#9 Writing is a Waiting Game
#9 Writing is a Waiting Game
Did Amy Winehouse write a song called 'Writing is a Waiting Game'? Maybe not, but it's stuck in my head all the same.
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If you read this in time, join us for our third in our series of four webinars about the impact of AI, in particular LLMs, on writing and publishing. This seminar will be on AI and its impact on the teaching of creative writing. It's at 4pm UK time on Wednesday 27th March, a better time zone for those of you in North America than our usual lunchtime slot. Book here - if you can't attend, book anyway and we'll send you the recording.
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I just finished reading Joseph O'Connor's Shadowplay. It's about Bram Stoker and the actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry and is mainly set during the period when Stoker was writing Dracula while running the Lyceum Theatre in London against a backdrop of Jack the Ripper terrorising women across the city and Oscar Wilde's trial. It is dense and funny and gothic and sad and very absorbing. Highly recommended.
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I'm currently writing an essay about influence for an academic creative writing handbook. It's a coincidence that I've embarked on this essay while reading Shadowplay but one of the things the novel has reminded me of is that Stoker's novel Dracula has loomed over me for much of my writing life. I read it when I was twenty-one, living in a squatted house in Vauxhall across the river from what was then the only Tate, Tate Britain. I remember the reading experience vividly, which in and of itself is unusual for me - I had a cosy bedroom with a narrow single bed and a desk at which I had begun to write short stories. I'd lie in bed at night reading Dracula which so terrified and enthralled me I'd have to hide the book under a pile of clothes and blankets in order to somehow prevent whatever might crawl out from its pages from coming to get me.
My lifelong interest in the Gothic novel stems from reading Dracula. I wrote a feminist revisioning of it, Where Does Kissing End?, and it's there in the backdrop of my novel about a witch, Weird Sister, my digital fictions Branded, Jellybone and Breathe. And of course it's there in my current novel-in-waiting, a supernatural thriller. I owe Stoker a debt, and Joe O'Connor has brought that back to me vividly.
I tried to find my old copy of the book, but I think one of my kids might have it, so I walked over to the nearest bookstore and bought a copy of an edition that includes, surprisingly, an appendix in which, in 1908, Stoker interviews Winston Churchill who claims that while he hates being interviewed he was willing to talk to Stoker because he loved Dracula.
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Spring is here, the pool I use has re-opened, and like everyone else I'm doing my best to both acknowledge and avoid the news.
Thank you for reading!