BLOG FUNDED BY THE NHS

In the wake of the strike by our national services, I am pleased to be able to report on a healthy and helpful NHS.

To date, I have been blogging recently about me (inevitable I suppose) and the stuff that happens, mainly good.  This week events took a turn in the other direction.  Not big time.  Just ironic, as the link between made a perfect match.

On Wednesday, the shower leaked for the second time.  First time involved massive lake of water on the sitting room carpet, an insurance claim, a builder and a decorater.  Result?  A vow by my husband to clean the outlet pipe more often – something he swears he has done.  Still, on Wednesday there was the tell-tale brown, decorative edging to the ceiling cornice and the suspicion of a new crack in the plasterboard.  Neither the builder not the plumber have responded to our calls for help.  Result?  No more power showers, at least for a few days.

On Thursday I attended an outpatients clinic at Charing Cross Hospital for an ugly and painful lump on the back of my right hand.  I’d had it – or it might be more accurate to say that ‘it’ had been growing – since the end of September, like a bad tempered gremlin: round, red, chubby at the circumference, flat on top but crunchy in the centre and prone to bleeding if the top was knocked off.

I knew really.  I’ve read the literature, seen the medical warning posters.  Still, I went along with my GP’s suggestion and put cream on it for a week.  If only she would prescribe a cream for my face wrinkles, I’d be a happier bunny.  No change to the lump so I was posted to the clinic to see the skin consultant.  Hospitals are amazing places, bright, friendly, efficient, busy.  Being of a certain age, I miss that  ‘pink’ smell which hit me when I entered the old hospitals, the doctors in white coats and the nurses in spotted or striped dresses with crisp, rustly aprons.

Still, as treatment for skin cancer goes, this modern hospital was first rate.  For that was what my gremlin was, cancer, as I guessed all along.  I answered all the questions about being in the sun – I do go in the sun but I do not sunbathe as such.  I was sent for coffee while I waited for the ‘procedure’ and came face to face with the expense of modern hospital facilities in the coffee shop.  I phoned home, the news sounding more dramatic than it really was.

The procedure was quick and painless, if a trifle messy.  I explained to the nurse, who kept asking me if I was all right, that I do seem to bleed a great deal.  The consultant cauterized a few veins, making the room smell like a bad bar-b-que.  Never mind, a heap of swabs later and I was all done, with a long, stitched up seam on the back of my hand.  I will skip over the amusing pause while I watched a small blood lake pool and tiny red rivers trickle over my skin as the consultant took a call on her mobile.  Let’s just say at least the stain will wash out of my sleeve.

I will have a scar.  Maybe I will take to wearing gloves, like a member of the cast of My Fair Lady.

And the perfect match with the two calamaties?  With six stitches in the back of my hand, no showers for a week.

PS.  The only thing about this blog and its connection with writing is that it is writing.  A notebook and a pen will always fill half an hour, wherever you are, whatever you are doing.

PPS  The stitches are on my right hand but I can still hold a pen and type.

LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN – AND WOMEN

Still reflecting in the glory of last week’s Lightship launch, I lay in the bath and reached into our magazine rack (which is where I stack out of date colour supplements because I am too stingy to throw them away before we have read them which we never do over the weekend) and found a copy of The Sunday Times Magazine dated 13^th November ’11.

Opening the page, I had a sudden reversal of my self congratulations.  Because the first article was all about Martina Cole making her several millions of pounds through her writing.  I am connected to Martina Cole by that theory of six degrees of separation which claims that, through the links between six different people, everyone knows everyone else.  In the case of Martina Cole and myself, the chain is composed of three people.  I had met Darley Anderson, her literary agent, and persuaded him to read my first novel, just about the time that he had taken on Martina Cole.  According to the article, Darley told Martina, ‘You are going to be a star.’  And she is.  After reading my manuscript, he told me, ‘You could be one of the big writers.’  But I’m not.  No hard feelings about either Martina or Darley.  My novel was nowhere near as clever as Martina’s or as wicked or as racey.  Which is why Darley sent it back with a ‘Thank you, but no thank you.’

I stared at the photograph of Martina Cole with her son and read descriptions of how they enjoyed her wealth, BMWs, houses everywhere, you know the kind of thing.  And there was me, in the bath in my one house with a Citroen parked outside.  I never met Martina but I did have lunch once with her great friend Lesley Pearse, also a client of Darley Anderson.

