i am 14 years old and have planned out my first 'large book' at what i hope to be around 100 pages long but cant think of a good way to start it.

my plans for the start of the story are:
a boy has bean bullied all his life at school because he is 'exentric'.
he is under grate preasure.
he runs off one day to a forest.

I enjoyed the film but was fidgeting by the end, being unaccustomed to sitting with my knees drawn up towards my ears. I may have been an Empress in a former life but I don't have the physique for crouching.

Never mind – looking forward to canapés and wine at a new Chinese exhibition opening tomorrow.


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It's been one of those weeks when various bits of ideas from various places have coalesced. First, I've been revising my PhD commentary, and found myself trying to pin down how and why I feel that the first half of Atonement, while beautifully written and intelligent and all the other things you expect of McEwan, just, for me, edges into a cliché which I've called long-hot-summer-before-the-war. You all know the kind of cliché I mean, but maybe I'm not being fair to the book: is long-hot-summer-before-the-war so well-established that McEwan's playing with the convention, rather than falling into it? In which case, could we actually call it a literary trope, and talk about how he handles it, rather than whether he should have handled it at all?

And then you might remember that when I was talking about procrastination (and again in The Other Novel) I quoted the idea that 'symptoms are universal, causes are particular'. And that thought came up again when a piece on Vulpes Libris, Five Things I hate About Chicklit, bred a spin-off thread on WriteWords.

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A short unedited extract from my NANO which has a working title of Running on Empty.

Another blue tit landed on the hawthorn branch then hopped onto the bag of black sunflower seeds, nodding this way and that. The robin dropped out of the lilac onto the terracotta tray that held the mixed seed and the sound of a train’s whistle startled them both and they flew off. [more ...]

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I watched The Future is Unwritten last night, the Julien Temple film/tribute to the late Joe Strummer. And it was excellent. Anyway, I found this interview clip earlier and a few things struck a chord, so I thought I'd share.

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Life is strange and beautiful. It is such a cliche that we can be surrounded by thousands of people yet be really lonely. I sometimes wonder if that is because we are too lost in ourselves. I wonder what would happen if one were to reach out to another in such circumstances? Sometimes we are bitten and become twice shy. Sometimes it's just easier to stay in one's own shell. I think there is a certain security in it. I wish this wasn't true. It is difficult to make other people like you. I have met so many people this year - lovely, interesting stimulating people. I have really wanted to get to know them more - find out what makes them tick. It hasn't worked out that way. Socially awkward is a term that springs to mind. Other people are so interesting. I would love to spend all day finding out one person's story. I had honey and lemon today...so sweet and fresh.

Great fun last night when a fly unexpectedly surfaced in the flat and Lord H attempted to tackle it with a spanner. Which was all he had in his hand at the time (well, the saga of the unforthcoming radiators continues apace …). Seemed a little overkill to me but hey we got the beast in the end, aha. That showed it.

Anyway, talking of peace and love to all living things (ho ho), here’s this morning’s meditation poem:

Meditation 9

Carry nothing with you
when you go.

Let the air drift round you
untrammelled

and do not take
what you cannot restore.

When you return
shake free

even the dust
that clogs your feet

and breathe.


At work, I am now neck-deep (possibly higher) in the rejigging of the personal tutors’ handbook ...


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And as Christmas is now less than a month away, I have got to say how very impatient I am for the Christmas break to begin so that I can write and write and write and work on my new project. Who knows - maybe next year, I really will be able to cut the hours at the day job and do what I am meant to be doing with my life. Well - I can live in hope, can't I? Maybe I will drop Santa a letter - how should it go? Oh yes ... Santa baby, forgot to mention one little thing.......

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I’d asked to be further back after nearly getting my eyebrows singed in ‘Zorro’, but I found that in the New Theatre, Drury Lane, Row D is the front row. R said he missed one key point entirely – a slogan painted on a briefly appearing backdrop. It was because we were looking upwards at an angle. A bit nerve-racking too when the Roman soldiers were using their lances for impromptu kung fu fights - even more attention-grabbing than Ian MacKellan’s full frontal as ‘King Lear’ in the same theatre.


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The fifth stop on my round-the-world virtual book tour is New Zealand author Tim Jones' blog, Books in the Trees. We're chatting about interstitital fiction, fiction which falls between genres... as well as books, trees, and the number 27! A taster:.................

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