The Potential of Crowd Sourced Funding for Writers - Adam Horovitz

A poet friend of mine, Adam Horovitz, has recently used crowd-sourced funding to raise money to help him with his next collection of poetry. I was fascinated by this possible solution to some of the perils of the funding sector, so asked him for his thoughts.

What do you know about crowd funding? It's a pertinent question in these hard times for arts funding, politically and economically. I discovered it thanks to following the musician Amanda Palmer on Twitter, watching with increasing astonishment and delight as she raised an incredible $1.2 million to fund her latest album, having originally asked for $100,000, claiming that this method of funding was the 'future of music'.

As the year progressed it got harder and harder to be a freelance writer - anyone following that career path will surely know what I mean, although no-one in the creative industry or the job market in general can be finding things that easy at the moment - I began to think that crowd funding might be a useful way to help get myself to the Hawthornden Fellowship I had been offered last year, when things were a little less financially constrained.

I got the fellowship on the back of my first book, Turning, which was published by Headland Publications last year. It offers unconstrained time and silence in a castle in Scotland to write. Trouble was, I was beginning to think that I would have to pass on the opportunity because work was so fragile and hard to come by. Who'd want to sit in silence in a castle not writing because of mortgage worries, after all?

So I went to Sponsume, one of a number of crowd funding websites that have sprung up in the last few years, and set up a campaign to try and buy myself time to work on my second book of poetry.

The beauty of crowd funding is that it takes the funding of artistic ventures right to the heart of the audience who are interested in the art. One is encouraged to offer 'rewards' for people who contribute - in my case, I am offering anything from limited edition postcard poems to a very limited number of private readings to people who contribute.

I have agonised about the naked-making feeling that such an open form of money-raising engenders, and the risk of making oneself look foolish, greedy or just plain arrogant, but have been gratified by the response from many people, some of them friends, some family and some (and this is the most wonderful part for any artist) people one doesn't know who either like the art in question or like the idea of supporting an artist. It is also a wonderful feeling to be able to offer them all something in return.

I don't think crowd-funding is the best way of raising really large amounts of money, unless one has the social networking nous, fanbase and reach of someone like Amanda Palmer, but I do believe it is an excellent way of creating small but potent amounts of money for individual projects and (and this is important) creating publicity for them that is not mired in corporate profit-mongering.

At the Free Verse Book Fair, I had an interesting discussion on the ethics of this sort of fundraising with Adele Ward of Ward Wood Publishing. There was some concern that raising funds for, say, a new anthology of poetry via a company like Sponsume would smack of vanity publishing.

There is a telling difference between crowd funding and vanity publishing, however. With crowd funding, poets included in an anthology can promote it to friends and family via Facebook, email, Twitter and so forth without ever having to fork out a penny, alongside the publisher who should be equally hard at work promoting it, and the people supporting it will get copies of the book as 'rewards' when the funds are raised. If they want to put more money in, these 'rewards' can be increased in desirability by adding limited editions, signed copies and more. What could be better in small press publishing than a publicity-generating pre-ordering system?

Even projects like mine, which are more personal, are viable if it is clear that there are goals in sight. In my case, when I was offered the Hawthornden Fellowship, my publisher perked up and said: "Oh, good! I look forward to seeing the next manuscript!". Without that in mind, I would have felt much more uncomfortable about setting up the campaign.

I also equivocated early on about the ethics of such a project on Facebook and was gratified when the poet Jon Stone fired back with the comment (and I'm paraphrasing a little, as it's hard to find the exact comment immediately on Facebook's clumsy Timeline): "I'd rather see 100 poets funded for a month's retreat than one poet funded for a lifetime's career".

It's this attitude that makes crowd funding exciting for me - the possibility that many people who might not find it easy to get a creative project off the ground, given the bureaucratic hoops one is expected to jump through with big funding bodies, could find that they suddenly have the time (with a little careful thought and a fair amount of work sat at the computer gritting their teeth and promoting it) to do something marvellous with the support of family, friends and people interested in their art.

As my campaign draws to a close, I realise that the process has been somewhat akin to the feeling I get when I test a new poem out on front of an audience for the first time. There are nerves, palpitations, the worry that it might not be liked. I have noticed and edited out flaws as I have gone along, and made the campaign stronger. It seems to have gone down reasonably well this time. I might try it again some time, but not for quite a while.

