I was so upset to hear of the death of Fay Weldon yesterday. Ninety-one is, of course, a bloody good innings in anyone’s book – and I’d only known Fay for a little over six years – but I honestly thought she’d outlive us all, if not Methuselah. It was such a privilege to have her as a mentor and even to count her as a friend.
I was already lecturing at Bath Spa when I started my Masters in Creative Writing and if anything I knew her scripts (and the adaptations of her novels) somewhat better than her books. Seminars with her were always a delight, though they weren’t entirely without issue: once Fay got an idea into her head, it was hard to shift it. She confidently stated that my novel opened with a terrorist strike, even though it didn’t, and was convinced that I was adapting a script, even though I wasn’t. Woe betide anyone who dared use a WE Johns-ish synonym for ‘said’ (which is good advice), and on more than one occasion she advocated visiting a publisher’s office to hand deliver a manuscript, even if their policy was not to read unsolicited material (which is less so). I often joked with my fellow students that half of her advice was barmy, half was pure gold, and the trick was to try to work out which was which.
But she was dogged and dedicated in her defence of writing that she liked, would read anything and everything submitted to her, and was always more interested in building up than knocking down. (Creative Writing courses are notorious for taking the opposite approach.) Though it might be true to say that I learned more about technique and style in my other classes, the best note I received while studying for my Masters was Fay’s encouragement to stop worrying. Indeed, a few of her emailed comments were so positive and inspiring that I printed them out and made sure they were in my eye line as I finished my novel.
They’re still there.
I was delighted when she was appointed as my manuscript tutor. She got me reading The End of the Affair at just the right point in the process, but otherwise left me to get on with things. I approached over fifty agents when I’d finished my novel and most didn’t even bother replying – but Fay remained on hand to dispense positivity, or a kick up the arse, as required. I sometimes think she believed in my book more than I did – when I messaged her, after her move to a nursing home, she was overjoyed I’d finally found a publisher, and pretty much admonished me for having insufficient faith.
As she grew older, it was faith – or sheer bloodymindedness, which may sometimes be the same thing – that kept her going. Though somewhat lacking in mobility – she couldn’t use the stairs and would be driven to and from the campus at Corsham – her mind was razor-sharp. We had to keep reminding ourselves that Fay was in her mid-eighties, given that she was still lecturing, still hosting fabulous parties, still writing and publishing book after book. (Her 2018 ‘Handbook for the Rejected Writer’, Why Will No-one Publish My Novel, was Fay in a nutshell – full of wisdom, but hard-headed.) I’ve loved those novels of Fay’s that I’ve read (she wrote getting on for forty, so I think she’ll forgive me for not having tackled every single one). But I think I loved her work ethic and tenacious determination even more.
Right to the end, Fay was at least as interested in the business of writing as the art of it. (Those years in advertising, that need to write to support a young family, never really left her.) To this day, whenever I have to put on my big boy trousers and do a bit of hustling, or if I’m thinking about making an approach with zero expectation that I’ll even get a reply, I talk about channelling my inner Fay. It’s appropriate, I guess, that one of our last conversations (by email) was to agree a form of words for a cover quote for my novel. But I’m so sad that she’ll never get to hold it in her hands.
Of course, the sadness I have felt over the last 24 hours is nothing to that of her family and friends of long-standing. I send them all the love in the world (and, as per my last blog, I’d rather be accused of being over-emotional and sentimental than the opposite). I’ll miss Fay terribly but am honoured to have known her. As I said on the socials yesterday, when they made Fay, they didn’t just break the mould, they burnt down the entire factory. I just hope she knows how loved she was, by her readers, by her colleagues – and by all her students, young and old.
Talking of age, it’s worth concluding by saying that, despite her advancing years, it was unwise to take Fay for a fool. Irrespective of the twinkle in her eye, the softness of her voice, she could be cutting. One particular (anecdotal?) story about Fay at Bath Spa comes to mind. (I’m going to rewrite things, partly to obscure, in case the story is real, and partly to embellish, as I’m sure Fay would have done.) At BSU, before being accepted onto the course, it was customary to be interviewed by two of the lecturers regarding a piece of creative writing. One particular student submitted something that was, by common consensus, rather flawed. The other lecturer took the student gently through potential faults: was the dialogue dull, the prose overblown? Was some of the writing clunky, did the tense slip, were there structural issues? After listening to this lengthy dissection of the writing sample, and weighing up the options, Fay leant forward. ‘The problem is,’ she said, ‘it just isn’t very good.’
A few weeks back, my friend Sue Teddern reposted a tweet from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall about the writer, fisherman and agony uncle Nick Fisher. He had gone missing from his home in Dorset and everyone was worried for him. Tragically, and as you might already know, the search did not end positively. I read his obituary in the Guardian a couple of days ago[1] and I wanted to write something about him – or, rather, my reaction to the desperately sad news.
It’s important to say at the outset that this isn’t primarily a blog about Nick. I only knew Nick through his work, though I believe he may have been a Writers’ Guild member when I was Wessex chair. However, I’ve been thinking about him a lot since that fateful Friday – and about how trauma involving people we don’t know can affect us so deeply, and bring to mind our own hurts. (Fans of Nick Cave will almost certainly understand what I’m talking about.)
People, quite rightly, mock the concept of ‘thoughts and prayers’, especially when the phrase is used to sweeten a certain type of political or practical handwashing. However, in circumstances like this, and however we define them, it’s all we’ve got. My thoughts go out to Nick Fisher’s family and friends. I wish them well. The loss is almost unimaginable (or imaginable only to those who have experienced similar trauma and grief), and I don’t know how they’ll cope, though I hope that they do.
