Reading: Michele Roberts at Manchester University

A great evening on Monday - a reading at the University by Michele Roberts, which was of course guaranteed to bring people from as far away as Liverpool and Chester, and so I met some old friends I hadn't seen in a while. The reading itself and the Q & A afterwards were engrossing, and as people said afterwards, inspiring: Michele Roberts is wonderfully open and unassuming and engaging. Although known as a novelist, she was reading from her recent memoir in which she looks back on her time in seventies London as a struggling new writer.

Interesting to me, with my obsession with the subject, was the audience discussion with Michele about the differences between memoirs and novels. Asked why she had chosen this time to write a memoir, she laughed and said with typical openness that her publisher (presumably responding to the current appetite for memoirs) had suggested it. Then someone in the audience identified herself as a teacher of memoir and 'life writing' and said that she always told her students that (as I'm always saying) a memoir is as much of a construct as a novel, and asked Michele whether she had found that to be true. Michele said that she had, but that the linear shape of the memoir had made for easier construction. However, a further question prompted her to say that she had originally conceived of the book as structurally more complex, but that the commissioning publisher had wanted something more linear (and presumably more marketable). Asked if this had compromised her truth, she said that, actually, yes it had: she had wanted very much for the book to be about the difference between her two personae: that of the young woman she was in the seventies and the woman she is now, but that the linear form hadn't been as capable of carrying that idea as her original conception. But then she laughed again and said without regret that this was the situation in today's publishing market, which you just have to accept.

What was really interesting, however, is that, at least with Michele Roberts accompanying the book in person, you very much did get a sense of the differences between those two personae, and of the relationship she now has to her former self - which was actually pretty moving, to me and I know to others in the audience. Someone noted that while many writers like to distance themselves from their fiction writing (something which I tend to do as a protest against the cult of personality), Michele is very open about the relationship between her writing and her life and personality. Michele responded by saying that this stems from her sense (with Julia Kristeva) that writing comes from the body, is felt before it is articulated in language - something I can't argue with in the least.

Food for thought - and a really stimulating evening. (And some OK wine.)

Salt Autumn Party

An announcement today (on both my blogs): on Thursday evening Salt Publishing will be holding a party at Foyles Bookshop in Charing Cross Road to celebrate their poetry and short story lists and launch their autumn titles. Yours truly will be reading, along with a glittering array of brilliant, prize-winning, other Salt authors - or Salties, as some of us like to call ourselves.

Everyone is welcome. Come along and celebrate with this truly wonderful, and superhuman, publisher (I know I'm biased, but...!): The Gallery, Foyles Bookshop, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, 6.30-8.30, Thursday November 29th 2007. Readings kick off on the dot at 6.30 (and I'm reading at the start).

The pic shows the cover of Salt's autumn short story catalogue, and is taken from that of their brilliant collection by Charles Yu, the title story of which, Third Class Superhero, won the 2004 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. Charles has also been named one of the US National Book Foundation's '5 Under 35' writers of exciting fiction.

Whose right to write?

Oh, I am all churned up again.

Reading group last night (report when I finish decorating that ruddy room!), and it was my turn to make suggestions for next time. One of the two books I suggested, and the one plumped for by the others was Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces. Talking about the book to the others, and waving my signed copy, I remembered the Waterstone's Deansgate reading at which I got it signed, and the fact that someone in the audience asked Anne Michaels if she was Jewish. (The book deals with a Jewish theme.) Now I don't know if this guy was meaning to be aggressive, but he certainly came over as challenging, and Anne Michaels clearly felt wrong-footed if not threatened as she declined to reveal her cultural identity, saying that she didn't feel her own racial or cultural identity was relevant, that the book should stand up for itself. The guy persisted, saying he wanted to know because he was Jewish, and it was a pretty sticky moment before he finally gave up.

Me, I was hot and cold all over, just as I was again last night remembering it, because of course this issue - the idea which I'm sure the guy was pushing, that only certain people have the right to write about certain experiences - was the issue over which my own writing career stumbled.

As if fiction is merely testimony! (Yet there have been literary movements where this notion has been seriously held.) Fiction operates via imagination and empathy, and this is what makes it more potentially socially dynamic than is nowadays acknowledged. You can't change society without empathy, after all.

Wordless

I never thought I'd say this, but sometimes, I've discovered, you just need some time away from words. I've been in Amsterdam without my laptop, I looked at a newspaper only twice, and although I took a book I read the first few pages and then never picked it up again. I've just been looking and dreaming. And here, look, I made my own Dutch interior, and it was a damn sight easier than knocking together those slippery words...

Short break

I'm taking a break for the next few days - back next Tuesday or Wednesday.

Reading group: Disgrace by J Coetzee

A big crowd of us to discuss this Booker-winning novel about David Lurie, a Cape Town teacher of Romantic poetry whose affair with a student leads to his dismissal and who retreats to his daughter's smallholding where he and his daughter are subsequently raided and his daughter raped.

Hans, who had chosen the book, said he found the depiction of Lurie fascinating: it was hard to know whether to condemn him for his chauvinism or to admire him for his honesty and determination to stand up for his own insights against those who were intent, like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, on making him apologize.

A long discussion followed - one of the longest we've ever had - in which we tackled this and tried to tease out the meanings of the novel. I said Lurie was a colonizer - as an academic (colonizing poetry, perpetuating the culture of an imperialist nation in South Africa), as a womanizer and as the seducer of his student (whom he feels he is raping when she passively submits to him). John agreed and said that everything in the novel was very highly patterned around this theme: as he 'rapes' his student, so his daughter is raped in turn (just as, as whites have 'raped' South Africa, they must be raped in turn). As at the very beginning there is an ambiguous contract between the apparent colonizer Lurie and the prostitute Soraya (each using the other), so by the end of the book there is an ambiguous contract between Lurie's daughter Lucy and the new landowner Petrus.

