Bleeping and Clicking, Not Being Able to Write and a Nice Prize

I've had a break from writing because I've been off colour.  I want to write stuff. I spent whole bleeping, clicking nights in hospital (bleeping and clicking are not coy swear-word replacements; hospital nights do come furnished with a bleeping and clicking sound track).

I spent whole bleeping, clicking nights in hospital mentally composing a piece on how I feel about an arrangement that often seems to strive, 'officiously to keep alive'*.


Time and again I have witnessed ordinarily aging people who have had their chassis-life extended with replacement body parts and chemical tinkering.  They live on, but often they live on to become broken, muddled old shells of human beings who survive into a shitty and undignified great age.

The piece I was mentally composing had a testing extra facet because I have recently and unwittingly become part of that arrangement.  Last Autumn I developed a ridiculous, sore limp and it turned out that, if I wanted to walk painlessly and (sort of) normally again, a surgeon would need to strive and replace my knackered hip with a new version.

Whatever gruesome things happened to me in hospital they were not conducive to getting mentally composed-words down on paper in an engaging order.  The piece I was composing is too difficult for me to write (I keep editing the last three paragraphs but they continue to sound like muddled old crap).


All I want to do at the moment is read.  Mostly, what I do do is stare into space and drop asleep with my glasses skewed across my face and my neck in a cricked position.


I was quite subdued and sad when I was admitted into hospital.  I was plagued with grave doubts about my writing abilites - see previous post.  Actually, see most of my previous posts.  And, although I pretend to be fearless I was witless with terror about what was going to be done to me in the name of officious striving.


During the bleeping, clicking second post-operative day I received an email from the Writer with the Writerly Name telling me that my short story, The Musical Mobile, has won the 2010 Helen Clark Award for prose. 

The news could not have come at a better time and it made me very, very glad. 


The Musical Mobile is an extract from my MA dissertation and is a redrafted version of the piece I read so badly at my first open mic.


That's all.  That's a start.


* from The Last Decalogue by Arthur Hugh Clough

The YMCA Test for Bridesmaids' Gowns and being a Creep

There are going to be some pretty damn special weddings in the near future. My youngest child has been asked to be a bridesmaid, which is grand, and frocks are under discussion. One suggested dress is an asymmetrical style. It has rose petals or foliage all around the top and clambering over a single strap.

My youngest child is hesitant about this style.
‘What’s going to be under those petals climbing over the shoulder?'

'I'm not sure.'

'Will it be a shoe-string strap?'

'It could be.'

'You know what'll happen if it is don't you?'

'Will it dig in?'

'No.'

‘Will it be annoying because it’s not equal and balanced?'
'Not that.'
'Will the other shoulder feel left out?’

'No, not left out.'

'What then?'

'The second I start doing the YMCA it’ll snap. There'll be petals flying everywhere.’

I’m not sure how to put it to her that this celebration might not be a YMCA kind of a do. It might not even be a

(brace yourself) Oops Upside Your Head kind of a wedding-do either.

I'm not going to let on just yet. It's going to be much more fun shopping for bridesmaids’ outfits if we're assuming we have to submit each gown to the YMCA test.

I discovered yesterday that the Author who is Writing about Neanderthals (my favourite hominin) will supervise my MA project. This is a very good thing but I’m also a little bit sad that it isn’t going to be the Writer with the Writerly Name.

At least I can now write sycophantic comments on the Writer with the Writerly Name's blog posts without appearing to be a creep. But then, what is the point of writing creepy comments, if it’s not going to get me better marks? Only kidding. Oh man, I think I’m only kidding, I hope I'm only kidding.

Had two mentions and very fine link-ups in the last week.
Valerie O'Roirdan at not exactly true is about to start an MA in creative writing at the University of Manchester (she's keen to hear from others doing the same or similar). There are links to some of Valerie's smashing stories from her blog.

Kate Feld at Manchizzle is hard at work adding blogs nominated for the Manchester Blog Awards to her blogroll.

And on the topic of the Manchester Blog Awards Dave Hartley has written a story a week for the last twelve months (just two to go). If you haven't read his tales yet you're set for a lovely treat.

Thank you, James Fraser, for my YMCA bridesmaid.

Zulus fighting in the flowerbed

This post is mostly about Preston and South Africa and Crail and some dead people who were once alive in those places.

Last week I finished the last two first year portfolios for my MA; the Writer with the Writerly Name’s Creative Writing Workshop portfolio, and the Agreeable Doctor’s Creativity and Marginality in Contemporary Writing portfolio. There’s a dissertation to write now; and a year to complete it in. As ever, I was just one day short of having enough time to finish those last two pieces nicely and I was up until three on Friday morning compiling them.

A few hours later Ian hefted me weightily into the car, folding my legs and arms in after like an inexpertly doubled deckchair and we set off for Crail, via the Humanities Office to hand in the assignments. The Humanities Office was locked and deserted; but I can’t talk about that yet. It’s enough to testify that the kind lady from the Ceremonies Office took the portfolios from me and gave me a receipt, and a hug.

There is an assignment drop box but how I feel about assignment drop boxes is: what about the bad person with the lighter fuel and the lit match? That’s all I’m saying.

On the way to Scotland the Radio 4 play was Ken Blakeson's Bearing the Cross which tells the story of Rorke’s Drift. This is an Amazing Coincidence because there’s a flower bed in Avenham Park in Preston that’s designed to mark the 130^th anniversary of Rorkes Drift (*thinks* 'maybe that’s why Ken wrote the play too').

The 1964 film, Zulu, depicts the Battle of Rorke's Drift. It was a terrible fight between the British Army and Zulu warriors. Preston are observing the event because the padre, George Smith, became the chaplain at Fulwood Barracks, here in Preston, on his return from South Africa and is buried in New Hall Lane cemetery (that was after he died, obviously).

Apparently one hundred and thirty-nine British soldiers successfully defended the garrison at Rorke’s Drift against several thousand Zulu warriors (reported numbers vary). Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded to the defending soldiers; the largest number of VCs conferred to a regiment for one action. George Smith received the Zululand medal and clasp for gallantry; only soldiers can receive the VC.

I felt ill at ease when I saw first saw the Avenham Park flowerbed a few weeks ago. I know the soldiers were brave and doing what they were employed to do, but it somehow seems out of place to be commemorating the defeat of native people who were defending their stolen land; just as Victorian Prestonian warriors would have defended Avenham Park, armed with fettlers and yard-brushes, if Zulu pastoralists had rolled up and set about grazing their cattle on the sward. Ken Blakeson's play reinforced my disquiet.

Crail is in Fife, across the Tay from Dundee. I tipped my hat groggily to Kathleen Jamie as I was driven by Newburgh. Jamie wrote Findings which was one of the Agreeable Doctor’s set texts. She also wrote the poem Arraheids in which arrowheads in museums,

‘thon raws o flint arraheids
in oor gret museums o antiquities’

are likened to the sharp tongues of Grannies who cannot stop themselves from putting you back in your place;

'ye arenae here tae wonder,
whae dae ye think ye ur?'

We’ve all met one of those Grandmas.

Crail is a picturesque fishing town (see above) fixed in another time and place. Like the Isle of Man, I suspect it isn't there if you’re not looking.

As you know, I spend a lot of time in graveyards, stealing names, admiring Shap Granite headstones, looking for dead babies; I can add looking for the headstone of an Army padre to that list now.

The graveyard at Crail Parish Church is the best yet. It has the oldest and most elaborate range of monuments I’ve ever seen. Tombs that would temp one to be buried alive (as was said of the mausoleum at Castle Howard, I forget who by).

I’m tired and emotional now, thinking about assignment drop boxes, kind administrators and displaced Zulu warriors who're reduced to fighting in a flowerbed. I’ll tell the tale of mural memorials, body snatchers and mort houses next time.

