Flashing in the Library

This is the cover of Jawbreakers, an anthology I'm thrilled to have a short short story in. I've had a sneaky read of it already, and I can honestly say there are some flipping spectacular stories inside. It's been put together by Calum Kerr, the brains behind National Flash-fiction Day and all-round superhero, as a way of celebrating National Flash-fiction Day, and of showcasing the wonder that is flash-fiction. The book will be released on May 16th, but you can pre-order it here right now. Yeah!

There are events and happenings up and down the country, and as far and wide as Australia and Abergavenny. In Derby, I'm running free flash-fiction workshops in collaboration with Derby City Libraries.

The first of these will take place on actual National Flash-fiction Day, Wednesday 16th May, from 10am - 12pm at Central Library in the city centre. There are still a few places left, so if you fancy having a go, you can book here.

The next one is on Saturday 19th May, from 10:30am - 12:30pm at Mickleover Library. There are only a few spaces left on that one, so get in quick if you want a bit of Saturday-morning-creative-writing-action. Click here to book.

Writers on these workshops will have the opportunity to have their stories published on a special National Flash-fiction Day website, too. Hooray!

Hope to see you there.

This Must Be The Place

This house has sparked a thousand ideas. Here, we started a small press, here, we hand-bound books, made badges, dissected clocks, pieced together record sleeves, sang loud, sang hard, stopped time, restarted it, made up stories, and songs, made plans, made casseroles, changed our lives for the better.

And now the house is empty. It’s just me here. And it’s a different empty to the times before, when the boys were off on tour or were away for a while, or even just for the day.

Some people call this a spooky house. I get why. It used to be part of the funeral home next door, it’s old - it first shows up on maps around 1832, when this street was the edge of a field - and yes, the cellar has got hooks on the ceiling. But I’ve only ever felt welcome here.

This house is rickety and the floorboards creak and the central heating can often sound like a monster waking up, or a monster being woken up by a really rubbish steel band. But whenever I come home and close that green door behind me, it's always accompanied by an audible sigh of relief. I stand in the hallway and take a breath, and in this old empty house, I feel safe.


Right now, I feel like for the first time, me and the house are getting to know one another. There are the noises I recognise, the clanking of radiators and of pipes cooling down, the muffled drip-drip of rain inside the chimneys, the moan of guttering against the brickwork, all noises the house makes on its own. And then add to that the pad of my feet on the stairs, the ticking of clocks, the pop of the loose floorboard outside my room, the slide and squeak of my shoes on the tiles, and there’s a communication of sorts. A call and response.

“I am here.”
“I am.”

This house makes me think differently about the whole idea of a house being yours, belonging to you. Because I belong to this house. (For now, at least.) The way everyone who’s lived here has belonged, in their own way. A while back I read a brilliant piece by Sarah Pinborough, about how maybe it’s we, the living, that haunt our houses, and it's stayed with me. I knew exactly what she meant.

“People don’t own houses. Houses own people and their memories. They hold lives for a while. They know secrets.”

In the front room there’s still a map on the wall of the people who’ve lived here and the people they’ve known. It was drawn long before I moved in, but I am a part of it, my name written in black ink and connected to others with arcing lines. This city is not so big. I know most of the others on the map, even if only by name. The people whose names are on the wall come to visit still. Occasionally I’ll meet someone new and recognise their name before I realise they are a part of it, too, they are on the wall.

Soon, the house will be full again, and then there will be other things that are equally as good, just different. And I’m excited about that, too. Lazy Sundays watching Eighties films, and silly, made-up games. Nights spent screaming favourite songs and sitting in the back yard all moon-lit and stargaze-dizzy. The house takes on a different feel when it’s not just me. It wants to be fun, and to open itself up and let us into its spaces. It also quiets down, leaves it to other people to make the noises.

So I’m going to cherish this time right now. I’m going to use it to listen. To walk through rooms and lean against walls and run and slide down the hallway. And to whisper, to tell my stories, and see what this old, lovely, amazing house has to add.

Holy Smokes!

March, so far, has been crazy-busy.

The very first National Flash Fiction Day is taking place on Wednesday 16th May, and there's so much cool stuff happening. There are events and workshops and even a book! The book will feature stories by Jenn Ashworth, David Gaffney, Vanessa Gebbie, Tania Hershman, me, Kirsty Logan, Nigel McLoughlin, Jonathan Pinnock, Sarah Hilary, Simon Thirsk and...Ali Smith. (!!) If you happen to be a writer-of-stories, then you might want to enter the competition and possibly be in t'book as well.

In celebration of NFF Day, I'm running two Flash-Fiction workshops in cahoots with Derby City Libraries. The first is on Wednesday 16th May, (actual NFF Day) at Central Library, and the second is on Saturday 19th May at Mickleover Library. Click on the links for more details. They're free, but booking is essential. Come along!

