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
Short story writer & novelist. K Blundell Trust award-winning Author, Saboteur Award winning editor (Remembering Oluwale), fiction editor at Strix Magazine. Director of the Northern Short Story Festival.
Saturday, 21 November 2009
Sunday, 1 November 2009
A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but cafes are a girl's best friend....
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?
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?
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
12.5 writing tips....
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].
Monday, 26 October 2009
30267 words and counting....
A week off from the day job, I though optimistically, would give me the time to write a good 10,000 words. Hell, maybe even 15,000. When your productivity rate after a hard day's work is generally around 1000, writing 10,000 words when you've taken the time off specifically just to do that, should be a snip, right...? Right?
It's at these times that the writing malaise always strikes. Isn't it always the way that when you've specifically set aside the time to write, there's nothing you feel less like doing. Give me an hour in a productive meeting at work, an hour in the supermarket, an hour shopping for shoes that fit properly (spit) .... and all I can think is, "I'd rather be behind my desk right now". Yet now here I am, with a whole week to spend behind my desk, and I'm procrastinating. (See entry on "Bradley's foolproof 10-step procrastination method" if you want to know how my time is being wasted).
In times of writing malaise and laziness, I try to inspire myself by reading. I don't hold with this rubbish about not reading fiction when you're writing fiction. If, like me, you're continually writing fiction (ha, except for today, of course) then your reading list would be a dry mix of The Encyclopedia Britannica and The God Delusion. That's the literary equivalent of existing on a diet of dry shreddies and punishment muesli. With maybe a bit of brown rice for variety every now and again.
If you hold with this quite frankly ridiculous notion that writers shouldn't read fiction (IDIOTS), your writing is accordingly also going to take on the same dry texture, until you're turning out 'comedies' that read like academic textbooks, or pacey crime novels that read like nutritional information. There are enough rubbish books as it is, and I can do without funny books that read like the phone book, thanks.
Accordingly, I try and match my reading with the tone of whatever I'm writing. Writing dark, read dark. Writing light, read light. It's a formula that can't go wrong. (Maybe). The current book is a farce / comedy, so here's what I've got on the old bedside table at the moment.
Currently Reading
Carry On, Jeeves P G Wodehouse
Persepolis, Marjane Sartrapi
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
How I Paid For College, Marc Acito
How do you get yourselves going on the dry days?
It's at these times that the writing malaise always strikes. Isn't it always the way that when you've specifically set aside the time to write, there's nothing you feel less like doing. Give me an hour in a productive meeting at work, an hour in the supermarket, an hour shopping for shoes that fit properly (spit) .... and all I can think is, "I'd rather be behind my desk right now". Yet now here I am, with a whole week to spend behind my desk, and I'm procrastinating. (See entry on "Bradley's foolproof 10-step procrastination method" if you want to know how my time is being wasted).
In times of writing malaise and laziness, I try to inspire myself by reading. I don't hold with this rubbish about not reading fiction when you're writing fiction. If, like me, you're continually writing fiction (ha, except for today, of course) then your reading list would be a dry mix of The Encyclopedia Britannica and The God Delusion. That's the literary equivalent of existing on a diet of dry shreddies and punishment muesli. With maybe a bit of brown rice for variety every now and again.
If you hold with this quite frankly ridiculous notion that writers shouldn't read fiction (IDIOTS), your writing is accordingly also going to take on the same dry texture, until you're turning out 'comedies' that read like academic textbooks, or pacey crime novels that read like nutritional information. There are enough rubbish books as it is, and I can do without funny books that read like the phone book, thanks.
Accordingly, I try and match my reading with the tone of whatever I'm writing. Writing dark, read dark. Writing light, read light. It's a formula that can't go wrong. (Maybe). The current book is a farce / comedy, so here's what I've got on the old bedside table at the moment.
Currently Reading
Carry On, Jeeves P G Wodehouse
Persepolis, Marjane Sartrapi
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
How I Paid For College, Marc Acito
How do you get yourselves going on the dry days?
Saturday, 17 October 2009
Editing the book...
Who'd be a writer, eh? After last week's good news about the Tonto Books competition, I have spent this week looking over my novel, with the aim of getting it into as publishable form as possible. (I've read somewhere that this is an important thing to do with unpublished novels).
