The Strictly Writing crew are herewith signing off for a couple of weeks. We'll be back posting on Tuesday 5th January - 2010!

We hope you all enjoy the festive season and wish you the very best for the New Year.

I shall be attending a Bollywood themed party on New Year's Eve. Last year's theme was unspecified - I wore a Twenties style costume and my husband went as a giant whoopee cushion (it's amazing, the variety of fancy dress outfits you can buy nowadays). We and the group of friends there really only chat, in depth, at this party, once a year. So I am bracing myself for questions about how my writing went in 2009 and whether I am published 'yet'. Erm... Nope. But I'm one book closer. Hopefully. Well, it's easy to be 'half-glass full' when it's champagne!


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There seems to be a lot of love for cats and snow right now, so here's a little Simon's Cat treat for you.

Happy Christmas!

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It’s a slippery thing, fiction! So I looked up a few definitions.

Story: a fictional narrative of briefer length than a novella. Then I looked up ‘Novella’ and discovered that the original ‘novels’ were probably the verbal relating of news from one town to another. The news was told to entertain as well as inform. The sequence of events changed. Some was held back, making the listeners desperate to know more…and so was born the ‘art’ of the story.

Art: the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions.

The short story is one of the most powerful forms of fiction. An arrangement of fictioncraft elements to elicit a response from the reader. ( Something that varies from mere enjoyment through to a real emotional punch in the gut). It is also one of the slipperiest forms of fiction –on one level it is easy to write (anyone can scribble a story in a few minutes – a sequence of events; a beginning, middle and end). But it is one of the most difficult to do well –that is the challenge for those of us who adore the form.

Maybe we love it for its power. The strength embodied in so few words, the way it can elicit a depth of emotional response that cannot be sustained (and rightly, or the reader would collapse!) for a whole novel. The way it can literally be life-changing.

Life changing? What IS this woman talking about?



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A wonderful time last night at the special launch event for Short Circuit hosted by Ride the World XX at Cafe Yumchaa! Here I am in full flow, reading three flash stories (photos courtesy of Elizabeth B):

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'Er, well, it's a kind of hole in a rock, perhaps all covered in snow'.

Last week I'd met with puzzled faces and blank stares from the Spanish teachers in Zamora. They'd enjoyed my Christmas Quiz, but were stumped by the question: 'Where does Santa live?'

Was it in:

a) a cabin

b) a chimney

c) a grotto

My Oxford Dictionary Thesaurus says a grotto is ' a picturesque cave' and I recall they were popular as writers' retreats in the eighteenth century. Alexander Pope had one in the garden of his house in Twickenham. The local History Museum and Art Gallery in Blackheath, a converted convent, had one too. Maybe it's iconic, associated with Lourdes and other places where the Blessed Virgin appeared. I've always hankered after a grotto, although I'd settle for a caravan at Whitstable.


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For those of you who remember Top of The Pops, I need you to get into the mood. Remember Dave Lee Travis? No? Just me then…

Imagine the countdown music. It goes something like this:

Na Na Na Na – Nah, Nah, Nah! Na Na Na Na – Nah, Nah, Nah! (Repeat repeatedly)


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Did Amanda Knox's graphic stories of brutal rape ultimately lead to a conviction for murder? Well according to some newspaper reports, it helped. The stories which appeared on her MySpace account, emerging after her arrest on suspicion of murdering fellow student Meredith Kercher, were lurid and graphic.

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Emily Gale is a London-born writer of children’s books, currently living in Australia. Girl Aloud is her first book for teenagers. Emily has kindly given us a signed copy of Girls Aloud to give away to one lucky person who comments below. The winner will be chosen out of the SW hat and posted up on Friday.

Kass Kennedy, the main character in Girl Aloud, is being pushed to audition for the X Factor against her better judgement. What gave you the idea for the story, Emily?

The initial spark came from thinking about pushy parents – in particular there were a few first-round auditions on The X-Factor in which the kids were tragically lacking in X and the parents were wearing gigantic rose-coloured spectacles. Watching those clips made me want to go home with the families and find out the set-up: how you go from clapping adoringly at your toddler singing Incey Wincey Spider, to encouraging them to make utter twits of themselves on national television? I wanted to complicate matters by giving my main character a lot of oomph and absolutely no desire to be a star – we hear a lot these days that “everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame” and I was sure my character wasn’t interested in that

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Nik Perring has been asking us to draw story shapes of our Works In Progress.

Well, I had this in mind when I was writing a recent short story set in a motorway service station in Northern England. It seemed quite linear, with little drops into the past and some arches to the future, which would have made quite a nice scribble, had I tried to put it onto paper.

The afternoon was wearing on so I went for a run before the light went completely. It was unbelievably cold; the little lake was still frozen solid and my lungs were beginning to hurt from the icy air. Then I met a cat.

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