Dear Readers,
What is the craic? It’s autumn. We’ve passed the equinox, or maybe it has passed us, seeing as the sun and the moon and the earth were here first. Shorter days and longer nights only means more time to curl up with a book and vanish into some other inner worlds. Good times.
I haven’t been writing letters. Since the solstice last year I’ve been writing other things. I met the incredible Sarah Webb at a thing last summer and we chatted about reading and boys and about the ‘decline at nine’ which is a thing where boys can often run out of books they want to read and then… kind of stop reading, and don’t grow up reading for pleasure or as my new friend Becky calls it, reading for joy. I like that. I like that a lot – there’s so much joy in reading, and of course inside that joy you sink deep into a book and there is anguish and there is elation and there is frustration and there is disappointment and there is love and there is discovery and every other kind of feeling all wrapped up in words. What a great bit of human invention a story is.Â
Anyway, we were talking about there not being a lot of contemporary fiction with a boy in the main role – plenty to read if you like your hero to be a half-god or have magical powers or be coping with events of historical significance or be finding their way through or out of a dystopian set-up – but what if you prefer your main characters to be in a world more like the one you know? So Sarah says something along the lines of ‘There’s a challenge for you now’ and I think okay and that’s what I’ve been writing. It’s a book called fifteen and it’s about a boy who finds a body on his way to work and about what happens next. It’s raw and a bit brutal and maybe funny here and there and if you’d like to read it, let me know.
I’ve been writing other things too – poetry, which is a surprise to me, and worth letting you know all about in another letter, and short stories, and random stuff not including letters. And with all the writing, I haven’t been reading at all. I’m not sure why – I do love reading. I mean reading books. My buddy Pearl gave me a spin the other day to pick up a car and we were talking about this and she was telling me that she doesn’t really read. She’s a writer that prefers to get her fill of fiction from other forms – theatre, cinema, opera – so that voices from the written narratives influence her own voice less. I can see that – I’ve watched plenty of X Files and the very excellent Kaos over the last nine or so months that I’ve been working on the draft, but reading books? Not so much.
I love those voices. It’s so intimate in a book, in the way that it isn’t always on film or on stage. You, dear reader, are the master of the story. You read it at your own pace. You re-read bits to understand more, or to savour a delicious moment again. You return to a book after a day or two knowing how it will feel, like slipping into a familiar cold-weather coat, or you return to it after a decade or two and discover that you are not the person you were when you last read it. All of it conjured up by some writer somewhere.
I’m not writing now. This means that it’s Reading Season – twelve or so weeks of delighting in other worlds that I cannot yet imagine. The book I’m reading first is called October, October and it’s by Katya Balen, on loan to me from my good pal Lucy. It is already astonishing after only thirty pages and I can feel the characters at the edge of everything, alive and waiting for me to return to their world. It’s full of autumn too, like the air around us. I’m going to go back in.
Yours faithfully,
Paul