Bright Lights, Medium-sized City

There’s a new streetlight right across from my house. It’s super-tall and shines in through my window like it thinks it’s the moon. When I go out at night, it feels like it’s day. It’s weird. After they removed the old one and before they switched this new one on, there was a week when there was no light at all, and I had to fumble with my keys in the dark, trying to find the lock. But this brightness is strange. It washes the stars out. It will take some getting used to.

I have a story up at the very excellent For Every Year, where you can travel all the way back to 1400, year by year, and discover all kinds of wonderful things you’d maybe only chance upon if you spent an entire day clicking through on Wikipedia. And you don’t get stories and poems as part of that experience. I’ve been so excited, counting the years down until finally, today, it got to 1620. A glorious year for underwater innovations. Oh yes.

Things are happening in the background of my life, and some of them I have no control over. I’ve made some huge decisions over the last week, and now I’m waiting to see how things will play out. It’s a strange thing to make life decisions when there’s no one else to consult. I spent so long having my choices affect someone else’s life. The choices I made were smaller, then. And I was wary. But now, it’s all just me, and contained in that immense freedom is the equally massive fear that I will f*ck it all up and only have myself to blame. Oh well. I'm sure I'll come out the other side with stories to tell, if nothing else. Hehehe. Watch this space.

I Blame Don Draper

What I do when I have a reasonable amount of time off work (anything more than three days will do) is turn myself nocturnal. I get way more done at night. It’s just easier for me to write and do creative things between the hours of 9pm and 6am. I usually take some time out to devour at least one TV box set, too. This takes place over the course of just one day. This holiday, I went with Mad Men (S3). And now I'm sitting here with a pack of chocolate cigarettes on my desk. I'm not convinced the two aren't linked. Who goes into a shop and comes away with a pack of chocolate cigarettes?

As a kid, my favourite part was always the paper. Or maybe it was the mix of chocolate and paper. It dawns on me now that the paper is not rice paper. The paper is, in fact, just paper paper. And I don’t know why I didn’t figure this out before. I’ve eaten rice paper. And I’ve eaten paper. I know the difference. So I think I spent my childhood eating and loving the paper from chocolate cigarettes. I feel like I want to pat my younger self on the head and sigh heavily.

So, 2010 is over and done. It was a good year. It was a crazy year. A LOT happened, and a LOT changed. Right now I've got that slightly-panicked, giddy feeling of living at the end of an era, just waiting for everything to collapse. It feels like it could, too, more so than at the Millennium. (Ooh, could the Mayans have been right all along?) I feel like my childhood obsession with survival manuals will definitely pay off, anyway. Sooner or later, sooner or later.

Here's one of my favourite apocalyptic stories outside of a Coupland book.

Here's the beginning of a very brilliant novel set at the turn of the Millennium.

And here's Coupland doing a bit of excellent zeitgeisty doom-mongering. I love him.

In 2010, I wasn’t quite so prolific with my short stories. I focussed on my novel, which made me a different kind of writer, I think. More “marathon-y”. Despite this, I was lucky enough to see some of my short stories come out in actual books - Best of the Web 2010, Even More Tonto Short Stories, Bugged, Scattered Reds - and it’s been amazing to hold them in my hands and smell them. New books are like crack to me. (I say that like I know what "crack" actually is.) Exciting things are afoot for 2011, too, and I feel like it’s going to be a very different kind of year.

I’m not doing resolutions this year. I’m having themes. Month by month, a one-word theme for each month. See if it shakes things up a bit. See if anything really changes at all. My word for January is “deliberate”.

deliberate adj 1 done on purpose; not accidental 2 slow and careful
>verb to think about something carefully
from Latin deliberare, deliberatum to consider carefully

I think I'll lean more towards the "done on purpose" part than the "slow and careful", depending on what I'm actually doing. I thought it up whilst walking back from the shops with some potatoes. I thought up February’s word then, too. I think February is going to be pretty funny. We’ll see how January goes first, though.

So I spent the first day of this year deliberately regressing. I stayed in my pjs all day and watched Big, then Star Wars, then The Empire Strikes Back. Does anyone ever get to Jedi? Might watch it tomorrow, deliberately. Might carefully consider Ewoks.

