news: theme tune for “Last Exit to Sodford” novel

I’ve recorded a theme tune for my novel “Last Exit to Sodford”. (The plan is to publish the book with a free download of this and other tracks.) I was aiming for that ‘dreary wet Monday’ feeling, so you could call it a success …

news: stories published in Lightship anthology

Two of my short stories have just been published in the Lightship Anthology as runners-up in the International Prize Winners 2013 edition.

news: quadruple-longlisted for Fish Flash Fiction Prize

Four stories of mine have been longlisted for this year’s Fish Flash Fiction Prize.

news: shortlisted for Fish Prize

A short story of mine – ‘Stockholm’ – has been shortlisted for this year’s Fish Prize, which is worth €3,000 to the winner. Another two of my stories also made the longlist.

spoken word piece: ‘White Van Man’

“White Van Man”
(Kipling’s “If” reworked)

news: ‘Turning Japanese’ is one to watch

My second novel – ‘Turning Japanese’ – has been highlighted as one to watch by HarperCollins on their Authonomy literary site.

microfiction: ‘Another Laura’

It wasn’t a chasm, or even a fog, that separated her from her past, Laura reflected on the train journey to the reunion. It was something more substantial, though somehow less tangible. Angela would no doubt find a word for it when they met. She would probably feel the same.

Twenty-five years ago they had studied English together, last seeing one another the day they’d collected their degree results. And what had become of her since then she had barely ever wondered. Life had taken over, its mazy river sweeping her seaward, and she’d come ashore another person. Career, husband, children and divorce divided her now from her university days … Memory was a curious thing, she felt. Without it you were almost nothing, yet with it you might be tethered to a self that was no longer you … A few moments stood clear in the mind, like stills from an old movie, but the rest had receded into a dim, shuttered corner labelled ‘Someone Else’. Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina remained more part of Laura than the ‘her’ of 1983, whom she could only view as some sort of emigrated cousin … Was that the function of memory – the function, at least, of its loss: to distance you from former selves? Perhaps rebirth was impossible otherwise.

How many ‘hers’ had there been? she wondered. How many Lauras?

The carriage rattled from side to side as it pulled into the station. Angela was waiting on the platform, reliable as ever. Familiar blue eyes penetrated Laura’s – her ‘psychic stare’, they used to call it. The smile was genuine.

“You haven’t changed a bit, girl.”

Laura gazed back at her, adrift for a moment. She pictured herself swimming naked up a stream, stopping here and there to collect lost mementoes … a seashell her daughter had found on a beach in Cyprus … a fountain pen from her first job … cufflinks she’d once given her husband … the pendant she’d worn – and lost – the first night she drank wine … one of her son’s milk teeth … a plastic fairy she had treasured as a child … her mother’s butterfly hair-grip …

“Is there a wine bar nearby?” she asked.

“Just around the corner,” said Angela.

“Do they serve cocktails?”

“Why?” Angela seemed puzzled.

Laura smiled. “I feel like me again.”

How should we define a novella?

Back in 2007, the Booker Prize panel created a storm in a literary teacup by shortlisting Ian McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach’. It was a decision deemed controversial in critical circles, with the Irish Independent regarding the book as “barely even a novella” and “in some ways more a long short story” … all of which begs the question, what is a novella?

The word itself comes to us via Italian, in which it means ‘a piece of news’. ‘Novel’ has the same derivation, but ‘novella’ in English has come to imply something less substantial. Yet how do we define literary substance? In what way is a novella less substantial than a novel? – in its length, its content, its scope? … Various word counts are talked about as both maximums for a novella and minimums for a novel; and if there were such a thing as a concensus on the matter, it might put the limit for a novella at 40,000 or 50,000 words, with anything beyond that qualifying as a novel. But given that there is little concensus, we perhaps need to look for a different definition.

It seems to me that a novella is not only traditionally shorter than a novel but also simpler in form. It will still have the detail, power and depth of character that is absent, for example, from a short story. Indeed it may be more intense than a novel – but not, I would argue, because of its relative brevity; rather due to another crucial factor: a lack of subplot. A novella is inherently more focused because its plot is uncluttered. It is a single arc of narrative, building to an emotional crescendo, without losing track of the tale’s essence amid unnecessary meanderings … which is surely what makes stories such as ‘Of Mice and Men’ and ‘On Chesil Beach’ so affecting.

I for one would take a random half dozen novellas in exchange for my copy of Ulysses any day of the week. And who knows, in this time-conscious age, our ever-decreasing attention spans may well prompt a resurgence among writers in this compact but meaningful form. I certainly hope so. In the meantime, you may like to check out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_novellas.

Footnote: Ian McEwan once revealed in a Radio 4 interview that he had kept some pebbles from Chesil Beach on his writing desk whilst working on his classic novella. The local borough council’s response was to threaten him with a fine of £2000. Happily, the pebbles have since been returned – put back in their place, one might say. I can only hope that the same is true of the council.

Who is Benjaman Kyle?

Answer: nobody knows, not even the man himself.

It is a curious case. A man is found naked and unconscious in a waste disposal area behind a fast food restaurant – in Georgia, USA, on the 31st of August 2004 – and more than five years down the line his identity remains unknown. To this day he recalls nothing of how he came to be there, and very little about himself at all. His last specific memories (which are rather fractured) date from twenty-five years before he was found battered, blinded, sunburned and ant-bitten behind a roadside Burger King (‘BK’) – hence the adopted name ‘Benjaman Kyle’ (he is confident at least that his first name is Benjaman, complete with its peculiar twist of spelling). Having been treated by doctors and recovered his eyesight, he looks like just a regular guy. He is reportedly hardworking and of above average intelligence. And he’s almost certainly not faking his amnesia: he has made TV appeals for help to discover his identity, undergone fingerprint and DNA tests, and given alien abduction theorists cause for pause: where on earth (or otherwise) has he been for the last quarter of a century?

Searches of missing persons’ databases, criminal records et al have failed to yield a result. And with The System being what it is, not knowing his his social security number, BK is unable to gain official employment. He survives on the kindness of benefactors. But what does he remember? … That he hails from Colorado; that he had brothers; some details of the restaurant business; and, rather oddly, that he is ten years older than Michael Jackson – which would make his date of birth the 29th of August 1948, putting his fifty-sixth birthday as a likely day (or night) for whatever befell him. Was it simply a case of one beer too many? … We, and he, may never know.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjaman_Kyle for more; but be warned: you may become obsessive.

A new turn of phrase?

Has anybody noticed how all of a sudden everybody’s talking in the present continuous tense? … Nowadays it seems we’re much more likely to hear someone say, “I’m really loving Mad Men on BBC2 at the moment”  than, “I absolutely love watching Mad Men” or, “I think Mad Men’s fab” … Not a big deal, but I wonder (I’m wondering) if this is a consequence of the ubiquitous Facebook, where users are encouraged to key in what they’re currently up to, prefixed by the word ‘is’. For example, “So-and-so is picking his nose and drinking sauvignon blanc atm” – when surely what so-and-so is actually doing at the moment is typing? … I certainly am.