I didn't know, until leafing through the Writers & Artist's yearbook last week (my favourite idle read of the moment... I have a copy of it on my bedside table, between my copy of What Ho, Jeeves! and Old School) that 60,000 - 70,000 words is generally considered the optimum length for a paperback novel. Publishers and agents, apparently, find novels of this length easier to market and sell.
I can't deny that I'd love to be the sort of established literary genius who's above the rules, and who can write a book as long or as short as she damn pleases; but I also can't deny that I never pick up big books myself. Take Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , for example. It's well written and interesting, but at about the stage where a regular size paperback would have finished, I found myself losing interest. It's not Susanna Clark's fault. It's not that her book's boring. It's that I've got one of those iPod attention spans that sees me flicking past songs if I don't like the first 10 seconds of the intros, and I'm no different with books.
Which conveniently brings me to the 'problem' of my book. It's way over 60,000 - 70,000 words, and would benefit hugely from editing. I don't know anyone who can do it for me, and so in the absence of that, I'm doing it myself: taking out all the unnecessary repetition, taking out all the irrelevant bits, making it shorter, sharper, snappier, faster, and more interesting. More... iPod.
I don't doubt that some of you are going to be seething in outrage at my comparing literature to MP3 players, but I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this. Who else finds themselves writing or editing with an imaginary 'audience' reading their work over their shoulder? Can't be just me!
I didn't know, until leafing through the Writers & Artist's yearbook last week (my favourite idle read of the moment... I have a copy of it on my bedside table, between my copy of What Ho, Jeeves! and Old School) that 60,000 - 70,000 words is generally considered the optimum length for a paperback novel. Publishers and agents, apparently, find novels of this length easier to market and sell.
I can't deny that I'd love to be the sort of established literary genius who's above the rules, and who can write a book as long or as short as she damn pleases; but I also can't deny that I never pick up big books myself. Take Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell , for example. It's well written and interesting, but at about the stage where a regular size paperback would have finished, I found myself losing interest. It's not Susanna Clark's fault. It's not that her book's boring. It's that I've got one of those iPod attention spans that sees me flicking past songs if I don't like the first 10 seconds of the intros, and I'm no different with books.
Which conveniently brings me to the 'problem' of my book. It's way over 60,000 - 70,000 words, and would benefit hugely from editing. I don't know anyone who can do it for me, and so in the absence of that, I'm doing it myself: taking out all the unnecessary repetition, taking out all the irrelevant bits, making it shorter, sharper, snappier, faster, and more interesting. More... iPod.
I don't doubt that some of you are going to be seething in outrage at my comparing literature to MP3 players, but I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this. Who else finds themselves writing or editing with an imaginary 'audience' reading their work over their shoulder? Can't be just me!
Sunday, 11 October 2009
Good news, everyone!
Right, I'm going to throw superstition to the wind, and just go ahead and announce it: one of my short stories is to appear in the forthcoming Even More Tonto Short Stories collection. Tonto is a small independent publisher that has been publishing a short story anthology annually since its inception in 2005.
The book isn't out yet, but when it is you'll be able to buy it in the Tonto Shop.
Whoop whoop!
Saturday, 10 October 2009
Hands up if you feel ugly
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that most of us feel ugly at least at some point in our lives. (I'll go further still, and say that if you've never felt ugly, there's probably something the matter with you). And although I've no stats or evidence to back me up, I think it's more common in women than in men.
We're constantly surrounded by images of women - in advertising, on TV, in magazines, on billboards, on packaging. Any images of realistic looking women - and by "realistic", I don't mean women who are size 12, who have quirky faces or haircuts, or any other slight deviation from the narrow and homogenised beauty ideals we're constantly surrounded by - when I say "realistic women", I mean women who look tired, women whose clothes look like they need a wash, women walking around carrying 73 different bags containing everything they need for the day ahead - are vastly outweighed by these unobtainably beautiful images of women which can only be rendered possible with hours of lighting and photography, and a lot of judicious photoshopping after the fact.
