A dish well-cooked with Masterchef precision – Sarah Hilary’s Tastes Like Fear

The third book in the Marnie Rome series, after Someone Else’s Skin and No Other Darkness

It was immediately obvious, from the opening few pages of Sarah Hilary’s Tastes Like Fear, that this was exceptionally well-written, the antithesis of pulp fiction. The scene is set beautifully or rather, London is presented in all its ugly squalid stink and risk. There are some eloquent turns of phrase that never feel over-written or didactic. Like a bad but rogueish lover, London become an oily, fascinating and distinct character of its own, like Hardy’s Wessex. I have rarely seen a better and more tender portrayal of kids on those harsh London streets, too, vulnerable as a crab’s belly. The Lost Children. I did a tiny bit of work in the past with a charity called Railway Children, who dealt with homelessless and runaways. So Tastes Like Fear is real and reflects the situation as it is now. Characters are strong, self-contained and memorable. Our detective has a past, a past damaged by murder. It fuels her, pushes her forward – a classic example of how anger at a situation can be productive, valuable. As a reader bored with being spoonfed, I was grateful that here, I was given the intelligence to deduce for myself and that wonderful gift that is mostly seen in Nordic Noir (which this is not, but it is equal in quality and darkness) , the space to think about things. Marnie is a fascinating gal who really pours heart and soul into finding the missing, helping the families who have lost them. If I needed help, I would want Marnie on my side.

Think writing crime is easy? Try juggling enviable pace, psychological insight, three dimensional characterisation, believable dialogue and a plot that compels the reader to keep that book open. Alternating perspectives are tricky too but they keep things fresh, fast and intriguing. If Tastes Like Fear was a cake – it would be one of Mary Berry’s best. Pacy, punchy and powerful, with some unusual but spectacular and unexpected flavours – it also has another factor that makes a book into a novel with resonance – compassion. As we watch the odd and disturbing world of a killer, a killer for whom family has become a warped concept that makes sense in his twisted and constructed world, we are equally horrified and fascinated by him. Harm – our perfectly named bad man – compels us to look and listen to him even if we feel ashamed, like straining to look at traffic carnage.

There were so many characters that drew me, that existed beyond the scope of the book. Noah was charming and sexy too. I wanted him as my friend. As with all the characters, I felt that they were flesh, brain and soul.

After I finished Tastes Like Fear, I had to analyse for a while why I found it such a satisfying read, why I was happy to rip through page after page, neglecting everything else around me. Ultimately, it’s because I felt the author’s sincerity. Nothing was gratuitous and the lurch I felt in my heart as a mother when reading about the young victims was also genuine. I was connected. Hilary is fierce as a writer but empathetic, oozing an angry intelligence about human nature, our capacity to be truly bastardly to one another. It helps that this is done in strong, muscular prose. The reader is never allowed to be complacent and in this, there is one particular shock that I absolutely did not see coming. Want to hear the plot? Read it.

Ashes to Ashes Indeed

Most of us would love to believe that we are strange, mercurial creatures with an alien inside. The truth is usually more mundane; most of us are pinstripe prim – at least on the inside. But we grew up chafing against conformity – a single earring here, an attitude (that most didn’t notice) there. I went out around a small market town – Hereford - in bondage trousers and a combat jacket, with a punky bounce and I thought, a sneer. I was but a tiny tiny speck in the universe – a nothingness. Yet there was Mr Bowie – that voice seems to cleanse my blood and make me want to scale mountains while shouting down ‘see you suckers’ to the people below, spiky finger in the air to the world.

As a teen your emotions are undulating bloody monsters. Bowie in a single song could tap into melancholy, that disconnected anarchy that goes on in the black soul of an arrogant but terrified teen. He made you feel that strange was norm, that the normal people were the freaks. I had a very beautiful German boyfriend – Paul Schindler – who was an enormous fan. So, as with all of us, Bowie will mean a place, people we knew or attitudes we struck where we were most happy. Mine would be Berlin, I think, running up one of those high-ceilinged hallways to someone’s flat, or watching Marianne Faithful ride in black leather in Girl on a Motorcycle, in a shabby building in Berlin that had been turned into a cinema with seats from a bus. The wall had just fallen and it was an exciting time to be in the city.

Tomorrow I will be fine but today has been a rather discombobulated one and I have returned to adolescence – just for today, to indulge, to listen to a lot of Bowie. I was about to buy The Man Who Fell to Earth for my own teen but I am sure that they will show it on TV.

We all love the alien. We may never be alien and we can plod through our lives carrying our secrets and our stubborn strangeness. So thank you Bowie for all you gave us, how some of will share the grief and then we can smile and dance around to you. We won’t talk about Absolute Beginners and we won’t mention Tin Machine. We all make mistakes, my darling boy and we can forgive you much. For the songs, for the wonderful wonderful weirdness that made us all feel sane in our difference.

Life So Far

It has been an obscenely long time since I shared anything, personal or writing-wise, on this blog. Life continues to throw some challenges at me and there have been times when things are coming in from so many angles, I can’t catch them all.

I am lucky in a lot of ways – I am very proud of being able to work with my beloved wolves, to have brilliant friends and a funny feisty girl I adore.

Recently, I read about Sinéad O Connor and her meltdown with a certain amount of sympathy. It is a little too easy to judge someone when we are in a happy, sane, comfortable place. What drives someone to share and rant on social media can be a desperation, a sadness and an imbalance of sorts.

As writers, should we not communicate to others in depth, particularly on points that are meaningful to us? Writers like Matt Haig have opened themselves up to the world and talked in great depth and sensitivity about depression. It helps him, it helps others but of course it makes him vulnerable. I admire him for that.

Sadly, when we share – there will often be others who do not understand or choose to say cruel things to us, or just live to troll. I have always been a sharer, a communicator.

Ultimately, I would still like to think that I am a writer. I certainly love editing, writing and proofreading – but my own creative writing has recently taken a back seat due to unpleasant personal circumstances. I respect my daughter but she took a very hard decision to have nothing to do with her father when he walked out on us. She had some very serious problems and I made sure that she had a stable home, even when I had to fight to keep it. Every parent – every good parent – will understand that the tigress comes out when our offspring are threatened. However, when my mother was sent a vile message from my ex partner’s new wife, it gave me a very clear view of how they see me, how nasty they are together – which is rather sad. It is easier to blame me presumably than to look at the truth, of a man who leaves his sick partner and a vulnerable child. I have never used my daughter in any way, or denied her support. I did not choose to be a single parent and it has been bloody bloody hard, particularly with bad health and regular chemo. My discussions and arguments with my ex other half have been justifiably furious, considering how ill our daughter has been. That is OUR relationship, based on twenty years together in which we were incredibly close. I was his first love, his first proper girlfriend and we shared many beautiful moments together – including days in London when we took out the whole series of I, Claudius and watched it in bed. Lots of utterly wonderful times and a lot of laughter. I will not have that stolen from me. Ever.