Scary hairdressing-ladies and workshopping creative non-fiction. Wednesday 20 May 2009.

A few months ago I compiled a self-important list of 25 things about myself; a sort of Facebook meme. Number 8 on my list is:
8). I always feel intimidated in libraries. And hospitals. And most shops. I never know where the proper standing-place is.

I was fresh from an awkward experience in the library in town when I wrote the list. I was waiting in the improper standing-place to return an Audio CD. Library-people could see me waiting in the improper standing-place clutching my Audio CD looking as if I'd finished with it, but no one told me I was muddled. They smell your fear you know.

I am, incidentally, a librarian, but it doesn’t help. Or maybe it does help; I just wouldn’t even be able to set foot inside a library if I wasn’t actually one of the cognoscenti. And understanding informatics (which I don’t) wouldn’t help me to know where the proper standing-place is in an alien library.

Anyway, there’s somewhere more intimidating than libraries, hospitals and shops. Hairdressing places.

I have Winnie Madikizela-Mandela-type hair, not that I’m black you understand. I just have big hair. I was born in Liverpool. When I was nineteen I nursed a West Indian lady who said one of my great-granddads definitely came off the banana boats. I’m pretty sure I can say that – it’s my hair and my great-grandad so I’m not being unacceptable I’m being self-aware and ironic; post-modern (more of which next week).

For about five months in the early 1970s, when posters for Hair: the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, were everywhere, I was temporarily stylish. Since then I haven’t been hip at all and I’ve never really known what to do, so I keep the hair short lest I put people in mind of Paul Breitner.

Recently, I’ve decided I’d like to experience that giddy sense of being a hair-do leader once again.

For months I’ve tramped the rounds of hairdressing shops. I’m working on the assumption that if the shop charges a lot of money their hairdresser-ladies must be well trained and kind and full of ideas. I want someone to advise me and then style my hair so that it suites me and makes me modern (or Mod, as Auntie Pam would say).

True enough, expensive hairdressers do provide a consultation. But what good is that when the hairdresser-lady’s a flaxen moppet with a silky-do like Minxie Geldoff’s. She seats you in a black vinyl chair; already you’re pasted to it with sweat; apologising.
‘What do you want?’ Minxie chafes your raspy head with the pointy-end of a pointy-ended comb.
‘Dunno, I want to look nice.’
‘Mmmmmm… we’re a bit limited with short hair,’ she pokes tentatively again (did you see her lip curl?).
‘I’m sorry.’
(Don’t state the bleeding obvious Minxie. Do you know how hard it was for me to come in here in the first place?)
‘Shall I just tidy it up?
‘Okay, just tidy it up.’
So, she tidies it up, rasp, rasp, raspy-rasp. In a belated attempt at styling she glues wispy bits forward onto your face, a bit like Liza Minnelli.

Why do young pretty hairdressers with hair like Minxie Geldof imagine that middle-aged women are enchanted by wispy bits or crappy kiss-curls? Would you choose to look like Liza Minnelli, Minxie? Wispy bits scare me. That’s something else for the list.

Then, you’ve tipped Minxie a tenner because you want her to like you (why?) and you’re scared of her and the receptionist thinks you’re ecstatic with your liza-look and you’ll need another appointment in four weeks time. You can’t go back to the same hairdressers and ask for someone else. You can’t say,
‘No, not scary Minxie, give me a hairdresser-lady who understands about afro hair.’ You can’t because that would be unacceptable rather than post-modern; and because the receptionist is terrifying too. So you make a ruddy appointment and have to get your friend at work to phone up and cancel for you. Then you have to avoid that street for a year or two. There’s barely a street I can venture along now without the aid of camouflage. In the end I might to have to grow my own fright-wig disguise.

