Tag: flash fiction

Kicking monsters down the hall

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Improving my spoken word performance is an ongoing mission. There’s no substitute for actually reading live, and I have my first two events of the year booked in for February. First up is a support slot at Dreamfired on Valentine’s Day, and then I’m top of the bill (eek!) for Verbalise at the end of the month.

As well as actual readings, I’ve started looking for workshops. I attended a great Spotlight session in Lancaster with Brindley Hallam Dennis last year. He set the class the truly startling task of having other people read our work. My workshop partner went through my flash piece Marrow at a third of the pace I usually do, really savouring the words, and she made it three times better. That was an important lesson. I’ve also taken a huge amount from veteran performer David Hartley’s tips for spoken word.

I watch a lot of readings, both live and online, to see how other writers project and present their words. I’ve seen some great stuff, and some terrible stuff. This performance by Shane Koyczan is absolutely, completely, one of the very best. I’ve listened to it a dozen times, and it grows ever more wonderful.

Inky Little Fingers

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Okay. Steady breathing. I’ve finally sent Marrow off to the printers. It’s a nerve-wracking process, especially for a first time. I’ve gone with Inky Little Fingers on the recommendation of Flashtagger Fat Roland. If it goes wrong, I’m blaming him. 

Early in the process, Inky Little Fingers estimate the thickness of the spine from the number of pages involved. That measurement (in this case, 5.6mm) needs to be factored into the dimensions of the custom document created for the cover. Then, when you upload the cover art and contents, they generate an online proof for a final check. I was extremely relieved to see that my measurements were right, as I was certain I’d get everything horribly wrong and have to start again. Then I paid for 100 copies (which didn’t hurt too much, because I’ve been saving for this for a year) and submitted the final order. So there it is. Out of my hands, and into the production queue. The next step is a box of books turning up in a week or so, just in time for my spoken word support slot at February’s Dreamfired. I’m looking forward to reading from the book, rather than from the tatty shreds of paper I keep in my back pockets, all crisscrossed with notes and late amendments. I’m also terrified that I’ve missed something really obvious and the cover will be printed upside-down. Something abominable is bound to happen. 

A couple of people have asked if I’m going to have a launch for Marrow, but I don’t think so. It was never supposed to be a big deal – just something to sell at readings, and something to teach me new skills. I’ve learned big chunks of Photoshop and InDesign over the last few weeks. And it’s been fun to oversee the entire process, too. I’m already drafting the next collection, which I think I’m going to call Real Life, after a story about checkers.

Here’s the final version of the Marrow artwork, with front and back covers.

Marrow full cover low-res

 

Odobenus rosmarus

~ simonsylvester ~ 3 Comments

I found this picture of a walrus skull (odobenus rosmarus, according to my friend Ross) in the British Library archives, cut away the background, made it black and white, lifted it into InDesign, added the background colour, changed the transparency mode so the skull turned shades of blue, found and added the fonts, and exported it.

If you knew what you were doing with Photoshop, this would probably take you about four minutes. But I don’t know what I’m doing, and it took me all night.

ALL BLOODY NIGHT.

Anyway – this is a first draft of the cover of my flash fiction collection Marrow, which I’m going to self-publish in the next few weeks. I’d appreciate any thoughts, positive or negative, about the design. I want something lean, but is it too simple?

Marrow final cover PDF1 crop small

The Blog Tour – answers

~ simonsylvester ~ 4 Comments

I was delighted when Elizabeth Stott invited me to follow her on the blog tour. I’m a fan of Elizabeth’s writing – I bought her short story Touch Me With Your Cold, Hard Fingers from Nightjar Press last year, and was engrossed in the tense, almost existential body horror she conjured in a few short pages. A lot of Elizabeth’s work generates that sense of claustrophobia – another of her stories, Mrs Wetherby, delivers simmering sexual tension amongst uptight ex-pats in the setting of a baking Gulf. Have a read – highly recommended.

Many thanks to Elizabeth for the invitation – here are her answers to the blog tour questions – and here are mine:

What am I working on?

