Manchester Blogstory: What Would You Do?

My next project: Manchester Blogstory: What would You Do?

Well, I said last post that after all the drama production I've been involved in this summer I was looking forward to getting back to writing and sole control of the creative process, and I recently contributed to a series on John Baker's blog in which I said that I believe that 'inspiration' comes primarily from a writers' psyche rather than outside influences. But actually it looks as if I'm about the challenge all of this. I am delighted that the Manchester Literature Festival has commissioned me to write an interactive blog story which will appear in weekly episodes from September the 4th until October 10th when the final episode will be read at the Manchester Blog Awards. I won't, after all, have total control: readers will help to steer the story by voting on alternative plot twists and locations, and I'll have to respond to their decisions and thus to outside stimuli in a very concrete way. Hence the title: What Would You Do?

I'm excited to be doing this - it'll be an interesting experiment from which I expect to learn a lot, and above all, it should be great fun.

The Blog Awards will also feature a reading from Caroline Smailes, whose blog led to the publication of her wonderful novel In Search of Adam (reviewed below).

The trials of filming

'I wanna be in this film! Aw, go on, let me!' That was one young lad standing watching as we filmed last night. Seemed to think it was glamorous. Yeah, right. Discovering how short a time it goes dark for in summer, even in late August, because the shoot that was meant to finish at two in the morning actually goes on until half six? Standing around for hours and experiencing at first hand the particular quality of this strange summer's rain (first it drizzles, then it hurtles, then it drifts around like a cloud, and then it hurtles once again)? Hurrying down an alleyway fifteen times pursued by an attacker (my aching legs! My lungs!) while the director of photography got his perfect shot? Sitting for over an hour in a strapless dress in a cooling bath and turning into a prune while the lights kept getting changed? (Yup, that was me at four this morning.)

As Julie my fellow cast member said, halfway through a film shoot you wonder why you do it. Even in radio, which is so much quicker, as a writer I have got irritated by the laborious, piecemeal process of producing a play, the writing of which is so organic and fluid. Well, I've had a summer of practical drama, and it's been a great antidote to the isolation of writing, but I can't tell you how much I'm now looking forward to the peace of my desk and the control of my own creative process - and the new project which I said I'd announce, and will do so next post.

Night filming

A new experience for me yesterday: night filming. Last night at half-three I was standing on a porch in a business park, lighting up a fag (and trying to look as though I'd just finished work as a cleaner and had been smoking all my life) while the rain came down in sheets and what seemed liked a crew of a hundred (I think there were about ten) huddled beneath umbrellas with the camera and lights. Earlier, you could have seen me doing something you won't catch me doing often, hoovering (an office floor), and something I've never in fact done in my life: mop another floor with one of those old-fashioned buckets and mops. Let me tell you there's a knack to this last - which I had to discover PDQ - you have to point the mop at the holey bit of the bucket if it's not to slop over the sides when you twirl it round to squeeze it.

You always wanted to know that, didn't you? And now I'm back to bed with my sponged-out brain, in order to be fit for another long session tonight and being jumped in an alleyway and turning up afterwards traumatised. Because unless I get some kip the makeup artist won't be needed...

Review: In Search of Adam by Caroline Smailes

For a person who calls herself literary, I do shamefully little reading. As I have written before, unlike others, whom I envy, I find it very hard to read while I'm writing - my own writing is too likely to be influenced - and now that blogging is eating into my non-writing time... So going to Wales, where there isn't even a phone line, is a marvellous chance to catch up on books I've been meaning for ages to read. This time one of the books I read was Caroline Smailes' In Search of Adam.

Well, wow. Sorry about the cliches, but sometime you can't avoid them. This is a book I couldn't put down. This is a book I grabbed the moment I woke in the morning and sat reading for the next hour with a full bladder and an empty stomach. It's sad, no, it's harrowing - a tale of a wretched childhood and damaged adulthood, of loss and child abuse and a cycle of despair - yet it's utterly riveting in its psychological precision and manipulation of language, and let me tell you, it's the first convincing depiction I've ever read of the psychological underpinnings of bulimia, and a searing indictment of the way the medical profession deals with it. So it's a very brave book too, and not least in its depiction of the damaging forces at work in a working-class community. I can imagine that many would make objections to this last, but for me the whole thing rang with a truth that would make such objections sentimental.

Read it, is all I say.

Inspiration

This month John Baker is tackling the age-old question of 'inspiration' by running a series of pieces by writers describing how they create a text. Mine appeared yesterday.

Cover as proof

Back from Wales (and whitewashing walls) to find the bound proofs of my collection of stories waiting in the hall. Strange to see several of my stories collected together like that: although most of them have been published previously, and between book covers (in anthologies) at that, they had only ever been published singly and I have always previously seen them as individual and scattered, rather like my kids. Yet here they are together, grouped together in ways that show their links (or I hope they do), and suddenly they seem like a family, and the greater project to which each story has contributed is revealed even to me. Well, whether it will be revealed to readers, remains to be seen of course... And there's the cover, concrete rather than electronic: what will people think of that?

I discover that Emma Barnes of Snowbooks recently wrote on the Guardian books blog about the importance of covers, and there are some interesting comments. Although The Writers' Guild and the Society of Authors have always fought for writers to have a say in their covers, marketing imperatives often mean that this doesn't happen too much in practice, and I understand that it's the big booksellers now who often have the biggest input. But Salt is an independent publisher with a great concern for the writer, and I was asked immediately whether I had any ideas for the cover. This was wonderful, but what a responsibility! Emma Barnes says that a cover needs above all to inform you about the kind of book inside, and I was very conscious of this fact. Trouble was, though, one of my abiding principles in writing short stories has always been to make each one unique, and I couldn't then see the overriding mood or style. It was Ann French, one of the members of my reading group, who came up with the unifying notion of a sea horizon. Salt went with it and added the picture and chose the typography. I love the result and I'm grateful to them all. Needless to say, though, it's the readers who'll decide...

Time out

I'm still pretty tired after the play, and I'm off now to the Welsh hills to recuperate and gear up for my next commission, which I'll announce when I return.

Sometimes I like reviewers

Now that's nice and enough to pull you out of your post-production anticlimax - a nice review of The Processing Room on Manchester Confidential:

Playing creatively with the idea of the different stages of life and death, the play raised some interesting ideas and also employed a clever use of movement to emphasise and enliven what could have been a very static waiting-room scenario.

Reading group: the Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

We held our last meeting in the run-up to the play, but I don't think it was just the play which prevented me from finishing the book beforehand - Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon, chosen by Mark - for I had started in plenty of time, beginning in tandem with Jenny, on our weekend to Paris in June.

