Another Friday post and at 11am, what's more, so we'll start off with elevensies, one of my favourite meals of the day. Mmm, delicious. More cake?

So I am newly settled into the Land of Unlimited Coffee Refills, Big Cars and Inspirational Presidents (when did you last wear your Gordon Brown T-shirt?).
Yes, America.

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The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid

I bought this book up because I wanted to read something different – ie, not a thriller and not YA fiction. When I picked it up I was hooked right away by the way the novel is written to the reader, as though you are the other character in the story. What follows is a lengthy monologue about the life of the MC and his experiences and opinions of the West before and after 9/11.

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This week I have been mostly tackling... eggs. Our new home requires building work, which has cleared out our little all aka the nest-egg. Which is a shame but we survive. I have written a new short story which features a man who smells of boiled eggs and baby lotion.

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One simple test to find out if someone is N or S is to show them a painting and get them to describe it. Froggy, for example, the tree-frog I bought from a local artist in Costa Rica. The painting on my office wall. I show it to you for a minute then take it away. Now tell me what you saw.

If you are S, you will tell me that it’s a painting of a frog perched at the tips of two leaves or stalks. Unusually, the leaves are bright red and so are the frogs eyes. Its legs are blue and the background is completely black. The eyes are jutting from the extreme sides of the face. The frog has three toes to each of its legs in a sort of orangey colour. The hind legs are blue but its front legs are green, which makes them look like arms. The face is the same pale green. You might mention that the artist used pastels.

If you are N, you won’t notice any of that stuff, apart from possibly the scarlet eyes. You’ll say, the frog looks as if he’s about to jump out of the painting straight into the room. You’ll say that his eyes bulge in a slightly ominous way but his wide wide mouth gives him a more friendly look. You’ll admit that you quite like the picture but might find it a bit disconcerting to have that beady-eyed frog watching you while you work.


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A while ago, in Ask Your Talent, I was thinking about what you do when you've learnt your craft, done your time, are writing really well, and just can't quite get and agent or publisher to take you on. The rejectors like your work so much that they're trying to help, but what they're saying is things like "The ideas and characters are subtle in a literary way, but the writing style is very commercial." Or, alternatively, "It's quite plot-driven and the characters are lively, which doesn't sit well with your sophisticated and allusive style". And the writer howls, "Why can't I have interesting ideas and plain writing?' Or "Why should really good writing mean I can't tell a thumping good story?"

As writers, putting different things together and finding something new emerging is what we do: 'What if?' is our basic mode, and 'as if' the defining characteristic of fiction. On the other hand, the industry needs to persuade readers to part with their hard-earned cash, by reassuring them that they'll get something worth paying for, which for the most part means something which does what it says on the tin (or the book cover): a certainty.

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I met Paul and Claire last night (they are a seriously good team) to have a look at and edit (or watch them edit) the video Claire shot of the launch night of the photo book back in May. Thank you both, very much.

And here's me reading my contribution to the book (a piece of flash fiction inspired by the projected photograph).

(I'll try to post something a bit better in quality soon, or at least a bit larger.)

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I make lists. I’m a list maker. I do it to organise what is sometimes a hectic life, but I’ve also been known to do it to make myself seem busy when things are in fact quite quiet. On a quiet day or days when I’m trying to avoid something important, I tend to scribble things down on The List as I’m doing them, then cross them out straight away. An immediate sense of achievement – happy days

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'What do you mean, you'd forgotten you'd applied?' said R. I'd just I told him I'd been accepted on a two month volunteer teaching programme in Spain.



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Not this one.

I've been thinking a great deal over the past few weeks how things change(d). Really, selfishly, specifically about how much I've changed over the past few years. So I thought I'd share.

When I started out writing, many years ago, I wanted to be a decent freelance journalist. And I did ok at that. But then I started writing fiction and fell in love with it, despite - and I think this is important - not having a bloody clue what I was doing. I wrote horror at the beginning. Odd things. An awful, awful, AWFUL novel about cloning Jesus (it's true and if writing it hadn't made me a better writer I'd almost be ashamed of it). Then I discovered children's literature. And I think it was at that point that my writing changed. It got better. Actually it got good. And I was starting to be published regularly. I think that editors were prepared to put their name to what I'd produced, that they felt it was good enough, was a hugely important thing for me. That validation gave me confidence.

And then I wrote a children's book, which was published. I was an author at last. It was then that I started blogging and running workshops - doing different things. Living as a writer, or at least pretending to. I toured the book, met readers. Got to talk about writing to people who were interested in it. I was asked to start a writing group (which is still going). I grew a beard. (Actually the beard growing was an accident: I'd finished an exhausting stint of appearances and, once I'd finished I got back to writing and simply didn't shave and one day discovered I had a beard.)

The next stage, I think, could well be the most important one, and it provided me with a realisation.

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I just noticed this article in the Guardian about Philippa Gregory's venture onto twitter. The Guardian describes it as "the latest in a series of recent literary experiments on the micro-blogging service which have run the gamut from the comic to the literary".


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