Edge Hill short story prize

Well, I expected that when I got to the end of my big writing stint I'd get back to blogging more frequently, but it hasn't happened... I've had so many practical things to catch up on (including a week spent decorating!), I've been away twice, and other, more journalistic work has been piling in. One of my trips was to London and included the Edge Hill award ceremony on Thursday, at which Graham Mort won the prize for his collection Touch (Seren) and Salt author Tom Vowler won the Reader's Choice prize (chosen by sixth formers) for a story from his debut collection, The Method and Other Stories. The other shortlisted authors were Polly Samson for Perfect Lives (Virago), Helen Simpson with In-Flight Entertainment (Cape), and Michele Roberts with Mud: Stories of Sex and Love (Virago).

As Graham (left) was in Africa, Seren fiction editor Penny Thomas received his prize instead and read from the message he'd sent (below).

 

I've been to so few events in the past few months and am consequently so out of touch with taking photos at them that I  failed to get a photo of Tom receiving his prize, but this was also partly because he was so surprised to get it, it seemed, that he had no speech prepared and didn't hang around at the front! Here he is, though, in the audience beforehand (centre) and looking as though a prize was the last thing on earth he expected:

On the left of him is Adam Marek, author of the short-story collection Instruction Manual for Swallowing (Comma) and just behind on the right Robert Shearman, who won the Reader's Choice prize last year and was short-listed in 2008 with his collection Tiny Deaths (Comma).

I really can't believe, either, that I didn't get photos of the other shortlisted authors, who were all there. It's all just too exciting, you see, after being incarcerated at my desk for so long...

As for my own project: I've now had feedback from my early readers: mostly typos, but one reader thought I should excise a (small) section which she didn't think added to the whole, and I have decided she's right. Also, an inconsistency occurred to me out of the blue one day (and when I mentioned it to that reader she said that she'd also noticed it), so that's another thing to see to, and I'm hoping to get down to finalising the ms in the next few days. And funnily enough, when I went outside to the garden this morning, I noticed the jackdaws flying back in to their previously emptied nest. Brooding again, perhaps, just as I'm about to start brooding the novel once more...

A fate to avoid

I was out on a walk on Sunday afternoon and came across this which really struck me. It's kind of what I'm hoping doesn't happen to my WIP while I'm working with my publisher on the launch of The Birth Machine!

Novel progress and Didsbury Arts Festival

Well, I must say the safety-net of my flow chart has been working brilliantly. I've been spending no more hours than usual on my novel but they have been very productive, even in the run up to a big publicity push, because I've had peace of mind for those few hours each day, knowing I'll still get everything done. I am though now in the full flow of the centre of the novel, with the characters long set up and the structure long established and lots of things falling into place, so I'm not sure it would all be working quite so well if I were at that early stage when you have to juggle so many possibilities in your head...

It's all been a bit stalled since Friday evening, however, as the Didsbury Arts Festival is now upon us. In fact, the art previews started on Thursday evening, but I missed the first one - Phil Portus's lovely photos of France at the Cafe Delice: I got the time wrong, and turned up at 6 just as it was finishing (but then I was just emerging from great immersion in the novel, and not quite yet connected back with the real world). Here's a sample:

I managed to make the next preview, on Friday evening, at the Feel Creative Gallery, where more of Phil Portus's photos were on display along with those by Martin Malies, Ray Grover, Ged Camera, Jo Kaberry and Sharon Hibbert. A really good exhibition, one of which - Phil's photo of the Cherry B swing singers below - had been in the Royal Photographic Society Exhibition.



There are exhibitions of artwork all over Didsbury, in many shops and businesses (list via this link), and the festival is extremely lively. Yesterday morning, outside the library, I caught the very funny outdoor theatre Fairly Funny Family and their Cheesy Trailer


and a team of Eastern European dancers (I don't think they were actually Eastern European):


In the afternoon, I popped up to the open-air events at Parsonage Gardens to hear Linda Chase read some of her great poems between various musical acts, and in the evening I went down to the Albert Club for a short while to catch a bit of Mish Mash, the cabaret that my old writing friend Julia Brosnan is in, but unfortunately I had to leave before she came on.

