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the sea in birmingham

I travelled down to Birmingham this weekend to attend the launch of The Sea in Birmingham, an anthology of short stories set in and around the city.  My story is set around some of the city’s hundreds of miles of canals – we have more canals than Venice! That’s a true fact.

I had thought I wouldn’t be able to go to the launch, due to a lack of funds.  But a kind friend (who prefers to remain anonymous) decided to be a Good Fairy and sent me some cash!  In their words, ‘one of the few perks of being a writer is getting to go to your own book launch.’  I was utterly blown away by this person’s generousity, and hope I repaid it in some measure by going along and having a really fantastic time.

It was wonderful to meet some of the other contributors, including those I’ve chatted with online or admired from afar but never met in person.  The event was in Birmingham’s swanky new library, which is a fine and glamourous place, although I’m pretty sure I did manage to lower the tone at least a little.  There wasn’t much chance to explore, but at one point a few of us broke away from the crowd on the way to the studio theatre and got excitingly lost in the guts of the building.  A kindly lady guided us away from the kitchens and other steamy workings, and back to where we were supposed to be.

We sold a lot of books.  I signed my name on a few of them, and learned that I have absolutely no idea what messages to write.  Even now I am cringing as I recall writing ‘Hope you don’t find any dead bodies in the canal’ on a mate’s copy.  This is clearly an Area for Improvement.

After the launch and a few complimentary glasses of wine, I popped in to another launch – this one for Pigeonwings, a self-published collaborative novel by some members of Birmingham Writers’ Group.  They didn’t have free wine, but they did have free salami and haloes.  A few of us sat at the back of the pub and played a giggly game of consequences.  It was rather like old times.

The Tindal Street antho is on sale through Amazon, and you can buy it here.  I’m only sorry I can’t provide the full Officer-and-a-Gentlewoman experience to everyone who buys a copy.  If you can make it up to Edinburgh, I could probably do you a fireman’s lift.

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mythic delirium

Mythic Delirium is such a fab name for a literary journal. It’s also a really good name for a medical condition – but probably not a great one for chucking a sickie. “I can’t come in today, I have a bad case of Mythic Delirium. A snake-woman brought me an apple and now I’m on a perilous quest. Probably be okay by Monday.” I mean, try it. It wouldn’t be the most outrageous sickie that anyone’s ever pulled. (One time, a friend of mine couldn’t go to work because she’d painted herself head to toe with orange emulsion some hours previously – there was some pretty far fetched sickie-throwing going on that morning.)

Anyway, I do have a mild case of mythic delirium, as my  story ‘The Art of Flying’ is published in said journal, alongside work by such luminaries as Jennifer Crow and Patty Templeton. It’s another project from the talented Mike Allen, who is also responsible for the brilliant Clockwork Phoenix anthologies.

You can subscribe, or buy a copy for your e-reader, or read some of the stories for free.  Lois Tilton reviewed the issue and described my story as ‘moving but depressing’ – you can judge for yourself, as it is free to read here. And when you’ve finished, you can enjoy yet another example of how not to write an author bio. I do so hate writing those things.

 

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responsibility

A classroom is not a place to replicate ‘real life’. A classroom is a place where you model equality and justice.

Teaching is not about having specialist knowledge to impart. Teaching is not about imparting knowledge. Teaching is about creating a safe space where people are treated with respect.

Feeling safe and respected is fundamentally necessary if a student is to take risks. An environment that favours competition, sarcasm, mockery, negativity and the replication of social injustices such as sexism, ageism and racism is not an environment in which people will feel able to take risks.

Taking risks (and failing) is the way that we learn.

Teaching is about taking responsibility for creating a space where people can learn.

Teaching is inherently subversive. Not because you are eccentric, or mean, or pushy, or cool, or a genius who loves avant garde ideas and art. But because the act of creating a place of equality and freedom is revolutionary.

This is true of every discipline and subject.  But in the arts, in any subject where students are expected to reveal their own selves and do the incredibly vulnerable thing of letting others see and judge their writing or drawing, then it is true a hundred fold.

