Cinderella Flash Fiction

Here's my entry for a competition to update a fairy tale in 350 words or less. This is exactly 350 words:

“Well of course you're shallow!” said the Fairy Godmother. “What's with the sense of entitlement? Of course you can't go to the ball. You don't belong. Why would you want to go? Have you got anything to wear? No! You expect me to provide it. Why do you want the prince? You've already got Buttons.”

“I don't want Buttons, I want the prince,” said Cinderella.

“I want, I want... it's all I get from you. Ooh, I have to have the best carriage and the finest horses and a ball gown that makes me look like a meringue so I can pretend to be someone I'm not. Don't you think someone wanted that pumpkin? And what did the mice ever do to you? You're just bloody selfish.”

“But you're my fairy godmother! You're supposed to be helping me!” She stamped her foot.

“I am helping you, you airhead! You'll get nowhere with these ridiculous expectations. Live within your means. Pick a man who loves you, not some tool who thinks you can base love on shoe size. Learn to be happy within your own life. Don't change your life. Change yourself.”

“Don't change my life? I have to work!”

“Everyone has to work, sugar. You think I'm doing this for the good of my health?”

“You don't know what it's like. Did you never watch Slumtown's Next Top Princess and think 'that could be me?'”

A derisive snort. “You need to sort your life out, girl. You're even harder work than Lady Di. And we all know how that ended up...” A shudder. “Look, you need to get this into your head. You're not going to be a princess. Like most people, you've got a hard life that you have to make the best of. Work out what skills you've got and use them to your best advantage.”

So Cinderella got herself pregnant by a married footballer, sold her harrowing story to the tabloids and spent the rest of her life blaming the fairy because she wasn't a princess.

The Joy of NaNoWriMo

Well, it's the first of December and I can relax. November is behind me.

November is the month of NaNoWriMo. It's not some kind of Mork & Mindy pachyderm reference. It stands for National Novel Writing Month and the point of the exercise is to get people writing creatively. For this, I applaud it.

It is fair to say it has taken over my life over the last 30 days. The point of the exercise is to write 50,000 words in a month. This is only actually 1,667 words per day, or about 4 pages of single spaced A4 with a 12 point font. It is doable. It is surpassable. When I did some research and found that 50,000 words is actually a novella and not a novel, I wanted to do more. My total word count for the 30 days of November was 80,071 and I still probably have another 30,000 words to go before the story is complete. But today is a day for putting my feet up and drinking too much. I do feel I have something to celebrate.

I have been obsessed by the project. I couldn't sleep for writing. I would try, and then I would get inspiration for something and would have to type it up before it went the way of all ignored ideas, confined to the bin of oblivion. I didn't eat. Mainly, I lived on a diet of Golden Virginia and the occasional Battenberg cake to keep the energy levels up.

And I discovered some dark sides to myself I didn't know were there. I am not writing a book for children. One of my main characters is a psychopathic rapist, another the victim of paedophilia. Societal ills from racism to Thatcher are themes in one section of the book, the dark underbelly of suburbia in another. And the way the orcs get treated in the fantasy section was tantamount to genocide.

The scary part is that none of this was planned. I had a vague idea of the wider story arc, I knew kind of what was going to happen but I was constantly surprised by the behaviour of the characters I created. They had their own very clear ideas of who they wanted to be. It didn't feel like I was controlling them at all. They arrived fully formed and told me who they were. I felt more like a journalist documenting the eruption of a volcano than a novelist creating the unreal. Jim Morrison said 'the role of the artist is not to invent, but to receive.' I understand what he meant now.

So yeah, I got loads out of the NaNoWriMo experience. I got insomnia, I got obsessed, I got exhausted but ultimately, I got the first 80% of a novel I'm actually really proud of. I recommend it.

So what is the book about? In a sense, it's a little like Tron or the Matrix, in that characters are trapped within a computer game. But it's a very different story to both of them. I don't consider the idea of characters being trapped inside a computer game a story anyway. Were that the case, Tron and the Matrix would have many more similarities. I consider the inside of a computer game a location, a plot device, an updating of the old dramatic dream sequence where anything is possible. Shakespeare used it a few times and he wasn't the first.

