The best emails that I get are from fans. They ask the best questions, make the best suggestions, and write the most honest and insightful reviews.


So today I thought that it would be nice to blog about them. After all, if people can be bothered to take the time to write to me, it's only fair that I should return the compliment (I do reply to every piece of fan-mail that I receive).


I think for every writer...

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So now I am waiting - waiting for a sign to let me know that conception has occurred. Certainly, nothing as alien and momentous as the beginning of life could happen in my own body without me being alerted to it.

I think I am waiting for a noise, or an explosion, or perhaps some God-like voice speaking a language I've never heard before, whispering that I am With Child. Then I will run my hands knowingly over my belly, my face suffused with serenity and devotion. I'll be deeply aware of every newly-made cell dividing and growing, unknowable to all but me. This is going to be the quietest, the sweetest romance.

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I was feeling great this morning, woke up chirpy, checked email, switched on the fiction-only laptop (yeah, yeah) and was about to get some work done before 10am, which is rare for me. Then I got a Google alert for my name (everyone does those, right?). I click on the link. And it's this...

Orange Award For New Writers Announces 2009 Shortlist

No, I'm not on the shortlist (luckily, I think I would have had a heart attack), but...

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My name is Katy and I’m a procrastinator. There, I’ve outed myself, come clean, hoisted my head above the parapet, shaken my tail feather, strutted my funky stuff in full view of the virtual world. But if there was indeed a 12-step programme to cure me, would I want to take it? And am I even being accurate in my self-diagnosis of procrastinator when ‘hopelessly addicted daydreamer’ might be more apposite?


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Larry’s Party by Carol Shields is the tenth book I’ve read this year already. I loved the beginning, was bored in the middle and felt irritated by the end. At first the format inspired me to make notes for a future project. She tells the story of this guy’s life in sections two years apart and the writing is just wonderful but I don’t think the whole thing is as good as some of its parts.

The only character who is never more than a sketch is the son; I gave her the benefit of the doubt in that the musing is from a man; I thought she might be Showing quite literally how a man thinks about his life – rather than Telling, to make her point. If that is indeed what she was doing then she’s been successful –

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I am no longer Runaway Granny! How shocking is that? I came across a huge file on Saturday, stuffed with print-outs from the first year of the blog, some doodles with AOL and MSN and the travel journals I kept since I left in August 2003. I didn't begin writing here till May 2006. There it was, the tale of my travels, neatly sitting in glossy sleeves -

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We reject a lot of manuscripts. We’re bound to: we’re a small publisher with an open submissions policy, and we publish far fewer books each year than are submitted. I want to share with you why we make offers on the ones we do, why we reject the others, and why you should be glad to be rejected, some of the time.

First up: even if your book is brilliant, it may not fit with a publisher’s objectives. If you have written a novel which is destined in the future to win the Booker, chances are that we at Snowbooks will reject you. We have an editorial policy driven primarily by our own entirely subjective tastes, combined with a forecast of what we think we can sell. Since we have collectively loathed most winners of the Booker for the last decade it’s unlikely that an excellent example of modern fiction will find a home on our list – regardless of whether other people would appreciate it or how many prizes it has a chance of winning. And if you’ve written something which is breathtaking in its mould-breaking originality, we’re unlikely to go for it, despite its genius. We are interested in books which we can sell – and, without huge budgets to break a new genre into the market, this often means books which are easily defined.


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How great is it when a friend gives you a copy of a book they love and want you to read? This morning I was delighted to receive Welding with Children by Tim Gautreaux, sent by my friend Lisa in the US. I had sent her a signed copy of The White Road & Other Stories, and instead of payment asked if she'd send me a book she loves. This is what she chose. I'd read the title story a few years ago in a short story workshop and been blown away. I am so thrilled to have the book! I get sent review copies all the time, I occasionally buy short story collections myself, but to have a recommendation turn up in my mailbox is the ultimate pleasure.

I will savour it - I have a lot of reading time on my hands now, J has just gone away and I'll be alone for the better (or worse) part of two months. I am open to any other amusements...

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It all made me want to rush off to Italy – or to Preston.


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Maybe it's an occupational hazard, or maybe it's because I'm becoming a monomaniac, but I've got to the point where I'm so sodden with what I do and think about, that almost anything that ordinary, boring life throws at me seems to connect with writing. This time it was sitting in the doctor's waiting room. Never mind the embarrassingly compelling agony column in a year-old copy of Women's Weekly (always good for sparking off some 'what if?' ideas for stories), or eavesdropping on the other patients (we do still have a National Health Service, and my parliamentary constituency is one of the most marginal in said nation, so you can imagine how wide the social profile is in the waiting room). On the table I spotted a special issue magazine of a Dutch newspaper: it's all in English (except for the advertisements paying the rent), it's beautifully produced, and from top to bottom it's about Rembrandt.

In another life I would have been an art historian or a photographer, and I find analogies between different arts endlessly fascinating, as anyone reading The Mathematics of Love or A Secret Alchemy will realise. Such analogies are also endlessly revealing about my chosen craft (which may be why they end up in my fiction). And among lots of other things in this magazine (okay, I confess, I decided that there were plenty of other mags on the table for everyone else...), I found the following:



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