Marc Nash's Blog, page 27

Reading Live

Few writers have acting or voice training. Some like me have profoundly uninteresting voices to listen to. I always used to shy away from making videos of me just stood there to camera droning on.

But reading live is I believe absolutely vital for any author. Not only as the most immediate way to connect with your audience, but also through reading over your work you nearly always come to see new things in it, or learn to see some of the unconscious processes that informed the work that you were unaware of until now.

I took my cue from poetry slams where the poets performed their words. That is through gesture and movement they brought their words to life, literally embodying their words, or acting them out. Now poets usually have one advantage over prose story writers, that is their rhythms and rhymes means they are far more likely to have committed their words to heart, freeing them to move and gesture uninhibited. Writers are usually rooted with the book in one hand.

So I have one arm/hand free to gesture. Yet even with one arm you can draw quite a visual picture. The hand is an organ of intimacy, either reaching out, or clasping, stroking, punching or whatever. When I rehearse any story for reading live, I am choreographing what my arm is doing, matching it to specific words and phrases. Such movements also help me pace the reading of the words, like a conductor only I'm conducting myself.

There are still some restrictions, mainly arriving around the fixity of the mic. So for example, you can't sink down into a crouch if the text suggests it, which was a pity for one of my pieces "Wings" which I read last night at the Brixton Book Jam. But you can still do a lot and in the case of that story, about a junky angel, I furled and unfurled my wings as arms, the book-free arm doing just that bit more than the book-cradling arm, because jiggling the book up and down makes it a tad tough to read the words! You also have to ensure your motions don't take your mouth too far away from the mic, so that when I enacted looking up at an ultrasound screen for my other story "Echoes", only a slight turn of the head is enough to suggest it, simply because you are no longer at that point looking straight out into the audience.

I don't have a video of last night's performance, but you can listen to it here. My stories are in set 2, 33 minutes in.

"Extra-Curricular" - Story themes

There are 44 (45 in the print version) stories in my new flash fiction collection "Extra-Curricular", arranged around a school subject timetable. Here are the stories and their themes.

PHYSICS:
1) "Night Vision" - Voyeurism enhanced by a thermal imaging camera
2) "A Round, A Bout" - A 'Ring Girl', the woman who holds up the board with the round number during the breaks between rounds at a boxing match, here is not your usual suspect...
3) "Bedroom Ballistics" - Some role-playing as a husband tries to keep his wife's planetary sized brain focused on the task to hand
4) "Threads" - a series of stories linked by horizontal lines
BIOLOGY
5) "Flea Circus" - a flea circus, only with the roles somewhat reversed
6) "Rebirth" - a man who has suffered brain trauma undergoes physiotherapy to restore his functioning
7) "Zombie" - the myth of the zombie, as cast through plastic surgery disasters
PSYCHOLOGY
8) "Wrist Assessment" - a series of stories all centred around the often overlooked human anatomy of the wrist
9) "Group Therapy" - Two voices compete to be heard in a group therapy session
10) "People Watching" - A sniper who spends his time viewing people through the crosshairs of his rifle scope, finds it hard to readjust when back in civilian life
11) "Bas-Relief" - A human brain constructed from the labyrinth of its memories
LOGIC/PHILOSOPHY
12) "A Moment In Time" - When you time travel, just how do you decide the exact moment in your history to return to?
GEOMETRY
13) "Overpass" - A series of stories linked by perpendicularity
HISTORY
14) "Occupational Hazard" - A humorous tale of occupational surnames, when no one quite lives up to their name
15) "Blood Angel" - A witch burning fails to stamp the authority of the judges and executioners on the crowds who have gathered for the spectacle
LANGUAGES
16) "Bye Bye Lingual" - The last native speaker of a language contemplates the extinction of his mother tongue if he dies
17) "The Conversion Gag" - A strange translation device
18) "Compound Fracture" - A German engineer explores London and the English language
ENGLISH
19) "Reading For Two" - A man reads to his wife on her death bed
20) "Phoneanemic" - A sneeze wreaks a terrible paranoia on a man as to whether others are talking about him
21) "The Word Alchemist" - The alchemy of language under a very strange investigation
ART
22) "Perspective" - An alien species observing Earth armed only with art criticism books to guide them
23) "Life Class" - How humans might look to others
DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY
24) "Performance Anxiety" - The anxiety caused by not having the latest version of a gadget
MUSIC
25) "Disbanded" - A military band reassemble after their death
DIVINITY/RELIGIOUS STUDIES
26) "The Sky Fell In" - trying to build a church in a colonial setting where different gods are worshipped
27) "Confirmament" - redrawing the constellation of the stars into shapes we might actually recognise
28) "Wings" - A fallen angel brought low by drug addiction
POLITICS
29) "Laundry Lists" - The man who draws up lists of names for political executions
30) "Message For You People" - We don't receive any training in how to vote do we...?
31) "Drones" - Reclaiming the word 'drone' from being associated with only one of its various meanings
32) "Hollow Point" - Bullets received through the post marked with your name on....
ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
33) "Crowd Sauced" - Mob justice in the most mundane of causes
34) "The Disenchanted Forest" - Folklore recast in the polluted modern world
CAREERS
35) "In Triplicate" - A put-upon secretary thinks only of revenge on her boss
EXTRA-CURRICULAR
36) "Pinboard Wizard" - A tale told from the viewpoint of a college noticeboard
37) "An Ideal Woman" - the image of women in everyday life
38) "Echoes" - A mother to be sees her baby on the ultrasound screen
39) "Trading Places" - A married couple have a suicide pact for when one leaves the other through death
40) "Eye In The Back Of His Hands" - A woman and her blind lover
41) "Clutch" - A woman, four lovers and their colour-coded handbags...
42) "Table Plan" - A poker player with plenty of tics and tells
43) "Johnny Smoke" - a comedic noirish detective story
44) "Subjectify" - a 100 word story about a serial killer finally behind bars