Enough of not being a famous writer, let us turn the page of the magazine.  To find a photograph of Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen.  Lawrence was one of the students on my foundation course at Camberwell School of Art, although he was plain Lawrence Bowen then, the Llewellyn being added, I assume, as an indication of his qualification to change rooms.  Before you ask, no I am not the same generation as Lawrence, but was going through a phase of life described by my son as my ‘mid-life crisis’ while I followed the course as a mature student.  Lawrence and I attended a life drawing class, on a Tuesday.  He didn’t, of course, take the slightest notice of me; me being a boring, middle-aged mum with no right to draw or paint and him being the trendy, seventeen year old destined to be a brilliant artist.  I am not going to spill the beans on what it was like to have Lawrence in the class, but if a young woman called Vanessa with loads of golden hair down her back is reading this she will no doubt remember her constant exclamations of ‘Oh, do shut up Lawrence’.  Not that I have any right to cast aspersions at Lawrence, since he won a place on the Fine Arts BA course and I didn’t.  As you all know, he isn’t a great painter but what was once called a television personality.  Nevertheless, there he was in the mag and there I was lying in the bath.

Recently, as the younger generation take their place amongst the names bandied around in the media, I am able to listen to what some of them are up to and a warm feeling comes over me at how well they are all doing.  Adam Holloway resigning the Whip in the House of Commons so that he can honour his promises to his constituents; Louise Mensche rivalling Jeffrey Archer in the field of producing best-selling block-busters and now making a brisk rise in the world of politics;  Nick Gottschalk, art director, who doesn’t get his name in the papers but on the credits of films such as Atonement and Pride and Prejudice;  Alex Williamson, ditto but directing films for the BBC and the Discovery channel and Laura McDermott, producing successfully The Masque of the Red Death at Battersea Arts Centre and being Joint Aritstic Director of Birmingham’s Fierce! Festival.

All these people, are connected, through me, by the theory of three degrees of separation, all are from the happy group of children I either baby sat or ate after-school tea with.

Enough of all this name dropping.  I am now ‘the writer who won the inaugural short story prize in the Lightship competition’ and will, one day, be the writer of a novel short-listed for the Orange Prize.  Just as long as I finish the thing, find an agent who likes it enough to take it on, a publisher who will sink masses of money into promoting it and millions of women who will buy it and read it.

Time to stop day dreaming, get out of the bath and have an early night so that I wake at 6am tomorrow, ready to open up my lap-top.

Which is what I will continue to do whether I am famous or not.

PS:  Darley, if you are reading this, please leave a comment to the effect that you are keen to be my agent again.

PPS My apologies for this blog being tardy in its arrival but I was delayed by a long weekend at the establishment of Le Verger in Northern France.  Anyone can stay there; it is a fantastic place and you can find it on www.houseinnorthernfrance.com

LIGHTSHIP LAUNCH

It’s a fair way from London to Hull so my husband and I (that sounds familiar) treated ourselves to a two day break with a couple of nights in a posh b & b.  The plan was for us to arrive at Middleton Hall Gallery, at the University of Hull, at around 5.15 pm.  I was to read my short story The Way to a Man’s Heart in front of a camera before the launch of the first ever Lightship Anthology and the prize giving.

Lightship Publishing is a new venture of Simon Kerr’s ‘to discover and mentor the best new literary voices from around the world.’   And that, apparently, included me!

The prize was a generous one but I would have joined the party at the university anyway.  It is all very well to write and to ‘be a writer’ but at some time an author has to bite the bullet and read his or her work in front of an audience, however daunting.

I had read a novel synopsis in public at a Spread the Word event in London and the Chichester MA programme offered all the students the chance to read to colleagues.  My other ‘secret weapon’ was that I had done some acting and at the age of ten my mother entered me for a talent competition which necessitated me reading the poem The King’s Breakfast  in our village hall.  I had won 2^nd prize.

However, this time I had won 1^st prize for my short story from a long list of 30.  The short list of 10 was to be published in the Lightship Anthology 1 by Alma Books and Lightship was about to give me a cheque for a thousand pounds.  In the audience, apart from other writers who had been short-listed, was Alessandro Gallenzi, the poet and translator of literary works and the founder of Alma Books, which maybe, one day, might publish my novel.  No pressure to read well, then.

Any nervousness I might have experienced was dispelled by our taxi arriving half-an-hour late and taking forty-five minutes to complete a 20 minute journey to the University.  The filming of the reading was cancelled; we retired to a pub to drink rum and coke.

