The Return of the Charity Shop LP

I walked into town this morning intending to buy some milk and go and sit in the library and do some writing. I’d armed myself with notebook, pen, and a list of writing prompts. All set. Only problem was the ‘quiet’ area of the library that has tables and chairs was occupied by a loud and patronising lady who was being slightly horrible to a lad of about eleven as she tutored him in something or other. I left. Went upstairs to the café, because after all, how hard can it be to find a quiet table at ten in the morning and sit with a cup of tea and write something? They had sandwiches, which wasn’t fair, so I had to have one (roast beef and spinach). Once I’d eaten that, and looked around at the other café folk – mostly gents of a certain age reading the complimentary copies of the Daily Mail – I realised it just wasn’t going to happen. I would buy my milk and go back home to write. I hate writing by hand anyway. Be much easier at home on the computer.

Still had to buy the milk, so I wandered down Newgate Street towards Heron, picked up a couple of pints, and thought I might as well pop into some charity shops on the way back. I usually do themed shopping – one week I might look for books, another for oddments of china. This week I noticed they had started doing LPs again. It’s been a good few years. These shops always used to have piles of them, mostly Jim Reeves and Barry Manilow, but then CDs came in and pretty much took over; we were told the sound was better and they’d last forever (ha!). Charity shops, certainly round here, stopped collecting and selling them, and most of us stopped listening to them.

Fast forward a few years and us diehard LP fans have been joined by a load of people from a much younger generation who for one reason or another love their turntables and want to be able to buy records to play on them. I invested in a turntable a few years ago when they just started becoming available again, mostly because I have an extensive collection of LPs and 78s and wanted to have the option of listening to them, but oddly I never did, so the turntable has been gathering dust.

One of the first charity shops I went in this morning had a mountain of LPs and they were only a pound each and so I thought, okay, have a look, there won’t be anything, but why not. It was curiously nostalgic to bump into Gentleman Jim Reeves again. I must admit, I’ve never heard anything by him. He might be quite good – but then again, the fact that he is always, without fail, in charity shops suggests that maybe he isn’t if so many people have been so keen to get rid of his records. I have no problem with Barry Manilow, and am surprised that he turns up so often. Apart from that, all the usual suspects were there, everyone from Liberace to Herb Alpert, who actually isn’t too bad, but still not really my cup of tea. This shop had a lot more, however. It had rude rugby songs. It had Johann Strauss waltzes. It had something I couldn’t read because it was in Hebrew. It had Frank Ifield. Definitely an eclectic mix, so I had a good look through and came away with a number of records: Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘London’ Symphony in a classic recording by Vernon Handley; the Schumann and Grieg piano concertos played by Radu Lupu; and a couple of records of masses by William Byrd and Josquin, sung by the Tallis Scholars. I looked at them all carefully and all appeared unmarked. The Josquin was still in a sealed package so had never been played.

Back home, I tried to play the Vaughan Williams. Nothing happened. Looked round the back, realised the turntable wasn’t plugged in. Felt slightly silly. Plugged it in, tried again, and it worked – the sound was crystal clear. Utterly beautiful. While it was playing I wrote a half decent poem with almost no effort at all. Then I put the Grieg on, then the Schumann. I’m listening to that one now. The Byrd comes next. I’ll quite likely write a short story while that’s playing, and will soon reach the thousand words a day I’ve been aiming at as a minimum since the start of December.  

We all write differently. Some writers can go into cafés and coffee shops and libraries and find endless inspiration by observing the characters who come and go; some people do the same thing on trains. I write to music. Not always – sometimes I write to a rugby match on the telly. But music, I think, works best. I’m not sure why it isn’t a distraction. When I was doing A level music at school and had to write a piece of music for homework, I would often annoy my mother by doing it with the radio on. It did genuinely help my concentration, bizarre as it may seem. Of course it’s different if you’re writing words rather than music, but I’m still not quite sure why it works. It’s not that it provides a sort of white noise that can be tuned out, because I’m well aware of what I’m hearing while I write. A neurologist might be able to tell me what’s going on, but I certainly don’t know.

