Oh no! The Germans have invaded!


This is the first line of a child’s review of a novel set in Holland in World War Two. In the eight years since I read it, it has stuck in my mind, partly because it makes me smile (something about the sheer understatement of Oh no! as a response to a Nazi invasion), but also because it makes me think, about what makes a story work.

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Sadly, I have just discovered, through the medium of writewords, that a good friend has died. Died in fact two years ago. I feel moved to somehow commemorate the fact in verse. Will post what transpires...

Christina Nassif in the skirt-swishing lead role seemed at times lost among the 100-strong cast and her voice was not strong enough for the venue. Elizabeth Atherton was outstanding as Micaela, the girl-next-door admirer of Don Jose. With mousy plaited hair and dull clothes, her subdued gestures and posture held attention and earned her the loudest final applause. Kevin Greenlaw was handsome in the fairly slight role of Escamillo and John Hudson was a stocky and sympathetic Don Jose, also cheered.


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So I’ve stopped thinking about doors.
Now I’m thinking about spotlights.

An obsession with interior design? Yes - at least in terms of inner furniture.

I’m thinking about visibility and what it means for that most mole-like, reclusive and solitary creature, The Writer.

As a member of several on-line writers’ groups, I’m continually exposed to writers who are succeeding – being signed by agents, getting published, giving readings, winning competitions, winning prizes. And whilst I’m thrilled for them - and inspired by them – it also serves to emphasise my own relative invisibility

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After an absence of more than seven years, I've been drawn back to writewords and have paid up for another year. I don't like the new 'only 1 submission every 2 days rule' - I've got a lot of catching up to do and am itching to share stuff.

A friend has just had feedback from a publisher who wants to buy her book. The main plot is great, but one of the subplots needs to go, and the other doesn't work, so it's a case of cutting one, replacing the other, and knitting the whole book back up together again. Much discussion ensued, because the issue is partly about getting the new stuff right in itself, partly about weaving it into the existing stuff, and partly about making sure she's fished the bones of the old subplot out completely, so that readers don't choke on them. Coloured highlighters were mentioned, also ways of making sure the baby didn't get thrown out with the unwanted half of the bathwater, and so on.

I mentioned the way that I plan my novels, because it's also a way you can re-plan them when revisions get structural. And before I knew where I was, three people had asked me for the spreadsheet file I use. Now of course there are as many ways to help you plan a novel as there are writers, so for once in a post I'm not trying to encompass all the possible processes. This, in other words, is how I do it, for you to ignore, adapt or accept, as seems right for you. And at the end of this post, there's a link to a generic version of the grid that I use, pulling it about for each novel, for you to help yourself.

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The play’s big success is Anthony Ward’s design, with its multimedia, multi-level impact and the superbly orchestrated lighting effects by Mark Henderson. Brisk scene run-ons under Rupert Goold’s direction and some clever choreography combine with fantastic escapades where characters scuttle about in giant animal heads. Office clones with laptops are drilled to deliver numbers with a precision that echoes Busby Berkeley musicals or Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 film, ‘Metropolis’, about workers dehumanised by capitalism, all down to the troupe’s choreographer Ewan Wardrop.


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I was chatting on a writing forum recently about Catherine Storr’s classic children’s book: Marieanne Dreams. It’s a wonderful, frightening, psychological novel about a girl who’s ill in bed. To entertain herself, she draws. She draws a house and then thinks she can see someone looking at her out of the window. This scares her so much she scribbles over the windows. But when she dreams that night, she finds herself in front of the house. The house is real, and the lines she drew across the window have turned into cold, hard bars.The story starts there...

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I'm thinking about doors.

Every news bulletin recently seems to be featuring the front door at 10 Downing Street. The door to Power. The door to Opportunity. The door, as David Cameron and Nick Clegg tell us, to Change.

Doors are thresholds. They represent the moment of transition from one place to another. I'm house-sitting right now, living behind someone else's front door. Locking up at night is like being the caretaker at Fort Knox. The snib lock. The chubb lock. The two bolts. The chain. (When the doorbell rings, it's really cool. A short, melodic phrase of saxaphonic jazz meanders through the house, a gentle way of announcing the electricity meter man.) But I digress.

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