The only advice I would give new writers is more general and as follows:

1 – Don’t waste time on envy. You’re only in competition with yourself. It’s a long road and just use others’ successes to inspire you or make you raise your game. It’s a happier way to live. I’m a believer in sharing. I’ve got people in with my agent who’ve come away with better deals than me. Am I envious? No. Good on ‘em. I always put people I know who are need of  a break in touch with my editors and agents. It might come to something, it might not, but I’m not in competition with them. I’m in competition with me, see? Plus, being nice feels good. Even for a wicked woman like me.

2 – There is no easy road. This is a tough business. So toughen up. Take the knocks and the criticisms. Listen. Watch. Learn.

3 – Be charming. Charm goes a long way. It won’t get you a deal, but it will get you remembered for when you’ve got something dealworthy.

4 – And finally – always remember that the trick is not in getting published (tough as that is), it’s in staying published. Embrace ‘the fear’. It keeps you working harder and smarter.

All of which is probably better than the advice I used to give the school kids I taught which mainly involved ‘Everyone has favourites. Get over it.’ and on Sports day, ‘Just remember. Second Place is First loser.’

SP.

I remember the day this picture was taken. (yes, I AM the one who looks like a boy and is determined to NOT stand where my sister is attempting to put me). Somewhere, probably in a battered suitcase of memories at my parents’ house, there are two more photos from this day in our garden in Damascus back in about 1978/9. One has me and my sister on either side of my dad, and the other is of me and my sister both hugging another man – an American man called Swayne Britt. I think in the picture I’m holding him so tightly round the neck I’m close to choking him. And smiling. We’re all smiling.

Because Swayne Britt was a magical man.

We loved Swayne Britt, me and my sister. He was one of those unique people. He was from Texas. He had a long grizzly grey beard. He was tall. His skin was just on the turn to leather from the sun and his hair was thinning. He wore soft cotton shirts with all those flowery patterns that were hip back then. His eyes always twinkled. He was always laughing.  Swayne Britt didn’t just HAVE stories, he WAS stories. Of course, I was six, my sister was nine. Maybe that’s just how he appeared to us. But then truth is only perception and my truth was that there was no one more fascinating on this planet when I was six or seven than Swayne Britt. Even his name sounded like it came from story.

Swayne Britt was a single man. He must have been in his early forties. I don’t know how he became friends with my family, but I guess, knowing my dad, it probably happened over a beer. He was my dad’s opposite number in the American Embassy and all the ex-pats mixed. Swayne Britt became a firm favourite in our house.

The magic of Swayne was that he loved kids. He understood kids. We spent a lot of halcyon days together, just me and my big sister and Swayne. I don’t know when he started taken us off the for day to give my mum some peace. It just kind of happened. He took us swimming. He took us to the Marine House where they had proper American lollipops. He’d take us to his house and play us all his Rolling Stones records and we’d dance like idiots. It was in Swayne Britt’s house that I first saw a KISS album cover and I remember being both fascinated and terrified by the make-up.  Swayne Britt told us fantastical stories of ridiculous things, and fantastical stories of real things. He made us Cowboy Beans for lunch.

Once, when my parents were having a party and Swayne was there, a little English boy asked him who he was. Swayne said, ‘I’m a cowboy, son.’ The little boy looked at Swayne’s shirt and trousers, shook his head and replied, ‘I don’t believe you, Mister.’

You know what Swayne did? He put down his beer, got into his car and drove back to his house on the other side of that dusty city. He came back about an hour later all dressed up in his chaps and stetson and neckerchief. He winked and smiled at that little boy and said ‘Now do you believe me, son?’ That little boy was completely lost in the magic. He was in AWE. I bet he remembers that to this day.

And that’s the magic. Some people just have it.

Yeah, me and Laura, we loved Swayne Britt. We loved him a lot.

I don’t know why I started thinking about Swayne Britt today. Maybe it’s because I’m writing (should be writing) a story about another city of my childhood. Or maybe it’s just that barely six months goes by when I don’t think of Swayne Britt and smile, which given that it’s been thirty-two years since I’ve seen him is quite a testament to the magic he made for us.