Now let me put my cards on the table here. I am not exactly a fan of crime-fiction, but I do remember once reading Raymond Chandler and being pretty impressed by the ethos he conjured, and since Orion provide quotes on the cover of their current paperback edition testifying to this book's 'masterwork' status, I was prepared to be won over.

We began in the Paris apartment, me on the sofa with my copy and Jenny on the sofa-bed with hers. I read the first sentence. Sam Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. Flexible v? I tried to imagine it. And who is this Sam Spade, by the way? (I haven't seen the film.) I read the next. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. Eh? Two nostrils making one v? Didn't he mean two vs? Or does he mean the point the nostrils make when they come together at the end of the nose - in which case why didn't he just say he had a pointed nose? And the next: The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows (brows - rather than a writer or an interior designer -picking up a motif ?) rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down from high flat temples - in a point on his forehead. High yet flat? And doesn't a widow's peak usually reveal enough of the head to give the forehead a rounded impression? And if it's a widows' peak, how can the hair be growing down? But maybe I've got it all wrong, because the temples are the sides of the forehead, aren't they, and that must be why he says they're flat... But then how is the hair growing down from them into a point on the forehead? Good god, I'm thinking, my mind going fuzzy with all this complicated facial geography and all the points and vs and feeling I could be missing some of them in the picture I'm piecing together, which bears a disconcertingly (or laughably) cartoonish resemblance to Captain Hook in Walt Disney's Peter Pan, and not least because I still have no real clue as to who Sam Spade is. But then the final sentence shattered the image: He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan. What? How pleasantly? To whom? To the author? To another character in the room? And what is this rather? And can I picture it anyway?

Then before I can find out any more about Spade, we get another disconcerting description:

He said to Effie Perine: 'Yes, sweetheart?' (Who Effie Perrine? and where is all this taking place?)/She was a lanky sunburned girl whose tan dress of thin woolen stuff clung to her with the effect of dampness. Eh? What? Is this 'dampness' symbolic somehow, some thematic hint? It's somehow self-conscious enough to make you entertain the possibility, but we know so little yet about this situation and these people it's hard to grasp the nature of the hint. Or is it simply a fancy way of trying to cover up a cliche, ie 'her dress clung to her'?

You read on, and you know from the imprecision, the clunkiness and the repetition that it's the latter. 'Hey, listen to this,' I said to Jenny: 'His eyes slid from side to side between his lids. Where else would they slide?' Jenny giggled. 'Yes, I'm not finding it very gripping,' she agreed. 'I can't get my head round this,' I said as we sat in Paris airport waiting to go home: 'Spade's elbow dropped as Spade spun round to the right ... Spade's elbow went on past the astonished dark face and straightened when Spade's hand struck down at the pistol. ... His right shoulder raised a few inches. His bent right arm was driven up by the shoulder's lift. Fist, wrist, forearm, crooked elbow, and upper arm seemed all one rigid piece, with only the limber shoulder giving them motion.' The thing that Jenny's shoulders were doing was going up and down. 'I'm still trying to picure him "grinning wolfishly" all the time,' she spluttered.

Well, I'm sorry, folks, but this is a writer struggling with prose. 'You're nit-picking,' Trevor said at the meeting, and Mark, amazed that we hadn't thought the book remarkable, strongly agreed. What about the great plot, Trevor said, and I could hardly comment on it if I hadn't finished the book. I said but plot doesn't interest me in itself, and especially not a simplistic plot about recovering some old antique. Mark expostulated, But the book's not about that really, it's about Sam Spade, about the fact that he becomes humanized, which I would know if I'd read to the end. It's said to be the most complicated and clever plot in fiction, and (John said) one which people are meant to have difficulty grasping. For a start, if I'd read to the end I'd know that Spade and the femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy had been double-crossing one another. I said that I would hardly call that a recommendation, a book based on plot in which the plot can't be grasped, but actually I'd known from very near the beginning what the two were up to. Mark, backed by Doug, said that that was only because the template which Hammett set with this novel has now become familiar. I stuck to my guns. I said to agreement from John that early on it's more or less stated that this is what the characters are doing, and if readers don't pick it up it's because of the fuzziness of the prose rather than any cleverness on the part of the author. In any case, I said, I'm not interested in Sam Spade, he never comes alive for me, he's described in entirely (mechanistic) physical terms, and we are never party to his feelings. For me there's a big problem with viewpoint. Somebody asked suspiciously, What's viewpoint? and I explained, not without the feeling of being thought writerly and precious: We don't share Sam Spade's viewpoint but there's no authorial viewpoint to compensate and fill in for us; the authorial eye is unknowing about Sam Spade, so there's no psychological depth. But they had already stopped listening and were discussing opening another bottle of wine, though Mark said, But that's the point - it underlines the fact that Sam Spade keeps himself close and needs to be humanized.

I said, Well, I'm sorry, but a writer needs to write better than this to convince me that this is a conscious or worthwhile strategy or to engage me at all. Mark said, exasperated, How can you say these things, when this book is held up as the greatest crime novel ever? I said, I thought you were the one that saw through hype! Mark said, But this isn't hype, this novel had stood the test of time and sold in the millions! I said, Well so has Catherine Cookson, and Harry Potter which you despise - sales don't mean great writing. Then people said, Well, no one has claimed this book is literary, it's a genre novel, it doesn't have to have great prose, and I said, Well, yes, that's why I don't go for genre fiction as a rule.

John said, 'The trouble is, most people don't care about things like that when they read a novel - language and viewpoint etc' and everyone agreed, somewhat self-righteously I thought, at which I felt like crawling away and giving up on writing and said so to no sympathy.

Then Trevor said, 'Well, the thing that really upsets us is that you laughed at it,' and I'm sorry, but I laughed again.

Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.

All over bar the bar bills

So it's all over - the rehearsals, the publicity, the week of the play spent in town from morning till night and living on peanuts and wine, and the frantic get-ins - the fifteen mad minutes between the last show getting out and our audience moving in, in which the furniture for the set must be whisked from behind a screen and placed on stage, the stage marked out with tape, the video and camera for the media element of our show set up, gaffer tape slapped down on the leads in case the actors or the audience went and broke their necks, and the programmes laid out, all before Front of House called down and demanded clearance and the audience filed in... And falling asleep on the bus and then waking at five in the morning with the thought of all I had to do - emails, phone calls and printing - before I had to jump back on the bus into town and the whole thing started again... and of course, a whole week of grabbing as many as I could of the other amazingly diverse shows.

