London reading: 21 March 2015, Courtyard Theatre London N1

We’re off to London! Nottingham Writers’ Studio are showcasing work from their first three journals – Crime, Secrets, and A Sense of Place- in a Free Event at The Courtyard Theatre in London on Saturday 21 March.

I’ll be reading my YA short story, ‘Didn’t See Nothing’, alongside Booker nominated author Alison Moore, award winning screenwriter Michael Eaton, and other members of the studio who have contributed stories, poems and articles.

It’s a great chance for NWS to showcase some of the brilliant writing being created in Nottingham right now, and I’m really pleased my story is one of them.

If you’re around, it would be great to see you there!

Half way up

I have a curious relationship with heights. I can easily lean out over a parapet on a castle and enjoy the view – but put me on a stepladder to paint the ceiling and I’m in a cold sweat.

So I faced my fears at Clip’n Climb in Maryport, and lived to tell the tale – because I bottled it.

The setup is fantastic (perfect if you’re looking for something to do on a rainy Cumbrian day), with a load of individual climbing walls you get to use without fear of bumping into another climber. The waist harness is rigged to an industrial safety rope, which lets you down very slowly if you fall away from the climbing wall. I could see it working brilliantly for all ages and sizes, who scrambled up, hit the button at the top of their wall, then slid gracefully down, ready for the next climbing challenge. Then it was my turn.

I gave every wall a go – the simple ones, the tricky ones, the ones where you use ‘ice pick’ pegs to haul yourself up the side of a fake glacier- and each time the furthest I got was half way up.

Because I looked down, and focused on how far I had to fall.

And even after testing out the harness and the safety rope time and time again, I still had to climb back down.

Because I looked down and focused on how far I had to fall.

I had lots of fun while I was there, but I learned something about myself that I need to sort. I realise I have the same struggle with my writing every day. In the safety of a blank page, I can take risks, push my luck, and fall as many times as I like without a scratch – but I feel sometimes I only achieve half of what I could be doing, because I look at how far I have gone, and worry about how far away the bottom is.

Or worse still, how far I could go.

Fear holds us back from doing daft, dangerous things for very good reason. But when you’re in a situation where there is next to nothing to fear, where you are encouraged to take a chance in safety, and you still don’t, you need to sort it. And the only way to do that is to face that fear, again and again, until it gets bored of seeing you and goes away.

So I’m thinking about how annoyed I was with myself as I struggled back down instead of letting go at Clip’n Climb – and putting that energy into my writing. To push harder, climb higher, and learn to fall and fail with style. And stop looking down.

Nottingham Festival of Words Blog Hop

Nottingham Festival of Words

Nottingham is holding its second Festival of Words in October this year. It will be a celebration of the spoken and written word, as well as a key part of the city’s bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature.  After reading Sarah Dale’s great opening blogpost, it's my turn to pick up the baton and tell you a little bit about my connection to the festival and hopes for what it can bring to Nottingham. Then I’ll be passing the blog baton on to two great writers that embody a lot of what I’ve talked about in this blogpost - Emily Cooper and Pippa Hennessy. 

What’s your connection with Nottingham and its written and spoken words?

Words have welded me to Nottingham since I arrived here in my old red Peugeot in 1997. I came to Nottingham after getting a copywriter job in advertising, so it’s likely you might have heard some of my writing without knowing it!  After a few years of doing that, I had a story that kept coming back to haunt me, so I took a deep breath, left my old job and began writing fiction. Shortly after that, I heard about Nottingham Writers Studio, and sent off my application – one of my smarter decisions. Through meeting other writers at the Studio and events members were involved in, I’ve met, talked to and been inspired by brilliant Nottingham writers who’ve been kind enough to support and encourage me to keep doing the work of telling my story. Without them, I’d still be trying to get chapter one right of that first book, rather than working to finish my third.

What do you love about Nottingham and its creative scene right now?