These days though, when I think of him, I always feel a little sad. Not because of the passing of time and wondering whether he’s ill or happy or sad or even still alive – I don’t think those things because in my memory he’s always exactly as he was the day those photographs were taken – but because of the way the world has changed.

A single man. In his forties. Playing with kids. On his own. All day.

I asked my mum a couple of years ago if those days were now, and we were small in this decade, would she let him take us off for the day like she used to? Or would she say no? Find it weird? Think he was weird? She thought about that for a moment before agreeing that she would probably say no. She wasn’t happy with herself for the decision, but it was an honest one.

I thought about it too. In this day and age, he probably wouldn’t have even mentioned it. Single man. In his forties. Offering to look after someone else’s small girls for the day? What would people think?

We know what they’d think. THAT word.

Best not offer.

That makes me sad. It makes me feel old. The world has made us all so cynical. The world is so in our face about every terrible crime that we forget that most people are essentially all right. Some forty year old men are just people who love kids but don’t have any of their own.

There are no more wicked people in the world than there were thirty years ago. There are just a lot more suspicious ones.

Probably with good cause.

There are no answers. The clock can never be turned back to more innocent times. That world is gone. Just memories.

But they’re my memories and I’m happy I got to have them.

And I’m  very, very glad my mum just saw the goodness in the magical man.

SP x

http://www.youtube.com/user/snaxhanson#p/a/u/0/ylT-EQWJfC4

Let me put this into context. The previous evening, author Guy Adams, who is one of my best friends, and I, had hosted the raffle. We have become a kind of double act on these things, and much of our humour depends on me being blonde/dumb and him pointing it out. It kind of works. People laugh anyway. But what I forget, amidst the laughter, is that a lot of those people DON’T KNOW ME like Guy does. The parody has become my failsafe. It makes people feel comfortable, and I like people to feel comfortable. What I didn’t realise until that conversation with Maura, was how much I liked the feeling when people  ’saw through it.’ Because it isn’t me. Not really.

Anyone who was at World Fantasy last week  has probably heard about the weird guy who ended up getting his membership taken away from him and evicted. (Oh yes, we are totally rock n roll in the genre.) The other day I went for lunch with a producer friend, Ray, who is also in LA currently, and a partner of his. We were chatting and I started telling the story about how this guy had stalked me, harrassed me, and then my good friends Paul and Marie had walked me back to my room because they were worried about me. My version of this events had lots of jokes and laughs in it (as you do), but when I’d finished, Ray looked at me thoughtfully and said, ‘The thing is, these people think they know you.’

This reinforced something that struck me after the fiasco of this years BFS awards, when some has-been soap actor who was a dinner guest of the then-chairman came on stage to present an award and said I’d look better with my dress off (he’d never even spoken to me before) and then afterwards tried to join in a conversation I was in by referring to me as ‘This tart…..’ (Trust me -he won’t ever do it again.) I remember being shocked that he thought it was okay to speak to me like that, but then afterwards I thought, what exactly is it I allow? I don’t draw a boundary, so how is anyone supposed to see it?

That’s the weird thing about the internet/public persona, I guess. Am I flippant? Yes, of course. Otherwise, I couldn’t be the ridiculous person I am in front of a microphone or in a tweet or a FB update. I play for the laughs. Look at my Twitter or Facebook and that’s what you get. Blonde in a nutshell. It’s all part of who I am. But is it who I am?

Hell no.

I’m serious. I believe in true love. I work really, really hard. I think too much about everything. For all my talk of wine and men, I’m normally in bed by midnight and on my own. I don’t do one night stands. My standards are high. I like kind people more than I like successful ones. I want a man who is talented, stands his ground, makes me laugh, makes me feel safe, and doesn’t make me want an audience. My friends are the most important people to me. I cried for days when my cat died. I’m scared of everything. I like to sit outside on warm evenings and think about everything I will never do in my life and feel okay about that. Autumn makes me think of death. Only if I trust someone will I let them touch my neck.