More than I can handle! Foremost is new novel Grisleymires. Whenever possible, I’m trying to guide my rare writing days towards this; it’s the story of a man who loses his memories, and the woman who goes to find them. It’s set in a huge swamp, which is great fun to write, and I’m really excited by the characters and how they’re evolving. The issue is finding time to write around my other projects. I’ve been working on a novella called The Year Of The Whale for about five years (though I haven’t touched it for the last two). That’s about a whale beached in Morecambe Bay. It’s about 20,000 words finished, with only another 5 or 10k to go, but novels are taking precedence. I’d love to finish it soon, though – my partner Monica wants to make a series of linocut prints to illustrate it, and I think that could look fantastic – something like Alex Garland’s novella The Coma.

I’m also putting the finishing touches to my first flash fiction collection, Marrow, and starting to draft the second, which might be called Real Life. Around all this, I’m periodically developing my future novels – I already have plans for another four or five after Grisleymires. I’d love to write more often, but I struggle for time around my teaching and film jobs.

The final thing I’m working on is the copy edit of my first novel, The Visitors. The editor’s notes are due back next week, and I’ll need to go through those slowly and carefully (and with flagons of cider, according to Ali Shaw).

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

This is a difficult question to answer, as I believe all writers differ from others – that’s part of the wonderful polyphony of writing. As soon as a writer begins to speak in the first words of their own voice, they’re different. Genres are useful for sifting and gathering – I use genre far more as a reader than a writer.

That said, I guess I’m moving increasingly towards low fantasy. That’s where I can best tell the stories I want to tell. If my stories are in any way unique, it’s because of the themes I work in and the juxtapositions I explore. When I walk through woodlands, I worry about velociraptors. When I visit London, I imagine minotaurs haunt the Underground, dodging Tube trains as they roam beneath the city. There are doppelgängers watching from rooftops, waiting to make the switch. There are secret societies of pigeon fanciers that keep the internet alive, and kelpies working for the local council. I try to infuse my work with the same sense of magic I find in the world. I think every writer tries to do that. I’m interested in memories, and walking, and the idea of threshold spaces. I’m interested in myths and especially in folk tales. I’m interested in the breakdown in gender and what it is to be alive. Ultimately, though, lots of writers are interested in those things. What makes my work different is that it’s mine.

Why do I write what I do?

Writing brings me comfort through escapism, I suppose. I’m an army brat – we didn’t settle in one place until I started secondary school in Inverness, and I’ve often struggled to feel at home. Books and stories have been havens for as long as I can remember, and it was probably only a matter of time before I tried to create my own. As for the actual topics I write about – that’s evolved wildly over the six or seven years that I’ve been writing fiction. I started with experimental, deliberately obscure literary pieces, aping the styles of challenging writers like Hubert Selby Jnr and William S. Burroughs. After finishing my first attempt at a novel, which took me to some personally unpleasant places, I started to rediscover my love of stories that took me on adventures, rather than stories that were flayed to the bone. I reread David Mitchell and Sarah Waters and Jasper Fforde and Neil Gaiman – and I realised that those were the worlds that sang loudest to me. And so I started again, near enough, finding new ways to tell my stories. The more I’ve worked in this vein, the more I’ve enjoyed my writing.

How does my writing process work?

My ideas tend to arrive as acorns – I stumble upon them everywhere, buried in mud or blown into gutters. Some of those ideas never escape my notebook – and others explode, branching and sprouting into completely new directions. I can’t explain how an idea arrives already fully formed, but my best stories are already bristling with life. They evolve as I write. I know I’m working with strong characters when they start doing things I don’t expect; when it becomes inevitable, no matter what I’ve planned, that they’re going to do something else.

Landscape and place are important to the way I work – I like those strong characters to be in landscapes that I care about, so the air fills my lungs and I can feel the ground beneath my feet. In good locations, the story is a drop of water, taking the most organic route to ground. Place is as important to me as character, plot and emotion – when I write, I try to keep all those strands of story entwined together. Writing is a holistic process, following disparate elements all at once. That’s one of the things that makes extensive redrafting so hard. It’s easy for the fabric of the story to become tangled. When my stories are in a muddle, so am I.

