On Wednesday 31st August at 6pm I will be in Preston Waterstones discussing Cold Light with the book group.
I don’t know if any bookish Prestonians read this blog, but if you do, and you’re free on Wednesday, and you’d like to chat about the book with us, come along!
There are some discussion prompts for reading groups here. But really, we get to talk about whatever we like.
Freestyle conversation. Books. Preston. Brill!
Today at 1pm I will be on the John Gilmore Show on BBC Radio Lancashire.
This will be the second time I’ve been on the radio. The last time, about three years ago, I confessed, live on air, to liking Will Young. I have no idea why I did that, because I don’t. Well, I don’t dislike him. I just don’t know all that much about him. Will Young and I are not *like that*. We’re actually strangers. You can see why I’ve avoided radio since then.
Tune in to listen to more of my anxiety filled fictional confessions this afternoon.
I’ve decided to pack it in.
I’ve been blogging for four years (ish) now. I started because I wanted to have a place to link to the short stories I was beginning to publish in various web magazines and never expected that I would find such a welcoming community. Through this special kind of writing I’ve made friends, found work, been able to talk to my readers, hear what you think about my writing (Cheesy Peeps!) and I’ve been able, I hope, to let lots of people know about my writing who might not have heard about it otherwise.
While I’m NOT FROM MANCHESTER, the Manchester blogging and literary community in particular welcomed me with open arms, and long before A Kind of Intimacy was published I was attending reading nights, vomiting with fear, and testing out some of my earliest attempts at flash fiction and unreliable memoir. That wouldn’t have happened without blogging friends – there’s not a chance in cheese I would have plucked up the courage otherwise. There are too many of you to name, and this isn’t an Oscars speech – but you know who you are. Ta. (Not you.)
Despite my incurably sloppy spelling, tendency to post when tipsy even when I promised myself I wouldn’t, my ignorance of arcane blog etiquette and the occasional (pfft!) indiscretion, I have enjoyed blogging, and enjoyed reading other people’s blogs. A friend, Max, argued that blogging is an exhausted form and has been replaced by newer, briefer, more immediate forms of on-line communication. That newspapers have gobbled us all up. Maybe that’s not true for all of us bloggers, but I think it is for me and for Every Day I Lie A Little. The blog form might not be exhausted, but I am.
It’s always been a struggle for me, like all bloggers, to draw a line around my private and family life. I know you know my children aren’t really called Small Fry and McTiny, and my house isn’t really called Ashworth Towers. For those of you who are close to me in my real life as well as my online life, thank you, thank you so much, for indulging me and collaborating with me on keeping them apart from this world for all this time. For the persistent (two years, you weirdo) person who has been reaching this blog by trying to find out the real names of my children: I am not packing this in because of you.
I want to be more private, and the more private I am, the more insipid my blog posts become. I toyed with the idea of starting again – anonymously, and saying what I really wanted to say. To write like I used to – without worrying about making a Career Limiting Move. But then I realised, I am saying what I really want to say. In the novel I am writing now, and in the writing projects I’m planning for the future, I am still communicating. My best writing is elsewhere. My blog writing was becoming something much less than second best. So in novels and stories and whatever else I get up to – that’s where you’ll find me from now on. Lying my head off, and letting more of the truth slip through than I’d probably like.
I’m also tired of the energy it can take to be a part of this community. To join in with the exuberant pissing contest that Manufacturing An Online Buzz about your work can be. No-one asked me to do it, and I’m sure many of you would rather that I didn’t. But I did, and now I’m finding that the energy needed to turn myself outwards, to sell and advertise and display, isn’t working well when I need to be quiet, and think, and type and delete and type some more.
And lets be honest, I can’t be the only one to notice that I’m fast running out of ways to make the writing life sound interesting. I get up, do a school run, type, do another school run, cook, eat, drink, type, read, sleep. Every Day. Sometimes it’s really hard, but you’re not allowed to say that because it’s not a proper job, and there’s lots of other people who could do it better than you, or would give their arms and legs to be in your shoes. And sometimes it’s brilliant. And you can’t say that either, because it sounds like bragging. So what is left? I type a lot. There it is.
Let’s not be melodramatic about this though.
I’m converting this part of my website to ‘News’ and will be updating, now and again, with details about events, readings, and gigs. If you want to carry on getting that sort of information, you can subscribe here. I’m hoping to move into book reviewing, and other kinds of online and print journalism. I’ll be reading and commenting on blogs, and writing posts for the Writing Smithy. If you’re wondering how you’ll get by without my ill-punctuated domestic ranting, refusal to be drawn on matters of national import, and puns about sandwiches, I’ll be on twitter and would love to carry on the conversation there.
But for Every Day I Lie A Little, it’s curtains.
