Battleship Island

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Here’s another gallery of awesome threshold spaces – thanks to Iain Maloney for pointing this one out to me. This is Hashima Island in Japan, also known as Battleship Island. It was used as a base for extracting and processing coal from the sea bed, and for housing the miners. The Mitsubishi corporation owned the island for almost a century, but the mines became unprofitable as coal was increasingly superseded by petroleum. Mitsubishi abandoned the place in 1974. Since then, the concrete has crumbled, the balconies have fallen from the buildings and plants have erupted in the courtyards. It’s an astonishing, ghostly space.

The sea will take its own.

Some strange alignment of the stars

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I’ve booked an open mic slot at Lancaster’s Spotlight club next week. Mon’s driving, so I can even have a couple of ales. Happy days.

I haven’t totally settled on what to read yet, but I’ll probably try a new story from my flash fiction collection-in-progress, Marrow. There’s one about home cooking that I’d like to run past an audience, and another about guinea pigs that needs a first outing. I won’t have time to read both, but I’ll read one and save the other for when I try – again – to attend the Brewery’s open mic in August.

It really shouldn’t be so hard to make it to the Brewery. It’s one of my favourite pubs in Kendal, and it’s where we watch movies. I probably go a few times a month, but I haven’t managed to read at the open mic night for three years. Probably no coincidence that Dora is two and a half, come to think of it. Some strange alignment of the stars always seems to prevent me attending – something always comes up that means I can’t go. I’m determined to make it down at some point in the next few months, as reading live is becoming so much more important  to me, and I want the practice.

Three years ago, before the fates decided I couldn’t go back, I read a short story about a WWII fighter pilot called ‘The Matador’. It was my first ever open mic. I was sick with nerves, but it went quite well, and it gave me the confidence to go on and read in Edinburgh and Glasgow for Words per Minute, Cargo Publishing and Gutter. I don’t think I’ll ever be totally secure in my public reading, but I’m improving all the time, and I’m enjoying it more with each performance.

All these open mics are building up to October, where I’ve landed a support slot for one of the Dreamfired story nights in Brigsteer. I’m reading in support of Emily Parrish and her retelling of the Loki myth. It should be an amazing night. To get into the storytelling spirit, I’ve decided to drop the notes and perform my work from memory. The thought makes me a little nauseous, even four months distant, but I think it’ll be a good thing to do. I’ll be reading ‘Gumbo’, which was published in the first issue of Fractured West. It’s one of my favourite stories, and fun to read aloud… though I doubt it’ll feel very funny when I’m performing without notes to an audience.

Back to Lancaster and the Spotlight Club. It’s a great line-up: amongst others, poets Trev Meaney and Nick O’Neill are headlining, and there’s music from experimental ethnomusicologist Deep Cabaret. Hopefully old friend, talented multi-instrumentalist, New Hawk and haikuist Rich Turner is coming along for a beer, too. He’s a good friend of ours, but we haven’t seen him in a year, because he has an amazing daughter, and we have an amazing daughter, and all children are black holes for time.

Anyway, it’s going to be a fantastic night. If you want to hear me read a story about guinea pigs and then crumple like a cheap suit, head down to the Storey Institute in Lancaster from 8pm on Friday 19th. See you there. Buy me a beer.

Labour

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Physical work is a counterpart to writing. I wrote my first novel while working in a furniture workshop; I wrote dozens of short stories, and started Riptide, while making yurts for a carpenter.

As a teacher, my life is at once more manic and more sedentary, but my ongoing house restoration has provided frequent and occasionally brutal reminders of what it is to work with my hands. This weekend, it was the turn of the garden. Along with my dad and my father-in-law, I put up a fence, laid a patio, cut down two trees and cleared a ton of rubble. It’s been an exhausting, sweltering few days, and my hands and arms are riddled with scratches and grazes and splinters, but that seems a fair price to pay for the achievement.

Physical labour is good for my brain. It allows me to switch off, for a while, through either the concentration or monotony of the task, and the blank space it leaves allows the formation of thoughts. Climbing does the same trick. About halfway through the fencing, I had a mini-brainwave about my new novel. Two sequences quietly switched places, and the narrative opened up a little more. I’m coming closer to blocking out the plot all the time, just making notes and letting it simmer in the background. Even if my hands are cut to shreds, it’s healthy to remember how to use them for more than typing.

