Some say Twitter is essential for writers; others sneer at it as a time-wasting exercise in vanity. I wouldn't say it's essential (which for me means stuff like oxygen and water), but I do find Twitter useful and, what's more, fun.

I've only been on Twitter a couple of months, having resisted joining for ages because it seemed pointless. Like many people who have never looked at it, I thought it would consist of morons informing the world that they're about to eat a doughnut, or that their baby is a genius because it just did a poo.

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1 I've just moved countries and am unsettled (can milk this one for months and months...)
2 The cats are in quarantine and I can't possibly write without them (another 5 months' shelf life for this excuse)
3 My new study is an unfamiliar place, I can't write here until I feel totally comfortable (Yes, right, I can write in any cafe but not my own workspace?)
4 I've got far too much to do with the Short Review (I have a great deputy editor, so really can't use this one)...




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Blimey last week was a long one. And it had it all I think - fab acceptances, brilliant editors (see below) disappointing rejections, one of my favourite stories going live at a place I really love, and so on.

And discovering that I've a medical appointment next week which makes it impossible for me to read at Sparks in Brighton. I had been looking forward to that very much, and to meeting up with some lovely people while I was down there. But, as I'm trying to be sensible, my health has to come first. I sincerely hope that I'll have another opportunity to read there. (Incidentally, it was another medical appointment last week which stopped doing something else I'd been really looking forward to doing. I guess it'll all make sense in the grand scheme of things.)

***

On a more positive note, I spent a good chunk of yesterday fiddling with my website. It has had a face lift. I reckon it looks okay. (It does, doesn't it?)

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I do like October. Everything's another colour, the light is different; it's impossible to look at things the way you did in August, or even in September.

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Usually when I've written about editors here it's because I've been cross - and that's usually because I've felt that they've taken far too long to get back to me (if at all) re the story I've sent them. I've said that I don't think it's fair, for instance, to expect us writers to adhere to their guidelines (set it out this way, send it like this etc - perfectly reasonable) to then find that they don't pay much attention to them themselves (you should hear back from us with xyz days, or send us an SAE and we'll make sure you know if you're not short listed). Or worse, there are those places who say it could take (insert stupid amount of time) to hear from us, if you don't your story's not been accepted. I still think I'm right, and I still think that those examples are unfair and are far too common.

But in three years of blogging, my praise for editors has been, shall we say, minimal. And that, equally, isn't fair.

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This book is touted on the cover blurb as being the follow-up to Brick Lane, despite the fact that Ms Ali had another (not terribly well-received) book published in the interim. In The Kitchen centres on Gabriel Lightfoot, Gabe for short, who is executive chef in the kitchen of the swanky Imperial Hotel in London. Gabriel’s life begins to unravel when kitchen porter Yuri is found dead in the basement, and also when he discovers that up north his Dad is dying of cancer.

I thought Ali dealt well with the multi-cultural aspects (as one might expect from someone who has written something as brilliant as Brick Lane), the character of Lena who Gabriel gets friendly is excellently written, and her Russian dialect perfectly captured. However, sometimes it felt as if Gabe was asking the various members of his cooking team their stories as a way of dumping information upon the reader. Ms Ali has clearly done a lot of research (she lists a whole heap of books she has relied on for research), but some of it was unnecessary – I think she mentions the fact that proteins are ‘denatured’ in the cooking process three times! I saw her speak about the book at the Hay Literary Festival, and she actually spent some time in a hotel kitchen observing.

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It was Josa Young, author of “One Apple Tasted” and recent guest blogger here on SW, who chose Barbara Comyns’ “Our Spoons Came From Woolworth’s” as her favourite book. I was immediately taken by the title and looked it up on Amazon. A Virago Modern Classic. Published in 1950. A novel set in the Bohemian London of the 30’s about marriage, poverty, and adultery, praised by none other than Graham Greene as having “an off-beat humour” and ending happily. Oh, yes. I already knew this was my kind of book and I was right.

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A friend is suffering from something which I think we all are at risk of: a passionate desire to write something, and a poisonous sense that everything they might write - every kind of character, situation, theme or plot - has been done before. And better. And worse. And in corsets and in spaceships and in Brixton. So why bother? What's the point? How can any of us, ever, say anything new? Anything worth writing, let alone worth reading? Let alone get it published? And I found myself replying like this:

There's a bird's-eye map you have in your head, a big but un-detailed map of the whole bookish terrain. You can see an awful lot of books, but only their most obvious features. And in those obvious features, they have a lot - too much - in common. Yes, there are only seven basic plots, and if you reduce a book to it barest bones - the blurb, the elevator pitch, the synopsis - it'll look like one of those seven (which is why we hate constructing those so much).

One reasons stories like fairy tales and myths seem so archetypal - are the archetypes of all our stories - is that they don't have particular, individual detail. Stepmothers are bad, princes are good, trees are trees (only oaks in Victorian dressings-up of them), cats are magical. There are very few individual motivations or peculiarities - it's all generic, in the true sense of the word - because we're dealing with the basics of human interaction (see Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment for Freud, Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots for Jung). Which is why we have such fun with re-tellings and modern fairy tales and things: they play with the bare bones of our archetypal stories like a skeleton dancing at the Day of the Dead, and dress them up in silly clothes so that we re-see them. Of course fiction isn't like that: we have a couple of millenia of drama and now novels dedicated to bringing alive the individual human consciousness, from Oedipus to Hamlet to Hedda Gabler.

So, "It's not the subject, it's all in how you do it!" we cry, and it's true that what makes a book itself, rather than something else, is how those basic bones are fleshed and clothed and made to dance.

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I have a very short (and rather strange) story over at the brilliant Metazen today. It's called Two Old Women Birdwatching in My Garden. I hope you like it. It's one I'm rather fond of.

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As I formulate witty and insightful thoughts in my head about the cultural differences between my new city and Jerusalem, I am bringing you the second in the Writing & Place series of guest blog posts, this one from Miriam Drori, who blogs at An' De Walls Came Tumblin Down. A bit about our guest today: Miriam Drori came to writing late in life, prompted by a passionate desire to be understood and to help others. By profession, she is a writer of a different sort: a technical writer. Miriam lives in Jerusalem with her husband, three children, a cat who walked in one day and a novel that’s straining to get out into the world.

Take it away, Miriam! ........

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