A Day In The Life of a Writer. Yesterday.

I wake up. First thing I do is check the time. Have I overslept? I got home from work last night at 11 p.m. and then watched Question Time on the iPlayer. The one glass of wine I intended to have turned into several. Question Time turned into The Week. I like politics, especially when I’m drunk.


Sun is coming through the curtains. My mobile says 8:45. This is not ideal but ok. If I don’t write in the morning then I can’t write at all. Usually I like to read in bed for an hour first. If I do that it’ll be nearly 10 o’clock. Then by the time I’ve checked my emails, usual internet sites it will be 11.


I start to panic. I’m not going to get any writing done.


Downstairs there is a knock at the door. I know it will be the postman. He’s the only person who knocks on my door. I am naked.


I don’t always sleep naked. Sometimes I like to have a sweatshirt and underwear and I regularly have two duvets and a sleeping-bag on my bed.


I’ve ordered some books from Amazon. I imagine that’s why the postman is knocking. On top of the nakedness I have an erection. Why does the postman always come when I have an erection?


I can’t very well go downstairs like this.


I used to do door to door sales in Australia. Sometimes when I was doing areas by the coast you’d get surfer dudes out of bed. I used to hope they’d come to the door naked. It was a boring job and the mind tended to wander.


As it happens, it rarely happened. This is just one way in which life is different to fiction.


I stumble into the spare room and pull on yesterday’s work trousers and a cardigan. I either looked dishevelled and interesting. Or a tramp with a hard on. No time to check in the mirror.


Postman done I make a cup of tea and go back upstairs to bed. The books I ordered were ‘Jack’ and ‘The End of Alice’ by A M Homes.


A M Homes is getting to be one of the writers of whom I have read their complete works. In this she will join Rupert Thomson, Magnus Mills, Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, Andrey Kurkov, David Mitchell, Timothy Mo, Sarah Waters.


She will be, I note, the only woman on the list. Except for Sarah Waters.


I spread the books out on my bed. The two A M Homes ones and also Nocturnes by Ishiguro. I have recently bought this too.


I haven’t got too long.


I choose the Ishiguro and read the first story.


So far I haven’t mentioned much writing. That’s the thing about writing. A lot of it is in your head. The rest of the time is not writing.


So when I am sitting in bed naked, books spread out before me, drinking tea, I am actually very busy. Convincing other people of this is sometimes a problem.


I have just finished six days in a row at work. Therefore I haven’t had much time to write. In fact, I haven’t done any. Prior to these six days I’d had five days off. In those five days I’d written 8,000 words.


Writing is like that for me. Once I start it’s easy to carry on. Once I stop it’s difficult to start again.


Once downstairs, and dressed, I open up the document.


I stopped right at the end of a long section in which a character on a boat to the Antarctic is telling a story over the phone to another one of the characters back in England. This story is about his time in Iraq and it’s kind of a love triangle.


The character on the end of the phone is in love with the character telling the story.


This 8,000 word section from my previous days off is this story.


This novel is a novel of people telling stories to each other. I like all the characters and the stories but I wonder if it works as a novel.


I have a cup of coffee.


Also all the stories are about death. Would someone want to read about so much death?


Someone slips under a tram, gets hit by a car, falls into a vat of acid, loses their hand in an industrial accident. But pulls through! Loses their feet to frostbite, is the victim of a serial killer, dies of cancer, dies in a water-skiing accident.


And so on.


As I don’t know if it works I am trying to establish a life / work balance. I don’t want to spend a whole year doing this and then have to delete it. If I’ve done other things I can look back on those things.


Like drinking tea in bed. Drinking wine and watching Question Time on the iPlayer. For a few years I didn’t do any of those things. I used to write all the time.


I follow pretty much the Stephen King model of writing. I try and do 1000 words and then stop. Like him, sometimes this can take hours and other times I can rattle off 1000 words in an hour.


While I’m writing though I am constantly checking things on the internet. Looking at the news, Facebook, my blog, YouTube and so on. So often I don’t feel like I am writing. When I stop I feel useless and berate myself.


“You’ve wasted your day. You’ve spent it on the internet.”


But I do hit my target.


At three o’clock I stop to go to the gym. If I’m going to sleep naked I owe it to myself to look the part.


Also I’ve managed to stop in a good place. David non-Dave has built a city out of toilet rolls for the miniature person who was living in his bum. This is a person he killed earlier in the book. He’s about to show it off to the other characters. His city that is and not his bum.


David non-Dave is having a nervous breakdown I should say and it is not a real miniature person living in his bum. These miniature people made an earlier appearance in another story of mine, ‘Neighbours’.


That’s another tip. Recycle.


After coming back from the gym I go straight out food shopping. This is on foot as I don’t have a car.


It’s a beautiful sunny day.


As I walk I wonder if I’m wasting my time with all this writing. There are other things I could be doing. I would like to be in the countryside somewhere walking by the side of a canal.


Then I imagine falling in the canal and getting attacked by a shark. It bites off my legs. But how would a shark get in a canal?


There was a lorry heist. They expected cash but instead found themselves with a shark on route from one aquarium to another. They don’t know what to do. Under cover of darkness they release it into the canal.


One of them has a favourite film of Jaws. During the heist he says, ‘We’ve got ourselves a shark situation.’


It could happen. There are sharks in the world. There are aquariums. It’s just the question of thinking it.


When I get back home I reopen the document.


I’ve been thinking about the beginning. It needs re-writing. I pour myself a glass of wine. I pick up Music For Torching by A M Homes and re-read the opening. It’s a good beginning. I’d like something like that, but Homes has already used it.


