The Next Big Thing

Well, I've been tagged by the one and only Maya Chowdhry in something called The Next Big Thing by which I'm required to answer questions about a recent or forthcoming book. Ever the proactive author (though my actual writing has kept me from attending to this blog over-much lately!) I have chosen a book that, should you not have read it but like the sound of it, you can get hold of without waiting, and which anyway may be quite new to my more recent readers: my short novel Too Many Magpies. Plus, I've never answered some of these questions about it before.

But first, a word about Maya. She's an innovative and gloriously subversive writer whom I first met properly when she co-edited Bitch Lit (Crocus), an anthology of stories about bad women for which my story, 'The Way to Behave', was commissioned. Bitch Lit was great fun: we did a reading tour, each dressed as our protagonist, and Maya, who also contributed to the book, was dressed most exotically as a fairy goth. I won't ever forget the sight of my mum, who came to the Sheffield reading, sitting chatting to a fairy with wings as if she did that every day of the year. (You can read my posts about the Bitch Lit anthology and tour here.) The book Maya answered TNBT questions about is her poetry collection, The Seamstress and the Global Garment.

So, the questions about Too Many Magpies:

What genre does your book fall under?
It's not a genre book, though it definitely has elements of the psychological thriller: the female protagonist meets a charismatic man who seems like her saviour, but becomes ever more scary... As for the form, I tend to call it a novella but I once read that a novella is 32,000 words or less and actually Too Many Magpies is 38,000. Goodness only knows (or cares!). Suffice it to say that according to the Reading Matters blog, it's 'smartly plotted and with not a word wasted... an appealing, bewitching read, one that feels slightly dangerous and a little bit thrilling.'

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

That's a difficult one: Maxine Peake or Shirley Henderson could capture wonderfully the neurotic vulnerability the situation produces in my (nameless) protagonist - a state akin to madness, though you never really know how sane or otherwise she is - but Kate Winslet has the kind of looks that fit my picture of her - wholesome nice-girl looks that attract her sinister suitor and belie the chaos in her psyche that she's suppressing with her tidy bourgeois life. And of course, Kate Winslet could do that brilliantly, too, as she did in the film of Revolutionary Road. Kevin Spacey would be great as the charming, even cheeky, yet sinister older stranger...

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
A young mother married to a scientist fears for her children’s safety as the natural world around her becomes ever more uncertain - until, that is, she meets a charismatic stranger who seems to offer a different kind of power…

Who publishes your book?
Who but the wonderful Salt, who have also published two others of my books, the short story collection Balancing on the Edge of the World, and another short novel, The Birth Machine.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Not long at all. I wrote the whole thing in eight weeks, first and second drafts included. This is why I think of it as a novella rather than a novel - it has a kind of holistic shape that I associate with short stories, as opposed to the more rambling feel of novels, and as a result somehow it needed to be written quickly, just to get it all down while it was in my head.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I've always been interested in the divide between science and art, and between rational and magical thinking. My father was an engineer and my mother was literary and artistic, and as I was growing up I felt caught between different world views. Both were fascinating, and attractive, to me, but what was fascinating to me also was the way those supposedly different ways of thinking could become blurred - my artistic mother was by far the more rational of the two, and my 'scientific' father was a great believer in ghosts and magic. Then I married a doctor and came up against some real 'magical' and non-rational thinking on the part of some medical so-called scientists, and I began badly to want to write a story based around these ideas. (So I suppose you could say that one of the reasons the book tumbled out so quickly was that it had been gestating for some time.) The autobiographical bit of the book concerns the protagonist's small son, who falls ill with a life-threatening condition: that happened to my own small son, and the uncertainty of it fed into the novel and fitted the themes.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
There are spells and sinister nursery rhymes, there are spooky birds, there's a day when the protagonist wakes and just knows there's someone out there watching in the hissing rain...

