Kerry Hudson's Blog, page 4

Because if I dinnae write this quickly this blog will die

Sorry! I’m really sorry. I haven’t been near this in months and while I would like to claim that it was due to some sort of Really Good Excuse the truth is I’ve just been busy working and living. These are good things that sometimes need to be done. 

Anyway, I have an hour and I’m going to empty my wee brain and the last few months into this little white box Tumblr has helpfully provided. Are you ready? Alright then.

February…oh. February you beautiful beast, you made my heart sing and knackered me like good ‘un. 

A week of February was spent in the gorgeous wilds of Lumb Bank teaching an Arvon course to some of the most inspiring young people I’ve ever met. 15 teens from Grantham who wrote some of the most powerful prose I have encountered. I was co-tutoring with Adam Marek (one of my new favourite people in the world: official). There was uncontrollable giggling, welling-up at the incredible, brave writing, giant bowls of banana custard and bacon and eggs for breakfast. It was sincerely one of the best things I have done in my adult life and I hope to see everyone again soon. Here’s Adam and me with the brilliant teachers on the last day…

Then I came back and began my five week set of City Lights: Turn Up To the Page workshops at the Feminist Library. The first time I’d ever set out on my own to teach a set of classes but I was so fucking lucky…I had ten of the loveliest, coolest people to lead through the workshops (covering everything from narrative to dialogue to character). They were game for anything, learned fast and I’m thrilled to say they’re still meeting up now with several embarking on new projects. I’m still beaming from the feedback a month after the final session.

I also got to hang with Julia Bell (editor of the Writer’s Coursebook - which was the first book I ever did any writing from!) when I took part in In Yer Ear. It’s a grand night and I really recommend heading down if you can. You will never again see me accidentally refer to Janie’s family as ‘pish wifes’ (jeysus!) but there’s lots of fun still to be had. 

March…saw me do two events at Essex Book Festival (one solo and one as part of the Three Literary Supremes alng with Francesca Main and Jo Unwil (also fucking both lovely (I don’t know what to tell you…everyone I’ve met recently has been lovely)). I wrote a chapter on the importance of detail for the forthcoming Art of the Novel being publishing by Salt and gave a lecture (in a proper lecture theatre and everything) to the Creative Writing undergrads at DeMontford University - the lecture contained more swears than one might imagine are possible in a forty minute lecture. 

March also allowed me to help release my friend Jonathan Kemp’s new novel Ghosting out into the world by chairing a chatter with him at the New Bloomsbury Set for Gay’s the Word. The picture below is deceptively sedate - we can talk like a pair of fishwives, me and Jon, when we get started. 

Otherwise…otherwise…I moved to Clapton which immediately stole my wee fickle heart thanks to: the marshes, Palm 2, amazing cafes and lovely locals (what? Everyone is lovely!). I’ve been learning about Buddhism and meditating, taking dance classes and swimming long sunny lengths at London Lido. WoMentoring turned one with 115 mentors and twelve months of solid, enjoyable work and a pledged to make it ongoing. I’m proud of what we’ve done and I can’t wait to see what happens next. 

I also bought a camera to start taking pictures. This is how I see London in my head…but better framed and exposed (I’m still learning innit). 

Oh and lovely, lovely, fucking lovely VAL MCDERMID (whose books I grew up reading!) only chose Tony Hogan as her pick in the Metro. That was fucking amazing. 

Next…well tomorrow (today (Thursday) if I don’t get my arse in gear to post this tonight) I’m appearing with Zoe Strachan, Allan Radcliffe and Jackie Kay on a panel for the Scottish LGBT Anthology All Out at Aye Write. Next it’s a trip up to the Highlands for Ullapool Book Festival - I’m on Saturday and will otherwise be found wandering, eating oatcakes, drinking whiskey and taking photos. After that I head to Paris for two weeks of meeting French readers of Tony Hogan in Nantes, Brest and Angers (cake eating, flea market shopping, taking pictures). There’s heaps more to come…but maybe that’s all I’ll say for now, save something for two months time, eh? Also who read this far anyhow? 

Oh, and I’m redrafting Book 3. I opened the first draft a month ago after a long time away from it, read a scene, and cried (in a good way)…I think this is a good sign of things to come. 

So that’s me: I’m very happy right now and hope you all are too (all three of you who got this far (hope the rest of the fuckers who gave up halfay are happish too though)).  

Night, night x

Home. Fuck yes to that

So I am back in London. Staying with friends in Dalston and realising that, although I fucking love adventure, new horizons and challenges, there is something supremely comforting about familiar places and faces…about having a story for every corner. I suppose this is what ‘home’ means. So yes, I’m Home. 

I arrived back in (fucking FREEZING) London last Thursday from a few days in Madrid where there were winter walks, pounds of cheese and ham and chocolate and churros every few hours. I flew there from Rio de Janerio in which I fell in love with Dalston’s hotter Brazilian little sister Santa Teresa…a beautiful bohemian/working-class hilltop neighbourhood with some of the best food I’ve ever put in my mouth. 

Before that I was in Paraty, a beautiful blue sea, white sand colonial coastal town, where hired a bicycle and cycled the coast, over little bridges, up steep hills…when I got too hot Istopped and got someone to hack a hole into a big green coconut for me or left
my bike on the beach and ran into the sea (though it was as warm as bath
water…) and caught up with two lovely London friends - my first familiar
faces in months - and spent the day on a schooner (is that not an amazing
word?) going around islands. Paraty was a perfect little paradise and I’m so happy I got to see it.

