Has anyone asked about your writing recently in the voice we use for people with illnesses which aren't going to get better? 'How's it going?' they say, consciously radiating willingness to receive a terse 'Fine, thanks,' or a half-hour outburst of gruesome symptoms and existential fears. When you first declared, or mumbled, that you wanted to be a writer, did you get an anxious spiel about how agonising rejections are before you get a deal, and even worse four books down the line when even your agent will drop you? And how lonely it is! And what about the terror of the blank page and the horror of writer's block, (let alone when you've got the rent to pay)? Did they even go so far as to wonder aloud why so many writers have drunk or drugged or committed other forms of behavioural suicide? As a foreign interviewer once asked a middle-aged poet friend of some standing, 'You had success as a poet very young; why have you not yet killed yourself?'

Why is it that we regard creative work as so potentially dangerous to mental health?

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If you’ve ever had to wait for an important verdict on a writing project, you’ll know how horrible it can be.
I think of it literally as a large waiting room. The walls are painted the colour of despair and there’s much nervous coughing and magazine shuffling. Writerly types are sitting around and pretending to ignore each other, but really everyone is quietly sizing each other up. Every now and then the double doors open and someone important-looking with a clipboard sticks their head out. My turn at last! But no, another name gets called and someone leaves the waiting area, punching the air or weeping, depending on their outcome.
I’ve somehow got myself into a situation where I’m waiting for external verdicts on two separate books from two sources. What I was thinking?

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After our exposure to the cheap vices of Georgian times we blinked when the barman charged £7.50 for a pint of Grolsch and a pint of Guinness. It made me almost nostalgic for the good old days of 'poor man's punch'.


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I am planning to serialise my first Porfiry Petrovich novel on the social networking site twitter, starting tomorrow.

I'm not the first writer to use twitter to publish fiction. I've been very much enjoying Sarah Fox's unfolding story, Circus. Someone, I assume it's the author Laurie R. King, is tweeting quotes from the Mary Russell books, The Beekeeper's Apprentice and The Language of Bees.

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Many many congratulations to my great friend and colleague Vanessa Gebbie for being awarded second prize in the FISH short story competition - for the second time! A marvellous achievement, there were 15,000 entries.

The full list of winners is:

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Maggie and I share a birthday, early December, two Christmas babies.

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I’ve been saying for months that I was going to do this, ever since I was thinking about the advantages and disadvantages, but at last I have got round to it … ta da!


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Two, in fact, to make up for my grumpy post.

Charles Lambert's The Scent of Cinnammon and Elizabeth Baines' Balancing on The Edge of the World arrived a little while ago, and I am enjoying them both a huge amount.

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I'm back home in Israel now after a week of traveling - from Belgium to London, London to Jerusalem. I tripped off the Eurostar for a lovely meet-up with Vanessa in St Pancras on Monday involving cupcakes and much short story discussions! More news on that to come.

The Liars' League event on Tuesday night was great fun, five stories on the theme of Art & Science. My story, The Painter and the Physicist, was beautifully read by Susan Crothers. Follow the link to read the story online or listen to it - highly recommended! A wonderful thing the Liars are doing, a wonderful boost for the short story and for live story-telling (I am still thinking about the story with the zombie mice). ...

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It seems I'm not the first crime writer to turn his hand to writing a libretto. Apparently, Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith have also had a go, as I discovered from this article in The Times.

Is there something about writing crime fiction that makes us especially qualified for the task, I wonder?

Without wanting to appear either pretentious or glib - though aware that I will probably come across as both - I wonder if it is something to do with a preoccupation with death. I sometimes feel when I'm writing my Porfiry books that the whole thing is really a way of confronting death, facing up to it. This happens literally, of course, when the detective, and the reader, is presented with a corpse. And I, as the writer, have to look that corpse in the face and try to describe what I see - or rather imagine.

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