Shit.


I need more humour. The characters need to stand out more. Perhaps I should scrap the whole thing.


I drink some more wine. I make dinner. I watch the Pulling special. This is reassuring because it is more rude than my books. This is important to me but I’ve already gone on enough.


At ten o’clock I go to bed. I read ‘Jack’ for two hours.


I drink two beers.


I fall asleep.


Tomorrow it starts again.

Currently reading – see above


Currently listening to – Friendly Fires by Friendly Fires

Drew Gummerson’s first novel ‘The Lodger’ was published in 2002. It was a finalist in the Lambda Awards in the States. Drew’s latest book ‘Me and Mickie James’ was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2008. Drew is also an award winning short story writer, his short fiction being widely published and featured on Radio 4.

50 Word Animals

While we’re on the subject of animals, one of my favourite animal books is Timoleon Vieta Come Home and it’s by Dan Rhodes. This is a book that almost wasn’t because when he handed it to his then publisher they didn’t want to put it out. This is a shaggy dog story with a happy end though as it was picked up by Canongate and was a big success and he has since gone on to write about a woman that chops her car into little pieces (Little White Car) and a Japanese lesbian with a sneezing affliction (Gold).

Then the next best thing is Fup by Jim Dodge which is a novella about an ugly duck called Fup which likes going for your balls. It also has some rather nice ink drawings in it.

If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, and after all, if we were all duck people what a dull duck infested world it would be, then there is ‘You’re An Animal Viskovitz!’ which is a collection of stories in which in each one Viskovitz is a different animal but in all of them he is in love with Ljuba. Cue, a parrot, a dormouse, a police dog with a heroin habit and a microbe with an inferiority complex.

And if that doesn’t get your goat there is of course the masterpiece which is The Jungle Book by Raymond the Kipper. I haven’t read this one but if it is indeed a masterpiece please let me know by text or email.

All of which brings us nicely to the latest of the 50 Word story competitions, the theme of which was Animals. Huge thanks to the beautiful and talented Polly Tuckett director of Leicester’s own short story night Short Fuse for picking this month’s winners.

The winners will actually be announced at the forthcoming Short Fuse event on the 26th May at Leicester’s Y Theatre, and read out there. Details of the winners will then follow on this blog…

And as a bit of a news flash the stories may also be on BBC Radio Leicester. A big thank you to them….

(Unless I balls it up and read like a donkey. Eeyore and all that.)

Anyhow, without much more to do, please enjoy the shortlisted finalists which were the very best of a brilliant bunch of cats and dogs.

WINNER Eric Karl Anderson

To Survive

Mark’s earliest memory was running for his life. His heartbeat in his throat, burning leg muscles nearly snapping, eyes searching wildly for cover. A beastly phantasm was hot on his heels, animal-jaws snapping. Smiling adults observed this game, but it was more serious than playing. This ritual enabled Mark’s survival.

JOINT RUNNER UP Sean McNulty

The Foxes of Summer

City foxes take to the streets regularly in the summer, but we rarely see them. They’re sharper than us, so amuse themselves with our blindness. I’ve noticed one. I’ve fallen in love with her, but she knows my dimness, so dances without me. City foxes play tough in the summer.

JOINT RUNNER UP Ralph Dartford

The press conference, the day after, in Sheffield.

He said they were nothing but animals. He was a police officer, a man in a black uniform, a nice house near Barnsley, a kitchen to swing a cat in.

In Kirby, the Wirral, Stanley Park. There’s a breathless scream of rage.

Jake Webb

I tried to make life-size animal crackers. What a nightmare! The monkeys wouldn’t sit still. The hippos objected to having chocolate poured on them. And a crocodile bit my hand off. So I gave up and started making giant iced gems instead. But it’s not easy with only one hand.

Louis Anthes

Here we are, a million monkeys typing out a novel, but the striking elephants stopped editing, and all we are left with are parrots to memorise what we say while we write. The hyenas laugh as the dogs eat reams of used typewriter paper falling from tables.

Frances Gapper

After he left, I spent my evenings drinking gin on the sofa. The tiny elephants who live behind my skirting board would troop out through an abandoned mouse-hole. The shag carpet waved like grass. I kept very still as they drank and bathed in the orange neon glow of sunset.

Keith Olsen

The Last Ride

Dooley sensed something terribly wrong when the bull broke from the chute. The animal surged violently and came down on its knees. The cowboy slammed into the Brahma’s bent horn as bursts of hot breath buffeted his face. Then, seconds remaining, the beast rose and launched Dooley to the heavens.

June Anne Welsh

My Back Garden (2)
Used to be scared of insects. Not now. Just rather they didn’t hang in my house. Spiders are different. I don’t mind them coming in for a warm. Last summer I tried to start a dating agency for them out on my windowsill. Nice to be able to make magic.

June Anne Welsh

My Back Garden (1)
The night cold and dark, birds all gone, no more chattering. Where do magpies sleep? Do they have any kind of nightlife, I wonder? Could they be with crows, maybe, in some seedy night-club for birds, listening to jazz and getting high? That’ll be why they chatter all day.

Peter Lawson

I was in the shower this morning. This is true. The small half cuticle sized ’squirm’ the movie flesh eating worm thing on the shower head filled me with wonder. And angst. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy it. It was there before me. But I value my flesh. Flick……

Join the 50 Word story group here.

Currently reading – Music For Torching by A M Homes

Currently listening to – Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes

50 Word Recession

Eminent psychologist Fritz Lieber’s famous words, ‘The best way to deal with something is look it full in the face, and then bite it on the nose’ were in the forefront of my mind when I settled on the theme of this month’s 50 word short story competition, Recession. After all, it’s all around us. I hear even the pound shop is reducing its prices.