I left Buenos Aires about a few weeks ago now. It was hard leaving - I
find it harder and harder to leave places - I was just starting to feel at
home, me and the city were just beginning to come to an understanding. Buenos
Aires is a city of huge contradictions…wealth and poverty on the same stretch
of street, age and youth, beauty and ruin…my time was full of stark
contrast. For most of my time I closeted myself away, worked as hard as I was
capable of, I ran evening circles of the gently-ghetto Congressa Park,
wrote my book, worked on all my other projects, cooked and ate at home…I
probably allowed myself to become a little too solitary…even by my standards.
And yet my time was also punctuated by sudden lovely friendships, nights
drinking Fernet and dancing until dawn leaving nightclubs while the air was
pale and still night time-cool with my ears ringing, midnight visits to the ice-cream shop
and chats about queer politics with my flatmate, drunken ping-pong, amazing meals
and long walks full of stories…Buenos Aires is a place of many things and
perhaps my experience reflected a few of those faces. There are some cities,
when I’m at the bus station or airport mentally saying my goodbyes, that I know
I won’t see again…but Buenos Aires isn’t one of them…

And then? Then on to a 19 hour bus to Paraguay…a fully
reclining seat, excellent playlist (mostly Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem and
Vampire Weekend thanks to glitchy Spotify downloading), fleecy blanket and an
incredible electric storm complete with lilac fork lightening is a pretty good
way to spend 19 hours. Paraguay was the place I was going to because it was in
the middle of two places I actually wanted to go. No one goes to Paraguay…and
you know what? They’re all fucking idiots. Paraguay is fucking wonderful.
Perhaps only a few other places…Palestine, Bosnia…have I experienced such
generosity, sweetness, a willingness to smile at a stranger. In Paraguay,
fairly out of place as a blonde, smiling, Scottish woman, I was met only with
warmth, hospitality and well-intentioned curiosity. I walked the broken up,
dusty streets, petted dustier dogs, ate giant meals every day with the locals
on a high stool at the counter of Bolsi, ran at the local muscle gym (so hot, crazy, crazy hot) or sat in my little hut adjoined to the hostel looking up at the cat
silhouettes on the plastic sheeting roof, the door open while I worked so I
could hear the birds and the insects buzzing away in the garden.

When I was leaving Paraguay to catch the bus to Brazil I watched
two teens, perhaps seventeen, with matching buzz cuts, in smart shoes, trousers
and pressed shirts, hold a Paraguay flag between them as their Mum took a
picture..they had such beautiful, open-faced smiles. When I think of Paraguay I
will always think of them.

It’s a twenty-four hour bus to Sao Paulo. The twins sat in front
of me, smiling nicely if our paths crossed, whispering to each other about
things along the journey. I made friends…a group of guys in thug life
bleached denims and blinged baseball caps who were very chivalrous about
letting me go first at border stops, a woman off to Rio on holiday with her
daughter who showed me how to get coffee from the urn. The bus was freezing. I
slept sprawled over two seats in every yoga position I’d ever half-mastered and
in every dream I was asking people for more clothes. Still, I woke, had a cup
of the strong sweet coffee and watched the sun rise over Sao Paulo glad for
everything. I have a theory that, when travelling and it’s not very comfortable
or it’s slow, that being a grumpy arse increases your suffering ten fold. I stand by
this theory. 

Sao Paulo Tiente bus station is the second largest in the world
(after New York) and the stories I’d heard led me to believe it would be like
something out of Mad Max…guns, motorbikes and flame throwers…imagine my
surprise when, during my three hours there, I met lots of lovely people who
were simply curious abut my travels ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Where are you coming
from?’ ‘Are you alone?’…even when I spilled ice-cream on the big, burly,
topless Brazilian man sitting next to me on the bus to Paraty he simply licked
it off and smiled ‘de nada, de nada’.

This year of travel - it’s almost exactly a year since I left
for frozen Budapest - has been an incredible gift. From Budapest to Berlin,
Podaca, Sarajevo, Lisbon, Madrid, Rio, Buenos Aires, Paraty and finally back to
Rio, Madrid and home. It is something I’ll remember forever. I’ve worked
really, really fucking hard this twelve months but I have glorious, bright
memories from each of these cities. I learned without realising I was, I was
braver than I’ve ever been in lots of ways, this trip made me more grateful
than ever for this life full of freedom, possibility and opportunity.

Back in Buenos Aires, sheltering in a coffeeshop from a huge
storm on my last day, I had a thought…

Imagine one person getting to see all these things. Imagine that
person is me.

…I didn’t have a holiday until I was seventeen and I went
Amsterdam on a college trip. I didn’t get on a plane till I was nineteen to go
to work at an American summer camp. I spent my early life, more than half of
what I’ve lived so far, furiously willing myself broader horizons, new places,
new people and adventures. When I was thirteen I went through a habit of getting loads of travel brochures from town on Saturdays and sitting in front of
the TV, poring over pictures to places I wasn’t going to in a
blue moon because I didn’t want to go out into the council estate and sometimes inside wasn’t any
picnic either. I think I did that thirteen year old proud. 

It’s a huge privilege to travel and it’s a wonderful thing to do. It’s an equal privilege to have somewhere to call home and I’m very glad to be back. So here’s to adventures wherever you are. 

Next post…the thousands of things the next few months will bring….(cannot stay still: official) but it’s all good and exciting. I am here. 

About What I Did Last Night

I wrote my third novel and typed THE END*. I’d decided about 5 weeks ago that this was the only way I’d feel right about going into 2015 so worked my arse off to get it finished by midnight last night. 

I actually finished a few hours before midnight a wee tear in my eye. At midnight I put on some Nina Simone, opened up the big windows and a tiny bottle of Argentine champagne, sat up on the table for a better view and watched fireworks light up the starry Buenos Aires sky. Perfect. 