The world would be a better place if there were better teachers in it.

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life and art

It’s confusing when you’re young and your Whole Life is Ahead of You. When I was young and my Whole Life was Ahead of Me, I didn’t really know what to do with it.  The only thing I’d ever thought seriously about was writing, but that didn’t seem like something I’d even be able to do, let alone make a career of. I didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant, even though I had the academic stuff to pursue any of those careers. I didn’t have much ambition, career-wise, at all.

Even so, I ended up going to university and getting a degree, which didn’t make a lot of difference to my prospects – I still found myself working in jobs where the qualifications required were basic maths and English. (It did give me a chance to go to Japan, though. If you want to work abroad, having a degree can help with getting work visas.) Some years later I went back to university and did a PGCE, which I thought would professionalise me, give me a career and some job security. Then the government cut most of the funding for the courses I teach, withdrew its political goodwill, and pushed colleges into becoming profit-making businesses, which meant that I was only able to get work on temporary contracts, only paid for my teaching hours and given few opportunities for professional development. Or I could work in the private sector, where wages for an hour’s teaching can be as little as £8. Finally, last year, I decided to do an MA in creative writing – not because I thought it would improve my career prospects! I thought I might learn something, though.

So I’ve done the whole education thing. And I think, if I had been smarter from the off, and if I had been braver, I wouldn’t have bothered.

Here’s the thing. Getting degrees didn’t open a lot of doors for me. Employers don’t care that I have a first class degree. It’s not in engineering or maths or a specialised subject, so it’s meaningless – like every other humanities degree. Even a professional, vocational qualification like a PGCE doesn’t get you very far when the only decent teaching jobs are at universities where you are expected to have a PhD just to teach on a sessional English course.

What opened doors for me, gave me opportunities, and made it possible to support myself over the years? Being able to touch type. Secretarial skills are the skills I have that are marketable and usually in demand. And those skills, in my case, are entirely self-taught.

Here’s what I wish I had understood back then: If you’re an artist, be an artist. If you’re a writer, write. Get a job that pays the bills and doesn’t corrode your soul, something you can do without giving your heart. Travel and live cheaply, seek out adventures and experiences, find out what matters to you. Give up on the idea of university as a place of enlightened growth and learning. Universities are businesses now. The idea that an expensive education in the arts or humanities is going to open doors for you is a myth. That’s not how this economy works. It used to be that education was a way out for ordinary, working class people, but it’s not anymore. It’s a trap. It’s a rip off. What might open doors for you is having some kind of practical skill, a good work ethic, and no massive debts to worry about. Be more free. And good luck to you.

 

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everybody needs good neighbours

In one of the more hilarious moments of my life, I recently discovered that I am living underneath a troupe of Australian acrobats. I found this out when I went upstairs to politely enquire about the tremendous stamping/thumping/crash-bang-walloping noises they were making. WHAT ARE YOU, GIANTS? ARE YOU SUMO-WRESTLERS? ARE YOU JUST THROWING EACH OTHER AROUND THE ROOM? (I ever-so-politely asked.)

Actually yes, they said. The last one.

After I stopped laughing, they gave me a couple of free tickets to their show, so this afternoon a friend and I went along to see it. I knew it would be good, because acrobats and circuses are always thrilling. We sat right at the front, crowded around the few square metres of performance space.

“It’s audience participation,” I joked to my friend. “Can you remember how to do a forward roll?”

The acrobats started with a bit of fun skipping-and-stripping, but soon got into the serious business of DEFYING GRAVITY. They held each other in the air, balancing on hands, heads, shoulders. They climbed up each other’s bodies to reach the ceiling. I had my hands over my mouth most of the time, thinking there was no way I could be seeing what I was seeing.

