I’ve published a couple of short stories on a musical theme: there’s my flash Getting It Together with Elvis; my short stories Melanie’s Last Tune about a narcissistic music teacher and The Invention of Harmony about a mediaeval nun’s fear of her own creativity. So it didn’t take me long to come up with an idea for the required 99 words. I’m pairing this with the march from Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, although anything that sparks different reactions would do:
Welcome
I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist. I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.
I had an encouraging response to the musical link I included in my recent post on water-themed fiction. I used to provide a musical accompaniment to my posts quite frequently – up until the beginning of this year I was actively populating my Google+ page with a YouTube link to each blog post – but somehow I'd lost the habit. The latest flash fiction challenge from Charli Mills seems a timely reminder to re-establish the link between music and words.
I’ve published a couple of short stories on a musical theme: there’s my flash Getting It Together with Elvis; my short stories Melanie’s Last Tune about a narcissistic music teacher and The Invention of Harmony about a mediaeval nun’s fear of her own creativity. So it didn’t take me long to come up with an idea for the required 99 words. I’m pairing this with the march from Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges, although anything that sparks different reactions would do:
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Despite my smug response to Norah Colvin’s question for the Liebster award, I’m dreadfully pushed for time at the moment. Novels to read and review, blog posts to read and write, the eternal submissions before I can even consider writing fiction. Then there’s the rest of my life, the garden especially frantic at this time of the year. I’m not sure I’ve even got time to write this post. But no point complaining; you’re probably in the same boat and I’m grateful to you for reading. How did you make the time? I wonder if skimming the blogs was one of the items on your to-do list today? Perhaps you’ll feel a warm glow of well-being when you tick it off? If that’s your general style, you might be one of life’s precrastinators. Yup, you read that correctly. No, my spell check hasn’t gone on the blink. This is just the snazzy new term for people who tend to knuckle down to tasks prematurely, for the satisfaction of having got them out of the way. Perfectly sensible, you might be thinking, except that in the research that spawned the term, people were prepared to expend more effort completing the task early than they would have needed had they put it off until later. Does this mean that we should all congratulate ourselves for our tendency to procrastinate? Probably not, but we might consider whether “clearing the decks” before settling down to “the real work” is not only a way of avoiding an unpleasant or daunting task, but actually creating more work for ourselves. Thank you, Norah Colvin, for another blogging award. Versatile isn’t a word I’d readily use to describe myself but, if Norah thinks this blog qualifies, I’ll happily accept. The Versatile Blogger Award asks recipients to thank their sponsor (done that), nominate another fifteen blogs (that might take some time, but I’ve started the ball rolling below) and tell everyone seven things about yourself. I’m sure I read somewhere it’s supposed to be seven interesting things; fortunately, Norah hasn’t set the barrier as high as that. I thought I’d take it as an invitation to illustrate the extent and limitations of my versatility, and have a bit of fun along the way. Some of these even come in multiples of seven. Carrot Ranch Communications is one of the great new blogs I discovered on the podium of Norah Colvin’s Liebster nominees. Here, along with buckaroo-tinged insights into the writing process, Charli Mills poses a weekly flash fiction challenge. Now, I thought I’d cracked the art of the short short, but my shortest story to date is four times the length of the 99 words set by Charli, practically a saga in comparison. Each week I checked the writing prompt and each week I let it go by, while admiring the efforts of others who managed to shoehorn a proper narrative into under 100 words. Maybe it was things winding down for Easter, maybe it was the theme of the challenge, but this week I decided to plunge in. But boy, was it hard! Much as I relish pruning back redundant words, this was like growing bonsai. But I persevered in the knowledge that limits can be liberating for writers, and Charli’s introduction had already drawn me in. She writes about how a glimpse of the world can spark a memory, and that memory can lead us towards a choice of creative paths. One leads to memoir, another to fiction: why someone might follow one route rather than the other to tell their story is something I’ve been pondering lately, as I’m looking forward to hosting a post from a memoirist here later this month. Charli’s 99-word challenge is to “write a biography for a character, alter-ego or you”. Well, I struggle enough with the bios editors request to accompany my short story publications, so you can guess which way I was going to go. And I thought it would be useful to tighten up my thinking