In the week that A L Kennedy said in the Observer in response to the question "Why don't we read short stories in Britain?"

That's like saying I don't like pandas because I don't spend much time with them. We do read short stories; it's amazing how much we read them, when we rarely know they've been published, because they aren't reviewed. We can't find them in bookshops and rarely see them in magazines.

The Short Review is trying to do its small part to redress the balance. Issue 5 is now available: Ten new reviews - ....


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Ah it’s like a Monday all over again today – the existential pain of having to go into work, groan … Still it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared (about two calming pills-worth, if you’re asking), mainly because I was running around like the proverbial until late afternoon and hardly had time to breathe, let alone think.

I’ve managed to be incredibly brave and ring some suppliers to get ballpark (hark at my management speak moment – someone take me out and shoot me before I do it again!!) estimates for our online booking system. My, how these people do like to talk. And ouch. It’s slightly more than a trip down the High Street, m’dears, ain’t it … I think we might be parking the ballpark (as it were) and carrying on as we were ...

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I got home yesterday evening, after a day spent doing things other than writing, and switched on the computer. When at last it was ready to chunter off and pick up the day's email, one that came in was from my publisher. Now they don't bombard me with stuff, and I'm not expecting anything this week, so was this big news or small, good news or bad? Either way, it and a whole lot of other online stuff would need dealing with, so I had an excuse for not sitting down at the computer straight away.

I changed out of my funeral-going outfit, got the supper out of the freezer, went to the loo, made a cup of tea, opened the post, tickled the top of my maths-homework-doing daughter's head, went upstairs to the study, drew the curtains, adjusted the lights, sat down and tackled the spam, approved the blog comments, checked the stats... But of course I couldn't help wondering all the time what Headline was emailing about...

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Book blog, The Millions, just held a Short Story Week. At the conclusion of the week they published their 45 favourite short story collections. The list includes quite a few titles that are new to me. Wonderful to see Aimee Bender, Lorrie Moore, George Saunders and Diane Williams on that list, some of my personal favourites. The ones reviewed on The Short Review are:

* The Collected Stories by Katherine Mansfield
* Self-Help, by Lorrie Moore

So we have at least another 43 we should be reviewing, it seems.

The Millions also has a fascinating interview with short short story writer Barry Yourgrau .....

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“The crones have got me my first national interview,” I told Cheryl, swaggering in a comical fashion in order to hide my real excitement.

“Oh my God!” she said, clapping her hands together. “That’s fantastic!” She hugged me. “What in?”

“The Ealing Leader,” I told her.

“Oh.” I felt her arms go limp. “That’s not really…national as such, is it?”

“Well, ‘national’ is just an expression we use in the industry to mean ‘major’.

“No, I’m pretty sure it means ‘national’.


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A day off today, thank the Lord. Nothing special but I need to use up some days before the end of March, as I can only take five days over to the next holiday year. Still, always nice to have a bloody Monday off!

Had quite a leisurely morning - I am however utterly delighted by Jill Weekes' review of Thorn in the Flesh which you can find on her blog dated 2 March. Jill has also been kind enough to put a similar five-star review on Amazon though of course they're not stocking it, Gawd bless 'em ... (you'll need to click through to full post for links!)

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With St. Patrick’s Day just around the corner, you can be sure I’m excited and already getting ready for my favorite day of the year! This year St. Paddy’s day will be celebrated on March 15th, rather than the usual date of March 17th. This is to avoid it falling on the Holy Week of the Catholic Church. The last time this happened was in 1940 to avoid it falling on Palm Sunday. So the year 2008 is a special year, indeed! And even if you’re not Irish, it’s a wonderful excuse to let go and have some fun! So put on your green and dance your own Irish jig, if you like. There’s no better time than St. Patrick’s Day to infuse your day with some good old fashion fun! Soon I’ll be out and about creating my own mischief, leaving copies of Laura and the Leprechauns hidden throughout Orange and Los Angeles County—so be on the lookout! Just check at www.bookcrossing.com for where I’ve left my clues.
All my best,

Amber

www.chrysalispress.com

I'm sure this is usual for writers; you reach a point of real progress with a story and you begin to lust after a place of retreat, somewhere you can hide away with your notebooks and just... think, read, write. I don't mean a cottage in the woods or the wilderness (although the Coach House at Gwydir? Bliss!). Just a room would suit me. Or a garden shed, as long as it had a few home comforts. Hmm. Milly Molly Mandy's jam pantry would suit.

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When you ask a writer “Where do you get your ideas from?” you may as well ask “Where do you get your dreams from?”

Writing can perhaps be seen as a type of lucid dreaming that the dreamer bothers to record. In lucid dreaming, the dreamer seems to have some control over the dream content. We writers also like to believe we are in control of the material we produce. There’s more to it than that, of course. As writers, we actively seek out the dreams that fuel our fiction, sometimes even inducing them with our own preferred stimulant or ritual, or combination of multiples of the above.

The American writer and writing professor Louis Gallo shared his own particular method for dream inducement with me in an email: “I crave dreams and have studied them for years, mainly the symbolic and archetypal elements. So I try to induce them. I find this concoction to work: a glass of RED wine, a large greenish banana, a piece of ephedra (this is what gives the really vivid dreams) and about half a mg of Ativan, the latter for getting to sleep.”

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Ye gods, sound the trumpets and wave the ruddy flags as, by George, I've done the bloody rewrite!! Yes. The Gifting is now completely rewritten and I believe I can give myself the ruddy evening off. Hell, I deserve it.

Naturally, I'll have to do the read-through and correct the no-doubt numerous errors, plus redo the timeline, create a new character profile for Annyeke and do a battles timeline, but at least I have something nearer the beast as I think it should be to actually work with. Sorry, you'll need to forgive the split infinitive. I can't be arsed to rewrite it. Ho ho. It is funny how some novels have to be chipped away at like sculptures before you get to what's inside ...

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