The five writers I've tagged are Charles Lambert, A J Ashworth, Zoe Lambert, Ailsa Cox and Sarah Salway - all writers I very much admire.

You can buy Too Many Magpies direct from Salt or from Amazon or The Book Depository.

Mary Sharratt posts about The Birth Machine

A nice piece about the reissue of The Birth Machine appears today on the blog of novelist Mary Sharratt, who with Maya Chowdhry edited the fabulous Bitch-Lit anthology I was thrilled to be included in. The piece touches on some of the history of the book's publication, so do head on over, and leave a comment if you wish: I'd be very interested in your thoughts. Thanks, Mary!

The Way to Behave on Radio 4, 3.30, Friday.

Looked at the radio listings in the Observer this morning and found that it's Friday of this week that my Balancing story 'The Way to Behave' is being broadcast on Radio 4 (3.30 pm). It's a fabulous series to be in, intended to highlight collections of stories in print and easily available, and titled In Bookshops Now. The series kicks off tomorrow with (appropriately) 'Monday Diary' from another Salt collection, the wonderful Some New Ambush by my friend Carys Davies (she's my friend because we met through both being published by Salt and precisely because I so love and admire her writing). It's a real mark of Salt's marketing nous that they should feature so prominently in such a series.

I'm particularly chuffed as my story is being read by actress Lesley Sharp (above) of Clocking Off fame and numerous northern TV dramas - what an honour, and she's just perfect I think for the ironic tone of the narrator. My story slot is critic Stephanie Billen's Radio Choice for Friday and she has this to say:

Radio 4 continues its valuable championing of the short story by highlighting fiction from widely available collections. Concluding the week is 'The Way to Behave', a clever tale by Elizabeth Baines, in which a social worker takes a slow revenge on her husband's far too nice mistress. Reader Lesley Sharp invests her character with just the right amount of venom as she recalls her fateful first discovery of a blonde hair: 'a gold worm, hooked and wriggling...'

I should mention that The Way to Behave was first published in (and commissioned for) the Bitch Lit anthology which is also available, direct from Crocus Books (get them both if you can afford it!)

Satisfaction or your money back

Yesterday The Guardian tried to elicit tales of stage rage from writers and performers who had been annoyed by audiences, but in several cases it was the audience who turned out to have been most enraged, and the performers forbearing or even timid.

Anyway, it reminded me of the time we took the Bitch Lit tour to Ilkley....

Clouds in the hills and a story on the radio, maybe

Oh dear, this is turning into a blog about the ruddy internet. So OK, I got a better mobile broadband, and yes, it does work from the house here, but not when the weather is bad! And has the weather been bad up here in the hills! Here from the upstairs window where I sit at my laptop I should see a blue ridge of hills but all I can see most days is the cloud we’re sitting in the middle of, and the very nearby ash trees flinging themselves around with the kind of anguish I feel every time I try to connect up.

However, sometimes it happens and I find myself thinking what a miracle the internet is, instead of taking it for granted as we’ve all learnt to do in the past few years. Still, it can take several minutes – now and then 10! - to navigate between web pages, so I may not be very good on links, I’m afraid.

So anyway, I got an email through to my publisher Jen at Salt to tell her about my Raymond Carver win, and the next time I managed to hook up there was a reply from her telling me that my story ‘The Way to Behave’ is to be broadcast on Radio 4’s afternoon slot sometime in the autumn, probably in September – that is, if she received my answer giving the go-ahead: too many of my emails have been bouncing back! ‘The Way to Behave’ is one of the stories collected in Balancing, and it was originally commissioned for the Bitch Lit anthology (Crocus) with which we had great fun doing a series of readings dressed in character, since most of the stories, TWTB included, were dramatic monologues. TWTB is the story of a wronged wife, the narrator, who finds an unusual way of taking revenge, and is one of my naughty swipes at the abuses of feminism by so-called feminists. (My Aunty Phyllis read Balancing recently and pronounced TWTB her favourite in the whole book, so maybe I should be worried: but no, Phyllis was a WAAF in the war, and she’s pretty switched on about female power.) To read my character for the Bitch Lit tour, I dressed up, as she does in the story, as a vamp: red high heels, red nails, bright lipstick and dark wig, and when my mother and sister came to the reading we did at Sheffield, they sat there as the reading started wondering where I had got to, and didn’t realize I was me until I began reading! TWTB is one of the more conventional stories in Balancing, and so I suppose well suited to radio.