about a character I’m musing on. So it’s over to Bernie, in her ninety-nine words: Winning the TV quiz show, Family Challenge, assured me a rosy future. My encyclopaedic knowledge would fuel my teaching career. I hadn’t bargained for a pregnancy midway through the training. When I surrendered my baby for adoption, I lost my sense of purpose too. Can’t complain, though. I work in a school, albeit in admin. I’m extremely popular on quiz nights down the pub. But, if people ask if I have children, I don’t know what to say. Everything’s changing again, as Jason has made contact. Given he’s about to become a father, can I call myself Grandma now? After reading some of the beautifully poetic contributions already up on the site, I think I might have fallen into the trap of prioritising information over style. Clearly, more practice is in order, but at least I’m getting to know Bernie a little better. If you’ve ever visited this blog before, you may have noticed that I’m rather partial to linking. So when I came across the recent trend for blog posts on six degrees of booky separation on Isabel Costello’s literary sofa, I wondered how I might join in. This month’s starting point is Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, but I thought I’d take myself down a different track involving the titles I’ve featured in my debut novelists Q&A’s. After various deliberations, I’ve ended up with a loop of eight novels, each connected to the one on either side as well as to the one in the middle, for which I’ve selected my most recent addition to my growing list, Johanna Lane’s Black Lake. Some of the links might be rather tenuous, but I’m pleased with how I’ve managed to bring most of them together, my only disappointment being that I couldn’t find a place for Anthea Nicholson’s The Banner of the Passing Clouds (but perhaps that’s for another time). Let me guide you round the circuit and perhaps you’ll find something to inspire your reading or an “x degrees of separation” of your own. The launch-point is arbitrary, but I’ve chosen The Lighthouse in honour of Alison Moore’s generosity in stepping forward as my first virtual interviewee. The loneliness of the main character, Futh, is somewhat reminiscent of John in Black Lake. Both men struggle to make meaningful emotional connections with their wives, although, as Johanna Lane says in her virtual interview, the outcome for John is more hopeful. Futh’s narrative in The Lighthouse is interwoven with that of Ester, a somewhat disturbed and scheming woman. We meet another wonderful scheming woman in Frances, the narrator of Alys, Always by Harriet Lane. I connect this novel with Black Lake, not only by the coincidence of the authors sharing the same surname, but in their exploration of the lives of privileged families. In Alys, Always, this is from the outside in, as Frances sets out to inveigle her way into the family of a woman who dies in a car crash. In Black Lake, we are invited to accompany the impoverished “landed gentry” through a period of unwelcome change. The Liebster Award is a badge of honour for blogs with fewer than 200 followers. As with a chain letter, recipients are expected to put on a little performance on their blog (answer a bunch of questions set by the person who nominates them) and recruit up to about a dozen more bloggers into the fold. Well, I’ve had my What, this little blog? moment, I’ve responded to the excellent questions put to me by Norah Colvin who was kind enough to nominate me, so now it’s time for me to step out of the limelight and pass on the mantle to another clutch of blogs. One of the great things about blogging is the diversity of approaches and voices. While my main interest is in all things literary, I’ve tried, in the blogs I’ve nominated, to represent something of that range, hoping I can point readers to something new. If you’re listed here, I hope you’ll want to take part in the process, to answer my questions on your own blog and pass on the favour. But should you decide it’s not your bag, that’s fine too. This thing’s about playtime rather than heaping another load of responsibilities an already busy people’s shoulders. Paying it forward to 10 bloggers' blogs Whenever the interviewees in my debut author Q&A’s complimented me on my questions, I assumed they were merely being polite. Well, they may well have been, but that hasn’t stopped me musing on what constitutes a good question since beginning to tackle the questions set by Norah Colvin for her Liebster Award nominees. How do you define a good question? Despite a fair amount of experience of interviewing – as an element of both selection and therapy – in my other life, I find myself having to rethink the matter all over again for my blogging persona, Annecdotist. From the perspective of a candidate in a job interview, a good question might be the one for which you’ve already prepared a good answer, one that enables you to showcase your skills and talents to good effect. But an interviewer who is genuinely curious is unlikely to be satisfied with a “here’s one I prepared earlier” response. Yes, we shouldn’t be looking to trip up the interviewee, but the interaction will feel more authentic if we are able to create something new in the space between us. So a good question can also be one that takes us by surprise. One of the things I like about Norah’s questions is