The commissioning process: New piece on The View From Here

It's a good while now since I've written for radio: I've even talked of having given it up, but to my delight I find myself working on radio once again - not yet on producing a play, I hasten to add, or even yet writing one, since in the time I've been away the commissioning process has changed. What I'm doing is throwing up ideas with a producer and developing them according to BBC guidelines to pitch to a commissioning editor, and there's no guarantee that our offerings will be accepted in the end. My latest post on The View From Here considers some of the implications in such a process for creative production and for writers.

New Salt Twitter Reading Group & how to preserve radio plays

I'm thrilled that Too Many Magpies is to be the first in a new Twitter Reading Group for Salt books, beginning right now. You can read about it here on the Salt blog, where you can also listen to a podcast of me reading from the novel. Next week there will be an interview with me, and at the end of the month there will be an open Twitter discussion about the book, so anyone on Twitter will be able to have their say (eek!). (Just search on Twitter for #SaltReadingGroup.) If you'd like to take part and haven't read the book yet there's still time to do so (it's not a long book!). (And you know where you can buy it, eh?)

In other news, yesterday I had a letter from someone calling herself a 'senior lady' saying that her recording of my radio play 'What Mummy and Daddy Do' had worn out (!) and could she possibly buy another from me to leave to her family after her days. This was a lovely accolade, but then I wondered where she could have got my address and realized it must have been from the BBC (which would have been her first port of call), and they must have destroyed their own copy - if they ever kept one in the first place, since the play was produced by an independent company. Makes me realise once more that I need to carefully hoard my own collection of my radio plays and make copies (and somehow covert those on tape cassettes to CDs: another reminder of the way that changing technology can lead to the loss of archives). Maybe I could start selling them... Must look at the contracts!

Out of my head and into the air

So I listened to my story, The Way to Behave, on the radio this afternoon - often a strange experience, since it's so rarely the same as it is in your head, but Lesley Sharp had it almost the way I hear it myself! Of course, it had been cut to fit the slot - the 'frilly' bits had gone (I couldn't help thinking that that was how they must have thought of them): the descriptions of the room and the autumn, with their hints of witchcraft and physical violence; I suppose you could say it was (appropriately) turned into more of a drama. But it definitely got the spirit of it, and Lesley Sharp really was the character as I'd envisaged her: what a pro! Thank you, Lesley, thank you producer Jill Waters, and thank you Jen at Salt.

The story can be heard online for the next 7 days here.

The Way to Behave on Radio 4, 3.30, Friday.

Looked at the radio listings in the Observer this morning and found that it's Friday of this week that my Balancing story 'The Way to Behave' is being broadcast on Radio 4 (3.30 pm). It's a fabulous series to be in, intended to highlight collections of stories in print and easily available, and titled In Bookshops Now. The series kicks off tomorrow with (appropriately) 'Monday Diary' from another Salt collection, the wonderful Some New Ambush by my friend Carys Davies (she's my friend because we met through both being published by Salt and precisely because I so love and admire her writing). It's a real mark of Salt's marketing nous that they should feature so prominently in such a series.

I'm particularly chuffed as my story is being read by actress Lesley Sharp (above) of Clocking Off fame and numerous northern TV dramas - what an honour, and she's just perfect I think for the ironic tone of the narrator. My story slot is critic Stephanie Billen's Radio Choice for Friday and she has this to say:

Radio 4 continues its valuable championing of the short story by highlighting fiction from widely available collections. Concluding the week is 'The Way to Behave', a clever tale by Elizabeth Baines, in which a social worker takes a slow revenge on her husband's far too nice mistress. Reader Lesley Sharp invests her character with just the right amount of venom as she recalls her fateful first discovery of a blonde hair: 'a gold worm, hooked and wriggling...'

I should mention that The Way to Behave was first published in (and commissioned for) the Bitch Lit anthology which is also available, direct from Crocus Books (get them both if you can afford it!)

Clouds in the hills and a story on the radio, maybe

Oh dear, this is turning into a blog about the ruddy internet. So OK, I got a better mobile broadband, and yes, it does work from the house here, but not when the weather is bad! And has the weather been bad up here in the hills! Here from the upstairs window where I sit at my laptop I should see a blue ridge of hills but all I can see most days is the cloud we’re sitting in the middle of, and the very nearby ash trees flinging themselves around with the kind of anguish I feel every time I try to connect up.

However, sometimes it happens and I find myself thinking what a miracle the internet is, instead of taking it for granted as we’ve all learnt to do in the past few years. Still, it can take several minutes – now and then 10! - to navigate between web pages, so I may not be very good on links, I’m afraid.

So anyway, I got an email through to my publisher Jen at Salt to tell her about my Raymond Carver win, and the next time I managed to hook up there was a reply from her telling me that my story ‘The Way to Behave’ is to be broadcast on Radio 4’s afternoon slot sometime in the autumn, probably in September – that is, if she received my answer giving the go-ahead: too many of my emails have been bouncing back! ‘The Way to Behave’ is one of the stories collected in Balancing, and it was originally commissioned for the Bitch Lit anthology (Crocus) with which we had great fun doing a series of readings dressed in character, since most of the stories, TWTB included, were dramatic monologues. TWTB is the story of a wronged wife, the narrator, who finds an unusual way of taking revenge, and is one of my naughty swipes at the abuses of feminism by so-called feminists. (My Aunty Phyllis read Balancing recently and pronounced TWTB her favourite in the whole book, so maybe I should be worried: but no, Phyllis was a WAAF in the war, and she’s pretty switched on about female power.) To read my character for the Bitch Lit tour, I dressed up, as she does in the story, as a vamp: red high heels, red nails, bright lipstick and dark wig, and when my mother and sister came to the reading we did at Sheffield, they sat there as the reading started wondering where I had got to, and didn’t realize I was me until I began reading! TWTB is one of the more conventional stories in Balancing, and so I suppose well suited to radio.

I haven’t been feeling very literary, though. Writing’s on hold as I’ve been too busy helping out with the work on this old family house, which was started two years ago, but is only ever done in people’s spare time, mostly in the summer. And do I really want to start writing a blog about lime plastering and woodworm?

Although, actually, a damned enticing story came to me the other night in the pub down by the straits…