H.J. Hampson's Blog, page 5

The Intrepid Vegetarian Files: Cuba, part 1

I’d been warned that Cuba wasn’t going to be easy. They are poor and vegetarianism, unless practiced for religious reasons, is understandably rarely practiced in such countries. To boot, Cuban cuisine is renowned for its blandness – pork, rice and beans is the staple dish, and just as you might think ‘oh great, well just the rice and beans is OK’, for some reason they often add a bit of pig skin to the rice.

I arrived in Havana very tired and very hungry after meagre and uninspiring food on the Virgin Atlantic flight from Gatwick. But thank God, there was pizza available in the hotel’s cafe!  Now, I am under no illusions that pizza is always the fail-safe option, having had a bread-crust-with-plastic-cheese concoction once in Uruguay, but I thought the Cubans couldn’t do that much worse with it… could they? Pizza with seasonal vegetables. This comprised of tinned carrots and what tasted like tinned onion, sitting on far too much tasteless, gloopy cheese sauce. Comprehensively disgusting.  ‘Oh, no’ I thought, the next two weeks are not going to be easy.

I was on an organised excursion, one of hundreds of the Europeans tourists who zip about the country in big air-conditioned buses. This isn’t my usual mode of travel, liking as I do to rough it with the locals, but I’d read that Cuba is hard to get around by yourself.  So the next day we all climbed aboard our bus with our guide, Freddy, and set off for Santa Clara, stopping for lunch at a government-owned roadside restaurant where I dubiously picked over some un-indefinable buffet bar salads. Still, I’d already discovered that the rum measures were large and cheap, so the drinking front was looking OK.

Santa Clara is where the rebels won a decisive victory in the revolution, there is a model of the army train they derailed there and Che Guevara’s mausoleum is nearby.  The town itself is pretty unremarkable as Cuban towns go, but walking down the street there is one of my favourite memories of the trip. I was traipsing up a dirty, narrow back street trying to avoid the battered old Ladas and Chevvys that came chugging past, when jazz music began to play. As I reached the door of a drab, decrepit building the music got loader and when I peered inside I discovered a full jazz band, dressed in matching white suits, on the stage of a theatre all draped in red, playing an afternoon concert for enraptured audience. Down the next street, a young guy stood chatting with his friends, his double base propped up against the kerb, and a women rushed past carrying a flamboyantly decorated cake… in Cuba there always seems to be someone hurrying down the street with a cake. The old American cars, the converted-lorry buses, the rickshaws and the horse-drawn traps paraded past the ration shops and the racks of Che t-shirts. You could sit and watch the traffic here for hours, I can’t imagine doing that anywhere else in the world.  I thought of the line from Blue Nile’s, ‘Let’s Go Out Tonight’, ‘where the cars go by…’. It seemed an appropriate song and it stuck with me for the whole trip… it’s sad but hopeful, a bit like the run-down villas, the battered cars and the stinking streets, but there’s always a good night to be had wherever you are on the island, with a salsa band always on hand and unending supplies of Havana Club.

It was one day into the trip and I felt I was already figuring out what Cuba was all about, to hell with the manky pizzas.

London Screenwriters Festival

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Horror is where it’s at

I’ve just got back from an exhausting but brilliant weekend at London Screenwriters Festival. It was my first time and a total hairpin bend of a learning curve. Here are just a few of the things I learnt.

1. I should have a crack at writing for radio.

There were loads of really inspiring sessions but the ‘Should you write for radio’ was unexpectedly motivating. The speakers, R4 commissioning editors Jeremy Howe and Caroline Raphael, writer Katie Hims and producer David Tyler argued that radio and feature film writing are more closely related than you might think.  The possibilities in radio drama are almost endless. Radio scripts are cheap to make: you could write a forty five minute drama set amidst the Battle of Trafalgar if the right sound effects can be found.  Jeremy Howe said the BBC is looking for more comedy and horror, which brings me onto…

2. I should write a horror script.

Low budget horror is the best way to get a feature film writing credit, period.  But…

3. You can do *almost*anything on a low budget with a bit of ingenuity.

Producers Signe Olynyk and Bob Shultz gave a really insightful case study on how they made their forthcoming movie ‘Below Zero’ for very little money. Set decorating including mixing food scraps with powder paint and daubing it on the walls of a disused slaughter house.

4. Hollywood execs and producers aren’t really that scary.

5. Pitching isn’t that scary.

The aforementioned Bob and Signe brought their Great American Pitchfest concept over here, to create the first Great British Pitchfest at the festival.  The concept is simple: a load of producers, execs and agents sit at rows of desks and pitchers queue up for a five minute speed pitch at whoever they want to talk to.  I was absolutely bricking it before hand, but it turned out to be rather fun.

6. The Full Monty was, at one point, going to be set in Detroit.

And other revelations. Hearing screenwriter Simon Beaufoy talk was one of the highlights of the festival, and he seems like a very nice man.