All I know is I’ve bought some records, and that’s something I haven’t done in years, and I’m getting a terrific buzz from listening to them. They might well give my writing a spur, give it more depth – make it better simply because I’ll be in a better ‘zone’ (horrible word) at the moment.

The Josquin, however, is special. That’s being reserved for when I’m painting. It would be wasted on writing.

Keyboards and Tea

The portrait of Hemingway is now framed and hanging over my workspace. If I’m struggling with whatever I’m writing, I can look up, see him busy at work, and get back to my own magnus opus. He’s using pen and paper, and will no doubt type it all up later. If by any mischance he should happen to spill his drink on his typewriter, the machine will still work. The paper might be spoilt, but he can put in a clean sheet and carry on almost as if nothing untoward has happened.

Computers, though...

Yesterday evening I realised I was behind with my writing, so made myself a mug of tea and sat down at the pc to write. I had an idea formulated already, just had put it into words and type it up. I started, reached for my tea, and spilt the whole scalding mugful all over the pc’s keyboard. I have never done such a thing before, so I suppose I assumed it would never happen. I unplugged the keyboard, tipped it over, and half a pint of boiling hot tea came out and all over me and the carpet (goodness knows where I thought it was going to go).

Not the end of the world. I might not be able to write by hand due to illegibility problems, and I might not own a typewriter, but I do have a laptop, so after a modicum of quiet swearing, I booted it up and started again. Trouble is, I don’t write well on my laptop. It’s not comfortable. The keyboard is horribly sensitive and it jumps about if I accidentally lean my arm on the edge. After a few sentences I knew this was never going to work. I thought I’d try the pc again, see how bad it was. I’d left the keyboard sitting on a radiator, so I now got a roll of kitchen paper blotted as much tea out as I could and then plugged it back in. At first, all seemed fine, though the numbers were a bit haywire. Then I pressed ‘shift’ and the computer promptly shut down.

I took the keyboard upstairs and gave it a good blast with the hair dryer on high setting until it was definitely absolutely bone dry. Brought it back down, plugged it in again. The shift key still shut down the pc. It must have short-circuited somehow because of the heat of the tea, which had been barely off boiling point. This was at about seven fifteen in the evening, and I was exhausted – I’d been out earlier and bought a smart phone. This is something I have never owned before, always thinking I didn’t really need one, but that morning my ISP had gone down for hours, and it had absolutely done my head in. I rely very heavily on email and had no way of accessing it. I occasionally get publishers emailing and asking for an immediate response as to whether a piece is still available for publication – I didn’t want to miss anything of this type, so connectivity had to be found somehow. I suppose taking the laptop to an internet café would have been a possibility, but that’s one hell of a palaver, so it had to be a smart phone. I’m sure anyone reading this has one already and knows exactly how to use it, but I’ve only ever had the sort of basic phone that costs £4.50 from Carphone Warehouse and does nothing whatsoever other than make phone calls and texts using a prohibitively expensive pay as you go scheme that discourages you from using at all except in emergencies. This means I can barely operate one of those, let alone an all bells and whistles modern machine. But I went out and I bought one, and a nice gentleman demonstrated all its functions and I nodded as if I was following, brought it home and switched it on and thought; so how do I make a phone call? And couldn’t work it out, though I did manage to set up various email accounts and facebook and stuff like that, which had been the point of the machine in the first place. But this had all taken time. I’d been busy drawing Hemingway all morning, and had spent too much time in the afternoon trying to work out how to make a phone call, so I hadn’t even begun to write – and that’s why I’d sat down with my mug of tea later on, and thrown it all over the keyboard.

Seven fifteen, and I really was tired, but I jumped in the car and hurtled down to Tesco’s which luckily is a 24 hour one, and bought a £6 keyboard, hurtled back, plugged it in, and wrote over 2000 words of a short story. I haven’t dared read it back. It possibly is one of the worst things I’ve ever written, but at least I wrote it. I’m trying for a minimum of 1000 words a day at the moment, and have managed it for several months, so it was a relief to have got something down.

