I am a student of creative writing and of life, and this space is for my creative and other scribblings. I'm also a Mum, daughter, wife, sister, granny, friend - an ephemeral sentient chimp studying the tricky subject of being a good human being - so I bang on about all that stuff and shit too.
It’s been a weird year of ups and downs in these strange, unsettled and often dark times. Watching the news has been hard to stomach sometimes and writing about what’s going on, either directly or in fiction as subtext or allegory, has been hard too, and yet there have been really good times as I hope the photos below will illustrate. In 2025, I turned 60, my eldest turned 40, my youngest, 25; I went to Poland 5 times, had my 3rd book published, wrote (as yet unfinished) long stuff instead of flash fiction, read at several events including at Halloween, went to some fabulous concerts including Max Richter’s brilliant Sleep at Ally Pally with Harry, saw The Snowman at the Peacock Theatre, had a brill holiday in Pembrokeshire curtesy of bessie mate Clarey Fairy, stayed up a snowy mountain with grumpy husband, attended a wonderful wedding, grew some gorgeous flowers, did cartoons of grandpeeps and loads of crafts with them, watched my youngest son fight in the ring, met a constellation of stellar authors, had two sleeps at Gladstone Library, saw wonderful dawns and sunsets, went to Bat out of Hell the Musical with my Sis and walked up Winter Hill, saw my pup Nolly turn 4, had big fun at the Flash Festival and applied to do a PhD at York St John (more about this in the new year). The non-chronological montage of moments below is by way of documentation and also farewell to the year. Thanks for the memories 2025, but to say I’m looking forward to 2026 and all the writerly challenges it will bring is a wee bit of an understatement, and now we’re past the solstice, it seems like a good time to say farewell. So happy holidays blogosphere peeps. Hope the holidays bring some joy – and see you soon for a brand new start in a couple of weeks.
Had a wonderful night on Thursday at the launch of Hostile Environments and have been so thrilled so see copies winging into the world. Above are some that have found their forever homes and/or a place in the best bookshop ever. One is on Northodox’s ‘for sale’ table at the fabulous northern indie that is The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley. Northodox are this month’s indie publisher of the month at The Grove and so have a promotional table there during August which is full of amazing Northodoxian Books. And I’m very happy to report that Hostile Environments has sold out it’s first order there. Thanks so much to everyone who posted photos of their copies including The Grove, who you can read more about by following the link to their website, here: https://www.grovebookshop.com/
And I’m very happy to see from the flowers in some of the photos, that there’s several potential contenders for plant of the day – though I’m not expert enough to be able to identify them all. This being the case, I’m going to nominate the fern in the last photo which I do recognise. I love a fern and grow several myself. They provide lush green backdrops for the bursts of colour provided by petunias and nasturtiums in the flower bad outside my writing shed, but they’ve struggled this super dry, hot summer and needed a bit of additional TLC. But their time is coming, and soon it will be September – cooler shadier days that they much prefer, and even in winter when everything has died back they still make the garden feel alive with their feathery fronds and fractal shapes. Hoping it will be the same for my newly born book which houses several dark and weird stories very well suited to drawing-in evenings and nights by the fire. Going to be doing some spooky season readings in the coming months to help promote Hostile Environments and though the launch is now in the balmy past, the book’s future is only just beginning – which feels really exciting, more of which next time when I should also have good news about the PhD project I’ve been banging on about in previous posts. Safe to say it’s been quite the week in the writing shed, one that I’ll remember for the rest of forever. Thanks for sharing it with me blog buddies. Wouldn’t have been the same without you and if you fancy getting a copy of Hostile Environments either in paperback or as an e-book, here’s the links: https://www.northodox.co.uk/product-page/hostile-environments-paperback https://www.northodox.co.uk/product-page/hostile-environment-ebook
It’s day 7 of my week of blogging to celebrate the publication of Hostile Environments and today I’m mostly promoting the on-line Zoom launch which will be on Thursday night between 7 and 8pm UK time. I’ll put a link to the Eventbrite page where you can book tickets at the end of this blog. It’s free but you do have to book.
