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12 Books in 12 Months

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Call for Submissions

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you might be aware that when I’m not writing I sometimes act as Media Officer for Homespun, a new children’s theatre company.  Now I am cannily combining the two in the interests of raising cash to send our show, East of the Sun West of the Moon (which was pretty well received at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year) on tour in 2013.  I am putting together an eBook of folk and fairy stories, with all proceeds going towards redevelopment and production costs.  I am therefore looking for bright young things to donate their stories in the interests of supporting new children’s theatre.  If you or someone you know is a bright young thing, please read on for more information…

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Great King Street

I was going through half finished word documents from last year (there are a fair few with beginnings of characters and ideas started then abandoned) and found this.  It’s a poem I wrote for my brother in December which I considered making into a picture book before I got into the falcon idea.  Maybe I’ll get it done this year, though.  In fact, maybe I’ll do a collection of story-poems based on Edinburgh streets and illustrate the whole thing… if you think that idea has legs, please leave a comment!

The background to this one is that my brother and I were crossing Great King Street in Edinburgh and both slipped on a wee patch of black ice.  However, the temperature was a balmy 6 or 7 degrees and there was no ice or snow or anything anywhere else – so naturally we got suspicious.  Why was that bit icy, when everywhere else was fine?  Clearly the answer was magic.

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A.L.Kennedy at Edinburgh Book Festival

If you don’t know of A.L.Kennedy, you should rectify that state of affairs immediately.  I first came across her through her column in the Guardian, which is very funny, but she does all sorts of other stuff too – book writing and stand up being the main activities where it’s socially acceptable to follow her movements (although not in a stalker-y way).  Yesterday she was at the Edinburgh book festival talking about her new novel, The Blue Book, so I went along to listen.

Kennedy began with a reading from near the start of the book – “it’s page 31. Not much has happened, not much will,” – a passage including the character description, “red shoes and amateur clown hair,” which I loved, although naturally she says it better than I do.

She was then interrupted by an enigmatic lady leaving the auditorium with the chilling words, “I know you from a long time ago.”  Not the most traditional of heckles in my experience, so top marks for mystique there, especially as she proceeded to stand in front of the stage repeating the phrase over and over again…

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Science Fiction Brainstorm

Click to embiggen!

When in doubt, brainstorm.  Turns out I’ve sucked up a lot more sci-fi in my time than I first thought – not all of it entirely sensible.  Does anyone else out there remember The Tomorrow People?  The early 90s version featuring Todd from Neighbours, not the original 70s incarnation with Peter Davison.  The vaseline-edged corners of my mind remember it as being pretty good.

Anyhoo, having reminded myself I actually do have a reasonable amount of genre knowledge, I scribbled out several pages of plot and character ideas, and now some chapters are forthcoming.  Isn’t the creative process magical.

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Meanwhile, the writer…

Meanwhile, the writer was determined to get to a reasonably high word count irrespective of what that meant for the quality of the story.  She typed like the wind, except for the long gaps in which she was checking her phone, or making cups of tea, or yawning. 

Sometimes she would go off on a tangent about how she was looking forward to having crumpets for tea when she ought to have been describing Amelia’s hat collection (which was vast, expensive and unexpected; not least because Amelia never wore hats, not even at weddings or funerals).

And when she ought to have been making subtle hints about the whereabouts of Chris’ mother, she was actually looking up forums about digital photography in the hope someone would be able to enlighten her on the best way to take a self portrait to go with one of several articles she was writing on the side. 

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