Unexciting email; Final Fiction session with the Writer with the Writerly Name. Wednesday 1 April 2009.

I’m obscenely happy that I (kind-of) own a posh phone but these are a few of emithers I didn't particularly want to be alerted had arrived:

• Asos style update.
• Bounty Produce: We supply fresh vegetables /seafood in and around Metro Manila.
• Facebook Shelley Buske Partridge sent you a message on Facebook...
  Subject: Queenswood Heights?
  "I am looking for Kim McGowan who lived in Queenswood Heights, Orleans back in the 70's" (no - but that just makes me feel dull and provincial because living in Queenswood Heights, Orleans sounds way more interesting than Glasson Dock - which is where I was).
• figleaves.com.
• John Lewis Hottest News (somehow I doubt it).
• ബൌന്ടി പ്രോടുസ്: വെ സപ്ലൈ ഫ്രെഷ് വെങേടബ്ലെസ് /സീഫൂദ് ഇന്‍ ആന്‍ഡ് അരൌന്ദ് മെട്രോ മനില.
• Johnnie Boden: a great offer! (see JL above).
• Ticketline Ticket Talk Camp Bestival 2009.
• Waterstone’s Team Stop press! New J K Rowling available to pre-order.
• Marks & Spencer Summer favourites (unlikely).

I just want to hear from real people.

Came out of the Writer with the Writerly Name's final fiction session a different person. Now, not only do I know that the way you unmake a shitty first draft is to redraft it until it sounds agreeable, I also know how to start the process. Credit goes to Kaplan’s Laundry List of Stylistic Glitches, I think from chapter 9 in a book called Rewriting: A Creative Approach to Writing Fiction by DM Kaplan.

I’ve got to ditch a lot of stuff but mostly I have to rid myself of unnecessary adjectives, adverbs and stop overusing the conditional or past perfect tense. That is would and had as in ‘he would make himself a novelty Easter hat and he would leave glue and feathers all over the kitchen’, or ‘he had made himself a novelty Easter hat and he had left the glue and feathers everywhere’. Better to write he made an Easter hat and left glue and feathers everywhere. Betterer still, I suppose, hide the glue and feathers and Bob’s your uncle.

And I’ve got to watch how I use a big list of Weasel words, for example - about, actually, eventually, really, somehow, truly – and a lot more. I use them all excessively with the praiseworthy exception of ‘basically’ which I've avoided for a long time because it grates.

A person from work emailed to say she enjoyed a review I'd had published (should that be I published? Nah! sounds far too pompous and as if I did it myself). A review I wrote that was used in a library periodical. She described my writing style as lively. I know it was meant kindly but that jaunty lively disturbs me. Is it euphemistic? Like ‘salt of the earth’ (common) and ‘friendly and outgoing’ (fast). Doesn’t lively imply shitty self conscious verbose first draft-type writing?

My blog got a nice heads-up at Preston Writing Network . Thank you PWN!

The sculpture is part of a war memorial in a St Annes park. It makes me infinitely sad because the big lady is too bereft to cuddle her baby.

Good mark, book launch, shame and 'Tis. Wednesday 25 March 2009.

I am pitifully driven by marks and this week I clawed up to my first proper result for a pre-portfolio (non-assessed piece). Yay! As I’ve learnt to say. The module is stylistics so it’s a commentary rather than the story that’s being measured – I’m far too shallow to mind what I got a good mark for.

In the commentary I’d fretted over structure at the level of whether to use ‘an’ or ‘his’ in the text - and then finished off by saying that, despite several iterations, the story still felt like a shitty first draft to me. One friend said he’d felt a bit mad with me when he read the commentary; wondered if I pretended to be tough on myself. I know just what he means and I do agonise over whether I’m being disingenuous in what I say or write, as in: “oh this is so awful”, so everyone will assure me: “no it’s not – you’re great you”. And of course there’s a big-bit of that because doing an MA in creative writing and giving people your stuff to read is hubris. I told one of my daughters how he’d felt and she said she thought that about me too; so that’s three of us. I'm really glad he dared to suggest it because it feels less like a shifty secret now.

