My Unbound Diary Part 5 – Back On Track

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Catherine Smith, crowdfunding, Dianna Vickers, fame, fiction, Gethin Anthony, James Ellis, Latitude Festival, poetry, publishing, short stories, short stoy collections, social media, spoken word, stars of the week, Unbound, Word Theatre, writing

Crowdfunding a book is overwhelming. There is so much marketing to do just to eek out one or two supporters. Unbound (the crowdfunding publisher I have signed to) send you a pledge update once a week so you can see who has pledged and what level they’ve opted for. Everytime someone pledges I want to shout their name from the rooftops. In fact my book In The Future Everyone Will Be World Famous For Fifteen Minutes is, as the title suggests, about fame and I am going to offer to give top pledgers the star treatment on social media.I will make you famous for a week. This is not necessarily about the amount pledged. Here’s the first:

Last week I was a bit despondent having only achieved 13% of the required funding in a month. This week I am 26% funded! Over a quarter of the way there! This is a big deal for me; I am beginning to think that it can be done. There is about 8 weeks left to pledge. If I work really hard I can do it but I can’t do it without your help.

Amongst my pledgers this week was my old Creative Writing tutor, the wonderful poet and short story writer, Catherine Smith. When I first started writing Catherine made me feel as though I was actually good at it. She also taught me that adding a bit of poetry can lift prose into something really meaningful and thought-provoking. I write poetically, I can’t help it, I like language to flow, to alliterate, to unfold like a movie in your mind. (These days I don’t like too many similies so I don’t know why I wrote that last bit.) Catherine left me a message on my last blog post:

I loved Starlings and am so glad you are going down this route, Unbound is an excellent model, though I think UK publishers need a kick up the arse to be less prejudiced against publishing short stories, which as we know is a transcendent and exacting form.

Take note UK publishers and thank God for Unbound, who really are enabling many writers outside of the mainstream to get published.

Unbound have a Facebook support group on which shell-shocked writers can exchange experiences and come up with new ways to get pledges. One of the writers, James Ellis, is a Rattle Tales regular and I asked if he wanted to do a funding event in Brighton. Other authors in the group expressed an interest too so I’m going to book a date at The Brunswick Cellar Bar and see what happens.

I have a sort of plan –  when to contact certain people, when to push Facebook/Twitter ect. how to drawn attention to the project. One of the stories (Underneath) was performed by Games of Thrones actor Gethin Anthony and Diana Vickers at US spoken word group Word Theatre’s UK shows a couple of years ago. I contacted Word Theatre to ask if they could help promote and was told there was a video of one of the events. I was lucky enough to see the performance at Latitude Festival and it remains one of the thrills of my writing career. Here’s a short extract:

Please pledge to this book of short stories. There is something in it for everyone. For just £10 you can help bring this book to life.

https://unbound.co.uk/books/fifteen-minutes

 

 

Latitude 2015, Dracula and Political Poets

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Breaking Bad, Dracula, Hanif Kureshi, Latitude, Latitude Festival, literature, live lit, Luke Wright, Mike Figgis, pink sheep, poetry, Portishead, Rob Auton, short stories, Suffolk, The Sopranos, The Wire, Thom Yorke

I’m just back from Latitude Festival and this year was certainly one to remember.  Of the party I was with, one almost teen was carted off in an ambulance due to a crushing incident at Catfish & the Bottlemen and another left in an ambulance due to a perforated appendix. Before that everything was great! Thankfully both kids are fine and on their way to recovery. This (and events in the news) has made me aware of how precious and breakable our almost growns are. I spent much of this Latitude hanging out with my thirteen year old son. We went a day after my husband and youngest because he was on a school trip to Amsterdam. We caught the train to Diss on Friday and found ourselves sitting opposite Hanif Kureshi. He seemed at bit grumpy so I didn’t ask for a recap on his thoughts about Creative Writing MAs; instead, we just interrupted his sleep by eating crisps and watching Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Junior) on the iPad. It’s much easier by train, no massive traffic jams just a coach from Diss to the Orange Gate and you’re in.  

