For want of anything interesting to report about life down the rabbit burrow I thought I’d share with you five of my favourite quotes about writing for a living.

1. I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.  Douglas Adams
2. Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’: your editor will delete it and the writing will then be just as it should be. Mark Twain
3. The road to hell is paved with adverbs. Stephen King
4. Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. E.L.Doctorow
5. There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are. W.Somerset Maugham

Grannyboast moment: our Connie, aged 6, won her school’s spelling bee.

I said, ‘what was the hardest word you had to spell?’

‘There,’ she said. ‘Because you can spell it three different ways and one way has an apostrophe.’

Gosh darn it, I know junior copy editors who still haven’t got that one figured.

Give that girl a book token!