I love the sheer variety of talent and passion for supporting creativity we have in Nottingham at the moment. Wherever you look in the city there are people sharing that enthusiasm week in week out, from The Mouthy Poets, to Broadway Book Club, to emerging comic, music and book stores like Five Leaves, to the programmes celebrating Nottingham’s creativity on Notts TV – I can only see it growing.  I joined over a hundred readers in the Dawn of the Unread mass read recently – it was fantastic to see how many people were willing to say how important stories were to them and how important it is to share that passion. I was involved in promoting last year’s Nottingham Festival of Words, and was amazed by how much talent is here in the city, working away to bring amazing new things for Nottingham audiences to experience. I’m looking forward to seeing more of that when the festival launches later this year.

How would you describe Nottingham to a visitor coming to the Festival of Words?

Nottingham is born from stories of rebellion, beginning with Robin Hood’s literary legacy, and continuing through rebel writers, rebel printers, rebel booksellers, and since Dawn of the Unread’s flashmob event, rebel readers! If you want more from your words, so do we - we’re a city made of stories. All you have to do is come, look, listen and get involved- you won’t regret it.

Great Writing Starts Here

Write Club, downstairs at Nottingham Writers' Studio

If you've followed my @Andrew_Kells tweets and Facebook updates recently, you'll know my start to 2014 has been dominated by the launch of Nottingham Writers Studio. Based in Nottingham's Creative Quarter, I've been working hard with a dedicated team of other writer volunteers to create a real home for writing in Nottingham. And it looks ace!

If you want to know more, here's a link to my guest blog post for Creative Nottingham - and if you'd like to see it for yourself, you're more than welcome to pop in and say hello - I should be the one writing on the pink chair.

The Black Glass at Derby Quad

Had a great afternoon meeting readers and writers at Leicester Sci-Fi Festival this weekend - I joined Alex Davis of Boo Books and fellow writers Gary Budgen and Mike Chinn to launch After the Fall, our collection of short stories around the end of technology.

I really enjoyed reading The Black Glass, and it was interesting to see how other people received our ideas on a world where the technology we take for granted was no longer something you could rely on. Stories shared, books signed, friends made - a good day. Big thanks to Starbase Leicester and the festival goers for making us feel so welcome.

If you missed us at Leicester, you can catch up with us at Derby Quad cinema on Thursday 15th May - we'll be reading and discussing our work from 7pm as part of the Derby Film Festival, with the genre defining Mad Max to follow. 
I'm really pleased to be reading at Quad, it's a fantastic venue for Derby, and a key location in The Black Glass, my short story in After the Fall - if you want to find out more, come and say hello!

If you can't make it but you'd like a copy of After the Fall, it's available now - visit the Boo Books website now.

Flatpacks, Anthologies and Interviews



The Sillitoe Workspace at
Nottingham Writers Studio

I’ve been knee deep in allen keys and instruction booklets this week while helping to build the writing workspace in the new Nottingham Writers’ Studio – transforming a derelict pram shop into a new focal point for writers in the city is a lot of work and dedication, but it’s worth the effort, and coming together brilliantly.

It’s been fantastic to see the reaction of people as they come to visit the space for the first time (thank you for calling in, Paula Rawsthorne) and it’s exciting to see new people see the potential of the space as we get closer to our launch event later this month.
 
Which is why I’ve only just managed to blog about next week’s reading at Leicester SF Festival – and why I’ve only just started to get nervous about it…

I’ll be reading The Black Glass, my short story in the new Boo Books Anthology of post-technology tales, After The Fall. I’ve read work at the festival before, and the crowd are always really friendly and receptive to writers they may not have heard before, so I’m really looking forward to it. I just hope they won’t ask me a tricky question in the Q&A session.

After the Fall from Boo Books, featuring The Black Glass

Sarah Dale, author of Bolder and Wiser

Being interviewed about your work is tricky, but interviewing someone about their work can be even trickier – so I’m choosing my questions for Sarah Dale very carefully when I head back to Waterstones Nottingham and talk to Sarah about Bolder and Wiser, her collection of interviews with women aged sixty and older.

So… if I plan to be kind to Sarah in the evening, will the festival goers at Leicester be kind to me earlier in the day? Should I be thinking about timeslippery shenanigans like this, or should I get on with writing? I think we all know the answer to the last one…

Tickets are still available for both events!
If you’d like to join us at Leicester SF Festival, click here.

If you’d like to join us at Waterstones Nottingham, click here.