In the Gallery, competitors and others were gathering.  Immediately we arrived, a dashing young Jamaican, dressed in a natty suit, the scarf around his neck draping to his knees, seduced me with the news that he had read my story and my blog, Being Rejected.  My blog?  How had he found that?  He smiled and waved an elegant hand decorated with two huge silver rings.  He had Googled me, of course.

I smiled back.  He was?  Roland Watson Grant, writer of the shortlisted story The Sketcher, who had just flown in from Jamaica.  This was his first visit to England and he had to fly right out again as his wife was to have a baby the next day.  We were amazed but delighted to meet him.

The winners of the poetry award and the flash fiction had made it to Hull but not the winner of the First Novel Chapter.  Never mind.  Simon’s introductory speech left us in no doubt that we were involved in the creation of a great new literary venture and we all vowed to enter our work again the following year.  The readings were delivered without a single hitch, Roland and a young woman called Kiare Ladner raising laughter as well as applause.  The other readers were Angela France, winner of the poetry prize, Peter Crockett winner of the flash fiction prize and Helen Holmes, shortlisted for her amusing flash fiction about a doomed budgerigar.

After more wine and chat, we were bussed to an Italian restaurant for dinner.  Alessandro being Italian, there was much light hearted banter about the food in my story and a tricky moment when he told me he’d personally checked all my Italian.  I didn’t ask if he had found any mistakes and he didn’t say.

The champagne flowed and the noise level grew.  I turned to the person sitting next to me, a good looking man with blond hair and a nice smile and asked his name.

‘Andrew Motion,’ he said.  And he was still smiling.

‘Of course you are,’ I said, like an idiot.

He turned back to the poetry winner for some sensible conversation about the art of real writing.

Not wanting either to get in the bad books of our hostess, or for this literary person I had become to change back into an ordinary wanna-be writer, we left the party at a quarter to midnight.

The next day I presented myself at the home of the cameraman for a filming of the entire story, 33 minutes in length.  It is, I understand, to be a pod cast on the Lightship web site.

We drove home via a weekend stay with friends living outside Oxford, the four of us indulging in more champagne, the excellent cooking of our hostess and a walk in the grounds of Baddesely Clinton, courtesy of the gracious giant poodle, Gracie.  The perfect conclusion to a few extraordinary days.

Anyone interested in either winning the 2012 Lightship competition with a short story, a poem, a flash fiction or the first chapter of a novel, visit the web site www.lightshippublishing.com.  Those of you wanting to read the work of the shortlisted writers, buy the book Lightship Anthology 1 published by Alma Books www.almabooks.com, available from Amazon.  

You’ll get a fantastic read and plenty of inspiration.

REALLY A WRITER AT LAST

My tail end leaving the stage at Chichester University Graduation Ceremony on 11.11.11

So a handshake is all it takes to become a flully-fledged Master of Arts of the University of Chichester.  A hand shake, a smile, a ‘thank you’ (no bow necessary) and a few steps across the stage to a lady who gives me a handshake and a smile and hands me a piece of paper.  I thought I had the certificate at home.  It is in my study, somewhere, as my study is a muddle right now on account of me having done nothing in the past few weeks but write the final part of my novel as I really, really wanted to type those words THE END before Friday 11th November.

Not that it was anything to do with Remembrance Day, although I did appreciate the 2 minutes silence as we have a member of the family leaving for the ‘theatre of war’ very soon.

I wanted to do that walk across that stage knowing that I had completed the task I set out to do when I began my MA course 3 years ago.  I wanted to know that I had finished my novel before formally accepting my MA.  I didn’t want to be a fraud.  I wanted to be a real writer.  I had not, of course, actually finished the novel in the sense that it was ready to be sent to an agent.  There were, and still are, jobs of checking for mistakes in names and places, checking that time works within the novel, ie did it really, in 1953, take that long to get from A-B?  Redrafting of certain scenes particularly in that final part which I wrote in such haste.  But as I travelled to Chichester, I relaxed during the train journey, as much as I could relax with the train being re-routed around half of West Sussex including West Worthing.  West Worthing?  Where did North, South and East get to?  Never mind, I had finished my novel.  Hoorah!

However that was before I had a session with my mentor.   My mentor, being most dedicated, had requested a print out of the existing draft of Parts I-III, so that she could read my latest offering with a full picture of the plot, characters and storyline.  All well and good.  After all, I had finished my novel.  Until she said her bit.  Which was quite a long bit.  And a revolutionary bit.  Because my mentor might have liked my draft – she did – she might have thought it was progressing well – she did -but she wanted more.  Not more as in what happens in Part IV but more as in more information, detail of characters, involvement of characters in Parts I and III.  (Part II is a ‘stand alone’ group of chapters about certain events in World War II, just as in Atonement, with one character in the novel as the only view point.)