Yet writers have a huge advantage – everything can be used and I am now writing a non-fiction book, that will hopefully help others. There will definitely be over-sharing in that.

In the spirit of over-sharing, I would like to share the badly-written and unbelievably nasty message sent my diabetic mother, who is nearly eighty years old. Facebook in one of its odd moments had attempted to add my ex’s wife as a friend – this is how she responded:

I am not completely sure what or who drove you to contact me and more to request my friendship?
By all respect, which I do not have for you or your daughter, somebody who needlessly attacks my family either directly or indirectly has no room in my life and also I have no need to have such people around me. I do not care if you were cajoled to do it or if it came directly from you, somebody of your age should know what is appropriate and what is just tasteless.
I was always hoping that you could be the voice of reason (my husband and my mum-in-law had nothing but nice things to say about you) and convince your daughter to move on, live her life instead of wasting it on some manufactured self-pitying lies, childish procrastination and endless bullyboy tactics not even stopping at involving her own daughter. Instead of being happy and making sure that her daughter has as many people in her life that love her and support her, she selfishly strips her of that right only for self-gratification purpose. If that is what you encourage and support then I feel only pity for you.

So, I have over-shared but this will be fuel and I will do well. It has been an awful four and a half years.

JULIE AND COSMO – THE TOUGH AND THE TENDER?

Julie Burchill and Cosmo Landesman in the same room. Could ever such a thing happen? Well it did – at Covent Garden’s Horse Hospital on a skin-flaking December night. December 2nd to be precise. Both were there to discuss their respective memoirs and in particular, some small recollections of their marriage. Can a memoir ever be subjective? Is an entirely straight account simply boring?

Two people, once lovers, sat on the stage – with journalist Katie Glass between them. There was a crackle of anticipation. Many people in the room knew Burchill, or were fascinated by her unusual, unquiet life.

It was clear as the night progressed that Julie and Cosmo are very different people: Julie is a modernist and a mischief-maker. She believes in ‘candour in all things’. Candour was clearly once a worry for Cosmo, as he once put a stipulation in their divorce papers that Julie never spoke about their relationship. When Cosmo spoke publicly about their relationship first and broke his own embargo, she saw it as a release to do the same, albeit with great discretion. ‘I was a gentleman,’ she said quietly. Cosmo is much more of a measured and melancholic soul but his description of the young Julie tip-tapping out words while asking sweetly to be fuelled on more booze and cocaine - still producing ‘perfect copy’ - was a revelation. ‘I was taught by a master,’ he admitted and his tone throughout was seemingly fond, nostalgic and self-deprecating. They both remembered the ‘cold vodka and hot sex’ of their early affair. In contrast, the notorious bileophile Julie was disparaging about Tony Parsons, her first husband. He was, she said, always keen to come to London to parties to ‘be all cockney and also be my bespoke fucking guard dog’. It was clear that Cosmo – her ‘hot jew’ had been an escape, an adventure and a breath of clean, unpolluted air.

Their first meeting – or memory of it – was an example of how subjective memoir truly is and how detail is remembered so uniquely. Cosmo met the ‘hip young gunslinger of punk’ and she met the ‘son of the parents who have an open marriage’. The young Julie was all legs and pale skin, whereas Julie saw Cosmo as a young John Taylor from Duran Duran, without the flounciness. Or the hair. ‘Now you look like a Jewish grandmother,’ she giggled. Cosmo’s peculiar family – the subject of his memoir - was talked about a great deal.

Julie read a chapter from her memoir Unchosen called ‘Meet the Perverts’. Cosmo’s family were notoriously into free love and they pottered, kaftan-kinky, in a crumbling house in Islington that they had picked up for a song in the sixties. Cosmo describes his father Jay wearing purple nail varnish and his mother in a see-through kaftan at the school gates. ‘Were you jealous of your father?’ asked Julie. ‘I guess I was,’ said Cosmo. His father was a libertine but a very successful one, with women at least. The fact that he tried to blag his way into parties with his ‘I’m Julie Burchill’s father in law, don’t you know!’ truly placed him as a wannabe, besotted by celebrity. Cosmo’s mother Fran once berated the clean very working class Julie for throwing away mouldy bread. ‘I dislike beards on men,’ said Burchill –‘ …but I dislike them even more on bread.’ She was pretty brutal about his parents and described Cosmo as the ‘only intelligent person in that house’. A house she nicknamed Slaggy Heights. ‘Not so much Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ she said, ‘…but more Guess Who’s Coming to Do You…’ It prompted a member of the audience, who knew the Landesman family well, to stand up during open questions and make a long defence of the parents. She wasn’t the only person to make a statement rather than ask a question, as some people seemed to have missed the point of a time for questions.

During open questions, a woman garbled a little about being middle class – most of us lost her point – whereas Julie told her sweetly: ‘I can tell that by the way you talk.’ (She was high end posh). It was a great putdown and some of us were choking with laughter. Burchill is funnier than a donkey on acid slipping on a banana skin. She gives you belly laughs because that’s exactly where she kicks. Cosmo throughout simply shrugged at the stories and muttered ‘true…true’. I actually quite liked him and wasn’t expecting to. Julie was very generous in complimenting his book and he gave her a number of sincere compliments too. Not a love fest, but a relationship with a certain amount of respect, particularly as they share parenting.

Ultimately, there were some fiery moments, but no blood drawn. Or at least, none dripped. Julie did sneer at Cosmo’s romanticism of the past. ‘You think things were better then,’ she told him. He denied it, but his protests faded away pretty quickly. When, during their marriage, he told her he was writing the great London novel. Later in his life, his failure to do it successfully was always a regret for him. The Tough and The Tender was the intended title. ‘Sounds like a butcher’s memoir,’ Julie giggled to the audience. But she was unimpressed by a suicide in the novel of a character very obviously based on her: a woman who ultimately throws herself off Brighton Pier. ‘If I had written about you throwing yourself under a lorry in Tesco’s car park, you wouldn’t have been happy. It’s so mundane. But you are more of the suicidal type than I am,’ she said wryly.

Cosmo painted well the fire and fun of their life together. Yet he rarely smiled. He seemed to have a melancholic core that has hardened over the years. He talked about the young punky girl teasing him and call him a fucking ponce with one ‘crazy demonic finger’ – pushing him to write when he was tangled up in angst and procrastination. He admitted once to only 250 words and he was known for rewriting shopping lists. ‘Just hit out the fucker,’ was her advice. I was reminded of the glorious film Betty Blue – where beautiful troubled Betty acts as a strange but effective mentor to the blocked writer Zorg.

