A Literary Life

A writer writes. This is what a pen and paper looks like to you digital age apes That’s the common adage we hear.   Sometimes we writers aren’t writing though, but we are thinking about it.   No, really we are.   Thinking is just as important to a writer as the actual writing.   And since we’re deconstructing that adage, rewriting is actually more important to a writer than writing: it is though rewriting that we find the truth of what it was we were trying to say.   But we write, we have to write.   It is compulsion.   We should try and write every day as well, even when we don’t feel like it.   Even when we’d rather pull out our own fingernails than consider putting pen to page (or fingers to keyboard).   So this is my proclamation.   That for one month, and one month only to begin with (we’ll see how this goes), I will write a new blog post every day.   I might talk about utter rubbish, I might talk some sense, I’...

Gwendoline Riley has been working steadily for a decade now.  Her first novel, Cold Water, set the tone for the work to come: young woman, adrift in their lives, stumbling between one romantic fling to another, drinking too much, and generally failing in life.  Aislinn Kelly, like Carmel McKisco before, treads a similar path, but is more successful.  She has published three novels – not too much acclaim or success it seems (unlike Riley, who has won the Betty Trask Award, a Somerset Maugham Award and been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) and is about to decamp to America, where she hopes to feel free once more.  America featured prominently in Riley’s last novel, Joshua Spassky, but here it seems nothing more than a country of false promises.  Aislinn Kelly’s life is failing, and so are her dreams. Opposed Positions is a real maturation of Riley’s talents.  Though a slight novel (it is 230 pages with wide margins) it packs quite t...

So I missed a few days. Let me fill you in. Thursday I spent the whole day going line by line through my BBC spec script, excising spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, and generally making sure each line sounded true. Thursday night was quiz night in a local pub, so I wandered over, had four pints, came second – done in my photographs of soap stars and a lack of knowledge of the English Premiership (I follow neither) – and woke Friday morning with an awful hangover. Four pints! Lightweight I hear you call. Yeah, probably am now. I drink once a week if I am, and sometimes not at all. I can go months. So when I do, it hits me. Hard. Like a pile of bricks to the forehead. So all day Friday I spent trying to sleep on the sofa, episodes of Being Human playing on the television. I also watched The Green Hornet film: really wish I hadn’t. That brings us to this morning. Up later than planned, I am today planning for another night of drinking a hundred...