New story shortlisted

I'm very happy that a new story of mine has been shortlisted for the Short Fiction Journall/University of Essex Wild Writing Prize. I'm not allowed at this stage to say which one of the shortlisted stories it is, as they have to be presented anonymously to the two judges who consider them at this stage. It's a nice boost, as I have felt at something of a distance from writing recently, other, more practical matters having kept me away from my desk and displacing from my head a new novel idea I've had brewing. 

Astral Travel keeps me busy: all four of the videos I made about novels with which Astral Travel has certain connections can now be seen together on my YouTube playlist.

And in June there will be a blog tour for Astral Travel, organised by the wonderful Anne Cater.

And now I think I have a few days at least to sink back into that day-dreamy parallel dimension that a new idea always is...

Review: Cocky Watchman by Ailsa Cox

Cocky Watchman by Ailsa cox is the latest from Nicholas Royle's Nightjar imprint, limited-edition singe-story pamphlets, dedicated to the uncanny. 

This haunting story opens with intimations of unease as a writer and teacher of writing takes a ride home in a taxi through the dark eerie plain of west Lancashire, the trains having been cancelled for no explained reason. It's Mischief Night, the night before Halloween, when children cause mayhem, an ancient Liverpool tradition much older than Halloween. In the distance there are bursts of pre-bonfire-night explosions - at home her dog will be whimpering and cowering - and the Scouse cabbie is a potentially threatening man, 'big' and with a 'closed-shaved head'. But he wants to talk, in fact he came from the suburb in which she lives, and 'he liked to reminisce'. The writer, our narrator, is eager to draw him out. 'A writer's never off duty,' she thinks pragmatically, 'that's what I always told my students'. 

    

And he has indeed a tale to tell, a mysterious tale connected with Mischief Night, of a 'cocky watchman' (a Liverpool term for a sharp-eyed and alert watchman) who once guarded the small park near where she lives and told tales to the kids who gathered around his brazier. It is a tale of fire, of fascination with fire, and of the way that stories can leap like flames and take hold in the sometimes dangerous obsessions of others. Meanwhile, in a subtle authorial manoeuvre, the narrative voice takes over the story from that of the cabbie, as the tale catches in the narrator's mind and begins to flare.

Arrived home, the narrator thinks of the ghost story she could write if she made use of the tale. But the haunting is much deeper than any conventional ghostly apparition. For someone involved in what happened to the watchman, she muses, there would be 'always the smell of smoke coming from somewhere'. And it is the story itself, and its telling, that haunts the narrator, in a way that moves her on to a different future. 

To be haunted in turn by this cleverly calibrated story, you can buy it here.

Mainstream published

This week sees the publication of Mainstream, an anthology of stories from the edges to which I was invited to contribute. It's really exciting. Editors Justin David and Nathan Evans have done a wonderful job of publicity - I don't think I've been involved in a non-mainstream project that has been quite so buzzy. There's even a song ,'Permission', written and recorded by Andrew M Pisnu of Memory Flowers, and a video. The book was crowd-funded with the publisher Unbound, and thank you so much to those who pledged support. It includes several of the more well-known authors writing about experiences that tend to be overlooked in mainstream literary culture, but also 15 exciting newcomers. My own contribution, 'Alignment', set in a hospital, is a story about conceptions of class inferiority and the power plays and gaslighting that can result.

The book can be bought here.

'Falling' interpreted

Googling your own name is a well known as an act of vanity, but writers do it also to try and gauge responses to their work (it's always good to know what people think of what you've done). So there I was idly Googling a couple of times recently and I came across two responses to my story 'Falling' which really tickled me. First of all, it turns out that, all without my knowing, a recording of the story has been uploaded to YouTube - a really nice recording, I think, the story well read.

Then yesterday I came upon this, the description by design graduate Gus van Manen of his graphic design interpretation of the story, a beautiful little book that lets you, as he says, 'fall' through the story - exactly the kind of sensation I was hoping to create for the reader. (Go to the page for the images, which I can't copy.)  It never palls, that sense of gratification when you feel that someone has really understood what you're doing. And when they pour their own creativity into attending to it in these ways - well!