I have Ernest Hemingway staring down at me at the moment, telling me to stop doing blog posts and write something publishable – a decent short story or a poem. Quite right too. I’ll get to it, just as soon as I’ve made myself another cup of tea – which for safety’s sake will NOT be placed next to the computer keyboard.  

Writing a poem when you have not an idea in your head

Since December last year I’ve been writing an average of 1000 words a day, the point being if you’re not writing you’re not a writer, and 1000 feels like a sensible and achievable total. The words comprise a mix of short stories, flashes, poems, and blog posts. I haven’t written a poem for about a week, so I’d like to do one, but I don’t have a single idea in my head at this moment, so I thought it might be an interesting exercise to write down the process, and see if a poem comes out of it at the end.

Facebook has already proved helpful. I have a possible title. Someone has noted that today is the anniversary of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, and they’ve helpfully included a quote: “the world to me was a secret which I desired to divine”. I like that, and I think I’ll use it.

Sometimes there will be a word or phrase that strikes me from one of the many prompts lists that appear on various workshops and forums on the internet, but today nothing is working, so I’m going to go to my alternate source – images. Street photography is invaluable for story and poetry ideas, and one of the best street photographers around is ‘SUDOR’ on deviantART, so that’s where I’m going. My notifications are usually packed with a good selection of his photos, and today is no exception. Having had a quick browse, I see there are several that include a little girl. I could use her as the character who sees the world as a secret which she desires to divine. I’ll go through the photos one by one and jot down descriptions of what I can see, and perhaps something will grow out of my observations. I’m a great believer in ‘things’, ie concrete objects. I don’t want to note if the girl is smiling – I want to describe what she is looking at that is making her smile.

First photo. I don’t know if she’s smiling or not as it happens, as it’s a back view. She’s on the Paris Métro, and she’s small, maybe about five years old, dressed in a tartan raincoat, white ankle socks, smart little shoes. She’s right at the front of the train, and has climbed the ladder that’s attached to the end of the compartment so that she can lean across and see through the window that gives her a view of the driver’s cabin. She’s holding on tight. She can’t get through the door into this other world. Her side has a carpet, shiny poles, posters – the driver’s side has a huge window, daylight, windscreen wipers – it’s raining, so we’re not in a tunnel. Most children would be pulled straight back down by whoever’s in charge of her, but she looks relaxed and comfortable. I think she’s been up there a while, holding on securely while the train rocks and buffets.

Second. In the Quartier de la Défense, a wide paved path that curls like a snake, she’s running along it, and she could run in a straight line but she’s choosing to follow the curves, so although she’s running, she’s not in a hurry, she has time to enjoy the architect’s design.

Third. She’s not in this photo at all, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll imagine her standing at the photographer’s side and looking in. The scene is a hairdresser’s shop. The hairdresser has short cropped dark hair and big earrings, she’s wearing a dark jumper, a suede mini-skirt and suede platfrom boots, she’s perched on a stool on casters. The lady having her hair done has turned to look at the camera – at the girl – with a ‘what do you think you’re doing here?’ kind of a look. She has an unpleasant long, horsey face. I’ve taken an instant dislike to her; she is supercilious – but I mustn’t think in such terms. I’m not interpreting at this point, I’m trying simply to observe, note down as if I were going to draw the scene. Okay then. She has one hand up to her face, and has her long thumb pressed against the side of her mouth, the fingers of the hand are curled over. Eyebrows are raised. There’s a chair in the way so I can’t see her body, but I can see her feet, in patent leather slingback shoes, lowish heels. The hairdresser has a small smile on her face as if she’s thinking about something good that’s going to happen when she leaves work tonight. I don’t think anything good is going to happen to the lady in the chair.  

Fourth. This one’s odd. It’s a Paris street. There’s a man, sixtyish, business suit. He has a small attaché case, an old fashioned leather one – and he’s balanced it on his head. He is standing perfectly motionless with a case on his head! No, I don’t know either.

Fifth. A dark alleyway. All old cities have these. It has high walls either side, stone built, repointed so many times you can hardly see the stones any more except where the pointing has fallen away. Dark mossy steps, well worn. Granite setts, or similar. Very damp. Four or five steps, every four or five yards. It alleyway bends slightly so that you can never see very far ahead. Nobody else there. Splashes of graffiti, but old, scrubbed away, so they just look like coloured mosses. Brown leaves in the corners where the wind has dropped them.

