Map Making Competition

My writing group is organising an awesome map making competition. Check it out!

Every story is set somewhere and it’s the writer’s job to immerse their reader fully into that fictional world. How are we to write convincing worlds if we do not know our way around them? 

We challenge any budding writer*/ artist out there to draw a map of their fictional world. It doesn’t have to encompass the entire world, it can be a small part of it; a city/ borough/ street, an island, a country or county, a building-plan etc. 

Please email your map to us at zomara@googlemail.com with Map Making Competition as the subject. Make sure the file isn’t massive, send it as a jpeg 72dpi. Keep a print-version at hand because we’d like to pin some of the best maps up at Shaftesbury Arts Centre (we’ll contact you about this). The winner will be featured on our blog and within Shaftesbury Arts Centre and Shaftesbury Arts Festival on 5th-9th Sept.  We will be publishing the winning map online, so if your world is top-secret then maybe keep it under wraps for now and submit it next time. 

The world/ location must be your own. We don’t want to see lots of renditions of Hogwarts.

The closing date is Friday the 31st August, so get your colouring pencils out and start drafting! 

Further info:

We don’t take ourselves too seriously, so we don’t expect you to either. We’re not concerned about intricacies of scale or worried over the physics of your world. If it looks cool, we’ll be happy. Inspire us, excite us. 

*Wait, you’re not even a writer? But you like to dream up worlds and make maps? – okay, that’s cool, go for it and submit. Maybe one of us writers will like your world and want to team up with you and write a story set in your world. Our writers are always on the lookout for things that will spark the next story, so we’d love to find a new world to write about. 

More information and examples of already published maps can be found here http://www.facebook.com/events/341655955921155/ 

Stuff that is happening

There's been lots happening, so much so that I've not had a chance to write about any of it here. So here's a quick run down. 


1) I won Ideastap Editor's Brief; Grow for the text category. Exciting!

2) Here's a photo of me reading at the Southbank Centre, London a few weeks ago: 

3) Jennifer K Oliver, myself and Jian Yang Dong went to the Tate Modern to see the Damien Hirst exhibition. I love Hirst's work, especially seeing all of it in one go, it doesn't really make any sense if you view isolated pieces. 


4) Our story slam in Shaftesbury went really well. I am working on a post about it at the moment, so hopefully you can read about it soon. 

5) Yesterday Robbie and I went to Sturminster Exchange open mic, me to read a story, and Robbie to perform a comedy song. I regret reading the story I did, I wrote it a while ago and it's not as tight as it could be. The evening was more geared towards music anyhow, and mostly unoriginal work (covers) which I never really understand. Maybe next time I should take a copy of Harry Potter and read that out for 15minutes. Having said that, the performers were mostly young (some of them children) so it was a great event for them to get experience and gain confidence. My favourite performer (aside from Robbie) was a young Jazz Pianist. She had talent, original talent; it was different and interesting. 


6) Today I'm running a writing workshop adapted from the 826 Don't Forget to Write book, about world-building. Come join in if you're around, 6:30pm Park Walk bandstand (if it's raining we'll move to the pub, probably the Mitre because the Brewers have a quiz night on). Bring colouring pencils, we'll be making a map. 

Short Story Idea Bank 3

I decided to write a story for London's StorySlamLIVE the day before the slam. The theme was Sheet-Lightning. Here is the idea bank for that story, which I titled Happening, though will retitle as Mount Analogue from now on. 


My Notes: 

Sheet lightning can look quite contained, almost like a snow globe, the lightning caught within. We catch glimpses of a greater drama that occasionally breaks out of the cloud.

This makes me think of a tent lit from within. 

 On a more general level sheet lightning is lightning that doesn’t touch the ground, it travels from one cloud to another in a horizontal fashion, creating a sheet of light in the air.

Or that feeling, almost sublime, you get when you witness something like that. It’s kind of primitive and fresh and scary all at once. Exhilarating.

It doesn’t go to ground. Like passing a baton, handing over a spark, energy, not allowing it to dissipate. 


I saw an art happening in Bournemouth, forty or so students crammed into a tiny space, cacophonous sound art and flashing lights, and so much buzzing energy: it was like sheet-lightning, ideas sparked from the artists to the audience without dissipating, without neutralising, charging the people who shared their space. 

http://jump-into-the-void.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/london-trip-1-mt-analogue.html

London Trip #1 Mt. Analogue

Last week I went to AUCB's graduate art show in Brick Lane. This year photography, fine art and illustration all exhibited in the same space. My main interest was in photography, having graduated from Bournemouth in 2007 with a 1st class BA (hons) Photography. The photography B.A's portion of the show was called Mt.Analogue, an apt and clever title. In 2012 there seems to have been a new departure from digital and a resurgence of silver gelatin prints and sculptural pieces.

The entire graduating year were of very high standard, but two or three artists particularly interested me, Kharn Roberts, Loz Clarke and Antonio Parente. I met Kharn back in April when I went to an art happening in Holdenhurt Road (Bournemouth), Open Space/ Black Branches. This was a performance piece/ soundscape, and there was something about it that really worked well for me. Black Branches tend to release their stuff onto cassette tape, the artists seem to be preoccupied with the relationship between digital and analogue media, as well as certain obsolete digital media. (I think) they work with the record label Amps Against Trend, who release music/ sound on floppy disk and cassette tape. In this digital age where everyone/ thing is so connected and easy to share, this resurgence of clunky analogue and obsolete media is interesting. These media are limiting; it's hard to share this stuff. These media force the audience to interact, they are tactile and frustrating and messy, in antithesis to the clinical ease and distance of  trending digital media. With twitter hashtags art, music, stories, inane idiocy, etc can be instantly shared, trends occur, not because they are meaningful, clever or interesting, just because chance allowed them to be picked up and shared many times over. With Black Branches and the stuff released on Amps Against Trend, this cannot happen so easily. If you want to share a song that's been released on cassette tape, you have to be dedicated, you have to have the right equipment and a dose of patience, and at the very least, you need to pass your tape on to someone who has a cassette player.