I haven’t been feeling very literary, though. Writing’s on hold as I’ve been too busy helping out with the work on this old family house, which was started two years ago, but is only ever done in people’s spare time, mostly in the summer. And do I really want to start writing a blog about lime plastering and woodworm?

Although, actually, a damned enticing story came to me the other night in the pub down by the straits…

Change at Commonword and Bitch-Lit still going strong

To Taurus bar last night for a leaving drink for Cathy Bolton, Commonword's innovative and inspirational publisher, who will be sorely missed. She's not going far, though - just down the road, and in fact to the part of town where Commonword began: after stepping in as Acting Director of Manchester Literature Festival last year, she is this year taking up the post of Director.

One piece of news was that Commonword's Bitch-Lit anthology (which includes my story The Way to Behave) is still going strong: Maya Chowdhry, Mary Sharratt, Michelle Green & Cath Staincliffe will be performing in character again at Manchester's Central Library on International Women's Day, March 8th, 1-2pm (Committee Room, 2nd Floor), and next week Maya, Char March and Brighid Rose will perform at London's Split-Lit Festival.

Maya also told me that we had had a really TERRIBLE review on the web, and of course I came straight home and Googled it. Omigod, so she didn't get that any of the stories were IRONIC!!! Is it not clear that they are ironic?!!! Should I not put mine in my collection, therefore? EEK!!

Bitches and Chicks

Manchester Bitch-Lit event last night and Waterstone's packed out for it. This time I wasn't performing, but could sit back and enjoy: delicious performances from Rosie Lugosi, Chris Scholes and Sherry Ashworth.

The tour is over for me now, though there will yet be events in Newcastle, Leeds, York and London. It's been interesting to compare the different events and the different audiences and audience discussions. The 'Bitch-Lit' idea really seems to have struck a chord: events have sold out, with people placed on reserve lists or turned away. (If you still want to go but find it sold out, then reserve a place, because at Manchester some people who had booked failed to turn up - though you might need to turn up on the off-chance.)

In the book and at the readings editors Mary Sharratt and Maya Chowdhry have pointed out that generally in literature female protagonists are allowed to be less trangressive than male ones, or if they are transgressive they must be punished and/or realise the error of their ways. A condition for submissions to this book was that protagonists must not be punished for their behaviour, but must triumph in their transgression. The idea was to counter the censorship on women writers - that sense that you'd better make sure that, in some way at least, your female protagonist can be seen in a good light. The female heroes would be autonomous, answerable to no one, and thus an antidote to Chick-Lit, where your heroine is usually pathetically desperate to get her man (well, that's what they say - I've never read any Chick-Lit myself).

At Sheffield, and especially at Ilkley, you could see that the audiences, mainly female - there were only three men at Sheffield - were really taken by this. 'We're celebrating female badness!' said Mary at Ilkley, and many in the audience grinned and nodded. I have to say that I didn't feel entirely comfortable with this sentiment, though of course it was not completely serious, rather a provocation. I wouldn't exactly celebrate or condone my protagonist's behaviour, I'm simply inviting the reader to understand the extremes of behaviour to which her situation has driven her. At another point (in the book's introduction) Maya says that the women characters in the book are not victims 'lashing out in self-defence'. 'I don't intend to be a victim,' my protagonist says at one point, but it depends what you mean by a victim, and you could say that her act of revenge makes her one, a slave to her vengeful emotions, and as desperate, in a different way, as any Chick-Lit heroine, to get her man. As Suzanne Elvidge, another reader at Sheffield, said to me in the bar afterwards, several of our protagonists are indeed, in this sense, victims lashing out.

