Houston, we have lift-off.......

Actually, not Houston. You can't by Stations in Houston yet.  Or  in the rest of America.  (You can, however, buy it in Switzerland of all places.   Who knew the Swiss would be interested in our little East London railway line?)

Yes, today it's publication day:

I have to admit, I am not *entirely* sure what that means, except that some point I should probably eat some cake. 

But what I think it means is that you should be able to find copies in bookshops (PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me if you see one), and if your local bookshop doesn't have a copy you can ask them to find you one.  Or you can order directly from Arachne Press.

I have never played professional basketball (this might surprise you), but today I have a pretty good idea of how this guy feels:

Events!

According to Elanor Roosevelt, 'Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.'

I'm feeling distinctly average tonight, so here a few reminders:

Stations Launch(es): 

The official publication date is November 29th (that's this Thursday, people!) and there is an unofficial launch at Deptford Library that evening; it's free to attend but you have to book a ticket. From what I've been told, it's much easier to do this over the phone than online -the number to call is 0208 692 4446.

The official launch is on Sunday December 2nd, at the Brunel museum in Rotherhithe, from 12.30 - 2.30.  You can buy the book and get a pound off a train tour through the tunnels, OR you can pay for a train tour and get a pound off the book.  I'm not sure how much the train tour costs, so I can't tell you which option is financially more viable.  For you, I mean - I know which one is (marginally) more financially viable for me, but I wouldn't want that to influence your decision.

Brick Lane Reading:

I (along with quite a few of the other authors) will be reading a short extract of my story at the launch, but if you want to hear the whole thing, I'll be reading it at Brick Lane Books on Thursday 6th December, from 7pm.  Again, there will be a few other authors reading, again it is free and again again you will have to book.  You can tweet them your booking if you like (how modern!), on @BrickLaneBooks - make sure you include 'Stations' in your tweet.  Or you can find them online at www.bricklanebookshop.org, where, under the 'Events' tab, there are full details including an email address for bookings.

(Don't try bricklanebookshop.com like I did.  Unless you're looking for dating tips, in which case: knock yourself out.)



Sorry this is brief, but my NaNoWriMo clock is ticking........ If you can make it to the Brunel museum or Brick Lane, do come and say hello!

And while we're on the subject, let's all have a long hard think about Christmas and puppies, shall we?

Here is a very sad sight I saw the other day:

Oh. Ok, I can see that photo might need a bit of context.

1. It was taken looking upwards from a train platform somewhere on the Overground line.  At Shadwell,  I think, although I can't be 100% sure. It doesn't really matter.

2. What you can't see in the picture is that there's some wire netting stretched across the top of the platform, and because this particular part of the Overground is, in fact, Underground, the wire netting is a tiny bit below road level.

3.  On the right there's a footbridge, from which people have thrown various unwanted items - old shoes, random gloves, that sort of thing - which you can see as little splodges in the photo.   (The big splodge is a tree branch.  You can ignore that).

Here's a close-up:

Forlorn, isn't it?

 And look closely.   Doesn't that silhouette look strangely familiar?  Are you experiencing a moment of vague recognition, as if this particular abandoned object is something you've seen before - perhaps quite recently - but can't quite place?

I told you it was sad.



Poor old Wenlock. Yesterday he was the nation's sweetheart, the darling of the Olympics;  now he's been tossed aside like - oh, I don't know, that bloke Tom Daley was in the synchronised diving with.

This might be a good time to remember that an Olympic mascot is not just for summer. It's for life.

The Snowflake Man of Vermont

No two snowflakes are alike.  Everyone knows that, yes?  It's a fact I've known since I was at least 10 years old, maybe even younger.  And I grew up in Australia, where we didn't even *have* snow.  Which might, come to think of it, explain why I was so fascinated.

So it's something we all know.  But I bet you don't know why we know.  It's largely because of this man:

Wilson Alwyn Bentley was only 20 when he took the word's first ever photo of a snowflake.  He was just a farmer, from a tiny town in Vermont, but had developed a curiosity about snow after his mother bought him a microscope. Initially he made sketches, eventually moving on to photographs when his father bought him a camera.  You can read all about him, as I have been doing this morning, in this piece by Keith C. Heidorn.  It's a great article; I love the details in this description of his methods for collecting and transporting his specimens:


What he found worked best was to capture the crystals on a cool velvet-covered tray. Taking care not to melt the crystal with his breathe, he identified a suitable subject and lifted it onto a pre-cooled slide with a thin wood splint from his mother’s broom and nudged it into place with a turkey feather. The slide was then carried into his photographic shed and placed under the microscope. The back-lit image was focused using a system of strings and pulleys he devised to accommodate his mittened hands. 