Before that, I want other campaigns to come to life. I want to see more writers and creators of all sorts getting their ideas out there and promoting them. Crowd funding may not be the future of arts funding (joyous though Amanda Palmer's hyperbole was to watch), but I think it could and should play a large part in that future.

I will certainly be looking out for good campaigns to support as and where I can when I get back from Hawthornden. More power to your crowd-funding elbows!

To take a look at Adam Horovitz's Sponsume campaign, or even donate if one of the 'rewards' tickles your fancy, click on this link: http://www.sponsume.com/project/help-send-poet-hawthornden-fellowship-0

Adam Horovitz is a poet and journalist. Born in London in 1971, he was raised in Gloucestershire. He was poet in residence for Glastonbury Festival's official website in 2009, was voted onto the Hospital Club 100 as an 'emerging talent' in 2010 and is a 2012 Hawthornden Fellow. His first collection, Turning, was published in 2011.

An interview with Joel Willans - Pangea Blog Tour

In support of the recent release of the fabulous anthology, Pangea (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pangea-Anthology-Stories-Around-Globe/dp/toc/0857284630), I am interviewing one of the writers included in the book, Joel Willans:

So, Joel, you’re a writer. In case my readers don’t know who you are, can you give us a potted biography – what you’ve written, what you like writing, etc?

I’m a Brit living in Finland who writes lots of different things depending upon which hat I’m wearing. I’m a partner at a communications agency called Ink Tank, so one day I might be doing copywriting, the next blogging, the next scriptwriting. As for fiction, I’ve been into short stories for about six years, though there’s been a lot less time dedicated to that pleasure since the arrival of two little Willanses, Eliot and Lotte. Despite their wonderfully energetic presence, I’ve managed to write stories for about two-dozen anthologies and had a couple broadcast on BBC radio.

You’ve recently been putting together a collection of stories for Route, called Spellbound. Can you tell us about that and how it came into being?

It came into being from another collection, which got shortlisted for the Scott Prize in 2010. I was very pleasantly surprised that it made that list and, after it lost out on gold, I decided to try and polish it up, take some things out, write some new stories and send the new improved version out into the wild. Route had a call out for manuscripts at the end of 2010, so I sent it to them. I eventually met up with Ian Daley of Route in September last year and we sat down and went through the manuscript over a beer or two.

It was a fascinating experience to have someone really dissect the stories, and after a few hours it became clear that they weren’t linked by the themes I’d thought, but by the way women weave their magic, both good and bad, over men. After some more editing and some more new stories added and some others taken away, there are eighteen stories all together. The main characters include everything from pimps, janitors and music journalists to old sailors, composers and bricklayers. The one thing they all share is that women are messing with their minds.

It’s taken quite some time to get everything ready, mainly because my daughter was born the month Route agreed to publish the collection. I discovered very early on that sleep deprivation really isn’t conducive to editing. Thankfully Route were really patient with me and Spellbound is now due out at the end of October.

  

You’re here as part of a blog-tour for the Pangea anthology. How did you get involved with that, and what is it all about?

To be honest, it was mere good fortune. A few years back, I was a member of Writewords. It’s a fantastic online writing community full of really supportive people. During that time I shared a lot of my stories with people to critique and a couple caught the eye of Rebecca Lloyd, a great writer who really helped me out at the time. Her and another Writewords member Indira Chandrasekhar wanted to put together an anthology to showcase some of the fiction that comes out of the community. Pangea is the result. It includes thirty-four stories from writers from all over the world and is, even if I do say it myself, a fine read.

What’s your writing process? How do you go from idea to finished piece?

It really depends what I’m working on. For short stories one of my favourite ways of writing is from prompts. This is great to do with a group of like minded writers, a list of random words or phrases and a time limit, normally an hour. Sometimes I can knock out a complete story like this, more often I conjure up a thousand words of rubbish. Yet in the cold light of day even this can be useful. The first draft of one of the stories I have in Pangea was written like this and maybe half of those in Spellbound. The great thing about using this writing technique, for me at least, is that I don’t have time to self edit as I write and the stories are totally different to those I’d write if I sat down at the keyboard with a plan in mind. I know some writers who call this “writing drunk” because you give the creative right side of your brain the freedom to go crazy. I think it sums it up perfectly.

