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Cure for what ails this fine Saturday

 Two nights of disturbed sleep courtesy of my lovely little girl. Last night particularly bad with her awake from about 1 am until 4. Finally got to bed about 4.30 (after waiting up a little to make sure she was back off properly) only to be woken at 6.30 by my five year old. Feeling extremely fuzzy headed but this little gem from the lovely Jesca Hoop is managing to brighten my exhausted husk of a self: And on the plus side. I’m a hair’s breadth away from having my latest short fiction polished-polished-polished. Should be shining by the end of next week. It’s a competition entry piece. Fingers crossed.

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The Leaving of What’s Left @ Metazen

 My latest piece of short fiction, The Leaving of What’s Left is live over at the quixotic Metazen. I find what’s left of my love asleep at the kitchen table, arms folded under a lolling head, face hidden, red hair tumbling over pale skin – a contrast so severe it nearly breaks me to see it……. I am also interviewed by editor Christopher Allen as part of his excellent series of ex-pat author interviews over on his blog, I Must Be Off. Hope you enjoy both.

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Something Stunning

 This is just stunning. Really. Stunning. Just watched it with my eighteen month old daughter, both of us agog. Be sure to watch it in full screen HD with sound to get the full effect. It’s by this guy. I’m now following to ensure I don’t miss his next piece. Meanwhile I’ll be going through his Vimeo back catalogue. (found via my brother)

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Do it now.

 Tripped over this piece of writing advice via a recommendation from the ever helpful Nik Perring. For this post to make any sense I urge you to go read it now. Really. A while back I posted over at Write Anything about how my own good taste managed to stop me writing for too long a time, convinced that what I was producing was a heap of shit. In that post I talk about how I wish someone had given me the advice that Ira Glass lays out in his brilliant videos about creative work. Well I also wish I’d received Aubrey Hirsch’s writing advice back in my early twenties. Perhaps then I…

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Review: Too Much Sex & Violence – Issue 1

 I’ve been a fan of Rol Hirst’s comics since way back in the misty past of the early nineties when he was busy writing loads of issues of small press smash The Jock. He’s recently released a new small press comic Too Much Sex and Violence, which features artwork from a whole host of artists, many of whom worked with Rol on the Jock way back then. The first issue has already received a load of positive reviews on various blogs, but I thought I’d add to the praise with my own. TMS&V is set in the fictional coastal town they forgot to close down, Fathomsby and is populated by…

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The pen is mightier than the PC?

 This article over on the Guardian, itself inspired by a New York Review of Books article by the poet Charles Simic, got me thinking about my physical writing process. Novelist Alex Preston makes an interesting contribution: “I think each writer, and each novel, has an inherent pace,” he says. “It’s important to find a tool that matches the pace of the writing. I composed my first book in a computerised blur; for the second, I wanted to be more scrupulous, more thoughtful. This is the pace of longhand. Writing with the fetish objects – the Uni-ball pen, the Rhodia notebooks –and watching the imprint of pen on page reminds us that writing is a craft.…

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The power of reading

 A boy sits amid the ruins of a London bookshop following an air raid on October 8, 1940, reading a book titled “The History of London.” Saw this here and have been meaning to blog about it. Fact is though, there isn’t much to say that the photograph doesn’t express eloquently all by itself. I’d love to know who took this.

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Jackie Kay on short stories

 I already knew that Jackie Kay was rather brilliant. Her post on the short story over at Thresholds is just the latest confirmation of this fact. I heartily recommend anyone interested in the short story form read the whole post but I wanted to share my favourite bits here. First up: A (short) story asks the reader to continue it after it has finished or to begin it before it began. There is space for the reader to come in and imagine and create. There is space for the reader to think for ages, to mull the impact of a story over, to try and recover from it! The short…

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A little advice from Chekhov

 Been so busy with my MA reading list that I forgot to post a link to my latest rambling over at Write Anything. This month’s theme was the dark side of writing and I chose to focus on that most dangerous of forces, the inner critic; the little voice in your head that so often tries to tell you that what you are writing isn’t worth pursuing, even before you’ve completed a first draft. Luckily. I’ve been reading Chekhov’s letters recently and the greatest of short story writers talks a great deal about how to fend off the devilish inner critic. Read more about this in my post ‘Defeating Your…

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100 Word Review – The Final Solution

 An intriguing premise: the last case of an elderly, retired to the coast Sherlock Holmes, investigates the disappearance of  a parrot repeating some sort of number code, set against the backdrop of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Holmes is never mentioned by name but from his first appearance in the book its very clear it is the great detective being coaxed back to life. While well drawn and never less than engaging, my reading was frustrated by two things, Chabon’s tendency to have key action take place between chapters and the absence of a Watson figure telling the story. Chabon could have used his shifting p.o.v. to show…

