Longshots and Shortlists
The Yin and Yang of Writing
This year, October brings with it not just the usual mists and mellow fruitfulness but the tantalising dangling carrot of prize-winning as I wait to hear whether I have made it from the shortlist of Wells Literary Festival’s Book for Children to the winners’ podium. Did I mention that my children’s book has been shortlisted? Of course I did! It’s all I’ve been able to think about since I got the phone call from Shepton Mallet* a month ago with the good news. I’m telling everyone…
21 Years A Parrot Parent
21 years down, sixty-plus still to go??! Hard to believe, but Jerry Parrot celebrated her 21st birthday….or hatchday….this month, a day that was marked with a little bit of ankle biting, a few swear words, some manic playing with an empty vitamins bottle and plenty of tuneless whistling (all her, not me, I hasten to add, though the ankles, of course, were mine). It was a day just like the 7,665 that have led up to this momentous occasion, for such is the reality of owning a parrot, or at least owning a parrot like Jerry.
Brave New World: Moving Forward After Lockdown
With lockdown lifting, will we drift back to our old ways?
.BRAVE NEW OR SAME OLD?
As the world slowly unfurls itself like a giant sleeping bear from hibernation, it may be time to examine the shape of our new post-Covid lives, and to re-evaluate our relationship not only with each other but also with our planet.
Trawling my bookshelves during lockdown, in one of the many space-themed tomes that have gathered there over the years, I found this wonderful quote from American Author Lt. Col. William H Rankin:
“Someday I would like to stand on the moon, look down through a quarter million miles of space and say, “There certainly is a beautiful earth out tonight.”
Please just pause for a moment to really appreciate that…Keep Reading…
Lockdown Laughter
A Look at the Funnies of the Last Few Months
When the going gets tough, the tough get…er..giggling? Maybe it’s not always the best medicine – there’s a time and a place for a fistful of paracetamol, granted – but laughter certainly gets you through some tough times, and there have been few tougher than the last 10 weeks of lockdown. Whose phone hasn’t gone into meltdown recently with endless WhatsApp shares as we try and relieve the tedium of our isolation? Who hasn’t had their day brightened at some point by a bitingly funny meme?
Coughs, Quiz Shows and Quiet Time
A Reflection on the Month just Gone and Surviving the Next!
Month one of lockdown is behind us. But the world, far from being brave and new, has become strange and scary, under threat from a vicious and voracious virus, which has left us cowering in our homes. Scared to go out, many of us are faced with the problem of what to do with ourselves, trapped indoors as we are, all day every day. Well, what better distraction than our old friend, telly?
Hello Telly My Old Friend…
It was on such a quest that I stumbled upon ITV’s 3-part drama, ‘Quiz’ last month. This is the quite extraordinary tale of the birth of quiz show ‘Who Wants To Be a Millionaire’, hosted by Chris Tarrant. While today the series may be relegated to reruns on distant Freeview channels, back in the noughties this show was THE programme to watch, not least of all because of its tantalising million-pound prize…keep reading...
Verse in a Time of Virus
It’s hard to write anything when our heads are full of the Coronavirus currently rampaging the globe, so here’s a short piece of Flash Fiction (under 500 words) inspired not only by the virus but, more importantly, literature. It’s constructed from the openings of a number of (very famous) books. How many can you spot referenced here?
VERSE IN A TIME OF VIRUS
If only this were a book that could be replaced upon the shelf. If only this were the best of times instead of the worst of times. If only things were normal, the way they are in Privet Drive. If only this remarkable incident could stay 20,000 leagues under the sea. Instead, it lurks around the corner of a street that – on TV – looks just like yours or mine. Suddenly, Jane Eyre is not the only person being told there is no possibility of taking a walk today.
The Ides of March and Whether you should Beware!
14 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the Ides of March
“Beware the Ides of March,” warned the soothsayer to Julius Caesar. At least, that’s how it went in Shakespeare’s dramatization of real-life events from 1600 years earlier. Indeed, it was on the 15th March 44BC that Caesar was assassinated by a group of Roman senators. It seems they were pissed off at his being made ‘dictator perpetuo’ (dictator for life) and so did the only thing they could think of to depose him…radically shorten his life, by stabbing him 23 times.
But what exactly are the ides of March? And is it just Caesar who needs to be wary of them? Put simply (which is not as easy as it sounds when it comes to the Roman calendar) it is the middle of the month (the 13th or 15th depending on which month we are referring to). Numbering the days of the month from 1 to 31 (or 30 or 28) was obviously far too straightforward for the Romans who preferred to count back from 3 fixed points within each month: the Nones (the 5th or 7th), the Ides (the 13th or 15th) and the Kalends (the first of the following month). Clearly, while their roads might have been straight, their time-measuring was anything but.