I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a natural and very human response, this reaction to the grief of people we do not know. And yet, how easy it is to feel that you do know people, having encountered them only through their ‘art’. Nick’s writing was magnificent, and BAFTA-winning. I especially adored Manchild, which Sue script-edited: four childhood friends (played by Nigel Havers, Anthony Head, Don Warrington and Ray Burdis) facing, or throwing themselves into, mid-life crises. Kids, marriage, sex and money. Everyday and relatable stories, even if the characters had assumed positions of privilege. I have a vague memory of emailing him, years ago, to say how much I loved that show. Or perhaps I just meant to. I really hope I did.
I make no apologies: I love letting creative people know if I enjoy their work. There’s a blog to come (if I haven’t already said this before) about mental health, and its polar opposite, when you lose your emotional connection to the world, and the people, around you. (At least, that was how depression manifested in me, and it was in part triggered by events in my writing life.) However, I’m not saying ‘artists’ deserve a free pass and should never be criticised, but I am explaining why I think it’s important to be positive when we can. We might never again have that opportunity to say to someone, ‘I love your writing!’ (and mean it). And it could mean everything to them.
So if it ever sounds like I’m starstruck or bum-licky, or not inclined to be part of some internet pile-on… Well, I’d rather that than be unfailingly negative and bitter. It’s not about professional grovelling: I don’t think it makes much difference as we jostle our way up, and down, the greasy pole. But better I think to be known as a moderately successful writer who is occasionally kind, than a moderately successful writer who tends to be a bit of a git.
Incidentally, I ended my last little blog with the words, Don’t stop. You never know what’s around the corner. Keep writing. I was thinking of this the other day, when my wife stumbled across a diary entry from a decade or so back. She wrote that I was feeling down about something telly-ish (I think Casualty had said ‘No’, again)… But a few days later, I got a commission (I don’t even remember what for now) and my mood was transformed.
I can’t promise that every ‘down’ will immediately be followed by an ‘up’ (in the creative life, or life in general). But let’s be kind to each other along the way. And, if we can, be kind to ourselves. I’m sure it’s what Nick Fisher, Just Seventeen’s agony uncle, would have wanted.
Steven Moffat’s working on a new SF show. There are eight episodes in the first series and details are all very hush-hush but somehow I’ve blagged my way into the writers’ room. There are four of us, I think, and I’m by some measure the least experienced scriptwriter. There’s a whiteboard and a few screens and comfy chairs and a desk in the centre, covered with paper and laptops and ideas. There’s a room next door – a nightmarish amalgam of skittle alley and prison cell, all broken chairs and rusted fittings. Whenever we have guests, we joke it’s the real writers’ room, but usually we keep it locked. I don’t know where it leads, and I really don’t want to find out, and anyway, my priority is working with the other writers in that much more pleasant room of light and imagination. And today is the day when, having broken the series, we’ll find out who – if any of us – will be assigned an actual episode to write. We’ve worked hard, but nothing’s guaranteed. Moffat is like a kindly god, dispensing gifts. He’s giving himself four, and the next most experienced writer is given two. My writing buddy – I can’t quite get a handle on their features; it could be Andy Lane or Paul Ebbs or Paul Cornell or someone else or some odd combination of everyone I’ve ever worked with – is given two episodes to work on, and one will go into series one, and one held over for the next, if the show is recommissioned. Incredibly, I am given one episode to write, despite my junior status. I haven’t written for television for a while, not since… No, I can’t get a handle on it, I can’t remember what happened – it slips through my hands like wet soap, but it doesn’t matter now. I know getting this episode is a big deal, and I’m optimistic and happy and fulfilled. My wife and children appear – I can’t quite see their faces, but I know it’s them. I joke about the room next door and we pop some champagne and I wake up.
OK, it’s not the best punchline in the world. I could probably have made the gag work better if I’d written the above paragraph differently and worked to obscure its dream-like nature. However, it is a pretty accurate summary of the dream I had an hour or so before waking this morning. (That scary room next door! The numerical detail of how many episodes there were, and who was writing what!) It was one of those dreams of delight you wake from and, like Caliban, cry to dream again. I had to take a break from television a few years ago, and how wonderful to imagine, even for a moment, that I could find my way back somehow.
For those that don’t know, I spent much of the last academic year lecturing in scriptwriting at Winchester University, and there’s nothing like teaching a subject to make you yearn to return to it. While I hope I supported and perhaps even inspired some of my students, lecturing also enabled me to do some work on what I know – and what I don’t, and where my shortcomings as a writer lie. Looking back, I was always (to use my favoured analogy) a Third Division scriptwriter – perhaps I even toiled in the old Vauxhall Conference, who can say? As I worked on soaps like Doctors, the Messis and Ronaldos of the writing world – people like Russell T Davis, Steven Moffat and Matthew Graham – were conquering the world. And rightly so – each is a genius. And each has figured in my dreams, over the years. Which is pretty weird – I don’t know Russell or Steven as well as some of my friends, but Matt’s a mate, and so him popping up in my dreams from time to time feels doubly strange. But you don’t need to be called Sigmund to take a stab at what’s going on here: these three fine writers, in my subconscious, obviously stand as archetypes of quality and success, of creativity and optimism. (In other words, even when I’m, asleep, I’m needy and desperate for praise and encouragement.)
The night before my dream, I watched Stanley Tucci on The One Show talking about Inside Man, and that was obviously a trigger for my dream (Tucci spoke warmly of the brilliance of Steven Moffat’s scripts). But it’s interesting that I don’t generally dream of ‘stars’. I think actors are incredible people: I admire them hugely, and the one or two I know are fabulous people. However, as a writer, it’s these showrunners – and other writers touched by genius – that I seem to idolise, even in the depths of my subconscious thinking.
And what does it all mean? If, indeed, these random firings of synapses can be said to mean anything. Perhaps the other trigger is that I knew that today I would be seeing my first Bristol University student in my capacity as a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. I’ve just started my third year, and it’s a great job, and I get to help all sorts of students (and sometimes even staff) with their academic writing. But I’ve also decided to do less lecturing this year, though I love it. The plan is to do (a lot) more writing over the next twelve months than I managed over the last – my literary agent and I have hatched plans for a third (truly original) novel, and then there are the ‘spec’ scripts I need to write. (Television may have abandoned me, but I haven’t abandoned television.)