I have blogged from the festival before, it is such a relaxed, happy event and it helped that the sun shone and the sheep were neon. The poetry tent rocked it this year. Every time I walked by people were spilling out of the edges, craning to listen to beat box poets, sound and word artists and the politically angry. Luke Wright’s poem/play , What I Learned From Johnny Bevan, was outstanding, heartfelt, personal and yet political with a capital P. Like all good art it wasn’t perfect, it was bit rough around the edges, but it said more about the current state British politics than a thousand episodes of Question Time.  There were lots of big names this year, Michael Rosen, John Cooper Clarke, Simon Armitage but the crowds came for the lesser-known too, and I managed to catch, and laugh along with, Emma Jones and Rachel Pantechnichon but missed out on Rob Auton on Sunday because I had to go home. Rob Auton is my poetry hero, I saw him at Latitude  a few years ago and used his book with the reading group at BHT, you should buy his book.

I was a bit disappointed in the Literary Arena, maybe most of the good stuff was on Thursday and Sunday when I wasn’t there. There was a lot of debate and hardly any short story, which is odd for an arts festival as short stories are perfect for dropping in on and listening for ten minutes. My writing career highlight was having a short story read here by Word Theatre a couple of years ago. More short story Latitude. Interestingly the best advice on creativity was given in the Film Tent by Mike Figgis. After entertaining us with tales of working with Nic Cage, someone asked him if we were in the golden age of television. No, came the emphatic answer. The writing is good, The Sopranos was great, so was The Wire, but some shows start off with a great first season from one author and by the end are produced by a roundtable of writers all trying to get as much in as possible. You have to stick to the rules of your original story. He cited Breaking Bad, watchable as it was, by the end the interesting original character was transformed into a superman who had been in remission an unbelievable number of times and could create a car with a selective machine gun that only shot baddies and not him or Jesse. I have to say he makes a very good point.

Saturday was crazy busy and broiling. Little pink lambs gambolled by a reed bank and the sound of music reverberated from all sides. We meandered around a lot not really watching anything for long, drank ice cold fresh lemonade, bumped into friends from Brighton and got chased by a grass man in the Faraway Forest.  Night fell and Portishead transported us back to the 90s on the Obelisk stage and sounded more current than most of what I’d heard that afternoon. Then over to 6 Music for The Vaccines. Most of what was on the 6 Music stage should have been on the Obelisk Stage, you could hardly get near for any of the bands, many were just too big for the tent. The same with the not very secret midnight Thom Yorke gig in the woods; thousands were queuing for that by 9.30.  

I didn’t bother; instead I went to my second highlight of this year, Action To The Word’s modern musical Dracula in The Theatre Arena. Packed to the door and glorious gory fun across the midnight hour, this was a cleverly choreographed production with its tongue firmly in its cheek (when it wasn’t hanging out of Dracula’s mouth). They combined Grand Guignol plasma and corsetry with modern rock, giving us appropriately placed versions of Foo Fighters, The Doors, Mumford and Sons and yes, Radiohead – I didn’t have to go into the woods after all.

I’m off for the summer now – see you in Sept for some exciting Brighton Prize news.

 

 

2014 – A Year of Literary Rejection

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Apple, BBCNSSA, Bono, Hilary Mantel, journals, Parklife, poetry, rejection, Riptide, Russell Brand, The assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Thresholds, U2

Last New Year I posted a piece about my plans to submit writing to every possible publishing opportunity. I said I was going to organise my submission records, keep track of everything and just go for it. Of course the re-organisation and record keeping lasted about a month, it remains as haphazard as ever. I’m sure I must submit things twice over or not at all; in fact just this morning I got a message saying I’d already submitted the same story twice to a magazine. This year I really do resolve to sort this out. I’ve set up a spreadsheet and everything, and those of you who know me will realise the effort this will have taken!