how well they reflect (what I know of her and) her interests, her passion for learning most of all. This also made them quite difficult to answer: although obsessed with my own thoughts, none of these are the questions that I routinely ask of myself. So I needed to give myself time to consider my responses, to do justice to the spirit in which the questions were asked. Hence the interval between receiving the award and posting my answers. So here are Norah’s questions along with my responses in italics. I’d love to know what you think. Miserable cynic that I am, whenever I see those award badges in a blog’s sidebar, I can’t help thinking of Boy Scouts or those chain letters we passed round as children. (Who would not be swayed by the promise of 6⁶ picture postcards or the threat of a pestilential curse on the whole family? The fact that I was lucky if I received one card in return didn’t stop me from diligently making six copies of the instructions and names and addresses in my best handwriting when the next incarnation of the chain letter appeared.) Yet my adult cynicism doesn’t prevent me from craving one of those shiny things for myself. In the early days of this blog, when the modal number of comments accruing to my posts was zero, I even toyed with the idea of creating an award of my own – well they’ve got to come from somewhere – to bestow on the kindly few who deigned to visit. All that held me back was my husband’s refusal to knuckle down to the necessary artwork and the lack of a suitable moniker. I’m pleased to announce that my moment has come and I’ve been recruited to that glorious congregation of lauded bloggers. Norah Colvin has passed on the Liebster Award, designed to recognise those beavering away with fewer than 200 followers. Having enjoyed interacting with Norah on Twitter, and reading her passionate posts about early-years education on her blog and her generous comments on mine, I’m honoured that Annecdotal is one of the blogs she wants to recognise. It’s all the more welcome when Norah isn’t a woman to deliver empty praise, but engages with the attentive curiosity which must be the blogger’s truest reward. Even so, I’ve had to overcome my inbuilt anxiety about falling foul of the rules (so many ways to get it wrong) to embrace this with the appropriate sense of fun. But I’m looking forward to selecting another ten worthy recipients and setting them my own set of questions. I recently published a post – no, I’m not saying which one – which I knew was a bit muddled. I had something to say, and it was timely to say it, but I couldn’t marshal my thoughts to express that something in a sufficiently coherent manner. For weeks it had festered on my To do list. I’d bring out my draft now and then to add bits and chop bits and move bits of it around, but it still wasn’t anywhere near how I’d hoped to get it when the idea had first lodged itself in my mind. It wasn’t so dreadful that I wanted to consign it to the scrap heap, but I had to accept I hadn’t the time or the talent to make it zing. So I clicked on Publish and left it for others to judge its worth. Do we demonstrate a lack of respect for ourselves and our readers when we send out work we consider below par? Or are we being realistic in recognising we can’t perform at our optimum level all the time? Where do we draw the line between acceptable and sloppy, and how do we recognise such a line when we see it? We need our standards but, as Emma Darwin points out, too much self-criticism and perfectionism is counter-productive as it stops us even trying to create. Yes, we must kill our darlings, but we mustn’t abort them before they’ve had the chance to see what they might become. Accepting things as they are isn’t tantamount to passive resignation. It’s not the same as giving up. Yet isn’t it rather grandiose to think we have to get everything right? My blog post, along with the rest of my millions of sentences, is insignificant in the overall scheme of things. Good or bad – the universe doesn’t give a shit. I like the way Justine Musk has drawn on the Icarus myth to illustrate how writers need to forge a path between reaching for the scorching heights of the sun and sinking so low our wings become waterlogged and we come crashing down to earth:
Don’t you love connecting through the internet? It’s great fun peering into other people’s shop windows and, if we’re really lucky, being invited inside. I get quite excited about the way we feed off each other’s ideas (with appropriate credits, of course) and can visit places we wouldn’t otherwise go. I’m just back from a virtual flight to Australia to pontificate on Norah Colvin’s blog. My post, exploring the psychoanalyst’s Stephen Grosz’s thoughts on praise, blossomed out of <140-character interactions with Norah on Twitter. Why not climb aboard your own magic carpet¹ to have a look at what our creative dialogue has spawned? Thanks to Norah for the invitation and the lovely way she has presented my post. I didn’t have to travel quite so far when I did my other g**st² blog post at This Itch of Writing. The theme of that was writer’s block, with a bit of psychoanalytic theory thrown in, and, if you’ve avoided my plugs so far, you’d better have a look now! Since Annecdotal’s inception, I’d wondered about playing host to other writers, but my attempts to persuade friends who weren’t already blogging