And in between all this, I kept slipping home for brief periods to work on my own reading and talk for Monday night at Moor Cottage (7 pm), where I'll be concentrating on the themes of magic and science in my work (oh, and I popped into Oddbins for the wine I'll be providing!) - although I have to admit I did bump into my colleague and fellow Salt author Adrian Slatcher, who will be reading at Pizza Express on Thursday, and ended up gassing over wine in Saints and Scholars, so I'm sure you can guess I haven't got my plan quite sorted yet, leave alone touched the novel...

Today I'm off up to Fletcher Moss Gardens to hear Nick Royle read one or more of his bird stories, as he did last year, at 2 o'clock outside Fletcher Moss Cottage where the RSPB was born, and kick off a whole afternoon of outdoor events there. The weather's cold but it's lovely and sunny, as it was yesterday, so it should be good...

And this evening I hope to get up to the Didsbury pub to hear Conrad Williams, who has just won the British Fantasy Awards, read from his novel Blonde on a Stick (7.30 pm).

Other literary highlights are:

Salt poet Steve Waling and Edmund Prestwich at the library (unfortunately they clash with me at Monday 7 pm!)

Poets John McAuliffe, Rachel Mann and Annie Clarkson at the Northern Lawn Tennis Club on Tuesday, 7 pm

An evening of readings from Nick Royle's short-story chapbook press, Nightjar, again at the Northern Lawn Tennis Club, Wednesday, 7 pm

Cath Staincliffe talking about her latest novel The Kindest Thing at the Didsbury Pub, Thursday 7 pm.

Cath clashes with Adrian Slatcher and James Davies, but I won't have the agony of choice as I can't go to either, unfortunately. I am doing something exciting, though: that's the day I'm off to London to the launch of A Clash of Innocents by Sue Guiney, who will visit this blog with it on October 10th.

Maybe not a blindfold but...

Well, I'm feeling a bit of an idiot. It's 3 weeks since I looked forward in Wales to getting onto the second section of my novel within a couple of days, and I have only just got there!

Maybe you'd think my life was boring enough for me to have got on with the thing (I'm hardly going out, after all) but enough things have intervened - the tail-end of my virtual book tour, a few days of the house being full of guests up from the south for a wedding, a reading and a one-day trip to London, and finally and most recently Salt's Just One Book Campaign - to dissipate the kind of focus it turned out I needed to negotiate the transition between the two sections.

There's an apocryphal story about Jonathan Franzen (one of my favourite writers) that appeared in some of the broadsheet interviews at the time of publication of The Corrections - to whit, that he shut himself in a room blindfolded in order to write it. He came to read at Waterstone's Deansgate and someone in the audience asked it were true. Of course it wasn't, he said, but yes indeed he had said it to a journalist: it was a hyperbolic way of describing the kind of isolation and peace one needs to concentrate on a novel.

Well, on a couple of mornings this week I did somehow find the kind of concentration I needed to discover that the reason I was finding it so impossible to make the transition between the two sections while negotiating three different time levels was that the overall voice was still not right (in spite of the fact that I spent so much time trying to get it right at the start, and in spite of having worked on the diction since!), and to work out how it should be different. It wasn't a big change, in fact it was a pretty subtle one, but it made all the difference in the world, and after I'd gone back and changed it for the whole of the first section, I was able to make the transition into the second section at last.

I've never before taken so long to get the voice of a piece of writing right - usually the voice is the first thing that comes to me. Live and learn, see?

Stalled

Not a lot of novel progress lately. I had several visitors for a long weekend - they were up for a wedding they'd been invited to, and I hardly saw them because they were either out at the wedding or the pre- and post-wedding parties or in bed sleeping it all off, but somehow just having a crowd in the house shattered my novel consciousness... Sometimes I think I have such a special and delicate writerly consciousness, and other times I think I'm just too damn precious for my own good.

And since then I've had a mound of washing, and now my mind is turning to the reading I'm doing this evening for the Oxfam Bookfest in Didsbury, and then tomorrow I'm off to London for the Edge Hill Awards ceremony, and won't be home until very late, which means I'll be tired on Friday, and then that'll be another week gone...

Honestly, maybe somebody should just put me out of my misery... (Or let me get back up the mountain where even the internet doesn't work half the time...)