Boo! New short story to appear in 'After the Fall' from Boo Books

Although it's February, I've just seen the result of a great start to my writing year - my YA short story 'The Black Glass' has been accepted for Boo Book's forthcoming anthology, 'After the Fall' - it's a real honour to have your work read and commended by your peers, especially when they like it enough to share it with others in their book.

The theme of 'After the Fall' explores a world where the technology I'm using to write this blog, and that you're using to read it, is gone. After a lot of scribbling off-grid with a crayon in January (as low tech as I dared to go), the first line of the story appeared out of nowhere, challenging me to write the rest.

It's one of the first 'longer' short stories I've written (about three and a half thousand words), and I'm really pleased I stuck with it to make it work.  Big thanks to everyone who listened very patiently to me talk about The Black Glass while I was trying to get my head around telling the story of Mad Alice.

'After the Fall' launches in May 2014 - looking forward to reading the other contributors and seeing their vision of a very different future appear through the pages.

Write. Finish things. Keep writing.

Write. Finish things. Keep writing.

That's what I've been trying to keep up across 2013, which has been backed up by the brilliant Neil Gaiman (or rather, Neil Gaiman's brilliant hand), and the results are pretty good - I've done a quick rundown of the milestones I've left for myself in the past year as I launch myself into 2014.

I'm working on finishing Red, my contemporary fairytale very soon, and am really looking forward to the Costa Book Award event at West Bridgford Library this week after winning a pair of tickets with my winning Letter story in a Tweet:
      

For 40 years, it waited in a locked drawer to be sent. But it did not worry. It knew unspoken words said enough 40 years ago. #nccletters

 

If you've not had a quick look back, do it now - you'll be surprised what ground you've covered.  And the stuff you didn't do - that's 2014 planned.

Write. Finish things. Keep Writing.

Didn't See Nothing at Word of Mouth

It's all been a bit full on since my last blogpost (buy me a coffee and I'll talk you through it - all good, but blimey), but a quick thank you to Pippa Hennessy for her support in bringing the Word of Mouth Event to Antenna at the end of 2013.
I had a great night listening to a world of crime-related tales, and a terrifying but worthwhile five minutes performing 'Didn't See Nothing'.  Thanks also to Leftlion for the review of the event.

If you'd like to read Didn't See Nothing, it'll cost you precisely nothing - take a look below:

Performance! Word of Mouth, 7.30pm 3rd December

After finding out it's going to be published in the NWS Crime Sampler Journal, I'll be performing 'Didn't See Nothing' as part of Word of Mouth at Antenna next month.

I've already had some brilliant comments about the story before I knew it was going to be included in the journal, but reading it and hearing it are two very different things - It's going to be really interesting to see how the audience will react to my performance of the story.

Inspiration, collaboration, publication

I’ve started this week with a team meeting, which is easy when you’re a team of one.  Sorting the diaries is a doddle, as is remembering who ordered the coffee (even remembered the cinnamon this time).  The challenge of being a team of one is that no-one else asks you what you’re doing about the Good Ideas you had the week before – so this is a meeting to look at what went well last week, and what I'm doing about it this week.  I guess these are the minutes of the meeting…

I started last week wearing my scriptwriting hat, with a fantastic meeting to discuss ways to support the participants of the new Shine a Light project at Quad in Derby – it’s a fantastic opportunity for people aged over sixty to get involved with filmmaking, and I’m looking forward to seeing the results of the project on the big screen.

Wednesday brought another great meeting with a new writer contact I met through Derbyshire Scriptwriters – we shared an interest in developing a story which was outlined at a recent meeting, so we caught up for a coffee to discuss it (I can see a pattern emerging…)  After writing alone, it’s nervewracking to work your way through a story with someone else, but the experience is invaluable, as are the results – even at the first treatment stage, I think we’ve got a cracking story to show you.

Thursday took me to Creative Brews at Nottingham Writers Studio, where I finished my short film treatment in between talking about the mythology of animals, followed by a great email – my short story, ‘Didn’t See Nothing’ will be featured in the next Nottingham Writers Studio journal (I ordered another coffee to celebrate).  It’s a piece I’m really proud of, and really pleased I submitted it after discussing it with the Young Adult and Children writing group at NWS.  Some of the work will be showcased at a Word of Mouth in December, fingers crossed one of them will be mine…

So that was last week, what about this week?

