Ho hum...

Just when I was feeling so pleased with myself at Tally's £3.79 patch of lawn (see below), here's someone who has gone one better. Always happens, doesn't it?

Poetry Thursday

I vividly remember the first time I read anything by Marilyn Hacker. I was sitting in a Starbucks in London Bridge waiting for someone to arrive for a meeting, and I had to stand up with excitment. It was as if I'd just had the biggest adrenalin rush - similar to when I read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. That breathless feeling, almost like fear, that the writer was going somewhere completely daring and unexpected, not with content but with structure. So my poem recommendation for today is Hacker's Scars on Paper, and I thoroughly recommend her recent collection Essays on Departure if you're tempted to read more.

The Salway Estate

So it's the week of Chelsea Flower Show, and all the great and the good seem to be opening their palatial doors wide to reveal their gardens. This is my sore spot. I gave up a really well-loved vegetable patch in Edinburgh, when we moved down South. Now I have a patch of concrete instead. For three years, I kept up an allotment but had to give it up this year because of a mixture of time and bad back. However, all is not lost... I am trying positive thinking to make me love my concrete. First up is my portable vegetable garden - some time over the summer, I want to have grown my own ratatouille (first having found out how to spell it)...



The other spoilt fat-girl Salway now has her own spot of lawn, thanks to buying a piece of turf at £3.79 at the local garden centre. And she thinks it very nice to lie on it in the sun ...


I'm even starting to see some results ...



And because every gardener needs something to make them happy ...



Gold medals all round, I think!

Book signing

My hand is crab-like after signing the special editions of my short story collection, Leading the Dance...
Luckily I only had 125 to do, although it became strangely soothing, almost like meditating, and the book is so very beautiful.


And to launch the edition, I'm reading at the Waterstones in Tunbridge Wells on Wednesday 30th May at 7pm. No need to book, and all welcome!

Close reading

I'm sitting nervously here because my daughter's GCSE English Literature exam is just about to finish and I'm waiting for her thumbs up/thumbs down text. We spent last night going over the poems in her anthology, and I was surprised at just how good it was to read the texts closely with her. Surprised because I had maybe arrogantly (OK, extremely arrogantly) assumed that the life of the poem would have been taught out of her and her classmates by the time she reached the exam. Not so. She was as excited by the language and the meaning of the poems as if she was reading them the first time, maybe more as she saw more and more in each line. In his fantastic T S Lecture in 2005, the poet George Szirtes says:

The task of poetry is to tell the best truth it can about whatever it happens to be dealing with. After that it must trust the reader, and assume that the reader is deeper, stranger and wiser than the poet knows.

George also describes what seems to be happening with Rachael, which is that, rather than looking for points to be scored for each technique spotted, she was letting the poem take over. He says:

There is a process I have often noticed in my teaching: that the understanding of poetry is not, as Paterson thinks, structured like an apprenticeship. There is, rather, a particular point at which the nature of poetry is understood for the first time. That first step on to the ice involves understanding both the point of the ice and something of ice's nature. It is in fact the realization of something we have known all along. We have always known what lies beneath: we are always feeling the ice under our feet.

It was really exciting, and whatever the result of the exam, all credit to her English teacher for that. I was envious of how she 'got it' so much earlier than I ever did.

Mind you, she did come through first thing this morning to say 'I've been reading and thinking about the poems on my own'. Then she hit her head with her hand and said: 'No, I haven't. I must have been dreaming I have.' So maybe it was all just a dream, and English teachers are still beating out the rhythms on the back of pupils' heads with wooden rulers as they did at my convent school, and pupils are still growing up with an absolute terror of getting poetry 'wrong', just as I did.

Juxtaposition 2

Here's a fledgling vineyard in Kent:


and here's the result of many (possibly) cynical marketing meetings re the above:


A student gave me this bottle of wine and I say I keep it because it makes me smile, but actually I'm scared because I'm not sure if it clears or induces writer's block. Or am I just reading too much into it? Quite possibly.

The Judgement Hour

That's what a wise friend called it when I said I wasn't sleeping, was waking up every morning too early, every effing morning. In fact I've got to hate going to bed, because I'm already waiting to wake up - and I've always been one of those annoying people who usually love mornings. A whole day ahead, and all that.

'Ah,' my friend said. 'The judgement hour. Between three and four, I guess.'

Why yes. I'm waking every morning at 3.46am almost exactly according to the digital alarm clock I also hate. So in some ways, it's comforting to know I'm not alone. That there are many many others there having that horrible hour of facing all the bad things you might have said, or done. That joke you thought was funny when you were telling it but in retrospect was just a bit embarrasing. The deadlines you're not going to make. Even the time you were six and told your mum you weren't the one who ate the last piece of cake and your sister had to take the blame. Etc, etc, etc. Well, kind of comforting. As soon as I get up, everything falls back into proportion, but, hey, I've always been more than a 'getting by' girl so I want to kick this. Any suggestions welcome, as is anyone who wants to keep me company in the 4am blues, including James Thurber, it seems, who said: "I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness."

In the meantime, I'm particularly interested in this blog, and this, and this.

Everyday Matters

The book, Everyday Matters by Danny Gregory has given me some electric moments today. I was sceptical at first, but that says more about me than the book because it's not trying to convert me into anything. There are no self-help or 'come over to my side' lessons, more just a feeling of how it felt for one person to get through a bad time. When Danny's wife, Patti, had an accident leaving her in a wheelchair, his first thought was 'why me?'. Then when his wife seemed able to cope with the changes but not him, he took up drawing. The way he describes the process of letting go into the creativity is really beautiful, and there's a randomness about the pages, the stories, the humour that makes you feel you're there with him, learning to see things all over again. The page of drawings of all the different lightbulbs in his house has given me at least one idea for a short story, and I feel inspired to go out into my neighbourhood (becoming what he calls the 'weirdo' if I'm not that already) with my pencil and pad right now to capture some living of my own. In fact, the need to make something, anything, is proving compulsive. I love the quote at the beginning from Miles Davis: "Do not fear mistakes. There are none." If Danny Gregory's got a side, I guess I've come right over to it!

Friday Fact

90 percent of women who walk into a department store immediately turn to the right.