Nice Oxfam Bookfest event last night: Nick Royle and Tom Fletcher, but I'm afraid I've no pics. I'm still getting used to my iphone and I messed up the photos... * My own tonight (7 pm) clashes with the football, so I'm quite prepared for no audience whatever...

*Added: Sharon Ring has come to my rescue and sent me two of her photos, below, the first of Tom reading, the second of Nick talking to the audience.

Novel progress and Clare Dudman's launch

I didn't get into the second section of my novel after all in Wales, and still haven't. After I got to the end of the first I had a day off, and guess what, during that day things kept coming to me about the first section - connections I could point up, even something I could add - and the voice came to me even more clearly. Bugger! - and I say that advisedly: it was a characterizing word of my protagonist that I'd left out previously, and once it came to me it brought everything into even greater focus. Which shows how rest periods can be an essential part of the writing process. I know that I have to get it right before I move onto the second, because the voice of the second section will depend on it, so I'm still tweaking the first section. And tomorrow I've got other, more domestic duties...

Ah well. At least I'm getting more and more sure of what I've done so far, which is a good, warm feeling (at least for the moment!).

The pic above is the one I tried unsuccessfully to upload in Wales, the view from the desk I was writing at, and here's a swan with cygnets we came across while walking on Anglesey one evening:


On the way back from Wales we stopped off in Chester for the really lovely launch of Clare Dudman's new novel A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees (Seren), at the Forum Studio Theatre. It's a book about the first Welsh settlers of Patagonia, and Clare gave an extremely moving presentation in which she read from the book, talked, and showed us films she had made about the historical background, the research she had done for the book and her own feelings about her relationship to her Welsh heritage, which last I identified with closely.


I am very much looking forward to reading the novel. And Clare makes a cake every time she has a launch, and here was the wonderful one she made for this book (and it tasted delicious!):

Immersion - and things you sometimes see from your writing desk IV

I wanted to show you the view from my writing desk in Wales, as it's a view which this week has been central to my psyche, apart of course from the scenarios of the novel. However, the mobile broadband signal isn't good enough for pics this morning (I think it must the wind, and not the clouds, as I've thought previously: there's no cloud down on the mountain), so I'll describe it instead: there are ash trees, and beyond them the blue-and-purple of Nantlle Ridge. I've been working really hard - not steadily as I intended, because it's really taken me over, and I need to take advantage of that. I've been writing in the mornings, typing up and editing the morning's writing in the afternoons, sometimes until six or seven o'clock in the evenings, by which time I have been exhausted and badly in need of just getting up from the chair. As a result, I've been out of touch with blogging and the internet generally, although every day I have (unrealistically) intended not to be...

The new typing chair has been great, though: I would never have managed such long hours without a lot more stiffness and RSI with the old Victorian chair...

Yesterday evening I finally got to the end of the first section of the book, and this morning, for the first time since I got here last Sunday, I am able to sit back and take stock and turn my attention for a moment to other things.

The days have been hot, apparently (though not nearly as hot up here on the mountain as I understand it is in England), but it's cool inside the house where I'm working. On one of the warmer days the swallows were teaching their young to fly right past the window, and one baby almost flew into the glass just as I looked up, only to realise its mistake just in time, which felt like some of the moves I was making with my narrative. Often when I look up I see goldfinch and yellowhammers and linnets flitting in the nearest tree. For the whole time a cuckoo has been calling, which puts paid to my long-term idea that cuckoos only call for the month of May, and for some reason I have found that really heartening: I love the idea of having one's longtime assumptions overturned, and I think the sense of that has been especially good for the novel. By the time I have emerged in the evenings it's become fairly nippy, one evening so cold that I wore three tops including a woolly jumper without getting too warm and could have done with gloves, even though John and I had a strenuous walk up the side of a mountain. This is a wonderful time of the year for writing, because it means that you can work for such long hours yet still have long light evenings for walking, which you really need to do, I think, when you've been static all day - and of course, it stays lighter longer here than in Manchester, being further west.

In the evenings too I have been reading Nuala Ni Chonchuir's really lovely novel, You, which she will be touring around the blogosphere from 7th July, stopping by here on the 14th. Usually when I'm writing so hard I find it very difficult to read - it's the disruptive wrench into another psyche and another language - but Nuala's book is so engaging and moving I'm having no trouble at all, and I'm really looking forward to talking to her about it on the tour.