Oh, and I discovered from Google yesterday that two years ago a paper was presented at a conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English at Bangor University in 2014 by Michelle Deininger on 'The Politics of Disease in the Short Fiction of Elizabeth Baines'  - all without my having any inkling! *

'Falling' can be read on East of the Web and is included in my latest collection of short stories, Used to Be (Salt).

* I am grateful to Michelle Deininger for posting in the comments below a link to her thesis, from which her paper was taken, and which I have brought up  here: Short Fiction by Women from Wales: a neglected tradition. Pages 177-188 deal with two of my early stories.

New Nightjars: Campbell and Burns

Through my door not so long ago: the latest beautifully produced chapbooks of individual stories from Nicholas Royle's Nightjar imprint - stories by Neil Campbell and Christopher Burns that fulfil perfectly Nightjar's concern with the uncanny and the macabre, each unsettling in both subtle and shocking ways.

Neil Campbell's Jackdaws is drenched with unease as the first-person narrator describes walking in the Derbyshire hills around his home - first in snow, then in summer - and the effects of the weather, snow and floods, on the row of houses in which he lives. The descriptions are stunning, but there is something deeply unsettling about these sequences - about the fact that we know so little about the narrator himself, about the obsessive nature of his descriptions (we could draw a map from them). And why is this all we are getting - descriptions of walks and weather and no story? When the denouement comes, it comes as a real jolt, and we understand the very shocking story that has been running underneath all along. Masterful.

Christopher Burns' story opens in a similar manner, with a protagonist walking in an atmospheric dawn. This time our sense of foreboding comes too from the protagonist's own unease as he approaches the farmhouse from which he feels he has been more or less disinherited. However, when the moment of shock arrives here, it is again entirely unexpected and at this moment Burns executes a clever narrative switch which lends a dynamism and true horror to the events that then rapidly unfold.

The covers of both volumes are aptly illustrated by details from two of the stunningly atmospheric landscapes of Manchester artist Jen Orpin.

Don't forget: these are limited signed editions, and they soon sell out! You can order them here.

Used to Be published

Yesterday I was at my mum's for the day. 'When is your book coming out?' she asked me. I told her it was due back from press any day now, but I couldn't check on my phone to see if it had come yet, as where she lives there's no signal whatever of any kind - well, there is a bit of phone signal, but not great enough to hold a decent mobile phone conversation! So it wasn't until I was on the train back to Manchester that I discovered that Used to Be had arrived from the printer's at Chris and Jen's, along with Jonathan Taylor's novel Melissa, and Roddy Lumsden's poetry collection Melt and Solve. Don't they all look fabulous? (And isn't that a beautiful clock on their mantelpiece?)

I'm holding an event to celebrate the publication of Used to Be at Deansgate Waterstone's, Manchester, on Thursday 29th October (7 pm), and I'm making it a celebration of the short story, with additional readings from three brilliant short-story writers, two of whom are also key players in the recent rise of the short story. Ailsa Cox is Professor of short fiction at Edge Hill University and founder of the Edge Hill short story prize, and was co-editor with me of the one-time short-story magazine Metropolitan. She is the author of numerous prizewinning short stories and the collection The Real Louise and Other Stories (Headland). MMU lecturer Nicholas Royle, has edited numerous short story anthologies and now edits the Best British Short Stories series (Salt) and publishes short story chapbooks under his own imprint, Nightjar. He founded the Manchester Fiction Prize for a single short story. His own stories have been shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and he is the author of several novels, including the latest, First Novel. (He was also a valued contributor to Metropolitan.) Also reading, I am thrilled to say, will be Carys Bray, whose debut novel, A Song for Issy Bradley, has been such a resounding success, and whose collection of stories, Sweet Home, won the Scott Prize.

And there will be wine! (Gotta celebrate, yeah?)

Unthology 7 arrives

Today I received my contributor's copy of Unthology 7 (Unthank), soon to be officially published, which includes my story, 'Looking for the Castle'. The book looks every bit as good as in the photos we've seen beforehand (and feels lovely: all silky-matt!). Very exciting. Nicely typeset, too.

