Litro accept a story

Yesterday I got back from a few days away to the great news that Litro Magazine, a well-regarded British literary magazine distributed free to libraries and the like, have accepted a story of mine for their (relatively new) online 'Ones to Watch' section.

The story, called Spark to a Flame, is a topical little piece about an arson attack on a school. I originally wrote it for the revenge anthology since the twist in the tail contains definite overtones of vengeance. But I can easily replace it with something else and I'm delighted to be part of Litro's new venture. Look out for more news of when the story is likely to appear in the next few days.

Scribbling again

Little by little, now that the intense hard work of preparing the house for sale is over, I'm starting to write again.

I can never concentrate when there's too much going on. I need to be able to hear my characters' voices in my head, and if I can't hear myself think then I certainly can't hear them think.

But although there's still work to be done it's more of a 'holding action' now, of keeping everything clean and tidy while the agent brings potential buyers round. I can actually stop to draw breath again, and there's even time to sit and just think. All of which means progress on the story front. I've finished one more very short one for the revenge anthology (remember that from earlier in the year?) and am rattling through a second as I type.

It's a huge relief not to have all those words bottled up inside me with no way of getting them out.

Psst! Wanna buy a house?

The hard work is finally over and we signed contracts with an estate agent on Monday to put our Birmingham house on the market. He braved a howling gale (ex Hurricane Katia...) to take photos of the place, but in spite of that has managed some stunning shots which we're delighted with. I never realised how tidy everything looked!

We had a couple of viewings yesterday; no offers yet but it's still very early days - it hasn't even been advertised in the local papers yet. We're expecting a quietish weekend, and then for all hell to break loose later on next week.

If anyone is interested, either in buying a 5-bed Victorian house in Birmingham or just in being nosy (grin), then you can find all the details here. And anyone who's seen references to our 'pointy' house in my biography can perhaps see what I meant...

No more hurricanes, thanks

America is being a tad too generous with its ex-hurricanes at the moment. So far we've had the tail-end of Irene (gales, rain); Katia is expected on Sunday night (more gales); and Lee is hovering in the wings and looking far too likely to cruise across the Atlantic in the other storms' wake.

This is Not Good if you're about to put your house up for sale. We're eyeing the nearby trees nervously and wondering if they're going to chuck nasty big branches all over the garden, or even worse, topple over on the roof. It's a nerve-wracking time.

The rain, on the other hand, is welcome. We heard on the local news last week that this summer has been the driest in the West Midlands since the long hot summer of 1976. Pretty much everywhere else has had a damp and depressing summer but every time it rained somewhere else, Birmingham missed it. The end result is a garden that looks as thought someone poisoned it, since so many plants are either losing their leaves to conserve moisture, or dying. We've been watering but there's only so much you can do with a hosepipe; what we really need is several days of good, heavy, non-stop rain.

Perhaps we need those hurricanes after all...

A bit of Shakespearean fun

Oxford Dictionaries online are running a fun little app that you can use to find out how 'Shakespearean' your writing is.

Simply copy a paragraph of your writing, paste it into the box and hit the button at the bottom. It calculates how much like the Bard you are by comparing the number of words you use that he also used. I got 85%, which is pretty good going in a small paragraph about a swimming lesson!

Mind you, the calculation was so incredibly fast (really, almost instantaneous) that the cynical part of me wonders if it just plucks a number out of the air at random.

It's still a bit of fun, though.

Quiet but crazy

Things have been a little quiet on the writing front the last few weeks. Partly, I think, this is due to so many people being away on holiday. Partly it's my own fault, because in the strange world of Real Life (TM) things have been anything but quiet as we prepare to put our Birmingham house on the market.

This entails a huge amount of work. Finishing off all those irritating little jobs that we started and never 'got around to'. Redecorating to tone down any colours that aren't neutral enough. Decluttering. Cleaning on top of and behind all those large pieces of furniture that you can't normally be bothered to move. Taking bag after bag of excess clutter to charity shops or (if beyond repair) to the tip. And endless tidying, snipping and sweeping up in the garden.

