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.

Read Full Post

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 ...

Read Full Post

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.

Read Full Post

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.


Read Full Post

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 ...

Read Full Post

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'.

Read Full Post

I live in a ground floor flat in Ealing Common between two of the loudest households in Britain and below a young couple whose chief preoccupation appears to be dropping heavy objects on the floor.

Cheryl and I are sitting in our living room sipping wine and straining to hear our television above the cacophony surrounding us. DVDs seem to be mixed with the dialogue approximately three times quieter than the music and sound effects, and as the plot unfolds on The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and I edge the volume slowly upwards to a comfortable level, suddenly Reggie imagines his mother-in-law as a hippopotamus and the bassoon goes ‘wah-wah’ and the audience erupts in deafening laughter, the room shakes and the baby upstairs wakes up and screams. Oh, did I mention the baby upstairs? He’s one and he likes to run around and bang on windows. And, of course, he has been blessed with the dropping-heavy-objects-on-the-floor gene.

Read Full Post

Sorry, I've been working like a dog all day and there's no space in my brain for a snappy title. I'm ... um ... dog-tired. God, sorry. That's bad, even for me, but I can't be arsed to retype.

Have had my eyes glued to the computer and my fingers glued to the keyboard all day doing Thorn in the Flesh edits for Goldenford. I've done all the actual changes now, but am going through the styles so it's set in the desired format and - at the same time - redoing the traumas of the disastrous "search and replace" mistake I did on the speech quotes earlier in the day ...

Read Full Post

Sunday I went to Cardiff in the hope of buying new shoes. Shoes and I have a love hate relationship. I love high boots with high heels but my feet loathe that elegant footwear. So I trailed around every shoe shop, eyeing up the goods, knowing that none were suitable. Fed up, I found myself in Waterson's and there, stretching out in front of me were books, books, and more books. "Buy 2 get 1 free," tags screamed at me pinkly. So I bought 6 and returned home shoeless but happy.

Lord H and I have spent a marvellous day admiring the birds at Dungeness. Which were stunning, I must say. New birds spotted today: a smew (they're sooo lovely - all white with tracings of black. Wonderful!); a goldeneye; a hen harrier; Bewley's swans; possible divers, though it was hard to say; and a barn owl. The latter being an extra special treat as I navigated us along the wrong road on the way out and we saw it as we turned round. Goodness me, what a star I am indeed. It was all planned of course ...

Read Full Post