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.

Until you see me next, feel free to join in with the discussion about the downsides of blogging that continues here, or read The Wrong Shoes – the story I wrote for Bugged. Those of you who have loads of time on your hands and money to burn might want to pop on over to Amazon, where Cold Light in all its manifestations is now available for pre-order. I’m off to do an interview with Grazia (I kid you not…)

Part of the workshop is going to be about the tricky side of blogging – the worrying things that can sometimes happen as a consequence of putting yourself out there on-line and how you anticipate / prepare for / avoid them.

Perhaps I’m just noticing blogging perils more now I’ve started to think about them in advance of my workshop, but recently I have noticed a few on-line friends having bad experiences – with trolling from anonymous commenters, sarcastic remarks on facebook pages from envious fellow writers, hacked twitter accounts,  plagiarism of stories and poems posted on blogs and forums… all kinds of horridness.

My version of a bad experience might not be yours. I don’t think I’d be upset by an anonymous trolling commenter because they usually make themselves look so daft it would only be funny, although I do worry about my privacy and the privacy of my family. The benefits I get from on-line exposure (making friends, getting invited to do readings and workshops, increased promotion for my books which might, one day, translate into increased income through royalties…) outweigh the risks for me right now. But that is always something that could change.

There are other kinds of pitfall – it isn’t all cyber-stalkers and trolls. Perhaps some of you pour time and effort into blogging and feel that your ‘real’ writing is suffering. Perhaps by publishing yourself on-line you worry you are giving away something for free you could have been paid for? Maybe your work colleagues and employers don’t know you’re also a blogger and you worry about what the consequences would be if they did? Feel free to chip in if you’ve experienced a blogging pitfall that I haven’t thought of yet.

My own approach is fairly simple. I always keep in mind I’m talking to strangers and not friends – even when that isn’t entirely true and I’ve actually met many of the readers of this blog. I don’t talk about other people when I know / guess they wouldn’t like it, and if I don’t have anything nice to say, I don’t say it (hence no real book reviews). This isn’t how I conduct myself in real life (I can be an opinionated over-sharer at the best of times) but I know that once something is in writing it is there forever and can be quoted into infinity without me being present to explain myself.

These aren’t things that I thought about when I started blogging three and a bit years ago but apart from a few strange emails and the someone who persistently finds this blog by googling for my children’s names, I’ve been very lucky. Because I’ve worked in prisons I know just how careful I need to be with my personal information, but I also want to live and write my life, and so I take calculated risks that may be different to yours. My own comfort zone (ugh, what a phrase) has also evolved from what I’ve observed from other bloggers.

As many of the readers of this blog are also experienced bloggers, I thought whose better brains to pick? What advice would you give to a beginner – someone who has only just started reading blogs and hasn’t started their own yet, or perhaps who has been blogging for a little while but is looking to expand and get a wider readership?

My teaching style isn’t prescriptive, so I’m not looking to create a set of rules or guidelines. I’m researching other people’s experiences so I can lead a discussion on the way the bloggers in the workshop can think about what parts of themselves they want to put on-line and how they go about safeguarding themselves. I know what I do and why I do it, but there are as many ways of doing this as there are blogs and bloggers, so the more you share with me about your own thoughts and methods, the richer the discussion will be.

If it could be guaranteed that your personal information was safe, that you’d never be misquoted or offend someone you later want to employ you, how would your blog be different? For long time bloggers – have you ever been back over old posts and deleted content you wish you’d kept to yourself? What about photographs? Have your ideas about what it is ‘safe’ to write about online changed since your readership has increased? What is your policy on anonymous comments? In what circumstances would you delete a comment?

Comments on this blog are public and so I may quote them in the workshop or direct workshop participants to this post for ‘further reading’. Emails sent direct to me are private and won’t be shared in any format either anonymously or with your name attached unless you give me your permission.

Go!

