Sometime during the third week of November - just after my NaNoWriMeltdown - I decided to resurrect a novel I wrote in 2006, which had been 'resting' (which in this case is another term for not being able to even contemplate reading a single line of it because it marked the end of an Almost Very Exciting period in my writing life)...



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In David Morley's review of Mimi Khalvati's new collection he quotes Theodore Roethke:

"Form is not regarded as a neat mould to be filled, but rather as a sieve to catch certain kinds of material."

And though I'd never thought of it like that, and it's more obviously relevant to poetry, I was struck by how true this is. My Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory defines form in a literary work as "its shape and structure and the manner in which it is made."

In poetry form shows up as the shape on the page and patterns within the sense and sound of the words. In prose fiction it's something a bit harder to spot.

I've had funny looks when I've said that in planning a novel it's thinking about form and structure that I really enjoy.

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Here we are at Post No 5 and I've discovered something strange about the dark art of blogging: with the exception of the first post, which I started writing the day before I began this blog (yes, calendar buffs, that does indeed mean on New Year’s Eve, which, as a partying opportunity, I generally dislike almost as much as I love Christmas), it turns out that every time I've sat down to write a blog entry, I have ended up talking about something entirely different to whatever it was that I originally had planned.

Take Monday’s post, for example. I thought I'd be sitting down to write about my day's work at the library on Sunday - the exploits of Angry Man, the 'My Newspaper!' 'No, Mine!' twins, and the 'Why Does Your Printer Hate Me So?' and 'You’ll Prise That 30p From My Cold, Dead Hands, I Tell You!' women. Instead, the one time that I was really ready for them and poised to take notes, Attenborough-style, as the various Mentalists (affectionately nicknamed – though obviously not to their faces, since neither I nor my colleagues have any kind of death wish) went about their library-related business/madness, they decided, en masse, to behave.

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Up early this morning, dammit, as I had a doctor's appointment at 8.40am. 8.40am!! Why do I do this to myself? Am I insane?? No, don't answer that. It might incriminate me ... Anyway, I picked another doctor this time rather than the souped-up bitch queen I saw before, as I vaguely remembered he might have been nice from when I saw him a couple of years ago. He was too. In spite of being only 9 years old, he actually listened, agreed to write out a prescription for my oh-God-make-me-normal oestrogen dose, and told me that my blood pressure was fine. He also thought that the HRT might not be affecting my teeth after all, but I should ask the specialist when I see her next week. So, thank you, Dr B! I have now marked him down as one of the nice ones at the surgery and I will make sure to ask for him next time I have to go ...

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I've been thinking quite a bit over these past few days about the power of emotion in words.

I mean you can write something, that isn't particularly well written, (in the writery craft sense) and it can have a big effect on someone. Be it a small poem to cheer a homesick friend up, or an UnMadeUp piece about being spooked about something you've seen but can't explain. The emotion, the truth you express through these things can be affecting and, in some cases, deeply powerful and moving. Maybe that's because the emotion, feeling and point of writing it is obvious and clear.

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Why am I not writing as much as I want to? Well, here are a few reasons:

Podcasts

Yes, I may be the last person in the Western World, but finally I too am the proud owner of a cute little just-bigger-than-an-aspirin iPod Nano 3G. I resisted for so long, but then succumbed because I realised that working out in the new gym I just joined (more on that later) would be a lot more bearable with my own music rather than the booming soundtrack the gym favours. Little did I know that it wouldn't be music that I would be listening to but... Podcasts. How amazing they are! In a few days I have found the BBC Radio 5 Book Panel with Simon Mayo, Guardian Books Podcast, the NewYorker Fiction podcasts, Radio 4 Front Row Highlights, the NY Times Book update, the NewScientist podcast,, Ny Times Talks, and the The BBC World service World Book Club!

Heaven... There I am on the treadmill, pounding away, an interview with Phillip Pullman going on in my head, or giggling to Simon Mayo and friends reviewing a book about Genghis Khan, or Jumpa Lahiri reading and discussing a William Trevor short story that was published in the NewYorker thirty years ago....

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Firstly I'd like to draw your attention to Vanessa Gebbie's blog - especially her last post (January 9th) as I think what she's doing is both incredibly interesting and hard. Editing a passage from a novel into a short story is serious business.

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Last year I wrote a Rap Sheet post about a number of my fellow historical crime novelists who happen to be practically neighbors of mine, in the Highgate-Crouch End-Stoke Newington triangle of North London. The writers in question are Lee Jackson, Andrew Martin, and Frank Tallis. After that post went up, Andrew and I did a joint reading at a leading North London independent book store, the Muswell Hill Bookshop. Sometime later, the four of us met up at the annual Bodies in the Bookshop event in Heffers, Cambridge. I also met Frank for a drink at the famous Flask Pub in Highgate, just a short stroll from his millionaire mansion and within spitting distance of a house Sting was once reputed to inhabit.

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Television-man and Desmond Lynan lookalike James Rycarte arrives for his new job: as “Mistress” of an all-woman’s Cambridge college, the fictitious St Radegunds.

Here he finds himself beset by problems: the library is falling down, the students are on strike, research stipends cut, and he is swamped by divided committees where the fiery Feminist Marxist academics take on financial administrators happy to be propped up by money from land-mines.

Unsurprisingly the fiery Feminist Marxists aren’t too happy about the appointment of a man to head up St Radegunds either, and the hapless James finds himself besieged on every side.

Enter Martha: the brown-eyed, lip-munching forty-something Senior Tutor: moral to the core, loyal to a tee and the one true adviser he has to guide him through the quagmire of college politics. But Martha has her own problems at home and with her own career and her sense of self. She needs to be needed, but does not know what to do when her teenage daughter really does need her and is threatening to go off the rails.

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And it's come to this:

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