So, in that context, my dream is perhaps a note of encouragement, a gift to myself, especially when it has been so hard recently to carve out time to write and be creative. And I note it here, in lieu of a journal or a dream diary, and share it more widely, in case anyone else needs to hear this. Don’t stop. You never know what’s around the corner. Keep writing.
Just sneaking in a second quick update… As well as writing, and snagging a new literary agent (the fun and games surrounding that I still hope eventually to discuss here), and talking about writing (see previous blog)… I’ve been a bit busy with music.
Not mine, of course: as I made clear in this blog, I have no real talent in the area. But, as the phrase goes, I know what I like.
In fact, it goes beyond that – I’m the sort of person that, on finding a brilliant new artist or album… Let’s say, via Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone on 6 Music, or Elizabeth Alker’s Unclassified on Radio 3, or my own meanderings… I jolly well want the world to know about it. My overriding principle, my child-like guiding enthusiasm, is to see if people are as bowled over, and obsessed, and moved, by this stuff as I am.
Now, it turns out, my tastes are not vastly mainstream, especially these days. I’m bewildered when people just don’t get it (though of course, they have every right not to), but I’m touched when people do. And so, with that in mind, in recent months (years?), my thoughts have turned towards the idea of mixing songs together, of acting as a (silent) DJ to share the music that means the world to me.
Unfortunately, creating a Spotify playlist doesn’t exactly scratch the old mixtape itch.
Also added into the mix (quite literally) are memories of the ‘soundbath’ event I attended as part of Robert Smith’s Meltdown festival on the South Bank back in 2018. Specifically, the sensation of lying down (with a few hundred others) in a vast hall and relaxing into a semi-dreaming state as beautiful and largely instrumental music washed over us. The music – and the visuals, and the performative aspects – were curated by Jónsi, Alex Somers and Paul Corley as part of their ongoing Liminal project.
It proved to be one of the most spiritually moving experiences of my life. And since then I have been borrowing from that evening, and even attempting to recreate it for others.
All of this has fed into Experiments in Vertical Take-Off (extra Brownie points for anyone who recognises the source of the title), a series of DJ mixes I’m putting up on Livesets:
On two consecutive Sundays, I grabbed my trusty little USB DJ controller and my laptop full of music, and I ‘broadcast’ live. The plan was to share some of the most beautiful music I know, and to explore whether I could recreate that soundbath, or the sensation of listening to Brian Eno while at a spa.
The first session was a test comprising – still stunning – music that seemed not to fit, or that I couldn’t fit into week two; the second ‘broadcast’ was a mixture of ‘ambient big hitters’ and soundbathy material that coincided with Pentecost (though I must stress it’s not ‘religious music’ in the usual sense of the word).
If this mixture of ambient, alt-rock, drone, electronica, minimalism and neo-classical sounds up your street, the two sessions are at:
As I say on the main page, “You might enjoy what I play through headphones. You may wish to lie down. It doesn’t matter to me if you meditate, or pray, or if you listen while doing the washing up. I suppose what I’m saying is, I’m at least as interested in the journey as the arrival.”
What’s this got to do with my writing? Not much, I suppose, though this is generally the kind of thing I listen to as I work.
Not much – and everything.
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EXPERIMENTS IN VERTICAL TAKE-OFF TRACKLISTING
Sunday Evening Extended Test
Mogwai, ‘To the Bin My Friend, Tonight We Vacate Earth’
Jon Hopkins, ‘I Remember’
Sonic Youth, ‘Providence’
Aphex Twin, ‘Avril 14th’
William Basinski, ‘O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow’
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, ‘OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN (for D.H.)’
Biosphere, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’
Stars of the Lid, ‘Humectez la Mouture’
Eluvium, ‘Indoor Swimming at the Space Station’
The Album Leaf, ‘Window’
Sigur Rós, ‘Dauðalogn’
Jónsi & Alex, ‘Boy’
Pentecost Sunday Soundbath
The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, ‘Repentance – Sama’
Biosphere, ‘Kobresia’
Max Richter, ‘Dream 3 (In the Midst of My Life)’
A Winged Victory for the Sullen, ‘Requiem for the Static King [Pt. 1]’
Stars of the Lid, ‘That Finger on Your Temple is the Barrel of My Raygun’
Very quick update – no foolhardy promises about future blogs, no nonsense. I’ve been talking to a few different people in recent weeks, about writing and television and lecturing at university, and I thought I’d put all three links in one place.
If you’re interested in what I do at Bristol University, in my role as a Writing Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, I talk about it here:
In the first episode of the Sledgehammer podcast series, I talk with Paul Ebbs about the script of the pilot episode of Doctor Who, and about writing in general. Subsequent podcasts feature some proper luminaries from the world of Who, and all are available on your podcast platform of choice. Do check them out.
Finally, and most recently, I had a wide-ranging chat with author and poet Leslie Stuart Tate here:
There’s lots of stuff about the difference between prose and scripts, about how I approach my work and the pitfalls and pleasures of trying to teach Creative Writing in an academic context.
You’ll notice, perhaps, that two out of three of these aren’t really interviews or discussions in the usual sense. (In other words, instead of being recording talking, I was emailed questions, which I then answered in writing.) The podcast with Paul is, obviously, the exception – and it’s the sort of thing I don’t normally rush to do. Growing up, I had such a bad stammer that – in socially tense situations – my words would loop for what felt like a lifetime. And by ‘socially tense situations’, I mean pretty much everything that happened within a school context or that involved interacting with anyone who wasn’t a friend or a family member. When you have the sort of stutter that would make Michael Palin’s character from A Fish Called Wanda look unruffled and articulate, even buying a comic from the newsagent feels like a daunting challenge.