Because I have so little time to work, I tend to write in fierce bursts. If I’m on a roll, I can manage more than 10,000 words a day, but that’s rare. A good writing day is 2,000-3,000 words I’m really pleased with. When I’m not writing, I think about my work constantly. I’m often awake at night, staring into darkness, tracing my way through story strands, trying to work out where they run to, where they meet. More often than not, I fall asleep without working it out – but sometimes I have to turn the light back on and write them down.

I’m also an helpless tinkerer. I can’t let go of my stories, and I return to them obsessively – even years after they’ve been published – to develop the story and tweak the prose. My flash fiction collection Marrow is typical of this – of the 28 pieces, around half have been published elsewhere – but in preparing the collected manuscript, I’ve spent months compulsively redrafting them. Some no longer bear any relation to the original. I can’t help myself. That tweaking and revising comes into first drafts, too. My stories are probably one third writing, two-thirds editing.

Another of the keys to my workflow is reading aloud – as I write, I constantly read, lips moving, shaping the phrases to find the most organic flow, and then reworking it on the page. On the rare occasions I’ve been asked for writing advice, that’s my first suggestion. Nothing has done as much for developing my work as reading aloud. My second suggestion is to carry a notebook. You never know when those acorns will tumble from the sky.

***

So there we have it. If anyone’s still reading, these are some of the things that go into my work. I’m now passing the baton on to David Hartley and Iain Maloney, who’ll publish their blog tour answers on Monday 3rd February. In their own words, they’re a bit like this:

David Hartley is a story botherer and blog tickler based in Manchester whose debut collection of flash fiction ‘Threshold’ was published by Gumbo Press precisely a year ago. He is one fifth of the writing collective Flashtag and can be regularly seen haunting the open mic stages of the North West. He blogs at http://davidhartleywriter.blogspot.co.uk/ and tweets at @DHartleyWriter

Iain Maloney was born in Aberdeen, Scotland and now lives in Komaki, Japan. A widely published writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, his debut novel, First Time Solo, a story of World War 2 RAF pilots and jazz, will be published be Freight Books in June 2014. He blogs at http://iainmaloney.wordpress.com
Thanks for reading.

Blog tour

~ simonsylvester ~ 3 Comments

Just a quick post to say that I’ve been invited to join the blog tour by the excellent writer Elizabeth Stott. The idea is that writers post answers to the same four questions, then pass the baton to another writer. If you trace it back, there are dozens of fascinating responses around the idea of what it is to write. Here are Elizabeth’s answers, which are a tough act to follow.

I’m due to post my responses on Monday 27th January. These are the questions in question:

  1. What am I working on?
  2. How does my work differ from others in its genre?
  3. Why do I write what I do?
  4. How does my writing process work?

There’s quite a bit to get through in there, but I’ll try extremely hard not to be boring.

I’d also like to introduce David Hartley and Iain Maloney, the writers who’ll follow me on the blog tour. David is an intimidatingly prolific writer of scintillating flash fiction and short stories, and he’s working on his first novel, which is pretty cool. Already looking forward to what he has to say about writing.

David Hartley is a story botherer and blog tickler based in Manchester whose debut collection of flash fiction ‘Threshold’ was published by Gumbo Press precisely a year ago. He is one fifth of the writing collective Flashtag and can be regularly seen haunting the open mic stages of the North West. He blogs at http://davidhartleywriter.blogspot.co.uk/ and tweets at @DHartleyWriter

Iain is an old friend of mine. We’ve been reading each other’s work for seven or eight years, and I’ve learned a lot about writing from him. He has broad interests, from haiku to historical fiction, and I’m especially eager to see his thoughts on genre.