Bonus Story
CLASSICS
45) "Boustrophedon" - A tale written in Classical Greek boustrophedon style


Available for pre-order on Amazon UK, Amazon US, I-Tunes

Published September 18th

"Extra-Curricular" Story Prompts

When you're writing a new story just about every week, you need to find inspiration in the things around your daily life. Something in a book, in the news, an image on film or an advert, a song lyric. Anything can be utilised as we writers pounce on it like the magpies we are. So with the forthcoming publication of my fifth collection of flash fiction stories, I thought I'd give the story behind some of the stories, what actually prompted the idea to pop into my head.

"Night Vision"  I am a huge music fan, always on the trawl for mew tunes. I'm on a couple of mailing lists for record stores and get weekly new release updates. I usually try and check out any that sound interesting by going to YouTube. Can't remember the band as the music didn't grab me, but their video was of a man's movements in this incredible blued out visual. I don't know if it was thermal imaging or some other design treatment, but it sent me thinking. You really got see see and think about the movements of the human body in a wholly different way.

"Blood Angel" This came about by a striking image in an "X-Men" movie of the character of Jean Grey with her red hair billowing against flames the same hue, so you almost couldn't tell which was hair and which was fire.

"Zombie" In my last collection "28 Far Cries" I wrote a story deconstructing the werewolf myth. Here I take the same treatment to the myth of the zombie and equate it with plastic surgery disasters. I'm not a big one for myths.
"Flea Circus" I'd always known of the existence of flea circuses, but when the phrase was prompted once again in something I was reading, I went and looked up how they were actually constituted. Then it very quickly became the notion of scale as I had human beings performing feats for an audience of giants. There are some great flea circus videos on YouTube.
"Reading For Two" Just the touching gesture of a husband reading to his dying life as she lapsed into unconsciousness. I was very moved by such an act.
"Phoneanemic" When you sneeze, you are deafened by your own noise and your eyes reflexively lid themselves for protection. When this happens in the middle of a conversation, you lose what is being said through the sneeze. So I had some fun trying to recover the missing meaning effaced by an explosive sneeze!
"Perspective" There is an author called Ben Marcus who writes the most remarkable fiction that pulls and stretches at just how language functions. He has a book called "The Age Of Wire And String" which is never overtly explained, but seems to be a dictionary/anthropological work of an alien species observing the human race on Earth but not quite 'getting' our language. So I wrote this story about aliens observing and interpreting the human race if their guidebook was formed from all the Earth's canon of art criticism. 
"Performance Anxiety" Just from thinking about how quickly our consumer technology becomes obsolete. Remember 8-Track music cartridges, Betamax videos or Sony Walkmans? I do.
"Drones" Many nouns have several shades of slightly differing meaning. The word drone unfortunately in recent parlance has come to stand for only one thing, the military pilotless aircraft. I explore all the other meanings of the word and try and reinstate them alongside the prevalent meaning. When read out live, I try and make the words sound like a drone. 
"Bye Bye Lingual" Periodically you hear of a language in danger of dying out with its last speaker. This is a story to honour that happenstance.
"Rebirth" This came from watching a true crime programme about a victim who was strangled to within an inch of her life and suffered some brain damage from oxygen starvation. The programme was an uplifting portrait of her battle to recover all her faculties as she battled back to have the last victory over her assailant.