(That Lieber’s historical novels, ‘Hitler: I should of (sic) shot him’, ‘Stalin: all he needed was a good blowjob’ and ‘Mao: Man or Mao:ouse’ remain resolutely out of print is beyond a mystery to me.)


(Although Lieber can take comfort that he is still listed in the Guinness Book of Records as having the most consecutive book titles with a colon in them: twenty-six. It would have been twenty-seven except his book, ‘Bras: And the women in them’, was disqualified for being ‘more of an erotic magazine than a book per se’, a statement which Lieber wasted the last seven years fighting against.)


(Ed. If you are interested in reading more about this fascinating yet pointless last period of Lieber’s life please check out Lieber’s son’s wonderful biography, simply called, ‘Dad: Bra: Colon’.)


Anyway, the winners of this month’s fifty word short story competition are below. Thanks to everyone who entered. If you want to join the group please do so here.


Next month I’m going to ship in a special guest judge. If you’re in the group please invite your friends to join and carry on posting. Thanks, Drew x


And the winner is!


Ralph Dartford

Taylor has lost everything, even his hair was falling out. All he had left was a crumpled fiver to perhaps buy some Spam, margarine and bread. He passed the fancy dress shop; an Afro wig in the window for £4.50. He brought it and went dancing in the street again.


And the runner-up is!

Rebecca Bachtel

“C’mere Bucky.”
He leaned back against the building, enjoying the sun.
“They’re talkin’ all about this financial crisis…I just don’t really see it.”
He scratched his balls, wiped the snot from his nose on his sleeve, took a swig from the paper-wrapped bottle.
The dog licked his nose.

And my other favourites are in no order except the one they came off the shelf:

Jacqueline Hilary Williams

George fills discarded coke bottles with next-door’s tap water. Solemn dad shoves a pan on the camp stove. His garden amused the kid, but now tears fill their eyes. The electricity’s been cut, so the roast’s redundant and cold. The loss of work means beans, more beans and cold bread.

Keith Olsen

A warm breeze drifted through the open window as Leonidas watched the tide’s recession into the sea. Below, young Spartan boys wrestled in the surf as the golden sun set. This is a picture of the world, he thought. Young men fight as days pass and economies ebb and flow.

Bitten Twice

“What’dya get?” Harry asked expectantly, rifling through the purse.
“Not much…” Twelve blocks had taken my breath.
“There’s barely enough to keep us!”
“There wasn’t much!” The chest-pain eased slightly.
“What’dya mean there wasn’t much?”
I shrugged breathing deeply. “Tough times… I guess the recession is gonna hit us too?”

Peter Lawson

So you can’t afford to drink fifteen pints of lager, abuse homeless people on the way home, stand in a stupidly long, cold, taxi queue, eat a kebab and break something or someone, get home and try to convince your partner to have sex with a useless prat? Some recession.

Daniel Balter

I woke up because the cops came under the bridge and shone a flash light in my face. They said I could take my gear, but that I needed to leave. The city woke up like an angry drunk. The paper said hard times were on the way. No shit.

Stacy Muszynski

She jammed her hand inside her skirt’s squeezing waist, down, across the shock of hair, unkempt and grown thick in her husband’s absence, to her muffin-sweet spot. That’s what he called it. But he was away. Two thousand miles away. Working.
“Oh,” sighs the wife in the bad economy.

Armanda Baruti

Recession made him lazy. Recession made him a couch potato. Recession made him a movie buff, movie critic, movie analyst. He can watch up to four movies a day. Awake till 2AM reading random stuff. Recession made him a night owl. And, recession made him write his first short story.

Frances Gapper

The morning he asked me to come for “a little chat” in a private office and there was Alison from HR with an A4 envelope and his eyes looked teary, maybe from hay fever, of course I understood this was serious, but my heart floated up into the blue sky.

June Anne Welsh

He drove buses for a living. Recession or not, he almost never went to work. Sometimes you just needed time for yourself. Ironically, he would work on public holidays, when no-one else would. Crazy cat. At Christmas he put a tiny tree in his bus cabin . People needed cheering up.

Nick Harkaway

I have my hair cut in Knightsbridge by an expensive stylist. Last time I went, he asked me if I was worried about recession. I said no. He said he thought I was all right for the moment, and I realised he was telling me I may go bald.

To finish a couple of plugs: Or three:

I’ve just had a story published in The Global Village: Tell Tales 4. It also features new stories by Matt Thorne, Sophie Woolley, Adam Thorpe, Justin Hill and Michael Gonzales so please check it out.

There are some pretty good deals on my latest novel Me and Mickie James over on Amazon so get yourself over there and buy a copy.

And I am now also a professional blogger over on the Literature Network. My first one is here.

Currently listening to: Doves, Kingdom of Rust (great!)


Currently reading: Willy Flautin, The Motel Life (fantastic!)

Doves – Kingdom of Rust video

Coming soon…

Time ticks by like the hands on the clock, along with its concomitant atrophy. What gives?


As it’s the first of March (well not quite, it being the second), and it being the first day of Spring (well not quite), it’s time, as I always do on this day of the year (never before!) to look forward to books that are soon to be released.


But first I’ve enjoyed two articles over on the Guardian website this week. The first is AL Kennedy’s new and regular blog, about the writing life.


To summarise, ‘Don’t do it. It’s shit.’


How I love AL Kennedy! I really do. ‘Day’ was my favourite book last year. And also an article about Graham Swift and his new book, also about his writing life. This book is ‘Making an Elephant’ and out now.


