Why the 19th of January is the beginning of 2015 for this particular writer.

I know it isn't January the First today - let me look, ah yes, it's the 19th, well that'll do.  It feels like the beginning of the new year so give me some slack here, OK. It's 2015 which, for me, is worth celebrating mainly because it's not 2014. If I'm to remain optimistic about 2015, I've decided it should begin today rather than on the more mathematically correct date.

On New Year's Eve 2014, I was perfectly prepared to celebrate until a fever over-took me and sent me to bed shivering, my teeth chattering, in a relapse from an unpleasant condition that had begun in November and that has only really left me, I hope, in the last couple of days. I don't see why we can't invent our own diaries, calendars and schedules and, even if I can't persuade you all to see today as the beginning of the new year, then I intend to go ahead anyway.

It's not just a health thing. Last Monday I finished and sent off to Ward Wood Publishing, the fifth draft of my second novel, Still Notes, Still Frames, which will be published later this year. I'm sure there will be more tweaks and adjustments but it is, in reality, finished until the ever vigilant Adele Ward of Ward Wood comes up with her usual insightful comments. As far as my brain is concerned though, the bulk of the work is done and it can relax into other duties like mostly concentrating on my new novel that is now a quarter through its first draft. Thinking two novels at the same time has been a hazardous occupation so my brain and I are celebrating 2015 in the spirit of ring out the old and ring in the new.

Feeling less cluttered mentally, and much better physically,  has encouraged me to establish new working practices and a new rhythm to my daily life here in Lewes, UK.  I know you've all done your New Year stuff - made and already broken your resolutions, got over your hangovers, decided to give up that diet or that frail attempt at spending January on the wagon but, yes, give me some slack here everyone.

My resolutions centre around finding more space in my life, seeing a bit more blue sky, settling into a fitness regime that suits my schedule, getting this daily blog back up and running now that it is entering its 7th year and, a difficult one this, staying healthy.

Wish me luck because I'll need it. It might be registering very cold here today on the poncey South-East England thermometer but the sun is shining and I can't detect any physical ailment so far this morning, so optimism reigns, Happy New 2015.

Four have fun in Greenwich - the Ward Wood Writers hit the road.

It was a full house at the very welcoming Greenwich gallery, Made In Greenwich yesterday when I and three of my Ward Wood Publishing colleagues gave our first collective reading together. Like a band on the road, the four of us had a great time and have vowed to do this again in the spirit of The Beatles movie, A Hard Day's Night.

An idea dreamed up months ago in a conversation at London's Poetry Café finally came to its very enjoyable conclusion last night in front of a large and encouragingly receptive audience (many of them were poets from the Greenwich area) hosted by the wonderfully informal and enthusiastic Irena Hill, co-owner of the gallery who stepped in at the last minute to replace our publisher, Adele Ward, who had become a victim of the London Underground strike. Thanks, Irena, you were great.

First up was Peter Phillips who fully engaged the audience right from the start with his wryly humourous and yet passionate readings from his two Ward Wood poetry collections, No School Tie and Oscar And I.

The No School Tie poems provide a vivid poet's impression  of a boarding school childhood as well life as a writer,  a husband and a grandfather. Then Oscar And I, the confessions of a fictional minor poet George Meadows who experiences all the fragile hopes and stoically received disappointments of any writer's life but with irony and honesty and humour. If you have read the poems but not heard Peter read them then you've missed a treat. Once heard, his voice always sounds in my head when returning to these delightful collections.

Next was American-born but London-based novelist and poet, Sue Guiney who is working on a series of novels set in Cambodia where she has founded a writing workshop for street children in Siem Reap and now spends about two months each year teaching there.  Her most recent novel, Out of the Ruins, the second in her Cambodia series, was published by Ward Wood in January. 

Sue read from Out Of The Ruins continuing her exploration of what happens when East meets West, in this case when two European doctors set up women's clinic in Cambodian town of Siem Reap with the passionate assistance of a young Khmer nurse. Sue read this and some of her new Cambodian poems with the real passion and commitment she feels for this much put-upon country. She also read from her Ward Wood poetry collection, Her Life Collected, my latest "loo read" - a collection of wonderfully direct and personal poems that are my current inspiration.

Then there was Joe Stein, Ward Wood's impressive crime writer, who is much more than that. He is a terrific writer who draws on, amongst other things, his life as an amateur boxer and professional bodyguard. His main character, Garron, is a body-guard with a philosophical soul and an ever-questioning attitude that gives the Garron books their special quality - I would say literary quality if that didn't sound dull which the books most certainly aren't.

