Which is a pity, partly as this week’s blog was going to be about vests.


I saw a feature in a magazine recently, Top 50 Vests of the World! and I thought I quite fancy one. Can, I thought, a 37 year old safely wear a vest these days?


It’s not as if I’m just anyone. In last week’s Boyz magazine I was the 49th Great Gay Thing. There I was perched gayly above Robbie Williams at no. 50 and the Ukraine Eurovision Song Contest entry at no. 48.


The very next day I was in Debenhams, the Top Man concession, looking for a papoose for my forthcoming stint in Prague when there before more was a whole rack of fashion vests. I managed to desist.


I kind of regret it now. It’s one of those things that I’ll have to live with. Luckily, I have Me and Mickie James finally coming out to cheer me up. It is now available to buy on Amazon and apparently in the shops.


I am a little disappointed that it wasn’t whisked down the Thames in the butt cheeks of a naked sailor a la the new Bond book, but I am pretty excited nevertheless.


Now I have the worry of wondering whether anyone will buy it. But as they say in the Post Traumatic Stress Handbook I am ‘thinking positive, staying positive’. This book is issued to all soldiers and is quite a read.


‘In the event of post-traumatic stress, please avoid all loud explosions’.


‘Feeling stressed! Why not take in a movie?’


And,


‘Always remember to drink plenty of water.’


(In a brief aside, from the blog stats page on my WordPress account I know a lot of people come to this blog after searching for Mickie James the wrestler. I am sure that she is lovely but my Mickie James isn’t her. My Mickie James is a hunchback. I should further add that I don’t know what Mickie James (the wrestler’s) oiled breasts look like, nor do I have pictures of her naked, whether she has a boyfriend, or what her address is.)


(In a second aside it’s true I did write a story Arse Licking for Beginners but again I am not an expert. If you are looking for an ‘arse licking award’ or ‘man licking woman’s arse’ you are going to be disappointed.)


Finally.


I spoke to a very nice lady at the BBC yesterday.


“I liked your play,” she said, “but we’ve already commissioned a series of sci-fi dramas and I’ve been told not to take any more. Not even one.”


Me: “I didn’t think my play was science fiction.”


Very Nice BBC Lady: “It’s got a time machine in it.”

Currently reading - You Don’t Love Me Yet, Jonathan Letham


Currently listening to - The Hobbit, audiobook

A video someone pointed out on ABCTales - Book launch 2.0

Just back from the gym. Didn’t do much today, only some rowing. Just enough to keep my oar in.


On Saturday I was at the Lowdham Book Festival. I went early to see how other authors did it. My first mistake. I watched with increasing trepidation as they bused in legions of Latvian immigrants to fill the back seats, had publicists quickly laying Scaletrix tracks in mediaeval loops to entertain the kids. When the dancing boys and fireworks began I was really worried.


Should I have agreed to read the whole book while standing naked on a podium? Perhaps not.


As I finished one of the festival organisers came towards me, barging her way through the wheelchairs, picking up dropped colostomy bags and letters from the Queen.


“Have you thought about attracting a younger audience?” she said.


I like old, I thought. I’m old. Beneath this make up and implanted smile, I’m 96. Frinton is my favourite holiday destination. Put a rug over my knees and wheel me out to sea and I’m happy.


“I don’t know if your blog is serious or not?” she said.


“It is,” I said. “Deathly.”


But I enjoyed it. It was a learning curve and all curves have high points and low points. It’s the straight lines you’ve got to watch out for creeping up behind you with daggers in their mouths. The sun hits them and they look like crosses. You can be crucified on a cross, ask Jesus.


It’s just over two weeks now until Me and Mickie James is properly released. I remember this time before The Lodger came out. What did I feel? More than anything I felt that it was just going to disappear without trace.


It’s hard work all this selling. Perhaps I need to get myself on Big Brother.


“You wouldn’t do that to a Monet!”


Exactly. As far as I know though Monet was never in Big Brother. Perhaps he would have been. Perhaps it would be good to choose contestants whose great contribution to debate isn’t, ‘How much toast have you eaten?’


Or maybe that is the great philosophical question.


And another one. What has happened to the Olympics? Wasn’t it going to be in China this summer.