All of a sudden, after sharing work and ideas with other inspirational writers, I’m working on multiple projects.   As well as my Middle Grade WIP, Red – I’ve a couple of short stories to prepare for submission, a short film to develop, a tricky synopsis to wrangle into submission, and copy edits on ‘Didn’t See Nothing’ following it’s successful submission.  And I’ll be updating the Writing at Rosys team with my progress on a short story they helped to inspire, along with a creative workshop with the YAC group this Friday.
And, of course, writing, writing, writing.

Any other business?  How about another coffee…?

Epic steps at Lady Bay

Words are pretty amazing things- whether they're blobs on paper, or lights on a screen, or vibrations in the air, they can mean different things to different people all at once (especially in the brilliant, confounding, inspiring craziness that is English), and stand out for all sorts of brilliant reasons…

I’ve just read a lovely group email from Mary Small and the team behind the Nottingham Children’s Book Festival to say a big thank you to everyone who played a part in their very first festival on Saturday – hundreds of families joined us in the rain to get stuck into stories, poems, illustrations – and Epics!



Epic preparation!

The young (and not quite so young) writers who joined us for 'Your Epic Starts Here!' on the day were superb as always – and I was amazed again just how creative we can all be – all it takes is a little inspiration and encouragement.  I saw princes in swamps (a bad place for a prince to be, so a good place to start a story!), soldiers resting between battles, and worlds you could only reach in a way that was simple and amazing all at once.  Even the volunteers joined in (to the lady who shared her epic hero – write that epic, or I will!)

But once the pens are collected in and the room goes quiet before the next workshop, you wonder what will happen next to those stories… then I read Mary’s email and saw one word from the great feedback the festival had collected on that day-

‘Epic’

Something tells me that for at least one of those Epics, it's only just the beginning – and I’m honoured to play a part in inspiring people to create their own Epic tales. 

If you'd like to know a bit more about what 'Your Epic Starts Here!' is all about, take a look here.

1001

A great week last week, where one of my short stories, The Middle Room, was commended as part of Derby Museum’s 1001 objects writing competition.

It was great to hear the winning entries, and get another chance to look around the exhibit again (with added tea and cake – felt a bit weird, but the mugs were nice so I went with it).

The items are arranged in collections of what they’re made of, rather than their historical or social setting which means you get an interesting mix of momentous and everyday items rubbing shoulders with one another.

The contest was to write 1001 words based on one of the items – choosing from this amount of inspirational material was not easy (I’d started writing something about the bottles for Derby businesses in my head before I got halfway around the exhibit), but after a long time of looking back at my snapshots, this was the item that stuck.

It’s a Congolese antelope horn, highly valued, and given as a gift.  I wondered about who would normally get such a stunning thing, and who would be least likely to receive it, to get it almost by accident.  About two hours later, The Middle Room was there on the page.
I’m really pleased I took up the challenge, and I’m really pleased Derby Museums has taken such an interesting approach to showing us the things we collect in the ongoing story of who we are.

Harbours

This week, Appletree Writers are getting ready to publish an anthology to raise funds for the Dunbar RNLI, with stories based around the theme of ‘The Harbour’ – and one of them is mine. 

‘Captain’ began life as a family story (one of the legends re-told and re-argued at Christmas), which began to change as I began to retell it.  I don’t know how – the true story is vivid, and funny, but the story I had to tell took another direction.

By the time I’d edited it, I was somewhere else entirely.  Off the map, in open water.  I had no idea whether anyone else would connect with it, but I knew the only way to find out was to submit it – and I’m really pleased they did. 

I’ve learned a valuable lesson from writing this little story – begin writing what you know, and when your story begins to have other plans, follow them.  Leave the harbour, and see where the story takes you. 

If you'd like to read it for yourself, The Harbour is available to order from the Appletree Writers website.

5k, 29’ and change

I’ve been running on and off for over three years now, and I finally got organised enough to enter my first race last weekend - a five kilometer race around the park - and I feel great for finally making it happen!

