Category: Microfiction

Mental health, Brexit, and political displacement projects

9/8/2020

Mental health’s a work in progress for most of us. Tougher for some, easier for others, yet there must be few this pandemic hasn’t wobbled. Years of therapy have killed off some of my demons, and given shape to those that will dog me to my dying days. Normally that dog will walk to heel, chase a ball and even raise a smile. Alas, it’s recently escaped the leash and is running rabid, baring bloody fangs. Everything’s harder with that monster circling me yet, while defeated by a trip to the supermarket, I can still, intermittently, report to my laptop and write.

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Are you ready for women in translation month?

31/7/2020

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What does August signify for you? Sandy beaches, barbecues in the garden, an easy-read book? For me, it’s a singing summer school (and, despite large gatherings still being prohibited, I have two virtual ones this year) and a chance to celebrate female novelists writing in languages other than English. I’m no linguist – although I’ve studied French and Spanish and have enjoyed picking up a smattering of the lingua franca on my travels – so I’m grateful to translators, who are far too often unacknowledged. As physical international travel is still problematic, it’s a great way of virtually visiting other countries.

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Come into the garden, Maud!

26/7/2020

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When Charli invited her followers to write a story to show what it is to protect nature around us, I thought I’d tag mine onto a recent post addressing that theme. But both of those that sprang to mind – see below for links – already had a 99-word story or two attached. I could have used the prompt to develop my skills in nature writing – I certainly need the practice – but more pressing projects – again, linked below – meant I didn’t have the time or headspace. Although nature cues my creativity, I’m more adept articulating human nature than weather, animals and plants. So I’ve gone for a predominantly pictorial post, based on my garden, leading to my flash fiction contribution about distanced dating, a prompt from the early days of lockdown, and clashing concepts of what protecting nature actually means.

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Caterpillars, Butterflies, Sugar and Snails

20/7/2020

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Whoever designed[1] butterflies, must’ve been having a laugh. No mere shapeshifters, the creepy crawlers must dissolve completely for their winged alter egos to emerge. No wonder the butterfly is considered a metaphor for transformation. Where else does nature deliver such a dramatic change?

Thanks to our gorgeous garden meadows, I can observe this metamorphosis almost at my back door. And it strikes me that it’s an oversimplification to view this as a transition from ugly to beautiful: some of the caterpillars are rather attractive too. Take, for example the brown-and-yellow striped creature that feeds on ragwort, or the bright[2]-eyed elephant hawk moth caterpillar (pictured) that graced our willow herb last year.

[1] Don't mistake me for a Creationist, I mean this metaphorically!
[2] Obviously these aren't its real eyes.

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Connections: The Sweet Indifference of the World & The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die & Coming up for Air

13/7/2020

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Mmm, seems I’ve chosen books with long titles for this threesome! But the reason I couldn’t bear to choose a couple and leave the other on the sidelines awaiting a partner is that they are all about characters connecting in unconventional ways. Firstly, I review a novella in translation about a writer meeting a man who seems to be a younger version of himself. In a second translated novella, a woman ensures that more than her memory lives on after her death. In the third, a literary novel, two women are linked via an invention that a third character plays an active part in developing.

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From lockdown hair to Buxton Fringe

3/7/2020

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For those fearing lockdown more than government mismanagement of the pandemic, July 4th is England’s Independence Day. (Apart from Leicester, where restrictions have been tightened due to a sudden surge in coronavirus cases.) If the response to the reopening of inessential shops is anything to go by, a mass of masked and unmasked people will flock to pubs, restaurants and hairdressers, but I won’t be among them. The former would never have been a priority, but I’ve hesitated over the third: I’m fond of my hairdresser, I’ve missed her through three missed appointments, but I’ve grown surprisingly attached to my lockdown hair.

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How would you answer the covid novel’s call?

28/6/2020

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History can’t have got the memo. The virus destined to put the world on pause has had us glued to the news: first with the exposure of right-wing government incompetence, then with the spotlight on racism we can no longer ignore. Whether this depresses or delights us, it’s hard to keep up. What’s the role of the writer – particularly writers like me with a tiny readership – in historic times? Should novelists switch to facts from fiction? Should we try to shape historic discourse or step back and observe?