What is wrong with me? Why can’t I march into a hairdresser shop and demand to know who can style my curly hair and not leave me looking like a 1970s footballer or a legendary singing star?

When they start with their raspy-rasp poking and excuses why can’t I say,
‘Don’t look at me pityingly. Don’t ask me what I want or tell me there’s not much you can do. You’re the trained expert; expertly help me. And, while we’re on the subject of experts, stop making me feel stupid – you’re a hairdresser-lady, I’ve got a science degree (first class hons)’.

Why can’t I do that? Because I’m scared and intimidated, that’s why. And a little bit because it’d be rude too.

I submitted a blog post for workshopping as a creative nonfiction piece. It hasn’t been workshopped yet but the Writer with the Writerly Name was very encouraging and suggested I enter the Flax competition.
I was very touched and I will enter, but this time I won’t be thinking.
’What’ll I do if I don’t win?’
I won’t be thinking that because I can sit here and touch a dozen blistering-blogs without even stretching, for example: Every Day I Lie a Little , My Shitty Twenties , Mollie Baxter, Dave Hartley and I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car.

Thank you to James Fraser for my little bit scary and intimidating kisscurl drawing.

Controlling idea, premise, subject and theme, a love-sick finch and tractors in macs. Wednesday 6 May 2009.

Before workshopping our writing we thought again about what we were writing about; controlling idea, premise, subject and theme or world view. Nancy Kress and Robert McKee are the bods for this stuff and I’m seeing it in context now that I’ve tried to write a short story.
It seems so obvious, of course, but identifying your theme makes writing easier because you can choose scenes, events and imagery that reflect that word view. Oh yes.

I know it is obvious when Kress and McKee say it but most obvious things are a revelation to me. For a long time I couldn't understand why skirting-boards in other peoples' houses weren't like mine; defined by a ridged detail of sooty dust. One day I caught a friend at work with a bowl of soapy water and a scrubby cloth.

'Does everyone do that?'

'Think so'

'Do they? How often? Christ it’s all slotting into place now. Oh my goodness! Is that why other people have tidy bathroom windowsills too?'

Why is there this conspiracy of silence over helpful information just because it’s obvious?

With the Writer with the Writerly Name we workshopped our stories. No one was harshly criticised but we were palpably subdued by the end. I think we’ve realised that having the story is only the start; now we have to make that story believable and alive, and all before the end of May.

My office has recently acquired solar reflecting glass which is a bit mirrory from the outside. There were a pair of chaffinches out on the cement ledge a few days ago; a plain brown-job hen and a rosy cock (yes, yes, very funny). The male was peck, peck pecking at the window, level with our ankles, all day.

At first I though he was pecking at tiny insects. I couldn’t see any but I imagined they were only visible to the naked finch-eye, or maybe he was locating them by ultrasound or smell or radar or some other finchian special-power. Sometimes though, he really launched himself at the glass. A man visited the office for referencing advice and said the little cock wasn’t eating; he was defending his territory against his own reflection. Sure enough the little brown hen hadn’t pecked at the glass all day – I suppose I imagined she wasn’t hungry or she’d eaten a cracker-bread the day before.

The little brown hen hopped around on the ledge patiently all day whilst the battle raged. Around 4 o’clock she disappeared. The cock was still having it out with himself when I left work; his poor little face surely must have been sore and he can only have been exhausted. Eventually he’s going to have to concede his territory to his own reflection but it won’t matter by then because he was so busy scrapping that he didn’t notice his missus gone. The event felt like a parable but I’m not sure what the moral of the story is.

I know the photo is of a Blue Tit. I didn’t have my camera at work. I hang the bird nuts on my primeval looking monkey puzzle tree to deter squirrels who steal all of them (and demolish the bird feeder) in one go. But I feel a bit ambivalent about doing that because squirrels are only being squirrels, they didn’t be born and then think, ‘I’m going to be a pest and wreck bird feeders.’ They are just helping themselves to a yummy snack. But then blue bottles are just being blue bottles and I generally don’t feel undecided about whacking them with a rolled up copy of the Daily Mirror.

