How Paul McCartney taught me to stop worrying and love zombies: on killing zombies with pencils, and the starting point of my story Meaty’s boys.

My sushi plate epiphany: how my childhood phobia of public speaking was the starting point for a story about a man saved from infidelity by a bout of vomiting.

The best day of your life? On childbirth, Serpico, and my story about a couple pregnant with 37 foetuses.

Writing in books: On signing Kindles, writing in books, and worrying about all the books lost to my memory.

The Book Stops Here on Monday 12 March
No one does writer introductions like Emma Young (citing bad Amazon reviews and giving general abuse). She’s the best, so I’m looking forward to reading at The Book Stops Here alongside the brilliant Evie Wyld and a couple of other people whose identities are a mystery to me at the moment. There is beer, loud music, dim lights and good company.

Doors open at 7.30pm and readings start at 8pm. It’s also free.
The Alley Cat, 4 Denmark Street, Soho, London WC2H 8LP.

BioPunk at the Cambridge Science Festival on Saturday 17 March
A few days later I’ll be at the Cambridge Science Festival alongside KJ Orr, Ra Page from Comma Press, and scientist Dr Simon Stott, talking about Comma Press’s latest short story anthology: BioPunk.

BioPunk is a collection of specially commissioned short stories exploring the ethics of bio-medical research. Each author was paired up with a scientist working within this field. For my story, I went up to the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh (home of Dolly the sheep) to chat with Prof. Bruce Whitelaw about one of their current projects. I’ll write more about it in a future blog post – it was a mind-blowing visit.

The event is free, but you have to book here.

Saturday 17 March, Arts School room A, Arts School, New Museums Site, Bene’t Street, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire CB2 3PY.

Simon Stott and I will also be live on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire with Liz Fraser at 2:30pm on Friday 16 March talking about the book. You can listen here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

They’re not spelling mistakes or character names that change half way through the story, which would be bad, because some of these stories have already been published in magazines and anthologies.

They’re not really mistakes, but little bumps in the road that I’m leading my reader down. The odd clumsy phrase. The odd bit of showing off.

My reader may not mind stepping over the really little bumps. But I do mind bumps. I want a perfectly smooth surface for my reader’s feet. If he or she were to trip once, it would feel like a failure to me.

The oldest of the stories in this new collection were written a couple of years ago, and I’ve barely looked at them since then. It’s amazing how a year or two of rest makes all the bumps in a story rise to the surface.

Why could I not see them before, when now, every one feels like hitting a speedbump at 40mph?

I’m always working at improving my game, so maybe my eyes are keener than they were a couple of years ago, but I don’t think it’s just that.

I think stories are like a joint of meat – they are easiest to cut when they’re cold.

Mostly, I don’t get the luxury of letting a story get really cold. I’m often working to a commission deadline, so there is a definite date at which the story has to be finished. This doesn’t mean that I send it out before it’s ready – my personal rule is that no one but my wife, Naomi, reads anything of mine till it’s so polished I can see my face in it (usually about eight drafts in).

But my experience this week of working on stories that have been hung for a year or two has shown me that to really see a story objectively, and to cut it most cleanly, it has to be long dead.

Right, back to the cutting board.

PS. Of course, the other vital people in my carving process are my agent and editor, both of whom have saved me from making big gaffs in the past. But the Sunday roast analogy doesn’t really stretch to my relationship with them, so I’ll write about that another day.

PPS. I’ve finally got my head round WordPress (I think) and have managed to set up a subscribe button. If you want my new blog posts delivered right to your email inbox the second they’re online, rather than having to spot them amongst facebook updates and tweets, pop your email address in the space on the sidebar. Cheers! A

I have a theory about titles:

If the title is the first thing you write, then the story goes like a dream.

If the title is the last thing you write, you are screwed.

This is the problem I’m having at the moment. My second story collection is almost done, but I don’t have a title. I have left it too late, and now I am struggling.

If I had come up with the title when I started writing it, two years ago, then it would have helped guide the book’s development. Now I’m trying to come up with two or three words for the cover that speak for the 50,000 words inside. That’s a lot of pressure for two or three words.

Your title is the thing that first sells your book. It’s your hook, so it has to be sharp enough to catch attention. Boy I would love to have something as cool as A clockwork orange, or The wasp factory on my cover, one of those titles that puts two words together for the first time ever and is hugely memorable because of it.

But maybe it doesn’t have to be one of those kinds of titles. Some of my favourite books have pretty plain titles (Perfume by Patrick Suskind, Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Nemesis by Philip Roth).