Along with the article is a picture of the author, and I thought, ‘that’s what I want to look like when I’m fifty-nine’. He’s handsome.


As I look nothing like him now will give me something to work on.


*Ring ring*


“Hello, is that Bayswater plastic surgery?”


“…”


“How much!”


And this is what dreams are made of.


Out in April is a book which I have a hand in. This is ‘The Global Village’, a collection of short stories. I mentioned it last week and you can read about it here. Also in April, from across the Atlantic, is Greg Ames’s first book, ‘Buffalo Lockjaw’ but available from Amazon over here. If indeed you are over here. And if you are over there, hello over there! And if you’re someplace else, get yourself over here (or there). This is where it’s happening.


I first came across Greg Ames in McSweeneys, an excellent short story he wrote, and am very much looking forward to the book.


Finally in April (for me anyway) is James Meek’s latest, now in paperback, ‘We Are Now Beginning our Descent’. James Meek is another author whose work I discovered through short stories, this time a collection, The Museum of Doubt. Still available, so get that too, if you like strangely absurd tales.


In May is Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest, Nocturnes. And to turn everything I’ve just said on it’s head, this time it’s a novelist releasing his first collection of short stories. I’ve read everything he’s written so I have my fingers crossed in anticipation.


Then if that doesn’t make me happy, after what seems too long an absence is Magnus Mills new book, ‘The Maintenance of Highway’ in August. Also in August is Andrey Kurkov’s ‘Good Angel of Death’. From the synopsis, this one sounds great.


All these writers Ames, Meek (in his short stories at least), Ishiguro, Mills, and Kurkov, all share distinct but similar styles; deadpan, absurd.


There is probably something interesting to say about this but I have to get in the shower and cook tea so stop freaking me out with your high-class demands Baby Jane.


Later I’ve got a bottle of wine to drink and four Woody Allen films to watch. Then tomorrow morning it’s time to get back to my own writing. It’s going fine, thanks for asking. Back on the treadmill of doing it every day but there’s never enough time. It just ticks by like those hands on a clock.

Books on my current to read pile:

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (the Booker winner just out in paperback)

Music for Torching by AM Homes

When You Are Engulfed by Flames by David Sedaris

Pity the Nation by Robert Fisk

The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross

Russia, The Man and Jonathan David by Saul Pope

On Tour

Click here to listen to the new podcast of my story Post Traumatic Hokkaido Blues

They say you can tell a lot about a man by the underpants he wears. Mine today are black. This mirrors the dark interior of my soul.


At the end of this month I will be on tour. Well, not exactly, but I have three readings coming up.


1. On March 17th I’ll be headlining at Short Fuse. This is Leicester’s new short story night at the Y theatre. I’ll be reading ‘Gus’, a story set in Leicester and which is in a new collection, ‘The Global Village’, being released at the beginning of April.


2. On March 18th I’ll be reading from ‘Me and Mickie James’ at Polari in London, along with Adam Mars Jones. Details here.


3. On April 2nd I’ll be reading ‘Gus’ again at The Blag Club for the launch of The Global Village.

And between March 18th and April 2nd I’ll be in Belgium and Holland. Not on tour, just on holiday.


I haven’t seen ‘The Global Village’ yet but it looks like it’s going to be a great collection with stories by Adam Thorpe, Matt Thorne, Olive Senior, Keith Jardin, Sophie Walley. ‘The Global Village’ is produced by Tell Tales, a collective dedicated to promoting short stories, much the same as Short Fuse is.


Ian McEwan was talking last week at the Short Fuse launch. He said that he spent the first eight years of his writing career purely writing short stories. He didn’t see them as a springboard to writing a novel, but as a thing in themselves.


He seemed like a lovely bloke, wise and funny and I wondered why writers aren’t revered more in our society. The French and Italians love writers. And they also have fine wine and pasta respectively.


Actually I didn’t need convincing about short stories. I am mostly a short story writer. ‘Me and Mickie James’, my novel, is seven short stories. But I’ve said this before…


Last week I wrote the first draft of a new short. Tentatively it’s called ‘Palestine’ and it’s about a man with two arseholes. I’m going to work on it over the next few weeks and enter it for some competition or another.


I wonder if a story about a man with two arseholes if the sort of thing competition judges would like though. Looking back over previous winners of top competitions it seems that winning stories have featured men (or women) with only one.


Maybe I can buck the trend.


I basically have an absurd view of life, that it is mostly pointless and we drift around a godless universe drinking wine. Yet at the same time I am wildly enthusiastic and passionate about a lot of things.


This is the point Woody Allen makes at the end of Crimes and Misdemeanours, how humans have the capacity to find comfort in the smallest tokens of love and hope. Good job really as a life spent staring death fully in the face would probably be quite miserable.


‘Palestine’ I wrote because I am reading ‘The Great War for Civilisation, The Conquest for the Middle East’. This is reporter Robert Fisk’s history of the last 30 years of conflict in the Middle East. For much of this time he was based in Beirut and the book is filled with first hand accounts of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, dispatches from the front lines of both the Iranian and Iraqi armies during the Iran Iraq war, the ‘liberation’ of Kuwait, meeting Osama Bin Laden and so on.


While I am aware of over-used adjectives in the reviewing world this book is both remarkable and important. It also calls into question what I am doing writing fiction when there are so many more significant things taking place in the world. At the same time I comfort myself that I am not significant anyway so whatever I decide to do will largely go unnoticed.


At the same time again, because I am so immersed in non-fiction, I am missing fiction. It is like an pang. No it is a pang. So for the past few nights I have been rereading some short stories.