The other two photographs are of tractors wearing macs on the shore at Lytham. Very nice, very nice.

Left hand down a bit, First Creative Writing workshop, Naming Names and the Competition... Wednesday 22 April 2009.

I do get out of sorts when I’m trying to reverse into a parking space and a dapper bystander wearing a shorty-mac taps eagerly on my car window with his knuckles and proceeds to give me instructions.

‘Left hand down a bit.’
‘What?’
‘Left hand down a bit, and you’ll be sorted’
The thing is, I have absolutely no idea what ‘left hand down a bit’ means. Now and then I’d quite like to punch that dapper man in his shorty-mac when he taps eagerly on my car window with his knuckles and says that thing. I’m not a bad person but sometimes I might come across as a being a bit insolent.

This Wednesday was the first week of the Writer with the Writerly Name’s Creative Writing Workshop module. We’re going to be doing a lot of peer appraisal in this unit. Peer appraisal is what happens when we take in turns to offer feedback and suggestions on each other’s work. The convention is that each group member says what they consider to be admirable about the piece. Then they each comment on what doesn’t work so well and, if they can, offer advice suggesting what might make the piece more effective.
My daughter is using a similar approach with her primary pupils and terms it ‘three stars and a wish’. My writer friend uses what she calls a sandwich – commendation-suggestion-commendation. What’s important is not to descend to platitudes, just saying ‘I like it’ or ‘it’s good’ with being specific about what exactly does work and why it works.
When my children were little I tried to say at least three positive things for every negative pronouncement. Similarly I tried not to resort to inanity such as ‘you’ve tied your shoe laces very nicely’. Being a mother who is forever blurring the boundaries between roles the children were soon party to my approach. It has become a family joke that if one of us does something regrettable, say comes downstairs in an irredeemably grim outfit, we say: ‘Well, your shoes are tied very nicely’.
The MA group have critiqued each other work since the start of the course but now the process is to be more rigorous and we’ll each have the opportunity to chair a discussion.
In The Poet’s module I received very poor feedback for a poem. Well deserved on reflection, but I thought I’d die of grief at the time. The experience triggered another poem; Dead on the Table.

They comedian and singer, Isy Suttie was asked to make a face out of edible stuff for a weekend magazine and found some bits quite tricky. Peer appraisal, like making ears out of ham, is harder than people make out. Last term I think someone suggested that half an hour was enough time to spend on preparing feedback on a colleague’s work. Well. Like Suttie’s ham-ears it takes me a lot longer that that, about a day a person I reckon.

I’ve been thinking about naming names. During the Life Writing module I was writing about characters from my childhood. I discovered I couldn’t give my people fictional names (to protect the not-so innocent) until the very end of the process because individuals with a pseudonym name immediately stopped being who they were and started to behave inappropriately.

During the Fiction module I found the apportioning original names to characters thorny. I've called someone Bette Benn and it sounds contrived. All my made-up names sound risible; improbable.
In the book That Old Ace in the Hole each character Annie Proulx introduces has a more ingenious name: Bob Dollar has an uncle called Tambourine Bapp (Uncle Tam) who has a boyfriend named Bromo Redpoll. Bob visits a town called Woolybucket where he meets Sheriff Hugh Dough; Ponola Dough; LaVon Fronk; Orlando Bunnel; Ribeye Cluke; Ruhama Bustard; Parmenia Boyce; Ruby Loving (an ancient haggard Country Singer); Ace and Tater Crouch. He also spends some time helping out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Café. I like the names in That Old Ace in the Hole very well. But then I think, people in America do have interesting names anyway.

There’s a vast disused county lunatic asylum at Lancaster; you can see the vernacular quadripartite tower looming above the trees from the M6 on your drive up to the Lake District.