However, if you think that I am referring to Julie and Cosmo as the tough and the tender in the title, you would be very wrong. Julie showed a great deal of tenderness during the evening, particularly in the way she described her parents: ‘straight out of Thomas Hardy novel’. She talked quietly too about the Stalinist influence she inherited from her father, which faded eventually but formed a lot of her opinions at the time. She considered that each new marriage was better and Cosmo gave her confidence, was the sherpa who took her up the mountain. At the summit of course is now her Dan, the brother of Charlotte Raven, who she originally left Cosmo for. ‘I will die in my marriage, ‘ she said, before apologising for being ‘operatic’. Cosmo also talked about being with Julie as ‘winning the lottery of love’.

But ultimately, the subject of Julie’s memoir Unchosen is her love of the Jewish faith. It was only brushed upon during the evening but she is very clearly fuelled by this love. She now has a happy marriage and her Jewish faith. Her eyes shone and she sat up straighter whenever Judaism was discussed. Cosmo pronounced Judaism as ‘Judyism’ in his chewy American accent and called himself a ‘bad jew’. He was quickly corrected and for a second, you saw the solid husband-wife combo in their comfortable berating of one another. Two writers in the same house must have created interesting chemistry. Cosmo argued that she was not quite so pro-jewish when he knew her, but Julie vehemently denied that.

A tough and tender lady indeed. I feel Julie Burchill – the heroine I so admired in my bondage-trousered teens – is tough in terms of not accepting any bullshit, but is tender in terms of friends she loves, a husband she adores and a faith she will be fiercely faithful to for the rest of her life. But don’t think settled and slippers – that is not her style. There is still the same naughty insolent spark in her eyes and when she told the story of Cosmo asking her about books on her bedside table when she was younger, her remembered reaction was typically scathing: ‘Bedside table, I said! I don’t have a fucking bedside table! What am I – 50!’

Now 50 has come and gone, but Julie Burchill still has energy and things she wants to do. If she has climbed a mountain, from the evidence of that evening, she has not only arrived at the top, she is planting flags everywhere with happy, well-oiled hyperactivity. I hope she and Cosmo take their banter on the road. They have so much to say about marriage, the process of writing and the world as we are experiencing it now. A great night.

J K Rowling and her Cloak of Invisibility

I was intrigued by J K Rowling’s recent flirtation with her cloak of invisibility. There will be plenty of people – particularly publishing folk – who will dissect and analyse her motives, as well as sniffing out a cynical marketing exercise that will of course, in time, make money.

I do have to be honest – the industry that Rowling began has given me my house and the food I eat. My ex other half worked on Potter for ten years and it was fascinating, but more so for the tactile talent it stirred up amongst designers and artists, who had a vision that was spurred from a reasonably-sized book. The creativity of crafting wands and Rowling’s early involvement with drawings and notes was genuinely exciting. But talk of it was forbidden at home - it grew so big that it was too overwhelming at times. I went to a few Potter parties and again, if I’m honest, I was bored. Actors are lovely but they ‘are’ rather than have vast and complex things to say that have not been written for them. Film folk too sometimes have a hard edge or they live in a rarified world where the veneer is important, but nothing is deep. So when I finally got to talk to Rowling – a fellow writer - I felt a sense of relief.

She has been typecast so much – so many have built a sense of romantic poverty about her life. People flutter around her, waiting for their good fortune to arrive from a touch of her hand. So what did I ask her? About Wales of course. She went to school in Chepstow and grew up in that area. I was a Tintern teenager and although the valley is lovely, I can fully understand the need to create worlds of your own, to cloud-dream lying on your back in a field. The penultimate film recreated the forest in the Severn Valley and so I asked her if she missed Wales. I had a lot of champagne inside me and she had more – but the joyful way she talked about Wales was real, very passionate.

But I didn’t ask her about the name Hermoine. My mother – who had an antique shop in Tintern, not far from Chepstow, had her name across the shop front. Her name is Hermoine – not Hermione – my grandfather spelt it incorrectly on the birth certificate. But I often wondered if J K Rowling made the connection. Yet I never want to know – to be disappointed, perhaps.

But drunk or not, she struck me as intelligent, mischievous and playful. In some ways, it’s sad that people can only see her as money as a ‘standard’ for writers. ‘You can be the next J K Rowling’ is the most vulgar and depressing thing I hear from non-literary folk and even, shame on them, some bookish souls. Money is important of course – it cushions you from some pain – but literary excellence is better, surely?

So I understand why she wrapped herself in Gaibraith (which means ‘stranger’ but also is a Scottish estate agency.) For a moment she could walk in the world with a moustache and a big hat pulled down over her face and people would still say ‘Handsome fellow.’ Writers are about words, the quiet internal worlds. But successful writers – where we know their faces and every aspect of their lives – invite huge amounts of criticism and some jealous sneering. Many attack the work as sport and it often goes beyond literary criticism. So the production of this work quietly let her know that she can write, that other writers rate her without all the baggage of the Rowling name. She has broken out of the typecast and instead of the main part in the panto, she was for a while the back end of the horse, watching the audience from a hole in the cloth.

Many discussions will be made and now of course, like people who forensically analyse the darkness in pop songs, meanings will be made for her Cuckoo. But a cuckoo too is of course in disguise and the over-grown nest baby and by the time it is revealed, it is too late. I’m sure that there was lots of playful knowing symbolism that made her chuckle when she was writing the book.

She is not the first writer to write under another name and if you can afford to experiment as a writer, then why not? It worked for the wonderful George Eliot in a sexist age. When writers become a clumsy and monstrous brand – they surely crave some delicacy and impartial judgment of the words they spill on the page? Let’s love our writing – be the best we can and stop being jealous of those who actually get off their backsides – or should that be settle down on their backsides – and write! Not to be the next Rowling, not to copy any particular voice or see gold in the print. Just to write because you have twitchy fingers and some tiny little fictional people keep matchstick-poking your brain to smear their lives on some paper.

In The Lowlands

Depression is like a dog chasing its tail. But it’s a tail that not even the dog wants. Not really. It is just the compulsive need – a short circuit in the brain – that prevents the dog from leaping up and racing outside to join a world of new. Of vibrant. Of delicious potential.

I now put my hands up and admit that I am deeply depressed. But I am only depressed on certain days, when my Interferon kicks in and the bugger causes this reaction. So I know the cause – it’s a recognised side effect. I don’t want anti-depressants. Really don’t like the idea of a pill-popping Valley of the Dolls existence. I have a bit of an obsessive and compulsive personality but not OCD. They are separate things.

