things are. I'll tell you one thing for sure, though: those bods at Huddersfield University sure know how to run a world-beating festival. Last time I went to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, I heard so much fascinating new music, I almost went home and threw my entire CD collection away, so tarnished did it appear by comparison. True story.

The Grist Anthology, the result of last year's short story competition, will be launched at the festival. Winners of the currently-running short story & poetry competition on the website could also be included in this book! The closing date is February 12th, and you need to be succinct (upper word limit, prose, 1000 words; poetry, 10 lines). So be quick and be sharp, and good luck to everyone who enters.

Currently reading

White Teeth Zadie Smith
Broken Glass Alain Mabanckou
The Kid Dan Savage
Boy Roald Dahl
After The Fireworks Aldous Huxley
Kafka on the Shore Haruki Murakami

Let's start a revolution!

2010-01-16T10:12:00.001-08:00

, originally uploaded by lakash.

So yesterday, I was complaining about the lack of breadth in beauty ideals, and how images of women in the popular media conform to a ridiculously narrow ideal. And then today, I was "browsing" the internet, and I found this flickr group, Revolution of Real Women! How do you like that?

Why are you hitting yourself?

2010-01-15T08:23:00.000-08:00

A couple o' months ago, I wrote a piece about unrealistic beauty ideals and what they do to women's self-esteem, called Hands Up If You Feel Ugly. I did it because the current prevailing definition of sexy is too thin, too young, too inoffensive, and quite frankly, too super-bloody-lame.

There's a uniformity to the look. It's unattainably thin, but it's also - somehow, inexplicably - got knockers. It's got clear, glowing skin, and a perfect, cute little button nose! And most "how do they do that?!", it's got no scars, no floppy bits of skin, and no bruises. It's like the most popular girl from your secondary school all over again. She's better looking and has a better life than you, and she's taunting you everywhere you look, and selling everything from chocolate to cars.

There's only a certain amount we can do if we want to be free of these images. You can stop buying magazines, and if you really wanted, you could stop watching telly. But for God's sake, what sort of a society would we be living in if we were only allowed to enjoy entertainment if we were willing to pay the price of feeling dreadful about ourselves?! Come on, people. Wouldn't it be better if the general rule were to populate the worlds of advertising and television with people who looked like real human beings? Real human beings are great. They come in all shapes and sizes. Lots of them are sexy and beautiful in unexpected ways, they have personality and vigour, and they don't look like they just stepped out of some bizarre heavily airbrushed nether-world.

Unattainable beauty ideals have shocking knock-on effects for your average woman in the street. Looking at them every day - which you could only not do if you wore a blindfold everywhere you went - makes us feel fat and ugly by comparison. We come to hate our own bodies, and we don't feel sexy. That, friends, puts us off getting naked in front of our husbands and lovers. Who in their right mind wants to live in a world like that? DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING!

In an interesting twist upon Big Corporations Doing Evil Things That Are No Good, [past examples include killing third world babies with formula milk, and shooting anyone who joins a trade union], Dove have set up the Susie Orbach-instigated campaign for real beauty. Part of this campaign involves using a wider range of body types and beauty ideals in their advertising, and education work in schools to improve body image in little girls. There's a short film on their website about how girls and women develop skewed ideas about beauty on their website here.

In other good news, the Liberal Democrats called last year for a ban on heavily airbrushed images, arguing that they are bad for women's mental health, and that they put pressure upon women to live up to unrealistic beauty ideals. [The libs would also make it easier for small venues to get a license for live music, and abolish Council Tax, so vote for them. DO IT!].

Wouldn't it be great to see loads of sexy girls and boys of all shapes and sizes in the public eye? For every Eva Longoria Parker, a Nigella Lawson; let's have more pictures of big girls eating cake, and more images of older women looking pleased with themselves. Let's have everybody feeling good about themselves, and a chocolate fountain on every corner. Let's make sexy older, let's make it more interesting, and best of all, let's make it bigger.

2010-01-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

Interesting article in The Guardian about how e-publishing could overtake the traditional ink and paper publishing format, given the right software.

Its an interesting idea, in which the reader can create 'playlists' of novels they like, in software akin to Spotify (the music streaming software). You know why this wouldn't work, though? Because books aren't the same as a three-minute pop song. You can't listen to a book in under three minutes. You can't divide your attention between reading a book, say, and crossing a road. What's the point of creating a 'playlist' of novels? It's not like you can flick between one novel and the next. You'd only get confused about the plot.