Edited to add: someone kind sent me these links, which may interest you:

Only You Can Prevent Blog Trolls and Comment Jerks

Developing a Personal Social Media Policy

How To Protect Against Social Media Remorse

The work hasn’t been extensive but it has been slow and painstaking – mainly because I want to check time-lines and continuities, (I have a chart and everything) and because it has helped me to look at the novel in an entirely different way which has involved lots more tweaking. And the fellow writers amongst you will know, once a novel is nearly finished altering one sentence in an early chapter has knock on effects and often means you need to rewrite a paragraph in a late chapter. Which is as it should be – it shows the whole thing is knitted together, is all of a piece.

I’ve already blogged a little bit about the way the first glimmers of the story for Cold Light came to me. It was similar for A Kind of Intimacy – where I had the idea of neighbours and envy and tea parties right from the very start. I like this part of writing – the inventing part seems easier. I always have lots of tall tales up my sleeve. I can create a mess of a first draft in a couple of months.

Editing is very different though. By editing I mean anything from a second draft to a seventh, and the final tweaking which I am doing now. A Kind of Intimacy was seven drafts – Cold Light has been about the same although because I don’t tend to start at Chapter One and end at the Epilogue the lines between what counts as one draft and the next are always very blurred. Editing means turning the shapeless mass of the first draft into something that runs from page one to page – let me check… 337 at last count – with some kind of drive forwards and coherence.

What has helped me this time is to think of the novel as an attempt to solve problems that were thrown up by my original idea. In my mind, it works a bit like this:

What happens if you’re always the one left out and all the interesting things are taking place when you’re at home or distracted by other, more mundane events? What happens if you desperately want to be included, but almost never are?

This translates into a problem – of telling a story where the narrator didn’t witness any of the dramatic, plotty-type things that happened. Hmmm.

What happens if the effect of one winter in your teens totally derails the course of your life? And what if that life is stunted – if you grow into an adult who still acts like a fourteen year old? What if I want to write a story about people who get stuck, who don’t change?

One of the members of my fiction group translated this into a problem perfectly – the characterisation is static, the action in this part of the book is static (to be specific, adult Lola spends a LOT of her time alone in her flat watching television) and this works against narrative, which has forward motion, is about change and development.

Hmm.

So my editing this time around has been structured by me knowing I wanted to tell a gripping story about a crime with a few spanners thrown in the works (the narrator leads a life that would be boring to read too much about and is remembering a time and a series of events that she doesn’t funny understand and didn’t fully experience).

It isn’t up to me to judge how well Cold Light has solved those problems, but it has turned into the sort of book I’d like to read. I’m looking forward to seeing what people think. (Actually, that is an out and out lie. I’ve been composing scathing reviews for myself in my head for weeks).

I know this is itself a very partial, over simplified, craft-oriented way of thinking about writing and editing and checking if a novel ‘works’ or not. It is not dissimilar to the idea of ‘plot’ being nothing more than characters overcoming obstacles to get at something they want or get away from something they don’t want. ‘Story’ as problem solving for characters and structuring a ‘plot’ as problem solving for writers. Which works as a way of thinking about stories a lot of the time, but not always. And I don’t know if it would work like this for poets. It seems to be more of a way to think about how to do a plot than how to do language.

I’m looking forward to the next novel too (no working title yet. Just Number Three). I am wondering how my very specific requirements about structure: five first person narrators all narrating, partially and unreliably, the events of one twelve hour stretch of time are going to throw up problems for me, and what tricks I need to learn to solve those problems and tell the story. I’m excited to find out. I like the realist novel. I don’t think it is dead.

we did it!

Had a little bit of time out from the relentless editing (actually, I do about three hours a day, usually in the mornings and then have the rest of my time free so nothing to moan about) to travel to and attend a lovely family wedding, watch Small Fry do her duty as a flower girl, have a birthday and assist in the making of a birthday cake.

I forget to turn my face away from my computer sometimes: people can be kind of nice too. We are fairly anti social, keep ourselves-to-ourselves guys in this house but the last two months have seen a steady stream of supporting, helping, celebrating visitors and my misanthropy is gradually wearing down. It is sort of nice to be in a family.