But first – plant of the day – Celosia argentea or plumed cockscomb, or silver cock’s comb, or Lagos spinach. I bought this one (pictured here) from Aldi when I was doing a shop earlier in the year. It was sitting outside in that heatwave we had in spring, looking almost dead and I felt sorry for it, so, not knowing what it was I bought it and brought it home, watered it and it grew and grew. I had no idea what it was but it’s easy to identify and turns out it’s considered an invasive weed in parts of India and china and is grown as a beloved veggie in west Africa where it’s served as boiled greens. It thrives in hot sun (if watered adequately) and is easy to grow – just the sort of plant I like then and perfect for my potager’s garden. I think I will always grow it from now onwards – for the gorgeous brightly coloured grassy flower heads, which are soooo lovely as much as for the leaves which do taste very like spinach. It’s a win win win plant – lovely to look at, great to eat and easy to grow. Wish writing stories came so easily. It’s funny because quite often folks are surprised that writing a teeny flash can take such a long time. To be fair, in my life BCW (before creative writing) I too, thought authors just sat down and wrote and there it was finished. I had no idea that writing was re-writing, editing, experimenting with what you’ve got, leaving everything alone to settle in a drawer, coming back to what you’ve written some time later, then maybe repeating that process all over again, and again, and maybe even again.
Mark Twain got it right – he once wrote to a friend, sorry about the long long letter but I didn’t have time to write a short one. And then sometimes stories do just pop out ready formed – you put pen to paper and ta-dah – a flash. For me this is very rare though because I like to experiment and pare things down, to do an Ursula Le Guin i.e. cut down the word count of a story by half – a really fab exercise to do – why not give it a go? It’s amazing when you do it for the first time, you learn a lot about editing, crafting and your own style of writing. Reet going to finish there today because you know – brevity. Will write more about the PhD application later in the week but in the meantime, here is the link for the launch on Thursday where I’ll be doing readings, a lighthearted generating writing ideas ten minutes, and answering questions from Northodox Press. Bring a brew or some fizz or whatever you fancy and spend an hour in cyberspace talking Hostile Environments. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/hostile-environments-book-launch-tickets-1480973193689?msockid=1f3453cc4e1460930acc46d94f126195
Been trying to identify the name of this compact little climbing rose that’s lived in my garden since before I lived here as it is day six’s plant of the day. Have used three different apps that have so far matched it to (5 different) leaves and flower heads that simply do not conform to what it is, so for now, until someone gives me better info, going to just call it a rose.
Whatever its Latin name might prove to be, it’s defo a hardy specimen. We had the garden landscaped about a decade ago and moved this rose from the bottom to the middle lawn and it took the upheaval in its stride, which is another reason, in addition to: its beauty, its thin, fragile fragrance and the way the petals cluster so thickly that the rose heads are almost like huge buds even when they’re full grown, why I love it so much. It’s not a typical looking rose so I’m glad I’ve got the picture to show you what it really looks like. Without the picture maybe the default setting rose image that might pop into your head would be bigger or more open? Words are weird like that – they signify a thing that we all agree on but leave loads of room for error/difference. I.e. when someone says pig we all think of a pig – but then maybe my default setting pig is different to yours. Maybe the first image that pops into my head when someone says pig is a pygmy Japanese pot bellied pig – and maybe yours is a Gloucester Old Spot, or maybe its Peppa, or Babe. Which just goes to show, that words at once signify something in common but also have loads of margin for non-overlap – which is what makes them so interesting, especially for a writer of flash. That’s kinda what I was going to go on to say at the end of yesterday’s blog before Harry unexpectedly rocked up – about exciting and unexpected effects in writing which can result from wide spans in agreed meanings. Words can at once share and befuddle, or