My Turn

This week sees my turn at having a piece of flash-fiction on our RASSSA site.

This is especially exciting for me, as it marks the first time I have had a piece of artwork produced (and beautifully, too) for something I have written.

Isn't she amazing?

To find out exactly how she fits in with my tale, you will have to buy A Seeming Glass, which you can get from a number of places. You can have a hint or two in the flash-piece, which is set a number of years before the events in my anthology story.

To see more work by the artist, visit Mat Sadler on his own page.

Seeing one of your own creations brought to life (albeit a fractured, light-emitting life) is most thrilling. I think I need more of this. I may well have to blog about this thought another time, but for now I just want to stare at the pretty. You stare at it, too. If you want to find out more about her, you know what to do!

Launch Party

Our RASSSA anthology, A Seeming Glass, has been out for at least some hours, now. Obviously, this means it is time to have a launch party. As we all live in different places, this means that handing round a tray of drinks takes a while. Getting the sparkling wine over to Australia is going to take a while, for one thing.

My good friend Miss Ironside and I have managed to exist in the same area of space-time for a couple of hours now and neither one of us has blinked out of existence, so that is one person it is easier to get drinks to. Getting me to her house was a bit trickier (I didn't even know I could end up on the M6 Toll road on the way here. I still don't know why there is a toll there. Unless the money I threw at the odd basket thing attached to the totally un-personed hut goes towards paying for all of the queues.), but I got here in only nearly half again the time it should have taken.

One day, we may have a launch party in an art gallery or some such. Maybe in a lovely little boutique place in Ireland. For now, a settee under the watchful eye of a cat who is not at all sure she should trust me is standing in for a gathering of well-dressed people holding elegant wine-glasses. (This is what TV tells me happens at a launch. Also, murder or fraud or theft. I am willing to admit that getting all of my information on the writing world from Murder She Wrote and the like is perhaps not leading to a full picture.)

We do have sparkling wine, though. And it's even in a wine-glass, so there's posh.

Well, now it is really close.

I would go so far as to say the launch of our anthology, A Seeming Glass, is imminent. The launch day is tomorrow. By the time most people read this, it will be today. Time is funny like that. ARC readers are starting to write reviews and the whole thing is now feeling real. For a given value of real, anyway.

It will be (is - apparently I am not the only one with a vague connection to time) available both on e-reader and as a paperback.

Reviews so far have likened one story to being hit by an 18 carriage comedy train, or words to that effect, called another 'genuinely scary' and call the writing style of a third 'flowing'. Not a bad start. Not bad at all.

Seeing reviews, hard evidence that other people have read your work, is bizarre. In my job, I get assessed and receive feedback, often to a changing set of standards, but it is not as personal as a story. A story is something you have worked at yourself, by yourself (even though we are a supportive and helpful group of writers to each other, it is ultimately you and the keyboard, or notebook, or clay tablet if you are so inclined, when it comes down to it) and, in many ways, for yourself. To send it out into the world is to realise that other people might think the story has been written for them, and they might not have the decency to read it exactly the way you read it to yourself, late at night, when the little story-goblins were dancing around in your brain and singing that another metaphor would be a really good idea right about now. No. Really. More imagery will really make the story come alive.

Once it is on the page in nice, sharply contrasting black-and-white (or grey and slightly different grey, if you are reading on some platforms), you have to acknowledge that not everyone is, by law, required to love metaphors as much as you do. The story-goblins don't care. Why would they? They live in your head and dance around your thoughts to the flashing strobe-lights of your firing synapses. They aren't bothered by the words of strangers, or family, or friends. In fact, they have forgotten all about your version of Snow White and are desperate for you to get on and write that story about the ghost heart, or the one with the boyfriend being blasted to Hell. They'll even take new words on the post-apocalyptic take of The Three Little Pigs. Story-goblins just want writing to be happening. No, you aren't dealing with story-goblins in this scenario.

Instead, you have to deal with a rather more reactionary beast: the ego ogre. (For anyone who knows about psychology, I am sorry for butchering terms. I just love the way 'ego' and 'ogre' look together.)

This ego ogre crows with delight at positive comments, stomps around in a lumbering dance, then recoils under sudden doubt that it was not a truthful statement and hides in its cave again. The reactions to bad reviews don't bear thinking about, but strong tea is certainly required to get over it. Yes, tea. Not any other beverage. Not at all. The ego ogre drinks tea, possibly with a biscuit accompaniment. A chocolate bourbon or Rich Tea, since you ask.