Jenny disagreed that this was the point about Lurie (but I've been so busy I can't remember now what she said the point was), and she said with a giggle that actually, having taught in universities in the seventies she didn't think Lurie was all that bad as a womanizer, which set us all off laughing pretty helplessly, and from that moment on the whole meeting kept swinging between hilarity and the seriousness to which the novel kept drawing us back.

John said he was interested in the passivity which kept being enacted in the novel - the sexual passivity of the student and Lucy's passivity as she gives in to the consequences of her rape and to the new landowning order. It's this passivity in Lucy which Lurie can't stand, but which makes her the realist, and, as someone suggested, his (colonizer's) inability to accept it makes him redundant and leaves him only the option of retreat from this society.

In fact, he returns to the smallholding, but the ending, turning on the dog theme running through the book, and thus the whole book, Doug and I found utterly bleak.

I said I thought the book was too patterned: I didn't find at all psychologically convincing the episode in which Lurie visits the parents of the girl he seduced (which Hans suggested was a development of the covert Truth and Reconciliation theme), and especially their response, and most people agreed.

Finally Clare said it was odd that Lucy's rape, which was the really vivid (and horrifying) part of the book, and the episode which finally pulled her into it, was the one thing we hadn't discussed. I said that I thought that was because it was the only incident in the book which was entirely unambiguous, everything thing else being morally complex and shaded.

Doug, Clare, Jenny and Trevor said they thought the book fantastic, but Ann said that while she had appreciated the themes and patterns she had never become fully engaged.

Goodness knows how, but from the book we then got onto the subject of boils, and the fact that people don't seem to have boils as they used to, which we thought was due to better diet, and then people compared boil experiences and remembered how painful boils could be and said how horrible it must have been to have a boil on the bum, and Jenny said she did.

So by the time Ann offered her choice of two books for next time we were far gone in hilarity and when she held up two whoppers, we shrieked, How on earth could we choose (since we tend to go for the shortest)?, and people compared the authors' photos and made rude comments and considered turning down the one who looked snooty and in the end we chose the book which went with Jenny's jumper, a kind of brick orange.

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

Reading group: Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier

I've been so busy I've got behind with our book group write-ups, and I'm a bit hazy now about our September discussion. The things I remember most vividly are that there were very few of us and that when John and I arrived Clare and Doug were discussing their respective forthcoming surgical operations.

Clare had chosen the book, a French classic and one of her favourites which had had a great impact on her when she first read it as a teenager. It was published only a year before its author, Alain-Fournier, was killed in World War I at the age of 28. The Grand Meaulnes of the title is the young lad who enters the life of the (initially) schoolboy narrator when he becomes a boarding pupil in the village school of which the narrator's father is the headmaster. Meaulnes is his surname, and because of his impact on the other boys - he's older, bigger and with a somehow enigmatic presence - he becomes known as Le Grand Meaulnes. The defining moment in the book comes when he 'disappears' or runs away and stumbles upon a seemingly entranced world- a grand but crumbling estate in which a party is being held - and encounters a beautiful woman with whom he falls in love. After his return, he and the narrator are constantly longing for and planning to re-find this lost world.

Clare said that what she loved this book for was its atmosphere, its descriptions of the seasons and the French countryside and its depiction of a mood of longing which conjures beautifully the adolescent condition which the book is about.

We all agreed about the atmosphere, but didn't find that it overcame our other doubts, mainly the fact that the book wasn't simply a depiction of adolescence, but was adolescent in itself. As Adam Gopnik says in the introduction to the current Penguin Classics edition, there's a lot of 'mooning about', and John had taken to calling this book (which has apparently had many different titles in translation) The Big Moan. Clare pointed out that after all the romantic yearnings, the ending of the book leads to a kind of disenchantment, but she then agreed with the rest of us that this disenchantment, rather than a growing-up, amounts to a failure to accept the realities of maturity. As such, I found it rather depressing. As Gopnik says, it's not so much a rites of passage novel as a Peter-Pan type tale of rejection of maturity. Clare also said that she was surprised when she re-read the book to remember that the 'adventure' occurs fairly near the start of the book, and that the rest of the book deals with repercussions continuing for years - which underlines the notion that the force of the book, and the true colour of the author's attitude, lie in those romantic adolescent longings.

Trevor said he thought that maybe the book's classic status owed more to the 'romantic' early death of its author than anything. Someone else suggested something subtler: that the book's theme of a lost world chimed with the sense of irrevocable change which the first world war brought. Everyone agreed that the rural French world in which the story takes place, and which is contemporary with Fournier's own life, is singularly archaic, thus adding to the impression of an old world only recently lost.

Before we met, Clare had met John in the street, and had said she wondered if she shouldn't have suggested a book she was so fond of, and she did indeed seem a little disappointed by the fact that we weren't swayed by the lyrical prose. And then she noticed that she was the only one with the earlier Penguin translation. She borrowed a copy with the new one and took it away and reported back that, as we had discovered with Camus' The Outsider, the newer Penguin translation was far less lyrical and thus less persuasive.

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

Didsbury Oxfam bookshop readings: Cath Staincliffe

Last night it was Cath Staincliffe's turn to sit in the chair in Didsbury Oxfam bookshop and give us a reading - she read from her latest crime novel, Missing. She had arrived with a huge bag of all her books but when we said goodbye in the swirling evening her bag was empty: she sold the lot, in spite of the fact that the spellbound audience could never be huge in such a small space!

For details of the rest of the week's events see post below.

Readings in Didsbury Oxfam Shop: Adele Geras

Last week I had my launch in my favourite restaurant, and last night I went to a reading in the place where I buy my clothes - Didsbury Oxfam shop.

All this week the newly refurbished Oxfam shop is holding a series of readings by local authors in its books section, and last night, the first night, was Adele Geras. Outside there were leaves swirling - Manchester is so fluffy with leaves this autumn (not so much rain)! - and inside there was a lovely homey atmosphere, with wine and nibbles, and Adele sat in an armchair beside a big vase of flowers to read to us. I think that - at six on Bonfire Night - only adults were expected, but children turned up to have her sign all the books of hers they owned and their autograph books too.

