MARCUS BENTLEY VOICE-OVER:
Seven twenty-one pm.
Susie is in the study.
She appears to be busy writing a novel.
In fact, she has been given a Secret Task.
She is writing a post for Strictly…

Here it comes again – for possibly the final time. Tonight, seventy-nine crazy, egotistical and desperate wannabes will fight to win the (apparent) privilege of entering the Big Brother house. Among the would-be housemates are a neuroscientist, an ex Royal servant and a one-legged author. By midnight, the chosen few will be ensconced, their every flaunt, bitch and bicker recorded, edited and transmitted to the viewing public. Of whom (of which?) I’ll be one.

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The host isn't always the same librarian, but the role is much the same: replenishing the drinks and biscuits supplies, updating the comment file and prompting discussion. Not that it's necesary - tastes vary and most people are ready to give opinions.

A big advantage with the crime genre is the range. The more predictable British and American writers like Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Lynda La Plante, Nicci Gerrard and James Elroy take turns with literary works, such as Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair and Case Histories by Kate Atkinson.

More recently there's been a spate of Scandinavian authors: Arnaldur Indridson's Silence of the Grave; Hakan Nesser's The Return and of course Stieg Larsson's The Dragon Tattoo It's prompted interesting discussion about national characteristics and representation in crime novels.

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I’ve been thinking about reading habits and whether you can you make judgements about a person based on the way they behave around books. I think the answer is probably 'Hell, yes!'
Take this quiz and find out whether you are a biblio-star or a biblio-slut.


Answer this question. ‘I keep my books...’
a) ‘Alphabetically arranged or by author. It’s important that my shelves are neat.’
b) ‘Not in any particular order but I usually know where things are.’
c) ‘I have to negotiate my way round the teetering piles in order to locate the washbasket and find my clean pants.’

You

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I’ve successfully avoided writing now for about...well, lots of days. How many, I’m not sure but I’d stab a guess at about twenty four. Twenty Four! I hear you all exclaim. That’s not days, that’s almost four weeks! But up until this moment in time, I haven’t wanted to face that. I’ve been happily ignoring the passage of time on that river in Egypt. ‘De Nile’ as they called it in the Dublin I grew up in.

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A couple of weeks ago I got an email from a radio producer who I'd sent some work to - the same producer who commissioned Kellie Jackson's story last year, which Kellie guest-blogged about here. This producer is commissioning a series of three stories from writers new to radio, and would I be interested in writing one of them? As so often, the timing was quite tight, with the recording due at the end of June, for transmission in early August. And as it's part of a set of three the location and theme were set. Was I interested? It was Wednesday: perhaps I could have a think over the weekend about what I might like to write, and we could meet on the Monday and discuss it.

Interested? I was thrilled. But not so thrilled that I forgot to check that by the end of that meeting I'd know whether the story was commissioned or not, before I did the Provisionally Happy Author Dance round the kitchen. One of the realities of the professional writing life is that you often can't afford to take work on spec, even in pursuit of something which will pay, if it means putting paid work on hold, or under so much pressure you do it badly. Indeed, you have to think quite hard about how much work you're prepared to put in at all, before you know the contract's on its way: even the petrol and subsistence for a research trip is money coming straight out of your existing income. However, the answer was yes, she wouldn't dream of asking me to write the story on spec. Then I did the Definitely Happy Author Dance.

On Saturday the sun came out, and the writing work I needed to do to clear the decks for the story, wasn't compatible with domestic things which needed doing anyway. But research was. So I drove down to Brighton.

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Sometimes it's the sheer inventiveness of an idea that generates a great piece of writing. A case in point is The Man, brilliantly presented at a tiny theatre above a pub near Earl's Court.

Ben has to fill in his tax form and is in a panic. He's kept all the receipts over the past year, but isn't sure what he can claim as expenses.

As you file into the theatre to to take a place on tiers of padded benches you're handed a worn till receipt and told you'll be asked for it at some point in the performance.