He developed his own post-production techniques (which included manually scraping layers of black emulsion from the negatives with a pen-knife) and had a 7-year dalliance with raindrops, too; capturing their imprints in a shallow pan of flour and keeping meticulous records in his journal about the size and nature of the drops themselves, as well as the rainstorms they came from  and the  surrounding conditions which produced them.

He didn't just record these observations, he also analysed them in painstakingly enormous detail, forming what were eventually proven to be robust scientific theories about cloud physics and meteorology; concluding, for instance, that the basic shape of a snowflake (hexagonal, star, etc) was determined by temperature at which is was formed.

Despite acquiring what Hiedorn wonderfully describes as "a considerable understanding of snow", Bentley wasn't taken seriously by the scientific community until long after his death.  He was, after all, just a self-educated farmer from Vermont; even his own father told him that his experiments were a waste of time.

It was the beauty of his photographs which captured public interest while he was still alive, leading him to become widely known as The Snowflake Man of Vermont.  The best ones were sought after by artists and jewelery makers, and it's not hard to see why:

Bentley died a few days before Christmas in 1931, of pneumonia contracted while walking home in bad weather.  At his funeral, just as his coffin was laid in the ground, a blanket of snow gently began to fall.  

Autumn

I had a strange thought yesterday afternoon.  It must have been about 5 o'clock; it was already dark, and the weather was grim.  I walked past a mound of golden leaves, all shiny from the rain - and that's when it happened.  Autumn, I realised, was really here.

For some reason I've been in a slight state of denial about autumn this year. I have been paying it lip service; for weeks I've been saying all the right things like "aren't the nights drawing in", and "can you believe they're selling Christmas decorations already",  and I'm wearing all the right clothes.  Even so, part of me has still been clinging to some crazy hope that there might be a tiny whisp of Indian summer still out there somewhere, just hanging around waiting for its moment.

And then yesterday I saw these leaves, and realised it was absolutely, definitely Autumn. Well of course it's Autumn! was the very next thing I thought.  It's the middle of November.  Which is practically  December,  and that's Winter.  You can't go around thinking it's still Summer when it's virtually Winter already.  

I was right, of course.  But the end of Autumn has just kind of snuck up on me this year.

It's not the only thing to do that lately; tomorrow is  my 39th birthday. Suddenly, I'm not going to be in my early-ish, mid-ish, late-ish 30s any more; I will have reached almost-40.  If feels like a significant age, and although I've had plenty of advance notice - 39 years, in fact - it still seems a bit out of the blue.

Getting here has been a slightly backward journey.   I spent the middle part of my twenties - those years when you're meant to experiment and be care-free and figure out who you are - in a very settled (I thought), very serious relationship, with someone ten years older than me.  So when I moved to London, aged 28, I told myself that it would be OK to spend the first few years of my thirties being a 20-something.  And that's exactly what I did. In my late-late-twenties I made new friends, and tried new things, and fell in love, and had my heart broken, and hopped back and forth between  houses, and jobs and entire careers - did all those thing I'd missed out on the first time around.  It felt like I'd been given a second chance and that this time I had finally managed to grab hold of life, and really live it on my own terms.  Not that I had any idea what those terms were, most of the time, but that's sort of my point - I got to work them out.   I really cherish those years.  There were some truly terrible lows - but also some very amazing highs (metaphoric, not chemical ones, I mean.  I didn't go completely crazy) and I learned all sorts of things. I realised the real value of friendship, and  discovered aspects of myself that I never knew existed.  And I had fun. SO much fun.

And as the years tip-toed by, and whispered new ages at me - 33, 34, 35, 36....... I slowly started to settle down again, and do some of those things that you're supposed to in your 30s. I bought a flat. I started to manage my finances (sort of).  I learned about wine.  It happened very gradually, this process of turning into an adult, and I didn't really notice it happening.  And of course it's not over yet.  There are still some fairly big milestones left to tick off; whether I'll ever reach them or not is still up in the air, and it's not as if they can't happen after  I'm 40.  But still, that age feels like a marker of sorts.

And I can't help thinking that somewhere in all of that, there's been a glorious autumn that I've missed. I was so busy enjoying that crazy Indian summer of my late twenties and my extra-late twenties that I didn't even notice the season had finally changed.  Until now, when it's nearly over.  Being nearly 39 feels a lot like suddenly catching sight of that pile of leaves yesterday.  I really am in my 30s.  Well of course you are.  I mean, you're very nearly 40.  You can hardly go around pretending to be a late-20-something still, can you?

I've got the day off work tomorrow, but I haven't quite decided how to spend it yet.  I don't really mind that it's  going to be one of those birthdays which slips by without fanfare -  last year I celebrated with lunch at the Fat Duck, which was always going to be a tough act to follow.  But  I think what I will do, at some point, is find a park.  Preferably one which is full of leaves which are good for stomping through.  I plan to make the most of these last few weeks of autumn.