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12 recommended reads for World Refugee Day

20/6/2020

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Twenty people a minute abandon their homes to escape war, persecution or terror. The United Nations has designated June 20 as World Refugee Day in solidarity with refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, stateless persons and returnees. The global pandemic means they need our support more than ever; having made my donation, I’m ready to share some fiction books you might like to read. All were published within the last ten years and are loosely arranged in historical order of the story setting, beginning with two set in the Second World War and ending with two which are timeless. I’ve limited myself to twelve, but could have chosen more. I hope you find something here to tempt you.

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Racism, entitlement and political protest in the age of covid

12/6/2020

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Recently I was first-world-problems moaning about the deluge of emails from individuals and organisations offering to fill my apparently endless lockdown free time. Now it’s people shouting their condemnation of the murder of George Floyd and either flaunting their antiracist credentials or vowing to do better. My immediate reaction was: does it need to be said? On the one hand, if you’re sitting in my inbox, abhorrence should be your default setting. On the other, white people’s silence could be taken as support for the status quo.

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Lockdown dis-easing and risk assessment, personal and political

5/6/2020

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Arrive late, leave early! Excellent advice for fiction writers pruning the unnecessaries from our scenes. Equally useful for introverts who quickly tire of socialising. But for a public health initiative in a pandemic? The UK is showing the world how not to do lockdown, introducing it too late and loosening the restrictions too early. Could it be that the occupant of number 10, having achieved his ambition of becoming prime minister has been using his undoubted spare time to brush up his skills in creative writing? Could it be that covid-brain has mangled his already

muddled pathways so that he’s imposed a strategy for achieving his next unlikely ambition – if a man of his talents can “lead” first a capital city, then a country, why not go for the Booker Prize? – upon the one of which he’s tired?

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On rescuing and burnout: are you trying to save the world?

31/5/2020

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A new Twitter follower picked up on my post on self-compassion and flagged her own about the urge to rescue other people when the one who really needs rescuing is herself. Well, that got me rethinking a familiar theme which might account for why my email inbox is clogged and my to-do list is endless when the world is meant to be on pause. Apologies to those struggling with a loss of human contact and structure but, from where I stand, there’s a surfeit of life-belts in an extremely small pond.

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My locked-up novel’s #lockdown #bookbirthday … and virtual choral singing

25/5/2020

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The writer’s life is riddled with disappointment, so we need to celebrate the successes when we can. When I’ve remembered – which I haven’t always – I’ve marked the publication-day anniversary for my books. For my second novel’s third birthday this month, I had in mind to write something on the theme She never intended to write a thriller, echoing the opening line of the blurb: He never intended to be a jailer, but the universe knew better. (As it did on this novel’s first anniversary – I don’t know what happened to the second – when I was so moved by the warrior women of Ireland coming home to vote for reproductive rights, I threw the plan away and wrote about the importance of normalising abortion in fiction.) This year, I’m wondering about the parallels between a fictional character who seeks to resolve a relationship crisis by keeping a woman captive in a cellar, and our current experiences of lockdown.

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The politics of unkindness and our collective mental health

18/5/2020

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I was ready for mental health awareness week early this year, with a post prepared on the proposed theme of sleep. Fortunately, before pressing publish, I checked back on the Mental Health Foundation website to discover that, on account of the pandemic, they’d abandoned sleep for kindness; but it wasn’t too much trouble to write another post. There’s no doubt that receiving, doing or witnessing acts of kindness raises the spirits, something we all need right now. And while I wouldn’t want to detract from the heart-warming generosity of neighbour helping neighbour, there’s another side of the story that needs our attention. The culture of both the UK and US as we went into this crisis was one of massive unkindness; an iceberg that clapping for carers can’t possibly melt. And it’s disastrous for our collective mental health.

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In which Anne disappears down the rabbit hole

11/5/2020

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Image by Prawny from Pixabay

At 15.55 one Sunday in mid-April, Anne decided to go stark raving bonkers. Of course she was conscious of the contradiction: madness that’s chosen, isn’t madness at all. Nevertheless, she was earnest in her objective, if unclear how it would be achieved. She even made a note to that effect on the information sheet for the novel she’d just been reading. The novel about depression with rabbits in the title that had just made her laugh out loud.