Two and and half months of solid hard work to realise a play I wrote in days! Can't say it exactly compares with radio where it's all done for you, where the publicity machine is huge, and the audience, without any trouble to the writer, thousands. And our slightly sniffy review from Natalie Anglesey in the Manchester Evening News was a bit disheartening, and it was hard not to see this as contributing to the fact that our houses, which began comparatively large, dropped thereafter.

But there are other ways of course that theatre and radio don't compare: with theatre there's that live adrenalin buzz, and above all, for me, the special ability of theatrical magic to tackle my particular thematic interest: the nature of identity. And on the last night UK Theatre Network dropped in and the next day gave us a really nice review, which, if too late to boost our audiences again, was lovely.

How did it happen?

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Originally uploaded by Tom Wright 1964

First night for The Processing Room last night. Wow. We were so nervous beforehand - so many technical hitches with the equipment for the media element of the show, the music disc going missing at the very last minute and Tracy having to rush home to record another one, the actresses panicking because the rehearsal time had been so truncated and gathering in corners for emergency line runs, me on the book with them and trying to find time to leaflet as well. And me thinking: Bloody live show business, it's just too damn hair-raising, let me get back to the recording studio and the printed book! And then it was time, and an audience of about fifty piled in from nowhere, and suddenly it happened and it was great, and I'm thinking - this is why we do it, because it's actually a kind of magic!

Our next performance is Wednesday (5.30), but I've hardly got a day off today. Better rush in at lunchtime for a bit of leafleting, before which I must gather together a costume and learn my lines for a film rehearsal in Widnes this evening - another script and another world which I have somehow to switch my head to!

A big day for a little writer

What an amazing day I had on Friday. First I met my lovely publisher Jen from Salt. Well, of course I think Jen can do magic because she's publishing my book, but she also arrived from Cambridge miraculously fast through the flooding country and arrived for lunch at Croma bang on time. (It was a different story, though, according to her blog, when she went back later in the evening.) We had a great lunch and Jen had brought me a lovely present - a proof copy of Carys Davies's forthcoming collection of short stories, which is due out at the same time as mine. I met Carys over the internet through our both being published by Salt, and it turned out that we had each spent a part of our childhood in the same tiny corner of South Wales which features in both our books. Magic, or what?

Here's Jen and me in Croma:



Then Jen and I parted for the afternoon - she to meet Forward Prize nominated Salt poet Eleanor Rees, and I to do a spot of leafleting before the tech rehearsal for The Processing Room. I had dressed up for the evening in a frock and heels but then I found myself lugging chairs around and sticking down duct tape so I can't say I ended up looking very glamorous. I can't say either that the tech went without a hitch - for one thing, I'd been so busy with publicity and thus absent from the last couple of rehearsals that I had failed to remind everyone that I had arranged for Tom Wright, the 24:7 photographer to cover the show at the tech, and the costumes hadn't been brought! (But it'll all be all right on the night - honest!)

Then it was off out into the liquid day day again, leaving everyone else to pack up, and down rainswept Cross Street to the Royal Exchange where the award ceremony for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize had already begun. Jen was there, with Eleanor Rees whom I met for the first time. The prize, for a collection by a single author and judged in this its inaugural year by AL Kennedy, was instigated by Ailsa Cox with whom I founded and edited metropolitan short story magazine. Short-listed authors were Neil Gaiman, Jackie Kay, Colm Toibin and two authors we published in metropolitan, Nicholas Royle and Tamar Yellin. Winner was Colm Toibin for Mothers and Sons (Picador). In his heartening winning speech he said that short stories were a much more difficult form than novels and that the notion of them as minor and 'practice' for the 'real' form of novels was seriously mistaken.

After this I had a couple of hours to kill before going to be interviewed on BBC Radio Manchester, so I went up to Cornerhouse to let the effects of two glasses of wine wear off and gather my thoughts for the interview - and who should I meet but Mark who the evening before had interviewed me and Stephanie on Let's Go Global TV.

Then it was quarter to ten and time to turn up at the BBC. What a strange place the BBC is at night - so hushed, not a soul around as I made my way down the winding corridors to Radio Manchester. Through the glass you could see the BBC car park gleaming and black with rain, but the little waiting area was cosy with bright light and a soft sofa and the sound of the current broadcast coming softly through the speakers - like a little oasis in the streaming night. And that's exactly how Phil Woods' programme seems too, an oasis in the night, with his urbane voice and his calm relaxed style, and in no time at all I had forgotten I was on the radio, which of course is how it should be. I was 'Mrs Manchester' for the night, choosing my favourite records (while of course plugging my play), and we ended up with Fats Waller's 'Your Feet's Too Big' which John once bought me because I have such big feet for someone of my not too considerable height.

And then out of the BBC on my big feet and straight onto a 42 bus, and I was stepping through the door by midnight.

Not bad, eh, for a writer - ie one whose typical day is spent in jamas and moving only between the desk and the kettle?

Free-to-Air and Magic Arm

For once I didn't go to rehearsals as I had rushing around to do, and between picking up Tracy's trailer for our show and dropping it off at Let's Go Global for tonight's programme I was able to call in at Cornerhouse and listen to the day's 5 o'clock Free-to-Air live broadcast. This takes place in Gallery 2 (Gallery 1 houses the main radio station), and it's fitted out cosily for a live audience with red-cushioned benches and the walls papered with Free-to-Air's red twenties-style posters. As the audience gathered, the artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White (who run the Open Music Archive website) played tracks of out-of-copyright music including Jean Havez' hilarious and catchy Good Bye Booze.


Then the broadcast began and the day's musician, one-man-band Magic Arm, played his own versions of the same tracks. I was enthralled as he not only managed to play several instruments but operated a loop pedal to build up his own accompaniments.

There's no live music today, but a discussion with the two artists behind Free-to-Air. I understand that Saturday and Sunday there will be two sets of performers each day, and I'm told that Saturday's show, featuring two female musicians, promises to be very good.

No end to it

Oh dear, the ending of my play! After Mary-Ann expressed doubts about it, I spent half a morning thinking about how to reword it. Last night I took the new version along to rehearsal. I showed it to Tracy. She perused it silently. She looked up. 'You know what? I liked it better the way it was before.'

