Ick. Just got in from the dentist's. I have gained some metal in my mouth and a numb face. Seriously, half of my bottom lip and chin I cannot feel. Weird. And I've been told (I'd forgotten about this bit) that I can't eat for two hours. And I am hungry. Curses.

On the bright side, I think I've almost finished the Very Short story I've been working on this week. Does The Lamp Timer sound like a good title to you good folks? I get the feeling I might need to don my thinking cap. Not that I'd feel it.

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Some moments of joy this morning when I realised that a delightful person - who I suspect is probably the doctor at the University Health Centre who enjoys taking my dark stuff on holiday with her, God bless you, Vicky - has bought a copy of A Dangerous Man (see full post for links) from its Amazon listing. Delightfully, this meant that for a few brief minutes I was actually in the Amazon gay fiction charts - ye gods, Carruthers, somebody pass me the smelling salts as I've never been there before ... Okay, it was in the late 70s in the list and has now sadly vanished but I'm hanging on to my moment of chart glory with all my might. Hell, wouldn't you? ...


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Inspired, as I always am, by Clare, I thought I would try and find three beautiful things to say today, in the face of such tragedy, in the face of the fact that the baby I mentioned turned out to be the child of the cousin of a friend, and her mother, who had tried and tried for a child, saved her daughter by handing her out of the window of the car seconds before she herself was crushed and killed by the rampaging bulldozer driver.....

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My ten year old daughter is in an inventors' club at school. She spends most of her spare time jotting down ideas for inventions, and the rest of it trying to actually make them. She says she's quite good at coming up with inventions but what she finds hard is thinking of problems people might have that need solving (by means of a new invention). So she is always asking us to tell her the problems we face in our lives, so she can think of an invention to help us.

Yesterday I gave her a few of my own problems to work on. I was trying to think of things that might conceivably be solved by something a 10 year old could invent and successfully make. That turned out to be a big mistake, because when I stopped patronising her and told her a real live problem - one that I was convinced would be impossible to solve - her face lit up immediately and she said: "I can invent something for that!"


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It is just over three months to lift-off, and the publicity juggernaut is revving up.

By that I mean that Pauline has sent me a list of things that I should do. “I see that Black Kids’ second single went straight in at number thirty-six,” she added. “Nice job picking them as the next big thing.”

“Are you marketing them on the side?” I email her back.


Picking an item from the list at random, I call my local library. I have no idea where my local library is, having never belonged to one, but the Internet directs me to Acton. An Indian man answers the phone.

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Have spent most of the day attempting to look normal and welcoming (God, but that's one hell of an effort, I can tell you) at the University's Open Day. Had an initial moment of terror when I turned up at 9am to discover our Student Care Services table was completely bereft of all literature and minus a pull-up stand with our name on it. It turned out that nobody had turned up as asked for to get our boxes of literature so the Student Advice team and I did it ourselves. That still didn't solve the problem of who the hell had stolen our name stand, so Student Advice and the Marketing Team spent the whole morning attempting to search for it. This meant that people wandering round had no idea who we were supposed to be and we kept having to tout our wares in the time-honoured fashion of shouting and gesticulating. The problem was finally solved by Les from Counselling who remembered that the Health Centre had taken the stand for one of their events, so he went and retrieved it himself. Gawd bless you, Les ...


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A lovely review of Thorn in the Flesh (see full post for links) from Vicki Tyley who was kind enough to say the following:

“Quite simply, it was wonderful – intense, emotional and suspenseful, even dark, with a satisfying ending.”

Many thanks, Vicki - much appreciated! Your comments have seen me through today's team Away Day, which we spent at the Manor House Conference Centre in Godalming - so only a three minute drive, hurrah. I must admit a large part of the discussions were beyond me: if I hear the word "strategy" or "framework" more than three times, my brain implodes - purely as a safety mechanism. Indeed I think I may have entered some kind of coma a couple of times during the morning, but it may have been the heat. Which wasn't helping. Only the fact that I was taking basic minutes kept me alert. I even got quite tearful during the late morning individual exercise when I sat in the garden, stared out at the woods and longed to be at home. Sigh. Nice food though - and the peanut butter icecream at lunch was fabulous ...


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I realised sadly a few weeks ago that I was going to have to go to France to research the new novel. This is, of course, the worst possible aspect of the writing life: that we can travel to beautiful or at least interesting places, and set off the whole lot, from the first cup of coffee at the airport, by way of hotel bills, entry tickets and photo printing costs, to the last steak-frites, against tax. I remember saying to my father that it seemed odd that Ian Fleming had suddenly upped and set a whole James Bond novel, You Only Live Twice, in Japan. 'I expect he fancied a tax-free holiday there,' said my father. These days I know enough about Fleming (though some things I rather wish I didn't) to know that it wasn't quite as simple as that, but the point stands.

So I don't expect anyone to sympathise when I say that this kind of research isn't without its difficulties.

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I’ve found a fantastic site for procrastinating called, Protagonize. Collaborate to your heart’s content. I’ve tried to get my fellow writers at WF in Writewords to play with this kind of thing but they never do, or keep anything up I begin. So I’m in clover; I’ve only been a member there for two days and I’ve got two stories running and have joined in a couple of others – now this could be very addictive but at least it is actual writing!

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I came out of one site where I'd been trying to source linen bags for a client and idly tapped YUCKETYPOO into the search box. I nearly fell off my chair! There were pages of it, in everything from French to Japanese and who knows what all in between. If news of the book is hitting foreign book sites likes these, why aren't I earning more commission from it? I was flattered, horrified and completely astonished all at once. So then I tried Yahoo and there it was again! So it does look as if word is steadily creeping through, despite the fact that I often feel completely disconnected from it because I hear so little about what is actually happening.


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