1. Rainy City Stories is Manchester's interactive literary cityscape. Go here at once to read commissioned stories by Nicholas Royle and Jackie Kay amongst others, as well as excellent new contributions from Richard Barrett, Socrates Adams-Florou and Jenn Ashworth.

Jenn's story made me feel ashamed because I frequent Cornerhouse and have been known to lay claim to a 'dairy intolerance'. Thankfully I do not own anything from American Apparel. I did once go in but was scared away by the plethora of neon leggings on display.

2. The Pygmy Giant has been reborn in a new incarnation, hosted by Wordpress. It looks pretty. You can find it here.

3. Flax have launched an exciting new blog project which may have something to do with writers Jenn Ashworth and Tolu Ogunlesi. Check out the brand new blogs Adorna Shine and Desiderus without further ado.

I am already intrigued by the case-book of Desiderus. And I have to admit I am 'adoring' Adorna. It’s the sparkly star cursor that does it. And the pink. And the picture of the dog. And the fact that she likes cheese triangles.

4. Six sentences brings me tiny six-sentence stories to brighten my day.

I tried to submit something to them recently but it turned out that I could not count to six.

Apparently I cannot count to three either.

Oh dear.

It’s November, and my autumn literature festival odyssey is now at an end. It’s been a good one. I have heard so many interesting and inspiring writers read over the last month or two that I have accumulated a huge list of new books to check out, starting with Claire Wigfall’s short stories, Sallie Day’s Palace of Strange Girls, Adam Marek’s Instruction Manual For Swallowing, and Anne Donovan’s Being Emily to name but a few. I have been to all kinds of great events, ranging from the Northern Poetry Slam to David Gaffney’s rather marvellous Destroy Powerpoint, to the very appropriately spooky Halloween launch for Comma Press’s New Uncanny anthology, and of course, the Manchester Blog Awards.

Since the blog awards, I have been enjoying reading the many and varied responses to the event, as well as to the shortlisted and award-winning blogs themselves. One or two have been less than complimentary, like this one from Manhattanchester, who dismissed the whole sorry affair as ‘whimsical’, ‘trite’ and ‘woefully middle-class’ and characterised the blog readings as 'flat, ill-chosen and uninteresting' mumbles 'about coffee and home appliances':

They chose the wrong winners... evidenced in part by the reaction of the crowd and the vox pops of the people I interrogated. The few that is who had actually heard of or read any of the blogs. Do your homework people!

...I have to admit, though, that actually I don’t mind much being considered whimsical or trite. In fact, dare I say it, I actually quite like it. I quite like domestic appliances too - they’re quite harmless really, sometimes quite useful for cooking and that kind of thing. I think it’s OK to write about domestic appliances if the mood takes you.

Anyway, other responses have been much more positive, emphasising the exciting possibilities of the critical mass of blogging activity in and around Manchester. I like this one from Adrian Slatcher on the Mancunian Way, which identifies the blog's potential to act as a ‘genuine platform for new writing:’

What was noticeable last night is that there's hardly a hair's breadth anymore between the blog writer and the writer. Follow the Yellow Brick Road or Chicken and Pies could easily be the first chapter of an autobiographical novel...

I’m intrigued by the idea of a blog functioning like an autobiographical (or perhaps even not-so-autobiographical) novel. After all, I think even if you try to be quite honest, there’s something about the nature of this medium which necessitates you to assume a certain voice, a certain character, to tiptoe over into the territory of fiction. I think the ‘character’ or ‘voice’ of this blog is not dissimilar to me as I am ‘in real life’, but is quite a lot more perky. I feel quite jaunty and frivolous when I write this blog, as if I am a peripheral character in a Nancy Mitford novel. There’s a touch of the lashings-of-ginger-beers too I suspect - that’s the bit of me that grew up on Enid Blyton and likes words like ‘marvellous’ and ‘lovely’ and has probably read I Capture the Castle one too many times.

I have to admit, though, that for me, the whole blog awards experience has been quite odd. I was genuinely very surprised to be shortlisted, and especially surprised to win. It was quite a shock to the system to realise that there are actual ‘readers’ out there - I don’t think I had really thought about readers before, having always assumed that very few people would be interested in listening to me happily rambling about things like baked potatoes or tights and sparrows. But suddenly lots of my friends are reading my blog, and the link even got sent around my office. It’s made me feel rather self-conscious: I realise that this blog has been largely a place for me to indulge myself, to play and experiment, rather than a particularly thought-out project. I started it mainly just because, not having much time to dedicate to writing at the moment, I hoped it would keep me going, even if just by forcing me to write the occasional small something-or-other. There’s never been a clear plan in mind: it feels entirely different from a polished piece of finished ‘proper’ writing.

Thinking about it though, maybe that’s part of what makes this medium interesting. It’s inherently organic, and there's always space to play or to move in unexpected directions - to write about stuff you see out of the window, or on the bus, or to post a picture of your shoes if you feel like it - in a way that you would never feel free do in a more formal context. It’s a good way to break down your own barriers, to banish the fear that every piece of writing has to be 'perfect' in some way. And in the end, in spite of all the strangeness, winning the blog award has been an enormous encouragement - just to keep on playing, if nothing else. Perhaps not everything we write has to be carefully considered. Perhaps all these unimportant, frivolous (even trite or whimsical!) words can come together and start to mean something more. Perhaps it's in precisely these kinds of fluid, open spaces, where you feel you can just meander about anything, just like I’m doing now, where sometimes things can happen.

So with all this in mind, in spite of the oddness, I’m going to keep going and see where this takes me. Isn’t it the whole point about yellow brick roads that they can lead you to good places, after all?