Matt Haig – he of new book The Humans – has spoken out about depression. I saw him launch the book last week and when he was asked by a fellow depression sufferer if he wrote through the low bits, he admitted that he hasn’t had a major low for quite some time. His focus and humour were very – oh I hate the word ‘inspiring’ – but yes, they were.

In fact, I do love the way writers are formed. It is rarely a linear process. They get battered as they go along, something is chipped or they stumble. Or they deviate into various daft adventures. Where else can you see a CV that is proud of ‘I was a circus performer at gunpoint, ran cigarettes for the Gestapo and plucked chickens in Margate’ etc? But writers do need not to be neat creatures, if they are to find little strange moments, characters that you would never meet in an accountancy firm. Of course, there are those who live a neat carefully controlled life who can write purely from imagination – particularly famous fantasy writers. But they are rare. Things spark from wandering down wrong streets.

I have been down some bloody awful streets. Taken risks, been in relationships with unsuitable folk, been reckless. There were times, when I met a golden-haired Oxford graduate that I felt ‘Jeez – how messy my life is and how blessed and Brideshead brilliant their life must be.’

So depression is a dark street and sometimes, a rough hand pulls me into a street littered with fag butts the smell of failure. But stories also come in those times – they just may need a little lighter shading in the good times. Dark is good but some stories are coloured in by oblivion – so much so you can hardly see them.

I mentioned the dog and that depression can be a debilitatingly circular affliction. You worry and thoughts magnify, repeat and then hurt you so much you can’t function. It’s bloody annoying because you end up being a bore, melodramatic. Yesterday I went to a Quaker thing in London. Religion can be boring too – if people with shine in their eyes try and persuade you that their happiness can be your happiness, I run away. Quakerism is never like this. I am an atheist Quaker and this is fine. All manner of things are fine in Quakerism. It’s a Society of Friends and activism is a huge part of it all – whether it be political or compassionate. It’s also about thinking, challenging preconceptions. One Quaker talked about his bisexuality and how the Society of Friends now embraces same sex marriages. Another fellow talked about his militant atheism and how he loves to ‘embrace the anarchy.’

It felt like an intellectual movement, rather than an incense and robes kind of religion. The latter is fine for some but really, I’ve done that and I have the ‘Bloody Guilty All My Life’ t-shirt. But finding a group of folk who share your world view is also about joy, finding it wherever you can.

So – what was I talking about – oh yes, depression. Yeah, it’s annoying but I seem to be pushing myself to productivity. Most writers do. It almost becomes a ‘I haven’t got depression or alcoholicism– good grief I can’t be a writer!’ If you are not in the gloomy club….tut, tut.

But when you are in that low place, your skin is softer. I was hit hard recently by someone beloved telling me that ‘You were special, but not that special.’

Someone who can kick a dog (chasing its tail) when it’s down – may reveal much about a person that no further comment should be made. It helped me let go of them completely – hoorah! No one that heartless deserves much from me. Special is subjective and we shouldn’t really be hostage to anyone else’s approval. Special is what you do, how you treat people, that soft chicken fillety thing in your chest. Trying not to sound like a shy over-sensitive snuffly schoolteacher in thick-can’t-see-you-without-them-glasses – but YOU ARE ALL SPECIAL.

News?

I am writing a novel: The Modelmaker’s Daughter. Trying to run along with a 1,000 word challenge with my writing group Reading Writers. Keep getting sidetracked by various travel writing and article things.

Have had article on Abruzzo published in The Independent on Sunday: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/europe/abruzzo-poetry-in-motion-in-central-italy-8603826.html

The best thing about that?

My guide Alessio – who is mentioned quite a lot in that piece – sent me a message: ‘Brave, Maestro!’ To put his beautiful country in a British newspaper, made him incredibly happy. You can warm your hands on other people’s happiness, can’t you?

I have been shortlisted for The Bath Short Story Award, which felt like some bloody achievement.

White blood cell count is very low but I treasure the ones I have. I will treat them well and try to keep them away from stress. Maybe I shouldn’t take them down too many dark streets. In fact, I should be a better writer and not mix my metaphors. Dogs chasing tails and dark streets indeed! Ah who cares. They are my words, my indulgences, my legacy.

Write well and prosper, folks!

ALL THE LOST CHILDREN

It has been a crazy few weeks. Whenever I have been tired, I have remembered greater folk than me. Did Scott of the Antarctic seek a comfortable chair and a Hobnob? Did Shackleton watch bad TV? No because they pushed up through unpleasantness and strain – to achieve great things.

Not at all comparable – but I have challenged myself to do interesting stuff and none more interesting than going to Downing Street. Me – an ex-anarchist – walking the stairs where many decision-makers' slippers have trodden. But this was important – an event for RAILWAY CHILDREN

http://www.railwaychildren.org.uk/campaigns/help-make-the-invisible,-visible/

A group of mostly women (as we had been selected through our connection with Mumsnet, the very vocal parenting site that often makes the news) met first at Horseguards Parade Hotel – for lurid macaroons and to meet several other charities around the country who deal with children on the streets:

www.streetwork.org.uk
www.safeatlast.org.uk
www.aberlour.org.uk

These lost children are invisible to most. Outreach workers, who can see them, are out there all the time – not only checking on anyone obviously homeless, but identifying children at risk.

Statistics can be powerful – but these just made me sad:

‘Every year thousands of children across the UK, India and East Africa run away or are forced to leave homes that have become unbearable through poverty, abuse, violence and neglect.

In the UK a child runs away from home every 5 minutes. That's 100,000 children under 16 a year, and 70% of those children are never even reported missing by those who are supposed to love and protect them.
Unwanted, unloved and often abused, children find themselves alone and at risk on the streets simply because there's nowhere else to go and no one left to turn to.

The streets are often even more dangerous and frightening than the homes these children were desperate to escape. Violence becomes a way of life; something to be endured and often a necessary means of survival. Sexual abuse and exploitation is rife. Drug use often seeps into the lives of children living on the streets and becomes impossible to avoid; drugs are often the only available escape from the hopelessness of their situation. These factors are the same across the three continents in which we work.

With no means of support or protection, these children fade into the background of the streets, often unseen by societies who either deny their existence or regard them as the 'norm'.’


So many of these children are under twelve years old. Imagine not even having a dozen years on the planet under your belt and to be out in the world. Vulnerable, maybe superficially tough but on the inside, where it matters, to be tender and lost. Truly disturbing.

The flip side wass hearing about the incredible workers who put their time into these projects. They radiated enthusiasm and sincerity when they explained their work. It must never be forgotten how vulnerable a child is out there.