Basically, in the year 2051, computer technology has got amazingly good and is entirely based on organic components and nanobots made from stem cells. Four people get trapped within a virtual reality game so real there are times they don't know they're playing it. They have to find their way out before their real world bodies die of dehydration. That can take up to a week, but there will be serious organ failure if it takes that long, especially to the brain which is largely water-based. But meanwhile, they have a mad evil genius controlling the game from the outside, playing with them like puppets and manipulating them and their world for his own amusement. Mwah ha ha. So my characters start off in a fantasy role playing game, their characters elves and barbarians as they slaughter orcs and try to escape, then get picked up and moved to a Grand Theft Auto game, re-imagined as London in the 1980s. Bring on the stolen cars, the hookers and the ghost of Thatcher. Now, they are in the land of the Sims, living the suburban dream, where your happiness is largely determined by the cost of your possessions. Not that different to the 80s, then...

And from here? Still not sure. There will be a dramatic conclusion. There will be a poignant epilogue, reflective and tinged with reminiscent melancholy. But as for the details? I'll let my characters tell me. This is their world now.

The Day of the Launch

I had my book launch yesterday - that went pretty well. My publishers had spent about 5 hours on the train coming down from Peterborough and when they came, they brought wine so that was very welcome. Starting drinking wine at 11 AM wasn't such a great idea though. Of course, you never find out these things until afterwards.

I had a pretty good turnout. At least 30 people came, and most of them bought copies of the book. Some bought more than one. I kept a tally chart which I updated each time a signed a book, and had it subdivided into friends, fellow poets and strangers. After the allotted three hours, I had sold ten to friends, seven to poets and ten to strangers. I was very pleased to have sold so many to strangers. It's lovely to get the support of your friends, but reaching a stranger was especially nice.

Waterstones had expected to sell about fifteen copies, the publishers were hoping for twenty, but twenty seven was great. Much of the credit has to go to my dear friend, Swindon's community poet Tony Hillier. He was a whirlwind of energy as he asked people to 'roll up, roll up, meet the poet' and encouraged them into the shop.

I wish I was more comfortable being the centre of attention...

Four Go Mad In Yorkshire

I've literally just got back from an amazing weekend away so I'm typing this up quick while the taste of metaphor and imagery is still rich on my tongue. Four poets from Bluegates (Tony Hillier, Michael Scott, Keith Hilling and myself) made the long journey from Swindon to darkest Yorkshire.

I'd never been to Yorkshire before. All I knew of it was what I had gleaned from Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe books and the occasional 'Last of the Summer Wine' episode as a child. It's easy to surpass expectations that don't exist, but I think I would have been impressed regardless. It was a great time.

A group of poets called Write Out Loud, based in Hebden Bridge, had booked a hostel for the weekend and filled it with poets and poetry. There were 46 people signed up, more when you count the organisers, workshop leaders and invited performance poets.

There were workshops on a wide variety of literary subjects: comic poetry, war poetry, script writing, experimental poetry, performance techniques, etc. There were 9 different workshops in all, but alas, only time to do 4 of them. I chose 'starting from a blank page', experimental poetry, Chartist poetry (more on this below) and 'getting pithy with pity', a study of the poetry of war.

My first workshop was 'starting from a blank page' and was a series of tricks that a constipated poet can use to get the creative juices flowing again. Some of the exercises were quite useful. For example, you can take a couple of lines from an existing poem, add new lines of your own and then delete the existing lines and see where the new direction takes you.

For example, we were given the lines 'I found them huddled on the bed / the paperback opening by itself'. We analysed this snippet (who were 'them'? Words? Children? Lovers? What did 'huddled' imply? A threat? Comfort? Intimacy? What about bed? Could it also be a flower bed or a river bed? Etc). We extended the two lines, based on what we'd discussed. When I had added my new lines, it came out as:

I found them huddled on the bed,
The paperback opening by itself,
Its spine damaged by the weight of favoured memories
As its words embrace,
Breath on cheek,
Sniffing each other's hair.

