1,617 words isn't bad, considering they were done by noon, when I went off to swim.

It was not a good day to start because first thing I drove my son David to Victoria Coach Station. 'You said you would, Mum', he claimed when I raised my eyebrows last night. It meant, apparently, that he'd felt free to get heavy gifts for girl-friend Natalie, back in Belgium. She'll meet the Eurostar at the other end.

So what with that and a post-operative friend who rang for a chat about how get enough sustenance on a liquid diet at the same time as not upsetting the gut, the morning's output represents just three half-hour sessions, timed on my digital timer.



Read Full Post

In Jerusha Cowless's most recent missive from the South Seas, she came close to telling a writer what to do. (Clearly Jerusha is not me: I try never to tell anyone what to do, only to unpick the possiblities as clearly as I can. Honest.) Jerusha hinted that a poetry course might be the best way to go beyond the edges of that writer's own commercial-mum-lit-writing nature.

And, having read Jerusha's answer, I'm working on a theory that the thing to do when you need/want a break or have got stuck with your writing, is the absolute opposite of what it was that you have been - and probably feel you "should be" - doing. Commercial novelists should do a poetry course. Poets should write Talking Heads type stories with a full plot voiced by all sorts of different characters. Womag story writers, who have to find fresh humour and drama in some of the tighest parameters in the writing trade, should start free-writing and see what happens. Literary short fiction writers wedded to the magnifying-glass perfection of their form should do NaNoWriMo and start unreeling their literary cloth with what used to be called gay abandon, before that phrase came to mean something equally delightful, but rather different. Poets who love traditional forms should refuse to rhyme or scan, lovers of free verse should tackle a sonnet, literary blockbuster novelists should try writing a Mills & Boon pocket novel where they only have 20,000 words in which everything must be clear, passionate, and tie up neatly at the end. And so on.

There are lots of excellent reasons for trying this:

Read Full Post

It’s incredible how things can change in a year....
I posted a while back about securing a deal for my novel Dark Ride, which is being published by Piccadilly Press next year. Well, things have since moved on. I’ve now been signed by the kind of agent I always dreamed about having and about ten days ago I was offered a further two book deal by my publisher. I'm still slightly in shock.

When I first posted about the original book deal, which happened after many years of struggle and rejection, a few of our lovely readers said it helped to hear about the journey and how hard it had been.

In the spirit of this, I’m taking a deep breath and posting from the heart today. I’ve been looking through my diary for 2009 and finding entries that happened at key times. They’re fairly self explanatory so I haven’t bothered with details of exactly what was going on.



Read Full Post

Strange how characters in books can influence behaviour. I once came across a subject called 'the role of literature in society' that suggested the purpose of stories is to allow people to access 'life scripts' on which to model their actions. It's true of all kinds, from folk tales to contemporary fiction.

I was reminded of this when I re-read The Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency for my crime reading group.


Read Full Post

I’m a nice girl, me. Good as gold. I do my submitting by the book.

What book, I hear you asking?

A clue: The Great Agent In The Sky begat it.
And Lo! It was carried down from On High in tablets (Prozac, probably) by His disciples and delivered unto us aspirant writers.

The title? The Ten Commandments of Submitting.

And here they are:


Read Full Post

Last Wednesday I heard a thud on the hall floor and for once it wasn't a rejected manuscript.

All week I've been carrying the book around like a talisman, and reading it ostentatiously on the tube.



Read Full Post

Ok, so I've gotten 80,000 words into my second novel, and have around 30,000 words remaining for the first draft. Its been sitting there for ages, waiting for me to cotinue. I've now finished the research for the next part hich will allow me to complete, but I've got this burning ambition to continue on books three and four in the series, which I've already started....grrrrrr!

The perennial question came up: “I'm 30,000 words in, and it stinks. I've a nasty feeling the central idea is no good and the writing's rubbish. Should I keep going? I've got a completely different idea, which is much more promising and likely to work.” I've ruminated before about writerly adultery, and the third-of-the-way-in mark seems to be the writerly equivalent of the seven year itch. When you're cohabiting with a novel, sharing the washing up, mortgage, tricky family stuff and leak in the roof, the Other Idea is so very delightful. It smiles at you in the candlelight of the restaurant, laughs back at you over its shoulder as it skips away along the beach, has a clever body and a beautiful mind, and oh, those bedroom eyes... But it's not the one who's there when you come home, when you go to sleep, when you wake up. It's not the one who's still there when you're ill, who still needs you when it's tired and grumpy, who is words of your word, flesh of your flesh. And most of the time, most of us, know it.

Lots of people (including me) often liken books to babies. But if our relationship to a book must ultimately be that of a parent, while we're writing it it seems to me that it's more like a marriage. “Where did you first meet?” the audience asks, and the answer may be that you saw The One across the carriage, on a train you wouldn't have been on but for the faulty signals at Letchworth.

Read Full Post