Return to blogging

Well - if anyone is out there reading this - I can't tell you how strange it is to be writing this blog again today. Apart from the monthly reports of our reading group I see that I haven't in fact written a post for going on for two years (and even those reports I've sometimes struggled to achieve). The reasons are several: I was working very hard on fiction that left little space in my head, or time in the day, for any other sort of writing, and there was personal stuff that made me want to pull in my horns and sit quiet and private for a while (but which is superb grist for the mill, of course!). I suppose also there was the sense that attention had moved on from blogs and the fact that a blog, which takes time to create, provides far less reward in terms of tangible interaction with readers than Facebook and Twitter.

Yet here I am, after a summer away from my desk - a summer completely taken up with trips and visitors and family, so that I have hardly written at all - with a yen to blog again (and yet with that initial awkwardness you experience when you've not seen someone for a good long time), to be able to contemplate things at greater leisure and with more permanence than the noisy, fleeting Facebook and Twitter allow. I realise too now that writing here about developments concerning my own writing provides a permanent record of publications, dates etc that can otherwise so easily get forgotten.

As for this last, this summer has seen the publication of two new stories, and a third, 'Kiss', was longlisted in the Short Fiction Journal Prize.

'The Meadow' appears in Words for the Wild, an anthology of poetry and prose fiction 'rooted in the countryside', edited by Amanda Oosthuizen and Louise Taylor. It's my first ever 'flash' and was first commissioned by Amanda for the Words for the Wild website, which was set up to support a campaign against development plans for executive-style housing on precious green space. 'The Meadow' tackles this situation directly and ponders the clashing issues involved (and is pretty autobiographical!). (I met Amanda in June 2015 at the Norwich launch of Unthology 7, in which we each had a story - we had a great time afterwards in the pub!).

'The Next Stop Will Be Didsbury Village' was published in the Spring 2018 issue of the literary journal Confingo. This story was originally commissioned for another project. Last summer (2017), the writer Sarah-Clare Conlon produced a performance for Didsbury Arts Festival, Re/Place(d), for which several of us - Sarah Butler, Adrian Slatcher, David Gaffney, Nicholas Royle, I and Sarah-Clare herself - wrote and performed stories inspired by various sites around Didsbury. I chose Didsbury tram station, which is on the site (more or less) of the old Victorian railway station, inspired by the sense it always gives me of people's comings and goings through time, and the shifts and yet permanences through the centuries. I don't usually write site-specific stories - or, at least, if I do I work hard on making them universal rather than specific (sometimes not even naming the place or changing its name): it seems to me that if you don't you risk making readers who don't know a place feel excluded. But I did find this a great project to do, and really enjoyed trawling through old photos of the station and taking photos of my own, and the way they formed ideas and a story in my head.

We read in the great atmosphere of Didsbury's Parsonage (which is supposed to be haunted) and old footage of Didsbury showed on a screen as we read. It was a great evening with a packed house. Confingo editor Tim Shearer was in the audience and afterwards asked to see my story with a view to publishing it. Here I am chatting afterwards with him (centre) and Nicholas Royle:

Well, it's taken me some time to write this blog - to provide the links and upload the photos etc, which reminds me why I found it so hard to keep going while working so solidly at other writing. Perhaps I won't achieve what I used to - I used to blog every day, or most days - but I do hope now to keep in touch with it.