This flash of mine, Mug's game, went live over at Every Day Fiction a couple of days ago. Please do pop along and read, and leave a comment if you do. Thanks.

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Now that college work is out of the way (well, mostly) I thought it was time to clear my mind and search for some inspiration, something to fire up a creative mind. A camping trip! ...

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It seems the ‘expressing the block’ thing worked. I managed to finish a tricky chapter this weekend and plunge a fair way into another, barely looking up from the keyboard. I think it’s a good thing to sometimes find yourself daunted by your work, otherwise it becomes too easy, you grow lazy, and you’re probably not doing your best. Some of the greatest advice I ever received in regard to my writing was: ‘Enjoy it. If you’re not enjoying it, it will show on the page’...


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Just back from wonderful Portugal and have started the no-doubt week-long traul through the washing. I am convinced that we are actually doing the washing of the whole boat (sorry, ship) and they will sneak in the flat when we've done it and send it back to its original owners.

Anyway, Portugal is wonderful and the river life and people are so much nicer than in Lisbon. It's very relaxing just staring at the countryside go by, and having smiling servants provide you with wonderful meals and historical tid-bits. Fabulous. Particular highlights for me included the different birdlife ...

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Oh dear, oh dear, time does slip by during half term. What with having family to stay, and an editorial report to write, and a PhD chapter to finish, and vast quanties of reading for that and the new novel, and a big update for my website about A Secret Alchemy - temporary cover, extract, reading-group-questions, how-I-came-to-write-it and all - the poor blog's been going hungry.

A truly superb production of Pygmalion at the Old Vic is one of my better excuses. I know the play pretty well, and it never fails to be good value, but here was a subtlety of thinking and acting I've never seen used on such an old warhorse of a play.

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Dear Kitty,

Since my ex left me at the altar, I’ve become addicted to horoscopes. I have a few trusted suppliers: Shelley Von Strunckel; Jonathan Cainer; Russell Grant…ah Russell, I have warmed to your cuddly charms.

Is it wrong to wait up until 12.01am to get my horoscope for the next day? Wait, don’t answer that.

Okay, do.

Because I’m afraid it’s getting out of hand. I refer to the Mercury retrograde in polite conversation. I’m tempted to ring a premium rate phone line for my annual report. And last week I called up my ex because Jonathan Cainer told me to. Well, he said: “You are due to make a breakthrough in your personal life” which amounts to the same thing, right?

Wait, don’t answer that.

Okay, do.

Starstruck, Brighton



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Lovely news that I can now share with you all - I am one of three winners of the Biscuit Flash Fiction competition! When I entered I was desperately hoping I might get somewhere because the prize is a week's writing retreat in a small town in Belguim, plus 200 pounds spending money. A cash prize is always very welcome, don't get me wrong, but it's very unlikely that were they to have just given cash I would have decided to spend it on a week's writing retreat. Now I simply must go to Belgium, and I can't wait! (I think I have a year in which to go.)

Another lovely aspect to this is that I sent a very new story in which I tried a different writing technique/style from anything I had done before....

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I hate attention. I am uncomfortable with people crawling to me, treating me as though I am better than them, running after me like servants. At least, I imagine I would be if it happened. So I am surprised by my disappointment when I am not met by anyone at the sci-fi convention, and am merely left to wonder through Doncaster Leisure Centre in a bewildered and frustrated state.

I spent the morning and afternoon in the hotel pretending I wasn’t fighting the urge to be sick, as though admitting I was hung-over would confirm in Cheryl’s eyes that last night’s drunken behaviour was indeed as pathetic as we both know it was. At one point I even leapt off the bed and did twenty press-ups, even though alcohol-laced blood flooded into my brain and caused my vision to white out and a thin trail of bile to ooze up my throat. When I finished I disguised my desperate clinging to the wall for support with a leg stretch. At lunch I ordered a dry sandwich rather than the grease-mess I would normally gobble down in a pained frenzy, and left some of it even though my belly was still gurgling for nourishment. (Later I shoveled a family-sized packet of Kettle Chips into my mouth in the tiny hotel hot tub, ignoring the awful shouty kids standing on my legs and splashing chlorine onto my crisps).

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Around eight o'clock, the neuralgia hit me full force and at nine pm, Hubby woke me up from my slumber on the sofa and suggested I go to bed. I then slept twenty out of the next twenty-four hours. I was in dire pain all day Sunday (what I remember of it!) and all day Monday and knew as soon as I got up Tuesday that I was in no fit state to go to work. Finally I went back to the doctor today and she has signed me off for the rest of the week. There is an area about 2cm by 1cm on my left cheek that is swollen and inflamed and, although the pain has gone off quite a bit and my teeth are now functioning almost normally again, I know I am still not a hundred per cent. I am feeling a lot better though so Hubby snapped his fingers about 4pm this afternoon and said with tons of passion "Tomorrow you can write all day! It'll be good practice for when you can write full time. " So tomorrow, it looks like I'll be writing all day. Maybe I can even breathe life into The New Idea - it is surely far too good to keep simmering on the back burner.


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I just listened to a Guardian podcast of an interview with the wonderful Jim Crace, author of Quarantine, Being Dead, the Devil's Larder etc.... He has obviously spent time - or been asked a lot of questions which made him spend time - thinking about the writing process, and I wanted to bring in a few things he said about narrative. He was talking about Quarantine, his book in which Jesus is the main character. Jesus didn't start out as the main character, was only "supposed" to be briefly mentioned but, the way Crace tells it, some subconscious force changed the way Crace thought the book was going, and Jesus become the focus.

The subconscious exists in all the chambers of our world, particularly narrative. Narrative is ancient; human beings have been telling stories for thousands and thousands of years and we have become good at it. What that means is that when I, somebody who just has three score years and ten, and whose imprint on the world of narrative is going to be tiny in the grand scheme of things, when I sit down and start writing a story,there are thousands and thousands of years of narrative that have gone before, and thousands and thousands of narratives that have proven themselves before me. Narrative, of course, in that case... becomes wise. It learns a few things, it establishes protocols, it understands shape, it knows what works.

.........

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