didn’t work out. But it’s time to cast the net a bit wider and think about recruiting other voices to vary the tone. There’s so much knowledge and talent around, it’s hard to know where to start, but I want to keep the focus on reading and writing. Let’s see how it goes. What’s your experience of fruitful connections in the blogosphere? If you’ve played host on your own blog or been invited to appear on another, do you have any tips for the novice? My next post will (probably) be on writing is the second person – do come back this weekend to share your thoughts on the ‘you’ narrator. ¹ Apologies for the whimsy, I’m dancing back and forth between this post and one I’m drafting for International Women’s Day next month, where Scheherazade gets an honourable mention. ² If you’re wondering why I’m nervous about the g**st word, I read somewhere that Google was very snotty about it. It might be a myth, but don’t want to mess up those SEO’s. So, it's the time of year when the newspapers, half the staff on holiday and the other half nursing hangovers, fob us off with reviews of the year which are nothing more than a rehash of the articles they can most easily lay their hands on, much in the way a cook conjures up a curry from the leftover turkey. Now, I've got more respect for my readers, yet – blame the sherry and figgy pudding, if not the reruns of sentimental Hollywood films – I feel a similar urge to regale you with a look back at my reading and writing and blogging year. I hope you'll find the generosity to indulge me and perhaps return the favour in the comments box below. And, because it's the time of year for tantalising puzzles, there's a connection between the numbers marked with an asterisk. I used to read for pleasure, then I read to develop my craft. Now I read for the blog and website. Is this how it was meant to be? Of course, the three aims aren’t mutually exclusive, I can read as a writer and blogger and still enjoy it, but it does affect the content of my TBR and TBrR (to be re-read) piles. In fact, I think I should re-label my book mountain as my TBB (to be blogged) pile. Reading for the blog definitely requires a higher level of concentration: Do I love this debut enough to invite the author to my Q&A? Would this aspect of plot/setting/ character help bring one of my posts alive? Because it’s not just for me, I’m more accountable and, while I’m not complaining, it sometimes leaves me longing for one of those sand-spattered novels that requires the reader to switch off her brain. Above, for your amusement and edification, is my TBR/TBB pile as of the last day of September: debut novels; novels featuring therapists or set in psychiatric hospitals; one for the Hungarian slant; one with a quirky take on pronouns and a book that isn’t a novel at all.
Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how many of these will get a mention here in the coming month? So how does this compare with your own TBR pile? Anything here you’re already raving about? Anything you’ve sampled and thrown across the room? While we’re on the subject of questions about books, remember the quiz I set when I blogged about my new header at the beginning of last month? Three simple questions, and my apologies for the absence of prizes, but I’m sure you’re all grown-up enough not to hold it against me. The answers are below the line so, if you didn’t do the quiz before, you’ve still got a chance to go back and test yourself before clicking on Read More. While published novelists will often blog about their new book covers, I get to announce the earthshattering news that I’ve changed the masthead on my website. What do you mean, you didn’t notice? I’ll assume that’s because you’ve been too dazzled by my words. To be fair, all I’ve done is swap one row of novels for another. Side-by-side you might mistake it for a children’s spot-the-difference puzzle: On the left, the random sample of my favourite novels culled from my bookshelves that made up the old header; on the right, the bones of the new one: a selection of books that have had at least a walk-on part on the blog, or will do soon. Apart from a couple of novels I hadn’t even read when I made my first choice back in April (Harmattan; The House of Sleep; The Orphan Master’s Son – and I certainly wasn’t consciously planning to position them together slap in the middle), I’m surprised there’s so little overlap (only Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto springs up in both, although Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin also meets the criteria). Clearly, my mind works differently when I’m picking works to illustrate a point or a theme. But I wouldn't want to make too much of that: in all honesty what constitutes my all time favourite novels varies from one day to the next. In fact, less than a fortnight after I launched it, the new masthead is already out of date, with significant omissions such as Claire King's The Night Rainbow, the latest addition to my interviews with debut novelists. But if I tried to update it every time I read a new book I'd never get any writing done. That said, I thought it would be fun to have some dialogue around my selections, and got carried away with the idea of quiz before I noticed it’s enough of a challenge to identify some of the novels from the photos, never mind answer questions about them. So if anyone’s still reading, here are the titles:
Now, here at last, three questions, one each on the themes of author, character and setting:
1. How many debut novels are represented in each picture? (Clue: not all of them have featured in my author interviews.) 2. How many novels feature a psychological therapist as a main character? 3. How many novels have predominantly British settings and how many don’t? I’ll come back with my answers in a couple of weeks – and then we can argue who’s got it right. In the meantime, do share your opinions on my selections. Still a baby relative to many, my 50th post slipped by last month while I was still resting on the banks of Oldshoremore. My visitor stats began to surge around the same time; you're all very welcome but I wish I knew where you'd come from all of a sudden! If you'd like to read the earlier posts, you can go to the archives, or check out some of my favourites on my Facebook page. (As an old dinosaur, it took me a while to see the point of FB, but now I just love those cute little boxes with the icons and taglines, and all I have to do is paste in the link!) Big thanks also to those who've tuned in from the early days (gosh – I make it sound like I've been doing this for years rather than a matter of months); I do appreciate your support. Barring illness or disaster, I can promise at least another 50 posts, on writing, in the widest possible sense: on the inputs and outputs; the hows, whys and why nots. I do hope you can stay with me for the journey, and maybe call in at the comments box and let me know how things are going for you. How concerned should you be when you fall out of love with your work in progress? Is writer's block a genuine affliction or an affectation dreamed up to convince the world we're sensitive souls? Are there any lessons for writers of fiction in the research of a long-deceased English psychoanalyst and paediatrician?
My post is up this weekend on This Itch of Writing. Love it or loathe it, I'm sure you'll agree it's an honour and privilege to have my work on so illustrious a site. I'm not given to risk-taking, especially not on something as scary as the net where trolls can monitor your every move, so I thought long and hard before starting my blog. Mostly what I thought was: No, that's not for me. Quick, draw the curtains, you never know who might be peering in. Then, all of a sudden, I had a new computer and a brand-new blog. Learning my way round both Windows 8 and Weebly at the same time, perhaps I should be grateful that it was the computer and not me that went into meltdown (miraculously only a couple of days shy of the end of the no-quibbles return period). Aside from the first post, which seems a bit pointless, but I'm leaving up as part of my ten-step programme for combatting shame (not that ten steps are anywhere near sufficient), I'm glad I've done it, but I'm still not sure what it's for. There's a part of me still thinks it's quite mad – but that might be the same part that thinks that any project not set up with the explicit purpose of pleasing my mother is mad, I'm not sure how seriously to take it. Yet I’m seriously addicted and, I think, in a good way, so read on if you want to know the three reasons why I got into blogging and kept going. In my early days of blogging, I took the 0 Comments by-line at the top of so many posts as an indictment my writing skills. I needed more than the spikes on the website stats chart to convince me I had any readers at all. Six months on I'm happy for you to use the site in any way you like as long as it's legal and decent, but still a little puzzled that so few of you seem to want to leave your mark. Are you all fans of detective fiction, donning kid gloves to come visiting, or has that great poet Leonard Cohen convinced you that true love leaves no traces? That's all well and good, but I can't help wondering if you might enjoy the blog more if it were interactive. A few words for the hesitant. The system asks for your email address: this is standard practice, presumably to deter trolls, and is never published or used to plague you with junk mail, so please don't let that put you off commenting. For those more familiar with fancier systems that let you leave a thumbnail photo along with your comment, I'm sorry weebly is a bit Amish in that regard, but you could always keep it sparkly by linking to your gratavar if you have one. Sometimes it looks as if you can't post a comment after I've done so, but trust the technology, you can. And however elderly the post, or seemingly mundane your views, I'd be pleased to hear from you. Overloading me with comments in response to a post on the shortage of the same would be a neat test of the popular misuse of the word irony, don't you think? I welcome your feedback, or lack of it. I'm pleased, proud and tickled pink to be one of the prizewinners in Emma Darwin's postiversary competition, even if it has taken me a few days to find the time to announce it here. It will be a real honour to have one of my posts appear on This Itch of Writing, which is an excellent resource for writers, and one I've linked to often enough here. Hopefully I'll get some feedback on my post from some of Emma's many followers. I'm also looking forward to reading the other winning posts, the first of which was up yesterday, and I'm expecting both to learn and to be entertained.