We'll be here until Monday, and on the way back we'll be stopping off in Chester for the launch of Clare Dudman's new novel, A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees, which I'm also really looking forward to reading - and speaking of launches, I'm especially sorry to miss Charles Lambert's London launch next weekend for his new book from Picador, Any Human Face.

And by the time we leave I hope to be well into the second section of my novel...

Here's hoping...

I've had a bit of a rest from the current novel recently, as I found I was getting very tired from working such long hours at it, and I just hope that as a result of that last I've truly cracked it and will be able to work at it more steadily from now on. Tomorrow we are off to Wales again for another week, and for my birthday John bought me a typing chair to use there - previously there I have used a very nice-looking but probably-very-bad-for-my-posture Victorian chair which he once bought in an auction - so I hope that next week I'll really make some inroads (so long as the carpenter doesn't turn up for the ongoing renovations, that is).

Things you sometimes see from your writing desk III

Here's another image from the time, a couple of weeks ago, when I was getting going on the WIP, and which will now always be associated with it for me. It's a whitebeam tree with clematis growing all over it, and as usual I can't help finding a parallel with the novel: the new draft is taking over from the old one, but the old one is still sturdy and flowering away underneath, so (I hope) I'm getting the best of two worlds!

Stalking the novel

I've been up the mountain in Wales since Tuesday. The weather's been great but I have to say I've spent most of the time indoors - with the window wide open, I hasten to say - as I'm working really, really hard on the novel. I was very frustrated with it when I got here: I had been stuck for about four days on a particular section, which I must say I had thought pretty perfect in the last version of the book! I had decided that I needed to dramatize the scenes in it much more, but as soon as I began doing so, a different slant to the story began emerging, and I began to see possibilities and connections I hadn't seen before - I guess this is what people mean when they say that their characters take over from them. It wasn't gelling, though, and I was getting pretty fed up with it.

Usually when we get here, as soon as we've dumped our bags I want to rush straight down the mountain to sea - I was born by the sea, and setting foot on the beach is always like a coming home - but for once, this time, I didn't want to: I was just too involved with my novel (and quite frankly I even appear to have lost much desire to go out at all!) As soon as we got here I laid my papers out just as I'd had them laid out in Manchester (it was quite traumatic having to pick them up from there for travel) and all I wanted to do then was go for a wander near the house and come back and have a quick supper and get to bed and get on with the novel again early next day. So that's what we did, and saw the badger in the pic above.

At first I thought it was a rabbit - I saw a movement which disappeared, and thought no more about it. Then as I got closer to the place where it was, it emerged, and I saw it might be a badger but I wasn't sure. We crept closer, and it went on grazing, moving towards us, turning away so that we still couldn't see it properly, until finally, as we crept up towards it it turned towards us and we saw its striped face and I snapped.

And next day I cracked that section of the novel and afterwards I thought how like stalking that badger writing it had been: new aspects suddenly showing themselves, then seeming not to fit after all, then emerging again, and finally, as I circled around them, coming into focus.

Brooding the novel

Here's another image which I'll always associate with the time I was starting out on the present draft of my current novel. It was a Sunday afternoon and John and I went walking along the canal near Bollington, and needless to say I was brooding away on the novel, and we came across a duck with a brood of ducklings - 15 of them! It was impossible to capture more than a few at a time with my camera - they were everywhere: running along the top of the water in that funny way they do, shooting in every direction and only very vaguely staying in a proper gang near the mother. Really, quite frankly, she could hardly control them, and in retrospect the whole scenario was a replica of what was going on in my brain, with all the possibilities for my novel skittering every which way, and me only vaguely in charge of them, but doing my damndest to marshal them somehow!

Images in and around a novel

I imagine it's the same for other writers - though strangely, I've never heard anyone else say this - but when I'm involved in a project, a novel especially, and really knowing where I'm going with it, everything else in the outside world seems to cohere. I will keep coming across things that support my theme - comments on the radio, incidents in the newspaper, threads on the web, and even things I hear people saying in queues. I guess what's actually happening is that I'm suddenly seeing and hearing the whole world through the focus of the novel, filtering out those things that don't fit and subconsciously homing in on those that do, but the experience of it is a really magical one, a feeling that your novel is being 'gifted' to you by the world.

