The other day I took the Black offspring to their athletics club and watched them hare around the track. Their ability and determination never cease to amaze me.
I should point out for the sake of transparency that I am possibly the least sporty person I have ever met. Pouring myself another glass of wine is more than enough to exhaust me for the day.
I blame my Mother of course. She locked me in our house from the age of six and didn't allow me out until I had an offer from a Russell Group University safely under my belt. To be fair, we lived on a sink estate where every third teenager had an aerosol can up their sleeve and our next door neighbour left his upstairs window open so he could escape from the police with balletic ease.
My kids however, live such ludicrously middle class lifestyles that they are more likely to meet their doom at the bumper of a badly driven Rangerover. Thus they, unlike their Rapunzle like mater, are allowed out into the world and have consequently built enough muscle density to run.
And run they do. Like Greyhounds. Only cuter.


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Well, this is a new one: an inspirational rejection.

'Thank you for letting us see "The Prison," but we've decided to pass.'

Ok, that starts off quite normally...

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1) Writers are extraordinary. I don’t think so - most of the writers I know have ordinary jobs, have a mortgage and/or kids and spouse. I read Heat, I watch lots of telly and I do the school run. I like Pizza, I don’t hoover behind the sofa and I worry about the Credit Crunch. I’m just like anyone else. In fact if I ever get published, that will have to be my hook!

2) Everyone has a book in them and therefore the potential to be a writer. Erm, correct! I’d agree that everyone does. But if this book is to be publishable, is to be page-turnable, then no, not everyone has the where-with-all to produce such a tale. We each have our own unique story, some narrative that defines our lives, and this autobiographical prose is often what a virgin writer puts on paper. But whether this should be made public in all its self-indulgent glory is quite another matter. Mine was written 4 years ago, a novel set in Paris, in the Eighties - Cue Monet, Metro stations and Merlot. Cue unimaginative characters based on people I once knew, speaking with Carry-on style French accents.


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Dear Everybody, by Michael Kimball is definitely up there in my all time favourites list. It is incredibly good. Wow. Read it.

***

And if you should so desire, you can read what Mr Kimball had to say to the excellent Kay Sexton here.

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Every so often I take a step back and wonder how the world hasn't been blown off course by the explosion of the internet.

We have entirely absorbed it into our lives: email, Google, online banking, job hunting, blogging, travel booking, price comparison, information, information, information galore.

One group especially that has been able to take advantage of the internet revolution is the writers of the world.

The other day I was writing a short story and needed a fictitious company name. I searched for my company on the web to check it wasn't already in existence, thus possibly saving me a lot of hassle in the future. Before this information was available at the click of a button I would have had to go... where exactly? I'd have contacted (written to/phoned) Companies House in Britain for a start. But where do I go to find out about the rest of the world? Does it matter for legal reasons? Again, I can research this very question now: the information is all there.

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I've just finished reading The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold and have found my reaction to it intriguing. I think I would classify it as literary crime, if only because it involves a crime. It reminded me in parts of Sex Crimes by Jenefer Shute, a favourite writer of mine. Both stories are told in the first person by women who have committed terrible crimes. Both stories use flashback to draw the reader gradually into the past, the unfolding of which provides an explanation for the shocking "conclusion". Shute's book does it better, despite the naff title she chose to give it which must have turned off swathes of female readers and picked up several unwanted male ones (I like to think they got a hell of a shock reading about the crime in question). Sebold's book lacks the disciplined structure of Shute's. The flashbacks are not given to us sequentially and I found at the end that I had a very muddy idea of why things happened the way they did. In part, I'm sure, this was deliberate. Sebold is writing about mental illness and she wanted to do justice to the lack of black and white, the toxic melting pot of need and resentment, love and hate. I enjoyed turning the pages of the story but at the end I felt disappointed, overall and in one particular instance. I'll come to that particular in a moment.

My reaction to The Almost Moon was a little like the frustration I felt after finishing We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Both books are page turners, Shriver's relentlessly so. She uses every trick in the plotter's handbook to keep us reading despite the increasingly disturbing subject matter. At the time of reading, she had my undivided attention. The book gripped me, completely. It was only afterwards that I started to resent the manner and extent of her manipulation.


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So much has been written about self-publishing and vanity publishing and the potential stigma attached, but nowadays it seems to be more acceptable to self-publish.

My husband Steve and I completed our science-fiction novel, "Einstein's Question" in the early Spring of 2008. We did our research and drew up a list of agents who specialised in Science-Fiction. There were various factors that meant we weren't an immediate choice:

* First-time novelists
* No follow-on book and definitely not the first part of a trilogy
* Joint authors
* Some heavy scientific content including equations

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'You know why you're having trouble putting that tent up?' I was struggling against the wind, and probably should have practised at home, but my new neighour from across the field had his own theory. I was glad to see him come over because I was beginning to have doubts about the whole venture.

There were only two poles, crossing in the centre and fixed at the ends to form a dome. The poles were made up of sections and I'd just bent one of the metal sleeves where they joined. Now how was I going to slide it through the outer sleeve, as per instructions, without piercing the material?


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Our regular novelists' group met the other day. We all seemed to be suffering from the same malaise. A sense of exhaustion, lethargy, lack of inspiration, inability to Buckle Down. Had we all mysteriously co-contracted M.E.? We began to share stories.

A cold virus which went on and on; a virus of the virtual kind which clobbered a computer and threatened to lose all its data; a printer which printed at a rate of one page per minute and then refused to print at all; ludicrously but painfully, an infected toe. And that was just me.

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