Ever seen 'Team America: World Police'? Well I feel just like Kim Jong Il (is that how you spell it?) did in the film. Isolated, alone, and ready to blow the hell out of anyone because of his 'ronriness'. What is truly sad, is that I have allowed myself to get like this since I moved jobs nine months ago. I got so distracted at work, that I forgot about why I was there in the first place - to help me write. Now I resent myself and my job for taking me away from what I want to do and am trying to leave as quickly as possible. I have no life to speak of because of my job, and despite having a wonderful girlfriend, I can't see her nor my friends as often as I like because I'm working funny hours. I feel stuck despite having written lots over the past three years. Rejections aplenty, but then everyone gets them so I shouldn't be moaning. Chin up and all that.

Anyway, I should stop ranting about how bad everything is.

Today's trauma has arrived early, so hey at least it's over. Every so often, the good people at the Times Literary Supplement send me a free copy in a brave but ultimately foolish attempt to get me to subscribe. Each time I open this unwanted gift, I can't help but groan. I mean call me an Essex book slapper if you must (hell, I like it), but honestly the TLS is so unutterably worthy and essentially dull that if you read as much as two sentences, you're likely to lose the ability to write altogether. And, dahlings, the font is so dreadful and there are just too many words all pressed together on one page, like the Black Hole of Calcutta. One cannot help but feel sorry for them all really. It's so exhausting ...

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The dream article is taking shape in my head. However, I am wondering if it will ever progress beyond there.

On Thursday I drove to Cambridge with Frank Tallis, who happens to be a clinical psychologist and an expert in Freud. He's also an exceptionally good crime writer.

We had a lunch appointment with a reading group based at Heffers, the number one bookshop in Cambridge. There was plenty of time to chat in the car.

I mentioned to Frank the almost incapacitating sense I have of feeling I need to do something to promote my books, whilst not being sure what exactly I should be doing. This has perhaps led me to coming up with ideas for articles, pitching them to the Guardian, occasionally posting them at the Rap Sheet, and of course feeding the plog.

Frank had a clinical term for the state I was in, which has been induced and studied in lab rats apparently.

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Finally Lord H and I managed to solve this week's "Torchwood" mission last night - but only by dint of Googling the answer, which made us groan when we saw it. Honestly we should have thought of that! I appreciate we may well now stand accused of cheating, m'dears, but if the TV Torchwood team can call up the great Martha Jones when they're stuck then I don't see why we can't ask the audience either, ha! The utterly strange thing is that the codeword we needed is the same as the codeword I use in Maloney's Law for a minor but essentially very key character. Weird indeed ... Lord H remains unsurprised that my head is full of aliens ...

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In response to Tim Lott's lament in The Guardian that heterosexual love stories are no longer considered a properly literary and sufficiently substantial subject for a novel, even though they power much (most?) of the great fiction of the past, Susan Hill argues that our ordinary love lives are too prosaic, that these days writing about great love can't be done in a world with easy and blame-free divorce, and that it has to include writing about sex, which is impossible to do well. As a result, she says, we cannot write the sweeping narratives, the high drama and heartbreak that great love stories demand. (I did post a comment on her blog, but it seems to have got lost in the ether).

I do agree that the lack of impediments to our modern western sex lives can make writing a 'big' modern love story very difficult.

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Ye gods, but I'm actually into the last quarter of The Gifting edit. Sound those ruddy trumpets indeed. And I'm really pleased with the scene I rewrote at the end of Part 3 as well - it somehow makes far more sense now. It gave me that glorious feeling of yes when I finished it - which isn't something that happens often. Dammit. Still a long section to tackle now though, and I fear that the rewrite of Quarter 4 will be deep and painful. Nurse, the screens ...

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I don't know why, but I am feeling decidely low in mood tonight. It has grown with me all day, like some nasty, festering boil. I don't know if it is because of my age. Or because I am so unhappy at work. Or because I just don't feel a hundred per cent. Or maybe even eternal optomists get fed-up from time to time? Does anyone else get days like that? Where it takes every ounce of willpower you possess to get out of bed and then you spend the entire day just getting more an more and more stressed out. It is very out of character for me to feel so sorry for myself but in fact I do feel sorry for myself, which is just pathetic.



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Ye gods, but it’s chilly today. It’s the third time this week I’ve opted for a jumper rather than a jacket in the office. Ah, we’re all downgrading now, you know. Soon I shall be rolling in wearing my pink fluffy dressing gown and bedsocks. That’ll get rid of the campus population for sure ...

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It’s late on a Saturday night in Hore’s on Frith Street and it’s as if something trippy has been mixed into all the alcohol behind the bar. Everyone is wasted but decadently so. At least, that’s how it feels in the moment if you’re part of it.

Sid is shuffling around on the dance floor. He is not a good dancer, and he is not good looking, but something about his awkward posing endears him to the women around him. Not to the point where they find him attractive, but when he grinds up against them they push him away without malice.

The whole floor of the club is ankle deep in booze. Not the cheap strong lager that splashes up onto your jeans in the Camden pubs, but exotic cocktails that girls in white high heels have been unable to keep in their glasses. They slip and slide in their own liquid, paid for and sloshed onto the floor and they land on their backs, laughing, skirts riding up revealing white or pink knickers. Men rush to help them, the grips on their DMs just holding them upright as they haul the girls to their feet and hug them. The girls are not particularly pretty. All the pretty girls are at clubs you’ve heard of.

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