You know what would be a really great piece of software for voracious readers? A piece of software more like last.fm radio. Using Lost.FM radio, music fans can 'scrobble' (brackets: 'find') bands similar to their existing favourites. How could would that be if it existed for books?!! I would love to use a piece of software that recommended authors to me that wrote in similar styles to the ones I already enjoy. Existing recommendation systems are clunky at best, or embarrassingly wide of the mark at worst. I'm talking to YOU, Amazon Recommends. A Quiver Full Of Arrows, for me? Really?!

I can't be the only keen reader who'd love to be able to get personalised recommendations for new authors, recommendations of authors she's actually likely to enjoy. I would buy this software, for sure.

Snow day!

2010-01-06T02:38:00.000-08:00

This post first appeared on my Red Room profile

Well, we've had the shortest day, according to reports, but according to me, the mornings appear to be getting darker. How do they make that work?

This morning, I was up and at 'em before the sun had risen. In the glow of the street light, I could see snow falling. Great, heavy, juicy globs of snow, a dozen snowflakes clumping together like heavenly muesli. I thought, "Should I go to work? Will I get stuck?" This was the question I mulled over my tea and toast, sitting at the kitchen table. It was coming down the whole time I chewed on my toast, and was still the one I considered while I held Pig Destroyer up to the window to show him the snow.

Long Suffering Boyfriend came down the stairs as I was checking the news. The journalist, apparently unable to get anywhere with her crew, was forced to make news by hi-jacking a poor old lady in a nearby house. "Are you cold?" she asked, in desperation. "How do you stay warm?"

"I wear lots of layers," the old lady twitched. "And I bake cakes." She helpfully held up a fruit cake to the camera, to better illustrate the point.

"You might get stuck if you go out," Long Suffering Boyfriend said. "There are about six inches of snow in the street."
"Make sure you wear boots with good grips," the TV journalist was saying. "It's treacherous out there." Grinning, she held up a pair of ski shoes, pointing at the sole.

I called my office, and unbelievably, some sucker was at work. Having secured myself an Emergency Snow Day off, I sneaked the heating on, and sat down with Pig Destroyer on my knee to get to work on the Big Secret Project (approximately 6,000 words left to go, dear readers!). But the day seems wasted to use entirely indoors, and so after a big chunk of work, we strapped our boots and our gloves on, and went to take some pictures.

The streets were quiet: no kids throwing snowballs, and only one snowman. There was nobody in the park, leaving me the welcome opportunity to tramp through ten inches of fresh, crunching snow. I had my photo taken next to somebody else's snowman, and wrote half the first verse of 'Ding Dong Merrily On High' in the snow in someone's windscreen with my finger.

As I write, its still coming down: tomorrow might be another snow day....

So, how about this e-publishing, then?

2009-12-31T04:42:00.000-08:00

Paper books. They're nice to hold in your hands. You can take them on the bus, you can read them in the bath, you can easily lend them out to your friends (and never get them back, in my experience) ... and, if news reports are to be believed, they're fucking dead.

In 2001, Apple computers launched the iPod. Until that time, mp3s and music downloading had been the preserve of music nuts, people given to sharing music illegally on sites like soulseek and kazaa. Most people who shared mp3s were music nerds, and used file-sharing to listen to new music and try out new bands & artists without risk. After Apple launched the iPod (and subsequently, the Apple store) everybody was at it. By 2009, even people who don't really like music all that much (e.g. the kinds of people who habitually buy CDs in supermarkets along with the weekly shop... Robbie Williams fans and the like) wanted one. Everybody and their wife / husband / civil partner had an iPod.

Along the way, the swapping and sharing of music had become the property and preserve of the people who made it. MySpace allowed bands to easily manage their own hosted website, distributing their music directly to their fans without the need for tape-swapping or a middle man. Bands no longer needed a record company or a publicist to share their music with others. This way of doing things opened many bands' eyes to a more DIY way of doing things: they owned their music, they didn't need to sign over their rights to somebody else, and more crucially, they didn't have to spend a lot of time trying to get industry attention.

Will we now imminently see the same sort of sea change in publishing? Several e-readers are now available, and bookworms can now purchase e-books on Amazon for as cheap as $1.99. This kind of publishing allows writers to upload and directly distribute their work directly to readers, and to interact with them on the Kindle forums. Rather than losing out on royalties, authors using this method of publishing get to reap the entire profits that their work generates. [There's an interesting post on how this approach worked for one author - whose novel was already available in traditional format - on The Millions.]

