Resolutions or Resetting Priorities

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The beginning of a new year always seems to inspire resolutions. I don’t really like resolutions, I prefer goals. Taking a look at what has been working, what hasn’t. Where I’d like to be in a year’s time. What I need to take care of, what bad habits I’ve fallen into. So for me it’s much more about resetting priorities. I like to read the monthly shamanic forecast from Power Path, it’s quite inspiring and usually spot on with what is happening in my life. January’s theme is indeed “Resetting Priorities“. Inspired by this I set a new assignment on Diving Deeper which focuses on priorities regarding our writing, our creativity. In the assignment I ask questions like: What are the ways I avoid creative writing? What are the ways I avoid going deeper with my writing/creativity? What is the ‘next step’ for me and my writing?

I feel fairly on track with my writing, apart from the fact I haven’t been working on my novel since September. I put the first draft to bed, to rest awhile, to give me some separation from it so when I start editing, it will be easier. Well, that’s the hope. And the year is starting off fairly intensely with my trip to Sri Lanka to give a talk at the Galle Literary Festival (January 26 – 30), and also for the British Council in Colombo on the 2nd of February.

I am actually being ‘forced’ to read what I’ve written before I leave for Sri Lanka as I have to choose 25 pages to workshop for Sirenland in March.

If I have a particular priority to reset, I would say it is to do some daily writing, even if it’s not on the novel, and to do this before I do anything else… in particular before I communicate and connect with others via my computer. I very much enjoy my social life via Diving Deeper, Facebook and Twitter, but if I’m not careful most of my workable day can whizz past on these and other sites, and by the time I get to doing some writing, I have no energy.

Do you own an iPhone (iPod/iPad) and like to read?

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Are you in need of something to distract you while you wait for your train to arrive at its destination? Ether Books, the mobile publishing company, have published my story La Llorona. If you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod and want something to while away the time while you are enroute somewhere, please download the Ether App, where you’ll find me in the Authors section.

There are other stories you can download, some free and some for a small fee. There are stories from Hilary Mantel, Alexander McCall Smith, Henry James and many others.

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Write or Die is being Unthologised…

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My crazed short story, Write or Die, is being Unthologised in Unthank Books Unthology No. 1. If you go to their website, you can get a free sample… and you can buy a copy or rather pre-order one as it’s only available on December 1. If you do get a copy please review it on Amazon! Unlike many anthologies, they split the 25% royalty between all the contributors so your pennies are going to a good cause: supporting starving writers ;-)

UnthologyCoverFbk“UNTHOLOGY NO.1 is the first in a series dedicated to showcasing unconventional, unpredictable and experimental stories. Containing seventeen pieces by brand new as well as established authors, this is a hard-hitting, hilarious and entertaining collection. Inside you will encounter a motley crew of animals, objects and even humans. These are tales that inject fresh venom into the shorter form.”

Unthology No. 1 Advance Information Sheet

Drivel for NaNoWriMo

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For NaNoWriMo I have promised myself to write at least one page a day. This is about one third of the total word count required to ‘win’ NaNoWriMo, but as I try to persuade myself, it’s better than nothing.

Here is Day Three’s attempt, bad language warning:

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The end of day. Shutting down so soon now, before I’m ready. The thing is it takes me all day to be ready. I want it to be light outside but it is not; it is densely black and impenetrable. About as impenetrable as this page. I’ve already diverted myself by updating my profile on Twitter, checking Facebook, my email, and sending a query to a place that does LP recordings of short stories (discovered during my dillydallying on twitter). Now I notice that once again Word has assigned the font Cambria to my document. I hate this font. I’ve just diverted to see if I can change the preference, which I’ve done countless times previously. No, I can’t find any way to do this. If anyone knows how, please tell me.

