It's a hardy perennial of a question among writers, because it matters, from which agent might represent you to what cover your book might get. The forums seethe with arguments about "any book worth reading" to "would you call Dickens literary?" to "pointless pretentious rubbish" or even (seriously) "a book only academics will like".The latter can't be true, because there can't be enough academics in the world to account for the combined sales of Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, Helen Dunmore, Hilary Mantel, Peter Ackroyd, Barry Unsworth, Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, Martin Amis, Beryl Bainbridge, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Umberto Eco... But it is worth remembering that if you like and read literary fiction, in the world at large you are a tiny minority of book readers, and an even tinier minority of human beings. That's the truth.

But I've noticed that inside the book trade (and don't forget that, as Harry Bingham says in Getting Published, writers by definition aren't inside it) no one angsts about this question at all. They might argue about whether a book really classes as "literary", for all those purposes from imprint to bookshop promotion, but they don't argue about what "literary" is. Not that they could tell you, at least only by talking about specific examples; they just know. They're also less and less inclined to tolerate low sales in return for literary prestige, so although the market of readers is undeniably there, they're more and more stringent about whether a literary-seeming novel will get published. So I've been trying to work it all out.

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Can you hear the difference between a circle and a square? Can you see the birdsong? Can you feel a whisper?



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I just got back from Baltimore MD where I had a great reception from Nathan Rosen of www.microhorror.com and we set the 2010 Hallowe'en Competition rolling with a video Read all about it and see the piks at Parallel Oonahverse and while your there visit The Vaults and take a look at some of my work online. I also got to meet the lovely Jody Costa and Jennifer Stakes who is a WW member too - great stuff!

STAY SCARY!

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I admit it, I’ve been neglecting my blog. I could say that it’s because I’ve been busy with other things. Getting started on a new novel. Kids off for half term. A clutch of MA novels to read, assess and mark. A workshop to prepare. The sequel to The Exsanguinist to write. Tax return to submit. A living to earn.

All that’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. In the past, I’ve managed to keep up with blog updates while working on other things, even while holding down a day job. So what’s different now?

The difference is that I seem to have developed a fear of blogging. Let’s call it blogophobia.

The more I tell myself that I need to get some fresh content on my blog, to give people a reason to come back and read, the harder it is for me to face the empty WordPress wizard.

I think the reason for this is that, through the Twisteries, I partially converted my blog into a vehicle for fiction. That was fine while I was working on smaller projects or writing opinion pieces for Aol. But now that I have started writing my new novel in earnest, I find that the challenge of producing two streams of very different fictional content has defeated me.

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1,617 words isn't bad, considering they were done by noon, when I went off to swim.

It was not a good day to start because first thing I drove my son David to Victoria Coach Station. 'You said you would, Mum', he claimed when I raised my eyebrows last night. It meant, apparently, that he'd felt free to get heavy gifts for girl-friend Natalie, back in Belgium. She'll meet the Eurostar at the other end.

So what with that and a post-operative friend who rang for a chat about how get enough sustenance on a liquid diet at the same time as not upsetting the gut, the morning's output represents just three half-hour sessions, timed on my digital timer.



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In Jerusha Cowless's most recent missive from the South Seas, she came close to telling a writer what to do. (Clearly Jerusha is not me: I try never to tell anyone what to do, only to unpick the possiblities as clearly as I can. Honest.) Jerusha hinted that a poetry course might be the best way to go beyond the edges of that writer's own commercial-mum-lit-writing nature.

And, having read Jerusha's answer, I'm working on a theory that the thing to do when you need/want a break or have got stuck with your writing, is the absolute opposite of what it was that you have been - and probably feel you "should be" - doing. Commercial novelists should do a poetry course. Poets should write Talking Heads type stories with a full plot voiced by all sorts of different characters. Womag story writers, who have to find fresh humour and drama in some of the tighest parameters in the writing trade, should start free-writing and see what happens. Literary short fiction writers wedded to the magnifying-glass perfection of their form should do NaNoWriMo and start unreeling their literary cloth with what used to be called gay abandon, before that phrase came to mean something equally delightful, but rather different. Poets who love traditional forms should refuse to rhyme or scan, lovers of free verse should tackle a sonnet, literary blockbuster novelists should try writing a Mills & Boon pocket novel where they only have 20,000 words in which everything must be clear, passionate, and tie up neatly at the end. And so on.

There are lots of excellent reasons for trying this:

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It’s incredible how things can change in a year....
I posted a while back about securing a deal for my novel Dark Ride, which is being published by Piccadilly Press next year. Well, things have since moved on. I’ve now been signed by the kind of agent I always dreamed about having and about ten days ago I was offered a further two book deal by my publisher. I'm still slightly in shock.

When I first posted about the original book deal, which happened after many years of struggle and rejection, a few of our lovely readers said it helped to hear about the journey and how hard it had been.

In the spirit of this, I’m taking a deep breath and posting from the heart today. I’ve been looking through my diary for 2009 and finding entries that happened at key times. They’re fairly self explanatory so I haven’t bothered with details of exactly what was going on.



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Strange how characters in books can influence behaviour. I once came across a subject called 'the role of literature in society' that suggested the purpose of stories is to allow people to access 'life scripts' on which to model their actions. It's true of all kinds, from folk tales to contemporary fiction.

I was reminded of this when I re-read The Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency for my crime reading group.


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