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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Real life can get in the way of writing at times. As can barking dogs and everyone deciding to cut their hedges at once, noisily. So it's not been a productive week thus far for me.

But I am, as ever, curious (nosy??); writers, what stops you from writing?

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Yesterday I was surfing the net, as you do when, frankly, you ought to be writing book four.
In fact I’m addicted to the internet with all the ardour of a junky, or one of those saddos that spend twenty three and a half hours a day watching porn.
But I digress.
I have, of late, been having a crisis of confidence and so I did what I always do ( instead of the obvious which is to write the next book!) and began looking for a creative writing course.
This annoys my husband who points out, not unreasonably, that this is like bolting the stable door etc...
What popped up was astonishing. There are courses at colleges across the land. There are internet courses. There are even, for the full writerly experience, residential courses in misty, remote Shetland Islands.
Now, I’m always honest about the fact that before I wrote my first book I had never attended a creative writing course. To be fair, I was working as a lawyer at the time and had baby twins. Where was I going to fit in a few hours a week to discuss the misuse of adverbs?
But once Damaged Goods was sold and I was under contract to produce book two sharpish, the worry worm appeared. What if DG had been a fluke? What if those 90,000 words had simply fallen into a random, yet coincidentally, pleasing order? More importantly, how could I ensure that the next 90,000 wouldn’t disappoint even my Mum.


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Kathryn Robinson is Managing Editor of Cornerstones Literary Consultancy, where she works with Director, Helen Corner. Do visit the website for information on their book doctor services and workshops.


The author I wish we’d ‘discovered’ most is…..
Ooh where to start. There are so many authors whose work would have loved to be involved in. Growing up, I was a huge fan of Joan Aiken - these were the books my mum used to read to me and I loved them so much I'd wait until she said goodnight and then read ahead. She has a huge range as an author - from chilling present-day ghost stories to gritty historical fiction with a fantastical slant. I also adored Gillian Cross who writes with fantastic warmth and wit and does tension as well as any author I've ever read. I find her depth of emotion and characterisation inspirational.

Left on a cliffhanger or told all?
Even books within a series ought really to have a good solid resolution – I’m not really a fan of books which end on a total cliffhanger (though ambiguity can be good) and I don’t think readers find them satisfying. But with individual chapters in a book – a cliffhanger, every time!

The perfect book deal is…
One where the agent, publisher and author all feel as though they’ve made a healthy investment for the writer’s career, rather than a deal that’s all about promoting a one-book sensation then leaving the author high and dry.



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Stats are pretty poor for the last few months. I started out this year with some pretty good intentions but things got in the way. I still keep my daily stats and monthly totals. So far, they're not very impressive: (note that these figure are for new fiction only, and don't include editing, which is a pretty lame excuse, but here we go...)


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A show which is religiously series linked on my Sky TY planner, is BBC's Masterchef. Ever since Gregg Wallace and John Torode took over from Lloyd Grossman, I've been addicted to this fabulous culinary show which enables amateur cooks to demonstrate their best recipes and ingenuity. While watching the nervous contestants slice duck, knead bread and stir sauces, the sweat lashing off them as they dart around in the kitchen attempting to create that sumptuous masterpiece, I realised, laptop on knee, that their finished product is not unlike the author's novel. And the process too which results in the completed dish is similar to the procedure the writer follows as he or she attempts to create that novel.

The author needs to have the right ingredients, the book has to be enjoyable for the palate and it has to be free from mistakes - oops I've burnt the pancakes, messed up the POV, and the cream has curdled - help me! While it's often too late to salvage a Masterchef dish that has gone wrong under exam-like conditions, the novelist has the advantage of time to perfect the book.

Here are some thoughts on creating a lovely dish - or a novel, if you are a writer...

1. Use the right ingredients. Don't put black bean sauce in pasta and give it to John and Gregg to taste, and don't throw Bisto all over a Dauphinoise potato dish. Don't salt and pepper it to hell and back. The author can quite easily overdo the adjectives and get a little heavy-handed with the herbs and spices, making it go all flowery needlessly. Furthermore, make sure that the POV is right. Don't confuse the reader who is digesting your book. Don't have too many flavours going on - don't have the action taking place with a hundred characters. After all, you wouldn't heap thyme, garlic, ginger, sage, nutmeg, corriander, tarragon and curry powder into your starter.



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A huge and very warm welcome to my blog, Tamar. It’s a genuine pleasure to have you here. Can we start with you telling us all a little about what you do?

Thanks, Nik. I’m delighted to be here. I guess my qualification for being here is that I write novels and short stories. I’ve published three books – a novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher, a collection of stories, Kafka in Brontëland, and my most recent book, a novel in linked stories (what some people call a mosaic novel), Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes.



I’ve just finished reading Kafka in Brontëland, your first collection of short stories, and I utterly loved it. There’s such a delightful mix of surrealism and realism: where do these stories come from? Do they share similar roots?



On some level they’re all stories about identity and belonging, themes which have preoccupied me a lot over the years. Because of my background I’ve always felt like a bit of a floating person, and I really found my way as a writer when I realised that this was my subject. At the time of writing them, I felt Jewish but was on the outside of the Jewish community, Yorkshire but with foreign roots, lived in the countryside but had grown up in the city – in so many ways I was in the margin between identities. I found this to be a very creative place.

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