I think I adopted a deliberate attitude pretty much straight after midnight. Even before the fact that it was 2011 had sunk in properly. I was deliberate in my actions. I wasn’t particularly slow or careful (except for when walking up and down the stairs), but I did things on purpose. I even had a non-accidental conversation with someone I’d never really talked to before. I’ve stopped being a hermit so much, of late, and it’s been nice getting to know people I’ve been just nodding Hi to for the last however many years. I did, however, fail in deliberately not dancing like a robot. Oh well, it was a cusp time. I'll let that go.

I’m deliberately going to do some things this evening, and I’ll report back if they pay off. The things aren’t going to be press ups, btw. Just in case anyone’s wondering about my upper arm strength, i.e. if you ask me to arm wrestle, you will probably still win.

Happy New Year!

Scattered Reds and That Old Tornado-Feeling

I'm missing a lot of good things this week. If I had unlimited funds and a jetpack/helicopter gunship, then this week would be looking very fine. This week, I'd be feeling a little like an international playboy, so to speak. Because this week, two books that I've been lucky enough to get stories into are being officially launched. The first launch, for Even More Tonto Short Stories was last night, in Newcastle. By all accounts it went really well. I'm sorry I missed it.

Then tomorrow, in Manchester, Bad Language are launching Scattered Reds, their second anthology. My story, Pause, is in the book. I won't know who else is in it till I get my hands on a copy, although I do know my fellow Bugged alumnus Calum Kerr is in there, and he'll be reading on the night.

Here's the official blurb:

Scattered Reds - Book Launch

Bad Language will be launching their second anthology at the Castle Hotel on the 24th November. There will be guest stars! There will be books for sale! There will be an open mic slot!

The launch will be free to attend, and if you wish to partake in the open mic slot, please e-mail events@badlanguagemcr.co.uk
in order to book a place.

We hope to see you down there!

Dan, Nici and Joe.

I wish I could be there. It promises to be an amazing evening. If you're in the vicinity, then you should definitely pop in.


In other news, I NEED to visit this place.

Also, it's National Short Story Week this week, and I've managed to get two new stories written, and finished one I'd been wrestling with for a while. (Yay!) It makes a nice break from editing. I do need to stop with the 4am bedtimes, though.


I spoke with a friend a while back about feeling like there's a tornado inside you making everything heightened and crazy. Sometimes it lasts a few hours. Sometimes it's a few weeks. And it's always fun, but it puts everything up in the air and you're never quite sure how things will land, or what will happen when they do. I've got that now, the tornado-feeling, and I don't know why. Maybe I should wear my red shoes today, just in case.

A "Thinking About Time" Kind of Day

I’m always really surprised when the weather turns this cold. I feel like I’ve been caught out, like autumn has swapped itself for winter. Right now my hands are cold and numb and I’ll need to put on my hobo gloves in a minute.

Time is speeding up again. The last few weeks have seemed to last forever, but somehow it’s almost November now, and even though October has been full and crazy, I’m sure it can’t be the 30th already. Saw an interesting clip of a possible time traveller recently. I like to think it’s an actual time traveller, but the logical explanation is it's an "ear trumpet" and the person is hard of hearing. There must be some time travellers though. Someone must have figured out how to do it by now.

In a matter of hours British Summer Time ends, and we all get to travel back in time by an hour. I like thinking about this. That whole hour from 1am to 2am on Sunday 31st October, we get to redo. I have a feeling the hour will be a good one, based on the company I will be keeping. There are things I probably shouldn’t do. They are the things I want to do the most. We shall see.

I like thinking about how I’d live and what I’d do if I knew I could always go back and redo it, if I had the ability to stop and start and rewind time. Would I be more free if nothing stuck? Would I live a life full of risk and shameless abandon? Possibly. Or I might be just as likely to live with my hand on the snooze button, cosy and warm and forever in bed.

One of the reasons I always gave for wanting to be able to stop time, was so that I could read all the books I ever wanted to read. All the books. And I’m not alone on that...



...but what else? Maybe the fact that we only get one go at this makes the things we do more important. Telling someone you love them wouldn’t mean half as much if you could just rewind it and have it forgotten if it wasn’t reciprocated. We find a lot of who we are in those moments when we’re leaping over the abyss.

Yesterday I killed a cold, with effervescent vitamin C. Today feels like a good day. Maybe because it’s one of those “Time is being thought about/talked about/shifted around” kind of days.


