Things and Stuff #10

Things and Stuff is a grab-bag of things that've been on my mind this week. In this edition: theatre, drinking, ARCs, home and Night Vale.


Thing 1: The Drowned Man

Jessie and I went to see Punchdrunk Theatre's new London production The Drowned Man. It was several weeks ago, and I'm still processing the experience. It was like being in a dream, more literally than I can really express. We were surrounded by mysteries. We walked through strange places and found ourselves in even stranger places. We saw things, and we missed other things, and we were moved and incredibly creeped out and got seperated and found each other again. We imagined that things would happen that didn't happen, and had several what the hell just happened moments. We were told that there was a bar, where we could take our masks off and sit for a moment... and we never actually found it. 

One of the things we did see, (C) Punchdrunk Theatre

I would love to literally walk you through everything that happened and everything we saw and felt and thought. But I won't do that, because some of you might want to go, and for the rest of you it'll be like someone telling you in detail about this weird dream they had last night... 

Thing 2: alcohol
I also saw The World's End last week. I have to admit, I don't think I loved it the same way I adore Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I really did enjoy it, but what with the Gary King character and the way the whole thing is based on nostalgia and wasted lives and the concept of a good life not necessarily being what you think it is, and death and friendship and, y'know, some really self-destructive alcoholism... it was a lot of fun in places and soared past the six laughs rule, probably on the music choices alone, but at the same time it was really, really melancholy. Much more so than either Shaun or Fuzz. I think that fight in the final pub is going to stick with me for quite a long time. 

Also, today I am rather hungover as last night we said our WP goodbyes to Karen Ball, Commissioning Editor extraordinaire who is tragically leaving us to become Publisher at Little, Brown and Atom books. I think we all needed to drown our sorrows a little, because we don't know what on earth we're going to do without her... 

Thing 3: ARCs
The advance reader copies of Skulk have gone out! And when I say they've gone out, I mean apparently there were enough requests that every single copy is accounted for. I'm officially on the edge of my seat, hoping that anyone who reads it and likes it will say so loudly and often and those who hate it will never tell me... 

Thing 4: maybe it's because I'm a Londoner
Some unexpected househunting developments this last week have left me thinking about London and whether I'll even know who I am any more if I move away. 

I was actually born in Holland, though my parents are both English, but I've been a Londoner for at least twenty one years. Whether it's North, South or East (West London is the only compass point I've not lived in), London is London. Whatever you want, whatever kind of entertainment or culture or food or shopping or anything, it's about an hour away on the Tube. I've spent probably more hours of my life on the Tube than doing almost any other thing. There are places in London I've never seen and other places that feel like coming home every single time I go there. 

I just don't quite know how people live outside London, and not in an obnoxious 'oh how can you bear it' way - more in a 'I don't know how busses work or what it's like to live more than seven minutes walk from a supermarket' kind of way. It's silly, really, but being a Londoner is a big part of my identity. I don't think I'll ever stop being a Londoner, even when I don't live here any more. 

Thing 5: Carlos' perfect hair
Welcome to Night Vale is a very strange, very wonderful podcast about a sleepy desert town and its everyday problems, such as strange pyramids appearing out of nowhere, PTA meetings being interrupted by an invasion of pterodactyls, all wheat and wheat by-products turning into snakes, and Desert Bluffs' underhanded attempts to win at football. Also, the weather segment is unexpectedly brilliant. Here is some beautiful fan art: 

As made by the rather absurdly talented alackoforder on Tumblr

You can download the episodes on iTunes or from Commonplace Books' website.

Things and Stuff #1

Helloooooooo interwebs.

Well. This is certainly a blog.

I have to admit to a little bit of stage fright about actually writing more honest-to-god blog posts. But there's very little point in having a blog if I don't put things on it, and I do love lists! So every Friday I'm going to do a little post about the things and stuff that have been on my mind this week.

Sometimes it'll be writing, editing or publishing based. Sometimes it'll be about music, or nerd stuff. Sometimes I might have a really boring week and just list fruits or something. More often it'll be a mixture of all of the above.

For instance...

Thing 1: A painless edit is the greatest thing ever
This week I handed in ('handed in' sounds a bit primary school, doesn't it? Let's go with) delivered the second draft of a book I'm freelance ghosting for Working Partners.

Not what a WP edit looks like, but funny (C) Eve Corbel

Sometimes, even with the detailed and specific edits you get on a WP project, editing can be a pain, in terms of time and in terms of emotional input. I have found that I need to do one sweep of the comments all the way through and just allow my ego to go wild. 'Nope', I say, sometimes out loud. 'No', 'not doing that', 'yes well if you'd read it properly you'd know what I meant'. You have to get those out of your system, because I've very rarely met an edit that wasn't bang on 100% correct once I'd done the 'nope' pass and moved on to the 'how do I fix it?' pass.