It's pretty great being in Unthology. Editors Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones have received much praise for their aplomb in creating a series of eclectic high-standard anthologies which Sabotage Magazine has called 'a beacon of promise for the short story genre'. Here's the editors' mouth-watering press release for the new issue:

WONDERFUL AND FRIGHTENING SHORT FICTION FROM NEW AND ESTABLISHED WRITERS

 Flinch at the things that twitch in the windows a mile up from the city streets. Let text messages lead you towards a man that you already know is going to mess with your head. Find the meaning of life in your own lobotomy. Now, the ghost of Gaudi whispers in your ear, urging you to get yourself another lover, insisting it’s all going to be smooth and comfortable this time. Ruin yourself and drift towards the haunted shores of your youth. Then find yourself back there, returned to the low-down slums of a city in a country that no longer exists, that UNTHOLOGY 7 documented and mapped out for you, and you alone, a long, long time ago. 

Elizabeth Baines, Roelof Bakker, Adrian Cross, George Djuric, Debz Hobbs-Wyatt, Sonal Kohli, Amanda Oosthuizen, Dan Powell, Gary Budden, Ken Edwards, Elaine Chiew, and Charlie Hill

Unthology 7 will make its first appearance at an Unthank event at the London Short Story Festival on June 20th, and the official launch will take place at Project U in Norwich on the 25th. I'll be reading at the Norwich event along with other contributors including Dan Powell. (Excited to be going to Norwich again - last year, when I went to read at the Unthology 5 launch, I made my first ever visit there.) Dan and I will be interviewing each other for the Unthology blog, and I'll provide links when the interviews appear. The book can be preordered here and here. Previous Unthologies can be ordered here, and you can read about the Unthology project on the Unthank website.

New story collection

I am thrilled that a new collection of stories by me is to be published in August by the wonderful Salt Publishing (who published my first collection and two of my novels).

My writing life has been pretty quiet for the past year or so: I've been very much stuck to my desk working on two big projects (so I haven't had many comings and goings to write about here, and when you've spent a whole day squeezing your brain there's not much juice left for bloggish reflection), but I guess life will be different now that there's a publication in the offing.

Strange, the writing life, with its swings from hermit-like withdrawal to utter busy-ness out in the world. I wouldn't have it any other way...

Bare Fiction Magazine Review of Best British Short Stories 2014

There's a new review of Best British Short Stories 2014 in Bare Fiction Magazine. Lucy Jeynes notes that 'when an anthology limits itself to a particular vintage, you hope it’s a good year', and, having read the book, she comes to the conclusion that 2014 must have been a strong one, and that 'this collection forms the ideal starting point for a wider range of reading.' Taking the subtitle of my included story - 'How Stories Do or Don't Get Told' - as the title for her review,  Jeynes ponders the essence of the short story as well as the varieties of ways in which it can be tackled, and the way in which this anthology illustrates both, and she quotes at fair length from several of the stories. 

Short Story Conference in Vienna.

I've now written on Fictionbitch about my impression of the 13th International Conference on the Short Story which has just taken place in Vienna, and about some of the panels and readings I attended. Also there's an anthology of stories by writers participating in the conference, edited by conference director Maurice A Lee, and which includes a new story of mine, 'Where the Starlings Fly', available here.

It was was my first-ever time in Vienna, and although there wasn't a lot of time left over, I did do a little bit of sightseeing, and here are some pics of moments snatched away from the conference.

