I've been thinking quite a bit over these past few days about the power of emotion in words.

I mean you can write something, that isn't particularly well written, (in the writery craft sense) and it can have a big effect on someone. Be it a small poem to cheer a homesick friend up, or an UnMadeUp piece about being spooked about something you've seen but can't explain. The emotion, the truth you express through these things can be affecting and, in some cases, deeply powerful and moving. Maybe that's because the emotion, feeling and point of writing it is obvious and clear.

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Why am I not writing as much as I want to? Well, here are a few reasons:

Podcasts

Yes, I may be the last person in the Western World, but finally I too am the proud owner of a cute little just-bigger-than-an-aspirin iPod Nano 3G. I resisted for so long, but then succumbed because I realised that working out in the new gym I just joined (more on that later) would be a lot more bearable with my own music rather than the booming soundtrack the gym favours. Little did I know that it wouldn't be music that I would be listening to but... Podcasts. How amazing they are! In a few days I have found the BBC Radio 5 Book Panel with Simon Mayo, Guardian Books Podcast, the NewYorker Fiction podcasts, Radio 4 Front Row Highlights, the NY Times Book update, the NewScientist podcast,, Ny Times Talks, and the The BBC World service World Book Club!

Heaven... There I am on the treadmill, pounding away, an interview with Phillip Pullman going on in my head, or giggling to Simon Mayo and friends reviewing a book about Genghis Khan, or Jumpa Lahiri reading and discussing a William Trevor short story that was published in the NewYorker thirty years ago....

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Firstly I'd like to draw your attention to Vanessa Gebbie's blog - especially her last post (January 9th) as I think what she's doing is both incredibly interesting and hard. Editing a passage from a novel into a short story is serious business.

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Last year I wrote a Rap Sheet post about a number of my fellow historical crime novelists who happen to be practically neighbors of mine, in the Highgate-Crouch End-Stoke Newington triangle of North London. The writers in question are Lee Jackson, Andrew Martin, and Frank Tallis. After that post went up, Andrew and I did a joint reading at a leading North London independent book store, the Muswell Hill Bookshop. Sometime later, the four of us met up at the annual Bodies in the Bookshop event in Heffers, Cambridge. I also met Frank for a drink at the famous Flask Pub in Highgate, just a short stroll from his millionaire mansion and within spitting distance of a house Sting was once reputed to inhabit.

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Television-man and Desmond Lynan lookalike James Rycarte arrives for his new job: as “Mistress” of an all-woman’s Cambridge college, the fictitious St Radegunds.

Here he finds himself beset by problems: the library is falling down, the students are on strike, research stipends cut, and he is swamped by divided committees where the fiery Feminist Marxist academics take on financial administrators happy to be propped up by money from land-mines.

Unsurprisingly the fiery Feminist Marxists aren’t too happy about the appointment of a man to head up St Radegunds either, and the hapless James finds himself besieged on every side.

Enter Martha: the brown-eyed, lip-munching forty-something Senior Tutor: moral to the core, loyal to a tee and the one true adviser he has to guide him through the quagmire of college politics. But Martha has her own problems at home and with her own career and her sense of self. She needs to be needed, but does not know what to do when her teenage daughter really does need her and is threatening to go off the rails.

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And it's come to this:

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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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