We've been at it, on and off, since April, but the last two to three weeks have just been non-stop. I ache in places I didn't know I had, I seem to be permanently sneezing, and as for work, I've hardly even looked at it let alone written anything new.

Never mind, we're down to the last few tasks now and hoping the house will be on the market sometime next week. After that we settle down to wait for viewings, buyers and the like, and to catch our breath. And after that, I'm hoping to get scribbling again. It's been too long without and I'm starting to get irritable. Never a good sign.

Missed it?

If you missed reading my latest 75-word story Early to Bed, don't worry. There's another chance to catch it at the Paragraph Planet archives, which have just been updated for August. Simply follow this link and select 21st August from the drop-down box. Hope you like it!

Don't forget!

Today, for one day only, you can read Early to Bed at Paragraph Planet.

The story will only be available for the day (at least until the archives are updated) so don't miss your chance. It may only be 75 words long but hopefully it's a bit of fun.

Silly sign

This sign, seen outside a dentist in Solihull, made us smile.

"OrthodonticsForYou"

We wondered who else you'd be getting orthodontics for. Mother-in-law's Christmas present, perhaps? Sensitive teenage son, because his teeth stick out?

You'd probably need orthodontics yourself after they'd finished knocking your teeth down your throat...

Attack of the killer shrubs

Our garden in Brum has got very overgrown. Partly this is because we've been away so much, partly it's sheer laziness, and partly it's the dry weather. It's hard to weed or mow the lawn when the ground is as hard as sheet steel and the vegetation has turned to toast. But if we're going to put the house on the market in a few weeks' time we need the garden to look as good as possible so today I armed myself with gauntlets and a pair of shears and set to work.

I say 'armed' with good reason, because most of what needed cutting back involved inch-long thorns. The roses had thorns, the pyracanthus had thorns, the berberis had thorns; even the wretched ivy seemed to have grown thorns judging by the way it was attacking me. And I'm convinced the plants were working together; one wrapped tendrils round my ankle while another sank its teeth into my elbow. It's a wonder I didn't end up in the compost sack instead of the plants.

I prevailed, though, and filled three whole compost sacks with bits of vegetation, chopped up very small to stop it clambering back out and murdering me.

And the garden? It doesn't actually look much different, but I suppose every little helps.

Early to Bed

Nope, not me personally! This is the title of my latest 75-word offering at Paragraph Planet, which should be up and available to read this Sunday, 21st August.

Like several of my other Planet flashes, this is heavily based on my childhood and yes, my parents really were that strict. You'll have to read the story to find out what it's all about, though. ;)

Riots in Birmingham

The news is full of unpleasant images of last night's rioting in Birmingham city centre, and one or two suburbs, last night. Mercifully this was nothing like as bad as the violence in London over the last few days and the good news is that we're fine.

It is worrying though. The last time I saw rioting on anything like this scale was back in 1981 (Brixton, Handsworth, Toxteth) but I was over 15 miles from the nearest centre of unrest and it all felt very distant and unreal. This time it's a lot closer to home and I've already decided not to go shopping alone in the city centre until things have calmed down. Hopefully it'll be sooner rather than later.

Psst! Wanna be in a movie?

Are you a goth, punk or heavy rocker? Do you want to be an extra in a new sci-fi movie, based on the US series Firefly, which is due to be filmed in Cumbria? Then pop along to this article in the Westmorland Gazette to find out more!

Exciting!

Building work has finally started on our house in Windermere, two days after we signed the contract with our builder. He turned up at 8.00 am one morning last week, helped Dave move out the really heavy stuff (cooker, fridge, washing machine etc) and then set about the units with a lump hammer. By 9.30 am we no longer had a kitchen. At all. In any shape or form. Even the sink had been dismantled and trundled out into the back yard!

It's all very exciting and we're looking forward immensely to the time, about 8-9 weeks away (assuming all goes to plan) when we can have our new and much larger kitchen fitted. We've gone for the bespoke one in the end, which we felt represented the best value for money. Whenever I've seen custom-made kitchens in magazines they've started at the most ridiculous prices - one in particular cost a bare minimum of £60,000 no matter how few units you bought. Gulp. You'll be pleased to know ours has cost nothing like that much, and we're delighted with the level of service we're getting.