Wide roads and imperial buildings:

Baroque doorways:

Freud's house in Berggasse:

Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust memorial in the Judenplatz:

Cafe Central, where Freud, Trotsky and other famous figures once played chess:

And a group of us having lunch there. Ailsa Cox, Stef Pixner, Zoe Gilbert, me, Vanessa Gebbie, Tania Hershman, Alison Lock and Catherine McNamara:

Lunch in a historic beer garden, once the garden of a monastery. With Felicity Skelton (left), Ailsa Cox (centre) and Allan Weiss:

Farewell dinner at the Heurigen. First, Moy McCrory, Ailsa Cox, Jim Grady, Nuala Ni Chonchuir and Kath Mckay:

And Adnan Mahmutovic, Vanessa Gebbie and Tania Hershman:

And drinks afterwards:

Egon Schiele in the Leopold Museum on the final morning before my plane:

The Secession building containing Klimt's Beethoven Frieze (which you're not allowed to photograph):

Tim Love writes about my work

I'm back from the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English, held last week in Vienna. It was a pretty amazing experience, a fascinating and stimulating insight into the latest thinking about the short story, which I know has given a boost to my practice. I'm still digesting it all, and hope to blog about it soon.

While I was in Vienna I had an email from Tim Love, who has been devoting himself for some time now to thinking seriously and blogging about the short story, telling me that he had posted a blog about my work. It's an attentive piece in which he very much puts his finger on the kind of thing I'm trying to do in my writing - it's so wonderful when that happens. I'm especially touched that he includes a photo of the page in an exercise book where as a schoolboy he copied out one of my stories, 'Cautionary Tale'  - in fact, one of the first I had published (he's written and told me this before). (It's not one in my collection Balancing.) I thank him for his thoughtfulness and insight.

Proofs and copyediting

It surprises me that it's never happened before, but for the first time ever I've received a copyedited version of one of my manuscripts as a Word document displaying the tracking of changes (above),which I can add to as I see fit.

It's a very long time now since copyedit proofs came through the post to be marked in red pen with British Standards Institution proof marks:

Usually though with short stories in those days, if you got proofs at all, they were the final or so-called page proofs, which is what my first-ever proofs were: I remember how anxiously I referred to the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook (where the BSI marks were printed - I don't know if they still are), worrying about getting it right, and about neatness and clarity: in those days of metal type, it was the printer you needed to communicate with (via the editor, of course), and at that final proof stage you only had the one chance.

BSI marks were a wonderful shorthand though, and generally unequivocal (apart from one occasion, I found: I'm not sure whether the fault was mine or the printer's, but a line in the first edition of The Birth Machine, which I thought I had indicated should be moved in position, was repeated instead, and the effect was ridiculously sonorous). But as I've commented before, even before the internet really took off, BSI marks had begun to fall out of use. When Ailsa Cox and I edited the short-story magazine Metropolitan, we had the use of a computer (remember desk-top publishing? - how things change!) so we were able to print out typeset copy, but we still sent it by post to the authors for their approval. Very few of them in fact used the BSI marks, which surprised me: it seemed so laborious to have to explain in writing the necessary changes, and so open to misinterpretation. Yet once the internet made it possible to whizz proofs back and forth at the press of a button, that's mostly what I've ended up having to do with my own work. We've gone straight to typeset (page) proofs and I've had to send emails with laborious lists of items such as: 'Para 2, line 3, the word "out" should be omitted' - even though change-tracking software has been available.

But Honno, the Welsh Women's Press is ahead of the game. The copyedited extract above is from my story 'A Matter of Light', to be included in their anthology of ghost stories, The Wish Dog, which will be published in the autumn.

Short Fiction Longlisting

It's a rum business sending off stories. When I'm writing only short stories there's no problem - my mind is fixed entirely on the short-story world, but once I'm involved in something longer, as I have been recently, I find it hard to remember competition or magazine deadlines or even, frankly, to think about the stories I have waiting around for publication. I'll miss deadlines altogether, or will scrabble around sending something at the last minute and then promptly forget I ever sent it (even though I make notes of submissions - I forget all about the notes too!). So it was a surprise to me to open up my email yesterday to find that my story 'Looking for the Castle' has been long listed for the competition run by Short Fiction magazine - where I hadn't even remembered I'd sent it! I'm in great company: the long list includes the wonderful writers Tania Hershman and Sara-Mae Tuson, and Graham Mort, winner of the Edge Hill Prize.

