Working is writing for me. Nothing else seems quite like work, and I love working and achieving something as many days in the month as possible. When I was trapped in a corporate nightmare a few years ago, I would feel grubby and unfulfilled at the end of most days. The only thing I was allowed to write were reports that circulated internally like bored goldfish in an algae-infested tank. Other people in my 'team' did nothing at all as far as I could tell except a bizarre activity called management, that involved telling other people what to do - but only when you had no idea how to do it yourself. I could have taken the piss and written a novel and no one would have noticed, but that would have made me feel even grubbier.

When I was young, physically my writing life was words on paper spooling out of the top of the typewriter with a ting at the end of every line. Then I saw films from the US that featured word processors and I longed and longed for one of those. In the mid-1980s I got an Amstrad, and then the words would appear on a screen, where they could be edited. I did long to write fiction, and tried some short stories - had one published in a magazine when I was at Cambridge (sub Switch Bitch) and another very nearly made it onto Radio 4.

I earned my living as a consumer journalist, having been a Vogue Talent Contest winner while in my last year reading English at Cambridge. When my children started arriving I began to specialise in maternity leave cover at senior levels in magazines and newspapers. Deputy editor of Elle Decoration;. Commissioning editor on the Times Weekend section for instance. Very little time to write, but I still was doing something that resembled what I loved

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I am delighted to be hosting the second leg on my great friend and writing colleague Nuala Ní Chonchúir's Nude Not Naked virtual book tour for her stunning short story collection, Nude, published on Sept 1st by Salt Publishing.

Young though she may be (the same age as me, so very very young!), Nuala, who lives in Galway, has already published 4 books: two short story collections and two collections of poetry, with a third forthcoming from Templar Poetry in November. Shortlisted for the European Prize for Literature, the Irish Times included her in their "People to watch this year" feature in January. Watch her? You'd better concentrate, she is so prolific and active, you are liable to miss something if you don't! (Did I mention that she gave birth to her third child, Juno, this year too?)


Before we start chatting, I thought I would give you a taste of Nuala's latest collection, in which all the stories have some flavour of nudity, but it is never what you expect. I tried so hard not to read it in one sitting, to savour it over time. But I couldn't put it down. It is clear to see that the writer is also a poet who loves language and rhythm........


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Hello, everyone! And how are you today? Had a good breakfast? Got the kids to school? Humoured your boss or already been down the gym to stretch and tone? Come on then, let’s get on with the writing day. Let’s celebrate each other’s literary successes, let’s mentally hold each other’s tired typing hand. Because that’s what we do, here on the net – regardless of our identity away from the screen, regardless of whether we stutter or dress weird or laugh like a donkey on dope. We stand firm, side by side. We’re in this game together, arms open wide.

Heh, heh! It’s a fickle community, I find on the web. Best buddies come and go – some stay in touch, even meet up with us, in the flesh. But others fall by the wayside because we’ve moved on and they haven’t or because they’ve found success first.

During my years mingling in writing communities on the web, I’ve found there are various types of virtual friends:


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A while ago a US writer said that if you allow any thought of the market to affect your writing, then you're not a writer, you're a whore (and the comment made me so cross that I'm not going to try to find dates or names). And now I see that my post The Market for Ropes has been picked up as expressing my strong views about writing for the market. Well, I do have strong views about lots of things, but that wasn't quite what I was getting at in that post. What I was trying to express there was that thinking about product, at the wrong moment in your practice, really screws up your writerly horse sense, your intuition, your instincts about what your writing needs and how it works.

But it's true that whether you should write for the market is a hardy perennial of most writers' talk. That US novelist, who'd better stay nameless otherwise I'll want to make a wax figure to stick pins into, is talking bunk. Because the market really doesn't have horns and a tail, still less fishnets and a basque: the market is another word for readers. Who else are we writing for? If we were really writing 'for ourselves' then we wouldn't go through the pressures and tediums and panics of getting published: we'd be quite happy sitting at home, scribbling away, and then stashing the notebooks under the bed: it wouldn't even matter if no one could read your writing. Yes, the writing process is actually a constantly revolving writing-reading-writing-reading cycle - we are our own first reader - but storytelling is fundamentally a communicative act. It needs a teller with a story but also an audience, and, to date, the only way to get lots of people to hear your story (and to feed and clothe yourself while you write the next one) is to put your words out into the market, which for better or worse is only the size it is because it can pay people to write, publish, print and sell books as a day job. (And no, sorry, giving away work on the internet is not the answer. What am I supposed to live on while I'm writing?)