I probably won't be taking this poem any further, but it's an interesting trick. I may use it if writer's block gets too troublesome.

We also experimented with automatic writing techniques and self-hypnosis, letting the eyes defocus and writing about what we see. The most interesting thing in my field of vision were the crocheted flowers on the blouse of an elderly lady sitting opposite me. This inspired the following:

Flowers on a blouse
Made of fabric
Shot through with thread
That catches the light
Like a net catching butterflies.

Flowers on a blouse
Made of hearts
Three hearts making six petals
Holding hands at the corners
A blossomed brocade
At the top of a top
In the foyer of a hostel
In Yorkshire

Not a great poem, perhaps, (I was still warming up) but an interesting exercise. I gave it to the lady whose top had inspired it, and she was delighted. Poetry is for sharing.

We were then split up into pairs, and read our embryonic poems to each other, choosing four words randomly from each. My partner chose fabric, light, butterflies and hearts, and these words then had to be included in a new poem:

Butterflies fly
Scintillating, corruscating,
Made of light,
Their hearts aflame,
The fabric of their wings akimbo
As they crash,
Screaming,
Into the grill
Of a Volvo

No-one said it had to make sense! We were then given postcards to write about but my poem on this was shit, so I'm keeping it to myself. It wasn't all my fault. I was given an unused German postcard of quite a bad painting of an unimaginative flower arrangement. There was little to say about it, but the idea of writing based on a picture was a good one. I've done it before (click here for details).

I took the experimental poetry workshop not knowing what to expect, but discovered that poetry can be very weird indeed. My musical tastes include things that some people would consider a bit odd, but my poetic tastes are generally quite conservative and I wanted to stretch myself, but I found this workshop a bit challenging. Poems are discontinuous, sections cut and pasted from line to line, breaking up the narrative. Sentences are incomplete and sometimes just made up of punctuation. Some are very short (eg, 'So much depends/upon//the red wheel/barrow//glazed with rain/water//by the white//chickens', by William Carlos Williams. And yes, that is the whole poem). Experimental poetry is the written equivalent of abstract art, the non-representational paintings of Jackson Pollock. But I don't really get that either. I did write a poem based on these ideas, but I don't really like it very much so I'm going to keep that one to myself as well.

The Chartist poetry workshop was a revelation. Chartism was the world's first working class revolutionary movement, and started in about 1838. At the time, there was little democracy in Britain. The common man had no voice in Parliament, no vote, and was banned from standing for election. Chartism resolved to change this by the charter that gave the movement its name. It wanted secret ballots, a vote for every sane man over the age of 21 (if he wasn't in jail), wages for MPs, so the ordinary man could afford to represent his constituents, etc. While all but one of their demands (that parliaments be dissolved after a year) were set in law by 1918, in the mid 19th century, a very nervous government sent in the soldiers time and time again, leading to events like the Peterloo Massacre. And what was the driving force behind Chartism? Poetry. Newspapers in the industrial centres like Manchester and Sheffield printed thousands of poems by Chartists, calling members to arms and reflecting on the hypocrisy of their social betters. Even poets like Shelley were involved in this. The Chartist years could have been the time that poetry was the most effective instrument of social change. And yet, the poems from this time are largely unknown to us. They have been collected precisely once, in 1956, by a Russian publisher and translated back into English. And some are excellent. Here's an example, by an anonymous Manchester poet:

O, instinct there is none - nor show of reason
By outrage gross on God and Nature's plan,
With rarest gifts in blasphemy and treason,
That Man, the souled, should piecemeal murder man.

The final workshop I took was on war poetry. This was one of the best of all, not least because we did the most writing. We discussed the First World War poets, mainly Wilfred Owen, and more recent writers that discussed the Second World War, right up to Simon Armitage who wrote a wonderful piece about the Iraq conflict. We were given an exercise to come up with a poem that expressed what it would be like for a soldier to miss his home comforts and compare his old life to that of a soldier at war. I wrote the following (probably my favourite of the poems I wrote this weekend):

The memories of beer and sex
Are faded now, already dead.
My iPod and my MTV
Replaced at last by IEDs
And UAVs and Taliban,
The poppy fields of Flanders fame
Transplanted to Afghanistan
By deep-set men in shallow graves.