As an aside, the world record for enduring ‘total’ sense deprivation – staying alive, conscious and sane without appreciably seeing, hearing or feeling anything - is three days and twenty hours, recorded in 1962 at Lancaster Moor Hospital. The perceptual isolation research was conducted on volunteer nurses and patients and was an attempt to see if schizophrenics and ‘normals’ differed in their tolerance levels. I first read about the feat in the Guinness Book of Records forty years ago and understood at the time that the subjects were submerged in sound proofed tanks of body temperature liquid. Reading about the experiments now it seems that there weren’t the resources for such sophisticated techniques, so the subjects were wrapped in cladding and placed in sound proofed rooms. The deprivation wasn’t total because they still had to eat and go to the loo. I think I imagined that they’d be tube-fed and have astronaut-type toilet arrangements. Common sense dictates that the Lancaster Moor Hospital wouldn’t have had the benefit of Nasa technology. I find myself bizarrely disappointed by the researchers’ lack of rigour. Disappointed and bemused and then saddened. I feel saddened by the poignant image of a sightless schizophrenic volunteer being bundled along hospital-green tiled corridors to the lavatory in the name of scientific research.

On the city-side of the asylum is a cemetery. The Lancaster liberal peer and linoleum giant, James Williamson, and three of his wives (and others) are buried under a modest monument in this enormous graveyard.

Little Jimmy, as he was nicknamed, commissioned the Ashton Memorial in Williamson Park in remembrance of his second wife, Jessy. Jessy’s monument is also visible from the M6.

The colossal dome of the Ashton Memorial is copper and in the 1960s it was cleaned and burnished. The monument looked very strange for a while but soon reverted back to the more recognisable verdigre-ed state. When Jimmy, Lord Ashton, died in 1930 he was worth ten million pounds; which would have been be worth an almost unimaginable sum at today’s standards.

However, the point is I went to the cemetery to look at names. Here’s a small selection: John Shadrach Slinger; Alice Maude Wolfall; Charles Purdon Silly; Rimmon Clayton; Dolly Salliss; Oliver Speddy; Harold Muckalt; Bindloss Smith; Nellie Bell; Peregrine John Smart; Ninian Smart; Isabella Row; Jane Bailie. And some nice alliteration: Alice Arkle; Ernest Ellershaw; Clara Ann Airey; Henry Homer; Herbert and Harriet Hall and Maria Marriott.




So you see; people do have diverting names in Britain too - Shadrach Slinger and Ninian Smart; half of my characters will be named Shadrach or Ninian from this time on. What strikes me is that, although those names are uncommon they don’t sound contrived like my Bette Benn does. Maybe a name has to be lived in to sound authentic.

All students in our group have been urged to enter the writing competition (entries to be submitted by 1 May). I assumed that the fact that I’m busy on the presentation night would exclude me. Apparently not; the Author who is Writing about Neanderthals (my favourite hominin) said I could still submit a piece. Sadly my first thought on learning this was:
'What if I don't win?'
There I've said it. Now if I do enter and I do tell people I've entered and I don't win everyone'll know why I'm doing deluxe sulking.

I'm including the photograph of Mary Jane Minnie Davis because her name is fine and because her headstone is made from Shap Granite which is currently my second favourite rock.


Shap Granite forms in batholiths when magma is contained underground rather than escaping through volcanic vents. Batholiths can be miles in circumference so the magma cools very slowly allowing large mineral crystals to form (in contrast volcanic rock like basalt cools very quickly as it leaves the earth so there is no time for large mineral crystals to form and the rock has a fine texture). Shap Granite probably formed when the tectonic plates carrying Scotland and England collided about four hundred million years ago. It contains high levels of orthoclase feldspar which gives it its glorious distinctive pink colour, prized by monumental masons. I like the idea that the granite owes its existence to the colliding of two continents; I like the idea of something crystallising under the ground for millions of years and the earth being eroded down to expose it; and I’m enchanted by the notion it is located just up the road; it’s our Shap Granite.

