Saw this on you tube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sjnie-aqYw

It s a trailer for a re-imaging of the Wizard of OZ from the Sci-fi channel.

Now the Sci-fi channel has done superb work with Battlestar Galactica, a truly marvelous series that has redifined the concept of spaceship drama. But I ma not sure if this is going to work. It looks like a formula concept, last seen in Sliders.

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I think the word muse is old-fashioned, and suggests that writers sit at their desks, always waiting for it...like a 49 bus; and it's just not true. Writers write, then they edit and then they write some more before putting it away. All the writers I know begin from a prompt or an old/existing piece of work; they don't really sit facing a blank screen/page - that's a cliché.


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Returned home this lunchtime from an interesting weekend of culture and countryside.

We drove north into Sherwood Forest on Saturday morning to take a look around Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home of the famous poet Lord Byron, that roguish smoker of opium and causer of scandals.

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Had an ace time at the Virginia Woolf play last night - such a weird and wonderful thing to do and very Godalming too. Mind you, the wine was rubbish. After one sip of Lord H's, I plumped for the orange juice. Still, he managed to drink it all, which was definitely beyond the call of duty. The play was good too - though I think Lord H enjoyed it more than I did. Lovely to pick up with a bit of Tennyson again though. One of the great poets of course ...

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I've just come across this, in a terrific book about the Short Story, and it seemed to me to encapsulate what we're all up to in writing fiction. Talking about how in many of the best short-story-writers' work - Borges, Poe, Maugham - specific subjects and techniques recur, Valerie Shaw says that

"Where originality comes over is in the skill with which a writer can simultaneously meet the demand for comforting sameness and divert it into new and often disturbing areas."

To traditional literary snobs only the new-and-disturbing is important in writing, and anything easy to apprehend is pap for the masses. To inverted literary snobs anything that's not one of the traditional pleasures of storytelling is so much high-falutin', deliberately obfuscatory nonsense. But what is a story but something we want to read? And why do we want to read it? Because we know that narrative - events and sensations that we at least partly recognise, arranged to have beginning, middle and end - gives us pleasure, and a familiar pleasure at that. And yet we also read stories to tell and show us new things, at least more exciting/funnier/more romantic versions of our own lives or, newer still to us, other worlds, other lives, other passions...

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Hey ho, I'm feeling surprisingly calm today. What an astonishment for us all indeed. It was great to be able to stop angsting for Britain (is it an Olympic sport, as I'm sure I'd be in with a chance ...?) and get out and play some really quite bad golf with Marian. The weather was great (yes, I know I sound like a postcard, but I'm getting into training for next week) and there was absolutely no-one else on the course but us. Weird. That has never happened before. We were so spooked by it that halfway round we began to wonder if aliens had landed and taken off all the other inhabitants of Godalming. And whether they planned to replace them with large, confident women with whicker (sp?) baskets. Bloody difficult to tell the difference then ...

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God, what a day. Another of those ones where I've felt extremely fragile and wondered why the hell when you interact with people face-to-face, they always have to come with knives. Is it just me or is everyone getting pricklier these days? Great title for my next book, eh ...

Anyway, I'd had way too much of people in all shapes and sizes last night so emailed the Counselling Centre to cancel my appointment with Kunu today - the phone being far too scary to contemplate and me feeling far too depressed to talk - which is probably like tidying up for your cleaner, but there you go ...

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I’d rather be a cleaner than a teacher; when people tramp all over your work they apologise, and sometimes ask your permission to continue. Students don’t usually say that they’re sorry for giggling in your class and disrupting the lesson plan you spent ages working out. Thank the stars I didn’t spend time in that area. I did quite enjoy popping in at Book-week and doing creative writing workshops, or reading something with the younger years. Teaching English to ten 10yr old Spanish kids just makes you paranoid. I couldn’t hack it – give me a mop every time.


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Ye gods, but it was all stress city at work this morning – several emails about the appalling inappropriateness (is that even a word??) of my poor little event flyers. Heck, and I was only trying to be helpful! Still, it managed to piss me off from the start of the day, so one hopes it can only get better. I sent back emails saying that at least I was moving from being “disappointing” to being “inappropriate”, which showed some kind of progress. Perhaps the next response to anything I did would be “shocking”. One lives in hope, eh …

Actually, I think people were surprised by the strength of my response, but heck, let them be surprised. Sometimes the university can be so nitpicking and bordering on anal, it might as well be an Olympic sport. Deep deep sigh. Still, since then, people have been nice - relatively - so here’s hoping that lasts too. In the meantime, I have rejigged the bloody flyers until I’m sick of the sight of them and will attempt to get them off my hands this afternoon. I’m also flicking through catalogues looking at free pens we could give to students, so that’s nice ...

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Yep, today is my 35th birthday. It feels like a landmark in many ways, not least because I released my debut novel at the weekend. I actually started writing Unrequited not long after my 30th birthday (after a horrible crisis of faith - wtf are you going to DO with your life???), so it feels like a good time to sit and assess just how far I've come.

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