Bye!
I went with the Mr yesterday to the Liverpool Tate to see The Pleasure Principle, the current exhibition of Magritte’s work. It was brilliant. Especially ace was the chance to see in real life my favourite picture of his.
That’s it. It’s called The Night Owl. The man is supposed to be a sleepwalker and he turns up in other Magritte paintings too. I’ve been trying to write exactly what it is I like so much about this picture. I think it boils down to the fact that I can’t tell if the man is looking at the lamp-post or the painting on the wall. What do you think? If I could afford this, I’d hang it over my desk and stare at it for a very long time every day.
I like the famous pictures less. Apples and pipes and cheese. Maybe I’ve seen them so often they have become just like adverts to me and I can’t look at them properly. I think Magritte liked adverts anyway so he probably wouldn’t mind me saying that.
In a little navy curtained room off the main exhibition was a series of drawings that ‘some viewers might find challenging’. Seeing as there were plenty of naked ladies in the main exhibition (on the walls, not wandering about) I don’t see what the coyness was about a few erect penises (done in fine, squiggly ink lines that looked like pubic hair) but I’d never seen these drawings before so that was interesting too.
I’m not much of an art critic. I realise this.
The other good thing I saw was a shoal of jelly fish. Tiny baby’s-palm sized ones, fluttering their way through Liverpool Dock. I tried to get a picture but my phone wasn’t up to it.
After a nice day out with no writing at all I was very ready to get back to it this morning. I am making good progress, I think. On schedule and under budget.
Unicycle Emptiness (‘an irregular guide to the North West and more) is one of my new favourite blogs. Just look at these pictures of Fleetwood, Pilling and Knot End. Fleetwood is where A Kind of Intimacy is set. It couldn’t possibly be anywhere else. I’ve still never been to an eerier place. A place that still provokes such curiosity in me that I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime soon I write about it again.
While I’m here, fellow Fleetwood lovers should make sure they check out Julia McKoen and Jayne Steele’s film, Frozen, a suitably eerie film set in the town. In Frozen, Fleetwood itself is as much of a character as the actors. The thing I loved best about this film was the ambiguity of it. Never sure if it was a ghost story, an allegory, a psychodrama, a thriller, all of them at once, or something else entirely. Like the town itself, Frozen prompts imaginings and is silent enough to hold the space you need to scare yourself with wondering.
My current work in progress (I actually have a title for it now, but don’t feel like telling just yet) is set in a very different place. Mainly Chorley, with little parts in Utah. Chorley is still close to home, for me, but the first one of my novels not to contain, in some way, the seaside, beach, shoreline. Sometimes I wonder if it is harder to capture and evoke the feel of a place that’s very familiar to you – that the uniqueness of a place that you know well can become invisible. So maybe Fleetwood and Preston and now Chorley are not strange, uncanny sort of places. But they have become that way, for me, because I have written about them and in writing about them I need to make them familiar and not familiar to myself at the same time.
I missed, while I was away, this strange Guardian CIF article about Preston Bus Station and (oddly) J. K. Rowling. Preston Bus Station (or a building based on it) features in Cold Light and for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure yet, is one of the main stars in the Cold Light book trailer. I’m not nearly famous enough to do the job, but if anyone did feel like getting a writer in residence for the good ol bus station, I’d be first in line to apply for it. And I’d be dead cheap on travel, as I can near enough see the thing from my house.
So many people think it’s an ugly, unnecessary, pee-smelling sort of place. I think it is a beautiful building and I could quite happily spend days in there, collecting and writing stories.
The photograph is (with permission) from Unicycle Emptiness, taken by Matthew Jones who’s flickr stream is here.
I’m really proud of the progress Sarah and I have been making at the Writing Smithy over the past few months. Recently Sarah and I have been guest blogging about our work at the Smithy for Andrew Oldham. We do have plans to extend the Writing Smithy website by adding a blog – where we’ll expand on some of the topics we brought up in our residency. But in the meantime, you might be interested in these posts.
Setting up the Smithy (it’s all in a name)
Miners and Watchmakers (using metaphors to think about writing process and to work with writers)
The Poet as Novelist (the bigger picture of structure and sequencing)
Before you start (some things to consider before you commission a mentor / editor)
Making a Space (tips on carving out time to write, think, read and daydream)
Going it Alone (working without a mentor – or moving on from a mentoring relationship)
I came home from a lovely (very damp) week away to find that Cold Light has been nominated for this year’s Guardian’s Not the Booker.
Two years ago A Kind of Intimacy made the short-list, which was just splendid. So if you read Cold Light and you liked it you send me to the short-list again by clicking this link here and following the instructions. You need to write a short review to make your vote count.
