I went to an event of Jo Bell's last night and it was brilliant.

This was the idea: go to the pub and write poems.

On plain beer mats.

And it worked so well.

Jo's an excellent poet, and she's lovely (I knew these things already) so I knew it would be good - and it really was. She had some fab exercises for us to do and managed to get people who were just there for a beer and a chat to get writing - with terrific results. Seriously, some great and hilarious poems were produced. I think we counted 40 poems by the end of the evening, which is pretty darned good in two hours.



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When do you stop? When do you decide that enough is enough?

I'm editing and writing at the same time (copy edits for Changeling: Dark Moon, finishing Changeling 3), and my head is in a bit of a spin.

I quite enjoy editing (yes, I know that makes me a bit of a weirdo, but hey...).

I'm a putter-inner. Most authors are taker-outers, but I'm in the other camp. By this I mean that many authors write huge first drafts, and then for the second draft they set about pruning, trimming (or sometimes even hacking) the manuscript down to make it as streamlined as possible. I, however, tend to have a first draft that I know needs adding to, and constructing my second...

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My name is Caroline and I am an email addict.
In the time it took me to write that, about five million emails went whizzing around the world. It’s reckoned that about 210 billion are sent every single day. And even though many of them are offers for penile extension and requests from made-up banks, a very large number are genuine.
Rather too many of them are probably mine.
It’s hard to remember what life was like before email. I work from home and on the rare days when my program is ‘down’, I’m like one of those lions pacing around its cage at the zoo. I live on a quiet road and the ping of my inbox helps me feel in touch with the world outside. [My email doesn’t literally go ‘ping’. It doesn’t make any sound at all, but you get my drift]. Almost all my journalism commissions arrive via email and it’s the medium I use most to contact people in my job. I often set up interviews by email and sometimes even get to DO the interview by email, thereby by-passing the phone entirely. That means no transcribing of the conversation and a clear record of what was said for all concerned. Result!
I also love email as a means of keeping in touch with friends, from the ones that live just down the road, to the one who live thousands of miles away in different time zones. The great thing about this medium is that you can reply at your leisure, unlike phone calls that happen when your child is decorating the bathroom with their bottle of Matey bubblebath, or when you’re late for an appointment, or just can’t be fagged to speak right now. Sure, an answering machine serves that purpose too, but ‘screening’ calls always feels just a little bit furtive.


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Workmen were arranging what looked like oversized fridge-magnet letters across the pavement, some of them reversed.

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Well I think I'm as busy as I've ever been, possibly even as busy as when I was doing the Roaming Roman Book Tour all those years ago.

And what have I been doing?

Photobook work, mostly to do with the launch now and posting books (and it's not just editors, type-setters and the like who I have a new found greater respect for, it's everyone who's involved in small presses and small publishers - hats off - it must be INCREDIBLY hard work).

And Katherine, the supercool photographer and collaborator is poorly - good vibes to her please folks. Desperately hoping she'll be able to make the launch.

On top of that there's my work I've tried to do (looking at my white board I've twelve stories that are waiting, eagerly, to be sent to places) and that's not taking into account suff I want/need to write - that's had to be put off, sadly. But I NEED to get back to doing that soon. I need the money! And I miss it.

And I went to a reading yesterday morning at the local Drop-In Centre. Which was fun. My stories were really well received, which was great and I got to listen to some really great poems too. And, possibly best of all, I was able to see the lovely Joy Winkler sing - she was great - what a performance! (Btw, Joy'll be there on Sunday, maybe we should convince her to do a rendition...)

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One of the questions that’s asked a lot in creative writing workshops and similar contexts is ‘Why did you do such-and-such?’ And since you’re a thoughtful writer, you have a reason – you did it on purpose, after all – so you explain, and although the fact that someone stumbled over it may mean you do a bit of fine-tuning, that will be that. You have, in a sense, rebutted the challenge and proved your point: it is the right thing to have there. So it was a shock when my editor first asked, ‘Why did you do that?’ about some aspect of The Mathematics of Love, and listened to my reason, and then said, ‘Yes. But it doesn’t work.’ The reader - or rather, the editor as my representative reader - didn't get it, and the fact that I had a good reason for everything I'd done isn’t enough to justify leaving it like that. Ignoring such feedback from a trusted reader isn't an option: I've either got to do what I was trying to do better, or do something else.

I would never say that for this reason editors in the book industry are more rigorous than teachers in the academy: it’s a different kind of rigor.

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While newspaper columnists are busy trying to predict when the recession will end, and others pondering when Starbursts will turn back into Opal Fruits, I thought I would delve into the world of literature and make a few suggestions of my own for 2009.

I'm no Mystic Meg, so rather than make predictions, I've thrown up a few ideas as to what titles I feel will make waves this year. Of course, I could be totally wrong in my assumptions put forth, but here goes....I must also add that the following books are not necessarily ones I've read, but they are novels which I feel will have an impact upon the reading public.


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Sadly, my wonderful publishers, Salt, run by the astonishing and energetic Jen and Chris Hamilton-Emery, are struggling to keep afloat in these difficult times. Chris sent a message out on Facebook yesterday and so I am passing it on, trying to do my part:

As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our press. Our three year funding ends this year: we've £4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt's operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April's much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It's proving to be a very big hole and we're having to take some drastic measures to save our business.

Here's how you can help us to save Salt and all our work with hundreds of authors around the world.

JUST ONE BOOK



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Those of you living in the North of England may be interested to hear that the Imperial War Museum in Manchester is about to open a new exhibition, Captured: The Extraordinary Life of PoWs, which will attempt to recreate conditions for prisoners at camps around the world during wartime. To coincide with this event, Radio 4's Woman's Hour is interviewing female survivors of prison camps on Friday 29th May at 10am. You can tune in via their website here. One of the interviewees is Bernice Archer, an authority on the Batu Lintang camp where my grandparents and mother were interned. Given this connection, I sent a copy of my Foto8 Magazine column to Nicola Swords, the editor at R4's Woman's Hour, and received this super response:


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Laura Wilson certainly knows her onions as far as WW2 research is concerned. The atmosphere, as claimed on the blurb, is painstakingly evoked by descriptions of bombing raids, transport disruptions, parents anxious about evacuated children and bombed-out buildings. It's for this reason, I expect, that the book won the 2008 Ellis Peters Award for Best Historical Crime Novel.



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