What’s your next project?

The novel that’s been sitting on my hard drive since last May is waiting to be edited. I haven’t read it since then and this week I plan to print it out and see how it sounds. Now I’ve finally finished everything to do with Spellbound I’m more enthusiastic about novel writing than I’ve been for ages. I love short stories, but I really want to finish a decent novel and get it out there. I hope this one has a shout. It’s a very modern adventure – a road trip story, which takes the main characters from London to Peru to Finland. A friend who read it said it was like Bright Lights Big City meeting The Beach. Not sure I totally agree, but I took it as a compliment nonetheless. It was great fun to write the first draft. Hopefully, when it’s finished, publishers will find it great fun to read, too. 

Thank you for that, Joel, best of luck with Spellbound, Pangea and all your other endeavours!
For more information about Joel, go to http://fictionaut.com/users/joel-willans.

Life Writing

As some of you may know from earlier posts on this blog, as well as writing fiction I have an interest in life-writing, ie: writing about real things which have happened to you.

This came about in two ways, the first through writing fiction and the second through teaching life-writing to students.

In terms of writing fiction, I have spent most of life doing that thing we are told to do - 'write what you know'. Now, only a very simple reading of that concept means that you can only write about real things that may have happened to you. Instead, it is a deeper thought, which says that whatever you are writing, include those concepts and emotions which you have come across and, sometimes, where appropriate, include fictionalised elements of reality.

I think it would be impossible to write something completely fictional. Writers are forever borrowing from real life, even if it is just from observations - the way someone walks, talks, flicks their hair, wears mismatched socks on every alternate Wednesday or whatever. And sometimes we borrow events or snippets of conversations. It is what we do and how we create, and in each usage there will be a greater or lesser correspondence to real life.

I started thinking about this a few years ago when I wrote a story which was very close to autobiography. It had a fictional narrator, and the main event (the loss of the narrator's father when the narrator was very young) was also fictional, but many of the details I used in the story were real and true to my life. Over and above that, the theme of loss which ran through the story very much reflected my own feelings about my father who was, at that time, suffering from dementia. After I had written it, I took great interest in trying to work out if this was memoir or fiction. It ticked a lot of the boxes for both. It was a made up piece of work, but it borrowed a lot of both my memories and my feelings.

With distance, I class that piece as fiction, but it certainly gave me an insight into the crossover between the two forms, and left me interested in how much reality writers use in their work.

A couple of years later, while working at Edge Hill University, I was asked to take on the Life Writing module. This sparked my second wave of interest. I was teaching the students how to write a whole range of pieces, from personal essays to travel articles, biography, memoir, etc A topic which soon came up was the concept of 'truth' versus 'accuracy', something which is still a debatable topic.

The other main issue was to do with writing style. How do you make the mundane interesting or stop the tragic from becoming melodramatic.

This last is something which I think is crucial to life-writing, in that most people who set out to document their lives don't just want to talk about making a sandwich, but often about difficult experiences in their lives. The technique I recommend for this is to write completely without emotion and just present the events to the reader. It is the ultimate in 'showing' not 'telling' in that you present the tragic events to the reader just as they were presented to you and allow them to feel the same things you felt without the authorial voice imposing upon them. It is a very powerful technique and one that I employed in a piece I wrote about collecting my brothers ashes from the crematorium a couple of days after his funeral (I have posted the piece below, in case you're interested.)

What has been most interesting, however, since immersing myself in life-writing, is just how useful the specific techniques have become in my fiction writing. By aligning oneself with the events in a novel and searching for ways to tell them which convey the situation without directing the reader, I think that the writing becomes better and the reader, by having to do a little more work and engage a little more empathy, becomes more involved in the story.

I'm glad that I was given the life-writing module to teach as I think it improved my fiction writing and gave me insight into the tools that I need to use in given situations.

And... here comes the plug. I'm running an online course in life-writing. If you fancy giving it a go and seeing how it interacts with your fiction writing (or poetry, or script, or whatever) or just want to do it to set down those stories you have always promised to write, then please do sign up. It starts on 17th September 2012 and further details are here:  http://www.calumkerr.co.uk/pp002.shtml

Advert over. Here's the piece I wrote. Thanks for reading and, until next time, take care.
Calum

The Box

It’s been three days since the funeral. It’s strange to be back here.