What have I learned this week? Well, just look at those last two images; John Shadrack Slinger and Mary Jane Minnie Davis. I’ve l learned that I need to do right-hand down a bit when I'm taking photographs. This is a doubly significant realisation in light of my opening remarks. I’ve also learned from Eric Partridges Dictionary of Catch Phrases that the expression ‘left hand down a bit’ is a standard piece of Navalese. It caught on when the dapper actor Leslie Phillips used it regularly in a 1950s radio programme called The Navy Lark. So, to all you spruce and eager bystanders with shorty-macs and tappy knuckles; now, at last, I can see where you were coming from. So thanks, and I’m really sorry if I came across as a being a bit insolent, as I say I’m not a bad person.

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.

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

Fiction Writer with the very writerly name. Wednesday 4 February 2009.

Started the fiction module led by a short story writer with a very writerly name. There was an almost instant ulrika moment. When I redrafted my life writing piece from first to third person I was annoyed at myself because of all the: 'she recalled's and 'she remembered's, I managed to splatter around the text. Well. Transpires I was needlessly filtering the images through the observing consciousness, as in: “she had imagined that he was ancient”, when “he seemed ancient” presents the thing seen and removes the filter between the character and reader; I’m glad I know that now.

We were cautioned to avoid abstraction and generalisation and to include specific detail to increase credibility – in yesterday’s Guardian Review John Mullan writes: “such details are there to win the reader’s confidence”. When I was thinking about my poetry portfolio commentary I remembered how much I liked the precise geological and medical references in Robert Browning’s poetry.

We wrote a bit of credible detail so that we could introduce an impossible thing, for example a talking dog, and make it seem plausible.

Then we chose a photograph each and started to construct a character for our photo-person. What was remarkable how proprietorial people became about their characters immediately. And how much detail they could instantly produce about someone that doesn't really exist; surgical procedures, dodgy spouses, all kinds of stuff. My photo is a lady who looks like what I’d look like if I wasn’t on a perma-diet and I still smoked and drank to incontinent excess. The photograph was taken in a 1950s-looking front parlour; she is staring straight at the camera and has a broad, fleshy face and a serious gaze. She has curlers in her hair above her forehead but not the hair at the sides. I think she’s clever but has never had the opportunity to develop her intelligence. She’s a hospital cleaner called Betty. I recounted how Betty refused to shake the hand of Princess Diana when she visited the hospital she cleans at because she was appalled that the mother to the heir to the throne had just been on her third skiing holiday of that year and children were sleeping rough on the streets. The story is true, my mother in law did and said just that when she was the Lady Provost of Dundee.

Now my photo-lady, Betty, is going to feature in a short story if I can make one up, I think she might have been a prostitute in her teens and twenties.

Over time my sentences have shrunk because I want to avoid ambiguity. I’ve noticed that when doing the artist’s sketchbook field work exercise - recording still life and movement I am going to have to come to terms with longer sentence structure again – like the long messy sentences in the Stylistics coursebook.

Most of the children were home over Christmas and I was reminded about remembering rememberings and Jenny Diski and the Australian greenstone leilira blades; (the blades are produced in a sequence of ceremonial steps and exchanged with distant groups but never used or curated. Robert Paton believes the blades aren’t utilitarian items at all but are the vehicle of information transmission. At each ritualised stage of their production and circulation the Aboriginals involved get stories straight). Over Christmas my daughters rehearsed childhood accounts: Convincing the youngest that the plug-end of the communal bath was the pole position and the competitions to see who could get a sodden flannel from the bath into the loo. The stories have their own energy now and the retelling and reordering of them is more animated if there is an audience.

When made the final redraft of the Funeral for my life writing portfolio I misremembered the chronology of some relatively recent events. It was only when I reread an earlier commentary that I realised that I had been dishonest. I though I was becoming much more cavalier about the permeable borders between fact and fiction; but it transpires I’ve always been that way.