Matthew Hurst

Woohoo. Another short story accepted today. I say short. 9000 words…. More as we get it.

#amwriting #HorrorSky #WriterSky

Good audiobook, terrible reader. So far she’s mispronounced antipodean, MI6 (as M16, twice), frequent, Grosvenor and idyll. Does nobody check this stuff? #bookstodon #booksky

Little writing prompt left on our front lawn one morning…

Read: All That Man Is by David Szalay 📚A highly regarded slice of seedy short stories about men, mostly down at heel and incuriously baffled by their world of fried chicken shops and unreliable acquaintances. Perceptive, atmospheric and humane but I’d like a bit more plot. #booksky #bookstodon

Read: Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner 📚Good, but not quite up to the hype. Lit types called it a thriller, but it lacks suspense and there are longeurs about human evolution which aren’t really part of the genre. It’s a thriller if you don’t normally read them, I suppose. #booksky #bookstodon

Podcast guests: please stop with the ‘great question’ response. 1. They’re hardly ever great questions. 2. We know you just mean ‘ohhhh pick me, I can answer that one’. 3. It’s patronising. Just answer the question. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Projection ‘tells’ #764: One of Trump’s favourite superlatives is ‘like you wouldn’t believe’. No, OrangeToddler, we would not believe.

I had a ghost story idea cycling in France during the hottest summer there for years. I finished it a couple of years later in Canada during the coldest winter for years. Now it’s going to be on the www.kaidankaistories.com podcast next spring. Expect updates #writing #iamwriting

Abandoned: The Spite House by Johnny Compton 📚mysteriously on-the-run father with two daughters gets a ‘stay in this weird house for money’ job. Believable characters, strong idea, and some thematic meat underneath it all. And yet, somehow I couldn’t get into it. #booksky #bookstodon

Read: Yesterday’s Spy by Tom Bradby 📚Reliable Bradby content - suspenseful, realistic and intriguing world of spy shenanigans to put the Shah of Iran into power in the 1950s. Fast and compulsive reader #booksky #bookstodon

Read: Bleaker Waters by Gary Kruse - A mix of Jane Harper-like ‘locals hiding a secret’ and Commissioner Ricciardi ‘I see dead victims’ psychological thriller, and set in my native Norfolk, so I know the locations well. Twisty, engaging read. #booksky #bookstodon

Read: Blue Machine by Helen Czerski 📚 This is how you write popular science: engaging, clear, authoritative. Stories, weirdness and passion. It’s about how the sea works - the depths and shallows, the currents, the chemistry, the thermodynamics. An all time favourite. #booksky #bookstodon

Turns out writing short stories is addictive. Just finish this next one and then I’ll get back to my official WIP. I really will. I promise. #writingcommunity #iamwriting

Just finished a pretty close-to-done first draft of a the thing I’ve got earmarked for Emerald City Ghosts ghost story mag. Still going to leave it at least overnight to catch the inevitable typos and other cludginess. #writingcommunity #writing

Got my first short story acceptance today. First one I wrote too (although after 40 years of writing other things for a living, I’d like to think I have some idea what I’m doing…). Will brag about it more when I know the date it’s coming out, etc. #writingcommunity #writing #shortstory #horror

Someone explain to me what’s so great about a bunch of celeb wannabes LARPing Agatha Christie? #TheTraitors #RealityTV

Beware of the German shepherd. Not a dog. An actual German shepherd.

Sometimes I’m just in the wrong mood when I listen to a musician for the first time, so I like to go back and listen again months later. I just tried #Coldplay again, and still nope. I’m sure #chrismartin is a lovely man, but his music is still shit and bland. #musicsky

I grew up in the Second World War, in Norfolk in the 1970s.

At least that was effectively what happened, even if the chronology is a bit off, technically.

Thirty years after the end of World War Two, Norfolk (the English county) was starting to accept that it might be over.

To get anywhere at all, you had to drive through abandoned world War Two airfields with decaying concrete loading ramps poking through the wheat stubble. In the corner of fields, pill boxes, squat concrete octagonal huts still had slots for machine gun barrels to point at the German troops advancing across towards them. Someone had at least put the signposts back, though ‘foreigners’ were still viewed with suspicion.

But it wasn’t just that. I had my own total war going on with my mother, and the insidious emotional occupation that forced me into emotional covert operation. Seamus Heaney had his inner emigre. I had an my inner French Resistance.

In a way, this was fine with me. I was a 10-year-old with ambivalent feelings about reality, and I welcomed becoming a member of the Resistance. Or the British Special Operations Executive, or Lifeline, the Belgian aircrew rescuing network in the Sunday evening BBC series Secret Army.

