Phillipa Ashley is a freelance copywriter/journalist and talented author of contemporary romantic fiction. Her first novel won the Romantic Novelist Association’s Joan Hessayon New Writers Award, and The Little Black Dress imprint will publish her latest book, ‘It Should Have Been Me’, today!


Which 3 writers, dead or alive, would you invite to dinner?
Jane Austen, Ian Rankin and Bill Bryson

Favourite desktop snack?
My daughter’s home made cakes or a Snickers flapjack.

Longhand first or straight to computer?
Straight to computer unless I’m on holiday. Otherwise longhand.

A writer should never…
Let other people’s prejudices prevent them from writing the kind of books they want to.



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On Monday I was at the Royal Society, as Pepys might have said, always being at the cutting edge of the establishment of his day, for the launch of a book co-written by a friend of mine, Nicholas Beale, with the particle physicist Professor John Polkinghorne. I've not often been to that wonderfully grand, white building in Carlton House Terrace, but I never cease to be awed - once I've recovered from entering under the gaze of its founder, one of my favourite monarchs, Charles II - at the history of science which surrounds you: Newton looking mad, Faraday looking sensible, Wren, Hooke, Davy, Huxley, Kelvin, Rutherford, and so on, portrait after portrait, room after room. The book, Questions of Truth, is about the interface between two belief systems which attempt to make sense of the universe: religion and science. And the launch took the form of a fascinating panel discussion between distinguished scientists, none of whom had any difficulty in reconciling the two by virtue of having thought long and hard and clearly about what that reconciliation consisted of. There were then questions from the floor, which were, for the most part, civilised and scholarly versions (as befitted a room and a platform full of FRSs) of the usual debates.

But one answer really caught my interest. The question concerned the reductiveness of a certain kind of science, which believes that everything which matters about the world and human experience can - or will be - explained, if we can only break things down into small enough particles. And one of the speakers described how Nobel laureate physicist Martin Nowak has said that science has spent the last forty years doing just that, and now it's time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again: to reassemble everything that we now understand so much better, and try to see what we've actually got, and how it explains the world we experience.


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I've been thinking a lot lately about why I write. Like any good narrative psychologist I automatically turned to the story of my life and tried to remember when I first loved writing. I cast my mind back to school, as far back as I could remember into the blue and green splattered paint, the sparkling new decimal coins in their blue plastic folder and the tick-tick-tick of a measuring wheel until I reached a poem.
I was six years old and I wrote this poem:

In winter trees are bare
And robins are in the air
Children sledge on a hill
Hurray, hurray,
Off, off and away.
And what a lovely sight,
Snowflakes are falling
All gentle and white.

I can remember my teacher blushing pink and taking the poem from me, asking my mother who had written it. Of course, she too thought I had copied it from somewhere and rushed me home to scan the only poetry book we owned, by Patience Strong. I was punished for lying about that poem. I did write it.



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The publicity and posters and listings and stuff for the local festival are all out. Which is good for raising awareness and promoting the festival and the great people coming here to read and perform.

But.

It's also meant that over the past couple of weeks, since said promo's been out there, I've been asked what I'm doing for the festival, more and more, - a question quickly followed by: Why Not?

When I was first asked it was easy to be polite and diplomatic. But as I'm getting the same question more frequently it's becoming that little bit more difficult to maintain that level of un-grumpiness. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind people asking, I'm certainly not grumpy with them. I just wish I could tell them something more positive. Something other than I'd have loved to be involved and I did try.

Some of you might remember I drew a line under it a little while ago.

Anyway.

On a more positive note, I'm back on the radio tomorrow (at a little after 10 am - you can listen online) via telephone, burbling more about the World Book Day event, which starts at 11.

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I was recently interviewed by Falcata Times (I knew I'd make it into the FT one day) about how I came to write Changeling, what my influences were, my loves and hates, my favourite characters to write for, and how fish show me nothing but disdain.

To get a pre-publication look at the interview, you can go to

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Yes, Ghent is fabulous and not because it seems to have a chocolate-shop-to-person ratio of 1:1, but because it has a coffee shop with Free WiFi!

Yay, back to my own keyboard, back to Google and Facebook not in Flemish (that was tough). I came here for the day, and despite the persistent drizzle, had a lovely wander in the older part of town, which has, of course, been overtaken by MacDonalds et al, but still retains great charm.

Unfortunately, the anxiety I have been suffering from for the past few months at home, related to the thyroid and hormone fluctuations, has followed me here. It means, as a very wise friend told me, that where before I may have felt a tiny amount of anxiety in, say, a new place, now that the anxiety "tap" has been loosened, that same situation releases a flood of it. It's strange and uncomfortable, but being online and doing the things I am used to doing definitely helps calm me. I am sure it will pass, as I get the hormonal and glandular stuff under control.

A quick, highly scientific observation from three days in Belgium: all the people, almost without exception, are skinny. Not slim, skinny. And there are chocolates everywhere. Conclusion: chocolate makes you thin. You heard it here first.........

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It's always good to set yourself new challenges.
Generally, I get thoroughly enthused and start a good five or so at a time. This week, it's my new Word Count Per Week challenge, my Exercise Everyday challenge (does walking to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet count?), my Keep on Top of the Washing Up challenge (cheating by buying a dishwasher ha ha), my Blog More Often challenge (working well, thank you) and my Write Something Different challenge.

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Your wedding dress, that is? Or top hat and tails? Bear with me, fellow writers - this is relevant to our craft…

A couple of weeks ago I fetched my wedding dress down from the loft. I hadn’t fitted it on since my wedding day, more than a decade ago. Finally the time had come to swish around in front of my daughter, show her what Mum had looked like for real, instead of in fancy photos. I mean my weight’s more or less the same, give or take a few pounds; my height hasn’t shrunk (yet) and my hair’s still blonde. To the outsider, to me even, there was no apparent reason why it shouldn’t slip on. So I undressed and stepped into the cream puff creation, trying not to tread on the skirts, beaming at my daughter as she helped me hike it up, imagining I’d look like one of those celebs on the cover of OK Magazine or Hello!

Folks, you’ve probably guessed the rest. We heaved, we hoed, but the zipper just wouldn’t budge. ‘It must be jammed!’ I cried as I breathed in hard and my daughter pulled together the seams, straining to do it up. But it was no use, the zip stuck fast at about ten inches from the top. Sheepishly I turned around, red in the face, looking like a half-peeled banana that was just about to fall out...



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It is with great difficulty that I type this - not because of any physical impairment, but because the keyboard in the local library here in the Belgian town of Poperinge has moved the keys around. "A" is in the top left corner, "M" is off the right)hand side, the full stop requires you to press "shift", as do the numbers. It is slowing me down considerably so this will be short.

Wow!

(How is that for short?)

I am here to take up the prize I won in last year's Biscuit Publishing Flash Fiction competition (this year's deadline is April 30th) a week at Talbot House, set up during World War I as a haven for British soldiers amidst the carnage and misery, an "Everyman's Club", a sanctuary. The house has been beautifully preserved and now guests can come and sleep in the bedrooms which used to house the soldiers. I am extremely fortunate to be in the General's Bedroom:
.......

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I stuck my head out of the window and waved until my arms ached and my mother and little sister became specks on the platform. The early April day was gentle, the train warm, but there was no way I was going to risk another passenger pinching my black suede bikers’ jacket with its swanky red sateen lining from the overhead luggage rack. No way. No way Jose. I slumped down on the mottled blue velour seat, propping my pointy-toed boots on the edge of the bench opposite, and slid a cassette into my knock-off Walkman.


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