I recently did one of those “25 random things” lists that have been doing the rounds of Facebook and forums, and in a failed attempt to make myself sound interesting I put that I can draw Celtic knots. That reminded me to dig out some paintings I did a while back, and seeing as I’ll probably never get round to framing them or anything (plus I’m casting about for stuff to put on my blog) here they are ...


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How well do you know your main character? Better than you know your best friend? Your partner? Better than you know yourself?
I thought I knew the 13-year-old boy at the heart of my children’s book. But there was a common thread to some of the criticisms I’d received on earlier drafts. The voice isn’t quite convincing; I haven’t got a clear enough picture of him; I’m not sure I cared enough about what happened to him. It was a real worry. I tried to address this through plotting and dialogue, and even changed the whole book from third person to first and then back to third again. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I still wasn’t quite there.
There’s lots of advice to be found on this particular problem. Some people recommend filling out a questionnaire on everything from your character’s family history to their favourite food. I’ve no doubt this approach can be very helpful, but in my case, the answer lay in something much more straightforward.
I wasn’t seeing him properly. Literally, seeing him.
And by that I mean that his appearance was all wrong.
It happened like this.

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Two opposite things are rubbing up against each other in my mind, and I can't work out how they fit together, so I've come over here to try to do so.

First, my friend, the thriller writer Debi Alper, who's also a photographer, has been blogging about a part of her life which I, for one, didn't really know about. Twenty-five years ago she was living in Grenada, taking part in the Revolution which seemed to have created a free and democratic state in the Caribbean. She was there when the military took power and then assassinated Maurice Bishop and his pregnant partner, and when the US invaded, and she kept a detailed diary. Now she's finally found the courage to revist the past and, day by day in her present, she's describing what happened day by day then. (That link is to the latest post, but it's really, really worth starting at the beginning by following the links at the top of it.) It's a story which needs, and gets, the plainest, most simple treatment: there's no need for high verbal drama or elaborate descriptions of states of mind, but just the kind of telling that, paradoxically, only real writerly craft can bring to such a story.

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'In the room, the women come and go,
Talking of Michelangelo'
(T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1915)

So different from Tate Modern on a Sunday afternoon.

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I am terrible at choosing titles. So I try not to. I hide away from them, and hope that they'll go away.


I wrote what was finally to be called Changeling with a working title that I hated (no, I am not going to tell you what it was), and I never referred to the work-in-progress, even to myself, by that title. The final title came about by chance: I was doing a bit of research into...

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Here's a list (really, for the benefit of those who might be interested in buying a ticket) of all the books I've received for the World Book Day/Book Aid raffle - and above is a pic of how I've arranged them. Not quite as impressive as L's classroom displays but I have, I feel, done myself proud.

A huge thanks to all who've contributed and to all whose books are in transit/waiting to be sent. I really, really, hope what we raise does justice to your generosity.

And the books are:

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Apologies for the scruffy layout of the radio bits below - it was the only way that I could upload a series of instalements (the show's an hour long so it would have been a right big bugger to download whole).

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Michael Feast makes the best of his underwritten part as the disgraced thesp, with great support from a cast that is all male except for Celia Imrie, equally convincing as Sybil Thorndike and as a flapper-dressed publican worried about her licence. David Burt gives sterling and versatile performances as a urinal attendant with a side line in reminiscence, a camp waiter, a newsvendor and a stage door keeper.



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“You can’t have a story with a divorcée as heroine in a woman’s magazine story.” So said one of my students on a course I ran a couple of years ago – “Writing Short Stories for Women’s Magazines.” She was adamant about this. Because, you see, that was the case thirty years ago, apparently, when she last read a story in a woman’s magazine.

Women’s magazine stories are cosy, with happy endings. They never threaten the status quo. Everyone gets their just desserts and the hero and heroine will always walk off into the sunset at the end.

Are you following me here, fellow womag writers? Because you must get this drivel in the ear too, from time to time – invariably from those higher up the literary food chain, “proper” authors who write angsty novels about incest and abuse and who believe the only ending worth its salt is one when the heroine throws herself under a train. Or from people who would seriously love to write for the market but whose only point of reference is the Woman’s Own their mothers used to read back in the early 60’s when men were men and women were expected to be grateful for it.



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Sonnet 116
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken...

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