However, my experiment, inspired by a New Year’s Eve winning at roulette, didn’t really pay off. I did spend the first half of the year flinging work out to anyone foolish enough to call for submissions but success was limited. The spread betting didn’t pay off quite as I’d hoped. Acceptances, when they did come, were very welcome. Metaphor Magazine saw fit to publish my poetry, the first time anyone had seen anything worthwhile in the tens of poems I had sent out into the world. I had flash fictions accepted by Paragraph Planet and Visual Verse and Threshold’s Short Story Forum published my essay on Sarah Hall’s BBCNSSA winner Mrs Fox. A very old short story, submitted on deadline day to Riptide’s The Suburbs issue, also made the cut. These last two provided a very satisfying experience as both journals made editing suggestions that greatly enhanced the pieces submitted. That’s it though; these few are the extent of my success in 2014. I’ve had better years.

The trouble with sending out hundreds of submissions is that you open yourself up to rejection. Rejection emails clogged my inbox from February onwards. The first few months were tough but by May it wasn’t so bad. Opening a rejection hurt for about a minute and then it was filed under experience. A couple of rejections were particularly cruel. One journal said my story (in my opinion the best thing I had written at that point) wasn’t quite good enough for their journal but perhaps I would like to try such and such magazine (which presumably has lower standards). What does this even mean? Not quite good enough for them is a bit of a wishy-washy statement. If you are going to say this much at least qualify it. Luckily I have complete conviction in this particular story. I have read it at a couple of spoken word events and people I trust completely to tell it how it is have told me it is my best work. My writing doesn’t work for the editor of this particular journal, it doesn’t mean it’s not quite good enough, it means they have no taste! While we’re on this, well established English literary journals do seem prone to this sort of discouraging dismissal, whereas their American equivalents (even the massively influential ones) are the polar opposite. Editorial rejections from US journals are generally so encouraging they spur you on to work on your writing so you might be of a standard they feel they can publish. No American journals appear on my NEVER AGAIN list but several British journals are and they are frankly so fucking rude and dismissive in their rejections that I wouldn’t sully my email again by association. One US journal rejected a story after months of deliberation because, though they loved the writing, my homeless character had nothing to lose. They missed the point of my story but I wasn’t discouraged, they didn’t tell me I wasn’t good enough only that the story wasn’t for them, they encouraged me to re-submit. I probably won’t because if they think that a starving homeless man has nothing to lose we’re clearly not on the same wavelength and it would be a waste of everyone’s time. Submitting to the old established British literary journals can sometimes feel like taking on the establishment and being laughed off the floor because you didn’t go to Eton. But there are plenty of new kids on the block, looking to take advantage of new formats and new ways of publishing and these innovators are mightily more grateful that you consider them worthy of your work, even if they can’t publish it at this time.

My year was filled with rejection but by September it didn’t really get to me anymore. I thought about it a lot. I started to look at the way rejection makes you feel. I read articles about it. We discussed it in a class I taught. I looked at websites that listed famous literary rejections and the persistence of the eventually successful recipients. One writer suggested that rejection made you feel like a child again, that the rejected experiences the same feelings as the kid who has spent hours on a painting, maths paper or poem and feels extremely proud of their work only to get a C from the teacher or a ‘that’s nice’ from a disinterested parent. Rejection seems particularly hard in a society that thinks it is advantageous to praise absolutely everything. As a child of the seventies my parents didn’t universally praise everything I did but when they did I knew it was good. Somewhere along the way the child has become the focus of everything, every word they utter, every drawing they scrawl is better than anything ever done before. For a few decades now children have been made to feel invincible by their parents, they are singled out as special. The shock hits them in the face when they first become aware that they are just like everyone else. It’s not just the young though, there are also a sections of the older generation who believe that can do nothing wrong. I recently talked to my father-in law about this, he told me a woman had submitted a non-fiction book to a society he is on the board of, and several members read the book and offered to print it with substantial editorial changes. The woman self-published, taking no heed of their suggestions.