I don't know how e-books would work for a reader like me. In an embarrassingly old fashioned manner, I like the feeling of a book in my hands. Equally, in my doddering old age, I'm prone to leaving expensive items in public places. That's two iPod shuffles and a mobile phone I've lost already this year, by the simple expedient of catching a train. Well done, me. So would I ever use one? It's difficult to say until I've held one in my hands. I might really like it, although I'd probably leave it on a bus or something. But it's not use relying on me for predictions. You're reading the musings of a woman who thought CDs would never take off. [Note to self: never take job working in the Futures department of any large corporation].

In theory, for authors, the e-book looks attractive. You can choose how the book's marketed, and what goes on the 'cover'. You get the final say in editing decisions, and you don't have to attract the attentions of a publishing house or agent. But equally, there are so many downsides. The writer becomes solely responsible for the marketing and selling of his or her own book, if he or she publishes this way, and although there's no significant financial outlay, is still essentially self-publishing. Although most writers are more than happy to spend a lot of time and effort publicising their work, how many want to be solely responsible for it? A lot of writers might be left doing the e-publishing equivalent of spending all day on MySpace browsing people's profiles and clicking "add". "Add." "add".

And how might this alternative access to publishing affect the quality of work that's available? If this method captures authors' imaginations, we might see a lot of un-rewritten work out there, with 'authors' who don't bother with the sort of extensive writing and rewriting that fiction needs to be readable. This might leave a lot of e-book adopters with a lot of dross to sift through, and a general loss of faith in the medium as a whole. A lot of the work available won't be going through the extensive professional attention of editing and critiquing process of conventionally published books. There again, it also means that genuinely interesting, good quality books that publishers are currently unwilling to risk publishing, will get into the public domain. We might see a wildly oscillating range of quality of books, but also an explosion in style and genre. It could be an exciting time.

E-publishing is already starting to have an impact on the publishing industry, and it'll be interesting to see how this pans out. Will readers ever totally abandon the paper and ink book? And if they do, how is the landscape going to change for publishers and writers?

Fa-la-la-la-laaa, la-la la la!

2009-12-21T07:56:00.001-08:00

So Christmas is coming and the goose is getting &c, it'll be the end of the year before you know it, and before you know that, Winter will be over. End of decade-lists and end of year-lists abound everywhere. The only list I like is a good to-do list, preferably with everything crossed off it, so I won't bore you with one here.

It's been a tough couple o' years, the recession deepening and really getting its claws into all of us. Millions out of work, shops closing down all over, industries closing down, far right groups doing their best to make political capital and gain ground, as they always do in recession-times [scum], people with dark shadows around their eyes everywhere you look.

People often say that economic hard times are always times of great creativity. Like, people are looking for new ways to make things and do things, maybe because lack of cash and resources forces us to work harder. Also, because you haven't got the money to go out, you spend all your time indoors Doing Stuff [no bad thing]. Also, the climate of the times sees us all creating stuff that reacts against the politics of the time [cf. "Stand Down Margaret" by The Beat, "Maggie's Farm" by The Specials, both made in the big recession in the 80s, when 3.2 million people were unemployed...]

One of the big problems with recession for writers is that publishers are unwilling or unable to take risks, and there is a great blog post about this very issue over on the Tonto Books Blog. It's a valuable read for anyone with more than one rejection letter to their name, for example every writer in the world.

Christmas for me is going to mean a break from the day-job, more valuable time spent on the Big Secret Project (now extremely close to being finished), and getting some more short stories done. Merry Christmas, everyone!

2009-12-14T11:49:00.000-08:00

In New News (obtained from the Tonto Books blog), the new news is that the Tonto Short Stories anthology will be available in shops from May 2010. In between now and then, it will be available in e-book format (What's best? Amazon Kindle or Borders E-Reader? I'm still very much in the Technologically Backward Granddad Category: "Is that the same as a Tamagotchi?"). It's currently being sold into bookstores, which is good news for readers an' writers alike. The book's more widely available, and it gets picked up by more readers on the strength of the cover. Everyone's a winner.

In my own personal news, I've been working hard on my current big project. I've been pullin' the typewriter up close and personal when I get home from work of an evening, the result of which being that I'm a long way into it. The first draft should be finished by the New Year. (Am I jinxing myself with those very words? - no, I don't think I am).

Boyfriend commented recently, "You're very disciplined". [Also commented, "Do you really need more notebooks?" when I stocked up on travel-journal notebooks in the Paperchase / Borders closing down sale. I will always need more notebooks. Please, send notebooks. Always send notebooks]. "Of course," I answered, primly. "Do you know that Murakami wrote his first novel in the early hours of the morning after coming home from work every night?" Actually, if I'm honest, this was not my first answer. My first answer was, "No talking while I'm busy."