Joe read from his latest Ward Wood novel, the third in the series, That Twisted Thing Called Truth and then, a special treat for people like me, hooked on what is going to happen next with the intriguing existentialist Garron, Joe read from his new novel, Through Another Night due to be released in October. I can't wait.

And then there was me, the newest of all the Ward Wood novelists. I read some extracts from my book Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love enjoying the contrast between my hapless young fogey character Stephen and Joe's much more muscular Garron. Afterwards, Joe and I pondered what it would be like if the two of them met. As Made In Greenwich usually hosts poetry events, I read part of my Fibonacci poetry sequence, Brief Encounters, a work still in-progress, but one day, I hope, a collection in the spirit of the Romantic song cycles by two of my heroes, that I used to sing as a young music student, Schubert's Winterreise and Schumann's Dichterliebe.

Peter, Sue, Joe and I are enthusiastic about doing this again. Our work is so contrasted that collectively the readings really do add up to something greater than it's individual parts. More important than that though, it was fun.

On the road with Shauna Gilligan and The Writing Process Blog Tour

Shauna Gilligan

My fellow Ward Wood novelist, Shauna Gilligan has asked me to join The Writing Process Blog Tour where each writer answers four questions about the writing process and then passes the baton on to another set of writer-bloggers. Thanks Shauna, like any other relay race, the current runner is scared of dropping the baton and ruining the race. Anyway, here goes.

Firstly though, here's some information about Shauna whose novel, Happiness Comes From Nowhere, is simply terrific. Inventive and unconventionally structured, it's a gripping multi-dimensional tour de force.  

Shauna Gilligan was born in Dublin, Ireland and has worked and lived in Mexico, Spain, India and the UK. She currently lives in County Kildare, Ireland with her family. Her fiction has been published widely and she has read from her work and presented on writing at conferences in Europe and the USA. She holds a PhD (Writing) from the University of South Wales (formally University of Glamorgan). Happiness Comes from Nowhere (London: Ward Wood, 2012) is her first novel.

To read Shauna's answers to these questions go to:

http://shaunaswriting.com/wordpress/2014/02/my-writing-process-blog-tour/


Right, my turn:

What are you working on now?

Now that my first novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love has been published (Ward Wood Publishing, 2013 - see below), I can put my mind to other things. I've just finished the third draft of my second novel, Blue Notes, Still Frames, like my first, it's based in Brighton but it's set in the 1990s with a completely new cast of characters. I am also writing a lot of new poetry and revising many of my older ones. This year, I hope, is going to be the time when I raise my game with poetry so I shall be concentrating on that and on a number of short stories that have been languishing on my desk looking for a little love. I'd like to clear my desk before settling on a number of ideas for the next novel but I'm already itching to get on with it.

Why is your work different from other work in the same genre?

This question scares me! I don't know if my work is different from others' work but I hope it is - otherwise, why bother. So much of writing is about finding confidence in your own voice so this question sends me scurrying away to my inner world of insecurity. I came to writing after a long career in the television industry, working for Granada Television, where serious and often complicated ideas had to be expressed in clear, direct and entertaining ways that were intelligible to every viewer. I believe that spirit of directness is important in my fiction too, as is humour, and I hope that I achieve at least some of this without sacrificing any of the passion and respect I feel for the great canon of Western literature. If my work is different from others', it might be that it is a mix of the old and the new expressed from what I'm told is a rather quirky worldview. God, I hated that question!

Why do you write like you do?

I love words whether it's in conversation or on the printed page. I was thrilled, as a child, by the impact and power of words. The years between childhood and my actually becoming a writer, were about honing down and refining what had always, I suspect, been my individual voice, an impulse that has been with me ever since I can remember. If it doesn't sound too weird, I think I have always listened to that observational voice in my head. It grew up much earlier than I did! I think I'm only just catching up with it now realizing that I don't really have any other choice but to write in the way the distinct voice dictates. Discovering this has also lead to my relatively new enthusiasm for writing poetry which often comes quickly in its first draft form.


How does your writing process work?

I always wanted to be a writer and always got a real kick out of the act of writing - The Joy Of Writing I suppose you could say,  like The Joy Of Sex. That feeling has never left me but has been fueled by great writers and artists from other genres, who have regularly turned me on throughout my life. I internalise what I love and let it mix with all those insubstantial and subconscious impulses and memories that rush around in the brain. I suppose my interest in the world around me and my fascination for our own oddly contradictory species is fed into that almost abstract thing, the mind. In some ways, I'm a passive witness to my own writing but when I start,  I write in a great flow of enthusiasm even if the subject matter is dark. The difficult bit is before that, sitting in an armchair quietly waiting while these thoughts are formed. It's a matter of opening portals in the brain. When it's a novel, this requires a lot of discipline, a daily ritual that begins meditating in a leather armchair and then moving on to some frantic typing at the computer. The real "work" comes with the second draft and beyond.  I'm always trying to improve and experiment with style and I anguish over these later drafts but, deep-down, I have to obey an internal force and, as humbly as I can, write down the words as they are formed in that place in my brain that is often quite dictatorial. It's an exhilarating ride whether it's a short poem or the extended writing of a novel even if I'm always left with the wish to have done it all better.