In writing related but not actually writing news, I had a tricky and troublesome chapter of Cold Light given the five star reading treatment from my fiction group, who helped me see what I needed to do to fix it (tweaks rather than rewrites, which at this stage, is reassuring) and it was brilliant to have the kind of, ‘I wonder what happens next, I want to read the next bit’ response that I’m after from my talented crack-team of beta readers. I want to write suspenseful, gripping fiction. They claimed to be gripped, so I am happy.

A Kind of Intimacy has now been published in Italy – and the parcel of Italian copies arrived on my birthday. I can now say ‘that bloody sofa!’ in Italian. As well as that, news arrived that the Italian Vanity Fair has done an in-depth feature on the novel this month, and that the German rights for Cold Light have sold, and last but not least, due to my near constant feeding of him, the McTiny has put on a stupendous amount of weight.

Now allow me to digress onto Quotes From A Health Visitor -  a newly regular feature of my ranting on this blog. Took the McTiny to get weighed and measured and generally poked. The government likes to check these things now and again. We go into the waiting room, introduce ourselves but the two HVs, both older than my own mother, insist on calling us mummy and daddy, which in our sleep deprived state is nothing short of surreal. He’s bigger than he was last time. This works in our favour. So does the fact that we managed to put clothes on him – we were lavishly praised for this: oooh  – you’ve got his trousers on him! Well done! all said in a pitch only slightly lower than a dog whistle.

Do I really, really look like the sort of person who is not capable of putting trousers on a baby? Is anyone not capable of putting trousers on a baby? Who are these people? Next appointment – two weeks. I will have finished my edits on Cold Light by then and will, hopefully, be in a sweeter mood.

Lydia Unsworth is a worthy winner with her short story The City is Leaving Me If you like that, there’s plenty more where that came from – on her blog Getting Over the Moon.

I want to think more about the experience of judging things before I write about it here. The last time I was a judge was at last year’s Manchester Blog Awards – an event close to my heart because the earlier incarnation of Every Day I Lie a Little won the Best Writing on a Blog Category back in 2008. Last year Emily at My Shitty Twenties took the ceremony by storm and won two categories.

I wonder who it will be this year? I know there are a lot of Preston based bloggers who read these posts – so as a reminder, seeing as we’re in commuting distance of Manchester, we’re eligible to nominate ourselves too… there were two Preston nominees last year – Just Testing and I Thought I Told You To Wait in the Car and it would be great to see some more Preston bloggers get a bit of extra publicity for their writing this year.*

What can I say? I am a mad Preston Patriot. Get in.

*this isn’t a thinly veiled plea for you to nominate me. I’m fairly sure ex-winners aren’t eligible any more.

I hope my writing isn’t formulaic, but there’s a knack to working out a good first person narrative – deciding what the person thinks they are telling you, and what they are actually telling you. What they don’t want to say, and what seeps in around the edges anyway. What they don’t want to talk about might be near death experiences or trauma. It is just as likely (in my stories, anyway) to be secret humiliations, sins of omission and social failures. How does it seep around the edges? How do you show what they don’t want to tell?

There are a couple of things in my life that I’ve very deliberately decided I will neither think nor talk nor write about. It is like editing a novel (everything feels like editing a novel right now, though) and cutting out the bits you don’t like and rearranging the rest to cover the gaps. It’s very important and makes the rest of the whole wobbling edifice possible. Not amnesia. Editing.

Perhaps you will find some of this deleted material seeping in around the edges – in jokes, dreams and stories I make up – but not, I think, if I am vigilant. Not if I am really good at what I try to do. But if I can spot the way the truth seeps in around the edges and replicate it for my pretend narrators, I should be able to get a handle on it in real life, shouldn’t I?

It is lazy thinking (it is, isn’t it?) to go through a writer’s output and circle the recurring images and themes and label them as autobiographical – as the juicy trauma they’ve edited out of their real lives and allowed to seep into their fictional ones. I don’t doubt lots of writers make conscious and unconscious use of their secrets and unspoken events like this. But it isn’t quite what I am talking about.