                It was raining on the day. Pathetic fallacy, that’s called. The sky wept along with us. We moved from the car to the shelter of the crematorium’s porch, and people milled and talked, sometimes about the deceased, but more often about other things.

                We only had a few moments, though, before we were called to carry the coffin.

                It’s not something you think about very much until you actually have to do it, but you need training to carry a coffin. There were four of us, one at each corner. We were told how to lift it in a particular way, and settle it on our shoulders, then walk in step to keep it level, stop it from slipping.

                I was conscious, as we walked down the central aisle of the chapel – all the other mourners having already taken their seats – that we looked suitably slow and respectful. I wanted to turn and tell them that it wasn’t respect, it was the weight. We couldn’t walk any faster. The weight of years, the weight of life, pressed down on each of us as we carried him to the front.

                As we placed the coffin on the platform at the front, there was a sense of relief as the weight was taken from us. I wondered if he felt the same relief when he was finally able to shed his burdens.

                The rest passed in a blur of music, tears, and the kind words of others.

Now, three days later I have returned to carry out the next duty.

                There are no black cars or black-clad mourners today. The chapel is deserted, and the sun is shining. Is that another reflection of mood? Is this a good day to balance the bad?

                It’s strange to be alone. I seem to have been surrounded by people for so many days.

                I don’t linger in the porch, nor enter the chapel, but instead make my way around to the back door. I’m conscious of the large chimney which rises from this part of the building, a dark finger pointing up into the clear blue of the sky.

                I knock on the partially-open, wooden door, but there is no answer so I step into the gloom.

                It’s dark after the brightness of outside. Once my eyes adjust I see more wood and the normal trappings of an office. I have stepped back-stage and can see the workings of this particular theatre. It feels like trespassing. This place feels more sacred than the other room with its pews and symbols.

                “Hello?” says a voice behind me.

                I turn, startled and see the a face that I only vaguely recognise, even though it’s been little more than 72 hours since I last saw it.

                “Sorry I wasn’t here. How can I help you?”

                “I’ve come to pick up my brother.”

                “Of course.” He bows his head in a show of respect which seems utterly unconscious, simply part of the man.

                He takes his name from me, nods again, then disappears through another wooden door. He returns with a small box, no more than ten inches long. He doesn’t hand it to me immediately, but places it on the table and directs me to complete and sign some forms.

                With the formalities complete, he lifts the small container and places it into my hands.

                I’m strangely split, aware of what is happening, but also aware of a haze which seems to have settled on me.

                I wander back into the sunshine, blinking at the brightness.

I walk slowly, not out of respect, but because I cannot walk any faster. The weight of this box is so much less but also so much greater than that of the coffin. I can feel it trying to pull me down to the ground as I walk back to the car park, alone, just me and my brother.

(Originally published at http://flash365.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/21-box.html)

A Whole Lot of Nothing and a Bit of Something

Well, hello there. You're looking well. Got a little of that rare and precious sun, I see, and is that a new hair cut? Whatever it is, keep doing it.

Welcome back to my sporadic venture into the blogosphere. As the title suggests, this post will be about the nothing that I have been achieving lately, but also about some bits of something coming over the horizon. Can you see them? No, just to the left. There. Got it? Good.

In my last post I talked about stopping flash52, some plans for the stories from flash365, and about the new novel that I had started writing. However, it seems that whatever got in the way of my carrying on with flash52 has spread to everything else and nothing new has been written since we last sat down for one of these chats.

Now, I can rationalise it. After all, for the first half of this year I was incredibly busy doing flash365, NFFD and teaching, as well as trying to lead a life, it's only fair that I have a bit of a low after all that. Someone today used the phrase 'burned out' and I suppose that's right.Add to that the fact that it's summer and I have no structure to my day, and no deadlines, and you can understand why my ship is adrift in calm oceans.

Oh, and the distraction of the Olympics really didn't help.

But there's another problem, and it's one which will be familiar to most of you out there. That problem is that thing we call work. The thing that allows you to pay your bills.

