My outline for The Monochrome Landscape is finished, and I think I'm ready to make a start on the writing. Sticking with the course schedule, I should 'officially' make a start during Week 34, which starts on Monday 23rd August.

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You often hear that the art of editing is dead. I’ve read many articles along the lines that the truly great editors, the sort who can turn a sow’s ear into a literary silk purse, are a dying breed and today, all editors really do is cross a few t's and dot a few i's.
I don’t know if this is true in some of the big publishing houses. I expect like most things, it’s true in some cases and not others. What I can say with complete confidence is that this hasn’t been my experience with the small independent publisher who has taken on my young teen novel.
If I’m hand-on-heart honest, I never really ‘got’ what an editor did until now.


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There's a sense of excitement building, along with a lot of trepidation. Come September, with both of my little ones in school and me without any work whatsoever, guess what I will have? A lot of time on my hands! The excitement is hand in hand with hope, ideas, wondering if I can really do it and belief that I can. Get my stories written and then get them read. Please don't let me get swamped by all those other things that need doing, oh, and housework. Let it just be head down, fingers tapping, tea steaming, cat purring, ideas flowing, characters living, breathing, talking.

A while ago, I was thinking about how the order in which you arrange the phrases of a sentence makes a difference to its effect. And then on the WriteWords forum someone queried whether a sentence like this was good writing:

My hand reached out, seeking Adam's rough warmth but finding only the cool sleek linen of the sheets.

The grounds for the query were that "finding" implies that the sentence is going to go on with something like "My hand...finding only the cool sleek linen of the sheets, gave up in despair". Only it doesn't. (And yes, it's arguable that traditional punctuation dictates that there should be a comma between "cool" and "sleek". But for now I need my commas for more structural things.)The querier felt that "finding" should have been changed by the editor to 'found'. That would be a perfectly correct and clear sentence, but it definitely feels different. As always, what's really going on is buried in the grammar. The main clause, able to stand alone because it has a finite verb, is this:

My hand reached out.

Then there's a subordinate clause, which tells us more about the main clause.

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So, I decided before going on holiday that on my return, it would be head down for the rest of August to finish the first draft of the current WIP.

The trouble is twenty five thousand words in and recently I've had these other characters, from another book idea totally, demanding to be heard. I put them on the back burner months ago because the voices from the WIP were coming through louder. Now it seems they're being bullied into submission. And I hate it.


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Now that 'Calling' has been broadcast, and the flurry of flattering Facebook comments and tweets and emails had died down, I meant to do one last post in this Writing for Radio series: how it feels to have your story read on the radio. But then a friend who writes magazine fiction for a living started a discussion of where stories come from, and I realised that actually I haven't been able to talk properly about where 'Calling' came from, because it would have given away the story. So this post is one big plot spoiler, and if you'd like to listen to the story before you read the rest of it, you can go here, and Listen Again (till Wed 11th Aug). I'll do that other last post in a few days.

The commission gave me the following:

* Brighton setting
* 'Lost in the Lanes' theme
* 13½ minutes: 2,200 words

When I went down to Brighton to research I knew that it would probably be historical, in some sense, just because, try as I will, it so often is. I was also aware that while I wanted to find a story I could get excited about, to some extent it would be a calling card for me and my writing, so perhaps it wasn't the moment to try my hand at a futuristic techno-thriller. But I didn't know more than that.

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Christopher Little was non non-committal.
I believe A&B mostly go for TV.
The Marsh Agency was harsh as can be
and David Higham, to me, look exclusive: don’t try ‘em.
Heard Aitken Alexander is wary of slander
and Rupert Crew takes on very few.
From Susanna Lea, ‘It’s not right for me’ and
a slip by Diane Banks said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’


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I was foolish enough to think that when I'd got my new novel off to my agent for her opinion, life would get a bit simpler. In fact, of course, it's got more complicated, as there's a huge swathe of stuff that I put aside to get the novel done, from doing my tax return to booking a holiday, by way of returning my London Library books and even reading a book or six purely for fun. The tax return, in particular, is not only tedious to do, it also gives me a weird sensation that last year is passing again before my eyes. Never mind New Year's Eve, this is the moment when I really look back and think about where I've been and where I'm going, and what - if anything - it all means. Meanwhile, I'm afraid this is just a quick catch-up post.

Most exciting is the fact that my story 'Calling', read by Philip Voss, will be broadcast on Radio 4 next Wednesday 4th August, at 3.30pm, as part of the Lost in the Lanes series. It'll also be available as a 'Listen Again' on the BBC iPlayer for seven days after that, and as soon as I've got a link for that I'll post it here. I'm really looking forward to hearing it... I think.

On Saturday 2nd October...

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