Once in a generation the Big One comes around. The heir to the throne marries. CofE or atheist, Monarchist or Republican, the whole country is united.
United in being on the make.
Whether it's a chance to cash in with dodgy advertising weddings, uninformed opinions, plastic flags, shoddy crockery or a somewhat dubious short story, the call to every right-thinking English person does not go unanswered.
And while the Street of Shame keeps its pencils sharp and long lenses polished for the aftermath, only the Bishop of Willesden and I are making any predictions.
Which brings me to my little stab at self-publishing. I am posting my short story Cinderella's Wedding Night, because it seems like the right thing to do at this time. If it harks back to the fairy tale character, you may also detect resonances with the fall-out of more recent royal weddings. See for yourself!
Available at feedbooks.com but I will attempt to post direct links here.
I would really appreciate any feedback, either on the content, the website or the published version.
Monday 14 March 2011
Thursday 28 October 2010
The Day Job
I'm quite pleased with how this rewritten intro to Yemen turned out. Basic; but reads OK. Not the simplest national history in the world.
Yemen - General Introduction
The modern history of Yemen is a complex and troubled one. The 20th century witnessed the withdrawal of colonial powers, foreign-backed war and financial dependency; Yemen was a Cold War battleground and went through reunification and civil war. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Yemen has been described as a ‘failing state’ (Colton 2010, Barron 2008) with a severely damaged economy, resentment of the ruling Northern powers and sections of the country in open armed revolt. Yemen has both the largest and poorest population on the Arabian peninsula, with over 20 million people in an area similar to that of Ireland (MEDEA 2008) – among whom the unemployment rate is estimated to be as high as 40 per cent (Colton 2010).
Yet this is the region of Arabia known to Ptolemy as Eudaimon Arabia – Fortunate Arabia, a term adopted by the Romans as Arabia Felix; Herodotus described the region as ‘…scented with [the spices of Arabia], and exhales an odor marvellously sweet.’ (in Ovendale 1998). This fanciful description reflects the importance of Yemen at that time in the trade in incense and spices. The Incense Route along the Western part of the Arab peninsula was the predecessor of the Indian Spice Route (Artzy 1994), and the origin of much of the frankincense, one of the most important and valuable items of trade, was Wadi Hadramaut in what is now the eastern part of Yemen (Shackley 2002). This ancient wealth is remembered in tales of the queen known to Arab scholars as Bilqis and in the Bible as the Queen of Sheba (Saba). The people of Yemen were also very successful in their exploitation of rain water by developing an ingenious irrigation system, including the famous Marib dam, whose purpose, according to one account, was not to retain water but to deflect the runoff from the occasional rains into irrigation canals which helped agriculture and made that region the only area of the peninsula to be self sufficient in agriculture (Baynard et al 1980, pp. 7-9).
The interior of Yemen would go into a long decline as trade shifted from the overland routes to maritime routes along the Red Sea, although the port of Aden remains important. Yemen was early to accept Islam, and this would shape the development of the region over the next centuries. Following on from Abassid rule from Baghdad, the Zaydi imamate developed in North Yemen and, initially, Rasulid rule of the south, based in Aden (Long, Reich and Gasiorowski 2011, p.207).
In the early 19th century, after further political upheavals, Yemen was divided between occupation of the North by the Ottoman Empire and the seizure of Aden by Britain in 1839. British occupation did little for the non-strategic rural areas of the South Yemen interior, where traditional tribal leadership was maintained.
The rest of this chapter will discuss how this historic background has led to the current, troubled political and economic context of Yemen. I will then look at theories of leadership and strategy in modern Yemen, at the tradition of entrepreneurial leadership, at new challenges, especially those arising from the crisis of the Gulf War and Yemeni civil war of 1994; and at the special case of women in modern Yemen. This will be investigated in more depth through case studies, and I will close by looking at the severe economic and social development challenges facing Yemen in the future.
