February 2008 - Posts
I did it! Amazingly my story A Very Special Sparrow was finished ahead of deadline and fired off to my editor. She was very nice about it (although there was an embarrassing continuity glitch due entirely to rushed editing on my part). Anyway it will be in the magazine in May. To my surprise I could still do 'proper writing' after spending the last few weeks being a cub journalist.
I have a feeling that my massive reading list may actually have improved my own writing. Perhaps at last Hemingway meets Virginia Wolf, but I doubt if I'm the right chap for the job.
I am not a great fan of the Olympic Games. There must be a better way of finding out which nation has the best and most undetectable drugs. But it makes me even less of a fan to see one art gallery after another being pushed into closure by cuts in grants while the Olympic budget spins out of control.
Next week. How the careful Germans have bought a forged classical document for an awful lot of money. Probably...
I have been sending articles to online magazines. Not from choice but to develop links to our new Alonah Reading Cambridge website. It seems that links are a GOOD THING. Producing the articles is not too difficult. The difficult thing is getting past the password system. What seems simple enough - user name + password = access - results in bounces and major loss of motivation. Then if I do get any further there is the anti spam fancy letter code to negotiate. This changes so fast that I frequently get it wrong half way through.
What I cannot understand is what it is all for. Should I wish to type KNICKERS in the article submission space I could still do so (eventually). So why all the password hassle anyway. It makes me so stressed it seems rather a good idea to type KNICKERS and run.
My sainted editor at Dimdima Magazine has asked for another story. The good news is she's a star and I am really pleased. The bad news is she wants it by the end of February. I could well be about to be saved by a leap year.
Hooray! It is proposed that school children have five hours a week culture throughout the year. So kids from South London sink estates will be exposed to the undoubted benefits of Chekhov at the National. I do hope the story is carefully explained to them, as they will probably be unable to read the programme and three acts is tough on those raised on soundbites. Coincidentally Arts Council funding to many small local galleries is being cut. These are, of course, just the sort of places - in the community as they say - to which children should be taken. All a very predictable failure of joined up thinking. Do not despair; there will be no time in the school curriculum for teaching culture anyway.
I am still trotting through my reading list and feeling greatly improved as a result. Amazingly Oxfam came up with 'Herzog' by Saul Bellow which was on the list. Moses Herzog is an everyman much in the mould of Leopold Bloom, I'm finding it rather an amusing book. I have also re-read 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro' a moving story and very well written. But then I shouldn't say I think the deeply unfashionable Hemingway rather a good writer.
At long last our website is up and running. Alonah Reading Cambridge is launched and we patiently wait to become dot com millionaires. And wait, and wait. The take up of our teaching package for children and non-readers is a little slow. Maybe there was not enough joined up thinking. Any adult who needs help cannot read our website and parents of children expect schools to do it all for them.
We are told that 70% of those in prison are illiterate. Maybe a proactive trawl round deprived areas (or the House of Commons) leaving wallets and mobiles at home and armed only with business cards may help. We might well consider payment in dodgy BMWs if the going gets really tough. Until then I am trying to optimise the website to make it more search engine friendly between panics at losing parts of my inbox.
Recently I received a sure fire proposal to make me a best selling author. It fitted neatly between the usual offers from Nigerian money launderers and requests for details of my bank account from imitations of Abbey National online.The deal was that thirty nine carefully chosen nonentities write a short story each. These are published as an anthology, together with one story by a well known person. So, bingo, a best seller. Can't fail! I didn't read far enough to come across the request for a three figure up front payment for the joy of being between the covers with a C list celebrity.
All this did, however, make me consider the whole celebrity industry. I carried out a check on my local bookshop with the biggest turnover (Tesco's). Books were split more or less into Genre (crime fiction, violent adventure, romance, 'How I survived an abused childhood in the slums of Knightsbridge'), Children's, and Celebrity Autobiography by ghost writers. Leaving out the two or three works of literature courtesy of Richard and Judy the celebrity shelf space was easily a third. Of course this means if you are neither a ghost writer or a minor celebrity forget it. Fortunately there is still the Nigerian money laundering option to consider.