I’m out of sync with the day which as I’ve said has shut down already. I just had my tea. Not tea as in high tea as in the last meal of the day comprising bread and butter, cold cuts, pickles, assorted limp salads and Victoria sponge cake if you are lucky and it’s not the war where perhaps all you’d get is a pasty looking spam sandwich with a scraping of margarine. Now there’s a thought. Would you like a little Make your dick good on sliced white? Or perhaps a wedge of PRAY FOR ME WHILE YOU CONTACT HER FOR YOUR AMERICAN EXPRESS CARD? If that doesn’t make you salivate, perhaps I can interest you in some Feel yourself a master of bed action on brown toast? No? A small spoon of Best p-i-l-l-s here? Just in case you were wondering, ’spam’ is a canned meat product. I have never eaten any and don’t plan to. My tea was a small cup of Ceylon with a croissant. I worried that I’d spoil my appetite, having this treat so late in the day, the curtains drawn against the already accumulating night humors. I was a little uncertain of my use of the word ‘humors’ so of course it required a little trip to google. It seems that the night does not have humors but the body does. Four, to be exact. Yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood. Apparently these humors correspond to the four elements of air, water, earth and fire. Too much earth makes one melancholic; too much air, sanguine; too much fire, choleric; and too much water, phlegmatic.

I’m studying the list.

I’m familiar with melancholic of course, but I’m not sure what sanguine means. Or choleric. Or phlegmatic, but I suspect I’m all four. What to do? The “prudent Hippocratic physician”, I discover, would prescribe a regimen of diet, activity, and exercise, designed to “void the body of the imbalanced humor.” I tried to find out more, but it appears I have no internet connection. Perhaps this is a symptom of one of my imbalanced humors- and I’m sure they all are imbalanced. Well, I’ve just been on the telephone to report my lack of internet connection, which of course miraculously fixed itself during the phone call. I’ve now scrolled up and am astonished to see that I have duly completed my page for today. Shall I continue? Are you bored yet? I’ve not even started on this humor business. I still think the night has them. Voiding sounds interesting, doesn’t it? I like a good purge. Did I ever tell you about the time I embarked on a course of colonics?

Logline Blogfest

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I’ve not managed to get my logline entered into the wonderful Miss Snark’s Logline Critique sessions, But Steena Holmes at Chocolate Reality is kindly hosting a Logline Blogfest. Check it out and comment on the other participants and you could win a query critique or a critique of the first 5-10 pages of your manuscript by Michelle McClean.

So, my logline:

Helen, desperate to escape London and her life of waitressing, petty thievery and failed relationships, buys a one-way ticket to idyllic Sri Lanka. However, she arrives in the midst of a full-scale civil war. She falls for gentle Raghunath but he is imprisoned on suspicion of terrorist activities. When he disappears, believed dead, Helen is distraught. She needs money to bribe the police for information. Wooed by Ian, son of a local politician, Helen accompanies him to Thailand on a risky gem-dealing escapade. Will she return alive? Will she discover the truth about Raghunath? Will she change her life?

Second attempt after taking in all the comments, feels a bit clunky but here goes:

Helen, desperate to escape her London life of petty crime moves to Sri Lanka where she is swept up in the turmoil of the country’s civil war. When the man she falls in love with is imprisoned and later disappears in suspicious circumstances, she has to decide if it worth risking her life to discover the truth.

Third attempt:.. still clunky I think:

Helen, desperate to escape her London life of petty crime moves to Sri Lanka where she is swept up in the turmoil of the country’s civil war. When the man she falls in love with is imprisoned on suspicion of being a Tamil Tiger she must risk her life to discover the the truth about his subsequent disappearance.

A literary event in paradise

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Screen Shot 2013-08-19 at 16.08.03I’m very happy to share that I have been invited by Shyam Selvadurai, festival curator for the Galle Literary Festival (and author of ‘Funny Boy’), to attend and offer a workshop in the main programme of 5th annual festival in Sri Lanka, which takes place from January 26th-30th 2011. Established in 2006, the event is now a regular fixture on the literary calendar. This year speakers include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Damon Galgut, Kiran Desai, Lawrence Hill and Orhan Pamuk.

I will be offering a talk for new and unpublished writers on how to move from being an unpublished (fiction/poetry) writer to a published one, particularly in literary magazines and using new media (audio publishing and mobile publishing).

I am particularly excited about attending the Galle Literary Festival because the novel I am presently working on is set in Sri Lanka (inspired by events that occurred when I was there in the early 80s). I was fortunate to receive a Canada Council grant in 2010 to develop this work from novella length to novel, and to undertake a research trip this year, which I did in August/September 2010. It was an extraordinary trip in many ways. However, I was not able to visit a small town just south of Galle where several scenes occur, so I will be able to do this in January.