Yemen - General Introduction
The modern history of Yemen is a complex and troubled one. The 20th century witnessed the withdrawal of colonial powers, foreign-backed war and financial dependency; Yemen was a Cold War battleground and went through reunification and civil war. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Yemen has been described as a ‘failing state’ (Colton 2010, Barron 2008) with a severely damaged economy, resentment of the ruling Northern powers and sections of the country in open armed revolt. Yemen has both the largest and poorest population on the Arabian peninsula, with over 20 million people in an area similar to that of Ireland (MEDEA 2008) – among whom the unemployment rate is estimated to be as high as 40 per cent (Colton 2010).
Yet this is the region of Arabia known to Ptolemy as Eudaimon Arabia – Fortunate Arabia, a term adopted by the Romans as Arabia Felix; Herodotus described the region as ‘…scented with [the spices of Arabia], and exhales an odor marvellously sweet.’ (in Ovendale 1998). This fanciful description reflects the importance of Yemen at that time in the trade in incense and spices. The Incense Route along the Western part of the Arab peninsula was the predecessor of the Indian Spice Route (Artzy 1994), and the origin of much of the frankincense, one of the most important and valuable items of trade, was Wadi Hadramaut in what is now the eastern part of Yemen (Shackley 2002). This ancient wealth is remembered in tales of the queen known to Arab scholars as Bilqis and in the Bible as the Queen of Sheba (Saba). The people of Yemen were also very successful in their exploitation of rain water by developing an ingenious irrigation system, including the famous Marib dam, whose purpose, according to one account, was not to retain water but to deflect the runoff from the occasional rains into irrigation canals which helped agriculture and made that region the only area of the peninsula to be self sufficient in agriculture (Baynard et al 1980, pp. 7-9).
The interior of Yemen would go into a long decline as trade shifted from the overland routes to maritime routes along the Red Sea, although the port of Aden remains important. Yemen was early to accept Islam, and this would shape the development of the region over the next centuries. Following on from Abassid rule from Baghdad, the Zaydi imamate developed in North Yemen and, initially, Rasulid rule of the south, based in Aden (Long, Reich and Gasiorowski 2011, p.207).
In the early 19th century, after further political upheavals, Yemen was divided between occupation of the North by the Ottoman Empire and the seizure of Aden by Britain in 1839. British occupation did little for the non-strategic rural areas of the South Yemen interior, where traditional tribal leadership was maintained.
The rest of this chapter will discuss how this historic background has led to the current, troubled political and economic context of Yemen. I will then look at theories of leadership and strategy in modern Yemen, at the tradition of entrepreneurial leadership, at new challenges, especially those arising from the crisis of the Gulf War and Yemeni civil war of 1994; and at the special case of women in modern Yemen. This will be investigated in more depth through case studies, and I will close by looking at the severe economic and social development challenges facing Yemen in the future.
Friday 15 October 2010
Gods & Monsters
Gods & Monsters
The Book Club
If your book club has no magic in its realism, no science in its fiction and no fantasy in its sad and boring life… if you’ve tried to recommend a book you love and been given that look… like a teacher just caught you reading porno in class… then try Gods & Monsters, for people who read the books that other book clubs don’t read. A new genre-bending book club in Heswall. One that picks books based on raw emotion, not the bestseller lists. If you have the passion to convince us to read the book that changed your life: if you will read anything, once: then mail us...
The Book Club
If your book club has no magic in its realism, no science in its fiction and no fantasy in its sad and boring life… if you’ve tried to recommend a book you love and been given that look… like a teacher just caught you reading porno in class… then try Gods & Monsters, for people who read the books that other book clubs don’t read. A new genre-bending book club in Heswall. One that picks books based on raw emotion, not the bestseller lists. If you have the passion to convince us to read the book that changed your life: if you will read anything, once: then mail us...
