So, while I was writing The Lessons, I tormented myself by imagining all the horrible things that reviewers would say about it. Sometimes I even wrote down a line or two, just to get them out of my head. And a couple of days ago my friend Robin sent me this, written by Gretchen Rubin of The …
Over the years since my first novel was published, I’ve had various friends, and friends of friends, and acquaintances of cousins of friends of friends of friends ask me if I would read their work and give them my ‘honest opinion’. It’s flattering to be asked, of course. And I like to try to be …
Read the incredibly powerful Dragonslippers: This is What an Abusive Relationship Looks Like a couple of days ago. It’s a quick read but unputdownable (that over-used publishing ersatz adjective, but really true in this case). Started reading in bed at 1am thinking I’d look at a few pages and then go to sleep, finished at …
Some internet rambling recently led me to this – an essay George Orwell wrote about his ideal, platonic perfect pub, The Moon Under Water. Apparently this is where the Moon Under Water chain took its name from, which I didn’t know. I don’t think they follow all his rules anyway! Carraway seed biscuits? And then yesterday I …
Remember ‘shopping’? Not for food or clothes, things which one really wants to select by sight. I mean, shopping for the perfectly-packaged, homogenous items Jeff Bezos targetted as being ideal internet-commerce stock. DVDs, books, CDs (who even buys CDs now?). I used to really enjoy that kind of shopping. I remember as a teenager (yes, …
You know what writing a novel’s like? It’s like waking up one morning in London and saying to yourself on a whim “hey, I know what’d be fun: walking to China! That sure would be a great place to walk to.” And you sit down with your atlas and a ruler and you say “OK, …
I went to a wonderful Women Novelist’s salon a little while ago, which is the sort of event that always makes me feel that I am Actually a Real Writer, and perhaps not Just Pretending. Much of the chat revolved around horrible evenings giving readings to unappreciative audiences. From what I can tell, I’ve been …
My paperback’s going to be published next month, so I’m back into readings-mode: going places, reading from my novel (which I finished almost two years ago now, I’ve pretty much forgotten what it’s about, all I have is the memory of the other times I’ve described it), answering questions. Which leads me to this rather …
Spent last night in Dublin at the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award, for which I had been nominated in the ‘fiction’ category but did not win. It’s interesting, not winning – it felt different to how I expected. I would have thought I’d’ve been disappointed, at least a bit, but in fact I wasn’t really. …
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/openbook/openbook.shtml in which I appear in a discussion about The Short Story. I’d had a terrible day before we taped this, there’d been a huge accident on the North Circular which jammed up most of north west London and meant that 10-minute journeys suddenly took two hours. (Although, to be fair, I’m sure I’d had …