And in another festive give-away, bob on over to The Lancashire Writing Hub where Daisy Baldwin interviews me and I set a taxing competition question about cake.
If you like and want free things, you’ll almost certainly want to check out my interview with Sarah Hymas while you’re there, because there’s a DVD version of one of her poems just waiting for one lucky reader to win it.
If you want to be the very first amongst your friends and relatives to own a (proof) copy of Cold Light, thus making them all jealous and casting the rest of your Christmas presents into the shade, you should make your way over to Bookhugger, who are running a give-away.
It’s a bit scary to think of the first copies of Cold Light making their way into the world. I’m uncomfortably aware that out there, somewhere, people are reading it.
Avenham Park had an old and famous avenue of trees chopped down a few months ago because they all had Bleeding Canker (it sounds medieval enough, but people can’t get it).
I remember going to this park where I played and rolled my eggs when I was little, skulked and sulked in as a teenager, drank and laid about reading in pre-babies and pushed prams in post-babies and I remember seeing these huge trees laid on the river bank, the smell of broken wood and sap in the air. Very sad. Small Fry cried about it.
I thought about one of the prisoners in the creative writing group that met in the library I used to work in – he’d written and worked and reworked a poem set in this Avenham park about this avenue of trees – the way they frame the path that hugs the north bank of the Ribble and in the summer turn it into a green tunnel with the veined shadows of the leaves beneath your feet. His favourite place for thinking about his children and women and the first place he was going to go when he was out.
And those trees – hundreds of years to grow so this park will not be the same in our life-times. And I’ve been walking there again recently and the thick, toilet-freshener smell of the sap has gone and they’ve carved away the stumps from the bank – either to stop the disease from hiding in the soil or to make room for the new saplings or so we won’t be reminded of what was once there.
And the bare places are covered up now – pink fireweed and curly Japanese knotweed with the white trumpet flowers. Bees, and a crap attempt to fill in the sides of the path with flags and pebbles, and I got used to the bareness and realised you could see along the river much better now, and for the first time it felt okay again.
I was house-bound and missed most of the late Spring and summer so I didn’t see it happen, but I feel better now and it all grew back while I wasn’t there.
So that is one of the things I’ve been doing while I haven’t been writing.
I have been trying to remember the kinds of things that I did in 1998. I am interested in what fourteen year olds spent their time doing in 1998. It’s too cold to go outside much. 1998 was the year I left school.
I remember watching Blockbusters and Countdown a lot (this might have been earlier), and hanging out in parks. I remember there was a Yellow Pages advert that had the Kinks song ‘Days’ on it, and then later, shopping in TJ Hughes with my mum, I saw a tape of the Kinks greatest hits for £2.99 which I bought. It had a red cover, which I lost. I remember having a few hamsters. There was Dawson’s Creek, I think – although that might have been the year later.
Someone in our house really liked the Spice Girls, although I don’t think it was me. I remember reading (and going mad over) a set of books called The Fabled Lands which were the best kind of adventure game book ever. I was friends with a man who was writing a role-playing game set in Ancient Rome and his partner taught me how to make beaded bracelets on a loom with a curved needle. I remember trying smoking, and hiding the fags in a little wooden box at the back of my wardrobe. I think I was temporarily into Marilyn Manson – certainly when I was asked what ‘treat’ I’d like for passing my GCSE’s, I asked for (and got) Mechanical Animals. There was some sort of white chocolate spread that I ate a lot. I didn’t like Buffy The Vampire Slayer but I liked Third Rock from the Sun.
One more thing to do in September is read a full year’s worth of diary entries from 1998. I’ve got the box down from our upstairs cupboard. It’s going to be horrific.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a list. Today will be a list post. Lists are nice ways to ease back into writing after a long weekend off.
Current Affairs:
I might not write novels anymore. I’ve got an excellent plan for a whole series of marvelously written and intricate text-adventure games and I want to do those instead now please.
People keep asking me about my influences when they’re interviewing me. I never know what to say. I worry I sound a bit like a big tit. I’ve had a long think about it, and I’d like to correct the record and say that if anyone were ever to compare me to Patricia Highsmith or Dostoevsky, I’d be very happy. Plummeting amazon rankings tell me this is unlikely, but so was writing a novel anyone would want to publish/read/review.
Fringe. I need either to cut it, or grow it out. I’m in limbo. I’ve got a hairband at the moment. For some reason, probably completely random, I am reminded of a line in Martin Amis’ Experience, where Amis quotes his father Kingsley inquiring about what galaxy of acne is hiding under his floppy fringe. Hmm.
I’d like to get an allotment and grow vegetables. It’s either that, or write this novel, and number three – which is SEETHING to get out of my head and onto the computer. But I like the idea of me wearing a halterneck and boots, digging. Freckles on shoulders. A worm tapdancing on my palm. Do other people fantasise about themselves in third person? I am always the star of my own film.
Please recommed me a book. I’ve been reading lots of long, difficult things recently. Don Quixote and Montaigne. I’m after something different now. Short, spare, plotted. I like Raymond Chandler very much, but I’ve read all of his. I like crime, mystery, thriller, suspense, psychological. I like reading to find out what happened and admire the writing along the way. Story must come first. Not all the time, but that is what I am in the mood for now.
I watched this last night. What was I thinking? Have also been watching this a lot.
When I was younger I wanted to be a pathologist. I think mainly because I could say it and knew what it meant and when people asked me I could tell them and they would be surprised that I could say it and I knew what it meant. Attention seeker from day one, clearly. My dad was friends with his dentist and the dentist collected skulls, mainly animal ones but he also had a human one that I think was a model and useful for his work and not a real actual skull but then again I never asked I just assumed it was.
