I took part in National Novel Writing Month as part of a group based at Barnaby’s wine bar on Robertson Street in Hastings. The group was set up and hosted by the wonderful Gwendoline Coates. In a nutshell, the aim of NaNoWriMo is to challenge participants to write the rough first draft of a 50,000-word novel in the month of November – an average target of 1,667 words per day.

The group followed up this project by creating artworks related to their writing, and we put on a NaNoWriMo Art Exhibition at Barnaby’s in March and April 2024. See photos further below.

I managed to achieve the target. My novel’s working title is The Zarrow Shuffle. Here’s a brief synopsis:

The Zarrow Shuffle is the modern-day tale of a hoax on the art world. For fun, Richard, a bored and unsuccessful writer, sets out to fool the art world, the press and the public that a radical new arts movement is being born in Hastings. The aim of the imaginary movement is to blend together all the different manifestations of art, bringing about new and more interesting art forms. He issues a manifesto and organises events involving performances by various artists from different fields – music, drama, painting, spoken word, dance, comedy, and so on. Events take a curious turn when his events make headlines for the wrong reasons–a protest which turns ugly, a suicide on stage–and soon his hoax is being taken seriously, not least by Richard himself. Media coverage leads to arts grants and the lease from the local council of a disused building which becomes the hub of the new movement. Richard’s muse, Stella, leads him further into the deception and towards the conflagration which brings the adventure to an end.

The ‘Zarrow Shuffle’ is a trick in which a magician appears to shuffle a deck of cards but actually leaves them in the same order.

Here’s an extract which I read to the group at our end-of-project celebration at Barnaby’s on 1st December 2023:

After an aeon the train scrinches into Hastings station, pauses just to wind me up personally, then with a pshush the doors open at last and I’m running along the platform, out through the ticket barriers, looking up at the CCTV cameras to make sure they record my alibi. I dash towards the automatic doors, which delay me again, another precious second lost. Why the hell does everything have to be automatic these days? – doors, taps, toilets, as if we’re all suddenly incapable of operating the world manually now? I wheel out of the station to the right, to the taxi rank, relieved to see a cab waiting. I jump into the front passenger seat. 

‘Rock-a-nore please.’ 

‘No can do, mate. It’s all sealed off down there. Big fire.’ 

‘Okay, Okay. Get me as close as you can.’ 

The electric car whirrs into life and the driver glides us out into the traffic. Lights on red, lights on amber. I feel everything getting in the way, like an obstacle course designed by offended gods to slow me down. I’m watching videos of the fire on my Facebook feed. The driver glances at my screen and says, ‘Looks bad, hey?’ 

‘Yeah. Have you been near it?’ 

‘No,’ he says. ‘But you can see the glow from the seafront. It stinks of smoke all over the Old Town. Fire engines and police cars everywhere.’ 

He pulls over outside the Albion. Policemen in hi-vis jackets have cordoned off the road ahead. 

‘You’ll have to leg it from here, mate,’ says the cab driver. 

I pay him, the bloody automatic card machine taking bloody automatic ages, then I’m running again, past the fish and chip shops and amusement arcades, through the Stade, over the miniature railway track—these features of the town I know so well, all now alien in the acrid gloom, strobed by the flashing blue lights of a queue of emergency vehicles. Up ahead I can see the orange glow beyond the net huts. As I get closer there are sparks in the air like fireflies, just like Bonfire Night, and then as I break out through the black fishing boats sitting on the beach like stranded whales, I see the full conflagration in all its terrible and thrilling glory, our Melting Pot totally ablaze, firefighters arcing jets of water uselessly into the furious, billowing fire. The backdrop of cliffs is glowing in the firelight, and at its feet the sea keeps up its eternal gnawing, but the sound of the waves is drowned out by the crack and bluster of the inferno, the wail of sirens, the shouts of emergency workers trying to restore order from chaos.  

I’m quickly amongst the onlookers, shouting for Ava in a voice I don’t recognise. She must be here somewhere. My heart thrashes against my birdcage ribs. I fear arrest, as if the officers in their various uniforms are all looking out for the culprit, as if my face has been flashed around their computer screens and phones already: caucasian male, middle-aged, no facial hair, medium height, medium build. Goes by the name of Richard Gaston, but real name uncertain. Known to partner Ava Lansdowne, also of Hastings. Both potentially dangerous. 

I stumble in the shingle around the blaze, searching for Ava, looking into the hypnotised, fire-lit faces of the spectators. I wonder at the sheer spectacle, the event, the happening: it’s art, I am saying to myself over and over, it’s our art. We made this. We will be remembered for this. Our lives are ending and beginning again in this purifying funeral pyre. 

Then there she is, the calm at the heart of all this pandemonium: Ava, standing, watching with her hands in her pockets, still and erect and patient as a heron; then we’re hugging each other, and I’m pressing my mouth to her delicate ear, saying bloody hell, bloody hell, and laughing and crying at the same time like some sort of maniac. She’s smiling and crying too, and we cling to each other like survivors in the maelstrom.  

Then she’s kissing me full on the mouth and pressing her body against mine to tell me she’d like to have sex, right here, right now, in this glorious orgasmic moment of birth and destruction and rebirth, and I press back into her to say yes, yes, I know, I know.