Balancing on the Edge of the World on Frank O'Connor Longlist

Well, along with 38 other short story collections, including 7 wonderful others from my fabulous publisher Salt. I'm always going on, on my other blog, about the invidious aspect of literary prizes, and the way that choosing some books over others for long lists and short lists inevitably bestows negative associations on the books omitted. But this international prize, The Frank O'Connor Short Story Award, was set up specifically to draw attention to the short story and to publicize collections which have appeared within the year, and, as a function of this, the long list is deliberately inclusive.

This list is a thermometer showing the robust health of the re-emerging short story, a map of its geographical growth and an indication of the areas of publishing in which it is thriving. As last year, it shows that it is within independent publishing that the short story is thriving, and this year that Britain is now the great home of the short story. There are 8 collections here from the US, 5 from Ireland, 4 each from Australia and New Zealand, 1 each from Singapore, Taiwan and Nigeria and a whopping 14 from Britain, including 8 from Salt, who are thus announced as the Biggest Champions of the Short Story in the World!!!

Proof positive

My page proofs came through for my collection of short stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World, and for the first time ever I didn't use the British Standards Institution proof correction marks.


It felt like a kind of loss. I'll never forget the first time I ever used them, on the proofs of an early short story, using the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook: that exciting sense of learning a new code attached to an extra expertise, that of the printer, and of communicating directly with him/her.

Not so long ago, though, a young relative of mine was asked to edit a journal, and I offered to buy him a book containing the BSI marks. He looked at me with pity. He said, 'Oh we don't use those. We mark everything up on Word.'

Well, of course, I knew that the BSI marks had been dropping out of use. When I edited the short-story magazine Metropolitan, by which time the job of typesetting had moved away from the printer to the desktop publisher, very few of the authors used the old marks on their proofs, they simply wrote in their corrections in whatever way they saw fit.

And when my proofs for Balancing came through I thought: well, why don't I use the software markup too? And I did, and was thus able to send them by email, as well. Jen at Salt is happy. It just remains to be seen whether the typesetter is too...

Salt authors Neil Campbell and David Gaffney

Salt Publishing have just launched their new and innovative short story list, in which I'm thrilled to be included, and on Friday lunchtime at Manchester Central Library two of my fellow contributors, David Gaffney and Neil Campbell, gave a great reading from their debut collections. Lunchtime it may have been, but the room was packed, latecomers standing, to hear their two very contrasting styles. Firstly, in suitable deadpan mode Neil read from Broken Doll, ironic and moving stories of urban loss and confinement, and then David bounced on to make us all laugh with the short-short stories in which he specialises, collected in Sawn-Off Tales.

You can see from the pics below how appreciative the audience was, and how keen to snap up those striking Salt editions. (Neil is on the left and David on the right.)

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!!

How to name a bestseller

According to Lulu.com's Titlescorer, the title of my forthcoming collection of stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World, gives it a 79.6% chance of bestsellerdom. Hm. I might be excited if the scorer included the meanings, associations or connotations of the words in a title, and not simply the parts of speech.

Thanks to Debi for the link.

Learning to adapt

Giles Foden writes in today's Guardian about the dangers of having one's fiction adapted for the screen. It's a funny business, as I've said on my other blog. As a reader I would say I don't like screen adaptations: I usually try never to see one before reading a book, yet if I watch one afterwards I'm always frustrated by the gap between the director's vision and my own. I haven't read Foden's novel The Last King of Scotland, but on this occasion I was dragged along, reluctantly, to see the film. I was bowled over - rarely has a film made such a lasting impact on me - but I know now that I'll never be able to read the book without its images and those actors in my head.

As a writer, though, it's a different story. Someone comes along and offers you a big bag of money to turn your novel into something which will make it a hell of a lot more famous than it ever was before - or in, my case, famous in a way it never was. I had had bad luck with my second novel, Body Cuts. Halfway through the editing process my editor at the small publishing house left to pursue her own novel career, and the publisher failed to tell me, or to make clear to her replacement where we were in the editing process, and as a result the book went to press without my final editing. The reason for such mix-ups suddenly became evident. Weeks before the book was due out the publisher was bought up by another, and although my book had been announced in the trade press, it failed to appear. When it was eventually published, no new announcements were made in the trade press by the new publisher, and not long after that the original publisher's fiction list was remaindered.