But Mary-Ann still had real problems with the way it was before. What did it mean? What message would the audience go away with? Wouldn't they go away confused when they need a resolution? Tracy said, 'But I like the ambiguity, that's the whole point for me, and the way it's written now, so explicit, weakens it, there's no impact,' and Stephanie (pictured above at an earlier rehearsal) agreed. Everyone pondered. Mary-Ann tore at her hair. I felt confused and said nothing, and then got all pedantic about the meaning of the play, which didn't help for a moment, and then I got all confused again.

In the end Tracy said to me, 'Well, you're the playwright, I'm just directing it. You have to make the decision.'

Can I make the decision? Can I heck. Help.

Reading: Adele Geras at Manky Poets

An anouncement: Adele Geras will be reading at Manky Poets at Chorlton Library this Friday (20th) at 7.30 pm. Adele is best known as a writer of children's books and, more recently, adult novels, but she also writes vivid poetry which tugs at all the senses. A warm and engaging speaker and a great reader of her own work, she is a treat to hear, and I would most definitely be going if I didn't have the technical rehearsal of my play. I've been intending to go to this event since copland smith, who runs Manky, told me he was planning it, and I'll be sorry to miss it.

Radio refuge

Andrew Edwards of the Manchester radio station ALLFM (96.9) is recording interviews with the theatre companies involved in 24:7, to be put on the 24:7 website, and on Sunday night Rachael (above at rehearsal) and I made our way separately over to Levenshulme to do ours. What a night! So cold! It would be cold for April, leave alone July! And wet, of course. I got a lift over, and after I was dropped, wrapped up in my leather jacket I went up onto Levenshulme station to wait for Rachael who was coming by train. Not a soul in sight, no sign of the train down the line, just wetness and wind and swaying trees, and everything grey - a world forsaken not just by summer. And how I wished I had gloves! But then the signals changed to red and the train came into view, worming its way towards me, and then there was Rachael stepping off the train in her woolly duffel coat and wellies!

ALLFM is situated in a converted three-storey corner terrace house just across the road from the station. Such a contrast inside! Another 24:7-er answered the door to us - I think it was Anthony Trevelyan who wrote Harlequin - since Andrew was in the studio recording someone. Julia Hogan, the author of Each To their Own, was also waiting her turn in the cosily bright back room which still had the air of a living room with a sofa and easy chairs. Not long afterwards, others joined us, including Luke Walker, writer of Mind The Gap. There was an immediate sense of refuge and cameraderie induced by the evening outside, adrenalin for the impending recordings and the fact that our shows opened in precisely one week's time! Julia echoed my feelings by saying that she was exhausted - she was amazed at how much work producing a show was. At the start she had considered directing hers, but was now entirely thankful that she hadn't!

Andrew was lovely, popping out in his bright tee-shirt between recordings to tell us to help ourselves to the water and biscuits and nectarines, and putting everyone at their ease. Then it was mine and Rachael's turn to go into the converted front room which was the studio and talk about The Processing Room. I had prepared a little dialogue, and we took turns at the only mic to read our bits, which Andrew would splice together afterwards. Rachael was brilliant, as I knew she would be: she is the daughter of actors and has been doing radio for all of her life. I haven't been in front of a mic that often, but as I said to Andrew when he said he thought I had, I've been around radio studios for a very long time. Let's just hope it sounds like it!

The publicity is really kicking off: on Thursday I'll appear on Let's Go Global TV's weekly evening programme, and on Friday night I'm on BBC Radio Manchester's Mr and Mrs Manchester (95.1FM/104.6FM)!

Art Radio at Cornerhouse

I'm listening to Art Radio, the amazing project/exhibition which is on at Cornerhouse. Galleries 1 & 2 have been transformed to a temporary radio station (106.5 FM and online), from which until the 26th August resident artists are broadcasting innovative radio programmes.

The contribution to this project from artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White is the 'Free to Air' series of programmes. Eileen and Ben, whose residency at Cornerhouse lasts from today until the end of July, run the Open Music Archive website from which you can download out of copyright music, and they are very involved in 'copyleft' issues. A 'Free-toAir' programme on at this very moment (running from 2-4) includes discussions about copyleft and Creative Commons and some amazing archive radio commentary on the nature of radio and intellectual property.

Later in the day, and until Wednesday 25th, Ben and Eileen will be playing some of the twenties and thirties music from their website, and broadcasting new interpretations they have commissioned from contemporary musicians. Most afternoons at five they'll conduct a live fifteen-minute broadcast in Gallery 2, when invited musicians will play their own interpretations.

This is a fantastic project bringing back to life forgotten music and misicians, and should be of inhterest to anyone concerned about the draconian developments in modern copyright.

Too much to do

Uh-oh. On Thursday night at rehearsal for The Processing Room, we are rehearsing the ending when Mary-Ann (pictured at rehearsal) says, 'Er... sorry to throw a spanner in the works, but...' The ending doesn't make sense for her, and now I have to think about re-working it to make my meaning clearer. And that's on top of working on publicity and rushing off to Widnes today to rehearse for a short film (and learning my lines for it) - not to mention clearing a room in the house for builders! And The Processing Room opens a week on Monday... Help!

Thing is, we writers moan when we're not busy, don't we?

Publicity

Rehearsals for The Processing Room continue apace (that's Rachael on the left, who plays the very strange and wry nurse who drops a bombshell for the three women lost in a hospital). I've been getting on with publicity, and an article about Stephanie (who plays one of the three women) will appear in the Lancashire Evening Post on 20th. Meanwhile, Channel M have put the details about our show up on their website and on Thursday 19th we'll appear on Let's Go Global's weekly TV show (7-9 pm).

We now have a stage manager, Becky Saville, and she came to her first rehearsal on Tuesday evening. It had been warmer in the day and she wore her shorts, and, like me, no socks, and as the temperature plummeted we got pretty frozen sitting watching the others as they kept warm with all their complicated and very funny moves.

Another one tonight - and I'm going to wrap up warm!

Bookarazzi

An announcement today, of a brand-new website set up by a group of us blogging writers:

There are about fifty of us involved, who came together in a forum set up by novelist Clare Sudbery. Some of the members have been working away over the last few weeks to set up the site, including artist and writer Lucy Pepper who has designed it and helped us less techy folks along the way. It should be a fantastic resource for fellow writers, with regular articles and features on the subject of writing and publication, a news and events page, lots of useful links and a blog where anyone can comment.
We intend to update regularly and add as we go along, but it's already pretty good I reckon. Check it out! And you could stick our button in your sidebar:

Leafleting

I am totally exhausted, my feet are aching and they have blisters: I have just walked several miles around Manchester leafleting for The Processing Room. Well, at least I'm making up for all that time I've spent at the computer and the desk...