You see, because I am an associate lecture, I only earn during term times. So I rely on those times to give me enough income to last the rest of the year. With fears about the new fee/loan structures for incoming students, funding has been cut, and my hours have disappeared along with it. I will be teaching this autumn, but not as much. The anxiety associated with that has certainly not made me want to get on with all of the luscious projects I could be doing. They only pay in potentia, you see, not in reality.

So, what am I going to do about it? you ask...

Well, I sat down, and had a good think about what I do and what I can do. And I came up with THE PLAN.

And that is why I am setting up a little business called Palimpsest. It is basically my folio of abilities, gathered together and formalised into a set of literary services.

My first idea was to offer online courses. I figured that just because the university didn't have money to pay me, it didn't mean there weren't students out there looking to learn the things I can teach. So I have set up four courses to start in September, in Flash-Fiction (naturally), Short-Stories (because I can do those too!), Life Writing (something I have been teaching and researching in for a while, and a popular topic) and one in Editing & Rewriting (a common bugbear being that university courses don't ever actually focus on these skills explicitly).

I have also set up a full suite of offers for reading, editing, typesetting (for print and eBooks), mentoring and, soon - in collaboration with Chris Bisette - bespoke story writing!

All of these can be found, for the moment, nestled on my own website at www.calumkerr.co.uk.

And the best thing about all this? Well, it started out as a way to try and make my freelance work a little more formal and bring it under my control, but now I'm quite excited about the possibilities of working, in so many different ways, with a host of writers at different stages of their careers. It feels like what I should have been doing all along. And, just to help matters, it's brought back my desire to write. After all, I've written this, haven't I?

So, weekend off, and then back to the novel next week, I think.

If you are interested in any of the courses or other services, then please do either sign up or get in touch for more information. And, if you think you know anyone who might be interested, I'd be really grateful if you would spread the word.Thank you.

Anyway, that's me for now, stuck in a lacuna, but starting to feel the faintest zephyr trying to fill my sails. I wish you fair winds and will see you soon!

Some Starting and Some Stopping

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my Unmitigated Audacity. I think, if you have been following my exploits over the last year, you'll agree that the title of this blog is getting more and more appropriate.

Anyway, that's beside the point. What I wanted to do was welcome you back here to my writing blog. I know I've been very quiet over the last 6 months but, again, if you've been following all the other things I've been up to, I'm sure you understand.

Since I last chatted here a number of things have happened - National Flash-Fiction Day, the release of Braking Distance, the start of pamphlet publishing from Gumbo Press and more - but I have talked at length about those things in other places, so shan't get into them here. What I do want to talk about is the end of flash365 and what is/has/will be following.

I finally completed the 365th story  on 30th April and was pleased to be able to tie all of my 'challenge' writing together by writing a sequel to the story which opens the 31 collection, 'The Spark of Inspiration'. It was a marathon undertaking but, having finished, I am more than pleased with what I managed. I am still submitting stories here and there, and looking at the feasibility of producing both short collections from among it's pieces, and possibly producing a printing of the whole collection. The blog will stay up for a little longer to give people a chance to have a look, and I will shortly start writing some articles about the process and it's outcomes, some of which will appear in draft form here.

With that project finished I decided to start on a new one, a less ambitious one and, I thought, an easier one. This was called flash52 and was to be a story a week for a year. The only problem is that it's not even the end of June and already I've missed my Friday deadline twice (or is it three times?). So, what's going on here? Well, there are a couple of things. The first is the lack of pressure, I think. A lot of people write FridayFlash and so that makes me just one amongst many. I have no problem being part of a crowd, but what it does mean is that if I miss a week, no-one notices. With flash365 I was always conscious that if I didn't get a story up before midnight then I would start getting emails and Facebook posts asking what was going on. With flash52, no-one has noticed the missing weeks, and without the pressure to produce it's just too easy to let it slide.

However, there is more to it than that. In order to notice the lack of pressure I had to miss a week first. And that was all too easy. I simply forgot. You see, when I was writing one a day, I knew that I had to get it done, I had a routine, and it just happened. But with 6 days off and 1 day on it's far to easy to just forget. Also, those 6 days, rather than being restful, are times for the machinery to seize up. As the weeks have gone on, I have found it harder to get started on each story, and then having missed it, easier to not bother.