I can’t recommend the London Screenwriters Festival enough for anyone who writes scripts.  The LSF team did a fantastic job organising this year’s festival and I met so many cool people.

Anyway, better get back to that screenplay…

Sacre Bleu! The Vanity Game will be coming out in French.

I am très heureux to announce that The Vanity Game has been bought by the French publisher, Liana Levi. They have an interesting selection of titles, including the late Primo Levi, a literary hero of mine, so I am rather chuffed to be sharing a ‘label’ with him.

The thought of having my work translated into another language is exciting and rather strange. How will the novel, which is written in first person, and sometimes quite colloquial, work in French? Beaumont Alexander, my footballer protagonist is, like many of those in his profession, rather blunt, so it would be something of a shock to him to find his words translated into the most romantic language on the planet.

The foreign rights would never have been sold had it not been for my agent, Judy Moir, and this has just reinforced my view that the ‘traditional publishing’ route of getting an agent and then hopefully getting a publisher is still better than the self-published route. Self publishing may be OK if you have the time and the nouse to sell works in your own language, but few people would be able to pay for a translator and then successfully market their work themselves abroad. Foreign rights are key way for writers to make money from their works and enables their work to reach a much, much wider audience.

Anyway, one of the more whimsical reasons I am so excited about this deal is

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Henri Toulouse Le Trec and his absinthe walking stick

so I can refer to ‘my publisher, in Paris’, and imagine that I sound like Ernest Hemingway or something. Last time I was in Paris, I found a fantastic walking tour in the Lonely Planet guide that took in all the famous literary sights on the Left Bank, from Hemingway’s first apartment to the hotel where Oscar Wilde died to the posh restaurant where F. Scott Fitzgerald enviously stared through the window at James Joyce. That is my kind of tourism.  It’s quite a knackering walk though, next time I think I’ll make à la Henri Toulouse Le Trec, and take a walking stick filled with absinthe.

Ted, a rant

I went to see the much-hyped Ted last night. What a mistake. I left the cinema feeling like there must be something wrong with me, that I’m a totally prude. This is worrying as I am currently working on a comedy screenplay myself.  Ok, admittedly, bits of Ted are funny, like when the bear calls a fat kid Susan Boyle, but the rest of the cinema was in stitches throughout this puerile film.  Fart jokes, gay jokes, ‘white trash’ girl jokes, people with debilitating illnesses jokes.  Am I overly sensitive because I don’t find these type of ‘jokes’ funny?

There is a scene at the end where a gay couple briefly kisses – people laughed at that.  Like, this was a central London cinema, you would think these people, although mostly teenagers, would have seen men kissing before? I can’t see the comedic value in this.

I’m always suspicious about American comedies, because most of them seem to go in for the toilet humour type comedy.  What changed my mind was The Hangover, which I thought was pretty smart. There is actually an earlier draft of The Hangover screenplay floating around online, and it’s quite different to the shooting script. Interestingly, the early draft is much more ‘toilet’ focused.  For example, there’s a whole storyline about one of the characters fearing he had gay sex the night before and the hooker character is a horrid, brash, busty women.  But someone along the way decided to take out the toilet humour and go for a more sophisticated tone, like getting the eternally sweet Heather Graham to play the hooker, who, in the film, we essentially feel sympathetic towards rather than mocking.

The Hangover went on to make millions. So what is with the fart jokes in TED, and why are people still finding this funny?

I started thinking about why I don’t like this kind of humour. It’s odd, because the night before I watched Withnail & I, one of my most favourite ever films.  Obviously, there is a whole storyline in this film where ‘I’ fears he is going to be, well basically, raped by Withnail’s gay Uncle Monty, but I don’t find this offensive like the gay jokes in Ted. Perhaps it’s because the main characters in Withnail & I are wonderfully camp themselves and experience abuse because of this (like in the ‘ponce’ scene). They themselves are tragic characters.  And from the first scene Uncle Monty is in, we are already encouraged to feel sympathetic towards him – he too is a failed actor, but is now too old to ever succeed. And when he’s cornering a half-naked ‘I’ in the bedroom, it’s actually ‘I’ we are laughing at. By the end of the stay in the cottage, Uncle Monty is portrayed as a truly tragic character who is a victim of society’s prejudice, because, in a time when homosexuality was illegal, he was never able to find true love.

With Ted, it’s a macho white guy, and a teddy bear inhabited by the personality of a macho white guy who make these jokes.  The Mark Wahlberg character is a childish drop-out, yet he lives with (or should that be off) his implausibly beautiful and successful girlfriend (Mila Kunas) in a nice house, so really, he’s still got a lot going for him.  He’s never really tragic like Withnail and I are, so when he mocks people who are in a more potentially tragic position in society it just comes across as the strong guy making fun of the weaker people.

This, I think, is why I just can’t stand those toilet humour American comedies… the people making the jokes are always fairly well-adjusted white guys.

