Newsletter baby! / Baby newsletter
no babies were harmed in the writing of this email
I used to blog. I used to tweet. I used to publish and write online a lot. But lately, not so much. Various reasons, though since 2017 when I took up my full-time role as Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries at Bath Spa University I have had next to zero time for anything creative, let alone time to stare at a blank blog post and think about what I might write. In the spring of this year I moved from a full-time role to half-time, from 1.0 FTE to 0.5 FTE as they say in the acronym-laden world of academia. Last week I handed a draft of my new novel to my agent here in the UK; its working title is NUMBER ONE LONDON. (Should there be a comma? NUMBER ONE, LONDON? But it’s a novel, not an address - well, it was an address at one time, but no longer… And that title might change.) The previous week I submitted a short story to a competition, and over the summer I rewrote a children’s book I hope will be published next year.
I’m now in that weird half-light that writers occupy quite a lot of the time - waiting for other people to tell me what they think about things I’ve written. I’ve been working on the novel since 2019; it is a development of Jellybone, a smartphone novel I wrote for a start-up that went bust six weeks after it was launched back in 2018, and a smartphone story that is still going strong, also published in 2018, Breathe (a 15 minute free read that personalises itself for every reader - only really works on your smartphone, no download required, just a url HURRAH). The children’s book I first started writing nearly a decade ago; the short story has been around in draft form since 2015. Everything takes a long time in my writing life, it transpires.
Who knew back in the day twenty-two years ago when I first started experimenting with interactive digital storytelling that email would turn out to be such a reliable way to publish? Not me. But in those two decades I’ve shifted from being an enthusiastic early adopter of digital platforms to someone who has more in common with the movement people are calling the new Luddites. More on that another day (I’m married to a Mellor whose family has always claimed to be descended from George Mellor, one of the original Luddites. However, George was hanged for murder aged 23 so I don’t think he had a lot of time to produce descendants what with all the protesting and rioting).
So my task here will be to write about writing, reading, technology, academia, mentoring, and other things that accompany the life of a writer like me. My first book came out in 1989 - a book of short stories called Tiny Lies - and I’ve been at it ever since, more or less, often less, successfully. I’ve been around the (publishing) houses and back again. Through all this I’ve had one constant in my bookish life: my agent, Rachel Calder, of the Sayle Literary Agency. She has remained steadfast and calm through these ups and downs, always taking my calls and answering my emails, for which I am grateful.
My next post will be about some of those lows - I think I’ll call it Horrible Things Famous Literary Men Have Said to Me.
Stay tuned, subscribe, tell your friends please. Any feedback or comments most appreciated.
Kate