This is the newest member of my fountain pen family. It's a 1950's Pelikan Stenonib, and it's come all the way from Germany. I like it. I'm thinking the thin nib'll be great for mss alterations.

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… dammit. Managed to break one of our nice glasses in the kitchen today – why can’t I ever break one of the horrid ones?? I then spent some minutes looking for the dustpan and brush to clear up the glass, but then realised that Lord H had left it in the loft whilst working on the watertank over the weekend. As I don’t do the loft – too spidery – I then had to get Lord H out of the bath and into the loft to retrieve it. My, the excitement we have in the mornings here in the shires. And we came here for the peace and quiet, don’t you know ...

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Heatwave! Where did that come from? We went to Bournemouth on Saturday. A long haul but worth it to remind myself how simple life can be when you're jumping real waves instead of imaginary ones. Or just paddling.


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In 'Wanting, needing, yearning, dreaming' I said that thinking about a piece of writing after you've written it can teach you much more about how writing works than reading a textbook before you start. The more formalised insitutions of academic creative writing seem to divide into two kinds: the departments and degrees which discuss ideas and theories of writing, and then write to explore them, and the places where the writing comes first and the analysis afterwards. A piece in Times Higher Education argues that creative writing is reviving the sort of liberal humanism in English departments that Theory banished, but the piece and the comments didn't rule out the theory-first approach to CW from which I instinctively recoil. So why do I recoil from it?...

And finally, the row about age-banding children's books rumbles on. I think the attempt by publishers to guide parents in choosing the right books for their children is well-meaning, but...

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Ye gods, but I'm feeling slightly stronger today. Almost like being a real human being, you know, rather than a mass of misery and shifting complexes. No idea how long it will last, and I can only think it's my double dose of Vitamin B pills kicking in finally. I wouldn't say I was dancing a jig, but at least I've stopped whimpering. Thank God.

Talking of which, Lord H and I dragged ourselves to Shackleford Church this morning. The priest was curiously dressed in red and may - as Lord H suggested - have been taking the concept of being clothed in the blood of the lamb rather to extremes ...

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They came on Friday, a 145-page PDF file of the proofs of my book, The White Road and Other Stories! As I was printing it out, I nearly cried. Just looking at the title page, and that wonderful page that asserts my rights and has the ISBN number... Very emotional. I have an ISBN number, I join the ranks of thousands, millions, of writers, I join them on shelves, I join them in bookshops, I join them on Amazon. I join them.........


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Seemed to take forever to get up today. I wasn't actually ready to face any kind of world before 11am. By which time, Lord H thought it was probably too late to do a day's birdwatching (which was vaguely planned), so we went shopping in Guildford instead. Nice day for it, but an extraordinary lack of people. Perhaps they all decided they were too late for a decent day's shopping and are watching birds instead. It's a mystery ...

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I had a bit of a freak out - or eppi as the kids still sometimes say – at school yesterday. Fortunately the only two people to witness it were the colleagues who 'caused' it in the first place. I've put 'caused' in inverted commas (sorry, MD!!), because, to be fair, a less emotional, er . .histrionic type might have stayed and discussed the matter calmly like a rational human being. Except that as far as I was concerned NOBODY BLOODY ELSE was being rational. Doing it again. Sorry.

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Tilly and I spent the afternoon at ZaZa’s yesterday: sandwiches, cakes, shortbread and more cakes – all home-made, for breakfast, lunch and I took some away for dinner at work. Howzat for bad habits? Then I began today with two of her rolls and am planning the last of the shortbread for lunch, in a minute! Just as well I’m arranging to begin a new life next week, isn’t it?

We had a great time yesterday, talking nonsense; of course funerals came up, and the outfits we would wear, and what would or should happen to our bodies

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There used to be a terrific series on Radio 3 - Monday afternoons, as I remember - called Stage and Screen. It was always a stand-alone programme about theatre or movie music, from the acutely avant-garde to the blockbustingly popular, and apart from the fact that it was always full of all that gorgeous repertoire, the discussion of the interaction between drama (and so at least by implication, storytelling) and music was consistently illuminating. The Broadway musical seems an impossibly tight form to us novelists, lying back comfortably in the arms of our own baggy monster of a tradition. And composing music, complete with beginning, middle and end, for a three-minute-forty-seven-second cue which has already been shot, is also something to make even those of us who are turned on by technical and formal challenges feel a bit weak.

I get grumpy when it seems that the nearly as tight principles of screenwriting are being applied to fiction without any acknowledgement that the two art forms are in many ways fundamentally different, and that happens a lot, not least in books about creative writing which ought to know better. But there's no denying that the basic simplicity of the novel-like elements of a musical (the time-frame of the experience so relatively short, the music/set/choreography doing much of the work that the novelist has to do for themself) can mean that the big bones of the storytelling can be seen and discussed amazingly clearly.

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