On this one, the 'nope' pass was more of a 'yep' pass, and it was so wonderful. 'Yep', 'I see what I did wrong there', 'ooh that's a great idea', 'yes we can cut that', and also - because WP editors are the best - a bit of 'aww, thank you!'. I love it when an edit comes together, and I loved doing my editing this week.

Thing 2: Iron Man 3
OH MY GOD HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BECAUSE YOU SHOULD.

I have to say I was slightly dreading this film because I loved Iron Man very much and found Iron Man 2 to be fluffily entertaining, but... 'The Mandarin', seriously? Of all Iron Man and Marvel villains you could've picked, you decided that The Mandarin was the one you wanted to give screen time to? And he's being played by Ben Kingsley of all people? I was braced for so much horrible Hollywood racism.

But something amazing happened. The racism did not appear! The film turned around and lampshaded and contextualised the racism and it was the best day ever. After that, it was basically all fun and games and snappy dialogue and explosions and Rhodey and Pepper and passing the Bechdel Test (barely, but brilliantly) and really well depicted anxiety attacks and the dodgy disability stuff is in some ways not as dodgy as it could be. And if you saw Avengers, stay for the post-credits sequence. I made this face:

Seriously, it was this exact face (C)  Disney/The Internet

Also there is a joke about Croydon, which got the biggest laugh of the entire film.

Thing 3: This blog
I started a blog. It was sort of an accident. So that has been on my mind somewhat this week.

Thing 4: Ally Pally's lottery money
Incredibly exciting, but possibly irrelevant to people who've never lived in North London: Alexandra Palace has been promised £16m from the National Lottery! This is huge. I grew up just around the corner from Ally Pally and it's incredibly important. It's a beautiful building, it's historically and culturally significant, it's the original home of the BBC, it has several massive halls and a lovely park with views across all of London and a theatre and an ice rink, and the Doctor climbed it in order to use the BBC to save Muswell Hill from Maureen Lipman which may be the most North London sentence ever written.

The BBC, (C) The BBC

Unfortunately, it's also been destroyed by fire, not once but twice, so it's this huge building with huge potential that's been sitting half-empty for thirty years. The idea that it might finally get the funding it needs to be properly regenerated makes me very, very happy.

Thing 5: Blogger's post-editor spellcheck does not recognise the following words - 
Blog
Blogger
Blogspot
Spellcheck

Undiscovered Places

This is a blog for the 2014 Undiscovered Voices anthology blog tour! Undiscovered Voices is a bi-annual competition for unagented, unpublished writers run by the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Without UV or SCBWI, I'm not sure I would ever have finished Skulk, let alone found the brilliant Catherine Pellegrino or Strange Chemistry to take it on. 

And now, here are six stories from six London locations, each of which played a fairly major role in Skulk and my Undiscovered Voices story... 

Dramatic reconstruction (C) Marijn Kampf

Tavistock Square Gardens

Picture the scene: it’s mid-November and you’re enjoying a chilly afternoon stroll in one of London’s tiny squares. All of them are pretty much the same – spiky iron railings, enormous trees, wooden benches, pigeons. This particular one is Tavistock Square, just off the Euston Road. You’re enjoying a quiet moment to yourself when all of a sudden thirty nerds in big coats descend, chatting about character and plot, clutching notebooks and laptops.

They settle down on the benches and begin scribbling. Their fingers quickly turn blue from cold, but they don’t stop until their leader announces time to pack up and move on, even though they’re being distracted by the single most persistent and fearless squirrel known to man, which is literally climbing up the benches as if to say ‘So, what’s your novel about?’ 

This was Nanorilla 2011, the guerrilla writing crawl held by the London chapter of Nanowrimo. I love Nanowrimo, and I’ve taken part every year since 2008, even though I rarely finish a book during the month. The Nano London group is the best in the whole world, no arguments. It’d be wrong of me not to also mention the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, where I and a group of equally crazy writers gathered to write through the night. We finally stumbled out, coffee-blind and slightly hysterical, at 6am, before anything was open except the McDonald’s – which is why one scene in Skulk takes place in a 24-hour Mc-D’s. 

Stables under the Westway (C) Giles Smith

The Westway Flyover

Some places are beautiful, and some places are interesting. The Westway Flyover is definitely interesting. I used to cross it on a fairly regular basis on the Oxford Tube (which, despite the name, is a bus), and it became just familiar enough that I feel like I know it despite never having set foot on the ground there.