I often think about the names of some of the biggest bands of all time, and how dreadful some of them are. The Beatles is maybe the worst band name ever conceived, but we all accept it. It doesn’t affect how we feel when we listen to A day in the life.

Imagine being given a brief, today, to rename The Beatles, based on their body of work. You sure as hell wouldn’t name them The Beatles.

Better to start with a title. The title is the first thing your reader reads, so it should be one of the first things you write, IMHO.

My current favourite for my new book is The Stone Thrower. It’s the title of an individual story in the collection, and the stone thrower is a metaphor for something that all the stories have grown out of. But I’m not going to settle just yet. I probably won’t settle till the covers are whizzing through the printing machines in a few months’ time.

…the amazing Maurice Sendak.

That’s why I was so happy yesterday to find this new TateShots episode of Sendak talking about his work. I just love his integrity. Right at the start of this clip, he talks about being asked to write a sequel to Where the wild things are. ‘Go to hell,’ he says, ‘I’m not a whore.’

Where the wild things are is the first book I remember reading as a kid. I loved In the night kitchen too, and used to giggle about Mickey’s willy with my nursery school buddies. But I was terrified by the giant bakers, who would chase me upstairs in nightmares. Sendak made such an impression on me as a kid that when I think back now to my earliest memories, they’re in those muted Sendak tones, and riddled with his crosshatching.

I named my first son after Max in Where the wild things are. For his first birthday, we had a Where the wild things are party. My mum made him a wolf suit. Two of my friends and their dad made him a boat – an exact wooden replica of the boat from the book, and my wife and I painted giant cardboard trees and wild things and put them round the house.

I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to watch the recent movie, even though I’m a Spike Jonze fan. A friend saw it and said it was the most depressing thing she’d ever seen. I’m worried that my connection with the book will be frayed in some way if I see it and am disappointed. Maybe if you’ve seen it, and have good things to say about it, you can reassure me.

I was an art student at the time, so I read the whole story in the bath by candlelight, in one sitting. It’s the only book I have ever read in the bath. I hate reading in the bath, but this is not Kafka’s fault.

Here’s the spot – looks pretty cheesy now, but I’m so grateful that it came to me at just the right time. There were two other spots in the series – Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks) reading from Delta of Venus by Anais Nin, and Timothy Hutton reading from a Donald Barthelme short story – both great. I’ve included the Barthelme here too. I’m afraid I can’t find the Anais Nin one anywhere.

Enjoy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kafka’s Metamorphosis

Click here to view the embedded video.

Donald Barthelme – from Forty Stories

PS. I also discovered Haruki Murakami through MTV, but I’ll write about that another time.

I just spent the most amazing week of literary hedonism in Serbia, at the Kikinda Short Story Festival. Along with 23 writers from 18 countries, I ate testicles, showered in sulphurous water, did a live interview on Serbian radio at 8am after 3 hours’ sleep while hungover, then got to feel like royalty on a horse-and-carriage tour of the town. And of course there were nightly short story readings – such a pleasure to be in the company of so many passionate story writers.

I’m so grateful to the Kikinda Short organisers for inviting me – it was an unforgettable week. You can read my full report on the Sunday Times online Fast Fiction blog.

For years I’ve been getting up at 6am every day to write for an hour or so before heading out to work. I’ve always longed to have proper time to write, and now, finally, I have it.

It’s all thanks to the Arts Foundation. At the end of January, they awarded me the Arts Foundation Fellowship in short story writing.

At the awards ceremony at Pentagram in London, I had no idea that I’d won beforehand, so was too excited and nervous to eat any of the delicious canapes floating round. And when Grayson Perry (who hosted the awards) read out my name, and I started to walk up to the stage, I had a moment of panic where I worried that maybe he’d called out someone else’s name and I’d mistakenly heard my own because I wanted to win so badly.

Every year, the Arts Foundation chooses one person from each of several art forms to award a £10k grant, with the aim of buying them six months’ freedom to work on their art. This year, short story writing was one of the chosen forms, alongside ceramics, live performance art, folk music and sculpture. The two previous winners of the short story fellowship were Ali Smith and Michel Faber – what a treat to be in their company! I was also in very strong company for the shortlist: Kevin Barry, Joanna Quinn and Ian Wild.

I’m so grateful to Shelley Warren and everyone at the Arts Foundation, and to the judges of the story award, Alex Linklater, Deborah Rogers and Kamila Shamsie, and to the two lovely people who nominated me for the award, Diana Reich from the Small Wonder festival at Charleston, and Ra Page from Comma Press.

I’m still getting up at six every day to write, but now, there’s no alarm telling me to go get ready for work. I can write fiction all day. What pleasure!