We were then asked to consider a war that had affected us personally, and reflect on who had won, who had lost, and what had they won or lost. When I was about 12, the Falklands War was happening, and like any young boy, I got caught up in the excitement. My broken Action Men stopped being Germans and started being Argentinians. So I wrote this:

The sheep clung to the hillside
As the South Atlantic wind
Had Argentinian accents:
The army's coming in.
General Galtieri,
Franco on the cheap,
Had launched a quick invasion:
Give me back those British sheep!
Thatcher was the winner,
The election was khaki.
I may have been a schoolboy
But I was old enough to see
If the government's in trouble,
They make the soldiers roam.
If they give us outside enemies
We forget the ones at home.

I'm not happy about the end of this, but I ran out of time. I may revisit it later. The last war poem we had to write was one about the delivery of bad news to a relative. I came up with the following:

Gloved knuckles on a painted wooden door
Sergeant-major, crown and stripes on his arm
Beret under epaulette

Door opens
Drained, drawn face
Realisation dawning
Long hard swallow

He says "I'm afraid I have some bad news"
She says "I know"

Door slams
Crying footsteps

He walks to the staff car
And drives to his next victim
One down, six to go

Maybe I had learnt something from the experimental poetry class after all. I usually have much more punctuation and full sentences in my poems.

All in all, it was an excellent weekend. Half a hundred people were brought together by a shared love of poetry. We drove for 5 hours to get there (thanks Michael!). Others came from much further. One came from Exeter, another from Cornwall. The quality of the poetry was amazing. We had open mic nights on both Friday and Saturday evening, where we would read our poems to a rapturous audience of fellow enthusiasts, and to be honest, just being with that many poets would have been worth the cost and travelling alone. Factor in the excellent (although mainly vegetarian) food, the workshops and the accomodation and the £50 fee was embarrassingly low.

And poets are so eloquent. I couldn't get up the seven-foot vertical ladder to my bunk bed (dodgy knee playing up) and had to sleep in the lounge, but no-one said my snoring was merely loud or offensive. It was described as 'operatic, in a full-blooded baritone'.

You've got to love poets. They can find a decorative way to describe anything.

Almost There!

There are now only twelve days left until my book is launched! I'm ridiculously, childishly excited about this. The local Waterstones has been booked, my lovely publishers are laying on drinks and goody bags and I have a big stack of posters that I need to distribute to local shops and pubs.

This is a completely new experience for me. I've never had a book out, never seen my face on a professionally printed poster before (when I had various bands, my wife used to design posters for gigs, but this is the first time I've seen something that wasn't produced on an inkjet). I have been plugging the book to almost everyone I met for months now. I don't think there's anyone I know that isn't aware I have a book coming out.

I pity my poor friends on Facebook. Almost all of my posts recently have mentioned the book in some way. There's an application that tells you your most-used words. Number two on my list was 'book'. Number one was 'watching', but that's just because I often complain about what's on TV while I post. There's always something to complain about. Nothing to complain about with the book, of course! It's almost perfect.

I say it's almost perfect because there were a couple of poems I wrote that were too late for inclusion. One I've already given (An Epitaph for Justice can be found here) but there was also one about winning the poetry competition. My publishers had asked for this months ago, but typically, I didn't have any ideas about how to start it until it was too late. Oh well. Consider this to be a blog exclusive! The poem is here:


Two Words

Two words
Short ones too
A name
My name
Andrew Barber

I don't hear these words very often
The doctor
The dentist
The nasal Tannoy
For the deli counter drones
At the council offices

I hear them most
From my own mouth
Hello insert name here
I'm Andrew Barber
Shake the hand
Flash the eye contact
I'm not scared
Feel how firm my grip

And once
I heard two words from a stage
Short words
A name
And the winner is...
Insert my name here...
I've won

And everything changed

I'm Turning Japanese

I've been thinking about the Japanese standards for quality, and I've come to the conclusion that I prefer them. I've long preferred the difficulty levels of Japanese videogames over their American counterparts. I'd rather sweat in an abandoned shed in Resident Evil 4 with two bullets and four zombies than be the flag-waving bullet sponge capable of carrying ten different rifles at once in Call of Duty or something. I like to be tested in a game and I like the laws of physics and anatomy to be realistic.

