Visual Verse: The Fire Triangle

Have a flash fiction piece up on Visual Verse, The Fire Triangle.

"I kissed Francois. Black-body radiation. Organic matter glowed. Life burnt"

You can read it here.

Paris

There are events which render us speechless. How do we react to the senseless brutality of the attacks on the 13th November in Paris? What can we say? What can we write? Where should we write? Here in France, we shift nervously, our world out of kilter. Etat d'urgence. State of Emergency. I collect people's comments in my mind, catch them as they fall. My daughters. The childminder. Colleagues. The café owner. Many people know someone who knows someone who was in the Bataclan or on the street. We write, we speak, we type and text in attempts to connect and hopefully unearth and rebuild some truth from the rubble, to find a shared pattern, to make peace from disaster.

My debut detective novel

I've been absent from this space. I've been off writing, in my house, in Catalonia, in Donostia, in the South of France and in the middle of the forest in a wooden house that's off the GPS. Since my last post, I've finished the first draft of my detective novel. It was one of those books that ran out of my fingers, shouting and kicking onto the page.

There's been much work and all of the business of burning the candle at both ends and many, many (far too many) late nights. I bless coffee, green tea and sea-swimming for keeping my boat afloat (as well as my amazing family!). 

To keep my inspiration hooked on the polar, or roman noir, - as they call detective novels in French - I've been reading Chandler, J. Ellroy, Nicci French, Paretsky, Ruth Rendell and Jane Casey.  I also dipped into Girls this summer, watched Macbeth and King Lear. I read This Too Shall Pass, by Milena Busquets (we share the same Literary Agency Pontas) and loved it. 

In-between times, I've been contributing to various magazines and reviews, working on film projects and a collaboration with a painter, but will update on all of that later....