Short Fiction, produced annually from Plymouth University and edited by Anthony Caleshu and Tom Vowler, carries the subtitle The Visual Literary Journal: special care is taken over presentation and illustration of stories, which makes it a great treat to read. It's pretty prestigious, too, and guest editors have included Ali Smith, Toby Litt and Jayne Anne Phillips, so I'm thrilled to have got to this stage in a competition associated with it.

The mother in 'Compass and Torch'

Now and then one is pulled up short by the sexism inherent in the odd literary-critical comment. I've been shocked on a couple of occasions by interpretations of the female character in my story 'Compass and Torch' which is on the AQA GCSE syllabus, most recently by the BBC Bitesize website page designed to help students revise the story.

The story concerns an eight-year-old boy and his father, who don't see each other very often, as the father and the boy's mother are separated, setting out awkwardly and self-consciously together on a camping trip on which a lot consequently rides in terms of cementing, indeed repairing, their precarious relationship. As they unpack the car there are two flashbacks, located in the child's consciousness, featuring the mother, the first when he overhears her talking to her live-in boyfriend about the coming trip and about the father's general conduct as an absentee father, and a second one in which the father picks the boy up for the trip from the mother's home.

BBC Bitesize tells us that the mother

is presented as an angry and embittered person. Her anger is spoken to her current partner, Jim, and is directed against her former husband whom she regards mockingly as having made a poor effort to act as a father to his son. "There was a choke in her voice now, and suddenly a kind of snarl: 'You wouldn't expect him to start now, would you - accommodating his child into his life?'" (ll. 24 - 26)

Well, OK, the mother is angry. But angry why and in what way? I'd say she's chiefly angry about what she sees as the father's inability to be a better father, both as an absentee parent and previously, before the parents separated - there is italicisation that isn't replicated on the Bitesize site on both the word now implying a previous, similar situation, and on life, implying an inability by the father to adapt to fatherhood. This last, the father's inadequacy, is something that the incidents on the camping trip go on to support, but the critic implies it is just the mother's view: he says she 'regards' the father as putting on a poor show as a father. One can extrapolate that this, the mother's sense of the father's inadequacy, was one of the reasons for the breakdown of the parents' relationship in the first place, and thus that the mother's comment on the irony (ie if he didn't do it when they were together, how is he going to do it now?) indicates that her anger is also about the irony of the general situation. Nevertheless her anger  - I don't think it's just anger, but I'll come to that - is directed towards a particular (and very important) issue, the fact that her son and his father aren't close.

However, the wording of the Bitesize commentary implies something different. She is an angry 'person' we are told, implying a general anger typical of her personality, with a possible resulting implication that she doesn't have justification for anger on this particular occasion. There is something pejorative about this in itself, and once 'angry' is paired with 'embittered', a word generally used pejoratively (it generally implies an unjustified, self-centred resentment), we can be in no doubt about the critic's negative view of the mother. Thus he (I'm kind of assuming the critic is a he, but I may be being entirely unjust) sees the mother's ironic comment as 'mocking', with its hints of cruelty and a position of cool superiority. This last runs completely counter to my own view of the situation and my literary intentions. I see all of the characters, including the mother, as caught up in a painful situation and suffering. The mother, as I say, is not simply angry. There is a 'choke' in her voice, which surely - well, I intended it anyway - implies that she is beginning to cry. One of the things I am trying to say in this story is that it's just about impossible to shield children from their parents' unhappiness. So when the boy comes downstairs and hears his mother saying this thing about his father he is not only upset on behalf of his father, but also catches his mother's unhappiness. He hears the choke in her voice, and 'the light seeping through her fuzzy hair made the bones of his shoulders ache'. The BBC Bitesize tutor/critic does note that the mother tries to shield the boy from what she has been saying about the father, but does not seem to see that this is one of the ironies on which the story pivots: the mother stops (and is alarmed and ashamed that the boy may have heard) because she wants the child to have good relationship with the father. In fact, the critic states that the most obvious judgement of the mother's sudden silence and change of manner is that the mother is being 'hypocritical', and agrees with that judgement, before going on to state that, actually, I present it as 'more complex'. The mother's 'behaviour', he/she tells students, 'is what adults do when they try to protect their children from the ugly truths of the adult world.' This is a vague phrase, including no sense that the mother is trying to hide not only the discord between herself and his father but also her own unhappiness from a child she understands will in turn be made unhappy by both of these things ('wrenching a look of bright enthusiasm onto her face'). It is the boy's happiness she is concerned with here.