Those of you who are already published, and have been for a while, will no doubt know all about your own version of this. For me, as a writer, this is the first time I have had anything reviewed. I have had writing peer-reviewed, which is extraordinarily useful, but this is different.  This is...exciting yet vulnerable.

I plan to stock up on tea and biscuits, keep the ego ogre well fed, and listen to the story-goblins again. Listening to them is always fun.

It's Seeming Closer

Leaving my job has pulled up all sorts of thoughts from the depths, it seems. My job is one where you can get a new job and then have to wait for months to leave your old one. If you leave at the end of July, you have to wait until September to start the new one. This can all mean that other people, people who have somehow not got friends and relatives in the same career as me, but rather in the tiny number of jobs which operate on the system of working a few weeks notice and then going to the next job almost at once, assume I must have changed jobs about three times by the time I can actually tell them I have started at the new place.

A side-effect of this is that you can get a new job, then come to view it all as some sort of waking-dream. It is not real. Not really real. It is just something you did one day (We also accept jobs on the same day as the interview - good system all round and not at all odd in any way. At all.) and then you went back to your existing job and got on with it.

It came as something of a surprise the other day to actually hand in my keys, and my key-fob for getting through the electrically controlled doors (as opposed to the many non-electrically controlled doors you could just use instead), and my laptop. Still with a disc in which belonged to someone else, it turned out, but the joys of email and still having my work account (though who knows when it will suddenly be pulled?) meant I could at least email and tell someone. A large part of me still does not believe I have left.

A friend who has left her place of work twice now says she still feels she works there. Then again, my mum has often said she still keeps thinking she is not a grown-up and that she can't understand how she has two kids in their 30s, so it is not just a phenomenon related to leaving jobs.

The point is, we can wait for some things for so long that they seem as though they are never going to arrive, as though they are not real.

Happily, one event I have been waiting for now has a date, so I can work on making myself believe in it as a thing which will occupy space-time.

I have mentioned before the upcoming anthology combining the efforts and insanity of the RASSSA group. We've been working away at it for months and now we have a release date. The 7th August. Not too far off. Not far off, at all.

To add a little extra to the news, one of my fellow writers, Martin J Gilbert, is offering a free teaser story on the RASSSA website. Pop over and check it out.

Perhaps don't try to persuade yourself that the people in his story are really real, though, or else you may end up in trouble.

Moving Up

Thus ends my first day of no longer working at my job of eleven years.

So far, not working there has included a lie-in and a cream tea at Rufford Park (a park I would recommend. Lovely range of trees, a fantastic building for the tea-room and a lake with yellow-eyed ducks).

Whilst munching away on our sandwiches, and agreeing that none of us really saw the point of the egg sandwiches, my mother-in-law asked me if I feel like I have left my place of employment yet. I proceeded to talk about it as though I am going back for a good twenty minutes. So...no. No, I do not really feel like I have left.

That place has been a huge part of my life since my early twenties. I didn't meet my spouse there, or make my best-friends, as other people leaving this time have done, but I have met a lot of people. Hundreds. I have interacted with and influenced a good number, been influenced by a good few and grown so used to being there that it is hard to imagine not going back.

I have also been asked, by an old friend from back home, if I am moving onwards and upwards, and I am. My job includes new challenges all of the time, but you can get settled with certain routines and a fresh challenge, fresh routines, fresh people, will be good.

The challenge will include a promotion, which is always fun, but just the fact it is new, that it is a fresh challenge, makes it worth doing.

Slight tangent, perhaps, but on the theme of challenges, the excellent Matt Willis is offering a free short story which revolves around a genuinely breathtaking challenge. You can get it on his website.

The tale is in honour of the ascent of the Eiger Nordwand, and, though my own challenge is hardly on this scale, it is not helpful to compare challenges too far. A challenge is a challenge, and the important thing is to have them and face them, rather than to stand still and do nothing.

Reflections

I've been spending a fair bit of time recently looking back. 

I'm about to move on, as are a number of other people I've worked with for years, and a couple of us have fallen into the habit of late of telling stories from years ago to people who weren't around then. We haven't discussed these events for years, just letting them slip by as the next lot of tales act themselves out around us, but most lunchtimes over the last few weeks we've ended up remembering, and sharing those memories.

