Back at work today – on a Friday, arrgghhh!! – looking at the last of our website providers and also minuting the Student Induction Group over lunchtime. I hope to goodness they don’t say too much, or at least nothing that’s complicated, as I don’t have the emotional energy for complexity today. It’s been a heck of a busy week.

So much so that when I rushed into the kitchen last night to see if Lord H wanted help with the dinner, I found myself saying, as a kind of automatic work response: can I help you or shall I take a message? He stared at me for a few moments, blinked, and then said in his best, slow baritone, Reeee-laaax. Reee-laax. At which point, I flopped over like a rag doll and rested on the breakfast bar until light dawned in my brain. My, what fun we have in Godalming ...

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PD Publishing have sent me four samples of covers for Maloney’s Law – and the one which you can see if you click onto the full post (link below) is my favourite. I love it! Just how I’ve been imagining Paul all the while I was writing him. I might ask them to fiddle around with the London context, but we’ll see. Anyway, I’m thrilled.

At work, I’ve been in meetings (ones I don’t have to minute, hurrah!) all morning looking at possible new website providers. And there’s another one of these tomorrow, so we can’t make decisions yet. However, I favour the first guys, although the people with the power favour the second guys – even though they’re more expensive. Groan. Anyway, whatever we get will be better than what we have now so in any case we’ll be smiling. And it’ll be much more whizzy. Double hurrah ...

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Got up this morning, had my cup of tea. It was early, very early as usual and trying to be quiet, I came in here, looked at my email and wow! Bewildering Stories have accepted my story! But who could I tell at 5.30am? So I logged into Writewords and told the group. Y'vonne, bless her, sent me her congrats. The day seemed a lot brighter. The sun shone. Wonder what it would be like winning the Booker. Not that's there's a chance. Good thing, really, as my heart wouldn't be able to stand all the excitement.

I’m a great believer in things happening for a reason, but also that certain things come to you when you’re ready for them. In the latter case, I have to include Gene Wolfe. When I was a boy of about ten or eleven, I kept straying across The Shadow of the Torturer but for some reason, it always seemed a bit beyond my reading ability. I’ve recently picked these books up again off Amazon out of sheer curiosity and have been more than pleasantly surprised. They are quite simply amazing and I’ve hardly been able to put the omnibus (Fantasy Masterworks #1 Shadow & Claw) down. So there you go. I’m a brand new fan.

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For my talk at Goldsmiths this evening, I've been digging out extracts from the new novel which illustrate what I'm saying. I'd been slightly regretting saying I'd do the talk, though it's being very interesting to work on, simply because I'm so busy. But a nice side-effect is that, because of it, I've fallen in love with the novel again. That must sound a) very soppy and b) dangerously starry-eyed. Certainly it doesn't sound like the cool, rigorous self-editor, murdering darlings with relish, that all writers have to learn to be. Equally, it doesn't sound like that other cliché: the passionate author pouring heart and soul raw onto the page.

The thing is, you see, that I have felt quite often as if this novel and I are opponents, and all too often it's had the upper hand.

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Ye gods, but I've finished the Thorn in the Flesh final editing process, hurrah! And I've now sent it off to Jackie so she can work her PDF magic for the Goldenford lists. Phew ... It's always a relief to get this part done. The thrill of completion is very satisfying indeed.

In the meantime, I've been slogging away at work too - including dealing with a raft of emails and minuting the Student Affairs Committee this lunchtime, and adding in an extra meeting for the Registrar into the fast filling-up January schedules. Well, there's only three weeks of term left, so we have to get the academics now before they all escape ... Not only that, but I've actually started writing the damn lunchtime meeting up too. Though don't ask me what it was about. I only take the notes - I don't follow them ...

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Today has been spent printing and stapling. Not very glamorous or exciting you may think. You'd probably be right (especially if I told you that my printer was being silly and my stapler broke).

But why have I been printing and stapling? Well, it's because on Friday I'm heading up to a school in Rochdale to run some workshops and to open thier new school library. Which is very exciting and makes all the stapling, printing and falling out with my stapler and printer worth it.

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You turn your back for a moment, and half a week slips by without a post. There's nothing like the relief of having v-e-r-y n-e-a-r-l-y f-i-n-i-s-h-e-d the new novel (not quite, but we're getting there, fiddle by fiddle, tweak by tweak) for making me sit back and relax, disastrously. Here it is, Tuesday already, and all I've got to show for it is... well, quite a lot, really, and most of it to do with writing.

First there was Essay Clinic on Friday. I sit in a room high up in the tower at Goldsmiths, from which I can see from west of the London Eye to east of the Millennium Dome, so that the slave ship weather vane on Deptford Town Hall skims the dome of St Paul's and bisects Hampstead Heath. I line up my cup of coffee and Department Handbook and wait for English Department students to knock on the door and ask for help with their essays. And knock they do. I hope I usually manage to help. What's interesting is that if I ask the right questions, they so often turn out to know the answer to the problem they came in with after all. I'm sure there's another ruminative blog post in there, but it's not my week for ruminations: so much to do, and in so many different places...

Then there was a nice browse in the National Gallery, choosing postcards to get my seminar group writing in voices.


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Have spent the whole day knee-deep - no, neck-deep - in Thorn in the Flesh, and I'm now halfway through the final read-through. Phew! I'm hoping I'll be able to get it to Goldenford by the end of the week, but it depends on a variety of factors. Not the least being that my two days off from the University is now over, and alas I have to go to work for the next three days as of tomorrow. Groan ...

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I had the strangest dream last night. I was in London in this towering bookshop (the spiral staircases went up forever, manuscripts everywhere) that also doubled as my agent's lair and the 'just-so-happened to be' heart of the UK publishing industry. A leading author was there (except he was really a different leading author), and we were all getting on swimmingly until it transpired that I'd written (insert massively famous best-selling title here) as cheap 'fan fiction'.

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