So, the Christmas chunk of time off will be spent with my head anti-socially buried in my laptop (but don't worry, I'll be wearing a seasonal party hat while I do it), knocking off the last 15,000 words before I get to the editing and rewriting part, which I'm am slightly embarrassed to admit, is my favourite part of the process. I'm embarrassingly nerdy about rewriting and editing. It's one of the great joys of my sheltered little life. Other people get drunk, take drugs, and indulge in high-octane, adrenaline junkie life-threatening extreme sports. Me... I rewrite.

In the course of writing this novel, I have so far drunk 137 cups of tea, lost one pair of fingerless gloves (where can they go in a 2-bedroom terraced house?!), used one notebook, worked about 300 hours, invented a whole fictional world of people, surreptitiously asked my friends about their day-jobs in the way of research, and given my boyfriend at least 52 dirty looks for trying to converse with me while I am working. I don't deserve him, really. (somebody is in line for a really smashing new pair of slippers when this is finished).

Assistant Wanted....

2009-12-04T10:34:00.001-08:00

In recent weeks I've been vocal (or should I say, 'writey'?) about the advantages of winter for writers. It's cold, it's dark - perfect weather for staying in, and what better to do with your enforced time indoors than getting stuck into the latest project? I've got me a pair of fingerless gloves and a whole bag of mulled wine spices - so I'm all equipped for it.

At last, I've got a perfect routine going. Work is such that I get home early enough, and emotionally equipped and energetic enough to get a bit of work done most evenings. But you know what really grebs away at the time? Things. Stuff. Crap tasks, like going to the post office, and putting the washing in. It's not just that I resent housework for being an instrument of oppression to women (Emmeline Pankhurst didn't chain herself to the railings so I could waste my time vacuuming the stairs, that's what I always say), but also as a drudge, an idiotic waste of time, and worst of all, it keeps me away from writing. And do you know what the worst swizz of it all is? That you have to do it all again a few days later.

I dream of having a maid. Or even better than having a maid, having an assistant: somebody to pay my National Insurance Contributions at the Post Office. Somebody to go to Wilkinson's to buy cat litter. Somebody to cook my dinner! It's days like these when I exist entirely on pasta and noodles - not because I like either food, but because they take under ten minutes to cook. Alright, so it wouldn't be a very fulfilling job, but it'd free up my time to get more done. You ever wish there were 26 hours in a day? That's me.

You'll already know about Borders' financial troubles. They went into administration recently - a friend who works there told me that the branch he works in is staying open day by day on the basis of how much stock they sell each day. They don't know for certain when the store will close for good - could be any day.

Any way you look at it, Borders' closure is bad news for readers and writers alike. Most book fans are first attracted to books by their covers, and decide to buy on the basis of flicking through them in store. Yes, the prices are cheaper on Amazon, but who buys a book without first holding it in their hands and reading sections of the book to check they like the authors' style? Without bricks and mortar stores for people to wander into, to browse the titles, or to be tempted to buy more books than they intended to through 3 for 2 promotions, I can't see how book sales won't be impacted. The scary thing is, if a bit store like Borders can't survive in this climate, what hope is there for independent & locally owned bookstores?

But... onto the Good News. Mslexia's 2010 Short Story Competition is now open! Submissions of short stories by women authors are invited for the competition, closing in January 2010. The top prize is a day with an editor from Virago. This is a prize really worth winning - so good luck, those of you who enter it! There are more details in this quarter's issue of Mslexia.

Also, independent publishers Wild Wolf Publishing are accepting submissions of full length novels. Specialising in dark, brutal and edgy fiction, they accept submissions of any genre, so long as it's dark! [You can't miss their website. It has pictures of wolves all over it].

Until next time.... I'm putting the fingerless gloves back on and heading back up to my study.... x

November: writing season

2009-11-21T02:28:00.000-08:00

It's been over a month since the clocks went back, and I've been wearing my fingerless gloves all around the house ever since. This is no pretension on my part: it really is that cold in our house. Most evenings I creep up to the attic to get to work wearing two shirts, two vests, a thin jumper, and a wonky home-knit aran sweater that I made two years ago, and which is too embarrassing to wear outside the house. Putting the heating on is cheating. Apparently, if one wants to write a great novel, one has to suffer like a character in a Dostoevsky novel. That's Ricky's excuse for not putting the heating on, anyway: it's all the interests of supporting my work.

Dark nights can be something of a productivity slayer. Crawling into hibernation after long days at a day job is perilously easy. However, the slide into torpor is even more depressing than 16-hour long nights, rendering the lazy writer a regretful quivering heap by February, when the snowdrops start to emerge.

