Two Self-Portraits

I rarely like photos of me - but here's two that I do. From 1974 and 1995 respectively... both collaged with stuff in my journals. The white alsation was Nicki, the first dog I ever had. He was a retired police dog and when I was tiny I'd sit on his back like he was a pony. I'd sit inside his kennel while he lay outside and kept watch.

The other pic comes from photos that were taken for my first novel, 'Marked for Life' coming out from Chatto when I was twenty five. I don't think they even got used in the end. Maybe I'll write a bit more soon, about publishing that first novel and how it all happened. And what it was like, in the mid-nineties, writing and publishing queer-northern-working-class-magical-realism, as I used to laughingly refer to it.

Vintage Item No.5 - Crossroads

Everyone who knows me knows that I really love really bad vintage tv. I make no apologies about it. There's something very touching and involving about particular soaps, dramas and comedies from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. I especially love things that are acted out under brilliant lights inside poky studio sets, involving under-rehearsed actors battling their way through scripts that have been thrown together by someone right at the end of their tether. I like watching episodes of things where you can hear people tearing out their hair behind the scenes.

So... Crossroads.

I always loved it, going back as early as I can remember. Tea times with tea on a tray, mopping bean juice with white bread and watching these adults parading around in a Motel, having mystifyingly dramatic adult lives but behaving all the time with the same earnest, semi-improvised gusto of kids in the playground. I remember very clearly things like David Hunter's crazy-eyed wife shooting him in his office while a party goes on in the next room. How he lay on the sheepskin rug oozing bright pink blood until Meg came and found him, executing a marvellous double take in her party frock. I remember daft Benny in his Badly-Drawn Boy hat, falling in love with the gypsy girl who taught him to write. And how she was run over and killed on the day of their wedding - leading Benny to do some kind of heartbroken monologue over an orchestral track... which ended up in the pop charts, as if that was any consolation to him. And, of course, the day that Meg - zoned out on tranquilisers on Guy Fawkes' Night 1981 - set fire to her own motel, faked her death and skipped off to the QE2 for a cruise from which she never returned.

For me, this was adult life. This is how grown-up people carried on. If you were classy you lived in houses like Jill's - Chimneys, it was called, and you had a cosy country kitchen with a welsh dresser and earthenware mugs and a troublesome ex-husband like bleary-eyed Stan who could turn up drunk at any moment and threaten to steal your toddler Sarah Jane away. If you were a busy business woman you would march around your motel with a clipboard having terse words with the temperamental chef and the shiftless receptionist... and maybe you'd have your head turned by a suave fella in a nylon suit with huge collars and sideburns and hair that looked like a wig.

In recent years they've released a massive batch of old episodes on dvd, of course. My favourite EVER is Christmas 1979. It was in the first bumper volume that came out maybe four years ago and I rewatch it every Christmas Eve. It features a final sequence with the entire cast celebrating in Meg's swish sitting room in the Motel. Even those characters who didn't really get on with each other are perched there, cramped together, holding aloft schooners of sweet sherry in the olive-walled boudoir of the Queen of Soap. It's all rather poignant. It's like they're gathered there for the end of the Seventies. Soon, everything would be changing for them and the rest of the country.

Meg rallies them all for the close of the episode by bullying a pianist to accompany her and busting into song. She swirls her arms up and gives them, 'We Need a Little Christmas.' The whole cast complies and what sounds like a jazz ensemble tucked away somewhere leaps into action as well. Doris Luke the cleaner gazes from the velour settee at her boss with what seems like raptly sapphic desire. Poor depressed Glenda rallies from her doldrums to get the song words mixed up. David Hunter stands with his brilliant new novelist wife and the two of them look elegant and festive, but complex and sophisticated, too.

Network dvd (I love what they do. They unearth real treasure, they do) have slung together every single one of their Crossroads releases and are putting them out in the ludicrous Motel-shaped boxed set above. Isn't that marvellous? With all the characters looking out of the windows? Just exceptional. I wish their releases had gone beyond mid-1979, though. What I really want is the second half of 1979 - so I could have all the brilliant build-up to that year's final singsong in the sitting room of Meg Mortimer.

Cats and Blogs

Am I going soft-headed and soppy? I'm reading 'Dewey' by Vicki Myron - the story of a librarian in Iowa who adopted a cat and the whole town / state / world took the cat to its heart. And I'm loving it. I've gone daft and sentimental, but maybe that's okay this time of year? Mellow fruitfulness and wallowing in it. But the book's sold a million copies (according to the Christmas bauble spot-laminated on the cat's neck on the cover of my copy) and I wonder whether I should be reviewing the more obscure things I read? I love the shonky old paperbacks reviewed by The Groovy Age of Horror, and god knows I spend enough time delving into obscure stuff myself... Maybe these million sellers get enough attention as it is? At any rate, I'm still enjoying the cat book.

Cats and vampires and old ladies. That's where I'm at these days...

And Doctor Who, of course. Yesterday, a smashing lunch time meeting with Gareth at the Lass O'Gowrie - planning the NovelCon event for Sunday 11th October. Now, there's a real celebration of obscure novels! We were just saying sitting in the snug yesterday, how funny and strange it is, that even the most obscure Who episodes from way back in the mist of the early 60s are pristine and available on dvd (apart from those lost forever, of course) and yet the original Who novels of the 90's and early 2000's seem suddenly vanished forever... We're hoping this daylong celebration of Doctor Who in print will bring back a few memories... with panels, readings, playlists and silly games - and pints and pies, of course.

Oh! Speaking of book blogging... here's a couple of quotes from Nicola Morgan in this autumn's issue of The Author - being brilliant about blogging and book reviews. This is Nicola telling authors not to be snotty about readers-turned-bloggers:

'Please don't go all reactionary and roll your eyes: yes, some bloggers are weird and not to be trusted with a minute of your time; so are some authors.'

And here she is on why Amazon's reviews and recommendations are to be taken with a pinch of salt:

'...the automatic recommendations on Amazon, which have so little pertinence that they keep suggesting I buy the books I actually wrote...'

It's a great article.