I have read – The Nimrod Flipout by Etgar Keret, Keeping Up by David Sedaris, The Second Bakery Attack by Haruki Murakami, The Crack by Mikel Jollett and The Wavemaker Falters by George Saunders.


This last story, the George Saunders one, I actually read out loud in bed twice straight through. It is brilliant, sad and funny, and depressing, if you are a writer, because it is so outstanding.


I want to be that good. And I doubt that I ever will. But at least there is no god and when it’s the end it really will be the end and all I need to do is to keep myself constantly entertained, horrified, bemused and questioning until that point.

Currently reading – see above


Currently listening to – Divided Kingdom (audiobook) – Rupert Thomson

Love Love Love

You can listen to this blog here.

Last night I dreamt Woody Allen was trying to break into my house and shampoo me. Leaning out of my window, I shouted down to him, he bathed in the moonlight nestling a crowbar, ‘could you tell me the truth about love?’


‘No,’ he replied, ‘but if you give me the opening chords, perhaps I could dance it for you?’


My boyfriend and I have decided not to give each other Valentine’s Cards this year. Instead we are enrolling in night school classes. I am doing, “Despair: For beginners’.” He is taking the advanced option.


(Actually he said, “If you’ve got to walk to Sainsbury’s then don’t bother. Just come round and dangle your willy in my face.” I agreed.)


Idea for a love story: two people meet and they fall in love.


I like the theme but feel it needs padding. Will I write it myself or shall I sell it to Starbucks as a kind of novelty coffee? They could serve it in a heart-shaped mug with a business card for a good divorce lawyer on the side.


I’m not a romantic person. Show me anything heart-shaped and I break out into a cold sweat. “Face your fear,” my psychologist would say, if I had one. And so I have been running a 50 Word Love Story competition over on my Facebook group and have been duly rewarded with lovely romantic stories of…


…drowning, car crashes, internet porn, lost love, and so on.


Thanks to everyone who entered. Once again it was really hard to pick a winner but here they are…

Winner: drum roll, round of applause, naked running in a public place.


Li Bai and the Moon by Sean McNulty


When the story of my life is told, I hope they describe the happiness of that night with the moon, and refer to my last moments not as the misfortune of a drunk falling into the river and drowning, but as a man hugging the moon in delighted quixotic love.


And my nine favourite other ones, in no particular order:


Saville


14/02/09: submerged in a world of transient satisfaction, his each lonely click pushes forth a different permutation of over-tanned, over-tired, overdosed figures, unnaturally posed and pretending to enjoy one another in that secret gladiators’ arena for millions. A never ending tap of bored flesh that only his conscience will run dry.


June Anne Welsh


You want to impress, so over-identify. Take a chance, show off a bit. He mentions his Spanish class. You see your chance, extract the few words of Spanish you know from your box of tricks… He comes back with a long and complex letter – in perfect Spanish! You freeze.


Armanda Baruti


Eight out of ten times she drives past his apartment, she still looks up. The other two times she manages to look at the road ahead, the only goddamned road from Toffen to Bern.
She looks for him wherever she goes. She will find him. One day but not today.


Return Address by William Jones


Nothing… for seventeen years, then a picture in the mail. She’s sitting on the grass in a sun dress. The back says, “Do you remember?” Yes; like he walked her home yesterday. And all that matters about the last seventeen years was that she wasn’t in them.


Tania Hershman


She thought it was love; he was wondering about engine oil. She designed white dresses, he imagined the carburetta running smoothly. She had her hands all over him while he raced off in dreams to distant horizons. One morning, alone, she discovered it wasn’t. He, she realised, already knew.


Peter Lawson


I wanted to love her: it pained me to receive but not to give back. She was everything I could ever want, but the ache persisted. If love is only a chemical imbalance in the brain, I would gladly medicine myself, but we all know drugs are not the answer.


Frances Gapper


They all advised against it, all thought it would be a bad idea. Catwoman, Soapbox, the Australian. All said it’s too soon, and too long ago. For good reason it didn’t work last time. So you ignored my emails and let the thing die. How wise of you, I guess.


Hazel McSporran


That moment, seduction, energy of dodging waves surrendered to sublime liberation, of wet feet. Salt ring marks of one who has jumped in with both feet, risking the pull-plunge of waves. In the home-coming warmth of later on, the wide awake taste of salt spray on the lips.


Fall in by Eric Karl Anderson


We’re friends sharing a bed. We are tense with twisting turning trying not to touch before silence. The night is long. Sleep and wakefulness blur.


Did he?
Dare I…?
….
And then we…
Concealed in darkness, there is a language to touch. By sunrise we lovingly embrace with no ambiguity.

Darlene Longo

Roses are red
that’s what he said
and she believed him
a fool would know better, instead
she stood by the door
ear pitched for the phone
He’d gone for sure
left all alone

They’d never argued, not one fight
but the car he was in,
hit another that night.


And finally one by me:


Blind Date

We met on a blind date. She was supposed to have a rolled-up copy of The Times under her left arm. Instead she had tightly packed the complete works of James Joyce into a small trolley case. She pulled it romantically behind us as we walked along the moonlit path.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone.

Much love

Drewx

Join the 50 Word Short Story group here

Books of the Year 2008

Hello peeps. It’s time to put my hands on my head and announce my books of the year.

(Note from editor. If your hands are on your head, how are you going to type?)

One of the good things about keeping this blog, is that I’ve recorded week by week what I was reading. And a quick flick through tells me that this year I’ve read 36 books.