Game shows are the same. I do like shows like Ninja Warrior, where there are absolute standards of quality. You have to complete the course, and if you don't, you lose. It's been running for ten years, and only one person has ever completed the course in the final (which is much harder than the qualifier). For nine years, there has not been a winner. Can you imagine this happening in a British show?

I've got the X Factor on at the moment, as I type, and this would be the same. Like most British game shows, they don't pick winners, they pick best qualified losers. The twelve judged best would always make the final, regardless of how good they really are. If the 'fastest finger first' winner on 'Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire' took two minutes and only got one answer right, they'd still go through. There are no absolute barriers to entry, no predetermined ability threshholds. The format requires that someone play and if we can't have good, we'll make do with least bad.

I think the worst of them all is 'Deal or No Deal'. There's literally no skill involved at all. Talk about a level playing field. Just guess a random number, and if your guess is beneficial, everyone tells you how well you did. Yay! Way to guess a random number! Of course, you are as likely as anyone else in the world to do well, because it is totally random but take your comfort where you can, I say. Take the credit for a sunny day, while you're at it.

Free T's and Semi-breves

Despite what I suggested in my last post, not all my endeavours over the last few weeks have been related to the poetry book, at least not directly. Thinking about it, a lot of time has been spent doing music as well.

I've always been interested in music, since the first time I heard Pink Floyd. Prior to that, I had thought of music as being an occasionally pleasant noise in the background. I don't dance, so I can't appreciate a song just for its rhythmic basis, and I'm a big fan of poetry, so I like words to communicate something more than 'I'm happy because you love me' or 'I'm sad because you don't'. An awful lot of music I heard growing up fitted into one of these two camps. I thought of music as being like gardening - a lot of people clearly get pleasure from it, but it's not for me.

When I discovered Pink Floyd, I found that music could say something meaningful, something relevant. Song lyrics could be as creative as poetry. They could say as much. They could arguably say more, given their much wider audience. Hearing Floyd made me reconsider the point of music, its power to communicate. Suddenly, I realised there might be other artists that tried to say more than 'the moon in June'. And of course there were. Bob Dylan. Lou Reed. John Lennon. Paul Simon. There were some fantastic writers out there.

So I set about learning music. I wanted to be Roger Waters. Why should there be only one? And while my first faltering steps were embarrassing (virtual re-writings of Waters' songs) I persevered. I taught myself music. I came to understand its awesome power. Music is an incredible colloboration between maths and emotion. Everything about its structure is logical; everything about its expression is emotional. Music is the ultimate synergy of the head and the heart. It's a language, a science, an art, a religion. It symbolises everything that mankind have evolved to produce. Over the last twenty years, I have written about fifty songs.

Having said this, though, I still feel a bit of a fraud for including song lyrics in a poetry book. I think it's a bit cheap to have repeated choruses in a poem, even though there are lots of poets that do it, even though many poets like Blake and Shelley have called their poems songs, even though the earliest poems of all were sung and accompanied by a lyre.

So to make myself feel better about short-changing the reader, I have given in the book a link to some songs (poems) I have recorded. They can be heard here. And over the last few weeks, I have been recording some songs that I hadn't done previously. Some of the songs were recorded years ago. Some just last week. One hasn't even been finished yet. My friend Sheena Dean, who did the photographic project I was involved with (see here for details), has a wonderful voice and will be recording one of the songs that my vocal cords just weren't able to cope with.

Here's a photo of me with the keyboards on which I wrote several of my songs:













My lovely publishers were kind enough to send me a couple of free T-shirts with the book cover on them. It is very tempting to just sit on a bus with the T-shirt on, reading the book, and see if anyone notices my face on the cover of both. But that would probably be considered crass commercialism, even by me. When it comes to the book, I'm not sure whether I'm the product or the factory...