Saturday 9 October 2010
Lament
This may be a literary blog but this is an entry about music and I’m not going to apologise for that. I don’t see a fixed line between music and language, except that music is more fundamental, is deeper and can move us in ways that simple language can’t – but the best poetry, and some prose, can, because it dips into that wellspring of meaning that is beyond words or any language in particular; that is the natural home of music. Every time I write I try to write with music – not a soundtrack but a counterpoint, music that inhabits and informs the language – not always in a way that would be apparent or even helpful to the reader. It’s just there.
I didn’t grow up in a musical household. For a long time my parents owned only one LP – and no record player. We only got a player for that record when my granddad died, in 1975. I was 9 years old. The album was Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.
We weren’t completely without music before that. We had a big old wireless that sat on a shelf in the living room, and on a Sunday we’d wait for the charts to come on, on the FM frequency that Radio 1 shared with Radio 2. Medium wave reception was pretty much non-existent, up in the Dales. Dad always wanted to know what was top of the ‘hit parade’, and if he was home on a Thursday we’d tune in to Top of the Pops. There’s nothing like your Dad liking something to make it seem uncool.
But listening to records was different – listening to them over and over, hearing them properly, learning the words, letting them become part of you.
There were other records around the house – singles mostly: Herman’s Hermits, other bands I’ve forgotten, an Action Man record and we had a Rolf Harris album… but the Johnny Cash album was the only proper, grown up record we had and the songs were about things we didn’t hear about in the charts, Jesus and the devil and trains and poverty. Things that meant something to a boy who’s life was a cramped cottage and no money and trains and chapel. Maybe it didn’t so much become part of me, it had always been a part of me.
I've been in and out of love with a lot of other music between that time and rediscovering Cash’s music with the American Recordings. In between, I remember the surreal experience of being in a country and western bar in Wilhelmshaven on Germany’s North Sea coast with the owner unlocking the jukebox and putting on every Johnny Cash single and B-side, from Boy Named Sue to Chicken in Black. And Rosanne carries on the legacy, especially with The List: I’ve come to think, when it comes to American song writing, that if one of the Cash family hasn’t recorded it… it probably isn’t any good.
Johnny could make the Atlantic seem very small, make Langcliffe, West Riding of Yorkshire, seem very close to Tennessee, or to Dyess, Arkansas. He died shortly after I returned to England in 2003, but still his music is one of the few things all of my family can share, can agree about. That’s something. And the music’s always there, playing now, but inside of me at any time. So this is not a lament for Johnny Cash. It’s a lament for vinyl, for long playing records, for a time when music was hard to get hold of, was precious and enduring, and for a time and place I can’t return to.
I didn’t grow up in a musical household. For a long time my parents owned only one LP – and no record player. We only got a player for that record when my granddad died, in 1975. I was 9 years old. The album was Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.
We weren’t completely without music before that. We had a big old wireless that sat on a shelf in the living room, and on a Sunday we’d wait for the charts to come on, on the FM frequency that Radio 1 shared with Radio 2. Medium wave reception was pretty much non-existent, up in the Dales. Dad always wanted to know what was top of the ‘hit parade’, and if he was home on a Thursday we’d tune in to Top of the Pops. There’s nothing like your Dad liking something to make it seem uncool.
But listening to records was different – listening to them over and over, hearing them properly, learning the words, letting them become part of you.
There were other records around the house – singles mostly: Herman’s Hermits, other bands I’ve forgotten, an Action Man record and we had a Rolf Harris album… but the Johnny Cash album was the only proper, grown up record we had and the songs were about things we didn’t hear about in the charts, Jesus and the devil and trains and poverty. Things that meant something to a boy who’s life was a cramped cottage and no money and trains and chapel. Maybe it didn’t so much become part of me, it had always been a part of me.
I've been in and out of love with a lot of other music between that time and rediscovering Cash’s music with the American Recordings. In between, I remember the surreal experience of being in a country and western bar in Wilhelmshaven on Germany’s North Sea coast with the owner unlocking the jukebox and putting on every Johnny Cash single and B-side, from Boy Named Sue to Chicken in Black. And Rosanne carries on the legacy, especially with The List: I’ve come to think, when it comes to American song writing, that if one of the Cash family hasn’t recorded it… it probably isn’t any good.