Of course the book is ‘finished’ rather than Finished but the words are there, now I can make them what I want them to be. 

Happy New Year…here’s to new stories, adventures and horizons. 

*And discovered that masterig Microsoft paint is harder than writing a novel

2014 - Part 2 -Thank You Very Fucking Much

You can read Part 1 here…along with my disclaimer where I say ‘fuck it’ 2014 was exciting and I think it’s ok to be happy about that. 

July

July was the biggie. Thirst was coming out…the dum-dum-dum…second novel. All the scarier because folks had embraced Tony Hogan so enthusiastically. So I came back to London to see Thirst off properly. In July I took part in Short Stories Aloud for the second time with Sarah Franklin and Carys Bray, interviewed on The Culture Studio (On LIVE BBC radio) with him frae that Deacon Blue and, amazingly didn’t swear and was interviewed for The Observer including a Hackney photoshoot where lovely locals shouted ‘are you famous?’ (if you have to ask…) while I tried to remember to smize and tootch like Tyra taught me. I also headed up to Hull to do a corker of an event. And Thirst? I was lucky to get some really good reviews in some really big papers (lucky because I know how hard it is to get reviews for second novels). It ran the gamut making onto ‘best of lists’ in Red, Harpers Bazaar, Belle *and* Cruise International. It was The Metro ‘Big Read’…catching the underground was weird that day. It did me proud, maybe I did Dave and Alena proud too. 

August

At the end of July I started my second year of Supervising at Pembroke College with the National Academy of Writing. We had an amazing group this year and I learned as much as taught. I also got to do an event at Wilderness Festival with Susannah Otter and Deepti Kapoor, revisited my favourite London Lit night Speakeasy at Drink, Shop, Do and go along for a night of chatter at The Bookseller Crow on the Hill. There was also an academic conference at Stirling University on the referendum (imagine the audiences dismay that I wasn’t Alistair Gray…)  and of course…Edinburgh Festival. I love Edinburgh Festival - though I always come back broken - this year’s event with Simon Van Booy and then much high-jinx with pals was no exception.  Oh, and I went on holiday to see my lovely mate Simon Savidge aka Sugarbear & visit the seaside. This highly unflattering windy cagoule shot might be my favourite of 2014.

September

This month was beginning of my mentoring with the excellent Ideas Tap and Writer’s Centre Norwich Inspires project…I began intensively mentoring two extraordinarily talented writers (selected from hundreds)…again one of the most rewarding things I did in 2014.

If you’ve read this far then you won’t be surprised to hear I was knackered, voice three octaves lower knackered, by September. So I took myself away again. First to Podaca, a tiny coastal village in Croatia and then to Mostar and Sarajevo. Podaca allowed me to mainline pacefullness after an pretty mental few months…I swam, cooked, fed scrawny stray kittens and wrote longhand looking at the sea. Bosnia is one of the most extraordinary places I have ever been. The kindness, the spirit, the food and views. I walked a lot, ate mountains of turkish delight and cevapi (Bosnian sausage sarnies), wrote and remembered how important it is to be grateful for the simplest things: safety, peace, food in your belly and somewhere warm to sleep. Podaca and Sarajevo were just what i needed.  

October

The beginning of the month saw me back in Scotland in conversation with Peggy Hughes at Wigtown Book Festival (contender for best festival ever…just lovely) and then down to the also excellent Birmingham Literary Festival with Nikesh Shukla, Lottie Moggach and Sathnam Sanghera…and then on to beautiful, glorious, Lisbon…city of incredible food, sunshine beaches, lovely folks,  back to back visitors and much, much carousing. I loved Lisbon even though it will forever be the city in  which I lost about 20k of my novel. I also did this interview about not allowing disadvantaged kids to slip through the cracks for The Daily Record.

October is also my birthday month and though I don’t celebrate the universe had other ideas…the Freight  ’Out There’ Anthology of Scottish LGBT writing was published and my story ‘Grown on this Beach’ was only BBC Radio FUCKING 4 and *on my birthday*, alongside my Green Carnation Prize longlisting for Thirst I felt very happy and lucky indeed. 

November

And the Green Carnation Prize was the one that kept giving because in November I found out Thirst had been shortlisted alongside five outstanding novels. I had a plane ticket to Brazil to use in November but first I returned to Norwich to mentor my Ideaptap WCN Inspires mentees and do an author and agent event with my agent Juliet Pickering and Ben Johncock and *then* back to London for a meeting with the Producer of one of my favourite films ever The Arbor. Then it was onto another plane…to Madrid to eat churros and take winter swims, to Rio De Janerio to see the beach, onto Iguacu Falls of rainbows, butterflies, monkeys and armadillos and then finally to my beloved Buenos Aires…

December

This month has been simple and perfect. I have a beautiful old art deco apartment full of the artist landlord’s books and paintings, a covered balcony to write on overlooking a a butterfly and bird filled garden. I spend a lot of time buying food and cooking…I learned how to cook a perfect steak, use the best fresh, seasonal ingredients. I walk the city, learn a few new words in Spanish, run in my local gym (everyone kisses ‘hello’ on the cheek…once you stop worrying about being sweaty it’s quite charming). I take Latin dance classes, eat toast, work hard and then go to the local ice-cream shop. I also found out I was awarded a Prix litteraire Cezam Inter-CE (a French Works Council reader voted prize to fund ten authors to attend literary festivals in France) so next year I’m off to Nantes and then to Paris to promote Thirst (to Paris! To promote my book! Insane…). And Thirst made quite a few ‘best of 2014’ lists and that made me especially joyful too, thank you to those who were especially touched by Dave and Alena. 