Adele obliged by reading from her one of her spellbinding Historical House teenage novels before moving on to her luscious adult novel Made in Heaven and finally she entertained us all with her writing, publishing and reading tales and gave us a good laugh.

A really lovely evening.

Tonight, crime writer Cath Staincliffe reads, tomorrow it's novelist and story writer Conrad Williams, Thursday is a double bill with novelist Nick Royle and poet Linda Chase, and on Friday the shop presents poet Carol Ann Duffy - all at 6 pm. On Saturday poets Jane Weir and Mike Garry read at 2pm and 3pm respectively.

Launch for Balancing on the Edge of the World

I'm so lucky - I had such a lovely launch for Balancing on the Edge of the World! So many of my fantastic friends came down to help me celebrate - writing and acting friends, my reading group, most of the guys from the old Robert-Topping Waterstone's days, neighbours and family - I really couldn't have had better support. And the venue, Chorlton's Croma Restaurant, was so stylish, and the Croma people looked after us so attentively, and had set out the room with such thoughtfulness and care. Vicky and Jo from Chorlton Bookshop - who, as I said when I gave my little spiel, have been supportive of my writing right from the very early days - generously gave up their evening to come and sell the books (and people bought a heap!). Ailsa Cox, fellow short-story writer and my one-time co-editor on the short-story magazine Metropolitan, also generously offered at the last minute to introduce me before my reading, and Tim Power took some great photos (below) in spite of the fact that the light was pretty tricky.

Afterwards about 25 of us stayed and had a meal - what a great evening. I think I must have got a bit drunk in the end: we had wine with the meal, and when my family got me home they opened a bottle of champagne. At any rate, next morning I felt quite giddy whenever I bent down...

Thank you everybody for making the evening so great! Thank you, Croma's Kirsty and Claire for respectively offering us Croma and organising the event. And most of all, thank you Salt for publishing my book and for providing a long-needed platform for short stories.

Here's the crowd beginning to gather, artistically caught by Tim in the wall mirrors:

Filling up (that's writer and blogger Clare Sudbery I'm talking to on the left and far right in the foreground is writer and Art of Fiction blogger Adrian Slatcher):

Here's Ailsa getting ready to introduce me before the reading (I look a bit serious - a moment of nerves):


And then the eating began:

Thanks to Tim Power for permission to publish his pics. More of his work can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gonzopix/

Ridiculously strenuous preparations for a launch

Who would have thought that a book launch would require such preparations? (Tonight, Croma Restaurant, Chorlton, 7 pm, the launch for my collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World.)

I'm not talking the printing of the invitations by my lovely publisher, Salt, or the sending of them out, or the liaising with the venue (well, there wasn't any really, the marvellous Kirsty, Croma's manager, just offered me the launch!) or the bookshop (ditto: Chortlon Bookshop have been wonderful, as they always are!), or press releases etc.

No, I'm talking DECORATING A ROOM!

When John and I first bought this rather large house together the reason we (writers!) could afford it was that it had only just been converted back to single occupancy after years as pretty grotty flats. The work to be done was, well, monumental, and although the previous owners had worked hard, they'd really only scratched the surface before they had to sell up and move on for their work.

Well, John and I had great intentions, but we also had young kids, and we were very busy with our writing and our work, and let's say we got used to the congealed and peeling paint, the dropping plaster, the plumbing that never worked - and anyway, we could never afford the improvements. We stopped seeing the remains of yale locks on all the doors and the big dents where they'd been kicked in (now there are a few narratives lurking!). And the books piled up and hid it all, as well as the furniture we inherited from dead relatives - well, we had the big house, didn't we? We could be the depository for the family 'heirlooms' (a piano that doesn't work any more, but on which my mother learned to play when she went as a playmate to the lord of the manor's daughter, so it simply can't be jettisoned! Chests of drawers with half their handles missing etc etc).

Except when people came to stay: that's when I'd get embarrassed about the piled junk and peeling wallpaper in the bedrooms and the cracks in the walls, and the patterns drawn on the ceiling by the previous owners' children and the blocks of wood knocked into holes in the plaster (!). Well, I won't go on.

And now all of a sudden we are going to have a houseful: people coming to the launch tonight need to stay! So three weeks ago John and I decided to create at least one decent bedroom. This is why I haven't been blogging. For the past week we have been working against the clock, from nine in the morning till nine in the evening, scraping and sanding and painting and driving ourselves to distraction and exhaustion.

A strange way to prepare for a launch, don't you think? And guess what, the room's not finished anyway, so there's one less half-decent room than before...

Split personality? Moi?

It's a funny old life, this writing one. Last winter, after three years on a very big project, I was housebound, almost agoraphobic, and I think all my friends had just about given up on me. I was starting to envisage an old age of shuffling to the shops every afternoon for a little bit of entertainment, and beginning to think I'd been an idiot to choose this way of spending my life (not of course that it's a choice - I just can't help it).

Yet this summer and autumn, with the production of my play The Processing Room for the 24:7 Theatre Festival and the publication of Balancing on the Edge of the World (not to mention taking part in a short film) - well, let's say I haven't drawn breath, I am hardly ever home and when I am I'm climbing over piles of unwashed laundry, and - a writer with the need to observe! - hardly noticed the seasons passing until I was forced to do so, thankfully, to write the Manchester Blog Story.

So here I am longing for a bit of peace and quiet again and a CHANCE TO GET BACK PROPERLY TO WRITING!!! It's such an irony. You dedicate yourself to your writing and to do so you need to retreat (well, I do, anyway), to answer to nothing but your own dreams, but nowadays, once your writing becomes public there's no choice but for you to become public too - indeed to become some kind of mad PR machine - and, most ironic of all, the writing comes to a standstill.

And it's not over yet. There's the proper launch of the book, and I have three trips to London lined up, and today is the first, so excuse me now as I dash off for a shower and then for the train, dreaming of those cosy December days when at last I'll be able to sit down at the desk in my pyjamas and get lost inside my own head again...

And then of course, by March I'll be longing for contact with people and the outside world all over again...

