I enjoyed writing this story because it uses two voices and let me playing with senses. I don’t think I did that last part particularly well but I learned something in the process. The thing I enjoyed most, however, is that I could use a dream I had as a teenager. I’m not going to tell you which scene is from my sleeping head but you can probably guess. The scene stands out. It has detail. It was one of those really odd dreams where I woke up happy but aware that the dream I just woke up from should have been a nightmare, not a joyous romp. But that’s what it was. Joyous. Fun. Happy-making.

So, here goes. Written about two years ago, and officially retired since last year because it’s been written again and again and again (I even saw it in a one-page, online comic).

Julia’s Dream

Wolves: they’re not cuddly

The night is warm and dark. The forest is dense with life, not just the pack running with me, but other life too. There are birds in the trees, mice hiding in hollows as we run past. There’s a foxes den with a bitch and four, no five, cubs under that tree. But we’re after bigger game than foxes. Killing them is not worth our while.

Ahead we can hear the crashing of our prey as it flees. It’s a buck, a big strong animal. I look forward to taking it down. We’re getting so much closer. I can almost taste the blood in my mouth and I growl, low, in expectation. All other life is still, holding its breath, as we chase our quarry.

I love the hunt.

#

Julia has always had problems sleeping. After years of lying awake at night she has found a kind of peace in routine. Her going to bed routine starts two hours before she wants to be asleep and is the same every night. The sameness helps her calm down, go into sleep mode. After a warm bath she has cup of extra-strong chamomile tea on a seat in the living room, or, if Kevin is watching television, in the bed room. She’s learnt that she can’t read or watch television, do cross words or sudoko. She has to avoid all of the things that people seem to think are relaxing but that sets her synapses firing. She needs to close down her brain, bit by bit, until she can get into bed, put on her mask and count her bones until she slips under.

Everything has to be just so. The bedroom must be completely dark and silent. The duvet has to be warm but not hot, the room should be on the cool side but not so cold she can’t let her feet hang over the side of the bed. She can’t abide having her feet tangled in bed clothes. She doesn’t take sleeping pills. Herbal ones don’t work and pharmaceutical ones take her dream away.

Most nights Kevin slips into bed after her, pulls her tight and kisses her shoulder. It makes Julia feel safe and loved. And then he falls asleep with a contented little grunt and a twitch and she’s wide awake again. Wide awake and trapped under the protection of his warm, heavy arm.

Sometimes Kevin opening the bedroom door is enough to wake her but she always pretends she’s still asleep. That’s part of the routine too. If she acknowledges that she’s awake she will be. All night.

Timing is important. It works best if Julia is asleep properly when Kevin comes to bed, or when they go to bed at the same time. Then she sinks, slowly, into dreamland. When she wakes up before she’s started dreaming, when her brain is still looking for a reason to go over the day, she cannot fall asleep again.

Some nights she gives up. There’s no point in worrying about not sleeping, it just makes it worse. After listening to Kevin’s breathing in the dark for a few hours, she gets up. There’s always something to do. Marking is good, it makes her fall asleep with her head on her desk, but if she doesn’t have marking there’s always ironing or a long, long walk. The park is pretty at night. She feels at home in the dark and the fog.

Julia sometimes wonders why she bothers with her elaborate routine, why she doesn’t just give up and let sleep come or go as it wants, but then she remembers. Julia wants to sleep because she wants to dream.

#

We’re still running, still following the heady scent. There are two animals running ahead of us now. I am so close that I can feel the air move where they have been. The scent of their fear is delicious and it makes me feel so alive. But the forest is changing. The trees are growing sparse, square, tall. The leaves and moss that cover the ground morphs into black asphalt. We still run. The scents change too, as the forest turns into a city. The smells of mould and mushrooms are replaced by stone and fossil fuels. The prey separate and the pack splits in two.

The sound of the man’s feet slapping the pavement and his panicked breathing is easy to hear despite the noise of the city. The lights above us hum and there’s traffic but too far away to matter. As we run past closed doors I hear snatches of music and arguments from open windows. The man ahead of me is too winded to call for help. My feet beat the pavement with a lighter sound than those of the man running ahead of me. My breathing is less ragged than his. I sound excited, hungry, keen, where he sounds close to accept that I will catch him. Another female is running next to me. I can smell her excitement and it matches mine. We laugh and lengthen our strides just a little. I can almost touch him.

#

The first time Julia dreamt that she was a wolf she was five years old. It was just a glimpse of a dream, really, a panting, running sensation of joy and power. It was such a strong feeling, that she has never forgotten it. Instead she has dedicated her nights to having that dream again, and again, for longer and with more detail.