Some part of me is all too aware that I won't be at that place for much longer (a few days, now, and I'll have left) and, whilst it's good to be moving on, a lot of my memories over the last decade and a bit are tied to that job. This seems all the more poignant as many people have left recently and hardly anyone will be left from when I started. In my particular part of the place, no-one will be left who has been there long enough to remember some of the most vivid, frustrating, anecdote worthy times and I am aware of some urge to pass these on, even though I doubt anyone who is going to be left will really care.

The memories are only really important if you lived them.

Despite this, people are obsessed with looking back, with retelling tales. Perhaps it feels more like the stories really happened if we share them, especially if we can share the telling with someone else who was there. 

Of course, it may have as much, if not more, to do with assuring ourselves who we are now. A story about how you used to eat massive piles of take-a-way by yourself? It's safe to talk about now, when you moderate what you eat or share it with someone else. Your story is a good point of contrast to show how far you've come, how much you've changed.  Maybe your story is about how you used to spend all of your time on a particular hobby you now don't have time for. You are both reassuring yourself you still have that passion inside you and that you are busy and in demand in the present. Looking back can let us see where we are now, as well as where we were then.

What does it mean when we retell other people's stories? When we retell stories of people who have become archetypes and figures of myth and fairy-tale?

I suspect that is very much about telling ourselves where we are now, how we have moved on from the older versions of that tale. It's about looking at the tale through another lens. 

My friends in the RASSSA group have been looking back to look at ourselves now, reflecting old tales in a modern mirror, and I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how my own anecdotes from only the last decade (not much time in the grand scheme of things) are reflections of the truth rather than wholly factual reports. 

What with so many people leaving, I've been present at a number of leaving speeches (mine is next week and will likely involve me nodding a bit and sitting back down), and some of the anecdotes used have been about the same incidents as the ones I have been drawing on over lunch.

Here's the thing, though - I don't remember the events going the way other people say the did. 

Even with tales we were part of, which happened very recently, a different view and a different lens leads to a different tale. We reflect ourselves back onto the stories. 

It might be fun to get everyone in a family group to write their own version of a key event. You just know they would all be different. 

I suppose we have to ask ourselves if that matters. And if we all only own our own version of an event we lived, then every version of an old tale is valid. I've been thinking about that, too, in terms of representation in film, TV and books. People cite the 'source' text as though it is immutable, as though it not only shouldn't, but can't, change. Which is ridiculous.

Shakespeare spent his life changing other tales. If it's good enough for Shakespeare... 

I'm probably not going to start actively changing the identities of people in my own life stories, but when we look at old tales or at re-booted versions of tales only a few decades old, I don't think being too obsessed with how it 'really was' has much mileage. It is certainly not the only yardstick.

The news that Thor will be female and Captain America will be black is worth considering, here. That is not to say we should ignore how it was in the past (but if Thor can be a frog, and has been a frog before being a woman, then that tells us a lot about values in the past), and in fact we should not wash over issues and realities from days gone by, any more than I should let myself start believing my current workplace has been a constant dream of uninterrupted happiness, just because I am about to leave it. We also shouldn't hold fast to damaging habits and beliefs just because they are from the past. 

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I firmly believe we should expect our fictions, both those we know are fictions and the ones we believe to be accurate recounts of our own lives, to reflect our present views, and let's hope those reflections are something to be proud of. 

The other day, I was asked to be the time-keeper for a 100m race. Now, thankfully for everyone involved, this did not actually come to pass. I say thankfully because I can get a Tassimo to stop working just by standing next to it and it has exactly one button.

However, my initial response was not gadgetry related (and the stop-watch the PE person showed me looked to have at least more than one button), but more to do with being vaguely disconnected from time at the best of times.

Right now, I am sitting watching songs from the 90s on some music channel or other. These songs are all from roughly the same time period and yet, in my head, some of them are recent and some are from the distant past. I seem to group songs, as I do so many things, by strands of events. Some, like the Shania Twain song I am listening to during this paragraph, linked to my visit to Durham in the very last years of the 90s. Others are linked to being a kid at secondary school.

This covers a short period of time, really. I visited Durham at the end of my second year at Uni. As far as my highly subjective view of things goes, however, there is a massive gap between school and University, even though adult-me thinks five years ago was yesterday.