I reject the Romantic and romantic notion that a writer is more hurt, more embarrassed and more traumatised than the rest of the population and good writing comes from their working-out of that trauma. Life is often humiliating and frightening and crap for everyone and people who shuffle words are not special or more sinned-against. Trauma is boring and ordinary.

But trauma, or the things we don’t want to talk about, is important to writing. It doesn’t matter what the content of the trauma is. One person’s car-smash is another person’s disastrously violent c-section (plucking an example off the top of my head…) is another person’s wrong-shoes-for-the-party is another persons saw-my-parents-shagging. We have all got the things that we edit out of the stories we tell about ourselves.

It is important to writing because understanding the way this works is understanding one of the basic things about writing and noticing the way it is done in real life is practice for being a writer. In other words, writers are not more hurt, they are just more cold blooded about noticing the way they deal with the hurt – the editing is never complete because writers look at how they self-edit and replicate that when they’re dealing with sentences and paragraphs.

Having a sad secret isn’t unique. Picking the scab of your sad secret in front of the mirror (on a blog, in a poem, during a novel) is possibly a little bit more unusual / narcissistic / healthy / unhealthy / interesting / pathetic / useful because nothing makes you notice the difference between what we tell and what we show more. I’ve been invited back to the hospital for a chat with a professional that will, apparently, prevent me getting post-traumatic-stress-disorder. No thanks, says I, I’d rather suppress it, watch myself doing it and then blog about the process. Could come in handy for the next book (this is why writers don’t have friends – I’ve never heard of anything so vain in my life).

Body language experts call the signs – the ticks and twitches – the body makes when we are lying / omitting parts of the truth ‘tells’. They aren’t tells. They are (some of the) shows. Creative writers are instructed to avoid one and encourage the other – better teachers advise writers to be aware of which one they are doing, and control it. My narrators are all ‘tell’ and the interesting bit – the ‘show’ is the bit that is between the lines, the silent bit, the unwritten part.

How else did you think I learned how to do it?

The blog post was a response to Too Much Information which you can find, along with many other illuminating ruminations, at Not Designed to Juggle. The photograph, which is not as good as Diane’s, was taken by the Mr – who was slightly baffled by my weak laughter and insistence he take this snap for me because I wanted it for my blog.

I think the most rewarding part of this project, for me, was working with a small group of beginner writers and bloggers to create a permanent record of their memories, thoughts and experiences. Some of the stories are autobiographical or started out that way – and all of them capture authentic Wirral voices that, in some cases, we are publishing for the first time. If you like the stories, I’d also recommend you dig about in the blogs that all the participants kept as a record of the evolution of their story. The dead-ends, rejected ideas, eureka-moments, frustrations, abandoned drafts and alternative endings are a fascinating record of what it is like to invent a story and work on a collaborative project like this.

Now the ‘behind the scenes’ bit of the project is over, the site is also accepting new stories / poems and photography set in the Wirral. You don’t need to live there or work there to submit – but your story does need to be set there. We are hoping that over time the site will evolve into an on-line library of tales that will put a little-written about area on the map. Since I started tweeting about the stories last week (what you mean you don’t follow me on twitter?) I’ve already had a few submissions. Top Banana!

You can submit via the site, or you can email me about it. Stories will go up in batches and I’ll be tweeting lines from them over the coming weeks to generate some traffic. Your story should be under 1500 words, although we’re not going to be super strict about that – and it should stand on its own two feet, although if you want to link it to any of the original stories written by our first set of project participants (if you click on the links within my story you’ll see what I mean by this) then we’d hop with glee.

I met all the folks at Sceptre – my new editor, and the marketing person, and foreign rights people, and lots of other people (it was a bit like speed dating, except I got to drink tea and look at book covers so better than speed dating) who were kind and enthusiastic and worked in really nice looking offices high up in a big glass building. I tried to get into the building by bouncing off the said glass, mistaking it for an open door – but only the extremely professional reception person saw me do that, and didn’t mention it, so all is well there too.

