False Azure

I wrote this confection for the most recent round of the Short Sharp Imaginative Writing competition.


Zoe Proudlove is a writer of flash fiction and other

Zoe Proudlove lives, works and writes in Manchester. Her stories have appeared in her writing group newsletter

Zoe Proudlove is a computer programmer by day and a storyteller by night. Her most recent stories appeared in Nowheresville Story Zine and VanityPub.com. She has two dogs, a husband and a favourite teddy bear

Zoe Proudlove lives in Manchester, where she gains inspiration from the grey clouds and stormy days, which explains why you will reject this story

Zoe Proudlove is surgically attached to her keyboard. She works computer magic by day, and is bossed around by her fictional creation at night. She gets no sleep. Her most recent stories have appeared in We Actually Pay magazine and Tough Editor.com, and have been nominated for several major awards by her mother

Zoe Proudlove is a modern magician. She works for a top secret IT startup, where she leads a team of specialist software developers in the search for a computer that can empathise with its users ... that has telekinetic powers ... that can predict the future, based on negligible differentials in quantum effects. Naturally, her work absorbs a considerable amount of her brain power, but she manages to spare some of her finest alpha waves to give life support to her favourite fictional creations. The rest of her time is devoted to escaping the attentions of MI5, and foiling her commercial competitors. She likes dogs, but can't own any because of the security risk. Her husband is a teddy bear

Zoe Proudlove is one half of Britain's top custom teddy bear manufacturing team. She and her partner live in a cottage overlooking Derwent Water, where they farm goldfish and carp to provide a ready supply of eyes. Their most challenging commission to date was an exploding teddy bear for the latest James Bond film, Just Die, Already, but Zoe's favourite commission will always remain the 10 foot high mohair bear she made to be the next secretary general of the UN. In her spare time, she grows sweetpeas and bakes flatbread. She also sometimes makes stuff up

Zoe Proudlove is a single mother of ten children, who lives in a canal barge and can thus be said to be of no fixed abode. Inspiration for her stories, which have appeared in Glitter Bus, Grunta and Barely Credible Stories, comes from the people she meets on her travels and the antics of her talented and energetic family. She is the only person to have been accidentally locked in the reputedly haunted Harecastle Tunnel overnight. All she saw was a deceased crisp packet

Zoe Proudlove has more imagination than sense, or so her dear old dad always used to say. Her partner is learning how to put up with her. If she spends too long curled up with a book, the top of her head gets hot. She drinks tea and tries not to eat chocolate

Zoe Proudlove is a writer of short fiction, who lives and works in Manchester. Her stories have disappeared into print on several occasions. She hopes one day to learn how to stop this

Zoe Proudlove lives in Manchester, where she writes short stories and shopping lists

Zoe Proudlove is a writer of

Zoe Proudlove is.

My story "Unbalanced" has been published in the Spring 2007 edition of Flashquake.

I like the illustration they have produced for the story very much. The thin white lines on the black background are perfect for this piece.

Ali Smith's the accidental is one of those books that makes me feel like two separate people inhabiting the same brain. The writer-me found it intriguing and unusual, a wonderful lesson in tight third person viewpoint as well as in using multiple viewpoints on the same set of events to deepen and broaden a story, rather than as a mere authorial convenience. As a reader, though, it left me largely unmoved. Strangely, I'm not sure these two sets of views on the book are entirely contradictory.

The book centres around five main characters: Eve, a writer and mother; Michael, her ambitious academic husband; Astrid and Magnus, Eve's children by her first husband; and Amber, the catalytic stranger who drops into the middle of this troubled family while they are spending the summer in a rural holiday home. Each chapter is written from the viewpoint of a separate chapter, rotating through them in the same order as the book progresses. The family members are written in third-limited and roughly the same length; Amber's chapters are first person, and typically much shorter and far more ambiguous, functioning more like commentaries on the theme of the story than anything else.

With the third person chapters, Smith uses the narrative voice to bring us right into the heads of the characters... it's not quite stream-of-consciousness, but it's perhaps as near as can be got it without being irritating as hell. And each chapter has a very distinct voice. The characters all emerge as quite different but believable people within just a few swift sentences of the start of each chapter. I particularly liked Astrid's continual use of the phrase "typical and ironic", and even found myself saying it when something typical and ironic happened not long after I'd finished the book.

This is also a book where the structure, the underlying skeleton of the story, was made very visible and explicit, and it was interesting to watch the reaction of the reader-me to this. I found I was willing to go along with it, but really expected to get some big pay-off from it at the end. Since I didn't really get one (or missed it, if it was there), the explicit structure started to feel like authorial intrusion - it was rather strange to get that sense from chapter headings and choice of viewpoint, and so on, rather than from the story itself...

As a reader, my main problem with the book was that Amber is supposed to be very attractive and charismatic, but I just found her incredibly smug and irritating. She makes bold pronouncements, apparently based on a supernatural knowledge of the family members' history and thoughts, she interferes into the lives of the family members in quite grandiose ways, with a confidence that can only be explained by the fact that the author is continually bending down and whispering in her ear, "go on, it's alright, this is the right thing to do". The ending of the book tries to suggest that this confidence is born out of the emotional distance of being swept into the lives of strangers without the baggage of your history and past mistakes. But I don't buy that myself. Nor did I get much out of Amber's interlude chapters. They were fun to read, but they took me out of the story world, rather than adding a new dimension to it. I suppose they did serve the useful function of stopping me from trying to make Amber work as a real person in the story - but they didn't help me to think of her as anything more significant than a literary device.

It's entirely possible that I've completely missed the point that the book was trying to convey. (It is a book that works hard at having a point.) I certainly admired the writing, and it's a wonderful tutorial on deep third-person limited viewpoint. But, for me, the accidental remains very firmly in the territory of good book, but never makes it into the land of good story.