Delighted, but also confused. We've been told we can have the units painted in any colour we like from the Farrow & Ball colour chart, and if that's not good enough we can select something from the Dulux collection instead. I'm sitting here looking at about 953 paint samples and thinking, 'Oh God', because they all look so nice and how on earth do I choose between them? Still, if that's the only problem we have with the project I'll be a very happy bunny.

Still on the subject of excitement, who says nothing exciting happens in small towns? This little episode must have raised an eyebrow or two amongst the locals...

The great cross-country kitchen hunt

We're in the process of choosing kitchen units for our new extension, which is due to begin building work shortly. Easy, you might think. Swan along to your local kitchen showroom or DIY store, pick a kitchen you like, get a plan and quote, put in an order and wander off again. If only.

So far we've had five different quotes from five different providers; some high-street, some local; some large, some small; some ready-made, some bespoke. And the results surprised us mightily. Contrary to popular belief the DIY stores were *not* the cheapest, in spite of economies of scale. In fact Wickes proved to be the most expensive quote we had from anywhere, for any type of kitchen.

In the end we'd whittled it down to two - one for ready-made units which was slightly cheaper, and one for a bespoke kitchen which was more expensive - but still well within our budget. We ummed and ahhed, and ummed a bit more, and simply could not decide which represented the best value for money. Part of the problem was that we hadn't seen the exact ready-made kitchen we wanted; our supplier had a similar one in his showroom but not that design, so all we'd actually seen was one cupboard door and a pretty picture in a brochure. Not the best thing to base a purchase of that magnitude on, so on Saturday we headed off across Cumbria to a different showroom which had our kitchen on display.

It's at this point that you start to realise just how big Cumbria is. It took us an hour, driving north via Keswick and Bassenthwaite Lake, to get to the right area. And it took another twenty minutes to track down the showroom, in spite of using sat-nav, and phoning the place twice for increasingly desperate directions. Turned out we'd driven past it four times but it's hardly surprising we kept missing it since it was tucked away on a tiny business park (of just two units) behind a row of houses in a one-horse village in the middle of Absolutely Sodding Nowhere, mid-way between Carlisle and Cockermouth. There was nothing there - a few quarrymens' cottages, a farm or two, a tiny church... there were no signs for the showroom and none of the streets had names. Cue much driving round in ever more bad tempered circles.

However, find it we did, and they had the right kitchen on display so we could clamber all over it to our hearts' content. Actually, it only took about five minutes, because it wasn't what we were expecting at all. Far from being the stunning, lovingly-built kitchen we'd been led to believe, it was actually cheap, relatively poorly constructed and very, very modern. The doors didn't fit very well, the surface finish was decidedly rough-and-ready and the interior fittings were standard high-street crap. It was disappointing after a 50-mile drive, but it's saved us paying out all that money and being devastated by the result.

On the way back we called in at Bassenthwaite village (tiny, remote and wonderfully higgledy-piggledy) and then for a coffee at the Old Sawmill tearooms, part of the Mirehouse estate. The latter had some great-looking walks and forest trails leading off from the doorstep so we've bookmarked those for another time.

I've been interviewed

Well, sort of. Scottish author Bill Kirton devised a seriously wacky questionnaire over at his blog and together with a few other writers I sent him my replies. He's posted the results today and if you potter along you can find out all sorts of unexpected things about me, including why I would paint Mel Gibson blue and whether I'd like to be immortal or not!

See my answers here. Hopefully they'll make you giggle as much as I was while I was writing them.

Air Show

The Windermere Air Festival, to be precise. It'ss been going for a few years now and seems to be getting steadily bigger and better, with two days of air displays over the lake, fun fair, stalls and various other events. Last year the Saturday was rained off (you simply can't fly aircraft down steep valleys in rain, mist and cloud - it's too dangerous) and we were distracted by our neighbour's burst boiler. This year there were no last-minute disasters and the sun shone pretty much all afternoon, meaning every plane that was scheduled turned up and performed.