Johnny could make the Atlantic seem very small, make Langcliffe, West Riding of Yorkshire, seem very close to Tennessee, or to Dyess, Arkansas. He died shortly after I returned to England in 2003, but still his music is one of the few things all of my family can share, can agree about. That’s something. And the music’s always there, playing now, but inside of me at any time. So this is not a lament for Johnny Cash. It’s a lament for vinyl, for long playing records, for a time when music was hard to get hold of, was precious and enduring, and for a time and place I can’t return to.
Friday 28 May 2010
-Oh, don’t tell me. Not science fiction.
I don’t get it. Really, I don’t. But I hear it a lot – every time I say something about recommending something outside the comfort zone of my reading group…
-I don’t usually read science fiction…I didn’t know I was writing it, for that seminar: Last Drive In was set a (very) few years in the future, but as far as I was concerned it was contemporary fiction. I mean, you can go back at least a few decades without it being called Historical Fiction.
- If you say science fiction you’ll think things we saw when we were kids or the pictures you went to because your boyfriend insisted.
Woman’s Hour’s introduction to a feature on SF. Poor deluded little boyfriend.
- Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that. That isn’t this book at all.
Margaret Atwood, on The Handmaid’s Tale. She later changed her mind and is happy to describe some of her fiction as SF. Maybe winning the Arthur C Clarke prize for Science Fiction helped persuade her...
In a seminar last year I did a compare-and-contrast between The Handmaid’s Tale – given MA’s original statement- and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5. S5 DOES contain space travel to other planets, and time travel, and aliens in flying saucers. It is NOT science fiction. It’s a story of a man fucked up by his wartime experience in Dresden and escaping into an alternate reality. If that’s SF, then Don Quixote is Sword and Sorcery...
The strange thing is, Science Fiction pretty much generally DOES NOT CONTAIN FLYING SAUCERS. Not prose science fiction, anyway. Flying saucers stepped straight off the front pages of the newspapers (these were factual reports by airforce pilots) into an emerging genre of allegorical Cold War, Alien Invasion fiction. Valid enough in itself, but with little relation to the extant science fiction literature, already at least several decades old – maybe going on 200 years old.
Look at the cover art of the SF Pulp magazines contemporary with the Flying Saucer hysteria (http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm). You will see rocket ships. Flying battleships. Flying skyscrapers. Little that could even tentatively be described as a Flying Saucer.
I’m not about to start writing a history of SF literature. Read Brian Aldiss’ Billion Year Spree. In fact, read everything written and edited by Brian Aldiss http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/jun/16/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.artsandhumanities (start with Hothouse and don’t miss the Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus).
And when it comes to movies, just remember how Star Wars opens:
Long Ago
In a galaxy far, far away...
SF doesn’t start like that. Fairy Tales do (and don’t get me wrong, I love fairy tales!)
One of the other problems with SF is the term itself. I mean, I only dabble myself, but to some degree I’ve been aware as terms of speculative fiction, slipstream, new weird, new wave fabulist – or, stepping back, scientific romance. ‘Course, the geekstream like their sadly threatened hard SciFi, based on ‘real’ science and preferably written by ‘real’ scientists (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein … maybe even ‘Doc’ Smith, a Chemical Engineer). But… any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from magic. That’s Clarke’s Law.
Who writes SF? There are a bunch of authors who are tagged as genre authors and would therefore, even if they wanted to, have problems getting anything else published. Apart from that, it seems like every bugger else does. For better or worse, they all dabble – Will Self (Book of Dave), David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas), Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go). Ian (M) Banks has this whole dual identity thing going on. Kingsley Amis was a huge fan of pulp SF and wrote it himself as well as writing about it. What about Salman Rushdie’s first novel (Grimus)? Doris Lessing (Canopus in Argos)? Back to EM Forster (The Machine Stops). Fill in your own favourites.