This will be my first literary festival as an invited participant. I hope I don’t get stage fright! At the very least I’m sure I’ll feel quite overwhelmed meeting so many extraordinary writers.

My author page on the Festival website is here.

If you are thinking about a holiday, I can highly recommend Sri Lanka, and what better holiday than a literary holiday? Come and join me!

Reasons to do National Novel Writing Month…

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This is an edited version of what I recently posted to my Diving Deeper Writing group:

200px-NaNo_logoAs some of you know it is less than two weeks until National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as it is commonly called. The object being to write 50,000 words in one month.  It is an annual creative writing project coordinated by the non-profit organization ‘The Office of Letters and Light’, first started in 1999.

Last year just under 170,000 people from all over the world took part in the event, writing a total of over 2.4 billion words. It means writing just under 2000 words a day, or if you want accuracy: 1666.6667 words a day for 30 days. Of course you can write 5,000 words a day and hit the goal in 10 days, as our own Leigh-Anne did in 2008… (Here is a little interview they did with me in 2008 when Diving Deeper was part of Gaia.com)

Now if you’re thinking “I’d rather clean my entire house with a worn away toothbrush than do THAT”, let me tell you why this is an incredible event and why you should join those of us who have already committed.

It has been said that to truly be a writer you need to write a million words. There was a time when I rebelled against this and thought it was rubbish, but as time went on and I saw how my writing was in fact improving the more I wrote, I see the truth in it. NaNoWriMo is an excellent way to get some of those million words down, and in particular because NaNoWriMo is not about quality. It’s about quantity. It is the ultimate in our Truly Bad Writing assignment. For some reason, a million quality words isn’t what makes you a writer, it’s simply about getting those words down, about knowing you can do it, that you will do it, regardless of how shitty you feel or how important it is to write those 10 emails you haven’t got round to for months or how you absolutely must redecorate the living room.

Writing is about practise. As in learning by repetition, AND as in ‘practise’ as in a spiritual practise. To write daily, or at least as often as you can, as a way of life. As something that feeds your soul, even when it feels like it isn’t. I believe NaNoWriMo is one of the best ways to truly experience what it means to be a writer, and to put to rest all the fears that you can’t write, that you could ‘never write a novel’, that it’s too hard.

The other wonderful aspect of doing NaNoWriMo is community and friendship. During the month we gather on Diving Deeper, in the NaNoWriMo group, and share our daily experiences, with the writing and with ourselves.

Now there are NaNoWriMo communities and boards on the NaNoWriMo website with all sorts of tips and encouragment, and you can just gather there and not on Diving Deeper. If you prefer to join one of those by all means do, but we have found that a small group who know the Diving Deeper principles is very supportive. We can share anything at all, we can moan and groan and weep or celebrate, and there will always be someone willing to listen and commiserate.

In terms of actually achieving the goal of 50,000 words, it is quite possible to write your daily quota in an hour (or less if you are a fast typist), but if you can I’d say you need 2-3 hours for mulling and creative space. But, if all you have is an hour a day, that’s enough. As I said, it’s not about quality. Just get those words down! Anything at all. Short stories, memoir, novel, total blather, the longest, worst poem in the world, whatever…

One word at a time…

Another addition to the list of short listings…

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I seem to have an embarrassingly long list of stories short listed in competitions. However, this one I am very pleased about: I was a finalist in the BRIDPORT PRIZE 2010.  Over 6,000 stories were received and approx 100 shortlisted.  Zoë Heller was the judge this year and her report will be available on the Bridport site from 31st October. The Bridport Prize is one of the most prestigious short story prizes around – certainly in the UK. Some writer’s careers have been launched by this competition: Kate Atkinson’s short story went on to become the first chapter of her wonderful novel ‘Behind the Scene at the Museum’. The winning stories are read by leading London literary agents who scout for new talent using this prestigious competition.

It’s worth noting that the story of mine that was short listed has been passed over by many lesser competitions and journals. I actually think the story is one of my best, so it was good to get confirmation of this and encouragement to keep submitting and to trust my instinct.