In the meantime, however, during the short time that book was in the bookshops, the TV director John Glenister happened to pick it up, got hooked and immediately decided that he wanted to adapt it for TV. How cool was that? How could I refuse such a chance of resurrection? My usual reservations about screen adaptations went shooting off into the ether.

In fact, in the end that adaptation didn't happen - people at the BBC had moved on, artistic and funding policies had changed - but as I had been working on the adaptation with John, I took it to a Channel 4/arts-board screenwriting scheme, and here my reservations dropped back down from the sky. My God: the changes I was expected to make!! My main male character should be a different sort of person, my female character's mother ought to die!!! Needless to say I soon dropped the whole idea, and contented myself with salvaging from this last experience insights for my satirical (and entirely fictional) story, 'The Shooting Script', which may be included in my forthcoming collection from Salt, Balancing on the Edge of the World.

We haven't yet decided which stories will go in this collection, but one which probably will is 'Power', which looks at the stresses on children of quarrelling parents through their contrasting voices (previously published in Power [Honno]), a story I adapted as a radio drama. It was the second time I had adapted my own fiction for radio: earlier I worked on my first novel, The Birth Machine. Both times I worked with the director Michael Fox and both times I was given free rein to adapt my work in ways which allowed me to stay as true to the original as I wished. I have to say that adaptation for the verbal, non-visual medium of radio is a different thing altogether: I don't feel in any way that the transformations stole the souls of the original fictions in the way screen adaptations so often seem to do.

Out in Manc

To Manchester Metropolitan University's Writing School last night for a great reading by tutor Simon Armitage, and on to the Kro2 Bar afterwards. There Steve Waling and I sat and patted each other on the back for getting on Salt's publishing list, and, with silly grins on our faces, compared notes about how great they seem to be, and how much effort they seem to put into marketing their books. Steve's poetry collection comes out in April and he told me that Publishing Director Jen Hamilton-Emery had been up to make a podcast of him reading a poem and talking about his book for the website.

I haven't been out much recently, and I should go out more often: as we sat there shamelessly congratulating ourselves, a film company for whom I worked as an actor last summer walked in. The film we made has been really well received, apparently, and they're doing another, and would I be free? Yippee. Acting is one of the things I love best in the world (much easier than writing!!). I'm not telling you the name of the company or the film, because I play a pretty uncool character (it is a surreal comedy, I hasten to add), and that's not the kind of image you need for marketing fiction, now, is it?

That photo thing...

So Salt asked me to provide some recent publicity photos PDQ. Oh, help. That dreadful process again. And my last photographer has moved away. Where would I get another one? Fellow bloggers Manchizzle and Adrian Slatcher came to my aid with suggestions, but their contacts appeared not to be around. Then John reminded me how fantastic the photos had been last summer for the Manchester 24:7 Theatre Festival. Yes!! Dave Slack, the festival's organiser, put me right on to their photographer: Tom Wright. And there I was within a day or two meeting him in the city centre.

What sort of thing did I want? Tom wanted to know. I resisted the urge to say the thing which made my last photographer go white even though I was joking, ie Please try and make me look glamorous if you can; I didn't even say Just making me look not plain ugly would be great, and I gave him the publisher's specs: interesting urban shots.

I suggested the new white bridge over the Irwell, which is always appearing in telly dramas like Cold Feet, and as Tom checked the light I leaned on the side in the hope of looking writerishly thoughtful. A man walked past and stared. He kept staring, turning back. More people came, in both directions, all staring back over their shoulders. I cracked up. And the bridge turned out not to be the best suggestion: it shook as people passed, which was not so good for focus, and it was so huge that it was hard to get a shot of it except from a distance. At Tom's more sensible suggestion we moved off to the old arched bridge. A woman stopped. 'Oh don't forget your bag will you, dear?' she cried, scooping it up for me and spoiling the shot. More people endangered their lives by walking while looking backwards at us, and again I had to make the effort to straighten my face.

At the end I took a shot of Tom taking one of me, and if I hadn't still been laughing it wouldn't have been blurred.

Lost Literature

You can't help wondering what literature, both written and potential, is lost through lack of outlets. Commenting recently on my other blog, nmj relates how she started out as a short-story writer and got an agent on the strength of her short-story writing. However, she discovered, it wasn't the stories themselves the agent was interested in, and she was immediately persuaded to write a novel, and her short-story writing went by the board.