If this year could be said to have 36 weeks then that’s almost one book a week! Not bad on top of everything else I have to do.

(Note from editor. What exactly is it that you do? Remind me…)

Firstly, a short introduction.

(Editor. God help us! And while we’re on the subject, you make a note of the books you read? What are you, some kind of freakosaurus?)

Freakosaurus?!

Unlike other self-styled lists of the same name I won’t limit myself to books published this year; only ones that I’ve read. And I’m going to choose my top ten.

(Ed. Don’t tell me, it’s going to be in no particular order.)

That’s right. In fact, it’s going to be in chronological order.

(Jeez!)

1. Don Quixote. What a way to start the year. This was my dad’s favourite book and I bought it because I felt I should read it. I shouldn’t have worried. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are fantastic characters. So funny I read bits out at work, my pen a sword, my computer screen a shield.

2. Donjong Heights by Ben Borek. This is a novel in verse. And if that puts you off then don’t let it. Donjong Heights is the Eugene Onegin of its day, but set in a tower block in South London. Our hero, unnamed, is dying. This novel follows his last throw of the dice, a Christmas Party. A perfect novel for Christmas!

3. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. This is the history of Reaganite / Thatcherite neo-conservatism. It’s particularly pertinent right now as capitalism totters and the neo-cons fall further out of favour. What was good for other countries, it seems, is not good for America.

4. Day by A L Kennedy. I loved this book, Kennedy is a genius. Day is the eponymous hero, returning to be an extra in a prison of war film, shortly after the Second World War in which he fought as a gunner. Both a love story, and a book about the horror of war.

5. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Being chosen by Richard and Judy seemed to be a double-edged sword for this book. Looking at all the negative reviews on Amazon a lot of people, it seemed, just didn’t get it. I did. Narrated by ‘we’ and set in an office but so much more than that.


“I listened to Karen Woo give an explanation of photosynthesis once. God only knows why they were discussing photosynthesis. They hung on her every word, like she was a PBS special. *Her explanation didn’t even involve sunlight.*”

6. Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol. I bought this as it has an awesome cover. It is also an awesome book, an adventure in the 19th Century mould, a journey into the Congo and a lost world and strange creatures found. It also turns into a treatise on the power of story telling.

7. City of Thieves by David Benioff. A buddy novel if ever there was one. A teenage boy, Lev, and a soldier, Kolya, are given a stay of execution during the siege of Leningrad. The condition is they must find a dozen eggs for the commander’s daughter’s wedding cake. What follows is an absurd adventure.

8. Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks. As the name suggests this book is about the Iraq war and the best I’ve read. It takes you from the first Gulf war and then through the whole kit and caboodle concentrating on styles of leadership – how to fight or not fight a guerilla war.

9. Blindness by Jose Saramago. The first time I picked this up in Borders I was put off by the lack of punctuation, pages of unbroken text. Actually, it’s not difficult to read. It’s like a Hollywood blockbuster with brains (and shit). Read it and see although don’t read it while eating.

10. What We Talk About When We Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. The best and only sport book I’ve read this year. Murakami started running at the same time he became a full-time novelist – sitting at the desk he was getting fat you see. And he applies to running the same methods he applies to his writing. In it’s quiet and dedicated way this book is inspirational.

So that’s it, my ten favourite papery multi-leafed things of the year. And there were also plenty of other nearly-rans. Seeing them here makes me realise how much better my life is for books, and how much worse it would be without them.


What would I do in my lunch-hour at work? When I wake up in the morning? Go to bed at night? And I think of all the pleasures I would have missed.

(Ed. Pass me the sick bag.)

Books, you are great!

Currently listening to: Day and Age, The Killers


Currently reading: This Book Will Save Your Life, A M Homes (brilliant so far. The horse has just fallen in the hole and been saved by the movie star in his helicopter.)

Drew Gummerson is the auther of Me and Mickie James

Sister Morphine – Now With Salt

So you’ve spent the last ten years in your garret writing your novel in blood, you’ve walked naked down Clapham High Street clutching your manuscript, doing the approximation of a casual Fandango, a small cherry tree nailed to the back of your head. Someone has finally taken note, your manuscript is accepted, you are published, (well, that’s my story.)


But then comes the big question. What next! (And it doesn’t even have a question mark.)


You see, these days it’s easy to feel that unless you can do ever more spectacular things with a range of ever increasing girth of broomsticks (again, my story), or have a high-flying media profile no one is going to notice you.


Salt Publishing, winner of this year’s Nielsen’s Innovation of the Year Award (in publishing) are doing everything they can to combat this. They encourage their authors to have websites, videos on YouTube, and do something called a ‘Virtual Booktour’.

(Catherine Eisner, author of Sister Morphine: ‘they’re scheduled appearances (virtual ‘tour’) of an author and newly published work on a number of blogs whose bloggers are chosen (possibly) for their affinity to the author. Anyhow, one can see the virtue of optimising the medium of the Worldwide Web to widen the appreciation of literary offerings other than celebrity memoirs and cookbooks.’)

Not getting out much these days, rapidly approaching my 38th (38th!) birthday, a virtual tour sounded something I was keen to take part in, especially as it meant getting a free book to review.

(Quick note to Holiday Companies – I am not interested in Virtual Holidays. Real thing please. Trans-Siberian Express.)

The first thing to be said about Sister Morphine is that it looks good, hard-backed, beautifully produced. On the cover is a Polaroid of a blurred woman, and below this the phrase, ‘Women’s Narratives From the Case Notes of a Community Psychiatric Nurse.’


