Sid, my agent, calls me from his office at seven am. “Christopher!” he announces cheerfully.

“This better be good,” I mumble, my brain sending out surveillance probes to assess the extent of my hangover.

“Oh, is it early again?” he says. “Sorry mate, don’t mean to keep waking you up.”

“Why are you always at work so early anyway?”

“Well, I share hot water with the other flats in my building and a couple of times it’s run out in the middle of my shower so I’ve started getting up before anyone else to beat them to it. Unfortunately a few of them are road sweepers. So I’m up at four every day now.”

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NANO Excerpt II

Outside the hoar frost ran the length of the washing line. Birds flitted from branch to branch and from fat ball to seeds to peanuts before flying across the garden and into the conifer tree. The weather forecast said it would be clear today and sunny but the freezing fog which had appeared last night hung about the garden ... [more]

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Her large brown eyes swivelled towards classmate Pam, who piped up. ‘And then one day, it suddenly clicks and you get a breakthrough’. Zadie nodded as if she knew exactly what we meant, then laughed and said she’d stick to Italian, as that was difficult enough for her. Remembering my manners, I asked what she was working on at present and learned she’d been awake until 4am finishing a talk she had to deliver in New York the next day. As she moved off, I explained to Pam that the life of a successful writer involved a lot of time-consuming publicity.


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Book videos have been the in thing for the last couple of years, and I’m rather keen to make one. I am, however, in two minds about it. As a Z-list author, I can’t justify spending thousands of pounds hiring a professional company, and yet if I cobble together a trailer myself will it be so tacky it’ll actively put people off buying the book?

I’ve already made a few lame attempts at a video, just to get to know Windows Movie Maker, but as publication draws nearer, it’s time to start taking the idea more seriously. I’ve made a list of pros and cons that I hope will be helpful to other authors thinking of jumping on the trailer bandwagon.

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I feel like I'm dying - although I have been diagnosed by most of the women around me as suffering from "man-flu". I hate being ill, because being ill means being lazy with no choice. If I'm going to be lazy I at least want to do it on my own terms!

It's a well known thing amongst writers that we get some of our best ides in less than ideal situations - on the toilet, at 3am, at work, or when we're stumbling home plastered after a night out. Last night, inbetween my nose exploding, immense coughing fits and my throat feeling like a beefy, angry lumberjack has shoved a chainsaw down it, I ended up thinking various pieces of writing that I wanted to start, continue, or finish. I was ticking over some of my better past works and thinking of how I could renew them. Just general thoughts. I think one of the main problems with me (and you can say this goes for life and not just my writing) is that I think about doing something but I don't act on it for fear of cocking it up.

Well it's time to take a bit of a more confident attitude to things and just get on with things, and see what happens. Let the chips fall where they may.

Ja ne~

The real star was Mark Strong, playing a kind of Jordanan James Bond with suits to match. His lean grace and brooding glances enhanced every scene he appeared in. Fortunately there were plenty. The plot’s better than ‘Syriana’, in that I could at least follow it. Amazing establishing shots such as barren Afghanistan mountains roads or the high-rise hotels of a Dubai cityscape were impressive, but never overwhelmed the storyline.

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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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