So the other thing I disliked about this film: I just can’t imagine Ted being about a woman who was addicted to cannabis, had a crappy job, a best friend who was a living toy, yet a gorgeous boyfriend who holds a management position at a PR firm.  No, because in Hollywood the white guy drop-out still deserves the beautiful girl and some funny lines, but the female drop out (unless a good looking hooker), or the non-white drop-out, or the gay drop-out doesn’t get the beautiful, successful guy/girl and usually doesn’t even get a happy ending, because, perhaps Hollywood is saying, these types of people don’t deserve it.

Anyway, I’m off to write a film about a gay black girl who works in a supermarket and has a living My Little Pony and a white banker girlfriend…

My trip to Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival

Well, I have just about recovered from my first ever trip to Theakstons Old Peculiar Crime Writers Festival in Harrogate. All in all, it was quite an eye-opening experience. Firstly, I should say that I am still adjusting to the fact that my novel, The Vanity Game, is a crime novel.  I didn’t write it intending it to be one, I saw it more of a black comedy which happened to have a bit of violence and a detective popping up in it.  But my publishers, Blasted Heath, seem to think it is. So off I went to Harrogate to find out what crime writing was all about. Despite being left on occasions with the feeling that my taste in books is horribly pretentious (I fucking love Evelyn Waugh, I can’t help it) overall it was great to meet other people working within the genre and lots of passionate readers, and listen to many interesting panel discussions.

Of these discussions, the most interesting to me were, unsurprising, one on e-books and one on crime fiction and why it doesn’t get nominated for prizes like the Booker.

Firstly, e-books.  This was a panel discussion featuring prolific e-book author and self-publishing entrepreneur Stephen Leather, the MD of Little Brown, author Steve Mosby, literary agent Philip Patterson and a book seller. The debate was fiery, with only Leather really gunning for the advantages of the e-book and everyone else, including most of the audience, being either really skeptical or fearing it like Christians feared Slayer records back in the 80s.  To be honest, it was not long before the debate turned predictable: the same old arguments about piracy fears, quality fears and, I don’t know, the satanic messages that are contained in all e-books if you read them backwards. What really annoyed me, as an e-book author, was that some of the panel and some of those commenting from the audience seemed to think that if a book is only out as an e-book, it is therefore unedited crap. The Vanity Game was edited by my agent, an editor, and a copy editor.  Why, therefore, should it be any less well edited than a traditionally published book? Does no-one remember Jonathan Franzen getting in a mega strop on News Night because there were loads of errors in the first printed copies of Freedom?!

Whilst I do have concerns about very low priced/ free e-books devaluing creativity, I can only commend Mr. Leather for exploiting the opportunities offered by the digital revolution and doing stuff like selling his short stories on Amazon.  Most people think there is no money in short stories, so this is great. But I do think that authors who sell their novels very cheaply or give them away risk making readers think that all fiction should be free, thus making it even harder for writers to make any money from their work.  The NUJ advises against freelance journalists contributing work for free, lest it pushes down freelance fees, and I think that argument is relevant for novelist too.

The panel on crime fiction and literary prizes featured authors Val McDermid, Laura Lippman, Simon Lelic and John Harvey.  I think this panel really needed a full-on literary author on it to defend character-driven stories.  At one point there was a discussion about prose style. Simon Lelic described how he had once written a beautiful sentence, but he hoped his readers would not linger on it thus slowing the pace of the novel down, and there was talk about how crime writers do not tend to develop an individual literary style, which is more the thing of the literary author, and prefer to concentrate on fast, tight plotting.  I found it funny no one mentioned that some authors (yes, you, Larsson, Cole and Patterson) writing within the genre do have a style though: clunky and clichéd ridden. You could never write a character-driven novel about some big philosophical idea in the style of Stieg Larsson really, could you? Maybe it is big-selling authors like this that are letting the side down and giving crime fiction a bit of a bad rep amongst snooty lit types?

I’m not ashamed to admit I like literary fiction because it says something and I like sometimes lingering on sentences. Crime fiction, or romance, or thrillers are great if you want a bit of escapism, but often I want a bit more from a book, no disrespect at all to those who don’t.

I think literary fiction is its own genre and should have prizes and festivals to itself.  Not least because it’s really in the doldrums at the moment and needs a bit of yearly promotion from the Booker. This debate, named ‘A donkey in the Grand National?’ sort of suggested that crime writers should aspire to get to nominated for the Booker prize, like literary fiction is ‘the best’, but someone like Anne Enright would never be considered for a Dagger award or Harrogate’s own Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year Award, so why should crime writers really expect to get nominated for a literary prize, unless they are writing literary fiction featuring crime elements? Within the crime writing community I’m sure a Golden Dagger is as, if not more, prestigious than a Booker prize.

