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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I decided to walk to Piccadilly because I'd read that ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ was being screened at the Cineworld at 4pm. The late afternoon sun turned office blocks to gold as I crossed Hungerford Bridge at dusk, and a five-strong band, including accordion and trumpet, played ‘Kalinka’



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You might remember that as a postscript (or should it be a postpost?) to a post about covers and blurbs, I linked to Musings from a Muddy Island, which is a booky-writey blog I enjoy, about one thing which makes authors happy: seeing people reading their book. A few other things which have made this particular author happy this week are:

1) A few months ago one of my longest-standing writing friends - let's call her Marguerite - whose beautifully built, beautifully written short stories I admire enormously, asked my advice about arranging and submitting a collection to agents, and as I've never done that I passed the query on to all my short-fiction-writing friends at Glamorgan, who came back with all sorts of helpful advice. We all know that it's next-to-impossible (though not completely impossible) to make your publishing debut with a short fiction collection. But Marguerite sent them off, and settled back to wait. Meanwhile, I happened to mention NaNoWriMo, which she'd never heard of, but dived straight into, and a couple of weeks later I got an ecstatic email about the joys of being able to unfurl huge bolts of story-cloth, and see where they flew.

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A few recommendations for great reading that I've enjoyed this week (links open new windows so feel free to click 'em all!):

Flash fiction
Missing by Marcia Aldrich, Vestal Review
You Should Know This by Meg Pokrass, Dogzplot
The Meaning of Life by Tom Robbins, Conjunctions

Short Stories
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I was lucky enough to see the wonderful Joe Craig today give a presentation at my daughter's school. Joe is an extremely good public speaker and energises his presentations in a way that had the children in the audience captivated by his on-the-spot storytelling. The kids seemed to love him, and he had them rolling around with laughter at times. He did so well to keep them attentive for a little over an hour (no mean feat).


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