Gosh, some nice news to start the day – the lovely Verda – my editor for Maloney’s Law at PD Publishing – has now completed her edit and emailed me with changes and a covering note to say what a wonderful story it is and how much she loved it. Gosh, thanks, Verda! I can honestly say that’s the first time that’s happened with a commercial publisher – it’s so nice to be treated as if I’m a real person rather than a number in a very long list. My experience with PD is certainly proving very pleasant indeed. They make me feel like a worthwhile person – shock, horror!

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Happy New Year! Hello one and all and welcome back. How was your Christmas break? Ours was brilliant. It started when a copy of my book arrived in the post - a perfect bound one! I was chuffed! It looks even better than I could have hoped. Per-lease buy it! it really is a quite remarkable little volume, just right for little hands (Beatrix Potter knew what she was talking about when overseeing the publication of Peter Rabbit with Frederic Warne!). My ten year old nephew read it cover to cover one day, got to the end and said enthusiastically "That's the moral!". I felt like clicking my fingers like Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady and saying "By George, he's got it!"


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Today's seminar was on Blake and, courtesy of my mother, I handed out copies of his first draft of 'The Tyger', set against the final version. It's not a long poem, but perhaps half the lines are different in some way, and one whole verse in the first draft was cut. We discussed why he'd changed what he did, whether the cut words found a home elsewhere or were gone forever, why the cancelled verse didn't work, and so on. And this one short poem kept us happily discussing for the whole forty-five minutes that's left after you've handed back the essays and dealt with the signing-in and asked after everyone's Christmas holiday.

The good things that came out of that seminar made me regret that it isn't easier or more automatic to get hold of such drafts when you're studying a piece.

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This morning, I am inundated with paperwork. Hmm, the academic staff must be back then. And raring to go, darn it. Anyway, I have now printed out everything there is to print in the entire universe ready for Monday’s meeting, with the knowledge that at least three people are taking it to the wire (as it were) in terms of tomorrow’s deadline. Which – for once – is completely and utterly unmovable. Mainly because I won’t be here to do any further photocopying on Thursday and Friday, hurrah! Honestly, I think I am actually engaged to the photocopying machine, and hope to set a date shortly ...

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Today was my official start of 2008 - Happy New Year!


I just didn't feel ready last week: there were still mince pies in the cupboard, the woman across the road hadn't removed her garish lights from the window, and there were a couple of To Do items in my 2007 diary that I hadn't crossed off. But this morning I was raring to go with the New Year and my resolutions...

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The February issue of Writers' News magazine arrived this weekend and I was interested to see that it included a short article about NaNoWriMo and its various spin-offs. Now, as we’ve already established, I tend to lag a little behind everyone else in all things technological or particularly 'online-centric'. (See? I even have to make up my own hyphenated words to compensate for my ignorance of the proper technical terms...) And this why, despite first hearing about NaNoWriMo in November 2005, it was 2007 before I finally decided to throw my lot in with the other 100,000+ writers/madmen/masochists (delete as you consider applicable) around the globe and give the whole '50,000 words of a new novel in a single month' thing a try.

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Bloody hell, but my new website has actually gone live. Sound the trumpets and begin general huzzahing!! You can see it here (please see Full Post for link). I’d be delighted if you felt able to pop in and leave me a message via the contact form! And while you’re there don’t forget to admire Lord H’s stunning nature photography, which appears with some of the poems and on pages of novels with no front cover. Yet. So huge thanks to Lord H for designing and inputting it all – though I did work out how to do changes towards the end of the process, you’ll be relieved to hear … - and a thank you to Zen too for finally getting it live. (Of UK Hosts, we will of course say no more) ...

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Never having written flash fiction before joining the group, I've become addicted. A new challenge this week, the theme, I thought, scary. But, I saw a man with a kite and I was off. My desk is tidier but thoughts ramshackle after a rare celebration with friends over the weekend. It was worth the headache though. Social skills returned. It's like riding a bike. Trouble is, the bike's a bit rusty.

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve packed in the day job. Today is my first day as a full time writer. Shit. Scary. Especially when you read stuff like this.

So what have I done today? I got down to serious work on my next Porfiry Petrovich novel. I’ve been making character notes, on index cards of course. And trying to tease out and develop the various story strands.

I’ve also tried to do some work on something I call ‘the visual structure’ of the book. I find it quite interesting to approach writing in this way, to think of visual themes for the book, and possibly to imagine the story as a progression, or journey, from one predominant visual motif to another. To put it in its simplest terms, from darkness to light. Or, in the case of the book I’m working on, from mist to clarity.

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Managed to act like normal citizens of Surrey today and actually went to the Epiphany service at Shackleford. Which had rather more people than usual due to the terribly unfortunate incident of the sister church in Peper Harow experiencing a rather large fire on Christmas Eve. They're apparently looking for people who left quickly after the Carol Service on the Sunday. Um, that would be Lord H and myself then ... We're hoping that Shackleford Church isn't a shadow of its former self by this time tomorrow, or we may indeed have to flee the country. You heard it here first ...

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