‘More,’ I gasped.  ‘It is 120K words long already.’   Bit of an exaggeration that, but it threatens to be at least that long with the ‘more’.

‘Never mind,’ said my mentor, ‘You can always cut back later.’

Later!  And I thought I had finished.

I am now planning a break from my novel – apart from workshop sessions already set up.  I am leaving the ‘more’ until I have the energy to face going right back to Chapter One and beginning over again.  It won’t be quite that, of course, but right now, after becoming an MA in Creative Writing and thinking I had mastered the art, I am not sure I can face the reality of being a real writer, which, as we all know, is re-writing, re-writing and re-writing.

Suddenly a short story has much appeal.

But we had a great day on Friday and it was with more than a tinge of sadness that I walked along North Street and South Street in Chichester.   It was the end of an era.

 

PS I found my MA certificate – in a brown envelope under my desk.  So that’s all right then.

ON BEING REJECTED

•                             

I need to get back to my blog, I need to get back to my blog, I need to get back … but what can I write?  About my prize, about my MA, about my novel about going to conferences about writing a novel …. ? Which picture shall I use?  Something’s changed. It doesn’t seem as easy as it was to copy a Google image.  I give up.  Can no longer do this IT stuff.  My technical brain, not that I ever had much of one, has become mushed by too much writing.  Never mind.  I will skip the illustrations.  So what to write about?  Since I want to write about being accepted, that is having a story accepted, not just accepted but winning the prize, since I want to make as much impact as I can with that approach, maybe I should start with a page about not being accepted?  That will make my acceptance much more exciting, much more important, much more ground-breaking.

So, for any of you reading this blog, here is the article which was accepted and published on Thresholds (a short story website published in connection with Chichester University who are to award me an MA this week).

ON BEING REJECTED.

What is a writer?  The immediate definition which springs to my mind is that a writer is someone who is used to being rejected.  The only people who are constantly rejected as in, ‘Thank you but no thank you, not this time,’ are writers.

Stella Whitelaw in her book How to Write Short-Short Stories (Allison & Busby Writers’ Guides 1996) says, ‘How the heart falls with each rejection.  That thud on the mat, the echo of doom.  It makes no difference how many stories you’ve had published or the books already on the library shelves, a rejection slip is still a small dagger in the heart.’

Ignoring the facts that most writers no longer ask for their manuscripts to be returned, that library books on shelves might not be our dream and, most pertinent of all, that most of us have not had the happy experience of having ‘many stories’ published, I suggest that we can agree with Stella that the heart falls with each rejection.

My first exploration into the world of being a writer and, maybe, being published was when I wrote a short letter to The Times aimed at that bottom right hand corner of the letters page.  And guess what?  My letter was published.  So far so good.  My second foray into the wider world of publishing was to send a short, genre novel to Robert Hale.  That book was published as a library book for grannies (no sex, please, we are too frail).  A rising star, you might assume.  If only.  I won’t trail you through my long, despondent list of blockbuster novels, Catherine Cookson look-alikes, Aga saga Joanne Trollop style novels, and traveller-through-Europe-with-the-odd-sexual-encounter-on-the-side non-fiction books as they were all rejected.

What has this to do with short stories, you ask?  Nothing, except that it was with one short story that I was, eventually, accepted.  Not a great deal: a horror story, for want of a more specific description, accepted by an independent publisher.  Aha!  My CV can now display the words ‘Published’ with the title of the publication and a date.  Like a real writer.  By this time I also had a collection of ‘not to be thrown away’ rejection letters.  My favourite is from the BBC (yes, her aunty-ship herself) saying that it was great that my short story was shortlisted among 60 other stories but, hey! that was from a long list of over 600 and so sorry they didn’t want my story in the end but as they were only broadcasting 3, yes 3! it was hardly surprising mine hadn’t made it.  Please send in again, we would be pleased …

You get the picture.  Always look on the bright side.

I have a Mslexia diary.  One of the features of this diary is a couple of (four actually) pages entitled  ‘Submissions’.  Here is a column for the title of the piece, for the competition or periodical submitted to, the date submitted and the response.  Here is where I write, in the same pen, in the same way, rejected, rejected, rejected.  A recipe for suicide perhaps?