But then there are those other things, mainly images, which strike you deeply while you're writing a novel, but don't actually feed into the novel itself: they become instead indelibly associated with the process and/or the period in which you write the novel. For instance, Too Many Magpies will always be associated in my mind with a particularly horrible M&S jumper someone bought me - maroon fair-isle and shapeless: it made me look barrel-chested - because I was wearing it one day when someone interrupted my writing at a very crucial moment, to bring me some manuscripts to read. When I was embarking on the rejig of my current novel a few weeks ago, and having to think really hard about how to do it - and spending very long hours at the desk each day - I decided I'd go out for a short run/walk first thing each morning to get at least some exercise and clear my head for the day. I didn't keep it up - I'm now so into the novel I want to get to it straight away in the mornings - but the first excitable but scary creative searchings involved in writing this draft are now associated in my mind with the park I walked in then, and a carpet of fallen red camellia flowers, and, as I stopped to look at it, the odd scratching, shuffling sound I heard to my side, which turned out to be the squirrel above eating a nut.

The writing or the life

This is what I feel a cross-section of my brain must have looked like while I was beginning work on the present novel. On my current visit to Nuala ni Chonchuir's blog for my virtual book tour, I explain how hard I find it to concentrate on anything else if I'm involved in a piece of work, and vice versa: once my attention is scattered by external things the spell of the novel/story/play is broken. My novel was increasingly gripping me (which of course I needed it to do), and it was a stage requiring especial concentration because I was working out a new structure and grappling with a new voice. I needed to sit and listen to that voice and watch the new structure taking place, but there were other calls on my attention. Flying with Magpies, the virtual tour for Too Many Magpies, was beginning, and I had to turn my mind to its organisation, and to think about that novel instead. It's not as if I don't enjoy these virtual tours - I do; I really love the interaction with the blog hosts and their readers - but that's part of the trouble: it's so very distracting! And then I had to take time off to design leaflets and a poster for my Chorlton Arts Festival event, which takes place tomorrow evening, and to spend a morning delivering them. Here's the poster I designed: I have to say that with my attention at such a premium I didn't put as much care and time as I usually do into the design, but I guess it does its job.


It really felt as though the novel was being sucked out of my brain by these things. Anyway, they all got done, and the virtual tour seems to have settled into a routine now, and the novel seems to have taken good root in my head in spite of it all. In order to ensure that, I had been working really long hours on it, and my back was aching and I felt exhausted, and I must say pretty frazzled at the end of each day when I looked around at the mess in the house and turned to all the other things I had to do. I made the decision, having cracked it, that I need to pace myself and do fewer hours on it each day, and I felt secure enough in it to take the weekend off and take stock of it while clearing up some other things. Turns out it was a really good move: with the distance, I was able to think about an unformed worry that had been growing at the back of mind and see what it was: I needed to go back to the beginning and adjust the frame I had set up for the novel. Must say, though, that by the time I had spent yesterday afternoon planning the reading on Tuesday and doing an application for another arts festival, and with domestic stuff still to do, I just didn't get round to writing this blog yesterday evening as I meant to do...

Thrills and stresses

I had a lovely surprise yesterday afternoon: a story I had entered for the Bristol Short Story Prize had made it to the longlist. I was amazed, as I had rather forgotten about it, having a lot else on my mind, with the novel I'm working on. Strangely enough, I had only just been reading Adam Marek's piece on the Short Story Page, Five Mistakes I Made While Trying to Get Published, in which he says:

Don’t dwell on your submissions. Send them off and forget about them. You should push them from your mind so strongly that when you get accepted, you can barely remember submitting them in the first place.

Good advice, because, as he says, success is best of all when it comes out of the blue.

And then I had a really lovely little Amazon review for Too Many Magpies, which is short enough to replicate here in full:

Too Many Magpies is a fantastic short novel, full of mystery, humanity and depth. It is extraordinarily well written - in beautiful prose - and the question at the heart of it kept me hooked till the end. Very enjoyable and highly recommended by this lover of quality literary fiction. Baines deserves a wide readership & critical acclaim.