Rehearsals

Rehearsals are properly under way now for The Processing Room. Last night we all made it through the sheeting rain and ridiculously dark early evening to the third, and Mary-Ann wore her wellies. I am delighted with the way it's going: Tracy is picking up on the surreal elements of the play with lots of stylised movement which enhances the comedy. It's very complicated, and I don't know how the actors are picking it all up so quickly but they are. Here are some pictures:

And here they are collapsing in giggles when it all went pear-shaped:

Launch: Missing by Cath Staincliffe

Last Thursday evening, before I left for Paris, I went to the launch at Waterstone's Deansgate of a new book in the popular Sal Kilkenny series of crime novels by my old friend Manchester writer Cath Staincliffe. Cath is unbelievably prolific, and it seems hardly any time since she won the Commonword Novel Competition with her first, Looking for Trouble, which was immediately taken up by a mainstream publisher and serialised on Woman's Hour. Amazingly, the new book, Missing, is her seventh in the series, and in the meantime she has published other stand-alone novels and is the originator of the Granada Blue Murder detective series starring Caroline Quentin.

Missing (Allison and Busby) finds Sal searching for two missing people, one a young mother, while on Sal's home front the love interest hots up...

Here's the enticing beginning:

People disappear every day. Most of them choose to. Have you ever been tempted? Slip on a coat, pick up your bag and walk, or drive, or run. Turn your back on home, family, friends, work.

Tim Preston took these photos of Cath with the book and signing copies:

A rehearsal, a holiday and a Normblog competition

First rehearsal last night for The Processing Room. I didn't attend, but director Tracy rang me afterwards to say it went swimmingly, and that everyone is upbeat although she's given the actors plenty to think about with lots of movement. Can't wait to be at the next rehearsal next Tuesday when I get back from a long weekend in Paris and I hope some headspace for a new writing commission (more of which later), as well as a rest for my RSI.

Before I go (cringing about my carbon footprint, of course) I want to draw your attention to the short-short story competition being run by blogger Norm.

Reading group: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

'Oh god, no!' said Jenny when John suggested for our reading group A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers' first-person account of bringing up his younger brother after the death of his parents. Then: 'Oh, you mean that's the title!?' and everyone laughed.

In an extended cod-Acknowledgements section at the start of the book, the author addresses this very question of the effect of the title on potential readers - The author wishes to acknowledge your problems with the title. He too has reservations - and there follows a tongue-in-cheek history of the title choice and a deconstruction of all of its possible connotations and implications about the book, the author and readers' expectations

Even earlier, right from the verso page of the book we are alerted to the fact that this is a book which calls into question the whole nature and status of authors and books:

First published by Simon and Schuster, New York, a division of a larger and more powerful company called Viacom Inc, which is wealthier and more populous than eighteen of the fifty states of America, and all of the former Soviet Republics combined and tripled.

'So what is it, this book?' John asked the group when we met for the discussion. 'Is it a novel, or is it a memoir?' Once again, in the Acknowledgements and a preceding Preface, the author anticipates the question, and while insisting the book is a memoir stresses the fictive techniques he has used - the dialogue has been almost entirely reconstructed - and throws into the air the notion of distinguishing between memoir and fiction with this suggestion: if you send in your copy of this book ... [the author] will send you, in exchange, a 3.5" floppy disk, on which will be a complete digital manuscript of this work, albeit with names and locations changed, in such a way that the only people who will know who is who are those whose lives have been included, though thinly disguised. Voila! Fiction!

As a writer I was very taken by this and by the way that the book itself addresses this issue throughout as well as the moral implications of writing openly about one's own life. I also found the book brilliantly written: witty, energetic, yet utterly moving, the author masterfully in control of his material.

Not everyone agreed. Most did agree that the prose was brilliant and from her counsellor's viewpoint Clare found the narrator Eggers' emotional dilemmas accurately as well as movingly depicted. However she and most others were irritated by the Preface and Acknowledgements and skipped them altogether (I had to admit that I had felt the same before reading the rest of the book, but had gone back and read them with relish afterwards). Madeleine (who wasn't present but rang up beforehand) said that she had no problem with someone writing about himself, but she was pretty irritated by him writing about writing about himself. Most people got bored in the section I really loved, in which the narrator undergoes a clearly non-naturalistic and self-ironic interview for a Big-Brother-type reality TV programme, which is the starkest comment on the theme of personal exposure v fiction:

[TV producer/casting person:] But what about privacy?

[Narrator Eggers:] Cheap, overabundant, easily gotten, lost, regained, bought, sold...

[TV producer/casting person:]... what about ...exhibitionism?

[Narrator Eggers:] ...Someone wants to celebrate their existence and you call it exhibitionism. It's niggardly.

However, while I saw this as Eggers successfully deflating potential criticisms, and Ann said she saw the whole book as a piss-take, others still thought the book self-indulgent and Eggers as thus less in control of his material than John, Doug, Ann and I thought. Hans said with irritation that in any case he didn't see all this self-referential stuff as excusing Eggers at all, it simply made matters worse.

Even those of us in most favour of the book, however, had to agree that it suffered structurally from the memoir mode: a longeur recounting the running of Eggers' alternative-lifestyle magazine, Might, created a slackening of narrative tension which spoilt the arc of the true story, that of Eggers' grief at the loss of his parents, and we didn't feel that on this occasion Eggers managed to dispel such criticism with his pre-emptive Acknowledgements warning that this section of the book should be skipped by anyone not interested in the doings of twenty-somethings.

Most people in the group seemed to share the feeling which Eggers challenges or at least explores in the book, that writing a memoir is a more self-indulgent activity than writing a novel. I said that, as Eggers indicates, while memoirs inevitably fictionalise, many novels are hardly any less autobiographical, and it can be thus the case that writing a novel, in which the names and locations are changed, is a safer, and therefore less brave thing to do.

What about the problem of protecting others, though? said Clare. I agreed that that was an important issue: once, I had written a very autobiographical story and had fully intended to sell it as fiction, but then a chance came up to publish it as memoir, which I did instead. As a result, like Eggers I had then had to consult with the people I'd written about in the story, and had had to make changes they'd asked for - which created the paradox that, since the change did not match with my memory, the 'memoir' was to me less autobiographical than the 'fiction' had been!

That's one of the great things about fiction, we decided: however autobiographical a story really is, as long as it is presented as fiction, then the author can always deny it with impunity!

Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.

The proof of your eyes

We are finalizing the proofs for Balancing on the Edge of the World! Scary. I never don't find it scary, knowing that you can look and look and still miss the most obvious errors...