But no.  Because I am a writer, because to be a writer I must be both demented and ever optimistic, because I own that ego which drives me on even when common sense tells me to give up, every rejection is a challenge.  Never mind I say.  Just as well I have that story back because now I can send it to that other competition next month.  Never mind, that was not the ideal place for that story, anyway.  If I send it to so-and-so and if I win…

And so it goes on.

Now I am about to submit my dissertation for my MA in Creative Writing.  When I have finished it, that is.  As I write this blog, the deadline is looming and I am still buying books on Amazon in the hope they will provide me with quotes to support my approach to my writing.  This time, I cannot be rejected.  I have paid my fees and therefore I must be read, appraised and rewarded with letters after my name.

And what then?  There is no other way but to finish my novel, to send it out, to be rejected.  In the meanwhile, I will revert to my short story writing, to sending out my manuscripts and being rejected.  The upside of short story writing is that it is short.  And it can be easily rewritten to be submitted again.  And that there exists a long list of competitions which are eager to receive stories.  (If you do not have such a list, email me.  In a moment of sheer despondency, when all writing energy had abandoned me, I compiled one.)

There is no conclusion to this personal history of rejection, only that it seems to be the writer’s lot.  It goes with the job; you get used to it.  Until that wonderful day when you receive a letter which says, ‘We would like to publish…’ or ‘Your short story has won …’

Until that day, dream on — for it is of dreams that stories are made.

END OF ORIGINAL ARTICLE.

Now, the dream has come true and my short story has won and is to be published along with other works.  But that is for my next Blog.  I have made a start.  Oh, yes, I have also made a start on Tweeting and have tweeted twice.  Twice because the first time I did it, I was so excited I wrote the wrong thing and brough forward the prize giving for the above short story by two weeks.  I have no idea how to attract the attention of other tweeters in the same wayas I have not much idea how to make people read this blog.

And they say you have to blog and tweet to be taken on by an agent.  What I want to know is how many agents are that IT savvy?

PS I managed the picture!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  once.

THE HOOKLINE NOVEL COMPETITION

      A HookLine novel   real art 

I am in front of the family desk top.  The house is empty (husband at Porlock with son and annual visitor from Egypt staying with his own family for a week.)  It is 8.30 in the morning.  I have eaten breakfast but am still in my pyjamas and dressing gown.  I read once that Jackie Collins always woke and, without doing a single thing, ‘crawled’ (her word not mine) to her study off her bedroom and began to write.  If it can work for her maybe it can work for me.

And I need something to work.  This week I have had my submission to Hookline, my last completed novel called Past Imperfect, returned with a ‘thank you but no thank you message’.  For those of you who do not know, Hookline is a novel writing competition open to those either with writing MAs or currently on an MA course.  The first 3 chapters of the submitted novel is bound and circulated to book groups.  If the manuscript receives enough votes from the members of the book groups, the writer submits the rest of the novel.  The preliminary chapters and then the whole novel are bound and the organisers use this to justify the £50 charge to entrants.  Which is reasonable.  I told myself that readers’ comments would be useful as pretty much all I had on this novel was a stack of reject letters.

So why should I moan if the comments were:

Everyday story of a middle aged woman who had a child in her teens and gave it up for adoption, her mother dies and she receives a letter from social services asking her to get in touch to make contact with her adopted child, contrived events, good descriptive writing, fair.

 Author needs to know the difference between:  Strait and straight (no such thing as ‘straight-laced’, confidant and confidante, dairies and diaries.  

Slips slightly towards bathos with the deep, heavy significance accorded to what seems a fairly familiar tale of teenage love gone wrong.

OK, I take the point about sloppy line editing although I am grateful for the info on ‘straight-laced’.  Be honest you out there, did you know that?

As for the comments: this was the novel which won a prize in the Spread the Word Pitch competition and of which The Literacy Consultancy said,

‘I was immediately interested in this very professional piece, partly because I am fascinated by the subject of virginity in the 1950s and 1960s and also because your prose style is very readable and possesses an air of confidence which I found instantly engaging.  

Your synopsis is clear and implies a strong sense of planning and construction – a sort of self-belief that is appealing to a reader and which suggests that you are in control of your subject matter and know in which direction and how you intend to develop it.

You have contrived to be sensitive without being in the least mawkish and there is something charming about Kate’s slightly self deprecating view of herself at both the stages of her life which concern us.’

However, I do find it helpful that readers of book groups found the narrative boring to use a plain word.  Also that their summary of the novel is  ‘a tale of teenage love gone wrong’.  When I set out to write the novel, my idea was to write about a mother/daughter relationship rather than a gone-wrong love story.  That aspect of the plot was just the result of the gone wrong mother/daughter story.  All the redrafting has clearly taken me away from my original idea.  Maybe also confusing were the various comments received on the many courses I have taken the novel to.