And we went to his house to look at the skulls and the dentist had hard-backed books, a set that looked like the Reader’s Digest Dickens, but the paper inside the books was glossy and printed with pictures of injuries and skin diseases and dead bodies. I don’t think it was corpse-porn – I think they were proper medical text-books about forensic science. I remember one picture very clearly: a dead woman lying on a mortuary table with no hair and no clothes on except her tights. She was quite fat but not because she was a large person but because she had died in her caravan wearing her tights and it was hot and the air in her body had got warm and grown bigger, pushing against her skin, her skin pushing against the nylon waist band of her tights, cutting her up as she swelled. And her skin was black, not like Black people are black, but like blackboards and coal and tar, seals and crayola crayons – shiny and blacker than anything is in real life. I think it was something to do with the decay of her blood or the heat.
I never thought what a strange thing to show a child (I was eight, maybe younger) but I thought about a book I had when I was very little. It was called Bagdad Ate It and it was about a dog who was fat and greedy and ate everything until one day he ate a blob of yeasty dough rising in front of the oven, and it rose and rose and rose until he had to be rolled to the vets and popped, or squeezed, or extracted – like the purple one in the Willy Wonka film.
The title of this post is a quotation from a Guardian books blog. I can’t remember who it was or what it was about but the phrase tickled me and so I kept it on a bit of paper. If I can find him again I will credit him properly. He was writing about bloggers. I bet his mum is really pleased about how clever he is. Dilettante is a word I first heard from one of my friends. I did not know what it meant so I decided to look it up but it took a very long time because I coudn’t think how to spell it.
Tonight I am going to write about other people. Except it won’t really be about other people – all of these posts and my emails and telephone calls and conversations generally and much of the novel writing and story writing is sort of about other people but mainly circling about myself and a way for me to find out what I think about things. I have written about needing an audience and not liking solitude for the writing and I have written about liking to explore the dark place between what people think they are and how they appear and what they really are.
It is a kind of arrogant thing for a writer to decide that they know what someone really is and not just what they appear to be. And that they are going to write about it in a way that is going to make their character look silly or funny or sad. It is what I have tried to do with most of my writing. I knew it was sort of arrogant at the time but it was too interesting to stop doing it and I think what people write about is more or less the same as what colour cardigans they wear – it is something that is interesting but does not have a moral dimension. So it is all right to lie or be cruel in typing because it is not real. I am not really sure if I agree with that, but that is all right, I can think about it some more in the next fifty years or so I might have on this planet.
Mainly I am thinking about other people. There are about two or three people in the world I can stand to have in the room with me for any amount of time, but not at the moment. At the moment the number has dwindled to none and I am quite liking my cardigan and my night-times and enjoying the not-irritated feeling of being on my own. There is a thought blooming about being unread, and unwritten, and selves and rubbish and dark places but I can’t get hold of it.
The writing is going better. I think it is because when I am with other people I am often not really with them but with myself wondering if I have said the wrong thing or not said enough of the right things. With the typing saying the wrong thing and not enough of the right things is all right, it is better and it is important and you can delete it anyway. I would quite like to try being on my own (apart from working and mothering) for a long time. I would need to wash less, not go and get my hair cut and not worry about saying the wrong thing. This would free up a lot of brain space.
Part of the reason I posted the pictures on my website of my writing desk was a book I was reading at the time. Always a book. A big expensive picture book, How I Write. Lots of pictures of desks or special chairs, tea-stoves or pens, post-its or pictures or ornaments. Little ritual things that are supposed to make it easier. Habits, like hot baths or cigarettes or looking out of the window. I bought the book because I was feeling nosey – went to Waterstones because it is the only bookshop in my town even though I was going to boycott it because they don’t have a lift and refuse to help me carry the buggy up the stairs. (I don’t CARE if it is a listed building! What if I used a wheelchair!!) Just as I was about to pay I remembered that I had left my card in the card reader at the last shop I went to. That shop was called Home Bargains. I don’t know if they have them everywhere. They’re like a pound shop, but with more variation in prices. It is a good place to buy things like soap and washing up liquid. So I went back there and got my card and went back to Waterstones (listed building, my behind! It is ugly! It looks exactly the same as every other Waterstones in the whole world!) and paid for the book. I was a bit embarrassed by this point and it was going to get worse because the man had already put the book in a carrier bag and I got him to take it out so I could put it in my ruck-sack, then I took it home and did some child-neglecting while I looked at the pictures. I tried to make a tea-stove out of an empty tuna can because I wanted to be a real writer.
My method involves getting worked up about something then using a pen or a keyboard to rant about it for a bit. Usually a keyboard. I can type really fast, without looking. People notice, when I am at work, and I always want to say, ‘yes, I can type faster than anyone I know because after I have my tea that is all I do.’ I want to say it in a proud kind of way, but enough people think I am a geek as it is. Anyway, I love typing. I love the noise of it, even if what is coming out isn’t anything I’m pleased with. The first novel I wrote was on an old typewriter that cost five pounds from a charity shop, and I do remember getting a plastic type-writer when I was little. Some birthday, or Santa Claus. I also had a date-stamp and liked to stamp the date in the front of my books. These two things make me think that I should be what I am. I lent my cheapie yellowed ‘Wordsworth classics’ edition of Dracula to a friend recently, and when I flicked it open I noticed one of the stamps in the front. 1993! I remember reading it lying down in the back of my mum and dad’s Astra Estate. The back seats were down and the car was filled with Yellow Pages books. I had to lie down and read because there wasn’t room for me to sit up. They were delivering them at night to earn extra money and I was lying down reading Dracula. I get a bit embarrassed about my rants so either change them into third person and put some scenery in, or invent a narrator I take great pains to ensure is unreliable.
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