Salt and Transmission reading at MMU

Last Thursday I took part in the Transmission Magazine/Salt Publishing event at MMU. It was a great evening and I enjoyed the others' readings immensely. Earlier in the day I met our Salt publisher, Jen, who arrived laden down with camera and tripod and a box of David Gaffney's new book, Aromabingo, which apparently he hadn't even seen yet. Jen says that's one of the great things about being a publisher - she keeps her arms well toned.

Here's a photo Jen took of the four of us Salt authors after the reading: David, Neil Campbell, Steve Waling and me.


After the reading we all went over to the Sand Bar, and I had far too late a night when I had a reading and workshops at Edge Hill University the next day!

Bloggers in the flesh

What a great do the Manchester Blog Awards was! (Didn't win, but what would you expect when you're up against the other nominees in the Arts and Culture category - including the amazing Mancubist, the eventual winner?). A big thank you though to everyone who nominated my Fictionbitch blog - I was very surprised and immensely flattered.

There were some great readings from nominated blogs, and we had a smashing time: Norm (also nominated) and Adele Geras were on the next table, and Norm and I were able to talk about how addictive blogging is, and Adele, always with an eye out for the physical details, said she liked my shoes, but actually they were far too high for climbing on stage to read the final instalment of the blogstory, and I nearly came a-cropper!


Trevor from the reading group and his wife Anne came down to give support, and Trevor was pretty shocked when Art of Fiction blogger Adrian Slatcher said to him, 'Oh, I know you: I know all your opinions!' and was quick to inform him that he only knew my (blog) version of his opinions of books.

Caroline Smailes was there, giving a reading from her great book In Search of Adam and answering questions, and as usual Kate Feld, the force behind the whole evening, was a brilliant compere.

The other winners were as follows:

Best Personal Blog: Single Mother on the Verge

Best New Blog: Rent Girl

Best Political Blog: Politaholic

Best Writing on a Blog: Day of Moustaches

Manchester blog Awards and a reading of the final episode of the Blog Story

The Manchester Blog Awards tonight at Matt and Phred's, 7pm. I'll be there, reading the final episode of the blog story. I wrote it at the weekend, as I've had a hundred other things to do this week - preparing for workshops and readings - and I've been on tenterhooks all day today, hoping that there was going to be no ground-shaking breaking news which would mean that I'd have to sit down and thrust everything else aside and re-work the story at the last minute!

Special guest Caroline Smailes will be there too, reading from her fantastic novel In Search of Adam, which was picked up by publisher The Friday Project from Caroline's innovative blog.

Reading at Independents Day

Just back from Manchester Literature Festival's day for independent presses at the Lowry in Salford and my first reading from Balancing on the Edge of the World.

Well, I guess twelve noon is not a good time to get people flocking to a reading, especially somewhere a bit off the beaten track, and actually I got a dozen or so, so I guess that wasn't bad going!! The worst thing was following Chloe Poems, that fantastically seasoned and hilarious (as well as moving) performer, dressed today as Sandie Shaw, and who doubled up before his own gig crying: 'What is this hour of eleven-thirty in the morning: I don't know it!'


You see, we matched: blue and red! (Well, OK, the red's just in Chloes' cheeks, and I was in black too.) And we both read stuff set in Manchester and about being drunk and out on the town! (Chloe's book of poems is The Lil Ol' Book o' Manchester.) And during his reading Chloe had a brilliant tantrum about this big posh building we were reading in, which can be built while people are homeless - after which I read my story which begins with a homeless guy. Oh, we Manky guys - so angry, yet so swish and abandoned!!

Here's Chloe, bless him, listening to me reading:


And here's the view our wardrobes were competing with - through the window right behind us:


Later, at two, fellow Salt author Shamshad Khan read and got the audience, which had begun to swell by then, miaowing and barking like cats and dogs.

Finally I attended a very interesting panel discussion on independent publishing chaired by DJ Taylor, who came out with this line which we should all get engraved on our foreheads: 'We live in a culture that's based on the glorification of stupidity.'

My new book!

Oh my goodness, I have lost all will to vacuum the stairs, which was what I was doing when the front doorbell went, and a man in a luminous gilet was standing there with a box which I knew - because Jen told me yesterday - was full of copies of my new book!

Needless to say, I wanted to rip into it straight away, but he said, 'I need you to sign,' and I had to put it down. And then he stood there for three minutes setting up his electronic signing pad and moaning about how it was all so much quicker when he had a pen and paper, and I was trying to stop myself from jumping up and down on the spot, and noticing sideways what a beautiful morning it was, and how everything suddenly glowed in the sun, his nice brown skin, his amazingly luminous gilet, the tan leather cover of his signing pad, and then at last, at last, he let me sign and went and I shut the door and ran for a knife and slit the tape, and there they were: piles of beautiful cool blue copies of my book, all silky to the touch!!

Oh, there's nothing like this moment - the moment you first see your newly-minted book!

And it's the moment when it's no longer private, but a public thing. And indeed on Saturday I'm reading from it at 12 noon in the Circle Bar at the Lowry, Salford, as part of the Manchester Literature Festival Independents Day series of events. ( Book on 0870 428 0785 or www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk, but I think you can also get tickets on the door.)

Rejected!

Well, this blog just been rejected by BritBlogs - I think maybe because, for several posts running, I've been posting here about the interactive Manchester Blog Story which I've been writing for the Manchester Literature Festival, and it looked as though this blog was simply a portal to another!

Undeterred, I'm going to alert you to this week's instalment, which has just gone up online. It's such an interesting literary experiment, but have to admit I've found it a bit hard to talk about the process while I've been actually writing it. As I said at Saturday's Blogging for Writers workshop (which I conducted with Kate Feld), I'm one of those writers who doesn't like to talk about her projects while she's still writing them, and even finds it difficult, because the whole process of writing for me is rather intuitive and 'magical', using a different, non-logical and associative part of my brain from the one required for analysis of literary processes. But of course this project isn't simply mine, others have had an input, and in order to involve them I've had to promote it by talking about it on the radio - which I have to say I haven't found easy.