at least mean more than one specific thing to different people which is what, hopefully, I will be looking at when I do my PhD. (Yeay I got there eventually – took a week but you know – steady pace wins the race). It’s by no means a done deal yet, but I’ve put in an initial proposal to York St John to write a horror novella-in-flash as the creative part of a PhD by Creative Practice with a critical commentary, working title Off the Page and Between the Lines – a critical investigation into blank space, internal endings, pause and stasis in writing a horror novella-in-flash. Will write more tomorrow explaining how resonant word meanings fit into all this empty space – but just going to leave that there for now, because you know – white space is important and it doesn’t often get foregrounded. Before then though, here is me reading a story on the BBC last week called A Fairy-tale Ending (from my new collection Hostile Environments). This story depends on loads of breaks and spaces and silences to help with the moving on of vast swathes of narrative time – as I hope you will hear as you listen. I’m on at 1 hr and 21 mins
Ended up not blogging yesterday because I was proper cream-crackered after grand-folking in Sidcup and also because I got home so late. It took an hour and a half to get to the Dartford tunnel and longer still to get back from there due to jams on the M11. Roads are such a nightmare in and out of London. Proper wish the trains ran better and to time. Anyhow back in the garden now, post book publication day and it’s been a joy looking online seeing copies of Hostile Environments out in the wild. Thanks to everyone who posted pics on Facebook and Bluesky – so lovely to see them. Here’s three,
I’m also very much looking forward to the launch event on Zoom on Thursday night, when I’ll be answering questions about the book and reading a couple of the stories. My author copies were waiting when I got back from Sidcup – here’s the vid of me opening them. I know it’s passe to do vids of book openings but I give no shits about any of that because for me it’s all joy and I worked really hard on this wee beaut and so am going to wring every last joyful memory out of it. So look away if it’s too self indulgent and skip ahead to plant of the day.
Hostile Environments safely home
Plant of the Day is cosmos as pictured above which is usually more than just these feathery ferny foliages. It’s usually masses and masses of gorgeous white flowerheads too (I always grow white ones though they come in many other colours too.) If you look really closely at the photo at the start of this blog, you can see one single flower finally starting to form. This lack of flowers had flummoxed me as its never happened before in any of the other years I’ve grown them so I set to googling to find out the answer. Turns out it’s to do (indirectly) with the globe courgette I mentioned earlier in the week. Cosmos it transpires, likes sparse conditions and poor soil and I’ve been feeding its courgette-y neighbour, and using the same (enriched) water on the cosmos saplings which has encouraged the foliage growth and disinclined the flower formation. I’ve rectified the mistake now and the first wee flower was open when I got home last night. I do love the foliage though – its so so pretty – like a sort of green mesh feathering which, from the place I’m sitting right now, looks lovely behind a pot of white violas. It’s fab to add to little arrangements I put indoors too – lasts for ages and sets off the electric pink sweetpeas a treat. Reet – was going to pap on next about contrast in storytelling and how sometimes stories take their own unexpected directions and do surprising things, but will enlarge tomorrow, as my youngest son – bang on theme – just unexpectedly rocked home from London (en route to going to Oslo tomorrow) – so off to chat to him now. More on surprise turns in storytelling tomorrow then.
Had a lovely but very busy launch day looking after grandfolk in Sidcup, so didn’t get time to blog. Am doing the same again tomorrow but will blog again in the evening when I get home but wanted to record the wonderful Bluesky post my publisher made today about Hostile Environments which really touched me. I’ve been watching copies wing their way out into the world as when the day allowed (which wan’t often), but I’m going to have a proper look now before going to sleep. Having a third book in the world feels like something big and I am very proud of these tiny stories and so grateful that they are now out and about.
