A funeral is never a good way to start the week but on Monday I had the pleasure of hearing my son’s beautifully written eulogy to his father. It was, by turns, poignant and hilarious and I’m slightly relieved that he’s too busy doing an important, proper job to compete with me for writing…

   A short post to pay tribute to David Graham who died yesterday. David was my husband for twenty years and the father of my four children. We did the whole thing, soup to nuts: young love, lean years, good times, bad times, divorce and, eventually, truce and friendship.  We found many ways to infuriate…

       Yes, I’m still unemployed.  I have never sweated so much over a book proposal. On bad days I feel my confidence dripping away and if there’s one thing a novelist needs in buckets it is self-belief. How else could you work completely solo for a year?  Other days I remind myself that vastly better…

I know you’re waiting with bated breath to know my next career move but prolonged breath-bating isn’t good for you (unless you have hiccups) so I thought I’d better give you an update. The story so far…. a few weeks ago my publisher thought the WWI story I’d pitched to them was a good plan. Then they decided…

    There’s an interesting piece on The Writer’s Almanac today, the anniversary of the patenting of the first typewriter. Remember typewriters? My first one was given to me by my mother-in-law and was already so ancient that it required great physical strength to pound the keys and great resourcefulness to find replacement ribbons. I never learned to touch…

Larry McMurtry, one of my most esteemed writers, is 79 today. There are  writers who are very full of themselves and indeed these days are encouraged to be  –  put yourself about, blow that trumpet  –  and then there are writers like Larry who never take themselves too seriously. My favourite McMurtry anecdote is the one…

   So how do we feel about Sophie Hannah performing CPR on another writer’s character? I think Agatha Christie’s wishes were pretty clear when she killed off Hercule Poirot. He’s been in his grave for forty years as has Agatha and it seems to me an act of gross impertinence to dig him up. I realise…

It’s that time in my writing year when the manuscript comes back to me with bloopers and queries marked up by the copy editor. Copy editors are essential people in the publishing business. They catch howlers and misspellings, they patiently insert missing commas.  But sometimes they go a bit further and make stylistic suggestions and when they do that they cross my…

     Thanks first to all those who sent messages of support/death threats to my publisher/offers of a long-term let of their garden shed. My book proposal, revamped because I refused to accept that it was totally crap, is being reconsidered and may yet live. But what with one thing and another I’m not likely to hear the news, good or…

No news is good news, so they say. Why do they say that? No news is, well… no news. So as of 9am this morning I was still unemployed but hopeful. My proposal for a new novel was on my publisher’s desk and with every day that passed I had fallen more and more in…