Downing Street is a tiny political village. Policemen laughed with us but their hands never left their guns. Inside the place there is Tardis magic and as you walk up the stairs, you have to stop to look at the handsome Earl of Aberdeen and the many many portraits Prime Ministers who have graced the place. Samantha Cameron came to support the charity. She is not her husband and is a person in her own right. But it still felt a little uncomfortable, especially when I talked to her. I felt a bit better when I chatted to Andy, who gives talks for Railway Children and has been at the rough end of things – in care, waking up with another strange tattoo he can't remember. He told me that being in a Tory den was nothing – there were plenty of places where he had felt a lot, lot dirtier. But it’s all about the kids to him. Theresa May arrived as we were leaving but was not impressed by a gaggle of women giggling on the steps.

Fanastic charity, great experience.


I have also:

Helped to judge a short story competition with Reading Writers

Auditioned unsuccessfully for Blithe Spirit

Rejoined my playwrites group

Attended a Writers and Artists’ event at Bloomsbury and spent time with wonderful writers Vanessa Gebbie and Tania Hershman

Said goodbye to someone and truly meant it – a door closed and locked firmly

Met a member of great Indie band The Real Tuesday Weld at a gothic and gin-pickled event called London Bone (which I will blog about shortly).


Exhausted. Communing now with my pillow but still thinking of all those children out there. Some stories are coming too...always a good thing...

The Society Club in Soho - What a Night!

On Saturday, while sitting Last Supper style at The Society Club in Soho, I talked to Tania Hershman about a book she had read on the power of the introvert. It was a fine night – in a pockety, vibe-laden corner of Soho. There were dogs – tiny little ones and a happy-gloomy bulldog, who were taken away before the literary performances by a tall boy-man in a black suit, with otter hair. One was left – Foxy – who barked only sometimes but was zen mostly.

But it’s a interesting thought – that we all fall into various levels of extrovert/introvert comfort zones. A writer, by their very nature – has to live in the mind for some considerable period of time. But then hermit land will not sell books – so the writer has to emerge, blinking – to pump hands, flash teeth and look interested when dull people ask ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Is there any smart answer? Perhaps to elaborately mime pulling them down from trees, or something equally sarcastic.

Saturday was immense. Tania of course but also James Meek, Jane Rogers and Alex Preston. Alex read an unpublished story about a literate, angst-infested dog. James Meek – who had apparently only just finished writing his story but it sounded slick, cleverly-shaped. Tania read the title story from her collection, which she said ‘got more laughs than usual’ – plus treated us to three other stories. Tania is a natural performer and shines when reading her work. Jane Rogers really showed us an unreliable narrator – but unreliable because the narrator was losing her power to remember as she slipped into dementia.

Four writers and much to learn from all of them – as they stepped out into the world to be extroverts – or at least to share things created in a quiet place.

The Society Club is a marvel and there is more to come as they further champion the short story.

Paul McVeigh’s blog is here too, plus some pictures. I am in one of them…but it might be like ‘spot the ball’:

http://paulmcveigh.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/whats-story-becomes-word-factory.html?spref=tw

PRIVATE LIVES

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/poet-sharon-olds-scoops-ts-eliot-prize-for-confessional-work-about-her-husbands-affair-8451387.html


The news that Sharon Olds has won the T S Eliot Prize for a work that mines her experiences of betrayal – a husband leaving her after three decades, raises an interesting element of the creative process. What chemistry occurs in the creative brain – not all brains but some – that percolates negative elements and like Rumpelstiltkin then makes straw tragedy into ingots of resonant prose?

Olds’ work intrigues and seeing just one quote from the book:

‘I did not know him,/ I did not work not to lose him, and I lost him’

makes me see how raw and powerful her feelings are still – but how powerfully she has translated her loss. It is controlled – reminding me of method acting, where emotions are used but they are never allowed to take over the professionalism of reading the script.

Of course – it is not logical or fair to say that writers and artists who enjoy fortuitous lives, in the arms of partners who adore them perhaps, are bland and barren. This is just not true. Many writer friends in particular seem to have beautiful and productive personal lives. Their partners or family give them space, the impetus to create. Some understandably wish to make a division between private and public lives – so we may never know what makes them tick. They need their enigma – they feel exposed without it.

So comfort and discomfort can produce good work in equal measure. It is work of the imagination, after all. But when we are thrown a bad hand, like a nasty card sharp chucking things at us from a speeding car – we either throw it away or shuffle it a little.

I have always felt that poets are different animals – pain and suffering does induce some peculiar type of reaction – like a twitch in the synapses that cannot rest. I once wrote – in a review of the wonderful Irish poet Nuala Ní Chonchúir’s book – that poets are more alive than ordinary folk. I truly believe that – it is their curse and their gift. They see things far below the surface of live as the rest of us hurry along – like veins beneath the smoothest of skins.

I have shared – perhaps cryptically at times – some negative things that have happened in my life. In fact, I have lymphoma – manageable at present – but I have been through experiences that have been horrifying, but have fascinated me at the same time. Losing hair, going through odd machines to see if a lump that appears might kill me, being naked with lead goggles in a room full of strangers – while a nurse inappropriately plays ‘Having the Time of My Life’ from Dirty Dancing.

And then, when it is finally under control at least – with a strong chemo drug – the man I spent twenty years of my life loving and supporting, decides that future with someone ill was too traumatic. He wanted freedom from the responsibility. Flippantly, I can say fair enough.

I wanted to die, frankly. I could see no future. But then a light ignited in that unnecessary damp bitterness and hate that kept rising in my throat and threatening to poison me. Write. Write. Fury. Reach out to people. Join things. Help people. Write. Write.

I still hurt and I will carry it always. It is a scar that opens to a cold wind all too often. But I am busy:

• Winning the 2013 Don Louth Writer of the Year Award, run by Reading Writers www.readingwriters.wordpress.com

• Writing blogs for a friend’s advertising company

• Writing articles for magazine The Simple Things

• Penning another travel article for The Independent on Sunday

• Planning a travel writing workshop and writer’s day for Reading Writers

• Writing the arts/books pages of Wolfprint, the magazine for www.ukwolf.org - which includes book reviews, poems and articles about fascinating conservation folk – such as an arctic explorer and cult writer Glen Duncan.

• Pitching ideas

• Writing plays for the Prospect Theatre Writers’ Group

• Attending as many literary events as possible, including Windsor’s Book Swap, Short Story Aloud (Oxford)…..anything where writers are…

• Mentoring a friend and encouraging her ambitions – then swelling with pride when she gains more confidence

• Proofreading

• Applying to work part-time with the Society for Storytelling


I am far from rich. I am far from happy. But it is a fair enough approximation of happiness to get me through. Writing sometimes feels like flames from the fingers. It soothes, it transports. You can see by its light.

So good luck to Sharon Olds. I shall raise a glass to her. It sounds like a work I would really want to read.

Will Self at The Bloomsbury Institute 4th October 2012

Muttering ‘What’s all this bollocks?’ Will Self climbed up onto his elevated chair next to his editor and scanned the room like a velociraptor looking for flesh.