Sixth. This is the first photo where we see her properly – and incidentally, it’s not the same child, but for the purposes of my narrative it can be. There is more tartan after all – she’s wearing a tartan skirt that’s too small for her and a vest top. Her hair’s cut in a bob, her legs are long and very skinny. She’s leaning against a wall, concrete render, the side of a house. There’s a ventilation grill low down. The window is above her head, painted wooden frame, net curtains, iron bars across the front. One casement is open, and there’s a tabby cat that’s come out onto the ledge, it’s reaching down one paw towards the girl’s head, and I think she knows it’s there. She’s keeping very still, it reaches further and just pats the top of her head.

Seventh. The Parc de Sceaux, a wide, wide, grassy avenue covered in autumn leaves, trees either side. She’s riding her bicycle pell-mell, nobody else is anywhere near.

Eight. Her parents’ car. They are moving furniture. There’s a roof rack, a mattress on top of the roof rack, and then an unidentifiable piece of wooden furniture – it’s covered with a tarpaulin which is tied to the roof rack but also secured to other parts of the car, like the wing mirrors and the boot, by long ropes. The bonnet is up and father’s looking into it, mother’s got her hand on one hip and the end of one of the ropes in her other hand. The car door is open. It’s looking seriously unsafe.

Nine. She’s in a library, standing in a quiet corner surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of books, some of the lower shelves have had books pulled out and their higgledy-piggledy on the floor. She has her hands behind her back and is scowling at anyone who comes past. The shelves are very close together.

Ten. Back outside, the Rue Mouffetard, an ancient lady carrying a capacious wicker basket and a black cane, bent double, walking past scaffolding that’s protected by a fence of what looks like bamboo. Behind the fence, peeling posters. I’ve seen this one before – I recognise the ‘Emerson, Lake and P...’ poster. I wrote a poem about it ages ago. Must be the same photo. Doesn’t matter. The impression of the scene is that this grimy street has been like this for ages.

Eleven – I’m in two minds whether to use this picture or not, as it’s London and all the others have been Paris. It shows a woman with a huge dog. Massive. It’s standing its ground and she can’t move it. There are skid marks on the paving, and it’s almost as if the dog has caused these. I can’t get over how big this dog is. Maybe it’ll have to be in the poem anyway. I saw two Bernese mountain dogs outside the supermarket yesterday and they were just as big – everyone was looking and commenting. I think you never outgrow the joy of seeing an absolutely huge dog.

Twelve. Here she is with her two friends. She’s in her tartan skirt again, and all three of them are wearing clothes that look like hand-me-downs. It’s the Boulevard de Ménilmontant. Scruffy kids, one’s barefooted, but they look very very happy.

That’s enough pictures. I’ve now closed the window on the computer where I was bringing them up, and I’m going to read through what I’ve written so far and see if anything is gelling. I’m still thinking the idea of tying these images together with the little girl is a possible, but I’m wondering if her age needs to be less specific, if they need to be snapshots of different times with her looking back on her childhood. Maybe she’s the woman in London with the huge dog, remembering her Parisian childhood. Perhaps she was very poor – but now she isn’t, hence the dog.

The next stage will be to copy all of this into a fresh document, delete all the words that won’t be included in the poem, and see what’s left; it should be a reasonable set of snapshots. Then I’ll go away and do something else for a while, letting the images gel in my mind. At some point a story will emerge, but I don’t yet know what it is. Some items will go. I’m not sure about the colour – I think this needs to be in black and white, so to speak, it needs to be looking back; childhood through the adult’s eyes. Possibly she is very old now, and these memories are fragmented. Perhaps she’s the old lady with the wicker basket rather than the child seeing her – or perhaps she’s both. Now that’s an angle I like. May well use that one.