Mostly in this energetic, dirty, friendly, sunshine city I have been writing. Tunnel-visioned, sitting down each day and writing my story. About two weeks ago I caught up to where I was in Lisbon and then the story ‘clicked’ and it was just a matter of my sitting down and typing out the vivid film reel in my head. Now I am…let’s just say I’m very fucking close to having written my third novel.

So that’s it. What  a fucking year. Thank you very much.

I really mean that…everyone who crossed my path this year, all the amazing people I met, people who read my words, reviewed them, hand sold them and passed them to others, those who ran events, my students and mentees, my travelling, writing and home pals, the exceptional WoMentoring women…thank you for being the shiny threads woven through 2014.

For now? I’m sticking to two important mottoes…Work Hard, Be Kind, Don’t Be an Arsehole and what Sylvia says…

 

Righto…I’m taking a bus to the best burrito shack in Buenos Aires. Happy New Year you bloody lovely lot. 

Dear 2014 - part 1 - thank you very fucking much

I actually almost didn’t write this this because when I thought back over the year I got a misty seventies-esque montage of me petting dogs in different cities, rotating plates of cake, new and old friends, airports at 2am, sleeper trains, bus stations and more beautiful views than one person should have the luck to see in a single year. 

More seriously I felt a bit abashed about ‘yay me’-ing all over Tumblr in this way. But you know what? Fuck it. Life is often hard, tiring, not what we hoped - everyone has good times and challenges. I believe in celebrating every day life doesn’t kick your arse. I think acknowledgement of good things is an act of gratitude…so 2014 was a year of adventures, travel, lots of fun and food, long walks and fast runs but it was a lot more than that for me…

2014 You Little Beauty (Part 1)

January  

I started the year in Shorditch Town Hall dancing on a radiator. I think this is how all new years should start. Then my beautiful little goddaughter Zarla was born and after a Twitter conversation I pledged to set up WoMentoring (though I didn’t know it it would have this kick-arse name then). Then (why not?) I moved to beautiful wintery Budapest just as the US and French editions of Tony Hogan were coming out. 

February 

I started to get my first foreign reviews: a wonderful one in the Boston Globe (there’s something mind blowing about being in a US paper, I don’t know why) and the people of France took to wee Janie Ryan like she was was made of choux pastry and filled with creme patisserie. I took a night train to Belgrade *and* flew back home to London to appear at an LGBT History Month/Polari Magazine event where I talked about my coming out experiences (and therefore my sex life in great detail) in Lewisham Library.

March

In March I danced on Budapest subway platforms as I learned that Thirst had been sold in France to my publisher Editions Phillipe Rey and in Italy Minimum Fax would be publishing both Tony Hogan and Thirst (the first time the publisher had ever acquired two books at once by an emerging foreign author…). I took a train to Vienna straight from Budapest piano bar high-jinx with writer Claire McGowan and travelled back to London (SO many planes in 2014…) to guest on Paul Burston’s Guardian Masterclass on Writer’s Block. 

April

I was still in Budapest in April and I was tired. I was so tired, guys. I spent most of February and March building the WoMentoring Project, collecting data, planning PR, building a website into the wee hours. It launched in April and went pretty crazy…our first day we had 29,892 page views, it trended on Twitter. We now have 99 (99!) mentors and it was worth every 3am work session fretting about Wordpress. It’s truly one of my best bits of the year. Oh, and I hopped skipped back to London to do an event at London Book Fair with Korean Authors as part of the British Council market focus and got to meet my gorgeous chic French Editor. Yep, April was a good one. 

May

I loved Budapest, I really did, but for years I’d wanted to live in Berlin…so off I went. Back via London and the Norwich to teach an all day workshop on rewriting a novel first draft for the Writers’ Centre Norwich (the feedback made me beam for months after) and then through Venice to eat calamari and drink Aperol Spritz with the wonderful writer and my lovely friend Lisa O’Donnell. I arrived in Berlin, bought a bicyle and moved into an arty work/live space in Kruetzberg. Then I cycled Tempelhoff, did some Bikram, ate a lot of wholefoods and basically did the whole ‘summer in Berlin’ thing. I also had my first ever review published in the Guardian: Emma Jane Unsworth’s corking Animals. 

June

I decided to stay in Berlin for June. I moved into a beautiful old Schoneberg apartment with a loft bed, a screenwriter who would become a dear friend and two attention deficit cats. I returned to the UK to teach my first ever Arvon on Queer Fiction with Jonathan Kemp at the extraordinary Lumb Bank…treading the same path as Ted and Sylvia. Teaching in such an intensive way was one of the most challenging and rewarding things I’ve ever done. I returned to Berlin and welcomed visitors…then we went skinny dipping in Grunewald, ate slabs of strudel and Fleishburgers and danced until dawn and watched Berlin go crackers when Germany won the world cup. I also made the Bookseller’s Rising Stars list for my work on WoMentoring which felt a bit mental but I was very honoured…it was a win for the team.

I had a wonderful June, I loved Berlin but the truth is I was preoccupied…the most exciting and scary part of 2014 was yet to happen…Thirst was coming out and I had no idea how it would be received*… 

*Yeah, there’s a part two (is that a cliffhanger? (if I’m a proper writer should  know this?))…I need to go have a sweaty summer run and buy some diet coke. You should have a cupper and crack open that Christmas chocolate orange. Part 2 tomorrow folks…try to get *some* sleep…   

Dear 2014...part 1...thank you very fucking much

I actually almost didn’t write this this because when I thought back over the year I got a misty seventies-esque montage of me petting dogs in different cities, rotating plates of cake, new and old friends, airports at 2am, sleeper trains, bus stations and more beautiful views than one person should have the luck to see in a single year. 

