Paul Magrs's Blog, page 37

Drawing Every Day - Six Months In!

It's six months since I started up this whole project of drawing - and finishing a drawing! - every single day of 2015. It's become such a huge obsession this year. I've learned such a lot, and relearned such a lot from the days when i just drew happily and never really thought about it.

In some ways the biggest thing i've learned is - spend a little longer. Let yourself enjoy doing this. It makes you happy and, if you let it, that shows in the picture.

I've also learned not to think about it too much.

Anyway, the twelve pictures here are significant ones for me from the last six months. They might not be the best, and they're not even presented here in order (some of them are dated, though.) I hope they show some kind of progress, or evidence that I've been learning and exploring with my cheap pens, pencils and paint.

2015 Books - the Year's Second Quarter

I know this is probably a slightly crazy way of doing it... but by the end of each year it's so hard to pick out my favourite books, and so this quarterly business is quite useful. And so, it's July all of a sudden, and I can talk about which books diverted me during the second chunk of 2015...

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN by Paula Hawkins. In retrospect, this probably wasn't as good as it seemed at the time. Three months on I don't remember much about the characters and even at the time some of the twists felt iffy. But I still enjoyed it a lot.

SUMMER AT THE LITTLE BEACH ST BAKERY by Jenny Colgan. There's a big spate of Romance novels this year that put bakeries / cake shops / cafes / tea rooms on a beach / garden / somewhere else lovely. I love this series of Jenny's because the characters are real to me, especially Neil the puffin. Everyone is put through their paces here, and our heroine almost loses everything she gained in the first book - as is only right in a cosy melodrama like this. I wrestled at first about whether it wasn't a bit repeat-y and whether there was enough story there, but was won over pretty quickly.

THE CAKE SHOP IN THE GARDEN by Carole Matthews. And here's another! But Carole's characters, also, are extremely vivid, and even the supposed villains of the piece turn out to have proper dimension and life to them. I don't mind these novels being wrapped in all the frou-frou stuff about cakes and recipes at the back, and so on - so long as they're well written. This one's a particularly good Carole Matthews novel - it does all the things she does best. Her romantic male leads are always terribly sexy.

THIRTEEN CHAIRS by Dave Shelton. A portmanteau of Gothic short stories - some of them drawn with great relish. There's a particular story about the crew of a sailing vessel, returning for revenge that's really, really horrible. Great YA horror - not too wordy and drawn out.

BLOOD RED ROAD by Moira Young. This is stonking bit of science fiction. It's a bit fighty-bitey in the Hunger Games / Mad Max kind of way, but this is also a really dark and bloody fairytale about a girl who has to make her own way through a brutal, violent world. I did an event at the Hay on Wye Festival with Moira in May and she's brilliant. The book is written in a very immediate style. When you read it you feel as if it's all happening to *you*, right now.

FIVE CHILDREN ON THE WESTERN FRONT and THE WHIZZ POP CHOCOLATE SHOP by Kate Saunders. I'm breaking my own rules of selection, and including two titles by the same author. I just discovered Kate Saunders' children's books this season, and she is a wonderful writer. The first here is a much-lauded return to the world of Edith Nesbit, continuing the lives of her beloved characters in WW1. The result is amazingly harrowing and touching and it feels exactly *right.* Such a clever recreation and expansion of the Nesbit world. I know it's a book that I'll return to - full of wisdom and humanity, in the guise of a fantasy tale about that tetchy hobgoblin, the Psammead.

I also read an earlier Saunders, set in her own magical world. It's a book that's so close to my own personal taste and sense of humour that it seems almost impossible. Everything about it was just spot on - from the ghost cat who tries to grow his hair back and cheats, to the very moving rehabilitation of the villain at the heart of the story. You know when you feel like a story's been written just for you? It's an especially good feeling when you're 45 and the story is ostensibly written for people much younger.

THE WOMAN WHO STOLE MY LIFE by Marian Keyes. Her tone is so natural, breezy and chatty, I find her books irresistable. This is true, it turns out, even when I get bored with the book a third of the way through. Because we begin with a story told, for some reason, in three different time zones for the opening section, the novel never quite took hold of me at first. There was quite a lot happening but all rather slowly (heroine trying to get life back together; heroine over-busy being successful in the past; heroine further in the past being paralysed and coming back to life.) I flirted with chucking the book early, but it was Keyes' voice that kept me going. Sooner or later the story straightened itself out and - even though much of it felt a tiny bit implausible - and then I was enamoured till the end.

But the lesson seems to be - don't fuck about with the chronology for the sake of cleverness, Marian. Just tell the feckin story in the order it wants to be told.

And finally (is that ten..?)

AN INVISIBLE FRIENDSHIP by Joyce Grenfell and Katharine Moore. This is a real Beach House book, in that it's been waiting for years in my heaps of TBR books, waiting patiently and modestly for ALL of my attention, which it duly got. For over twenty years these two dames wrote letters - one world famous, one completely obscure, both posh, both a bit goddy, both a bit dotty, both bird-watchers and greedy readers. Between the late fifties and Joyce's death in the late seventies they wrote huge long, gosippy, considered letters to each other describing holidays and books and states of mind. They're a bit snobby and fusty to harken to today, perhaps... but this is a glorious book. There's a gentle magic about it. They both try, without even thinking about it, to be good and kind, and to adjust and adapt to a world changing so fast around them.

It so happens that I love books of letters anyway - whether fictional or actual. There's something very inviting about them. It's like - in the nicest possible way, of course - peeking into somebody's drawers.

Just go and find it, anyhow. I'll feel better if I'm recommending something out of print and slightly obscure to you - to balance out some of the mass-market stuff that I find myself devouring and gabbling on about. (i heard someone recently saying that the mass market, bestselling fiction we have in the UK is terrible, etc. I really don't think that's true. I think the writers who sell like that and get book after book into the WH Smiths top ten are incredibly clever, reliable and, in many cases, very good writers. But then, I've always loved popular fiction as a genre - in which the characters are a little less ambiguous and perhaps more ready-made, and the plots are well-tooled and satisfactory in the way that stuff from Ikea tends to be. But at the same time, I do love a nice, eccentric, silly old book that's slipped out of circulation for thirty years or more. (Having said that, the letters describe Joyce G writing her first volume of memoirs, of which she subsequently sold SHITLOADS globally.)

So - let's hear it for bestsellers. Just the good ones, mind.

Durham Recently

Whitby Last Week

Just before 'The Brenda and Effie Mysteries' won gold at the New York Radio Awards, I made a lightning visit to Whitby to soak up some of the atmosphere again. Ten years on from starting to write the first novel, 'Never the Bride', it seems I still end up going there in my imagination and sure enough - sshhh - but I've started writing a new Brenda and Effie story. Whether it ends up being a story, a sketch, an episode or a whole novel - who knows? It's just nice to be back with the ladies again!

Here are the paintings that resulted from my return to Whitby last weekend. (Two of the originals have already sold!)

Brenda and Effie Won a Glitzy Gold Award in New York City Last Night!