As I said, though, in the Q & A at Ilkley, the real difference with this book is that it blows a breath of fresh air over the taboo subject of female badness, and does this largely by reclaiming the word Bitch. As I said then, if we can't say a word then we can't begin to discuss the issues around it, but once you reclaim the word you can break the taboo, and begin to discuss the concept of female badness more rationally.

Most of us were agreed that there has been a real taboo. At Sheffield we were asked if we felt liberated by the book into censoring ourselves less when we write, and even Sophie Hannah said that she did. Sophie is one of the most straight-speaking and independent-minded women I know, and one of the most balloon-pricking of satirical writers, yet she said that it has made her more determined to resist editors' pleas to 'make her protagonists nicer' (and thus, in Sophie's opinion, less lifelike).

Interestingly, however, when I asked Rosie the same question in the Q & A last night, she said that she had been developing in that direction anyway in her writing, and Sherry said that she had never felt censored, even though she writes books for teenagers, an area in which language is inevitably strongly policed by editors. I suppose, however, it depends how far you are already censoring yourself, and Sherry did indeed admit that although she had never been troubled by the b-word, she still found herself shocked by the use of what she called the c-word, a fact which many of the Manchester audience may have found shocking in itself.

It was a different kind of audience last night in Manchester, much more mixed in age and gender. A nineteen-year-old student in a red bakerboy hat said that she felt we were perhaps making too much of it all, and it was the same on the English degree course she had just started, as soon as you get to a woman writer people start on about the feminism thing, it really didn't mean a lot to people of her age and it irritated her, and furthermore she read Chick-Lit and enjoyed it and didn't see anything wrong in it. She clearly felt that there wasn't an issue, as the editors were making out.

The fact remains, however, that when Mary went on Women's Hour to talk about the book, Jenny Murray avoided using that word, as did many of the writers who rang up to inquire about submitting...

Bollards, fences and boxes

When you're doing a reading, always turn up early.

Yeah, right.

Bitch-Lit reading in Sheffield yesterday evening. 7.30 start, plan to get there an hour beforehand to change into costume and check out the venue, so leave at five for the one-and-a-half hour drive. Oh-oh. Traffic blocked at Glossop. At 6.30, when I'm meant to be there, we're still scooping round those scary bends between darkening misty hills, not a city light in sight. 6.40, we hit the outskirts, zoom downwards to the centre only to find what no one has warned us about: the roads around it are completely dug up, it's all bollards and diversions, hardly any lights or signs, and no one around - why not? - it's like the surface of the moon, the dark side. We're going round in circles, and now we seem to be driving away from the centre again... One lone man walking. I wind down the window. 'We're looking for the station!' He scratches his head, not sure how we'd get there with all these altered directions... Another: with all these altered directions, he's not even sure any more in which direction it actually is. It's seven o' clock now. John's driving, so I rummage in my bag, thinking I should change in the car, but then find I don't have the room. Two young girls, about twelve and ten. 'Know where the station is?' 'Oh yes! Well... erm... MUM!' they scream up to a window above the shops. The window opens. 'Mum, where's the station?' The woman starts yelling down instructions we can't hear.

It's 7.10 when we get to the back of the station which we know is opposite the venue, the Showroom Cinema. 'Stop! I'll run from here!' I grab my bags and costume and jump from the car, my skirt dropping from the hanger onto the pot-holed ground. Snatch it up, run through the dark round the side of the station car park, stumbling over potholes, only to come to a high workman's fence and be diverted a very long way round. It's 7.15, when I finally reach the steps of the Cinema Showroom. I fling myself, breathless, onto the box-office desk. 'To the stairs and then left,' I am told. I race down the stairs. There's no left turn... I race back up. 'Where's showroom 5?' I call to an usher. Oh, he meant past the stairs and turn left!