More seriously I felt a bit abashed about ‘yay me’-ing all over Tumblr in this way. But you know what? Fuck it. Life is often hard, tiring, not what we hoped - everyone has good times and challenges. I believe in celebrating every day life doesn’t kick your arse. I think acknowledgement of good things is an act of gratitude…so 2014 was a year of adventures, travel, lots of fun and food, long walks and fast runs but it was a lot more than that for me…

2014 You Little Beauty (Part 1)

January  

I started the year in Shorditch Town Hall dancing on a radiator. I think this is how all new years should start. Then my beautiful little goddaughter Zarla was born and after a Twitter conversation I pledged to set up WoMentoring (though I didn’t know it it would have this kick-arse name then). Then (why not?) I moved to beautiful wintery Budapest just as the US and French editions of Tony Hogan were coming out. 

February 

I started to get my first foreign reviews: a wonderful one in the Boston Globe (there’s something mind blowing about being in a US paper, I don’t know why) and the people of France took to wee Janie Ryan like she was was make of choux pastry and filled with creme patisserie. I took a night train to Belgrade *and* flew back home to London to appear at an LGBT History Month/Polari Magazine event where I talked about my coming out experiences (and therefore my sex life in great detail) in Lewisham Library.

March

In March I danced on Budapest subway platforms as I learned that Thirst had been sold in France to my publisher Editions Phillipe Rey and in Italy Minimum Fax would be publishing both Tony Hogan and Thirst (the first time the publisher had ever acquired two books at once by an emerging foreign author…). I took a train to Vienna straight from Budapest piano bar high-jinx with writer Claire McGowan and travelled back to London (SO many planes in 2014…) to guest on Paul Burston’s Guardian Masterclass on Writer’s Block. 

April

I was still in Budapest in April and I was tired. I was so tired, guys. I spent most of February and March building WoMentoring Project, collecting data, planning PR, building a website into the wee hours. It launched in April and went pretty crazy…our first day we had 29,892 page views, it trended on Twitter. We now have 99 (99!) mentors and it was worth every 3am work session fretting about Wordpress. It’s truly one of my best bits of the year. Oh, and I hopped skipped back to London to do an event at London Book Fair with Korean Authors as part of the British Council market focus and got to meet my gorgeous chic French Editor. Yep, April was a good one. 

May

I loved Budapest, I really did, but for years I’d wanted to live in Berlin…so off I went. Back via London and the Norwich to teach an all day workshop on rewriting a novel first draft for the Writers’ Centre Norwich (the feedback made me beam for months after) and then through Venice to eat calamari and drink Aperol Spritz with the wonderful writer and my lovely friend Lisa O’Donnell. I arrived in Berlin, bought a bicyle and moved into an arty work/live space in Kruetzberg. Then I cycled Tempelhoff, did some Bikram, ate a lot of wholefoods and basically did the whole ‘summer in Berlin’ thing. I also had my first ever review published in the Guardian: Emma Jane Unsworth’s corking Animals. 

June

I decided to stay in Berlin for June. I moved into a beautiful old Schoneberg apartment with a loft bed, a screenwriter who would become a dear friend and two attention deficit cats. I returned to the UK to teach my first ever Arvon on Queer Fiction with Jonathan Kemp at the extraordinary Lumb Bank…treading the same path as Ted and Sylvia. Teaching in such an intensive way was one of the most challenging and rewarding things I’ve ever done. I returned to Berlin and welcomed visitors…then we went skinny dipping in Grunewald, ate slabs of strudel and Fleishburgers and danced until dawn and watched Berlin go crackers when Germany won the world cup. I also made the Bookseller’s Rising Stars list for my work on WoMentoring which felt a bit mental but I was very honoured…it was a win for the team.

I had a wonderful June, I loved Berlin but the truth is I was preoccupied…the most exciting and scary part of 2014 was yet to happen…Thirst was coming out and I had no idea how it would be received*… 

*Yeah, there’s a part two (is that a cliffhanger? (if I’m a proper writer should  know this?))…I need to go have a sweaty summer run and buy some diet coke. You should have a cupper and crack open that Christmas chocolate orange. Part 2 tomorrow folks…try to get *some* sleep…   

Oh hello again...

I have a belly full of ice-cream and a jam jar full of tangerine syrup and soda. I’m bare foot and wearing a summer dress. I’m singing along to this. It’s ten days until Christmas and if it wasn’t for the occasional Starbucks piping out Bing Crosby I’d have no idea.

Hello from Buenos Aires.

Did you want some news? Ok, the biggest news is that I caught up on all my lost work. My manuscript currently stands at 53,185 words. Thank fuck for that. I am following my own best advice - sitting down every day and powering through the story, allowing myself free reign because it is a first draft, knowing that I’ll go back and fix things that I know aren’t quite right. Forward is the only way. I’m dead, dead happy about this. The world feels right when the words are there…and they’re always there, I just need to give them voice.

What else? Well, I left Lisbon with a teary farewell. A friend said the cake shop owners wore black armbands. I’ll be back though, it’s a special place full of special people (and cakes). 

I returned home to London for five whirlwind days. I met to talk plans for next summer’s National Academy of Writing at Pembroke College and I’m excited to say that, after two years of supervising, in 2015 I’ll be co-convening with NAW Director and founder of the summer school creative writing programme, Richard Beard. I’ll be living in beautiful Pembroke for the month and working as hard as I can to make the course valuable to the new intake. It is a good thing I think and I’m looking forward to getting stuck in.

