Tomorrow, friends, July 9th, is a rather special day. It's the day when the lovely and talented Jess Ruston's debut novel, Luxury, is published. And what better way to celebrate than to invite her over to my little blog for a chat? (All right, quite a few, but that doesn't make this any less fun!!)

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I am so excited about receiving Shaindel Beers' poetry collection, A Brief History of Time.

This is her reading 'Ha' - I utterly love it.

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I am back at work in my cool cellar/study, just the right temperature when it's 27 degrees outside. Since the lovely news about the Binnacle Ultra-Short comp, I have done a u-turn on my previous decision to stop writing flash fiction. The universe seems to be telling me that I'm pretty good at it, and I do love writing flash, so I'm going to keep on doing it.

I started today by writing a 25-word piece for Hint Fiction, a new anthology forthcoming from W.W Norton. If you link to the Hint Fiction page from your blog, they allow you to submit three pieces instead of two. Details:

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One of the first things people ask me when I describe my novel, Luxury, is ‘is there lots of sex?’. Maybe my friends and acquaintances are just a filthy bunch, but I suspect it’s more universal than that. So, let’s talk about writing sex…
As well as being one of the things everyone asks about, it also seems to be one of the things most writers worry about. Is there too much sex in my book? Not enough? Is it convincing? Is it cringe-making and worthy of winning the Bad Sex Award? Will everyone who reads it think that every bit of sex is autobiographical? And finally, what will my granny think?
Because Luxury is a bit of a ‘blockbuster’ novel – big characters, big swathes of time, lots of juicy betrayal and revenge and passion – people expect it to have plenty of sex, so I’ve had to face up to all the questions above. I don’t have any grandparents, but my father kindly proof-read the text for me, and I seriously considered blacking out ‘certain’ pages with a marker pen. The sex in Luxury tends towards the overblown and over-the-top, but I’m afraid the answer to the penultimate question is, almost certainly, yes. People always assume novels are more autobiographical than not, in my experience, especially first novels, so I expect plenty of raised eyebrows after my friends have read it (However, I would like to state for the record that I have never had sex on the bonnet of a Bugatti Veyron…).
So how do you make sex scenes work as part of a book, rather than ending up with something that feels tacked on and awkward?
On one level, it’s like describing any other sensory experience such as a meal or a sunset. Avoiding cliché and bringing depth and fresh thinking to the matter will help.


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Women who'd evidently been running some kind of race spilled off the heath around the church and were crowded into the village. Even the area outside the Crown pub had turned pink. An infectious cheeriness emanated from supporters congratulating the runners. They gasped, sweated, laughed and hugged one another as they made their way down towards refreshment in the village.


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The living van below was restored by the Green family, who live in the same village as me. It initially made me think of the Reddleman’s home in The Return of the Native, but it is too big for that and was not used in the wilds of the 19thC West Country but was pulled behind the steam-roller of a road-building gang...

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Your hands sweat. You check your email inbox.
Nothing.
You check your answer phone.
No new messages.
You check the area near your letter box (although you already checked it this morning).
Still nothing.
You might as well just check your email once more.
Nope.
Perhaps it went in the spam folder. (No.)
You tamper with the idea of sending a message, “Sorry to send this message, but just wanted to check if you received the submission of my new memoir “Travels with my Hamster…” .
You agonise about whether to send it…
You do, of course.
A few minutes go by. Nothing. Perhaps this message didn’t get through either. I mean HOW LONG does it take to read and respond to an email?
Stuff it! You don’t need them anyway. Who needs to be published? You’ll sit it out and go for accolades and glory after death, thank you very much. Yes. That’s it!
(You send another email).
Those of you Strictly readers who are unpublished or “aspiring” writers will recognise this as the torture known as the Submission Process.
It is impossible not to feel too forward and yet simultaneously pathetic and needy, slimy and disgusting – the worst sort of life-form to crawl out from under a stone – when you’re submitting your book to agents or publishers.
Your world reduces down to the size of an email inbox (empty). You become incredibly boring. People start moving away from you at parties.


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...the lovely, the talented, the great Tania Hershman (she blogs about it here).

Click to see the list full list of honorees (of which I'm one, along with some great writers and friends). Congrats everyone.

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I'd also like to draw your attention to this - The fab Jane Smith over at How Publishing Really Works is having an anti-plagiarism day on Friday and wants you to be involved. So do it! Plagiarism's about the nastiest thing we could come across in this industry and we should do all we can to banish it, and those who do it, for good and keep the writing community the happy, supportive and trustworthy place it normally is.

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OK, so you know how it is when you submit something to a short story competition, and you wait and wait for the date they said they'd announce the winners, and then on that day they kindly let you know that you have to wait another month because they had so many entries, so you wait another month and then they send an email saying they had almost 1000 entries and they would be letting the honorees know within the next 24 hours and you think, 1000, blimey, no way I've made the last 50 and you cross it off your very organised Submissions spreadsheet thingy .......

......and then.

.......then you get an email from the competition organisers................

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