The people that know me know that. Probably about three of the people reading this. See?

I used to joke that my flippancy was my judge of character to see who could see who I really was or not. However, I can’t help but wonder  if, as I get older and wiser, the joke has fallen back on me. Maybe I should ease back on the flippancy and be happy to just be me.  Or maybe we should all remember that a public persona is never who the person really is…

Or maybe my persona is me, and I just don’t like to see myself that way because I’m afraid of becoming Patsy…;-) Who knows…it’s only me..and I’m a blonde..and I’m rambling…

SPx (under the influence)

PS. But the pope is still a cunt. Just in case you were wonderin’….

It’s been a funny week on Twitter. But then, Twitter can be a funny place if you let it. The weird thing about that other dimension in which so many of us partially exist is how it polarises people . Issues arise and people immediately take one position or the other. Two sides go to war. Never the twain shall meet. That always disappoints me. As a writer I spend my life making other people up. I see their side on many things. It might not be MY side, but it’s theirs and I kind of get it. On twitter, there seems little space to see the middle ground on any issue without being flamed and that makes me sad. To me it denies reason, and reminds me that at the end of the day we’re the same kind of people who dragged others crying to guillotines while we knitted jumpers and laughed. I exaggerate obviously, but I’m a writer – helping the story along is what I do. I guess what scares me most about Twitter sometimes is how people forget how they react to things when they’re not being a ‘Tweeter’ and just being themselves. The two are often very different  I should imagine.

Let me give you  a couple of examples.

Two big stories seemed to fill my timeline this week. They outraged people one way or another. Me? Not so much. But then I’m not easily outraged. I like to smile. To laugh. Not to fight.

The first?

Well, that was @rickygervais and his constant use of the word ‘mong’ in the Twitter universe. Fellow tweeters either thought he should be burnt at the stake for offending or that those offended should just grow up and ‘get with’ our evolving language. You know what? I think there’s a pretty solid middle ground. I don’t believe for a second that Mr Gervais meant to offend. But at the same time I think he was naive in using that word on such an open forum and not expecting a large percentage of readers to be offended by it. It’s a word wallowing in a variety of interpretations depending on individual experience, but it started out as a derogatory term. If you use it, you have to accept that some people will still see it that way. Huge amounts of media time have been spent on this story; should he apologise of not? Is he a villain or a hero? To be honest, who really cares? I should imagine that Ricky Gervais doesn’t overly. It’s only Twitter, after all. He used the word. I presume he thought it through. Can everyone put the torches down now? Worse things are probably happening in the street around the corner from you. And you know what? If he doesn’t think it’s offensive, then NOTHING you can say will persuade him otherwise, and the same goes the other way round. That’s it. End of.

The second instance I’m more wary of talking about. After all this involves a ‘real’ person. Not a celebrity. They apparently are fair game. This was the case of @talkstoteens who was pursued by a journalist and had her tweets revealed in an attempt to expose her as some kind of terrible teacher. As an ex-teacher, I followed this story with interest. Let me say now, I don’t in any way think the paper was right in doing what they did. Not at all. But do I understand WHY they did what they did? Of course. She actually made it easy for them. I sympathise with her, but at the same time, I have to say, my inner eyebrow raised somewhat because as an Assistant Head she should have had the good sense to lock her account if she was going to tweet about blow jobs etc. I mean, REALLY??? Didn’t she think for one second that perhaps she should LOCK her account? Just in case the kids see it? Even I would have done that, and we all know what I’m like. Most teachers I know don’t even have facebook accounts, let alone tweet. If they did, their accounts would be locked. End of. If the papers hadn’t got her, her school/the parents/the kids would have at some point. I can’t help but look at her and think, ‘I feel sorry for you, but bloody hell, didn’t you THINK?’ Have I tweeted this opinion? Hell no. Because of Twitter’s extremism it would only have got me flak. Which I don’t need.  For once, I kept my opinions to myself.