So, what's the plan? Well, I'm going to shut down flash52. It obviously isn't working for me. Instead, I'm going to take a more structured approach. flash52 was meant to be a single collection on a particular theme. Instead of writing 52 stories over a year, I shall pick a week and write them all over 5 days. That will give me the pressure and the focus to actually get them done. And, I shan't be posting them online, as that makes it easier to submit them to magazines/competitions and makes it easier to possibly publish them as a single collection.

And this is something I shall do with other collections. I shall scout round, come up with ideas for complete collections, and write them in a single burst, rather than over time. It seems to me to be a better way to use my productivity, rather than trying to call on it just once every 7 days. It also means I can focus on one thing at once. Which brings me to my novel...

The day after I finished flash365 I started to write the novel I was talking about in a couple of the last posts I put on here. I managed 1000+ words a day for a week, but then NFFD took over and it went on hold. I have revisited it, and it's now climbing towards the 13000 mark. I'm very pleased with how it's going. A year of practise is showing in my writing and the stretch of my imagination, and when I get to do some the writing flows well. But I'm also finding it quite daunting, if not frightening.

It's going to be a very big book, but it's not the length that's the problem. flash365 turned out at 166,000 words, so I know I can produce the word count, no, it's two other things. The first is the age old problem of artists everywhere. I think it's a really good idea and I don't want to f**k it up! People tell me to just get it down and let the worrying wait for the rewrite. But I really hate rewriting, and have always found that if a piece of work needs major attention I am more likely to abandon it than do the work. So I would rather get it as right as possible on the first go, and that's quite scary. It won't stop me, but it's worth acknowledging.

The other fear is more personal. You see, before I embarked on my flash odysseys, I wrote 4 novels. And they were all, in some ways, restrained. I don't just mean a lack of swearing, sex and violence, I mean in terms of raw imagination. I used to hold back a lot, I think because I didn't really know how to use my writing muscles in the right way. However, a year of writing in as many genres and styles as I could think of, using as many voices and perspectives as could come up with, has helped me tone all those muscles and use them in controlled bursts. Now, with the novel, I am using them all in concert and I am - to switch metaphors mid-stream - eating the scenery. The novel is great fun, and working well, but the creativity going into it is on the verge of being out of control. I think that is probably how it should be. A novel not produced from the white heat of an overactive brain is only ever going to be middling. But it is intimidating to be strapped to the back of such a bucking bronco.

The result? I'm writing it in fits and bursts and not making as much progress as I should. But, I'm going to keep going, and apart from the next couple of weeks where I shall be doing some travelling, followed by getting married to my gorgeous partner, Kath, on 2nd July, and our subsequent honeymoon, I have got most of the summer clear. So, after we get back from a holiday which, I hope, will finally let me recover from NFFD, I plan to get stuck in, writing as intensively as I can, and then get on to the next thing - probably finishing the flash52 collection.

Well, that was quite long and round-the-houses, wasn't it? The upshot? I won't be back here for a few weeks, but once I'm back in the saddle and writing, I'll pop in from time to time with thoughts and updates. I would, as ever, be delighted to get your feedback, so feel free to comment. And, in the meantime, have a good summer and see you soon!

National Short Story Day Story

In honour of National Short Story Day, here's a story of mine which first appeared in Transmission magazine in 2007. Hope you enjoy it!

Can you spare a minute?

Daniel stands at the top of Market Street, just down from the corner; JJB Sports behind him, BHS opposite. This is his pitch; his spot. This is the best place.

He clutches the black plastic clipboard close to his chest and watches the groups of people walk towards and past him. Some see him early and cross the width of the pedestrianised area to avoid him. Some don't see him at all and walk close by. Either way, few stop. Undeterred, he offers his call to each one who comes near enough.

"... just a few minutes?..."

"... spare a few minutes?..."

"...can you just?..."

"...a few minutes?...."

"...spare a?..."

"...can you?..."

"...minutes?..."

"...it'll just take a sec."

Some brush past him. They see his shining eager face, his cold fingers creased round the edge of the black plastic clipboard, the other hand reaching out, imploring, and they keep their heads down and walk on.

Some glance at him and then away, quickly, as if he has some kind of disease which could be caught simply by looking at him.

Some look up long enough for him to catch their eye, but then they smile and shake their heads and keep moving, putting distance between them.

