Well despite working a twelve hour shift today, I managed to get quite a bit of writing done: 3 haikus (short, I know!), an ode and a piece of flash fiction (wrote in the staff room on my lunch break). Might take a notebook to bed and try to do something else later on, too. Am feeling very motivated, which is normal, I guess, as it's only the first day... I think what I want to achieve out of this challenge is

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I have finally finished the third draft of my novel. All is left to do is yet more spell-checking and another read-through. And then I will have to release it into the wild and send it off to agents. It feels strange, I have been working towards this and yet there is something of an anti-climax about it. I already have ideas and a big pile of research books to get through, so it’s not that I’ll have nothing to be working on. I can’t put it into words, it just feels odd. I’ve written first drafts before, but maybe because this is the only one I’ve bothered to edit that it feels different.



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Michelle's Blog

I've never believed in God, but I believe in Picasso (Rivera)
Giving up the day job (8): Robin Yassin-Kassab

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Robin Yassin-Kassab is the author of The Road from Damascus, the story of Sami Traifi, a second-generation Londoner, and his wife Muntafa, who decides to take up the hijab, when Sami discovers a nasty family secret. He is also a prolific blogger on his blog Qunfuz (Arabic for hedgehog!) and is co-editor and regular contributor to Pulse political blog.

MT: Welcome, Robin. Can you tell us about the day jobs you have done in the past?

RY-K: Most of the time I was an English teacher to adults or universiy students, in various countries. In Pakistan I was a journalist for a Pakistani paper called The News. In Paris I also worked in market research. In London I was a controller for a cab company, a hospital porter, a packer in the sub basement of John Lewis, etc.

MT: Was there anything in those day jobs that inspired your writing?

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Sorry for the unauthorised absence, I’ll do my best not to let it happen again…

I’ve been thinking today about how we compartmentalise our lives so much, giving x number of hours in the day for work, so many for looking after the children, and x amount for writing (or whatever it is that feeds us). It feels like we are trying to squeeze key elements in our lives into neat ‘compartments’, which works, gives us control, but perhaps it’s too regimented and institutionalised, and

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I just wanted to mention the campaign to get the poem put back into the underpass from Waterloo Station to the IMAX Cinema in London. Commissioned by the Arts Council and the British Film Institute, Sue Hubbard’s poem ‘Eurydice‘ fitted the setting perfectly. Early in October 2009, Time Out named Sue Hubbard’s poem, written when she was the Poetry Society’s Public Art Poet and commissioned by the BFI and the Arts Council, as one of the best things to look out for in London. So how come it ended up being painted over? Network Rail painted over it in bright blue paint in an attempt to ‘tidy up the tunnel’.

I asked poet Sue Hubbard what she thought the poem brought to the area: “a poem in such an unattractive place where people had to walk long way gave them a sense of time for private contemplation, and a sense of companionship.“

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I went to see this exhibition yesterday, slightly apprehensively. The exhibition presented various artists of the last twenty years or so who have created themselves as ‘brands’, something I am slightly dubious about anyway (I guess I think more like Richard Wright, winner of 2009’s Turner Prize, who liked the idea that his work would not survive his death, the ultimate anti-brand if you like). The exhibition started with some celebrity screenprints of Andy Warhol, along with television clips, magazine covers and newspapers of Brand Warhol. Other artists who featured were Damien Hurst, Tracey Emin Gavin Turk, Keith Haring, Murakami and Jeff Koons.

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So far today I have:

* put some washing on
* been to the Turkish shop
* played the Beetle jigsaw game, twice
* made fairy felt pictures
* made some chunky Moroccan hummous



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I spent Christmas in Tynemouth, a sleepy seaside town about 10 miles from Newcastle, where I grew up. My parents are moving down South in a couple of months, so this will probably be the last time for a good while I will go there. It feels a bit weird, knowing that potentially I will not go back. I left to go to university, and have lived in London since I was 18, but I still felt I had some connection with the area as my parents lived there, so this all feels a bit final.

One day of the post-Christmas period was spent at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, a converted flour mill on the Gateshead side of the river, the north-east’s answer to Tate Modern.

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The final interview in this series has a bit of a twist – the featured writer has chosen not to give up the day job. Katharine McMahon is author of The Crimson Rooms (out in paperback in March 2010), a historical who-dunnit about what it was like to be a pioneering woman lawer in 1924. She has also written A Way Through the Woods (recently out in paperback), The Rose of Sebastopol (Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Richard and Judy Best Read of the Year, 2008, and was a Richard & Judy Book Club Selection), The Alchemist’s Daughter, Footsteps and Confinement.

MT: Was not giving up your day job a conscious choice?

MK: It was definitely a conscious choice – both for financial reasons and of sanity. I find that three days at the desk is quite enough per week.

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The next installment of interviews with writers about giving up their day jobs features Emma Darwin, author of historical fiction novels The Mathematics of Love and A Secret Alchemy, which has just been named as one of The Times’ Top Fifty Paperbacks of 2009.

MT: Hi Emma. Can you tell us abou the day jobs you have done?

ED: As a student, front-of-house in the West End and for the RSC at the Barbican Theatre; then marketing and distribution for academic publishing; then part-time in a music shop, fitting little fiddles on five-year-olds and ordering sheet music; writing and editing for a magazine about childcare.

MT: Anything in those day jobs that has inspired your writing?



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