I never had speech therapy but I worked hard at developing my own strategies, thinking through what I was going to say in advance or saying ridiculous things to cover my embarrassment. As I became a little more confident in my teens, the problem faded somewhat, though I haven’t forgotten what this excruciating lack of control felt like. I still tend to gabble too fast if I get excited, and echoes of my stammer return if I’ve had a couple of pints, but most people aren’t aware that I had (have?) a verbal impediment. I guess it’s one of the reasons I became a writer – Who writer Rob Shearman made a similar point on a DVD commentary I watched recently. It’s simply that, with a head full of ideas, you trust your ability to write them down more than your ability to speak them out.
Of course, you can’t hide under a rock forever, even if you recognise you’re a creative introvert more inclined to live the life of a hermit than a hedonist. My first postgraduate job involved answering the phones at the Guinness Book of Records, and since then I’ve often had to contribute to meetings or discussions about publishing or television. I’ve tried to run youth groups (the emphasis is very much on the word ‘tried’); I’ve attended Doctor Who conventions and once was interviewed by Jane Garvey on BBC Radio 5 Live. Though I still pathologically hate making telephone calls, these days I’m happy to stand in front of a group of twenty-odd students and bang on about writing or literature or TV. I enjoy the process of making podcasts, even though I find the end result a tough listen – and I hope you will forgive any vocal tics or oddnesses that you may encounter.
I say all this despite believing that these problems now exist more in my head than on my lips. But, like so much in life – especially as you trudge through your fifties, trying to learn things other people seem to have sussed decades ago… I guess there’s only one way to find out.
I bought a lot of new music in 2020. To be fair, I buy a reasonable chunk of CDs most years, but often I’m playing catch-up – filling in gaps in the collection and catching up with stuff I somehow missed first time around. However, I don’t think I’m unique in noting that music became therapy during the first lockdown: it seemed a manifestation of what I was feeling and a cautious promise of better times to come. I’d become completely obsessed with one new release, only for the baton to be handed on to another. And, with artists of all stripes facing great hardship, I resolved to buy what I could directly and on release, often via Bandcamp. (We have a family Spotify account, and I can’t argue with its usefulness – it’s a great way of finding new artists, but it’s simply not built to support them after that.)
I suppose I have something of a High Fidelity mindset and, by the tail-end of last year, I knew I’d listened to enough new albums to think about compiling a list. In fact, even coming up with a top ten meant omitting a load of releases that I bought and enjoyed (I’m looking especially at you, IDLES, Jónsi, Moby and Mogwai). And I noticed, not for the first time, that my list was leaning away from pop music (whatever that means) and towards the chilled and the ambient. It was that sort of year (and if music is therapy, we still need some of that in Lockdown the Third).
But what does this have to do with writing? For me, really quite a lot. Pretty much my first paid gig involved reviewing records for the NME (for a couple of months in the early 1990s, I had vinyl couriered to the publishing company where I worked, and I faxed – yes, faxed – my reviews over a few days later). My early Doctor Who books, building on the fan fiction I’d written as a teenager, were stuffed full of musical references and allusions. I’ve always been into my hi-fi – as a means, rather than an end itself. Perhaps I’m a frustrated musician – frustrated, in the sense that growing up, I was generally hammering away at my typewriter rather than hammering away at keyboards or fretboards. Frustrated, in the sense that I entirely lack talent: my synthesizer and guitar skills would embarrass a moderately precocious toddler. (More recently, I’ve taught myself to play the didgeridoo. Which is guaranteed to break the ice at musical parties, as Monty Python very nearly said.)
I rarely write in silence (though I’m not one for writing in coffee shops either), but I’ve noticed what I listen to – what I can tolerate – has changed massively. I used to be able to put on pretty much anything I liked – punk and post-punk, feedback-drenched rock and industrial poundings, ska and reggae and new wave pop – and it would inspire my thinking and drive me forwards. Now, pretty much anything with (intelligible English) lyrics, or that works within a three-minute pop song paradigm, is distracting and unhelpful. In the context of me trying to write, it sounds like noise (even the bits that aren’t).
For a while, I defaulted to certain albums or artists for particular projects or moods, but these days I generally dip into a dedicated writing playlist that I’ve created. It’s still evolving, but currently comes in at just under 300 hours, or over twelve days, in length, which means I rarely hear the same piece twice. It encompasses ambient, drone, alt-rock, electronica, skewed folk and a tiny smattering of neo-classical and soundtrack. Some of it is intended to nudge me out of my dreaming complacency – very occasionally, I’ll return to my office having left the music playing and I’ll think, ‘What the hell is that racket?’ – but generally the music I listen to while at my desk tends towards the beautiful and the calming. It’s one step above mere sonic wallpaper, but rarely designed to get the adrenaline pumping: it’s music for deep listening (Pauline Oliveros), it’s music for thinking (Brian Eno). It’s music so beautiful, so fragile, that ironically it almost edges back into silence.
I’m fascinated by what others listen to as they work: writers such as Ian Rankin seem to agree that you can’t beat something broadly Enoesque, something that unlocks creativity without drawing (too much) attention to itself. I still love my music, in all its shades and colours, but any list of my top albums of the year will naturally reflect where my head is at these days. And, in the absence of gigs and occasional high-quality parties, ‘pop music’ is often relegated to the car or to washing up while listening to 6 Music. Or occasional self-indulgent moments when the hi-fi is cranked up and a new album is allowed to let rip.
All of which is so much preamble before we get to the list of my top ten albums of last year!
Yes, I know it’s March, and we all want to forget about 2020, but I’ve been busy – more on that to follow, hopefully, maybe… (It’s typical for this blog, which promises regularity and never delivers – last time I said I would blog every other day for a fortnight, which clearly never happened… However, I do have some more subjects I want to cover here, and I’m keen to share a few writing-orientated playlists too. We’ll see. Perhaps I’m as much frustrated DJ as frustrated musician.)
Anyway, good music doesn’t go stale, so here’s the list, complete with YouTube links for videos (the irony of artists receiving only a pittance this way is not lost on me, but perhaps something will strike a chord and you’ll want to investigate further – as I say, many of the following are on Bandcamp and would be grateful for your support).
