Monthly Archives: January 2009

And the ten winners of The Letters are….

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The competition to win an advance copy of The Letters is now closed.

I had 63 people enter in total. I asked you to help me pick the winners by picking a number. And the winners are……

(…drumroll…)

243 Char March of the wonderful Poems While You Wait project

62 My friend the author of Spots and Stripes (who has a new little boy, congratulations!)

13 Barbara Ray from Oregon in the lovely US of A

111 Debs from Daydreams in a Shed

8 Jamieson Wolf (here’s his blog) – you can thank Liza Lee for picking you, Jamieson, but you were only 5 off with your own choice – what are the chances of that?!

168 Mo from Kilbarchan (you WERE in it to win it!)

195 Peter Breytnon of Light and shade

340 Georgi Gala

102 Ms psycho therapist at the wonderful lassie and timmy

182 Ghost Writer of Turning Left

There – it’s all over.

If you’re on the list, congratulations! I’ll be in touch soon – do email me your address if you see this before I track you down.

And many thanks to everyone who entered – very heartening. If you’d still like to read the book and you’re in the UK you can pre-order the paperback for £5.99 on Amazon now. If you’re overseas (or if you can’t wait and want to get a sneaky advance paperback) you can order directly from Snowbooks here.

Four weeks to go until the official release date….

Stealing tissues and finding a piece of my shadow

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I work as a therapist, and so there is often a need for tissues. I share my rented room with other therapists, and we all bring our own tissue box which we keep in the cupboard between our sessions.

When I wanted to blow my nose the other day, I found my hand reaching automatically into SOMEONE ELSE’S box of tissues.

This immediately reminded me of a story Robert Bly tells about himself in his wonderful ‘A Little Book on the Human Shadow’. He’s being interviewed by William Booth.

Let me give you one more answer to the question, ‘How do I know I have a shadow?’ The other day I was making coffee for Ruth (his wife) and myself. I put a spoon and a half of ground coffee in her filter and the same in mine. Then something inside me reached back and took another half spoonful for mine. It wasn’t me – I didn’t do it. I just noticed it happen.

I love that he admitted to this. I might talk more about the rest of this book another day – and how we should all aspire to eating our shadows – but for today I’m just going to acknowledge that part of me that feels I can’t afford to use my own tissues.

Blog tour update – come with me on the funky orange bus

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I’ve got all these stops on my blog tour now – yipee.

There’s still time to get on the funky orange bus. All you need is:
a) a burning desire (or at least a willingness) to buy and read my book and
b) a blog or something similar (it doesn’t matter how many readers you have)
There are still sneaky paperbacks available before they should be if you order direct from Snowbooks – click here and then choose UK or Overseas delivery. Shhhh.
And then email me and let me know you’d like a slot. You could send me a few interview questions, do a quick review of the book, post a photo of you reading it with an appropriate expression on your face, or whatever else you fancy. I look forward to welcoming you on board.

Follow me on Twitter (chirp chirp cheep cheep cheep)

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Thanks to a suggestion and some technical help from Gerd-Lothar at GLR (unfortunately I don’t get to read his blog as it’s in German, boo) I’ve Twittered both my small stone and my a handful of stones blogs.

If you’re already Twittered up, follow a small stone here and a handful of stones here.

And if that made as much sense to you as a bagful of frogs… Twitter is a clever computer thingy that allows you to write down what you’re doing, in 140 characters or less, and then broadcast it to the world (well, to everyone who’s signed up to follow you).

You can see whether Barack Obama has cornflakes for his breakfast, and whether it’s frosty outside where Russell Brand lives. As well as all the famous people, you can also stay in touch with your Twittering friends and family – it can search your address book and find out who’s already signed up.

But the MOST exciting reason to join is that you can now get small stones delivered to your desktop with a little ‘pling!’ noise (well, that’s how’s Gerd-Lothar described it). It’s very nifty. You might even want a TweetDeck once you’ve found your way around.

You can play about and see if you fancy signing up at Twitter.