An announcement from Bafflegab Productions - "Fighting off stiff competition from 30 other countries, 'Bat Out of Hull' scooped Gold for Best Audiobook at last night's glitzy New York Radio Awards. Which means it's officially the BEST AUDIOBOOK IN THE WORLD!"http://scifibulletin.com/…/bafflegab-and-b7-media-honoured…/From scifi bulletin: "The New York Festivals Radio Programming Awards recognise the world’s best work in radio broadcasting, awarding radio stations and independent producers from around the globe. The awards ceremony was held at Manhattan Penthouse last night, and is considered to be the ‘Oscars’ of radio. This is the first year that audiobooks have been included.Spooky comedy series The Brenda and Effie Mysteries, starring Anne Reid, won Gold for Best Audiobook (Fiction) for the second story Bat out of Hull. B7 Media’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles by Richard Kurti and Bev Doylefor last year’s Dangerous Visions series on Radio 4 won Silver for Best Drama Special.Bafflegab producer and director Simon Barnard explained: ‘It’s wonderful to get this award from an international jury of respected radio peers, particularly since we’ve just been making it up as we go along. The award really belongs to two people: to our narrator, and national treasure, Anne Reid, who told the story so beautifully; and to our author Paul Magrs, who really should be a national treasure and who wrote it so beautifully.’Writer Paul Magrs added: ‘I was actually in Whitby yesterday, exactly ten years since I started to write the first novel about Brenda and Effie. To write a script about these characters I love, and then win a a prestigious award like this is just wonderful. Thank you! Bafflegab and Simon Barnard and the cast are geniuses and I love their brand of spooky mayhem. I’m proud of the work we’ve done together.’"

Brenda and Effie's 10th Anniversary

Today's picture is to commemorate the fact that it's ten years this week exactly since I sat at the bottom of the garden and wrote chapter one of 'Never the Bride.' Sending out huge thanks to everyone who has stuck by Brenda and Effie and me.

Manchester pictures this week

Doctor Who Monsters of the 1970s at Home

Twenty Years Ago I Moved to Edinburgh

We would sit at the top of our fire escape and drink red wine from the bottle. Up here we were far above Thistle Street and Hanover Street, level with the purple slate of the rooftops and the honey coloured lights in those lonely cobbled alleys. I used to think the lampposts looked like illuminated giraffes peering into our warehouse windows at night.
Ours was the coldest flat I’d ever lived in, even in the height of summer. Edinburgh was a shock to the system at first. I loved it all: the hops in the air from the brewery and the garlicy steam from the Italian restaurant kitchen at the bottom of our narrow lane. I loved the ice on the tall sash windows in the morning and the simplicity of having five pounds a day to live off. It was my first time in a new city, apart from my university town of Lancaster. This was a place I’d chosen to live in myself, and it was somewhere that had nothing to do with a course or qualifications or any kind of work other than the writing I wanted to do.
We would go to the Blue Moon café on Broughton Street, at the apex of the city’s gay Triangle, and sit in the back room, where they played records all night and served pints of lager and nachos dripping and molten with sour cream and golden cheese and fierce jalapenos. Any time of day or night we would sit at their glossy tables on rickety kitchen chairs and talk about where we thought we were up to in our lives and what we wanted to do next. It was one of those times of trying to figure out just what to make of it all. We were in our mid-twenties. It was 1995. Everything was cool and easy. It was all about Britpop and loving new pop music and digging out the Beatles and the Stones LPs and glorying in being Common People, like Pulp reminded us to do, and at the same time there was a buzz in the air about Scottish stuff, about Scottish fiction and films and dialogue-heavy prose, stiff with sweet and sour dialects. Arriving right at the start of the summer, with all the arty festivals and stuff about to begin, it felt as if we were bang in the middle of something.
And what was I doing? I guess I was on a mission. I was writing my journals in cafes. I was drawing everyone I could see at the tables around me, whether I was sitting in the Blue Moon, CC Blooms, the National Portrait Gallery or the Filmhouse café bar. I’d have a pencil case crammed with felt tip pens, some missing tops and bleeding colour everywhere, and I would scribble away, drawing details from life, capturing every quirk and expression of the folk I was earwigging on as they forked up sticky cake or slurped pints of bitter or genteely sipped their cups of tea. Each day I’d pack my haversack with books and pens and novels and set forth, exploring each corner of the city. Drinking it all in, cup after cup. I wrote down almost everything I heard, glorying in the gossip once I keyed into the various accents. I thought long and hard and listlessly and let the thoughts just tumble through my head and onto the page. I made myself over-excited and crazily inventive, letting my diaries and stories go wherever they wanted to go. I also made myself thoroughly upset and miserable sometimes, dwelling on the past and things that had gone wrong, or those that had never been right. I depressed myself at times in the way that you inevitably do when you think long and hard about your life and what it’s all adding up to and you start to realise with horror how lonely you actually feel, sitting there amongst strangers with your coloured pens and scribbly pages and a cooling cup of coffee.
But mostly I was excited. I was deciding for myself where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. I wanted the life of a writer and I wanted to find a boyfriend. I wanted to grab hold of the next bit of my life. I put myself out there into the world and all its dizzy silliness, determined to make sure that when I bumped into the rest of my life and my future I would recognize it. I wouldn’t be tempted to remain sitting indoors and missing out on it all. I would stand as good a chance as anyone of being in the right place at the right time and welcoming happiness in.
So, I was at every fringe play I liked the sound of – traipsing up staircases into attic theatres high above the city; I was making dates to have coffee with men I chatted to in bars, I went to parties with friends and friends of friends, meeting lots people my own age and getting along and finding that they were just as mad with indecision and excitement about life as I was. Those that weren’t as dizzy were those who’d already embarked on their careers and they were harassed and tired and they couldn’t wait to get out at the weekend or every week night, downing tequila slammers or staying up all night dancing in dry ice in underground car parks that boomed with ambient noise.
I wrote until my fingers were sore and I learned to switch to my other hand to draw. I made myself ambidextrous because I wanted to fill even more of the time and even more of the pages with everything I could record or make up. I drank myself stone drunk night after night with my flat mate and we’d roll back through the Old Town and the New Town, hooting with laughter or inconsolable with misery and then we’d help each other clamber the six deadly flights of fire escape to our flat at the very end of Thistle Street.
Whether we got home at two, three or five in the morning, and whether we were doleful, gleeful or numbed by exhaustion, we would put the same record on several times, full blast, before bedtime and bounce up and down, jumping on the sofa and the armchair until the springs and cushions went shapeless. Our song was Love is in the Air. It was our song for those months of feeling utterly free, despondent, poor and queasily smashed and like we could do anything, anything at all. It was our song for quite a long time that year. Love was in the air. More than anything we were in love with the idea of at last becoming ourselves.