Working with Rattle Tales I have come across people who react extremely badly to rejection, even when it is qualified. We have had people ask for feedback who then continue the conversation by arguing with the feedback. Having seen the world from both sides now, this strikes me as a particularly churlish and pointless reaction. If someone is willing to give you detailed feedback, consider what they are saying. Do they have a point? If they do, edit accordingly, if they don’t, or if you think it’s subjective, let it go. Of course it is very hard to learn this. Even very successful individuals find this beyond their capabilities. I recently watched Bono on Graham Norton completely eaten up by the fact that some Apple customers objected to being given a free album, he wasn’t interested in the millions that wanted the music only in the ones that didn’t. Why should he care; a multi-millionaire, best-selling, prize-winning musician? Surely it shouldn’t bother him but you could tell that it did – a lot. Look at Russell Brand’s reaction to the Parklife giff, a churlish answer that suggested everyone was laughing at him because of his estuary accent rather than the fact that a lot of what he says is as nonsensical as the original Phil Daniels commentary. I like Brand, I think what he does is valuable, but I’ve read as much of that book as I could and his verbosity is monstrous and definitely worthy of a piss take. Again, why should he care enough to even answer? Some people just can’t take it.

#vote Bob & Roberta Smith

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was impressed by Hilary Mantel’s reaction to being dropped by The Daily Telegraph. Her story about the fictional assassination of Margaret Thatcher was never going to fly there really was it? She didn’t attack the fusty old newspaper for its commitment to the sacred memory of the deceased prime minister; instead she placed it with a newspaper whose reader would appreciate it. She transcended the hysterical furore that blew up around it on social media by simply stating that it was fiction and that freedom of expression was something to be cherished. It became less an issue of mud-slinging and more an issue about art in general and she probably sold a few more copies of her collection than she would have done if the Telegraph had published in the first place. This is how to deal with rejection.

On the last weekend of September, I suffered a catastrophic fall and broke my femur in 4 places. I had 5 hours of surgery and 6 weeks of bed rest, addled on opiates and unable to write a thing. My usual trick of soothing the sting of rejection by sending out a submission wasn’t open to me. All the submissions I had made in the previous months came back to me in my convalescence with a big fat NO. One even landed in my in-box on my birthday. In truth I didn’t give a hoot. If the way we react to rejection makes us feel like we did as children, my injuries had already taken me back to helpless infancy. I needed help with everything. If you have real problems, problems that require all of your energies (in this case extreme pain and learning to walk again) the opinion of some far flung editor really isn’t that big a deal. 

My experiment is over. This year I’m not sending stuff out everywhere. I need to get physically well. I have 3 months of intensive therapy ahead. When I’m not doing this I may have time to polish up my finished short story collection and try and get it published. I’m going to focus on these two goals and each rejection will be shrugged off for what it is – one person’s opinion.

 

My Ode To Autumn

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Alice Cunninghame, Autumn, Ben Wishaw, Brighton, Brighton Digital Festival, Bristol Prize Anthology, Charleston, Halloween, John Keats, Lastest Music Bar, Lonny Pop, novel, Ode to Autmn, poetry, Rattle Tales, short stories, Slam, Small WOnder, summer, The Bristol Short Story Prize, What Me & Pa Saw In The Meadow, writer's block, writers, writing

Autumn has arrived. Last week was all sweltering heat and last minute camping trips then the storms came and swept summer away in a flash. The sun is still shining but there’s a morning chill on the school run and I have plans to make blackberry jam! I love autumn; it’s my favourite time of year. My friend Sara Crowley (sara crowley.com) posted on Facebook that the first week in September is the start of a new year; it has a new pencil case smell. I have to agree and it also means it’s nearly Halloween, which is my favourite day of the year, but I’m getting ahead of myself. 