It is all very exciting. Cold Light will be coming out in May 2011 which sounds like a long way away, but in publishing time is actually very near and there are a lot of jobs to do before then. I’ve already mentioned the cover – which is a secret and not finalised right now, but even the drafts (is that the right word?) look brilliant. I wanted something intriguing and dark and enigmatic and that’s just what the preliminary covers look like. There’s going to be a hardback and a paperback a little bit later and an audio book (this last one has me delirious with anticipation because I LOVE audio books – just not the ones that make me dream about seagulls) and I don’t do outward signs of excitement very well so I’m not sure if it showed, but inside I was hopping about with glee.

I always associate the word ‘glee’ with Rumpelstiltskin. In the Ladybird book I had, I think he did a bit of glee, and then when she guessed his name, stamped his pointy foot so hard it went through the floor. Maybe it is hopping I associate with Rumelstiltskin. Hopping with anger. Hopping with glee. Well, I wasn’t angry and I was hopping, but only inside. I didn’t stamp on / through the floor. Not even when I walked into the glass door. Not even when, on the way back home, I paid £95 for some lukewarm undrinkable white wine on the train home. (I have VERY low standards when it comes to the quality of booze that I’m willing to pour down my neck, but all the same.)

Edits are going nicely, thank you. I’m now over the worst and into the realms of ‘tweaking’ after writing two new scenes, rewriting them a few (okay, loads of) times and choosing the best places for them in the book. So much of my process is trial and error that I’d be embarrassed to let you in on it. I have one chapter that I’ve fallen out with and am still trying to wrestle into submission – so have just turned it over to the wise eyes of the creative writing workshop I keep mentioning but forgetting to blog about properly. All the loose ends are coming together and I am confronting, again, just how poor my spelling can be when I’m typing quick (or slow). Looking forward to getting it off my desk because the ideas are coming thick and fast for novel number three. No title yet.

I am ludicrously pleased about this and even though Annie doesn’t have any lines they’ve promised not to use her in a derogatory or defaming manner. I expect she’ll be on a bookshelf or coffee table somewhere, or poking out of someone’s bag, or holding up a sash window, or propping up a wobbly table leg. Maybe she’ll be the book in the breast-pocket that stops a bullet bound for the heart. Perhaps there’ll be a code needing to be cracked and the book will be the key to the cipher (wasn’t that new Sherlock brillo-brilliant? He’s no Jeremy Brett, but extremely easy on the eye all the same).

I never thought people needed to ask permission for such things. The people making the film aren’t quoting my words and it seems more credit should be due to the cover designer, model and photographer than me. It’s book-as-object they want, not book-as-story. Perhaps I am over thinking. Still, it’s quite exciting and will probably have me in the cinema scrutinising the backgrounds for my green book as soon as the film comes out. I’ll be gutted if it gets edited out. I can’t think of anything worse than being an actor, but having Annie stand in for me and appear in a real, proper film is Top Banana.

The technical term is ‘set dressing’. It is product placement Gone Wild!

And here’s another US review via Mary Whipple Reviews. Mary helpfully includes a picture of some possible semi detached houses for her readers. I always wondered which bits of my book might need a bit of cultural translation. Duplexes are one on top of the other, aren’t they? I just heard the book is going to be included in a Barnes and Noble new writers promotion – something similar, I think, to the Waterstones New Voices promotion the UK edition was included in shortly after it was published. Having your book in the window / face out makes a difference. It makes me happy that A Kind of Intimacy seems to be doing well in the US. Are there any US readers of this blog? Do any of you live in duplexes?

This article from The Guardian by Frank Cottrell Boyce made me happy too. Apparently his son thinks he sits in his office retyping Millions all day so that everyone can have a copy. My Small Fry also thinks I’m a typist. There’s nothing like the contemptuous sneer of a five-year old (why are there lots and lots of that book you wrote still in your office?) to keep things in perspective. It’s only a job.

Current worries and concerns: travel to London. Getting eaten by rats on the tube. Shoes. Cat hairs. Not reading enough. Everyone having colds. The bead and button box being knocked over. Swearing in public and not realising it because I’ve been house-bound for two months. Writing / not writing a blog. Relative sizes of jeans in different shops (still). The great clutter clear out of 2010.