Lit crit of the week, #2

"Oh, fuck, not another elf!"
(J.R.R. Tolkein's friend Hugo Dyson, while Tolkein was reading him the final instalment of The Lord of The Rings)

An Apology

It's no life for a book, sitting under the legs of my table to bring it to an ergonomic height. Apologies to Nick Hornby, John O'Farrell, Michael Bracewell,Wang Shuo, Bernhard Schlink, and several others. I actually enjoyed several of these books, notwithstanding the humiliating position I placed them in afterwards. I am not a barbarian. In general, I care for books. I carefully protect them from the other contents in my bag. I was brought up to abhor people who put books down spread open at the page with the spine upwards.

I have a proper desk now. These books have been released from their burden. Some have already reached the charity shop in Spitalfields, where they will now begin new lives, and find appreciative owners with well-dusted bookshelves.

Fringe benefits

Once in a while, this makes a nice change. Someone else writes the story; I merely perform it, and drink in the wild applause slight tittering from the second row. As usual, my palsied hands shake the script in front of me, visually undermining the confidence I think I'm projecting via the microphone. The London Short Fiction Award took place recently, culminating in rather enjoyable readings of all the shortlisted entries in the West End last Wednesday, and some kind of ceremony for the winners of this and other London Fringe events to come on the 26th. I was proud to take part, if only as a stand in reader for my friend Sarah, and her short story The Biscuit Man - by the time I was performing it, I'd more or less forgotten I hadn't written it myself. I guess this is what happens when I'm in a competitive frame of mind.

But, there is a lesson in this somewhere. The first rule of story competitions should be, you do not discuss the judging mechanism. Somehow it doesn't reassure me know that the ultimate winner was decided on a whim in the interval of the event, after only the shortlisted readers from the first half of the alphabet had read their work; nor that the published scores before the event reveal the judges to be of remarkably dissimilar mind to each other; nor that two judges pointed out that fiction wasn't really their area as such, but they did read it (oh good!); nor that the other judge cheerfully pointed out he'd had four drinks with his agent before he'd even arrived. Maybe it would be better just to keep the whole process mysterious?

But god it was worth it, to see how alarmed the judges looked, when a microphone was thrust in front of them...

The Illustrated Frigg

I should hastily add that despite your natural fears, there is no content here that would offend Victorian sensibilities. As will become clear. This then, is my novel Darlington Frigg. With pictures.

I thought about including this in my regular series 'Things to do when you should be writing'. But I'm only human, and I hope you will understand how in the grip of inspiration it might seem more important to create an illustrated online version of your novel than to, y'know, submit a manuscript to a publisher or agent. Damned or be published, so to speak...

"I think Jamie wrote it." "Me too." "Yes, I agree. Jamie, definitely."

I saw Bob squint at his charts, like he meant to make something out. Bob was a weatherman's weatherman. The kind who knows a gathering storm when he sees one, and he’d been seeing one for years. 'What's it like out?' he said. He didn't look up.

I looked out the window. Shrugged.

'Mainly war,' I said. 'Patches of smoke.' I could hear something in the distance. A vehicle. The mailman. They don't give up.

'Like I said,' Bob said. It wasn’t though. Clear spells, he’d said. 'I told you,' he said.
'The hell you did,' I said.

I went to the door. Bob watched me. I hawked and spat out onto the grass. It veered left. Fifteen knots wind, maybe twenty.

'Spitting,' Bob said. He was a man of few words. Liked to say there wasn't time for speeches. When he was working with Dick Martin on the TV news, he had twenty-three seconds to cover the Eastern seaboard. Twenty-three more than it deserved. Some days, he could do it in twenty-one flat. Then one day, he took twenty-seven. Five seconds to indicate big government in DC, with a broad sweep of his hand. Two seconds to indicate smug liberals in New York. The network let him go.

I sucked on a cigarette. Screwed up my eyes, stared down the sky. Blew a cloud of my own.

'Chance of rain,' I said.
'The hell there is,' Bob said.

The noise of the truck had stopped. I picked up the rifle that was leaning in the hallway. Plugged the postal worker as he passed by, one-eighty pounds maybe. Sometimes it takes two shots to take one down that size. From forty yards you can see the blood almost straight away. Later on we’d spread sand over. I looked back. Bob was in his chair, staring a hole in the wall.

'Reckon this front is set to stay,' he said. ‘They’ll send another tomorrow.’

I liked Bob. Bob was a weatherman's weatherman. Hadn't paid taxes since the network stopped his paycheck. Hadn’t received any demands, and he wasn’t going to start now.

'Reckon so,' I said.

Things to do when you should be writing, #3

Write some software to help you write your novel

Respect to Jack Calverley for this.

An Admission

What do you say when someone asks you about your influences? Thankfully it doesn't happen very often. But I envy people who can confidently and sincerely say 'Steinbeck', 'Woolf', 'Carver', 'Rowling' - it's all good, if you mean it - I just can't match them.

I've had a revelation. I am not as blazingly original as I'd liked to think. The other day I happened to pull from my bookshelf a collection of articles and letters pages from the early days of football fanzines (I know, it should be the collected letters of TS Eliot, or something...) Truthfully, I don't even follow football any more, but it's all come flooding back. The following I recall from memory, maybe incompletely, maybe inaccurately, as others might recall song lyrics or passages from holy books:

'You Are The Ref: The US invades Libya. Do you a) award an indirect free kick... b) ...'

'You Are The Ref: Alex McLeish machetes to death Ally McCoist and buries him in a shallow grave by the touchline. Do you a) book McCoist for leaving the field of play without permission... b) ...'

(of a very traditional Middlesborough line up) 'Every one of them with a name that sounded like the Anglo-Saxon for an act of gross indecency'

'Bladder like a blast furnace'

'Sir - I wonder whether any of your readers have noticed the striking resemblance between Terry Fenwick and a waste of space. Are they by any chance related?'

(of a Newcastle United fan) 'Dad, what's a cup final?'

It's scary how many of these I must have recycled and repainted. Terry Hurlock, I turn into a blackbird. 'One man went past Mo, went past Maurice Malpas', I turn into a doggerel rhyme about cake crumbs.

There's nothing new under the sun. Not from me anyway.

Overobservedose, or, The Emperor's New Clothes

I feel there should be a word - something along the lines of religiose - to describe something that affects to be well observed, but isn't. Somehow well-observedose doesn't quite cut it.

I've been tinkering with a story called Go Home, Mr Frigg. It's actually a kind of mash-up of elements from the last and of course unpublished novel I wrote, Darlington Frigg - which some may consider cheating - but for me the more interesting aspect is a couple of lines that I've never changed:

Seconds after each round of explosions, the water in their hole rose a little, then dropped back. Curious. Five times he saw his own face in silver ripples, winking and pulling faces back at him.

Now, over time I've stolen this past a great number of critics - verbally, and on paper - it's 'startlingly real', advertises Storytails - and no-one yet has complained that this particular natural phenomenon doesn't, wouldn't, couldn't happen. Could it? It's like a historical account of the mobilisation for the first world war, referencing an eye-witness account of the troops leaving from platform 9 3/4.

Actually, maybe I'd read that.

Things to do when you should be at your writing group on Wednesday

See previous entry...

Things to do when you should at your writing class on Thursday

Look, I forgot, OK? Can we leave it at that?