But no. According to the critic, the mother is thinking of herself and lacks concern for the boy. (It is interesting that he uses the word 'behaviour', implying that she is not well-behaved.) It is true that the boy knows what the mother will be saying, which means that he has heard her saying it in the past. Rather than seeing this (as I intend) as proof of the enormity of the problem to the mother and the household, which will inevitably filter through to a child constantly alert to his parents' broken relationship, the critic sees it as proof of the mother's lack of concern for the boy. 'The mother is also presented as selfish' we are told in no-uncertain bolds. She cries, for goodness' sake, when the boy and his father are leaving! (Crying's no amelioration after all - it's a sin!) (Well, actually, she doesn't just cry - she is once again trying to stop herself doing so but the child sees that 'her eyes are bulging and wobbly with tears'). To the critic this indicates not the extent of her distress, but a selfish dereliction of maternal duty, and it is this, specifically, that to the critic 'spoils [the boy's] enjoyment of the weekend', rather than (as I see it) the child's more general apprehension of the adults' pain and the father's inability to relate to him. He ends his revision note on the mother by stressing the use in the story of the word 'unforgivable' to describe the mother's warning to the father not to camp too near an edge, and the implication, which the boy picks up - and which distresses him - that the mother doesn't trust the father with the boy. He seems to overlook the fact that, since the flashback is contained within the boy's point of view, this is just the boy's - momentary - judgement of his mother. As far as I am concerned it's an instance of the complicated emotions all parties experience in such situations - after all, in the next instant the boy feels he doesn't want to leave his mother and doesn't want after all to go with his father. But as far as the critic is concerned, it's my overall judgement of the mother (which he seems to justify by calling 'unforgivable' an 'adult' word), and it's clearly his. Clearly, in this critic's view, mothers are not allowed the human emotions of unhappiness and anger. Any failure to shield their children from their emotions is simply unforgivable, and any attempts they may have made to do so before failing need not be acknowledged. A less-than-perfect mother is a Bad Mother. (In the light of all this, a pretty pejorative halo surrounds the critic's reference to the mother's 'current' relationship, and a feckless woman moving from partner to partner is potentially conjured.)

This is sexism, and this is what students studying this story for this exam are being taught by the BBC.

You can read 'Compass and Torch' on East of the Web (where it was first published), and it's included in my collection Balancing on the Edge of the World (Salt).

(Crossposted to my critical blog, Fictionbitchhttp://fictionbitch.blogspot.com.)

Unthology 5 pre-order

It's now possible to pre-order Unthology 5 (which includes my story 'Clarrie and You') from Central Books. The book will be published on 27th June and will soon be available from the Unthank Books website and from Amazon.

Unthology 5 Cover

Here's the striking and intriguing cover of Unthology 5, due out in June from Unthank Books, and which I'm thrilled to say includes my story, 'Clarrie and You' about two sisters and the long-term corrosive effects on their relationship of secrets imposed by the prejudices of society.

Arresting, isn't it?

Story on East of the Web

'Falling', my story which was shortlisted and Highly Commended in the Sean O'Faolain competition, can now be read online at East of the Web. It's another of my less conventional stories: it deliberately plays on the 'and then she woke and it was all a dream' convention, turning it on its head and exploring the notion of the unreliability of consciousness. When I posted about East of the Web recently and the story's acceptance, I forgot to mention that one great thing about East of the Web is that they allow comments on the stories, which I don't think many online magazines do. It's a two-edged sword, of course: it's really great to get the reactions of general readers to your work, but also you need a thick skin: a couple of the commenters so far don't think much of 'Falling' at all!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone! It's not a day for a New Year walk here in Manchester: it's wild and wet and dark, even in late morning, so I'm sitting here by the fire and taking stock of the year that's just gone.