10. Julian Cope – Self Civil War
I’m not sure the Archdrude will ever again release an album as consistent and polished as the few he put out on Echo in the mid-90s – the advantage of releasing music directly to the fans is that there is no filter or censor; the disadvantage of releasing music directly to the fans is ditto. But still, a Julian Cope album is a Julian Cope album, and it’s always something to be welcomed. (It’s also a great way of remembering the last gig I went to before the Thing, when the great man was in fine form. As always.) Selected track: ‘Einstein’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB6tjYlFUys
9. Sigur Rós – Odin’s Raven Magic
Not technically a new release – the music dates back to the early 2000s, the recording to 2004 – but I’ve been waiting for a shiny disc copy of this for so long, I was starting to think it would never happen. It’s the most doggedly Icelandic of cultural objects (a 14th-century Icelandic poem in the style of the Poetic Edda, arranged by Kjartan Sveinsson of Sigur Rós and Amiina’s Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, with input from electronica noodler Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, Icelandic Rímur poet/singer Steindór Andersen and a choir from Reykjavik). And, if it doesn’t quite match up to Sveinsson’s post-Sigur Rós work in terms of heft and scale and jaw-dropping beauty, well, that’s because very little does.
I’ll be honest, I’m still working my way through the soundtrack (I missed the as-live original performance) and still trying to find the right word to describe it. ‘Devastating’ will do, for the moment. (The new album with Warren Ellis is pretty extraordinary as well.)
A profound and moving meditation on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (The full-length album also gives you a choice of listening to the music without hearing the words, which is helpful.)
6. The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus – Songs of Yearning/Nocturn
Honestly, you wait five years for a new Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus album, and then two come along at once. (All the more surprising, given that they managed three albums in the preceding 28 years, and that this new pair includes their first-ever single.) Named after a fictional terrorist group in Luis Buñuel’s last film, the Rev Army (as no one calls them) blend sacred and folk, ambient and industrial. They’re not on Spotify and by my reckoning they usually only play about a gig a year (I saw them, once, and will never forget it). You might not have heard of them, but you should.
Who knew there could be such beauty in tape loops slowly merging and overlapping and disintegrating almost to the point of oblivion? This collection of shorter pieces, based on recordings that stretch back to 1979, has the dark beauty and desolation of life under lockdown.
I’ve been aware of Barwick – and hoovering up her previous albums – for quite some time now. And where Basinski loops tapes and heads towards entropy, Barwick loops her own voice and tries to find the light – the clue is in the title. As the Observer said, the end result is balm for the soul.
Only the third Avalanches LP since their inception in 1997 (they’re probably still best known for the single ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’), I listened to this obsessively in December and January. It sounds like all the music in the world crammed into one 71-minute recording, which is appropriate for an album that broadly concerns the Voyager Golden Record project (Ann Druyan, the creative director of the project, had her heartbeat recorded for the Golden Record the day after Carl Sagan proposed to her). It’s an album, almost literally, about love, death, life, the universe and everything. And this is reflected in the stunning and diverse range of contributors: Johnny Marr and MGMT feature on the same track and, just when you think you must have exhausted the amazing guest list (Blood Orange, Perry Farrell, Tricky, Jamie xx, Neneh Cherry, Kurt Vile, Wayne Coyne, Karen O… even the artist formerly known as Terence Trent D’Arby), sodding Mick Jones puts in an appearance. Simply stunning pop music that will lift your spirits and put a great big smile on your face.
I could easily have gone for (Brian) Eno’s quirky Rams soundtrack, or the magisterial Film Music 1976-2020 compilation, but I had to go for this. Released three days before the first lockdown was announced, it’s no exaggeration to say this was my soundtrack during those early days of sunlight, anxiety and early morning runs while the streets were deserted. It reminded me of the power of the music, it helped to keep me grounded, and when I hear this beautiful album – basically Brian’s arrangements of a number of brother Roger’s piano compositions – I’m instantly taken back to spring 2020.
Inventions are the side project of Matthew Cooper (Eluvium) and Mark T. Smith (Explosions in the Sky). Now, I love Eluvium. And I like Explosions in the Sky. But I didn’t expect this album to be quite so uplifting and glitchy and rhythmic and delightful. My only complaint is it’s quite short, so back in May and I’d get to the end and start it playing again (something I very rarely do). Like many of the albums in this top ten, it made me a little obsessive, but at the same time, it filled me with happiness and joy.
Oh, and if you’re Spotify-enabled, here’s a similar NSFW playlist that includes a few more singles (some from late 2019, apparently…) and some other bits and bobs. The order of the tracks reflects my working day: something to wake me up, and then music to keep me going.
I was always told to never make promises you can’t keep…
Oops.
In my previous blog post – thirteen months ago now – I promised another, more meaningful post “in the next few days”. I was going to talk about my post-MA attempts to find a (new) literary agent, but… things obviously got in the way. Quite a lot of things, in fact. And this was before the pandemic!
At some point, I might indeed update this unloved blog on the subject of my search for an agent, or indeed, my thoughts on agents in general (A fair summary might be: It’s complicated). But in the last few weeks, as well as finishing a second post-MA novel, I’ve been writing some short non-fiction pieces for the Royal Literary Fund. (I will be an RLF Fellow, working out of the University of Bristol, from the autumn onwards, and these short pieces, on various aspects of writing and creativity, will be available as audio recordings in due course.) It’s renewed my interest in different types of writing, so I’ve set myself the task of blogging every couple of days for the next fortnight. (Famous last words, given what happened last time…)
I wanted to start with something quick and easy but (if I may be so bold) as useful to as many writers as possible – especially those starting out… And, over the three years I taught Creative Writing at degree level, it’s fair to say the subject of fonts – and formatting more generally – came up quite a bit.
