I've had my fair share of experiences lately which have shaken my faith in human kind, most recently the shock discovery that someone I trusted and liked has been ripping off other people's work and entering it in contests under his own name. Almost worse than this is the failure by the contest organisers to disqualify him when evidence is produced by the victims of his plagiarism.

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I have never written for fun. That doesn’t mean to say I don’t derive pleasure from my work. I simply don’t write for pure enjoyment, to practice my sentence structure or to fill an empty half-an-hour. I write because I want to get published. I write with that as the sole goal. Always have done. Always will.

Yet in some literary quarters, ‘The Market’ and ‘Target Reader’ are dirty words. They are considered somehow less noble than ‘writing for me’ or ‘following my heart’. As Moliere once said:

“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”

Goodness me – financial reward has always been my goal! But why, I hear you cry? Because I seek fame and fortune? A big house? A celebrity lifestyle? No. Because, quite simply, I need - I crave - an audience. The story is in my mind, so I don’t need to reproduce it on paper for myself. For me, things are better if shared. When my husband is out I find I cannot watch a film. I cannot cook a meal. It’s channel-surfing and snacks on the sofa – alone. And that’s how satisfying I would find it to write a story and never show it to the world.



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"It's Whit Sunday, you know" my mother said, pausing to look at me meaningfully over the top of her glasses before dropping her eyes to examine the black leatherette menu once more. Quite why she bothers to read the menu is unclear; it never changes and she always orders the same thing anyway. Quite why she also bothered to remind me it was Whit Sunday I'm not sure either. It's a long time since I went to Sunday School.

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One of the nice things about doing festivals, as opposed to other readings and events, is that you actually bump into not just other authors (I have lots of authorly friends, but mostly writing for the same kind of readers as I do myself) but other kinds of authors. This time, it was the Hay Festival, and I found myself sharing a car back to Hereford Station with Paul Stewart and Chris Ridell. They write The Edge Chronicles and other children's fantasy together, and we started talking about what it's like writing as a team. Scriptwriters often do it, in writing sitcoms it's almost obligatory, and of course anything which is illustrated may well have two parties to its creation. In adult fiction it's less common, though the well-established crimewriter Nicci French is of course actually a husband and wife team.

It's not just that it would be nice to have the company when doing festivals and events, though it would. (At the Swindon festival I watched Ruthie Culver with envy, not just because she has a jazz singing voice I'd die for, and a fascinating way with poetry, but because she gets to travel with her band. Sure, they have a lot of clobber, what with the double bass and all, but it would be worth it not to be alone.) Writing as a team is also a more integral kind of not-being-alone.

Paul and Chris and I were talking about editors, and they said that they've rarely had to change anything at the editorial stage: by the time it gets to Random House it's pretty much ready to fly.

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It must be the weak pound that's drawing them in. Maybe the fact that Greenwich is now a World Heritage Site is having an impact. The lower grassy area resembled Blackpool beach, with so many half-clad sunbathers.


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Across George Square bare

skin sizzling: not drowning

in high factors.


Here, summer lands

like a sledgehammer.

SURPRISE!

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Big cats settled down beside me, tame but still frightening, smacking their lips and jostling for position; they were my pets, companions since kitten-hood, loyal and enormous playthings with terrible teeth. The dreams were compelling; I slipped in and out of them and couldn’t escape, through wakings, turnings and tossing, there they were - waiting, calling me back, pinning me down.

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Fortunately it was disco night at the The Romney Tavern, the caravan site pub, and we could sit in the relative quiet of the bar while the racket went on in the adjoining room. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy dancing the Hokey Cokey.


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Not much to report on the Nik front, really. I've managed to get all the post launch errands done which has left me free (well, as of Thursday afternoon) to write which has been a real treat. It's been good to get back into it.

Along with some pieces of really rubbish news (which I can't talk about) there have been some good bits, which I will be able to talk about soon.

So, until then, I will have to remain vague.

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One thing I very often find, when I'm working on an aspiring writer's novel, is that the narrator, or the main character, disappears from the event. I'm not talking about an omniscient narrator simply moving their focus to a different part of the story. Nor am I talking about true incompetence in a writer who doesn't actually know what the story should be focussing on. What I mean is something like the following:

He rattled the doorhandle, and when there was no answer, let himself quietly in. Time was ticking past: there wasn't long left. Bags and boxes were strewn over the floor; the remains of a hastily-eaten pizza lay by the window. A hand touched something cold and wet and blood thumped in ears. It was only a pile of soggy washing heaped on the table, several days old by the smell of it. Sand crunched underfoot, eyes were dazzled by light from round the edges of a crooked blind and over it all there seemed to lie a pall of grey dust. The doorhandle rattled, which was totally unexpected; who could it possibly be? No one could have seen the stealthy approach, the cautious glance round, the quiet move round the side of the house. Could they?

The first time that I tried to work out why a passage in this style was so unengaging, despite being full of action and even suspense, I accused it of being full of passive verbs, because it has exactly that distancing effect. But, actually, there aren't very many passive verbs in the above, the physical detail is quite vivid, the image of the man checking out a suspect room is quite strong, so what's going on?



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