The pics above are me messing about with autumn colours... the squirrels are still busy up in the chestnut outside the front of our house, where I can see them when I'm at my desk. They're so organised in their campaign of terror - chucking down the conkers and scaring the passersby. Fester the cat shouted to be outside this morning and when he went the squirrels from the Longsight Branch scared him so much he had to come straight back in. To be fair, it was probably the dustmen with their lorry that scared him as well. He's not a soft cat. Aaagghhh. I'm writing about cats.

NovelCon in Manchester

A limited number of tickets remain for NovelCon, the upcoming Doctor Who event dedicated to the long history of Target books, Virgin New Adventures and BBC books to be held on Sunday October 11th at the Lass O'Gowrie pub in Manchester.

Appearing on the bill will be...

Paul Magrs, Mark Morris, Mark Michalowski, Steve Lyons, Paul Dale-Smith, Andrew Cartmel, David McIntee, Daniel Blythe, Justin Richards, Simon Guerrier, Martin Day, Trevor Baxendale, Paul Cornell and Gary Russell.

Various panels will take place throughout the day, with conversation covering the various forms of Doctor Who novel from TV adaptations to readings and some fun stuff thrown in.

If you're a lover of Doctor Who literature, then you cannot miss NovelCon - it takes place at the superb Lass O’Gowrie pub in Manchester on Sunday, October 11th. Full address is:

The Lass O’Gowrie
36 Charles St
Manchester M1 7DB

T 0161 273 6932
E info@thelass.co.uk

For more details of the pub, visit www.thelass.co.uk - note that at this late stage there is no guarantee tickets will be available on the door.

the Lakes

I've just realised that we never went to the Lakes this summer. Not even a day trip in the car. Looking for something else in my tiny study, and dragging out all of my drawings books and diaries, I found these watercolour sketches from a trip a couple of years ago and that's when it hit me - we didn't go to the Lakes this year. No plodging in the cold bronze of Lake Ullswater, or devouring vinegary chips in Bowness. It's a measure of how fast the summer flashed by that we didn't get to Lakeland this year. I've been on the Algarve teaching in a beach hut and I've been sipping pastis on a boat beside Notre Dame with J. and Panda - but I've not had a cup of tea in Ambleside or Grasmere and that seems weirdly remiss.

When I was a kid we used to go several times a year on runs-out. It was close enough to get there and back in a day from Newton Aycliffe. We also had a few holidays there. The classic parched summer of 1976, we were in a caravan park on a farm, with a bull in the next field and horses everywhere. I remember being in the Lakes almost every year. Picnicking at Tarn How, or yomping about uphill in the mist at 7 a.m to visit some Roman remains. Buying flipflops in Penrith. Walking miles and miles on a Geography school trip when they paired up our class with all the kids from a borstal. Staying in a fancy hotel with silver service, right on the edge of Ullswater.

My earliest memory of being in the Lakes is one of those days it was hoying it down with rain, and sitting in the car with the windows wound up - grandparents, parents and me at about the age of three. Eating hot dogs out of the tin and Tudor Sweet and Sour crisps, singing Yellow Submarine. Passing hot tea round in the flask. We were in a lay-by trying to see through the wet trees to the lake beyond and the rain was coming down in sheets.

It's sunny there too, sometimes. And in autumn it gets pretty spectacular. I hope we'll make the trip again before long.

Creeping Horror

I was talking the other day about reading Stephen King again, and how I'd been reading him since I was a teenager. I think I've worked out when it is he leaves me a bit cold, or the point at which the story starts to escape from me and leave me behind....

It's when the creeping horror, all that sly, suggestive, gradual stuff he does so well suddenly gives way to a full-blown manifestation of... something awful. It's when he brings the monsters on, that's when I go off him. When the true enemy reveals its horrid face.

It's not a problem I have with all horror writers. Just with Stephen King. This week, reading his latest stories, I've been pondering why.

The stories in 'Just After Sunset' I've enjoyed the most really hold back the full-blown revelation of the monster. My favourite has been 'N', which is a lovely and clever examination of Obsessive Compulsive Disorders . It's a proper ghost story, with multiple narrators and oblique accounts: a narrative wrapped in a successive layering of letters and analyst's notes. It's taking the neurotic ramblings of all those M R James heroes and H P Lovecraft loonies and updating them with a spot of obsessive naming-and-touching familiar to anyone with a mild touch of OCD (and what writer hasn't?). We're left on the brink of discovering the true horror in this story - as we are in any good ghost story. We see each of these doomed individuals follow each other into the dreaded Ackerman's field and its circle of standing stones... and the strange thinness and sense of evil lurking within... But we see little more than a reptilian eye. And that's enough for me, frankly. Lovecraft and James and all that lot were always best when we just got a glimpse. (There's nothing more unsettling to me, than that black plastic bin bag flapping down the beach in James's, 'Whistle and I'll Come...' )

There's another story in the new collection about the desktop belongings of office workers from the World Trade Centre, appearing suddenly in the appartment of their only surviving colleague. This is a lovely, seemingly benign haunting. But its effect is robbed by being followed up with a story that ends, quite abruptly in a capricious apocalypse, bursting, bleeding eyeballs and all. A story that seemed to be going in one direction - suddenly melts into nothing, as King confronts us with sudden, undeniable horror.

The differences between those two stories, 'The Things They Left Behind' and 'Graduation Afternoon' epitomise my reactions to his work. Back when I was seventeen and reading 'The Dead Zone' on a walking holiday in the Lakes, when I couldn't stop reading wherever I was until the thing was finished... it was the stuff just around the corner that kept me going. I was dragged almost against my will into that disturbing world of premonitions and assassination and the turgid workings of a damaged mind. And then, slightly later, when I read 'It'... I was carried along by the dreadful sense of history repeating itself... really feeling for these characters whose memories had been suppressed... who knew something terrible had once happened to them, and it was fated to happen again.

It was at the end of 'It's' huge double narrative that I lost my patience. I remember just how I felt, after a thousand pages of teasing and nastiness and glimpses of clowns and the monster at the heart of the labryrinth was revealed to be (spoiler)


... a great big giant spider.