I know that when it's all over- and when I'm scheduled to conduct a workshop about it at Edge Hill University - I'll have loads to say: you won't be able to stop me!

Because of last week's voter choice, our blogger-narrator Cat is undecided about her feelings for her housemate Ahmed, and the mystery of the elusive stranger is about to unfold.

You can vote to influence the nature of the mystery and thus the end of the story by doing so before 8pm Thursday.

I'll then unveil the final episode by reading it at the Manchester Blog Awards on Wednesday 10th October, Matt and Phred's Jazz Club, Tib Street, 7pm (Tickets free, but please book on 0870 428 0785 or on the Manchester Festival website.

Cover proof

A nice surprise this weekend: the cover proof of my forthcoming story collection from Salt (a bit wonky in the scan above as it was so big I couldn't get it straight in the scanner). I'm still getting used to the new processes in publishing. It's the first time I've ever had bound proofs - that is, bound with a proper cover - and it seems odd to be getting the final cover proof after I've actually had a 'book'. The new cover is lovely: silk, whereas the bound proof cover was glossy, and very luxurious-looking and -feeling!

Blogging for Writers workshop

Just back from the workshop 'Blogging for Writers' at MDDA, where I learnt something new: that I can't work on a computer and talk to a group at the same time - I lost my thread two or three or times! Interesting: I hadn't realised how utterly silent and private and inward this space at my keyboard was: because of the interactivity of the blogosphere, I had thought of it as quite the opposite. Now I understand why, when I've been doing a spot of blogging, John acts as though I've been away somewhere!

It was a great group of writers, with varying levels of knowledge about blogging. Kate Feld did a great job of explaining the fundamentals of blogging, and by the end of the session everyone, even complete beginners, had set up their own blog and was ready to join us all. I was going to take a photo if people had been willing, but guess what, that was another thing I forgot...

Manchester Blog Awards

Well, I'm pretty thrilled: my other, issue-based blog has been nominated for a Manchester Blog Award.

The blog awards will be held at 7pm Wednesday, Oct. 10, at Matt and Phred's Jazz Club on Tib Street in the Northern Quarter. Tickets are free, but should be reserved via the Manchester Literature Festival website.

At this event I'll also be reading the final instalment of the blog story I've been writing in the run up to the festival.

Go here to find the list of nominees.

A pub, a club and Nan

Instalment 4 of the blog story, 'What Would You Do?' which I'm writing for the Manchester Literature Festival, has now been posted. Last week's vote means that in this week's episode, 'A pub, a club and Nan', Cat must dash from her nan's somewhat robust party to the gig where she hopes to get information about the mysterious stranger - with an unexpected development.

You can vote on how that development should pan out, and you have till Thursday 8pm to do it.

Book launch: Some New Ambush by Carys Davies

Last night John drove us north out of the pelting rain of Manchester to the dryness and quaint stone buildings of Lancaster, where in the Dukes Theatre Gallery fellow Salt author Carys Davies was holding the launch for her fabulous collection of stories, Some New Ambush.

These stories are wonderful. Wry yet magical, and ranging from a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum to contemporary Chicago, they are fairy tales of human longing and determination in the face of fate. Carys read from three of the stories including 'Pied Piper', which blew me away when I read it, beginning as it does as the tale of a woman who finds a baby in the sand and passes it off as her own, and turning out to be a depiction of the human effects of one Britain's worst industrial disasters.

Here's Carys signing books after the reading:


I got my precious bound proof signed, and also a copy I bought for Christmas for my mum, who comes from the part of Wales where some of these stories are set. Luckily, my mum doesn't read blogs, so she won't find out unless anyone tells her. Right?

John McAuliffe at Manky Poets

I haven't been to Manky Poets for ages. It's run by copland smith (who spells his name without capitals) and is held in Chorlton Library one Friday each month 7.30-9.30. The first half is an open session in which audience members read - beginners and experienced poets alike - and then after the break there's always an invited guest.

Last night I went and found that the numbers had grown hugely in my absence - I arrived rather late and had to stand, as the only seat available was way at the front. Typical me: there was one seat near the back, and I promptly sat down on it, only to realize when the poet reading finished and came towards me looking stymied that I was not only sitting on her seat but on her bag!

Well, last night's guest was John McAuliffe, and a thoroughly enjoyable reading it was. He's a warm character and reads engagingly and his poems are funny and moving and at once sensuous and muscular. What I loved about them most was their concern with a kind of doubleness of both place and time: Ireland recalled in England, moments triggering the memory of others, layered and altered by their layering.

Great stuff. And great that copland has made Manks the success it is.

Blogging for writers

It seems that there are still a couple of spaces left in the Blogging for Writers workshop which I'm running on Saturday, Sept. 29 with the fabulous Kate Feld, writer and Manchizzle blogger.

We'll go over the basics of blogging as a tool to market your work, experiment with different styles and get projects off the ground. And have fun writing! It'll be from 11am-1pm.

Later the same day Kate will be running a more general blogging workshop, So You Wanna Be a Blogstar?, with Chris from Mancubist. It'll be for anyone setting up a blog, or anyone who has been blogging for a while but needs a little inspiration, and will run from from 2-4pm.

Both are just £2, and take place at MDDA headquarters on Portland Street. We will have computers available for those who need them, but the place has wireless so you can bring laptops if you like. Book here at the MLF site.

Late night, late September in Manc

To the BBC again late last night to update on the blogstory for the Radio Manchester Phil Woods show. Last time I went the streets were so quiet, but last night - well! What were all these crowds???? Sauntering in great crocodiles along Oxford Road and down Charles Street, dressed (in spite of the weather) in Hawaiian shirts and shorts and sandals, and strappy tops and pelmet skirts with bare legs or fluorescent legwarmers - and carrying balloons???? Like a children's tea party but with adult-sized guests?

Ah! Freshers week, of course!!!

