>>Nostalgia For Infinity

My review of Oronooko has gone live over at the Blog a Penguin Classic website.

I initially spent some time writing a medium-length review that, I felt, struck a fine balance between accessibility and insight. Then I attempted to submit the review and discovered the 2,000 character limit. That’s 327 of my words, in this instance. It’s not very much.

Still, despite having had to chip away at my review relentlessly I’m reasonably pleased with the outcome, and I think it still manages to hint at the interesting ideas and context in and of the book – even if there’s no space to explore them. It was also the first time I had to revise a wordcount downwards, and substantially so, which was actually very helpful from an editorial standpoint.

Astute RSS readers will have noticed that Illuminations has been reviewed by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro at The Fix (disclaimer: I also review for The Fix). I think it’s a very fair and perceptive review overall, and as a contributing writer I’m particularly pleased that he devoted time and effort to every story in the anthology. There’s that link again!

I’m being quite careful with this post since, as a book reviewer, I’m well aware that in most circumstances it’s poor form to respond to one’s critics. That aside – and let me note that I think all of Zinos-Amaro’s criticisms and observations of my stories demonstrate insight and even-handedness – I found it fascinating to find my work under this sort of critical microscope. It’s very different from the critiques received from a writing group, or feedback from friends. This is reviewage coming from someone with no prior awareness of me or my work, no prior expectations at all, and it shows in a way that is very helpful to me as a neophyte writer.

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A chap I work with has recently published a piece of flash fiction in Tall Tales and Modern Fables, and as it’s really quite excellent and he did buy a copy of my book, I feel obliged to share. Click here to read ‘Unquenched‘ by Daniel Raven.

Another work colleague, albeit one in the realms of development rather than the glorified breaking things that we engage in, has recently put up a shiny new WordPress blog for her one-women games studio. Check out Really Fancy Games here. Her first project is to be a point-and-click adventure game about the Bronte sisters, and she was recently interviewed by The Guardian. Intrigued? Drop by and encourage her to finish that demo.

I’ve missed the last few Friday Flash Fictions, which I genuinely regret. It’s been a tough few weeks and, in all honesty, this trend is unlikely to let up any time soon. Still, I’ll try and manage at least this one post per week!

This week’s story is short and bittersweet. It’s also me trying to imitate one of my fellow F3 writers – there’s a fabulous prize to the first correct guess who*.

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It seems that you can now buy Illuminations from Blackwell and WH Smiths, which is cool as it may generate a few more sales. We’re not on Amazon though. Probably something to do with that £2 markup on small presses. Fuckers.

As ever, the best place to buy a copy is from Odd Two Out, because that way other retailers don’t eat profits that could go to the NSPCC, and also because you can buy the eBook version for a donation (of which ALL profits go to the NSPCC).

Each of the contributors also took home a bundle of books to sell themselves, and I’m fair chuffed to report that I’ve now sold all of mine! Well, there are a few left which have been reserved by people too poor to afford one right now. Damn students / dirty unwashed hippies.

The scariest bit of news came from my mum – apparently my nan wants a copy. That’s awesome, of course, but I’m not sure how a Baptist in her 60s will react to Slip It In.

Okay, not quite. Quote Unquote records (home of Bomb the Music Industry!, We versus the Shark, Pegasuses X-L, the Riot Before and more) describes itself as “the world’s first donation-based record label”. True or not, it’s punk as fuck and I like it a lot. Kudos to all the artists featured, and especially to BtMI! for putting pretty much their whole discography online. Make sure you click the ‘Info’ link as the page describing the label is crammed full of independent charm and vigour.

You can download without donating, so why not try out a few tracks and see if you’re into any of their roster? If you like them then head back, send a few bucks their way and download some awesome new music. I personally recommend BtMI!’s Get Warmer, which is barely leaving my CD player at the moment…

Oh, and check out this Black Flag Hairstyle Timeline. Someone somewhere now has too much time on their hands, so more of this please.

