Headspace

I was having a conversation with someone earlier today about the importance of headspace, i.e. getting the inside of your head upholstered appropriately.
In an office-based business you'd expect nice shiny office chairs, desks at the right height, some potplants, maybe a little kitchen and good lighting. Why would your head be any different if, as a writer, that is your workspace?


I have been frantically busy recently with a couple of life-changing events that are taking up most of my mental and physical capacity. Even though I have had a little spare time, I have not been able to write (including blogging) because the inside of my head is so utterly filled with clutter and paper aeroplanes flying around. If my headspace was an office right now it would be condemned for several hundred breaches of health and safety law and the workers would be streaming out through the front lobby in horror.

Hopefully soon the headspace will be refurbished, the paper aeroplanes filed in the correct drawers, the keyboards dusted off and I'll be able to write again.

Flash Fiction at Bewildering Stories

I have a story called 'Sharp Focus' in Issue 341 of Bewildering Stories.
Click on the link to the right to view it!

New Words

Just a little something I came across today.

I was reading an article in the Comments section of The Times Online about the male pill. The article was quite light-hearted, discussing the attitude of dog-walkers to un-castrated dogs, a study in China where only about four fifths of the men remembered to take the pill even though they were (presumably) being paid to take part in the experiment, and the tendancy of both men and women to lie about contraception. All interesting reading over a lunch hour.
Being the online version, comments had been posted at the bottom of the page. One included the phrase 'I loled when I read about your dog'.
The word 'loled' isn't in the dictionary. Or if it is, it won't mean 'perfect tense of the abbreviated form of Laugh Out Loud'.


Yet. The language of technology is forever creeping into our speech. 'Phone has dropped its appostrophe to become both a noun and a verb in its own right. I've already mentioned The Times 'Online'. Even e-mail has lost its hyphen: I email, you email, they all emailed some emails.

Lolcats abound on the website ICanHasCheezeburger (much loved on this blog). Almost everyone under the age of 25 would be amazed if you thought 'lol' at the end of a text stood for Lots Of Love (a joke elaborated on brilliantly by the comedian Matt Kirshen).

Very soon lol, loling, loled, lolable will all make their way to the Oxford English Dictionary. For anyone who is a little uncomfortable at the idea, I like to think of language as a big party to which we are all invited and there's always room for one more. Even the poor castrated dog.

Fingers Crossed

I recently submitted the standard first three chapters of my novel, Maynard Hill, to two independent publishers along with my shiny new synopsis.
Both have come back to me and asked for the full manuscript.

Fingers crossed.

Doorknobs and BodyPaint

My new foray into flash fiction (stories of less than 1000 words) is definitely paying off. I've had my third success, this time in the quarterly fiction e-zine, Doorknobs and Bodypaint (see link to the right).
The piece was written in response to a challenge: write a story in less than 450 words about people's life choices using only dialogue. I'm quite scared of dialogue - I think it's one of my weakest areas - so I'm delighted to have been accepted. (AND - modest cough - mine appears under the banner First Prize. I don't think I win much more than honour but that's better than a kick in the shins, I think.)
The premise of the story is 'what if people really grew up to do all those jobs they dreamed about as kids? And what would speed dating be like?'


If you were paying attention a few posts ago you'll remember I wanted to be Hazel from Watership Down when I grew up.

Salt Publishing Needs Your Help!

Salt publishing are a small, independent press publishing short stories and poetry, among other things. They are truly tiny, but have made a big impact in terms of creating a home for the short story and for poetry in the last few years. Unfortunately last year the Arts Council decided to completely revamp the causes to which they supplied funding, as you may have seen in the press, and Salt were one of the losers.

They're asking you to buy 'just one book' from their website (http://www.saltpublishing.com/), Amazon, or anywhere else (providing it's first hand, not second hand!). They need to sell about another 3000 books, which is not a huge number in the scale of things.

Do culture a favour, get yourself a good book to read, and support the cause. Then get all your friends to do it too ;)

Kindle: the new e-book reader

What is this?
To kindle... to light a fire, to grow flames from very little. Kindling... the small, easily-lit bits of wood or paper used to light a fire. To animate, to inflame.

So, calling a new electronic book reader a 'Kindle' implies... what? That a new love of reading will be kindled by this device? The name certainly hints at something new.

And that 'something new' is where I am divided on this matter.

Reading is nothing new. I myself have been doing it for a good number of years and I am given to understand that others before me have discovered meaning in all those funny squiggles.
I am a book lover. I love books. The very sight of books excites me and I become positively giddy inside a library. It isn't just the words; it is the feel of the paper, the binding, the smell, the weight.

More than that, to own a book is to possess it. There are many, many people like me who cannot bear to part with a book, even if they know they are never going to read it again. To give it away would be like losing a friend. A book is a world more than the words which physically inhabit it.

So how, then, is this electronic device going to kindle something that a book cannot? How can it replace the joy felt when a new book is opened for the first time? How can something so cold and sterile take the place of something so beautifully tactile as a book?

Ah, so back to that 'something new.'

A Kindle cannot replace a book for the simple fact that a Kindle is an electronic device and a book is a book. Printing still has not replaced manuscript illumination. The production of hand made and bound books is enjoying something of a renaissance. The British Parliament still record their laws on vellum as it is far more durable than paper.

So instead, what new experiences can the Kindle offer?

Imagine you were travelling for a year (lucky thing). You would be able to fit every Lonely Planet ever written and several small libraries in your rucksack. You'd feel like a geek on the beach but you'd still have a straight spine at the end of it all.