Day three of my week of blogs then to celebrate publication day for Hostile Environments (tomorrow) and today’s plant of the day is the globe courgette which you can see growing here in a pot on me patio outside the writing shed. I’ve never grown a cucurbit in a pot before – they usually go into the ground in beds as they get so big, and I’ve never grown globe courgettes before this year at all. Never saw one before this year in fact, and now they seem to be everywhere – happen someone hybridised them last summer and are knocking the seeds out cheap. The cucurbit family which includes pumpkins, cucumbers, melons and all manner of gourds is very easy to hybridise – in fact if you gather then keep the seeds from year to year, you never know what you’ll get the following summer. They have male and female flowers that are fertilised by flies that spread the pollen. No fertilisation and the fruits just stay small and drop off, fertilised and they swell into whatever. I planted these globe courgettes in a pot because I forgot to label them as seeds in the greenhouse and wasn’t sure what fruit they would yield until they started to appear and was pleasantly surprised when they became these lovely shiny deep green beauties. They are very good for stuffing and roasting – even the skin in crispy delicious done in the air fryer. What I didn’t expect when growing them, was the early advent of the wee cyclamen underneath. These gorgeous pinky petals usually only poke through much later in the year, bringing showers of pink and red and white to garden as the days start to darken. I’m thinking maybe the shadow cast by the huge green zucchini leaves tricked them into thinking it’s October and so out they popped – and they look so lovely there like a younger, sibling basking in the protective shade of their older sister – which lead me to thinking, on this book-publication-day eve, how stories can change depending on where they are placed inside a book and how they are set on the page. Flash fiction of all the prose forms is the one most aware of how it exists as a form or a shape I reckon. Not always though – sometimes a great flash is a great story written in the (brief) form of a story with a beginning, a middle and an end (in that order). But so often it’s not. So often flash sits on the page aware of the page – like a poem does, making its shape part of the story telling even. In recent times this sort of flash has been called hermit crab flash because – well you can see why – because hermit crabs borrow their shells – but I like the term hybrid flash better because quite often non-conformist flash fictions don’t borrow a shape , they are the shape. The storytelling, the beating heart of the story – its life and soul comes from the shape – it’s not an afterthought or tacked on afterwards. Here’s one of my flash fictions that does what I just described. How it sits on the page, the blank spaces in between the words even, the pause and moments of quiet, the emptiness are all part of the intrinsic storytelling. And so too is the juxtaposition of the form and story which at once jar against each other and meld together – a bit like the lovely cyclamen and the huge courgettes – strange but satisfying flower bed fellows. But before you read it – I just remembered that, yet again I’ve not mentioned that bloody PhD application thang I’ve been banging on about for three days now. Tomorrow it will have to be…
How To Keep The Hunger At Bay
By Jan Kaneen
Preheat oven to 180 degrees then go pick apples. In the wet’s best, on the darkest day of autumn, when everything smells of mold and mushrooms and the garden looks like rust and cinders. But don’t let the fruit ruin waiting for perfection.
Stand under gnarled branches catching raindrops, marveling at how young the skin on your palm looks, not like the windfallen wrinkles everywhere else.
Place apples in appropriate receptacle. I use a trug made from sheets of birch. It’s got a long flat bottom so the apples lie side-by-side without bruising when I hurry down garden to get out of the weather.
Wipe fruit carefully so skins shine like wintery cheeks, like Georgy’s used to when he came inside for a warm on snowy days and the stove was lit.
Don’t peel. A little skin will give the edges a ruddy tinge, and anyway, it’s good for you – full of roughage and it makes your hair curl – least that’s what I always told him when he used to pull his face.
Slice into cored crescents that look like rose petals and place into buttered tart dish. I arrange mine in circular swirls that coil inward and make a pattern that looks like forever.
Make caramel by heating butter and sugar. Most recipes say not to stir but I do because that’s the bit he loved best – standing on his three-legged stool at the cooker in his Winnie-the-Pooh apron, watching the crystals dissolve into liquid gold, like alchemy.
Add four pinches of cinnamon. One for mummy, one for daddy and two for Georgy, then a squeeze of lemon. An edge of sharpness is necessary to cut through the syrup.