My conclusion?  To get on with the current new novel, now called Running to the Seaside, but to pick up Past Imperfect later, maybe when I need a break from Running, go back to my original idea, find the folder in my cupboard entitle ‘NOT IN CURRENT DRAFT’, do lots of cutting up and inserting different material.  I find that I need a new idea for each re-write and this new idea will be ‘this is now a novel about a mother, her teenage daughter and the grownup daughter’.  And then to re-write the book all on my own with no comments from anyone except my trusted colleagues within my two workshops (more about them on next post).

Having written all that I think I’ll stop and publish this is the hope that I might stimulate feedback (not bitchy, after all we didn’t really expect to win did we?) about the Hookline results.        

And it is now 10am – I must GET ON.

I’M A FILM STAR – GET ME OUT OF HERE

       

Hello Blog after a very long time away.  Why?  Part laziness I suppose but also part very much not laziness, as the last module for my MA in Creative Writing at Chichester University was exciting but also hard work.    The subject of Module 3 was Metaphor and the Imagination and, after a series of discussions and teaching on various aspects  (the uncanny, the fantastic, magic realism, ghostly, the macarbre), I wrote a story which had been growing in my head since the previous summer about a woman changing into a fish.  Yes, I had my doubts.  What had seemed the perfect idea when I was swimming up and down the pool in Italy suddenly developed all sorts of problems when I was back in cold, grey England.  However, with the support of my workshopping group and generous and clever tutor the story was finished.  I submitted it for assessment and it presented me with a Distinction.  So I am over the moon, of course and embedding myself in more research and new writing for this current module.  Back to the novel with renewed energy as I say to myself, ‘I can do it.’

Other good news is that Dark Tales Vol XIV has finally arrived with my horror story included plus a well-drawn and apt illustration.  I had a mention in Mslexia about this so at least my name has appeared in my favourite writing magazine.   The play I wrote for Module 2 is still with the BBC but, guess what, I have had a letter from the BBC no less to say that a short story I submitted to them for the Afternoon Short Story slot has been shortlisted from over 600 submissions to the long-list of 65!  I expect that will be as far as the good news goes, but, hey! it’s enough for me.  I see from my writing records that I also sent  a story to Mslexia but from their website that the results were out in mid-March so no success there then, although on the other hand I haven’t had a ‘no thank you’ letter from them yet, how we writers do kid ourselves!  My last completed novel is with an agent I’d very much like to work with and a publisher I’m not keen on but is looking actively for books and as I am at the stage where beggars can’t be choosers with that manuscript I though I’d give it a go.  There’s a poem of mine with Chichester University for possible publication in a new book.  So lots to make me get up in the morning as well as a 4 month old Schnauzer puppy I am looking after for another member of the family – see illustration at top.

The relevance of my title for this post is that I spent a morning being interviewed by the Robert Opie Museum of Brands in Notting Hill. www.museumofbrands.com   The Museum is making a DVD about their presence, the items on display and the reactions of visitors.  I have no idea whether my face and voice will be included but it was fun making the piece, sitting under the bright lights with the possibility of being famous for five minutes.  It is a great museum for everyone interested in commercially made and advertised objects from children’s toys through the pop music world to washing up liquid and much more.  I go now and then just to inhale the atmosphere.  However you much you think you can remember what a Picnic bar looked like when it first came onto the market, there is no substitute for seeing the real thing.

I have only 3 more evening sessions for my Creative Writing MA and then we are on our own to form our work-shopping groups and appointments with our individual tutors for our Manuscript submission.  We finish the term after Easter with a publishing panel to listen to and answer questions of.  Working with tutors at Chichester is a great experience and I will miss my two days a week out of London -although possibly not the timne spent on the train.

As I write this my other half is skiing in the Dolomites.  He returns tomorrow and his first question will be  ‘Have you done plenty of work?’  so I had better get on with the writing so I can at least tell him a half-truth.

More next week.