I just didn't care. I didn't want a real spider, giant or otherwise. That stuff belongs elsewhere - in Ray Harryhausen, in Doctor Who. Anywhere but where it suddenly was.

This is probably a very personal reaction to King's work. I know people love the shocks and the spills and the sudden revelations... Sometimes his schlockier moments are great - but only, I think, when they're deliberately parodying or pastiching 50s horror comics or B Movies and we're in on the joke, somehow.

I don't think it's his horror stories I enjoy. Or the ones about serial killers and the ultra violent ones. It's his ghost stories that I really like.

My library card was nicked along with my wallet a few years ago and it wasn't until yesterday that I got a replacement. Silly, waiting so long, when libraries have been such a big part of my life. The house is stacked to the rafters with a million paperbacks still waiting to be read... and I'm forever making heaps of the next-twenty-to-read and then the-next-twenty-after-that, and then changing my mind and digging up new books from the heaps and boxes of things-I-haven't-read-yet. So with all of that, rejoining the Central Library seemed a bit beside-the-point, in a way. Also, I've done a few readings in libraries over the years and sometimes I find them depressing - the way they've become entertainment-centres with computers and games and just STUFF everywhere. Everything but books, it feels like sometimes. Although the Central Library in Manchester is still pleasingly bookish and musty.

I was in there yesterday - having popped in last week and forgotten to take with me umpteen forms of ID and letters with my full name and address on, etc. Yesterday I had all the paperwork I needed and I was told about four times by the woman at the desk I had to, 'Look after it this time! Don't lose it again!' And I'd already told her it was nicked.

Coming over curmudgeonly - I went for a lovely long traipse around the stacks. Our Central Library is circular and seemingly endless. It's like trotting slowly around a subdued hamster wheel, exploring the central reference bit. Just a few people hissing earnestly at each other, the occasional burst of giggling and that agitated squeaking of a librarian hauling some kind of trolley around - crossly.

I had quite a nice time, browsing books about witchcraft and WH Auden, and then trying in vain to find something about Toulouse Lautrec in the Art section, every scrap of which had been colonised by a whole schoolful of teenagers and teachers, all busily doing projects. By then I'd forgotten what I'd come in for. Roman Britain, was it? Hans Christian Anderson? I was lost by then, and all I'd found was a book about Grayson Perry, which I'd seized upon. I always like the way he talks about stuff. So - I had a mooch about in talking books (which I love... and I was still reeling with happiness about signing a contract for an unabridged Brenda yesterday morning...!)
then I went off to Cafe Nero with a bag full of nothing I came out for... And I spent happy hour doodling and making notes on stuff before I went off down the Oxford Road again, for the last of the week's university events.

Upcoming Readings

What do you think of the drawing? I was using these felt tips that are more like the dabbers they give you at the bingo.

I thought I'd flag up a few dates that are coming up! I'm doing a bunch of readings at some literature festivals, all to do with books I've got coming out in the next little while. I'm also teaching a few workshops along the way. I love doing these things - and it'd be great to see some of the readers of this blog at these do's!

Saturday 10th October - the Ilkley Festival.
I'm running a fiction writing workshop on 'Secrets and Subtexts' from 2-4pm at the Manor House Museum. And at 5.50pm I'm giving a reading at the Ilkley Playhouse from my Brenda and Effie books, and talking about vampires and suchlike with Kevin Jackson.

Sunday 11th October - NovelCon at the Lass O'Gowrie pub in Manchester.
This is a one day event organised by Gareth Kavanagh: panel discussions and readings from Doctor Who novelists down the ages. Pies and pints and transdimensional debate. This should be a hoot.

Thursday 15th October - Sheffield 'Off the Shelf' festival
I'm reading at 2pm at the Sheffield college.

Saturday 24th Octover - Lancaster LitFest
I'm reading at a special Brenda and Effie do at 9.30pm at the Storey Auditorium. They're encouraging people to dress up Hallowe'enish for this one, though I don't think it's mandatory! I'll be reading some Brenda - most probably from the new book, 'Hell's Belles!'

I'm a bit heartbroken this year because I can't be at the Whitby Bookshop on Hallowe'en. The past few years they've thrown a party for me and the new Brenda book right in the middle of Goth Weekend and it's always been wonderful. A whole shopful of dressed-up Brenda fans, coming to listen and to buy stuff and get it signed! This year we couldn't do it because of various commitments. Hope we can reschedule for Beltane and the mass market paperback! (My editions seem to coincide with magical festivals...!)

Brenda and Effie Mystery no.4: 'Hell's Belles!' comes out on November 12th - the very day I turn forty. And 'Twelve Stories' is published by Salt books on the 2nd of November.

Mrs Saferi's Books

For our 1978 Christmas play most classes at Woodham Burn Juniors were doing quickie nativities or naff pantomimes, as usual. Not Mrs Saferi. She had us lot doing a specially shortened – ‘abridged’, she explained - version of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.

I, like most of our class, was a troll. We had to cut up old clothes and lumber about menacingly, brandishing percussion instruments. Vicki G was cast as a slimy character called The Crooked One, rolling about on the floor swathed in bubble-wrap and noisily tempting the hero. Mr Robson the headmaster came to our dress rehearsal and told us solemnly that The Crooked One would probably have to stand up and not wriggle on the floor so much, if she wanted to be seen from the back of the school hall.

The Christmas concert was a big do. Mr Robson used a microphone and did a whole comedy routine. We could tell he was showing off to the parents, who became quite rowdy. There was a huge raffle for hampers and he produced tickets out of the hat with quite a flourish. We’d all donated tins and comestibles and they were in boxes decorated with multi-coloured cellophane and bows. Mrs O’Connor the school secretary had been on with making those for hours. Everyone wanted to win one. We didn’t.

And we were all trolls, our whole class. We were all over-excited, being in school when it was dark outside, and the place was noisy with grown-ups and their laughter, and Christmas was coming. Only a few people said that our show, out of each class’s, was the least Christmassy. But we didn’t care. It had been a special production, quite unlike the rest. It was all Mrs Saferi’s idea.