I think mine goes up at the end of next week and, in the meantime, I've got a short post on writing and gardening (!) in the pipeline to coincide with another short story to be published soon. Now I'm endorsed as a proper blogger, I might even put up the full version of why-I'm-blogging that I was too coy to do a couple of months ago. I also hope to bring you my thoughts on the credibility of the psychologist in Jonathan Coe's The House of Sleep as part of my mini series. Those are the plans – who knows what will actually happen? A recent post from Emma Darwin leaves me nostalgic for my academic writing. On the whole, I prefer making things up but, so far, I'm disappointed not to have come across anything in the world of fiction to match the buzz of the academic conference. I really enjoyed the York Festival of Writing last year, and some of the discussions on the blogs can be quite lively, but they don't have the same mix of writers at different levels presenting their work that you'd find at an academic conference. Only in my wildest dreams does the place exist where Lionel Shriver would sit down and listen to me reading one of my short stories. Fiction writers might feed off each other's ideas but we don't need the level of collaboration that academic writers do. It must be a couple of years since my short story publications overtook my academic credits and, as of the end of last month, my blog publication count has finally surpassed my tally of published short stories. With a tentative commitment to do a blog post for each publication, it's a watershed moment: the stories are never going to catch up. As for academia, I'll be grateful to have my name tagged on the end of a couple of forthcoming papers, but that time's in the past. So I'm especially pleased to announce my newest short story publication, A Dress for the Address, about an academic not quite getting it together to set off for a conference. Many thanks to the folks at Halfway Down The Stairs for selecting it for their issue on Beauty. Apropos of the previous post, and writers of historical fiction, did you see that Emma Darwin has launched a blogging competition to mark her 500th postiversary? Perhaps that should be the cue for my overly foreshadowed post on why I'm blogging but, revisiting my draft, it seems overly earnest for someone on only her 31st post. (Gosh, my blog count is rapidly catching up with my short story publications. Not sure how I feel about that.) But in the spirit of celebrating prime numbers, and so as not to lose it altogether, as well as to stop me harping on about it, I thought I'd give you the abbreviated version today. So I'm blogging because:
I'd like to have a go at Emma's competition, as much in recognition of her wonderful support to novice writers, than with my eye on the prize. Although I don't have anything like the same ambition for my blog than for my fiction (the first is play, the second work), the discipline would probably do me good. If I could focus on 2, without letting 1 take over, I might get more of 3 and 4, although I don't think it would ever match what 5 meant to me. (See here, for examples of Emma's exemplary posts.)
