that I'm having another book! Now that the contract is signed, I can reveal that my second collection, My Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fictions, will be published by excellent Bristol publisher Tangent Books. It will be a collection of fifty or so very short flash fictions written over the past few years.

Because Tangent are well known for their art books, such as Banksy's Bristol: Home Sweet Home, about Bristol's most famous graffiti artist,

as well as the Naked Guide to Bristol

and two collections of short fiction from Stanley Donwood, who also happens to be Radiohead "artist in residence"

this physical version of my book is going to be a beautiful object, which will involve a local Bristol illustrator too. So, truly a local affair and I will be involved in every step, which I am very very excited about!

The book and ebook will be published in Spring this year, I will reveal more details as they are decided upon. It's been 3 and a half years since The White Road and Other Stories came out, and I finally feel ready for another book, and slightly better equipped than I was the first time to deal with everything that comes with a new book. We are planning some special treats, a limited edition and other things... what fun!

I just got back from a lovely 24 hours at the heavenly Totleigh Barton Arvon Foundation centre to some nice news! My poem, (yup, a poem) Dreams of a Tea Seller has been commended in the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry competition. I am thrilled thrilled thrilled! I was too scared to even call anything of mine a poem four months ago, I felt utterly unqualified to even mention poetry. Now it seems that, perhaps, I am actually writing poetry. Delighted! Congratulations to the winners and all the highly commended and commended poems!

I'd like to first mention that I am writing this blog post with a fever of 100 degrees, so it may seem a little muddled, for which I apologise. But having this lurgy has at least meant I have time, sitting in bed, to contemplate, (and, perhaps, hallucinate, who knows?) and I want to record some thoughts. Which I may entirely rescind later...

The sharp-eyed amongst you may have noticed that I've changed my blog design. The "I'm so tired" logo seemed appropriate to me the minute I saw it. I am. 2011 was a busy year, with many ups and a few serious downs. Very very busy. I had about 20 stories and poems published, a record for me, I think. Which was just wonderful, I got (and get) immense amounts of gratification at every acceptance, which comes after many, many rejections, as every writer will testify. Some of the stories were published as a result of me being asked to submit something, some were commissions, both of which are quite new concepts to me and also very gratifying. To start the year with a story in Nature and end it in New Scientist is a thrill that will take some beating!

But the thing is, with submitting, with having quite a lot of work "out there", comes stress. The "will they, won't they"? waiting for answers, checking websites for competition results, has become something bordering obsessive. I'm not one of those who sends work out and then forgets. I can't seem to forget.

The other thing is that when I am writing something new, part of me is thinking "Well, where can I send this?" And that's not necessarily what I want to be at the forefront of my mind.

So, this year, I am changing tack. I am not going to be submitting short stories anywhere, with one exception. I will send a story to the BBC International Short Story Award. That's it. Really. Part of it has to do with the two issues I've just mentioned, and part with the previous blog post about China Mieville and mystery. I'm going to hold back a bit. I'm working on a new collection of science-inspired stories and I think it could be a good idea, if it does find a publisher, if a certain number of them haven't been previously published individually. Perhaps it will allow me to think of the collection as an entity, rather than each story as a discrete object.

Anyway, this is a new thing for me. I've been submitting lots and lots of stories every year for the past 4 years or so (for our own interest, Vanessa Gebbie and I kept a blog throughout 2007 detailing all our submissions, acceptances and rejections - and I made 155 submissions that year, that's almost one every two days...). It's time to experiment with a different method. See what happens. If I am asked to submit somewhere, then I will. But I won't send out work pro-actively. I already have about five stories scheduled to be published this year and some that I submitted last year that are still "pending", so there is potential gratification to be had.

What I will be submitting is poetry. I am very much a beginner poet (even writing that makes me feel silly, how can I be a poet?) and I am dipping my toe in this completely new world. I took two poetry classes last term and am carrying on with one this term, and have been really enjoying it although very daunted. The more I read, the less daunted I become, though - and fabulous writer friends like Sue Guiney, Sarah Salway and Vanessa, all of whom write prose and poetry, are very inspiring.

This is the one major change I've made this year - smaller changes already instituted include deleting my stats counters for this blog and my website, another source of obsession that seems unhelpful in the extreme. It's lovely to see who visits here and from where, of course, but do I need that information?

I have been getting some great invitations recently to do quite a lot of teaching this year - flash fiction workshops, mostly, in various locations, and a science-inspired fiction workshop, so maybe this will be my year of teaching? I'd like that, there's nothing that beats the joy on the face of someone who has never written flash fiction before after proudly reading out their first story! (More news about workshops coming soon). And there are some bits of Big News that I hope to be able to unveil shortly too... but for now I'm keeping shtum.