I'm not sure I really have a point here, except that time is an illusion.

At a recent wedding, I spent some time chatting about time with another guest. Never met him before. He seemed nice. We played a game of some sort which involved throwing a shiny ball at a less shiny ball on a lawn. I won. This is rare, so I enjoyed it. On the whole, it was a good time. At breakfast the next morning, we got into physics. I am assuming this is something to do with his job, but I don't really know. Let's just say it is. He was talking about the theory that time does not exist, and that each slice of 'time' is a different arrangement of atoms and so forth and not really continuous from the one we perceive as coming before it.

I would like to point out right now that I am not a physicist, in case you had been fooled. I cannot do the maths on these things. I do tend to take well to the stories I am told, but you could tell me a different story and I could believe that one just as well. In any case, the concept behind these things, as related to me in layman's terms, generally make sense. Of a kind. I have no trouble deciding every instant is a separate, unrelated slice.

How does this fit with my comments on songs? Apart from to say, 'Time, eh? Tricky thing,' I am not quite sure.

I am also not quite sure about how I just punctuated that sentence, but I am blaming the glass of rather good wine from a bottle we got at the recent Good Food Show and on the fact that it is nearly 1am where I am.

Perhaps I am wandering around near the idea that time is deceptive. We can measure it and corral it into days and weeks and decades, but we experience it in spurts. Any memory I have will be a chain of linked events, and I can easily separate some event which does not seem to fit and think it happened at a completely different time.

Hey, you know what? Time, and the ability to play with it, is, in a way, linked to my story in the RASSSA anthology. So, there's that.

I may play with it in other stories. It fascinates me. How can it not? We are bound by it, it is supposed to be something which marches ever on, unstoppable, but it is so fractured and prone to manipulation and shifting.

It's almost as tricky as memory, and words.

For now, I will go and watch The Backstreet Boys and pretend it is...a few years ago.

What's In A Name?

Oh, Shakespeare, you crazy person-type thing, you. You really did know how to turn a phrase. The thing is, names have become a bit...odd these days. They still denote family ties and provide links to your origins and so forth, but in an age where we sign up to many networking sites, where we interact via social media so often, the act of naming is now both more meaningful and almost without meaning.

Some of us choose our own names in life, but for most people (of my acquaintance, at least) our names are chosen by our esteemed parents. And don't they have some crazy ideas? Mine have never even hinted that they considered sensible names like 'Talon' or 'Book Pixie', either of which I would have embraced.

Mostly, our names tell us more about our parents and their views than they do about ourselves, yet despite this I spent a lot of time as a kid reading up on the deeper meanings of my name, as though that meant anything on a cosmic scale. I did the same thing with my star-sign, of course, and delighted in both those elements which matched me and the places where I deviated from the apparent Sagittarius norm. Being equally happy with either option rather suggests it more about the chance to think about who I was as a person which delighted me, and was not an indication that I was really learning how to be me from a book with a muted blue cover covered in badly drawn symbols. Trying to wrestle a sense of myself from all these little bits of pieces of other people's decisions was tiring work, and I can only imagine how the internet would have impacted on that.

Thank goodness that I did not have to think up usernames until I had reached a mature and sensible age and could choose names which reflected an intelligent, thoughtful and thoroughly grounded persona.

Which is why I have just changed a bunch of my on-line usernames to Fireapple.

One of the things about the names we come up with for social media and the like is that these names can be transient. We can try them on and shrug them off, skipping merrily back to the clothing-rail of names in our heads to try on another one. Yet I don't. Not really. Generally speaking, once I have chosen a name and a profile picture, that is it. Job done. That is now my name. Granted, I have different names on different sites, but they tend to revolve around a few options.

I like to imagine that other people make carefree choices about their usernames, happily opting for whimsical monikers and not worrying overmuch about what they have chosen, but perhaps they spend hours determining just the right mix of words to sum up their entire personality and position in the world. What do I know?

If any of you feel like walking me through your self-naming process, feel free to chip in.

Tonight, I have gone with two random things I quite like, and shoved them together. Given how much I love apples, both as food and symbols, and my obsession with fire, this time almost entirely symbolically, I am quite pleased with my new name.

It also ties in rather nicely in some ways with my story in the upcoming RASSSA anthology, though perhaps I should have gone with Snowapple for that one.