I now have to stop writing and start thinking. I think a poem will emerge. It may only end up eight or nine lines long, but that’s fine. Distilling the essence of what I’ve seen and finding a narrative thread is all that’s required, and if that turns out to be very short, it’s no problem. The process is the thing, and the process can be a joy; the teasing out of images, finding exactly the right words to express something, getting into the mind of the protagonist. I write lots of poems, but I’m essentially a story-teller. They have to have character, voice, theme – all the elements of a story. They are no more ‘pretty pictures’ than my artwork. They get under the skin, and the deeper the better. As Mary Shelley said: “the world to me was a secret which I desired to divine”.

Hairy Arms and Icebergs

I’ve never much wanted to read Hemingway, having always been put off by the macho image and the bullfighting and hunting, etc. Didn’t think someone like that would have anything to say to someone like me. Then on one of my regular charity shop browses for bundles of books to keep me going, I came across ‘A Farewell to Arms’ and thought at 75p I might as well give it a go. It was entirely opposite to my expectations. I warmed to the central character, I found much of it tender and touching and the violence was never glorified in any way – quite the reverse. I had a few weeks of wishing I’d discovered him earlier, wishing he turned up in charity shops more frequently (I have difficulty affording new books at the moment) but then I had a brainwave – birthday coming up: ask Mother for some Hemingway. So I did, and she duly obliged with three more novels. I’ve just finished ‘Fiesta’ and absolutely loved it, even though a good proportion of the book is in Pamplona, there are bulls, they die – though one manages to gore a man to death in passing. And you know what? I get it. I get what Hemingway was saying about bullfighting, why it’s there, what it means. I get it in the spirit of the literature. I am not someone who would ever go to a bullfight, and I would happily sign petitions and demonstrate against the vile ‘sport’ – but in terms of the book, I absolutely get it.

A similar thing happened to me in my teens when I was going through a John Masters phase. I’d read a lot of the Indian novels, but then came across the Spanish one: ‘Fandango Rock’ which is very much a bullfighting novel. I hated the idea of bullfighting, but Masters really understood what it was all about and took it to the heart of his novel and made it work. It’s years and years since I read that book, and I possibly won’t read it again ever because I think one outgrows Masters at some point. He is very much an author to be read in one’s teens; fabulous storytelling, great characters, authentic settings, and sex scenes that are erotic rather than cringe-making, so he’s perfect when you’re fifteen or sixteen. He is also very full on with his prose – it’s rich and gorgeous. Very different to Hemingway, with his iceberg style – and that doesn’t mean he’s cold. Far from it. It’s referring to the fact that most of what is really happening is under the surface. Hemingway was a journalist first, so he reports what happens in a clipped and clear way. It’s left to the reader to work out what the real story is, and there will be much, much more beneath the surface than above, hence the iceberg analogy. He’s supposed to have pretty much invented this, apparently. I disagree. I reckon if anyone invented it, it was Jane Austen, because she does exactly the same thing. She tells you what people said and what happened. She doesn’t do a Bronte and delve deep into their emotions and pour them out gushingly in purple prose. Now, I love Charlotte Bronte in particular, but I sometimes find her completely unreadable because she will explain every last feeling in as much detail as she possibly can. Austen and Hemingway don’t do that, and the result is you are more likely to choking back the tears at the end of ‘Persuasion’ or ‘Fiesta’ than you are at the end of the infuriating ‘Villette’, and that’s because there is SO much going on underneath, you are left exhausted, whereas you feel with Charlotte Bronte, she’s the one who’s left exhausted at the end of the novel rather than the reader.