‘AND I SHALL BE QUEEN!!’ he shrieked more than once.

A theatrical start but what followed was an interesting exploration of a complex man, who is shot through with contradictions. I had spoken to him earlier, at the wine reception in the conservatory. He signed my book and he was calm, earnest. He can’t help that melancholic face but later, when he was excited, there was something highly daunting about his intellectual dismissal of anyone he considered inferior.

‘Someone earlier said my book was warm. I have never been so fucking insulted!’

He would repeat this during the evening – almost spitting out the word ‘empathy.’

On reading other people’s fiction
It was clear that he loves to talk facts, technique. Although denying that he is interested in anyone elses’s fiction, he spoke well of Kafka and Joyce. He had read them in the last few years. He also acknowledged reading Oliver Sachs’ Awakenings. Sachs had impressed him and you get a sense from Self that rarely does anyone impress him. He said he reads to look at the mechanics of things – or as Auden used to write in other people’s margins – if anything was GETS (good enough to steal).

On writing
I asked him (in the before as a ‘shy sharer’ – his phrase) if writing was a curse. He agreed that it was a compulsion. When talking to a very young writer who asked him ‘What advice would you give your 20 year old self?’ He replied ‘Get a job. You’ve got ten years to fanny around.’ He admitted that he was sitting in squats taking drugs – but a writer should be travelling, learning.

On the continuous present tense used in Umbrella

He feels that he cannot go back to ‘The Count took tea at 5 O’clock’ realist style of fiction. ‘There is no way back for me now. Finegan’s Wake is next.’ He admitted that he is excited about Umbrella as a trilogy and he had a productive summer blocking out the other two books. Despite the fact that he hated writing Umbrella, he seemed lighter and excited when he mentioned the next two. Self adopted the continuous tense for the emotional intimacy and although he may hate to hear it – it did indeed make the book a warmer one that the novels that have gone before.

Real people in Umbrella
Albert Death is based on his grandfather – a 6ft 7in man who was a mathematical savant and incredible autodidact. Self scanned the room with dinosaur intensity again. ‘We’re all pygmies compared to him.’ Audrey Death? Entirely fictional. ‘I like old women (a ‘hoorah’ sounded from the back of the room) and young women…I wanted to create a woman to love.’ It was probably the most enigmatic thing he said all night.

Sarcasm
‘Winning the Man Booker? I should have fucking won it years ago.’

(on white Australians) ‘There they are crouching on the verge of this incredible civilization..with the amazing tradition of storytelling…putting meat on BBQs. They are ridiculous!’

‘Oliver Sachs must have felt very demeaned by being played by Robin Williams.’

(on charm) ‘What is the use of charm. It’s the answer before you’ve asked the question. It’s close to fascism.'

(on them choosing the book for the Man Booker) ‘They chose it because there are no gags – so it is considered serious.’


Self has a strong interest in psychology and believes the ‘hard zombie’ theory – that although we technically have free will, we are in fact ruled by deterministic elements. He also believes in more ethereal concepts and ‘could never live in an old mental asylum.’ (Talking about the one he visited while researching the book.)

I did chat to him afterwards. He had told a story about a chimp – the alpha of her troop – he met when researching ‘Great Apes.’ The chimp had pointed at his tattoo on his arm to show her but the keeper had whispered ‘Don’t put your arm anywhere near the bars. She is trying to trick you and wants to break one of your fingers. I know all of them and if I stepped inside, I would be killed instantly.’

Self said 'Of course, these are highly intelligent animals held prisoner against their will and they are fucking furious!'

That was actually the point that I took up with him quietly afterwards – we both agreed it was bizarre that people are shocked that apes are developing, with weapons etc. The conversation extended to animals and I asked if any other animal had inspired or sparked his fiction. ‘I’m not an animal person,’ he said, but he was interested when I said that I worked with wolves – although his first response was a Benny Hillesque ‘What…professionally? Nar Nar.’ He was still up and performing - looking around to see who was listening when he said ‘They are just dogs. JUST DOGS!’ At which point, rather than tell him off like a naughty boy who had eaten too many cakes at a party, I shook his hand and as Shakespeare might say, took my leave.

I found him complex, exhausting, funny, scary, vulnerable, strange, witty, wordrich, awkward, insecure, fascinating, infuriating, egocentric, shy………

What a night.

Recently shortlisted for The Scott Prize, I was not surprised not to win. That is not pessimism talking – but it is another stage that all writers should face: realism and some objective (as far as possible) view on their writing. I rushed to submit to The Scott Prize. I know that some of the stories were good – they have had some literary pats on the back for being just that. But did the collection hang together? Was there a coherent unifying theme? No. There were some weaker stories too – less dark, less ‘me.’ So a learning curve and also a great thing that I even have a collection that loosely hangs together and now can/should be hammered into some kind of shape. Writing has taken a back seat, while I have been working at Victim Support in London. Working as a journalist, seeking stories and realising that I have bad habits when it comes to my IT skills and the way I do things – opened my eyes. But it also made me realise that I will never be a 9 to 5 person, unless there is a job where specific time is given to dreaming. It’s hard for a non-writer to understand but freebasing of the mind is a must on a regular basis. Remember being told off for dreaming at school? It has always been considered a wasteful exercise but it is in fact deeply productive. No one should stop someone in full flow of reverie, although I appreciate how difficult it might be for a teacher of 30 to allow all their charges to stare out a crow while they need to know algebra. I have some horrible and life-changing things happen to me but a writer is shaped by what they experience, whether they are moulded by kind hands or kicked in the stomach. The shape we emerge informs us, changes us, pours into our words. I am still hurting and my writing is a little raw now, rather than angry. But it gives me facets, shades, levels of experiences that others might never experience. So I am peculiarly lucky – to know what it is to be broken and then get myself back together. The writing world is where I sit, I cannot get comfortable anywhere else. I love the people, that world of word magic. Mastery of words is something that no one ever really masters and so you are always reaching, stretching, laughing and crying in equal measure with each inch of progress and pint of failure. I would like to thank Jen from Salt Publishing for even looking and appreciating my words in my collection. Congrats to the very talented Carys and Rob. Such is the Snakes and Ladders of writing and all the more exciting for it!

Some good news

All writers need encouragement and this is such a shot in the arm:

(Taken from Salt Publishing's website)


The 2012 Scott Prize Shortlist


Thank you to everyone who entered this year’s International Scott Prize for Short Stories — the only such prize for full-length collections of short fiction in the UK. We were overwhelmed by the standard of entries and selecting a shortlist has been a long and difficult process. We are thrilled with the final list; every entry has had to work hard to get there and fully deserves its place on it.