I had a great time anyway, it was fabulous to catch up with old friends like soon-to-be-published Helen Cadbury,  meet other writers such as David Belbin and K.A Laity, and even have a chat with best-selling author Peter Robinson, who is a very nice man indeed . Maybe see you all next year!

Blackout – TV review

I watched the new BBC noir-ish drama Blackout last night which came highly recommended by the Guardian TV guide (a “corking opener it declared). I have to admit, I went into this with reservations. The last two new dramas I’ve watched on the BBC, True Love and Line of Duty haven’t exactly lived up to the hype.  I thought True Love was predictable nonsense and Line of Duty was… OK… it’s the usual case of just not being able to make TV as innovative and exciting as the Americans at the moment.

Blackout looked like it was going to have a crack, with a good cast and big scenery: an almost Gotham style city-scape, though it was hard to actually believe this was anywhere in the quaint old UK, apart from the fact that it was raining substantially.

So anyway, to summarise: Christopher Eccleston is playing a city councilor who likes booze and whores, Dervla Kirwan is his long-suffering missus.  Eccleston goes out, gets drunk, shags a whore, then possibly beats up a local supplier of services to the council (admittedly a pretty nasty one) and leaves him in a coma, but he’s too drunk to remember if he actually did or not. He wakes up with that bad old feeling that he did something stupid last night, with a bloodied hand to boot.  It’s the same idea as The Hangover, but it’s not going for the laughs.  Eccleston has total meltdown and then accidentally gets shot whilst trying to save a witness in a drugs trial from being assassinated.  He lives, and realises he must turn his life around, but he still has that sneaking suspicion that he did something stupid when he was drunk. But now he is being touted as a hero and encouraged to run for mayor, which is IRONIC because he might have murdered someone, see what they are doing there?

There were several things I thought were absolutely ridiculous about this opening episode:

The morning after the night before. The wife starts having a go at Eccleston, reading off things she’s printed from the internet about ‘blackouts’, talking like it’s some really strange phenomenon that only hardcore alcoholics experience.

Sorry? But don’t at least 50% of people experience some kind of memory loss when they are very drunk? Why would you look this up on the internet? This seemed a pretty convenient and lazy way of telling us that Eccleston couldn’t remember what had happened. I’m sure they could have found a more creative way of showing this. A tiger in the bathroom maybe?

How much time is actually passing in this show?

Eccleston gets shot in the upper chest, yet is seemingly walking around the hospital within hours, and out and about, running for mayor, within days…but…

 … What the hell are the police doing?

Surely they would have discovered that the slain council supplier was erm, pitching services to the council.  So wouldn’t they come to interview key people like Eccleston as a matter of course?  But there is no interaction whatsoever… in fact the police are barely in this opening episode.  Fair enough, if we’re looking at the whole thing through the eyes of the criminal, but I get the impression they are going to feature quite a lot later on, so a bit more screen time in the opening episode would have been good.

 Eccleston’s son has been expelled from school, but he only discovers this when he finds the kid at home when he should be at school.

WTF? This guy is a city councilor… wouldn’t the local press find it interesting that his son has been expelled from school? Wouldn’t the school phone the parents and tell them

When he’s fully recovered from being shot, he has a flashback from the drunken night out and remembers throwing some papers (presumably council tender documents) on the ground near the scene of the attack… so he goes back to look for them.

Now, surely, the police would have combed the crime scene by now? By the time it’s taken him to recover from a gunshot wound? And is it really an idea to go back to the crime scene?

Is it me, or where there a lot of mumbling, indecipherable accents in this first episode?

I can’t say I am gripped…

Short Story Day: The Interpretation of Francesca

I just realised it is Short Story Day, so here’s one I wrote a while back and read at Storytails.

And if you like, you might also like my novel, The Vanity Game, available on all e-readers now!

The Interpretation of Francesca

Monday

Melissa was bleeding starving. She’d had a pig of a day: the creative not coming up with the goods, her major client telling her he just didn’t get the campaign, boss in a right strop, meetings back to back…and consequently no lunch break. And now here she was meeting Francesca for what had been generously called ‘dinner’, but she knew full well that once again she’d give in to borderline-anorexic Fran’s pressure and opt for the salad even though what she really wanted was a big fat bowl of pasta with garlic bread, dripping with oil, on the side. If only.  They were at the new restaurant-come-bar that had opened near Smithfieldmarket.  An impressive, twisted metal chandelier hung above them, the lighting was low and the wine glasses ginormous.  Melissa felt like she had been in a thousand restaurants like this before, each one with only the slightest variation from the next.  

“Oh God, there is nothing on this menu that I can eat,” Fran was saying, “I mean I can’t eat vegetables, I can’t eat carbs, I can’t eat dairy. Do you think they’ll just do me a grilled chicken breast on its own?”

“Sorry, what?” Melissa had been too busy reading the menu.  She was so hungry it felt like her eyesight was failing – if she looked at the menu hard enough the entries became blurry and her eyes began to water.

