How do writers decide what to write? There is a romanticised idea that writers stick steadfastly to their muse, creating an innovative piece of work that is a mirror to their soul. This is, in some part, true. However, those writing for publication must bend to commerce and produce as certain format and write within fairly strict genre.

A piece of fiction is a communication between the writer and the reader and as soon as it is created becomes subjective. The difference between a list of instructions, which is fairly objective, and a story is a beginning, middle, and end, characters and also a temporal aspect. A story lays out, in a familiar format, a narrative of where, when, why and how something happens. Part of the reason fiction is so popular is that it mirrors the way we live every day.



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Wheels... November 2009
Wheels have always been a really important and integral part of my life. The big black shiny but scuffed pram was deep, to put shopping under the baby, which was used for the last four children was then used by us all to collect jam jars and take them to the jam factory and get a penny each for them.

We found other wheels of all sizes and made trolleys and pulled each other around on them to give rides. Better fun going down hills and letting go so the little passenger crashed Amidst great shrieks of fear then wailing with pain and scraped and bleeding legs. We learned very early about the pecking order and survival of the fittest. It was all survival training.
We put our Guy for Guy Fawkes on our trolley and trailed it around the town centre asking for “A penny for the guy mister? Mrs?” And bought our fireworks with the money we earned from our initiative and some people would say, cheek.
We had metal roller skates and were so excited when we got rubber coated wheels ones. We thought they were wonderful. Smooth running.
We had scooters and I ran away on my scooter when I was 8 and life at home got too much. It was 15 miles away and 15 weary miles back and I got into lots of trouble. The priest at confession was very impressed at the distance I had scooted
We are railway children so we went on lots of trains. Great big oily heavy wheels on the steam engines were taller than I was.
Bikes were essential to any child’s life and we had all kinds of home made hybrid bikes. We could ride 2 wheeler bikes from an early age as we all shared each other toys. Not just my family. Our street gang. We could all mend punctures from an early age and bent our mums forks and spoons!! We cleaned our bikes and had shiny wheels. We did fast and slow bicycle races. We put lots of people on these bikes, crossbar rides, stand up pedalling with someone else on the saddle.. Could do wheelies too.
An interesting ploy was to fasten a plank onto two crossbars and see how many people we could give rides to. Steering was difficult but there were very few cars on our Railway estate.
One day we were out with our dog Judy and we called her to cross the road and a great big lorry ran over her. We were hysterical and upset and screamed tearful accusations at the man “you killed our dog!” The poor distressed lorry driver put all of us and our dead dog on to the back of his lorry and took us home. He was crying too. We did a solemn ceremony of burying our beloved dog in the field at the bottom of our garden and made a wooden cross and were only comforted by being told that we would see her in Heaven. We were placated.
We helped the milkman and the baker and they delivered their produce on a horse and cart. Once a big cartwheel ran over my brother Roger’s foot which caused him pain for some weeks and gave us free cakes for the duration of his pain which pleased us enormously. My mum cook make cakes but these were posh shop ones.
We used to jump on the bank of the steamroller which flattened roads for a ride home. It was exciting when the first combine harvester came and we rode on that at harvest time, playing in the hayricks and making camps. It made a change to riding sheep, pigs and ponies and any of the farm animals we all dared and double dared each other to ride.

During the bus strike I cycled 10 miles each way to school. I was 12. My mum always thought that I met The Cranford Woods murderer. I was cycling home from school along an open road with no houses and just the woods next to it. A man on a motor bike kept overtaking me and stopping and let me overtake him. Then he overtook me and started to talk to me. “Would you like to come for a walk with me in the woods? “ he asked. “OK”I said. NO ALARM BELLS SOUNDED We walked along a path and we sat down on the grass and he asked me “Would you like to have a look at my dean?” I didn’t know the word but I was feeling very uncomfortable and said that I had better be going home as my mummy would be worrying about me, and pedalled furiously along the “No Cycling “ path. I didn’t like to tell my mum, because she would have been very cross with me for being so gullible and stupid. Two weeks later there was a brutal murder of a woman cyclist in these woods and I tried to remember what the man looked like. The police came round. The murderer was never found.

I used to cycle 6 miles each way to Guides from the time I was 11. I cycled to the cake factory for 4 summers where I rolled 1.200 Swiss Rolls an hours, put the jam in doughnuts and the made the creamy whirls on gateaux.

