Dear writer

So began my email from the Ilkley Literature Festival telling me I'd been shortlisted.  It was a great moment, from my daughter's delight to the good wishes of my on-line friends.  I basked.  And then I waited.

Much time was wasted over the next couple of weeks with compulsive email checking.  Then you reach a point, rather like waiting for the outcome of a job interview, when you realise that the silence does not bode well.  It's strange then that you should feel so disappointed when the second email finally arrives.

After sleeping on the news I feel much more philosophical.  The world hasn't ended, nothing has changed.  I'll tweak my story a little and send it out again.  My friends enjoyed reading my story and, what's more, I had great fun writing it.  That, after all, is the main thing.  Isn't it?

Five long days

My students are all present and correct.  My reward is five long days off work. Bliss.

Of course, I don't want you thinking that I'll be putting my feet up.   My literature course books have arrived and I can't wait to get started.  Before that though, I'll have to make myself finish Dracula, one of the set books.  I'm so bored of it now.  Have I read it long ago or seen the film?  It's all so familiar.  I will persevere - only a hundred pages to go after all.  Then I can set to.

There are also pressing family matters to be dealt with.  A trip to Leamington Spa at the weekend for a bridesmaid's dress fitting.  An electric guitar to be collected from Morecambe.  Plans for my son's birthday party next weekend.  Italian course books to be collected from the post office.  Will five days be long enough I wonder?

I have plans for some writing too, or research at least.  I have an idea for a short story set in Lancaster in the late 1700s.  A trip to Lancaster's Maritime Museum should provide the inspiration I need.

I'd better get on with it then.

Happy New Year

The bags are packed and lunches made.  The summer holidays are over.  The weather is wild and wintry, shaking the fruit from our trees.  And so it's time to wish you all a happy new year.

January is a poor time for a new year.  The nights are long and dark, we're all broke and overweight.  January needs all the help it can get.  September, however, now that's much more promising.  Our whole family follows the academic year, so September it is.  New teachers and new students.  Time for us to reinvent ourselves.

Soon the parcels will arrive.  It's five years since the first parcel of Open University books landed on my doorstep.  I still remember the excitement and the panic.  Now I've learnt that the assignment book that seems incomprehensible now will, with time, start to make a little sense.  This year it's the nineteenth century novel and beginners' Italian.  Molto bene.

The running's going well too - I did promise you an update.  After two weeks of unrelenting work, I'm back on level ground. As with all my projects I blow hot and cold.  I've run four times in five days and it is getting a little easier.  As the working week progresses all my good intentions slowly unravel, so it's good to start on a high.

All of this distracts me (a little at least) from the small matter of the Ilkley competition.  No news yet, but if the time I'm spending compulsively checking my emails, were spent running, writing or reading, I would be wise and fit indeed.

Short stories

I've never been a fan of short stories.  I read Maupassant's Boule de Suif at school. At uni I discovered Ian McEwan and consumed everything he'd written with the kind of gluttony that adult, non-student, life will never allow.  Generally though, I dismissed short stories as inconsequential.  Either I read one and shrugged 'so what?' or I found one I enjoyed and wanted more.  Either way I was unsatisfied.

It was only the OU writing course that got me thinking about the art of short story writing.  I gathered short story collections, read William Trevor, Edna O'Brien, Malcolm Bradbury.  Many short stories still leave me with that 'so what?' feeling, but I am learning, at least, to understand their opportunities and constraints and to admire the form.  One or two stories have lingered in my memory, insinuating themselves into my consciousness in the way that good writing should.  Beryl Bainbridge's Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie is one such story.  It begins with a patronising gift of pantomime tickets.  Through a family's response to the gift and the pantomime itself Bainbridge deftly shows the tensions between the family members.  The ending is pitch perfect but I don't want to give it away - you might want to read it sometime.

Joyce Carol Oates' A Hole in the Head is far from understated, but boy does it suck you in.  The end is dramatic, outrageous even, but somehow seems a natural progression.  The initial fastidiousness of the main character makes his undoing all the more appalling.  I won't expand, but I would advise you against plastic surgery of any kind.

So, whilst I still don't rush to pick up a volume of short stories, perhaps there's something to be said for them after all.