The Lion-tamer’s Daughter

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Back from a grand night at the Dentdale Beer & Music Festival, unpacked with a mild hangover, wrote a new short story about a lion tamer and completely rewrote an old story about a boy who climbs lampposts, then cut both stories into my flash fiction collection ‘Marrow’… which leaves me just about ready for a bruising week of marking, course planning, meetings, filming, editing and building a fence. See you on the other side. Hopefully.

To Do

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I haven’t been writing very much lately. I’ve been too busy with real life, scrapping my way through end-of-year marking for my film students and working on videos for Kendal College and Cumbria Wildlife Trust. I’ve still some way to go, and there’s plenty more to do – my Dad’s popping up to help me build a fence, and I need to build a log store. But hopefully the end is in sight. Most important, I should be getting Jane‘s notes for Riptide in the next few weeks, and then I need to work my way through that final draft.

For a bit of a change, I’ve been using the odd evening to (slowly) teach myself the basics of InDesign, trying to put together a booklet of my flash fiction. It’s no big deal – twenty-five stories between 50 and 500 words, provisionally entitled ‘Marrow’. I’ve also booked in my next two readings – first for the Spotlight open mic in Lancaster in July, and then as a support slot for Dreamfired in Brigsteer in October. And in the background, I’m reading and researching towards my next novel; quietly brewing on the story, blocking out the plot. I still have some narrative strands to tidy up, though I know where the book will finish emotionally.

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For the moment: research. I wrote about rediscovering P.V. Glob’s The Bog People a few months ago, and I’ve finally had a chance to actually read the thing. For a 1970s archaeological review – even one designed for jumblies – it’s surprisingly well-written. Some of the bog bodies have held astonishing secrets in their graves. One poor woman was staked down with crooks and buried alive. A man was stabbed through the heart, smashed on the head and strangled. It’s all great stuff for the novel, generating context and building ideas. By happy coincidence, one of the jobs I’m doing for Cumbria Wildlife Trust is on wetland restoration, so I’ve been spending some time ankle deep in peatland. I need some more books, and I’d like to take trips to fen country at some point.

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It’s a thrilling stage, all the researching and blocking and plotting, preparing the ground before the hard work starts. I learned a lot from writing Riptide, and I’m excited to start work on a new book. Just need to clear away the hundred other things on my To Do list, first.

It hasn’t been all work. Friends Steve and Clare took us to Chester Zoo yesterday. We went straight to the orangutans, and spent a gloriously peaceful 20 minutes with them before a dozen school trips caught us up. Dora especially loved the bat enclosure, a vast warehouse where the bats swoop and skitter in artificial night. This morning we’re off to Dentdale Music & Beer festival, too. I’m going to take my story dice and drink ale.

Bookstores: may cause heartache

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While in Grasmere, we made the mistake of going into Sam Read‘s bookstore. This was a mistake because I wanted to buy everything. Sam Read is one of those achingly wonderful bookshops with books packed into every corner, stuffed into racks and alcoves, and stacked loose above the rows on the shelves. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have strayed beyond the fiction section in any bookstore, but my daughter Dora loves books (current favourite: Six Dinner Sid) and being read to, so I’ve started looking at the children’s section as well. And oh, my; children’s books are simply sumptuous. The quality of illustration and storytelling is just stunning – browsing those shelves was like a treasure chest of my own childhood, a feast of imagination, all dragons and goblins and tunnels and talking dogs. I could have stayed all day to drink in the artwork alone.

I buy almost all my books from charity shops, because I can rarely afford them new. A well-made, well-written book is a real treat for me. I want to hug them close and read them carefully and show them to friends. The one which really stole my heart was A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd. I’ve only discovered Patrick Ness quite recently, having been blown away by The Knife Of Never Letting Go (I’ll race through the rest of the Chaos Walking trilogy once I’ve tracked down the second part – the third book already sits on my shelves, waiting…). I love his writing – and he quoted on the jacket of Ali Shaw‘s Girl With Glass Feet, so he knows what he’s talking about.

The illustrated version of A Monster Calls is heart-stoppingly beautiful. Just look at this work by Jim Kay:

Illustration from A Monster Calls

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I covet this book more than I’ve coveted any book for years – but I didn’t buy it. I bought Cumbrian Folk Tales by Grasmere legend and master storyteller Taffy Thomas. I could only afford one book, and Taffy’s was the reason we’d gone into Sam Read’s in the first place. I’m truly delighted I bought Cumbrian Folk Tales, and I’m looking forward to immersing myself in Taffy’s take on local mythology, but I walked away from A Monster Calls with unbearable reluctance. Still – it’s my birthday in July. Fingers crossed.

Bookstores should carry warnings: may cause heartache…