My lecherous brother in law taught me how to drive in his plumber’s van when I was sweet seventeen. . I didn’t like being touched up but didn’t like to complain to my mum or sister.. There was no other way I could afford to learn to drive.





I had a pop pop bike, a motor scooter and a James 150 cc motor bike. All were sold to me by my little brother Kevin. I rode all over London when I was a nurse at Hammersmith Hospital. All that time I didn’t know that I was short sighted. At this great hospital we were taught patient care and didn’t have to make the bed wheels parallel. I collected up all kinds of wheeled vehicles, spare blankets and tarpaulins from the basement and evacuated a whole orthopaedic ward to see The Queen when she opened the MRC building. I didn’t think to ask anyone’s permission . I stayed on the ward with 3 people I judged too sick to go.
Everybody returned thrilled that the Queen looked just at them. We all worked about 13 hours that day as split shifts were abandoned.
I hitch hiked 30,000 miles on other people’s wheels.
I cycled London to Brighton 3 times on 3 different bikes. I used to have a 1935 Rudge junior back tandem and my daughter Gillian and I cycled to Brighton on that. I spent 3 weeks in Holland with my daughters and our bikes and the tired one rode the tandem. They tell me they didn’t pedal at all.
My daughters and a cousin Sharon spent a great week one half term on bikes going to Panshanger Gold Course for pitch and put, then to Stanborough Lakes for canoeing, then to Lemsford Village with me in the evenings for archery.

I was taken away in Ambulances on various occasions when I had big fits. In 2000 I was involved in a big car crash which wasn’t my fault. I was taken to hospital in an ambulance with a bleeding ear and I asked the ambulance men if I could have flashing lights and sirens as this was the very first ambulance ride that I had been conscious for. But they wouldn’t. I have a pond and a pink terrace and a summer house with the compensation.
I spent a day as an observer with the police last year and they happily used flashing lights and sirens. Boys with their toys.
We cycled around Greenham Common when American Cruise Missiles were there. There were many of us and we slept in a Methodist Hall and the next morning we were very stiff!! We tried to ride each other’s bikes but there is nothing like the comfort zone of one’s own bike.
I was broke and traumatised in 1983 when my husband left but we all had bikes and I made all the girls things continue including cycling to Hatfield Pool for their swimming lessons every week. We had lots of lights on the bikes. I spent 20 months including 2 winters on my bike. I was often very wet and very cold. I am resilient. To ameliorate this situate this situation and to accelerate myself out of poverty, I decided to have lodgers. My first one was a wonderful girl, Judy who was a student with a car. A 2CV. Her brother was the master brain behind 2CVs in Britain. She bullied him to get me affordable wheels and so a red 2CV, which had JWL as numberplates, and we called it Jewel came into our lives and kept us dry and expanded our horizons. When that one died I had another red 2CV.
I got on my bike and got a job and c

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I was chuffed to get a text message from Sarah the Publisher the other day advising me to check out a review of Yuck 1 written by someone in AMERICA! How exciting is that? Take a look for yourself - the link is http://www.literacylaunchpad.blogspot.com/ and it was written as part of a scheme to get 100 bloggers to review 100 'great books' printed in an environmentally friendly way! It makes me blush to relate that the reviewer's kind words and complete understanding of the whole concept of Yucketypoo damn near brought a tear to my unpracticed eye! It reminded me just how proud I am of it! I so want it to become read worldwide because its message does affect the entire world! In fact I can't believe it hasn't reached more people yet because it is just so completely unique! There is nothing else like it on the market - even its sequels are totally different - but, as hard as I have tried to get someone of note to comment on it, it still remains something of a non-entity. Ah well - good things come to those who wait, I guess. And getting a review from America is but definitely a step in the right direction.



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I am so, so, so sorry to have abandoned you but you just will not believe what is going on in my life now! Talk about Eastenders - I tell you, Albert Square has nothing on me! After months of harping on about how much I loathe, detest, despise and hate my job, guess what? I've been made redundant! Really! I left the Friday before last. It all happened in the space of four weeks - from the first email being sent round to everyone to me walking out of the door for the last time. What a relief!

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Inspired by Tania Hershman's recent posts about ex-pat writers (or in her case, recently repatriated ex-pat writers) I decided to think a little about how the move has affected my writing.