A winter night is well suited to writing. It's dark, it's cold, there are few distractions. What else are you going to do? It's not like you can have a barbeque, for God's sake. And so, every night after tea, I waddle upstairs in my seventeen layers to do a couple of hours' work.

This November I have mostly been: still embroiled in the very exciting Secret Project I'm working on. At this rate, I'll have the first draft finished by February. Interspersed with this, I've been working on some short stories. I've had some good ideas lately and they've all made their way into the fiction.

For anyone looking for places to submit work this month (be quick, there are short dates on these) here are a couple of competitions I've unearthed lately:

The Willesden Herald runs an International Short Story competition, leading to publication by Pretend Genius Press, who are an independent publisher who run on a non-profit basis. They have about 15 titles to their name, and currently also publish 'zines. They seem like a publishers' with a unique ethos, so go check 'em out.

This is a good comp for anyone who's a bit wordy in their short stories, as the word limit is 8,000 words. Best of luck to anyone who enters this one.... I'm off to don my gloves and get back to work!

Currently Reading

When To Walk Rebecca Gowers
Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them Phillipe LeGrain
Before She Met Me Julian Barnes

A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but cafes are a girl's best friend....

2009-11-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

Last weekend saw me tagging along behind Ricky on a trip to the South coast. I had a couple of free days, and he had some photographs to take. Although entreated to stand around holding a flash, or to stop passers-by from walking in front of the camera, I demurred. "You want me to take two whole days away from the Big Secret Project?" I shouted. "And get stuck in the middle of Chapter Six? I DON'T THINK SO."

The more I work at being a writer, the more it becomes clear that taking any sort of break from writing - especially in the middle of a big project like a novel - is disastrous. There was that one time when we had a holiday and I made the mistake of leaving my notebook at home. When I got back, I lost hours in staring angrily at blank pages, trying to get into a stride that had been unbreakable before we'd gone away. It's not the sort of mistake you're in a hurry to repeat.

So I shoved my laptop and a notebook into the old rucksack, along with a pair of clean knickers and a travel bottle of shampoo, and joined him in the car. Call me strange (go ahead, everybody does) but when we pulled into Brighton, it wasn't the main shopping street, or the tourist attractions, I was scanning the streets for, but a cafe.

You know the sort of cafe I'm talking about. It's the sort of cafe writers love. It's got mismatched furniture, jumble sale crockery, a clientele that plays Go quietly, and who chat at a non-concentration breaking level, and owners who don't mind customers ordering one cup of tea and staying there four hours. I found one such cafe in The Lanes, a cute place with a colourful array of retrieved furniture, and a synthetic cow-hide rug underfoot. Satisfied that I'd found my working spot for the rest of the afternoon, I plugged the computer in and got to work.

Despite my highly-strung need for absolute silence when working at home, paradoxically, when working in a public place like a cafe or a library, the quiet level of constant noise around me is comfortably stimulating. There is nothing more inspiring than watching other people eat (discreetly, of course... it's rude to stare) and listening in on their conversations for a couple of hours. Oh come on, it's not just me. You all do it.

My thanks go out to the owners of this cafe for not ostentatiously clearing up around me as I worked, in an attempt to hustle me out of the place. Their consideration allowed me to get my work done, and I don't doubt that there's a great tradition of letting writers get on with their work by cafe owners, without which the creation of many great works of literature would have been completely scuppered: "I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines give to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that.... you're taking the sugar bowl? Oh, for Christ's sake, please not the sugar bowl. Now I just look like a tramp who came in here to get warm. Thanks." ( (c) F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1926)

After a couple of hours' work, I felt bad about making one cup of tea last so long, and approached the counter again. The cafe was small enough that I could leave my laptop on the table to keep an eye on it while I ordered another cup of tea, and a slice of cake. "Greedy," the owner said to me as he reached into the Brownie jar with his tongs. I don't know how many slices of cake he thought I'd had in the two hours I'd been there. Seemed like he thought I'd been doing nothing but shoving bits of flapjack into my face continuously, rather than working tirelessly on The Big Secret Project.

Anyway, it was thanks to his consideration and generosity that I was able to get another chapter finished, and to tidy up a few other smaller bits of work that needed doing. I can't be alone in needing to thank cafe owners up and down the country for their understanding in allowing me to work in their establishments for hours at a time for the price of a hot drink.
Favourite writing cafes, anybody?

12.5 writing tips....

2009-10-28T03:12:00.000-07:00

Found on ffffound.com this morning... words of encouragement for writers everywhere.

On the whole, I'm not a big fan of writing advice. A lot of it is a bit too prescriptive, but this... this is good.

[image originally from palavra aguda's blog].