Not only that, but yesterday I reached a point in my current novel which allowed me finally to feel I was truly on the right track. As well as re-jigging the whole structure, I've been working on a new voice, and wasn't sure until yesterday that it was going to work, so up until now the process hasn't been without stress. And I'm finding once more how all-consuming working on a novel is for me: although I've already got a version on my computer and a printout sitting on my desk, I am still ending up writing the whole thing out, because the new voice is giving me new rhythms and tone, and too much reference to the old version destroys the sound of it in my head. And I still need, I find, to write by hand, which I'm not sure I'll ever get away from now: there's just something about that hand-brain connection and the flow of ink from my fountain pen. It's as though I'm painting the words and the scenes, and as with painting a lot of the emotion of the novel seems tied up in the curving movements of my wrist and hand. Which means that, having written all morning I'm having to type up in the afternoons. And since yesterday I was rather stopped in my tracks by the mid-afternoon news of the longlist, once I started again I was working until six, and then still had to go to the shops for something to eat and see to the washing...

But it damn well beats the times when you're blocked and not writing at all..

How long does it take to write a novel?

Here are the coloured fibre-tipped pens with which I have been working out a new plan/structure for my novel in progress (I love em! I could EAT em!)

Last week on the virtual book tour for Too Many Magpies Sue Guiney asked if novels come to me all of a piece and get written quickly or if I have to work hard at them. It's very different for each novel: as she had previously heard me say, Magpies did come to me more or less fully-formed, and I did write it quickly, in just two months - although, as I also said to her, I had been mulling the ideas for some time beforehand. The Birth Machine came fairly quickly - it took about six months - but the process involved a lot more thought and juggling/tinkering (and writing out coloured plans) than Magpies. And then again, after The Birth Machine was published a friend reminded me that about three years before I had said I wanted to write a novel on that very subject. Until that moment I'd entirely forgotten that, but it shows I'd probably been working on the book subconsciously all that time.

As I said to Sue, it all depends, I think, on your prior relationship to the material - how well you've got to know it and understand it before you sit down to the actual writing. Anyway, if you'll pardon the expression, my novel in progress has been a b****r! I have been working on it for some years now, and twice I have thought, mistakenly, that it was finished. The first time was when two separate agents I'd met as an editor and who had asked to see it, found themselves utterly confounded by its complexity! I snatched it back quickly, I can tell you, and, after the necessary period of nausea - you know what it's like: you suddenly can't stand the sight of the thing, it even makes you feel physically ill - there was the period of Novel Estrangement: you just can't get back in to it; you can't remember what it was that so entranced and obsessed you about its world. And you go off and have exciting affairs with plays and short stories and even other, short novels...

Well, eventually it starts knocking at your consciousness again, and you realise that after all it's the Novel Love of Your Life, and that's why your relationship with it is so complex, and you get drawn back in... So I wrote another draft, and once again I thought it was finished. And indeed a different agent took it up with alacrity, but lo, the six publishers she sent it to, while making lots of nice noises (oh, those nice noises that don't have to be backed up with action!) still found it too complex to be commercially viable! And I really didn't know after that whether it was a Good Novel but not commercial enough in the present climate, or just a Dead Loss. In any case, once again we were estranged, my novel and I, and I shoved it deep in a drawer, and, really, honestly, I was pretty sure it was the Novel Divorce.

Then one day last autumn I was incredibly lucky to have the wonderful, wise and inspired Fay Weldon offer to look at it. Not only do I regard Fay Weldon as one of my literary influences, she has actively helped me before, by choosing one of my very early stories for an anthology she edited, and indeed playing my real-life Marriage Counsellor, or rather Cupid: she chose a story of John's for the same anthology, and it was at the launch of the book that he and I met! Well, Fay saw that to make the novel saleable I needed to streamline it. As a writer, she knew of course not to tell me precisely how to change it - you can only do a thing if it comes from you - and it took me some time to digest her comments. But then I began to see what I had to do: the chunks I had to cut, the re-jigging of the rest that was needed, and the frame that was required. Then a couple of weeks ago I discussed it with my sister Anne. Anne isn't a writer (yet) so she didn't understand in the same way the need not to tell me how to do it, but it didn't matter, because, amazingly, the way she said I should do it was exactly the way I was starting to see for myself, and she clarified it for me!

How could they see so clearly, when I couldn't? They say the wife is always the last to know...

I am so unbelievably grateful to them both.

And now I have to actually do it, and make it work...