I’m currently working on the first of a two books series*

Yes, I am still cartwheeling at least four times a day. [Not literally. These are mental cartwheels. I don’t like to think of the orthopaedic consequences if I attempted a real one]

So yes, it’s all great etc, but it still has to be written and I’m realising how much of challenge it is to pull this off.

I started off by thinking about books I love with a sequel and why I love them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t put my finger on why any of them worked exactly. ‘They just do,’ said my stubborn reader's brain. So then I decided to ask online and got some very helpful advice. The tip that seems to come up again and again is the importance of having characters people really care about. I realised straight away that this was the common element in all the stories I’ve loved, from Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games, to Jackson Brodie in Kate Atkinson’s books to... many more I can't think of right now.



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Looking out of the window at the autumnal weather – a crisp chill and the hint of mist in the air, a flare of low sunlight – reminded me that A Razor Wrapped in Silk is set in autumn, making it an ideal read for this time of the year.

It was summer when I visited St Petersburg for research – the season during which Crime and Punishment is set, and also A Vengeful Longing, the second of my Porfiry Petrovich novels. So for inspiration on what a St Petersburg autumn might be like, I turned to Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg, an amazing book, which I would definitely recommend.

To get you in the seasonal mood, here’s an autumnal reading from A Razor Wrapped in Silk. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

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On Twitter, @beathhigh, otherwise known as Ian Rankin, has just tweeted a quote from the poet Kapka Kassabova on writing courses: All you can teach is the craft, not the art. Twenty minutes in, and it's been re-tweeted by two people I follow - an agent and a writer - and goodness knows how many others who I don't. So maybe I'm a lone voice in saying that although I like her poetry very much, I don't think she's entirely right. Or rather, I don't think it's as simple as that, though what I do think isn't that complicated: it only took me one more 140-character tweet: True. Though you can also teach ways of helping the art to happen if it's there and it's going to.

The quickest trip to the V&A will show you that there's no clear dividing line between craft and art, and yet we know which is which when we see it. And it seems to me that creative work becomes art when the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts: when an artefact has an effect on the viewer/listener/reader which goes beyond simply appreciating a job well and thoughtfully done.

But what puts the work over that dividing line that we can't see?

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These days, when I go to a writerly-authorly sort of do it's rare that I don't see someone I know, or meet someone who turns out to have friends in common. The book trade is a very small village, and book launches, parties and gatherings of The Society of Authors, NAWE, RNA and the like are our shop, pub, and cottage hospital. (Our school bus stop is Twitter, of course). By comparison, official networking events seem depressingly cold-blooded: the speed-dating of the human world.

But even that kind of event can bear fruit, though if you went looking for a bag of basic apples, you may find only a single, beautiful kumkwat.

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One of the odder corners of my beloved Radio 3 is the slot for really avant garde contemporary music, Hear and Now. But I love a contrast - I'm a hot chocolate sauce on cold ice cream kind of a gal - so I was lying in the bath last night, reading Georgette Heyer and listening to a programme from Cut and Splice, a festival of electronic music. The piece was as much sound art as music, really, an extraordinary plaiting and weaving of white noise and sound, the fading-in-and-out of the old Medium and Short Wave radio and so on, at once apparently random and beautifully structured. It was entirely electronic but somehow seemed acoustic, breathing memories of all sorts of natural things like whale song and rainstorms. And for a while after it had finished, every sound I heard, from the sploosh of bathwater to the flump of the duvet and the click of the light switch seemed extraordinarily clear, present and, above all, itself: the splooshiest sploosh, the flumpiest flump, the clickiest click ever. It reminded me a little of Aldous Huxley's description of his mescaline trip in The Doors of Perception.

We think of fiction as telling a story which never actually happened but might have; as making narrative sense of a random world; as making us laugh or cry or think. The empathy which novels demand seems to me a fundamental human pleasure as well as necessity: we call those who don't feel it psychopaths. And of course there are the non-fiction pleasures of documentary and understanding that you get from fiction, whether it's some history you never knew, or an experience of a life or a personality which is remote from your own.

In Alan Bennett's delightful The Uncommon Reader, the Queen becomes a bookworm, and discovers that "books tenderise you."

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The words ‘Cornwall’ and ‘paradise’ are often linked. And yes, Cornwall’s glorious light and wonderful coastal paths drew me to move here from London seven years ago, together with the fact that for less than the price of my one-bedroom flat in Chiswick, I could buy a four-storey Victorian cottage with 180 degree views of the river from every floor. Yet for the last four years or more I’ve been struggling with a growing sense of misery. People here look at me with non-comprehension. How can you – dare you – be miserable in paradise?

But I have been.

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Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is one of my favourites - the aristos are ridiculed in the best English literary tradition. But watching An Ideal Husband made me sympathise with Lady Bracknell's horror of babies in handbags - not because it smacks of 'the worst excesses of the French Revolution', but because it glosses political corruption, as 'youthful folly'.

London in 1891: Sir Robert Chiltern MP, who made a fortune selling privileged information when he was young, is being blackmailed by Mrs Cheveley, a woman in possession of a letter that proves his guilt. If his high-minded wife finds out she'll divorce him and he'll lose his Under-secretary post.



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I did my first my NaNo in 1987, before the 'official' one took off. I started writing a novel from scratch because I didn't know there were was any other way. Were there any 'how-to-write' books around? Nowadays you can't move for them, but I don't remember seeing one back then.

Ah Happy Days! Education was going through a shrinkage era so I wangled a year's sabbatical from teaching. My partner was selling BT's products in the IT boom so we didn't need my salary. I'd just finished a dissertation for a part-time MA, so I was into writing mode.


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HOOP TWO: What the 2% have, and how to make sure yours is in that pile.

So, your competition entry is probably sandwiched between a bank statement and a lost return slip for football training fees, somewhere in the first filter reader’s living room. How do you make it stand out?

A strong title and first sentence are good places to start. I’d never drop a story because it had a dull or pretentious title, but will pull one from the pile because its title appeals, to start the reading session. So, a good title might mean your reader comes to your work fresh. What’s a good title?

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