The dream changes. The wolf she is in the dream has grown up, just as she has, and learnt where she fits in. She has a mate, in the dream too, and he runs with her. Sometimes they change from wolves to humans. That does not affect the hunt: they continue running, following the scent and getting closer and closer to their prey.

Julia and her pack never catch their prey.

They’ve caught small things, mice, rabbits and foxes, but they don’t count. Things you can bring down on your own are for cubs, for children. Only the large animals she hunts with the pack count.

She wakes up, a jaw’s length from felling a deer, two steps from grabbing a woman they’re chasing. While the hunt goes on she is perfectly happy. Everything is just as it should be. Her joy would reach a crescendo in the kill. Then, just before her moment of glory, she wakes up.

Some mornings the disappointments makes her cry. It is not a good start to the day. She hates coming in to school with swollen eyes. Despite the dream’s hangover she wants to dream it again. Every night, she takes her bath, drinks her tea, counts her bones, in the hope that she’ll be running with the pack and that this night, they will bring down their prey.

#

I’m in a changing room, covered in blood and feeling great. The other female is covered in blood too. We’re trying to wipe some of the gore off, giggling like school girls whenever our eyes met. I know that in the sports hall, on the other side of the wall, is a mess of blood and body parts. We caught him and tore him to pieces. I can’t quite remember what shape I was in when we finally got him but I remember enjoying the kill more than anything I’ve ever done. I’m still enjoying it. At the end of the greatest hunt of my life, I feel so strong, so full of light. The man’s screams were flirtatious, the tearing and splattering was joyous. Blood smells so sweet compared to the other muck in a human’s body. The man’s flesh was even better than his blood. He tasted so good and I smell of him now. I’m covered in him and I love the feeling. I want to do it all again. I smile at my friend and we burst out laughing. Then we’re running again. Someone is coming and we’re laughing fit to burst at what they will find.

#

Julia doesn’t wake up in her usual panic but slowly, comfortably. She feels rested and happy. The bed is just warm enough and the sheets feel soft against her skin. What little light she can see around the edges of her mask suggests that it is early morning but not too early. She stretches slowly, enjoying the feeling. She wants to wake Kevin, to maybe cuddle for a while before starting the day. She stretches out her hand to touch him but finds something cold and wet. She takes her mask off to see what is wrong.

Kevin isn’t there. Instead there is mess. A bloody, gristly mess. Kevin’s side of the bed is covered in oxidising blood and lumps of meat. The mess spills over onto the floor, towards the window, covering the rug and sticking to the walls and curtains. There is so much blood. Julia’s side of the bed is clean except for where her bloody hand has rested on the white linen. For a second she just sits there, staring at the mess that was her boyfriend. Then she puts her hand out and touches the blood again. She brings her wet fingers to her lips.

She recognises the taste of him. He tastes of joy.

Happy? About a rejection? Absolutely.

Stories are rejected for all kinds of different reasons. Looking past the past rookie mistakes (not following submission guidelines, or submitting bad writing) the story might just not fit the market, or be similar to something that featured recently, or have unsuitable content.

Mine was rejected because it was a cliché.

Most rejections don’t come with a reason, so finding out is a boon. And mea culpa, the story was a cliché, I just hadn’t realised. And that’s a problem. I should have recognised the pattern when I was writing it.

The editor liked the story a lot and was very close to running it. But that would be an open invitation to the world to fill his slush pile with more of the same. And that’s no fun for anyone. Fair enough. I hold on tightly to the pretty words, words like “your writing is first-rate“. Those are words that warm the cockles on a cold night. I might have them embroidered so I can hang them on the wall. And I take great comfort in the fact that the story was good enough for an editor to take the time to tell me why he wasn’t running it. It’s a huge compliment.

Unfortunately, that story was not my first cliché. I recently retired a story when I came across a description of the plot in a list of stories a magazine (or was it an anthology?) didn’t want*. There is was, among lists of plots that made me think “but surely no one would...”: my plot. The poor thing didn’t even make it out the door before it was retired. There was a reason for that: Julia’s Dream I knew for a cliché. But I liked it, mostly because it used a dream I had for one of the scenes, but also because I had fun playing with senses when I wrote it. It was good practice.

The conclusion is that I need to think of better plots. Original, interesting plots. Stuff with ideas. At the moment, I’m not writing much because all of my ideas feel unformed: I have a bunch of scenes but they don’t go anywhere.

I need to practice idea generation. I need to read more speculative fiction short stories.

I need to learn to recognise the ideas I shouldn’t run with.

* Strange Horizon’s list of what they see too often makes interesting reading, as does the list of the horror stories they see too often. (Neither of these is the list I found my dream plot on. The story I had rejected this week fits loosely into three or four categories. Ouch.)