Iain Maloney was born in Aberdeen, Scotland and now lives in Komaki, Japan. A widely published writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, his debut novel, First Time Solo, a story of World War 2 RAF pilots and jazz, will be published be Freight Books in June 2014. He blogs at http://iainmaloney.wordpress.com

 

Resolve

~ simonsylvester ~ 2 Comments

I’ve always been a little dismissive of New Year’s Resolutions, because if I want to make a change in my life, that can happen any time I choose. That remains true, but there are things I want to do differently going into 2014. Post-Christmas binging is a natural place to draw a line and make a start, and I quite like the idea of formalising the changes I want to make. So here’s what’s going to happen this year:

Exercise

Because I don’t really do any, other than the odd Lakes walk and the exhaustive mania of teaching. I’ve already started walking the 2 miles to work – which I enjoy for the headspace as much as the activity – but I miss my bike and I miss my climbing. So I’m going to start cycling the long way to work and back. That’s only about 6 miles a day, so it’s not a great deal really, but it’s more than I’m doing at the moment. I’m also really keen to get back to my climbing. When I lived in London, I climbed four or five times a week. Now it’s four or five times a year. I’m going to start going for a few hours at least once a week. That, supplemented by some pull-ups at home and the cycling, should be steps in the right direction. I might even join Mon for the odd yoga, too.

Writing

The best I can hope for here is more of the same, I think. I crave more time to write, but the day jobs don’t allow it. In a good week, I get two days and two nights on my stories every week. Within that, I have specific aims for 2014. First and most important, I want Grisleymires finished in a year. This is a big ask, but it’s well planned, I’m excited by the story, and I can do it if I work hard. Research trip to the Fens in January!

Second, I want to have my flash fiction collection Marrow typeset and printed by the end of February. I’m reading at Spoken Word at the Brewery on Saturday 22nd, and I want it in my hands by then. This isn’t as big a deal as it seems; the stories are written and redrafted ten times over, and having typeset it once already as practice, I know glimmers of InDesign. With some guidance from knowledgeable friends and a few late nights, I think I can send the manuscript off to Inky Little Fingers in a few weeks. I’ve already saved most of the £225 it’ll cost to print 100 copies, so that’s not going to hurt my wallet too much.

Third, I want to keep on performing. 2013 was a turning point for me in reading my work aloud, and I want to push that as far as I can. Reading live brings an entirely new aspect to the way I write, and this is something I want to keep developing – pushing towards more theatrical performance where my confidence allows it.

Fourth, I want to submit my work to more competitions. I’ve never entered any of the big short story competitions before now, and I’m going to try and start this year. And I want to write new pieces, too, if the ideas keep coming to me. I’m not going to rehash old stories. I’ve pretty much drawn a line under my older work, but for two particular pieces: the excellent people at Comma Press have been considering my short story Every State In America for their delayed Reveal anthology for a couple of years. They’ll have first refusal on it for as long as it takes; being published by Comma would be an incredible honour. The other piece is called Art Is Long, Life Is Short, which is perhaps three years old and freshly redrafted for the BBC Radio 4 Opening Lines strand. That’s ready to go when the submission window opens in January.

Fifth, I want to finish Year Of The Whale, my long-running novella about a whale beached in Morecambe Bay. It’s been work in progress for three or four years, and it’s overdue. But writing resolutions one through four come first.

That’s lots of resolutions wrapped up in two strands, really. Writing and exercise. I’m only going to buy the time for everything else if I start saying no to low-paid film jobs, so I’m not doing any freebies/cheapies this year unless they have a clear benefit further down the line. I’m also going to try and rein in my irrational compulsion to reply to emails RIGHT THIS SECOND. I just don’t have the time. Most of the email I receive can probably wait until I’m ready. The point of all of this is to spend more quality time with Mon and Dora. Unless deadlines get in the way for either of us, we’re generally good at keeping weekends as family time, and I want that set in stone. There are a host of other things I can do towards this – less time online, for a start – and turning off the computer on free evenings. I want to read more, too.

I guess I’ve picked out goals, rather than resolutions, but it’s all the same in the end. I haven’t kept a blog to monitor resolutions before; I’m curious to see to whether writing about my success or lack thereof will impact on my success or lack thereof. Gazing into the void and so on.

2013 was a great year in many ways. Here’s to 2014, people. Be safe, be happy. Here’s a 1921 picture of a cat and a goblin in a tree:

goblin

2013 and all that

~ simonsylvester ~ 1 Comment

Obviously, the end of every year gives pause for reflection. For me, this used to manifest itself in a range of Top Tens – films, albums, books, gigs – but these days I don’t really do enough of any of those things to justify it. So here’s my combined Top Ten of 2013 instead. They’re not in order.