24:7 Theatre Festival Press Launch

Tuesday evening was Press Launch for the 24:7 Theatre Festival, and all afternoon beforehand there was a rehearsal for the trailers which several of us companies would be presenting to the press. Other companies were acting out their trailers, and the place was swarming with stressed actors, and my director Tracy and I congratulated ourselves that, since our trailer for The Processing Room was a film, we'd avoid such hassle: all we'd have to do was press 'Play'. Hm. Not so simple. The technicians had to rig us up sound, which it seemed was not easy, and we spent most of the afternoon geared up and waiting and so getting as adrenalin- stressed as the rest. But then it happened, and for the first time I saw the film which Tracy has made and I loved it! She's launching it on MySpace soon so I'll be able to link to it.

Then it was time for the launch: pink fizzy wine and hors d'oevres in one of the bar/lounges of the vast Tardis-like complex which exists beyond the narrow doors of Pure in the Printworks, followed by the trailer show, and then back into the bar again. There are reports in The British Theatre Guide and The Manchester Evening News and Tom Wright, the festival photographer, took photos including the one above. I'm on the far left talking to fellow playwright Trevor Suthers (whose Comedy Mouthwash features in this year's festival), both of us in our theatrical gear, me in my funky charity-shop heels and he in his bright-orange blazer. To the right of Trevor and just behind is Processing Room actor Rachael Carnegie, and in the centre at the back Amanda Hennessy, co-director of the festival.

Trials on the way to perfection, we hope...

Well, it wasn't easy turning people down after our auditions for The Processing Room. Not only was the standard so high, but as sometimes happens we had to make choices on other criteria as well: for reasons of plot which I won't divulge here, we had to find actors who fitted together in terms of physical appearance, quality of voice and overall energy - not an easy task, and there were people we were really sorry and very reluctant to pass over, but we did it in the end and have four perfect actors (see post below).

After the actual auditions, Mary-Ann and I, worn out once again, went and collapsed at an outdoor table at the The Old Pint Pot just across from Salford University Adelphi Building, where we'd held the auditions. It's a lovely spot, overlooking the river, and the sun came out and all the gnats were fizzing in the air above it and the ducks were making gleaming slipstreams, and I suddenly relaxed and realized how anxious I had been about getting this company together in time. People management, I'm not used to it nowadays, and though I look forward to it as a change, it's always a shock to be dependent on others and on outside contingencies when you've been so much in control of your world at your desk, the world of words. A glass of wine, that's what we wanted, but only the house wine, which we didn't much like, came in glasses, so guess what, we ordered a bottle. Good job that a truly charming guy on a nearby table overheard our conversation and introduced himself as a teacher of movement, and ended up joining us and helping out with the booze...

Not that that was the end of the panics. Tomorrow is 24:7's Press Launch. We decided to get our flyers ready for the event, and Ian Currie, Production Manager at Salford University (where our director Tracy Gentles teaches), very generously agreed to design them for us. Last Wednesday was the final day for getting the file to the printer, and on Tuesday afternoon Tracy emailed it to me to approve and send on to them.

I rang her quickly: 'Tracy, for some reason, Ian got the wrong logo!'
'No problem, I'll get Ian to change it when I get back to the university.'
Half-five she rings me back. 'Ian's gone home I'm afraid, but don't worry, I'll do it myself.'
An hour later, she rings me again. 'I'm locked out of the computer room, and I can't find anyone who's got a key. I can't do it in the morning because I'm on a plane at 5.00 am.'
'OK, if it's just a matter of dropping the logo in, I can do it.'
I try to load the file into Photoshop. It won't open. The only way I can have a file to send to the printer tomorrow morning will be to rebuild it from scratch.

8.00 on Tuesday evening I sit down at my computer and teach myself to use Photoshop properly for the first time ever. Is this only way to learn software, I wonder? I have sat at the computer for hours in the past unable to fathom how layers work in Photoshop, but on Wednesday evening I had no choice but to find out quick-sharp. Well, I got the file to printer the next morning just in time, but I'd been wound so high I hadn't managed to sleep that night...

Next, the meeting with the technician for all the companies whose plays will be performed in our venue, Pure Blue. Hmm. 'I hate these kinds of things,' the normally equable Tracy tells me. Why? I soon find out. As soon as Mary-Ann and I saw the Blue Room at Pure, the night of the Big Gathering, we knew it was the one for our play: it is draped all around with white voile curtains which, for reasons I won't divulge again, makes it perfect. Well, I walked in with Tracy last Friday and realized straight away what I hadn't noticed before, that one of the walls isn't in fact so draped, but is faced with white slatted boards. And the other companies were agreeing eagerly with the technician that the plays should be done end-on to this wall.


Me: Any chance that we could do them the other way on?
Writer/producer of one of the other companies: No! We chose this room specifically for those slats.
Me: Well, actually, we chose the room specifically for the drapes...

We came to a compromise. We will have to suffer the slatted wall, but the technician will cover it with a different sort of drape.
Tracy to me: See what I mean about hating this kind of thing?

Press Launch tomorrow, and thirteen companies, including us, are presenting trailers of their plays. Tracy has made a film for ours, and I can't wait to see to it...

Our cast is complete

Well, we held our auditions. The overall standard was amazing, and we have ended up with four great actresses for The Processing Room.

Mary-Ann Coburn, who was pre-cast, has worked for major rep and touring companies including The Glasgow Citizens and the Manchester Library Theatre as well as television:
She is joined by Paula Williamson who, since graduating in 2005, has set up her own comedy theatre company Yappo: by Stephanie Ridings who is a founder member of touring theatre company Angel Club and whose TV credits include Coronation Street and Clocking Off:

and by Rachael Carnegie, who graduates this summer from Salford University in Media and Performance: I breathed a great sigh of relief, and once we got them altogether and had a readthrough I knew it was all going to be great!

A great evening and a great book

I've been so overwhelmed with production for my play The Processing Room that I haven't been getting onto Blogger much (in the next few days I hope for a breathing space and the chance to blog about it all), but I did manage to take Thursday evening out for the launch of Caroline Smailes' fantastic debut novel, In Search of Adam.

This was a really great launch from every perspective: the reading room at Waterstone's Deansgate was full, and Caroline gave a beautiful reading which made clear that the book is riveting, a moving yet restrained depiction of childhood pain, and deserves all of the rave pre-publicity it has received. Caroline's publishers, The Friday Project, were there to support her, and it was clear from the Q & A and from my conversation with publisher Clare Christian and Editor Clare Weber that they had paid rare respect and attention to Caroline's typographically innovative script. Tutors from the MA course on which she had written the novel were there too, and - excitingly for me - fellow bloggers jumping their virtual reality to be there in the flesh: Clare Sudbery, nmj and Jude among them.