Growing Old: 21 Ways to Spot You’re No Longer Top of the Pops
Music’s Ever-Shifting Soundscape
“I can’t possibly go back to CDs!” This is what I heard myself wail, panic stricken, as my much-loved iPod Classic finally died on me, never to retrieve those carefully curated playlists ever again. I was bereft. What would I do without being able to access 5,000 songs wherever I went? How would I decide what to listen to if I couldn’t just stick it on ‘shuffle’ and let my music make the decision for me?
It’s amazing what we get used to, just as it’s amazing how quickly those same things become obsolete (the iPod Classic no longer warrants Apple’s time or support). Yet, it’s not so long ago that I was liberating myself from the weight of a dusty vinyl collection by scouring the endless, glittering racks of CDs in the likes of Tower Records and Our Price, slowly amassing my compact, shiny replacements. Ah, those were the days, you briefly sigh misty-eyed. But already music has leap-frogged well beyond CDs to surpass even my newly-fashioned comfort zone of digital downloads. Now, it’s all about streaming with Spotify, YouTube and the like. The world of music, like everything else, is constantly reinventing itself.
By Janus, it’s 2020!
Looking Forward to Looking Back
As plenty of people have been at pains to point out over the last few weeks, 2020 is not in fact the start of a whole new decade but the end of an old one. Unless there was ever a year zero, they reason, then this year marks the end of the….what do we call them? The Tens? The Teens? The last ten years anyway. Journalists all over the globe have got it wrong, they snipe.
Personally, I have little time for these killjoy pedants. It seemed more than fitting as the fireworks popped and fizzed at a minute past midnight on January 1st 2020 to believe they heralded in a whole new epoch. 2021 is just not going to feel as grandiose, as full of possibilities and fresh starts as this New Year just gone. And I’m aware that these pedantic sticklers for correctness are absolutely right in their calculations, but in my head I dismiss them as the same boring people who feel the need to constantly point out that a tomato is technically a fruit, or who glance at their watches as you bid them a noon-time good morning and remark snidely “it’s afternoon, actually.”
My Top Twelve Festive Films
Christmas Traditions
If ever there is a month associated with tradition, it is December, dominated as it is by the repeated patterns of Christmas. Whether those traditions involve mass at midnight, stuffing down platefuls of dry turkey or donning that playfully disgusting jumper from the back of your cupboard doesn’t matter. The point is you do it every year because that’s what you do at Christmas. It’s tradition.
I’m the same. As soon as the calendar gets flipped over to the cat in the Santa hat, then it’s full on festivity: Christmas music, Christmas lights, excusing everything that you shouldn’t do by adding ‘Ah well it is Christmas’ (which includes trying Advocaat year after year in the hope that it will taste different this time) as well as binge watching Christmas films.
Making Three Days Count: Don’t Be A Politician
It’s November 1st, and until very recently much of Britain believed it would be waking up to a new dawn, a new and scary dawn perhaps, but one which saw us on the other side of this whole Brexit mess. Boris Johnson had declared, after all, that he would rather be “dead in a ditch” than extend our departure beyond Halloween so it was absolutely, definitely, positively happening…until it wasn’t. Ding, ding. And there goes the bell after yet another pointless round.
If We’re Not Arguing About Brexit…
But, before we could even get up to put the kettle on, the great British public found it had ringside seats yet again. This time it was for the less than thrilling and equally deadlocked brawl over the date for a general election. Boris wanted the 12th of December. The Lib Dems and SNP favoured the 9th and nobody was exactly sure what Labour wanted.
Three days. My God, these people will argue over anything! Given that it has so far taken us three years to not leave Europe, I was really struggling to see what difference those three days could actually make to anything or anyone in real terms. But argue and bluster they did.
Wimbledon BookFest is back in Town!
It’s October and that means many things. Pumpkins won’t just find their way into soups and stews but out onto window ledges and doorsteps. Questionable American traditions will be imported to the UK for the last night of the month. (Okay, okay, that’s just me being a bit bah-humbug about it all but honestly I’ve never truly understood this Trick or Treat malarkey.) But most importantly, to my bookish mind at least, October means Wimbledon BookFest returns once more to the common!