Instalment 3 of blogstory goes live

Instalment 3 of the Manchester Blogstory is now up. We had a bit of bother with the poll site last week, and huge apologies to those who found they weren't able to vote. This week we're using a different one, so there shouldn't be any problems.

Those who could vote last week chose Ahmed the sound operator who lives at the top of Cat's house to help her begin to solve the mystery of her anonymous caller, and in the current instalment there's a development when Ahmed invites the inhabitants of the house to be extras in a film he's working on.

This week you can vote on a radical plot twist for instalment 4. Voting ends 8pm Thursday.

Last day of voting for Chapter 3 of blogstory

There's still time to send me into a pickle for chapter 3 of the blogstory - voting is open until 8pm this evening.

Voting for Chapter 3 of the Blogstory

Voting is under way for the next episode of the Blogstory, and Ahmed, the sound operator who lives at the top of Cat's house - a character who hasn't yet featured much - is at present way ahead as the person who in the next episode will inadvertently help her on the trail of the mysterious stranger.

It's a weird process, this, and maybe I shouldn't be looking at the votes, but I can't help it, I'm far too curious, of course. But I really mustn't yet start to envisage scenarios involving Ahmed - what if the voting pattern changes, as it did last week?

There's still until tomorrow (Thursday) 8 pm to vote and make a difference!

Chapter 2 of Blogstory goes live

Chapter 2 of the Manchester Blog Story, What Would You Do?, which I've been commissioned to write for the Manchester Literature Festival, has just gone live.

It's set in Central Library, which readers voted for - and I just hope I've come up to their expectations!!!

I didn't sleep much last night, as I was still mulling over a particular phrase - and I had to get up early this morning to get it to administrator Kate Feld in time!

Tagged after all

Well, I've been holding out against this tagging lark - otherwise how can I go on complaining about the tendency to want to know about writers' lives (rather than their books), as I do on my other blog? But now Jen at Salt has tagged me, and what can you do but comply when your publisher tags you, and anyway she makes it such fun, so I'm giving in:

"Each player starts with eight random facts/habits or embarrassing things about themselves. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog."

Here goes:

1. My mother once dressed me up for a village fete as a summer salad, and what this did for my self image may be a matter for the psychiatrist's chair. (I was only four, but I can still remember in a physical way the shock of cold when she placed the necklace of cucumber slices round my neck.)

2. I recently sat in a cooling bath for an hour and a half (mercifully dressed in a strapless dress) while a film director and cameraman decided on the shot they wanted. By the time they had finished I was a wrinkled prune.

3. I sing to myself without knowing I'm doing it, which made my children want to walk ten steps behind.

4. I talk to myself, too - or more accurately, I mouth the stories I'm writing - which makes my children still not want to walk with me at all.

5. A lost skill: I can't cook any more, I'm always too busy writing to practise.

6. My feet are so big that when John first met me he bought me Fats Waller's Your Feet's Too Big.

7. I'm crazy about cabbage, and never get enough as no one else likes it. What's fantastic about North Wales restaurants is that they serve it up!

8. Something that still makes me blush: I once agreed to use clippers on the head of someone about to go on holiday with a brand-new girlfriend, an event he was somewhat nervous about. I sneered at his worry that I might drop the guard, and then went and did just that and made a bald stripe up the back of his head.

Now I have to tag eight others:

Sally Lawton
Caroline Smailes
Debi Alper
Amanda Mann
Clare Sudbery
Lucy Pepper
Nicola Monaghan
Charles Lambert

Blogstory: readers vote for Central Library

So the vote on the blogstory was overwhelmingly for Manchester Central Library. This is where Cat's mysterious caller will tell her to go for a meeting, rather than the rumbustious pub in Salford or the the slick, slightly wild ambience of the Printworks with its bars and clubs. Not only does this potentially have a bearing on the identity of the caller, it makes me wonder about the readers who have voted. Why have they voted in this way? Is it because Central Library is the place they know and/or like best (in which case of course they're a pretty studious lot)? Or is it that, like the voters on Sarah Hepola's interactive blog story (see earlier post) they want to steer the characters in that more 'worthy' direction? Either way, the reality of readers is already strongly imposed on the story.

So it's quite funny that when I met an (admittedly senior) friend at the bus stop this morning and told him I was writing an interactive blogstory, he grimaced and rolled his eyes and did a comic quick retreat away from me and from something quite so trivial and trendy and 'unliterary'!

Blogstory voting

Voting is going interestingly for the blogstory, and implies that it's a pretty literary lot who are bothering, since so far Central Library is way ahead as the venue for the narrator's mysterious meeting. That's not how it began, however: at the start the Salford pub was in the lead, but unfortunately the voting site we were using at first went down and we had to swap sites. This meant that we lost the first dozen or so votes, which had been heading the story in that direction. I know that Kate Feld, the site adminstrator, tried to transfer those votes to the new site, but I don't think the software let her. So if you voted on Tuesday morning it's possible that your vote hasn't been counted, but you should be able to vote again on the new site. Voting closes tonight at eight, and then I'll have to get writing again!

Sundar Kanta Walker at the Portico Library, a dash to the BBC and a drink in the Lass o'Gowrie

To the Portico Library last night for the opening of Sundar Kanta Walker's final leg in the tour of her fantastic show of paintings, Samsara: The World, The Universe. What a surprise: since the first show in Sale last October, Kanta has added numerous new paintings, some of them huge and all overflowing with vibrant energy - and Kanta is such a little woman, I don't know why she wasn't flat on the floor rather than looking her usual bright-button self.

Some of these new paintings made me shudder in an exciting but disturbing way, and Kanta explained to the assembled guests that the theme of this exhibition is our treatment of the environment and its resultant cataclysmic changes. The picture above is Kanta's vision of a tropicalized Lake District, and others show mountain ranges where the brush-strokes and colour shifts seem dynamically to split mountains between melting heat and desolate uncompromising ice, capturing our sense of the uncertainty of the future in a way which brought my heart into my mouth. But, marvellously, there are pictures too celebrating those things which, if we are not careful, we could lose, and the shot below shows Kanta beside one of them.