Here's a link to our RASSSA website. Here be dragons. Sort of. Something dragon-adjacent, in any case.

You know, being Fireapple is making me feel much freer. I think I'll see how this name fits, for a while.

So many pieces...

My lack of progress in getting anything finished, in terms of writing, has been playing on my mind. To counter this, I took a prompt from Jules Ironside yesterday and wrote what was meant to be a drabble to get me going again. It has turned into the start of another novel.

This can't be a problem only I face. I know for a fact that at least two other people in my writing group wind up fighting back the armies of insistent ideas as they toil away building up the walls of their intended WIPs. Every now and then, an attacking idea gains entry and makes them abandon the WIP for a while, sometimes forever. I am imagining a landscape filled with half-built buildings, falling into decay before they ever had the chance to be completed.

Reading articles about J K Rowling, I know this is something which happens to those who have more than made their mark in the world of writing, as well as those of us who are not much more than a footprint in the sand, so to speak. She has said that she works on more than one project at a time and then one takes over. Rowling, of course, has actually reached the finish line with books.

I am still working on that one!

Today's effort to get going included moving 65 drabbles from one place to another, namely a new file on Scrivener. A number of them look promising. I have time to focus on none of them. I am already working on a WIP, a prequel to the WIP, two or three other novels which are simmering away (and now I am imagining buildings in a stew pot - go me with the mixed metaphors) waiting for their turn and a few short stories that just need a bit of work before I can look for a home for them.

This is not to mention the idea for a new YA series that popped into my head on the train back from the London Book Fair on Tuesday last week.

Wandering around said book fair showed how many books are already out there (I was especially impressed with the booth shaped like a castle, I have to say) and how many people are wheeling and dealing to get their books, or their clients' books, out into the wider world. It would be easy to be overwhelmed.

If I let myself be overwhelmed, though, there is even less chance of getting anything to publication. Besides, I write because it is such an engaging activity and makes me feel more myself than most things in life can manage to do, so worrying over much about publication to the point that it stops me writing is not the right route to take.

The number of people who have told me, repeatedly, to just hurry up and finish writing my WIP already is quite high. I am beginning to suspect that some people want me to write the thing. I want me to write the thing. So what is holding me up, really?

I think, in part, I am finding it hard to finish my WIP because then I have to do something with it. As long as I am working on it, it doesn't really matter if the roof leaks or the layout means having to walk through the bedroom to get from the kitchen to the pantry. As soon as I declare it fit for habitation, I have to face any flaws, or even just the possibility that I have built a shack instead of a palace.

Logically, the notion that the only way to fail is to not get it done does make sense to me. It is a mindset I have put towards other areas of my life recently, and it has (hopefully) worked out there. Fine. I will get some more bricks ordered and start looking at wallpaper. This house is getting built before the end of the year.

My Writing Process

Having been asked to partake in this blog hop about #mywritingprocess, I have spent most of the evening staring blankly at the inside of my own mind. (Bet you didn't know I had eyes on the inside of my skull as well as on the back of my head and the normal two at the front, did you? How else am I meant to properly watch my own nightmares. The one from the other week where I was made to slowly eat my own body, which seemed to be composed of a lot of sinew and long, stringy, pulpy bits, in order for some doctors to diagnose an illness, was especially fun and may become a short story. I just need to make it a bit more gruesome.) 

In any case, I have decided to go with my usual methodology when it comes to writing a piece, and leave it until the eleventh hour (literally - started this at 11pm) and just see what pours out of my head. This is, in essence, a performance piece of a blog entry, where I enact my process in order to come up with a blog about my process. Also as usual, Jules Anne Ironside has beaten me to the deadline. You can see what she has to say about her writing process on her blog. Whilst you're reading, I just have to use a bit of really simple Pixie magic to pop into her head and move around all of her mental notes. It is April Fool's tomorrow and it seems like a really good gag. Don't tell her; I want it to be a surprise.

I should take the chance to thank my mate Matt Willis, whose existence on the physical plane I only ascertained after agreeing to write this blog entry, and who I met in a little pub in Oxford the other week. The very pub frequented by Tolkien and Lewis, no less.  Pretty sure an Ent followed me home. In any case, Matt turns out to be just as lovely and interesting in person as he is in cyberspace, which was a relief. He even coped remarkably well when caught up in the vortex of fast-acting crazy that is Jules and I involved in a free-wheeling, free-association, surreal chat. 