Then it was off to Norwich for a Writers’ Centre Norwich ‘Agent and Author’ event with my brilliant agent Juliet Pickering and Ben Johncock (his book, The Last Pilot is out next year and I am sure it will fly). And the next day meetings with my brilliant IdeasTap Inspires and WCN mentees Jonnie Bayfield and Alex Scarlet Mullen. It’s no overstatement for me to say they are outrageous talents - it’s truly energising and humbling to work with them. Read extracts of their works in progress here. And here’s a picture of all the brilliant mentees (Alex third from the right and Jonnie second from the right…damn, they’re stylish too). 

And then? Then I returned to London and played with my godkids, ate curry (Brick Lane), drank cocktails (Dalston) and had some burgers (Honest) and generally caught up with my best pals. It was wintery and London was beautiful. We walked the canal, I walked past ‘Dave and Alena’s Mosque’ where they share their first tender moment. I realised how much Hackney was home to me and how much I was missing it.

Oh, and I went to Great Portland Street and had a meeting at Passion Pictures…read Variety in the waiting room, gushed like a small child about how much I loved The Arbor, how much I respected the films they made and, not for the first time this year, wondered how my life had got so mad that I’d be able to go to a film production office and talk about my books and their films. Life is mental. Life is wonderful.

London got under my skin a bit. It was so good to see my close people, to feel the thrum of London, to know every nook and cranny, to have a secret and a story for every corner. What I’m saying is, it was hard to leave this time. For the first time in a year I really wanted to stay at home but off I went anyway…life is also short.

I went to Madrid for a few days and spent all my time in a working class area with a great municipal pool and chocolate con churro cafe (a winter day swim and then a plate of churros and chocolate is one of the best things in the world - official). I flew to Rio de Janerio and lay on Copacobana Beach but still preferred wandering around my little neighbourhood and eating mountains of hummus at my local Lebanese restaurant.

Then I went to Icuagu Falls. And yes, they were amazing. I trekked the rainforest trail there by myself and saw a crocodile, a family of monkeys, caoti, the cutest armadillo ever…the sound of the rainforest was extraordinary, the waterfalls had rainbows over them. Life is mental. Life is wonderful.

Sometime around there I was utterly fucking delighted to be shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize with five other wonderful writers. That’s two shortlistings for two books on the prize so they are officially my favourite. The prize went to Annelise Mackinstosh for Any Other Mouth which is a worthy winner indeed.

 

And now? Now I am in Buenos Aires. It is a beautiful, frenetic, dirty, stunning city. It’s full of life and stories. The streets are in grids with streets that stretch for miles and my favourite thing to do it to choose one and walk its length passing through different neighbourhoods, from a little rough to elegant, stopping when I’m curious, meeting people on the way, making up little stories.

I got a beautiful art deco apartment in an area called San Cristobel, not posh, not full of expats and all the better for it. At my local cafe the grandad brings me extra cookies with my cafe con leche and pinches my cheek, the local ice-cream parlour know me by name (no surprise there…), the man who hands out leaflets outside the supermarket wearing big red headphones kisses my hand as I go by…it is a proper neighbourhood and they’ve embraced this lanky, Scottish, smiling woman as much as I could have wished for. Otherwise I work - on my novel, a new year project, WoMentoring - in my covered balcony overlooking the garden, listening to the whistling bird song and John Coltrane. I’m working really hard and it feels brilliant to have the days and environment to do that. I run at my very hot little local gym and take tango and Latin dance classes. It’s very quiet, very peaceful and very, very good for writing a novel.

I feel very lucky I get to travel. I hope I say that often enough. That I know what a privilege this is. I am so grateful. Growing up I desperately wanted to travel (all those hours watching Judith Chalmers on Holiday) and never knew if I ever would. I feel very grateful I get to write what I choose to without any fear of doing so too. I feel lucky that London still feels like home, that it excites me to be returning in February. Life is mental. Life is wonderful. Good to acknowledge those things I think and I’m doing that every day. Besos amigos!

A scary Halloween story: what happens when you lose a third of your book forever

Well the truly amazing thing is that remain breathing (if somewhat erratically) and still with ability to write new words and you might even learn something about your own practice and your work in progress along the way.

So how did this happen? Well, I’m the woman who swallowed a fly (or cockroach for the purpose of this paragraph).  Short story is: my computer broke, I managed to get it to work and backed up my work  including the ‘project’ folder all to Google Drive but, honestly, I was also gossiping with a friend who’d just arrived as I did so. Mistake Number One. 

 I bought a new computer, a secondhand bright pink one ala Elle Brooks that hopefully no one will wish to steal while I’m in South America. Around this time I discovered my little studio’s kitchen cupboards had cockroaches in the nooks and crannies (*shudder, shudder* - the cupboards three steps from my bed, WHERE I SLEPT, the cupboard WHERE  KEPT MY MUESLI). I told the landlady and stopped eating in the apartment but after two particularly big and brave roaches came a-roaming a little too close to me I emailed my landlady and told her I wouldn’t stay in the apartment (stay with me, I promise this is manuscript and back-up related - this is cockroaches as a plot point) I didn’t sleep that night until 8am, imagining creepy little legs (my friend’s advice that they wouldn’t crawl on me unless there food in the bed offered little comfort), at 10am the next morning my landlady came banging and hollering at the door.

Now, as most of you know, I have lived in a few rough areas, dealt with some shady characters…none so scary as a rampaging middle-aged Portuguese woman, screaming into your face when you have had two hours sleep.  She said I was lying, I asked her what reason I’d have to lie, she told me to pack my bags and I told her I wouldn’t stay another night in the studio if she paid me. I don’t like being shouted at, and even less so when I haven’t done anything wrong ,so in the forty minutes agreed I showered and packed my bags as quickly as I could (and caught a cockroach in the fridge (*shudder, shudder*)). And because I only have a small case that was packed full, and I was already backed-up…Oh God, do you see?…I threw my old broken computer in the communal bin.  Mistake Number Two.