1. Getting a book deal with Quercus

Securing a publishing deal with the wonderful Quercus Books has been one of the most amazing things to ever happen to me. I’m still waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under my feet, but until they do, I’ll keep enjoying every moment of this exhilarating, terrifying, extraordinary rollercoaster. I feel bowled over by the support for my writing, even as I feel a massive weight of pressure to deliver. I started the year with a manuscript called Riptide Heart; I finished with a rigorous redraft, now called The Visitors. Working with Quercus editor Jane Wood has made my writing tighter and my story much stronger. It has also given me a real hunger to push on with my work – I now have half-a-dozen novel ideas clamouring for my time.

This wouldn’t have happened without the hard work of my awesome agent, Sue Armstrong at Conville & Walsh, and the support of my amazing partner Monica. That brings me to the second thing on the list:

2. New work from Monica Metsers

While she was pregnant, and in the first year of Dora’s life, Mon took time away from her painting. 2013 was the year she really started again, and the results have been amazing. She has a solo show in London next year, and as well as a few smaller paintings and a range of drawings, she’s made these two stunning large-scale paintings, which I think are amongst the best work she’s ever done:

BATALLA DE LOS GIGANTES                                                          BALLENA Y GEISHA

BATALLA DE LOS GIGANTES   ballena y geisha

2013 also marked our five-year anniversary – it’s been a blast.

3. Performing live

I’ve never been good at public reading, and this year I set myself the challenge of improving. I went on to read my work twice at Spotlight in Lancaster, once at Kendal’s Spoken Word, once (performing from memory) at Dreamfired in Brigsteer, and once at the Flashtag 2013 writing competition in Manchester, where I won second place. My confidence grew with each reading, though I still feel I’ve a way to go.

I also attended a spoken word workshop run by the excellent Brindley Hallam Dennis. One of the activities he set has changed everything: he had other members of the workshop read our stories. The lady who read my flash piece ‘Marrow’ performed it at a third of the pace I do. She relished every word, and it was three times better as a result. I haven’t performed since then, but I’m going to practice reading with that sort of gusto at the next opportunity. I’m booked in for a 20-minute slot at Spoken Word in February, and I’d like another couple of events under my belt by then. My goal has evolved a little, too: what I’m aiming for now is something closer to outright performance than simply reading. That will come with confidence, and confidence will come from practice.

4. Seven Seals – Plan of Salvation

After a whopping 18 months, I finally finished making this music video for amazing psychedelic synth punks Seven Seals. They’re an extraordinary band, and it was an honour to be involved. They’re working on new material, which will hopefully be available in 2014 for their ten-year anniversary gigs.

 

5. Amy Hempel – The Dog of the Marriage

Quite simply, the finest collection of short stories I’ve ever read. Hempel’s writing is so sensitive, so honest, that it infuses her stories with devastating grace. Unmissable.

6. Les Revenants

This French drama is the best thing I’ve seen on television in years, remarkable for its intrigue, restraint and power. It delivers on every level, exploring an extraordinary narrative without needless exposition to unravel the mysteries of the Returned, all of whom are troubled in different but connected ways. The locations and cinematography are stunning, while the soundtrack by Mogwai is my album of the year. There’s a startlingly surreal lucidity to the conclusion, and I think they could have left it there; but I’m delighted to see a second series in the works. Here’s the trailer for season one:

In TV terms, an honorable mention also goes to Game Of Thrones. Tyrion Lannister might be the finest character ever committed to screen, and the Red Wedding haunts me even now.

7. Success for friends

It’s been a good year for many of my friends and peers, too. Iain Maloney landed an agent and a book deal with Freight, Kirstin Innes found an agent, Anneliese Mackintosh got a book deal, Kirsty Logan landed a book deal and won everything in the world. Friends Andy and Gemma had a baby boy called Miles, and Ali and Iona had a little girl called Inka. There have been a lot of richly deserved congratulations this year. Good work, team.