"Bas Relief" This did originate from a visual prompt provide by "VisualVerse" of a human brain. Just looking at it I was struck by the notion it could be viewed as lots of human beings compressed and packed one upon another to form a labyrinth.
"Compound Fracture" I've always been fascinated by certain aspects of German grammar even though I don't speak the language. After all, it is closely related to English through their shared Anglo-Saxon roots. I love the concept that if a word for what you're trying to say doesn't exist, you can sculpt it by joining together other words in German. Since I have found myself in this situation as a writer, I went ahead and wrote a story in which I could indulge this ability in English.
"Disbanded" A music video from one of my favourite bands provided the image of a set of skull drums mounted from the hips. 

"Confirmament" I have never understood how the drawings of star constellations of the Zodiac work. So I started imagining what it would be like to redraw them.
"Wings" from a lyric in the Birthday Party song "Mutiny In Heaven"

"Overpass" For some reason I got really hung up on perpendicularity, things crossing one another that otherwise would have had no relationship. I saw it only as an omen of ill, such as when a cat walks across your shadow. The title was a reversal of the word "Passover" which gave me the last paragraph of the story.
"Crowd Sauced" This came from reading about the folk justice meted out through Rough Music and wondering about what a contemporary version might look like. Recycling Nazis was my response, even though I happily and assiduously recycle.
"The Disenchanted Forest" Reading about folk symbols and translating them to their modern day equivalent. Some more Umweltverschmutzung  spilling over from "Compound Fracture". It means world pollution, literally 'environmental dirt'.
"In Triplicate" When secretaries had to type in triplicate using carbon papers, I just wondered what it would be like if the 'in triplicate' part was extended to other aspects of life beyond a typewriter. 
"Echoes" Ultrasound images of foetuses, so recognisable, so striking and achingly beautiful and all constructed from sound waves. I've written about the relationship of sound to language and memory before, but this is a story about the relationship of sound to the visual sense and emotions. 



Available for pre-order on Amazon UK, Amazon US, I-Tunes

Lock And Key - Friday Flash

Paris, city of romance.
At the Pont des Arts, lovers declare their eternal love for one another by tagging their appellations to the cold metal of a padlock, engaging the lock and dispatching the key into the Seine to seal their chastity. 
The municipality, afraid of the weight of love degrading the tensile strength of the bridge and plunging future lovers to their watery graves, removed the pullulating concatenation of padlocks. They declared however, that Paris was still the city for lovers. Only the chastity belts were now digital, their keys selfies.
The hackers had no trouble picking the padlock of Ashley Madison's source code and releasing the names of the unfaithful lovers around the world.
The Seine failed to turn to rust with the betrayal.

Paris, city of mistresses and not just separate beds, but separate bedrooms.

 

Brimful Of Book Titles

With a million books being published every second (unofficial stat), it's maybe none too surprising that many books share titles with others in the market. Now it is possible to ensure uniqueness, "Psoriasisters" as an epic family saga ought to stand alone, or "Campfire Legends of Hopalong Goldfarb" should nicely niche the Jewish Westerns market. "Quantum Vichyssoise" for those cookbooks in zero gravity...