This annual charitable event, which has been going since 2006 starts off on the 3rd October with Joanne Harris (author of Chocolat) talking to Jennifer Cox about her new novel in the Chocolat series: The Strawberry Thief. The festival closes ten days later with the equally sweet Nadiya Hussein (our Bake Off hero), with fewer strawberries but more self-reflection as she discusses her new and very personal book: Finding My Voice.
What Richard Powers’ ‘The Overstory’ means to me.
A Book About Trees
At the risk of sounding like an M&S advert, this is not just a novel, this is Richard Powers’ ‘The Overstory’–and if you have not heard of it and are not frightened off by the fact that the paperback has over six-hundred pages– then I’d urge you to read it.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018, this is an epic tale of trees as well as of nine individuals all with their own unique connection to them. It is a story which spans centuries in the telling, thereby giving us the most incredible sense of time and which will leave you in an altogether different place at the end to where you began. Most importantly, it puts our lives into a new and not particularly flattering perspective. Yet I think we need to be reminded, now more than ever, that “to be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs.”
Your August-Themed Reading List!
It’s a Word-Nerd Kind of Summer
Back in February I wrote my Ode to February…a bleak month in many senses coming as it does in the middle of winter–a month which needs as many odes as it can get to cheer itself up as it shrugs off the financial drains of Christmas along with the regrets of January’s broken resolutions. Poor February, sluggishly crawling along in its winter coat, never quite believing that there will ever be another spring. But that was six months ago. Spring arrived just as it always does. And now we come to August, an altogether different affair as for years this month has signalled the complete freedom of our summer holidays. An entire month not nibbled away at either end by homework and assignments. Yay! No more school. No more college. Its days are long and sunshine-filled. It is robust and healthy and needs no odes to feel good about itself.
So how do you fill these long sunny days without the structure of school or college? Well, if you’re a word nerd like me, you take the time to do projects and read books, of course! Oh happy days, August, thank you! But what to read, I hear you cry. Well, how about these five offerings, brought to you (in no particular order) courtesy of the month itself, for they all have August-named characters waiting to entertain you.
Why I Don’t Care Who The Next Prime Minister Is!
Published 3rd July 2019
THE POLITICS OF LIFE
Apart from fumbling through a mediocre degree in Politics and History many, many moons ago, and a brief dalliance with the Young Liberals when I was both young and liberal, I am not much of a political creature. Still, I would–until very recently–routinely follow the news and could identify the faces of those in government as well as naming the key opposition players. Moreover, I voted whenever that stiff, little card popped through my letterbox because I didn’t want to take this hundred-year-old right for granted. Greater women than I had fought and died for my right to bimble up to the local church and mark my X casually on some ballot paper or other. Besides, whatever you think of those people in government, it’s still better to live in a country where your opinion is sought out every five years or so, than a country where such freedoms are but an illusion.
THIS THING CALLED BREXIT
But then came 2016. And David Cameron’s ill-conceived pledge to hold a referendum on our place in Europe so long as we could just find it in our hearts to vote Tory for one last time. So we did. And there was. And now we have Brexit. And in the continuing debacle that has followed Mr Cameron scuttling off the very ship which he shot a hole into (just as fast as his ratty little feet could carry him) everything has changed. Or at least it has for me.
Code Purple: From Flabby First Draft to Final Edit.
Or…The Many Stages of Writing
Beginning At The Beginning
For decades, if my writing didn’t start with Chapter One at the top, I thought it wasn’t proper writing. After all, I wrote my first “novel” (well, it had chapters) at nine and got my first publisher’s rejection at eleven. Forty-odd years later (this ship doesn’t turn round very quickly!) I have finally admitted to myself that my definition of writing has been somewhat blinkered and that there is a whole other source of possible writing income out there–either through competitions or magazines or anthologies–and that is via the short story.
And guess what? Writing short stories rocks! What’s more, all those ideas I’ve had over the years and jotted into my notebook, where they then stagnated because I couldn’t work out how to fit them into a full-length novel, can suddenly be re-born in short story form. Put simply, I’m hooked!
How Does A Story Go From Flabby to Fit?
There are loads of blogs out there which will guide you through crafting your stories, so let me just say straight off…this isn’t another of them. I have no interest in telling you how to hone your skills. But I was interested, as I got into my short-story stride, to observe the stages by which a story grew from the merest germ of an idea to flabby first draft and then all the way through to a polished (one hopes) final offering. And to that end I sat down and wrote a story over a period of 8 days, charting all of its changes as I went. In other words, what follows is going to be an embarrassing, warts-and-all look at how my latest story, Code Purple, came into being. I trust anyone who reads the (really quite bad) first draft will stay with it to at least see the final copy….otherwise I shall never get offered another paid writing-gig, ever.