Now, it’s true that a work of staggering genius, crayoned onto rolls of toilet paper, might well find a home (eventually, or posthumously). But it’s much more true to say that overworked readers and editors and agents have certain expectations of clarity and appearance on the page, and you might only have a page or two to hook them. As a lecturer, you could often tell if a submission was sub-standard by glancing at the formatting (of course, I never did receive anything on toilet paper, if only because submissions were made online). Occasionally, the formatting was terrible and the content was stunning, and sometimes the reverse was true – and naturally I was obligated to read everything in full, so no short-cuts. But if I was working at a literary agency, and was tasked with reading, let’s say, ten submissions in an hour, I could easily imagine giving in to those first impressions. A well-formatted piece implies someone who takes their work seriously – I’m sure, at the very least, I’d give such a submission a proper read. However, a weirdly formatted submission appears amateurish and might end up straight in the bin (virtual or otherwise). It might not be fair, but, with time pressures weighing down, you’d have to make some tough decisions.
As I always used to say to my students, never give a reader an excuse to not even read your work.
Some time back, I got to discussing fonts with Jason Arnopp (all-round good egg, author of The Last Days of Jack Sparks and overseer of a wonderfully diverse Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/jasonarnopp/posts). He said that people in the world of publishing don’t care about fonts, and he’s quite right (we mean in terms of author submissions; fonts are very important when it comes to typesetting a book, and some companies – Bloomsbury spring to mind – even give you a potted history of the typeface they’ve used for the book that’s in your hands). Fonts should not be a source of agonised debate or sleepless nights (“I’d have succeeded if only I’d submitted in Garamond!”). Just settle on one that’s clear and smart and be done with it. Fonts with serifs (those small lines added to the larger strokes that form a letter) are generally believed to be easier to read over multiple pages (the science is contentious but you rarely see sans-serif body text in books or magazines), But, really, that’s about it.
Having said that – and we’re back at wanting to be taken seriously and not giving people an excuse to junk our work unread – there may also be a little more to it than that. One font – Times New Roman – is becoming the standard, partly perhaps because of its ubiquity in Microsoft Word. Some agents allow a little leeway – I’ve seen variations on “Courier or Times New Roman” – but others flat-out insist on the latter. (Most also ask for 12-point text, or have that as a minimum.) And while authors occasionally have a bit of a ding-dong in defence of their preferred typeface (https://bit.ly/2YqA0Tu), if you’re just starting out, I really wouldn’t take the risk. And I certainly wouldn’t do what I’ve seen suggested elsewhere (I’m not providing the link as I think it’s flat-out bad advice), that instead of “sticking to your old familiar favourite”, you should ponder the breadth of available typefaces and try to “intrigue” by submitting a manuscript in un unfamiliar or unusual font. (I’ve been working in, or around, the publishing industry, for over thirty years. I’ve never heard anyone say, “I’ll definitely give this a read – I’ve never seen that weird-ass font before!”)
Just stick to 12-point Times New Roman. And then you can get on with the rest of your life.
(And if you’re still troubled by formatting, I have a little Word doc that I used to share with my students. In case it’s of any use, you can download it below.)
This blog post has been written with the UK in mind, but everything I’ve written is broadly applicable to the US market (see https://www.shunn.net/format/story/1/, for example). Just remember: all fonts are equal (apart from Comic Sans, obviously). But, especially when you’re starting out, some fonts are more equal than others.
Though I rarely blog – as even a cursory glance at the entries below this one will attest – I think it’s time for a little housekeeping. In a nutshell, though I’m leaving the entries as they are and where they are, the blogs below about my offering a proofreading service, and about the Charnage House novels appearing via Patreon, are no longer accurate. I don’t, and they’re not.
Let me explain. Over time, most writers will try all sorts of things in an attempt to keep the werewolf from the door. Unexpected opportunities or circumstances might force them out of their comfort zones, or they may simply abandon a longstanding project in favour of something new and fresh. Most will experiment with different styles or genres or media (it’s hard to say ‘No’ to something until you’ve tried it). Not so much selecting the road less travelled as coming upon a bewildering series of paths and going at least a few yards down each in turn. But these things – proofreading and Patreon – didn’t work, for me. But I don’t (entirely!) view these attempts as failures either.
I often tell my Creative Writing students the story of the rich and idle monarch who became obsessed by archery. Calling forth the greatest archers in the land, he demanded to be taught their skills – time and money were no object. Over a period of years, and with no little dedication, he did indeed become an accomplished archer, the match of anyone in the land. One day, when travelling through the outermost reaches of his kingdom, he stumbled across a farm where the bare wall of one barn was adorned with a number of archery targets. In the exact yellow centre of each was an arrow.
The king wanted to meet, and be taught by, this great and previously unheralded archer. He asked the local peasants, who said that the only person in the village with any interest in archery was the farmer’s eight-year-old-son. Intrigued, the king called him forth. How had this child trained himself to reach such heights of martial prowess?
The child said he would show the king. He grabbed his bow and some arrows and, despite his limited strength, stood a long way from the barn. However, though his three arrows hit the wall, each missed the painted targets.
The boy, however, did not seem embarrassed or ashamed. Instead, as the king watched, he went into the barn, came out with three coloured tins, and carefully painted fresh targets around each new arrow.
I like to tell this story because I think it’s applicable to all writers – to all freelancers, and perhaps more widely still. The important thing is to try something, and see if it works – to fire off an arrow and, if there seems to be some interest in it, to furiously paint a circle around it. Though it’s important to follow your dreams, the truth is that most of us will fire more arrows than we will paint targets. I’m always suspicious of people who talk about masterplans and say things like, ‘And then I decided to change direction and try my hand at X…’ For many writers, change is enforced, and we never quite know what we’ll be doing next.
I say again: all we can do is fire the arrows, and respond accordingly. And, for me, proofreading was an exploratory arrow. Patreon was another. But neither hit the spot and were worth painting around.