Beauty I have no problem with. We all like to look at something beautiful, after all: that's why National Parks and America's Next Top Model are so popular. But the images of beautiful women with which we're surrounded are so completely ridiculously attainable, there's no way that even the foxiest of average woman isn't going to feel inadequate by comparison every now and again. Who has time to spend six hours in make up every morning? (before a full day at work, right? When do I have to get up? Four hours before I go to bed?) Who's got a special 'photoshop filter' through which everybody will look at them? (Look! No skin blemishes or marks! And look at my unnaturally thin thighs!)
There's no way we can live up to these ideals. We haven't got the genes, for one thing, for another, we haven't got the time, and for another, we haven't got the technology. But that's just the way advertisers like it: our insecurities make us buy more. Like it or not, that's the premise upon which so much advertising works, and women are especially susceptible because of being primarily judged on their looks. (Gee, thanks, partriarchy. When's the next stop?)
Wouldn't it be far better for everybody's mental health if advertising images used only images of normal women? Here, I've got to make a slight detour to give Dove a nod for using real women - with visible rolls of fat - in their advertising campaigns. Imagine it: you'd look at a poster of somebody who looked like your foxy 50-year old neighbour, modelling lipstick, and you'd congratulate her for looking so sexy at 50, you'd congratulate the company for using a real person, and you wouldn't feel ugly by comparison every time you looked at the image. Hell, you might even buy the cosmetics they were advertising.
In a world where it was the norm for women to feel good about themselves most of the time, as the rule rather than the exception, everything would run so much more smoothly. No more spending ages despairing over our own reflections in the mirror every time we think about leaving the house. No more desperately seeking reassurance about our image from our partners (come on, guys, this is a winner. Imagine never being asked "Do I look OK in this?" ever again!) No more obsessing over how ugly / old / sunken our faces are becoming. The casualties would be the photoshoppers, the advertisers, the beauty fascists, and who's going to mourn them??
Who's with me?!
We're constantly surrounded by images of women - in advertising, on TV, in magazines, on billboards, on packaging. Any images of realistic looking women - and by "realistic", I don't mean women who are size 12, who have quirky faces or haircuts, or any other slight deviation from the narrow and homogenised beauty ideals we're constantly surrounded by - when I say "realistic women", I mean women who look tired, women whose clothes look like they need a wash, women walking around carrying 73 different bags containing everything they need for the day ahead - are vastly outweighed by these unobtainably beautiful images of women which can only be rendered possible with hours of lighting and photography, and a lot of judicious photoshopping after the fact.
Beauty I have no problem with. We all like to look at something beautiful, after all: that's why National Parks and America's Next Top Model are so popular. But the images of beautiful women with which we're surrounded are so completely ridiculously attainable, there's no way that even the foxiest of average woman isn't going to feel inadequate by comparison every now and again. Who has time to spend six hours in make up every morning? (before a full day at work, right? When do I have to get up? Four hours before I go to bed?) Who's got a special 'photoshop filter' through which everybody will look at them? (Look! No skin blemishes or marks! And look at my unnaturally thin thighs!)
There's no way we can live up to these ideals. We haven't got the genes, for one thing, for another, we haven't got the time, and for another, we haven't got the technology. But that's just the way advertisers like it: our insecurities make us buy more. Like it or not, that's the premise upon which so much advertising works, and women are especially susceptible because of being primarily judged on their looks. (Gee, thanks, partriarchy. When's the next stop?)
Wouldn't it be far better for everybody's mental health if advertising images used only images of normal women? Here, I've got to make a slight detour to give Dove a nod for using real women - with visible rolls of fat - in their advertising campaigns. Imagine it: you'd look at a poster of somebody who looked like your foxy 50-year old neighbour, modelling lipstick, and you'd congratulate her for looking so sexy at 50, you'd congratulate the company for using a real person, and you wouldn't feel ugly by comparison every time you looked at the image. Hell, you might even buy the cosmetics they were advertising.
In a world where it was the norm for women to feel good about themselves most of the time, as the rule rather than the exception, everything would run so much more smoothly. No more spending ages despairing over our own reflections in the mirror every time we think about leaving the house. No more desperately seeking reassurance about our image from our partners (come on, guys, this is a winner. Imagine never being asked "Do I look OK in this?" ever again!) No more obsessing over how ugly / old / sunken our faces are becoming. The casualties would be the photoshoppers, the advertisers, the beauty fascists, and who's going to mourn them??
Who's with me?!
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