Mark Wallinger Presents
Late at Tate Britain
Friday 1 June, 6 – 9.45pm

Mark Wallinger questions the right to protest and the limits of art. What are the principles of free expression? What might constitute the moral imperative to transgress the law and exercise the right to speak out? Joining Wallinger are Lisa Appignanesi, Shami Chakrabarti, Brian Haw, John Hegley, Hari Kunzru, Geoffrey Robertson, Jerry Sadowitz and Adrian Searle, protest choir Raised Voices and invited guest Mark Thomas.

Mark Wallinger has recreated peace campaigner Brian Haw’s Parliament Square protest for a dramatic new installation at Tate Britain. Running along the full length of the Duveen Galleries, State Britain consists of a meticulous reconstruction of over 600 weather-beaten banners, photographs, peace flags and messages from well-wishers that have been amassed by Haw over the past five years. In bringing a reconstruction of Haw’s protest before curtailment back into the public domain, Wallinger raises challenging questions about issues of freedom of expression and the erosion of civil liberties in Britain today.

For more information about the event and Tate Britain please visit http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/eventseducation/lateattatebritain/

Time: 6-9.45pm
Tickets: These will be available from 6pm on the evening at the Clore Gallery Entrance
Venue: Tate Britain, Millbank, London, SW1P 4RG

Poetry Thursday

OK, time for real women now. My poem for the week is Catherine Smith's Picture This.

Acting our age

Is there any woman - young or old - who hasn't had something to say already on the extraordinary Christa D'Souza article in Sunday's Observer Woman? The trouble for me is how it brings back all the insecurities from the school playground. If I say I don't really think I want to look like Melanie Roberts (which I didn't) then everyone will turn round and say it's because I'm just jealous of her blonde hair and teeny feet. If I say I don't want to hang around watching the boys play football but would prefer to do something interesting on my own, it's because the boys don't want me to watch anyway. If I say I don't want to kiss Timothy Robinson, then its because I'm frightened he might not want to kiss me... you get the picture. But now I'm older, I don't care what you might say back - I really really don't want to look like Christa D'Souza. I don't want that level of fear she - and the others interviewed - must live with everyday when they look in the mirror. If I was lucky enough to have the time to do yoga three times a week, I'd hope it would take me beyond the physical benefits and to learn something about the spiritual holistic side too. But the article can't be real, can it? That's about the only thing I could think about when I was reading it. Surely this has to be some kind of joke, and then I couldn't help feel a sadness for everyone involved. And even more sad when it's printed in a magazine called Observer Woman. Still, I suppose it just proves us women aren't proper adults - as Christa says 'I am obsessed with age. But admit it, aren't you too?'. Yes, that's it - we all want to wear short denim skirts and flirt with dads so that the other mums won't like us and then no one will be our friend long enough to tell us just to Grow Up. Thank heavens for this blog anyway, but my favourite post on the whole subject is from yarnstorm. It's almost enough to make me take up knitting, but then of course I've never been pretty enough to worry about losing my looks anyway....

Gluten Free

We are rapidly turning into the family you really don't want to invite over for a quick meal. Not only are two members vegetarian, my son is also a coeliac, and although it has become second-nature now for me to cook the right meals, it's a nightmare to try to explain what he can and can't have. Luckily, since Hugh was diagnosed ten years ago, things have improved beyond measure in foods stocked, labelling and taste, and this week is Coeliac Awareness Week. Although it's worth putting up with people calling him a 'faddy eater' and me a 'fussy mother' just to make sure he gets the right foods, I'm amazed at how many people still think that 'just a little bit of flour' is going to be perfectly acceptable, even a treat. An extraordinary lack of knowledge when you think that they estimate that one in 100 people in the UK will suffer from it. Luckily, there are some brilliant blogs out there to help with recipes, advice and sharing stories. My favourite ones are: Gluten A go Go, Gluten Free Bay, Gluten Free Girl, and best of all, the divine Gluten Free Goddess, from whom I ordered the above t-shirt which still makes me laugh. I haven't found any British blogs as far as I know, but I'd really like to be proved wrong on that!

Wednesday Three Things

Three good interviews with writers today:

1. Narrative Magazine's profile of Ann Beattie. You have to sign up to get the full thing but the whole magazine is really worth it (even if it wasn't free!)

2.The Paris Review interview of Isak Dinesen. I love how the whole concept of what an interview is gets turned on its head before it begins.

3. This interview with Margaret Atwood. There are lots of interviews with Margaret Atwood out there, but this pleased me so much with its very particular specialised focus.

How to be Happy, though Married

My friend, Michelle Lovric, has recently edited a book - no, let's use its proper subtitle: "A Tender Compendium of Good and Bad Advice" - with this wonderful title. Some of the quotes given make me laugh out loud, like:

"Sometimes your wife will initiate sex. This will occur when you walk in the door after completing a triathlon, or in the closing minutes of tied grand final." (Peter Downey)

Others are poignant:

"As for the clitoris, this is to be saluted, at most, in passing, and afterwards ignored as much as possible; for the reason that it is a rudimentary male organ, and an orgasm evoked there evokes a rudimentary male magnetism in the woman, which appears to pervert the act of intercourse, with the result of sensualising and coarsening the woman." (Ida Craddock's The Wedding Night of 1900.)

Ho hum. One Lucy H. M. Soulsby is quoted as saying,

"A husband of "a superior woman" is usually much to be pitied",

but I say the ones that are to be pitied are the wives of all those saluting men who went to good old Ida for advice! It does conjure up some lovely images though if she was taken literally...

More about the book here.

Friday Fact

From possibly the most interesting timewaster I've found in a long time, your first Friday Fact. Amazing but this actually works:

While sitting at your desk make clockwise circles with your right foot. (go ahead no one will see you) While doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand.

Your foot will change direction.

Go and visit....

This wonderful blog, Dina Rabinovitch's Take Off Your Running Shoes, is worth a visit if you fancy an inspirational five minutes. Better still buy the book. It's positive, non-condescending, generous, funny and the fact that a percentage of all sales goes to cancer research is an added bonus.

Poetry Thursday

I was inspired by the idea behind Poetry Thursday at the beginning of the year, the collaborative, generous feel of it, but somehow let my weekly contributions lapse. But now it's time to start again. Here is my suggestion of what to read this week: the poem, The Nolans in Japan, by the wonderful Tamar Yoseloff. Her latest collection, Fetch is really worth a look, and if you click on the last link you get to hear her read some of her poems.