It was a shock to emerge from the bar we repaired to afterwards and find that Manchester was more Manc than ever, with cold rain dropping in sheets - the atmosphere inside had been so warm with literary celebration.

Caroline signs copies while the queue gets reading

Friday Project publisher Clare Christian looks justifiably happy

Launch: In Search of Adam

An announcement today: on Thursday evening there's a launch at Waterstone's Deansgate for Caroline Smailes' debut novel In Search of Adam, and the first in the Friday Fiction list from the innovative publisher The Friday Project, which specializes in picking up books via the web.

Caroline's publishing story is an exciting one. While still on the MMU Novel MA course for which she wrote it, she began an engaging and innovative website to promote it, and the Friday Project happened along... (Another forthcoming Friday Project novel from fellow blogger nmj was discovered in a similar way.)

Aside from all this, however, even prior to official publication, In Search of Adam has been a huge hit, raved about by Dove Grey Reader and others, and the extracts I have seen indicate that the book is stunning.

If you're in the North West, be there for this important debut: Waterstone's Deansgate Manchester, 7-9 pm Thursday 14th June £3.00.

A director!

We have a director for our 24:7 production of The Processing Room: the fabulous Tracy Gentles who at the stunningly young age of 24 lectures at Salford University and runs her own dynamic theatre company Hooh Hah.

Actor auditions tomorrow...

Got this covered...

Well, the cover has come through for my short story collection!

Meet the author - for real

I've just been to the Hay Festival, which I've posted about on my other blog, and which has now become so huge, with remote stages and audiences of up to 800 or so, that there's not really much chance to get to talk to authors. On Saturday morning we went to a discussion with novelists Gail Jones and Hisham Matar, led by Meet the Author website David Freeman, but stuck in a darkened 'auditorium' it didn't much feel like meeting them, and only two or so audience questions were allowed.

But a Fringe Festival has started up in compensation in the town (the official festival is now on a site three-quarters of a mile out), and, wandering through the streets, John and I came upon a reading about to begin in the tiny Hay Poetry Bookshop, by the celebrated Irish poet Tony Curtis. We had met Tony once before, at the South Tipperary Festival at Clonmel - not that he remembered, but that didn't stop him with true Irish lying charm referring to the occasion constantly throughout the reading, and suggesting afterwards that we three pose for a photo for old times' sake (Tony's on the right).

He was reading from his fantastic new book, The Well in the Rain (Arc). You know what's embarrassing when you're in such close proximity to the author and the other crammed listeners? It's OK when the poet makes you laugh (as of course he did), but what what about all the times he made me cry?

How to stay sane while producing a play

This morning I slept until 8.30. I am so exhausted! Why do I always forget how tiring, how time-consuming, how nerve-wracking and damn emotionally involving it is producing a play?

On Sunday Mary-Ann and I met in a pub to discuss things - Mary-Ann sweeping in all dressed in sparkly ear-rings and celebratory pinks and purples - and got too excited and ended up drinking too much.

'I'm not drinking any more,' I told her on Tuesday as I arrived at Cornerhouse to talk to potential directors. 'I'm staying clear-headed for this project.' She was there already, waiting for me in more sober but nevertheless glamorous purples and black. Me: I was all black and trousered, in a shirt and carrying my biggest brief case, but in spite of it all, feeling like a fraud. 'Oh, it's odd doing this,' Mary-Ann said, echoing my feelings. 'I'm so used to being on the other side of the table!'

The day wore on. With each interview we had coffee, between two of them we had lunch, and then we had coffee again. By 4.30 we were done, coffeed-out, our makeup faded, our clothes crumpled, papers out of order, and totally gob-smacked by the talent and commitment we had encountered. And exhausted. 'Oh, god,' said Mary-Ann, rising with her purse in her hand. 'Let's have a glass of wine!'

And that was that all over again.

All in the image

OK, so I kind of glossed over my hair-raising experience of getting an image for The Processing Room. Well, I'd decided what image I wanted - Dave Slack had warned us that we needed to be thinking about it - but I still had a mad panicked rush to achieve it in the end. Last weekend I went to London, and got back late on Monday to a packet from 24:7 which must have arrived on the Saturday, and the news that we had one week to submit our festival image! This meant that in fact I had 4 days to get the photo taken and - without training - successfully manipulate it on the computer before getting it to them in time! And I was due out all day Tuesday, and Mary-Ann was coming over Wednesday to help me go through actors' and directors' CVs, and meanwhile the correspondence from both was still coming through and had to be dealt with.

Tuesday night. John and I have waited for dark, and then there I am dressed up in some semblance of a nurse's uniform (and freezing bloody cold, since the boiler's bust and the weather's like February), trailing round the house with John behind me holding a camera, trying to find a doorway he can stand far enough back from to get enough black space around it. We choose his study, which is at the end of the landing. We want a silhouette, so we've set up a light behind me.

'Further back, John.'

He almost steps back in the dark, before realising the stairwell is right behind him.

I look at his efforts. He doesn't know what's in my head, of course, and I haven't managed to explain, so we have to start again. By the time we finish, he's very fed up and I'm frozen to the door frame.

Next day, with Mary-Ann, I take a look at them properly. They're hopeless. Too dark - there wasn't enough light behind me after all - and all John's study junk behind me is far too distracting, and most unethereal... We'll have to wait for dark once more and clear the room and adjust the lighting and do it all over again...

Thursday I'm at my computer working on the chosen shot. It's OK, I can do it, but I'm so slow, it's taking all day, and there's so little time left... And then Ben, my website designer and saviour, comes through on Messenger and takes over, whisking different colour versions of the image back to me over and over, and helps me to choose.

And guess, what, I did it: emailed the image off a day early and had a hard copy printed just in time! I'd have had a celebratory glass of wine if I hadn't already ended up with a migraine...

Production takes it out of you

The last few days have been crammed with activity - no time for blogging - around the 24:7 production of The Processing Room. I've been working on the image, which meant a photoshoot, and then my laboured and untutored efforts on Photoshop, and finally an SOS email to artist Ben White, who designed my website, and who now shamed me by flashing up double-quick various colour versions for me to choose from. In the end we chose ethereal blue - I'm calling the play 'an unearthly comedy' - in spite of my life-long belief that only red or yellow leaflets get picked up. (When we come to design the leaflet, we'll probably add some touches of red.)

