A Flash a Day in November

Repairing my relationship with writing

I’ve set up this substack to write a new flash fiction piece every day in November and share with as many people as are interested in reading. If you subscribe to this, you will receive a new flash each morning from 1 to 30 Nov 2024. I’m not going to be hard and fast about the length, I’m going for between 400 and 1500 but I’ll go where the muse takes me. The only rule I will impose on myself in terms of genre or style is that it must contain or propose a note of hope. There’s enough misery going around. If you want to check out what these will be like, here’s one I made earlier.

Why am I doing this? To heal a damaged relationship.

Even though I am a published novelist, have been shortlisted for major awards for my novel and short stories, and have had work published in a wide variety of prestigious magazines in different genres - my relationship with writing has badly broken down and I find it hard to call myself an author any more.

For a long time after my first novel was published, to later vanish into the maw that swallows so many novels that are good but swimming in an ocean, I strove to restore my career, writing more novels. “This is my time”, I told myself again and again, “this is my comeback”. But a cool, blonde, self-collected female voice from a diamantine-hard world responded, “That’s really not up to you.” And it wasn’t. I fell into bad fights with other writers, some of whom responded with abuse. I was fighting a broken world, being ignored, getting nowhere.

And then my body said ENOUGH.

On January 2023, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Oddly enough mixed with the fear was a profound sense of relief - I could no longer pretend that the old ways were working any more. And in the between-times, I found myself exploring new challenges. I completed my long-in-gestation crime novel, The Planter’s Daughter, and wrote a new one inspired by my chemotherapy, The Red Angel. While healthwise things were not optimal, in terms of creativity I was at a peak. Here, I thought, would be the triumphant comeback. A woman who wrote two novels during cancer treatment! A story of overcoming adversity with powerful words! Surely publishers and agents would be impressed?

Ladies and gentlemen, they didn’t give a shit.

For well over a year I strived to interest the professional publishing world. One particular firm was very kind and professional even though I didn’t manage to click with them, and they had kind words for The Red Angel. But for many of the rest, it was ghosting, form rejections, or abrupt dismissal. Part of that is because The Red Angel starts off a bit gross. I was writing it while poison ran through my veins and I was resolved to put poison on the page. I don’t get it - people will allow skeletons of dead infants, horrific slow killing and unspeakable disasters in opening chapters, but they will tut-tut at the scatological. That’s not a privilege anyone as rooted in their body as a cancer patient can afford to do.

I’ve given up. The whole process was corroding my mental health and I resented feeling like a marionette doing an endless pick-me dance. Writing was supposed to boost my health, not damage it. I can’t remember the last time the whole process didn’t make me miserable. And yet I love to write.

So this is the rebuilding. This is a deliberate attempt to write a story a day, without thought of publication, accolade, financial award or even much in the way of reading. This is writing for the pure fun of it. Over the next year I am going to find more ways of getting my work out there without putting my body and mind through these miserable systems. I hope you can join me, and enjoy what I put out there. I hope it moves you.