And then yesterday, having written scenes in Word over the last few days, I thought it’d be a nice job to re-download Scrivener, import my back-up files and get my project up and running. I opened the Google Drive folder in a café by the Marques Du Pombal Sqaure at about 10pm. But hold on, it was just a skeleton of my novel …the chapter and scene headings were there…but ALL, ALL of my words were gone. I opened it up in Scrivener and the project stats said the wordcount was ZERO. Then two things happened, the first is that I genuinely thought I was going to vomit in public and the second is that I really did cry in public (a lot) as the friends, Twitter and Facebook pals sent advice and words of support and it started to dawn on me that I had no way of getting those words back, that I had essentially thrown my novel and nine months of work into a wheely bin in Graca.

  

At about midnight I found over fifty tiny RTF files buried deep in my Google Drive and tweeted ‘It’s ok! It’s here! I need a fucking drink!’ or words to that affect. But today when it came to piecing all those little files together and seeing what I’d got, what I had was a back-up I’d done in July sometime. By my calculations I lost over 17k words of my novel. A Whole Fucking Third.

So if my hinge hadn’t broken…if I hadn’t trusted a smiling stranger with a glue gun to fix it…if I hadn’t been gossiping instead of concentrating when I transferred files…if not for cockroaches…or if only my landlady had been a bit fucking nicer or I’d had a bigger bag…if only if only…

But actually I think this could be good thing for the book and for me. Here’s how:

There’s nothing like thinking you have a giant problem to make a medium sized one seem pretty tiny: After spending two sickening hours last night thinking everything was gone, 17K really, really doesn’t seem that bad.

First drafts were made for this sort of thing: Because I had my words up until July and my more recent scenes on Word  I have is still the whole outline of the story so far. To be honest, it seems to me most of those 17k weren’t that needed.

I really only lost 20% of that 17k: Because this was a first draft and so much of the first draft for me is like feeling around a darkened corridor with your fingertips…who are these people? where is story going? What am I doing with this book? When I rewrite those scenes now I’ll have torch, I’ll know some the answers, then it’s just writing it out again. So yes, I lost 20% of bits of writing that probably won’t come out the same again and 10% of typing time…but a whole 70% of the work is still in my head ready and waiting.   

If you want to write a novel then you fucking will: About an hour into thinking I’d lost everything I was tearfully telling a friend on Skype that I’d already calculated how much I’d need to write each day to catch-up and get back on schedule. When I was writing Tony Hogan and my computer was stolen in China, I wrote the whole first draft by hand and then typed it up in noisy, smoky internet cafes.  When I want to write a book I will not be fucking defeated….what’s the point of writing a novel if you don’t feel like you really need to?

Sometimes things happen for a reason: The other side of that equation is that is made me analyse how much writing of my own I’d been doing (not teaching, mentoring or paid articles) and realising I haven’t done enough. I should have been at risk of losing a full 80K words really. Sometimes you need a big shock like this to put a rocket up your arse. Consider that rocket embedded (sorry)… almost losing it all made me even more determined to write a fucking beautiful book.

This happens quite a lot with Cloud and Scrivener syncing: If you run into trouble too, this article might be good for you.

Back the fuck up. That is all.

That is all except  thank you to every person who looked up articles for me, retweeted my calls for help and all my pals who sent virtual cuddles. It all made me cry all the more but after the hysteria had subsided I was so touched.

Next…getting my arse on the seat, catching up, writing the fucking beautiful novel of course.  

Good things

Sorry? Was the the title of my last blog? Well, fuck it, consider this seconds.

First is that Thirst is on the Green Carnation Prize longlist. It’s a list as tasty as a warm pastel de nata (more of which later) on a summery day and I’m very, very proud to be included. Take a look and tell me that this list is not an excellent party waiting to happen…

Through The Woods – Emily Carroll (Faber & Faber)
The Absent Therapist – Will Eaves (CB Editions)
The Fair Fight – Anna Freeman (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
All The Days and Nights – Niven Govinden (The Friday Project)
Vixen – Rosie Garland (Borough Press)
Thirst – Kerry Hudson (Chatto & Windus)
The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales – Kirsty Logan (Salt)
In Search of Solace – Emily Mackie (Sceptre)
Any Other Mouth – Anneliese Mackintosh (Freight)
The Lives of Others – Neel Mukherjee (Chatto & Windus)
Unspeakable Things – Laurie Penny (Bloomsbury)
Invisible Love – Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt (Europa Editions)
The Glasgow Coma Scale – Neil D. A. Stewart (Corsair)

And continuing the queer good times. The brilliant Out There Anthology by Freight Books is out now. It has some amazing stories from Scotland’s most interesting LGBT authors including Louise Welsh, Jackie Kay, Ali Smith, Damian Barr, Ronald Frame, Carol Ann Duffy and Val McDermid all edited by the utterly ace Zoe Strachan. Here’s a lovely review of it in The Herald. A slightly abridged version of my story ‘Grown on this Beach’ (with all the filth taken out) was also ONLY ON FUCKING RADIO FOUR…sorry about that…and you can listen again here.   

AND last week The Daily Record printed an interview with me where they let me bang on about my two favourite subjects 1. Why we need to start making positive change for kids from backgrounds like mine if they’re to reach their potential (I was lucky, many aren’t) 2. WoMentoring. It was a lovely positive piece and I hope someone like me when I was thirteen will have maybe picked it up and saw a bit of a broadening of their horizons. You can read the online article here.