I have a thing I do with authors I love – unless they are hideously ugly, and I can’t bear to look at photos of them, I like to draw their portraits. It’s partly a sort of ‘thank you’ letter to them for the books, and partly self-indulgence, and that irresistible strange alchemy that happens when you study someone’s face and draw them. By happy coincidence, we were doing portraits in my art class this morning. (By ‘my’ I mean the one I attend. I don’t teach it. Wouldn’t know where to begin.) So I thought, yes! Hemingway! Today’s the day. Ideally when I draw someone who I haven’t met, I watch film of them on YouTube and make a composite drawing from various images I find online, but I was short of time so thought I would simply pick a photo I liked and work from that. There’s a great one of him actually engaged in writing. I thought I’d get the basic outline in before I went to my class so that I wouldn’t waste time there trying to get it right. Glad I did, because the method we were being taught this morning would have been incredibly difficult to get right for me – it involved careful measurement and ratios and all that stuff. Now, for me, there are three ways to get a likeness. Best – you trace it. Next best – grid it. Third best – entirely freehand. I wouldn’t even consider doing the careful measurement of, say, an eye, and then seeing how many eyes fit into the distance between the right nostril and the Adam’s apple. So I listened to the teacher giving the explanation and demonstration of this method, and her encouragement to follow it, and as usual, I went my own way, and was thoroughly relieved I’d thought to trace the outline first so I knew my proportions were broadly correct. Then it was simply a question of sitting down with my favourite Conté pencil and getting on with it. This sort of thing takes far longer than you expect, and men with hairy arms – well, you can get locked into those hairs. I have a thing about men with hairy arms. I am very fond of such things. I spent far too long enjoying his arms – but I did also get his eyes, glasses, head, nose, mouth, bit of beard, etc, broadly shaded. Still a long, long way to go. The question is, will I be able to resist finishing this one off until next Thursday? We have another portrait session then to carry on with what we started this week. If I succumb to temptation, which is highly likely, I’ll finish him on Sunday if not before, and then I will have to think of someone else to draw. Actually, that’s probably not too much of a hardship. I could always do him again.

I have become ridiculously fond of Ernest Hemingway. 

History Is Everybody

‘History is everybody’ – not the most inspiring quote, but I was being interviewed today and the interviewer thought it was because she made sure she wrote it down then and there, even though it was being recorded and she could transcribe later. The context: she was interviewing me about ‘My Hidden Mother’, the biography I have written about Mum that, in a nutshell, tells the story of a Jewish girl from a nice middle class family growing up in a world that’s about to implode, ie 1930s and 40s central Europe. The story is all about what happens when a whole group of perfectly ordinary people are dehumanised by the system. They become a label. They are no longer people. They are unwanted, they must be discarded, disappeared. My mother was lucky in that her disappearance meant her survival – for millions of others it meant death. You can read in your history books about Hitler, but you don’t read so much (with the exception of Anne Frank) about people who were not in positions of power, despite the fact that they are the majority by a factor of millions. History is bunk? Certainly is in the text books.

This is changing, slowly. All I remember about history at school was the astonishing fact that Queen Elizabeth I had 2000 dresses. This is a ridiculous factoid. What does it even mean? 2000 dresses at one point? During her entire life? What might be more interesting, is who counted them? Was there really some lady-in-waiting who one night thought, what the hell, why don’t I count how many dresses she really has, then write it down, and a few hundred years time people will be SO grateful I did, because this is what really matters. Put like that, one can see how absurd it is. I want to know how many dresses I might have had if I’d lived then; I want to know what my underwear would have been like, I want to know how I coped with periods and boyfriends. There is one hell of a lot that would be really interesting to know if an ordinary person like me had written it all down, but nobody like me did. I wouldn’t have had sufficient education, wouldn’t have had the level of literacy necessary, probably wouldn’t have had parents who could afford to buy paper, certainly wouldn’t have had access to a publisher.

Different now. I don’t need to be able to afford paper, because I have a computer, and I can write my mother’s story and I can get it published and I can get it out there so that people can read it. And then a student from Greenwich University can come across my book and read it and love it and decide to interview me about it, and maybe she’ll recommend it to others to read, and all the tiny, enormous, everyday and extraordinary facts of my mother’s life will become known beyond the small circle of my expected readership.

We are all history, but if nobody writes it down, after a few generations we disappear.

There is a photograph of my mother with her family. She and her brother are smiling for the camera. Her parents are not. They know what’s coming. I think it’s the most desperately sad picture I have ever seen. We are ALL history.