Was a time when the majority of what I read was SF. Hard SF, real Golden Age stuff. Now, I like my SF soft and slipstreamy. I like things that blur boundaries – even if it still turns off those ‘literary fiction or nothing’ types. For some reason cross-genre detective fiction- science fiction works: Harry Harrison’s Make Room, Make Room! (filmed as Soylent Green), Asimov’s Caves of Steel, China Miéville’s fantastic latest novel The City and The City – even Robert Harris’ Fatherland (Alternate Histories usually attached to SF).
One more crossover… cinematic, this time: 2 years after Star Wars:
Alien.
Usually described as the most successful SF/Horror crossover, both Ridley Scott’s direction and HR Giger’s designs emphasise the sheer Gothic weirdout isolation of deep space. But the real point is… this isn’t unification. Like Richard Matheson’s vampires in I Am Legend (The Omega Man (Charlton Heston), I Am Legend (Will Smith)*), the reason horror/ gothic sits so comfortably with SF is because this isn’t unification, it’s reunification. The real roots of SF are in not just the scientific creation of Mary Shelley/ Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, but in its Gothic sensibilities. Science Fiction is Gothic Fiction.
And that is all I’ll tell you. Because that is all I know.
*I Am Legend also influenced George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. All genres meet somewhere…
MY short random bibliography/ filmography:
EM Forster The Machine Stops, story.
Rudyard Kipling – Wireless, story.
Richard Matheson I am Legend (The Omega Man)
Matheson The Incredible Shrinking Man
Alien
Village of the Damned
Dark City
Brian W. Aldiss Hothouse
Aldiss Billion Year Spree
Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus
Frank Herbert Dune
Robert Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land
Anna Kavan Ice
Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale
Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse 5
District 9
China Miéville The City and the City
I don’t get it. Really, I don’t. But I hear it a lot – every time I say something about recommending something outside the comfort zone of my reading group…
-I don’t usually read science fiction…I didn’t know I was writing it, for that seminar: Last Drive In was set a (very) few years in the future, but as far as I was concerned it was contemporary fiction. I mean, you can go back at least a few decades without it being called Historical Fiction.
- If you say science fiction you’ll think things we saw when we were kids or the pictures you went to because your boyfriend insisted.
Woman’s Hour’s introduction to a feature on SF. Poor deluded little boyfriend.
- Science fiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that. That isn’t this book at all.
Margaret Atwood, on The Handmaid’s Tale. She later changed her mind and is happy to describe some of her fiction as SF. Maybe winning the Arthur C Clarke prize for Science Fiction helped persuade her...
In a seminar last year I did a compare-and-contrast between The Handmaid’s Tale – given MA’s original statement- and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5. S5 DOES contain space travel to other planets, and time travel, and aliens in flying saucers. It is NOT science fiction. It’s a story of a man fucked up by his wartime experience in Dresden and escaping into an alternate reality. If that’s SF, then Don Quixote is Sword and Sorcery...
The strange thing is, Science Fiction pretty much generally DOES NOT CONTAIN FLYING SAUCERS. Not prose science fiction, anyway. Flying saucers stepped straight off the front pages of the newspapers (these were factual reports by airforce pilots) into an emerging genre of allegorical Cold War, Alien Invasion fiction. Valid enough in itself, but with little relation to the extant science fiction literature, already at least several decades old – maybe going on 200 years old.
Look at the cover art of the SF Pulp magazines contemporary with the Flying Saucer hysteria (http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm). You will see rocket ships. Flying battleships. Flying skyscrapers. Little that could even tentatively be described as a Flying Saucer.
I’m not about to start writing a history of SF literature. Read Brian Aldiss’ Billion Year Spree. In fact, read everything written and edited by Brian Aldiss http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/jun/16/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.artsandhumanities (start with Hothouse and don’t miss the Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus).
And when it comes to movies, just remember how Star Wars opens:
Long Ago
In a galaxy far, far away...