Everyone else is ready and waiting. So where can I change? Not in an office as they'd vaguely suggested we might, but in the loo... Great. Race to the loo. Can't paint my bitch lips on, must have dropped my makeup bag when I rummaged in the car...

I emerge with my arms full of bags, coat, clothes and a coathanger to find the audience already being seated. Where can I put them? Under that table there, I'm told, which I must squash past the legs of the audience to get to. So much for making an impact as your character...

And the setup, which I'd come too late to have a say in? A lectern with a mic we didn't really need, and which would hide our carefully planned costumes. And each side of it and a little behind it, two chairs for the readers, which meant that in the long room where the seating was arranged horizontally, each pair of readers was hidden from half of the audience. And as for the Q & A session: well, I tell you, it's amazing the rapport we achieved with our sell-out audience from behind a big blue box!


Here Maya Chowdhry and I are trying to converse around the lectern with the other two readers:



And here we are at last released from the box [From left to right: me in my wig and dressed as my avenging wife character, Sophie Hannah as herself (because, as she told the audience, she is her character), Suzanne Elvidge as her avenging cook, and Maya Chowdhry as a fairy punk]

From the sublime to the wicked

Yesterday I went to the talk by Murat Belge in St Ann's Church - an event I found quite mind-blowing, and which I've written about on my other blog where I try to tackle the more serious matters.

Afterwards I wandered a bit gloomily, musing how in Britain we just don't value serious literature any more, when we damn well ought to: after all, the issues Belge was talking about, and in the novels he publishes by Nobel-Prize winning Orhan Pamuk, are even now being played out in Britain, not least in the current comments by British politicians about the veil.

And then I went into Waterstone's and found something to cheer me right up: there in the anthology section was Bitch-Lit, our light-hearted anthology with nevertheless a pretty serious point, turned out in all its bright-pink glory. Not only that, someone was reaching up to look at a copy! I tip-toed away, thinking, Good Old Waterstones, and Three Cheers for our lovely publisher Cathy Bolton at Commonword!!

A schizoid moment

What do you do when your relatives decide to come to one of your readings? Bite the bullet, I guess: thank the lord they support you in your mad life's endeavour and hold no grudges about the way you've unfairly portrayed them, decide not to care about the clash between your carefully honed writer's persona and the real embarrassing you they could let slip in flash, and when the night comes shut your mind to the fact that they know precisely which bits of the piece you're reading are autobiographical, and can transmit this to the rest of the audience with their knowing, readier laughs.

My mum rings me: 'We're coming to the Sheffield Bitch-Lit reading.' Eek. 'But we've got this problem. We tried to book, but they told us because we're relatives we'd get complimentary tickets.'

They told them they were my relatives? (Like proud parents or something?!!)

'And they said you'd know all about it and would sort it out.'

Ohmigod. I know nothing. I want to know nothing... 'OK.'

I ring the festival box office, apologetic, foolish. 'Oh, that's fine!' they tell me. 'Yes, your mother and your sister: we've already put two comps aside!'

I feel just like when I was in the school play...

There's never not a hitch...

Forget your posh pens or your slick laptops: a writer's best equipment is a damned good sense of humour.

Yesterday we kicked off the Bitch-Lit tour. Drive from Manchester to Ilkley, leave in plenty of time, but the traffic is dire, backed up for miles, and I know others are cutting it finer. Will they make it? Will the folk of Ilkley miss out on the revelation of a row of bitches bitching? And what about the parking? Lucky for me, there's a space right outside the Ilkley Playhouse where we're performing. Grab costume and bags, rush in to find Mary Sharrat our editor there already, and I no longer need my sense of humour: lovely ladies ply us with cups of tea and a bottle of wine (before a performance?) and lead us up to a plush green-room with glorious mirrors and a big plate of fruit and enough hairspray, as Mary said, for Margaret Thatcher if she lived another forty years.