There are some strange things going on at the Westway Flyover. Like the way that you pass the Hilton and the city just seems to stop. On this side, Notting Hill Gate, Hyde Park, leafy crescents, bespoke cheese shops, houses with areas. On that side, nothing but motorway and suburb and the blocky behemoth of Westfield Shopping Centre. Not a bush or a shepherd in sight.

But the most fascinating thing is that the space underneath the flyover is far from empty – there’s a sports centre there with its own stables, a junk yard that used to have an amazing junk sculpture over the gate, and a caravan park where traveller kids could be seen riding their bikes round and round in tight circles and chasing escaping footballs down the street.

There’s a lot of life going on underneath the Westway Flyover. It seemed an appropriate place for Addie to have made her home.

There are no photographs of the WP Quiet Room (C) Kosmos

The Quiet Room

This sounds quite exciting, like an art installation, but actually it’s just a spare office upstairs at Working Partners. The main office is a big open-plan cluster of desks, so the upstairs office room is generally reserved for people who need space and quiet to get stuck into a tricky edit – but it can also be a handy place to sneak a private phone conversation or writing sprint over your lunch hour.

For such an unassuming room, it’s played a surprisingly big part in the story of Skulk. This was where I regularly came to hammer out a few hundred words over a bacon sandwich, but it’s also where I heard I was going to be in the Undiscovered Voices 2012 anthology! And even better, it’s where I snuck off to to take the phone call from Catherine Pellegrino saying that she loved Skulk and wanted to offer me representation. I’ve been so happy in this odd little room that my knees actually went weak, and also so stressed that I considered escape by leaping out of the window onto the Hammersmith and City line. Not bad for a spare office full of boxes of German copies of My Secret Unicorn.

It actually looks quite nice here, (C) Urban75

 The Princess Diana Memorial Fountain

This fountain is the focus of simply one of my favourite and most self-indulgent lines in the whole book. They say kill your darlings, and they’re not wrong – but sometimes they get a stay of execution. If you opened the book of Skulk and on page one it had this line, and the rest was blank, I’d be quite happy.

Of course, since the line actually comes in about halfway through, you’ll have to read the book to find out what it is…

Classic badly lit backstage corridor photo (C) Capital FM

Backstage – and on stage – at the O2 Arena

I’ve sung at the O2 a good four or five times now, almost all as backing to the great – if relentlessly populist – tenor Andrea Bocelli. This was a Crouch End Festival Chorus gig pretty much like any other. Uncomfortable black shoes, Nessun Dorma and Funiculi Funicula (which is an insanely catchy song about an Italian cable car), security wristband, brilliantly goofy percussionists, the tantalising possibility that there may be free tea and biscuits in the dressing rooms.

I realise I’m hugely privileged to think of all this as ‘normal’…

Except that I’d been told that Skulk was going to acquisitions at Strange Chemistry that day.

I checked my email about eight times between the escalator at North Greenwich tube and the backstage area, and indeed, the first email I got came just as I was waiting for the security man to find my name on the performers list and let me through. But it didn’t say ‘yes’, and it didn’t say ‘no’. What it said was, ‘Amanda Rutter, editor at Strange Chemistry, is now following you on Twitter’.

Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhh.

What did it mean? Was it another one of those incredibly nice ‘no’s? Was this like a pity follow, or a ‘we don’t want this but let’s see what she does in the future’ follow?

Or… could it possibly mean… could it…?

About ten minutes later, when we were lining up to go on stage for the soundcheck and rehearsal, I got the email from Catherine. It could. It did mean. Amanda did want to buy Skulk. I had a little jump up and down in the backstage corridor, and broke one of my own rules – no texting in rehearsals – to alert Jessie, my best friend and my Mum.

And when we got to the huge, exhilarating encore of Nessun Dorma later that night, nobody was singing that Gloria with more feeling than me.

Vertigo (C) The Telegraph

The View from The Shard

This place is hugely important to the ending of Skulk, and I’ve never visited it. That’s because when I started writing Skulk, it didn’t exist yet.

I don’t know why I fell so much in love with the Shard before it was even built. One of my favourite procrastination methods from writing Skulk was to go to the architecture nerd forums and skim through the photos of the core as it rose up over the London skyline.

I have no idea if the Shard is a good thing for the economy, but I think it’s beautiful and iconic and a little bit scary. I need to go up there soon – despite the slightly chilling £25 a head to go up to the viewing level.  I need to see whether my wild guesses at the layout are even vaguely accurate!

One thing I’m pretty sure I got right, though: it’s a very long way down. 

Submissions for the 2014 anthology open on the first of July! You can find out all about Undiscovered Voices at http://www.undiscoveredvoices.com/