In one particularly mesmerising section, two of the guys balanced on one another, whilst the sole female acrobat stepped and climbed over them. The game was that she couldn’t touch the ground. Wherever she stepped, there had to be a hand or a thigh or a head or something to hold her off the floor. This was a beautiful piece which not only showed the strength and coordination of these athletes, but also the depth of their connection to one another. There was something very humane and touching in seeing them move almost like one extraordinary body.

The most incredible piece, however, was the finale, in which the guys literally threw the woman around the space in a sequence that became ever more impossibly wonderful. She leapt from their hands, spiraling through the air, to land on other hands. She flew like a bird. There was always an edge of danger, a sense that they might just drop her (but of course they never did).  Afterwards, my friend and I both had the same thought – how many times must they have flung her off into empty space before they perfected this routine? And how crazily talented she was, how focused, and how strong.

I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like this before. Having said that, whilst they were doing an intense bout of backflips, I did think to myself that I’d heard something like this before. I’m pretty sure they do that in their living room. It would explain a lot. Of course, my first (proud) words to my friend upon leaving were, “They’re my neighbours, you know.”

If you’re in Edinburgh, go and see them! The show is called ‘Gravity and Other Myths’ and is on every day at the Gilded Balloon (Teviot).

(And yes, before anyone shouts at me, I *am* supposed to be writing a novel and I *will* get right back to it, this second. Jeez.)

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there’s a name for this

there must be a name for this feeling you get in the middle of a novel when actually you HATE your novel and you want to throw it out of the window and start over and your friends have to talk you down and talk you up and you read blogs that say WHATEVER YOU DO DON’T STOP WRITING DON’T GIVE UP PUSH THROUGH IT and you think what the hell do you know about it and you go to your own blog and you write one long run on sentence with lots of shouty bits and there is a little part of you that is thinking just get on with writing it and you can throw it away later if you really want to and so you keep going even though the voice is flat and there is no action and it’s so boring and you don’t know what you were thinking all those weeks and months when you thought and planned and plotted and worked it out and thought this is going to be great but you didn’t know you would hit this WALL and that is what it is A WALL and if you want to get through a wall you can climb over it or you can tunnel under it or you can get a load of weapons and blast your way through it but except for the weapons option it probably won’t be any fun and it’s only later you will look back and say I’m glad I didn’t just stop there because it made me feel good to get past that wall and on the other side of the wall there is a lot of great stuff that I honestly wasn’t expecting

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from the bottom of a very deep hole

It’s highly possible that by the time I get to the end of the first draft of this novel, all that I’ll have to show for it is the first draft of a novel. My home will be ripped apart by feral mice (they’ll become feral after eating the thyroid medication I’ve carelessly left lying around the place). Moths will turn all my clothes into lace. My phone and electricity will be cut off (obviously) and I will have to work by candlelight, except the mice will have eaten all the candles, which will turn out to be a good thing, as when the landlord turns up to evict me from this place, a huge waxy dead mouse will be wedged under the door, making it impossible to open or close. My friends will stop leaving me plaintive, slightly desperate messages about needing to ‘catch up soon!’ and ‘what do you mean you’re not coming to my wedding? You’re the bride!’

I will emerge from the writing of this first draft like something undead crawling out of its own grave. I will trudge around the streets, pressing my unedited manuscript into people’s hands, telling them they’re my favourite beta reader and asking them for spare change so I can buy stamps and send my work of genius out into the world where it is sure to cause a bidding war between the major publishing companies.  I will react to suggestions that I self-publish by setting my hair on fire.

One day I will go to sleep in a hollowed-out tree trunk, and when I wake up, some squirrels will be ripping up my manuscript and using it for bedding. Not even red squirrels, but those ordinary grey fuckers. I’ll fight them for the papers, incurring several painful bites and scratches, and ending up with nothing but a few scraps of soiled squirrel bedding and an incipient case of septicaemia which will quickly prove fatal. My remains will be found on a hillside, perhaps months later, bloated and green from the rain, a single piece of paper crumpled in my dead hand. The police officers who find me will attempt to prise the paper from my fist, but it will be nothing but mould and pulp. “Fucking writers,” they will say. “That’s the third one we’ve had this month.”

