When I was about ten, I made myself a skirt with a piece of red felt; I sewed it into a tube, hemmed the top and threaded elastic through for the waist then I hemmed the bottom with white cotton! Mum had taught me how to do a back stitch for seams, but hadn’t impressed upon me the importance of using the same colour cotton for invisible hemming. I didn’t notice the little white stitches dotted around the hem…and was out in the street, wearing my creation, in a flash. When my mother spied me posing in this MINI she dragged me inside and made me take it off…AT ONCE!

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This is new for me. I've not blogged before. Don't quite know what I should write. A story is completed. Sent off and another one started. 5.30am is the time when my mind is full of ideas Once upon a time,ideas battled with each other all day long. I carried around a note pad jotting them down. Now when an idea grows into a story, I'm like a nervous dart thrower unable to let go of the dart.

Over the summer I did some fairly serious surgery to one strand of my current novel, and was hugely relieved to get an email late last Saturday night from one of my trusted readers. She's already pointed out plenty of not-yet-right things earlier in the novel, but here she was, saying, 'The ending is brilliant!'

And, as with the bits she's not so impressed by, I know she's right. Those last scenes are at once a real surprise, and a conscious, careful, crafted pulling together of all the themes and ideas and threads. Crafting it has, I think and hope, given rise to art. I even had a lump in my throat as I wrote, and maybe readers will too. I'm not sure I did write, mind you:...


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Oooh, my friend Carrie and her man are back together again! He’s been and put an end to his past; closed down the shutters for good and the divorce is on its way. He’d been legally separated for years but recently came to the conclusion that he had to find out just how he really felt, so he went back to see if there was anything to be salvaged of the marriage.

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I don't know if anyone noticed, but in my previous post Brainy and Sexy I started with the idea of 'original and familiar' being the two poles between which a storyteller operates, moved those terms along till they became 'literary and commercial', and ended up with 'brainy and sexy'. Only of course all those pairs don't map neatly onto each other and, anyway, nothing about writing is as polarised as that. Even so-called black and white photography is almost entirely shades of grey, as you discover when you learn to print it.

I've just finished An Instance of the Fingerpost. I do see that it's not to everyone's taste (what book is?) but for me it exemplifies the fact that brainy and sexy aren't true opposites, any more than love and mathematics are.


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No. That is not me doing an impression of Dr Brunswick from the fabulous Alex and the Wigpowder Treasure though I know it could seem that it was. It's a happy coincidence though. I'd completely forgotten about buying the pirate fancy dress kit (and trying it on and being photographed in it) and only stumbled upon it yesterday, which, was about the same time as I thought I'd mention the book on here. Lucky, huh?




Alex and the Wigpowder Treasure by Adrienne Kress is brilliant. It's fun, sad, exciting, intelligent and so, so readable. It also features an Extremely Ginormous Octopus, hidden treasure, pirates, evil old ladies and... I'll stop there. Don't want to spoil it for you. But what more could you want? I doubt there are many children out there who won't enjoy it. Check it out!

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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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