Author Archives: Matt Hill
Half a thought on new writing
I am pregnant with a story.
It’s overdue, but I can’t get myself into labour. It won’t crown. It’s kicking my belly but it doesn’t want to play. It’s a distraction; I feel it most of the time. It’ll be the third time. The first time it was diarrhea. The second was a textbook delivery — [...]
Posted in Writing 19 Comments
Manchester snow
Manchester’s had more snow than anyone remembers. We woke to drifts a foot deep in places, and transport that scarcely worked. But there’s no meaningful way to write about snow without cliche — no point, even — not least when so many pictures have already coloured our day. The south’s next. Here’s hoping they have [...]
New flat
I’ve moved in with a girl whose legs I fancied in school. It’s a kind of deferred success.
Back then, 13 years old and sprouting limbs, I asked her out. She wouldn’t mind me saying her hair was kind of weird. It went all up and out — a hair-sprayed mushroom cloud – but she had [...]
Posted in Living 6 Comments
Somewhere-in-Furness
We overtake the ghost of winter floods on the motorway North – a lorry with Cockermouth written all over its flanks. Past Lancaster, and the digital boards start shouting about closed bridges. Later, while the night tips fully into black, we see a couple of dented road signs. And that’s all. We wind up staying [...]
Posted in Places 4 Comments
Getting unpublished
Let’s get dramatic. In July, my book was unpublished.
It fell from the pre-order listings of a dozen online book shops, was deleted from Nielsen Bookscan. The galley proofs were unbound, de-covered and bleached back to white.
Reps got in their cars after really successful meetings with booksellers — who liked and loved and wanted to see [...]
Suit fitting
Look, me and suits go like penis and blenders. It seems foolish and feels worse.
Suits, they’re for real men – men running for trains with cummerbunds flapping behind like some kind of heterosexual vapour trail.
Half the problem is they’re far too hard to get right. You see all these men in suits and you know [...]
Posted in Living 3 Comments
Science fiction, technology and Twitter
If science fiction’s not dead, it’s not quite the same now we’ve bombed the moon. After all, we’ve done space travel and beaten communism. We got to the stars, and went past plopping pulp heroes on Mars when we crashed robots into it. We worried about plugging ourselves into each other before the internet; feared [...]
Canterbury tale
I get into Canterbury East early evening, half expecting to find nothing but flower gardens, Chaucer graffiti and giddy vicars. Actually I don’t see a wrinkle for half an hour, surprised by the amount of road traffic, the number of fringes, and how green stuff is.
Posted in Places Leave a comment
Nine ways to trick yourself into writing