Phew!

Busy day.  I have a new favourite carpark:

And a new favourite movie tagline:

And a new favourite unconfirmed quote, from the youngest Titanic survivor, who apparently when offered a drink said:

"I can't bear iced drinks..... the iceberg, you know.  Perhaps some champagne though."

I really hope she did say it.

The car-park is attached to Kansas City public library, and came from someone on Twitter (the really cool part of the story is that the residents got to vote for which books were featured).  The movie, which  really is about sharks being caught in a tornado comes from the always entertaining, and often aquatic Plenty More Fish where there's a much better explanation than I've just given, and I can't remember who told me about the Futility Closet website which provided the Titanic quote (sorry if it was you) but I have barely looked at any other part of the internet since.

Also, after watching last night's Children in Need special episode of Only Connect I have a new admiration for Richard Osman's ability to recall the lyrics of "50 Ways To Leave Your Lover".  It's on the iPlayer for the next week, so if you're quick you can click here to see why.  The man's a genius.

I even have a title, too. They could call it: "Stations". And maybe put a picture of some train-tracks on the cover.

The London Overground turns five years old today.  I hope somebody made a cake.

Since it also happens to be National Short Story Week, you know what would be great, in an isn't-serendipity-marvellous sort of a way?  If someone, or maybe a whole bunch of people, were to write write a collection of short stories (you know, because it's National SHORT STORY week)  which had been inspired by the various stations on the Overground line.

 I mean, pre-ordering a book like that would be a brilliant way to mark today's illustrious occasion, don't you think?

Just saying.

Her name, currently, is Kate. But perhaps I should change it to Kiki Dee.......

 I'm working on a novel at the moment, and I'm stuck on one particular scene, which  I'm struggling to write.  It's a scene which really shouldn't be so difficult.  There are only two characters involved, and I already know exactly what's going to happen to them and it doesn't involve any laser beams, or weird monsters or exotic locations;  there are no complicated plot twists or subtle undercurrents to communicate and it's night time, so it's not even as if there's a lot to see.  I can picture the whole scenario in my head, and I've written the scenes leading up to this one, and there's no tricky research or fact-checking I need to do before I start.    On top of all that, this is just a first draft so I'm not even too bothered, at this stage, about getting the scene exactly right, or making sure it's polished.  I just need to get it on the page.

And yet, I'm struggling.  I don't want to start.  I can't start.  I did everything under the sun last weekend to avoid writing that scene.

The problem is one of the characters. She's in her first year at university, and she's just met Simon, who is in the year above and developed a huge crush on him, in that way that you sometimes do at that age, especially when you meet someone a little bit older than you who seems about a billion years more sophisticated.  They're going to go for a nice romantic walk, and he's brought along a bottle of champagne..... and then he's going to give her the brush-off.   Which will, of course, break her heart.

The ridiculous thing is, I already know she's going to be absolutely fine.   Simon's being a bit of a bastard now, but she'll win him over, and they'll end up going out for a couple of years.  It won't last forever (he'll go off to America in his final year of university, and they'll break up before he goes) but that's something she'll survive too.  They'll stay friends, and even when he marries someone else that friendship will remain intact. And she'll look back on their relationship, and this night in particular, and laugh about how naive she was, and how it was so obvious that he wasn't "the one" and how lucky it is that they didn't end up together.

So it's all going to be fine, really.

Nevertheless,  the idea of sending her out on that walk, full of hope and expectations and nervous excitement when I know full well what's going to happen..........well, I just can't do it to her.  Every time I sit down to write that scene, I feel a bit ill, and flooded with guilt, and I find something less horrible to go and do instead, like cleaning my fridge or putting yet another load of washing on.  I've been trying for about three days now.  And I know I need to get it written.  But I just can't.

It's silly, I know. And I suppose, in a way, it's a good sign.  Isn't it?

Eggs. It was eggs.

Right.  I've  had time to check my Famous Five references (see previous post for context) and it was on QI (this episode here, about 28 minutes in), and it was eggs they once had lashings of, as part of the world's most horrible sounding salad.  So now you know.

This is really just an excuse to link to a lovely article I read in the Guardian earlier this year, which made me feel quite nostalgic (and hungry) when I read it and where journalist Josh Sutton presents an in-depth analysis of the Famous Five's eating habits.  They were really quite healthy, it turns out, and he notes that their meals were quite social occasions as well as being a fairly accurate reflection of the austerity measures of the time.

There's a data file, too.  Yes, that's right; as part of his research Sutton  systematically searched for and categorised every single mention of food in every single one of the Famous Five books, which is quite a job when you stop and think about it.