Mrs Saferi looked like Barbra Streisand and she wore a poncho. She had us singing Melanie’s, ‘Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma.’ All of class Six belting this out. She had travelled as a student and lived on a kibbutz. She had us singing Kum-by-ya in assembly. She had been Miss Longstaff when we first knew her, but she had married an Italian man during one school holiday. We all stared at her. She was one of the most exotic people we had ever seen in Aycliffe, and that was saying something.

She used to walk home along the Burn with a whole gang of kids around her, singing like we were all in the Sound of Music together, if the Sound of Music had been set on a council estate in the North East. She lived on our estate. None of the other teachers lived anywhere near us, on the Agnew estates.

At the end of one summer term she did this brilliant thing. We were all queueing to leave the classroom and she had made up little parcels of sweets for us to take home. Teachers often did that. When it came to my turn she handed me something else – a brown paper parcel. She explained that the books it contained had been her favourites back when she was my age, back in the Sixties. These were her actual copies. They weren’t for keeps, of course. They were for me to look after during the six weeks’ summer holiday. The long summer holidays on the blackhouses estate in Aycliffe, the year the tarmac melted on the winding roads, and they built the doomed boating lake near our street.

I went home with a bundle of Puffins – Five Children and It, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Borrowers Afield and Worzel Gummidge and Saucy Nancy. She knew that I was a real reader. She knew I had books of my own and that I was in the town library. But she particularly wanted me to have these books she had loved. Maybe she thought I spent too much time reading Terrance Dicks and Doctor Who?

Funny thing – though some of the other kids laughed, like I’d been given extra homework – I never felt like that. I felt like I’d been trusted with something for a few weeks, like I’d been asked to take home and care for the class guinea pig or something. I also had to make sure that I read the books properly and carefully and was ready to answer any questions she might have about them, to test me out. But she never did. When I gave her them back that September she just smiled and took the books and put them in her bag.

They were all summery books. I’ve been rereading various children’s books this summer, including some of the above. Some of the best begin with going off on holiday. Arriving somewhere new, not home, and starting an adventure. I always liked wintry books that begin that way, too. It was a massive gift, that lend from Mrs Saferi. I wonder if she knew at the time it was such a big deal.

Long days in autumn

It's been a long day, but a good one, I think. I love getting up in the dark, these days before it's too cold, and making coffee and starting work. Today I was writing at 6 a.m, which is unusual... but exciting, too. It's like there's no impediment between what's in your head and what you want on the page. No internal censor. And I'm writing some crucial bits in the middle of my novel... bits where everything is turning rather strange and phantasmagorical. That feeling of lucid dreaming seems important. Fester the cat comes and sits by me on my desk as I write. He sheds hair everywhere and tries to batter the printer with both paws.

Then it was a day of different jobs: going over edited chapters of my next teen novel, emailed over from Simon and Schuster. Reading and making editorial notes on the last four story submissions for Obverse Books' 'The Panda Book of Horror', which I'm working on with Stuart. And being delighted with how our authors are just *getting* Iris and Panda right. Going into town and to the English department for a tea time do to welcome the new MA students to the Writing School - and to welcome back those returning for the writing-up year on their novels. Lots of familiar faces in the cavernous atrium of the Geoffrey Manton building, and some new ones too - and a lovely sense of new workshops and courses about to unwind and unroll. I'm about to start my 'Children's Lit' course, and kicking off with Eve Garnett and E. Nesbit: fantasy and harsh realism in the early twentieth century.

In the middle of all of this - at about two in the afternoon - I'm stopping to read some Stephen King and I drift off for a half hour nap. (Nearly forty!). Fester the cat is lying on my chest, of course. He'll find me wherever I am around the house and come to sit with me or on me. We both fall asleep on the settee. And after precisely half an hour I wake up - and I know exactly what I need to do with the rest of that strange middle section of my novel. The plot has clicked into place. I know the reasons for all the mysterious choices I've made so far. I know the revelations and epiphanies to come. It's all just slotted into place - and through the medium of a nap.

Then I've got to dash upstairs and get notes written about this plotting stuff before the cobweb strands of all those knotty decisions start to snap.

And tonight... arriving home after the MMU reception, and Jeremy home after his long day away on trains in Wales... there's the next episode of 'Hornets' Nest' for me to listen to. The Circus of Doom... with bearded ladies on the high wire, venetian midgets, monochrome clowns with painted lips and nails... And it's very, very creepy. The series is getting stranger and more sinister. I have a listen with headphones on, loving all the hurdy-gurdy circus music and the layering of kerfuffle and narration. Tom's on fine fettle. His Doctor is appalled and fierce... but there's a relish he takes in the macabre, as well... I love listening to these new episodes. It's like being inside my own dreams.

First day of term

I've been in the office today at MMU, having battled my way down the blustery Oxford Road, where a million new students are going up and down clutching paperwork and club flyers. I've been meeting the new first years and I've been beset the whole time with flashbacks to my own first week on campus, twenty one years ago. That start-of-term feeling comes back exactly the same time every year. The smell of freshly-sharpened pencils and a queasy tinge of nerves. The foamy coffee out of the department vending machine. The chemical tang of newly photocopied booklets...

Couple of links... I've just been sent a lovely review of 'Hands Up! - the Musical' on a blog by US fantasy writer Paul Genesse (http://paulgenesse.blogspot.com/)

and I just read Tom Baker's account of his signing sessions for 'The Stuff of Nightmares' in London earlier this month: http://www.tom-baker.co.uk/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=159

On the whole I'd say I've been enjoying the encroaching autumn. The weekend saw us wandering about the junk shops of Frodsham and hunting through a vast, wonderful barn filled with secondhand books for ancient pulpy paperbacks that I'm sure to review right here at some point. Also, I've been listening to the Radio 4 adaptations of Miss Marple stories. I seem to prefer June Whitfield's incarnation to any of the TV ones. I wonder why that is? She really plays up the snobby side to Miss M and that's the bit of the books I have a problem with. But there's such a light touch to those radio versions. Also, I think of those stories as being very verbal: stories being filtered through different view-points and all of it discursive rather than being dynamic or very visual...

