I was on a course yesterday. Not the most inspiring of days, since the tutors spent half the time going over the various parts of the assignment we have to hand in on 17th February. Can’t wait. It’s not all bad news, though. According to one of the tutors – who gave feedback on the first part – my case study is “really lovely” (what?). I had been planning on totally rewriting it, so that’s something I’ve wriggled out of.

From my course (which finished at 2.30 – only three and a half hours earlier than I usually leave work), it was but a short trip to the wonders of Lakeside, our nearest out-of-town shopping centre. Much as I desperately wanted to go home and get on with the staff panto, I felt it was only polite to spend the next five hours wandering aimlessly around TK Maxx. Rude not to.

How long can it take one person to choose a woolly hat for her youngest son? Over an hour, I’m here to tell you. I was at Lakeside, ostensibly, to buy Christmas pressies for the masses. I managed three (small) pressies, and spent the rest of the time gathering up armfuls and trolleyloads of things I’d never realised – until that moment – I needed.



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I’ve started something new. A diary of my research experiments as a crime writer. As is the way with all things twittery, it may get a little interrupted as I am distracted by other people’s tweets. But hopefully enough of a thread will show through.

I’ve only just started, so you haven’t missed much. So far I’ve talked about the problems of having a corpse stashed under the floor boards. To begin with it was the smell, which didn’t go down too well with the rest of the family. Now, it’s the swarms of flies that are getting us down, me included if I’m honest.

Ah well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and you can’t write a crime book without doing the research.

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Welcome to my blog!

I am the original wriggling writer… Forever trying to wriggle out of actually parking my bum on a seat and putting words on paper… Don’t know why – I love writing with a passion – but sometimes it all just feels like too… much… effort…

The excuses I come up with range from the reasonable – kids, teaching, housework (yeah, right) – to the ridiculous. Here are some of my latest get-out clauses:

I absolutely had to play SSX, Banjo-Tooie, and… um… Singstar. Had to. Life or death, don’t you know?
It was imperative that I watch House, Bones, Fringe and just about every other one-word-title American series on Sky. Had to be done (really – the planner was nearly full. Disaster loomed).
I urgently needed to read other people’s blogs and books… ABOUT WRITING.
Guess I could have called this blog OWN WORST ENEMY dot com.

Does anyone have any even more pathetic reasons for avoiding writing? I’d love to hear them… I’m always up for a new angle on avoidance tactics ;~)

Tonight I’m not avoiding writing the WIP. I’ve been asked to write the staff panto (roll of drums…).

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Why I thought driving to Preston and back could be done over five days staying in Travelodges I don't know. By the time we'd packed and unpacked, found places to eat, lost our way and tried to check in at the wrong ones it added hours to the total journey time.

Thank goodness I thought to go to the library and borrow a couple of audiobooks. It made the driving, especially the long two hours between Birmingham and London, almost pleasurable.

I've learned a bit about which tapes to choose. A long drive to Edinburgh last year was aptly enlivened by Ian Rankin's Exit Music. The latest one we tried was Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, and what with the careful build-up of characters and descriptions of landscape, it was all too leisurely. A drive to Worthing and back didn't allow sufficient time. We came back to London with one of the six tapes still to go, but lacked the will to finish when we were no longer a captive audience.



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When the police recovered 100 incomplete packs of playing cards from his house, they knew they had their man.


DCI Stafford liked to reminisce about the old days. The days before DNA tests and psychological profiling. The days when PC was just a rank in the police and nothing to do with minding your Ps and Qs with the birds.

He called them “the bad old days”, but there was a catch in his voice that suggested he regretted their passing. But maybe that was more to do with getting old than any true longing for a return to that particular time. Your past was the only past you had. As your future shrank, it was natural to look back on days gone by with a certain wistful wonder, no matter how awful those days had been to live through. And then, of course, there were the friends lost along the way.

“We might not have always got it right in the bad old days, but we didn’t always get it wrong either,” he had the habit of telling DS Ringer.

Nine times out of ten, Ringer would roll his eyes and zone out. But every tenth time, Stafford would say something that would make his younger colleague sit up and listen.

Like the time he said: “Take the Birmingham Six.”

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I’m currently working on the first of a two books series*

Yes, I am still cartwheeling at least four times a day. [Not literally. These are mental cartwheels. I don’t like to think of the orthopaedic consequences if I attempted a real one]

So yes, it’s all great etc, but it still has to be written and I’m realising how much of challenge it is to pull this off.

I started off by thinking about books I love with a sequel and why I love them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t put my finger on why any of them worked exactly. ‘They just do,’ said my stubborn reader's brain. So then I decided to ask online and got some very helpful advice. The tip that seems to come up again and again is the importance of having characters people really care about. I realised straight away that this was the common element in all the stories I’ve loved, from Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games, to Jackson Brodie in Kate Atkinson’s books to... many more I can't think of right now.



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Looking out of the window at the autumnal weather – a crisp chill and the hint of mist in the air, a flare of low sunlight – reminded me that A Razor Wrapped in Silk is set in autumn, making it an ideal read for this time of the year.

It was summer when I visited St Petersburg for research – the season during which Crime and Punishment is set, and also A Vengeful Longing, the second of my Porfiry Petrovich novels. So for inspiration on what a St Petersburg autumn might be like, I turned to Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg, an amazing book, which I would definitely recommend.

To get you in the seasonal mood, here’s an autumnal reading from A Razor Wrapped in Silk. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

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On Twitter, @beathhigh, otherwise known as Ian Rankin, has just tweeted a quote from the poet Kapka Kassabova on writing courses: All you can teach is the craft, not the art. Twenty minutes in, and it's been re-tweeted by two people I follow - an agent and a writer - and goodness knows how many others who I don't. So maybe I'm a lone voice in saying that although I like her poetry very much, I don't think she's entirely right. Or rather, I don't think it's as simple as that, though what I do think isn't that complicated: it only took me one more 140-character tweet: True. Though you can also teach ways of helping the art to happen if it's there and it's going to.

The quickest trip to the V&A will show you that there's no clear dividing line between craft and art, and yet we know which is which when we see it. And it seems to me that creative work becomes art when the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts: when an artefact has an effect on the viewer/listener/reader which goes beyond simply appreciating a job well and thoughtfully done.

But what puts the work over that dividing line that we can't see?

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These days, when I go to a writerly-authorly sort of do it's rare that I don't see someone I know, or meet someone who turns out to have friends in common. The book trade is a very small village, and book launches, parties and gatherings of The Society of Authors, NAWE, RNA and the like are our shop, pub, and cottage hospital. (Our school bus stop is Twitter, of course). By comparison, official networking events seem depressingly cold-blooded: the speed-dating of the human world.

But even that kind of event can bear fruit, though if you went looking for a bag of basic apples, you may find only a single, beautiful kumkwat.

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