The story and my personal views aside, what interested me was the Twitter outrage about it. That whole universe is in uproar. And I have to admit, that did make  me smile. Why? Because I wondered how many of those people would have felt the same outrage if they had come by that story from their kids rather than the great God Twitter, in a kind of ‘Oh miss X tweeted about giving a blow job, isn’t that funny?’ kind of way. I bet they’d have reacted differently. Their uproar would have been a completely different kind. Head teachers and phone calls spring to mind.

Am I calling those people hypocrites? No, I’m not. I’m not that harsh. I’m calling them people. Tweeters. And there in lies the strange dichotomy. People react differently when within the Twittersphere than they would in their real lives. It’s like when you’re walking along a road or driving. When I’m in a car, the pedestrians are all idiots, when I’m walking, suddenly the reverse is true. Twitter is sort of the same but different. Twitter is like a juggernaut. It sweeps up opinions and demands you join. It powers along that internet highway and people leap on, determined to be going the ‘right way’ in any given situation.

I guess what I’m saying is that Twitter, the mob mentality of it, makes you choose a side or just shut the fuck up. I’ve been shot down on there before for trying to be reasoned, and I’ve learned to keep my middle-ground views to myself. Sometimes I feel strongly enough about something to make a stand – the Quaddafi beatings and death images for an example – but I’ll make my stand outside the Twitterverse. Where I can actually DO something.

You see, that’s the thing with crowds. They make me feel like I can’t breathe.

I’d rather stand alone. Here in the middle ground. Where it’s calmer.

Over the past couple of weeks I have taken stands over certain issues. The BFS awards scandal was one. Did I take to Twitter on it? No. Not beyond re-tweeting articles (covering both sides). Why? I don’t like a mob. Mobs always turn ugly and I want no part of them. Anyone who saw the footage of Gaddafi (yes, I’m going for every spelling of that name in this blog) after his capture will know what I mean. Even when a mob is right, it leaves me feeling unsettled. All mobs are ugly. I want no part of Twitter OUTRAGE (caps intended.)

I’m fond of you Twitter, but sometimes, when you’re working as one, I can’t help but think you’ve checked your brain in at the door. Come over here to the middle ground. We might not always agree but the sofas are comfy and we could chat about stuff for hours.

And more than that, there’s room to be yourself. You can’t ask for more than that.

SP x

I live in the Blur – that almost dimension between fact and fiction. I think all writers live there somewhere, and maybe we live there most, (when I walk round London now and I see an old cab shelter, I’m with Ted and young Fin and the Knights and the secret Cabbies that watch London and all the rest of the Somewhere and Nowhere I’ve spent 3 books making real, I’m not there, on that pavement looking at a forgotten green wooden box) but it isn’t just our place. It would be easy to get all pretentious and try and stick a writers’ national flag on it, but it’s not ours. I knew the Blur long before I wrote a book.

Readers know the Blur. You’re in the Blur when you go to a real place but the things and people you remember most from it and care about are ones you read in a book. A few years ago I visited an author friend of mine in Boston and he said, ‘You know where we’re going today?’ I didn’t know. ‘Ogunquit, Maine. I thought you’d want to see it.’ Man, I was so excited. This may mean nothing to you, but if you’ve ever read The Stand (several times in my case) then your stomach would have fizzed like mine did. I smiled the whole goddamned way. When we got there, and Chris Golden and I walked the beaches and looked at the houses, I was seeing where Frannie Goldsmith found out she was pregnant,  and when I looked at the rooftops I could almost see the sign she and greasy Harold Lauder painted before they started their journey towards their individual destinies. That shit was more real to me than the people selling painted boats in the cute tourist shops or the cold wind coming in from the ocean. My Ogunquit, Maine T-shirt is all about having visited Stephen King’s Blur for an afternoon – a real place and a fictional one, layered over each other.