 Loz Clarke's work comprised of a looped sample recorded onto tape that wound around a plinth with sandpaper wrapped around it. As the evening progressed, the tape and sound deteriorated. 

Kharn Roberts exhibited an empty metal tray that he later smashed a pane of glass over. It was meant to contain a sculpture/ sound piece comprising of a block of ice suspended over a snare drum. Over the course of the evening the ice would melt, hitting the drum. I loved this idea, the chance element of it, the question over who the author of this sound is: Kharn or the ice or the drum, or the people generating the heat that causes the ice to melt. 
Health and Safety forbade him to exhibit his work over fears that a few drips may bounce off the drum and cause moisture to build around the display. The drinks bar collected a massive puddle of water and no one seemed to have any trouble negotiating that. 


Antonio Parente's work reminded me of the work made by a student in my year: Will Newnham, who struggled with the relationship between himself, his art and his audience. What I liked particularly about Parente's work (and Kharn's and Loz's) was the engagement in critical theory. All these artists are creating engaging and clever work that push boundaries in carefully considered ways. Antonio has established a website that looks very exciting and interesting to me (as a critical theory geek): http://www.onphotography.org.uk/


What I really love about the show is the title. Mt. Analogue - a nod to the surrealist author Rene Daumal and his novel Mount Analogue, A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing. I've not managed to get hold of this novel, though I have read about it, read excerpts and quotes. 


Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action. You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again... So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. 


To me, the ideas in this book marry well with the ideas that Kharn, Loz and Antonio are exploring in their work. 

SAC Story Slam

The writing group I co-direct is hosting a Story Slam next month, the 20th July. Come along, either as a writer to perform, or as a cool person to watch and enjoy. There will be book art on sale, as well as drinks and music. 

This fab poster was designed by Danny Morison. Check out his pages: website, facebook , twitter

For more info about the slam and to book tickets, please go here: http://www.shaftesburyartscentre.org.uk/item/creative-writing-storyslingers-story-slam.html

Writers' slots are filling up fast, so secure your place asap!

National Flash Fiction Day

It's National Flash Fiction Day today, which I'm very excited about. Flash fiction is a great way to accept and engage with this Age of short attention spans and on-screen reading. I can't stand to sit at a screen and read anything that's going take longer than drinking a cup of tea (and I'm a fast tea drinker). What I especially like about flash fiction is that there are no rules, nothing matters and if your reader didn't like or understand the story, that's no great loss - it only took them a few minutes to read. This means writers can be really experimental and try new things without fearing failure.

My academic background is in fine art, particularly photographic and contextual theory. I love to read and write fiction that is less about telling a story, and more of an outcome of artistic research - so rather than my project outcome being a fine art photograph - it's a short fiction of less than 1000 words. The fiction can then be read in the same way as you'd read a photograph or fine art piece - certain things might resonate with the reader, especially readers engaged in particular contextual discourses. And I can do that with flash fiction, I can afford to limit my market to only a few people who are going to get it.

I really like the work of Etgar Keret, who tends to write flash fiction. Check his stuff out if you're a fan of the short form. You can buy his collections through Amazon or (very) good book shops.

There are so many options with flash fiction, it can be whatever you want it to be. I like to play with language and be atmospheric and poetic with some of my flash fictions. I wrote a short atmospheric piece called Trapped in Nomansland, which has been published in this anthology in association with National Flash Fiction Day, specifically the South West region of contributing writers: Kissing Frankenstein and Other Stories
So please check it out, buy a copy, read it, lend it to your friends.

Get involved in NFFD here: http://nationalflashfictionday.blogspot.co.uk/

Pistachio Cake

I made this cake the other day. It's a pistachio and almond cake with an orangey zing. The recipe is mostly from Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries, minus a few things I didn't like the sound of (or couldn't afford. This is a pricey cake to make!) It's got an incredible flavour, it's heavy and moist and will last a good few days without a decline in quality - in fact I think it improves with age.

Butter - 250g
caster sugar - 250g
eggs x3
pistachio nuts - 120g
ground almonds - 100g
an orange
plain flour - 60g

Preheat the oven to 160C. Line a 22cm cake tin. Cream the butter and sugar in a mixer until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating between each addition. Grind 100g of the pistachios into a fine powder (use a food processor), and then add them to the mix along with the ground almonds. Grate and squeeze the orange, stirring it in (Nigel Slater puts rosewater in at this point too. I couldn't afford rosewater, so left it out). Fold in the flour with a metal spoon (or in my case, whiz old Ken Wood on a low setting).
Scoop the mixture into the tin, and bake for just shy of an hour, covering the top with foil about 10 mins before the end of cooking. It's done when a skewer comes out pretty much clean. Leave it in the tin to cool.

Nigel Slater makes a lemon icing to put on top. Mr Kite dislikes lemon in puddings, and I don't really like icing. The cake is so moist it doesn't need it. Instead I crushed up the remaining 20g of pistachio nuts and sprinkled them on the top. I put some primrose flowers on top for an elegant flourish. Depending on the season you could use whatever edible flower is in season at the time.

I recommend checking out the original recipe, especially if you want the rosewater touch and the icing. Nigel Slater includes a recipe for an amazing sounding sorbet that goes nicely with the cake.

Delicious!