Matt's first novel, Daedalus and the Deep, is available in ebook and paperback and is only the first adventure in the series. He promises he is working on the second one now. This pleases me. I have declared it to be mine. He has a rare knack for short stories, too, and I will be blogging about a collection of short stories he is co-editing with Jules before much longer. You can read more about Matt and his work on his blog.

Now, on to the actual point of the blog. My writing process. 


1) What are you working on? 

At the moment, I am working on a YA novel about Jade, a girl with the power to send people to Hell. Six months ago, she sent her boyfriend and he has just returned. Now, Jade must find a way to escape a demon of her own making, whilst working out her feelings towards Conrad, a newcomer who seems determined to be Jade's guardian. 

I am also writing a prequel to this novel, largely to firm up my own understanding of the back story. Who knows, maybe this will become the first book and the original one will be a sequel. 

Other than that, I am working on a novel about Fran, who, on the run from a traumatic event at University, is hounded by a bizarre old woman who insists that the past is written in her bones. 

The this novel which is currently vying for my attention deals with a young woman who was tricked into becoming a demonic assassin for her lover, only to find he has never loved her at all. This one will be a reworking of a short story I wrote a few months ago for a WordCloud competition and is still in the planning stages.

I have just finished work on a short story for the anthology being edited by Matt and Jules and have a number of other short stories bubbling away, though they need a while longer to simmer. 


2) How does your work differ from others of its genre?

My work tends to focus on specific physical details in the descriptions and veers towards metaphors and motifs whether that is the intention or not. I just think in metaphors. My short story for the WordCloud was described as 'compelling and disturbing', which sounds about right. I was rather smug about that, actually. Jolting the reader with a grounding or gruesome detail in amongst the figurative language is something I enjoy. 

Themes of isolation, fighting against being trapped and being desperate for meaning also recur. I am fascinated by changing states and those moments when a life choice crystalises. The boundaries between life and death are another mesmerising area to consider, as just one example of a change in state. Exploring the factors which keep us bound or make us change, then, are threaded through my work. As to whether this makes me unique? I agree with Gaiman; what makes my writing unique is the fact that I have written it, from the perspective of my particular store of experiences and life events. If something I have written resonates with someone, then I am delighted. 

Oh, and if I don't catch myself, my characters drink a lot of tea, though I mostly edit that out in the redrafts. They're thirsty buggers, these characters of mine. Well, the demon girl was intending to drink blood, but that's hardly a massive difference, is it?


3) Why do you write what you do?

Fantasy and speculative fiction in general have always drawn me in. The possibilities, the ways they can be used to explore the human condition and as metaphors for it, have offered thought-provoking and challenging tales for decades, and I love to play in this sandbox. 
Besides, everything is better with dragons.


4) How does your writing process work?

Ah. Tricky, in that is implies that I have one. 

I tend to circle an idea and pounce on bits of it at a time, scribbling down ideas on bits of paper, in notebooks, or in random word documents (I have files saved as 'random', which are collections or notes or fragments that have yet to find a home in a full piece). When an idea reaches a certain critical mass, I sit down and write from the beginning of the story. I am clearly in excellent company with the notes, as I read that Dahl once stopped his car on the side of the road and scribbled a word in the dirt of his windshield with his finger. If I am remembering correctly, that note sparked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. 

I have to write out the full story, working it out as I go, and then pull it all apart and start again. Plotting first has yet to work for me, though I can have a decent idea of some key moments or even an ending, as everything else can change wildly.

Ideas for the story or characters occur as I write, even if the specific bit I am writing is nothing to do with the idea I have. It is not quite automatic writing, but writing by hand or else typing do seem to unlock that part of my brain. 

I may rewrite a novel a number of times. I have replotted and rewritten Jade's story, Hellheart, six times now, and only got the end once. Each time, it becomes more vivid and solid in my mind, and stray plot points and pieces I find weak or unconvincing are cut or transformed. With any luck, this process will end and it will not turn out that I have been stuck in Tartarus all this time, writing a never-ending novel. 

When it comes to editing, I cut and cut and cut. Then I put some back in, as it can verge on being an elegant playscript in places. I follow through motifs, weave in a few extra layers in the metaphors and foreshadowing, and reach the point where I can no longer tell if this is worthy of the greats or in need of shredding. At which point, I put it aside for a bit and come at it with fresh eyes.