Also, I've been reading Stephen King again for the first time in ages. After being obsessed as a teenager for a while with his stuff, I'd gone off him for years. He's too messy, too big, too rambling, too cheap in some of those latterday novels I ploughed through. Every few years I'd try him again. Bag of Bones. Ho-hum. Dreamcatcher. Ugh. Nothing could match sitting up all night on Christmas Eve when I was seventeen, hooked on Salem's Lot. Anyway - reading his new story collection - 'Just After Sunset' - there's a story called 'Gingerbread Girl' that gripped me until I felt sick. I don't know if I liked it, but it made me forget I was reading. And that means it's good, I think.

The Princess Bride

I love books about old books. I’m thinking about novels such as Michael Ende’s ‘Neverending Story’, Jonathan Carroll’s ‘The Land of Laughs’ and Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s ‘Shadow of the Wind’. Usually involving the protagonist describing some hidden-away bookshop and a particular fantastic, extravagantly obscure book that once fell into their hands and changed their lives forever. There’s Italo Calvino’s ‘If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveller…’ too – another favourite in which metafiction’s fun and not bloody boring.

It’s a way for these writers to describe their love affair with reading, but also to write about the act of writing in a way that doesn’t get dry or clever-clever (mostly). I’ve just read William Goldman’s ‘The Princess Bride’ – twenty years after I first saw the film and loved it, back in my first year at University in Lancaster. I just picked up the book – I don’t know what made me – and for once I was glad I’d waited the twenty years. There was another layer of narrative that the book had accreted for its silver anniversary eleven years ago.

In its dotage the novel is wearing a lovely cardigan of extra stuff – we catch up with events after the fluffed ending of the original fairy-tale-within-the-tale and also, with the life of the implied autobiographical William Goldman of the italicized sections of the original book. In the original he’d come in and comment on the bits he’d edited from the original ‘Princess Bride’ manuscript by Morgenstern. All made up, of course: all delicious layers of made-up nonsense, like a big sticky vanilla slice with cream and icing sugar. I love that flickering between the derring-do and romance of the inner tale and the wisecracking New Yorkese of Goldman’s fictional Goldman. It’s witty and zippy and a hell of a device for cracking on through the boring or unnecessary bits of an adventure.

The best thing about the book is its humour. It got me thinking about how most fantasy fiction – most fiction full stop – is pretty humourless. There’s very few laughs in even the booky-book-type books I listed above. (Maybe just wry laughs. Ho-ho.) Goldman is full of humour. Belly-laughs and daft jokes, yes – but also humour in the good-humoured sense. Laughing at how people are, just as themselves. There’s such a warmth in the book. Even when it’s dealing with two-dimensional characters and scenes of battle and meta-discursive asides and footnotes and seemingly irrelevant anecdotes to do with Hollywood.

It all slots together so nicely – like one of those pieces of furniture fancy carpenters make without nails or glue.

Vintage Item no.4: Eric Houghton's Steps Out of Time

Some books stay with you and nothing can shake them out of your head. Steps Out of Time - out of print now, of course - was something read to our class at school when I was 10. Miss Booth, who was thin, elegant, sometimes caustically witty, read us a chapter before home time and we never quite reached the end before the end of the last summer term of junior school.

It's a novel about a boy who moves to a new town and, because he doesn't fit in, magically travels to another time and another situation, much happier than his chilly, Novembery, motherless own. Any other novel would have him transported to a magical land full of adventure and derring-do and that would be how he finds his outlets and his escape. Instead, he goes somewhere that looks like home and to all intents and purposes still is home: it's just sideways and a little further forward in time. When the brown mist comes down over the bleak little town during his friendless walks home from school, he finds himself at a front door that should be his and should lead to the damp house where he lives alone with his father. But he finds a happy family who recognize him as their own: mystifyingly, they think he is someone else. Someone happier, someone more fortunate, someone who looks just like him.

It's a delicious mystery, this one - full of that aching heimweh and spooky gloom that I adored at 10 and still do, if I'm honest. All novels that are any cop are somehow about homesickness and love, I think. In them, we're all - readers and writers alike - looking for that fogbound walk in the dark back from school, hoping to be transported. That's what I was figuring out then, anyway... that it's all about heading home somehow, blindly and trustingly.

At school we never quite reached the end of the novel. Summer holidays came up and, after that, there was the comp across town to attend. Autumn and lots of literal walks through leafy mulch and misty building sites. Real homesickness and dread, and I think at one point I managed to borrow Eric Houghton's novel from the town library. Put an order form in and waited. Found out what happened at the end and, of course, it was quite a simple solution to the boy's time-travel mystery. I was a huge Doctor Who novelization fan: temporal paradoxes were a doddle to me. But the plot of Steps out of Time was beside the point. The real stuff was in its atmosphere. The emotional stuff, the realism of its details. It just seemed right, the mood it conjured. Going home, getting there and it's not home, but it makes you feel like you belong.

Only bits of certain books stay in my memory. Brain like an Etch-a-Sketch - a toy from the same era as Eric Houghton's book. Give it a shake and the sand under the screen sweeps the pictures clean. Sometimes you can see traces of the drawn lines - clear enough to guess what was there. I read so much through all the years after that, the books got piled and jostled up in my memory. Steps out of time was pretty vivid still, even though I didn't have my own copy. I'd never seen it in Smiths or anywhere in paperback. Just Miss Booth's, just the library's. I'm a reader who likes to own everything he's ever read. Daft, I know, and our house is chockablock. Steps... was something I always wanted to recover.

It was years and years and years later - the rest of life had happened in between, loads of things - and I discovered online bookshops and Abe books and Amazon used-and-new... all those things. After years and years of second-hand-book shopping and rummaging treasure from grimy corners - this was a revelation.

Weird, though. The book hounder and haunter of boot sales and charity shops isn't sure at first what to make of such precision tools, with their 'advanced searches' and 'next day delivery'. Something about ease and certainty takes the fun out of the breathless hunt for half-forgotten novels. Anyway, I'd forgotten the author's name, but I remembered the title. And within 10 minutes I was in touch with someone in a bookshop in Wales, with an ex-library copy of the book I'd last seen 20 years before. It came return of post - rather expensively, of course. But that's the price you pay for having The Exact Thing.

And Houghton's book was certainly that. It was still definitely that. It was the precise edition - with the same cover: the green sitting room and the boy haunted by the image of his ghost self. The clock on the mantlepiece – the jagged flash of lightning. And I read and it was like there was a ghost-me reading just ahead of me, too – one that was reading the sentences aloud from the past. I remembered almost everything about it. The way the prose felt. The easy, realistic dialogue. That weight of sadness underlying almost everything in the book. The chill off the river and the descriptions of the boy drawing with charcoal on creamy paper. Of course! He discovered that he could draw. A big plot point has the boy discover that he has this talent and that's one of the things - besides time travel - that wakes him up emotionally and gives the book its sense of hopefulness. Art and love and going backwards and forwards in time – that's what it was about. I was glad I got the chance to remember.

As I say, it's not in print now, and that's a shocker.

(This piece was originally written for Norman Geras’s website in September 2006)

Dastardly Plots!

This comes from bang in the middle of George Mann's 'The Osiris Ritual': ''Miss Hobbes, I'd have thought you'd know better than that. This is not some ridiculous penny dreadful that we're playing out'.'

But it is! It's a wonderful penny dreadful, this second book in Mann's 'Newbury and Hobbes Investigations', published by Snow Books. It's an unashamed galloping romp through the ins and outs of the Victorian metropolis and the lurid generic conventions of adventure fiction.

I've had a lovely time with these special agents in a Steampunk version of Victorian London, one in which Victoria herself sits at the heart of every intrigue, lashed and jolted into cybernetic longevity, propped up like Davros in Buckingham Palace. I've not read the first in this series yet, but this second provides an easy jumping-on spot, with our heroes investigating missing, murderous special agents (who leave strange pongs in railway carriages); the unwrapping of Egyptian mummies as a divertissement for posh society, and the disappearances of girls who've volunteered to help a seedy magician with a trick. There's a breathless, headlong rattling pace to all of this. Even as we're pointing out the scenery and exclaiming at the bits that feel like Rohmer, Conan Doyle, Robert Holmes... the book's got us in its grip and won't let go. I loved all the rooftop chases and the fisticuffs in the theatre and jumping aboard weird submersible craft. It felt like being privvy to the adventures of Mrs Peel and John Steed's grandparents, and just as I feel about the Avengers, Holmes and Doctor Who - I wanted it to go on and on forever. All the way through I felt like George Mann was having a whale of a time with this. I just wish the mummies had come to life, as well. Can't have everything.

Similarly, this week, I loved James Anderson's 'The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy'. An outrageous title and the first in a trilogy of Golden Age Detective pastiches. Beautifully presented by Allison and Busby, this novel was first out in the Seventies and I was sad to learn that these are posthumous reissues. But what a lovely romp it was. A proper country house mystery story - with an outrageous twist. I was in the middle of a difficult week as I read this and the revelation to do with the disposal of one of the corpses made me burst out laughing when I really wasn't expecting to. There's a wonderful knowingness about the genre in this book, as in George Mann's, to do with his own source material. But it's not clever-clever and show-offy, as are many, perhaps better regarded novels.

This is a knowingness to do with love for novels and generic conventions. The author is letting us in on a brilliant joke. He knows that we know that he knows that we know that it's all a load of nonsense really... but that we love it still. These are books for real readers. There's a great fondness behind this book, and the George Mann, and that's something I really appreciate in fiction.

It's tricky, though - because if a book is funny, filled with fondness for its characters and subject matter and has a few twists and turns, adventurous bits and fights and clues and so on... it *is* kind of doomed to be seen as 'light'.

Nothing wrong with being light and popular. I read Stella Gibbon's 'Nightingale Wood' earlier this year (reissued by Virago - first time since 1938!) and somewhere in that she has a character disparage all novels as 'meringues of the intellect.' I love that description.

I'd rather read stuff that *seemed* light and snuck up on the reader with its style and wit and insight. Far rather that than flag it all up from the start. (But how many contemporary literary novels try to impress us by telling us, from the off: 'This is important! Earnest! Morose! Boring and dense! Unreadable! Clever-clever! Over-written!')

This week I've loved the lucidity of these novels and the sheer joy their writers have taken in riffing off other books they obviously love. I love the fact that they're part of series, too, and so become worlds that I want to return to for further adventures.

Vintage Item no.3: Doctor Who Weekly

It was the first time I was allowed to go down our town precinct by myself, the first Saturday DWW came out. Well, I say alone – I mean with my two best friends, Richard and Tully. We were nine. Our town was rough. We planned it like an expedition. Which sweets, what drinks, where we’d sit – on the bench outside the library where usually we scrapped over first dibs on the new T. Dicks – to read the first issue of DWW together. I’d seen the advert in, I think, Spiderman Weekly and we were unbelievably eager.

They say nowadays that the young fans of New Who are fascinated by glimpses of Classic Who and it was the same then. I was agog at the pics from the Sixties. Photos of Hartnell and the Daleks in shiny Skaro corridors seemed as faraway and spooky as the Universal Monster Movies depicted in my (treasured) ‘Dennis Gifford’s Monsters of the Movies’ book. It too was a glimpse into a prehistory of terror.

Every week I’d learn a little more about the history of The Show. I’d have all these Recovered Memory Syndrome flashbacks about episodes I’d watched when I was too young to remember. The Giant Spiders were etched on my memory and how they seemed to live on supermarket shelves or something. And Linx and Styre’s heads deflating like burst footballs on a barbed wire fence.

I wanted the Wrath Warriors and the duplicitous Star Beast to crashland in our town. The Iron Legion was more real to me than the Key to Time. I really thought the Doctor dictated his ‘Letters from the Doctor’ himself. I wanted to win the Crazy Caption more than anyone could imagine. I wanted a TARDIS Tuner just like Romana had – even though you could tell from the ad it was just a tarted up radio.

I was gutted when it went Monthly and the logo went neon. It was the Eighties and they stopped having as many monsters in Doctor Who on the telly and fewer laughs, somehow. DW and DWM went a bit more serious. We were all growing up.

I don’t know why I never wrote in – like seemingly everyone else I’ve ever known - or sent in a drawing or a photo of a police box birthday cake or me in a scarf and a hat or a pinickity fannish critique of last season that I’d sweated over. But I never did. Anyway, Dear Doctor – I’m sending my letter in now. Hello, back there in 1979! It was great! Well done! We loved you!

My First Musical Adaptation - in Salt Lake City, with Puppets!

Theater Preview: Wasatch Theatre Company's Page-to-Stage Festival

Posted 2009-09-09 15:50:59 by Kelly Ashkettle

Wasatch Theatre Company's Page-to-Stage Festival

When » Sept. 10 - 27. Thu. - Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 1 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.

Where » Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center (138 W. 300 South)

Tickets » $15 (includes admission to all three productions); www.arttix.org or 801.355.ARTS.

Info » www.wasatchtheatre.org

(Photo by Jessica Montana Ballard | courtesy of Wasatch Theatre Company) Tim Butler with the Tolstoy puppet in "Hands Up"

In the musical "Hands Up!" Scott Allen Curry plays a life-sized "homicidal bat puppet from hell" who goes on a mass puppet-killing spree during Christmas. Written by George Plautz (who co-directs with Curry), the new musical is based on a British young adult novel, but Curry has chosen to portray his Tolstoy a little differently than the one in the book.

"My Tolstoy is a little more vaudeville and crass American," he says, adding that he's made a collage of all the people who have inspired his portrayal: The Count from "Sesame Street," George Burns, Tony Soprano, Leo Tolstoy, A.L.F. and Ron Jeremy.

Yes, the porn star -- Tolstoy the puppet has a Brooklyn accent and is a bit vulgar; Curry says he would probably earn the show a PG-13 rating. One of his favorite lines, he says, is when Tolstoy tells his puppeteer: "Just because you have your hand up my ass doesn't make us friends."

The show is being produced by members of Salt Lake's Starry-Eyed Puppet Theatre Company. Curry has provided pre-recorded voices for them before, but he says this is the first time he's donned a puppet suit on stage. It's a bit tricky, he says, because he has to use one hand to work the puppet's mouth, making things a bit complicated when he has to perform, say, jazz hands.

Curry is also the show's co-choreographer. He says that two of his favorite numbers are an homage to the "Nutcracker" in which a ballerina dances with a broken leg; and a Motown number set in an insane asylum with inmates who wear doo-wop girl outfits made from supplies like dishwashing gloves and hospital scrubs.

"Hands Up!" is part of Wasatch Theatre's Page-to-Stage Festival and will be performed on Sept. 12, 17, 19, 25 and 27. The festival also includes "Making Waves," a full-length play assembled by Utah educators that presents their challenges and rewards in their own words; and "Short-Shorts" which features seven ten-minute plays by Utah playwrights.

Further buzzing

I love this Amazon review of 'The Stuff of Nightmares'. It echoes lots of things I think about doing Doctor Who tie-ins, and why they're a special thing to do.


A sublime treat, 7 Sep 2009
By N. Campbell "seahorsenick" (Hove) - See all my reviews

You don't need me to tell you that Doctor Who's a bit of a special creature, do you? That it takes a kind of genius to get it right? Born at the early end of TV broadcasting, when creatives were fearless and the audience was strongly suspected of having an imagination. Then buffeted and shaped by the tide of nearly thirty years of life in television.

A product of the televisual medium but always somehow out-of-time, somehow old-fashioned and postmodern at the same time, speaking to several audiences at once, cheap and stagey and using a particular sleight-of-hand to produce a magic kind of suburban gothic - you can't just drop a few of its ingredients into a book or an audio play. There have been a lot of `tie-in' adventures for the Doctor, and the successful ones have done what the source material does - taken possession of their new medium, played to it and played with it. Magrs' sublime audio adventure does this.

Not only does it pulsate with the fluorescent green life that once animated the brain of Morbius and the gleaming clefts of rampaging Ogri, macabre and hilarious in the same breath, mysterious and compelling, it also manages to reflect Tom Baker's own personality and eccentricities in a way that enlarges instead of diluting the Doctor's character. The Pescatons cut with Radio 4 drama and Valentine Dyall's Man in Black, this is pure Doctor Who, the real deal, and it comes highly recommended.

Tuesday Morning

You can tell it's September, all of a sudden. Soon as you wake up.

The squirrels are up on the horse chestnut trees, hoying down the conkers as hard they can, trying to smash them on the tarmac. There were mothers and kids yesterday morning, stopping on their way to school to watch. Only a couple of weeks ago we were having bbqs in the gardens up and down our street, salads and sticky bits of chicken and fizzy pink wine. Now it's stews with pearl barley and Sunday night serials on the telly.

I'm reading 'Dead Until Dark', the first of the Charlaine Harris books for our Book Club. I can't believe I haven't read the series before, having heard so much about it. It's my suggestion for our little group, since I feel I ought to get to it. It's in the paranormal mystery / spooky romance / cosy detective /comic gothic genre I like to think of myself as working in.

I like it, I think. It's a little harder-edged than I expected, maybe. At least in terms of some of the slightly gruesome bits. I'm not sure I like Sookie as much as I should. She's forever telling us what she's wearing and how marvellous she is. She's a little prim, too, in places - and just a touch superior. I read an interesting piece on the TV series based on this, in the new issue of 'Deathray'. They were talking about the Civil Rights dimension to this and the various things that vampirism is used as a metaphor for - race, sexuality, gender, religion, the whole kaboodle. The reviewer pointed out the blind spot in these books, though... in that a vampire such as the romantic lead, Bill, has in fact has a very dodgy, murderous past.

All the blood-letting and swapping and so on leaves me a bit queasy, too. It just gets all so complicated. Not as crazily involved as it does in the increasingly bonkers Anne Rice novels. But the mystical stuff tends to come in a bit too much in some of these vampire things.

I'm thinking about the way vampirism might work because of my drafting Brenda Book Five at the moment and Whitby's having something of a nasty infestation because of the return of a certain gentleman friend of Effie's.

So - vampires and autumn and twilight mornings in South Manchester. And already it's time to start going to meetings at the university and talking about marking and papers and seminars and so on. Where did that summer go? It's the same question every year. This year it's with an extra, horrible poignancy though, since the summer was the whole of Barrie-the-visiting-cat's lifetime.

Last night, late on, Fester (not known for his sociability or love of other cats) went padding about on the terrace and lay by the spot near the sun lounger where we found Barrie's body. He was reconstructing the story, it seemed, twitching his nose. He was like some kind of melancholy detective, trying to understand.

Barrie the new cat

Barrie

We were reading under our parasol and the cats were passing by

all day long, as they do in July, round here

Barrie wanted to stay

everything was new to her and it was all exciting

bounding onto the sun-filled stage of the terrace

squeaking and fanged; exclaiming at everything she met

on those too-big feet she might grow into one day

she loved dozing in the pots on mulchy soil

or lying tiger-striped beneath the sun lounger

which was where we found her later, in dreary September

Barrie’s little body like cardboard

all the lovely life quoshed

and driven out of her

as if by overnight Manchester rain

she was bigger by then but not so much,

making a tiny parcel in the faded orange towel.

She’d hardly had time to do anything yet

but be all excited and thrilled to be here

like Jeremy said,

she was only just learning how to be a cat.

Bit of a Buzz

Here are some of my favourite clippings from this week, all to do with ‘Hornets’ Nest’.

Thom Hutchinson in Deathray Magazine:

‘…Tom Baker has spent many interview hours expressing his reluctance to return to the role that made him famous, typically with a request that his Doctor, if he did return to centre stage, should be accompanied by an old lady and possibly some badgers. With no small amusement, Magrs gives in. Reference is made to his not having aged, but the story itself concedes the truth. Living in an English cottage, reading The Times and poking around strange warehouses in the night is the retirement the fourth Doctor deserves. It’s as if Yates has discovered him living inside a grisly children’s novel. ‘I opened up the badger’s brain,’ says the Doctor, ‘using very tiny brain scissors.’

Dr Piglet on Gallifreybase:

‘I don't own very many DW audios, by my own admission I don't have the patience. I did once, way back in a time when I was early teens, fat, waiting for the day I could trim, up jump out of the closet and actively take part in the real world - however, until that time I would have Genesis of the Daleks and State of Decay whirring away on my tape recorder, practically on a loop.

'My first memory of Doctor Who is Tom Baker in Meglos so for me its almost 30 years since I heard the Doctor utter a word and now I have the opportunity to relive that experience – I’m now 34 and I’m about to hear the Doctor, once a gain utter brand new words…For me, this is the most truly exciting and wonderful thing about this adventure. Not format or style or any of that old nonsense but the adventure itself.

'Personally I am very, very excited about Hornets Nest : A - it's Paul Magrs B: it's Tom Baker. Both a couple of geniuses in their own right.

'I’m off on holiday to Kenya on Monday and the Hornets Nest is coming with me on my Ipod so I can fly to my destination on the wings of the Doctor.

'My holiday couldn’t really have a better start.’

Jim Smith on GallifreyBase:

‘Finally listened to it.

'It's dark, dense, weird, arch, allusive, charming, literary, twisted and camp. Perhaps more like Paul Magrs' non-Who stuff than his Who stuff but that can't possibly be considered a bad thing, surely?’

Dennis C on Play.com:

‘The start of this new tale of arguably the greatest Doctor of them all (sorry you David Tennant fans!), begins with a deceptively slow pace but then proceeds to pump up the drama and the tension in a story that 's a quirky mixture of calm narrative and nail-bitingly gripping live-action.

'The supporting cast work well with Tom and produce an excellent audio play whose deceptively intimate atmosphere soon splinters into a disturbing frenzy of terror and the bizarre as dead animals return to life full of hate and desire to kill...

'Tom's back!! The tale lasts seventy minutes, but alas! that's over all too quickly, and we're left with no other option than to play the CD again and enjoy the adventure once more. And why not? I'm sure that the other four tales to come will be as good as this was, I even dare to hope that they might be better.

'As far as I'm concerned, Christmas came early - today, in fact, when my packet from Play containing this entertaining drama arrived. And hey - we've got four more to look forward to, before December 25th and the final tales of the latest Doctor and tenan(n)t of the Tardis...!’

Enter the Hornets' Nest!

This week BBC Audiobooks are publishing the first disc in the Doctor Who - Hornets' Nest series, starring Tom Baker. It's about a year since Michael Stevens first contacted me about it and asked me to pitch a story idea. I ended up pitching loads of ideas - carried away by my massive enthusiasm for the project - and wound up being commissioned for all five scripts, which I wrote during the first few months of this year.

The whole thing forms a great big, spooky Who story, set in the present day, but with a Doctor at the heart of it who has walked straight out of the past. I'm so proud of what the brilliant cast and crew have done with this - I think we've created a very different kind of Doctor Who story.

It's one that has its links back to Old Time Radio shows, such as the creepy old US shows like 'The Shadow' and 'Haunting Hour.' It's also very exciting and adventurous, with hints of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the Forties' radio incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, or of Dick Barton and - even more so - Vincent Price in the BBC's own, 'The Price of Fear.' I think we've built a lovely subtle blend of 'levels' of storytelling in the Hornets' Nest - rather like the Gothic tales of old - with a mix of restrospective narration, dramatised flashback and unfolding events in the present-moment 'outer frame' of the story.

It begins with the Doctor summoning his old friend Mike Yates to pay a visit to a cosy Sussex cottage round about the time of the Winter solstice. Here's the Doctor as he was in 1978, but seemingly at home in a snowbound countryside, surrounded by strange bric-a-brac and stuffed animals which come creepily to life in the night...

It's a series of tales-within-tales; mystery stories nested neatly one inside the other like Chinese boxes, as the Doctor sets out to bring Mr Yates up to date in his battles with the Hornet menace. There's a lovely feeling of nighttime vigils and wintry stories at the blazing hearth...

Anyway - I hope you'll listen for yourself! And listen out for the agitated buzzing of unseasonal insects...