What a fabulous holiday - we've had a seriously great time. And that in spite of the rain, which didn't dampen our spirits one jot, hurrah. Pause now for Boring Birder Moment (AKA BBM): we've seen 15 new birds in Norfolk, double hurrah! Including the bearded tit (my target bird for the week and identified by ... um ... me, even before our tour expert for the day could get to it), a spotted redshank, eider ducks, yellow wagtails, marsh harriers, reed bunting, gannet, a red-legged partridge, two golden pheasants, a ruff, several whimbrels, a sandwich tern, a willow warbler, two tree creepers and two yellowhammers. Well gosh! And yellowhammers really do sing: a little bit of bread and no cheeee-eese. Right in front of us on top of a bush too, Gawd bless it ...


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A few days ago, the British press went loopy over a debut author. Her name is Lorna Page, but that’s not what the papers were calling her. No – her proper media name is “93-year-old Lorna Page.”

So she was born 93 years ago and happens not to have died in the meantime. To the press, however, this means that she is a sweet little old lady (where did all the big, nasty old ladies go?) who has been ever so clever and amazingly compos mentis enough to write a whole novel all by her little old self.



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For a while now I've been considering starting another blog, or blog type thing. It would be a place where people could share what they love, whatever that might be, anonymously. But, aside from suggesting people put their loved things in a comment box, for me to upload onto the main page after, I've no idea how it would work.

Any thoughts?

Anyway, I think, if I were to start it, that this is how it would begin:

I love, that moment before a shiver.

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I've just been reminded what a tremendously useful book this is (I was describing someone as a 'let-down' and needed to know whether the hyphen was correct. It is.). Writers, if you don't already own a copy, I'd give serious thought to putting that right.
***
I'm about three quarters through type-setting the stories and poems for my writing group's collection (I finished proofing and editing them yesterday).

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My mother was a Mantle-machinist; that means she made the whole coat – she didn’t do piece-work…in fact she sneered at piece-work. I always got the idea that she felt powerful because of her skills; I know that she worked to her own timetable and her boss let her away with murder, apparently. I vaguely remember the mention of a company called Silvers. (for security purposes I will give my parents new names). Mum can be Queenie and Dad shall be Father Ted – but he wasn’t Irish or priestly.

She made most of our clothes. One of my jobs was to rock the treadle for her sewing machine, though I don’t suppose I did it for more than a few minutes. I couldn’t wait to try on her creations, especially when the dresses had a beautifully long and wide sash that tied in a great bow in my back; there’s a red one in my memory that I never tired of twisting at the mirror to see.


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The agent called yesterday. So it wasn't an outright, 'Flawless! Let's storm the publishing world!' but it was the next best thing.

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- and then three come along at once. Well, more than three, actually. One of the things they don't tell you about the author's life (as opposed to the writing life) is that it's ninety-nine percent boredom and only one percent... anything at all. Sometimes when people ask me to talk to their reading group, or whatever, they say 'I know how busy you must be', and I suspect they have a vision of me in one long merry-go-round of readings and signings and festivals and power-lunches and so on. Well, maybe five books down the line I shall be, and maybe the writers who turn out a book a year are, but meanwhile there are huge stretches when absolutely nothing happens in my professional book-trade life, however much is going on in my head. True, on my way to France I found a wodge of The Mathematics of Love face out in Foyles at St Pancras, and my US editor told me that she thought I'd done 'a marvellous job' on the revisions for that edition of A Secret Alchemy, but you can't feed on those forever.

So it was rather amazing that the following things all happened yesterday:

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Any discussion about the rules of writing can be cleared up by the catch-all solution: You can get away with anything, as long as you do it well. The use of the present tense is the perfect example.

In spite of all the reasons why present tense makes me wary, it is, after all, a natural way of telling stories. To take my favourite piece of overheard dialogue, which I remember from several years ago in a Chinese restaurant:

“The bloke who does my tattoos, right? He actually breeds scorpions, yeah? So anyway he gets this scorpion – it’s like the size of a baby rabbit – and says he’ll give the kid a tenner if he picks it up by the tail…”



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As well you know, I don't write book reviews. What I do do though, is mention ones I think are good. And that's exactly what I'm going to do now.


I read Out Of A Clear Sky, by Sally Hinchcliffe over the weekend. It is a remarkably good book, one I thoroughly enjoyed and wouldn't hesitate to recommend. It's a thriller, but in no way over the top. It's believable and it's creepy; it's scary and tender and delightfully written.

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One concern about a sports-themed novel that does give me sleepness nights is the stat that shows that a majority of novels are bought by women, while men watch a lot more sport than women. Now if you judge a book by its cover and 'Cheetah' shrieks sport, it may be a hard sell. It's going to be a tricky one to get right.
But I'm obviously hoping women won't be put off. The story is a human drama about stolen love, among other things.

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