I finally received my first published work in the post. I've been looking out for it for a month now, barely able to contain my nerves or excitement. So when I got home from work, and found it lying on the bed, it was a bit of an anti-climax.

My poem, Hurt Me, appears on page 252 of the Poetry Rivals' Collection 2011 - Putting Pen to Paper. I wrote it in one of my darker moments, in a flood of tears, after an incident with my five year old son which left me emotionally crushed. I never thought it would amount to anything, but after positive reviews from my fellow writers and poets at Writewords, my husband suggested that I should enter it in the Poetry Rivals competition. What did I have to lose?




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As a child I loved the circus, particularly the trapeze acts and the jugglers. Now, there is clearly an art to juggling balls or batons. I’ve tried it a handful of times, but my utter lack of co-ordination always lets me down. It's tough enough to catch one ball, let alone three. But what about the art of juggling life?

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Dear Jerusha: I had a one-to-one with an agent who said she felt my main character was rather dull and not pro-active enough. She was afraid that, not being like the usual feisty heroines who buck the system, my MC might fail to grab the reader's attention, and my writing friends have said similar things. I fully appreciate what they mean but I have struggled to correct the problem. The thing is, she is meant to be a bit 'wet' for want of a better word, or at least she is to begin with. She has to overcome this and break away from her "niceness" and stand up for what she wants, and that is her journey. (She ends up refusing to marry the man she loves because she wants to do other things first.) However, the novel is set in a world where an ordinary young girl brought up by a domineering mother can't be too "feisty" to begin, without it being anachronistic. At the start she is (outwardly) passive and more fearful than her peers. And she does make decisions and do things later on although her actions put her in a worse position than before. ("Out of the frying pan into the fire" kind of thing.) How can I make a good, quiet and put-upon character more interesting to readers, especially at the beginning of the novel, before her transforming journey gets going?

If your project in writing the novel is to chart the journey of a put-upon, un-self-determining character towards action, self-determination and self-knowledge, then you've got a classic premise. At the Guildford Book Festival I found myself describing Hallie Rubenhold's novel Mistress of My Fate to her as the story of how Fanny Price becomes Fanny Hill. But you've also got a built-in problem with this project: to make us like her and want to stick with her at the beginning, while she's still un-proactive, lacking in self-knowledge, and stuck in the situation (mental or practical or both) which she's going to have to learn to get herself out of.

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I received a proof copy of my second YA novel for Piccadilly Press the other day. It’s called Cracks and comes out in May 2012.

I started to write this one well before Dark Ride my first book, was accepted, and wanted to tell you a bit about how it all came about.

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I have found myself stumbling through life for the most part as I imagine most people do. I believe experiences make you who you are, but if I strip all of that back to my childhood, I think deep down I am the same little girl who sent off a story to Ladybird Publishing about evil goblins that lurked in her garden.


It's the stuff in between, the experiences that steer you down a different path, each twist and turn taking you further away from who you really want to be that get in the way.



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It's like the difference between riding a bike and riding a horse (not that I've ever ridden a horse) A film runs the same every time regardless of the audience, but actors in a play rely on a response to bring out their best performances. I used to do amateur acting myself, so I know something about that. When I'm in the audience,the nearer to the stage I am the more obliged I feel to respond to the actors.

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I'm reading a fascinating book, The Art & The Ego: the art and strategy of fiction writing explored, which is a collection of essays by all sorts of writers from Robertson Davies to Marina Warner, by way of the Johns Mortimer and Banville, and Sara Paretsky. It's edited by Clare Boylan, and it's out of print; I got it from the library, but it's so brilliant that I've just bought a copy secondhand, partly so I can read it in the bath with a clear conscience, and take a pencil to it too, but also because I know I'm going to keep going back to it, beyond the limits of even the London Library's patience.

What sent me to find this book was a forum conversation about my statement that I never write worse than when I've got a textbook, or a history book, or a guidebook, in my other hand. A friend quoted this, from Rose Tremain's essay (my italics):

...all the research done for a novel - all the studying and reading, all the social fieldwork, all the location visiting, all the garnering of what is or what has been - must be reimagined before it can find a place in the text. It must rise into the orbit of the anarchic, gift-conjuring, unknowing part of the novelist's mind before it can acquire its own truth for the work in question...