Embracing Your April Fool
April, wrote TS Eliot in “The Waste Land”, is the cruellest month and (while I realise this was not exactly what he was getting at) for a month to start with a day officially dedicated to cruelly pranking one another, I’m inclined to agree. What on earth is it all about?
APRIL FOOL’S DAY
It seems there is no consensus as to the origin of April Fool’s Day. Parts of Europe have been celebrating the first of April since the 1500s, though here it was often referred to as April Fish Day, a reference, perhaps, to the abundance of fish in French streams at around this time of year, which made them easy to catch. Ah, foolish fish! This at least provides one plausible reason why chocolate fish are still given as gifts in some parts of Europe and paper fish can get attached to someone’s back as a playful trick (not exactly LOL territory admittedly). Mind you, there are worse things to have pinned to you, as anyone who has ever watched The Simpsons will know. Oh Bart, you prankster: every day is April Fool’s for you.
And it’s not just Bart Simpson who enjoys a good prank. Who among you hasn’t been sucked in to watching TV’s Impractical Jokers even though, on an intellectual level, the premise of the programme is simply awful?
I Wish I Had Written That: Benign Book Envy
The Green-Eyed Monster
According to psychologists, there are two types of envy: malicious envy and benign envy. In the former, we feel tormented by another person’s superior position or good fortune and, in an attempt to make ourselves feel better, want them to fail or suffer in some way as a kind of warped payback for our own perceived shortcomings. With benign envy, we are able to appreciate the other person’s elevated position without it burning away at our insides like acid and thus use it as a motivational, aspirational force for ourselves, helping us to be better and strive further. Yes, it is possible to be such an evolved being! Of course I’m not saying I haven’t ever experienced that first kind of twisted jealousy but in this piece I am talking strictly benign envy, Benign Book Envy to be precise— that moment when it strikes you: God, I wish I had written that!
An Ode to February with all its Broken Resolutions
Published 5th January 2019
Is time running out?
So it’s February already. That means one twelfth of 2019 is already behind us. To put it another way, if the year were a clock face, five minutes would have already passed. Were each month to represent a step on the addicts’ path to recovery, we would have admitted its power over us and accepted that we need help. And if we were singing about Christmas, we would be holding a partridge in a pear tree while secretly dreaming of five gold rings. You get the idea. There is a sense of time passing, yet still a long road ahead.
This should be a good thing signalling as it does that there remains plenty of time to realise the resolutions that were blithely made some thirty-plus days ago. Standing on the cusp of the new year, filled once more with hope and prosecco, we promised ourselves that this year was going to be different to all those that had preceded it. Whether that meant going to the gym three times a week, dropping a stone in weight, writing a novel or quitting smoking depended very much on the prosecco-filled individual in question but what is common to all was the unerring belief that this year we would actually manage to make a change.
From Writer’s Block to Cheese in Three Easy Steps…
As any writer knows, especially one with a looming deadline, there is nothing worse than sitting at a blank page, fingers arched over the keyboard waiting for a light-bulb moment of inspiration which threatens never to arrive. For that reason, and again like many a writer, when an idea —however half-formed or half-baked— pops into my head I make a quick note of it somewhere so that I can come back to it later and spend quality time one-on-one with it, for this fledgling-fancy will need watering and nurturing if it is to later blossom into the glorious word-filled page or two that I long for. It is in this piecemeal way that books are mapped out, short stories started, lines of dialogue captured and characters, along with their entire back-stories, sketched out.
Analogue or Digital?
So it was, as the harsh glare from the white page on the screen intensified against the fading January light, that I went searching through the archives of unfinished (and sometimes un-started) ideas on my laptop, looking for inspiration. During my search I clicked hopefully into a word document entitled ‘analogue or digital’. It sounded promising, the notes for a thoughtful article on our rapidly changing technology and how this affects us writers and our creative processes perhaps. Yes, I thought: I can write that.
The Changing Nature of Language
(Or From Blimey to Bizjet, Wireless to Whoa!)
It was George Bernard Shaw who said “England and America are two countries separated by a common language” and as someone who once found herself at cross purposes with an American whilst trying to explain that I was on holiday in his lovely country, I concur. The aforementioned Floridian eventually rationalised that ‘Saturday is a holiday, I suppose’ and left me only later to realise that, had I just said I was on vacation in his lovely country, there would have been no such confusion.* More importantly, we could have spared ourselves the (no doubt mutual) suspicion that the other person was somehow ‘not quite right in the head’.