The Second World War never seemed to have properly left. I grew up close to where Apple TV’s Masters Of The Air were fictionally based and the rash of wartime American military airfields — aerodromes, my grandparents called them — were still there. The B12s Flying Fortresses and BXX Super Flying Fortresses had given way to the Phantoms and A10s, the US’s standard issues, but I would’ve recognised them from their silhouettes anyway. I had a wartime facsimile poster on my bedroom wall.

The RAF still wanted to cling on to its finest hour and kept calling the airfields RAF bases. 1970s England descended into three-day weeks and inflation, and the politicians paid fruit machine salesmen to kill blackmailers’ dogs [link to Jeremy Thorpe]. Norfolk decided it wasn’t keen on the 1970s either. Who could blame it. Ideally, it would’ve liked to go back to the 19th century, but grudgingly compromised on 1940.

I grudgingly compromised on a cover as a schoolboy, so I could the rest of my life intact. I became a spy.

The enemy was my mother. I learned to fit round the interstices of whatever object of venom she favoured that week, spotting the emotional checkpoints at the end of the street and taking another route home. If I could blend into the occupied population, cut out the labels in my clothes, do nothing to draw her eye to me, keep my papers in order, stay faceless, I wouldn’t get bundled into the back of an emotional truck in the middle of the night and annihilated.

My main manual was the Usborne Book of Spycraft, which was peopled with cartoons of squat eastern European men in gaberdine raincoats, homburg hats and dark glasses. They demonstrated how dead drops worked, how to make disguises out of papier mache, how to use a code wheel, and how to tell the speed of a cyclist from the tracks they left. All vital skills for those of us keeping our lives out of everyone else’s way.

But there was little obvious to spy on and the books themselves were pretty vague on how to know what you should be looking for. I’d gathered that often secrets were kept in desk drawers or filing cabinets, but when I’d searched through desks and filing cabinets in our house they were disappointingly free of anything except old bills and receipts and bank statements. Later, I’d come to see how a couple of things I saw there were actual clues to something, but at seven, I had no idea.

The other problem was my lack of staff. A spy ring, the book said, was a group of spies, who didn’t know each other, because they only knew the next link in the chain. The spy knew only the courier, and the courier knew only the master spy. I loved this control of who knew what about you. Naturally, I was going to be the master spy but I needed couriers and spies, and despite my attempts to recruit friends there was just me. I had no spy ring.

I hid in the attic.

The first floor of our house (second floor to Americans) was in the roof, so the upper halves to the walls sloped inwards following the external slope of the exterior. Below about adult waist height, walls dropped down from the slope, creating a little prism of attic to the side of the bedroom between the wall and the roof. They had weird removable panels to access them when we first moved in, but I convinced my father to replace the one in my room with vertical-swinging door so I could use it as my spy office. Not that I told my parents its use — the would have compromised security. They just knew I was keeping out of their way while they shouted at each other in the kitchen below.

I only realised later that hiding made you isolated. That came later when I discovered Graham Greene, the headmaster’s son navigating split classroom loyalties like a double agent, and John Le Carré, being whoever he needed to be to keep his conman father required to keep him out of prison. Other readers commented how their characters were living in some watchful, suspicious, cramped netherworld but it just seemed like home to me. That should have given me a clue that the spy behavioiur was more than just playing.

Spies keep themselves secret so they get to do the stuff they need to and concealed under the tarred roofing-felt, I was secret too.

Spies have the time to disentangle the ambiguities and deceptions of humans, consider every possible nuance and hint for hidden meaning. I was giving myself time and space

Spies decipher the inexplicable, shifting human motivations. I had so much to decode.

Spies stay out of the firing line of sudden, vicious betrayals. I was hidden

Spies are safe because they are hidden.

Spies lose any idea of who they are when they’re not hiding.

It would take me the best part of 40 years to to come out from the attic, to stop hiding, and work out who I am. This piece is part of that emergence.

Read: Vintage Ondaatje by Michael Ondaatje 📚Grab bag of his writings. I’d gleaned he was ponderous and dull from the English Patient but turns out he can be quick and funny too.

Currently reading: Remembrance Day by Henry Porter 📚 Techno thrillers age - the writing and construction is skilled but the breathless references to SIM cards, ZIP drives and faxing really date this one. #bookstodon #booksky

Sometimes music journalism really doesn’t help itself, does it, Rootsworld: “their music is characterized by the two of them harmonizing vocally while accompanying themselves on a metre-long 42-string Estonian zither known as a kannel, closely related to the Finnish kantele.” #musicsky

Currently reading: Blue Machine by Helen Czerski 📚 lining up to be one of my favourite ever books. There’s a lot of sea to be fascinated with and Czerski’s a fantastically lucid, enthusiastic and grown up writer. #booksky #bookstodon

Abandoned: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt 📚 There’s something good there, but it’s very well hidden. I lost patience with looking for it. #bookstodon #booksky