The Urban/Ecology exhibition opens in Liverpool today, featuring work from Art Yarn, James Brady, Rob Bailey, Ben Gwilliam Sarah Hardacre, Rebecca McKnight and Tenneson & Dale amongst many more!

Check it out if you're heading to Liverpool this weekend - find out more here.

I was surprised and delighted to be awarded the prize for Best New Blog at the Manchester Blog Awards ceremony this week!

















This is what the judges had to say about Follow The Yellow Brick Road: "It seems honest, and charming. The personality of the blogger comes across well, and I like how varied it is."

The other winners were:

Best Writing on a Blog: Every Day I Lie a Little
Best Arts and Culture Blog: Northernights
Best Personal Blog: Travels with my baby
Best City or Neighbourhood blog: Manchester Buses
CityLife.co.uk Manchester Blog of the Year: Travels with my Baby

Congratulations everyone!

It was a great night - beer, pizza, plus a brilliant selection of readings from Jenn, Socrates, Sally and Maureen, as well as previous years' winners Maria and Chris. It was great to meet people "in real life" - including, of course, the fabulously glamorous Ms Coco Laverne - and to put faces and names to blogs. Thanks to Kate and the MLF team for putting it all together.

I’ll admit I was slightly terrified when I had to get up on stage (partly just because the step up is enormous and I was convinced I was going to break my neck) and I actually missed hearing most of the nice things being said, because I was in a fever of panic at finding myself suddenly standing on a stage in front of a roomful of people who were all LOOKING AT ME. I am not very good at being in the spotlight. There is a reason I am a writer and not, for example, a performing artist. I would be very, very bad at it.

My prize came accompanied by this rather fine postcard with a recipe for Chorley cakes - strangely apt since I in fact come from Chorley and am a bit of a cake fan. I may even make some this weekend in celebration.



















Thanks so much to everyone for all the lovely feedback, encouragement and congratulations, and especially to my friends for putting up with me throughout the evening!

(Check out some photos from the night here, plus more about the event and the winners here, and here.)

I have a review of Jackie Corley's first short story collection, The Suburban Swindle up on Bookmunch. You can read it here.

It's been all quiet on the western front recently, but that's mainly because I've been busy. Amongst other things, last week I went along to the Buy Art Fair at Urbis. I also took in the preview events for this year's Manchester Literature Festival: Lucky Voice at Tiger Tiger, where poets Patience Agababi, Caroline Bird and John McAuliffe celebrated National Poetry Day karaoke-style; and an audience with Anita Shreve at Dancehouse. And in addition, I went up to Lancaster for the weekend, where I narrowly escaped being poisoned by some dumplings - though that, as they say, is really quite another story.

Today I was over in Liverpool for the North West Independent Publishers' Showcase, which is just one of the many events making up the new Chapter & Verse literature festival at the Bluecoat. It was great to see so many of the region's independent presses and literary magazines represented there, taking in everything from local history to radical poetry. I also enjoyed a varied selection of readings from a number of the writers they have published including Dominic Berry, John Redmond, Michael Carson and Rebecca Goss.

Tomorrow, of course, will be the first day of Manchester Literature Festival, complete with the Manchester Poetry Prize Gala in the evening. Today (when I wasn't enjoying new writing and publishing, of course) I found myself wondering what exactly one wears to a poetry gala. I had a brief flirtation with buying a pair of leopard print tights I saw in Topshop, which I thought might go with my favourite black dress, but then the doubt swept in. Could I really pull off leopard print tights or was it going to be a point-and-snigger situation? Were leopard print tights the kind of thing one really wears to a poetry gala? What shoes would go with them? And was £9.00 just a ridiculous amount of money to pay for tights, leopard print or otherwise? The questions were piling up, Carrie Bradshaw-style. In the end, I came home on the train with boring grey tights - 2 pairs for £4.99 - and no idea what to wear tomorrow night. Tights? Leopard print? What do we think? If anyone out there in the aether has a solution to my sartorial dilemma, I'd actually love to hear it.

But actually, the best thing that happened to me today didn't have anything to do with writing, literature or publishing, or even, as it happens, anything to do with tights. For various boring cancellation-related reasons, I ended up getting the train from East Didsbury to Manchester Airport this morning, and then catching a train on from there to Liverpool Lime Street. Whilst I was waiting for the train to Liverpool in the rather depressing waiting room at Manchester Airport, a sudden movement caught my eye, and I noticed a sparrow hopping around my feet, pecking hopefully at invisible crumbs. I felt a bit concerned about the sparrow: I wasn't sure how it had got into the waiting room, or how it was going to get back out through the automatic doors; but then suddenly I realised that there was actually a whole family of sparrows inside the waiting room. They were everywhere - lined up in a row on the beams in the roof, flitting from table to table cheeping to each other, perched on the back of a chair whilst scrutinising a man eating a Danish pastry. They were quite obviously having a great time. None of the other people in the waiting room (mostly cross-looking commuters, or people who were miserable because they had come back from holidays in the sun to damp, cold Manchester in October) seemed to notice the sparrows at all - even the man with the Danish pastry completely ignored them in spite of their best efforts to charm him into sharing his crumbs - but I sat there very happily watching them for about 20 minutes. I felt as if I had been unexpectedly transported to some tropical paradise where exotic hummingbirds might fly in and out or perch on the table, except of course that everyone looked colder and crosser than they probably would have done in a tropical paradise. But the sparrows were still the highlight of my day.

Lovely sparrow photograph by Rob Wallace via Creative Commons