I start my new job next week and am really looking forward to it, especially since my friend has offered me a room in their lovely Victorian terrace house. It saves the hassle of looking for a place and those nasty old deposits etc...

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Two emails from editors this morning. First up:

Thanks for sending that story along. It's not too bad, but our submissions are full, and we're not going to have the room to run it. Hopefully you'll be able to find another home for this piece. I hope you're able to think of us again in the future.

"Not too bad"? Yikes. I'd rather he'd said he hated it than implied it was mediocre. I think they call that damning with faint praise?

Here's the other one:


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It is funny the way things work out don't you think? All I have to do now is get some proper Work lined up - a commission or two, a couple of talks and maybe some workshops. I am also playing with a Brand New Idea. Not the historic novel as yet - that remains ongoing. But I have been bandying this idea around for a new weekly column somewhere if I can persuade an editor to try it out. I won't say too much here, but I promise I will keep you updated. If I can pull it off, it could lead to all kinds of things - so watch this space.....


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It's been an interesting few days in terms of short story submissions, rejections and acceptances. Seems as though quite a few editors have got to work sorting through slush piles, because in the past week I have heard back about several submissions:

a tiny flash story, Heart, was accepted by Magazine Minima, with suggested edits to cut it from around 50 words to even less, and which I accepted because it's an astonishingly funky online 'zine employing technology beautifully, in my opinion, and I'd love to be in it;......

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Good grief. Monday again – funny how quickly the darn day comes round. Also annoying that I feel fine today, having felt like a squeezed-out sponge all Saturday and Sunday. Typical!

Anyway, today, I have caught up with my emails and it looks like nothing too drastic happened while I’ve been away. Thank goodness. I’ve had to get my Focus Hat on this lunchtime though, as I’ve had to minute the Steering Group meeting. And I’m not convinced that particular hat is entirely uncrumpled today really ...

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Despite what I said in that last post, saying that writing “is what I do”, I haven’t really done a lot of it in the past few days. Well, not really creative writing. I banged out 1,500 words of college work (defining Special Needs and support) this afternoon and I managed 500 words of utter drivel late on Saturday night.


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I've spent the weekend working to Chopin, courtesy of Radio 3. I came late to him, and all to the core nineteenth century composers: at school my instrument was the flute, and there is no music written for it between early Beethoven and Debussy, though Bach and Handel and Telemann are in my bones. It was only when I made a writing friend with precisely opposite tastes in music to write to that my horizons expanded. He was astounded that the backbone of my writing-music collection is the big baroque choral works, whereas it had never occurred to me that piano music could do the same job. Thanks to him - haven't seen him for years - much of the contemporary strand of A Secret Alchemy was written to Chopin, and more recently Schumann. It's about atmosphere as much as period, you see: I find that a little 15th century music does go quite a long way, but Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary was absolutely perfect for... But that would be giving things away.

And then on Sunday afternoon, just as I was trying to hammer my narratological thoughts about Tobias Hill's The Love of Stones into something coherent, the tonkly sound of an electronic piano caught my ear.

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So, after the last post in which I whined about not being able to stick to the writing schedule I had set for myself, I cut myself some slack last week and loosened the definition of "writing". I wrote a flash story, but my main "writing time" was spent at the First International Jerusalem Writers Festival, listening to writers talk about writing. I went to four session: Nadine Gordimer talking to Amos Oz, Nicole Krauss (History of Love, Man Walks into a Room) talking to Amos Oz, Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer talkng to Etgar Keret, and Niall Williams (4 Letters of Love) talking to Ahron Appelfeld. I didn't take notes, although many around me were doing so, I just wanted to listen and absorb. I will give a quick precis of my impressions.

Nadine Gordimer & Amos Oz

This was supposed to be a session on politics and literature - very apt because Nadine Gordimer had been under a lot of pressure not to come to Israel because of the political situation. However, after a bit of interesting talk about when her writing was first banned in South Africa etc..., Amos Oz unfortunately began a political rant about Israel and the Palestinians that seemed more appropriate to an election rally than a Writers' conference. So, end of that session.

Nicole Krauss & Amos Oz
....

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Really, nothing much has happened today. Though I have been feeling a sight better than yesterday, thank the Lord. I just feel utterly and permanently exhausted. Thus explaining this morning's gloriously long lie-in - no chance of my planned visit to the Quakers then - and this afternoon's two-hour (or thereabouts) nap. Days can be so tiring, you know. It's astonishing I get through them at all ...

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