Laurie Graham

  I realise this is a lost cause. We’re 7: nil down and into injury time but I feel I can’t give up until the ref blows the final whistle. Which in my case will be when a doctor signs my death certificate. I’m talking about apostrophes, not for the first time and probably not for the last.…

 Well, it finally happened.   Facebook. I knew I had to do it. I’d already managed Twitter, and as for Pinterest, I was addicted after five minutes. But Facebook is something else. I guessed it would be like being dropped from a remote Pacific island into Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and I was right. After a couple of…

Five days away from my desk may not sound like a long time but I find it can take me another full day to get with the program. Do the laundry? No problem. Buy milk? Obviously. Remember where I was in the writing process? Erm…. So my first job is to re-read what I’ve written so far. All…

 Research is something I aim to have done before I ever start work on a book. After all, how can the flesh hang convincingly if the skeleton isn’t firmly in place? I suppose it’s just a reflection of my grasshopper mind that I never manage to stick to this plan. I start the working day…

My husband is currently reading my new book. In the past he would have read it at manuscript stage but lately he’s not been well enough to shuffle four hundred loose sheets of paper. I waited until I had a bound proof to offer him. This is always a tense time for me. Naturally I want…

   Here’s that Daniel Maclise portrait of young Dickens I mentioned yesterday. He didn’t improve with age, but which of us does?  Choosing a new Dickens to read proved to be fairly easy this morning. The bookshop had a long position on Nicholas Nickleby but no Barnaby Rudge or Dombey and Son. They did have Our Mutual…

I’d kind of been ignoring the Dickens bicentenary fest. Somehow the press these days doesn’t know when enough is enough and if I read one more Charles Dickens may have blown his nose here in 1835 type article I shall surely scream. But then last Thursday Mr F and I went to an excellent lecture…

       Self-promotion is a horrible, fascinating thing. You kind of wish the person who’s doing it would stop but you kind of can’t stop watching them. ‘Dennis Arblaster,’ he says, shaking you limply by the hand whilst scanning the room for more profitable pastures. ‘Best-selling author of  The Shape-Shifters Conspiracy Enigma Papers.’ I mean, where do you go…

  My daughters are not great readers, though one of them looks like she might turn out to be a late-onset writer. But most of the grandchildren are avid for books, which gives me every excuse for loitering in the Dr Seuss end of book shops, and my son, an English major, usually has something interesting to suggest.…

        Any day now I’m going to get an exasperated message on my screen telling me my document is so full of errors that Spelling & Grammar Check can’t take it any more. I’ve taken one liberty too many and brought it to its knees. It happens every time I write a book.  ‘Good,’ I think to myself. ‘Now bugger…