Also coming up at the end of this month is Holy Smokes! 4. It's a night of music, art and spoken word that takes place at Derby Silk Mill, which is one of my favourite places in Derby, and is only the first factory in the world! It ticks all of my Industrial-Revolution-fangirl boxes.

There will be music from Ben Butler & Mousepad and Grey Hairs, and they've also got the Hijacked III photography exhibition on. I'm going to be reading a story on the night, as is fellow Time Travel Opportunist Nathan. The incredibly talented Éireann Lorsung will also be reading, and will hopefully bring some MIEL goodies. (I NEED these pencils!)

I'm dead excited about all of this.

After The First Sleep

I read a couple of things recently about sleep, a subject I consider myself something of an expert on. The first was a news story about a man who had survived being trapped under snow in his car by hibernating like a bear. The second was an article about the sleep cycle, and how, up until the 19th Century, it was the norm to have two sleeps per night. So instead of having eight hours of unbroken sleep, people would sleep for four hours, get up, do stuff for a few hours, then sleep for another four hours. Yay.

I like the idea that segmented sleep is normal. It's how I roll. I just called it napping. But yes, a lot of my ideas happen when I wake after the first sleep - stories get written, plot problems get resolved, I make plans for world domination AND try to figure out how I can start my own baby sloth sanctuary in the spare room.

Apart from sloths, sleep and bears are also high on the list of my favourite things. And so I always think about hibernation during the winter months. Over this winter, I've claimed 'hibernation' a hundred times as my reason for not going out as often, of holing myself up under the duvet with books and notebooks and endless mugs of hot chocolate. I guess my version is a little different to that of a bear. (No cocoa for Yogi.) But the idea of settling in for the winter is not new, and seems to resonate with a lot of people. Entire traditions of storytelling have grown up from this same idea. Cold, dark nights, huddling round the fire under blankets, maybe doing a bit of knitting (ladies/fisherman) or scrimshaw (whalers/fishermen), and letting the stories slowly unfold.

There are always stories. So, even though I've been hiding away, I still have tales to tell.

A very short short story of mine has made it into a new e-book edited by Caroline Smailes, after she ran a competition to write 100-word stories that were inspired by songs on YouTube. All proceeds will go to the charity One in Four.

I've also had a couple of commissions, which is very exciting. More on them at a later date.

And I'm very happy to be involved with National Flash Fiction Day, which takes place for the first time on May 16th, 2012, and every year after that. As part of this, I'm going to be running flash fiction workshops in Derby City Libraries in mid-May (dates and details to follow). There are other things in the bag, too. All will be revealed soon. On the site at the minute are the winning entries from the very first NFFD micro-fiction competition, so if you want to get a good taste of flash fiction, pop on over and have a read.
There will be lots more NFFD news to announce in the next few weeks, too.

And later today, special-extra-leap-year day, Calum Kerr's Flash 365 is being taken over by other writers. (The lengths people go to so they don't have to change the name of their blog, eh?) I've got a story on there, as have Valerie O'Riordan, Sara Crowley, Vanessa Gebbie, Dan Carpenter and lots of others. Go! Read! Enjoy!


It's starting to feel a little like Spring now. Things are happening, things that have been worked on and thought out all through the dark of winter. Maybe today, Leap Day, is the day to wake up. And well, if I get sleepy, I can always take a nap.

No Newts Is Good Newts

Last week I got to revisit one of my childhood haunts. A lot has changed, but much of it was the same, only with taller trees and steeper riverbanks. It still felt as wild and overgrown as it did when I was a kid. It still felt big. And it felt calm, too. Something I maybe hadn’t thought about back then, but it was there, in the long days spent lying in tall grass, the slow afternoons of dipping my feet off the boardwalk into the water, letting them gently splash against the background hum of dragonflies.


In all my years of going back home to visit family, I’d never even thought about this place. Or of going back there, at least. Because as I write this, I realise I think about the place a lot. My stories are littered with the things I experienced there: the freedom of youth; the warm sun freckling my face; the sky seen through a carapace of trees; and ponds and canals teeming with life in all its slimy glory. Newts and frogspawn and leeches. And sticklebacks, caught and kept in coffee jars, pond water spilling out onto dusty tarmac as I made my way home.

As a writer, I’m constantly pilfering my own (and other people’s) experiences. Hiding truths in fiction and fictions in truth. It was amazing to go back to the place where so many summers were spent, summers that have found their way into story after story, and find that it’s all still there for others to immerse themselves in and perhaps let it become part of their own stories.

And on that note, I have a couple of new stories to tell you about. Sadly, there are no newts in either of them. The first is at there was nowhere to go but everywhere. It's part of a word association game they’ve got going on, which is an amazing idea, and lots of fun. I've just read Dave Schofield's piece, The Screams of Victory and Near Misses, the title of which is a line from my own story, and it gave me such a brilliant giddy feeling to see a line I'd written turned into something else entirely. Dave's piece is wonderful, full of so many great lines, so I can't wait to see what comes next.

