Two new stories for December

From reading my blog, I realise that it might seem that I spend my time wandering about the countryside taking photos. But you'll perhaps be glad to know that I also spend time writing stories, and last week I heard that two had been accepted for publication. Things have moved impressively fast, and they're both out in the world already.

The first is in Litro, a London-based print and online magazine (http://www.litro.co.uk/). I wrote the 'The Flotsam Cafe' last summer after reading a call for submissions elsewhere, asking for stories on the subject of Britishness. It seems to me that - though we're rarely aware of it - we're people who live, physically, on the edge. We're an island on the edge of Europe, never really fully part of life on the mainland. We're never far from the edge of our land (try living in mid France - or the middle of the US, where the sea is a distant rumour). I wanted to include that feeling with a story about someone who's living on the edge psychologically too.


The second story, 'All fall down', is in Untitled Books (http://www.untitledbooks.com/fiction/new-voices/all-fall-down-by-sj-butler/). I wrote it a while ago, and when I'd finished it, I showed it to my son, who said 'It's great, Mum - really mad!'. I wasn't sure that I'd been aiming for 'really mad', so I put it aside. A couple of weeks ago I had another look, decided that I liked it after all, and sent it off to Untitled. I'm really glad I did.

Head space

I've been out and about a lot recently - Plymouth, Dorset, Yorkshire, Cumbria, Norfolk and Suffolk, all in the last month. But this week the family table was turned - I stayed at home while everyone else went away. From Sunday morning till Tuesday evening I had the whole house to myself, and ate alone at that turned table. It's the first time that has happened in almost twenty years.

Normally I cram my fiction writing in around daily life. Which means - because I do need eight hours of sleep a night - that there's never enough time left for it. It's frustrating. I have stories buzzing round my head that I simply can't get on paper because I'd have to be up at three in the morning.

So for two days, I got up late. I ate, drank coffee, cleaned the loos, put vaseline on the hens' legs, and didn't speak to anyone. I just let the story I've been trying to finish for ages swill around inside my head, along with the muesli crumbs and the leg mites.

And at about lunchtime, I sat down to write. I got up only to drink tea, eat chocolate, and pace around the house and garden. If I got really stuck, I went for a walk. Mid-evening, when I came to a place in the story where I needed to leave it alone, I made an omelette, drank a glass of wine. Then I returned to my desk and wrote again, till I was too tired to look at the screen.

I'd take a book from my pile and sit and read for another hour or two before bed. Hilary Mantel's A Change of Climate, Gabrielle Wittkop's The Necrophiliac, and Richard Platt's Smuggling in the British Isles have finally made it from the unread pile to the shelves where books worth keeping go. I read short stories by Tove Jansson, Fay Weldon, Barry Unsworth, Janet Frame. I began Alice Oswald's collection The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile.

I watched no television. I didn't tweet, check Facebook, or phone or email anyone. I did listen to Radio 4.

And I finished my story, in a way that I really couldn't have predicted two days before. I began another one too, in the final hour before I collected my daughter from the station.

Yesterday I returned to writing the magazine piece that's due in next week. I went to the supermarket. I cooked dinner at the usual time. I resumed communication with my family and the outside world. But there's still a space inside my head where the new story is swimming vigourously.

If I can finish the magazine piece, I'll write the new story next week, when everyone's out, before I start the next piece of work. I won't have the same luxury of complete silence, and absolute focus on the story - I'll cook, I'll talk to people, hug some of them, I'll have to go to bed at a sensible time. But that space is still there and I'm guarding it carefully.

Paraxis

On my last day in Yorkshire I was woken by the pinging of an email to tell me that the new issue of Paraxis is online. I could only squint at it on my phone, but even in miniature (and before my I'd even had breakfast, not a good time in my day) it looked a treat, and now I'm home I can see that it's fabulous. And I'm incredibly thrilled that I have a story in it.

It's free to read, so just go to www.paraxis.org and lap up a bunch of stories, essays, images and thoughts about libraries.

It was an interesting experience, being asked to write on the theme of libraries. I love libraries (have I said so before?) but somehow the stories that came to mind betrayed that underneath I have perhaps a more complex relationship with them than I thought. 'A Slice of Tongue' isn't what I meant to write at all - but it's what came out when I sat down at my desk. And I've no idea why I had to put the butchers' in there, but it was essential - it added some juice, I guess.

