in shorts

Bit of a literary spat the other day. All up the wall of my Facebook page. Maybe more of a discussion than a spat? Anyway, it began when I'd expressed my support for a small press and their championing of short stories. This soon developed into a discussion of the marketplace and commercialism and all the rest of it. 'People just won't buy collections of short stories' blah blah.

In this midst of this I realised - once again - I belong to a generation slightly too young to be punks the first time around, but one infused with that sensibility. A watered down version. (Ribena Punks!) At any rate, people who like to track down obscure, interesting stuff in hidden away bookshops... people who feel irked and patronised by the laziness of bookshops filled with sheeny-shiny obvious bestselling books.

That week I'd been struggling with 'Night Train to Lisbon' - I'd been momentarily seduced by the sheeny-shiny railway station shop bestseller thingdom. The comparisons with 'Shadow of the Wind' on the cover made it seem like a literary mystery adventure I might like. The first half was good - gloomy, thoughtful... but then it starts to go on and on and after 300 pages I'm screaming WHO CARES?? Well, millions do, apparently. It's one of those books that go slack in the middle. Lots of bestsellers do. Are bestsellers best defined as books that millions of readers read only half of? Books you can safely skim?

What I LOVED reading that week were short stories. One very late night chancing upon HE Bates's 'Shot Actress - Full Story'. I first read it at school when I was 15. It's still great. Still terrifying. Filled with shame, hypocrisy and the dangers of gossip and messing with the press. (I've never read anything else by HE Bates. I was put off by a sappy idiotic TV show in the 80s based on his novels.)

The other thing was Ray Bradbury's 'The October Country' in a lovely, garish 60s paperback edition. He's a conjuror, that man. There's one story about an old woman who realises she's dead and who, as a ghost, chases the men taking her raddled corpse to the morgue. She gets her grandddaughter to drive her spirit there: 'Faster! Faster! They're getting away!'

Recently I read a review of a new Bradbury collection and the writer was talking about RB publishing TOO much. He apparently writes a story a day and always has done, all his life. Now these off-cuts and try-outs are being gathered up by small presses in vast editions, some of them de luxe. I was reading this surly reviewer talking about this and I was thinking - he should be so lucky. We should all be so lucky. So maybe there are duds and repetitions and sketches and little cul-de-sacs of invention in some of those stories. Maybe some of them are stories where he's just gone sailing off down the river willy-nilly and not managed to bring a story back. But I think we should be grateful for the whole load of stuff he's put out there. What a generous writer! And we don't have to read the whole lot, not if we don't want to. RB fans will love them.

But then - SF-loving people are always completists at heart, aren't they? That thing called the completist-gene.

Anyway - I revelled in these shorter pieces, as opposed to that endless book about Lisbon and the miserable bloke learning portuguese.

Paranormal Romance

Stuart Douglas has been setting up this whole website for me and has been brilliant. I've thought for years that I should have a site and a blog, and all the rest, and I've never quite got it together. I've read other people's and thought how great they were, and how nice it must be to have a place where you interact with your readers and give updates on all your news and gossip. (Maybe not all the gossip, but some, anyway.)

So here we are..! This blog, I bet will turn out to be mostly about what I'm reading. Which makes sense, since I spend as much time as I can reading novels and short stories. I love those blogs where people introduce me to stuff I don't know or have forgotten about. My reading is complicated at the moment because I seem to be reading about eight things at once. For a while, earlier this year, I decided that the perfect combination of different books left lying in different rooms would be:

1) in bag, current novel I'm on with.
2) in study, something comforting, like a fantasy novel or a cosy mystery
3) in kitchen, a kids' or teen novel - new or classic
4) living room coffee table with all the mags and papers - a non-fic hardback. Probably a literary or showbiz biography. And probably v trashy.
5) bedside table - two or three old favourites for rereading.

Anyway, it's all gone a bit haywire, and it's ended up with me carrying a stack of books from room to room, all the time. And getting stuck when I have to pack my bag to go out for the day to work or whatever.

So what have I liked lately?

Esther M Friesner's 'Druid's Blood.' A lovely, slightly deranged steampunk extravaganza with Holmes and Watson incognito and having the most outrageous of adventures. I'm feeling very at home in 221B these days, as I work my way through watching all the Jeremy Brett Granada episodes. I've become fascinated by the sequels, prequels and apocrypha to do with Holmes. And, back in March, I paid a v interesting trip to the museum at 221B Baker Street, which I enjoyed immensely. It was a hot little study, crammed with memorabilia and a little old man, inviting me to have a seat in front of the blazing fire so I could get my picture taken wearing a deerstalker and feeling a bit mithered on the first day of spring. Anyway, the Freisner was great fun, and I've been looking into her other novels - which seem wide-ranging, free-wheeling and fun.

Her books remind me of that remainder shop there used to be in Darlington, which sold american imported Ace Fantasy novels and similar stuff - all at 75p with clipped covers. It was there that I found some of my favourite novels for rereading: Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs, R A McAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon and John DeCles' The Particolored Unicorn.

What else recently..? I reread Armistead Maupin's 'Maybe the Moon' - and loved it as much as I did back in 1993, when my friend Alicia and I went to a swanky literary lunch in Manchester with him and a million others. All of us perched over the melon balls starter as he read from what's become my preferred novel about a midget. I've said it before - but it was Maupin who made me believe - back in 1990, when I was twenty and Gene sat me down with 'Tales of the City' - that it was okay to write fiction that sounds just how people talk. It's a hard thing to get right. People think it's easy. But it's that thing about the essence of style, isn't it? Make difficult things look simple and much easier than they are: that's what it's all about.

Remember - any questions, comments - let me know!

About Me...

I'm a novelist living, writing and teaching in Manchester. I've written books for adults and teens, and I also teach on the MA in novel-writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

There are several different strands to my writing, and I'm hoping this site will bring them all together so you can see what I'm up to, and how all the various bits of what I do inter-relate.

There are sections for my Brenda and Effie mystery novels, published by Headline Review, and for the books and audio dramas about that transtemporal adventuress Iris Wildthyme and her obstreperous travelling companion, Panda. Also, there are pages for my books for younger readers, such as Strange Boy, Twin Freaks and Exchange. And a page about those writings of mine that take place within the Doctor Who universe.

There's a news page with updates about what I'm getting up to - what I'm writing, what I'm publishing next and where I'm next giving readings or workshops.

Also there's this blog, where I'll probably write about what I'm reading. I'll also try to answer any questions that people have.