WARNING If you’re prone to getting addicted to this kind of thing (Facebook etc) be careful! Although it’s more likely that you’ll just think it’s all a bit silly.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

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I have a habit of turning ‘things that happen’ into little stories. When I drop a plate, I think ‘ah – this is telling me that I need to slow down’. Everything is a lesson. I did this a lot in my book A Year of Questions. So let me tell you a story…

Last night I was listening to birdsong on my wondrous red ishuffle when a buzzing started up in my right ear, as if a tiny bee had got trapped in the ear piece.

I’m not techincal, and so I shook it really hard. It worked. As I listened to the lack-of-buzz I thought – this could be a little story. Sometimes when something is broken we need to shake it very hard. It needs shaking so hard that it might break, but we need to shake it anyway… I was just getting to the end of this story when the ear piece started buzzing again.

OK, I thought. That wasn’t the right ending. Violent shaking is never a good solution. Hard shaking only happens when we don’t know what else to do… There – I can write my blog post now.

And THEN I thought, maybe this story isn’t about that either.

We like to think that stories have neat endings. Happy ending, sad ending. Important moral message. All of these endings are abritrary. If we stop the story at this point in our friend’s marriage, it’s a love story. Wait another few years for the divorce, and it’s a tragedy. Which is true?

Telling stories is a good thing. Listening to stories, and thinking about how they might illuminate our own situation, is a good thing. Don’t start feeling smug, though. Don’t feel ‘finished’. We never know for sure. We’re only stopping off – more of the story is always up ahead.

Get Known Before The Book Deal

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I’ve just read this interesting article over at my friend Sage’s blog. Christina Katz suggests that we writers need to be finding an audience for our work – a ‘platform’ – not just in preparation for getting a book deal, but continually throughout our careers as writers.

I’ve always been fascinated by the phenomenology of PR (I’m not sure that’s exactly the right word but I’m pleased to have got it into a sentence). Why do some people sell more books than other people? Is it because they write better books? ; )

I do see it as a part of my ‘job’ as a writer to help my work get out there to the people who might want to read it. I make small continuous efforts in this area – this blog being one of them. But for me the ‘reaching out’ only works if I enjoy it. I love blogging. I’m really looking forward to my blog tour. I’m slightly addicted to Facebook (come and say hello).

There might be different things I could be doing to make a quicker, bigger impression on out there. I don’t mind. I told you, I’m contrary. I’ve written the novels I’ve wanted to write, and I trust that an authentic approach to self-promotion will get me where I want to go, even if we take the scenic route.

On keeping your mouth shut

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Jon Kabat-Zinn says the following about meditation:

If you do decide to start meditating, there’s no need to tell other people about it, or talk about why you are doing it or what it’s doing for you. In fact, there is no better way to waste your nascent energy and enthusiasm for practice and thwart your efforts so they will be unable to gather momentum. Best to meditate without advertising it.

Every time you get a strong impulse to talk about meditation and how wonderful it is, or how hard it is, or what it’s doing for you these days, or what it’s not, or you want to convince someone else how wonderful it would be for them, just look at it as more thinking and go meditate some more. The impulse will pass and everybody will be better off–especially you.

This gives me one of those wry-recognition smiles, and also reminds me very much of how much I talk about my writing.

When I first started submitting my work, I would share every tiny failure or success with all my friends. Look, a poem was accepted! Look, another agent rejected me! They were very lovely and nobody told me to shut up and just get on with the writing. I’m not sure I could have contained myself anyway – I was very wobbly.

Maybe this is why we talk so much about a new meditation practice – underneath the fervent evangelising is a small voice that is still unconvinced.

As my writing career has progressed, I’ve started to find less need to shout everything that happens to my books from the rooftops. I think I’m learning to get on with it more quietly, and to quietly accept the good stuff (and feeling good) and the bad stuff (and giving myself time to heal) as it comes along.

In what area of your life do you get ‘a strong impulse to talk about it’?

Hello and welcome to new readers

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Marit and Stina were kind enough to interview me for their magazine, The Apprentice Writer – I’m at the front of issue 4. If you’ve surfed over from there, hello and welcome! There’s lots of good free stuff for writers at their site – go see.

Or you might have found me via that sweepstakes site. Or somehow else. And hello again and thank you for coming back to everyone else – I don’t want you to feel left out…