Non progress.

I am officially brain dead. Reader response theory. Shiver! I am trying to keep myself down to the bare bones of what writing for children could philosophically allow. Trying to argue about why one person can (and another cannot) write for children is a contentious statement.
In the west we all got a right to a voice - is just if anyone will listen. No?

Brain: 'I ache!'

I have no time to blog.Slowly becoming assimilated into the twitterborg. I need my lit buddies. I need the endless rows of books at hand and the coffee shop. Feeling very out of it and the bug doesn't help. Being out of my university routine makes me feel like a space cadet.

Sandra: 'I'm sorry - which planet is this again?'

Short story break-out

Seems that I am not destined to write short stories. Guess that's why I'm studying 'Writing the Novel' as part of my course.

All I've done with 'Mulled Chrsitmas' is springboard into yet another long plot! My daughter read this last night and wants more, so Im knocked out.

Have already started working the back story into some kind of order. There are several scenes, and feelings that circulate that I need to put down sometime soon. There's also a binary time strand combination beginning to form, so that's not hugely helpful when I have a novel to kind of finish for workshopping in January.

I'm definately on the road to Insanity (that place just West of Momentarily Confused). I even thought I had blogged this already and then logged on to find, nope - not here! In writing the plots for fiction I seem to be losing grasp of my own.

By the time I've graduated I will have enough ideas to keep me going for a good few years.

The magazine is finally launched. Hooray. And yes, Draven Ames, we are happy to accept an overseas submission for consideration. I'm still trying to get the notion to my team that being online in some capacity could be helpful - even if it's just podcasts audio versions for people with sight impairments. Fingers crossed. We even have someone wanting to represent us which is kind of cool. Someone just starting out, so it's something we'll have to debate as a magazine.

feedback for the short story

I'm in happy phase, after a very stressful day with logistic hell of magazine editorials.
Had great feedback from uni friends about this first fiction piece... just some very useful suggestions about tightening up the relevance of the closing para.

I'm so glad that my narrator is not loveable and that is accepted by the feedback given, so it's all looking positive.

I shall re-examine the ending and beginning to find the coherence needed to make both sections work together.

Okay I'm going to try something new: the editing process of first to final draft - short story form is definately much easier in a blog.

This is the first draft of a short story designed to fit into an anthology of stories for older children/YA. The existing collection is based loosely around Christmas, but loving how they barely leave a warm, fuzzy Christmas feeling, I thought I would also use this opportunity to have a go at a different kind of narrative to my normal style. Any feedback/ criticism/ amendment suggestions welcome...

I sometimes used to wonder about the nature of wild things, you know? When I was small, maybe five or six, I imagined that just like a puppy, everything could be tamed. I really believed that there was a good side to everything. Like the Christian and the Lion, in the bible story – I heard about that in RE this one time. How wrong can you be? It would be laughable if it wasn't so bloody heartbreaking.
If you're wondering what brought me to this particular topic of conversation you only have to go as far as the local graveyard and ask my brother. Ask him why he did those things to that cat and what good it brought him. My brother, the bad egg, born like Jesus on Christmas morning – except for we all know that Jesus was born some time in October. He'll be a kid forever, my brother. Born on Christmas morning, died the same day ten years later.
The graveyard is quite a familiar place for us these past five years. Every Christmas the day starts with breakfast, church, the graveyard – before anything else, always the graveyard. It's a bit snowy there today, so I don't imagine we'll stay as long.
It's not like when someone is old and it's their time, and their family's kind of faded away into old age themselves, so that the grave gets taken on by some local retired dude who pulls at the brambles and trims the weeds. Nicky's grave is very tidy, and there's a pot plant of poinsettia waiting on the hall table, for me to lug all the way to church and that.
I suppose I should probably hunt out some gloves or I'll get cold hands. Church always makes me cold. This year is definitely the last time they can make me go. I get the shivers. The eyes of the saints in the stained glass windows piercing me. They can see it. I know they can. I shouldn't be there – but then why am I telling you? You just want to know what I'm getting for Christmas. Lol. I keep getting told off for using that word, but who cares, so I'll use it. Laugh my ass off! LMAO.
Laugh. My. Ass. Off! An exclamation marks always adds dramatic tension, but my English teacher argues this point.
Oh and BTW, WTF but have you seen how early the Christmas ad's are coming on the TV? They almost beat Halloween. I mean, for god's sake. I get less peace every year. Less time not thinking about it. About it. About the bad egg. Rotten eggs have the worst smell ever. Last Christmas I cracked one open and it had 2 rotting chicks inside – there wasn't enough room for both of them, so they both died. Can't tell you how cheery and upbeat that made me feel. Still that was last Christmas and I should probably move on.
So anyway, good morning and Happy Christmas and all that stuff. Just got back from the grave and as you can imagine I had a whale of a time..
The grave was frosted up, there was a bit of bird crap pretty much glued on to the angel's nose which made her look like she had purple snot, but I tried to pick at it as best I could. 'Stop it,' Mum moaned. So I just shrugged and carried on staring at it the whole time we're stood there, getting cold feet from the snow-covered grave, like death creeping up and grabbing my toes. Here's a question: How far away from a grave can you stand while still looking like you are visiting one and not another? An accident, it says on his grave, but was it? Really? If he hadn't been jabbing at that cat with a stick it wouldn't have gotten out of control.
I could relay the story to you in third person but it will always be from my point of view. Omniscient. It's a truly ancient, annoyingly persistent word. I've tried breaking it down into text talk but it just won't go. What really gets to me is the present I have to leave for him every year.
'He's your brother,' Mum would wheedle, if I ever made an objection. But the worst part of it is, knowing that whatever I unwrap for him, I'll be unwrapping for myself later. She's under some crazy messed-up illusion that he bloody ascends the grave for her bit of Christmas cake. Seriously I feel like Santa. Maybe the crumbs get stuck in his throat, but he doesn't have to worry because the sherry would wash it all down. It used to be lager, before Dad couldn't take Nicky's absence.
Before he missed him too much.
I suppose you probably want to know a bit more about all of this. It's pretty much straight forward. You've probably guessed already. I feel responsible for my brother, sometimes because I have to and sometimes because I just damn well do. It's his face I see in the mirror every morning. It's his grave I look at every time I have to go to the churchyard. How is it, he could do stuff without me, but I am not allowed to do stuff without him?
Did you know that in some cultures twins are an evil portend? Such a good phrase that. Maybe we should've been exposed like the two chicks in the frying pan. But one of them would still be alive. Burning. That's totally gross I know, but here I am burning for what we were.
I still see that cat sometimes. It's a lot older now and it's ear and paw are mended. I took responsibility for both of us that day. It seems when he got all the strength I just got all the inability to listen to animals yowl. I still can't get to sleep when Mum's new little Nicholas squeals in his cot. He cries more than she'd like, but with Dad following after Nicky there is only me to share the job and I just put my earphones in and turn up the volume.
Just like Nicky used to do to me. Get louder, so he didn't have to listen. Make more noise to shut out the noise. So, I took a page out of his half of the book that day? So, I turned his own stuff against him? It was just so he'd learn. The lesson was ironically all mine. It's totally ironic that pushing him out into the road left me with it all. Irony, has it something to do with iron – blood?
I really didn't see the car coming, even if I heard it skid across the ice. I pushed him out there and the cat clawed me!
I still have three sickle shaped scars where the cat's claws were left in my palm. It's almost six, six, six. Like a dark mark. I am the anti-not-hero. I am half of the bad egg. Does that make me only half as bad or equally so?

