Summer is no friend to the author. Who doesn’t love the sun when it’s not aiding forest fires, causing continent-wide droughts, or slowly roasting the ozone layer? Problem is, when it’s hot outside and UVs are beaming through your window, it’s kind of hard to find excuses to stay indoors. It’s also hard to conjure up a dark and stormy night (and as we all know, the best stories always begin that way…)


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Double huzzahs! I have now finished the edit of The Bones of Summer and am making enquiries with The Literary Consultancy as to the the price of one of their worth-their-weight-in-gold critiques. Lordy, but I never leave the starting blocks without them. No matter how ruddy painful that process is - and believe me it's painful.

In the meantime, I have joined in with the Harper Collins-based showcasing website, Authonomy and uploaded the first 10,000 words or so of all my books, except the best forgotten Hit List , on site for people to run screaming to the hills from. Lordy, but my grasp of grammar is in a class of its own. As is my grasp of cliche. Obviously. Mind you, as the site is still in Beta stage, it's only open to guests at the moment, so the hordes of screaming people aren't as loud as they may yet become. My advice is buy your earplugs now. It will be interesting to see how long the great HC will allow a self- and small publisher slapper like myself to remain on board for sure - but you know me: any chance of a bit of book publicity and I'm there, waving my pom-poms around and shouting for the Quality Unknowns ...

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These have been very hard to capture; the gold embellishment glares back at the camera – I’ve tried it from all directions and this is the best I can get. I haven’t got a scanner. The art is just wonderful but there is no explanation as to how they’ve created them or who for that matter; I assume that Klimt is dead and these seem to be collages of his collages – some kind of insightful collaboration.

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Okay, I've now been publicly named and shamed by Mockduck for not posting anything, and runaway granny has unlinked me (oh, the rejection :( ) - so, despite my blogger's block here goes . . . I think i have to come up with 6 random facts about me. Um,

1.

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I can see the attraction of landing on those flat shingly beaches. The towers themselves , though, are not at all attractive; they're squat and cement-coloured, like fish-and-chip-shop steak puddings. Mostly they're derelict and this one seemed deserted, plonked down on a bit of derelict caravan site near the ugly sea wall.

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Have managed to edit another couple of chapters of The Bones of Summer today and am now on Chapter 21, p201. It's the start of the end phase, if you see what I mean, so I'll leave it till tomorrow now.

I've also played golf with Marian - Lordy, but we were rubbish. Goodness alone knows what the hell I was doing on the 8th hole, but Marian had to crawl into a bush twice in order to rescue my ball. And I was at that point still on the damn tee. Bloody hell eh!!! Believe me, 5 off the tee is not my best moment ever ...

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Tilly and I treated the city to our most scrumptious lunch outfits; we sailed our considerable ships out into the flash of a Glaswegian summer – and heads did turn. She sported a walking stick with a crystal ball clasped in a bronze hand, and my bag dazzled the streets with mirrors – we left the bells at home, on other accoutrements.

It was an amazing escape from the cave and my hermit existence and I made great use of the phone camera. Isn’t it fab? We were disgusted with the Museum of Modern Art; it is a bare place, littered with someone’s idea of Art - neither mine, nor, I suspect, any of the general tax-paying public! I was very vocal in my opinions, as always, especially when we found fabulous art in a little gallery in Prince’s Square. I wish I had taken some photos there.

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I had a couple of 'writing related' experiences this week that were nothing to do with sitting in front of a laptop, or talking to agents/editors on the telephone.

My daughter bought the fabulous Ways To Live Forever by the wonderfully talented Sally Nicholls, and read it in an afternoon. This is unusual for my little girl, who tends to flit in and out of books. Sally happens to belong to the same writers' forum as I do, and she asked a pertinent question when I told her that we had purchased her book:

"What made her choose it?"


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Believe it or not, I had a half-hour debate with a colleague over the use of "led" and "lead." Could someone confirm "led" is propely used in the following sentence: "The team is led by the quarterback."

Lead (noun - pronounced "Led" as is red) is a metal; lead (verb - pronounced "leed") is present tense; led (verb)is past tense of to lead.

To Goldsmiths yesterday evening, for a lecture by the literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton. Apart from knowing his name in connection with swathes of literary theory, combatively expressed, which I haven't read (I haven't read much of anyone else's literary theory, it has to be said) I didn't really know what to expect. In the event it was the kind of talk you wish you could have recorded, to go over more than once, spreading out the densely-argued points, gathering together arguments that ranged over an astonishingly wide area, and seeing whether it really is as persuasive as it seemed at the time. I suspect much of it would be, and it was also funny.

I still find that most literary criticism, however interesting it is in and of itself, and be it Formalist, or New, or Structuralist, or whatever, says very little to me about what I, as a novelist, spend my time thinking about. But one thing Eagleton said really rang a bell.

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