And it was amazing watching them. We had a series of grandstand viewpoints - first sat right on the lake shore at Bowness (getting mugged by the swans), then on the pier with a cup of tea, and lastly by the railings at the boat yard. All three places had a clear view of the skies and we watched as aerobatics teams, jets and the Battle of Britain memorial flight (Lancaster, Spitfire and Hurricane) climbed, looped and zoomed right above our heads.

After three hours we'd seen most of what we wanted so headed for home and put our feet up. Half an hour later there was a tremendous roar and we dashed to the windows to find that the Vulcan bomber had turned up. I say 'the' rather than 'a' because out of all the ones built in the 1950s, only one remains in an airworthy condition. It's based in Leicestershire and had flown across country to Cumbria to give us all a stunning display as it soared and swooped right over the lake. We've seen it at ground level before but never in the air and you really get no idea of their scale until you see one filling the sky. They are, quite simply, huge, and very, very loud. People were lining the streets, heads craning heavenwards, to see what was going on. And I managed to get a photo of it out of our bedroom window.

There's another day of displays today including the Red Arrows so I'll probably be waxing lyrical about those tomorrow. In the meantime, here are a couple of pics. I didn't have full zoom on so the planes look rather small, but it gives a good indication of scale.

They have specially trained swans in Bowness. One distracts you and another steals your sandwiches while you're not looking. I'm serious.

There were more boats out on the lake than usual. This is a nice shot of the fells through some of the masts.

The RV8tors display team in action over Bowness Bay.

The Vulcan bomber. Very difficult to photograph since it was travelling very fast, but I did my best.

Flash Fiction Friday

The other day Tom Pluck, a new moderator at the Flash Fiction Friday site, wrote to invite me to take part. I'd been vaguely aware of the site before, and of various writers having blog posts titled 'flash fiction Friday' on the relevant day, but I'd never really taken the time to explore. This time I did, and found that it's a resource site providing inspiration for writers, with some fascinating prompts. Some sites give you a title to work to, or a set number of words to include, or a first or last line. Flash Fiction Friday does all that and more, with a range of prompts that change every week.

I was flattered to be invited but not entirely sure I'd have time to write anything. Then I saw this week's prompt - a wonderful photograph of an old man on a subway train. He had such an air of 'otherness', of apartness from the normal, conventional run of the human rat race, that it set my brain whirring. I'd intended to write one story, but in the end 'Samuel' took over and rail-roaded the whole thing in a completely different direction, and A Walk in the Park was born. I'm still rather proud of the result (even though he should take the credit, not me), and you can read the whole story on my website.

I hope you enjoy it, and so does 'Samuel'. ;) And if you'd like to see the photo that inspired me, here it is:

Talking of cats...

...my uncle has entered one of his brood into a contest run by Purina, the cat food people. I thought the prize might be free cat food for life but apparently it's rather more amazing than that - my uncle thinks it might be a diamond necklace. Whether that's for him or the cat is anyone's guess.

Anyway, if you'd like to see a picture of Ptolemy (Tolly for short), read his biography, and vote for him, please go here.

Please note, if you click the vote button nothing much seems to happen but the vote has actually registered.

On behalf of my uncle (and Tolly) - thank you for voting!

Summer bestseller (or not)

I've been popping in and out of the BestWestern blog like a tiddlywink the last couple of weeks, trying to find out if I'd won their recent Summer Bestseller contest. (You remember the story about the cat...)

Finally yesterday I spotted that they'd announced the winning story... in the comments section of the post containing the winning story. It hardly counts as the most high visibility announcement ever; in fact if they'd buried it any deeper it would have been in danger of meeting the earth's core. But still, announce they did - and mackerel or no mackerel, my pussy-cat didn't make the grade.

Ah well, BestWestern seem to run writing contests on a regular basis so there's always hope for next time. In the meantime, you can read the winning story here. The twist is rather good.