I sent off one of my flash stories ‘Fog’ which they published on the website during 8am and 9am (I was still asleep then but found it on the website when I finally emerged). You can read it here (then when you’ve read that, read my uni mate Sarah’s brilliant flash ‘Sex in the City (written in the style of A Clockwork Orange)’

Flash Fictions will be published all through the day on Wednesday 16 May 2012 and my story ‘Fog’ will be published between 8am and 9am.

The website is open for submissions until midnight on 15/16 May 2012 and the stories will be posted on http://flashfloodjournal.blogspot.co.uk/ (which is also where you can find the submission guidelines).

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

I used to think Caitlin Moran was cool. This was because she worked for Melody Maker and, although that wasn’t as hip as working for the NME, it sounded more fun than, say, working in insurance.

How to be a Woman is part memoir, part feminist rant. Alarm bells should have rung when I saw the word ‘feminist’ (although, being female, I’m a feminist by default; I’m just not one of those feminists. Caitlin Moran most definitely is – or, at least, aspires to be – one of those feminists. You know, the really annoying ones).

The first three chapters concentrate on Moran’s fascination with masturbation and menstruation. Because her hero, Germaine Greer, says in The Female Eunuch that everyone should taste their own menstrual blood, Moran says, ‘I have, of course, tasted my own’. I’ll pass, thanks.

A discussion around masturbation and what she calls her vagina takes up an entire chapter. She also uses an impressive nine different names for it in two pages (including ‘lulu’, ‘moof’, Chihuahua’ and ‘toot’) and recounts a two-hour conversation with her sister where they suggest ‘Rolf’, as they decide it looks like Rolf Harris’ beard. Despite her vast vagina-based vocabulary, she can’t conjure up anything more creative to call masturbation than ‘it’ (‘“Masturbation” sounds too much like “perturbation”, “Wank … sounds like cranking a handle”’, she says).

Moran’s vagina monologue doesn’t stop there. We are treated to graphic descriptions of childbirth (‘my waters are unbroken – they break them with a crochet hook’) and abortion (‘The doctor then uses a vacurette to hoover my womb out’), and my own womb starts to spasm in sympathy. How her editor resisted reaching for the biggest red marker pen to scrawl TOO MUCH INFORMATION all over the manuscript, I don’t know.

A quarter of the way through the book, she starts getting SHOUTY and TYPING IN CAPITALS. This, as well as being unnecessary, is annoying. Fortunately, towards the end of the book she stops being shouty and turns off the caps lock.

Moran’s credibility shrinks when she writes about her time at Melody Maker in 1993. She whinges there weren’t any female singers to write about, making do with putting Echobelly on the cover. She asks where were the female rock bands to rival Led Zeppelin or Guns ‘n’ Roses. She obviously didn’t look very far. Come in L7 and Hole. And if they weren’t good enough for her, just how much more of an example of feminism did she need in 1993 than Anjali – the overweight Asian female singer of Voodoo Queens – screaming ‘Just get your shallow diets out of my face / Your thigh-rendering body-toning schemes’ in ‘Supermodel Superficial’? Remind me, where was Moran working that stopped her from hearing about these bands? An insurance office? No, Melody Maker. The music paper.

There are times, though, when I’m laughing and nodding my head in agreement (I too have neither a capsule wardrobe or a £600 investment handbag). She has an undeniable warmth to her writing, being funny without trying too hard. It’s just that at times she writes – to be blunt – rubbish, like she’s having an argument but with no one in particular. When Andrew Marr wrote in The Guardian that blogging is ‘the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night’, given her outpourings in How to be a Woman, he could have been talking about Moran, except Moran doesn’t need a blog. She already has one. It’s called ‘a column in The Times’.

Then I dreamt I was in a pub and two people there were naked and I had my dressing gown on but everyone else was dressed and I looked at a poster and I said no one told me it was naked night.

Wednesday 14 July 2010 (22:09)
I’ve started reading ‘The Smoking Diaries’ by Simon Gray and it’s inspired me to keep a diary/journal. I was inspired on the train and thought to myself I’ll start it tonight. I’ll set a time every night and write for half an hour or so. But tonight Waterloo Road and Dragons Den was on and my plan sort of turned to shit.