The distance is pretty much what I run when I manage to get out and hit the road, but the real achievement was to stand alongside fellow runners and say ‘I can do this.’  I had no idea how long it would take me to run the route, and I underestimated my finish time by about five minutes.  I crossed the finish line just after the average time for the race – should have fired up the Van Halen soundtrack a little earlier…

But that’s the point of standing up and showing the world what you’ve got –  on Friday, I had no idea how good a runner I was.  Now I do, with a benchmark time that shows I can run competitively, and a goal to beat.

And a medal.  Don’t forget the medal.

In Pursuit of Inspiration

Ideas come from everywhere.  Some good, some bad, some only worth a shrug before they go in the bin, some worth pursuing.

The trick is to work out which are the ones worth pursuing.  And then, pursue them.

After a week on a mountain in Wales, this was the last stop before home: Penrhyn Castle, a 19th century palace with all mod cons, paid for with the vast income from coal and sugar sales (the equivalent of investing in Microsoft and Apple way back when).  Wealth like that and land like that means you can build what you want (it's enormous!) and keep what you want, like steam engines: 



The railway museum lets you get up close to the engines, some narrow gauge from the Welsh highland railways that cross the country, some standard gauge that could still feasibly run on the rail network we inherited from the Victorians.

Our classic idea of steam comes from the 'Golden Age' between the wars; Agatha Christie, Brief Encounter, even the Hogwart's Express tips its hat to the Golden Age.  There's a couple of engines at Penrhyn that reflect that era.

There's a utilitarian beauty to those engines - dependable and sturdy, tastefully painted, a respectable machine for a more genteel age of travel.

But I'm more interested in this one.

She's called Fire Queen (great name), built in 1848 to work in a quarry in Llanberis.  In comparison to the kind of engines you see on heritage railways in the UK, she's old school.  She'll have been replaced because she won't pull as much as the 'newer' engines.  And she probably won't forgive a driver who isn't watching what they are doing.


But the in-your-face boldness of the colours, the bling of polished brass sticking out anywhere and everywhere, the oversized wheels and smokestack, Fire Queen looks thrilling.
Glamourous.  Primal.  And fast. 

That's the idea I've pursued in Cole: King of the Rails, behind a story which follows my young hero's friendships, secrets and quest for revenge. 

Where the glamour and thrill of those brightly coloured engines takes on a life of it's own... and changes history as we know it.

I'm hoping to share more of my world with you in the near future.  Until then, enjoy the pics.

Epic update

I had the chance to take a quick look at some of the epic stories created by the young writers I worked with during 'Your Epic Starts Here' last week, and was really impressed by their creativity and effort.

It's been a while since we talked about what we wanted to put into our epic stories, and there they were - a whole wall of words.  I scanned across the neatly written pages (their writing's a lot neater than mine) and saw words and phrases I remembered from the workshop - not my words, theirs.

It's great to see words you've created appear on a page, but it's something else when the words exist because you've told someone their story is worth telling.  Great day.

ps. They asked me what I was writing at the moment, so I told them.  Unwise move.  I have to write the rest of Red now, or they'll be asking me where my words are...

Epics starting here!

I had an Epic time at Nottingham Festival of Words this month, especially when I hosted my workshop, 'Your Epic Starts Here!' on Saturday.  The idea for a workshop came from a discussion at the YA and Children's writers group at Nottingham Writers Studio - how can you encourage creativity in younger writers?  Being inspiring during the workshop is just the start - the challenge is to keep it going afterwards...

Epics in waiting before 'Your Epic Starts Here!' begins.

Here's what I came up with - an Epic you can take away with you at the end of the workshop- well, the start of one, anyway...

After I talked for a short while about what I thought made an epic story, the writers in the group got on with creating their own ideas. 

Then it was time for the sharing bit...


...and here's the result! 
Note the change from 'In' to 'On' - love it!

Even with advance warning at the beginning (I didn't want anyone to give something away that was super-precious), the sharing part was a tricky bit - how many times have we guarded a character or a storyline like it was the crown jewels?  There was a very nervous two minutes where I thought it wouldn't happen - then one young writer shared (thank you!), and told us what the results were.  It was a lightbulb moment for everyone, which was fantastic to see - everyone wanted to share to make their Epic even more Epic! 