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Sleep, insomnia and mental health in contemporary fiction

3/5/2020

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Early this year, I was prescribed a course of antibiotics. While I’m grateful to live in a time and place where such things are available, this medication did not like me. Not only did they leave a nasty taste in my mouth, they disturbed my sleep to the extent of fleetingly fragmenting my mind in a manner akin to psychosis. So I don’t need convincing of the importance of getting sufficient sleep to our psychological (and physical) well-being; but we can also get too hung up on sleep such that the associated anxiety can be almost as damaging as not sleeping. I drafted this post back in February when I saw that sleep was the theme of this year’s mental health awareness week; although that's now changed to kindness, with many suffering insomnia in lockdown, this post on sleep in my own reading and writing still seems worth sharing.

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Unrecognised: Rabbits for Food & Miss Iceland

24/4/2020

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Is there discrimination against women writers? (Is there even more discrimination against older women writers?) Probably but, there being even worse things to get hung up about right now, I’ll gloss over the fact that these two novels about under-appreciated female writers – one in 1960s Iceland, the other in 21st-century New York – come from fairly successful female authors. With a couple of caveats, either or both would make great lockdown reads.

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I’m fuming (furious, irate, incensed, enraged, seething, mad, livid, cross)

17/4/2020

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Life’s changed so quickly, it’s been hard to keep track. I’ll admit my initial response was childishly self-centred. Woe is me, my favourite conference is cancelled; I won’t be able to give my talk and sell half a dozen more books. But, soon after, I saw the point when large gatherings were banned (although it was a shame my Wednesday afternoon choir couldn’t do its final concert). Next came concern for the mental well-being of those whose lives were restricted and livelihoods lost.

I felt grief when schools and pubs and restaurants were closed, despite not having much use for any of them; and guilt when a minor health issue kept me from my usual outdoor volunteering, with staffing already low as the over 70s were advised to stay at home. I welcomed the lockdown in bringing some order to an atmosphere of chaos and confusion, despite being appalled when I saw it happening to my publisher in Spain. I found a host of silver linings and even admired the most egotistical prime minister and the most extreme right wing government’s management of the crisis. And then the doctors and nurses began to die.

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The positives of pessimism as we await the pandemic peak

10/4/2020

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What character have you played in the early chapters of the dystopian novel we’re all living? Were you the sensible one whom the others ridicule or were you, like me, the seven-stone weakling who follows the trail into the ramshackle warehouse without telling her colleagues where she’s going or charging her phone? Although I’ve contracted no symptoms and stuck to the letter of the law, I look back in horror on my attitude of only a month ago; I ought to have been more cautious right from the start.

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Discovering interesting echoes of our current crisis as I edit my novel

5/4/2020

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I desperately wanted my third novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, to be published this year. For one thing, I like the ring of 2020. For another, I’ve been working on it long enough. Begun with three character sketches in autumn 2014, I completed an 80,000 word first draft in January 2015 and, after various ups and downs, including ballooning to 130,000 words, had it ready for reader feedback three years later.

When Inspired Quill, who published my first three books couldn’t find space in this year’s schedule, I considered self-publishing, and, for a whole week in January was convinced I was going with a pricey but prestigious assisted self-publishing outfit until it became clear that, even setting aside printing costs, I’d lose money on Amazon sales unless I ratcheted up the price. Now, of course, with events cancelled for the next several weeks, I feel remarkably lucky to have finally signed with Inspired Quill for May 2021.

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Do you read differently in anxious times?

29/3/2020

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As I said earlier this month, in a more optimistic – or head-in-the-sand mentality – there are good things about the coronavirus pandemic, an obvious one to this blog’s readers being more time to read. On the other hand, while we might find unexpected gaps in our schedules, anxiety consumes vast quantities of headspace, reducing our capacity for, on some days, anything more taxing than watching cat videos and repurposing unloved paperbacks as toilet tissue. So I’ve been wondering whether I, you, or anyone else, reads differently in times of high anxiety. What do you think?

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