“My new diet, have I told you about it?”

“Erm no, I don’t think you have” Melissa replied, putting down the menu before her stomach forced her to take a bite out of it.

She looked up and met Francesca’s pale blue eyes, circled in dark eyeliner, staring intently at her from under the severe black fringe.  Francesca was her best friend and yet also her biggest rival: her ‘frenemy’, to quote Gwyneth Paltrow.  And similar to the Farringdon restaurant-bar scene, Fran seemed to have gone through a thousand different diets, each one having only the slightest modification from the previous and all being along the general theme of masochistic-levels of food restriction.

“I read that if you eat a banana for breakfast, skip lunch and eat only protein for dinner you can lose twenty pounds a week,” Francesca said, “It’s like a cross between the Atkins diet and the GI diet…I mean, I know everyone says the Atkins diet gives you cancer, but I have to get into shape for Simone’s wedding, I can’t have that bitch looking skinner than me. What are you eating anyway?”

Simone’s wedding: that lucky bitch was getting hitched in some swish country house beyond the M25 to a hot guy who was big in publishing. Melissa was sick of hearing how there was going to be fireworks ‘and everything’.  Fran was going to be Simone’s bridesmaid, or maid of honour, or whatever it was appropriate to call women just past thirty in that role these days and was determined to look better than the bride whom she had known since they roomed together at their painfully liberal boarding school.

“Hmm, just a Greek Salad, I think” Melissa said, trying to sound as committed as possible.

Why, why, why couldn’t she just bring herself to order what she wanted? Why did she care what Francesca thought?  Would Francesca really bitch to every PR in Shoreditch that Melissa had eaten carbs? Would they really care if she did? Yes, they probably would. The people next to them had ordered garlic bread and she could smell it. She thought she might faint with hunger.

Francesca made a sort of snorting noise, presumably at the thought of both fattening Feta cheese and fattening olives being present in one dish.  Then she started rooting through her new Mulberry handbag. Melissa, quietly seething with frustration, watched in silence as she pulled out her precious Blackberry and began tapping away at the keypad.  Francesca seemed to have an uncanny knack for hearing her Blackberry beep in any environment – train stations, noisy bars,Londonstreets with the traffic clattering past. It reminded Melissa of a nature programme about penguins she had once seen. The adult penguins could hear their own chick’s calls over a sea of thousands of other squawking birds.  And Francesca’s Blackberry was like a chick, requiring her attention every five minutes or so.

“Oh Jesus, Clive’s emailed. The director we’d booked for the Addidas shoot tomorrow has OD’d on speedballs, what the fuck am I going to do now?” Francesca exclaimed.

“What, Jonathan Baker? Is he OK?”  Melissa thought the guy was a tosser, but cute as hell and the prospect that he might be dead made her temporarily forget her hunger and the penguin thing.

“I don’t know. Probably. He’s such a junkie, I had to give him half my stash of coke just to get him on board the project. Bloody hell, I need a Bellini to deal with this…waiter…”

It turned out Jonathon Baker had died for something like five seconds however was now, thankfully, groggy but alive.  They ate their meagre meals and after four more Bellinis Melissa went home, still hungry and slightly drunk. She ate cheese on toast whilst watching a programme about overweight Americans on Channel Five, and then went to bed.

Friday

They were having lunch to celebrate Francesca’s birthday at a gastro pub inCovent Garden.

“Why don’t we splash out and get oysters or something?” Melissa suggested.

“Are you crazy? Seafood is strictly forbidden on my new diet,” Fran said, appalled at Melissa’s suggestion.

“But it’s your birthday Fran, can’t you have a day off?”

“No way. I still need to lose five pounds for the wedding and the last diet didn’t work,” she declared adamantly.

Melissa groaned inwardly, and decided to change the subject: “Ok, let’s just stick with the salad, so what did you get for your birthday?”

“I got a necklace offSandy, but it looks awfully cheap. I think she got it from Debenhams, I don’t know what she was thinking.”

“She has just lost her job because of the recession though” Melissa tried to remind her.

“Whatever,” Francesca shrugged.

Melissa thought how their mutual friend Sandy, a casualty of the banking crisis, must have really fallen on hard times if she had to buy Francesca a present from tacky old Debanhams.   Francesca would probably have taken less offence ifSandyhad pretended she’d simply forgotten her birthday.  She wondered how her own present of a Matthew Williamson scarf had gone down.  It was lying in its nest of wrapping paper on the table, looking discarded.

“So, what did Matt get you?” she asked, trying not to look at the scarf.  She braced herself to hear what sickeningly fabulous present Matt, Francesca’s film-maker boyfriend, had given her.

“Well actually, you’ll never guess, but he got me a course of Freudian Analysis.”

“A what?” Melissa asked, almost choking on a piece of chorizo.

“Some analysis sessions with a Freudian shrink.”

