Well, my book tour finally comes to an end today on the blog of Tania Hershman, whose own amazing collection stories, The White Road is also published by Salt, a book of stories inspired by scientific ideas
and taking off into the most inventive realms of the imagination. Tania conducted her own riveting book tour at the end of last year - hers was a pilot tour for the Cyclone book tour scheme which Salt recently introduced. She knew therefore how much
hard work book tours can be - I have spent most weekends for the last ten weeks thinking so hard about my own writing and writing in general that I think my brain's about to implode - and how distracting from writing. Tania therefore decided to give me a break with a 'dribble' interview, that is, an interview in which each of the answers must be no longer than 50 words! It was a great relief, and great fun - and yet the interview is incisive, I think: no surprise, as Tania is a whizz flash
fiction writer. Some of the flash stories in her collection are the best and the most resonant I have ever read; John says that too, and as a poet he has very high standards for flash fiction.

Today's interview is here, and don't forget that all of the Cyclone tours remain on the Salt website, and you can click back and read all the interviews where I bare my writing soul!

The penultimate leg of my virtual book tour, Around the Edges of the World, is now up on the amazing blog of novelist Debi Alper - after endless technical glitches, apparently, so I'm even more grateful than I already was due to the fact that in order to host me she is stopping out from her amazing account of the Grenada revolution and invasion. (I wrote about this last yesterday, and about Debi's very striking and unusual crime thrillers).

Debi asks me about the differences between writing prose fiction and drama,
and about the special problems of adapting one's own work from the first of these forms to the second.

Today my virtual tour of Balancing on the Edge of the World goes to Italy and the blog of novelist and short-story writer Charles Lambert. This is something of a reciprocal thing, as last year I hosted Charles on his own Cyclone tour of his wonderful collection of stories, A Scent of Cinnamon.
I am a great admirer of Charles's work, and I wrote about his
sophisticated (in literary terms) yet utterly moving and accessible
novel, Little Monsters, here.

The intelligence behind his writing and which he brought to his own book
tour would, I knew, guarantee that the questions he asked me this week
would be thoughtful and searching, and indeed they are, getting right
to the heart of some of my main concerns as a writer. He asks me about
my political consciousness (with a small p) as a writer, the differences between writing for a radio and a short story audience, and the reasons for the variety of the stories in my collection (and in the
process I spill a few more beans about my past).

A prize draw today on my virtual tour book tour! A copy of Balancing on the Edge of the World for each of three lucky readers who leave their names in the comments section of the interview on dovegreyreader scribbles, this week's stop-off. Dovegrey gets me talking about my writing jumper (below), would you believe, as well as other accoutrements of my writing life.

And we discuss the issue of literary lenses: am I holding a microscope to
the minute details of life in my short stories, or am doing something
rather different which requires a different kind of lens?

Exposed good and proper: my virtual book tour

Today on my virtual book tour
Vanessa Gebbie performs the amazing feat of getting me to abandon my
long-held principle of not talking about which bits of a story are from
my own life. As readers of my blogs will know, I believe that in
general such discussion about fiction are reductive and even damaging,
since fiction is greater than the sum of its parts - and anyway, 'fact'
and imagination are so blended in fiction that it is often difficult
for the author to remember which bits are which. Worst of all, such
discussions tend to encourage biographical readings of a work of
fiction as a whole. However, Vanessa's questions concern the process of
writing, and I have ended up dissecting the process from real-life
trigger to fiction in two of the stories.

The latest leg of my virtual book tour is now up on the blog of Sarah Salwaywhose own wonderful collection of stories, Leading the Dance, I reviewed last night here.

We talk about the way so-called short stories can encompass BIG themes, and Sarah gets me to confess which of the stories in Balancing was stolen, and to reveal my idea of the literary dinner from hell.

You can get to it here.
Well, apparently you can't, for some reason. Try pasting the url:
http://sarahsalway.blogspot.com/2009/02/writer-worth-cooking-muffins-for.html

Not a long trip this week for my virtual tour of Balancing on the Edge of the World - just a quick hop up the road from last week's stop at Clare Dudman to novelist Caroline Smailes. Caroline's blog is renowned for the innovative way she used it to showcase her first novel, In Search of Adam,
with the result that the novel was quickly picked up by publisher The
Friday Project, and for the quirky and entertaining ways she continues
to promote her novels there and relate to her readership. Not surprisingly, her novels are just as unique: striking in their use of graphics and
typography, and utterly moving. Their great achievement is that they
deal with searingly grim situations in such a way that you are utterly
hooked: I read both ISoA and Black Boxes with a ravenous greed, and others have said the same. (I wrote about ISoA here.)

In this week's tour interview, Caroline asks me the hardest question of all to answer: Why do I write? See how I do here.

Today my Cyclone virtual book tour for Balancing on the Edge of the World comes (virtually) nearer home, just up the motorway to Keeper of the Snails, the amazing blog of novelist Clare Dudman (whose great books I wrote about yesterday). (Currently she's blogging about the silk worms she's keeping!)

Clare asks me in depth about my use of a child's perspective in my fiction
and in fiction in general, about how much I use people and settings from life and how acting relates to writing. Other things, too, including getting me to reveal my recipe for porridge!

This book tour is turning out to be fascinating. As Barbara Smith comments on today's leg, it's really interesting to be presented with the different responses and angles on the book from the different hosts, and I must say it's also a wonderful opportunity to be able to talk about the book and what I'm trying to do in it in such depth.

For instance, it's a great surprise to me that Clare finds similarities in my stories to those of Chekhov: the last writer I'd have thought I was like was Chekhov, simply because I think of Chekhov as a tradition, and I see many of my own stories as innovative. Stupid, of course, because Chekhov was enough of an innovator in his own time, and Clare is right, I do, like Chekhov, often use the minutiae of life as a telescopic window onto our wider place in the universe. Interesting how we need others sometimes to remind us of our influences...

An even bigger surprise to me today was that Clare took all of the stories
in Balancing as being set in the north, whereas in fact some of the settings I had in mind were Welsh! Part of the reason for this is that I tend not to specify geography as I'm looking for universality (there's just one story in the book in which I do): I want readers to sink into the situations in my stories (and not be alienated, as I think readers can be, by the names of places they don't know or don't know well). But Clare also says she feels the voice and tone of the stories are northern, which I must say makes me feel quite weird. I know my fictional (and real-life) voice is pretty ironic, but I always thought I got that from my dad, and not from having lived in the north for admittedly many years now...

And Clare sees an edge of anger in the stories. You see, you just can't fox some people...

You can read the interview here:

Back to England this week on my virtual book tour, to land on Me and My Big Mouth, the blog of Scott Pack, publisher and former chief fiction buyer for Waterstones, for a grilling about saleability! Well, actually, it's mostly me who goes on about saleability and the pressures of the market, after Scott surprises and pleases me by saying he likes the unorthodox stories in the book best, and about the effect the pressures of the market have had on my writing.

Isn't the internet an amazing place? Today, due to my virtual book tour for Balancing on the Edge of the World, I'm in two places and two time zones at once: I'm in present-day Ireland on the blog of poet Barbara Smith, and at the same time in Ancient Rome, due to the fact that she has laid on a virtual Roman feast...

Course, there I am reclining with my wine cup and she comes in with the killer questions about my writing process...