The Hay on Wye Book Festival

Last week was great because I was invited to the Hay on Wye festival for the first time and it was just brilliant. I'd managed to shake off my hideous tonsilitis of the week before and we had a drive down the country in brilliant sunny weather, playing the double cd of the previous weekend's Eurovision Song Contest all the way...

I was going to Hay to talk about 'Lost on Mars', my epic SF YA novel, which Firefly has just published. That wasn't until the second day, though. On the first evening I was drafted in as interviewer for two gentlemen writers of spooky stories - Chris Priestley and Dave Shelton. Both were on top form as we discussed  their recent terrifying books under the dark, twinkling canopy of the Starlight tent. I really loved chairing this session - and getting the chance to read both writers's most recent books, which are excellent. (Check out Chris Priestley's disturbing ghost tale 'Through Dark Eyes' and Dave Shelton's portmanteau of horrors, 'Thirteen Chairs'.)



Then on Wednesday I was teamed up with the marvellous Moira Young, whose 'Blood Red Road' I'd just enjoyed. It's a heart-rending and gritty dystopian quest narrative that really puts all its characters through the wringer. It was great to get a chance to hear more about it, and then to read a chapter from 'Lost on Mars' to a packed house in the Starlight Tent. We took lots of very good questions from our chair and the audience and wound up having a terrific conversation about science fiction and writing trilogies and everything else we could pack into an hour.

It was a lovely trip, into the vivid green of the Welsh hills. Hay itself is a magical town, teeming with bookshops and cafes. There just wasn't time to see even a fraction of it all. I was desperate to spend hours in places such as the bookshop dedicated solely to mystery novels. But we managed to do as much as we could - even getting to meet up with some old friends and making some new ones.

I'd forgotten how much I loved road trips like this - going off to talk about my latest book and getting the chance to convince people to buy it! It's like heading off on an adventure each time.