I was reminded today of something my great-aunt, the artist Gwen Raverat, once wrote which is just the kind of counter-intuitive idea which I love:

"The whole of a long life is spent learning to see, to know what one is looking at with one’s inner mind: not in gaining experience, but in losing it."

It is counter-intuitive, isn't it, the idea that experience makes you see less well, but I think there's something in it. I know that to take photographs well I need to clear my head out, shed preconceptions, words and analysis. Really seeing the way light falls and finding the way to show it means letting go of your preconception of what shape a house is or what's important about it, and you can't see the play of a hundred colours across a rippling surface if you're thinking, 'nasty, rusty corrugated iron'. My experience of people and writing is working flat out when I'm working, but perhaps the writerly equivalent of having my photography head on is more in the receptiveness which - at my best - I try to have to everything that's going on around me.

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My guest article, What We Talk About When We Talk About Short Stories, is now up on the fabulous Vulpes Libris book blog, with a gorgeous illustration. Thank you to Vulpes Libris for inviting me to rant about short stories, my favourite topic!
To give you a taster:
I would like to tell you what I will not be talking about. I won’t be:
1. Talking about the short story collection as the victim of the narrow-minded publishing industry, how sad it all is, if only they could all wise up etc…etc..
....

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From the fetid, rank, depressing confines of a sci-fi convention in Nuneaton appears a young woman of stunning beauty. Relatively.

She’s actually about my age, perhaps older, and glamorous rather than beautiful, but she bursts through the cloud cover of black Metallica and Warhammer t-shirts like a Supernova localised in the Travelodge cafeteria. When I recover from the shock I go back to flicking through the rail of seventies movie posters that I have no intention of purchasing but I have another four hours to fill before my reading and Q&A session. I have been given a small amount of cash by Mavis at Harper Collins to get ‘tanked up’ before I take the makeshift plywood stage at ten pm.

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A really miserable day today – certainly in terms of rain. Summer (ho ho) is most definitely over and autumn has its claws in us for sure. I even turned the heating on last night and this morning, though I do have a bit of a cold right now, so I have an excuse. Lord H doesn’t like the heating on till at least January, you see, but if I look pathetic enough he usually relents around about November. But hey now it’s on, I might try to keep it that way …

Meanwhile at work, the tension is really beginning to mount in terms of the new academic year (Gawd bless it). People are usually snippety the week before Freshers’ Week until the week after it, so we all get tearful then. Unfortunately they appear to be getting rather snippety now, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the month, dammit. In fact, one of the emails I received today was so snippety that the Marketing department rang up to sympathise. They obviously don’t know that we’re blamed for everything here at the campus coalface … Mind you, they were impressed with my reply to the aforementioned rudery, which (to my mind) was witty but firm. Anyway, I sorted out the problem, so hopefully the twig-beating that is no doubt lined up for me will be lighter than expected. Still, it’s all so upsetting though. Sigh ...


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Please click the link below to go to my blog page...

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I've been thinking about long sentences. The prevailing orthodoxy, it seems, among many of my fellows - not to mention writing teachers and students - is that short sentences, specially with the simple syntax which they're also likely to have, are 'punchier'. They're striking. Listen! They seem urgent, forceful. They demand to be heard. Readers notice them. Long sentences, on the other hand, go slowly, take too long, bog readers down, bore them.

Really? I think it's nowhere near as simple as that. Let's go up a step or two in scale, for a moment.

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Thoroughly enjoyed last night’s opera at Glyndebourne – Carmen is one of my favourites and they did it fabulously. The best Don Jose ever, I thought – he certainly knew how to act. The woman playing Carmen was pretty good too. But the near social embarrassment of the season was that in the short interval (as opposed to the long interval ...) I was chatting to Lord H near the shop when I saw a woman standing nearby whom I vaguely recognised. I couldn’t remember whether I knew her from work and, if so, which job it had been, so rather than blanking her I gave a half-smile and took a couple of steps towards her to have a casual chat. Um. It was at that point that I realised it was actually Sheila Hancock. Arrgghhh!! Being the totally cool customer that I am of course, I gave a strangled squawk and veered off in another direction. Mind you, I suppose she must be used to that kind of thing. But can you imagine the trauma if I’d got so far as to start the conversation??? ...


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First off, I want to wish Lorrie all the very best and say thanks to her. Last Tuesday was sad as it was the last time she was able to come to my writing group for a good while; work commitments and all that.

She'll be missed. Sorely. And I know not just by me. She's a terrific writer and her comments were always astute, informed and hugely helpful. All the best Lorrie, and a great big thanks.


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God bless the Kirk; I’ve just been reading that the establishment of a theocracy in Scotland followed a peculiarly masculine and mysogynistic theology – John Knox in his ‘First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women’ called them, ‘the porte and gate of the devil.’ Imagine that!


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I really wasn't sure this day would actually come, that there wouldn't be some natural disaster (earthquake, flood, pestilence) or a warp in the space-time continuum that would somehow prevent it. But it's here. And it feels GREAT. It doesn't even matter that I don't have the book in my hands. Whatever happens, I am a published author and no-one can take that away. Wow.
The website I built for the book is now live: TheWhiteRoadandOtherStories.com, with information on how to buy (bless you for wanting to), and more about science-inspired stories and flash fiction, and Eco-Libris, who are planting a tree for every copy of the book printed.....

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