What the art Calvinists don't acknowledge is that as soon as you clothe the ideas in your mind in words, and put them on paper so that others can read them, you're actually writing for a market: you're playing by a set of highly sophisticated, extremely evolved conventions about how storytelling works in our culture.

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I love an alliterative band and indeed a group which pays so much attention to what they're saying. Don't give me any of this mind-numbing Cascada or Basshunter nonsense, give me a band which has something of value to say in its lyrics. Give me Fleet Foxes.

The band is performing tonight (Monday, September 7) at the fabulous Vicar Street venue in Dublin and I was of the few (700 or so) who managed to scramble onto the Ticketmaster website a few months ago in a desperate race to get tickets once the clock struck 9am. The Seattle-ites are a breath of fresh air in today's music, even if they are influenced by the likes of the Beach Boys, Fairport Convention and My Morning Jacket. They have a unique talent for writing lyrics which are powerful and beautiful, yet simple, and all credit goes to the band members – Robin Pecknold, Skye Skjelset, J Tillman, Casey Wescott and Christian Wargo.

Song lyrics, and poetry and prose, are in my estimation, inseparable twins. Some say the music makes the lyrics more beautiful. Any band will tell you that their song lyrics are not expected to stand on their own. When stripped of their musical accompaniment, some might say the words when read aloud, seem a little 'flat'. A similar problem occurs too, in that so-called 'modern 'and 'post-modern' poetry would sound odd set to music.


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There is nothing about this book that yells at me to pick it up and read it. Not the cover, not the blurb. Nothing. Subtitled as “A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton” the back cover sells it as a trip down memory lane and hints at a few family skeletons. Big deal. Added to that, it was really difficult to find, so if wasn’t for the local Reading Group suggesting it as a title, I would have never even heard of it A shame really, because what the blurb fails to mention the one thing that held me throughout: mental illness.

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Hello and happy Friday to one and all. I've something a little different for you today. A guest post. For the first time in this blog's three year history (it turned three last month) I'm letting someone else take the wheel.

So a very warm welcome to Faye L Booth, whose second novel, Trades of The Flesh is published today and who will be talking about the Second Novel Experience. Over to you Faye...

Somehow, I'm just about to release my second novel. An interesting state of affairs, because I still don't think the reality of my debut coming out has hit me yet, and now I have two books out there in the world. Eeek.

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Recently I’ve read a lot about writers wondering if the time has finally come to give up on a project. You’ve sent it out a dozen times but the manuscript keeps on bouncing back. When you complain to fellow writers about your bad luck, the commiserations come thick and fast.

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The Short Review Sept 2009

Congratulations! To Petina Gappah, whose short story collection, An Elegy for Easterly, which we reviewed in the last issue, has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the only short story collection on the list.

In this month's issue, we bring you false relations, damaged goods, repetition patterns, quick repair, stories like donut holes, stories named for rivers, things that are cold to the touch, people who always want something, the collected stories of the Armitage family, and our first review of an ebook which leaves the reader, Radiohead-style, to decide what they'd like to pay. And, as ever, author interviews with almost everyone we review.

Controversially, perhaps, we've added the Literary Fiction category to the Find Something to Read By Category page. Difficult one, this. Might cause trouble. Who is to say what is Lit Fic and what isn't? Hmm. Also: Surprise yourself! Check out our non-complete list of short story collections published in 2008 and so far this year (almost). More than you thought, eh?

Pop in and have a read.

Do people still throw ’come as you are’ parties? I rarely get invited to parties… for some reason… so I wouldn’t know, but I remember them being the cause of much contrived hilarity in vintage sitcoms.

An editing tip that occurred to me recently is to think of each sentence as a potential party guest. When the telephone call arrives from the hip ‘n’ happening hosts, is the sentence ready to step out of the door looking effortlessly glam, or is it sitting in its threadbare pyjamas in front of a Dallas re-run, eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts and examining its split ends?

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