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Monday, April 22, 2013

The central [line] clemency





When Rae Joyce bought The 32 Stops, she had already visualised what the book would be like. Danny Dorling is a geographer who's done much to make his subject visually interesting in recent years through the development of spatial maps, so Rae was surprised, when she read The 32 Stops, not to find it stuffed with them in all their primary coloured loveliness. What she was presented with, however, was an intriguing and equally attractive combination of data presented as a sort of soap opera written in a way that could easily pass for a pastiche of Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency. It wasn't a novel, mind; it was an example of statistics brought to life. Though there were graphs scattered every few pages to remind Rae the characters originated from facts, the narratives were so effective that Rae really began to care about the people marking the x axis of the Central Line, which was, she guessed, the point.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Good tidings

Woman On Wire - scene from the animated trailer I'm making to promote this story and others. All images copyright © 2013 Rachel J Fenton (Rae Joyce)


Is it good things or disasters that come in threes? Or maybe just buses. Well, I have pairs of goodness. Two pairs.

My flash "Waiting for High Tide" is in the April issue of Flash Frontiers, along with "Young Girl With a Sheaf", published in the December "Gift" issue and now republished with a commentary from me - a sort of behind the scenes of my creativity/inspiration for the piece.

I also have two fictions in Brief #47- "Songs From a Room" and "Woman On Wire" - which I'll be going along to the launch of on Saturday evening at The Audio Foundation, where comics anthology Dailies is being launched in tandem!

Massive thanks to respective editors Michelle Elvy, Sian Williams, and Alex Wild.

PS Alex's book The Constant Losers is well worth a look for anyone with an interest in youth culture and graphics in novels, or anyone whose ever read the scrawl on a toilet wall...