I’m a nice girl, me. Good as gold. I do my submitting by the book.

What book, I hear you asking?

A clue: The Great Agent In The Sky begat it.
And Lo! It was carried down from On High in tablets (Prozac, probably) by His disciples and delivered unto us aspirant writers.

The title? The Ten Commandments of Submitting.

And here they are:


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Last Wednesday I heard a thud on the hall floor and for once it wasn't a rejected manuscript.

All week I've been carrying the book around like a talisman, and reading it ostentatiously on the tube.



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Ok, so I've gotten 80,000 words into my second novel, and have around 30,000 words remaining for the first draft. Its been sitting there for ages, waiting for me to cotinue. I've now finished the research for the next part hich will allow me to complete, but I've got this burning ambition to continue on books three and four in the series, which I've already started....grrrrrr!

The perennial question came up: “I'm 30,000 words in, and it stinks. I've a nasty feeling the central idea is no good and the writing's rubbish. Should I keep going? I've got a completely different idea, which is much more promising and likely to work.” I've ruminated before about writerly adultery, and the third-of-the-way-in mark seems to be the writerly equivalent of the seven year itch. When you're cohabiting with a novel, sharing the washing up, mortgage, tricky family stuff and leak in the roof, the Other Idea is so very delightful. It smiles at you in the candlelight of the restaurant, laughs back at you over its shoulder as it skips away along the beach, has a clever body and a beautiful mind, and oh, those bedroom eyes... But it's not the one who's there when you come home, when you go to sleep, when you wake up. It's not the one who's still there when you're ill, who still needs you when it's tired and grumpy, who is words of your word, flesh of your flesh. And most of the time, most of us, know it.

Lots of people (including me) often liken books to babies. But if our relationship to a book must ultimately be that of a parent, while we're writing it it seems to me that it's more like a marriage. “Where did you first meet?” the audience asks, and the answer may be that you saw The One across the carriage, on a train you wouldn't have been on but for the faulty signals at Letchworth.

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I was hooked when I learned his early influences were comic books and films.I think maybe this is true of most working class/blue collar would-be writers of our pre-TV generation. Comics were a cheap substitute for books and films gave an endless supply of new stories. As a youngster, Stephen scrounged lifts to the nearest town with a cinema, fourteen miles away from where he lived.

Two of my own favourite films are The Shining and Misery, both based on his novels and both about writers, and the books were even better. I haven't read Carrie but like most film-goers I'm haunted by the final event of the movie, much copied in later films.



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Soon to judge entries for WordPlay open short story competition (www.wordplaywriters.com), £75 and publication as first prize.
Shouldn't be too difficult, only 6 entries so far, and closing date is 25th!

One year on from my first blog post...

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Just joined WriteWords, very good looking site. Looking to connect with other writers, and looking for talent. Co founder of WordPlay Writers' Forum (www.wordplaywriters.com), and concentrating so much time and effort on helping develope other writers through ezines, quarterly fiction publications, editing, critiquing and synopsis writing that I am sadly neglecting the completion of my second Peter Hudson novel. Will keep you all informed!

I've known authors who can't concentrate for more than 15 minutes without pulling their head out of their fictional world to click through to their fix, even when they have scary contractual deadlines to meet. I've known some who spent days writing macros so the hit could happen automatically. I've known some whose struggle to withdraw had them staring at the screen, sweating with the effort of Not Going There. Even case-hardened Harry Bingham, novelist, non-fictioneer and director of Writers Workshop, who knows more about the book trade than most of us ever will, has confessed to being ever so slightly addicted since his latest book, Getting Published, was launched. And, worst of all, there's a funny little website which Jessica Ruston describes as "crack for writers", because the hit is so intense, and so easily bought, that it's lethal.

I'm talking about Amazon rankings, and yes, I've been addicted to. I haven't had a new book out for a while, and so my novels are chuntering happily along in what look like the lower ranks till you realise there are books on Amazon whose ranking is in the millions. But I still take a peek every few days. And yet Amazon rankings don't tell you how many books you've sold.

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