It's been a year in which I'm afraid my blogs have been somewhat neglected, especially my other
blog Fictionbitch, which, as a critical blog, takes a fair amount of thought and time. Mainly this is because it's been an eventful year for me on the family front, with lots of family issues to occupy me, some joyful, such as my discovery of my long-lost Irish cousin and her family, and others, like my mother's house move, pretty stressful, as is the way with these family matters. Partly it's been because I spent most of the spring and summer in Wales without broadband, coupled with the fact that my laptop is basically dying and very slow, so for a lot of the time getting online was impossible. One of my New Year resolutions has to be to get a new laptop, although I have to say that, as income for writers goes down and down and we are expected to contribute more and more for free, I can't really afford one. Reinstalling the operating system has made little difference, and the thing is basically on the way to being kaput. I guess it's had a lot of stick. My techie advisor was shocked when he saw it. 'You must do a lot of typing!' he cried, when he saw that the a, e, and s keys have worn to invisibility. Ironically, it's all forced me to take my own advice  to ration my social networking activity (advice I doled out in April on the Salt London Book Fair Panel on Social Networking, and in the new edition of the Creative Writing companion, The Road to Somewhere [Palgrave Macmillan]), with the result that in spite of other distractions I've been able to concentrate on writing more than I have for a good while.

There's a popular notion that short stories are the mode for our rushed sound-bitey times, but personally, I take the opposite view: a worthwhile short story is something distilled that requires stillness, both to read and to write. Over the past few years, while I've been spending a lot of time online, I really haven't found the right stillness for short-story writing, but this year thankfully I have found it again at last. I wrote several, now published or about to be. One short-story highlight in the latter part of the year was of course the publication of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontes (Unthank Books), for which my story 'That Turbulent Stillness' was commissioned, and our editor A (Andrea) J Ashworth organised great reading events, two of which I took part in, in Manchester and Blackburn. (Three of us - Andrea, fellow contributor Bill Broady and me - will be doing a signing at York Waterstone's on Saturday 18th January [12 am - 3 pm] ). In late summer-early autumn I managed a novella in nine-and-a-half short weeks (sitting up in bed at the back of  a mountainside cottage in Wales where the internet was inaccessible on the dongle!). I have also finally had the peace to come to realise that the longer novel I've been struggling for ages - years now - to make more acceptably commercial is never going to work unless I damn well write it the way it needs to be written, and hang the consequences in terms of anything but artistic integrity!

A peaceful and successful 2014 to you all!

New Review of Red Room

I was in the city centre yesterday afternoon - in Primark, actually, getting socks and marvelling at others buying reindeer-printed knickers and pink-spotted onesies - when a notice came through on my phone of a new, really enthusiastic review of Red Room. Kathryn Eastman of the Nut Press blog finds the book a 'strong collection' and seems to love every story in it, assuring her readers that 'once you finish, you'll want to dip back in again.'

East of the Web

I'm delighted that another of my stories is to be published in the online magazine, East of the Web. If you don't already know East of the Web I recommend that you pay a visit: it's a fount of stories. Everything they've ever published is there online, easily accessible, and there's an amazing variety, something to suit every taste, while the standard is consistently high. It's definitely a place one is proud to place a story. I've got two stories proudly on there already: 'Compass and Torch' and 'A Glossary of Bread' (both now collected in Balancing on the Edge of the World). They were both stories I'd previously found hard to place: I think the problem with 'Glossary' was that it's a bit off the wall in its form (it's structured around definitions of bread), but I'm not quite sure what the problem was with 'Compass and Torch' which I see as a pretty traditional piece. In any case, East of the Web believed in them both, different as they are, and were vindicated: 'Glossary' was afterwards published again in the prestigious lit mag Stand, and 'Compass and Torch' was picked off the site for an English school textbook, and by the AQA examining board, whose GCSE syllabus it ended up on. That's how significant East of the Web is. Among the most recent publications there is a story by Ailsa Cox, my one-time co-editor on Metropolitan short-story magazine.

My new story, 'Falling,' was shortlisted and Highly Commended in the Sean O'Faolain competition.