And that's what happens. At some point in the show when you feel like it, you offer the receipt to Ben, the single actor. Sometimes it's a ticket to a show, or a CD purchase receipt, and Ben will play an extract on his ipod connected to speakers. But every slip of paper reminds him of an event. As he says, 'We are what we buy'.


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Watch enough ER and you can convince yourself you’d be a bit handy in a real hospital ward. I’ve always been quite interested in medicine and have an occasional urge to see myself in those fetching blue scrubs.

Unfortunately, none of this second hand knowledge has prepared me for having to perform real life surgery. No, don’t worry, I’m not planning on giving my husband a DIY vasectomy or anything. I’m talking about the bloodless – but certainly NOT pain free – business of having to take a metaphorical scalpel to my novel.


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Back in the Pleistocene era, fresh off my Drama degree, I worked for a couple of years in academic publishing. It was the late eighties: in the wake of AIDS, and the Equal Opportunities and Equal Pay Acts, career-building had, briefly, been brought in to replace sex as Cosmopolitan's chief preoccupation, and I knew that I was supposed to network in my industry. The book trade ought to be a pleasant place to do that: indeed, I'd decided to go into publishing because when I was writing my Finals dissertation on play publishing, everyone I approached was so nice and friendly, as well as interesting to interview. So every few months or so I trotted along to the Society of Young Publishers, bought my Groucho-Club-priced drink, and wondered what to do next. The talks were interesting, and some were the basis of things I still find myself explaining on the aspiring-writer forums today. But after the speaker had finished, everyone else seemed to leap back to their feet and start making connections. They were doing and receiving favours, recognising friends, and even, for all I knew, doing deals. I used to leave, and walk through a Soho which was full of pubs overspilling with non-publishers doing the same, and get on a train home.

For years after that, I was convinced that I was socially inept when it came to work. I'd got enough conversations going between ill-assorted tablefuls of wedding guests that I didn't think I was a total disaster, socially speaking. But about work, I knew, I was useless. It helped a bit when I read an article which talked about how networking only works if you have something to offer: networks are built on reciprocity. So I forgave myself because of course I'd had nothing to offer: all I had was the desire to receive, and I wasn't even very sure what I was supposed to be receiving.

Still, when I found myself at the opposite end of the book trade - author not publisher, fiction not academic - I was disheartened to hear that, these days, Networking Is All, because publishers can't and won't spend money on promoting anything below the mega-names on their list.

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I'm thrilled to announce that Bugged, the brainchild of Jo Bell (poet, director of National Poetry Day) and David Calcutt (playwright and superb novelist for young people) has gone live!


Bugged is an online writing flash-mob, based on over-hearing things, happening on July 1st and resulting in a blog and POD anthology, which will be launched at the Manchester and Birmingham Book Festivals in October. I’m one of the core writers who will contribute to the anthology, along with Jo, David, Jenn Ashworth, Stuart Maconie, Daljit Nagra, and others.

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I posted yesterday’s blog on the Red Room website and got an interesting response from the author Rosy Cole. Rosy took me to task over my use of the term ‘homogenisation of culture’. In her comment, she drew attention to the diversity that in fact exists in Britain today:

“Scratch the surface and you uncover any number of disparate realities. The Hindu, African, Caribbean, Muslim, Christian experience, the Catholic v Protestant experience. The rich v poor experience. Have we really abolished the class system, or has it re-configured itself? The disabled v able-bodied experience. Just the Polish experience by itself. They are hardworking, good-natured, courteous and don’t bang on about rights. But they have antagonised a fair chunk of jobless Britons who prefer not to undertake what they consider menial tasks, yet who are not prepared to try and create their own work, or avenue of service to society.“

She’s right, of course. And the righter she is, the harder it is to encapsulate that diversity in a work of fiction.

In my defence, I think it’s true that there is a commercial homogenisation of the mainstream, and the mainstream has a strong pull that sucks a lot of us in, some of the time at least. But it does not represent the totality of experience available, and lived, today in Britain.

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