So I'm hoping now you kind of get why church is real kick and why at Christmas rotten turkey smells like soiled nappies, and my wondering about the nature of wild things to always be wild. I look at little Nicholas sometimes and get nervous about that. But then maybe in him is both halves of the egg.

multiple projects

My baby has just split into parts. An exercise in synopsis writing has just confirmed that a project I thought had been merely for play and an assignment has kind of created itself almost completely unnoticed by me.

I now have one experimental thriller and two ladlit projects on the go: The Beach meets Trainspotting, and a Book of Job rewrite based in the music industry. My head's all over the place. It is becoming all too clear, to quote another writer, that writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia...

Question: do i split my time evenly, or be indulgent and spoil whichever one happens to share company with me?

Plans for a short story on defamiliarisation are also starting to take shape. A dark foreboding and the eerie suggestion of something wicked sits just around the corner, crouching in the shadows and waiting for the right moment to show its face.
This isn't one I want to push - the gruesome always reveals itself in due course.

Authorial Gestation

Progress with my storyline has come rushing through the open sash window of my protagonist's bedroom and sent her old essays flying like a cloud of words. Her ailing bird in its delicate cage has had its decrepit feathers ruffled by the speed of the inspiration rattling its bars.

Characterisation was giving me some headaches, mostly on the problematic nature of my head being full of a million and one other things. How to love a murderer? I want her fall from grace to be shocking, but believable. Viewpoint, and how to approach her depiction has consumed me since the last blog.

I just didn't want to kick of by misreading her too soon. Reading up on serial killers was getting me down, and then I read The Collector, by J Fowles, remembered In God's Own Country by Ross Raisin, and that's really helped a lot, to see how it can work without being sensational and in this way, more dark for its innocence.

And here I am staring across a sea of possibilities, finally understanding that sometimes, you have to let the crap out in order to get at the nuts and bolts - the carcass of the thing. People tell you this all the time and then, wham! it hits you like a bloody great brick in the face. You know it, because you can physically feel it.

I have let some mini-metaphors in too because I needed some kind of allowance to play. Lots of little ones embroidered together are fast becoming the dream catcher in which the bigger narrative is growing.

After a week in which my laptop was invaded by spyware, then rescued by wonderful tech assistants at Southampton Solent University, the idea that I had almost lost EVERYTHING I have been working on for six months was, in one moment, terrifying.

Nothing like a shake up, and a reminder that other people have bigger problems than a laptop going on the blink, to put things in perspective.

Dog Days and clouds

Does anyone love Florence and the Machine as much as I do right now. Optimism floats around you in a lovely, spatial upbeat kind of way. Just perfect for my protagonist in her aspirational phase. This will be the soundtrack I use for lifting her soul out of darkness.

An inspirational conversation with a loved one pulled me out of a mire of depression involving several critiques, two synopsis' and a packet of Cadbury's crunchie biscuits. Draw it all, apply all experience - good and bad. Something has to come out of the crap. When the mental, interior CD is spinning on overtime and won't stop to play the content it's time to press eject and put a fresh one in.