What did my summer bring? One thing I can tell you is that I only wrote 300 words in the whole season.  All intentions of finishing my short story collection vanished in a haze of French sunshine and days on Brighton beach, followed by frantic preparations for my oldest starting secondary school. From Latitude Festival (which for me marks the start of summer) to September 4^th I wrote practically nothing. But, aren’t writers supposed to write every day? Isn’t it a compulsion that can’t be denied? Obviously not for me. I have to admit I was quite surprised. I have written something (anything!) almost every day for a number of years. However, I didn’t start writing seriously until I was thirty-nine so I suppose I haven’t followed convention to begin with. To all those people who think you have to start when you are a tortured teen and build from there I say – Pah! (sticks tongue out and blows seasonal raspberry). It’s never too late to start; if you feel compelled just have a go. Granted, there is a lot of bad middle-aged writing out there but there’s a lot of terrible writing by people under thirty too. Good is good. And bad is bad. If you want to start writing in the autumn of your life there’s nothing to stop you, you could have fifty years of work ahead of you (think Diana Athill, Frank McCourt, Richard Adams hell, Bram Stoker was fifty when he wrote Dracula). Plus you have all those years of wisdom behind you to try and sense of it all. Autumn see, it’s a wonderful time.

Anyway, after eight weeks away from writing I have been unstoppable. Inspired by my son starting big school I started on a short story based on dramatic events at my secondary school in the 1980s. I have written 10,000 words in five days. This short story is no such thing, it is a novel, the novel I have been looking for since Starlings flew from my imagination in a little under nine months. I have characters and plots and a beginning, middle and end and no dirty great road block saying stop.

There’s so much happening elsewhere this autumn too. Brighton Digital Festival is underway. The spoken word group I’m involved with, Rattle Tales, joined in by putting on a show of global consequences. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend but it sounded amazing. Members of Rattle Tales, the audience at The Latest Music Bar and writers on Skype created a story live from a skeleton of pre-prepared words, themes and actions. There was a lot of shouting and then there was a story! The results will be posted on the Rattle Tales website later this week. Well done to Alice Cunninghame who organised and led the event.   

On September 27^th, Rattle Tales is helping out with the Short Story Slam at the Small Wonder Festival in Charleston. One of our founders, Lonny Pop, is hosting and members of the group with be setting the tone by reading three-minute shorts on the theme The Shovel. Believe me you want to go to this one if you can. Lonny is a brilliant host; her motto is ‘never yawn!’ There will be no chance of that , when Rattle Tales have finished it’s over to the audience; names pulled from a hat and then three minutes to delight the judges and the chance to win £100. Click here for tickets. There will be another Rattle Tales show next month, keep checking the website for details www.rattletales.org.

The thing I’m looking forward to most in the next few weeks is The Bristol Short Story Prize on Oct 19^th. I am utterly thrilled to have made the short-list this year. All year, what I have considered to be my best work, has been rejected by EVERYONE, not even a sniff, no long-lists, no publications, barely even a reply until the Bristol long-list was published in July and my story What Me & Pa Saw In The Meadow was on it! Then came the email telling me I was short-listed and would be included in the anthology. I have several Bristol Prize anthologies and I think the standard and originality of the stories is incredible so I am awed to be included. I am really glad that someone enjoyed reading my story as much as I enjoyed writing it. You will be able to buy a copy on their website.

I leave you with a link to Ode to Autumn by Keats because it’s lovely. I was trying to find a version brilliantly read by a woman (because I’m sure there are some out there and you rarely get to hear one) but I want to get back to my writing and, in my humble opinion, Ben Wishaw reads it as well as it can be read.

Unblocking With Poetry

Tags

Aadvarks, Arthur C Clarke, astronauts, fathers, fiction, novelists, novels, Paragraph Planet, poetry, Rattle Tales, science, short stories, starlings, Ted Hughes, writer's block

Here I am two weeks into 2013 and despite my best intentions I am not sticking to my creative resolutions. Like every other writer I set myself the unyielding target of 2,000 words per day, every day. But, like many others I’m sure, I only managed to stick to this target for a matter of days. It’s not that I’m not writing but the first resolution, written in capitals at the top of my list is WRITE SECOND NOVEL IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE YEAR! For the last ten days I have diligently sat down at my desk and tapped away at my brilliant new idea, heartened that it was following a very different trajectory to the one I had envisioned (I always think this is a good thing, that it means it has its own life and that I’m just the means of expression). I appeared to be writing a science fiction novel with a creationist theme, in which the only beings left on earth are six female astronauts, a couple of angels and a whole lot of demons – it’s deep, either that or it’s just plain silly. Around seven days in, a bit like God I imagine, the doubt started to creep in. What am I doing? Do I think I’m Arthur C. Clarke or something? Because of this whispering devil I found myself coming to a standstill, wasting my time researching Hilary Clinton and the Chinese space program on the internet I realised that despite my best intentions I was blocked, the words just weren’t coming.