Now, with my thanks, I'll introduce the authors who will be continuing the writing process blog tour a week from now.  Their answers to these questions will be on their websites next Monday, 17th. February:

Adele Ward

Adele Ward is a publisher, Ward Wood Publishing, a novelist, Everything is Free (2011) and a poet, Never-Never Land (2009). She lives in North London with her sons Stefano and Danny. She worked as a journalist and author of nonfiction before spending four years in Italy where her children were born. She was one of the first students on Andrew Motion's postgraduate creative writing programme at the Royal Holloway, University of London. Her poetry has been anthologised and broadcast on national and local radio, and other publications include a selection in the first Bedford Square anthology published by John Murray. In summer 2010 she set up Ward Wood Publishing with Mike Fortune-Wood, and in 2011 she started the regular Friday Night Writers event in London.

http://adeleward.blogspot.co.uk/

Peter Daniels

Peter Daniels published his first full collection Counting Eggs with Mulfran Press in 2012, following pamphlets including three from Smith/Doorstop, Mr Luczinski Makes a Move (HappenStance, 2011) and the historically obscene Ballad of Captain Rigby (Pronoun, 2013) based on court records at London Metropolitan Archives. He has won first prize in a number of competitions including the Ledbury (2002), Arvon (2008) and TLS (2010), and twice been a winner of the Poetry Business pamphlet competition. His book of translations from the Russian of Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939), published by Angel Classics, was the Poetry Book Society’s recommended translation for Autumn 2013.

http://eggcounter.wordpress.com/

http://www.peterdaniels.org.uk/index.html

Café society at The Poetry Place - poetry and fun in Covent Garden

I was at the the Poetry Society's Poetry Café in Covent Garden, London on Friday for a poetry event hosted by my publishers, Ward Wood Publishing. I'd never been there before thinking that it might be a rather forbidding environment someone like me who likes to keep his superficiality to the fore. I was wrong, it was fun.

I was there for the launch of Ward Wood's latest poetry collection, The Anvil's Prayer by Scottish-Canadian poet James W. Wood with  support from Peter Phillips who read from his latest Ward Wood collection, Oscar and I.

Adele Ward

After a pot of tea and a rather large orange and cream cheese cake, I went down to the performance space where Ward Wood's Adele Ward hosted the late afternoon session which consisted of the two readings and also some extra poetry from the largely poetic members of the audience, including other Ward Wood writers, American-in-London novelist and poet, Sue Guiney, poet David Cooke from Grimsby, Yorkshire and, well,  I had to read too, myself.

James W. Wood

James gave an emotionally charged reading from his equally emotional  but also highly varied collection as well as giving a splendidly authentic performance of some Robbie Burns.

Peter Phillips

Peter Phillips, always a favourite of mine at these events, writes with real wit, sardonic humour and sensitivity his book, Oscar and I, is full of laughter and some tears. Oscar is a small dog and the Me is a minor poet struggling phlegmatically in a not always grateful literary world.

Us the audience then took our turn before returning upstairs where some of us Peter, Sue, Adele and I,  had a few drinks and some excellent conversation. It is a continuing delight meeting up with other Ward Wood writers. Maybe, we thought, it would be fun if we did more readings together as a group. We could go on the road like a rock band - now there's a thought. Peter is working on a new collection, Sue will be having a new novel published early next year, the second in her moving series set in a Cambodian orphanage and inspired by her regular work there. We will all have new work to take on tour - we could also have some fun.

Sue Guiney

I'm getting into gear for the imminent publication (31st October 2013) by Ward Wood of my novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love, the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

You can already pre-order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

...or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

...or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley's%20Summer%20Of%20love

Stephen Dearsley's visit to London captured on film by Adele Ward, my tireless publisher.

My reading at the splendid Polari literary salon at London's Southbank Centre last month will remain a fond memory. Luckily, I discovered the other day that it doesn't have to be just a memory as Adele Ward, my tirelessly supportive publisher filmed part of it and here's a chance to see it if you couldn't get tickets for that sold out event.

In the Summer of 1967, young fogey Stephen Dearsley is on his way to the funeral of a very old Frenchman - his only mentor: