'I have people queueing for returns in the shopping centre', said the box office assistant, waving towards exit right.

I don't know the form at the Donmar, not having been before. It's a victim of its own success, going by the attitude. 'Oh, how will I know if there are any returns?' Cold stare, then, 'We'll come and tell you'.

Welcome back to London, Sheila.



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I’m suffering. From acute PSM. No, that’s not a typo. I do mean PSM not PMS, though PSM does share similar symptoms to those of that other well known nasty acronym. For example, at the moment, my mood swings vary from elation to manic panic. Elation, when I manage to convince myself I’ve written the best novel possible and then immediate manic panic when the word ‘deluded’ comes to mind and I think of what must come next. I’m mildly irritable and want chocolate. I have stomach cramps. My long suffering husband can see my red aura of oversensitivity and knows not to offer an opinion, unless I ask for one.

For those of you who are afflicted by this debilitating condition, don’t despair – it’s actually a common condition, almost exclusive to the male and female writing fraternity.


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It was not a great day. It started off hot, like all the other days recently. And the forecast says only: "Hotter than average", and "getting hotter." Outside is doing its impression of an oven. Dazzling sunlight. Not conducive to work. Not conducive to focus. So... after dealing with bureaucracy, trying to phone, trying to get people to reply, I retired to my cellar. But still, despite the several-degree-temp-drop, I still couldn't get down to anything.

Faffing ensued. Much faffing (phaphing?). I assembled some prompts for myself, odd phrases from poems and things like that, to kick start me. But - nothing. Just frustration. More Facebook, more online scrabble. And much, much less writing.

Ok, I decided to abandon it all and watch an episode of Eureka, a wonderfully odd sort of sci-fi series from the US. ...

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The second most frequent question I get asked about Kill-Grief (after “how long did it take to write?”) is “Did you have to do a lot of research?” Sometimes people say this in a tone of voice that implies research is a right pain, and poor brave historical novelists somehow manage to slog through the nuisance of it as a means to an end.

But this suggests that research is all school-like note-taking in chilly libraries. It isn’t – a lot of the time it means going to exciting places, which is what I did on Saturday when I visited Wilton’s Music Hall in London’s East End...


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After a week of cheap eating in the North, I cancelled the cholesterol test I had slated for this morning. I hope a week or so of southern food will restore the level to more or less what it was before I left.


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The first thing I wrote was a short story. Before writing it, I read over four hundred stories. A friend was freelancing for a national short story competition then got the chance to go travelling before he’d judged his quota of stories. He passed the job to me.

The stories arrived at my flat in cardboard crates, like fruit. I remember staring at them in wonder. Hundreds of characters from across the world, loving, thieving, grieving, killing and running away now squatted in the corner of my living room. They could have glowed or hummed, they seemed so charged.

Until I read them. A few were illegible or illiterate. A few were so good my stomach flipped. It was the majority that puzzled me. They were well-presented, well-constructed little tales of no discernible value. The characters weren’t vivid. Their behaviour wasn’t believable. The situations they were put in and their responses to them, uniform. There was simply no breath of life in them. The more I read, the more I longed to write life as I saw it. In these stories children played happily on carpets unaware their parents were fighting. Whereas children I knew reacted to fights by acting oblivious to appease or disarm their parents. That so many writers seemed unaware of the intelligent dissembling of children (many of these stories were about divorce) made me ache bullishly to put them straight. My first story came from an evangelical urge to preach: children are young, not stupid.



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A good review here from Jackie at Farm Lane Books, who recommends Kill-Grief to “historical fiction fans with a stomach of steel!” There are some great comments from her readers too.

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Some authors and publishers are ambivalent about the value of book signings – or even dead against them. The über-famous know that people will buy the books anyway, so a signing is just a treat for the fans. For others it hardly seems worth sitting awkwardly in a shop for three hours being asked where the latest Jade Goody biography is.

For those of us, however, who are counting our sales in ones rather than thousands, there are many advantages to book signings, regardless of how many copies change hands on the day.


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