Pour over apples then take block of shop-bought pastry from fridge. This is a matter of preference of course, so feel free to adapt to personal circumstance, but forty-odd years of following this recipe has taught me life’s too short for homemade rough-puff.
Roll thin and place on top of apples, tucking in edges like a child’s blanket, then bake for fifty minutes.
As scent of caramelized apples creeps like yesterday into warm kitchen, pour a glass of something lovely and remember – when you planted the sapling a lifetime ago, when it meant nothing and you were so impossibly numb-and-sensitive-at-the-same-time you couldn’t feel anything though everything still managed to hurt – opening your eyes, birdsong, hearing your own name… and a year later when you finally scattered ashes round the reedy stem… and the year after that, harvesting the first crop.
Smile or cry. It doesn’t matter which.
Take tart from oven and cool, but not too much. Grief, hope, love, remembrance – all are dishes best served warm.
Eat as many slices as you need, savouring every last bitter-sweet mouthful until you’re so tip-top full to the brim you think you’ll never be able to manage another bite.
So, here is the second of my all-week blogs to celebrate publication day for my new collection Hostile Environments on Thursday. Exciting news, copies are now winging their way to people who pre-ordered, so that’s good and today’s plant of the day is cuckoo pint or lords and ladies, or snakes head, or bobbins, or starch root or naked boys or adders meat or adders root or friars cowl or Adam and Eve or arum maculatum. I love a plant with many names – it speaks of loads of uses and/or an interesting appearance, or the ability to tweak human imagination. Where I come from in Bolton it was always called cuckoo pint so that’s the name I’ll stick to here. Above is a little photo (not from my garden) of the plant before the berries form which is meant to look like male and female genitalia (thus the lords and ladies and Adam and Eve names). I can just about see it at a stretch. Not sure about the derivation of the other names though would LOVE to know the adder-ish ones which must be lost in time. If anyone knows please fill me in, or maybe make up an origin story? The only other cuckoo pint name I do know the origin of is starch root – thus called by nuns in the sixteenth century who ran laundries. They used to dig it up and boil the root to extract the starch which was good for stiffening ruffs when such neck gear was all the rage amongst the rich and powerful. Cuckoo pint grows all over the wooded parts of my garden and though loads of folk think of it as a weed – a poisonous weed at that – I love them. They speak of stories and old wives tales, and folklore lost in time. And they really come into their own in winter when those red red berries shine like Yule lights in the long dark days and, though the berries are poisonous to humans – not so with birds, to whom they provide an important source of wintry nutrition. It’s funny how things can come into their own, in different times and places. Like my wee story Bagsy Blobsy No Back answers. I wrote this story way back in 2016, about my childhood, growing up in the 70s. I sent it to various mags and comps where it got rejected and/or long-listed nowhere. I rewrote it and it longlisted but didn’t shortlist in Flash 500. I then placed it into my memoir-in-flash, The Naming of Bones which was published in 2021. I read it (and other stories) at the online, in-covid lockdown launch in April 2021 and was overwhelmed by the love this story got. I then read it on BBC radio Cambridgeshire where they played it multiple times, so much did people enjoy its summertime nostalgia.
(you can enter published stories into this comp which I highly recommend as they are a friendly, lovely lot and do brilliant feedback as well as inviting winners to read at the event) and you guessed it – it won! So you know – stories can have afterlives and futures and other incarnations that you might not think they’d have – and rejections are just steps on the road to that magical moment of acceptance.
Just realised I haven’t mentioned the PhD application I said I’d write about today in yesterday’s blog. Guess it’ll have to wait till tomorrow then, but in the meantime, here’s me reading Bagsy Blobsy no Back Answers, the recording from that first book launch. https://youtu.be/GbKiP_DziQo
…don’t come along very often for writers of strange, surreal, non-conventional and not all that commercial fiction. That is to say weeks in which your third book is published, so going to blog every day till Sunday, by way of celebration.