We're already changed when the others arrive in a breathless dash. 'Hi Mary,' they cry and fling their arms around her, but they don't speak to me, just glance at me uneasily. 'You bitches,' I say, and at last they see it's me beneath my wig and in my vamp's jacket and killer heels...

But there's no time for laughing, and in a very short while a sound engineeer who looks all of sixteen has excessively politely spoilt the line of our costumes by sticking mics up our jackets, and we're being led downstairs to the stage. The show begins, it's going well, and Cath Staincliffe is two minutes into her reading, the first. The door opens at the back and a tiny elderly woman in a sharp grey trouser suit bursts in. The usher jumps up to direct her to a seat near the back, but she booms that she has to sit at the front 'because I'm deaf', and, still booming over Cath, is led all the way to the front row.

Hitch over, the show seems to go well. The audience is a gift, laughing at all the right moments and very appreciative in the Q & A session afterwards. We're walking out to the foyer for the signing when I realise the hard-of-hearing lady is right in front of me. She turns and snaps at me: 'You want to invest in a microphone.' 'We had microphones, actually,' I tell her kindly and sympathetically, and then realise I might not be speaking up enough. She heard all right, though: 'Well, they didn't work.' She turns, scowling, to Mary who chaired the event: 'I didn't hear a thing and I'm demanding my money back.'

Hm. Everyone else seemed to enjoy it, however, and we sold a fair few books, the main point of the exercise, after all....

Four bitches, from left to right: Mary Sharratt, me in my wig, Char March and Cath Staincliffe

Writers reading

Since writers are so often called on to read their work out loud, it's worth learning to do this well. It shouldn't matter, but it does: a reading can sometimes have quite the opposite effect to that intended by the publisher. I have nodded off in many a Waterstone's reading by an acclaimed writer, and been unfairly put off their book.

The Bitch-Lit publishers are sparing nothing to help us out in this respect, and we had another rehearsal yesterday afternoon with Contact Theatre's Cheryl Martin. Actually, everyone taking part in the tour reads really well, but Cheryl helped us finesse things, pointing out when people were swaying on the spot (and likely to make the audience sea-sick), or where we could leave a longer beat for effect, or where certain passages might benefit from a subtle change of pace.

It's a completely new experience for me: I'm accustomed to practising in private and with no idea of what other contributing writers will be reading or how my piece will play out against theirs, and without knowing beforehand the running order or even often the basic format. Yet yesterday we were able to discuss and plan everything: how we'll introduce the sessions, the order we'll run in, even - since we're performing in character (in the characters of our narrators) - what we'll wear. And Char March, who reads her story, two intercut dramatic monologues, in a quite brilliant Russian accent, was able to ask people's opinions on a matter that was bothering her: how far she needed to vary the accent between her two characters.

Since my narrator is most definitely not blonde (but takes revenge on a blonde), I took myself off to Paul's Hair World on Oldham Road to buy a dark wig. Well, I have never had a wig before, and this was some experience. Walls draped from floor to ceiling in wigs and hairpieces, rows and rows of wig-topped plastic model heads. And half of them real hair! Where had it come from? I have had long hair cut very short now and then in my life, and never, ever, was it all cut off in one hank, but snipped away in fussy little hairdressery bits and let drop on the floor all higgledy-giggedly and hacked about, for the junior to sweep away. So there in Paul's Hair World I got a bit of the same creepy feeling I had when I went to the Bodyworks Exhibition in Brick Lane, and had images of poverty-stricken women in Eastern Europe or the East forced to sell their hair whether they liked it or not...

But my wig was for the stage, so I could happily get nylon. I would never have guessed, though, how hard it might be to find a wig which on the model had the vampish, wicked look of my character but didn't make me look like either a pea-head or a lion with a mane. 'This one,' I said finally, to the youth who was serving me and whose eyes had long gone glassy either from boredom or from trying not to laugh: black with bitch-red artificial-looking streaks. John seemed quite nervous when I tried it on at home...