Me and a 15 year old student took a trip to the Blur (prompted by the same book) one afternoon back when I was still teaching and there was the first bird flu outbreak. ‘Captain Trips,’ one boy said, ominously. I looked up, eyes wide. ‘Captain Trips?’ He nodded. I smiled. The other kids looked at us like we were mad, but I was there in the Blur for a moment and so was he. Captain Trips was coming..and bringing with it the walkin’ dude…The truth of the panic around bird flu was wrapped into the memory of the panic about Captain Trips in a work of fiction. Fact and fiction and the slipstream between them where in that moment, he and I sat.

Dreamers know the Blur. Proper dreamers. Vivid dreamers. I could cry for people who say they don’t remember their dreams. It must be awful. Life must be so dull, in colours as well as actions. How much life are they missing? I love my dreams. Even the terrifying ones that would wake me up at night when I was a kid and I’d creep into the older girls’ dorms at boarding school and wake someone up and make them talk to me until it was light so that I wouldn’t fall back to sleep again. Dreaming is a world in itself. It encapsulates the Blur. What is real and what isn’t? If you remember something vividly from a dream years after, then surely that’s maybe more real than something you actually did but that everyone, including you has forgotten?

About two years ago I had a dream where a famous writer was a kind of Doctor Who character and I was his assistant. He took me out to the very edge of our universe and we stood in space, on a boundary between two places. Ahead, there was a wormhole and through it I could see worlds of such brightness and colours and brilliance that they took my breath away. I ached to go forward. I looked at the Doctor/FamousWriter. ‘We can go there,’ he said, ‘but if we do, you can never go back.’ I turned around and looked behind me. Far in the distance I could see the Earth and the Moon and I felt such a wave of sadness. I looked forward. I looked back. I woke up before I made my choice. I don’t think that dream will ever leave me. But I can’t remember what I did last week….See? The Blur is real. It is to me.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on enough. If you know what I’m talking about, then you got it in the first sentence, and if you don’t, then I’ve probably just bored you. I have to go anyway, I’ve got some hours to spend in The Blur making shit up with people I’ve made up but who are very real to me and make them do stuff in places that are real but that I’ve turned into fiction. My stomach is fizzing.

You know that Doctor in my dream? I think he was wrong. You can go to a place of brilliance and brightness and colours, and you can still come home. It’s all in your own head, after all.

I love the Blur. It’s where magic is real and everything is possible.

Hope to see you there. x

Houses are strange. We buy them. We think we own them. They make us feel safe and secure and sturdy and forever.

We’re wrong of course. Houses aren’t ours. Not really. My house was built in 1898. It will be standing, no doubt, long after I’m dead. It’s that kind of house. It was built to last.

When I walk down to write in the nearest decent coffee shop to my house, I often pass the home I grew up in. I put it in a book once, ‘The Reckoning’, which was  a story about the souls of buildings. I guess it’s an idea that has always fascinated me. When I go past that house (that my parents sold about fifteen years ago), I wonder at all the lost memories inside it. I remember being so afraid of the attic that I would run under the hatch to get to my sister’s bedroom. I remember the awful green carpet up the stairs. I remember when the girl who lived next door got drunk at 15 and set her bedroom on fire with a cigarette and jumped from her  window in an attempt to save herself. Fifteen seemed so grown up to me then. She died on the lawn before the ambulance got there, her small dog howling beside her. Apparently, all the skin from her back was burned away. That haunted me when I was a child. I wonder if anyone who lives there now is even aware of that story. Of course they’re not. They’ve imprinted the house with their own memories. Mine no longer exist there.

I’ve lived in my current house for eight years. It’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. Last year I put my house on the market and am still trying to sell it (damn that recession). At the time, it was a practical decision – I spend a lot of time in London and it would make sense to live there. I still loved my house though. I found I’d formed an attachment to it. It was my comfort blanket. It was MINE.

It’s not of course. Recently, I’ve felt a shift. My house wants to regenerate. People don’t own houses. Houses own people and their memories. They hold lives for a while. They know secrets. But the lives pass and the people move on, and the houses wipe themselves clean and start again.

