Out On A Limb - Finale

Here's a picture of me doing my reading at the Queen's Hotel, Birkenhead last night at the private sneak-preview of the official website. If you look carefully, you can also see my newest project sleeping on the back row!

It was brilliant to see everyone again and catch up with how the blogs and stories have developed since the workshop element of the project ended. The venue, overlooking the park where so many of our stories were set, was perfect - and Louise, Doreen, Jensen and Robbe shared their stories with us which was a brilliant way of rounding off the project. There was a real sense of achievement and solidarity during the evening, and I felt pleased to have worked with such a varied and talented set of writers and bloggers!

What's next? I think our project will have a lasting legacy. Even though we were a small group, I know that several of the participants plan to continue blogging about their lives, their stories and what is important to them. I hope they'll use their blogs to keep in touch, and join in the online writing community. The stories will be on the blogs, on the website and available for anyone in the world to look at, comment on and interact with. I especially like Barbara's idea of inviting readers to submit their own alternative endings to her story - I wish I'd thought of something like that myself!

If you've found this blog through the project promotion on twitter, facebook or elsewhere - here are a few links to get you started:

The story I wrote as part of this project is here: Wirral Voices: A Chorus. You can also read a commentary I wrote about the way my ideas developed during the time I worked on this story here.

The story was commissioned by Elaine Speight as part of the Out on A Limb project, which she project managed and I helped to deliver. You can read about the project, the workshops and the background to the project at the offical website, here.

And of course, I wasn't the only writer working on this project. Each of the participants completed a short, blogged story set in the Wirral during the time we worked together. You can access their blogs and project diaries and read their stories, which are a constantly evolving and interactive web of tales set in The Wirral, through the official project website, by clicking on the links in my story, and by using the links in the side bar of this blog.

If you'd like to submit your own Wirral-based story, film or photography, you can by going through the official site.

This will be my last post on this blog, but if you'd like to keep up to date with news about my writing and other project, you can find me at my personal blog: Every Day I Lie a Little.

Have fun!

Pre-Launch Jitters

I've spent this evening putting the finishing touches to my story and reading all your finished versions one last time. I can't believe the launch is this week! July seems to have passed super-quickly.

I have one or two jobs to do with updating the design of this blog before we go public, as well as the icon for my story for the finished website - and making sure the links and photographs in my story are all present and correct. Barbara and Keith are putting me to shame with the new swish designs for their blogs, and I can see Doreen has been busy again. I better get on with it!

You've already read the commentary I did on the thought processes behind the story that I did. Maybe it didn't make sense at the time, but now you get a chance to preview the finished copy, my ideas about choruses and flash fiction might mean something to you now!

You've all got a few days left to link your stories to mine, and of course to let me know about all the mistakes and typos that I'm bound to have made! I almost feel a bit shy knowing lots of people outside the project are going to be reading this blog by the end of this week.

I will be visiting your blogs again before the launch to catch up and say hello but for tonight I am signing off for a well earned rest. See you soon!

Final Commentary

I've finished writing my story now, and it will be launched, along with the others, at a special event on the 28th July 2010. Watch this space for details.

In the meantime, I've written a short commentary piece about my thoughts and what inspired me while I was putting the stories together. It will probably, like my story, some of my pictures and film etc, be used on the final website - but until then, I thought you'd like to look at it here.

If anyone has any questions for me you can put them in the comments section of this blog and I'll get to them as soon as I can. See you at the launch!!


I wrote four flash fictions that linked together in a kind of journey, as well as linking or alluding to the stories written by the other participants in the project. I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to write a story that was too plotted – I wanted my tale to act as the mortar that linked everyone else’s stories together – I wanted to convey atmosphere, evoke a place, a feeling, a mood.

As a long-time blogger I know that people like their screen-fiction in short bursts – and as a novelist the discipline of flash – the shortest of prose forms – appeals to me as a way to stretch my muscles, force myself to be picky – to choose. So I opted for four linked flash fictions. I had a structure. Now, what to write?

The ingredients for these stories are not my own – they make up the ‘chorus’ element of the piece, as I wanted to capture as much as I could from the workshop discussions, internet research, conversations with Wirral residents, field trips and photography excursions that I experienced during the span of this project. And how to do this in such a short space?

Constructing a voice that was a composite of voices – a moving blend of mine, a writer who’d never visited the Wirral before this project begun – along with the voices of the project participants – all to eager to tell autobiographical and second-hand stories that described the Wirral and its history from Lord Lever to the present day - and weave these words stolen from others along with the facts of my research.

Some of the words and phrases were plucked directly from workshop conversations about the area – you’ll find the shoe-tree in a few of the other stories, and this is a remnant from Doreen’s input into a discussion we had during the second workshop. The comment about the best view of Liverpool being from Tranmere belongs to Louise. Billy Jones was a recurring character, although no-one can quite remember where he came from – and Barbara shared my interest in derelict buildings, and one of my stories takes place next door to an old chemist that forms the setting of hers. Keith, like me, constructed a journey through an area he knows like the back of his hand, and Dot, Margaret and Louise are interested in history, the changing faces of houses, of things they can remember and want to capture and share with others.

I didn’t write about the Ferry or the river because other participants do it so well, although water is never far away from any of these stories. The couple feeding squirrels in Birkenhead Park really exist, and might recognise themselves. Their loyalty and quite pride in their area touched me. The wedding dress mystery and Lord Lever’s bubble bath river come from Wirralpedia – another project that captures facts, fictions and voices in the Wirral. Locals assure me both these tales are true – I’m not so sure, but they’re in here, as solid as the climbing rocks in Birkenhead park, as improbable as a planetarium at Seacombe.

My stories aren’t just rag-bag collections of the things people have told me though. They’ve all been shaped by my own experiences of travelling into the Wirral – the long train journeys through the early spring and into the early summer – imagining the water over my head as the Merseyrail chugged into the darkness and never quite getting over the fear that it would all come crashing down on me.

The idea of home, of being isolated, out on a limb, or of belonging, is prevalent in many of these stories – the train was important to me, as it shaped my experience of the Wirral – a suicide on the line between Preston and Wigan stopped me coming from one of the workshops – delays in Lime Street, Ormskirk and Rock Ferry gave me time to think, a man who had a seizure on the bus outside Birkenhead brought me into contact with his cousins and aunt and reminded me of how special tight knit communities can be. Doreen finds correspondences between Turkey and Birkenhead and Dot told me about the night watchman who waits in the booth on the Wirral side of the Queen’s Tunnel in the dark hours, guarding the way in. Although he never found his way into my story, I thought about him often and I’m glad he’s there.

An early trip around the area with Elaine resulted in my interest, through hers, of the derelict and abandoned houses in Tranmere, the regeneration in some these housing renewal areas (also an interest of Louise's) and the way that everywhere the old and the new jostled together, until the past was superimposed on the present like ghosts.

Ghosts? History? A composite voice? I started to think – who was this narrator? And the ghostly, embodied presence of the memories trapped in the empty houses I’d seen on my walks started to appear to me. I wonder if that works.