In one short hour, we'd made a clutch of Epics that simply did not exist anywhere before the workshop started - story magic!  The young writers seemed to really enjoy being able to take ownership of their own Epics, and change them to make them something that was theirs to take away, keep safe and develop into a bigger, longer story.

Will I see these Epics on the shelves in Waterstones Nottingham and beyond?  I hope so.  I saw whales being saved over lunchtime, disco kingdoms and exploding ice-cream - imagine what will appear in draft two...

Starting, Growing and Mo'ing

I really enjoyed Word of Mouth: Journeys last week - as did a lot of other people who were kind enough to listen to my story 'Four Minute Warning'.  I was still editing the story as our excellent host Megan Taylor was calling me up to read - just a few words taken out or changed can make a world of difference to something you're reading aloud.  I felt a little bit like a preacher when I stood up on the lectern, then my story's character pushed down on his Raleigh Tomahawk's pedals.  The lectern became chopper-style handlebars and we were away on our race against time.  If you couldn't make it, Oliver Clarke's written a great review of the evening here.

It's a mo' for sho' - if you like, donate!

I got a lot of interest in my facial hair, too - I'm growing a mo' for Movember, and I've finally got my page up and running after my marathon edits.  It's raising awareness (and a little bit of money) for Men's health issues, particularly prostrate and testicular cancer) - it's been fun to see how I would look with a Victorian-esque mo', but it's not sticking around - although it is good to stroke when I'm thinking up new plotlines...

Now the YA novel's current draft is complete, it's time to start on something new.  I wrote three hundred words on one of the stories during a fit of editor's block about a month ago - rather than looking to the past, it's set in the here and now, in a city where green comes through the cracks in the pavement, and our unlikely hero makes a discovery, and a decision that changes his life forever...

Here's to growing things (and shaving some things off) in December.

Journeys and The Next Big Thing

Busy doing final copy checks and A5 printouts of 'Four Minute Warning'; the short story I'm reading tonight as part of Word of Mouth: Journeys.  

It's been a while since I looked at the story because I've been working through the newest edit of my YA novel.  It's been a brilliant and all-consuming journey of discovery as I follow Cole on his journey of revenge for the death of his father.

And it's not what Cole, or I, expected when I first wrote about the accident all those months ago.  If you want to know what it is, watch this space.  

In the meantime, the scriptwriting powerhouse that is Adrian Reynolds very kindly included me in his 'Next Big Thing' blogpost a couple of weeks ago - now I've completed rewrites and edits on my YA story, it's the perfect time for me to answer the same questions he did, and pass the blog baton on to another great writer.

So if we're all ready, here we go...

What is the working title of your book?

It started life as Coalface, but now I’ve finished rewrites and editing, a new title has come up...

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Lots of different places – I’m a bit of a magpie, constantly jotting stuff down wherever I go.  I’m usually looking at stuff like door handles in a stately home while everyone else is looking at the pictures on the wall.

What genre does your book fall under?

It’s YA fiction, in a historical setting, with a whoosh of the fantastic.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I’d be more interested to see who my readers would pick.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A boy seeks revenge for the death of his father after a train accident, because he secretly saw what happened, and knows it was sabotage…

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m working with someone at the moment, and I’m looking forward to seeing where that takes us.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

About eight months.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Chris Wooding’s ‘The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray’ – it’s a completely different story world, but mixes up the past and his own take on urban fantasy really well.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

The characters inside the book. And the world they live in.  Because their story needs to be told.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

It’s Victorian England, but faster.  A lot faster.

Right, that's enough about me, here's someone else with a story to tell about the story they're telling:

Ian Douglas

Ian writes for both children and adults. His first non-fiction book, A Children’s History of Nottinghamshire, was launched at Waterstones and sold over 1500 copies in the first month. The book proved popular with local schools and libraries and Ian now visits schools with his History Roadshow, a lively mix of pictures, quizzes, storytelling, and classroom activities. 

Ian recently won second place in the Meridian writing competition and his work is currently to be seen at the Museum of Childhood. Click here to read more about Ian’s journey through the centuries and here for an interview with the Nottingham Evening Post.