I was confused. I wasn’t sure if this was a collection of short stories, a novel (as it says on the inside cover), or it really was a collection of ‘Case Notes’.

(C. Eisner: The narratives in ‘Sister Morphine’ have grown like accretions over the past ten years and each can stand alone as a work of fiction … except, at the back of my mind I was working on a commonality that linked them, and this I found in the ‘connective unconscious’ of the characters, which is discovered in the last chapter.


In my own confected ’soundbite’ for this novel I wrote: ‘Fifteen women – Felícia, Charlotte, Zoë, Elenore, Eveline, Miriam, Grete, Esther, Marianne, Irina, Mary, Elspeth, Theresa, Isolde and Roberta unveil their psychoses to you … but not until the last page do we unlock the unsuspected secret that unites their destinies.’)

There are fifteen sections in Sister Morphine. Each section, or story, starts with a brief case history, next are some brief patient notes; name, ID number, drug being taken, and possible side effects. Next is the story.


And I was surprised again. Because the stories weren’t what I was expecting. The first one, for example is a tale of grand larceny, a bank robbery, and then they rattle through fratricide, enforced suicide, infidelity, illegitimacy, with a cast of characters of interpreters, ballet dancers, publishers, translators and so on.


Each story is presented in short sections, written by the narrator supposedly as therapy, and they work like jigsaw puzzles, or mise en scene, a picture carefully built up. It is only at the end, often, that you realise how the whole fits together.


But, I should add, not necessarily into a coherent whole. Each character’s motives and actions being somewhat influenced both by their past experiences (traumas), and present drug use. What we have here is a series of narratives written by unreliable narrators, then reinterpreted by the unreliable narrator of the Community Psychiatric Nurse (who is herself a construct of the author).

(Community Practice Nurse: ‘Hence, in each narrative you’ll observe how a psychotropic drug has come to be regarded as a character in the dramatis personae, obtruding slyly into the life of the patient like an antagonist introduced into the tale by the psychodramatist as a companionable deceiver or treacherous friend to control events or even to propel the plot as an auxiliary ego enacting different facets of the patient’s mental distress.’)

It’s a clever device and what we get are ultimately are the workings of fifteen minds, telling stories that might otherwise be taking place off camera. These are big short stories, told from the sidelines with voices that we wouldn’t normally hear.


e.g. Elegy from a Locked Drawer is told by an assistant in a publishers office, it is not the story of the publisher, or the writer. Red Coffee and it’s Post-Soviet Conference told by the interpreter, not the major players.


Oh yes, and if it’s not clear so far, these are all women’s stories. Definitely, taken together, they have a powerful effect.

(C Eisner: I’m probably wrong about this but I believe it must have been extremely difficult for women in the early twentieth century to write honestly about mental illness, given the prejudice against so-called ‘female hysteria’, which, where it was encountered, was so often a product of cultural repression.  


Ethelind Frances Colburn Mayne (1865–1941), a great Modernist writer of fiction and very early Freudian (she was the first translator of a number of Freud’s works). Mayne’s ‘The Separate Room’ is a masterpiece, and is the Ur-text before ‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Woolf, but unfortunately, ‘Room of One’s Own’ has become a kind of archetype for women’s literary and cultural aspirations. Woolf (on the evidence of Mayne’s work I’ve read) does not get so close to Mayne’s explorations of female psychology or her disclosures of disturbed natures (jealousy, grief, nervous breakdown, etc.) evident in Mayne’s confessional writings.

All the same, female mental health is most definitely dependent on a separate room (how utterly civilised was that intervening Dressing Room in upper class houses that separated the sleeping quarters of the spouses!).

And Mayne’s work ranks with Charlotte Perkins Gilmore, whose classic ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is also a perceptible influence on ‘Sister Morphine’.)

So they’re women’s stories but what they also do is foreground the use of prescription drugs, our society’s (unwise) dependence on them. This is not Trainspotting. They are not stories about drug-taking, drugs are a character in the story, often a malign one. They say, if anything, that the drugs don’t work.

(This year, the number of prescriptions for anti-depressants hit a record high of more than 31 million in England in the last recorded national estimate – even though official guidance stresses they should not be a first line treatment for mild depression. There were 16.2m prescriptions for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors alone. Researchers focused on drugs which work by increasing levels of the mood controlling chemical serotonin in the brain. These included fluoxetine (Prozac) and paroxetine (Seroxat), from the class known as Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). The UK government has recently announced that 3,600 therapists are to be trained during the next three years in England to increase patient access to talking therapies, which ministers see as a better alternative to drugs.)

The Introduction to ‘Sister Morphine’ makes the writer’s responsibility clear: ‘… these fictions should not be regarded as indiscretions; nor should they be seen as representing substantially more than illustrative examples from case studies for stimulating self-reflection and further debate on treatment strategies. Rather, [this book], if it has any clinical use, could be considered as a therapeutic process towards a better understanding of dysfunctional personalities whose hopelessness or helplessness or hostility is so often a mirror of our own.’)

Sister Morphine is available to buy now from Salt Publishing.

Also check out Salt’s Story and Poetry Bank.

Currently reading – the Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes


Currently listening to – Number9dream audiobook

The Verve – Drugs Don’t Walk

Saramago and 50 Christmas Words Competition

There’s a great interview with Jose Saramago over on the Guardian site this week. If you don’t know, he’s a Nobel Prize winning Portuguese writer. The film of his book, Blindness, is out around about now.


Saramago starts with a big idea and works it through to its logical end. For example, Blindness starts with the someone going blind and then one by one everyone else in the population goes blind.


At the opening of Seeing an election is held; almost no one votes. Another election is held. Even fewer people vote. Democracy crumbles.