Three Wednesday Things

I know, I know, it's Thursday, but I was ill yesterday so my new bootcamp schedule went to pot, although I did manage to read some of the stories in Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things which cheered me up with thoughts of arm gnawing and dead men's parties. So... every Wednesday I'm going to put up three things that give me pleasure.

It's Claire's idea, but she's gone off running with a different idea of mine, so I reckon we just work well together. AND we both live in Tunbridge Wells, so my first three things are going to be local blogs, just so everybody can fall in love with Tunbridge Wells, come and live here and we can have the UK's first writer's town.

1. Three Beautiful Things, this is updated daily and is so simple that it's strange how you find yourself smiling by at least the second point.

2. Here's someone who really really loves Tunbridge Wells...

3. ... and here's someone who would prefer it if we all stood up a bit straighter and certainly never let our dogs off their leashes.

(and just because I'm late with my Three Wednesday things, here's another photography blog of Tunbridge Wells. I'm cross because I was watching those fireman at the world famous Paul Elvis Chan's Gracelands Palace, but can't find myself in any of the pics. Probably a good thing really.)

A newer, nicer Marquis de Sade?

Childish of me, I know, but I'd like to go to this just to listen in on the conversation at the drinks reception afterwards.

A Different Sade: Food for Thought

A British Academy discussion evening convened and chaired by Marian Hobson FBA, Queen Mary, University of London

Speakers:
Katherine Astbury, University of Warwick, Bob Gillan, University of Manchester, Will McMorran, Queen Mary, University of London, Caroline Warman, University of Oxford, and Thomas Wynn, University of Exeter

Discussants and Commentators:
Philippe Roger, Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales, Paris, France and Svein-Eirik Fauskevåg, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway

Thursday, 7 June 2007
6.00pm - 7.30pm followed by a drinks reception


The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace,
London, SW1Y 5AH

With the publications of Sade’s correspondences, and his consecration in the Pléiade canon through Michel Delon’s excellent edition, after the monumental biography by Maurice Lever, not to speak of the much greater accessibility of much of his work through paper-back editions, the position of Sade in literary history is evolving. Much greater attention is being paid to his plays and to his short stories, while the sardonic pornography is seen as more embedded in its cultural content. A more nuanced picture of his production is emerging, and his work is now seen as key in understanding the ideological tensions of the Enlightenment, and the cross-over from the old literary world of the Ancien Régime to the new.

Almost 200 years to the day since Sade's final completed manuscript was seized from his room at Charenton, the event will discuss this new status, and to what degree the Sade of the older version is the twin or the black shadow of the newer, nicer and perhaps more approachable vision.

A poster for your notice board can be downloaded here:

Visit our website for further details and to to book on-line
Telephone enquiries: 020 7969 5238 / Email: externalrelations@britac.ac.uk

Another reason to live in Kent

Tuesday, May 8, 2007
SPELDHURST, England – An 82-year-old man in Speldhurst, England, clobbered a robber in the face with a head of iceburg lettuce after the bandit tried holding up a local grocery store. The bandit was armed with a shotgun but after being hit a second time by the produce, he made like a banana and split.

Apparently it's not as daft as it sounds - he'd just come from his allotment and he had the iceberg lettuce ready in his hand. No, sorry. It is as daft as it sounds. I don't quite get the banana joke though. Well, I do get it, of course, but it feels like something that's been hanging around looking for a story to latch itself onto. At least, you can be sure the lettuce was fresh.

Juxtaposition 1

Time to put some order into this blog, shake it up, sort it out, give it a good Spring clean. So Tuesday is going to be Juxtaposition day - for some reason they seem to go together for me. Here's the first one:
Dennis Sever's wonderful and magical time capsule house...
and right outside it, in Folgate Street, this maintenance sign:

I can just imagine the jokes about whether the workers will be wearing Victorian costume and digging by candlelight.

And back to writing prompts: Waking up in a different age

(Not) in the post...

It's seeing a notice like this today, sellotaped onto a village postbox, that reminds me how much I like living in the country. Can you imagine how the conversation might go? Honestly, the cheque IS in the post, it's just that there are birds nesting and we won't be able to open the postbox until they hatch...

Knotty Friendships

When we left Edinburgh to come to Kent, a woman I knew only vaguely came up and said that she'd always think of me as a lost friend because she'd always thought we'd get on, but now we'd never have that chance. I was rather bemused at the time, but can't stop thinking about it now, particularly as I've been searching through my bookshelves looking for examples of 'unusual friendships' for a newspaper article.

I thought it was going to be easy, but had to set myself rules quite early on. It couldn't really be a lost love affair - which dropped PG Wodehouse's Lord Emsworth and the Empress of Blandings; it couldn't be a master-servant relationship, however, heated - step down Rebecca and the creepy Mrs Danvers; and it couldn't be an ordinary friendship, but one where the two people involved (oops, that was another rule - just two) would absolutely not be expected to be friends in everyday life.

And then I had to add another rule - it had to be an actual living being - OK, Silas Marner is friends with his money, but I had to take that one off the list.

I'm still on my long-list, but have spent some very happy hours going back to all the fictional friendships that have moved me over the years. It amazed me all over again how writers have used them to demonstrate just how we don't live in isolation. I suppose I normally take the cliche of friendship as someone who supports us (a friend in need, and all that) but it's much more exciting than that. All it just takes is someone else close to us going off the rails to make us wobble too, or - more positively - to open our eyes to a completely new world.

Which is why I keep thinking back to that woman in Edinburgh. Just how would she have changed my life, and what have I missed?

Life is good...

The sun is shining and I've just ordered this book.

And one day after...

... the earthquake, it's hard to imagine anything so violent happened here in Kent. We took the day off to visit the garden at Great Dixter.

It was a perfect English Spring day, and a perfect English House:



There was colour in abundance



But, as always, it was potential that proved more interesting



Even the trees seemed to tell a story of ease and everything fitting together



And just when it couldn't get better, we came across the dog!