What about you? My next post will be on definitions of a writer (in response to Carlie's prompt), unless anything else takes my fancy before then. The blog's gone rather Tristram Shandy this month, don't you think, promising certain posts, and then digressing on to other topics before I've delivered? In fact, it started with that snowman back in March. Darley Anderson says you shouldn't write about the weather – and how right he is: just look what chaos ensues when you do! I'm sorry, but I do feel you need to shoulder some of the blame. If you don't slap me on the wrist when I go off on a tangent, I'll get the impression I can write what the hell I like here, and who knows where that will lead? Don't you see, part of the function of the comments box is to rein me in. So you can hardly complain, if I act like I'm talking only to myself. Anyway, back to the main topic. As I was saying, I wanted to spring clean my categories. There's a part of me that loves systems as much as Macon does in that wonderful novel The Accidental Tourist and I really believe that if I just try hard enough, I'll come up with a way that will have all my bits neatly compartmentalised. So I was a bit miffed when I realised I'd saddled myself with way too many categories (having confused categories with tags, most blogs having both but weebly providing facilities only for the former). But when I thought it over, this blog really does have only one category, which is writing, from the inside and the outside, from back and front, underneath and upside down, and all the rest are variations on theme. While it might not be something to boast about, I think I'd struggle to assign any of the posts to a single unique category. I used to listen to Alistair Cooke's Letter from America on BBC Radio Four. I liked how he'd start out in one place and take you somewhere you'd never expect. I'm not saying I'm trying for that effect – to be honest I'm not trying for anything, I'm just playing around and seeing what happens – and I don't think anyone would accuse him of a lack of focus, but for some people sometimes it works to approach your argument in a roundabout way. The disappearing apostrophe is coming very soon … The work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, claims he can live like common people on benefits of £53 a week, 15% of median earnings, apparently. Well, obviously that's a red rag to a journalist who will find very good copy in showing it just can't be done (Lucy Mangan) and would prove nothing if it could (Zoe Williams: what's one week of discomfort in the midst of fifty-two in relative luxury?). Might also have been a red rag to this blogger, given that I live in the computer, walk everywhere and my favourite food is lentils. I thought I might manage it if I pretended I wanted to do the 5:2 diet and the last two days were fast days, until I remembered that I wouldn't be able to use the computer I bought back in January because, at a cost of 13 weeks' benefits, I couldn't have afforded it. More disturbing, however, than these glib comments that suggest our politicians have a limited understanding of living on the breadline, is the continual drip feed of misinformation about the poor that comes from official channels. The DWP could soon start running masterclasses in point of view and the unreliable narrator. Perhaps that would be a healthier way of managing the debt than demonising a group of people who are already down: Fraud, which accounts for less than 1% of the overall benefits bill, was
I've been doing some maintenance on the website to smarten up the visuals, although I may have overdone it. Having conceded that readers are as likely to make as many assumptions from the absence of a mugshot as from a poor one, I've gone from hiding myself away just behind the homepage to cloning a mini-me beside the title on every single page. And that outfit, while it's a step up from the five fleeces I've been wearing all winter, whether or not I've just come back from a walk, is going to be a little toasty once summer finally arrives. I'm not sure about the books in the header either, although pretty nifty to have that subtle difference between the website and the blog, eh? Obviously I've selected some of my heroes (of both genders), but will it look as if I'm trying to emulate rather than admire? Nevertheless, I'm always impressed when I tackle a new bit of technology, although I seem to have left it rather late to find out about SEO keywords for a Google search. I wish I knew how to spring clean my website categories. I'll leave you with Here comes the sun with George Harrison and my short story Spring Cleaning. A more reflective, writerly post coming very soon. I can't make up my mind about novels about writers and writing. On the one hand, it seems a bit of a copout for a writer to make her (or more often his) main character another writer, a way of sidestepping the fact that a year of waiting tables, colourful or arduous as it might be, has little bearing on the working lives most of her readers, constantly updating their CV's. Who cares about the writing life anyway, except for other writers (although I confess that there seem to be enough of us about to make this a big enough market to target)? Despite, through this blog, I'm buying into the current requirement for self-promotion, and I'm sure Shelley Harris was being modest when she protested she was ordinary, generally I believe we writers are less interesting than what we write.
at least I'm not blogging about the weather
My fifth post in my first fortnight of blogging: is this professional dedication; the typical novice's enthusiasm; or a worrying case of blogivitis, that disturbing affliction in which one's every passing thought becomes a prompt for a 200 word post that quite likely no one else will read? So, just to show I'm not being totally solipsistic as I sit at my desk dictating into my new computer, here's a list some of the blogs I've started following to see how it's supposed to be done. Not many? Well, I'm going for quality, of course. No men? Now, that certainly wasn't my intention but I'm interested how it's turned out.
By the way, even though mine is not nearly as sophisticated, with seemingly no sidebar to list my developing links, it's still possible to comment, suggest other sites I should be looking at and to sign up for regular updates by clicking on the RSS feed link. |
entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice
Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.
Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin:
reader, writer, slug-slayer, tramper of moors, recovering psychologist, struggling soprano, author of three fiction books. LATEST POSTS HERE
I don't post to a schedule, but average around ten reviews a month (see here for an alphabetical list), some linked to a weekly flash fiction, plus posts on my WIPs and published books. Your comments are welcome any time any where. Get new posts direct to your inbox ...
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