Lovely news that I can now share with you all - I am one of three winners of the Biscuit Flash Fiction competition! When I entered I was desperately hoping I might get somewhere because the prize is a week's writing retreat in a small town in Belguim, plus 200 pounds spending money. A cash prize is always very welcome, don't get me wrong, but it's very unlikely that were they to have just given cash I would have decided to spend it on a week's writing retreat. Now I simply must go to Belgium, and I can't wait! (I think I have a year in which to go.)

Another lovely aspect to this is that I sent a very new story in which I tried a different writing technique/style from anything I had done before....

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I hate attention. I am uncomfortable with people crawling to me, treating me as though I am better than them, running after me like servants. At least, I imagine I would be if it happened. So I am surprised by my disappointment when I am not met by anyone at the sci-fi convention, and am merely left to wonder through Doncaster Leisure Centre in a bewildered and frustrated state.

I spent the morning and afternoon in the hotel pretending I wasn’t fighting the urge to be sick, as though admitting I was hung-over would confirm in Cheryl’s eyes that last night’s drunken behaviour was indeed as pathetic as we both know it was. At one point I even leapt off the bed and did twenty press-ups, even though alcohol-laced blood flooded into my brain and caused my vision to white out and a thin trail of bile to ooze up my throat. When I finished I disguised my desperate clinging to the wall for support with a leg stretch. At lunch I ordered a dry sandwich rather than the grease-mess I would normally gobble down in a pained frenzy, and left some of it even though my belly was still gurgling for nourishment. (Later I shoveled a family-sized packet of Kettle Chips into my mouth in the tiny hotel hot tub, ignoring the awful shouty kids standing on my legs and splashing chlorine onto my crisps).

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Around eight o'clock, the neuralgia hit me full force and at nine pm, Hubby woke me up from my slumber on the sofa and suggested I go to bed. I then slept twenty out of the next twenty-four hours. I was in dire pain all day Sunday (what I remember of it!) and all day Monday and knew as soon as I got up Tuesday that I was in no fit state to go to work. Finally I went back to the doctor today and she has signed me off for the rest of the week. There is an area about 2cm by 1cm on my left cheek that is swollen and inflamed and, although the pain has gone off quite a bit and my teeth are now functioning almost normally again, I know I am still not a hundred per cent. I am feeling a lot better though so Hubby snapped his fingers about 4pm this afternoon and said with tons of passion "Tomorrow you can write all day! It'll be good practice for when you can write full time. " So tomorrow, it looks like I'll be writing all day. Maybe I can even breathe life into The New Idea - it is surely far too good to keep simmering on the back burner.


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I just listened to a Guardian podcast of an interview with the wonderful Jim Crace, author of Quarantine, Being Dead, the Devil's Larder etc.... He has obviously spent time - or been asked a lot of questions which made him spend time - thinking about the writing process, and I wanted to bring in a few things he said about narrative. He was talking about Quarantine, his book in which Jesus is the main character. Jesus didn't start out as the main character, was only "supposed" to be briefly mentioned but, the way Crace tells it, some subconscious force changed the way Crace thought the book was going, and Jesus become the focus.

The subconscious exists in all the chambers of our world, particularly narrative. Narrative is ancient; human beings have been telling stories for thousands and thousands of years and we have become good at it. What that means is that when I, somebody who just has three score years and ten, and whose imprint on the world of narrative is going to be tiny in the grand scheme of things, when I sit down and start writing a story,there are thousands and thousands of years of narrative that have gone before, and thousands and thousands of narratives that have proven themselves before me. Narrative, of course, in that case... becomes wise. It learns a few things, it establishes protocols, it understands shape, it knows what works.

.........

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I started my new job yesterday and so far, so good. Ok, so it’s only been a day, but the people seem like a good bunch and I am so looking forward to having more in my wallet than a crumpled passport photo and a bunch of raggedy old receipts. It's Dickensian poverty, I tell you!

I’ve already started browsing the newspaper for somewhere to live. I’m having a major dilemma over moving into a friend's house and striking out on my own, with the latter becoming increasingly more favourable. If I can afford it, I’d prefer not to share again and actually work on something, for once, that might resemble a ‘private life’. I’ve always wanted to try one... ;)


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Apparently someone once said to Artur Rubinstein that he was a great pianist. He replied that, actually, he didn't play the notes any better than anyone else: what he played better than anyone was the spaces between the notes.

It's sort-of obvious that a very plain, bare narrative - what one might loosely and irritatingly call Hemingway-style - apparently using as few words as possible, works as much by what's not said, as by what is. From that realisation it's not so far to realise that much of such a story's power is in what the reader finds - or puts? - into the spaces between the words. We may not even be aware we're finding anything, and what we're lured into putting there may not be the details of how people feel or places look, a sophisticated structure of ideas or series of events. It might be nothing more than a sense of import, a hyper-sensitivity, a skinned-ness that's beyond words or even thought.

It's less obvious that rich, baroque, lavish writing also operates in the spaces. Why look for spaces, for what's not there, when the words are piled high, the scents and sights and sounds lap round us, the ideas tumble over themselves and each other? But what happens between these kinds of notes is important too.

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Well, I've just heard back from one of the editors I mentioned I'd emailed earlier. And I was almost right. I suggested there was a possibility that my sub/email hadn't reached them; it was actually the other way round. For some reason the email they had on file as mine, um, wasn't

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I've withdrawn two short story submissions today. And that is disappointing. Really, really disappointing.

The first was sent last September. I received no acknowledgement of its receipt and heard nothing when I emailed to see whether it had arrived.

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It's going better this week, the working-to-a-writing-schedule writing life. Who knows why? I was a mess last week, a sprained/strained ankle and twitchy knee keeping me housebound but too irritated to concentrate on writing. Suddenly, this week, although ankle is still a little tender, I am more motivated, more focussed, more intent on stopping playing Scrabulous during my daily two-hours of scheduled writing time. Ok, it's only Monday, but here that's Day Two of the week, so I'd like to take a moment (not during writing time, it ended 6 mins ago) to just give myself a little pat on the back. I think that's important. I find it all too easy to berate myself for what I am not doing, to feel guilty about this and that, but I don't spend much time being nice to myself, saying, Well done, You sat there for two hours doing only writing-related things, good going.

It helps to share goals with my new writing buddy, just the setting of the goals is incredibly useful. I guess that's the kind of person I am. I like lists, ............

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