If you didn’t like Cold Light, don’t let that stop you from voting. It almost always turns into a nice on-line scrap and there’s nothing like it, is there? There are some brilliant books on the long-list. Perhaps I’m supposed to vote under a series of aliases for myself, but my vote went to the book I nominated: Russ Litten’s Scream if you Want to Go Faster – and you can read my mini review of it here. I would have voted for Michael Stewart’s King Crow, also long-listed – a beautiful, startling, odd book set in Salford and Cumbria – a sort of Fight Club meets Kes – but Russ’ book just pipped it to the post by being so well constructed and unpredicatable. I wish I’d been allowed to vote twice.
I wrote on the ‘about’ pages of this blog that I don’t do book reviews. As ever, please refer to the title of this blog as an explanation for my recent review of David Whitehouse’s Bed which appeared in the Guardian Review last month.
I don’t know if reviewing is going to be a bigger part of the work I do in the future or not, yet. It is still something I have very mixed feelings about. I would, wouldn’t I? It’s strange and a bit not-on being the animal in the zoo as well as the person selling tickets at the gate, isn’t it? But reading is such a huge part of my working and thinking and writing life that it seems peculiar I rarely mention my opinions about the books I read in public. I will think on this more.
The next nice thing was hearing that Cold Light has been chosen by the Birmingham Books Festival to be their official Book of the Festival. I’ve appeared at various Writing West Midlands gigs over the years both as a writer and a reader and I have always been impressed by their events. I’ll be doing various things with the festival this Autumn, including an event on the 16th October. If you’re a bit skinty, the festival bods have just opened a competition where you can win two tickets for the event. All you need to do is write a short review of the book, and the best reviewer will be awarded the tickets.
I’m away. Not here. Absent.
Hooray!
The best bit about taking a trip away is choosing the books I’m going to take with me. Well maybe not the entire bestest best thing. I also like buying tiny versions of toothpaste and finding the right pocket in my bag to put everything in.
I’ve been reading lots recently so it’s been tricky to whittle the choice down. Even though I have a kindle and could take a million books if I wanted to. I’ve just finished Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me and watched (through my fingers) the film last night. Then I devoured Dispensation, an anthology of modern LDS fiction. And followed it up by listening to the original cast recording of The Book Of Mormon: The Musical while I put all the guff that has gathered on my desk over the past few months away where it is supposed to go. And found loads of fluff and an unused book of stamps (first class). Result!
I finally decided to take Mrs Dalloway, Pale Fire, The Great Gatsby and The Good Soldier. If there’s a theme there, I can’t see it.
In case you were thinking about missing me, Sarah Hymas and I, with our Writing Smithy hats on (mine has a feather in it) have been busy scheduling blog posts over at Andrew Oldham publishing. We’re writing about poets and novelists working together, setting up a creative business, making time for writing and other interesting things to do with our work at the Smithy. We’ll be there until the 12th August.
TTFN!
Now I am a respectable way into my second draft I am ready to report back. The feeling of the writing is very different, as I expected it would be. The white-heat of putting down the first draft (about five months for me, which is the quickest I’ve ever done it – perhaps because this bout of frenzied writing followed two months of detailed planning?) is as different from this slow unravelling, unpicking, putting back together again as it can be.
It is harder to keep track of the progress I am making though. I posted my word-counts every few days on Facebook while I was doing my first draft. Got slightly told off by one friend, who rightly pointed out that it is quality and not quantity that count. But the telling off missed the point a little bit too. I was never trying to write the biggest novel there was. Just get my first draft down, create that initial block of pages so I could play around with it later. Which is what I’m doing now. First drafts are harder for me and making myself notice the growing word count was motivating.
But now I’m editing I could be deleting and rewriting and reordering and end up with less at the end of a good few days work rather than more. The word count has crept up by 3000 since I started this second draft, but I think I might have written 8000 new words. I’ve sorted out the chapter breaks, and smoothed out some bumps in the time-line. Continuity errors abound. I’m a taker-outer and not a putter-inner, so my second draft will shrink before I’m done, I am sure.
Instead of posting word counts, I’ve got a list of chapters (19) stuck up over my desk. Once I’ve edited a chapter, I get to tick it off the list. I’ve edited five chapters now. Not bad going. I’m on schedule and under budget. I did this in the final stages of Cold Light – not so much with chapters, but with jobs that needed doing. Made a list of jobs, scheduled them into my diary, ticked them off when they were done. Knowing what job I need to do when I sit down at the computer every morning helped last time, and it is helping this time too.
This all sounds like a very inartistic and unromantic way of writing a book. I am pulling back the curtain and revealing the Wizard of Oz, who is eating satsumas, writing in bed-socks, checking facts on google and inching slowly, slowly onwards between the hours of nine and one every morning.
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