SF doesn’t start like that. Fairy Tales do (and don’t get me wrong, I love fairy tales!)
One of the other problems with SF is the term itself. I mean, I only dabble myself, but to some degree I’ve been aware as terms of speculative fiction, slipstream, new weird, new wave fabulist – or, stepping back, scientific romance. ‘Course, the geekstream like their sadly threatened hard SciFi, based on ‘real’ science and preferably written by ‘real’ scientists (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein … maybe even ‘Doc’ Smith, a Chemical Engineer). But… any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from magic. That’s Clarke’s Law.
Who writes SF? There are a bunch of authors who are tagged as genre authors and would therefore, even if they wanted to, have problems getting anything else published. Apart from that, it seems like every bugger else does. For better or worse, they all dabble – Will Self (Book of Dave), David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas), Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go). Ian (M) Banks has this whole dual identity thing going on. Kingsley Amis was a huge fan of pulp SF and wrote it himself as well as writing about it. What about Salman Rushdie’s first novel (Grimus)? Doris Lessing (Canopus in Argos)? Back to EM Forster (The Machine Stops). Fill in your own favourites.
Was a time when the majority of what I read was SF. Hard SF, real Golden Age stuff. Now, I like my SF soft and slipstreamy. I like things that blur boundaries – even if it still turns off those ‘literary fiction or nothing’ types. For some reason cross-genre detective fiction- science fiction works: Harry Harrison’s Make Room, Make Room! (filmed as Soylent Green), Asimov’s Caves of Steel, China Miéville’s fantastic latest novel The City and The City – even Robert Harris’ Fatherland (Alternate Histories usually attached to SF).
One more crossover… cinematic, this time: 2 years after Star Wars:
Alien.
Usually described as the most successful SF/Horror crossover, both Ridley Scott’s direction and HR Giger’s designs emphasise the sheer Gothic weirdout isolation of deep space. But the real point is… this isn’t unification. Like Richard Matheson’s vampires in I Am Legend (The Omega Man (Charlton Heston), I Am Legend (Will Smith)*), the reason horror/ gothic sits so comfortably with SF is because this isn’t unification, it’s reunification. The real roots of SF are in not just the scientific creation of Mary Shelley/ Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, but in its Gothic sensibilities. Science Fiction is Gothic Fiction.
And that is all I’ll tell you. Because that is all I know.
*I Am Legend also influenced George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. All genres meet somewhere…
MY short random bibliography/ filmography:
EM Forster The Machine Stops, story.
Rudyard Kipling – Wireless, story.
Richard Matheson I am Legend (The Omega Man)
Matheson The Incredible Shrinking Man
Alien
Village of the Damned
Dark City
Brian W. Aldiss Hothouse
Aldiss Billion Year Spree
Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus
Frank Herbert Dune
Robert Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land
Anna Kavan Ice
Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale
Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse 5
District 9
China Miéville The City and the City
Tuesday 26 January 2010
Writing Groups
Sitting in my converted washroom staring out at a bare brick wall, it's easy to forget the social aspect of writing. So it was refreshing to meet up with my original Fellow Travellers in Beverley this weekend. It will be 6 years this Autumn since we all turned up on the Certificate course at Hull University - Department of Care in the Community, or Continuing Education, or some such.
It strikes me that the Masters courses, that a few of us did next, are very different things. It's great to be still in touch with people from my Masters, but I don't think it's a coincidence that with one exception, those I'm in regular touch with were never in the same Conference group - and that one jumped ship half way through.
Just too much blood spilled in Conference. But hey, hopefully we'll all one day be giving each other impossibly glowing reviews in the press - just like all the UEA alumni in the Guardian every Saturday.
It was the Certificate group, though, that had real common purpose. We were all in the same hole (Still are. Still digging) - all trying to work out what we were trying to do with this Writing thing. Common enemies, too. As someone pointed out - Creative Writing does attract a lot of mentally unstable people.