Most recently, the reminder came in form of an article by Sarah Sheridan in the Huffington Post, about what writer’s earn. Not much, on average, is the unsurprising conclusion. It reminded me of a talk I went to at Edinburgh University, about producing cultural product, even if the stats that Sarah quotes are a little more positive (50% of producers get 50% of the money, as opposed to 75%/25%).

Writer’s, even successful writers, don’t just write. They lecture, review, write copy, and hold down all kinds of jobs not at all related to writing to get ends to meet. You don’t write for the money, you do it because you want to. Writing, like nursing, is a calling. (On average, nursing pays better.)

Collaboration!

My friend Rhian Thompson makes electronic music. She likes sine waves and interesting sounds. We first talked about doing something together last year, over beer after the New Writing Scotland launch. When I read the call for Illicit Ink’s Sleeptalking I thought of that chat and got in touch with Rhian. Could we do something together? Yes, we could!

Rhian’s developing background music and Foley and I’ll provide the voice over and story.

So, what was the story? Ah. Well, you know. I hadn’t written it at that point.

So I wrote a story, let it rest, reviewed it, re-wrote it and wrote a second story just in case. Rhian, meanwhile, started collecting sounds. A call on Facebook for the sound of children crying made me very excited: crowd sourcing sounds is collaboration above and beyond my expectation.

Now the story’s written, edited, recorded and submitted. We’re locked in to baby Ben and his pain. Rhian’s collected sounds and we’ve met to talk about lighting and costume. We’re good to go, pretty much.

Come along and hear us. R. A. Martens, George Anderson, Kirsti Wishart, J. A. Sutherland, and Andrew C Ferguson are some of the other writers performing on Sunday. It’ll be awesome.

Luckily, the conversation is available on YouTube. The writers cover several different topics but the first 15 minutes are about world building, a topic that I find endlessly fascinating. They then move on to character, another compelling topic. The video’s almost 59 minutes long and there’s a spoiler or two, but it’s all interesting stuff.

(And if the iframe doesn’t show, go straight to YouTube.)

Enjoy!

Editors are busy people so I don’t want to query, but it’s been 74 days, and the guidelines said to please query after 60. So I did. I expected to find out that a rejection had gone missing (I have searched through my spam folder, but you never know) but got more cheerful news.

No, I haven’t made a sale. But I might. The editor said the story is on his to read list because the second round comment was that he had to buy it. I’ll find out if he agrees sometime this week.

I might still get a rejection but I am over the moon. Not only did the story get through the first sift, but the second sift really liked it. Whatever happens, I know that someone other than me enjoyed it.

Someone told me recently that writers have huge egos but low self-esteem. I think that’s probably true for many artists – and many people – and it is certainly true for me. So I grab every kind word, every grain of positive feedback and clasp it to my chest as a kind of confidence-boosting floatation device. Of course, I get bad feedback too, but I try to let go of that after studying it closely. The trick  is to let the good buoy me up and try not to let the bad drag me down. Today, that was easy.

Thank you, kind editor, and  second-round reader with the positive comment, for giving me a boost.

As a reader, I form relationships with imaginary people, and, sometimes, also with authors. Imaginary relationships with very real writers. Writers have a world-building super-power that I cannot help worshiping them for, and when they go, the loss I feel is real.

A few years after I found out that Tove Jansson had passed away, Kurt Vonnegut died.

Again, I knew very little about Kurt. When I really admire someone, I try not to find out too much about them. Writers, musicians, film stars: if I like their art, I’ve learned not to listen too much what they say, in case they say something dumb. Sometimes dumb stuff ruins good things. I just wish my heroes well and hope they’re sensible, decent and wise people.

I think Kurt was all those things. I hope he was. As a writer, Kurt made me think in new ways and made the world a more interesting place. Slaughterhouse 5 change my universe forever. Kurt had the power to make me laugh and to make me sad. He also made me want to be a better person. Finding out that he’d died made me cry again.

And you know, I never met Kurt Vonnegut but sometimes I miss him. I really miss him.

This morning, I found out that Iain Banks is dying from cancer. It’s a horrible thing to know, and it’s deeply sad for Iain and the people who love him. The news hit the sci-fi fan community hard, and Twitter was all abuzz with grief today. Iain is another writer that has meant a lot to me, and one I’ve actually met. (Once. For 60 seconds.) His Culture novels convinced me that sci-fi could be fun, and The Wasp Factory made me excited about Scottish fiction. I finished Stonemouth just last night and was thinking about re-reading Espedair Street, the first of Iain’s books that I ever read. I was planning to revisit books I haven’t read for a long time. Whit, for example, such a laugh. We were going to have an adventure.

