hello... i'm clare

It's an honour to be here, and I'm thrilled by the invitation to take over from Polly as the new Booktrust online writer in residence, but the honest truth is the blog aspect does scare me a bit. In my day to day life, my writing is a private thing.  It's something I do in my study, on my own, often late at night with headphones on.  It's not something I talk about much. 

So it's a little unnerving to be asked to share that private side of myself with an invisible audience. The permanence of the internet scares me. I'm wary of revealing too much. Or of not revealing enough to keep people reading. I'll be learning as I go along. Please bear with me. The Booktrust web editor swears that by the time I finish my residency I'll be hooked.   

I found a New York Times article about blogging. It describes a blog 'as a collection of clippings, musings and other things like journal entries that strike one's fancy or titillate one's curiosity [...] with links that take the reader around the world in pursuit of more about a topic'. That sounds like it could be fun. It's not all just talking about myself. This blog then can be a sort of online notebook to collect and record the things that distract and inspire and excite me, with links so that they can do the same for you.  

I'm going to be sharing with you the books I'm reading (or perhaps that should be the books I want to read/the books I once read - since our baby daughter came on the scene I don't get any time to read any more); I'll tell you about the music I'm listening to, because I always write to music (Sonic Youth's Murray Street right now, in case you're wondering); I'll let you gatecrash (virtually at least) any glamorous literary parties I might be invited to (actually, I don't get invited to glamorous parties very often, but who knows, maybe the residency will change that); and I'll point you towards picture books that make me laugh, photos that make me want to tell stories, and stories that I think you should read, because if I end this six-month residency without having inspired at least a few more people to feel passionately about short stories...well, then I should probably give up blogging.   

Over the course of this residency, writing-wise I'm mainly going to be continuing work on the new collection of stories I've been asked to write. I'll probably also have thoughts about the novel I'll be working on next - vague, nebulous thoughts at this stage most likely (that's how everything I write begins). My first children's picture book will be close to its release date, and inevitably that will be crazy and exciting - it makes me laugh that having launched my career with a story collection described by author Pete Hobbs as 'sorrowful, disturbing, and darkly beautiful', my next book will be hot pink with a chihuahua on the cover. 

For my part, I do actually think the blog will be good for me.  Or at least an interesting exercise. I don't have a mind that moves in straight lines. It jumps and swerves and things flash and fade and I'm waylaid by tangents and easily distracted.  I often wish my mind was more ordered!  I suspect it will be helpful for me to have a reason to pause and focus my thoughts. To reflect and ask myself what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.  

So I'll share all of that with you. 

Well, some of it anyway. 

The rest I'm keeping private.