“He thinks you need to see a shrink?” Melissa had to stop herself laughing, what was Matt thinking?

“No!” Francesca said adamantly, “it’s just for the hell of it. You know there’s so much more to it than all that fucking your mother business. It’s supposed to help you delve into the depths of your unconscious self.  Haven’t you heard? Freud is so in at the moment, everyone is doing it.  I read that Kate Moss has had a leather couch installed in her attic.”

Jesus, Melissa thought, she didn’t know Francesca had a deep unconscious self, there didn’t seem to be much beneath the surface.

“Oh really? But I thought Matt was a scientologist and didn’t believe in that stuff,” she asked.

“Hell, no, he just signed up because they were trying to get Tom Cruise to do a bit part in their latest film, but they’ve found someone else now.”

“Oh right.”

This all sounded very strange to Melissa. Most importantly it grieved her that she had not heard about this new trend before and had to hear it from Francesca.  She knew her friend would note that and she resolved to keep more of an eye on the scene in future.   But Freudian analysis?  She had often thought Fran was a little neurotic and wondered if a few sessions with a shrink might do her some good anyway.

They drank far too much wine with their food and Melissa went back to her office and zoned out at her computer until it was time to go to the pub again.

Wednesday

They met for a few after-work drinks in a bar-come-restaurant near Old Street. Melissa had been trying to work out if she’d been in the bar before because the sculpted light fittings looked familiar when Francesca announced that she was now single.

“What happened?” Melissa gasped.  She was shocked, but she had to admit that part of her, a fairly large and significant part, took some glee at hearing this news.  She wondered if Matt had perhaps dumped Fran and gone off with some young, blonde actress.  She felt that Francesca had always taken Matt too much for granted and had ruthlessly curbed what she deemed to be his uncouth interests, such as beer and football.

“Well, I started having these dreams that I was standing outside my flat and I couldn’t get in, like none of the keys would work,” Francesca said,  “And so I told my Freudian counsellor and he said it meant I was sexually frustrated, because like, keys and locks symbolise sex, you see? And so that was the end of Matt.”

“Just like that? But you always said you and Matt had a great sex life?”

“So I did, but my subconscious ego says otherwise, darling.” Fran said, her eyes widening as she took a suck on the straw of her Mojito.

“How did he take it?” Melissa asked, incredulously. She couldn’t believe Fran’s story. Could it really be true? Could she really have dumped the gorgeous Matt just because of a dream?

“Not well. He’s gone toStockholmfor two weeks to get over it, apparently.”

Melissa smiled to herself.  Gone toStockholmto get over it: a likely story.  He’d be shacked up with some hot Swedish girl, or two, no doubt.

She excused herself to go to the toilet, where she locked herself in a cubicle and giggled. She couldn’t believe Francesca was taking this Freud stuff so seriously. But as she sat there smirking, she heard some women come in – a high pitched, whiny, transatlantic accent…fuck her if it wasn’t Cathy Zeldburg, head of the agency that everyone wanted to work at and the most respected woman in the industry.  She sat dead still, and listened to what Cathy was saying to her acquaintance.

“So, yeah darling, apparently my superego is at war with my id, so my analyst says.”

Superego, id? My god, thought Melissa, even Cathy Z, who she had a lot of admiration for, was in on this Freud stuff. Maybe there was something in it?

When she returned to the table, Francesca began to tell her more about her Freudian sessions.   It seemed that Fran’s deep, subliminal self was a wonderful, creative and highly intelligent being who had much to give to the world, or so the analyst had told Fran.  Though this seemed at odds with the self she presented to the world Melissa was intrigued to hear how the analyst had been interpreting Fran’s dreams, picking out symbols and themes.

On the tube home, head fuzzy with Mojitos, she laughed to herself again at Francesca’s decision to dump Matt, but just then an advert above the seats opposite her caught her eye:

“Let your dreams unlock your destiny” ran the ad, above a cartoon of a head with a dream bubble containing a lock, a key, an umbrella and a door.   Unlocking destiny…maybe Matt had unlocked his own destiny by pushing Fran into this Freudian stuff Melissa mused.  She had always suspected that he had wanted to get away from her but didn’t have the balls to actually tell her so.  And now he certainly seemed to be the one who had changed his fortunes.  She wondered if he was even in cahoots with Fran’s Freudian counsellor, and this made her laugh even more.

That night, as she lay in bed the symbols that Francesca had talked about swirled around her head.  Later she had a strange dream about walking though a dark forest with her friend. Francesca had the map, but they were hopelessly lost.  In the dream Melissa knew that if only Francesca would let her see the map she would be able to find the way out of the forest.  She woke up and was unable to get back to sleep so got out of bed, pulled on her dressing gown and went to the kitchen.

When she returned to bed she turned on her laptop and googled ‘”dreams about forests” Freud’.  Wikipedia confirmed her suspicions.

