The Tate Modern TH2058 exhbition and me

Aliya is back from Wales and has found out that I, along with fellow ex-Serendipitist Katy Wimhurst, am one of the winners of the Tate Modern TH2058 competition, inspired by the current installation in the Turbine Hall. There were several judges for the competition, including Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, whose work the exhibition comprises of, and author Jeff Noon.

The six winning stories will be recorded as an audiobook read by Christopher Eccleston and available for download. Big thanks to Jenni Fagan for the intial heads-up about the competition and thanks to JupiterSF for publishing the story in the first place, way back when in issue 8 (they're now on 23 and it's a quarterly publication).

Here's the full list of stories. Congratulations to the other winners.

Lagan by Anthony Scott
Snap-Shots of the Apocalypse by Katy Wimhurst
The Family by Bruce Stirling
158 days by Rachel Stevenson
Remembrance by Neil Ayres
Overclock by Sumit Dan

In limbo

My new manuscript—which from now on I’ll refer to as RD—is finished and has just been set loose on unsuspecting publishing types. While I wait for a response, I’ve tentatively started another book in a similar vein, in the hope I can find a publisher for RD and that they’ll want more of the same, only different.

Like RD, this new book will be fairly complex and no doubt quite difficult to write, but short and probably it’ll be described as ‘literary’. (To give you an idea, Aliya read and critiqued—very very well—RD, and subsequently described it as Ian McEwan mixed with Richard Adams (that’s the fellow who wrote Watership Down). A description I can live with quite happily. In return I attempted to compare the Lena and Pru mysteries with a mix of authors and plumped for Andy McNab meeting Alexander McCall Smith down a dark alley. Can anyone else more widely read than me come up with a better comparison?

Anyway, I digress. As well as starting the new difficult-to-write-Ian McEwan-Richard Adams affair (longhand), I’ve also begun to write another book: what I think is a really strong concept for a sprawling—in that there are a minimum of about a dozen primary players—spec fic book (straight to screen).

I guess I wait to see what happens with RD before committing to one more than the other. In the meantime Aliya and I are writing another story together. Well, when she gets back from Wales.

nb That's not me limbo dancing by the way

Cheep, cheep

For those of a tweeting inclination, I'm now on Twitter, although probably won't make much use of it for a while. Follow me.

Just because David Isaak hasn't mentioned it yet

My favourite book on the art of writing is Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which I have probably read more than any other book now barring Stig of the Dump. This weekend I found another reason to love it, given recent musings on the length of fiction. In the essay regarding Quickness, Calvino lambasts the publishing industry for ignoring shorter fictions. He states 'I should like to break a lance on the field for the richness of short literary forms, with they imply in terms of style and concentration of content.'

Hear, hear.

And talking of Calvino, if you haven't read this before, read it now.

The stylistics

More on style, this time from Hal Duncan, author of Vellum.

There's a lot of sense in there, but I don't agree with everything he says. I guess in some ways, I see structure as an important factor in my fiction, sometimes more than plot, but I would rather read a good story told straightforwardly, than a bad story in the right style and written with a brilliant structure. Then again, I'd go with reading a bad story brilliantly written, than a good story badly written.

Of Pens and Keys

Some magazines you may not have heard of.

In the UK: Pen Pusher

Aand in the US: Keyhole

Curtain call

Fifteenth and final edition of Serendipity is alive. This is a 'best of' collection, and in it you'll find stories from, among others, Patrick Samphire, one Aliya Whiteley, Lavie Tidhar, Hal Duncan, E Nesbit and The Brothers Grimm, plus a few more. A great story each and every one.

Keep on running

Aliya mentioned the other day, in amongst the spoons and Albanians--er, sorry, Bulvanians--that she considers herself to be a very stylistic writer. I'd say the same about myself too. I stumbled across this link to an essay by the Harukmeister on the Apex blog, where he equates writing not with running this time, but with music:

MFW Curran and the Floating Lotus

Possibly the oddest keyword search to arrive at our blog recently. The term was Matt Curran "Yoga". Matt, is there something we're not being told?

The short of it

Okay, so I'm really really close to finishing my novel, and have decided to drop the Dalmation island WWII back story I had going on. This will bring the book in at around 200pp. Pretty short, huh. I was a little bit worried about this, and then I found this site, to which I'm very grateful. Okay, so only a few books under the general fiction list were published this century, but I won't let that deter me. I like reading short novels, and it appears I also can't write anything that isn't one. Maybe I should look for a French publisher rather than a British one? They don't seem to have a problem with little books, and my novel would probably come out longer in French.

Help ease my pain, tell me your favourite novels of around 200pp, better still if the author's not been dead for more than twenty years or so.

What the bleep?

I just had to point out this post on uber-writer Jeffrey Ford's blog. And in case you haven't heard of/haven't read Jeff's books before, you will be in for a big treat if you check any of them out, but I particularly recommend The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque, or The Girl in the Glass, or indeed The Cosmology of the Wider World, or, well, I haven't read them all, but most probably any of them. So long as you're not Mary Whitehouse of course. And he's right, there really isn't that much swearing in them.

This is New Radio

And the lord of the veggies said, 'Let there be sound', and there was, and it was found at the foot of the page.