In other words, I had very little reaction to my attempt to offer a reading/proofreading service (“little reaction” being a polite euphemism for “no interest at all”), despite plugs on social media and even an advert (hello, Private Eye). And some lovely people backed me to start writing the first Charnage House novel, but I became busy with other things (chiefly taking an MA and writing a very different book). I must stress, the Charnage House series isn’t dead: like some long-toothed corpse in a tomb, it’s merely resting. I may indeed be finishing the first novel later this year. (As to exploring alternate models of publication… Well, we’ll have to see.)
Anyway: this is my typically longwinded way of saying that the links in those particular blogs are dead (ish) and that I’m trying different things. And, amazingly, I have plans for a second blog post over the next few days (like buses, you wait for years, and then two come along at once). It will be devoted to my ongoing attempts to find a new literary agent – which reminds me of a second, and equally tiny, bit of housekeeping.
Some time ago, I came across a website called Agenthunter (it’s now been relaunched as Jericho Writers). If you’re looking for an agent, you’ve probably stumbled across it too. The idea is that it forms a sort of database, enabling writers to look up a particular agent and see who their clients are, whether they’re looking for new writers, etc. You can perhaps discover much of this yourself via a Web search, but there is original content, and an ability to drill down to get recommendations, now called AgentMatch. (In other words, if you’re interested in a small agency with a particular penchant for crime, then you can quickly draw up a shortlist.)
I tried it, and found it useful. (Back in the day, you could get free membership for a month in exchange for a review. Consider this blog that long-delayed review.) It was helpful being able to search individual agents across an array of agencies from within one website and, though I found a few errors, I expect these have been tidied away by now. (The database is certainly much bigger than it was before, and now includes the US.) I would like to have been able to manually save a shortlist, and/or make a log of those I’ve approached, but instead, over the last few years, I’ve relied on Word and Excel to keep track.
You might want to give it a try (it seems they do a free week if you potentially sign up for annual membership) if, like me, you’re looking for a literary agent.
I’m just about to launch a series of novels via Patreon. Here’s the blurb:
Few people have heard of Charnage House. Fewer still know its location. There is no mention of it in any public record, and even internet rumour is closed down with a sinister thoroughness. On the surface, it’s just another rehabilitation centre, offering treatment, care and sanctuary to troubled rock stars, disgraced actors, and anyone in the eye of a media storm. However, its clients also include the CIA, Interpol and GCHQ.
Charnage is the only privately-run safe house in England. And it may be haunted.
Many that emerge from Charnage House remember a Tudor building with sprawling Victorian extensions and rooms that seem barely to have been touched in decades; others recall sophisticated modern therapy rooms and a gym. Those that work there know for a fact that Charnage House is many miles from the nearest town, and set in a hundred acres of dark woods and rolling fields. From the control room the entire estate can be monitored via a network of hidden security cameras. Of course, individual cameras have been known to malfunction from time to time – but that’s nothing to get worried about, is it?
More troubling are the strange noises and glimpsed rooms of the house at night. It’s as if Charnage reconfigures itself when no one’s looking. No one’s actually seen a ghost, but in the darkness, with the wind hammering at the doors, that moment can’t be far off…
Security at Charnage is currently overseen by Jacqueline ‘Jac’ Darnell. Jac is never sure who will need protection next, and she’s not always told what the guests entrusted to her care have done, or from whom they’re hiding. Who can she trust? The person needing sanctuary – or the person leaving them there? After all, those who come to Charnage House are often traumatised and haunted. The peace and quiet of the place brings all sorts of buried secrets to the surface. It also means that, when they leave, they may be very different people altogether. That is, if Jac can keep them alive that long…
In each novel in the series, someone new comes to Charnage, seeking sanctuary. In turn, Jac and her team make some fresh discovery about the house, its complex history – and the sinister men who now run it.
The life of the freelance writer has its moments. Having a book published or seeing your name on screen is always nice – though the self-doubt (I could have done better. Has the director screwed it up? What will people think of it? I wish we’d gone with a different cover) is never far behind. Supping cheap BBC wine or going to exciting book launches is a highlight, partly because they so rarely happen. And I’ve walked down the red carpet at the BAFTA TV awards (I’ve never felt such a luvvy), but I paid for the tickets myself, and let me tell you, it was that or a holiday.
Then there’s the agony of actually writing (when it flows it’s the best feeling in the world; when it doesn’t, it isn’t). Or staring at a blank screen all day, feeling worse than useless (I’m a writer, I’ve done this before. How hard can it be?!). Or the displacement activities and the hours that pass without interacting with another (non-fictional) human being.
Am I doing a good job of implying that the life of the freelance writer is anything but glamorous…?
And finally – let’s not beat about the bush – there’s the money. Or the lack of (regular) money, unless you are a genius and work hard and get all the breaks. (I’m not a genius, but I work hard and have had a few good breaks – but that’s not enough.) As I hinted in my blog earlier in the year, when I launched my script and prose reading services, I’ve not exactly been rolling around in commissions recently. Which is OK, it happens. If writers were footballers, we couldn’t all play in the Premier League – at least, not at the same time. Someone has to play for Accrington Stanley.
Mind you, when you listen to some writers, it all seems so easy. Actually, not easy – that’s not fair – but when interviewed they can sound relentlessly upbeat. A TV scriptwriter, for example, will basically say that s/he wrote for this soap, then wrote for someone else’s series, then created their own, then did another, and it won awards, and then they wrote a movie, and the next thing you know they’re sitting in a Jacuzzi of champagne and oysters. (No names, no pack drill… Oh, OK, you’ve twisted my arm. I’m thinking perhaps of the wonderful Paul Abbott, who I heard (and drank with) many years ago. But then he is a genius, and he works bloody hard, so of course he got the breaks, and wrote amazing things that I can scarcely dream of. I don’t want to sound like Red Dwarf’s Rimmer, always bemoaning other people’s opportunities and ‘luck’.)