This is the Scott Prize’s third year and we are delighted with the success many of our previous winners have gone on to have. We pride ourselves in not only championing the short story, but also giving that crucial publishing break to up and coming authors, many of whom start with their first love, the short story, and go on to further success with full-length fiction.

The winners of this year’s prize will be announced in April; meanwhile, many congratulations to those of you who have made it on to the shortlist:

Julia Bohanna (England) – Ink Eyes
Carys Bray (England) – Sweet Home
Madeleine D’Arcy (Ireland) – Waiting for the Bullet and Other Stories
Rusty Dolleman (US) – Other People’s Kids
Sarah Faulkner (US) – American Heartbreaker
Maurice Gartshore (Scotland) – Mother Icarus
Otis Haschemeyer (US) – The Fantome of Fatma
Julie Mayhew (England) – End Of
Alison Moore (England) – A Small Window
Rob Roensch (US) – The Wild Flowers of Baltimore
Chris Smith (England) – Between the Toes of the Cloven Hoof

Notes to Editors:

1. The Scott Prize is the only international prize for debut full length collections of short stories written in English.
2. The prize is administered by Salt and judged by Publisher, Jen Hamilton-Emery.
3. Previous Winners of the Scott Prize are:

2011:
Andrea Ashworth (UK) – Somewhere Else of Even Here
Cassandra Parkin (UK) – New World Fairy Tales
Jonathan Pinnock (UK) – Dot Dash (to be published 2012)

2010:
Patrick Holland (Australia) – The Source of the Sound
David Mullins (US) – Greetings from Below (to be published 2012)
Susannah Rickards (UK) – Hot Kitchen Snow
Tom Vowler (UK) – The Method

All Things New

Now is the time not to be tiny but to bite, exactly like a flea. It is time to concentrate on getting ahead, truly settling into more success and greater confidence. But it will all be about writing, as other areas of my life are not so good.

As disaster struck - I learned that I had come 2nd in the Sentinel Literary Competition with CHILDREN OF THE RUBBLE

On the worst day imaginable, I had a call to say that I am a finalist in the Brit Writers' Award with A SMALL HISTORY OF JOHN.

Strange- whether it be fate or karma, I do not know.

I am writing with fury - both volume and mood.

Julia Bohanna will get there.

Solitude

Ode on Solitude

Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose heards with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest! who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease
Together mix'd; sweet recreation,
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me dye;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lye.

Alexander Pope

...now what was I saying?

Yes, a long time since I have posted here...poor blog is dusty from neglect. But it is always good to begin with a New Year, new hope - all that malarkey.

Entering competitions again but trying to make a more focused plan for the old writing. Otherwise a writing 'career' can feel like a balloon being held by a moody toddler...all over the place and prone to either floating away or being maliciously popped.

So: (In absolutely no particular order)

1. Journalism - plan to do a bit more of this to earn some money. Have been offered job writing art and book pages for Wolfprint - a magazine for which I already assistant edit.

2. Fillers/letters - all earning but not much time required. Have done well with these in the past.

3. Proof-reading - am doing some now and I love it.

4. Fiction - work on weakness that a wonderful mentor has highlighted. Sharpen. Hone. Find the right competitions/publications.

That’s it – a simple plan.

Get the fuck on with it!

You Would be a Fool Not to Read This....

Today is Fool’s Day. I feel a little bit of a fool at the moment – in the sense that I am stuck in a daft non-achieving fug. Being bogged down by things, by life, is a hazard that everyone faces. I am no different. My daughter’s very serious problems at school – with her motivation, with her concentration - are so very real, so very solid, that they have temporarily eclipsed the wobbly phantom worlds that I usually enjoy creating. I have stopped entering competitions, stopped caring about writing. It feels so very different to how I felt at the beginning of the year, when everything was about possibility. I have even stopped reading, which feels scandalously wrong. My mind is like a fly that doesn’t want to settle – fluttering everywhere. Nervous. Purposeless. (I won’t say attracted to poo but it certainly seems to be seeking out rubbish to distract me,)

I think my brain needs cleaning. It should be taken out gently and a toothbrush run over that knobbly grey stuff. Like polishing heavily chased silver, getting into all the grooves.

There are lots of things that will save the day though – in the end:

1. Beautiful, wonderful, witty, wise and warm friends.
2. My sense of humour – an appreciation of the absurd.
3. Writing. It will get me back in the end.

So goodbye to Fool’s Day. Here’s remembering my favourite character the Fool giving the audience my favourite quote in my favourite Shakespeare play, King Lear:

‘Jesters do oft prove prophets.’

When the Dark Side Just Won't Do......

I like the sound of March. It has one syllable and means movement. Moving forward in fact. A proactive month. The word February is so miserable in the mouth.

On March 1st I feel Welsh. I can smell the rain, feel the slide of my shoes on the wet leaves as I climb up The Devil's Pulpit. There I can look out over Tintern Abbey, where legend has it that the Devil tempted the novice monks

More importantly though - March 4th sees the launch of the 100 Stories for Haiti book.

http://www.100storiesforhaiti.org/

I have felt like a giant to be involved with this book but also very interested to see a very dynamic and positive writer roll the whole idea along with such passion and single-mindedness. Greg McQueen is a very shiny bloke indeed. But it was an interesting process, being asked initially for submissions that encapsulated HOPE. I looked at my back catalogue. My writer friends looked at their back catalogue. What did we find? Lashings of death, distress and dirt. Dyfunctionality oozed out of us. No happy endings. Not the type of work that would have been suitable for this sunny, optimistic book. Ill-fitting for a country with more real horror than anyone could imagine.

So we all had to write something new and I was not the only one who struggled not to take a story into darker waters. I was so unsure of it when I finished, because it didn’t feel like ‘me.’ It reminds me of a very scary (very important) agent I spoke to a few years ago. I had then won a short story competition in a woman’s magazine, with another story that I gave a happy ending, because resolution seems to suit those type of magazines.

You can’t have someone raped and dumped in a cellar in a woman’s mag.

‘I liked this because it was mature,’ the agent said. ‘I am sick of people always giving me dyfunctionality because they think it is literary. It gets boring.’

I listened and `I thought ‘oh dear’ – because darker is more satisfying and to me, more resonant. The dark side – when we actually live in the light in our real lives – is more interesting. Of course if we were serial killers by day, we might well enjoy writing about kissing bunny wabbits and crossing old people gently across busy roads. You see even now I am imagining a scenario with an old person being dragged screaming into traffic. That is the way my brain works in fantasy. In real life, I am gentle. Kind, even. I transfer indoor ladybirds to rose bushes and feel guilty returning late library books.

