Some time ago, I lent This Itch of Writing to Jerusha Cowless, agony aunt, so that she could reply to an aspiring writer. Since then Jerusha has been travelling the world from New Zealand to Harmondsworth, in search of new ways to understand our peculiar art and craft. But every now and again another cry of writerly anguish reaches her by pigeon post, and she stuffs her reply into a bottle and tosses it into the sea to reach me. As she did with this one.

I've published four novels with (and had four more novels rejected by) a major, very commercial publisher, in four years, but I seem to have written myself into a brick wall: not a sniff of my books in the shops; a rejection from them for my next book which my agent doubts he can sell elsewhere; one false start abandoned on his advice; another 2/3rds written which he also doubts he can sell. I think this might be where I hang up my metaphorical pen (as Ian Hocking has) and get my life back from the treadmill which is trying to write novels as well as have a job and a family. I did read Nicola Morgan's post on Selling Out, and with great interest. But I suspect that going more pared down and grabby is not where my strengths lie. It's not that I want to remain pure, it's that I'm not sure I could do it. The WIP contains almost none of the stuff which is commercially off-putting about my work and it even has a high concept. But it is still too 'gentle' and understated because that basically is my voice.

I suspect what I need to do is learn to pack a greater emotional punch within that understated style. I do wonder if I will regret it if some time I don't have a bash at writing a different sort of book - more 'literary', if you like, though I shrink from all labels. Maybe I should let go of the thing I fear may have been limiting me, which is the drive to ensure that everyone in my books is engaging - fundamentally nice and good and decent, even the baddies! But then, would a book which didn't ultimately assert the values of community and mutual support, and trying to do right thing in adversity, really be 'me'? Perhaps I have been dashing into new projects, because I am terrible at sitting back and giving myself thinking time - I usually do my thinking by doing and wrestling and engaging, not letting things quietly mull over.

This seems to me one of those difficult situations where brute commercial reality, craft, and creative capacities are all embroiled in a muddle.

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I commented on Nick Cross’s blog a few days ago, saying that possibly people give up writing because, while they’re prepared for it to be difficult at first, they’re not prepared for it to go on being difficult.

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So it’s back again. That show which cheekily took its name from the Strictly blog. With a new set, a new format, and a cull of several of the most popular pro dancers.

But some things never change: Brucie’s back – albeit only for the Saturday show – and Tess towers over him as ever, resplendent in aqua. The four judges -Bruno ‘Hyper’ Tonioli, Len ‘The Charm’ Goodman, Alesha ‘Extensions’ Dixon and Craig ‘Char-char-char, dahling’ Revel Horwood - are ready with sharp eyes, tongues and nails, poised to pounce on any mistakes (rather as the sadly-missed Arlene Phillips used to pounce on the hunky male dancers).

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The signs to have your formal graduation portrait taken were at least as large as those for the graduands' check-in and for collecting robes, and more colourful. I had an hour to go till the ceremony and you don't have to pay unless you order one. The people in front of me were being slotted one after another into six units of the franchised formula, first alone, then with family, then "next please". Standard lighting setup, friendly and efficient ladies, camera with leads to lights and laptop, a slap-it-down rubber circle where you stand, complete with extra white line at an angle for the posture which ballet-dancers call épaulement. Since you don't have your certificate there's a dummy one to hold: as a friend said, it's nice of them to give you a fajita in case you're hungry. And since, failing a man's shirt and tie, your hood has by then slipped backwards to strangle you, on the back of the fajita is a neat little plastic hook to hold everything together at your breast: the 'right' image is obtained by all sorts of tricks and subterfuges. And I suddenly thought, if ever there's a place for decoding the semiotics of the graduation portrait, it's Goldsmiths.

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David Thorpe just wrote a really interesting post on Dragontongue, the blog for children's authors in Wales, wondering if we have to remember what it's like to be a child, to write for children.

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Like most people I go swaddled against the weather, but there's always a smattering of debs in sandals with swains and picnic baskets. I don't expect to see anyone I know. It's not so much the fairy lights swathing the bar area as the natural setting that gives a sense of occasion - the way the trees sway and birds swoop across the stage or call from the foliage at inappropriate moments. Watching the audience climb giddy heights and improvise sun hats or snuggle into blankets is half the point.


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I've decided to call the last twenty one days my Ëœweird weeks". Picasso had a blue phase so I think I'm allowed a weird one. Three weeks ago, I was happily sitting in the family home we've been in for sixteen years and now we're selling it. All because I drove up a road and saw a ËœFor Sale" sign. All because my husband, whom I regularly show ËœFor Sale" signs to, didn't give me a derisory grunt this time, but instead said "Let's do it. Let's move!"

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Okay, so in a loose, anecdotal, bloggy sort of way we've tackled how unpicking what you're doing in terms of grammar and syntax might help you to say what you're trying to say better, and also the different effects of past and present tense, and the value of learning to handle long sentences. Today's thinking aloud is about how a minute query about punctuation opens up an exploration of what you're trying to say. Here's a sentence from my work in progress:

And yet even the most self-hating Papist wife or joylessly Puritan husband knows that it is not so: that the nature of a man and a woman's coupling depends utterly on the nature of that man and that woman, each with his uncertainties, vanities, pride justified and pride false.

The simple question is: should there also be a possessive apostrophe on the first "man"?

Technically, as they're separate nouns, each of them should have their own possessive 's: the nature of a man's and a woman's coupling depends... because the coupling is 'of' each of them, even though "coupling" is singular.

Most people, including me (I know because I've tried it out in the WriteWords forum), feel that it's more euphonious as I originally had it, without the second 's:

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