When my book was accepted for publication by Salt, one of my first thoughts, when I had stopped jumping up and down and weeping, was that I wanted Eco-Libris, a company founded by Israelis that I had written about when I was a journalist, to "balance out" the paper that would be used to print my short story collection by planting a tree for every book. I got in touch, we all got excited, and you will notice that on the back of The White Road and Other Stories is the beautiful Eco-Libris logo. I pay them a small amount per book and they use the money to plant trees, together with their planting partners in Central America and Africa.

I like their ethos, it speaks to me:

"We believe in providing people with easy and affordable ways to take responsibility for their actions and go green. We don’t believe in preaching doom and gloom. It’s not our style. We do believe in taking action and in the power of small changes to make a big impact."

To this end, they aim to balance out (Eco-Libris doesn't like the term "offset") half a million books by the end of 2009. As well as collaborating with authors and publishers, any reader can go to the website and pay Eco-Libris to balance out their own books.

Well, I was happy enough to be collaborating with Eco-Libris, but I didn't know how much effort they would also put in to publicise my book, which they have written about on all sorts of green websites, for which I am very grateful! And now, I am appearing on the Eco-Libris blog as part of my 11-stop Virtual Book Tour. We're talking about green issues, as well as other topics like living in Israel. A taster:.......

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It's what we do, as writers and readers, isn't it? Sharing our words, or other people's.

Tonight there was a bit of time over with my group. I had the library's copies of two of my favourite books to hand (some members have been reading them, see) so I read from them. And it was brilliant.

I read Toad in The Hole, from Sarah Salway's Leading The Dance, and they loved it.

Then I read Plaits, from Tania Hershman's The White Road and Other Stories *and they loved that as well.

Sharing words is good. And to be encouraged.

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It's odd, I've gotten over one illness and seem to have acquired another!

I have an interesting question which I have posted in the Beginners Group. If you could ask your characters questions, what would you ask them? It's an idea I had that will help me flesh out my characters and make them come alive. From simple things to asking their favourite food to big questions like what they think the meaning of life is.

I'll compile a list of questions from myself and various people and possibly take one of my characters and put them up here as an example.

Hope you're all healthier than me.

Ja ne~

The characters were all one-dimensional, and coincidences notched up the melodrama. Saviour Malkovich arrives just as the asylum nurse is about to throw the switch on the electric shock machine and even worse, when Christine faints at seeing the headlines in the street, he's there on cue to catch her.

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Harper Collins has sent me a package with all the press clippings surrounding the release of my novel, Clear History. I was expecting a motorcycle courier, but the folder arrived instead with the rest of the Royal Mail correspondence in a single A4-sized envelope.

I pick it up between thumb and forefinger and flap it, as though it might trigger some expansion mechanism. It doesn’t. It remains depressingly thin and light.

I spread out the contents on the bedroom floor and pick through the skeletal remains of my writing career. “How could people have bought the thing if no one knew it existed?” I ask Cheryl...

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Even if I don't write another word of the new novel for a week, to have got six longhand pages down - even in my big, sprawly writing, every other line - does feel very different from all the weeks and months when it's been in my head and not on the page. And suddenly the reading, all the accumulating ideas, the streets and gardens, the scents and sounds, the clear and immediate vision of people in a place, are alive. Until now they've been like ghosts: not ghosts of the past (though they're set in the past) but of the yet-to-be. Almost nothing - as a proportion of the whole - is on the page, but now it's as iff everything's at the far end of a long room from me, rather than just over the hill. And it all happened because I realised that I knew the end of the story: I decided/recognised/understood/worked out (what writer could swear which these moments are?) where, in relation to the events she tells, one of my narrators is standing. That was all I was waiting for, though I didn't know it, and immediately I knew the tone and subject of her first line. Because I have a strong, if not clear, idea of how different she and the other narrator are from each other, I then knew where he is, and how he speaks and how he acts. And I sat down and wrote.

John Gardner talks of the psychic distance of a narrator and narrative from the characters and action he/she/it narrates. In my PhD I've extended that concept to discuss the psychic range of a piece, as measured by the nearest and furthest point the narrator inhabits, relative to the characters. But I'm surprised how rarely, in among all the agonising and tub-thumping and 'rule'-making that goes on over voice and point-of-view, that they're discussed in these terms.

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It promises to be a very different Christmas for us this year. As usual I am syphoning out the doom and gloom of the situation and gargling with it.

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I'd only called in at the National Portrait Gallery to use the loo...

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I occasionally listen to the Writers on Writing podcast, and when I saw that Barbara DeMarco Barrett was interviewing Melissa Bank, author of Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing and the Wonder Spot, two of my favourite books - which are really short story collections, not novels - I stopped everything I was doing to listen to it. Melissa is great, dry and funny, and also has a lot of wisdom about her own writing processes, I highly recommended listening to it.

A few interesting things: Melissa said that having always written on computer, she now writes first drafts by hand, to get rid of that urge that comes to instantly revise when you are typing on screen because it's so easy to cut-and-paste, shift things around. She says of her second book the Wonder Spot, that because she "knew this would be published" she didn't have any sense when it was finished and "had to have it ripped from my hands". She often, she says, has to rely on other people to tell her when to stop revising.

................

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Slowly working my way through This Book Will Save Your Life by AM Homes. It’s the sort of book you want to savour, tasting it bit by bit and, OK - the sort of book I’d love to have written. Still, there’s a good review here if you want to check it out, but better still - read it! I’ve two books waiting for me when I finish this one:[more]

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