As writers, we by nature have split personalities. Never even just the two. We inhabit other skins, sins and souls. But I learnt something in writing the Haiti story. I am not a jolly writer. In real life, as I always say, happy endings are desirable. I hope this book contributes in a small way to that shattered country. It is my way of showing love, showing concern. If I can write a happy story to help a sad country, then I am a lucky person.

Also congratulations to the very fine Tom Vowler http://oldenoughnovel.blogspot.com/ and the beautiful Susannah Rickards, for their SCOTT PRIZE win.

So March on, March. Head up, chest out.

Another month turned to history. Ten competitions entered and therein always lies the writer’s vulnerability: if you send your work into the world, there will always be the possibility of rejection. Of course, all writers could lie in bed looking wistfully from a window, wondering if the world is missing their genius. Or they could lick a few stamps/press a Paypal button and send out something they have crafted for judgement.

It takes time to become thick-skinned/professional about the inevitable rejection. It could be worse; actors have their whole selves rejected until their face fits. Imagine some cynical smoking man looking past you as if you are a scab on his dog’s behind – saying ‘Next.’ I once had an actor boyfriend and he whined so much about the rejection process that I took a dare and auditioned for a theatre school on the same day that he did. Bristol OId Vic, to be exact. I chose a scene from Taming of the Shrew and a song from My Fair Lady. There he was, my judge: a tired, bored grey-hued man in a stuffy room. I sang terribly, in a Cockney accent that would have shamed Dick Van Dyke. The Shakespearian speech was worse, as my grey man’s lack of interest completely deflated my confidence. I wasn’t surprised to get a rejection letter. My boyfriend got in and I went on to witness this process being repeated for him throughout. So writers, it is all comparative. We at least are hidden away when we are rejected – it doesn’t happen in a public arena.

What helps though, is sharing. Whether it be to share success – as with Tania (Hershman) who recently won a prize with her play – which makes me feel sunny and proud. I have been even prouder when I have had input into stories which have then gone on to be published or been placed in competitions. I have learnt a huge amount from critiqueing – literary forensics really help a writer to writer better, more dynamically themselves. Or to compare with writerly friends our near misses/abject failures. I like to see entering competitions as one of those intellect-grooming puzzles for children – the ones with the shapes and colours that you have to correlate. I am always trying to bludgeon a blue square into the red triangle slot. But I am learning. Having fun too, especially in an elaborately constructed fantasy life of winning all the competitions in my head.

Have decided for this year to take a particular author or poet and read every single poem/book/story they have produced, as well as all the literary criticism I can stomach. My first will be Seamus Heaney, whose poem Digging is one of my most loved and begins thus:


Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun


I can read that a hundred times and still find it beautiful.

Today is the day?

It’s delicious to put footprints where there are none, stain something a bit too pristine. Not to mention putting all the mistakes and bad things in a bag and drowning them. That to me is how the New Year always feels. Christmas is usually a dull time, where chocolate becomes heroin and television subdues me. I am not religious. Was once. Wanted to become a nun in fact. Loved the glamour and guilt of the Catholic Church. It felt noble and thrilling. At the same time, because my career aspirations were twofold, I told a local paper that I wanted to become a ‘romantic novelist.’ I had just won a poetry competition and the answer filled a gap in the conversation between the journalist and myself. It was a joke. I was ironic even pre teenage. But it was shaming to see it in print and compared to that, the compulsion to take Holy Orders seems a lot more respectable.

Yet the writer bit persists – even if the romantic feeling for writing and religion has been tempered with a fiercer and more realistic ambition. I really want it now, that success, the nodding of clever heads when they read my work.

Today, on January 1st, I reworked an old story and sent it off to Mslexia. Noted it down on my calendar and vowed to forget it. This year I was shortlisted for the last Mslexia competition but this year, I want a prize. If I say it, will it happen? Are you listening universe?

Today has been a positive day. My daughter with her grandmother doing their annual New Year’s Day walk, with dogs, children, determined old ladies. My other half cutting, shaping and laying a beautiful oak floor in our strangely shaped library to be. It was a task, but I saw him with a pencil behind his ear, a tape measure strapped to his belt. He looked happy, creative. We are one step closer to our reading room, which will have no television but a glut of books, a sofa and a desk. A curl up room.

All positive. All forward. I vow that every day I will do something connected with writing. At least start a story, work on an old one, or submit to a publication or competition. No more arsing around. No more Mrs Nice Writer, redecorating her ivory tower with a vase full of peonies. The time has gone to be fey and like the old Doctor Who, I want to be regenerated. Someone more positive would be great. Someone with more energy and less angst would be helpful.

Oh and if it is possible to look like Natassja Kinski circa 1982……..oh well, I will stick to the writing.

Although my writing persona will have changed, I will still be the same human creature. Still as in love with my other half, willing my child to do well, loving my friends and animals with great passion and respect. I will continue to enjoy others’ success, because that has always given me a whoop in my step, a sense of pride. The only difference is that I want to be a great writer.

A really great writer.

Novel-Writing for Beginners....

I have had something of a religious conversion to novel-writing. Having never attempted it before because I have primarily been interested in the craft of the short story, it is a fascinating process.

Of course NaNoWriMo is not traditionally how you write a novel. The aim is to move fast, move ahead, conquer that daily word count. But I have discovered that it has helped me enormously. I am a relatively slow writer, keen on crafting each sentence, discovering the absolutely right word, the rhythm and cadences of sentences. Sometimes I stop and stumble back over something: fiddling, fiddling oh so much fiddling. I like the indulgence of a good metaphor, the odd fanciful simile. Luxuries that further slow me down

So why is NaNoWriMo good for me in particular?

1. For once I have silenced that nagging perfectionist line editor that follows me like poo on a sheep’s behind.

2. I am concentrating solely on narrative, solving problems of plot as I go, not spending weeks as if I am planning to rebuild the pyramids.

3. More than ever, the story is breathing after I turn off the computer. Remarkably so.

4. I have conquered my fear of dialogue and it flows. It is carried in my head from character to character.

5. There is no looking back. So no novel turning to a pillar of salt.

6. I have produced now 28,445 words. Perhaps not the most exquisitely carved Michelangelo but a piece that can be chipped away afterwards to take away the roughness. In the worst instance, I can do what any ruthless business person does when they take over a large company: I can boil it down and slice away lots of the components, create several short stories. I already have one in mind from a minor character I have just ‘found.’

7. Did I say that I had produced 28, 445 words. For me, in fourteen days? A miracle. Usually I would have 2,000 words of the same story.

8. I am looking forward to the edit, always my favourite part of the whole process.

9. I am calmer, more purposeful. This feels like a job now. I go to work and actually manufacture something.

10. Characters have become friends - some enemies - but it is so much fun to string-puppet their lives. I can say pretentiously that I am a novelist. But whatever happens, I have gone on the journey……