Then I email it to Jules or Liz Crossland and see what they think. I keep some of my mind in each of their heads. It frees up more space for thinking about dragons.


There you have it. My process, such as it is. Next week, I am handing over to Liz Crossland, my close friend and fellow tea-drinker, who will tell you about her process. Here is a little information about Liz:

Liz Crossland is a writer, linguist, and educator with a passion for Yorkshire tea. She is currently writing a novel about speed-date rambling and malevolent sheep. When she is not writing, she enjoys climbing and Ceroc dancing (but not at the same time). She has lived in many countries including Italy, Poland and Cornwall. You can find out more about Liz and her random writing at her blog.

I accidentally networked.

Having just reread my last post (and wow, that was from a long time back. Bad me), I am almost ashamed to admit how I have spent my weekend.

I networked.

I know. I know. How could I? After everything I said about networking.

Never fear, it was less power-talks and secret handshakes and more tumbling into a narrow little pub in Oxford, falling into chairs and taking part in a writing exercise which had us shouting at each other in pairs.

I am now far more self aware. The first thing of which I am now aware is that I am absolutely awful at working out beforehand what people will look like. It's not that I spent much (or any, really) time pondering this, but part of me was expecting people to look like their avatars. They didn't. Not one person in there was a cacti or a sunny beach or a boat.

At this point, I should perhaps point out that I had never met most of these people before, even though I have shared writing and random conversations and advice with many of them. We normally meet up in cyber space and this was the first time many of us had met.

I understand it was less nerve-wracking for me, even with my general confusion over how to speak to humans, as I had turned up with Jules. People seemed to work out pretty quickly that Jules and I have known each other for a good long while. We give it away somehow. Others had arrived alone and had to go through the process of working out which bunch of strangers might be the writers. More power to them. Jules and I had spotted one person at the bar and were half decided on sneaking behind him until we worked out who was with our group and we had each other as back-up. We had just decided on Skyrim style sneaking when we were spotted by someone we met back at the Writers' Festival in York last year.

In any case, it was perhaps a good thing that no-one was a boat, as the restaurant we went to was...snug. I am not used to sitting hip-to-hip with people I have just met in person, whilst I try to wrestle chicken and chips off a plate without being able to move my elbows, but it went surprisingly well. It would have gone less well had I needed to rub elbows with a ship, I feel.

Thank-you for not really being a ship, Matt.

The meal itself was wonderful, with warmth and chat and wine...which may have assisted the first two items on the list. And a special mention must go to Tray Guy. Our waiter. It is a noble profession. He dealt well with a starter being ordered for pudding (something I have longed to do for years and now I have seen someone do it. She is a hero, that woman. Next time I want more ribs and people say 'No' and 'You can't eat ribs for pudding', and I going to ignore them and eat ribs.), didn't flinch (much) when he asked who wanted the wine, all innocent of the fact he was asking a bunch of writers, and nearly got hit in the face with raised hands, and heard every pronunciation of 'poulet' possible. Everyone raise a glass to Tray Guy. May he not need too much therapy to get over that meal.

Other people also turned out not to be ships and pieces of landscape. They all also had actual people names, something I suppose I knew in theory, and the afternoon and evening was full of people telling each other real names and then promptly going back to user-names in the next half of the sentence.

Using the Eagle and Child as our meeting point meant being in a pub about as wide as my living room and seeing Tolkien and C.S.Lewis references all over the place, so that was a plus. I was tormented throughout our time there by a door labelled 'Narnia', through which no-one stepped. Someone who looked much more like a 3D human than I had expected told me that the sign was a lie, but I suspect I was just being kept out of Narnia.

Clearly, the pub became our home base, as we ended up back there after the meal. By this point, people had mostly gone home (by which I mean most people had gone home, not that everyone had partly gone home, leaving only a portion of themselves in the place) and Jules and I soon realised that the dim lighting was actually our eyelids trying to close, so we went off to find a bus. Happily, the bus we got on took us in the general direction of our hotel.

All in all, it was a great day and I would wax lyrical about everyone I spoke to, but I am filled to the brim with confusion over whether to use people names or usernames, so I will simply say that I am looking forwards to meeting up with everyone again.