Been thinking about the industry that is publishing a lot in the run up to Thursday (launch day for Hostile Environments) – and its a weird old business I reckon. Though I’m on my third book, I’ve not got an agent and to be fair I’ve never really tried to get one other than via entering stories into comps that agents might see. And the longer my agentless status has gone on, the more I’ve become totally fine about it because at the end of the day I don’t write to eat. If I did it might be different but I started writing 10 years ago to sort my head out and see if I could. And it really worked for me and my mental health which has made me super grateful and I find it proper strange that so many people in this weird society we live in, want to monetise everything, even creativity. It’s like nothing has a purpose without the wonga it generates, and loads of people I know quite well still ask how much I earn/expect to earn from my writing, what I’ve sold, what I’ve won prize-money wise. And I’m not gunna lie – when I first started writing, the prize winning was great fun, and vindication too – but the longer I’ve gone on, the more I just like winning to get my work read, not necessarily sold (though all prize money is very gratefully accepted). My new collection of dark short stories and flash fictions is never going to sell a million copies. There I’ve said it. It’s short fiction, and weird, unconventional short fiction at that. Agents always seem to want to know when they’re asking for pitches, where books would sit in bookshops and which best sellers they’re most like. Strange that something new and entirely different is never wanted. Not at first. I have no idea where Hostile Environments would sit on a book shelf in Waterstones other than in the short story or flash fiction section. Or maybe on a table with other titles by indie publishers. When my publisher, Northodox decided to publish my book, they knew they would not be retiring on the proceeds. They took it on because my words spoke to them, because they loved my stories and wanted to get them read. And that’ll do for me. I want to get my stories read too. In fact its super important to me that they do get read, because I don’t really think a story’s finished till its been shared with other minds. Flash fiction demands a lot of its readers – with its concision, brevity and implication. Flash readers have to really lean in and join metaphorical dots – so much so, a well crafted flash can mean one thing to one reader and something totally different to another, and it’s that meeting of minds that I love about being a writer of it. So you see unread flash fiction really is unfinished flash fiction to my way of thinking.
Also. This. Imagine that in 100 years someone finds one of my books in a charity shop book sale say, or cyber-mines it from a long dead website, or digs one up from a ruined library in the aftermath of a war we have not yet foreseen – and they read one of my stories and it fires their neurones and their brains spring into action making synaptic leaps and other connections – and though I will be long dead and my atoms will be scattered, my mind will have connected with another human being over swathes of time and from beyond the grave, just because I wrote some stories and Northodox had the presence of mind to publish them in print and digitally. People think quantum entanglement is mind-blowingly weird and wonderful – but so is reading and writing -i t’s sorcery, and time-travel and telepathy all at the same time.
Anyhoo, back on planet earth, last week, I did an interview with the folk at Northodox about writing and creating. Here’s the link if you fancy having a read https://www.northodox.co.uk/post/author-interview-jan-kaneen and if you do feel moved to pre order a copy of Hostile Environments all the deets are there.
But in the meantime, here’s me doing a reading of one of my flashes that I just recorded especially for this blog. It’s not from Hostile Environments as I explain on the vid, but as I’m going to post every day this week, thought I’d release some of my stranger flash fictions into the wild too. Here’s the link to where it appears online as text ,if you prefer https://theshortstory.co.uk/words-and-sayings-by-jan-kaneen/ and below is my recording which carries a trigger warning with ref to toxic societal gender assumptions and uses sayings that would cause offence in their usual contexts, but hopefully not in this one, though they might well still be shocking. Reet that’s it for Monday. See you tomorrow when I will talk about the new project I have started to pursue – applying to York St John to do a creative writing PhD. Until tomorrow then. Oh yes and If you were wondering about the pot of flowers at the start of this post. Going to do a ‘flower of the day’ each day here too. I love growing flowers and veggies as well as stories and today I’m celebrating teeny lobelia and how though they might be small, they bring humongous joy.
Jan Kaneen Creative and Other Writing 