My other story, Overexposed, is in the latest issue of Word Gumbo, which came out today. The theme of this one, issue three, is ‘light’, and I'm really excited to be in it. You can download it for free here. Maybe even sneakily print it out at work and take it down to the park to read while you sunbathe? In October? Yes, in October. We're not gonna get snow for at least another week.

O with an umlaut

I have a new story in issue two of Red Lightbulbs. It's called Schrödinger.

(Every time I write that, I have to copy and paste the ö because I can't work out how to do umlauts. If I knew, I'd probably use them all over the place. Like these guys do.)

Our Cities, Ourselves

My housemate has just released an album inspired by the city at night, or more specifically, this city, Derby. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of home, and about the places we live and how when we leave, we give a little of ourselves to them. I have lived in fourteen houses in my life. That’s fourteen front doors I had keys to. Fourteen places I stepped inside, fourteen front doors I closed and leaned back against, breathing in that quiet stillness of a house welcoming its occupant home.

Apart from my childhood homes (2 of), the house where I live right now is the one I’ve lived in the longest. And that’s not wholly because of the fifty plus boxes of books I would have to move if I did decide to leave. It’s something more. It’s something I started exploring when I lived on the other side of town. Only then it was about the city, not the house I was living in. I would write out walks from memory. I would think about the paths I was taking as I took them, and I would try to take in every detail. I would then write these walks and try to make sure they could be easily followed, if I were to give the directions to somebody without a map.

The theme of psychogeography has been coming up a lot in my life lately. I’ll read a book, and the ideas stick with me for a while but then slowly the rest of life edges these things from the front of my thinking. And then I’ll see something or hear something, or get into a three a.m. discussion with a friend, and the city and how we map it with our lives, how we map ourselves onto it, becomes the main focus of my thoughts again.

I fell in love with this city by walking through it, across a span of months and years. Sometimes, I fell in love with it at night, whilst sitting on skateboards with a friend I loved fiercely, under those trees with the silver-green leaves, down by the river. We would always leave our house at four a.m., when we knew the city would be sleeping and unpeopled. The city was ours then, in that space between the night out and the new day.

I fell in love with it by day, too. There was a park I’d walk through to get to work, and with awe I watched it change before my eyes over the course of a year. Spring mornings, when the sun was just rising, and the leaves were coming into bud, I’d be completely caught up in the romance of being there. And afternoons of dappled sunlight through Summer trees. I’d collect energy as I passed through the green of them. There was a morning I crossed it after letting a boy I might have loved board a coach for France. It was six a.m. The trees were in blossom, and the crunch of gravel underfoot made everything a song, made everything bright and intense and amazing.

In a secret garden I figured myself out. Halfway up a three hundred year-old conker tree, I felt the safest I’ve ever felt. Standing on an old bridge I watched the past swim into the future, and made decisions, even if I kept them to myself for too long a while.

My camera is broken and I want to go out and photograph all these places, all the doors I lived behind. And all the intricate stonework and statues you only see by looking up, because hardly anyone looks up.

I loved Manchester in a different way. Manchester was all dusty summers that stretched forever. It was eleven of us riding our bikes to Daisy Nook and staying all day, our feet dangled in the water, jeans rolled up to the knee. It was hiding when the night trains went past, afraid of the ghosts they carried. Manchester was a hill so steep that cars couldn’t get up or down it in the Winter. It was sledges on Mountains, and carrying newts in our hands and teaching them acrobatics. It was Kick The Can and Hide And Seek, played out over days instead of hours. Manchester was never just me. I was too young to have a complete sense of self, and so all my memories contain other people, some remembered, others just blank figures who I know were there at the time but I’ve since forgotten their names.

Manchester was my home, but in another time. I’ve experienced Derby becoming my home and it has been a slow process. Like an old friend becoming a lover. These things take time, but when they do, they inevitably become everything you are. You don’t fall in love in a day. Not this kind of love.

And this house? I came to this house as a visitor often, and for years, before it was ever my home. So this house was in my psyche long before I first laid my head on a pillow in my own bed here. I always had an idea in the past of how settled I was in a house, by the time it took for my dream-house to catch up with the one I was in. Some houses never got there. Although even when I think about the bad times, something good will also come crashing through. A message showing through the paint every time the light hit it, or popcorn and absinthe on the first day of the year, and the best kind of recklessness.

This house has been home to more of my friends than I can count on my fingers. But it has always been a home. And sometimes people leave, and sometimes the people that leave come back.

I’m going away. Not just yet. Not all in one go. I’ll be doing it little by little. I want to explore the idea of Home, what it means, and I think you have to go someplace else to figure that out. There’s that T.S. Eliot quote,

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I want that. And I want to look into the idea that we carry home within ourselves, see if it’s true.



Here's the album I mentioned. It's nice to listen to at night. And during the day, too. You can download it if you like it, for no monies or for some monies. Enjoy.



*I also borrowed the photo from Biff's flickr. He's good people. He won't mind. He knows about my camera troubles.