THE WRITING LIFE

Kit Wright

I doubt anyone is reading this any more as I have left readers in the lurch for so long.  Blame the creative juices.  This current module at Chichester MA in Creative Writing is something of a challenge and I don’t think I am only speaking for myself when I say that it has been the most difficult so far.  The subject is prose or poetry written in the genres of the uncanny, the magical, the ghostly, any style so long as it involves the use of great imagination and metaphor.  My reading has included work by Angela Carter, Kafka, Ian McEwan, Jeanette Winterson and could have taken in again Ishiguro, Joyce Carol Oates, I could go on and on.  When I began to write my story I worked for 4 hours to produce 400 words.  I have never worked so slowly before.  Now the story is 5000 words and my tutor’s parting message at the end of term was ‘You could cut it by about 1,500 words.’  He had helped me along the way but doing some of the cutting up already and handed me a plastic bag with bits of writing cut up!  It didn’t worry me.  Trained as a civil servant, I am used to having my work rejected and redrafted.  I follow in the paths of writers such as Trollop and PD James: the civil service was a great training in the art of writing.

I am on holiday now until after Christmas.  No writing, just reading and doing Sudokus.

And, of course, the writing of Christmas cards (done), the posting of cards (delegated) and the shopping for presents (pretty much done) and the wrapping of presents – right now all I have achieved is a glorious muddle in the spare room as I get out all the paper and tags left over from last year so that I can use it up before others arrive to use my paper!

Last week we attended the Ealing Leisure and Arts presentation for their recent poetry competition.  I had submitted a poem and, as I received an invite for the event and a drink or two, I hoped I had been short listed.  Not at all.  I dragged my husband to a very long and disorganised 3 hours of poetry, announcements, misplacing of lists of winners and, eventually, no drinks as by 9pm we were both too starving hungry to hang around any more.  If you think of ever going, the first hour of the children reading their poems is by far the best.  Apart, that is, for the judge, Kit Wright, a very tall and funny man (because his writing is amusing not because he is tall) wearing delightful pink cord trousers who has just published a new book of poems for children ‘The Magic Box’.  His poems are so amusing and good to read out loud I did something I do not normally do, I bought a copy there and then.

On the way out, I said to a man who had read his rather unsatisfactory poem, ‘I enjoyed your poem.’  He replied, ‘So have you bought my book then?’  I said I had not as I had spent all my money and he then said something I did not catch but suspected it was fairly rude.  That will teach me to lie to poets.

I am still waiting for the latest publication of Dark Tales to arrive.  The EDA has travelled from September through October to November.  It now must be in December but I am not going back onto the web site to find out – I’ll just wait.

Which I have been doing all morning for a delivery which has arrived.  All I have to do now is to find a fake Christmas tree. John Lewis has sold out but I’m told the best buys come from B & Q so the minute my husband comes back from Porlock – it seems I am married to the old man of Porlock these days – we will get ourselves over to B & Q to buy one.  If they have not sold out by then.

That’s the lot for today – if anything exciting happens I’ll write again.

Oh, and it’s stopped raining.  Wonder how long that will last.

A FESTIVAL VIRGIN

Lady Antonia Fraser

I was innocent of either Hay or Cheltenham or Oxford or any place where ‘they’ had a book/literary/writing festival before last weekend.  Either extraordinary for a person who writes and reads or just plain lazy.  Now I have been seduced – featherbedded by locality, how could I resist?

A couple of weeks ago or more I was wooed by posters announcing the Porlock Literary Festival and the Porlock Carnival.

The Carnival won and a splendid occasion it was with colourful and imaginative floats, recreating my childhood pleasure at the Whit Monday carnival organised in our village in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  My husband reported that the literary event seemed a low key affair by comparison.  I hope to be there next year.

However, I was here in Chiswick last weekend for the Chiswick Book Festival.

Again it was lower key than Greens Week in June which involved a fair and stalls on Acton Green and attracted hoards of visitors.  However, the three sessions of the Book Festival I enjoyed to were pretty much sold out with book-lovers packing into either the church or the hall upstairs.

Friday evening saw Lady Antonia Fraser giving a spirited talk on the subject of her  biography, Mary Queen of Scots, (first published in 1969) followed by several personal amusing anecdotes.  Mary always was a favourite of mine when I was at school.  At fourteen I was fascinated by images of a sexy queen (we didn’t have much sex in school then) and my curiosity fired by earnest debates about whether Darnley died as a result of measles or syphilis.  OK, I know he was blown up but he was ill as well.  The book – bought as a very fat, purple covered paperback but seems to be re-packaged in a slimmer form – was my first purchase of non-fiction, taking me from the imagined world of those silver covered Penguin classics (eg Lord of the Flies) to whatever ‘reality’ a history writer chose to spin to us.  I still have the book although I see it is a hardback edition published in 1970 so not my original copy which must have fallen to bits through re-reading.

