The dreaded toothache has reared its massively ugly head; it seems to be coming from a tooth that was filled a few months ago that should probably have had root treatment – aaaarrgghhhhhh!!!

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So I was flipping through a notebook, looking for something else, and I came across a scribble. "Learning, as a writer, to get out of your own way/light" was all it said. I can't remember what prompted me to say that, nor decide what exactly I must have meant. And then I was talking to an aspiring writer who's hit the ugly duckling stage, where their knowledge and skill in writing have gone up a step, but they have yet integrate that into their writing, so everything's awkward and self conscious, and in lots of ways the new writing seems worse than the old. And I suddenly remembered the story of the Wooden Duck Making Kit. Inside the box are a knife, some paints, a block of wood, and an instruction leaflet. The leaflet says, "Cut away everything which is not a duck".

Quite. In Just for the sake of it I was talking about Richard Sennett and the 10,000 hour rule for learning a craft. But this time I remembered Grayson Perry and Ian Bostridge, in the same conversation, talking about how self-consciousness creates physical tension, and how, whether you're a potter or a singer, that tension in your body affects how you work the clay, or the music. I often find myself thinking about learning to write in terms of learning to work wood.

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Susie’s Monthly Update (April)
Highs: Got a job in a gallery. This will fund a four-day course on Women’s Commercial Fiction in
London. Hoorah!
Lows: Agent has turned down full manuscript (culmination of a six-month competition).
The hardest thing is that this process was carrying my hope and now I have to carry it on my own
again.
Goals: Edit/rewrite of opening chapters – again.
How about you guys?

The Falmouth Five are communicating across the e-waves, as we do at the end of each month. We’re a diverse bunch of novelists: two women, three men, published and unpublished, writers of thrillers, speculative sci-fi, comedic crime and women’s fiction. We get together several times a year to eat and drink and crit one another’s work, celebrating one another’s successes and commiserating over problems and knock-backs.

As novelists, we’re in it for the long term. We’re the marathon-runners of the writing world. It takes much practice, much motivation, much energy and much downright dogged determination to complete a marathon. As it does to complete a novel. Only difference is, the marathon-runners know that the culmination of all their efforts will be that splendid day when they race through the streets, clapped and cheered and supported all the way. Who supports the loneliness of the long-distance writer?




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Find it difficult to read at night so keep a notebook and pen by the bed - sods law - ideas strike just as I’ve got comfortable. But I do keep a selection of books - either reference (see photo) or books I can read short sections of without losing the plot. Have a great one at the moment; Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief...[more]

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Under Strictly-controlled conditions (i.e. Sam's son pulling a name out of a hat), the prize draw for a signed copy of Kill-Grief has taken place, and the winner is...



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Andy sat back in his swivel chair and steepled his palms together on the desk, index fingers pointing forward as if about to shoot an imaginary laser gun. It was his ideas signature move; if he’d been a cartoon character instead of our boss, a little light bulb would have pinged and flashed in a cloud above his head.


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No wonder I like the 'Carry On' films - Williams looking down, literally, on a cast of stereotypes including Charles Hawtrey as a sparrow-chested wimp and Kenneth Connor's snivelling coward. Joan Sims and Barbara Windsor provide the excuse for smutty innuendoes. The double-entendres come just as thick and fast, the jokes with time-honoured targets, but William's voice is a joy, either staccato or sliding through several octaves like some infinitely felixible stringed instrument, equally suited to playing gravelly uppercrusters or self-important shop-assistants.



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The beginning of a novel, and how to go about it, poses some interesting problems (for me at least). There is a popular school of thought that says that you need a momentous opening: a dead body, a car crash, a fight, the loss of a loved one, the accidental detonation of a small thermo-nuclear device in a packed marketplace...you get the picture.
The belief is that without an opening of this sort, you could lose the reader before the story has had any chance of developing. Certain genres lend themselves to this more than others: you need a dead body early on in a crime thriller, a relationship breakdown is a good way to kick off a rom-com, a heart-stopping and intense scene involving supernatural creatures would be a doozy of a way to kick off an adventure-horror, like…

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