8. Cats

Yup. Two of them. I wasn’t sure, at first, but then we met these two cats in the Wainwright Animal Rescue Centre, and it was an easy decision. They came to us with the names Remus and Teddy, which we’ve kept. They’re brothers, about three years old, and half-Persian. They’ve been an amazing addition to our house. They are incredibly relaxed and friendly, and they actively seek our company. That’s especially welcome when I’m having a writing day alone at home.

1174754_10153244876455551_211086219_n

9. Holiday in France

We were overdue a break, and this fortnight in France was exactly what we needed. We camped in half-a-dozen places, the best of which was Green Venice, a vast network of canals, ditches and overgrown waterways, crawling with vines and willows, alive with dragonflies and katydids. It was an extraordinary landscape. I read more in that fortnight than I’d managed in four months. Best of all, the holiday gave me enough mental space to plan my next novel, which will be called Grisleymires. That’s now blocked out on Scrivener, waiting for my next writing day.

10. Another year with Dora.

In their first year, babies are basically little puddings. Awesome little puddings, but puddings nonetheless. In their second year, they gather the basic tools to discover the world. And in year three, that toolkit expands exponentially; physically, vocally, intellectually and emotionally. Going through that with Dora has been nothing short of a joy. Seeing the world through her eyes has made me reevaluate so many things for myself. Her conversations leave me in stitches, and everything about her makes me smile. And she hasn’t been to A&E this year, which I consider something of a triumph. Though there’s still a week of 2013 left.

IMG_4758

So that’s my Top Ten. It’s been a good year, and 2014 is alive with possibilities. I might even pop some resolutions up in a few days.

Flash fiction challenge: Graffiti

~ simonsylvester ~ 4 Comments

Okay, folks. Here’s round three of the writing challenge I’m working on with performance poet Simon Hart, also known in certain Mafia circles as BigCharlie Poet. This is how it goes: we take it in turns to choose a picture, both of us write a response around it, and we post the results up here. Round one was Cathedrals. Round two was Libraries. For round three, it was my turn to pick the image, and I opted for this doozy from my Pinterest short story board:

20131220-223914.jpg

Although I had some inklings, I didn’t entirely know where to go with this at first. I was also embroiled in a marathon redraft of The Visitors, and so the challenge slid by the wayside a bit. Simon was finished in two days, the swine. Anyway, when I had a chance to work on it properly, the ideas came fairly quickly. My first story was well over a thousand words long and barely halfway in when I decided to put it on ice. It’s going to be a good piece, when I’ve time to finish it, but it’s not right for this. My second attempt was finished in a single session, plus a few tweaks the following day. As with my Libraries story, this feels like it could be the start of something much bigger; since finishing it, I’ve been brewing on a full novel about the characters and their situation, and I have some exciting ideas starting to spark. I think I’ll be taking it a lot further in the future.

It’s interesting, as well, that Simon and I had fairly similar responses to the picture. Our work in the first two challenges was quite diverse; I don’t know whether this image is more specific, and therefore limiting, or whether it actually offers more themes, and we simply happened to choose the same one.

Here’s what Simon has to say about the picture:

“What a difference an image makes! Last time out I (we) struggled a bit under the weight of a well-mined seam of creation for us with my choice of a library pic… I’m glad to say that the responsibility of the choice for this challenge came from Mr Sylvester, and, from my perspective at least, I think he should pick them all! To say that the creation of this piece contrasts with the last process would be underselling it somewhat… I also know that despite the complexity of trying to describe this picture to an audience, I really want to perform this.

This poem came about very quickly and with a very clear idea of what I wanted straight away, and I think it has delivered what I wanted from it. Seeing the image for the first time, I was struck how old monsters are never really old monsters, and they always find their way back somehow. They may change their locale and era, but they continue on…”

With that said, here’s Simon Hart’s response to the picture:

Urban Myth
by BigCharlie Poet

I started my life as a hasty scrawl
Daubed in white paint on a houses side wall
An innocuous way for me to be born
Not really planned, just hurriedly drawn
Against the time constraints of another coming dawn,
The sun creeping almost afraid of my form
And boy did I grow!
There was no way that they could ever know
What i would become, the strength i would show
And each feed of paint gave me a new glow
Though my home was a wall, i still reached for the sky
Never once did i ask for the reason why
I became a creature that makes young kids cry
Which the ancient greeks locked in a maze to die
That people turn their heads away hurts, i won’t lie…
But soon i was so big that single cans of paint didn’t suffice
When you’re twenty feet high, with the head of a bull, who do you turn to for advice?
I couldn’t exactly stroll into a restaurant and say “give me whatever’s nice”
So i had to come up with a solution of my own making
And because i couldn’t do any great british baking
I looked around and saw souls, ready for the taking…
I mean, it’s not as if you lot even notice they’re missing
You still stumble through each day like you’re barely living
Not looking away from what your tv is giving
So now, when you try to open your mind
And use your soul for guidance, you suddenly find
Yourself empty, and you don’t know the reason
But you convince yourself it’s because you watched another season
Of “I’m a Celebrity, get me out of here!”
Or you drowned your brain cells in far too much beer
That i am the culprit will never be clear…
So thank you for giving me what i really need
A simple, quick and nourishing feed
But i won’t let myself give in to my greed
I’ll satisfy myself with the odd soul waiting for a bus
The business professional in too much of a rush
The guy who’s become a 3pm lush…
Just enough to keep me going
After all, this wall doesn’t leave much room for me growing…

…and here’s my response:

Vanishings
by Simon Sylvester

We assembled at dusk and waited, scanning the skyline, binoculars flitting between the sunset buildings. Half the squadron wore night vision goggles, for all the good they’d do. It was only my third year with the division, and I was already the oldest. The kids were tense, but they struggled with all-night shifts. By two in the morning, a couple of them had dozed off. Dew glistened on their spray suits.

“Contact! Contact!”

As the radio crackled into life, slumbering officers stumbled to their feet. I checked the chamber on my gun. It was clean.

“Where are they, Jenkins?”

My voice was calmer than I felt.

“Corner of Gresham and Moorgate.”

I could hear her panic.

“Stay calm, Jenkins. We’re on our way n-.”

Even as I spoke, her scream clattered in my earpiece.

I gestured to the others. Grim-faced, we lined up and marched out, trooping along King William Street at a jog. At Bank, I gestured for the squad to slow and break formation. They fanned out, torches sweeping beams of light across the deserted road. I took point, and we stepped in silence through the Old Town.

Halfway along Prince’s Street, prickles ran down my spine. The feeling turned my bones to ice, but I knew better than to ignore it. That feeling had kept me alive for three years. I raised my fist, signalled to freeze. The squad halted at once. Nothing moved but sheets of paper, cartwheeling through the night.

On the wall ahead was a perfect, life-sized painting of Jenkins, caught mid-scream. I grimaced. She’d only been in the division three weeks. Some animal instinct made me raise my torch and scan the buildings above. The cone of light crawled up the wall into darkness.

I peered into the gloom at the edge of the light.

The top third of the building was graffitied with a gigantic white minotaur. It loomed above the street, unmoving, and for a heartbeat, I thought it was already dead. But then the minotaur grinned, and a fist clenched in my guts. Behind me, Stevenson shrieked and loosed a burst of fixative. The minotaur was too quick for him, melting back into the bricks even as the web of glue spattered across the wall. The beast darted around the corner of the building, pouring across the stone, the molecules of paint sliding from brick to brick. Splashes of fixative showered the empty wall.

“Hold your fire!” I bellowed.

The squad gathered closer together. In my earpiece, someone was hyperventilating.

“Shit! Jenkins has gone west.”

“He’s big. He’s big, sir-”

“I’ve seen worse, son. Be calm. Keep your wits about you. He’s somewhere close.”

There was another yell behind me. I spun round to see the minotaur reach out of the building, pour onto the pavement and swing his vast arm across the road, knocking half my squad to their knees. Redmayne lay closest to him. In two dimensions, his paint poured across the tarmac, wrapping around her ankle. She screamed and kicked, but the paint held fast. The minotaur yanked her to the ground, and began hauling her towards the wall. The rest of the squad were firing indiscriminately. Wherever splashes of the fixative caught the minotaur, fragments of paint were trapped within the brick, but he was big enough to shrug them off, leaving patches of himself behind. Redmayne was almost at the wall when I found a clear shot. I raised my gun, aimed and fired off half a tank. The glue showered across the beast in a net of spray, pasting his entire head. He juddered to a halt, mouth fixed in a permanent, silent roar. His painted hands continued to sweep across the bricks, scrabbling for purchase, but his head was stuck fast. One by one, my squad found targets, and soon every part of the monster was stuck to the wall. Redmayne scrambled free, sobbing, and backed into a knot of her comrades. We gathered together and looked up at the beast.

