I was hooked when I learned his early influences were comic books and films.I think maybe this is true of most working class/blue collar would-be writers of our pre-TV generation. Comics were a cheap substitute for books and films gave an endless supply of new stories. As a youngster, Stephen scrounged lifts to the nearest town with a cinema, fourteen miles away from where he lived.

Two of my own favourite films are The Shining and Misery, both based on his novels and both about writers, and the books were even better. I haven't read Carrie but like most film-goers I'm haunted by the final event of the movie, much copied in later films.



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Soon to judge entries for WordPlay open short story competition (www.wordplaywriters.com), £75 and publication as first prize.
Shouldn't be too difficult, only 6 entries so far, and closing date is 25th!

One year on from my first blog post...

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Just joined WriteWords, very good looking site. Looking to connect with other writers, and looking for talent. Co founder of WordPlay Writers' Forum (www.wordplaywriters.com), and concentrating so much time and effort on helping develope other writers through ezines, quarterly fiction publications, editing, critiquing and synopsis writing that I am sadly neglecting the completion of my second Peter Hudson novel. Will keep you all informed!

I've known authors who can't concentrate for more than 15 minutes without pulling their head out of their fictional world to click through to their fix, even when they have scary contractual deadlines to meet. I've known some who spent days writing macros so the hit could happen automatically. I've known some whose struggle to withdraw had them staring at the screen, sweating with the effort of Not Going There. Even case-hardened Harry Bingham, novelist, non-fictioneer and director of Writers Workshop, who knows more about the book trade than most of us ever will, has confessed to being ever so slightly addicted since his latest book, Getting Published, was launched. And, worst of all, there's a funny little website which Jessica Ruston describes as "crack for writers", because the hit is so intense, and so easily bought, that it's lethal.

I'm talking about Amazon rankings, and yes, I've been addicted to. I haven't had a new book out for a while, and so my novels are chuntering happily along in what look like the lower ranks till you realise there are books on Amazon whose ranking is in the millions. But I still take a peek every few days. And yet Amazon rankings don't tell you how many books you've sold.

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Michael Gambon is a perfect choice for this play, which has long stretches of stage 'business' while Krapp shambles about the stage eating bananas, absent at intervals when liquid being poured into a glass sounds offstage, opening and shutting drawers and messing about with spools of tape. Gambon's slow gestures and immobile face, the mouth almost permanently agape in a surprised O, his wild hair sticking out above raddled cheeks, presents a touching portrait of disillusioned old age. The sudden rages which scatter boxes and tapes are all the more striking because Gambon is a big man.



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Have you ever been on the end of a cringeworthy chat up line? You know the type: "Get your coat love, you've pulled" or the one that I married, "Dance with me. I'm avoiding the girl behind you." Well, they say first impressions count...


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It's amazingly hard, before you're published, to think beyond that glorious moment. But one thing that many aspiring writers know about and are horrified by is how "these days" (Dickens of course, being "these days") authors must do all sorts of events, appearances and readings. Since writing has an unsurprising habit of attracting people who are very happy to spend large amounts of time on their own, and who find themselves more eloquent on the page than in person, many of them are terrified.

Performance nerves are entirely natural: it's a mild case of fight-or-flight. Actors, musicians and dancers feel it, and so do teachers, barristers, best men and captains briefing the platoon. It sharpens your reactions, narrows your focus and makes you want to pee. It uses up blood sugar (which was why doughnuts were so welcome in Mexico) to give you extra energy, and the day you don't feel keyed-up and a little nervous before a gig is the day you'll stop performing well. If you can trust that the slight flutter in your stomach won't lead you to say anything daft, or dry up (it won't), then you can safely settle in for the show.

I feel keyed-up and alert before events, but I don't (so far) get nervous. But I do know what the true, paralysing, brain-fudgifying, hand-shaking, sick-making, tongue-tying stagefright is like, because it was a large part of why I wasn't as good an actor even as I might have been. On the other hand, I have several writing friends who used to be actors and felt no more than respectable stagefright when playing a part, but for whom reading their own work and talking about it is pure horror. And I was just brooding on this when an aspiring writer confessed that she was terribly nervous before taking part in the Getting Published day, even though she's someone who "doesn't get nervous". The thought of discussing her work with a book doctor (who wasn't me, but could have been) was terrifying.

That disabling terror is different.

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Four years ago, I started writing my first novel. (I’m not counting the one before that, back in my twenties, which I never finished). Anyway, this one’s told from the points of view of three characters, two women and a man. Third person, present tense. Its theme is change – indeed, originally it was called The Change (please, no sniggering). And change has certainly been the theme of its journey towards the novel it’s now becoming.

In those four years, I’ve revised and revised. I’ve altered the structure. I've dropped the adverbs. I’ve killed the darlings. I’ve changed the title. I’ve copy-edited countless times. The usual stuff. Then, for a variety of reasons, I stopped. Began the next one. Got a third of the way through the first draft of it. And stopped again.

Argh.


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