It’s been another busy period juggling work and family matters with little time left for Writing Matters (though, thanks to audio books, I’ve had plenty of time for ‘reading’). I seem to have been living in my car on motorways, driving through gales and cloudbursts – first from my home in Sutton Coldfield to my brother’s beautiful but windswept, cliff-top house in South Wales, then setting out the next morning for the M4, M25, M23, A 23, A27, finally arriving at my mother’s house. Two days later, it was back to motorways again in gales and torrents, all the way home.

My book on these journeys was ‘Deaf Sentence’ by David Lodge. As well as its intriguing plot, it’s an eye-opener* for anyone with friends or family members who are going deaf (*The narrator refers several times to the predominance of sight-related metaphors, compared to hearing ones – wouldn’t it sound strange to say ‘ear-opener’?). If you’ve ever been somewhat less than patient with a friend or relation after your 5th repetition of the punch line of your hilarious joke, you might feel a twinge of shame. This book is also uncomfortably acute in its depiction of family relationships. But don’t let that put you off – it’s also very funny.

Back to what I was saying in my previous post – last Tuesday my house was invaded by the BBC. Yes, that is an exaggeration – it was only a team of three with a few hefty bits of gear.

Anyone who’s followed this blog from its early days and/or has read my accounts of both of my book launches, will know that Clarissa Dickson Wright and I have been close friends since we met at boarding school. Anyone who’s read her autobiographyor seen her talking about herself on TV, will know something about the extreme ups and downs of her life, and won’t be too surprised to hear that the BBC will be showing an hour-long programme about her. As with other programmes, they’ll be interspersing Clarissa’s interview with snippets of comments made by people who have known her. As her friend since childhood, I was asked to make a contribution.

I’ll be very interested to see which sound bites are selected from my one and a half hours of interview, and which of the photos from school days they show, along with the ones of Clarissa holding my daughter as a baby, her god daughter.Clarissa’s interview is the first of four programmes in a series that has been timetabled for advent, the Sundays leading up to Christmas. Considering the time-slot, I can see why this series will have a focus on the ways that spirituality and religion have influenced the lives of the chosen four.

The whole experience was fascinating, but also exhausting – all that concentration! I enjoyed the novelty of it, but don’t envy celebrities and public figures who have to do this type of thing on a regular basis. Even the cat was exhausted by the end of it!
.

Anyone who’s been dipping into this blog on Writing Matters will have noticed that the first few lines often stray far away from my intended subject. But I won’t talk about today’s torrential rain - and I’ll wait till Sunday, when I post my next Poem of the Week, before I tell you about my radio interview on Chris Morgan’s Poetry Show this evening.

Now it’s back to the next phase of my novel’s journey towards publication. I imagine the package being opened by someone at The Literary Consultancy, who glances through the synopsis and decides which of their team of Readers to send it to.

Time was doing its usual trick, and had already swallowed the rest of September and the whole of October before I’d even noticed they’d come round again. Then, half way through November, a letter arrived from Sara Maitland , the well respected novelist who also works as a Reader for TLC.

She remembered reading my previous novel, In The Lamb-White Days, and how beautifully written it was. After some more encouraging words, she moved on to the book in hand, The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society.

I was delighted with her initial comments :

In the first place, I think that the idea behind the book –the “concept” – is delightful, enormous fun and surprisingly original
She then paid me the complement of commenting in depth and detail for several pages about the aspects she liked and those which she felt could be developed or altered. I respected her suggestions, but at this stage, after all the cutting back I’d done in response to Leigh Pollinger’s suggestions, I knew that the book was now set in its own shape – it was a finished product.

But the crucial part of her report was this:

I don’t know if you have noticed but there is a new press setting up in Oxford to publish novels, called Transita (www.transita.co.uk) specifically to publish “grown up” novels-so they obviously think there is a market out there.

She went on to explain that Transita had just taken on a novel by a friend of hers which had been stigmatised as being about “middle aged people”.

‘So I think there is a good chance that novels on themes like yours are going to be coming into fashion, and this will obviously be an enormous advantage in selling DSES.’

The next package I took to the post, contained the synopsis and first three chapters of The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society. It was addressed to Transita.

I decided to start this blog because I wanted to share, with anyone who’s interested in writing matters, a little of what I’ve learned about the craft of writing over 25 years or so, and the highs and lows of these experiences – as well as giving updates about my novels and poetry, and any future talks or readings I’ll be doing.

I started thinking about this a few weeks ago when I was staying in Relleu, an (almost) unspoilt mountain village in Spain. I’d enrolled on a poetry course run by Penelope Shuttle and decided to arrive a week early to give myself time to focus on my writing.

The weather was much colder than I’d expected - and wetter. For this first week, I’d rented a flat from the owners of Almaserra Vella, the beautiful house where ‘my’ course would be held.

Half way through the second morning, I realised that the heavy clouds were fraying at the edges, revealing patches of brilliant blue. I was just about to go out for a walk, when my eye was caught by the title of a book on a shelf nearby: The Founding of Arvon – A Memoir of the Early Years of the Arvon Foundation by John Moat.

This might not sound very exciting to you, but it seemed like a good omen to me, at a watershed in my writing ‘career’. That book was a direct link back across more than two decades, to when I’d first started writing seriously. My second child had just started school, and I was staving off the day when I’d have to take on more work. Two evenings a week of Adult Literacy classes didn’t bring home much extra money, but I wanted to keep the day times free to develop my writing.

Becoming ‘a writer’ was proving harder than I’d thought. The stories I was sending off to Radio 4 for their ‘morning story’ slot returned with the regularity of homing pigeons. By mid-November, it was becoming clear that I needed some impartial feedback, so I decided to look around for a creative writing course.

At that stage, I’d never heard of the Arvon Foundation – or any other residential writing courses, and even if I had, there was no way I could have afforded to spend that kind of money on myself. I knew that my (very part-time) employer, Birmingham Adult Education Service, provided weekly courses in all sorts of subjects, including Creative Writing, for a relatively modest fee. With any luck, there’d be a course nearby that I could join the following term.

There was a course, but not in quite the way that I’d expected.