So, I wish you all a very happy 2012, whatever resolutions you have made or not made. May it be a year of creativity, fulfilment, energy and passion!

I have read an entire, 400-page book today: Embassytown by China Miéville. And it has made me think. So, I thought I would record some of my thoughts here, for me and maybe for you too. This novel is his 9th book - 8 previous novels and one short story collection - and it is quite astonishing. And I might even say brilliant. It is a novel about language, about truth and lies, about simile and metaphor, set on another planet about humans and aliens. It is unlike anything I have ever read before, anything. It itself is a metaphor.

What's so amazing is Miéville's language. Look at this, the opening paragraph of the book:

The children of the embassy all saw the boat land. Their teachers and shiftparents had had them painting it for days. One wall of the room had been given over to their ideas. It's been centuries since any voidcraft vented fire, as they imagined this one doing, but it's a tradition to represent them with such trails. When I was young, I painted ships in the same way. 

Anyone understand this? Anyone know exactly where we are, what's going on? How many words we've never seen before? Enough to signal we're in a new territory, literally and linguistically.

Perhaps this is familiar from science fiction novels, I don't know. I'm reading more and more work that is labelled "science fiction" but Miéville prefers to call his writing "new weird" and that sounds about right to me. Anyway, there are those readers who will no doubt be put off by this opening, or if not then by all the continuing novelty that swiftly follows. This is an introduction that is almost an anti-introduction. It almost says: "You will not understand me, but if you persevere it will be worth it". And it is.

Suffice it to say, Embassytown is an immensely complex novel which employs Miéville's new and highly inventive language and concepts to illustrate fundamentals about how we communicate, the need to be able to lie, and about love, friendship, community, safety, war and power. He doesn't provide definitions of his many, many new words, and that's what captivated me - I had to work hard, I couldn't skim anything, just to keep my footing, or at least one foot on the ground! And I loved that.

Now here's an interesting thing: I found the final 100 pages less compelling. Yes,  it was a happy-ish ending, yes it tied up lots of loose ends. But I think it was more than that, I believe it was because I finally understood all the new words, got to grips with the novel concepts, which species was which, who did what. The mystery? Gone.

This made me think, of course, about my own writing. And also about the stories i am reading as part of the sifting I am doing for a short story competition. How often do you read a story that keeps you working hard? How much more compelling is it if the story doesn't give itself away too soon? However, the majority of the stories I've read for competitions not only give it away, they then add far too much information. Background, backstory... descriptions, explanations... All of which, for this reader at least, serve to push me away from the story. I think, Well, why should I keep reading? What's there left to find out? What's the mystery?

I do try and apply this to my own work, although it's harder to know how a reader who is not me will read it, since I am all-knowing (well mostly) about my own story. I tend to err on the side of too mysterious, too cryptic and minimalist, I think. But I think that it's better to err on that side, have your reader a little confused and curious than pile on information and lose their interest completely.

What helps (and here's a clumsy segue into the other thing I wanted to mention!) is having a trusted reader or group of readers read your work, not something I do that often anymore. "Trusted" is not easy to come by, and as Robin Black talks about in her excellent blog post over at Beyond the Margins,  sharing work can lead to horrible experiences. She suggests that reading and commenting on a writing colleague's work should be "a process of honoring the fact that the piece exists at all, as opposed to shredding or praising it." I like this very very much, she gives eminently sensible advice and airs issues that are not often talked about public. Check out the blog post,  On Reading One Another's Work.

I also highly recommend China Miéville's writings. I loved his short story collection, Looking for Jake (published in 2005 and reviewed on The Short Review here), which is weird but very different from Embassytown, and am going to seek out more of his books. I hear him speak recently at the One Culture science and literature festival held in the Royal Society in London and was extremely impressed by the way he talks about writing, about stories, about genre pigeon-holing. You can read a blog report of that event on the Royal Society's blog.

And perhaps, as 2011 draws to a close and 2012 approaches, next year will be a year of opening ourselves up to the mysterious in our writing? Of giving the reader some space to figure things out for him or herself? And of celebrating that in our colleagues' work too, if they share it with us. A giving-in to the not-knowing, perhaps. Because, really, what do we actually know? Happy holidays, everyone.

This has definitely got to be one of the highlights of my year - a year which began with my short story in science journal Nature ends with my science-inspired short story in science magazine New Scientist's Dec 24th print edition, available worldwide! It's not available online, so if you fancy reading it, I'm sure it's in your local newsagent, or whatever the equivalent is outside the UK. I'm unbelievably excited about this - they asked me for a story, which is something I'd dreamed of for years. Thank you, New Scientist! Happy holidays to all!

ADDENDUM: turns out it is published online too, on the New Scientist blog!