Ali Shaw's Blog, page 3

Over the last few days I’ve been committing to paper a long chain of thought that, I hope, is going to serve as the basis of the biggest writing project I’ve ever undertaken. I’m not plotting yet, justworking on a setting that I hopeto develop exhaustivelybefore I embark on the actual story.

I’ve never done anything like this before, and I’m planning itoutin a totally different way to my other projects. Time, as ever, is the enemy ofprogress, and working on several things at once certainly doe...

With each writing project I embark on, I find it useful to build a kind of digitalscrapbook of images, videosand miscellaneous piecesthat each reflect some part ofthe story I’m trying to tell. Most of the images are atmospheric, but some are photos of people who resemble the story’s characters,or of landscapes or places like those in which the narrativetakes place. I’m just starting to clip together two such scrapbooks, and above and below havelinked a couple of pieces from the first, to show...

photo credit: habeebee via photopin cc

I’mabout to start work on something new. Two somethings, in fact. Three, in a way. Maybe evenfive. One of those projects is a single novel, and another is a trilogy of sorts. The third or fifth, depending on whether you count a trilogy as one project or three, is a little spree of short stories I’ve been looking forward to writing for a long time now.

This is the problem Ihave after I’vefinished a novel, and havespent a bit of time outdoors with myfamily,...

“I like you sir. You’re shit or bust, you are.”

- Keith Douglas’ batman, to Keith Douglas.

I was twenty three when I discovered the work of the Second World War poet Keith Douglas. I’d just completed an English degree and was worn out with novels,so for a year I read only comics and poetry. Good comics were easy to find, but good poetry wasa rarer substance. It seemed to me that you had to read twenty impenetrable poems for every one that spoke to you, but I was fortunate enough to have time on...

Just received this in the post. I’ve been fortunateenough to seeThe Girl with Glass Feet translated into quite a fewdifferent languages, and I’m always really thrilled to get copies of the finished books. Theones that aren’t in Romancelanguages, however, are an especial treat. Like most English people, I’m terrible at speaking anything else, but at leastif I can recognise the lettersI can have a clumsy go at a few sentences. I can’t, of course, do that when the characters are of a kind I can’...

In the notes at the end of The Girl with Glass Feet, I wrote that writing is like going underwater. I still hold that to be true, and until two months ago I was swimming around on the ocean bottom, deeply immersed in the final draft of my newnovel. It’s finished now, completed at the start of April, andit’s taken me most of those two months tojourney back to the surface world.

The completion of a novel is a strange moment, made even stranger by our age of word processors and computer screens....

I’m delighted to announce that BBC Radio 4 are due to broadcast a brand new short story of mine called Broken Mirrors. This is the first story I’ve ever written for radio, and will be read as part of Radio 4′s Friday Firsts series. I’m really looking forward to hearing it.

You can listen to it on Friday 17th January, at 15:45. After that the story should be available for a weekon the BBC iPlayer.

January 1st 1909. Ten-Footed Bear. Tarak told us Wednesday evening that the tenfooted bear lives mostly in the water like a seal. Looks like a polar bear all but the ten legs. When he walks on ice the five feet of each side track after each other so the bear makes a double track like a sled. Walking the bear often gets his legs tangled up; there are so many, he can’t manage them all. Once a man was followed by a ten-footed bear. The man walked between two cakes of ice and the bear was caught...

Der Mann, der den Regen träumt is published in Germany in January and script5, the book’s publishers, have put together this neat little trailer.

I’ve also done a Q&A with London’s Litro Magazine, who I used to blog a bit for. You can read it online here. Expect more from me tomorrow, when I explain whose furry paw this is…

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Last Friday I finished work on the penultimate draft of my new novel. It was cause for relief as well as whiskey, since I’ve had my head down for the last several months, pushing myself to see it through to completion. Most of the time I can both write and keep a loose hold on the rest of my life, but sometimes I just have to let go and drop into a fictional world. That’s what I’ve been up to since the summer, and although it’s been rewarding as far as the new book is concerned, I’m sorry to...