So the earth moved

in Kent this morning. We felt a tremble at 8 am and turned on the news to see there'd been an earthquake. By 9.30am however, we were all shopping at the farmer's market as if nothing had happened. Somehow it seems quite surreal. The birds still haven't recovered though. They're spookily quiet right now.

Amazon recommends....

Several puzzled emails from friends this morning about the books I HAD actually written led me to this recommendation sent out by Amazon:

Greetings from Amazon.co.uk,

As someone who has expressed interest in books by Sarah Salway, you might
like to know that "Long-term Ill-health, Poverty and Ethnicity: A
Mixed-methods Investigation into the Experiences of Living with Chronic
Health Conditions in the UK" will be released on 30 April 2007.

Long-term Ill-health, Poverty and Ethnicity: A Mixed-methods Investigation
into the Experiences of Living with Chronic Health Conditions in the UK
Sarah Salway

Price: £15.95
Release Date: 30 April 2007

I'd love to claim talent for this, but reading a book while hula-hooping is about the limit of my multi-talents and in fact, there is another Sarah Salway - we emailed each other for a while, purely with excitement about having the same name, and it was the strangest thing, seeing myself pop up in my own email box. As the book title above suggests, she researches into health methods, based at Sheffield University, but she did say she often gets students coming up to discuss poetry, which puzzled her until she found out about me. As far as I know, this is her first book but now I guess the confusion is going to live for a while.

And onto something completely different, and if I can just show off madly for a second, I'm so happy with this review from Scott Pack's blog today, particularly the quote:

"full of the meaningless minutiae of human existence which become so meaningful when Salway gets her hands on them."

I've never forgotten those photographs we used to have when we were kids - the ones that showed an ordinary household object from an extraordinary angle and you had to guess what it was. Trying to do something similar is at the heart of most of my writing, and it's lovely to have that picked up, so in celebration, my writing prompt for today is going to be ... cheese graters.

How to talk to girls...

I loved Neil Gaimain's Hugo nominated story, How to Talk to Girls At Parties and am pleased to find it up on the web, along with some of the other nominees.

And my writing prompt is: Talking to boys

Chocolate and Squeaky chairs

So what gets your writerly juices flowing?

Shameless Showing Off

A spring in my step today after reading a lovely two page review of my short story collection, Leading the Dance, in the Irish literary magazine, The Stinging Fly. I particularly liked the comment, 'One of Salway's gifts is her control of the precise language used to tell these stories, while always maintaining a gleeful undercurrent of mania', and also, 'Salway is fearless in her choice of subjects: she is good on contemporary themes of love, betrayal and twenty-first century isolation, as well as sensuality and violence.' But best of all, 'This is energetic writing, ripe with menace and wit...' In face, I like the last one so much I'm considering a t-shirt with the words 'Ripe with menace' printed on it. Although I might also get ones with the slogans 'Salway is fearless' and 'a gleeful undercurrent of mania' printed on them too.

And then I think I'm going to wear all three when I visit my local branch of Waterstones which I've supported and where I've spent a fortune over the last few years but who have just refused me a reading because I'm 'not famous enough'...

Shopping dictionary

New definitions courtesy of Daily Candy:

Achilles heel
n. Your weakness for pretending to fit into the last pair of size-six boots when you’re really an eight.

ample sale
n. A sale that consists of pieces in only ginormous or miniscule sizes.

disdress
n. The agony caused by having to strip in communal dressing rooms at sample sales.

dressausage
n. A girl who has squeezed herself into a dress that is way too small for her.

dressing tomb
n. The physics-defying, one-square-foot room in which you’re expected to remove your pants.

fabric-ation
n. The involuntary impulse to lie when the salesgirl asks what size you are.

fearors
n. Dreaded dressing room mirrors that show every last flaw on your body.

insomnishopia
n. A disorder marked by making unnecessary online purchases in the wee hours due to insomnia.

reflection period
n. The time spent contemplating whether you’re being tricked by skinny mirrors and soft filter lighting.

riptag
n. A last-minute purchase that you wear out of the store.

unmodestmouse
n. A naggy salesperson who pulls the curtain back while you’re changing.

Smiles and Self-Help

Oh how I loved** finding out this morning that the author of the first Self-help guide was called Samuel Smiles, almost as much as the fact his research owed a debt to G. L. Craik's Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties. There was no easy ride with Smiles though, no mere listening on your ipod to someone else doing the hard work for you while you relax and emerge a a person of supreme confidence. I wonder how many books Samuel Smiles would sell these days if you picked this blurb up in the self-help section:

The object of the book briefly is, to re-inculcate these old-fashioned but wholesome lessons-which perhaps cannot be too often urged, that youth must work in order to enjoy,-that nothing creditable can be accomplished without application and diligence,-that the student must not be daunted by difficulties, but conquer them by patience and perseverance,-and that, above all, he must seek elevation of character, without which capacity is worthless and worldly success is naught. If the author has not succeeded in illustrating these lessons, he can only say that he has failed in his object.

I can see already that this is going to be one of those internet trails I enjoy so much. While googling Craik, I came on this article on the 'problems' of working class poetry in Victorian times. Apparently one of the solutions was that working class poets should:

Accept a more modest role as a means of developing class identity and solidarity – become a means of articulating commonly held values and beliefs in unambitious but memorable form. The poet thus becomes a slightly more articulate friend or neighbour.

So working class poets are allowed, so long as they are 'unambitious' (and, reading between the lines, male). I think this calls for more exploration, but in the meantime my writing prompt for today is... the unambitious poet.

**ps. I nearly wrote 'I heart' here but then I realised I wasn't talking to my teenage kids and it wouldn't annoy you nearly as much as it does them. It's one of the joys of teenage parenting no one tells you about - watching their body language as you get the names of bands wrong, be enthusiastic about things they like and so ruin them forever, hijack their slang etc etc etc. Come to think of it, it's making me re-evaluate my own teenage days and wonder if my own parents were really as naive as I gave them credit for. My own slamming door moment was when I nearly shared a flat with members of the Boomtown Rats and my mother went around saying 'Sarah's going to be sharing with some rodents apparently'. She did snigger then too, now I remember it without wanting to murder her. Ho hum.

Extreme nature

The ultimate guide to building your own tree house here, and Dan Ladd's site is well worth a look too. Look at these. Why am I looking these up? Oh, you have no idea of the piles of paper filing I'm staring at -there must be at least a forest in my office, and I'm ashamed. I need to get out and spend some time in nature.

And my writing prompt for today is ... paperless.

English PEN presents:

Taking the Pith
Craig Brown, Sebastian Faulks and Sue Limb, chaired by John Walsh

Tuesday 17 April, 7pm

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but surely pastiche is just looking to get a cheap and easy laugh? Can parody get to the heart of things or is it just taking the pith? John Walsh, Assistant Editor of The Independent, will host a discussion of what may be the lowest form of wit with parodists Craig Brown, described by Stephen Fry as ‘the wittiest writer in Britain today’, Sebastian Faulks, whose new book Pistache is drawn from BBC Radio 4’s The Write Stuff, and Sue Limb, author of the Dulcie Domum column which ran for eleven glorious years in The Guardian.

Time: 7.00pm

Tickets: £5.00 PEN Members / £7.00 non-members (includes a glass of wine after the talk)

Venue: The Guardian Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3GA

How to book: On-line at www.englishpen.org/events/ or call 020 7713 0023

Summer days!

Here's something that has already made me smile this morning:

From the magnificent Manolo's Shoe Blog which always makes me smile.

Happy Easter!

I'm away for a week now, but happy chocolate eating to you all...

Never too late

So what's your excuse? Harry Bernstein's 96, and he's just written his first book, and is already nearly finished his second. Apparently:

Bernstein cranks out his pages on a typewriter in his bedroom, saying that the computer nearby is too complicated for anything more than checking his e-mail. And at his age, he allows himself a certain latitude in the writing process, meaning that instead of worrying about deadlines he just writes until he doesn't feel like writing anymore.

"I've been trained to finish something you start, don't leave anything undone," he says. "I just feel I'm not satisfied until I finish what I start. And I will not be satisfied until I start something new."

My writing prompt for today: The thing I've always wanted to do.

More notebook jottings

From yesterday's trip to Oxford this time:

*My new coat giving me a kick-ass shape, even when, as now, I'm definitely not feeling it.

*Passing the primary school playground on the way and seeing a flower shrine on the railings by the swings.

*S telling the story of the terrier who kept rogering her leg during a dinner party. The hostess put the dog in the kitchen several times, but each time it escaped and made its way straight back to S. Everyone else tried to ignore what was happening. Later, the same S said her mother had once knitted her a swimsuit in a fairisle pattern.

*Overheard, "I have not got an internet personality"

*Seeing the workmen at the closed Regent Street tube station measure something with their arms and knowing, just knowing, they were describing the size of a rat.

*Trying to work out what that part of the face between upper lip and nose is called. How H kept on saying 'upper lip' and both of us getting so cross we couldn't speak to each other.

*The colour-in poster of pubs in Oxford. Story: the mother who buys it for a geeky student son because it might make him seem cool. (Laughing to myself about this until realising I'd probably be this mum)

*Seeing all the Alice stuff in the Christchurch dining hall - "We're not altogether sure which was here first". The corner door in the panneling which was the inspiration for the rabbit hole. The magic painting where Mr Strange turns his head at a certain point of walking past.

*The man coming out of one of the college rooms with odd shoes.

*The flip flop cactus in the shop window - "it's solar powered and that's all it does. We've had the greatest minds in the country trying to work out if there is any point to it, and there isn't. I promise you."

*Story idea: from comment - "It's very safe in the centre of Oxford, everything you do, everywhere you go is filmed on CCTV camera". What if a girl wanted to be a model and spent a day posing for the CCTV cameras?

*H saying 'This whole city is a shrine to Stephen Fry'

*The book you didn't know you absolutely needed until you saw it - photographs of odd chickens.

*B saying about G: 'Of course he's not a dog man.'

*My first time in an Oxford don's room and I end up being the expert of the Archers, somehow I can't stop talking about it.

Bizarre habits

Such as, apparently, sleeping in the same bed as your partner. Dr Neil Stanley, a sleep specialist, says: "Historically, we have never been meant to sleep in the same bed as each other. It is a bizarre thing to do." More worringly, or maybe not, there is the suggestion that sleeping (not even having sex) with someone else drains men's brains. Now, there's a thought for a story - even better than Stephen King's idea of sleeping on Lovecraft's Pillow.

And my writing prompt for today is: 'Sleep is selfish'

Jottings

Random thoughts from Whitstable today:

* Sitting in the restaurant window and seeing the small boy on rollerskates being towed along the road by a Jack Russell

* Having lunch and arguing about whether it was really 11 o'clock or 1 o'clock because of the time change, and then deciding it didn't matter anyway

* Trying to work out from a distance whether that strip of grey was the sea, or just a darker strip of grey sky

* The hut for let with 'Nice one' written under the notice

* Hot chocolate sitting on a sofa looking straight out to sea

* How nearly everyone looked as if they were from London, and wondering if we did or not, and then deciding it didn't matter anyway

* Noticing everyone's noses today. Do we pick on a different part of the body to notice every day?

* Praying my book wasn't in the remainder bookshop, but then when it wasn't, feeling slightly disappointed

* Seeing all the children with stabilisers on their bicycles zooming along the sea path and remembering the day mine were taken off, and how I didn't like it, but had to pretend I did because everyone else seemed much more excited than me

* Lightshades like sea creatures in a shop window

* Suddenly wanting to punch the smug second-home owner in the face because his children had silly names and having to walk fast so I wouldn't

* The size of squid's eyes

* Seeing the canoes being prepared for the Summer, and wondering about the difference between canoeing on the sea and on the river

* Inventing a game of throwing stones at F's prone body and trying to hit the buttons on his coat. Putting my hand down, picking up a stone with a perfect hole in the middle, and getting a shiver of joy

* The man coming out of a £50 cash casino and not being able to make out whether he'd won or not, and then deciding it didn't matter anyway

Blurbing

Interesting step-by-step piece on the Penguin blog here on how the blurb for Embers got written.

Really really useful...

... information here. This is going on to my 'things that will make other people impressed with me' list, along with playing an ace poker hand, making the perfect cocktail, understanding a company report, and not getting cross when strangers ask what name I write under...

And my writing prompt for today is: just one more cocktail before I walk out of the bar in my high heels

"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself." --Truman Capote

Chicken or egg?

I can't see who the people are who read this blog, but I can find out - in some cases - what they were searching for originally. Top choices are the lyrics to Honey, the words to a verse that used to hang in my granny's bathroom, Please remember, don't forget, never leave the bathroom wet... and also, weird writing. I was surprised by this last one, until I googled it myself and found this blog came about 10th in a list of 4,550,000 references to weird writing. So, of course, I investigated further, which took me, wonderfully to the horror writer, H P Lovecraft. I'd expected his essay, Notes on Writing Weird Fiction to be too, well, weird for me, but I ended up inspired right from the beginning paragraph:

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.

This idea of capturing an atmosphere, rather than a hard plot:

There are, I think, four distinct types of weird story; one expressing a mood or feeling, another expressing a pictorial conception, a third expressing a general situation, condition, legend or intellectual conception, and a fourth explaining a definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax. In another way, weird tales may be grouped into two rough categories - those in which the marvel or horror concerns some condition or phenomenon, and those in which it concerns some action of persons in connexion with a bizarre condition or phenomenon.

seems to be captured in Michel Houellebecq's biography, H P Lovecraft Against the World, Against Life, which has just arrived in one of those exciting Amazon cardboard parcels. It's described in an introduction by Stephen King as 'a kind of scholarly love letter, maybe even the world's first truly cerebral mash note,' and looks fascinating.

So I'm grateful to those searchers who have let me join in their internet trail, which I'm sure is going to take me to even weirder places in the best possible way. These trails are a bit like one of those conga party dances - we're all joining in at different stages and dropping out in different rooms too.

My writing prompt comes from Stephen King's introduction to the book above - he dreams of finding Lovecraft's pillow in a junk shop, and sleeping on it so thus absorbing all of the horror writer's nightmares. It's a story he never writes because:

"I paused too long to consider the drop and the possible consequences. Thus I was lost."

So without pausing, or considering, choose whose dreams you'd like to absorb and imagine sleeping on their pillow.

My very own writing map ...

... here. Have just spent half an hour following map routes and finding some interesting sounding new writers. That is, after I spent half an hour getting over the glory of being on the same page as Charlotte Bronte!

And my writing prompt for today is ... the picnic was interrupted by snow.

Orange Prize Longlist

The 2007 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction longlist is announced.

The 20 books are

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun

Clare Allan Poppy Shakespeare

Rachel Cusk Arlington Park

Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss

Patricia Ferguson Peripheral Vision

Margaret Forster Over

Nell Freudenberger The Dissident

Rebecca Gowers When to Walk

Xiaolu Guo A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

Jane Harris The Observations

M J Hyland Carry Me Down

Lori Lansens The Girls

Lisa Moore Alligator

Catherine O’Flynn What Was Lost

Stef Penney The Tenderness of Wolves

Deborah Robertson Careless

Rachel Seiffert Afterwards

Jane Smiley Ten Days in the Hills

Anne Tyler Digging to America

Melanie Wallace The Housekeeper

Found!

This link is my writing prompt for today. Visit Found Magazine for more 'finds of the day'.

So how do you think of the title?

The shortlist for the annual unusual book title has just been announced. The bookies favourite (really? People really bet on these things? Ho hum) is 'How Green were the Nazis?', but my own winner is The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: a guide to field identification (Harry N Masters), described as: "Julian Montague's study of urban life and irretrievable loss". Quite. Mind you, I like this because it lets me show this beautiful picture of just what we could do with stray shopping carts:


I could have done with this ten years ago when I had two toddlers and a friend who thought it would be a good idea to buy them a toy shopping trolley. They would spend the day filling it with things from my freezer, and I would spend the day putting everything back. If only I'd thought to get them to get out their sticky backed plastic and turn the wretched plastic thing into something beautiful.

And my writing prompt is: In the busy supermarket, I pick up the wrong shopping trolley...

Park Benches

I'm not sure where the park bench is on the front cover of my novel, Tell Me Everything, but it's exactly how I imagined the bench when I was writing. And it led to an obsession with park benches and their inscriptions (already documented in the archives of this blog!), particularly the personal ones which can be so moving.

And when it's sunny, as it is today, the location of these benches becomes all important. My home town of Tunbridge Wells is well documented for its, ahem, mature population, so it's perhaps not surprising there are benches everywhere, just right for a 'nice quiet sit-down'. What I hadn't realised is there is a social message behind which bench you choose to sit on. Best of all, apparently, are the ones up at the top of the hill, in the spot nicknamed the 'South of France'. In his memoir of growing up in TW, the historian Richard Cobb writes about his mother's regular battle to get the best seat:

"My mother, who always had lunch at midday and who could walk quite fast well on into her seventies, could generally beat the Wellingtonians to it, cutting down through Little Mount Sion, then right across the Common, past the Wellington Rocks, to reach the South of France by one, while the regulars were still at lunch. It was one of her favourite seats, but as she reached her late-seventies, she had to give up her trips to the local Riviera, it was too hard going."

And my writing prompt today is: It was lying under the bench...

Getting away from it all...

This picture is Salim Hossen Gaus, a carpenter from Bangladesh, who winches himself every day 100ft up to a platform he's built in a tree, just so he has space to read. Apparently everyone thought he was mad, but are now asking him to build platforms for them too.

"I feel a deep affinity with nature when I am in the tree writing poetry in the moonlight or looking at the sun rising or setting," he said.

No, not mad at all.

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." Richard North Patterson

Only six hours to go...

... before the eclipse. Am slightly disappointed I won't have to wear my Blue Peter sticky-backed plastic glasses I've saved from last time, but otherwise am counting down the minutes until I see that red moon.

On the Back of a Napkin

The magazine, Esquire, sent 250 writers a blank napkin and asked them to write a story on it. They got 100 back, and the results are now up on the website. I love Aimee Bender's most - so spare.

So that's my writing prompt for today, and look, I've put one up for you at the top here to fill in too... all nice and white and blank.

The Dog Book Club

Even by my standards, we had a particularly good dog count in the book we were discussing in my bookclub last night. At least three different breeds. No Puggles though (see above) or the other breeds that are apparently becoming fashionable, according to Dog Breed Facts:

Other popular designer dogs are the: Schnoodle (Miniature Schnauzer and Poodle), Goldendoodle (Golden Retriever and Poodle), Shorkie (Shih Tzu and Yorkshire Terrier), Schnorkie (Miniature schnauzer and Yorkshire Terrier), Maltipoo (Maltese and Poodle), and Chorkie (Chihuahua and Yorkshire Terrier).

It makes my border terrier almost look boring, but not, of course, to the man who followed me on a recent walk, shouting 'Congratulations on your dog'. I ended up having to run away.

But look, joys, the ever first blog written by a dog. All those people who come on here only to find out about dog borstal will at least find something interesting amongst the book news and writing prompts. Thanks to A Dog About Town for this link, a chance for all of us to find out what the best dressed New York dog is wearing this year.

And my writing prompt is ... a new breed.

The Future

There's no doubt about it. I have the hugest crush in the world on Neil Gaiman. I asked his 8 ball if there was hope and it replied 'Wrote 600 words', which either means we're a writing match made in heaven or I have to stop surfing and get back to writing my novel. Hmmmm... I feel the crush abating already as I forecast years ahead of me screeching 'Will you not just say what you mean?'. If you do one thing today, I urge you to ask Neil's 8 ball something. It's so sweet. Or, of course, you could write 600 words....

And my writing prompt for today is: Lucky numbers

Photographic prompts

I'm going to take my writing prompt for today from these photographs at the Busy Life website. (The link comes from the swissmiss design blog - another one well worth checking out.)

Fairy tale prompt

Everything posted on the Ullabenulla blog is beautiful and inspiring, but I'm going to pick these fairy tale papercuts as my writing prompt for today.

I'm one of those who resisted Kirsty Young as the Desert Island Discs presenter, but this morning's programme with Grayson Perry was one of the best I've heard. Sadly, it's not availabe as 'listen again' because of rights issues, apparently, but you can see his choices here. What I liked best was the way he allowed the imaginative world he created in childhood a place in his real world, not least in the decisions he made. It made me go straight to the internet to see where I can see his work.

A Cynic-free Lent

As one of the few non-Catholic in a Convent School, Ash Wednesday was always a miserable time for me. The good Catholic children used to be taken out to get their Ash marks on their forehead while I was left to sit alone in the classroom contemplating my sins for what seemed like hours. And then the other kids, those special ashy ones, would walk around in this annoyingly saintly fashion for the rest of the day feeling sorry for me, but not as much as I did for myself.. but LOOK, I'm in danger of getting cynical here, and that's exactly what I'm trying to give up this Lent. Actually, it's true. I'm horrified at how easily my nastly little mind nips to an all-too-easy bitchy aside. For instance, the women queuing up for the Tunbridge Wells Cath Kidson sale yesterday... No, no, no. As the nuns would say, it isn't funny, Sarah, and it certainly isn't kind. So this is officially the Lent I'm going to leave my non-cynical side behind - at least for the next forty days - and try to be kind. I've just joined The Karma Army (www.join-me.co.uk), started by the comedian Danny Wallace, and which is currently fund-raising to build a school in Kenya through the charity, International Care and Relief. How fabulous would that be? Plus, although I might draw the line at hugging strangers and also because, partly for reasons above, I'm not a Church goer, I've signed up to find out more about the Live Life Love Lent campaign, which is going to give me fifty good things to do this Lent.

And one of the things I'm going to do every day is to write down two things that make me feel happy in a well-meaning, non-cynical, good spirited way:

a. Since watching Dog Borstal, I've learnt that I can shout 'hip,hip' at my dog when she's walking and she starts to bounce. Literally. Her tail goes up and she sort of jumps on all four legs. Obviously I have to be careful where I do this because she's a very small and unnoticeable dog and people passing just see this mad woman telling them to gee up, and then laughing loudly.

b. The Park Keeper in my local park is just like Percy the Park keeper, even to the extent that he collects pieces of wood to build homes for wild animals, and is currently passionately observing an albino badger locally. Not only that, my teenage daughter will still let me read my very battered copy of this book to her in times of stress (both mine and hers!).

And my writing prompt for today is: A random act of kindness

Poker Face

I know, I know, any excuse to post THAT photo, but even so, there was an interesting article in yesterday's Times by Frieda Hughes on the relevance today of W H Auden's poem, Casino. This comment is particularly chilling:

“Lucky/ Were the few” — there must always be a winner somewhere, so that all the others can be persuaded to continue and lose — “and it is possible that none were loved” because there is little chance for the habitual gambler to form a relationship with anyone other than the interchangeable men and women who deal the cards or spin the wheel.

Having finally learnt the rules of poker, but still having to have it explained to me that being left with 70 pence at the end of the evening meant that I'd actually lost £4.30 of my £5 stake and not won, as I stupidly been crowing about, I'm going to take the warning that gamblers are dead to both the romantic and creative life to heart, and get out while I can - besides there are only so many teenagers I can persuade to play with me. I suppose I could take up bingo but then those really really bad Sharon Osbourne Bingo ads have put me off for life, and anyway, writing seems to me to be enough dangerous excitement for one woman. Putting out anything that means so much to you and having to actually court the critics publicly is surely the biggest gamble of all. Pass me a Martini someone.

And my writing prompt today is: The biggest gamble you can imagine

What if...

... you could ride your bike sideways?

Guilty Reading?

A recent blog entry by Squeetus drew my attention to an article in the Guardian about books we feel guilty reading. How sad that we're ashamed to be caught with a Stephen King or Harry Potter under our arm, so I'm joining Squeetus's campaign here, flinging off my shackles and admitting I read for pleasure. Let's just enjoy how different we all are in what we want to read and celebrate that. Phew, I'm feeling quite blood-thirsty here for some reason - could it be the number of people who have come up to me over the last few years and said that Something Beginning With wasn't the normal sort of book they'd choose, and they were surprised that it wasn't actually so bad. (And I'm supposed to take that as a compliment!) I might just have to storm up to my local bookshop and buy the latest Jilly Cooper, and this time not lie that it's for research. OK, OK, I will admit I've done that in the past, and I do love her so I shouldn't. Thanks Squeetus.