I am currently sitting in my study in my house just outside Washington DC. I put up a photo of this room a few posts ago, but that was before the clutter arrived with the shipping. It is now filled with books, pictures, printers, bits of miscellaneous paper and my trusty Leonardo da Vinci action figure.


Out of my window I can see typical neat suburban houses. A couple of times a day a yellow school bus comes round picking up and dropping off kids. The families here are a complete mix of colours and religions; it’s far more multicultural than where I’ve just left in the West Country. The kids all look like your typical American kids: climbing onto the bus in jeans, sweaters and sneakers… do they realise that most of the rest of the world have to wear school uniforms? It’s a million miles from my old tartan skirt and tie, with regulation bottle green woollen jumper.

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Fact: a proper publisher (book, magazine et al) will NOT charge you to publish your work. It's the other way round.

Yes, there are a good number of very good mags and e-zines who don't pay, but you are getting readership, credits to put on your CV etc.

It's a nice (and rare) thing to be asked to contribute to a magazine. So when I received an email from First Edition magazine earlier asking me to do just that I was chuffed (I thought it may have had something to do with the story I sent them in July - it wasn't and I've since withdrawn it).

And then I read on.

And was not chuffed. I was angry and pretty bloody insulted.

They weren't asking me to contribute. They were giving me the 'opportunity' to have my short story published online as part of their downloadable e-book content.

Customers would pay a nominal fee (based on word count), which sounded okay.

And then:

And all I'd have to do is send them the work. They'd edit it, convert it into their electronic format and pay for distribution (what distribution???) etc

AND IT WOULD ONLY COST ME £25.

Cost. Me.

Nope!!!

As I said, proper publishers do not charge writers to publish their work.



So what's going on here? I thought First Edition was a great idea. A print mag for new writers. Sold on the High Street as far as I remember.

I've just checked their guidelines.

They don't pay contributors (aside from a non-specific cash prize to the best in a category).

The do sell advertising space.

And now they're charging to people to publish something which, as far as I can understand, doesn't have to pass any sort of editorial scrutiny.

Where's the money going, First Edition? And why the sudden change?

I'm going to email a copy of this to First Edition and offer them the opportunity to explain themselves. I hope they've made a very silly mistake because if they've not, it's a pretty cynical exercise in exploiting the new writers they originally claimed to be supporting.

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Sleep; what is that – a novel I read years ago? Oh, sleeeeep, where you close your eyes and drift off into some other world for seven or eight hours – not in this life I don’t. I would pay fortunes (if I had any) to experience unconsciousness for more than an hour at a time. My friend, Sylvia mentioned on the phone yesterday that there is a version of Nightal (don’t know if I’ve spelled that right) that works like a dream, even on the usually impervious. It’s supposed to be natural drugs: not real serious drugs – I thought drugs were natural. Well anyway, I might try it if she can find out the right colour for me.

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I've been a tad busy this last few days, so I'm afraid this is a bit of a catch-up post. First, I've actually submitted my PhD! I can't quite believe how happy it's made me, not just because the last stages of a research project are notoriously fiddly and tedious and so I've been dying to get rid of it, but because, finally, I realise that I'm actually really quite proud of it. As well as A Secret Alchemy, which I can enjoy again now that the tooth-pulling process of writing it has faded from my memory, I do think I've found some interesting things to say about historical fiction and how it works. I celebrated with my very long-suffering offspring, who bear the brunt of whatever's happening in my professional life, by opening the last bottle of the fizz which the Hay Festival gives its authors. It seemed appropriate.

And since then I've been in Spain, giving a lecture (twice) on Creative Thinking: the Darwin family in the Arts and Sciences. After the first, in Valencia, the university had organised a dinner cooked from Emma Darwin's recipe book, which was delicious. I was also given the most beautiful edition of The Origin of Species, made by my hosts, biologists Juli Peretó and Andrés Moya, with exquisite illustrations by the scientific illustrator Carles Puche. Carles even drew me an iguana on the title page of my copy: I felt very inferior in only being able to write words in his.

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Yesterday’s post was cheating; it was half a lie, in that it was all internal – yes, I was talking to myself. My son never heard those words that were screaming in my head that still lurk somewhere seething to get out. I am a calm and lovely mother in my old age, though have to confess to being very un-perfect in days gone by. Looking back on it now I would wish to have been different – a better mother, who put her children first instead of herself. My children deserved more of my attention.

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