 I must say, I quite like the sound of Josh Sutton.

And I washed it all down with lashings of ginger beer*

I went to a tiny village in Kent the other day, for work.  I really wish I had taken my camera so I could show you some photos, but for now you'll just have to believe me when I say there is a village in Kent where the streets are called 'Bog Hole Lane',  "Heart in Hand Road" and "Old Tree Lane".

Going there felt just like stepping into an Enid Blyton story.


*Except, of course, I didn't really.  I washed it all down with the cold remains of a cup of Costa coffee bought from the M2 motorway services.   Besides, I'm sure I heard somewhere recently (maybe on QI, because it seems like one of their klaxon-inducing answers, but I don't really have time to check) that 'lashings of ginger beer' were never actually mentioned in any of the Famous Five stories.  Lashings of something else, certainly, but only once - and it definitely wasn't ginger beer.

On a map. Also, a train. And inside a book. Basically, I've been everywhere this weekend. Except to the gym.

Wow.  LOTS of writerly things going on this weekend.  All very exciting. The main thing is, I now have a couple of copies of Stations.  Yes, it's actually a real book now!  Look!

and, even more excitingly, for me at least, look!

There it is!  My story, in AN ACTUAL BOOK.  I am so excited about this that I literally have not stopped smiling all weekend.

More about all that later (come on, you really didn't think this was the last time I was going to mention it, did you?) but in the meantime, here's a map*:

And here's a little video we made on the train.  Basically, what you will see in my part of this video is me trying very hard not to explode with excitement and joy while reading the first few lines of my story FROM AN ACTUAL BOOK.**  You can decide for yourself whether or not I succeed. (Spoiler alert:  I don't entirely succeed.)   How I am going to cope with reading the whole thing in front of an audience,  while maintaining my cool, I have no idea.  I might have to resort to reading a print out; looking at the book is just TOO MIND-BLOWINGLY EXCITING***.

Oh yes, readings.  We are doing some.  There is going to be an official launch on December 2nd, which I'm going to and where some people will be reading, but I don't know if I'm one of them yet; there's an event at Brick Lane Books on December  6th and another one at the Ideas Store in Whitechapel in January, and I'm reading at both of those, and there are various other events going on in between, which should all be listed here. 

Helpfully, just as I'm starting to think about maybe practising for those readings, I received a fantastic audio recording of the first two thirds of Bloody Marys today - read by  a very nice sounding man (with a wonderful voice) who did a superb job of bringing my characters to life.  The recording was made by some radio production students, as part of their course-work and I absolutely love it - fingers crossed they'll give me permission to post that here, too.

So lots of Stations excitement this weekend.  But that's not all I've been doing.  I've also managed to squeeze out 5000 words of my NaNoWriMo project so far, most of which are completely ghastly but it's NaNoWriMo, so you know, that's sort of the point; and I've joined in with  a twitter-based storytelling experiment, via my new alter-ego, @FitnessDee

I managed to send one of her tweets from my personal account by mistake this morning, causing a certain amount of confusion for those twitter friends who know me in real life:

Luckily, I noticed and managed to put the record straight:

I'm already having a lot of fun being @FitnessDee;  if you want to get involved in the story, you can  -  details can be found here.

So it's been a busy weekend.  And it's going to be an even busier November.  Lots going on, but all of it good, and somehow in between it all I've got another 45 000 words to write for NaNoWriMo.  Don't suppose any one has an extra November they can lend me?



* I've been meaning to post this map for a while, and was even going to say something like "if you look at the map really closely, and you know your train stations, you should be able to work out the title of my Hoxton story".  Which is  still true, of course, but since the title of my Hoxton story is right there in the photo above, it's a slightly moot point.

**Actually, that's not all you'll see.  You'll also see my new coat.  So now you know.

***I don't mean this to sound as glib as I fear it probably does.  I am genuinely, properly excited and pleased and proud of the book.  And I do plan to write a longer blog post which explains why.

On the Clock

Curated by the London Literary Project, The London Clock is an online collection of poetry and flash fiction, all set at a particular time of day in a particular part of London.  

London is such an easy city to write about, and is perfect for a project like this;  full of hidden nooks and crannies, each vastly different from each other, and with so much going on at different times of day.  There's something magical about walking through Soho early on a weekday morning as the city is slowly waking up, and about being by the river late at night, seeing the lights sparkling on the water while everyone else is asleep.  Rush hour at Victoria station is a little less magical, perhaps, but no less memorable, and there are a thousand other tiny moments which make London unique.

It's a brilliant idea for a project - so simple, yet so perfect, and I've really enjoyed reading some of the entries.  You can submit here, and read my contribution here.