I give a lot of thought to my book titles, but one thing I omitted to do was to check top see what was already out there. I was alright with my first novel

"A,B&E" was unmatched by any other title. Largely I think because it was you know, conceptual!


















My second novel took it's title from the slogan of the Anti-war movement campaigning against war in Iraq. I later discovered it was listed against the enfant terrible of British journalism Julie Burchill's



















But it was with my third novel that I really should have done my homework and ever since which I unfailingly do. The number of books called "Time After Time" is mind-boggling. And a tad depressing. Of all my books this one had the most titles I went through until I landed on what I thought was the perfect one. It so fit the book, but apparently it fits scores of others too. I even met one of the authors of the same-titled books on Twitter this week when he RT'd a pun hashtag entry of mine. We both followed each other and commented how each other's book looks interesting. Neither of us bought the other's tome though!












And so to my upcoming new publication, a collection of flash fiction entitled "Extra-Curricular". It goes to print soon, so I looked up books with the same name. Unsurprisingly there are a few, predictably about illicit affairs between students and teachers. So, safe in the knowledge that there isn't a whiff of paedophilia within my pages, I commend to you my relatively matchless title


Available for pre-order from Amazon & I-Tunes
Published 18th September

How Do You Order Your Short Stories In A Collection?

"Extra-Curricular" is my fifth collection of flash fiction. Trying to figure out the order of the stories is as hard now as it was for my first collection. There's no reason why it would be any easier, since the stories are, of course, different, so each collection has to find its own feel and tone through the journey from story to story.

You don't want to group a bunch of stories that are all heavy in tone, but nor do you want to group some that are comedic, only to discover you haven't enough left to space out the heavier stories elsewhere in the book. Then there is always the one story that doesn't seem to fit anywhere, no other stories seem to run naturally into it or from it. Stick it at the end, but then it feels like the reader is ending on a note that isn;t the one you were looking to strike (the last story impression is as significant as the opener).

You think you've ordered them finally, only to discover on a read through that two successive stories echo one another in an image, or a word or a theme and that can diminish the power of each. So you look to move one of them and then the whole Jenga structure comes tumbling down because you can't rearrange it satisfactorily!

You always want a particularly strong story to open with. I normally go for one with comedy just to ease the reader into the work. "Extra-Curricular" perhaps breaks with that tradition although originally I did have a comedic story pencilled in there. But I was struggling throughout to order the 40+ stories when I suddenly hit on a solution.

When I try and figure out the running order, I always try and tag each story with its theme or style. With this collection I finally realised that the stories loosely could be tagged with school timetable subjects. Some of those subjects are a bit old-fashioned, such as Geometry or Logic/Philosophy, others are a bit modish and trendy such as Environmental Studies but hey that's poetic license right? Then there are some subjects that aren't represented at all, such as Maths and Chemistry. But then this isn't a hard and fast school timetable.

This broke the back of the ordering, in that now I could group together 3s and 4s of stories linked by subject theme. It would only be a question then of ordering the subject groups. Only... Some of the stories could easily be categorised as more than one subject. "Bas-Relief", ostensibly about the human brain, could be Biology or where it ended up as, Psychology. "Night Vision", the opener, was pegged as Physics because it involved thermal imaging, but it could easily have been Biology as bacteria and petri dishes are referenced within the story. "Confirmament" could have been Physics, History or where it actually ended up Divinity/Religious Studies.  For some reason, both the stories under the label of Art are science fiction...

And then there are the nine stories labelled as Extra-Curricular; stories of smoking, gambling, sex and love, all activities engaged in the playground or behind the bike sheds!

Oh there goes the bell for class. Reading books out on your desks please.


