Ever since the massacre at Charlie Hebdo I’ve been finding it harder to write. Instead of working on all the projects I’m supposed to be working on, I’ve scribbled page after page of notes trying to sort out what I’m feeling. It’s not an easy thing about which to write. I’m not even sure I should. But Paris is my home. And I can’t stop thinking about what happened here.
How do we write when you can be killed in the centre of Paris for drawing rude cartoons? (more…)
My short story, “Spark“, was shortlisted in the Fowey Festival Short Story Competition 2014. The Fowey Festival celebrates the work of Daphne Du Maurier, 
and author who (like a lot of people) had an enormous impact on me when I was growing up. The House on the Strand remains one of my favourite books (my mother prefers Rebecca). I really enjoyed my take on a Du Maurier story, although I doubt anybody but me would see the similarity. If you’d like, you can read the full story on the site here.
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The lovely people at Monkey Kettle have published my story, “Only Whores can be Heroes”, as part of their book of western short stories entitled A Fistful of Monkeys. “Only Whores can be Heroes” is about ruthless bounty hunter called Charlotte Coal, and evil banker, and a terrible secret under the town of Liberty station, and it is packed in with almost 200 hundred pages of six-shooters, action and excitement that can be bought via Lulu here. Exciting stuff.
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My flash-fiction, “Tony’s Phone”, reached the shortlist for the Words for the Wounded competition and was commended by the judges. That’s not quite getting published but I’m still pretty chuffed. I still haven’t decided whether it counts as a point on my rejections score board or not!*
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On the first day of April I signed up to Camp Nanowrimo, an internet based creative writing project where participants try to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month. On April 30th I posted my final count. I only managed 30,000 words.
I knew I wasn’t going to make it from quite early on. The colourful, super friendly Nanowrimo website gave me a graph showing me day by day exactly how much I was falling behind; just how much lower my average words per day was than the rapidly increasing target needed to finish on time; the glaring little endnote that if I continued at this rate I would finish some time in late May.
In the last week the near impossibility of reaching my goal haunted me. In theory, sure, I could rattle out 5000 words a day. But when I sat in front of the keyboard the words would come so slowly. I would look up, two hours would have passed, and the word count would only be 600 words up. What was I doing wrong?
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