Of course, one shouldn’t be surprised if scriptwriters and novelists – the successful ones, at least – talk in these terms (or, rather, unwittingly allow their audiences to think like that). Even in the UK, where we have a complex and antagonistic relationship with success, we still think in a way that could be described as being a facsimile of the American Dream. We’re brought up on a diet of Hollywood movies, and if there’s one thing Hollywood loves (because, naturally, the people making these films have got to the top, and have succeeded), it’s a happy ending, and a Be Yourself or Don’t Give Up message. No one wants to watch a movie about someone struggling against the odds, who contemplates turning away from their vocation, but then decides to keep plugging away – and promptly fails. (Actually, I would, but you can guarantee such a movie could not be made in (mainstream) Hollywood.)
And, of course, we writers are brought up on the hero’s journey (even if we’ve never read Campbell, we’ve seen Star Wars) – on that moment when everything is at its darkest (roughly three quarters of the way through a film), and then suddenly the light floods in.
As a writer, I’ve already had what I thought were my darkest moments – times when money was so tight I ended up spending a few days delivering Thomson directories in Wincanton, before vowing “Never again!” (And, do you know what? Things did pick up at some point after that.)
But only the other day, just when I thought I was content with my status as a Third Division writer, I found myself working in a potato packing plant.
Having endured a tricky couple of years in TV land, I’d signed to a temp agency in the hope of getting some casual office work. Instead I was offered a one-day shift at the spud factory. (No criticism intended of the agency. They can’t magic me the perfect job from out of their bottoms.)
And no criticism is indeed of the spud factory, either. They pay, I think, the Tory Living Wage, and it wasn’t exactly Dickensian in there (mind you, there was almost no natural light, and the work was both relentless and back-breaking, though you were at least provided with ear plugs to drown out some of the constant machine noise). But when offered the job I didn’t really think I could say “I’m an artist! Do these hands looks like the hands of a horny-handed son of toil to you?”, and flounce off to check my newly-acquired Morrisseyesque quiff.
As it turned out, and without wishing to be melodramatic, my day in the spud factory was just about the worst day of my life.
Actually, that’s not quite fair. I think “worst working day of my entire life” would be more scrupulously accurate – or, more seriously, the worst day that did not involve death, life-threatening illness, or a trip to the courthouse. (Long story, and not for this blog.)
Over the spring and summer I’d been teetering on the edge of what might have been clinical depression (it was never formally diagnosed, but my missus is a GP, and she lives with me, so I’ll take her at her word). That mental fragility certainly didn’t help. Neither did the fact that, on my breaks (15 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes for lunch, 15 minutes in the afternoon), I found myself thinking “OK, this is it. I’m no longer even a Third Division writer. I’m someone who works in a potato factory who happens to also be a failed writer.”
That makes me sound terribly grand and ooo, get her. To be fair, I’ve got nothing but respect for the people who do this sort of thing (though I observe in passing that I was the only British person in my group. Post-Brexit, you can say what you like about Eastern Europeans (the fascist tabloid press certainly do), but, by goodness, they work hard). And – because the work is so relentless – when you’re in the midst of it you can only really think in terms of open up the bag, shuffle forward to receive spuds, drag it and turn it so that it can be stitched shut, throw it onto the pallet with the label upwards, return for another bag. Repeat, and repeat, and repeat, until you reach an almost Zen-like state where you’re not even sure you exist any longer.
But I worked eleven and a half hours that day. I’ve never felt more tired at the end of my shift (in my defence, though I’m not unfit – three hours of kickboxing and kendo most weeks – I had recently suffered an apparently unprovoked deep vein thrombosis, which meant I hadn’t done anything remotely strenuous for a while). I felt 48, going on 148. My ears rang. Everything ached. My brain was empty, bar the thought, Was that more like purgatory, or hell?
Oh, and I never want to see another potato as long as I live.
As I say, bless the people who work there, but no, it wasn’t for me.
So, was this me, as a writer, at my lowest ebb? (Was that day – for those of you who know Blake Snyder’s approach to movie structure – the All is Lost moment, followed closely by the Dark Night of the Soul, where the hero hits rock-bottom and wallows in hopelessness…?)
Well, possibly. (I must stress again, I know it’s a First World problem; I know that plenty of people in the world would think safety from bombing and famine worth an infinite number of days in the spud factory. But if never wanting to return to that place, after one day, makes me a bad person, then, yes, I’m a bad person.)
And can we now expect a turnaround? Will my story – the narrative I retrospectively impose on my own life, and writing life – be ever-upwards?
We’ll see. In truth, I wanted to write this blog – only my third in six years! – the day after my stint in the potato packing factory, as a corrective to any woolly notions regarding the glamorous life of the writer, or that any artist’s career is always and resolutely going in one direction. (The fact that I’m doing this via a blog hints at one of the problems with having a ‘professional’ website. I can’t exactly talk about how hard things are, or getting turfed off various TV shows, there, on the front page. It’s got to be good news. It’s got to be positive.)
But I didn’t get around to it, and a few days later, I started to get busy. And blow me down if I’m not now busier than I’ve been in years. Half of the projects and sniffs of interest I can’t even begin to announce, but, as you’ll see from my web page (www.martinday.co.uk), I am now the Wessex regional rep for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, and as of next week, I will be an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. However, a lot of these opportunities and hints of work stretch back to the early summer, and often beyond even that – and an expression of interest butters very few parsnips. It’s certainly not impossible to imagine a future where the writing income dries up again (not that the Writers’ Guild position, though lovely and an honour, is paid), and I find myself contemplating the real world of work – even work in a potato processing factory.
So, what am I saying? Possibly that good things come to those who wait, as the Guinness ads used to indicate – but that no one ever tells you how long you might have to wait for something, as Micawber said, to turn up. That sometimes being a mere Third Division Writer ain’t so bad. And that the writing life – hell, life in general – is damn hard sometimes, and it doesn’t always fit into tidy Hollywood narrative arcs.
And yes, dear reader, of course I was back on the spuds – within 24 hours, as my waistline will testify.
