Mission Statement

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’ll probably try and crack some dreadful jokes and I might draw you another terrible picture in Paint (see a few posts down for illumination (or don’t)). 

So I actually started this yesterday with a review Gwendoline Riley’s wonderful new novel Opposed Positions (what do you mean you haven’t bought it yet?  Go – go buy it now!  Wait, finish reading this blog post, then GO BUY IT!) so I’m one day up already.  And I know that’s cheating – what are you, the blogging police?  Wait, you are?  Sorry, sorry, I won’t do it again officer, I promise.

My rules for this little exercise:

1)      Each blog post must be between 400-500 words in length.  Long enough to give some depth, short enough to read while eating a sandwich.

2)      It must be in some way related to the creative process.  I’m a writer, so I’m best able to talk about writing (or reading) – in fact, it might be all I’m able to talk about.

3)      It will be one new post a day.  No cheating by posting two in one day.  I have to write even when I haven’t really got the time to (such as when I’m working a ten hour day stacking shelves to earn some poor amount of dough – yes, they pay me in flour and water.)

So there we go.  One month of blogging nonsense to look forward to.  I know, I’m excited too.  You’re right, there should be fireworks.  And a marching band.  And… oh sod it, see you tomorrow.

See, I said there should be fireworks - and lo, there are!

Gwendoline Riley - Opposed Positions (2012)

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 the emotional punch.  The relationships at the heart of the novel – between Aislinn and her mother and her manipulative father, and between Aislinn and the men in her life – thrum with subtext and devastate emotionally.  The whole work is considered, and really should elevate Riley into the big leagues of British letters – but I feel that its sheer intimacy, its desire to cling to the humdrum in her characters’ lives might see her side-lined in a way a novel about the rich might not.  This is a very British novel, and a very northern one too, and such qualities make it distinctive, like words coming from a different planet. 

Riley’s prose often sings, and there are moments of sheer dazzling brilliance here: the memories of a Morrissey concert that seem to be at once profound and yet not, the exchange of emails from her father that had me biting my fingers in tension.   Opposed Positions comes highly recommended.  It deserves to make her more than £5k.

But it on Amazon UK now.

Women's Writing

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 miles away from Oxfordshire, in Cardiff, with friends I went to university with. Our reunion. People I haven’t seen in years. Should be a good one, if a little full of competition to see who has achieved the most since leaving. That I’m unemployed, living in a static caravan with my Mum, attempting to break into an industry that probably doesn’t need any new writers won’t win me any awards… hmm, perhaps time to break out the lie that I work for MI5 and have just gotten back from secret operations. Might work, if it wasn’t for the fact that my name is atop this blog!

In other news, over on the Seren Books Facebook page (a publisher of Welsh fiction in English), they asked their fans to nominate their favourite female authors. I chimed in with the obvious Austen, Brontes etc and then said a few recent debut authors I’ve admired: Eleanor Thom, Gwendoline Riley, Nicola Keegan, Laura Barton. Then a very learned and beautiful friend sent me a message berating me for not giving Elizabeth Taylor a shout out – no, not the actress silly! – the author of Angel, amongst others, one of the classics of 1950s British literature (recommended by a French lady and once directed by a Frenchman, Francois Ozon, saying something I think about the stature of this author in France, and her lack of fame in her own country). I shall read it as soon as I track down my copy. It did make me think, still in the grip of that night’s hangover, who were the best women authors. I’d still stick with my original collection, but I must mention here:

Zora Neale Hurston

Toni Morrison

Margaret Atwood

Iris Murdoch

Margaret Drabble

Annie Proulx

Virginia Woolf

Ursula K. Le Guin

Women who have, in their own way, helped shape the fictional landscape. Atwood, I want to mention, inspired me massively with her novel Cat’s Eye,

when I read it still at school. It made me shift from fantasy fiction into serious literature. Readers, if you had to say, who are your favourite female authors?

Well, tomorrow I shall undoubtedly be hungover again and travelling by train, so I might not blog. If I don’t, do not take it as a insult, or as a sign of lack of interest. It just means I’m older than I was, and it takes longer for me to recover. But in the words of the immortal Arnold Schwarzenegger: I’ll be back.

Also, today is World Book Night! Help celebrate it. Read a book. Recommend a book. Love books.