Cue gripping music, drumroll, audience shuffling nervously on their seats. The curtains twitch with hidden movement, and in the dead air before the show begins you can’t help wondering if it’ll match your expectations…

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I was walking past my bedroom on my way to the office earlier when I heard something tapping at the window. I opened the door and almost had a heart attack when I saw what I took to be an enormous (we're talking bird sized here) wasp. I thought, for a moment, I was in Dr Who; it's far more scary than you'd think.

It wasn't a giant wasp. It was a coal tit and it was stuck (coal tits aren't renowned for their window opening skills).

So, when I'd remembered how to breathe again I opened the window for it. I almost didn't, I didn't want to cause it any more panic but then pretty quickly realised that the longer it felt trapped the longer it would be panicking for.

So, I opened the window wide.

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Just a quick post to let you know that I've a very short story, Blink, up over at Ink, Sweat and Tears.

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I was looking forward to reading The Lovely Bones, after finishing Sebold's other novel, The Almost Moon. I admit I was expecting it to be a stronger novel than Moon, if only because of its stellar success as on the bookshelves. For my money, Moon is the better novel. And I think it's about structure, about the place where my thumb rested in the book as I was reading. I haven't considered the significance of this Thumb Measure before, but I thought about it all the way through Bones. I was partly judging the success of the story on how comfortable my thumb felt while I was reading. The Thumb measure is about whether what's happening on the page feels right in terms of how far I am into the book. Will I read on? How soon is it due to end and is there enough story left to satisfy my expectations as as reader?

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I slide into the room, back pressed to the wall. My heart is clattering, my breathing is shallow and my palms are sticky. Dots are dancing in front of my eyes, but my senses are on high alert to the slightest movement. It looks safe…but wait, what’s that in the corner? Did something move? Got to be certain. When I’m convinced the coast is clear, I make it to the bed and collapse, exhausted.
I made it. Until the next time….

Yup, it’s spider season again.


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Two thirds of the way into my novel, something extraordinary happened. My manipulative youth who nicks his mum’s contraceptives and Prozac to flog at school, turned out to have a heart. He gave a short, inarticulate but impassioned speech to my protagonist about how much he loves the girl around whom the story is based. I looked at my notes in panic. He’s not supposed to do this. He’s a git, from a strong, unbroken line of gits. I hadn’t figured much of a heart beat under that scrawny chest. If I’d wanted my characters to extemporise so far from the script, I’d not have bothered plotting the book before writing it.

But now that I saw him trying to behave honourably when all around him adults schemed and brawled, I realised I must let him, just as my own kids deviate from plans we’ve made if they have a better idea. What would happen if at the end he got back together with the girl? The replacement boyfriend I’d lined up for her wasn’t shaping up as planned either: he kept snickering away like Beavis and Butthead when I'd instructed him to be unobtrusively gorgeous.

I imagine any novelist reading this is thinking, ‘Already two thirds of the way through before that happened? Duh! That’s how books get written.’ Alice Walker claimed the characters from The Colour Purple marched into her kitchen one day and started dictating their stories to her. And though I recognised the vividness of a character’s presence in what she described, their autonomy was alien. My character’s bid for freedom was a revelation after the control-freakery of short fiction writing where every comma is scrutinised. Trying to control the first two thirds of the novel had been like the agonising slow haul towards the crest of the Big Dipper; now momentum from the hard slog was sparking change.



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Every now and again I read a book that knocks my socks. It is not something that happens very often, which is probably a good thing because it means when I do find one like that it's rather special. Slaughterhouse 5 knocked my socks off. Aimee Bender's short story collections knocked my socks off. So did Etgar Keret's. Caroline Smailes' Black Boxes knocked my socks off. So did Frankenstein. To name but a few (have a look through the blog for others - most have been labelled The Incredibles).

The most recent socks-knocker-offer was Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball. It's right up there with the best I've read. Ever. It's clever, sensitive, heart breaking, moving, funny and many, many other wonderful things. I can't say enough nice things about it. Honestly (like you can't tell!) I loved it. (Scott Pack reviews it far better than I ever could here. He says: "If you go out and buy this on the back of my review then you won't be disappointed, and if you are then you need to give yourself a slap." And I think he's right.

I was thrilled to be able to tell Michael Kimball how much I loved it. And thrilled also to be able to ask him some questions.

And here are the results:



So, let’s begin. Could you tell us a little about Dear Everybody and a little about where it came from?

Dear Everybody started with one short letter, a man apologizing to a woman for standing her up on a date; the man is wondering if they had gone out that night, if maybe his whole life would have been different, better. At first, I didn’t know then who was speaking or that it was a suicide letter, but I did have a strong voice and a skewed way of thinking. That one letter led to a rush of about 100 letters—Jonathon, the main character, apologizing to nearly everybody he has ever known—and the novel opened up from there. Most of the novel is Jonathon’s letters, but it also includes newspaper articles, psychological evaluations, weather reports, a missing person flyer, a eulogy, a last will and testament, and many other fragments, which taken together tell the story of the short life of Jonathon Bender, weatherman.


How much, structurally, was planned?

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'Friend! Friend!' The toddler patted the window in the shopping centre. Apart from the squeaky voice, blonde hair and cherubic face , it was a re-run of Boris Karloff in the Frankenstein film, trying out the new word the nice blind man taught him. (The only character in the film not to run screaming at the sight of the craggy creature with a bolt through his neck)


It seemed strange, when the window was devoted to a set of matching luggage. Luckily, his mother knew what he meant.


'Yes, I do like the suitcases', she said.' But they're pink. Mummy doesn't do pink.'


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Michael Jacob, who with his wife Daniela de Gregorio is one half of the crimewriter Michael Gregorio, has written up the recent event I did in Perugia for the Rap Sheet.

I finished reading Mike and Daniela's latest, A Visible Darkness, at the weekend.

It's an intensely dark and gripping tale, grotesque, atmospheric, full of candlelit twists and the fetid stench of the past - a bit like picking your way through an old, labarynthine castle.

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