Good things:

The Bugged launch in Manchester - reading to lovely people/reading with lovely and talented people/holding the actual book in my hands (also, Bugged getting a write-up on the BBC website, yeah!)

Fixing things myself - oh, I am so smart, and ever so slightly surprised

Raspberry-flavoured effervescent vitamin C

Doing my first post-Hundred Days book sculpture

The Panique Au Village film

Lots of planning and thinking and writing

Talk To Me About Love - a social experiment (the brainchild of Max Wallis)

Sexy music:




Lovely music

Thinking about linking to GWAR for the lovely music one

Preparing to erase an hour

Bugs, Books and Reading Out Loud

Behold! This is the contents page of the Bugged book! (I'm right at the bottom of the left page. Yeah! Note: all thumbs in the photos belong to Jo Bell. There's no way I can do nail polish that neat.)


And this is the cover. Sexy, no?


There are two launches, one in Manchester on Thursday 14th October that's part of Manchester Literature Festival, and one in Birmingham on Thursday 21st October that's part of Birmingham Book Festival.

I'm going to be reading at the Manchester one. My name is in the listing, so it's official. I'm dead excited. I like seeing my name on things that aren't asking me for money. Cathy Bryant, Valerie O'Riordan, Liz Loxley and Susie Wild are also reading, so I'll be in excellent company. I can't wait.

The First Star I See May Not Be A Star

Some music...



Some thoughts...

The moon these past few days has been amazing. And the sky has been so clear that I've been able to wish on the evening star (which yes, I know is really Venus and not a star at all, but I wish on it anyway) three nights in a row. Another birthday has come and gone and I don't feel any older or even particularly wiser, but I'm happy, and it feels important to be able to say that.

Someone else died tonight. It's 12:27 a.m. Sometimes I forget that every time the gate scrapes open in the night, it is the Body Truck bringing someone who has died in. We call it the Body Truck and it makes the people bodies, not lovers or brothers or mothers or friends. But just now I remembered it is a dead someone, and I let it make me a little bit sad. Because I know we all have our ways of dealing with the world, of shutting out what we need to shut out, but sometimes it's important to let these things in, if only for a little while. If only to see how we are shaped by them.

I will post less rambling things on here soon.

I am excited that there is a new story up at how men make love in the twentieth century. It is good.

I love mixtapes/cds.

There is a LOT going on.

I have a LOT to do.

Where did September go?

My Own Private Ladybug Picnic

Encouraged by the folks at Bugged, I did some eavesdropping on July 1st, and was gifted with more than a few story ideas from my overhearings. I sat on the bed with the window open, hiding behind the curtains with a glass of pop, ears pricked, pen ready, having my own private ladybug picnic.

People always seem to have arguments in the street just outside my house - I do live in the centre of town, which makes it the route home from the pub for many many people, certainly adding a bit to the argumental vibe. It wasn’t even that late when I heard one poor chap’s heartfelt protestations to a silent/indifferent girl. I just knew I had to immortalise him and his cheesy but sincere words. And so the story, Scar, was born.

Then, I’m not sure what happened, but a month seemed to pass by without me realising, and the deadline for submissions was upon me. I made it by the skin of my teeth - I even won a prize for being the last entry!

And now I can reveal that my story made it into the book! It’s going to be in there with work from the core Bugged writers: David Calcutt, David Gaffney, Ian Marchant, Jenn Ashworth, Jo Bell, Leila Rasheed, Mary Cutler, Mil Millington, Stephanie Dale and Stuart Maconie, as well as with stories/poems/plays from other great "creative eavesdroppers". The official publication date is October 14th, but it should be available for pre-order on Amazon before that. Hooray!

The cover is still being designed, but I'm almost certain it will be something like this...

More news soon!

***

Also on the interwebs this week, I thought this article was really interesting, and found myself nodding my head and going "yes!" at frequent intervals.

And if you fancy a good read and/or like Fleetwood Mac, Stephen O'Toole's chapbook, Tusk, is now online at Pangur Ban Party. Stephen was kind enough to send me a hand-made copy of this a while ago, and it has some of my favourite sentences ever in it. If you ask nicely, he might have one or two left to send your way. He might not, though. Don't quote me or anything.

***
That's it.