In the eight years I’ve lived in my house, lots of people have shared it with me. At first, there was the ex-boyfriend and his three children. Then, after we parted company, there were a few (cough) other men. Then my ex-father in law came to stay while he battled cancer. I remember him pointing out what a nice vibe my house had, (and it really does – My house is kind ) as he looked around each room and nook and cranny. After that there were ‘the boys’, two friends that rented rooms, and then when they moved out and bought their own place, my friend Liz and her cat Savannah moved in for a year. After they moved out, it was just me and Mr Fing, my old feline companion of forever, who moved on to the great cat playground in the sky a week or so ago.

Since Mr Fing died, things in the house have changed. I can feel a coolness in the bricks and mortar. To be fair, I haven’t always been the best house resident. I don’t do ‘stuff’. I don’t buy nick nacks. I like clear lines and spaces. When I’ve read a book it goes in the charity shop (yep, even the dedicated ones). Talking to @polarkoala at a party yesterday she commented that this was probably because I haven’t yet put down roots, and she may well be right, (and as I approach 40 I wonder if I ever will), but that aside,  if I was my house, I wouldn’t be overly pleased with me as a current inhabitant. And yet still, my house has cared for me. It’s protected me. I’ve felt safe inside it.

But like I said, since Mr Fing left, I’ve felt something shift. I think my house is restless. I think it wants new blood. It wants the vigour of change. The walls and doors and shapes of it are suddenly slightly unfamiliar to me. I feel as if my house is shuffling from foot to foot. It’s not unkind, but if it could, it would edge me towards the door. Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. I know I need change. I just didn’t realise that my house might too.

We often wonder if our houses are haunted. Recently I’ve decided that my house probably is.

The weird thing is, I think that the ghost is me.

SP x

I had a cat. He rocked. He died today. We had a lot of years together, and I can tell you exactly why I loved him.

My cat was called Mr Fing. He was a girl. When I got him he was called simply Fing, an abbreviation of ‘the Effing Cat’ which is what his old owners called him. This gives you a sense of his nature. He was funny. He was mental. He was French. When I got him he was about seven. When he died he was about twenty. Here are the reasons I loved my cat.

1) My cat knew he was at home with me. Whenever I moved – which has been a lot – I never worried about that ‘if you let them out they won’t come back’ rule. Mr Fing would get out of the cat box, look around, look at me and then shrug as if to say, ‘meh, she’s here. It’s okay. This is new home.’

2) When I first got my cat, I was married. Clearly my cat’s old owners had not had a lot of sex. Whenever my husband and I were getting it on, Mr Fing would come to check I was okay. It would make me giggle to open my eyes and find the cat sticking its face in mine, all concerned. My husband – and several men after – were less amused. I learned to be less noisy. My cat learned to stick its head under a pillow and wait till it was all over.

3) My cat liked to be where we were. He used to sit on the gatepost of our farmhouse in Devon and watch the world. We had a convertible car. There were several occasions when half-way down the lane we would look in the back seat and see Mr Fing sitting there all cool as a cucumber having jumped in as we drove out.

4) My cat used to come jogging with me. I kid you not.

5) My cat liked to share Doner Kebabs with me. Especially with chilli sauce and garlic mayonnaise.

6) My cat always came to greet me when I got home.

7) My cat used to wait outside the loo for me.

8) I loved watching my cat having a mad half-hour ghost chasing around the house.

9) Even in the last few days, when he was weak and sick and in pain, my cat would purr around me and face rub me. My cat had my back.

10) My cat was a kind cat. When my friend Nick came to stay when he was dying, my cat would always try to jump on his lap and chest for a cuddle. Nick would always push him away because of his cancer and it being painful. In the last week, when Nick was in bed and on a morphine drip, Mr Fing crept into his bedroom. He jumped softly onto the end of the bed. He slowly padded his way up, testing his way so as not to stand on Nick, and eventually reached his hand which was above the covers, and then carefully slid his head under it and lay down. I think my cat knew. Cats do. The right cats, anyway.

My cat was a happy cat. He liked to sit out in the sun with me. I hope the sun is shining on him now. And I hope he forgives me for doing what I hope was best.

Me and my cat – we were buddies. You can’t ask for more than that.

SP x