Ho hum.

Tomorrow I’m off to London to pretend to be a journalist and hopefully get myself some free Asics kit, and then I will come home and write my journal.

This was its only entry. I’m obviously shit at keeping a daily diary.

Then I was in some kind of hotel or something with a girl and we’d asked for a twin room because we were sharing (must have been a dream, I never share hotel rooms) and it was the tiniest, dirtiest, shabbiest room ever and it had a double bed in it, not twin beds. We looked in the bathroom and it was disgusting. Then I showed another girl to a room and it was massive. The ceilings were about fifty feet tall and there were heavy red velvet curtains covering the windows.

And that was about it really. Not very exciting, I did warn you.

• I was in a pub and there was a drink called Orange Broth which was orange and chocolate and had lumps in it.
• I had a load of clothes the same and had to take the duplicates back to the shop and I gave my brother a load of sparkly sports bras.
• I went to live in Australia with Colin (a friend from Manchester) and then we were back in England in a pub with Dunc and Bill and a load of bikers.
• I had Davina McCall’s and Limahl from Kajagoogoo’s passports.
• I was in a cafe with Robbie Williams and he put ‘Angels’ on the jukebox and apologised.
• I was running the London Marathon and it was like an obstacle course with cliffs and scaffolding and walkways with boards missing and I had a break halfway through then forgot to put my Garmin back on.
• I knitted some tea cosies.
• I was in an Italian restaurant and my dinner came with a load of bandage/plaster wrappers in it and then they didn’t even get me a beer.
• there was a field full of cows that looked like poodles and were eating pizza.
• I bought a pair of high-heeled, thigh-high pair of boots in Soho.
• that I saw two young girls fall through some metal railings on a concrete staircase and the girls weren’t moving and so I and another girl cut them up and stuffed some fish with them and put them on a market stall and hid the knife by melting some jelly and filling a glass with water and the jelly then putting the knife in it and wrapping the glass in clingfilm then freezing it and hiding it under a chest of drawers and then I was trying to run away from the children’s mother who turned out not to be their mother anyway then I woke up with the Waterloo Road theme tune in my head.

and my friend Rachel said I should write a kind of reverse dream dictionary, where I publish my dreams and people can tell me what they think they mean. So I thought, actually, that’s not a bad idea – I can put them on my blog. But then Rachel said that now she’s said that I’ll probably have dreamer’s block. And she’s right. I haven’t had a dream I can remember since she suggested it. Last night I was too drunk to dream, I think. At least, that’s what I thought when I woke up but I thought ‘too drunk to dream’ is too good a title not to use.

Anyway, who wants to interpret the above dreams for me?

Um, what I mean is, my story unfortunately didn’t make it through, but a very well done and congratulations to those whose stories will be in the anthology. 

I’M ON THE LONG LIST, WHOOP WHOOP! I’ve never been on a list – long or otherwise – before. Exciting. The writers who made it into the anthology will be announced in a couple of days. Obviously I’m hoping my story will be chosen but I am absolutely delighted to be on the long list.

(p.s. Nat got on the long list too. Well done, Nat.)

Freaks! is a collection of over fifty short stories, where you’ll find freaks and misfits such as a woman who can reproduce herself at will and attempts to teach her daughter to do the same; the man who can break his way into his lovers dream; and the woman in My Little Pony Pants who likes to be ridden like a pony.

As a taster, here’s Invisible, one of the stories in the collection.

Invisible 

[Super Power: The ability to make oneself unseen to the naked eye]

If I stay totally still,

if I stand right tall,

with me back against the school wall,

close to the science room’s window,

with me feet together,

pointing straight,

aiming forward,

if I make me hands into tight fists,

make me arms dead straight,

if I push me arms into me sides,

if I squeeze me thighs,

stop me wee,

if me belly doesn’t shake,

if me boobs don’t wobble,

if I close me eyes tight,

so tight that it makes me whole face scrunch,

if I push me lips into me mouth,

if I make me teeth bite me lips together,

if I hardly breathe,

if I don’t say a word.

Then,

I’ll magic meself invisible,

and them lasses will leave me alone.

Freaks! is out now and available from Amazon as a paperback or ebook.