Attended Jenn’s Manchester book launch; Blackwell’s were selling A Kind of Intimacy and Jenn signed copies and read an extract. I was so giddy and thrilled that I left my spectacles in the car. It seems my camera was on the take-a-baby-picture-without-startling-it setting. Consequently the photos of her reading are all enigmatic silhouettes; well, at least she wasn’t startled. Emily the good-blogger (author of My Shitty Twenties) set my camera back to Auto so I’ve got that one good photo of her left signing a book.

Stevie Davies reviewed A Kind of Intimacy in Saturday’s Guardian.

Also Saw Ray Robinson, author of the excellent novel Electricity, at the launch. But of course, because he didn't have his name rubber-stamped on his head I didn't know it was him until afterwards. Here's his back.

My blog was intended to track my MA progress but I feel it’s become a bit lightweight lately; partly I’m losing steam, partly because stylistics is hard. Stylistics suites me because my thinking is pretty jelloid and I appreciate being taught order; but it can be a bit dull to write about - so I’ve cravenly resorted to fancy dress outfits and Morris dancers and the like. When I first wrote about the Morris dancers I joked about fertility rituals; adding that the display was a grand example of the triumph of hope over experience. Then I took that out. For several reasons; many of the women were actually young and clearly fecund and (as I know) being over fifty isn’t something you have any choice about. It was great fun to watch the dancing and the dancers were happy and uninhibited and doing something crazyplucky and I was just cynically taking photos and writing about them so I could make a joke. And I’ve don't believe in the supernatural but I’m so quick to mock people that I’m starting to worry a bit about my karma. So, if you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody come and sit by me – well, not any more.

Transpires we have to submit 3 genres with our stylistics commentary; fiction, poetry and a dramatic piece. Thought I’d drawn a line under poetry. I’m trying to relate everything to the short story I’m writing for fiction so my poem’s based on a studio photo of my grandma and grandad and some other relatives taken around the time of the First World War. They’re very young and not yet married, my grandma has exactly the same eyes as my daughter. Nobody in the photo is beaming; in fact all the others in the assembly look positively glum. My grandparents are on the left end of the group; she seated, him standing behind her with his hand resting on her shoulder. They both have little faint half-smiles - as if they know a secret. I’ve been asking my dad Jim about them. My grandad was a slater’s mate and hefted a handcart with iron-rimmed wheels around cobbled streets in Liverpool. My grandma soldered cans in the Fray Bentos factory; the factory girls worked with rags wrapped around their fingers because of all the cuts and burns they sustained. The couple went on to have six children; first out best dressed. Jim was their youngest son and he never remembers not feeling hungry when he was growing up. My grandma was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis when she was still young. The skinny young Jimmy had to heft his mother’s wheelchair across those same Liverpool cobbles that his dad manhandled the cart over; he still feels ashamed of how mortified he felt doing that. She was in pain a long time; I remember her sitting in a wheelchair crying with agony when I was a small child. The girl in the photograph with my daughter’s eyes has no idea of what she had coming. As my grandma was dying my dad was at one side of her bed and her neighbour, Mrs Cowan, at the other. Mrs Cowan said: “she’s gone Jimmy” and he was glad, because she’d had such a hard life. So that’s going to be my poem; sounds queasily 'Tis-ish when outlined here.

All my stories are about Jim in one way or another. I want him to tell me stories about heavy handcarts. A handcart with iron-rimmed wheels for goodness sake, not and olde worlde cart festooned with ribbons or piled with chutney, but a beast of a heavy duty handcart that weighed a ton to push up and down steep roads in the Vale. I want him to tell me about Warehouse men with pockets full of Brazil nuts from the docks and poor-sod shoeless children who were sent home from school because they weren’t allowed in school without something on their feet and about the time he was mocked because he pronounced each ‘eee atch’. But I drift off when he starts telling me that he thinks someone is siphoning off his heating oil or his take on immigration or that he doesn’t understand the letter from United Utilities. And I feel ashamed now.