But it was the ability of this group to both honestly criticise AND find common ground and common references and suggest possible directions - to encourage with honesty but a minimum of pain - that was the true value. Michael's tutorship did the trick until it was unnecessarily cut short. As he said, it's good to start from the maxim of First, Do No Harm.
Finally, it's good to have people to drunkenly reminisce with to 4am.
Anyway, I'm hoping to drag them all over to the West coast for more of the same in the not-too-distant future. Maybe even bring some real creative work along as well as the plonk.
It strikes me that the Masters courses, that a few of us did next, are very different things. It's great to be still in touch with people from my Masters, but I don't think it's a coincidence that with one exception, those I'm in regular touch with were never in the same Conference group - and that one jumped ship half way through.
Just too much blood spilled in Conference. But hey, hopefully we'll all one day be giving each other impossibly glowing reviews in the press - just like all the UEA alumni in the Guardian every Saturday.
It was the Certificate group, though, that had real common purpose. We were all in the same hole (Still are. Still digging) - all trying to work out what we were trying to do with this Writing thing. Common enemies, too. As someone pointed out - Creative Writing does attract a lot of mentally unstable people.
But it was the ability of this group to both honestly criticise AND find common ground and common references and suggest possible directions - to encourage with honesty but a minimum of pain - that was the true value. Michael's tutorship did the trick until it was unnecessarily cut short. As he said, it's good to start from the maxim of First, Do No Harm.
Finally, it's good to have people to drunkenly reminisce with to 4am.
Anyway, I'm hoping to drag them all over to the West coast for more of the same in the not-too-distant future. Maybe even bring some real creative work along as well as the plonk.
Tuesday 12 January 2010
Compost
I have been (gently) nagged. Thanks, Val.
This blog has been sitting with the shutters closed and dust sheets over the furniture while I relearned how to self-edit and finally sent a couple of stories out into…
Into what, exactly?
One of the rejection-tracking websites calls it ‘The Black Hole’ – but that’s too solid. Black holes are there, affecting the physical universe, swallowing matter and leaking out Hawking radiation. But send out a piece of creative work and it’s just gone, in some kind of limbo – without form and void. Right now I’d feel more confident of a response if I’d rolled the MS up, stuck it in a bottle and thrown it into the ebbing tide. I can’t even do that now, I’d fall foul of No Simultaneous Submissions rule.
That’s strange isn’t it? It would make sense if Editors were heartless megalomaniacs who insisted on their right to ignore your manuscript for six months before consigning it to the compost heap, all the while owning some kind of right to prohibit someone else having any kind of composting rights.
Editors can’t be like that, right?
There are always the Competitions. At least they have deadlines, so you know when to give up. But competitions are so well-built, the outer defences – those volunteer readers - secure against anything innovative and original, the final judge(s) impregnable to anything but the most original and innovative. Anyone figured it out yet?
So back to the magazines – serious ones, no vanity publish-all websites. I’ve got a story that, on and off, I’ve spent (too) many hours on since its first conception two and a half years. Now, to my satisfaction, it is finished, ready to be sent out into the world.
Let’s say I send it to Shimmer – a good magazine, one which I’ve enjoyed reading. Guidelines include Standard Manuscript Format (pain) and No Simultaneous Submissions. They’re in the
Duotrope lists Shimmers's average response time as an incredibly quick 12 days per rejection. So let’s have a look at the other markets otherswho submitted to Shimmer tried. Stick to things I’ve read… in no particular order…
GUD (Greatest Uncommon Denominator) – 20 average days per rejection.
Abyss&Apex – 36 days.
Strange Horizons – 42 days.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet – 212 days.
Imagine I strike it incredibly lucky. That carefully nurtured story has only needed 5 submissions to find a loving and accepting market . It’s only taken 322 days.
Wait – it takes a bit longer to receive an acceptance than a rejection. Plus there’s handling and posting and messing about. May even a minor rewrite.
Let’s call it an even year.
So, feeling optimistic, here’s to sitting here in January 2011 telling you about the marvellous, overnight success of a new short story.
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