littorally

This week, I have mostly bin…

Busy week. Last weekend I was at the Amnesty conference in Newcastle. A good day, with lots of useful stuff. At lunchtime everyone at the conference got done up in orange boiler suits, masks and googles, and were marshalled through the centre of Newcastle by shouty men in US army uniforms, as part of Amnesty’s campaign to close Guantanamo. Made quite a sight for the Saturday shoppers, over a hundred people done up like this walking slowly along, head bowed, in silence. We were then lined up by Grey’s Monument, and put through various positions by the enthusiastic ‘guards’ whilst some of the national Amnesty team handed out info and collected signatures. Was slightly weird, because my googles fogged up right at the start, so it was like being in some sensory deprivation zone. Which, doubtless is the point when done for real.

Number of years since the first prisoners were taken to Guantanamo: 5
Number of prisoners under 18 at the time taken to Guantanamo: 17
Number of attempted suicides in custody: 40
Number of suicides in custody: 3
Number of prisoners brought to trial: 0
Number of prisoners convicted of any offence of terrorism: 0

Busy few days at work, as a number of things are coming to the boil at once. And also because I was off Thursday and Friday, as the kids were on half-term holiday. We went off to the country for a couple of days, and enjoyed being in the middle of nowhere but still near enough a pub with good food and even better Guinness. And a play park for moles.

Saturday, went and watched rubbish for about 85 minutes, and came away shaking my head at the fact that we nearly ended up winning it. Then to an Halloween party on the night, as matching devils with accompanying little witch and uh, corpse thing. Loved the fireworks, especially the ones which went straight up, hit a tree, and then bounced around entertainingly.

And then thirty-six hours of kids throwing up. Winter vomiting virus, what a barrel of laughs that is. And here we are, Monday again.

No “I” in the index, then.

Scott Pack notes an interesting coincidence: on the same day that Gordon Brown announces that “no one wants to see criminals profiting from publishing books about their crimes”, and proposes civil orders to recover payment from those that do, Random House announce that they will be publishing Tony Blair’s memoirs.

All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit

While the England capitulation against Russia might have been rubbish to listen to in terms of football, it was still a nostalgic experience.

The ISDN lines over which Radio Five were meant to broadcast their commentary were down, so they phoned the whole thing in over a mobile phone. You can imagine the quality of a mobile call made from inside a football stadium, then broadcast over AM. It hissed, it faded and surged as if they were standing next to some strange sea, every now and then human voices turned to those of robots, slowly phasing like one of those children’s voice changers.

Made me all fuzzy and nostalgic for European and international football when I was little, when any match from Eastern Europe broadcast on TV was a hazy, crackly affair which looked like it was being transmitted from Mars. It generally snowed. The picture was fuzzy. The sound was dreadful. Teams with mysterious names like Dinamo Tbilisi or Újpesti Dózsa would play tough matches in front of crowds that appeared to be completely made up of soldiers with ridiculously big caps. And Alsatian dogs.

That’s £3125 per bullet

Sir Ian Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, earns a salary of £228,000. His force are currently on trial about the series of mistakes which led to the shooting of an innocent man on the Tube. Sadly, they’re not on trial for the lies, spin, smears and cover-up which followed.

But hey, what’s one dead Brazilian. Sir Ian thinks he deserves a performance bonus of £25,000. His deputy has had the decency to turn his down, and not take it . But not Sir Ian, the man who went home at 7pm on the day de Menezes was shot.

Long and short of it

Friend of mine has a 7,000 word crime short, and is struggling to find markets that will take a piece that long. I’m a bit out of touch with what’s going on in the crime short fiction scene, does anyone have any suggestions? As far as I know, AHMM/EQMM don’t specify word limits, but not every story’s suitable for their readership.

Tweet to the beat

Moonwalking mannequin bird.

Flaneur

Will Self walks from London to New York.

There was times I’d take my pen, and feel obliged to start again

Like I said when I changed the design, time to rip it up and start again.

I’ve not been posting much recently, and I’ve decided to shake things up a little. If we get to Christmas, and I’m not posting much, I think I will fold it. But for now, all change. And now’s a good time to do it.

The theme for this year has been one of change and disruption. There’s been far too much in the way of serious illness with family and friends. An almost complete change of job, despite not moving anywhere. Stay in one place long enough, and the world moves around you. The job’s a change for the better, by some margin, but a still a big shake-up all the same.

And then there’s the writing. Started the year on a high: had been taken on by an agent (and some agent, too), working hard on revisions to the novel, feeling like I was getting somewhere. Then, at the back end of the summer, I got The Phone Call. The novel’s got a lot going for it. It had been read by a couple of people at the agency, and an external reader, and they thought the writing was great: style, character, pace all good…and yeah, I knew the ‘but’ was coming too.

It was not so much the parts, more the whole. You only get one chance at a first impression, I was told, and so it has to be as good as it possibly can be. Going in with a first novel, trying to sell it, any agent wants something that’s going to kick down the doors and demand attention. And One Of Us, for all its virtues, doesn’t quite do that. The team at the agency think I’m capable of writing something that does, so asked me to go away and do just that.

I took it with good grace, because being professional about these things is important. And then I hung up and hovered about the room for a while, not sure what I was thinking, not really thinking anything. Then I swore for a bit, shook my head, laughed, swore a bit more, vowed to plough straight into something that would just be the best thing ever written, swore some more but not out loud now, because the kids had come in, made a cup of tea, thought right, straight back to it…and then sulked for a week.

But still, onwards and upwards.

Or rather, around and around.

I’ve been working on a few ideas for the next novel, trying to decide which one can go the distance. But nothing’s clicking, they’re all ok, but not more than that, and I keep thinking: this has got to be something more than that. I do wonder whether I’m trying to judge it by too high a standard, and should stop the introspection and just start writing something, anything, and see where it goes.

So, I need to shake this off and get moving again. Publicly committing to doing something is one way of making sure I do just that. So, if I’m still spinning my wheels come Xmas, give me a kick. I need to get back into first draft, into that flow. There’s still lots to aim for, and right now I can either try, or just let it drift away.

Watch this space.