I couldn't help thinking there was an interesting culture clash between the urgency of the paintings and the gentility of the venue: live music, a gentle harp and a flute, above us the beautiful recently restored Georgian glass and plaster dome, all around us shelves of old leather-bound books, one wall classified in gold lettering: Polite Literature. And the reading room, where William Gaskell and Roget once sat. I love the place, but there is still an air of nineteenth century elitism about it - the way you have to be let in at the door, the fact that you need a letter of reference before you can ever borrow books and the original club-type membership system still in operation. There's good reason, of course - the books are a special and crumbling resource which need great care and renovation (the library is engaged on a massive ongoing renovation project of the books and the weakening shelves.) But you know me: I stood taking the photo below of the gentleman's-club type reading room, and couldn't help making a connection between nineteenth-century elitism and the state of the world about which Kanta is painting.

And then home for a bite to eat, and out again back to the BBC to talk about the blogstory on Radio Manchester's Phil Wood show, and then across the road to the Lass o' Gowrie and a world Gaskell and Roget would never recognize, where John was chatting to a bunch of ecology students all dressed up as animals (don't ask me why) and who should also be there but Art of Fiction blogger Adrian Slatcher and, guess what, we talked about blogging until chucking-out time.

Kanta's exhibition continues until 27th September.

Manchester Blog Story goes live

The Manchester Blog Story, What Would You Do? which I'm writing for the Manchester Literature Festival, has gone live! The first of six weekly mini-episodes, The Caller, is now posted, and readers have till Thursday 8pm to vote on the venue for the next turn in the plot - and then I'll have four days to write the next episode accordingly! It's scary, but exciting - never in my life before have I written so publicly, and never before have I not had the option of going back and changing things which turned out to be extraneous or out of place!

Here's the blurb about it from this week's Manchester Literature Festival e-letter:

Episode One takes place in the hallway of a large Victorian house converted into flats and introduces us to its eccentric occupants. One of the residents has been visited by a mystery caller but will they manage to collect their message?

The project is produced by Manchizzle blogger Kate Feld and sponsored by Richard Fair richardfair.co.uk

Never give up

About three years ago I sent a play to a theatre and received a discouraging response: my play wasn't really a play, it was far too schematic, the characters weren't fully rounded, and worst of all, I really needed to learn how to write dialogue and not have them spouting great explanatory speeches.

Well, you know how it is: you think, Couldn't they see that the style of the play was consciously chosen (rather than a mistake!), that the 'schematic' nature of the piece was deliberately devised as a comment on the schematic psychology of the characters, and that in any case it's subverted at the end? That it's not intended as naturalist, for heaven's sake - that televisual standard of 'rounded' characters' and real-life replicating dialogue? And that anyway, the things the characters say in their speeches aren't meant to be taken at face value, they are in fact subverted and overturned by the action? Are there no script readers in theatres educated in the history of theatre and who don't view life through the lens of Coronation Street!!!??? Didn't they read my ****ing letter and see that I have done tons of radio and can write realist dialogue whenever I like, thank you very much?!!! (And probably better than them!!!!) (You're getting vicious now and spitting.) Haven't they ****ing heard of me in any case?!!!!! Are there no script readers who know how to read a script? (You are practically foaming at the mouth by this time.)

And then of course comes the moment of doubt, when, even though you have thought all of these things, you think: But what if they're right? What if I am a crap writer after all? Because there's just no proof that I'm any good if I can't get past these script readers and get my plays on... And you start to think that writing theatre plays is a waste of time and you simply stop doing it...

Well, don't do that. In July I attended a panel discussion, 'Joining the Dots', at the Royal Exchange, held as part of the Manchester International Festival, and was greatly encouraged. One panellist was the inspirational Suzanne Bell, Literary Manager of the Liverpool Everyman - with its admirable record of showing new writing - who proved passionate about new writing. Another was West Yorkshire Playhouse Literary Manager Alex Chisholme who said (with what Chair Tony Clarke, AD of Hampstead Theatre, called admirable honesty) that working recently with a PhD student of Drama had caused her to think that British Theatre may well have been missing plays and playwrights by being too hung up on narrative and character because those are the things it's easiest to teach - at which Tony put in with the statement that he didn't in fact think it was up to other theatre professionals to teach writers how to write.

And guess what? Earlier this year I sent the play I mention above to the very same theatre all over again because the artistic director had changed. And when I got back from Wales there was a wonderful letter understanding everything I was trying to do and lavishing it with praise! They're not putting the play on, but the praise was really inspiring - and what's great is that they want to see anything else I may write.

So never give up, I say. And the best news is, I think things are looking up.

A reading and celebration for Balancing on the Edge of the World

Last night John and I went to the fabulous Croma restaurant in Chorlton, where we often go. Maybe I shouldn't be admitting this, but I often have my best writing ideas with a bit of wine inside me - it's that sideways, non-logical thing that slight inebriation allows - and I've had several in Croma of a Saturday night.

Well, the really exciting thing is that Kirsty, who runs the restaurant, has offered to do me a launch/celebration for my book of stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World, and Vicky of Chorlton Bookshop, next door to the restaurant, has agreed to supply the books. I'm doing several readings at the start of October (see the list on my website), but this will happen later (we've pencilled in 29th) when they've died down a bit, and will be more of a celebration. Details have to be organised yet, but I'll be keeping everyone posted, of course!

Reading group: White Noise by Don Delillo

Yet another book I read in Wales was Don DeLillo's White Noise, last month's reading group choice, the story of university lecturer and Hitler expert Jack Gladney who lives with his nth wife and a house full of step-children, and suffers existential gloom and unease - or more precisely, a fear of death - in a contemporary world of confusing signs.

It's a while now since we met to discuss it, and in the meantime I've been filming, so my memory of the discussion isn't too detailed: what I remember more than the discussion is the darkness and dampness of the evening, so typical of this odd summer, and the fact that the dog in Hans's house was suddenly different, because his old one had (shockingly) died, and every time we went to the loo the new one jumped up in excitement and wrapped us in her lead.

