I had lunch with Oracle today – well it was really a kind of early supper. We love to sit in Peckham’s and graze a cheese board once a month, with an assortment of drinks; latte, Earl Grey, water, pear cider, coke. Fabulous way to sift through a very late afternoon, though now the clocks have changed, it was dark when we left.

‘Ooh, I’m out in the city in the dark!’ I said.



He had a new toy, which he showed off; we poured over this beautifully flat and smooth iPod Touch.

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'Articulate' and 'eloquent' are often used interchangeably to mean 'convincing with words,' but there's an important difference between the two terms. To convey an idea effectively you need to be articulate; but only eloquence can achieve emotional resonance. Eloquence requires a fluency in the language of feelings, an understanding of the simple means by which one human being connects with another, and owes more to empathy than to vocabulary.

Take last Thursday's BNP-bash. To my mind, Sayeeda Warsi was by far the most articulate of the guests - yet it was Bonnie Greer who proved the most popular.

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Does sexuality govern how we write? As writers, do our preferences enslave us?

Our desires bend us in certain ways and every experience spills onto the page, coloured by our own personal wants.

Dreams really do shape reality.

This question popped into my head while writing Unrequited, this notion that while I was writing something personal (and no doubt, unmarketable) in terms of gay relationships, it was, at heart, only an unveiling of experience. Perhaps that’s all writing is, coaxed and prodded to within an nth of the make-believe, that capricious landscape that we call Fiction. But all Fiction has its roots in Truth. Would I have written graphic gay sex scenes if I were straight?

Doubtful. Or so I thought at the time.



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So, after having two guest posts here about writing and where you are, and how the two mix, I've finally written my thoughts on how it was to move countries and what that has done to my words, over at Petina Gappah's excellent blog. An extract:

So we moved, with our two cats (who are now, sadly and cruelly, in quarantine), two months ago. And that is when the culture shock hit. Yes, I had been back often on holiday. But something shifted inside me, knowing that this wasn't a short trip, and I found that I couldn't get through a whole sentence in English without stopping to search for a word. After 15 years, there were gaps in my English that I would have filled in in Hebrew. (I like to think this bilingualism made my fiction more "innovative"!)

..........

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We've had some new followers to Writer in the Wilderness recently, as well as a few more who subscribe (I'm not sure what that actually means. I think the Piskies give them a nudge when I put a new post up).

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Why?


1) That first time you show your work to someone, breath held, eyes shut, heart knocking on your chest. Will they laugh? Smirk? Struggle to soften the blow that your work is rubbish? Be it a relative, friend, writing group or online acquaintance it takes guts to put your work out there. So, whatever the outcome, Congratulations! You’ve done the equivalent of opening your eyes in the dark.

2) That first time – lots of firsts here – you submit your story, be it one thousand or one hundred thousand words long. Why is this scary? Because the result more often than not will be a large brown envelope landing in your hall, bearing those brutal words Not for us. Yet you’ve confronted your fear, you’ve stepped well and truly into the aspiring writer’s Haunted House. One way out is the door of publication and to find this exit you must confront all manner of spooks – the dreaded synopsis, the hellish cover letter, the eternal rewrite, the shattered confidence… It takes a brave – some might say foolish person – to take this path.

3) Next you must hold your nerve and ride the two-faced ghost-train of success. You get an agent, get a contract and your day of publication arrives, yippee! But then, hello scary sales figures and alarming Amazon rankings and a devilish deadline for Book Two. And ultimately you must grapple that ghoulish question – will my contract be renewed?


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Here is the second in the series of interviews with published writers about giving up their day jobs. This time it’s crime writer David Armstrong, whose excellent last novel Written Out is set in a residential writing school and features Detectives Kavanagh and Salt. He has also written How Not to Write a Novel: Confessions of a Mid-List Author.

MT: What day jobs have you done?

DA: I was a hopeless case at secondary school, worked as a milkman as a kid, then in a decorating shop and stayed there, becoming manager of one of the owner’s shops at nineteen. I left after a couple more years and went ‘on the road’ as a bit of a hippy and did loads of jobs, in restaurants, a van driver, labourer, ice cream seller, all sorts, before going back to school, then on to university to read English.

MT: Anything in those day jobs that has inspired your writing?

DA: I think, generally, the more mindless the work, the better for the writer’s mind. Being a teacher for example, which I was for fifteen years, is demanding and is often drawing on the same resources that you might use as a writer. It’s rewarding but very tiring,too (notwithstanding the large number of writers who’ve been teachers).

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I was surprised, then, when the radiators were hot on Friday 23rd, when I arrived home from school. Not for long and not all of them – the bedroom and hall ones remained cold and the knob to make them hotter was stuck. Best not force them, I thought, after my disaster with the ‘persiana’ last week: I tugged the cord too hard and the blind disappeared into the box over the window.


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Happy Spooky Season!

To celebrate all things ghoolie and ghostie I have been carving pumpkins as you can see... the bottom right one was supposed to be a scary pig but looks more like a Spanish Civil War ringmaster. Maybe that's scarier.

My flash, Prayer in the Storm, written for their Past-themed Halloween contest, is up at MicroHorror today. Read and enjoy!

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An A-Z of Possible Worlds. Wow. I read this a little while ago and it's been something that's reminded me of how lucky I am to be a reader. It is packaged beautifully. The stories within it are simply excellent. It's...just...great. You can read the review I did of it here.

But I'm not just a reader. No. I'm a blogger as well. And, as a blogger I can do really cool and exciting stuff, like welcome writers I love here, to talk about their work. And, yes. That's just what I've done with A.C. Tillyer, author of said A-Z of Possible Worlds, who's stopped by here on her blog tour. So over to it. And look, isn't it just gorgeous...

So, Anne, An A-Z of Possible Worlds – what is it?

It's a box of 26 individually bound short stories, one for each letter of the alphabet. Imagine you're on a journey around your mind and each story is a possible destination on that journey. What would yours be like?


[Nik: mine? I dread to think. Colourful, terrifying, bleak, with occasional sunny spells.]



And who do you think it’s for?

Me, of course! And anyone who likes reading. I think it's particularly good for people who are traveling because you can just take one or two with you at a time and they fit in your pocket.




What does your ideal reader look like?

Again: me, of course! Actually, make that me as my teenage self, lying on my bed and reading the first books that really burrowed under my skin and have been with me ever since. That would be the ideal.


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