I’m no stranger to writer’s block. Starlings came to me in a rush, from first sentence to final draft in less than nine months. I was a thing possessed. I just HAD to write it. I have tried to write a second novel three times in the last two years and each time I have failed to get passed 20,000 words. Granted in that time I have completed an MA, helped established Rattle Tales on the spoken word circuit, almost accidentally accumulated a themed short story collection and set up this blog, so it’s not as if I’ve done nothing, but I am getting slightly nervous about my inability to press on with a new novel. I don’t want another false start but the fact is that 2,000 words a day isn’t happening. Who am I kidding? 500 words a day isn’t happening.

Last Christmas my husband Rob gave me a Writer’s Block – a small brick of a book with an idea for beating the block on every page. Should you find yourself creatively stalled you open It at random and follow the instruction, a bit like the creative equivalent of throwing a dice. On Friday, frustrated by several hours at the keyboard with nothing to show, I decided to give it a go, flipped it open and read,

Write A Poem.

This was unexpected, but in fact last year, after a hiatus of around thirty years, I have begun to write poetry on a regular basis. It all started because I wrote a couple of 75 word paragraphs for the website Paragraph Planet.  I thoroughly recommend you try this, especially at the start of your writing day; creating a fully-formed mini story certainly helps you focus, my post productive days usually start this way. Because each word is so important I tried to be as poetic as possible in my descriptions in order to make a lasting impression. A startling image sticks in the mind and makes the best use of your 75 words. (You can see my contributions to Paragraph Planet in their archive – there’s also an author interview). I took the first two paragraphs I’d contributed and began to experiment with form to create something more akin to poetry than prose. My friend Lonny, who writes poetry as well as prose, always tells me not to be afraid of poetry, to just give it a go, but most people are terrified of it, even reading it seems scary. I really got into reading poetry when I did my MA. I remember loving it in 6th Form – doesn’t everyone? – Ted Hughes was on the syllabus so that helped, knowing that poems could be written by someone from Yorkshire and still be considered good! After playing around with my paragraphs a bit I came to the conclusion that what I had written were actually a couple of poems, not very accomplished poems, but poems nonetheless. It was fun, deciding where to break lines, which words to rhyme, repeat, what rhythms to use. I’m not saying I’m any good at it but it’s extremely creative and it makes you think in ways you wouldn’t normally, especially about the flow of language.

So, using a poem to help writer’s block appealed to me. This is what I wrote. It’s a first draft – I don’t like the end and it doesn’t flow yet – and if you want to comment on it please feel free. I might go back to it next time I’m blocked so constructive criticism welcome.  Now, back to those astronauts…

A Jacket for My Father

There, at the end of the rail,

brown suede with zippered pockets

like snoring eyes

and a soft mocha collar.

I reach out and touch

bringing sleeve to cheek,

and with it, memory

bittersweet.

So much history was lost

with your bones;

a pit escaped on horseback –

galloping to another hue.

Khaki stripes that saw

the founding of the Jewish State,

and dodged from shells in the East.

You danced to Elvis as a wall erected

piece by piece.

Finding symmetry in a divided place,

Your daughters grew and loved,

stood to attention

as red blossoms fell

like confetti from above.

Grandsons born and never cradled –

the stallion now asleep in his earthen stable.

Do you need help?

She asks, with wry eye and kindly smiles.

Lost in the nap against my cheek,

inside, I yelp and cry

focus its label with my moistened eye.

A jacket for my father,

comes my reply.

This one’s too small 

I say

too small by miles.