I'm reading, on and off, an anthology of American Detective Stories. It has some authors I've heard of, including Raymond Chandler, Ed McBain, Sue Grafton and William Faulkner (yes, that William Faulkner!) and many I hadn't. Clinton H. Stagg is of the latter group. His story, The Keyboard of Silence (1923), features - wait for it - a blind detective.

Reading the story has convinced me of a long-standing thesis of mine: detective fiction is actually a branch of surrealism.

To quote one joyously surreal passage: ‘“One often wonders,” continued Colton [the blind detective] ... “why a stout woman, like that one two tables to our left, for instance, will suffer the tortures of her hereafter for the sake of drinking high balls in a tight, purple gown.”’
His assistant is understandably amazed. But as the blind detective explains, ‘”All stout women who breathe asthmatically wear purple. It is the only unfailing rule of femininity. And to one who has practised the art of locating sounds that come to doubly sharp ears the breathing part was easy.”’ And so on.



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When my daughter was fourteen I tried to kill her with an umbrella but my sisters-in-law stopped me. I had a good excuse - murder was definitely called for…if I’d had a blog then I wouldn’t have given her the name Amazon: I hated her for the best part of ten months!

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YouTube poetry - brilliant stuff.

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If you were at the launch last night you'd have heard (as well as some wonderful readings) me mentioning the contributors to the 20 Photos 20 Stories book were both local writers and professional authors; you'd also have heard me mention said authors' books by name. But you'd have also been very excited by the quality of the readings and might, in the excitement, not have remembered the titles of those books.

So, here, in no particular order, they are:

Words From a Glass Bubble, by Vanessa Gebbie.
A Kind of Intimacy, by Jenn Ashworth.
The White Road and Other Stories, by Tania Hershman.
Black Boxes, by Caroline Smailes.
In Search of Adam, by Caroline Smailes.
Loads and loads of Anne Brooke's!!
On The Edge and Morag's Garden, by Joy Winkler.
House of Wonders, by John Lindley.
Navigation, by Jo Bell.
And a little book about Romans and Celts and a boy who doesn't like sleeping. By me.

I do hope I've not left any out.

***

There'll be more on the launch soon, with some pics. And vids and audio, hopefully. But, for those of you who just can't wait, click here for a teaser courtesy of Jo Bellfield, or here courtesy of Bubble Cow. Or here, if you'd rather see someone who wasn't me.

***

On a personal and mental note, I'm shattered. I have a lot to catch up on and a lot to write. And I can't wait to get back into it. I have loved working on the photo book but that, and all the other stuff that's happened over this past few months, has been tiring and a bit of a strain. So if things go a little quite over here for a wee while, you'll know why - I'll just be getting back to being me again. And getting organised.

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At one level, The Philosopher and The Wolf is a highly amusing and deeply moving memoir of the life and times of one man and his wolf. As both grow and mature and change - jobs, homes, continents, girlfriends - they provide, for each other, the only constants in each other’s lives. We watch Brenin as he grows from fluffy cub into 150lb adult; we observe his training and his interactions with dogs and other people; we prowl with the wolf as he hunts rabbits and chases birds as much as we see his human companion hunt jobs and chase girls.


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Never let it be said that the quality of this blog is going downhill…

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I went to an event of Jo Bell's last night and it was brilliant.

This was the idea: go to the pub and write poems.

On plain beer mats.

And it worked so well.

Jo's an excellent poet, and she's lovely (I knew these things already) so I knew it would be good - and it really was. She had some fab exercises for us to do and managed to get people who were just there for a beer and a chat to get writing - with terrific results. Seriously, some great and hilarious poems were produced. I think we counted 40 poems by the end of the evening, which is pretty darned good in two hours.



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When do you stop? When do you decide that enough is enough?

I'm editing and writing at the same time (copy edits for Changeling: Dark Moon, finishing Changeling 3), and my head is in a bit of a spin.

I quite enjoy editing (yes, I know that makes me a bit of a weirdo, but hey...).

I'm a putter-inner. Most authors are taker-outers, but I'm in the other camp. By this I mean that many authors write huge first drafts, and then for the second draft they set about pruning, trimming (or sometimes even hacking) the manuscript down to make it as streamlined as possible. I, however, tend to have a first draft that I know needs adding to, and constructing my second...

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My name is Caroline and I am an email addict.
In the time it took me to write that, about five million emails went whizzing around the world. It’s reckoned that about 210 billion are sent every single day. And even though many of them are offers for penile extension and requests from made-up banks, a very large number are genuine.
Rather too many of them are probably mine.
It’s hard to remember what life was like before email. I work from home and on the rare days when my program is ‘down’, I’m like one of those lions pacing around its cage at the zoo. I live on a quiet road and the ping of my inbox helps me feel in touch with the world outside. [My email doesn’t literally go ‘ping’. It doesn’t make any sound at all, but you get my drift]. Almost all my journalism commissions arrive via email and it’s the medium I use most to contact people in my job. I often set up interviews by email and sometimes even get to DO the interview by email, thereby by-passing the phone entirely. That means no transcribing of the conversation and a clear record of what was said for all concerned. Result!
I also love email as a means of keeping in touch with friends, from the ones that live just down the road, to the one who live thousands of miles away in different time zones. The great thing about this medium is that you can reply at your leisure, unlike phone calls that happen when your child is decorating the bathroom with their bottle of Matey bubblebath, or when you’re late for an appointment, or just can’t be fagged to speak right now. Sure, an answering machine serves that purpose too, but ‘screening’ calls always feels just a little bit furtive.


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Workmen were arranging what looked like oversized fridge-magnet letters across the pavement, some of them reversed.

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