And where the fuck am I now? I’m into my second week in fucking glorious Lisbon. I’ll talk about it more soon but basically it is a near perfect city…the ruined charm of Budapest, the cultural spoils of Berlin, the excellent food and warmth of Bosnia…it is fucking amazing. Thanks to friends of friends of friends I’ve already met some lovely local folks who keep urging me to keep Lisbon a secret - but this is between you and I yes? Lisbon is The Place. I’ve lots of visitors this month so my time is divided between writing (I’m at 50K on novel three…that’s half a book or a third of a Victorian saga (I don’t write those, for anyone new to the blog)), eating (a lot. Really, really a lot) and exercising (hint; it would take a lot of ‘lunge and ponying’ to even touch my calorie intake…). Since a picture of me typing and or doing bunny-hops is a bit weird, here instead are pictures of food that has gone into my belly. You’re welcome.

    

 

Oh, and this week I turned another year (I don’t celebrate it but it is nice when a beautiful week of Stuff coincides) and this was the best thing I saw on that day.

 

Here is where the fuck I am...

And where the fuck was I this month? This month I did a wee tour of Croatia and Bosnia. I started in Split…amazing ice-cream, good ferries to tiny islands, touristy beauty and excellent Japanese food. Then I went to the tiny little seaside town of Podaca where I’d rented a basic but perfect little apartment by the sea (I highly recommend it for those looking for a quiet, beautiful place to write)…there were majestic hills, a tear-up-a-wee-bit gorgeous coastline, sea so clear I could see the red nail varnish on my toes, two cafes and a grocery store…I did nothing but write, read, swim in the sea, run by the coast and hike up the hills at sunset…pure fucking bliss.

Next was Mostar, also good for the eyes despite the very evident, and initially, shocking evidence of the recent war. I walked a lot, ate a lot of Nutella torta and drank a lot of coffee while petting skinny little mewling stray cats.

And…then there was Sarajevo. Sarajevo is one of the most remarkable places I have ever been, a city build in a valley, a patchwork of Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Soviet architecture. I don’t think I have ever encountered a kinder or warmer folks (though the manager of the cafe I’m in did just come over and give me a free scoop of orange and carrot sorbet…). I lived in a communist-era little granny flat on a very steep hill near the Old Town and my favourite thing to do while there was to wake up and go for Turkish coffee and a slice Kadaif for breakfast and then climb up the hills surrounding Sarajevo.

It would have been an enormously enriching and humbling trip even without learning about the war…learning that during the four years of the siege the city reacted by holding schools in bombed building basements, that to reach those schools young people would run across roads while under constant sniper fire from the hills. Likewise, the orchestra kept rehearsing (I can’t get the idea of the people holding their instrument cases close as they run as fast as they can to get to the deserted and heavily shelled TV building where they met). Some women took part in a beauty pageant as a way of gaining attention form international media. A collective of artists and intellectuals decided to create a contemporary art gallery in Sarajevo, just as the siege was beginning, and succeeded by getting curators all over the world to donate pieces. The daily newspaper was bombed to the ground and somehow, God knows how, managed to keep reporting and producing a paper for the duration of the war. All this while there was no water, little food, no gas or electric, constant sniper fire and shelling…truly an example of courage and determination to keep close the things that make us human while in an often dehumanising world. There’s a brilliant short documentary about this called Miss Sarajevo which I highly suggest watching if you’re at all interested. 

I realise now that I have a lot to write about Sarajevo…I was unprepared for how I would feel about it (very much the same way i felt about Palestine when I visited briefly in 2010) the city, the kindness II encountered had a huge impact on me and I’m already planning when I can return.

You know, I do sometimes wonder what the fuck I am doing…very occasionally I’ll have a sleepless night and worry that I’m 33 and don’t own a towel or saucepan set, I don’t have children yet, that I spend writing wages on plane and train tickets as quickly as anything comes in, I own three pairs of shoes and one evening dress, how will I ever form lasting relationships when I’m never anywhere longer than a month (though I know things don’t work that way). And then I stand at the top of hill looking over the shimmer busy, thriving streets of Sarajevo, the call for prayer echoes from the many Mosques in the surrounding districts and I know I’ll return to my tiny little apartment, sit down and write words that mean something to me and even might end up meaning something to other people too…and I know, I’m exactly where I’m meant to be, this is exactly what I’m meant to be doing, right now, right here. 

And right now? Right now I’m at Split airport preparing for dashing straight from Gatwick airport to talk live on BBC Scotland’s Culture Show with Janice Forsyth and Damian Barr chatting about ‘writing and place.’ tomorrow. I’ll be on between 3.45 and 4pm if you fancy a wee listen.

I’ll spend the evening with two of the people I love most in the world before getting on a train up to Wigtown Book Festival where I’ll be discussing Thirst this very Thursday night with the wondrous Peggy Hughes. I am very excited about it as Pegs is one of my favourite chairs and by all accounts Wigtown is a fucking blast. Will report back on all shenanigans but, if you’re about, why not come and join in.

Then, then onto another train down to talk about ‘Voice in Writing’ at Birmingham Literary Festival with my pal Nikesh Shukla (Shuks, as I like to call him), Lottie Moggach and Sathnam Sanghera…it’s Friday night, the pub is sure to follow, you should come along if yer about - strongly suspect it’ll be a very good event. 

And then…then I’ll take the train down to London spend the day with some more of my favourite folks and directly onto another plane to Lisbon where I’ll be spending what I do sincerely hope will be a glorious October full of visitors, cherry liqueur, custard tarts, runs by the sea and long writing stints at the library (somehow I’ve written over half my novel now…I don’t know when really but it happened and it’s not all shite).

As ever..only one word: grateful. Actually two for this last month…very humbled and hugely grateful.

And here’s some pictures…a wee taste of my Balkan adventure.