And in case you're wondering, I did work in a butchers' when I was fourteen. I left it for a bookshop when I was sixteen - I couldn't resist the temptation of free books (if they had missing pages) and warm feet. Those sausages did taste good though. As for the tongue ...

The twelve short stories of Christmas

What joy! Twelve classic short stories introduced and read by some of my favourite writers, and all for free. There's one a day and so far, nestling in my iPod, I have Colm Toibin reading Eugene McCabe's 'Music at Annahullian', William Boyd reading JG Ballard's 'My Dream of Flying to Wake Island', Philip Pullman and Chekhov's 'The Beauties', Margaret Drabble and 'The Doll's House' by Katherine Mansfield, Anne Enright reading Carver's 'Fat', and Rose Tremain reading 'Extra' by Yiyun Li.


To my shame, and pleasure, almost all of these stories are new to me - the only one I know for sure that I've read before is Yiyun Li's, and she's such a lovely writer that I'm more than happy to enjoy it again. And given my sieve-like memory it's quite possible I'll recognise several more when I settle down to listen.

I'm planning Christmas already - each day, before anyone else gets up, I'll make a cup of tea, light the stove in my office and plump the cushion in my rocking chair. Then I'll plug in to half an hour or so of luxury. Heaven!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/short-stories-podcast

The Swimmer: hot off the press!

Today my first short story is published - I sent it to The Warwick Review and was stunned when Michael Hulse, the editor, accepted it as it's only the second time I've ever sent a story out.

If you'd like to read it in full, I'm afraid you'll have to buy a copy of The Warwick Review at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/warwickreview/ - but to whet your appetite, here's a taste from the opening paragraphs:

The Swimmer

The alders at the river’s edge stand motionless in the midsummer heat. In the fields, the twisted cattle beans are black. A car buzzes out of sight, its engine muzzled by the thick air. Above it all, the sky is a bleached starling’s egg blue. Three weeks of windless sun weigh down on the fields: nothing moves except the water, slow, steady, a slick of olive green pouring away from her.

She sits at her desk in the back room gazing out at the river. Where it rounds the first bend there’s an eddy as the current twists out into the middle, pirouettes and continues on its course. The sun catches the ripples, sprays them silver for a moment. The light is so bright that she can hardly bear to look at it. 

            She is so hot.

Snowy books

There's six inches of snow outside and more falling. I've filled the log baskets, reinsulated the doors, and checked my emails. There's nothing to do but read - bliss. So which books are the snowiest reads?

They have to be on my shelves. No chance of getting to the library or Waterstones - and Amazon won't get through either - so here's the perfect chance to reread books I haven't opened for years.

First off, a cheat, David Vann's 'Legend of a Suicide' - a cheat because I only read it two months ago, and it's still swirling round my head like a blizzard. It's shocking and beautiful and you'll never want to hole up in a hunting cabin in midwinter in Canada when you've read it. Especially not with a suicidal father.


How about Isabella Bird's 'A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains'? Here she is in November 1873:

'Thanksgiving Day. The thing dreaded has come at last, a snowstorm, with a north-east wind. It ceased around midnight, but not till it had covered my bed. Then the mercury fell below zero, and everything froze. I melted a tin of water for washing by the fire, but it was hard frozen before I could use it. My hair, which was thoroughly wet with the thawed snow of yesterday, is hard frozen in plaits. The milk and treacle are like rock, the eggs have to be kept on the coolest part of the stove to keep them fluid. Two calves in the shed were frozen to death ...'

Glad I'm in East Sussex and my walls are made of brick rather than ill-fitting planks of wood!

Here's another one, 'Peace' by Richard Bausch. It's set in Italy at the end of the second world war as a patrol of young American soldiers climbs a mountain on reconnaissance. The mounting snow is both beautiful and potentially lethal.

Perhaps I'll wrap up with something more heartwarming, 'A Child's Christmas in Wales'. Dylan Thomas's wonderful piece of prose poetry. Here's a taste, but even better, Spoken Ink have just made a recording of it for only 99p.http://www.spokenink.co.uk/

'Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards.'

Time to go and tuck up with a book under the duvet.

http://www.spokenink.co.uk/

I love Spoken Ink. They read me great short stories, often for only 99p - and sometimes for free.

http://www.spokenink.co.uk/