Many others, whether they look up at him or not, utter their own mantra in this traditional call and response, with all the rote dullness and precision of catechism.

"...sorry, no time..."

"...I can't spare any..."

"...no time..."

"...have to be somewhere..."

"...maybe on my way back..."

"...five minutes ago..."

"...can't at the moment..."

"... I haven't got the time to spare."

But every once in a while, one stops. He tilts the clipboard away from his chest and explains what he wants. They give Daniel his few minutes and, he likes to think, they go away feeling better and lighter for doing so. He feels he's doing them a service and each one he is able to help makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Daniel stays at his pitch longer than he should. He stays through rush hour and out the other side. The people on the streets now are a mix of those going home after working late and those heading out for the evening. In either case they have no time for him.

With a resigned shrug of his thin shoulders, he turns and starts to walk away from the bright lights and towards the lesser-travelled parts of town. The buildings he passes now are older, more worn, their facades crumbling and stained. Some of them have their windows boarded up but, as he walks down the road, more and more of them are bricked up, revenants of the window tax. Mist gathers and the tarmac becomes broken under his feet, rough cobbles emerging from under. The sound of the city dies at his back and the clump and thud of his boots on the ground becomes more noticeable. The streetlights soften and start to hiss. A horse goes past pulling a coach as Daniel turns into a narrow alley between two warehouses. He walks its length to the small wooden door at the far end. Candle-light glows from the window as he grasps the handle and presses the catch. The door opens with a soft creak and the smoke from the woodstove billows out past his face, carrying with it a smell of watery stew.

Daniel steps into the room and closes the door, he turns and places the wooden board he's carrying onto the worn table. An old woman, his mother, stands at the stove and stirs a large pot. She looks over and smiles at him, pleased to see him home. He smiles back and raises his eyebrows in a question. She shakes her head and goes back to her stirring.

Turning his attention to the room's other occupant, Daniel steps forward to see him better in the firelight. His father's bed, nothing more than a wooden pallet with a rag-stuffed mattress, was moved downstairs when he grew ill, to bring him nearer the warmth of the fire. He lies, propped up in the bed, wearing all the clothes he owns, most of them reduced to rags themselves, merging him with the mattress below. His gaunt face peers out from atop this mass, old and lined, but smiling and expectant.

"Danny, lad. You're back. Did you get me some?"

Daniel nods. "Yes, Dad. I did. "

His father licks his lips and some saliva dribbles down through the cracked flesh of his lips. Daniel feels vaguely disgusted for a moment, but then realises that he can see the wall through the edges of his father's face, ragged edges where he is starting to fade, and the feeling is replaced by one of urgency. He pushes his hands into his pockets and brings them out again, full. He opens them and shimmering jewels fall slowly onto the table top like insubstantial glass snowflakes.

He gestures to them. "It's the usual kind of thing, Dad."

He picks one up and gazes into it. It looks like a large diamond, but compresses between his fingers like jelly. In its heart there is a shimmer, which resolves into images of a man sitting at a desk, waiting.

"A couple of minutes waiting for a computer to boot up."

He drops this one and picks up another containing a woman in a coat. "Just over six minutes waiting for a bus."

A third, a man standing, staring into space. "The photocopier needed to warm up. Nearly a minute."

He drops the three fragments of time and looks back up at his father. "The usual. Nearly six hours in all." He picks up another, this one much larger than the others. "This was a three hour exam."

"Only six?..." His mother has turned from the stove, her face fallen.

"Only?" says his father. "It'll do me, and it doesn't matter what kind of time you've got, son. It's all the same to those of us who need it. And wasted minutes can feel like years." He reaches up to the tabletop and grabs a handful of the jewels. He squeezes them between his fingers and the light in the heart of each bursts and flows over his hand like water from a sponge. Slowly, the light fades as it soaks into his skin; skin which is now a little younger, a little firmer, a little more there.

Daniel looks around the room and sees the candles have been replaced with gas lamps, the window has thick curtains to keep out the cold, and his father's bed now has an iron frame with a proper mattress.

His father takes the second handful and squeezes them. The lamps become electric bulbs, the bed a floral divan on thick plastic legs. The pot his mother is still stirring is sitting on the electric ring of a cooker. She looks around, still trying to keep the disappointment from her face.

