Nov

20

More About “A Winter’s Chill”

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Ooh, take a look at this. Well, I’m excited - aren’t you?

Nov

18

Back Again …

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… from a week and a bit in Hong Kong. Whilst I was away I managed to get to the shortlist for the Café Doom competition, with a final placing of seventh. I’m quite pleased about this, because the story I submitted, “The Future of Photography”, was a rather unpleasant sweary and violent first-person, present-tense piece, thus committing several sins in one go. I’m not entirely sure what to do with it now, but I think it probably deserves another outing somewhere. The winning story, “The Rules” by Jaelithe Ingold, managed to be extremely elegant as well as taking a big gamble with the form - watch out for that one when it appears in Necrotic Tissue.

Might post a few pics of HK when I’m marginally less jet-lagged. Fab place.

Nov

9

Flashshot

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Just heard that “Internal Affairs” has just been accepted by Flashshot. All 87 words of it. I think the author bio accompanying it is slightly longer than the actual piece.

Nov

5

I♥USA

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Sometimes when you look across the pond, you despair. And then sometimes when you look, you are filled with awe. This is one of those times.

Twenty-five years ago, I went on a trip around the States using Greyhound buses (Paul Simon, you have a lot to answer for). I ended up in Washington just at the time when a big march was being organised to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s march on Washington, when he made his “I have a dream” speech. It was an inspiring occasion, and I wonder how many of those present dared to dream that one day a black man would make it into the White House.

Here are some pictures:

Nov

4

Fifty-Two Stitches

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People sometimes ask me where I find out about all these weird and wonderful markets. Obviously, Duotrope is an excellent resource for this, but in the short time that I’ve been submitting stuff, I’ve found that the most useful technique is reading other writers’ blogs, or to put it another way, stalking. And it was by stalking Catherine J. Gardner (sorry, Cate!) that I found out that Fifty-Two Stitches was opening for business on November 1st. So on Saturday I duly sent them a couple of my favourite flashes, one of which, “Anniversary Feast”, they accepted today. Fifty-Two Stitches is an interesting concept: a new horror flash will be posted there every week for the whole of 2009, at the end of which an anthology is published. (Oh, do I need to add that “Anniversary Feast” is another graduate of the Café Doom weekly flash challenge? But you’ve probably guessed that.)

Nov

3

The Whittaker Prize Anthology

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Just heard that Donna’n'Doug, the lovely people who run The Write Idea, have decided to expand the Whittaker Prize anthology to include all the pieces that came second in each round. Which means that my story “Dislocation” (which came second in the first round) has found a publisher. This is probably the nearest I’ve got to writing a conventional love story, and I’m rather proud of it. It’ll be nice to see it in something with an ISBN on the cover.

Nov

3

School Uniform

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The first couple of poems posted on Every Day Poets have been rather sublime. Of course, we all know where it goes after that. Enjoy.

Nov

1

Say Goodbye to Next Week

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A couple of weeks ago, Café Doom Ed was panicking that he’d received only ten entries for this year’s writing competition. He needn’t have worried. There are now 39 stories sitting there waiting to be read and voted on in the next ten days. And there’s the rub: all of the entrants are required to vote. And that includes me.

So if you don’t hear from me in a while, it’s because I’m knee-deep in horror. Think of me at this difficult time.

Oct

31

Normal Service is Resumed

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Apologies for going slightly spEak You’re bRanes in my last post. As this increasingly bizarre story has unfolded over the past few days, it’s become quite clear that there are some darker forces at work here, and almost involved seems to have their own agenda, apart (of course) from the saintly Andrew Sachs. That’s the problem with Real Life - it’s always far too implausible, and usually comes to an unsatisfactory conclusion.

So normal service resumes. The schedule for the first-ever month of Every Day Poets has now been released, and I’m on Day 3. I also feel just a little overawed to be on the same bill as Vanessa Gebbie, who has just been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize. I don’t know much about her poetry (actually, let’s be honest, I know bugger all about poetry, full stop), but I’m guessing that you may find that our styles are ever-so-slightly different.

Oct

28

Of All The People To Pick On …

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Couldn’t give a toss about Russell Brand, but I used to like Jonathan Ross. He always struck me as someone who had a little more behind him than the average celeb. But after this stunt, I’m not so sure.

I haven’t had many encounters with celebs (apart from - God help me - Margaret Thatcher, and I’m not entirely sure that she counts), but I did once receive a phone call from Andrew Sachs. Bizarrely, this means that probably the one thing I have in common with Brand and Ross is that I also have Andrew Sachs’ mobile phone number. This is how it came to pass.

Once upon a time, I wrote a radio play. It was a very strange radio play, and to this day it remains unbroadcast, although I would dearly love to hear it produced. I sent it off to the BBC - which in those pre-Writers’ Room days was a lot more straightforward to get into - and I received an invitation to meet Jeremy Howe, who was then in charge of drama at Radio 3. He basically told me that he really liked it, but it was too short, and did I have anything else? And I admitted that, er, no, I didn’t, apart from one half-baked idea that we kicked around for a few minutes, and that was that. In those days, I didn’t have the tenacity and single-mindedness to follow it up (to say nothing of having a young family to support), so nothing more came of it.

A couple of years back, I dug the script out of the drawer, and sent it off to Dirk Maggs, who also liked it, but said that it was too short, etc. etc.. Then I had an inspiration. Why not send it to Andrew Sachs? One of the lesser-known facts about Andrew Sachs (in fact one that is currently missing from his Wikipedia page) is that he was the writer of the radio drama “The Revenge”. This is an unusual piece, in that it has no words, only sound effects (but it works - especially when you’re wearing headphones, because it’s recorded binaurally). And it was, to a large extent, the inspiration for my play. So I wrote to him, via his agent, enclosing my script, explaining that “The Revenge” was the inspiration for it - and would he be interested in taking one of the parts should it ever come to production?

So it was that one Sunday morning in February last year, I received a phone call from Andrew Sachs. Once I had picked the phone up from where I had dropped it on the floor, we had a very pleasant five-minute chat, in which he seemed extremely down to earth and genuinely interested in what I was doing. He also mentioned that I could certainly say that he would be interested in playing the part that I had suggested. On the basis of this call, I would like to suggest that Andrew Sachs is possibly the nicest celeb on the planet.

And Jonathan Ross, you’re a git.

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