Each of our gigs is tied in with a festival. I'm doing one at the Ilkley Festival on 3oth September and another in October for the Off the Page Festival in Sheffield. At the Manchester event, which will take place at Waterstone's Deansgate and be part of the October Manchester Literature Festival, the readers/performers will be Maya Chowdry, Mary Sharratt, Chris Scholes, Sherry Ashworth and Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen.

Saturday afternoon in Manchester

Rehearsal today at Manchester's Green Room for the Bitch Lit tour (to Ilkley, Sheffield, Manchester, Newcastle, York, Leeds and London). A room full of bitches!! People kept letting the side down, though: everyone was so helpful, listening to each other's pieces and making useful suggestions for each other's performance costumes and carefully planning a coordinating colour scheme. But then you've heard of honour among thieves... Camaraderie among bitches...
Seriously, though: apparently we're not getting quite the coverage we were promised in Good Housekeeping, because when the editor saw the image (above) which the journalist had chosen for his article on the upcoming Manchester Literature Festival, she balked: no way would she allow that word in those huge letters... What is it with this word? Why is it so much harder to reclaim than all the others? As John my partner said, the dog world must be wondering what all the fuss is about...
Anyway, the least successfully bitchy woman of the day was Cheryl Martin, our director: she slogged away all day helping us in turn with our readings, yet she was due to perform herself later in the afternoon at the Manchester Book Fair in St Ann's Square. My turn. I began, glanced up, caught her seemingly horrified gaze, my eyes slid away to the ceiling, to the sides, out through the window, anywhere but meet her gaze again. 'Can I stop you there, Elizabeth? Now, my note to you is to speak to the audience, pin their gaze.'
First rehearsals are the hottest hoop of fire. Last year was just the worst, the first rehearsal for my monologue Drinks With Natalie for the 24:7 Manchester Theatre Festival, when my director was Susan Twist, Royal Shakespeare Company and ex-Brookside actress. How could I stand up and perform in front of someone like that? What hubris, what idiocy... But Susie was brilliant, and the first thing she told me was that everybody, however trained and professional and experienced, is scared stiff at the first rehearsal, not knowing precisely what is expected of them - something I had never guessed as a radio playwright when I would walk into the BBC green room the first morning of a production and face a company of well-known actors...

After the rehearsal I made my way to Waterstone's. I'd only gone a hundred yards when I met Trevor from the reading group and his wife Anne, who had just been to the current exhibition at Cornerhouse, and when I got to Waterstone's (via the book fair) I met Debbie, also from the reading group, and the organiser of the reading at the Jewish Museum next Sunday. Manchester: a small world, you say?

Some publishers are marvellous

That fabulous woman Cathy Bolton at Commonword has done a sterling job on the Bitch-Lit anthology (Crocus Books), due out in September and including stories by Manc writers Cath Staincliffe, Sophie Hannah, Rosie Lugosi and also yours truly. This week an interview with the editors appears in The Big Issue, and we're promised coverage in Good Housekeeping, in the Guardian and on Radio 4 Woman's Hour. Her nifty idea of decking some of us out in polka dots to match the book cover for the press photo (Bonnieandclyde) has clearly paid off. The spotty scribblers above are [clockwise from top left] contributor and editor Maya Chowdry, Susannah Marshall who offers a sinister tale of a female truck driver, contributor and editor Mary Sharratt, guess who with a story of revenge against a pious feminist, Rosi Lugosi the 'vampire queen', Char March with a brilliant tale of a female Russian mafiosa, and Brighid Rose whose anti-heroine just loves to cause destruction all around her.
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This kind of thing doesn't happen without utter hard work on the part of a publisher (I know - I've published a magazine, Metropolitan) and sheer flair. When it does, count your blessings, I say, and give thanks to the God of Marvellous Publishers...

Funny, hype never seems such a bad thing when some of it is happening to you...