On Saturday afternoon I listened to four authors, including Katie Fforde who joined the Romantic Novelists’ Association the same year as I did (I am no longer a member).  Katie was splendid in flowing pink with matching nails far too long to type with. As usual she spoke with joyful enthusiasm for her craft and her support for her chosen genre.  The session was entitled ‘Chick Lit for the Thinking Woman’ which, (sorry if this offends some of you) I find a contradiction in terms.  I do not agree that Katie’s novels are chick lit but an extension of the now defunct genre Aga Sagas.  Although since Katie’s books are set in the country why not …       Never mind, as Katie so charmingly put it, a writer writes what she can to the best of her ability and hopes readers like it.  For her a winning formula.  Although to compare the work of any of the panel with that of Jane Austin was, I feel, pushing it somewhat.

Moving on to writing itself, the final session of the afternoon was to discuss the merit of Creative Writing MA’s.  Chaired by Celia Brayfield,

the chat did extend to various writing courses rather than concentrate on MA’s (possibly because neither of the 2 writers on the panel had actually taken an MA in Creative Writing) but it was generally informative and interesting.  The one bright spark in the session for me came from the agent Sarah Such. (I’d give you her web site if she had one but she doesn’t, it seems.  If anyone finds one please message me) Sarah was asked about results from MA courses and she confirmed that manuscripts sent to her by graduates were more professionally presented and more honed than the normal.  She didn’t, of course, say that she was more easily able to sell them to publishers but confirmed that the marketing men rule in publishing as in everything else.

So a fun and interesting weekend.  Also exhausting as we were Scottish dancing on Saturday evening and entertaining until 1am on Sunday evening.

Writing wise, this week has been pretty much a wash out, although I have written a page (!) following an exercise given to us at Chichester last week which will, eventually, go into New Novel; sent work to a colleague with whom I workshop and also sent Chapter One of the novel I intend to send out soon to another writer whose opinion I value.  Having now produced this I can switch of the machine and get ready to go down to Chichester.

The current module on the Metaphor and the Imagination is stimulating and exciting but you will have to wait to hear about it.

THE NEW TERM – OOPS – SEMESTER

At last it’s September.  The children in the family have started new schools, with new uniforms, new school bags and new routines.  In the case of one child, she goes in one door in the morning and comes out of another at the end of the afternoon.

Question: is this a deliberate ploy to make collecting grandmothers suspect they are developing dementia?

Bad morning – I fell down two of our stairs which are on their own, if you see what I mean.  They jumped up at me, got themselves muddled up in the hem of my pyjamas and send me spinning into my husband’s study.  Who is in Porlock again so no knight to the rescue.  No harm done.

Question: is it time for me to change to lavender and old lace nighties?

Last Wednesday evening saw us gathered at Chichester Uni for the start of the new semester.  NB we are MA students so we use academic words imported from the USA rather than the ones we all know.  Lots of good news.  We are only 14 in the group, so split up into 3′s or 4′s rather than 5′s or 6′s.  Much better.  Our tutor for this module (see I’ve mastered the lingo) is energetic, exciting and enthusiastic and it’s a ‘she’.   We are examining fantastic literature, magic realism, the uncanny and the clever use of metaphor.  At least I hope I am going to be clever about all this since this is the module which attracted me to the course.  This week for  ‘homework’  (we don’t have a trendy word for that)  we have to re-invent a metaphor as in ‘a bun in the oven’  plus my small group has to prepare a presentation on Ovid.  Help!     Last night I  read the stories I know and like but the rest of it really doesn’t excite me.   It’s not the fault of Ted Hughes.  Try reading Birthday Letters.  You can’t put the book down.

Question: was it a mistake to spend my school  lessons on Greek Myths mucking about in the back row?

Yesterday I went to the South Bank for another workshoppping session with two of the Pitch the Word people – see blog for 16 June, New Lease of Life.  It was a good session and I came away with valuable comments.

Question: did I give the same?

On Tuesday I am to meet up with a fellow student plus one other writer for a workshopping session.  Question: what to take?

So at the moment I have on the go – old novel with Spread the Word group; new novel pending; last module’s play for the BBC to be revised; new short story up to 3rd draft; something to be written/resurrected for Tuesday; an exercise on re-inventing the word for Wednesdayand stories from the classics to discover.  When I say ‘on the go’ I mean, of course, lying in heaps on the floor of my study.

Right now I just want to go back to bed with another cup of tea and the  Sunday paper.

Observation: impossible, our corner shop doesn’t deliver the papers.

It’s almost nine thirty so must stop this twittering and GET ON.

With more tea of course.