He was easily four storeys tall, made with gallons and gallons of paint. His creator had been a talented artist. Even fixed fast to the wall, the minotaur wriggled with life. His horns came to wicked points, and despite the fixative now coating his body, veins and muscles still pulsed on the brickwork. He must have taken weeks to make, back in the day. In a sense, he was even beautiful.

It was hard to remember a time before the paintings came to life.

The Cleaners arrived within the hour, all dead-eyed and paint-smeared with their mops and detergents. We watched them scrub the minotaur from the building, watched him dissolve into suds and drip into the sewers. Then they washed Jenkins from the wall, too. I didn’t watch that part. When they were done, we walked back to the depot. The new trainees looked shellshocked. The older squaddies looked harder, meaner. Redmayne wasn’t talking. She was one of my best officers, but this would be her ticket out. Poor Jenkins hadn’t even made it this far.

Every step of the way, ghosts watched us from the walls. The Cleaners worked hard, but every day, new faces stared out from the brick. And no matter how hard they worked, they couldn’t wash the faces from my nightmares.

 

A century of…

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

I realised, after posting this video about a ballerina dancing on butcher knives, that I’d hit a hundred posts on the blog. A century is still pretty arbitrary, really, but it’s as good a place as any to stop and think about why I keep a blog.

I started writing the blog six months ago to track the progress of my novel. The book was called Riptide Heart, back then. It’s now called The Visitors, and it will be published by Quercus Books in 2014. All that has happened in the lifetime of this blog. I’ve tracked my highs and lows and uncertainties throughout the publication process, from finding an agent (a year ago) to signing the contract (last week).

As well as the novel, I’ve written a lot about reading my work live, and the struggles I’ve had with my nerves. Each of my various readings has been painfully revisited, but that return has helped me filter and understand the experience. I’ve also explored my decision to gather my flash fiction into a collection, which is called Marrow, and will almost certainly be self-published, and teaching myself InDesign to lay it out professionally. (More on this soon! As I approach the end of my redraft and clear my backlog of film jobs, I should have the time and space to push ahead and get this wrapped up and printed.) I’ve posted published and unpublished flash fictions, and talked about my writing processes. I’ve written about my film work, and catalogued some of the things that I find inspiring or magical. I’ve posted galleries of the threshold spaces I’m so obsessed with.

All in all, then, my blog has ranged far wider than I ever thought it would. More than anything else, I’ve been surprised at how personally I’ve addressed some of these subjects. When I started, I expected the blog to be fairly analytical, for want of a better word; dry, professional. But in struggling with my live performance readings, and in wrangling my novel redraft, I’ve found myself at times alarmingly open about how I feel about my work. I like that the process of writing has taken me in that direction quite organically.

One of the joys of using WordPress is browsing through the stats, which tell me what brings people to the blog, what they look at, and often where they come from. I’ve had visitors from as far afield as Mozambique and Mongolia, searching for everything from devil dogs to gay porn. (Hopefully not everyone will be as disappointed as those two internauts.) I’ve had a week without any views, then hundreds of visitors the day Neil Gaiman retweeted this post about libraries. Have a look at this screen grab and see if you can guess which day that was:

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The two things that bring people to the blog most often are on the periphery of my interests; this post about a nursery rhyme and this post about a WW2 fighter pilot preserved in a peatbog. People have searched for Bancree, which is the fictional Scottish island I created for The Visitors, and for novelist friends like Iain Maloney and Ali Shaw. Lots of people come to the blog looking for information about my agent, Sue Armstrong at Conville & Walsh, and my publisher, Jane Wood at Quercus.

More than anything else, though, the blog is for me. It’s how I filter my ideas and monitor what I’m doing. Writing about my life is what I need to live my life.