‘My Hidden Mother’ by Catherine Edmunds

Book: https://www.feedaread.com/books/My-Hidden-Mother-9781786101747.aspx

Photos: http://s78.photobucket.com/user/delph_ambi/My%20Hidden%20Mother/story

Being a Writer

An email out of the blue – a student at Greenwich University asks if I’d be happy for her to interview me regarding ‘My Hidden Mother’, the book I’ve written about Mum surviving the Holocaust. I’m happy to oblige, though I point out I’m a long way from Greenwich. She however is amenable to coming up to Darlington, so we arrange a date. She knows about the book from her grandparents. She gives me their name, but it means little to me, so I ring up Mum who tells me they’re a couple she regularly meets at the bus stop.

This is so random. I was expecting them to be people she’s known for decades.

So next weekend I’m going to be interviewed, and I’m going to have to sound as if I know what I’m talking about as regards writing. I’m going to have to sound like a proper writer. This student is studying creative writing – all I have is an O level in English Language. I wrote stories at school only if they were set by the teacher; never just for the sake of it. I then wrote nothing for decades, didn’t even consider writing until I was in my forties, and then it was purely by chance, and wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t fallen in with some poets in an internet chatroom. I’ve never written a diary and I didn’t spend my teens writing angst-filled poetry. I still don’t write a journal of any kind, which is why my blog entries are so few and far between. When I’m out, I don’t have a notebook with me to jot down ideas. I don’t have paper and pen by my bedside in case I happen to wake up in the middle of the night needing to write down something incredible because I know I’ll forget it by the morning. I was never one of those people who thought they had a novel in them and who were just waiting for the right moment.

The old msn chatrooms were much like facebook today – a right old load of tosh, but with the occasional brilliant conversation. I started jotting down ideas from these conversations, invented characters, threw difficulties at them to see what they would do, and they took off, they flew – and ended up as a novel. Having never written anything longer than three or four sheets of A4 at school, I soon had a manuscript of 96,000 words. In my naivety, I sent it to a few agents. When that got me nowhere, I published with a vanity press – cost me nothing, but I was bombarded with ‘special offers’ to buy my own book at an exorbitant cost, so I sold very few. That book is now thankfully out of print. First novels, eh? Absolute tripe if you don’t know what you’re doing, and I certainly didn’t.

The writing bug had taken hold, however, and within a few years I had learnt the craft properly and had a number of traditionally published books to my name – a poetry collection and three novels.

Did this make me a ‘proper’ writer?

No. When you’re starting out, publication feels like the ultimate goal. Then you realise all you have to do is write something and send it somewhere and someone will eventually publish it. On my website, I used to list all these publications, but I’ve now heavily culled the listings as I’ve realised too many of them are embarrassments. The poetry collection and novels are fine, as they’re out with Circaidy Gregory Press, a very decent indie-press, so I keep them on the list, along with Bridport listings, Pushcart Prize nominations, Butcher’s Dog, Frogmore Papers, etc – but I keep very quiet about some of the others from the distant past before I knew better.

Being published in the right places, however, still didn’t make me a writer, it simply mades me a person who happened to write and who sometimes managed a decent hit.

I mentioned my O level in English Language earlier on. That was slightly disingenuous of me, as it makes me sound as if I haven’t studied writing at all. I have, but I’ve used the internet. I soon realised the chatrooms where people said ‘thank you for sharring’ (sic) were to be avoided at all costs. I drifted instead towards the private, much tougher forums, one of which set me on the right track. I learnt a lot there, but it didn’t make me a writer.

A few years later, I discovered Alex Keegan’s online ‘Bootcamp’, and if you can’t learn how to be a writer there you’re really not trying. I’ve been a ‘bootcamper’ for three years now, and have learnt one hell of a lot – but none of the skills I’ve picked up there make me a writer in themselves.

What makes me a writer is the fact that I’m currently writing every day – averaging around 1000 words – and I’ve been doing this for months now, not even stopping for Christmas Day. When you’re primarily a poet, that’s pretty much impossible, so much of my output at the moment is short stories. They pour out, and they’re initially gibberish, so when they go through the bootcamp mill they’re eviscerated by myself as much as anyone. I fix them if they’re fixable, submit them if they have a chance in one of the better markets or competitions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t – but the important thing is that I’m writing them, so the idea of a student from London coming up to interview me about my writing no longer seems such a weird idea. This is not a hobby. It’s what I do.