And yesterday Mary-Ann Coburn, who is taking one of the parts, came over, and we studied the huge pile of actors' CVs I've been sent, and negotiated by email with interested directors. After which we were ravenous and stuffed ourselves with salad and smoked mackerel and cheese and cake!

Call this a writing career?

Proof copy

A lovely parcel through the post - a proof copy of Adele Geras's new novel, A Hidden Life, to be published in August.

Proofs are SO exciting! Limited in number, the cover not yet finalized, the text not yet finally corrected - they come with such an exciting sense of the process of publishing, and of privilege at being included!

The author of numerous acclaimed children's books, Adele has already published three adult novels - luscious sagas in which characters are made to confront the secrets of the past. A Hidden Life, her fourth, looks to be no exception: the story of a family gathered to discover explosive secrets at a funeral.

And there's the proof copy, sitting enticingly beside my bed, waiting for me to begin!

Cover blank

No cover for my short-story collection yet, though Jen at Salt, and I and John, and (as I said in my last post) our reading group, are all banging our heads for one. I used to do a lot of the illustrative photography for our short-story mag Metropolitan (under my other name Helen Johnson) and always had to make quick artistic decisions, so I was fairly confident when Jen asked me at the start if I had any ideas for the cover. The title is a spin on a phrase running through one story: Balancing on the Edge of the World, and the image which came to me was an androgynous figure poised on a curved surface, maybe a hill. However, Jen says that when they tried it out it looked like the cover for a management/spiritual/religious type textbook!!

'Ditch the figure' said Trevor in the reading group, and the general consensus there was that I should go for something abstract. I know that some people, writers in particular, prefer abstract covers because they don't artificially tie books down, but I have a feeling that browsers want, and are more attracted by, some concrete idea of the human situations behind that cover. And it's so crucial to get it right: although Doug in our reading group insists that he is immune to book covers, knowing that they can mislead (and pithily says that he's a title man himself), I think he's pretty unusual...

Oh well, back to the drawing board...

Reading group: A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

Everyone round to ours on Wednesday for the reading group to discuss A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami (translated from the Japanese).

None of us had read Murakami before, and during the week beforehand John and I had bumped into Doug and Ann separately, and each had told us that they were having difficulty getting going with the book. They would read a few pages, fail to get gripped and put it down, and then when they picked it up again find they couldn't remember it and had to start all over again. John and I told them that we were having precisely the same experience.

Ann said, 'I don't know where it's going', and I said, 'I don't know where it's coming from.' We felt we couldn't grasp the tenor of the opening chapters in which an unnamed thirty-year-old narrator attends the funeral of an ex-girlfriend and reminisces about their meeting and relationship before going back to his flat to find his ex-wife briefly returned to collect her things. While the stunning prose made all of this seem significant, there was also a sense of structural inconsequentiality about it, and indeed the story seems only to get going the next morning after the ex-wife has left and the vacationing narrator is called to his office to discover that he has been summoned by a mysterious stranger to engage on a 'wild sheep chase'.

Before this point, however, a surreal and absurdist element had entered the narration, which should have warned us that the conventional expectations with which we were reading this book were inappropriate: the narrator, it turns out, has a new girlfriend with ears so exquisite (and which during one conversation she sits carefully cleaning) that when they are on view and 'unblocked' in terms of channelling their power, they promote super-sensational sex. She is also possessed of a special sixth sense, which means she guesses that the phone call will come summoning the narrator, and knows it will be all about a sheep.

Hans, who had chosen the book, said he had found it very interesting but strange. He had indeed become involved at this point, and wanted to know what was going to happen, but the more that was revealed to him the less he could take it, a tale about a sheep which may or may not exist, with the power to possess a human and thereby dominate the world.

However, Doug and I had experienced an opposite effect. Doug said that once he understood he needed to accept the book as absurdist, he began to really enjoy its off-the-wall turns, its humour and, like me, its memorable evocation of the spirit of situations and things, landscape and the weather. By the end of our journey with this chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking narrator prone to bouts of philosophising which end with banalities ( 'I came to the realisation ... that I am not a whale') or are abandoned for a drink or a fag, whose Sherlock-Holmes-type reliance on clues turns out to be beside the point, we had come to understand the reason for the strangely inconsequential yet seemingly significant beginning.

The book is indeed about inconsequentiality, and the strange paradox that the seemingly inconsequential things, or the episodes which on the rational level are no longer relevant, are nevertheless evocative and important on the level of emotional experience, while the importance of those things which seem significant in the grand, Western-hero quest tradition, is unstable. Thus the girlfriend with the ears, who seemed so central to the endeavour, turns out to be not so important to the plot after all. Evidence too the absurd way, which had made everyone laugh, that the narrator gets the sinister figure who sends him on his quest to look after his ailing, farting cat while he is gone. The narrator has never named this cat, and during his narration never names any of the other characters: as Clare said, names fix things artificially and thus deny the truth that importance is relative, and reality fluid.

Several people, even Doug, thought that the ending, which I won't give away, was disappointing, but to me it endorsed this view of the book and was therefore fitting.

Then people got interested in the different covers of the book in the different editions we had and agreed that the one above (the latest Vintage paperback) was best. A general conversation started up about covers, and I asked everyone to help me think about ideas I might suggest for the cover of my forthcoming book, which isn't decided on yet.

Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.

Swamped

And now my inbox is swamped with the emailed CVs of actresses who didn't get to see me on Monday night!

Overwhelmed

Last night was the 24:7 Theatre Festival gathering, when interested writers, directors and actors get the chance to make contact to work together on this years' projects. Well, yeah, the kind of contact sardines get in a tin... I have never seen such a vast crowd! We had to wait in a snaking queue to be processed at the door and given our designation tags (actor, writer, director etc), but long before I got to the door the tags had run out. And once inside, a seething mass! Mostly actors, of course, but also mostly young, and there are only two young parts in my play, and very few old enough for the other part I have to fill. And, just my luck, very few directors who were not already committed to plays... Or at least, that's how it seemed: maybe there were scores squashed away in the crowds and impossible to see... Oh and, then organiser Dave Slack suggested we writers get up one at at time on this huge very high podium and address that packed crowd and say what parts we had to fill... Well, I've addressed plenty of audiences, but there was nothing quite like it before: quite stomach-crunching, I'm telling you. And then scores of pretty, intent and articulate young actresses squirmed their way between the bodies to hand me their CVs, and I have such a pile of them I honestly don't know where to start...