I know we all liked the book. Some of us, Trevor and I in particular, loved it. Trevor began the discussion by stating that the author was having a go at most things in the modern world, but I said, Wasn't it more precisely about the loss of boundaries between fantasy and reality (see, it's all coming back now) and Jenny said, No, surely it's about the fact that we can no longer distinguish between what's important or not. I had to agree that this was true, too: there's a running joke about the fact that there are 'PhDs now in cereal packets', and key scenes of the book take place in the supermarket, the place where

people scan the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal.. Many have trouble making out the words... Smeared print, ghost images... But in the end it doesn't matter... The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners... This is the language of waves and radiation.

We all loved the hilarious discussions between Jack and the younger visiting lecturer Murray, who is studying such cultural signifiers, and the fact that Jack's subject, Hitler, is of no greater cultural significance than Murray's, Elvis, in the scene in which they lecture together, almost physically dancing their subjects together around the room. We loved the way the household TV set ends up in one of the children's bedroom and becomes a god-like voice from above puncturing conversations with surreal and meaningless or trivial announcements. We loved the irony of the fact that when a real threat suddenly enters the family's life - a chemical spill causing a toxic airborne event - no one can immediately recognize the danger for what it is. We found brilliant the book's subsequent joke in the response of the Simulated Evacuation officer to the real-life toxic event:

'The insertion curve isn't as smooth as we would like. There's a probability excess. Plus we don't have our victims laid out where we'd want them if this was an actual simulation... You have to make allowance for the fact that everything you see tonight is real.'

One of the brilliant strokes in the book is the suggestion by the authorities that the toxic elements in the spill cause deja vu which is consequently experienced by the characters even after the suggestion is withdrawn.

There were some quibbles: neither Hans nor I were convinced by the original premise of Jack Gladney's obsession with dying - we felt that, on the contrary, nowadays people refuse to think about death - indeed this is one of the notions I explored in my recent play, The Processing Room. However, there is a conversation between Jack and Murray in which Murray states that this is the other side of the same coin. Most people, even I, felt that the book lacked forward momentum before the airborne toxic event, when it suddenly became riveting. Doug said that this was his main objection, the fact that there was no real story, and while he agreed about all the other things in the book, ultimately he was left wondering if it added up to much as a novel, rather than an entertaining and well-written exposition of a point that was made from the very beginning. I said, But isn't this the point: the book formally portrays its thesis, that we can't shape narratives any more, we are at the mercy of forces and codes we can't decipher? Jenny, however, said she liked the comfortable tone of the beginning and went off the book when she got to the toxic event.

John said that he wasn't sure about the ending: were we meant to believe that Jack really had committed such an extreme act at the end, and if so why were there no consequences, when he had left so much evidence? Or were we meant to think he had so lost touch with reality as to imagine it? Everyone else said, No, it was meant to have happened, but it's not remarked on because violence is normal now, and no one knows what's important or what anything means, though John still looked doubtful. I said that I had had similar doubts about the unrealistic lack of conflict or emotional disturbance in a house full of stepchildren, but in the end had put them aside because this wasn't a realist novel. Some people said they had skipped bits as boring - which I couldn't believe, as I thought the prose so brilliant - concise, witty and telling.

We all noted how prescient this book was, pre-imagining Bhopal and even 9/11, and prefiguring our present unease and uncertainty about what we are experiencing - is this a freak period in the weather or a new status quo? We marvelled that the book was published as long ago as 1985.

Finally, John said that when he got to the end of the book he experienced deja vu and thought he had read it before.

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

Normblog profile

I am honoured to have a Normblog profile up today.

Gearing up for the Blogstory, Manchester magazines and a reading

Just back from a meeting at Cornerhouse with Manchizzle blogger and writer Kate Feld, the brains behind the Manchester Blogstory commission. We talked about the story: less than a week to go now, and I've started on the first episode, which goes online next Tuesday - scarey! I haven't found it exactly easy coming up with a scenario which fits the format, allowing enough possibilities for developments of the story without creating dead ends. But I think I'm managing it, and I'm pretty hooked on the characters, so I hope others will be. I discovered that Kate conducted an interview for last winter's issue of Manchester's pretty impressive Revolvewire magazine (still on sale at Cornerhouse) with Sarah Hepola, who between 2004 and 2005 wrote a similar interactive fictional blog, The Education of Elisabeth Edelman, for the internet magazine The Morning News. In the interview Hepola says that she found reader interaction created a more boring story than she would have liked - people constantly voted for the safe options for her character - so I hope that doesn't happen here!

Kate and I also talked about the workshop we are running together in the run-up to the festival on 29th September (11 am - 1 pm at Manchester Digital Development Agency) for creative writers interested in beginning a blog or increasing their blogging skills in order to develop and promote their own writing.

And before I left, the brochure for the Festival arrived in the post - it looks like a great eclectic line-up of events.

And speaking of Manchester magazines, I'm delighted that this very morning Jen, my publisher at Salt, invited me to take part in a joint reading with Salt and the splendid litmag Transmission which specializes in short stories. (MMU at 6.30 on Thursday 11th October; MMU readings are open to the public.)

A Hidden Life by Adele Geras

Here's another book I read in Wales: A Hidden Life, the fourth of Adele Geras's vivid adult sagas packed with memorable characters and ancient feuds and secret histories. One day it rained all day, and I sat tucked up in bed with it for most of the day while the ash trees whipped and swirled outside the window and the mountains disappeared, and got transported by this tale of an unfair will and the shocking revelations that ensue.

There's a Dickensian vividness in Adele's treatment of her characters, and her ability to juggle a large cast while closely portraying the emotional predicament of each is impressive. The central drama of a disowned granddaughter and single parent coping with the machinations of her step-relatives is a truly modern Cinderella tale - with a satisfyingly contemporary resolution.

Before Wales I had begun the book on the train when I went to see my mother for the day, and took my paperback proof copy as easier to carry. Guess what, I came downstairs, and my mother was reading it and hooked - and I had to leave the proof copy behind!

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.