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something is squeaking

Something is squeaking in my room, and no no NO it is not my small bewhiskered friend Alphonse, he of the beret and the Gauloise and the stinky cheese. (I upset him by stuffing all the mouse holes with wire wool and peppermint-soaked cotton, and haven’t seen him since.) Maybe there is always something squeaking in my room at half past three in the morning. I wouldn’t really know because as a rule I am asleep at that time, with earplugs squeezed in my lugholes on account of all the outside noises I still haven’t gotten used to.

Maybe it’s my brain that’s squeaking. This book I’m writing has been kicking my arse lately, and insisting on getting me up in the middle of the absolute night if I want to achieve plenty wordage, which I do. Writing books is hard. It’s so hard it amazes me that anyone has ever actually managed to do it. It’s so supremely difficult that I can see now why some people will do anything but anything to avoid writing books, no matter how much they insist that’s what they really really want more than anything. I know plenty of ‘writers’ who don’t write. Edinburgh is seething with them. There’s a whole literature ‘scene’ in Edinburgh that pretty much seems like one big long excuse for not actually writing very much. (I put ‘scene’ in scarequotes because I wouldn’t want you to confuse it with an actual scene that’s like, you know, happening and groovy.)

You’d think there would be some kind of balance, a happy medium between poncing around on the ‘scene’ being a ‘writer’, and being awake at three-thirty in the morning fighting with your story-brain so hard that you are seriously considering attempting to persuade a mouse to write that tricky third act of your novel.

But that is not the squeak of a mouse. Perhaps it is the moon that is squeaking. Perhaps this is how the moon sounds: sharp and squeaky like a broken chair. A broken chair… Oh.

Oh, I see.

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how to write stuff and that

I have a confession to make. Actually, it’s kind of embarrassing. I’m making light of it, but it’s serious. I’m addicted to these:

Not just books in general, but books in particular. Books about writing, to be precise.

Last night, I counted. I have 37 books about writing, plus assorted reference books and works of criticism and theory. That’s a lot, right? That’s a crazy amount.

There are books on craft – plot, structure, character, point of view, genre… All these books say the exact same things, over and over until you basically want to kill yourself. Three and five act structure. Get to know your characters. Set the scene. Don’t overdo the exposition… blah blah blah let’s all die.

Then there are the big hitters: Story, by Robert McKee; Syd Field’s Screenwriting. Actually useful if you’re writing a film, although I do suggest getting the hardback edition of Story so that you can use it to beat yourself around the head when you finally watch Adaptation, and realise that some unspeakable genius has already processed the whole thing, turned it inside out, and written a film about it. And got Robert McKee to play himself in it, which is surely the icing on the cake of genius, and a good point at which to start beating yourself around the head.

There are books like Writing Down the Bones, which is perhaps the least helpful but most poetic book about writing ever written; books that polemicise and politicise the act of writing, like Carol Bly’s The Passionate, Accurate Story; and writers’ memoirs, such as Stephen King’s On Writing, which is full of great practical advice and is highly entertaining and readable, too.

The Queen of books about writing has to be The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield. This is the book that shames, bullies and goads writers into actually sitting down and working – and laughs in the face of those who think buying/reading books about writing is anything other than procrastination and avoidance of work. I recommend it. It’s worked for me, you know?*

*I’ve totally given them up, honest I have. Well, except that Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook is coming out soon, and I have to see the story fish. But that’s completely different. Completely!

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the egg

The blurb about me in the current Interzone mentions this short film from a while back, so I thought I’d post it up here for the curious. It’s based on one of the first decent(ish) short stories I ever wrote, and represents my first short story sale. Actually, this was the little story that could. First of all, it got me a place on an awesome screenwriting course, then it won first prize in a competition judged by Graham Joyce, and then I sold it to a film company. Honestly, watching the film now makes me cringe – for all the  bad writing they left in, and all the bad writing they added along the way. But despite its weaknesses, this story marks the moment when I became a real writer.

The Egg