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Mea Culpa. It was my turn to post on Strictly today and I've somehow managed to miss this fact. However, my colleagues have suggested posting this video on the subject of rejection - which is actually very funny and a little bit empowering.



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I've asked before whether you've ever thought about the order in which you put the elements in your sentence. And my post on the joys of the long sentence is relevant too, because of course a longer sentence, in our lovely, bendy, syntactical English, gives you more opportunities: you can play with rhythm and sound, with subtleties of meaning, with front-loading the sentence or keeping the grenade for the end. You can fine-tune for the period or the voice, for the character or their state of mind.

So when, the other day, I found myself writing the first version of what follows, I decided to do a writerly five-finger exercise with it. How many ways could I recast the sentence while retaining the exact sense by not changing the logic of the relationship between the five main elements: He, Surprise, Fierce, His-Need and Find-Out. And I'm sure there are more permutations I haven't thought of. I'm going to leave you to do the Maths about what works, what doesn't, why, and when you might use which. Yes, one or two of them do sound like off-cuts from the Star Wars script. But then you never know when you might need just that, do you?

* He was surprised by how fiercely he needed to find out.
* He was surprised how fiercely he needed to find out.
* He was surprised [by] how fierce was his need to find out.
* He was surprised [by] how fierce his need was to find out.
* He was surprised [by] how fierce his need to find out was.
* He was surprised by the fierceness of his need to find out.

* He was surprised that in him the need to find out was so fierce.

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As if trekking to Hammersmith last Friday evening on the Tube–my least favourite mode of transportation in the entire world–was not challenging enough, I got lost when I got there.

Don’t laugh. You would have too had you emerged from a distressing underground situation to an equally distressing above ground reality, of construction. Feeling scattered, I considered turning around and going home.

But I was scheduled to meet Paul to see a play, albeit one I had never heard of, and he was already on route by car. Over the phone, he insisted all I had to do was follow signs to the Apollo (what signs?), go under the underpass (don’t see it either), turn right on the first road, then take a sharp left and another left and I’d be at Riverside Studios.

I don’t think so. By the time Paul found me, or shall I say, I found him parked out front of the Apollo, I was shell shocked, having crossed one of the busiest roads in London with traffic coming full speed on.

And then when we got to Riverside Studios one minute until the hour, my dear husband insisted that I go ahead, get the tickets and secure our seats before curtain call while he parked the car. To make a long story short, I didn’t make it.

Thus, we stood outside of the relevant studio’s doors with three other late comers for twenty minutes before they would let us in. Once inside, however, it didn’t take long to know it was well worth the hassle and the wait.

A Round-Heeled Woman, starring Sharon Gless, is awesome! Thank goodness. Otherwise, Paul and I might not be speaking today. But as fate would have it we both so loved everything about the performance of the former Cagney and Lacey star, we can’t stop raving about it.

As talented as ever, the spirited Sharon Gless has no trouble keeping her audience entertained for the full one hour and forty minute running time without so much as a small break.

Based on Jane Tuska’s book of the same name, which tells a true story by the way, the play follows what happened after Jane placed the following ad in The New York Review of Books:

“Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

Trollope is the ultimate tip off here for what this play is about; more than a middle aged woman’s desires to have sex. It’s about coming to terms with the past and the present before finding happiness in the future. It also looks at how urgent this might become as one ages.

Writer and director Jane Prowse parallels the lives of Jane, 66, and the eponymous Miss Mackenzie, 35, of Anthony Trollope’s 1865 novel to tell a brilliant story within a story.

Both heroines are on a profound journey–Jane to find love, or at least feel love under the name of sex, and Miss Mackenzie to find love in the name of marriage, though neither of them have particularly promising prospects. Enough said. I don’t want to spoil this must see play for anyone. It’ll be at Riverside Studios until November 20.

Gless and her co-star Beth Cordingly are not the only attractions either. The entire cast is amazing, all of them taking on at least two roles each, which means remarkable versatility and unbelievable agility.

But don’t go getting the idea that this play is distasteful–quite the opposite. While it is not without grit, A Round-Heeled Woman, leaves much to the imagination and is tastefully done. In spite of the difficult beginning, it was a happy ending indeed!

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