I wrote a smutty, Virgin Mary-themed flash fiction called ‘Sex Lives of the Saints’, and you can read it at Tawdry Bawdry. Hope you enjoy it! Here’s a sneak preview:
Just so she doesn’t think I’m hopeless, I run my fingertip along her neck: a raised white scar, soft as fog, the width of a match.
‘My father,’ she says. ‘He was hit by lightning.’
I’m delighted to announce that I have an agent!
Francesca Barrie at Johnson & Alcock will be representing my first novel, Rust and Stardust, as well as (hopefully) whatever comes next. Short story collection? Novella? Genderqueer burlesque mime show? Watch this space…
She says: Flex your knuckles. Drop to your knees. Make me unmaid.
He says: You want a prince’s esteem, you want gallantry and grace.
She says: Princessing is not a process. I have skirts to be lifted.
He says: You have not checked under mine.
She says: Oh, now you complicate.
S/he says: Kings in tiaras, queens in the mud. We drew the line ourselves.
S/he says: I do not want to cut my hair.
S/he says: So don’t. We’ll make bridges of it.
S/he says: Skin can still cover secrets. You, I, we.
Saying: Unprincessed, unkinged.
Saying: Unmaidened, unmanned.
—
This is an entry for the Mookychick blogging competition, FEMINIST FLASH FICTION 2011. Enter now.
open your mouth wide wider
make sure they can hear that scream
all the way to the back of the cinema. aim
to deafen the projectionist.
look behind you when you run up to the attic
or down to the basement or whichever way
leads to snapping jaws. turn to the camera so your hair
flips just right. pull
your dress tight so your tits bounce.
leave a trail of potential weapons
dropped from your shaking hands.
you must always make it easy for him to follow.
later there will be a girl who will grab a weapon
and not let go. but this is only the third scene. you
are axe-fodder. you should not have
fucked smoked cursed filled the shape of a woman.
next time only sign on if your character has a boy’s name.
—
This is an entry for the Mookychick blogging competition, FEMINIST FLASH FICTION 2011. Enter now.
oh gahd, not Josh says Cassie with her
throat tilted just right and her glass angled
to spill. we all shuffle our boy-cards because
it’s late and Josh is the hot one. Cassie cradles
the loaf-sized phone — pinker than any girl —
and dials. he’s not wearing a hat says the phone
and we all scratch our pencils on the boy-list.
we played this game before we had tits or spots
or periods or stretchmarks or hangovers. now
we’ve had them for so long we need the game
to be those girls again. a handful of girls to a
fistful of women and really what’s changed?
we drink harder and compare one another’s
dark roots. you’re right says the phone.
I like you. Cassie giggles into her empty glass.
we crumple our lists,
our boys.
—
This is an entry for the Mookychick blogging competition, FEMINIST FLASH FICTION 2011. Enter now.
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is an annual creative writing event, held every November, where participants write a 50-000 word novel in 30 days. It’s wonderful, it’s horrible, and I love it.
In 2006 I was in my final year of university. I was studying English Lit, my dissertation was on retold fairytales, and I didn’t have a fucking clue what I was doing. So, purely as a distraction from the car-crash that was my dissertation, I signed up for NaNoWriMo. I wrote 50,000 words of rambling nonsense about a fairytale princess, her robot boyfriend and her mermaid best friend living in modern-day Glasgow. It was a total mess, but I thoroughly enjoyed writing it. I felt exhilarated by the experience – this writing malarkey wasn’t so hard after all! I resolved to fix up my novel into something halfway decent, and started looking forward to the following year’s NaNo. (By the way, I finally got my shit together with my dissertation and ended up with a 2:1 honours degree, so it all worked out okay.)
I completed NaNo in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010. I soon learned not to take it very seriously – I was also studying for an MLitt in Creative Writing, writing short stories and poems, etc. and in my head that was my ‘real’ writing – but oh, it was fun. It was made even more fun when my good friend Avery Oslo started to NaNo too, so every December we traded novels and crowed over the horrendous scenes we’d written.
In 2010, for the first time since I signed up, I didn’t participate in NaNo. I was a ‘proper’ writer now, working on a ‘proper’ novel, and I couldn’t take the time out. But I missed it. The frantic production of words! The all-encompassing obsession with people I had made up! The cancelling of all unnecessary commitments with impunity! Oh, happy days.
So now it’s 2011, and I’ve almost finished my second ‘proper’ novel (which just seems to mean that it took longer than a month to write and has fewer meandering, misspelled paragraphs about sex and self-indulgence). I do have time to do NaNo, if I want to. But should I? Do I need it? Do I want it?
I’d love to know what you think. Have you NaNo-ed? Do you plan to?
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