Would any of my techier readers be interested in taking a peek at NFI’s WordPress design template? I’m wondering if it would be possible to break my blogroll down into several subcategories that would display in the same way, and unfortunately my ignorant tinkering hasn’t produced the results…

Via DiS comes the news that Jaguar Love (take two parts Blood Brothers, one part Pretty Girls Make Graves, mix, shake and pour) will be playing a few dates in the UK in advance of their debut album, slated for July release.

The full list of dates:

July
4 London Wireless Festival
5 Brighton Barfly
7 Bristol Academy 2
8 London 100 Club
9 Leeds Cockpit
10 Manchester Roadhouse
12 Scotland T in the Park
13 Ireland Oxygen Festival

Nice to see a Brighton date on that short list – I’ll sure as hell be there.

Whoops – went slightly over the word count with this one. It’s just shy of 1,200 words. Hope you enjoy! And make sure you check out the rest of the gang (Neil Beynon has posted a piece, and we may yet see something from Gareth Lyn Powell, Paul Raven, Martin McGrath, Gareth D. Jones, Justin Pickard, Dan Pawley, Greg O’Byrne, Jay Lake and Ian Hocking – is that everyone, or is my list out of date?) plus the Futurismic Friday Free Fiction update (man, there’s a lot of alliteration about these days).

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I’ve just finished the first draft of a story for my BSFA Orbiter writing group (at the moment it’s called Underground Railroad, and is a story full of hope, warm feelings and Care Bears). Although I could just be talking nonsense through the afterglow of finishing a story of some length (about 4,800 words, which is hardly huge, but it’s rather longer than flash) it’s given me something to mull over concerning writing.

Writing fiction is hard for me. Some part of my brain is very lazy, and it likes to avoid hard work. This seems a little strange to the conscious side of me because 1.) I actually do far more with my time than many people I know, and 2.) when I start writing I am generally very happy with what comes out (sometimes something jarring will stop me – like ridiculous asides and parentheses that ruin the flow of prose – but for the most part my first draft is fine right up until changes need making after I get crits back about theme, character and structure. You know, the big stuff). But this is how I seem to regard these things: nasty old hard work and effort. So for me the hardest part about writing fiction, and to a lesser extent all writing, is persuading myself that I should get on and do it.

I’ve tried all the usual tricks: setting a daily or weekly target, offering to reward myself, trying to punish myself, adopting a worldview or lifestyle that encourages writing, using tools and spreadsheets, putting dictionaries and notepads in convenient places, buying a dictaphone to record ideas, sticking inspirational quotes everywhere, leaving unfinished stories in files on my computer desktop… if you write and lack real discipline, you probably know the sort of thing I mean.

But finishing this story off tonight has made me think something (probably daft): I’ve never really considered my, you know, physiological state of being.

By which I mean I’m feeling quite tired.

I’m not very tired, like I was last night. Staying up until the wee hours drinking delicious wine, smoking nasty cigarettes, and singing along to old Against Me! songs will leave one tired the following evening after a full day at work. But I’m not particularly refreshed or full of energy: I got some sleep last night, not too much, but just enough.

And tonight when I sat down to write I fell into the trance of it pretty quickly, just totally focused on writing, on letting the prose flow out and looking at it and nodding and deliberating over the correct word to use but never getting distracted. That’s perhaps a good word to focus on: distracted. I wasn’t distracted because I was tired enough to be single-minded, but I was able to write because I wasn’t so tired that I just chilled out with some entertainment “for a bit”.

Then again I’m also quite hungry, so maybe it’s that. The Gaslight Anthem sing, “stay hungry, stay free, and do the best that you can.” They might be on to something.

Or I’m actually (and this is an ever-present fear of mine when in the company of Smarts) just stating, in an overly verbose fashion, something that has been perfectly evident to everyone else for a jolly long time.

Or…

I think I’d better eat something and get a half-decent night’s sleep.