And then, this hopelessly sad news.

To stop myself from missing people I don’t really know, but whose characters feel like friends to me, I’m not writing this evening. Nor am I cleaning, doing the laundry or packing for my week in Basingstoke. Or doing any of the other things that I should be doing.

Instead I’m eating grapes and watching Glee. It’s one way of dealing with an unpleasant reality.

In November last year I attended a workshop on performance and presentation, presented by the amazing Alex Gillon and arranged by the Scottish Book Trust. There were eight writers working in a variety of disciplines, from playwrights through novelists and short story writers to poets. All of us need to stand up and present our work  with confidence. As Alex pointed out, every time we read our own work, we’re selling it and we want the audience to go away impressed enough to buy a book.

The workshop was very well timed for me: two weeks later I had two readings same week and it gave me the tools I needed to present with confidence.

It annoys me that I need the help – I used to be a tour guide, I used to do training. I have years of experience of standing up in front of an audience and talking to them. But I haven’t done much of that in the last ten years, and now I work on my own, from home. I’ve forgotten the mechanics of projecting, speaking slowly and anchoring myself to stop my knees from knocking. I used to enjoy the performance aspect of public speaking but I’ve even forgotten the feeling of “yay, everyone’s looking at me!” that was the childish foundation of that enjoyment.

So, I needed the training and I looked forward to it. I had heard a lot about Alex. She trains the Story Shop writers, among others. Alex has a beautiful, schooled voice and doesn’t pull her punches. She tells you what you’re doing wrong until you get it and start doing it right. She breaks you down and gives you the tools to build yourself up. Daunting, yes, she it can be, but I rather liked her technique. In a group, you have a lot of opportunity to learn from other people’s example. The first person to read for Alex gave me a long list of things to think about. I was second. Unsurprisingly, my performance raised new issues for us to think about. The main things I took away were:

1. Remember to breathe.
2. Look at your audience. Especially, memorise the first and last lines so the audience can see your face when you read them.
3. Practice makes perfect. Read out loud whenever you have an opportunity. When you can confidently read someone else’s writing on the first go, you’ll have more space to work on how to your perform your own writing.
4. Commit to the performance. Go for it. Don’t be afraid. Believe in the words and your ability to deliver them.

I’ll keep Alex’s advice in mind as I first write and then practice my story for May 5th.

(Read an account of the workshop by Andrea Mullaney’s.)

What’s not to love?

Well, a thing or two.

Lack of communication

I’m easily frustrated by plot lines that hinge on lack of communication. Much of the tension in the arc of Grimm comes from the fact that Nick can’t tell his girlfriend, Juliette, or partner, Hank, about his new abilities. There are a couple of times when that causes serious issues. Maybe I’m a romantic fool, but although I get why he wouldn’t want to tell his partner, I never really thought he had a good reason not to tell Juliette.

Weak world building

Nick can see monsters, but only when they “lose control”. Then their monster faces pop out of their human faces. A nice effect and all, but, you know, it feels hookey.

The set up is classical: our hero knows nothing, lands in a new world and finds a guide to show him (and us) the ropes. It’s worked in lots of other programs so it could have worked here. Nick’s get into the Grimm world really quickly but the supporting characters are left outside and the separation between the two worlds feels as forced as the special effects. I don’t buy it.

I watched the first season but I’m not going to watch the second.

Now I need another series to follow. Something with great characters and interesting goings on. Suggestions?

I still dip into the books that I loved as a child and shipped several of to Scotland, or bought new ones when the original language was English. A couple are missing: my H. C. Anderson, for example, and the picture book of The Happy Prince. (I didn’t like the pictures, but I loved the story.) A couple of others are missing from the pictures below. My The Dark is Rising and Narnia boxed sets are in the attic awaiting a move to a bigger flat, and I can’t find Vem skall trösta Knyttet?.

There are other important books missing from my current bookshelves. We had two great big books with images of animals and birds, and a couple of good dictionaries (both incomplete). I’d pick one and spend hours reading random entries and looking at the pictures.

Jules Vernes, Edgar Allan Poe (which we bought thinking it was a book of fairy tales), A. A. Milne and Lewis Carroll

I admit I read the Little Prince in Swedish. Oliver Twist likewise. (That’s the 1901 edition, from the before the great Swedish spelling reform, don’t you know.)

Tove Jansson’s moomin books still inspire

Eric Linklater and Astrid Lindgren wrote about more interesting worlds.

Friendly witches and private detectives with hearty appetites. I write characters like that now.

Nöstlinger, Åberg and Grimm have nothing in common except great stories and interesting perspectives.