Well, I asked the universe last night for some guidance as to what my direction should be now... and I got a swift and positive response three hours later: my play, Exchange Rates, which I adapted from my story of the same name, (and is included in The White Road and Other Stories), has been shortlisted for the Total Beast 6-Minute Theatre competition and will be performed, along with the other ten shortlisted entries, some time in 2009. The winner will then be chosen, and will receive 200 pounds and a professional critique of his or her play......

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I can't stop talking about myself yet, it seems! My sixth stop on the Walking the White Road virtual book tour has me On the Couch over at Eric Forbes' wonderful Good Books Guide blog. Here is a small snippet:...

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One advantage of paying £14. 99 a month for as many films as you can watch, apart from saving on heating costs, is you don't mind the odd 'turkey'. That's just as well.


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I've never read any of Michael Crichton's fiction, but Mark Lawson's discussion of his work in The Guardian got me thinking. I've always maintained that, far from being sniffy about huge-selling writers with no apparent literary merits, all writers, whatever their ambitions for their own work, should have a long, hard look at what it is which those mega-sellers do, and readers in their millions so clearly want. Not just because snobbery is an unattractive quality, and even more unattractive in writers than in others because writers have some pretensions to seeing further into human nature. It ill becomes us to assume that so many millions of our fellow-humans are simply so coarse in fibre or ignorant that they don't know any better, and we had better bar the gates to these barbarians now. (Don't believe me that there are writers who think like that? Drop by a writing forum full of wannabe literati and listen in for - oh, all of ten seconds.)

But nor should we be long-hard-looking because we'll write whatever it takes - distort our natural writing into whatever shape it needs - to achieve Martina Cole's sales. Indeed, I agree with Mark Haddon that there's no moral obligation on an artist to appeal to the largest possible audience: if what you want to do is make art for a small audience who will utterly 'get' it, then that's fine by me, and if I'm part of that audience, that perfect fit may be one of the great aesthetic moments of my life. But writers by definition are trying to be heard:

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Sid, my agent, calls me from his office at seven am. “Christopher!” he announces cheerfully.

“This better be good,” I mumble, my brain sending out surveillance probes to assess the extent of my hangover.

“Oh, is it early again?” he says. “Sorry mate, don’t mean to keep waking you up.”

“Why are you always at work so early anyway?”

“Well, I share hot water with the other flats in my building and a couple of times it’s run out in the middle of my shower so I’ve started getting up before anyone else to beat them to it. Unfortunately a few of them are road sweepers. So I’m up at four every day now.”

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NANO Excerpt II

Outside the hoar frost ran the length of the washing line. Birds flitted from branch to branch and from fat ball to seeds to peanuts before flying across the garden and into the conifer tree. The weather forecast said it would be clear today and sunny but the freezing fog which had appeared last night hung about the garden ... [more]

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Her large brown eyes swivelled towards classmate Pam, who piped up. ‘And then one day, it suddenly clicks and you get a breakthrough’. Zadie nodded as if she knew exactly what we meant, then laughed and said she’d stick to Italian, as that was difficult enough for her. Remembering my manners, I asked what she was working on at present and learned she’d been awake until 4am finishing a talk she had to deliver in New York the next day. As she moved off, I explained to Pam that the life of a successful writer involved a lot of time-consuming publicity.


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Book videos have been the in thing for the last couple of years, and I’m rather keen to make one. I am, however, in two minds about it. As a Z-list author, I can’t justify spending thousands of pounds hiring a professional company, and yet if I cobble together a trailer myself will it be so tacky it’ll actively put people off buying the book?

I’ve already made a few lame attempts at a video, just to get to know Windows Movie Maker, but as publication draws nearer, it’s time to start taking the idea more seriously. I’ve made a list of pros and cons that I hope will be helpful to other authors thinking of jumping on the trailer bandwagon.

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I feel like I'm dying - although I have been diagnosed by most of the women around me as suffering from "man-flu". I hate being ill, because being ill means being lazy with no choice. If I'm going to be lazy I at least want to do it on my own terms!

It's a well known thing amongst writers that we get some of our best ides in less than ideal situations - on the toilet, at 3am, at work, or when we're stumbling home plastered after a night out. Last night, inbetween my nose exploding, immense coughing fits and my throat feeling like a beefy, angry lumberjack has shoved a chainsaw down it, I ended up thinking various pieces of writing that I wanted to start, continue, or finish. I was ticking over some of my better past works and thinking of how I could renew them. Just general thoughts. I think one of the main problems with me (and you can say this goes for life and not just my writing) is that I think about doing something but I don't act on it for fear of cocking it up.

Well it's time to take a bit of a more confident attitude to things and just get on with things, and see what happens. Let the chips fall where they may.

Ja ne~

The real star was Mark Strong, playing a kind of Jordanan James Bond with suits to match. His lean grace and brooding glances enhanced every scene he appeared in. Fortunately there were plenty. The plot’s better than ‘Syriana’, in that I could at least follow it. Amazing establishing shots such as barren Afghanistan mountains roads or the high-rise hotels of a Dubai cityscape were impressive, but never overwhelmed the storyline.

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