My friend and stablemate at Headline Review, Rosy Thornton, has started a discussion on WriteWords about epistolary novels. Her own first novel More than Love Letters is entirely made up of letters, emails and diaries, as well all the other documents we generate without even realising it - newspaper reports, minutes of meetings and extracts from Hansard. (Well, I don't personally generate extracts from Hansard, but you get the idea.). TMoL isn't epistolary in that sense, but the letters - written in one century, read in another - were the origin of the novel, and are one of its building blocks, and for some of the same reason as Rosy's used them and A S Byatt uses them in Possession: things like letters invite the reader to imagine what they're not saying, to put the 'real' story together from these partial (in both senses) fragments. There's potential for comedy in people's different views on the same events, there's potential tragedy and irony in, again, how things are read wrongly or differently, or never read at all. Romeo and Juliet would have had a happy ending if a letter hadn't gone astray.

But, as Rosy says in the thread, one difficulty of an epistolary novel is that you can't put actual sex in it.

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Bloody hell, but I've actually done something literary today. Pause for blowing of trumpets and putting up of the bunting. Ah, I remember bunting. Brings back all those glorious '70s moments for me ... Does anyone still use this?

Anyway, I have changed all the names in Thorn in the Flesh that need changing and I'm sure my two secondary characters have grown sparkier as a result of being renamed to David and Nicky (or possibly Nicki - I'm still not decided). Strange what a difference a name makes. Even if only to my inner view of them. I've also added in a couple of phrases about Godalming Museum - well, if I'm going to have the launch there, then I'd better do the decent thing. Never let it be said that I, as an Essex Girl, am too proud to product-place in a novel. And even if the launch ends up being somewhere else, heck at least I'm showing local loyalty ...

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Today as over past days this month, it's easy not to write. Ideas don't seem to come. Winter blues grow darker. But, then a challenge is given and rising to the challenge, a sort of funny tale is born. Goodness, humour in November. Now that's a first.

A long blog, for which apologies – but I’ve put a fairly in-depth review of Lisa Glass’s Prince Rupert’s Teardrop at the end – well worth a read (the book – and the review, I hope!). Had great fun at the Goldenford meeting last night sorting out our upcoming book signings and fairs etc. Christmas is always a busy period. So if anyone’s in Farnborough at all on Saturday 24th November (this Saturday) between 11am and 1.30pm-ish, do pop in and see us in Book Boyz bookshop in Kingsmead, Farnborough – we’ll be happy to see you!...

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Did anyone see the news the other night where the brother of yet another young victim of violence was talking to reproters? It made my heart bleed and my soul weep. Through his tears this young black man was imploring "Why do these things happen? We see other families on the telly about it and now look, we are the family on the telly." He then went on to say "Something has to be done to stop this. It isn't the police. It isn't racial. It is black people doing it to ourselves and each other!"


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About eight months ago I mentioned that I'd attended a book launch at my local library. A couple of months before that I'd plugged the book. I believed then and still do believe that it's important to do such things.

So, eight months on...

I was in the middle of running my writing group tonight. The author of said book appeared and asked for a word. Of course I said that's fine. I did offer him the opportunity to speak to me in private; he chose to speak in front of the group. No problems.

He wanted to talk to me about what I'd posted on the blog in March.

He said he didn't like what I'd written about him.

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A fairly quiet day today. Full of rain and darkness. Goodness me, how poetic I am, ho ho – but it’s true. According to the weather forecast, it’s going to rain at least until Friday, so we’d better get used to it. It makes the concept of hibernation so much more appealing.

Work-wise, I’m waiting around for papers to fall from heaven for the rapidly approaching meetings. If I don’t get stuff out by tomorrow (my last day here this week), people will start to hyperventilate. And that will include me. But there’s not much I can do if they’re still being written elsewhere. We do so like to take things to the wire here in academia, you know ...

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I was somewhat surprised to note when I weighed myself this morning that since I stopped worrying about my weight I have lost half a stone! How did that happen? Where did it go? I think I will have to stop worrying about my weight forever; at least that way I might get back to my ideal weight (ideal according to the media you understand). I have heard of the phrase 'Think yourself thin'. Thin I will never be but thinner-than-I-have-been-of-late sounds quite interesting. Work that one out if you can!

Hubby and I did not get all the Christmas shopping done last Saturday, despite the fact we were in Croydon for around eight hours. Hubby - who was diagnosed diabetic eighteen months ago - was not feeling a hundred per cent which put a bit of a dampener on it, but it wasn't his fault. Plus the place was absolutely heaving. With five weeks to go, people were still shopping like there was no tomorrow. You couldn't move in some places, finding yourself hemmed in by a human wall of panic buyers behaving like weird dolls whose Prime Directive was to BUY BUY BUY. I have never seen anything like it this far in advance of Christmas Eve.


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Spent the morning catching up with emails and organising meetings on top of the meetings that have already been organised. Just in case there aren’t enough. All this is made more exciting by the new system for booking catering – which has snuck up on us without trumpeting its approach. Instead of the usual email, there’s a lovely new form where you have to try to remember project codes without being prompted. A challenge too far for a Monday really, but I think I sussed it. In the end. I’ll know if I’ve done it right by whether food actually turns up on the day or not. My, how I like to live dangerously – I now have visions of starving academics weeping over empty plates ...

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Last night I listened to Lavinia Greenlaw's Sunday Feature on Elizabeth Bishop, a great poet about whom I knew almost nothing, though after hearing some read a Collected Poems has now gone straight to the top of my Christmas list. It was on Radio 3 but, shame on them, there's no Listen Again facility, or I'd put the link here. Anyway, in passing Lavinia made the point that after an extremely damaged and damaging childhood, for Bishop writing was therapy. And yet, said the programme (I hope I'm quoting right), she knew that it isn't enough for writing to be therapy. It has to be shaped and worked with craft, to become art.

Writing can be used in a therapeutic setting, of course. And, more informally, anyone from a child writing a story about finding a scary monster in her mother's bed to an old man writing a poem to be read at the funeral of his wife knows that feelings beyond a certain intensity demand heightened and perhaps metaphorical expression. But for writers it's a very different thing,


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