She opened up a new email, and typed:

Dear Fran,

Sorry, but I don’t feel that I can be your friend anymore.  Last night I dreamed we were lost in a forest and that it was your fault because you had the map. Google tells me that Freud says this means I feel trapped by our friendship and you are a controlling personality with no clear direction.  My deep subconscious mind no longer wants to hang out with you, please don’t ever contact me again.

Love Mel x

She clicked ‘Send’, smiled, and sank her spoon deep into her pot of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

 

Being published!

On Monday an event I had dreamed of for years finally happened: I became a published author!! My novel, The Vanity Game, was released as an e-book by Blasted Heath. Being published is kind of strange – something you’ve kept to yourself for years is now out there and can be interpreted by anyone.

When I sat on my bed in an attic room in Sheffield about seven years ago and wrote out a short scene about a vain film star and his girlfriend, I never thought that it would morph into a fully formed novel and would be up there on Amazon.  For years I didn’t even tell anyone I was writing a novel, I was too embarrassed: it was like an unhealthy addiction I was ashamed to admit to having.  I thought people would think it was ridiculous of me to think that I could write a novel.   I, a serial binge drinker with a boring office job with the government, whose most prominent published work thus far had been a review of a Busted gig in the Sheffield Star (and yes, they were actually quite good), how could I be a real writer? Didn’t you have to do English Lit at Oxford and live in Paris or something?

Well, anyway, I kept going with it. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I don’t remember the point where I decided to turn that one scene into a novel. The film star became a footballer, but the scene is still the most crucial part of the story.

I still can’t quite believe that my agent and Blasted Heath deemed the book publishable, and it’s hard to imagine that people are out there reading and, hopefully, being entertained by it.   It was a total relief to get a five star first review. I can’t think how crushing it must be if your first novel gets panned in early reviews.  Whilst an e-book means you don’t get a box of books in the post* and you can’t sign them and give them to all your friends as Christmas presents, seeing the book up there on Amazon is still really, really cool.  It’s a shame neither of my parents were alive to see it, though considering the vast amount of sex and drugs in The Vanity Game, perhaps that is a good thing.

*Despite Blasted Heath being an e-publisher, I will actually be getting a box of books next Friday and you can win one over on their website.  Just two days left to enter!

At last! The Vanity Game is now out!

The day has finally arrived… The Vanity Game is now available for Kindle on Amazon UK, Amazon US and as an EPUB file for all other devices on the Blasted Heath website. 

If you prefer old fashioned books, you can enter a draw  to win one of 25 limited edition, signed and numbered copies.

If you read the book and like it, please leave a review on Amazon!

I’ll post a blog about my experience of finally being published soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Huge thanks to my agent, Judy Moir, Al Guthrie and Kyle MacRae at Blasted Heath and all my friends who have been really supportive.

Short story: Last Night

This weekend I took part in the fabulous Storytails 24 hour short story challenge, as part of the Stoke Newington Literacy festival.  There was no union bunting in sight, thankfully.

The challenge was to write a short story of under 1500 words which met the following criteria:

1. Had to be set over an hour, a day or a week

2. Had to be in a room, a city or on a trian

3. Had to feature a love relationship, a hate relationship or a celebration.

So here you go, a love story set over a day in a caravan (yes, not technically a room but it was allowed!).

 

Last Night

Kelly awoke. She was in the caravan. It was light, and the room was silent, but above her head there was a constant pattering sound: it must be raining. And Joe was not in bed next to her. Then she remembered the argument. Oh, fuck. They were walking back from the bar last night, both drunk. She didn’t know how it had started but she had a feeling she had insulted his mother. If only she could remember everything… it was all fragmented… Joe walking away, her chasing after him, the caravan door being slammed shut. A spasm of pain pulsed through her head: the hangover was bad.

Now she heard the low rumble of the TV. Joe must be up, moving about in the narrow living area.

She sat up and looked at the small travel clock. It blinked 10:25 at her. She should get up and face him. She hauled herself out of bed and pulled on her dressing gown, catching her reflection in the mirror: she’d slept in her make up last night and it showed. She pulled back the flimsy divider and stepped out into the living area. Joe was sitting on the sofa at the other end, eating toast. She looked at him but his gaze didn’t shift from the TV. This was not good.

In the cramped bathroom she washed her face in the tiny sink, scrubbing hard, trying to bring a bit of colour back then stared at her reflection, hoping it might tell her what exactly she had said last night, but it didn’t.  Back in the living area she looked at Joe again.

“Morning.”

“Morning,” he replied flatly.

“Any hot water left?”

“Maybe.”

He was the best thing that had happened to her for a long time, and now here she was, fucking it up like she always seemed to. She filled the kettle and peered out of the window as it boiled. It was raining hard, the sky as grey as a bruise. Joe was watching T4, some stupid woman squawking about something or other.

She made some tea and moved down the caravan towards him, but she noticed he cast his eyes downwards. She sat down at the table.