This is good advice for writers – write about Something.


What I didn’t know about Saramago was that he didn’t become a writer properly until in his 60s. Before that he worked as a car mechanic.


This is heartening to know. I can spend the next 22 years working on my next book and still be a spring chicken next to Saramago. However, I’d rather not be a car mechanic being no good with small parts.


It’s lucky I didn’t choose to be a pop star. As Louis Walsh said to Eoghan Quigg on X Factor last night.


“You’ve got everything it takes to make it in the music business. You’re young, you’re on a tv show, you’re Irish.”


I’m neither young, Irish, or on a TV show.


There are plenty of other writers who have made it while elderly. Post Office, Bukowski’s first book appeared when he was in his 50s, and Penelope Fitzgerald didn’t become published, like Saramago, until her 60s.


And look at Doris Lessing, dancing the Fandango at her Nobel ceremony, leaping out of taxis. She’s 89.


(There a good Lessing site up at the moment – you can read The Golden Notebook online and there are ongoing discussions by a number of chosen readers jostling for position on the sidelines.)


Lessing, like Saramago, was also a communist. Saramago says he still is. I agree, as we watch capitalism crumble.


The problem we are in is due to cheap lending and over-borrowing. The answer to the problem seems to be to reduce interest rates to encourage more borrowing so people can spend. This will stimulate the economy.


When the economy is stimulated interest rates will go back up and people will be asked to pay back the money they borrowed and never had and we will fall back into recession.

1. Idea for book. America, through its economic dominance, forces laissez-faire economic policies on emerging economies (see Argentina, post-Soviet Poland, post-apartheid South Africa et al). This brings about widespread unemployment, poverty, starvation and hardship.


Interventionist economic policies are not allowed.


When own economy starts to stumble, intervention is suddenly the thing to do. Let’s give lots of money to banks.


It will be a picture book. Louis Walsh will produce a CD to go with it. Westlife will perform a number of songs they haven’t written themselves and sing them without passion but a disenfranchised population will lap them up mistaking it for art.

2. Idea for book. America elects black president and whole world slaps it on back. Its history of slavery and apartheid is forgotten. Africa which has already quite a few black presidents is largely ignored.

Saramago’s website apparently gets a million hits. He not only talks about writing but also gives out advice like recipes and marriage advice.

Therefore in a new column I write:

Marriage advice: A wife is good for warming your shoes by the fire. (This from Charles Darwin.)

I am currently running on my 50 Word Facebook group a 50 Christmas Word story competition. Write any 50 word story with a Christmas theme, post it on the group page and then the best ones will feature on this blog on the 20th December. They will also be a podcast to go with it if I can get my Christmas arse into gear.

And for those of you struggling to think of Christmas presents my book Me and Mickie James is still out and available to buy. Details on my website.

Currently reading: Broken Doll by Neil Campbell


Currently listening: Hurricane by Grace Jones

Bukowski: Poetry and Motion

Exploration

Some people say you have to reach rock bottom before you perk back up. In my experience this is usually the people lying at the bottom of the rock face, for as they say, misery likes company.


Anyway, this week I am feeling better. If I was an art-movement this week I would be fauvist. Or perhaps primitivism.


I am writing, you see, and that always makes me more cheerful. And I have also been spending some time on the British Antarctic Survey website. You can see lots of cool pictures there and read articles such as ‘A Day in the Life of an Antarctic Boatman’.


I’ve always wanted to be an explorer. One of my favourite books this year was ‘Pandora in the Congo’ – a brilliant compulsive tale set in deepest Africa, with a lot to say about the world. Another of my favourite stories is when Pooh goes in search of the North Pole. Or was it the South?


I, myself, earlier in the week went to the bottom of the garden. I found a small plastic ‘Hong Kong Phooey’ football there. ‘Made in China’ it said on the side so even that’s come a long way.


Despite all protestations to the contrary the world is a big place and while we’re on it we might as well make an effort to go and see it before we turn into dust. Another part of me just wants to stay at home and watch X Factor with a bottle of wine.


That’s the power of capitalism; there’s an assuagement for every pocket however credit-crunched you are. I doubt there are many Antarctic explorers patting their pockets looking for their next dime. Although, Tania Hershman’s short story collection, The White Road, does feature an antarctic cafe.


I wonder if all artistic endeavour these days nods its head to a cash-cow? The Dickens I’ve been immersed in recently, Little Dorrit (on TV), Bleak House (on DVD) and Our Mutual Friend (the book) have all certainly been obsessed with money.


Every news bulletin is obsessed with money.


And now when I’m writing part of me wonders if I can sell it. This makes the writing harder because I know my writing reflects my own imagination which then means I’m trying to sell myself which I wouldn’t want to do as I’d rather sit in a corner going unnoticed or on a train going somewhere.


So the upshot is, I’m just trying to write, what I like, for me.


Next year I want to go on the Trans-Siberian express.


As a blog is a kind of diary:


Today is Saturday 15th November. It is 13:32. This morning I’ve been writing, but I have a horrendous cold. Still, I managed 800 words. In a moment I’ll be walking to Aldi to do some shopping. Then this afternoon, later, some editing of this morning’s work. It involved the partner of an alcoholic replacing his whiskey with tea, gradually, to a mathematical formula of her own devising. The former alcoholic then runs a marathon, the partner dies ironically, and the former alcoholic, on the proceeds of the best-selling book of his life, retires to South America where he takes up with former Nazis.


This story is just an aside.

Currently reading: Sister Morphine by Catherine Eisner


Currently listening to: Journey to the West by Monkey