Sparks Night 2

Last night was the second Sparks night at Brighton's 3 and 10. Brighton has a good range of literary nights, and both Sparks and Short Fuse feel like short anthologies.  Last night's stories were an interesting range.  They started with my story about a ventriloquist's funeral, 'A Bad Place to Stick Your Hand', and ended with Vanessa Gebbie's polemic about World War 1; in between were stories about gym trial memberships, ice-cubes of rainwater, school reunions and gold-fish.  It was a fascinating mix.

What makes Sparks unique is that each story is illustrated by a specially-commissioned photograph.  The image below is the one provided by John Biggs to illustrate my story – thanks, John.

Bowler

After the stories everyone milled around in the bar – it was one of the
friendliest night's I've been to.  Thanks to Jo for organising
everything.  I'm looking forward to the next one.

PS – Sparks now has a new blog.

Continuing the clear-out

After eliminating several thousand lines of notes I'm now sorting out my almost-finished and barely-started short stories.  A week or so back I had about 70 fragments and I've been working through these, either finishing or deleting them.  So far I've eliminated about 15 stories but I've also turned up some lovely pieces.  Some of these fragments are over 5 years old and the need to make decisions has forced me to rethink them. 

One of the downsides of cheap electronic storage is that everything can be kept rather than what is most useful.  Over time this can become overwhelming.  Any idea that's truly good will be memorable whether or not it's stored on a disk.

In between this, I've been practising reading 'A Bad Place to Stick Your Hand' in preparation for tonight's performance at Sparks.  I'm very excited to see how this works out, and can't wait to see the photograph that's been commissioned to illustrate the story.

The Tight Lip photoshoot

I recently had a photo-shoot at the Hotel Pelirocco with the Tight Lip team.  The photographs were taken by Sam Collins and will be used to illustrate a magazine project I participated in (details to follow).  The image chosen to go with my bio was this one:

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But my favourite was the one below.  There's something magical about the shadows in black-and-white photographs.  Thanks, Sam!

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Mortality and Consumer Choice

I've recently been reading the Runner's Handbook.  It's a good source of background information and I'm learning a lot from it.  One thing I've learned is that through running I reduce my risk of dying from heart disease.  I'm pleased about this – I doubt heart attacks are much fun.  What the book doesn't seem to focus on is the implication of reducing my risk of heart disease.

Thing is, I'm almost certainly still going to die; which means I'm now more likely to die of something other than heart disease.  I had a look on wikipedia and found their List of Causes of Death by Rate.  To summarise:

  • 29.34% die of cardiovascular diseases
  • 19.12% die of infectious and parasitic diseases
  • 12.49% die of cancer
  • 6.49% die of pulmonary diseases
  • 6.23% die of "unintentional injuries"
  • The remainder are mopped up by digestive diseases, intentional injuries, and so on.

So, to alter the advice in the runner's handbook, I've not decreased my chance of dying of heart disease so much as significantly improved my chances of dying from disease or cancer.  Thanks, healthy lifestyle!

Rosy and Jake

I've been meaning to post this photo for a while (I took it back on the 16th). It's from an event where Jake Spicer did a live painting of Rosy Carrick at Art@TaylorMade. I've seen lots of paintings but not much painting. I arrived in time to see Jake make his first marks and loved watching how Jake picked out which lines from the real world he was would use.  Jake said that he can't look at a person without mapping out their face for a portrait or planning the shading.

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A long strange Thursday

I had a strange day on Thursday, not helped by having very little sleep the night before.  In the evening I had a photo shoot by Sam Collins at Brighton's Hotel Pelirocco.  Sam was shooting various people for a Tight Lip project.  While my involvement in the project was minor being photographed was fun.  Apparently the final images are good.

After the photographs I headed to the Victory Inn to see Glue Gun '91.  It's their third show but I missed the other two as I was performing elsewhere.  It was awesome: the first half was fun, with two poets reading, but things became very strange after the interval.  An appearance from 'Jerry Springer' was followed by a man doing a striptease while riding a unicycle; he then sang songs about things like headless chickens and hagfish.  I'm looking forward to next month's event, which will include an appearance from famous poet Philip Larkin.

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Clearing out my notes

For years I've kept a computer file with notes for writing.  It contained brief story descriptions, character sketches and interesting lines, some salvaged from failed stories.  The file grew to a few thousand lines, with some entries that were years old.

As part of my general decluttering I've now eliminated the file.  I've taken out the ideas that suggest viable stories, moved some notes into works-in-progress and the rest are gone.  I think that having the file was more of a distraction than an aid.  Sometimes things were written in the file rather than take the time to write a fast draft and ended up never being written; other times I wrote things in the file rather than consider them properly at the time.

I'm very excited.  I now have a set of short stories that are no longer hidden amongst weeds and rubbish.  Over the next few weeks I'll see which ones grow into something interesting.  Clutter is never good.

Reading at Sparks Night on December 9th

I'm reading at Jo Horsman's next Sparks night, on December 9th at the Three and Ten in Brighton.  I'm very excited, as I'm reading alongside some very interesting people.  The line-up features Vanessa Gebbie, Jenn Ashworth, Kuzhali Manickavel, Pam Hewitt and Jacqueline Cattaneo.  I'm going to be reading a story called 'A Bad Place to Stick Your Hand'.  Tickets are £5.

"I was supposed to meet my family a couple of hours before the funeral but I ran late because of
work.  Everyone smiled when they saw me and I soon found out why: in my absence they'd decided
I would be doing the eulogy."

The 2008 Brooks Brighton 10K

Yesterday was the Brighton Brooks 10K race, which went very well.  I started further back than I wanted, meaning the first couple of kilometers were like Churchill Square on a Saturday.  Once past the crowd I could go faster and made up for lost time.  It was actually one of the easiest runs I've had (maybe because of the slow pace at the start) and I had lots of energy left for the finish. I was delighted to come in at 790th (by gun time – by chip time I came in 720th) at under 47 minutes – I knew I was faster than usual but not how fast.   I'm mostly recovered now but I'll take a few days off then switch down to practising 5K runs ready for the Santa Dash.

After the race (and still wearing my shorts) I visited the Art @ Taylor Made gallery where Jake Spicer was doing a live painting of Rosy.  I've often looked at paintings but not painting – it was fascinating to watch Jake picking out what information to put on canvas.  I'll post a photo of that when I get back to Brighton.

I had a long coach ride to Derby but I had lots of distractions- a history of boo.com, the West Wing and the BBC documentary on Hugh Everett (the "human interest" side was brilliant, but I wasn't sure about the physics explanations).  I wouldn't have survived without headphones to block out the people making long chatty mobile calls.  Maybe I do need an MP3 player after all?

I'm now in Derbyshire for a few days, relaxing and catching up with some friends.  I'm impressed that my sister has learned by heart the novel Each Peach Pear Plum