My own experience was the same, and I'm sure we are not the only two. It seems to me that the AL Kennedys and Ali Smiths are only the exceptions that prove the rule: Ali Smith, indeed, has stated in an interview that she feels she was helped towards publication of her first collection by things extraneous to her (marvellous) prose: the fact that she was Scottish, and the fact that she was lesbian.

Once upon a time short stories were all I ever really wanted to write. I loved the form with its special poetic yet muscular compression. Once I had published several stories in literary magazines, I began hoping to publish a collection. I went on an Arvon course and to my delight and gratitude my tutor Martin Booth sent my stories off to his agent, who immediately rang me. (And there are people in the blogosphere insisting that you don't need assistance and contacts to get taken up!) But this agent said the same to me as nmj's did to her: we have to have a novel, it's impossible to sell short stories. So I wrote a novel (The Birth Machine) - not a very long one that first time, more of a novella really; it took me a while to ease out of the short form - and then another (Body Cuts).

I didn't stop writing stories; I just went on publishing them in magazines. But then the magazines began to die away, and there didn't seem any point in writing them any more... And my novel publishers got bought up, the usual story, and the list I was on was remaindered. And, just as I found myself out in the cold, the commercialisation of publishing accelerated, and, after a beginning when all doors had opened before me, getting fiction published seemed no longer the easiest thing in the world. And since the doors in radio were flung wide open - I had written a play on the off-chance and it had been broadcast and won a prize - I became a radio dramatist instead.

Of course you don't stop altogether, you can't keep the urge down. And this week a collection of short stories won the Guardian first book award. Small presses like Comma, Salt, Elastic and Leaf are springing up to specialise in short stories. There are doors swinging open again.

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!!

Salt added

Yesterday afternoon I'm waiting to cross the road to get to the fish shop and over the other side, waiting to cross in the opposite direction, is Steve Waling, poet and editor of poetry magazine Brando's Hat. He waits for me, looking somehow calm, beatific yet excited... What's cooking, I wonder? When I get there he gives me this exciting news: he has a poetry collection coming from Salt. No wonder he looks like the cat that got the salmon! There is nothing so wonderful, so heart-warming as the joy of a writer who, after years of working away, has achieved success (just look at Marie Phillips' blog recently)! And this small press, Salt, seems to have come from nowhere to become a hugely respected force in publishing in a very short time. Another reason for writers not to give up in the face of the more commercial trends in publishing...

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.

Still not gagged

I am clearing up the breakfast things this morning and dreaming the dialogue I have to write today, when the telephone rings.

'Hello, is that Starling Editions?'

I whip off my dreamy writer's cap and pull on my publisher's hat smartish. 'Yes, it is.'

'This is Gardners. Did you receive the order we sent for The Birth Machine?'

'Yes, the book is in the post. You should receive it by tomorrow.'

I know what this usually means. Some academic is writing a book and wants to refer to my novel, or, since it's the beginning of the academic year, someone wants it for a course.

Not that this last will mean I'll sell a class-worth of copies: a lecturer friend long ago made me aware that classes get by on photocopies nowadays. Do I mind? Do I heck. No, I just jump up and down with glee and triumph because my novel still has a life, long after it was once almost suppressed and people tried to silence me as a writer.

Once upon a time I failed, in the eyes of the feminist world, to be a good feminist (long story), and there were those who thought I should be deprived of a platform and a voice. Letters went out warning feminist journals that my reviews should not be published, and pressure was put on the Women's Press, who had just accepted my first novel. The Women's Press, afraid of 'alienating their market', seriously considered withdrawing their offer, and it was only after I'd jumped through hoops of abject public (well, feminist-public) apology, that they went ahead. They were never happy, though, I think, with my pariah status in the feminist world, and when my novel sold out its 3,000 print run they declined to reprint - unusually for them at that time.

Damn good job I decided to reprint it myself instead. It was also a chance to restore the original and crucial structure which the Women's Press insisted on changing 'for their market' - with no leg to stand on, I felt unable to argue at the time. And why did I call my press 'Starling Editions?' Not simply because a black starling is a significant motif in the novel, but because starlings are noisy, insistent birds. You can't shut them up or easily chase them away.

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...