(Interesting though how the Guardian highlights how many books we hoard to read later - I always remember someone telling me that when you buy a book, you're also partly buying the thought of the time to read it).

Sleep

Am heavy with lack of sleep today, and I have to write a central tango scene for the new novel. Probably no co-incidence that I've made one of my characters yearn more for comfy pillows than hot footsteps, but perhaps he'd be better taking off to one of these exhibitions: the 4 vegetative sleep rooms in Rotterdam (see above by Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger), or the wonderful Sleepers, where Sophie Calle invited 24 friends and strangers to share her bed and tell her stories, or even Tracey Emin's iconic bed.

And my writing prompt for today is: An unsuitable bedtime story

Funny dogs!

I'm missing my dog this weekend, so have made up for it by watching this. Not sure if it should really be called 'Funny Dogs', because 'Dogs hurting humans' seems a more apt title but whatever, it made me laugh a lot. It's the little one carrying a heavy weight in his mouth that gets me in particular.

The walk of hell....

Imagine walking over this floor tiled with bathroom scales:
It's part of the "Dangerous Beauty exhibition in the Chelsea Art Museum in New York, which challenges society's view of beauty. In the press notes there is the startling statement that, in the US, more money is spent on cosmetics than education, with more than two million cosmetic surgery procedures performed last year. Ho hum.
(nb the exhibit above is by Jacob Dahlgren, and is called Heaven is a Place on Earth)

And my writing prompt (yep, I'm back to these) is: A different sort of beauty

CALL TO ACTION

9/2/07

What action do women want on climate change?

A survey to find out women’s priorities for climate change action has been launched this week by Women’s Environmental Network (WEN) and the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (WI). The results will inform a women’s manifesto on climate change being drawn up by the two organisations, to be presented to politicians this Spring.

The survey is available online at www.wen.org.uk and www.womens-institute.org.uk and click on Have Your Say on Climate Change.
The survey is open to members and non-members of both organisations to complete.

Questions ask about women’s own responses to climate change and what they want politicians to do.

Sue Buckingham, Chair of WEN said: “We want to hear from as many women as possible, to tell the government what would be most effective in helping women become fully involved in reducing their own and the UK’s carbon footprint. Climate change affects us all but so far women haven’t been equally involved in the debate and decisions about how to respond.”

Climate change is widely recognised as the greatest environmental threat the world faces. Yet it affects women and men differently - more women die in climate induced disasters than men and women are more likely to suffer the long term consequences because of their different positions and roles in many societies around the world. Women are less likely to be in scientific or technical jobs involved in developing solutions, or in decision-making positions in company boardrooms or in politics.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

Jean Leston at comms@wen.org.uk or 020 7481 9004.

GO SCOTLAND GO!

I'm off to ...
... first thing tomorrow morning to watch the ...

We don't want no wooden spoon!

A good read

I've been addicted to the blog, Seen Reading for some time now. It's such a good idea - she spots someone reading a book on public transport, goes to a bookshop or library, copies out a paragraph from the book and then writes her own story about the mystery reader. Surely there's a book in this blog? I'd buy it - and then read it on public transport and wonder if she was watching me....

John Donne Event

English PEN presents

John Donne’s Survival Guide, with John Stubbs, Ruth Padel and Harriet Walter

Tuesday 20 February, 7pm


In his acclaimed new biography, Donne: The Reformed Soul, John Stubbs paints a compelling portrait of an extraordinary man. John Donne did his utmost to stay on the right side of the authorities, even censoring his own work. But his writing tells a different story. His poetry lays down rules only to transgress them, doing battle with a succession of imagined ‘authorities’ who have a claim on his conscience or integrity. Poet and columnist Ruth Padel will be interviewing John Stubbs, and award-winning actress Harriet Walter will read from Donne’s poems.

Time: 7.00pm
Tickets: £5.00 PEN Members / £7.00 non-members (includes a glass of wine after the talk)
Venue: The Guardian Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3GA
How to book: Call 020 7713 0023 or visit www.englishpen.org/events/

Writing Choices

So, it's snowing again - here's the view from my bedroom window. The woods you can see in the background are the common and then at the very back and to the left, Winnie the Pooh's 100 acre wood, aka Ashdown Forest.

The news here is full of the snow, and the children are off school, as it seems are half the working population, or at least according to the radio. I've just listened to the third feature about the joys of working from home, whereas I fantasise so much about working in an office that I regularly look through the windows of office buildings around here. I live in fear of getting arrested as a stalker! It's all those office routines I think I'd enjoy - the coffee break, the chats about last nights TV, in-jokes... But that's not to say I don't have my own routines - or choices to make. First off - and Kath, are you listening? - it's slippers (as mentioned previously). Which pair of slippers I put on to work in will have a definite impact on how I feel - those brown ones, for instance, make me definitely rakish when I write...




Then it's which candle to light. I have to have a candle lit when I write, but I only let myself light one at a time. Different colours, different scents, different feels..


And lastly, which coaster to use for my ever-filled cup of tea? Some make me laugh, some make me feel nostalgic and others have been given to me so have a special significance...



Phew! And who said a home-worker's life was dull? And to think I've just answered a question about what special writing routines I have with a one-word answer: 'none'. What's strange is I hadn't thought about all this before. Any other 'homeworker' want to meet me by the virtual coffee machine and share their writing preparation?

Poetry Critiques

The critiques of Julia Copus's poetry workshop in the Guardian have been printed, and to me they seem like pretty ideal examples of how to read a poem, with a combination of a search for meaning and technical skills. I'm going to print this off and really study it - for when I get back to poetry that is. The third novel has now found 'its shape', and I know it's working because I can't leave it alone. It's become like my dirty secret, I keep sneaking away from important things, like watching Ugly Betty to spend some time with it.

Other news - the first prize in the Costa Book Awards has been given to a novelist - first time since Kate Atkinson apparently. I'd love to see the criteria for how you could judge one genre against another, not because I doubt it, but just out of interest.

And because it's been some time since I've posted a writing prompt (reason not because I'm not writing, but because I am (see above)), today I'm going to write about .... Writing prompt 20-2007: Living my life in the library (see also above, in the Costa winner link).

TAG!

Can a million penguins write a novel? Your chance to find out in what might possibly be the first tag masterpiece. I'm so definitely going to do this...