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The European Short Story Network

 Now, anyone who has spent any time at all reading posts on this blog will know I think (cue Matt Smith Doctor voice) short stories are cool. So much so I would go so far as to say some of my best friends are short stories. Indeed I take the stance that any friend of the short story is a friend of mine.  Add to that the fact that I am  both European and a reader/writer of short stories and it should come as no surprise that I have friended/followed The European Short Story Network.The website launched on the 18th October 2011, with an event in Manchester, UK with authors…

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The Yin and Yang Interview: Claudia Osmond

 Today sees the much anticipated paperback publication of the Chinese Whispering collections, The Red Book and The Yin and Yang Book. Both volumes of interlinked short fiction from the the best emerging writers around the globe have been previously available in digital format. Long time readers of this blog will be aware that I was lucky enough to be one of twenty writers selected to be part of The Yin and Yang Book. My story, This Be The Verse, was written in tandem with Claudia Osmond and you can read about my experience writing collaboratively with Claudia and some of the other writers of Y&Y. As part of the print…

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Review – To The World Of Men, Welcome

 Nuala Ní Chonchúir‘s second collection of short fiction To The World of Men, Welcome,  despite what the title might otherwise suggest, presents a world of dualities. While the nineteen stories presented within the recently released updated edition provide a window into the world of men, it is, perhaps, more accurate to say the collection describes the space in the Venn diagram where the world of men meets the world of women.This duality, the world of men conflicting/engaging with the world of women, suffuses the stories. No surprise then that this is a book about love and loss and while some of that loss is caused by the cruel actions of men…

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Living Room Songs

 Tripped over this while browsing the interweb this morning with a cuppa. It’s bloody lovely: Living Room Songs by Ólafur Arnalds Ólafur Arnalds creates and releases a new song, one per day for one whole week. The songs will be recorded and filmed live in the living room of his Reykjavík apartment and released instantly for FREE as streamed videos and MP3 downloads. Following in the spirit of Ólafur Arnalds’ critically acclaimed ‘Found Songs’ (2009) where he wrote, recorded and released a free song every day for a week – now comes ‘Living Room Songs’. This time Ólafur takes the idea further and invites the audience into the comfort of his…

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100 Word Review – The Corrections

 Having read Freedom and been mostly disappointed by the great white hope of American Lit, I was sad to see The Corrections on my MA reading list. I shouldn’t have been. Where Freedom is a largely laborious read with at least one dubious narrative choice (a character writing her autobiography in third person? -really, Jonathon?), The Corrections is as engaging and amusing a story as one could hope to have spun out over 500 or so pages. Yes, the trademark Franzen detail is there, often in excess, but it’s the characters that matter here and love ’em or hate ’em, and with most of the novel’s core cast the reader…

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Powellnuts

 I’ve been wanting a banner image on my blog for a while now but wasn’t sure what I wanted there. It needed to be something with a connection to the main thrust of my posts which tends to be reading and writing related stuff. Last week, while reading a Peanuts collection my ever generous wife bought for me, I came across this strip from June 1952: I love the way this strip captures the immersive nature of reading fiction, the one-on-one-ness of reader and book.  Immediately I saw this was just the thing. In my head I saw a Peanuts version of me replacing Charlie Brown, so I had a great…

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The Red Book – What I Would Have Chosen

 The paperback releases of the Chinese Whispering collections The Red Book and The Yin & Yang Book are almost upon us. Those of you with long memories will remember I reviewed the digital release of The Red Book and before going on to become one of twenty emerging authors, ten male and ten female, selected to write a story for the second collection, producing This Be The Verse for The Yang Book. I have blogged in some detail already about the intriguing concept of CW and the writing process involved. As the launch date of the paperback editions approaches I will be slapping up a few posts related to the collections,…

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I Might

 Had a pretty shit day today. Won’t bore you with the details, just thinking about them has me bordering on shuddering into a coma with sheer frustration. Suffice to say my writing time got hijacked by nitwits and nincompoops. On the plus side though, the new Wilco album has managed to lift my spirits. Jeff Tweedy and co do it again, another fantastic album that moves between playful and mournful and all the spaces in between. This track has been particularly helpful in cheering my scuffed self today: Oh and the other plus, managed to fix a major problem with my latest short story. One more draft and this sucker,…

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100 Word Review – Notes On A Scandal

 Having watched the movie adaptation of this and not being particularly engaged by it despite Judi Dench’s typically brilliant performance, I was a little disheartened to find the book on my MA reading list. I figured best to get it over with and read it in the run up to the course start date and was pleasantly surprised. The book just works where the movie, for me, didn’t. It’s success is entirely due to the brilliance of the narrative voice, all the events filtered through the unreliable, bitter, middle-aged narrator, Barbara. A classic example of how a book can do so much more to engage the reader than film. I…

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