Available for pre-order on Amazon UK, Amazon US, I-Tunes

Method Man - Friday Flash

He was Method Acting to within an inch of his life. Every second of every livelong day. Stanislavsky would be so proud. The Actors’ Studio would be so proud. If there were anyone left alive to witness his performance. Instead of wig and greasepaint, he adorned himself in blood and viscera. A fresh coat each day of his rank costume. Primitive man had studied the animals with such attention, that eventually they were able to mimic every one of their motions so as to hunt them. Here he was having to ape his predators to avoid becoming food for them.
The human offal masked the odour of his own untainted meat. He moved and sounded enough like them so as not to draw down notice upon him. In truth they were hardly the observant type. He shambled with the best of them, only deviating when he reached a supermarket and surreptitiously caching any cans of food he could find inside his clothes. 
For that was what they did all day, window shopped. What else was there for him to do? No theatre, cinema, sports events, no restaurants or boulevard cafés. The world had stopped passing by. Just this aimless mooching. The sun was still in the sky, trees still lined the verge, mountains still framed the horizon, but the natural world no longer seemed sublime. Man used to bask and wonder in the awe of Nature, lighting and providing and uplifting their lives, but their lives, his sole life, meant that she was now so terribly far from elevating anything. Illuminating nothing but this abominable scene. Providing for nothing now that there was no one left to harvest any nutrients, apart from second hand human flesh. Enthralling nothing in degraded brains that were of no greater sentience to every flower and plant and dung beetle. Even Wordsworth would be hard pressed to rhapsodise about this relinquished Nature. Shorn of her adoring audience she hadn’t curled up and died, but waxed on impassively.

He wondered why he bothered striving to survive. What was the purpose? There was no truth to be found in what he was doing. He had to so inhabit the world of the zombie, he effectively was one for all the inundations of his tormenting thoughts. It was all moot anyway, his food would eventually run out and he would starve to death. It was just a question of whether he might outlive the zombies or not, as some foolish asseveration of human pride. For the zombies too would run out of food and their corrupted bodies would close up and shut down on them for want of rancid sustenance. They were the ultimate deadly virus, having wholly colonised the human host and now unable to replicate any further. Just like him. That blind and ne’er understood human drive to reproduce offspring into future generations, now standing forlorn and superannuated in the sacs of his scrotum. What did Stanislavsky and Wordsworth have to say on that matter? Whither art? Whither seminal truth? Seemed man in his pomp and prime had little more understanding than these hollowed men. But there was no one he could relay that insight to. 

Extra-Curricular - Image gallery

While I don't often get prompted for stories from visual images, when I initially post them to this blog I usually try and accompany them with an image to encapsulate them.

So with my new collection of flash stories "Extra-Curricular" being published in September, here is a gallery of images associated with some of the stories.

 "Night Vision"









"Echoes"













 "Drones" 


"Confirmament"
 "Overpass"

 "Eyes In The Back of His Hands"
"Hollow Point"
"Pinboard Wizard"
 "Wings"
"Life Class"
"Boustrophedon"
"Performance Anxiety"
"A Round, A Bout"
"Crowd Sauced"
"The World Alchemist"
"People Watching"





 "The Disenchanted Forest"













"Flea Circus"









"Compound Fracture"














"Disbanded"













 "Bedroom Ballistics"
 "Blood Angel"
"Wrist Assessment"

Book Trailer - "Extra-Curricular"

     My new (5th) collection of flash fiction will be published on September 18th. "Extra-Curricular" has 44 tales (45 in the print version) arranged around a school timetable.

Here is the trailer for the book, with the first story "Night Vision"

Blind Date Dialectic - Friday Flash

Needy or carefree?Careerist or nester?Earnest or wanton?Antagonistic or placid?Lacy or leather?Realist or fantasist?Manhater or hussy?  Pussycat or scold? Golddigger or kindhearted?Artful or unaffected?Affectionate or ardent?Mardy or relaxed?Waxed or bearded?Fearless or mousy?Frivolous or prudent?Prudish or uninhibited?Unintelligent or forensic?Neurotic or unsentimental?Augmented or natural?Turpitude or chaste?Hassled or poised?Poisonous or juicy?Judgemental or tame?Amazonian or pacifist?Fisting or cunnilingus?Gusher or shrivelled?Vajazzled or trim?Frigid or freak?Speak or spurn?
Yours or mine?