"Nineteen sixty or so, I'd say," his father comments. "Not bad at all." He looks up at Daniel. "But we'll still need more tomorrow."

Daniel nods, but then can't hold it anymore and breaks into a smile.

"What?" his father asks.

"Maybe not," Daniel replies. Struggling to hold his excitement he reaches into his inside pocket and brings out a jewel the size of a cricket ball.

His mother, having turned at the sound of Daniel's excited voice, gasps. "That looks like..."

Daniel nods. "It's a whole day."

His father reaches out a hand towards it, but pulls back, almost afraid to touch it. "How...?" he asks.

"A woman gave it to me. It was a day not of wasted time, but a day she no longer wanted. It was a day of sharing, a day of wonder. A day of beauty." Daniel can feel tears catch in the back of his throat. "It was a day of sitting, watching the clouds move over hills, of watching flowers open and turn their heads to follow the sun, a day with a box and a ring. A day of love and laughing and joy." He falters for a moment as he remembers the woman's tale. "But she lost the one she shared it with. She no longer wanted it, and when I told her what it would be used for-"

"You told her the truth?" his father asks.

"Yes. I told her about you and us and -" he gestures round the room, "- all this. And she gave it to us with her blessing. It was such a beautiful day that with her loss, it brings her nothing but pain and suffering. The thought that it could bring us as much joy as it used to bring her, was all she wanted to know. She gave it willingly and left with a smile on her face and a weight removed from her heart."

His father looks up from his bed with tears in the corners of his eyes. "You know what this means, don't you, son?"

"Yes, Dad. I do. It means we can finally go home."

Daniel presses the giant jewel, coloured with the greenest of grasses and the bluest of skies, into his father's hands and together they squeeze it, feeling it burst between them like an overripe peach, its juices surprisingly warm and soft. The bright light crawls over their fingers, growing brighter, up their arms and out, over their bodies and over the room, covering everything; brighter and brighter until all that remains is light.

Dark in here, isn't it?

Well, I promised you a third post today, on darkness, and here it is.

A little while ago, poet Cathy Bryant kindly commented on one of my stories: 'You do dark better than anyone currently writing, I think' and that got me thinking.

I do venture into the dark side with my writing, it's true, but I still sometimes feel uncomfortable about it. Things like swearing, violence, death and just plain nastiness all feature, but part of me worries that readers will think it's me that's like that and start to steer clear of me.

Of course, this is silly, but it is something I worry about. And yet, I think it's important and something which is missing from my past novel writing.

You see, when I write a flash, I can throw in a little bit of darkness and then walk away from it. When I write a novel, I find it harder to deal with. Last year, for NaNoWriMo I wrote a book with zombies, aliens, vampires and robots in it. There were many deaths and quite a bit of violence. So far, so good. But all the characters in it were nice, and pleasant. Even the guy who I'd set up to be a bit of a player, a bit of a cad, turned out to be nice in the end. The monsters were largely off-stage and always beatable. There were no extremes of light and dark, and no real bad-guy to focus on, and I think that was it's failing.

You see, the good guys in a story can never really be good unless we see how bad the bad guys are. If Star Wars hadn't had Darth Vader then the bad guy would have been the disreputable smuggler, Han Solo, and it would have been pants.

So, I'm aware that I need to put in a bad guy, without which I won't have jeopardy. And I need to make things genuinely threatening, not just kinda, you know, a little bit, whoo, that was close.

And I need to not worry what people will think of me when I write it. I've been reading some dark things recently and I think I've realised when that association with the writer arises. If the darkness is there because the author wants it to be there, and they crowbar it in - if it's gratuitous - then you start to think 'Blimey, Writer X is a twisted weirdo' and that's because the dark doesn't arise naturally from the story. However, when the darkness is part of the plot, and a driving force of the story, then you forget about the writer. It's just what is happening to the characters, as nasty and horrible as it might be.

I like to think that I'm never gratuitous and that the dark in my stories arises purely because the narrative needs it. I think that my slightly oblique, slightly tentative approach to it is the cause of Cathy's comment. The sparing nature of the darkness in my flashes makes it all the darker.

So, my lesson in darkness is that oblique works better than full-on, but that the darkness needs to be there, otherwise no matter how bright the light, it'll only ever be grey.