“It’s chucking it down,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She took a deep breath and was about to speak but he spoke first.

“I think it’s set in for the day.”

He went over to the sink and washed his plate. Kelly felt like crying. She looked at his pale skin and she wanted to touch him, embrace him, run her hand though his dark hair. She wanted him to grab her, drag her back into bed and make love to her… but the way he was acting that was definitely not going to happen. He sighed.

“Joe, that argument… last night.”

He looked at her, and for a second their eyes met. She held her breath in anticipation… but he looked at his feet then brushed past her and went into the bathroom.

She fled and threw herself down on the bed. She lay there for a while but then she heard the caravan door open then close. She got up and went to the window where she watched Joe walking away, head down against the rain. Where was he going? She returned to the bed and sat hugging her knees awhile, but still he didn’t return.

She took a shower, dressed and went to sit on the sofa to wait for him: she would confront him, ask him outright what she had said.  But as she listlessly flicked though a magazine, she began to feel sick and so she locked herself into the bathroom: there was hardly room to kneel over the toilet.  After she’d thrown up, she leaned on the sink and let her head rest against the mirror.  She was doing this, breathing slowly, letting her stomach regain its composure when she heard him return.

“Oh god,” she muttered quietly, and tried to flush the sick away, but the toilet flush was so weak so she had to wait for the tank to fill again. Everything was weak and crappy in this caravan, she thought. She rinsed her mouth and stepped out to face Joe again.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Just out. Arcade and stuff.”

It was still raining.  He sat on the sofa, looking at the paper. He was trying to do the crossword and swiveled a pen in between his fingers, clicking the nib in and out repeatedly.

She couldn’t face him though. She went back to the bed and began to cry quietly into the duvet. She must have fallen asleep as when she came round it felt much later as the light outside was fading. It was only four pm though and she was ravishingly hungry.

Joe was asleep on the sofa, his mouth open slightly and the paper just balancing on his lap. She moved quietly so as not to wake him as she made some beans on toast. Maybe everything would be better after she’d eaten.

He began to stir though. He sat up and looked around him, as if confused about where he was.  Imagine if, by chance, he’d suffered some strange bout of amnesia, forgetting all the past. She could start again with him, all new, she could teach him everything. But she saw him grimace at her as she went to the table with her food.

He stood up and walked to the bathroom. She ate small morsels as she listened to him pissing and then flushing.

“Were you sick?” he asked when he re-emerged.

“A bit, yeah,” she replied, and looked down at the food which now was totally unappealing.

He didn’t say anything, he just went back to the sofa and turned the TV on. He flicked through the channels and settled on the football scores.

She looked out of the window and watched the raindrops running down the glass like tears. Nothing moved outside. The man reading the football score’s voice was strangely calming, she let her head fall against the window and closed her eyes. She wished she could go out for a walk, get some air, get away from Joe… it was as if the weather had conspired against her to keep her trapped here. She had the urge to open the door of the caravan and run through the rain, just keep running and running, all the way to the sea, and walk into the sea until it rolled over her head…

“I’m thinking of getting pizza later,” Joe said.

She sat up. “Oh, right, cool.”

He smiled, very slightly.

She threw the rest of the toast away, and then tried to read a book, but the words kept blurring and she couldn’t take it in.  The time went by so slowly Kelly thought she might die. She knew Joe was feeling this too, this painful boredom. He watched the TV without emotion, as if he wasn’t really watching it at all, but just sitting there thinking. She wished she could make him laugh, just like she had done on previous days, or that they could get out the playing cards.  A day like this would have been perfect for drawing the curtains and playing strip poker.

“What kind of pizza do you want then?” he said after a while.

She shrugged, “the usual”, and he called up and ordered.

She joined him on the sofa, sitting near him, but not touching. He didn’t move away. They watched some crap TV show in silence, until there was a banging on the door: the pizza delivery guy. Joe went to pay him and a blast of cold air came into the caravan. He brought the pizza box over and put it between them on the sofa. She smiled at him as they ate the steaming slices. It wasn’t bad pizza, better than she’d expected.

“X Factor’s just starting,” she said.

He nodded and turned over the channel, where the booming commentator was already introducing the show, all flashing lights and screaming girls: a world away from here.

A girl started singing. She was so young and fragile and singing some ballad Kelly didn’t know, but it was haunting – she felt like it hit a vein deep inside her. She couldn’t explain it, but before she knew it, tears were rolling down her cheeks. Stupid as it was, there was something about this song – it conveyed all her misery, all her self-hate, all her self-pity.

“Kelly…”

“I just can’t remember what I said to you last night,” she wept.

He looked at her and bit his lip.

“I can’t remember what I said either.”

“What? I’ve been going crazy in here!”

“I have as well. I thought you were angry with me.”

“No…”

Their eyes met.  Joe’s face creased into smile. Soon they were both laughing, sliding off the sofa and falling into each other on the caravan floor.