Revision and Lytham (and Doktor Hotfingers). Wednesday 18 March 2009.

Mother’s day poem from Ellie:

My mum is so great
I could eat her on a plate
Please don’t be late
Or I might be deflate
You make me laugh
when you’re in the bath
So glad you didn’t call me Kath
There are lots of things I could say…..
but we would be here all day.

Easy to see where my literary genes came to rest more or less unadulterated.

I'm brassed-off because my first drafts sound childish. My writer friend tells me that they wouldn’t sound any less juvenile if they’d been written by an older me; they sound like infantile shitty first drafts because that's just what they are. And the only way I’ll get them to sound any more mature is to redraft them twenty times, or more. I really think she was trying to cheer me up.

Motored to Lytham St Annes for Saturday afternoon Whelan's fish and chips . Lytham was the hanger-around-staring-at-stuff-person's dream. First there were clog-clad morris ladies.

Then there were exuberant hankie-waving, bumper-boot wearing morris men (that last was a heavily premodified noun phrase).












Then, outside Clifton Walk shopping tunnel, there was Doktor Hotfingers - tricked out in a red-spangled top hat and playing an electronic keyboard. I didn’t get a photograph of him because by the time I’d been into the watchstrap shop, bought and had fitted a new watchstrap, and come back out into the light, he’d packed-up and buggered-off; dammit.

I've faffed and fannied around with these pictures trying to get them in the right place and they just won't conform; they'll have to stay where they are.

Process and Development - and twitting protocol. Wednesday 11 March 2009.

This day we was starting to learn about crafting scenes, dialogue, plotting and back story. All that.

For practice the Writer with the Writerly Name set us an in-class exercise to write about two interesting characters in an interesting place doing something interesting. In addition we had to disclose a third character; divulge a bit of back story; reveal something of the characters of the people in the scene; feature moments with no dialogue; introduce a crisis. I had a vicar and a tart dry stone walling up Beacon Fell, the third character (of course) was a Bishop. However, in an attempt at wit and originality I made the vicar female and the tart male.

I have been researching to amass some back story for the fiction I’m properly trying to write. The story is set in the 1970s but the back story is set in the 1940s and 1950s and involves seedy things. I quickly discovered t’internet isn’t the place to research prostitution in the 1950s. Luckily I’ve found a library with lots of out of date social science books and I’ve hoarded a few bits of ‘credible detail’ which was what I was after. Still sounds pretty shite though; like a pretentious 15 year-old’s essay.

The stuff set more recently is even worse. Great platform-boots of clunky 1970s iconery fish-sliced in: Crimplene, Players Number 6, Brian Cant, Cortina mk 3, BBC 2, Bryan Ferry, Play School, uncut moquette and Hamble. It makes me cringe to read it; it’d be a whole lot more subtle to do an information drop: “It was 1976”.

Watched Red Riding to see how to invoke period in a more restrained manner but got caught up in the story, again, and forgot to notice. Think they did it with flares and spectacles.

Ali asked me what I’d like for mother’s day so I sent her the link to three bits of loot I’m after: Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel, Why Evolution is True Jerry A. Coyne and Darwin's Lost World: The Hidden History of Life on Earth by Martin Brasier. Obviously, there’s a bit of a theme going but she said she couldn’t possibly order any of those; Amazon’d keep contacting her with all sorts of ludicrous titles that people like her buy; it would, she continued, “be the sci-fi thing all over again”. Miniature hydrangea in a decorative pot it is then.

What's the protocol when a (very agreeable seeming) stranger twits you? Anthony twitted to me: "yay Preston :D" (we were both twitting from Preston). Do I: ignore it (rude); twit back "Preston yay :)" (bit trying too hard to be hepcat); follow him (creepy, he's literally less than a quarter of my age); twit back "hello Anthony, do you enjoy living in Cottam? (stupid). So, I followed him; then instantly unfollowed him in case he told his mum. Although maybe grannys are fine to makeup numbers - I don't know. Then I replied but tried to to achieve that that exact right mix of self aware and witty. I spare the details.

Happy Birthday Frankie