Imagine you're going to a conference. Before you board the plane you have downloaded all the relevant papers plus background chapters of books. It doesn't matter that you don't have the actual hard copies: you don't want your house filled with books about the hydraulic analysis of unsteady flow in pipe networks anyway.

Imagine you're a computer nerd. Books about C++ and suchlike are out of date by the time they even get to the printers. You can download e-books the moment they become available and delete them when they're obsolete. Without chopping down a single tree.

I would even like to remain optimistic about the future of a publishing industry that has such a low-cost method to reach new readers.

I'm not rushing out to buy a Kindle but neither am I sneaking out at the dead of night, burning pitchfork in hand, to destroy them. Let's see what, exactly, is kindled by this e-book revolution.


Any thoughts?

Stephen Fry reviews The Da Vinci Code

"It is complete loose stool-water. It is arse gravy of the worst kind."

Spoken on QI. Genius.




I imagine Da Vinci himself would have agreed with this assessment.

Better Careers Advice (From Anne Fine)

Following on from the last post I would like to tell you about the best careers advice I ever received. This was also at school. I don't think it is surprising that it was from a writer.

Chilren's author Anne Fine (pictured above, doesn't she look like a lovely lady?) came to my school once to talk at our annual prize-giving. We normally had really boring people who were generally terribly sucessful in industry to come and talk to us about success, working hard and all those other quite dull things, but this year (god knows how) the school had managed to persuade someone famous and interesting to come and speak.

I remember Anne Fine's speech being witty and interesting, and I remember her talking about education and success not always being best measured by exam results but in terms of personal achievement and the satisfaction a person gains from a task. As I was sitting on the prize-winners' bench I remember not being that impressed by those sentiments; I wanted maximum fame and glory, thank you very much, but I appreciate what she was saying now that I am very much older and my life isn't measured in percentages and grades any more.

The one thing that really stuck out for me was her advice on what one should do with one's future.

"Find something you enjoy doing and do that."

Simple.
At the time I wondered what on earth that would be; I was maybe thirteen or fourteen and enjoyed giggling my way around record shops, reading Point Horror, making mix tapes and going to friends' houses to chat. Not much you could build a career on.

But the fact that her advice stayed with me showed that it must have struck a chord somewhere: I think the idea of a job as something to be enjoyed was entirely new to me, but her sunny personality and obvious love of life gave her words weight. She had followed her own advice and it had worked well for her.

Careers Advice

When I was five I went through my 'Watership Down' phase and wanted to be a rabbit when I grew up. Specifically, Hazel. Hazel was my hero: courageous, resourceful (maybe I had a tiny crush on him, I don't know). To her credit, my mother did nothing to disourage me, despite the difference in gender.

When I was sixteen I wanted to be a writer. I was good at English and liked writing poetry (some of it not so awful, even reading it back at this cringingly long distance.) I was going to do A-Level English and then go on to read English at university. This seemed to me the obvious route to being a writer: study lots of books and then write your own. Simples.


I was fuzzily aware in the back of my mind that there wasn't one of those nice management-training-course set-ups for wanting to be a writer; no-one took you on after university to write a book for them. So how did people become writers? There were journalists, screen writers, novel writers, magazine editors... There were a lot of words floating around but I wasn't sure how to get at them. I worked on the school magazine but I did the creative writing side and wasn't sure about factual writing. I was a bit scared of it.
So I made the terrible mistake of going to see the school careers advisor.

Oops.

I think the clue was in the title. 'Careers'.
I spent some time in the tiny careers library looking at glossy leaflet options.
1) Let the army sponsor you through university? Great! Money to study... and then three years of killing people dead at 5am. I hate early mornings.
2) Management consultancy. Lots of money! Training following a 2:1 in any degree! Don't even understand what it is! (Although now I have lots of friends who work in management consultancy even they don't know what it is, so that needn't have put me off)
3) Accountancy! Training following a 2:1 in any degree, even English! Numbers! Lots and lots and lots of numbers! And being organised! And tidy!

It didn't occur to me that these glossy brouchures were created by companies who could afford to produce such things. Not one of those leaflets was 'how to be Roald Dahl', '10 steps to becoming Stephen Fry' or 'Margaret Atwood 1,2,3'.

So the meeting with the careers advisor began. I have to mention (you might have guessed from the fact we even had such a thing as a careers library) that my school was a bit academic and was very good at getting clever girls into Oxbridge. All well and good.

"So, what is it that you're interested in?"
"Well, I'm good at English and I'm planning on studying it at university."
"And how can I help you?"
"Well, I'm wondering about, well, jobs after it [I didn't have a word for the thing that writers did. 'Job' didn't really seem right]."
"Of course, a degree in any subject [even English, it was implied] can lead on to all sorts of things. Had you got anything in mind?"
"I like writing."
His shiny little cherry-blossom face lit up.
"Ahh! Wait one moment."
He rustled around on the shelves and came back with an assortment of glossy brochures.
"Have you considered a career in advertising?"

Now, I know some perfectly nice people who work in advertising. It is a very good career and pays well. But advertising is the devil and accounts for about 90% of misery in the western world by promoting lifestyles and aspirations that people can't afford and don't need.

After discussing the routes into advertising and the possibility of one day, if I worked hard, maybe even writing snappy captions for shampoos, I went away clutching a pile of glossy brochures with such titles as 'Marketing for Graduates' and 'Advertising 1,2,3'.
I felt oddly let down, although I couldn't say why.

I just felt further than ever from Stephen Fry.