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……

Honeymoon period on NaNoWriMo

Five days into NaNoWriMo - over 8,000 words as of yesterday - stretching my fingers for today’s efforts. Like a nervous athlete. But there is alchemy afoot here: a chore has become an organic experience. I am sitting in my office and it seems that my characters are living in the walls with me. I can pretentiously call the exercise a novel…at best it is stream of consciousness, a meander around a story not yet realised or credible. But it lives. Fantastically so. The house lies in sluttish abandon, I have fobbed off my child to another parent….all I want to do is write.

Of course I am not expecting this to last. It’s the new lover syndrome, before the odorous socks and picking of the teeth gets noticed. But for now, I’m enjoying the ride.

Also, my Jack the Ripper story has been selected for inclusion in The Whitechapel Society’s anthology. A few sweeties on the path help the journey. I will be giving Ripper anthologies and Vanessa Gebbie’s book Short Circuit for Christmas. Everyone should be writing and if I sound like a junkie pedalling the stuff - words that is - then I am unashamed of the fact.

Pssst, you out there want to buy an endless supply of your own imaginary worlds?

AT LAST! Writing! I am human once more!

Today I chained myself to a chair and set myself a challenge. A competition that closed today. 3,000 words.

Did it.

Sent it off to The Whitechapel Society Short Story Competition.

How could there be anything better than killing people at home? On the page only, of course.......

Happy.

Ashamed not to have blogged since July. In fact, I have not really written anything significant since then. I have been in quicksand in literary terms, barely holding on to branches that friends have thrown from time to time. It is strange not to write: distressing, frustrating, alien. Life of course continues and the world is still both evil and wonderful around me.

I also had a rat in my house, under the floorboards, building a nest. To me it really symobolised my lack of action; that another creature had moved into my life and was happily 'getting on with things.' Absurdly, I first thought the scratching behind the wall was mice and researched some gentle mice deterrents. They hate bay leaves apparently and so I picked a dozen, stuffed them into the hole in the air brick into which they had burrowed. I felt a tug and deftly, rather gently, an invisible paw tugged them away from me. So it was a rat, not a mouse. Rats love bay leaves. They are such clever creatures that they use them for natural flea control in their nests.

So I had an intelligent life form living beneath my house that was sharper than me. Or was at least at that time. We baited a live trap and the creature took the food and escaped before the door slid down. Genius. At night a huge owl took position on our roof and hunted it. It still survived and every evening I would hear this hard hard scratching.

I am not afraid of rodents. I have respect for their intelligence, particularly rats. If man died out, rats and cockroaches would remain. Fact. But I could not share my house with one, for all sorts of reasons, mainly that he was chewing through floorboards, then possibly wires. not hygenic either, if he got into the house.

Finally, a bacon bait did the trick and the rat sat there shrieking as I approached. It looked like a frightened wild animal, acclimatised to fear by man's hatred and need to destroy it. But we covered it, took some food and released it in a wood five miles from home. Perhaps it has a chance to survive. It had a large belly.....a very large belly.....so possibly pregnant. Just trying to cope with the usual preoccupations: finding a home, procreating, keeping safe.

Then I saw Lost Land of the Volcano, where a giant and friendly rat was discovered. In fact, all the animals were trusting, loving. They had no experience of man's neurotic need to change, kill or wipe out other species...including his own.

There is a twitch forming, a need to write. An absolute need, like a drug hit.

I wonder how my little rat is doing. I have a rat exterminator coming tomorrow. We booked him as an emergency measure, in case we had to poison them. But now I just want his advice where to block up holes etc. I must resist the urge to tease him though. When his mother gave birth to him, she gave him a fine aristocratic French christian name to go with his equally fine aristocratic surname. I don't think that she dreamed of him as an exterminator, or boasted to her friends that her son worked with poisons for a living. She was proud of him, proud of her son ROLAND.

Mustn't tease......

LARDING IT OVER OTHERS (For Anti-Plagiarism Day)

They castrate the books of other men in order that with the fat of their works they may lard their own lean volumes - Jovius


I am not very good at most things: opening jars, riding bicycles, changing lightbulbs. There is a faulty mechanism in the ‘practical’ section of my brain. But I DO words and I even have been known to form them into pleasing and resonant sentences. Stories have always been my friends. At seven, I would write twelve pages when asked for one, escaping into wondrous or terrible worlds. Then when I learnt to shape them properly, those stories got published, even won prizes. My writing made me happy, more than my practical incompetence made me miserable.

So my words are precious. The ideas behind them, which are kept secret until I can form them into something coherent, more so. Because they are original to me, caused by synapses crackling in my mind that make strange connections. Creating peculiar and I hope, interesting characters. I am also often entrusted with other writers’ ideas and their stories in the raw. I can admire, or criticize, or be envious of their skill. But I have never been tempted to take from them. Ever. If someone produces something brilliant, that is their baby. You wouldn’t steal someone else’s child. Would you?

It has taken me a while to realise that not everyone thinks I should be the sole owner of my ideas. In fact, that no-one actually owns their ideas. Is there anything worse than the creep who cribs your answers at an exam? The one who can’t be bothered to revise themselves. The lazy, unethical ones who feel that cheating is OK. When it is down on the paper, it’s theirs – however it got there. The plagiarist who steals ideas, plots or words is this type of cheat.

It is true that ideas cannot be copyrighted. But if a writer steals from others because they have nothing of their own, this is lowest point at which they can sink. If they do it frequently and compulsively, it is an admission of madness, illness or desperation. It doesn’t matter what they do with this stolen property, whether they dress it up and make it beautiful. It’s still linked to someone else and it will never truly be theirs. It carries another writer’s unique scent.

In their hands though, it will always smell rotten.

So instead, let's celebrate the freshness of an original idea, the uniqueness that makes us the writers we are....