Has it been cancelled?


Has China been cancelled?


I really don’t know any more.

Currently reading - Lorrie Moore, Collected Short Stories


Currently listening to - potential songs to put on my iPod for the after launch party. Any requests?

Matt Haig talking about The Dead Father’s Club

As no one has turned up at my door this morning with a suitcase of unmarked bills I thought I’d better get on with my blog. Question to self, what are unmarked bills? And if they were marked would I say that I didn’t want them?


“Sorry, please bring me some clean ones.”


Actually I am not so bothered about money. Or maybe I am. I’ve been watching Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain. At the end of the last episode he said, whether we like it or not, we are all Thatcher’s children. Perhaps. When she came to power I was eight years old, nineteen when she left.


I wonder if the world is a better place for her policies. Has the selling off of so many industries that were already owned by everyone (through taxes) to the few benefited me? Was the persecution of gay men under her regime a positive influence? The mass selling off of council houses? The use of war to manipulate an unwilling population?


Like last week’s Doctor Who perhaps we need to ‘Turn Left’.


Oil is in the news a lot. England had oil. What did the government do with those billions? And if energy production was state owned now would it be easier to just spend the money needed to build wind farms instead of asking the Saudis if they want to invest?


How did you get me on to this? Perhaps because I’ve been reading books of popular economics. On a purely people in coffins basis it seems clear that capitalism is a bigger killer than communism.


So, bring back the communists!


Mind you, these days Islamic Fundamentalists are the new communists. Funny that. I wonder what the next big enemy will be?


Scandinavians? The re-birth of the Viking hoards!


Anyway, what I really wanted to say is that there are some dates for your diaries. Next Saturday 28th June, I will be performing / reading at the Lowdham Book Festival. Come along if you’re in the area. There are loads of readings all day and I imagine, people who like books. I’ve never been to a book fair and I’m looking forward to it.


On July 22nd is the Me and Mickie James launch in Waterstones, Market St, Leicester.


(Some one asked me, ‘What are you expectations?’
‘I think in the bleakest possible terms, that everything about it will be a complete disaster.’
So, I might be pleasantly surprised.)


And on 13th September I will be at Stanza@LaDanza.


There is also a short but nice review of Me and Mickie James in this month’s GT.


In a strange coincidence this week also sees the release of a Jim Jarmusch box-set including the film Down By Law. The band in Me and Mickie James are called Down By Law, after the film. There is also a Jim Jarmusch film, Broken Flowers, available on the iPlayer. It’s got Bill Murry in it.


Anyway, that it. I’m off to write, as I’ve got a new story on the go.

Currently reading - Fiasco; The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks


Currently listening to - In Rainbows, Radiohead

Clip from Down By Law

Plot idea. Woman gets onto bus

The title this week is from a Lorrie Moore short story. I’ve been reading her, sitting in bed this morning. I wasn’t put off by Adam Mars Jones’ review in the Guardian or somewhere. He criticised her introduction to her own stories. What’s that all about? You can’t even introduce your own stories in the right way these days.


I read there, or somewhere else, that she was influenced by Woody Allen. And she is, no doubt. She’s funny.

“A self-described ‘ethnic Catholic’ he once complained dejectedly about not being cute enough to be molested by a priest.”

Woody Allen is one of my favourite funny people. But you don’t seem to see many of his films on tv these days. Perhaps part of the backlash against him. I try and save my moral outrage for things that are morally outrageous.


Dropping uranium depleted weapons on Iraq. Fifty per cent of the world’s household wealth being held by two per cent of the population. The fact that my oven just seems to take forever to heat up.

“After fifteen minutes he knew that this was the woman he wanted to marry. After thirty, he didn’t want to steal her purse.”

Plot idea. Man buys a mobile phone.

I received yesterday the cd of my Radio 4 story, ‘Teeth’. It’s brilliant. I listened to it five times and it made me laugh.


“It’s me gums!”


Lines that weren’t funny when I wrote them are funny because of the timing and delivery. Am I allowed to like something that I am part of? Or should I be like all the actors, ‘Oh no, I don’t watch myself.’


As if, I think. Dame Judi Dench no doubt has a private cinema in her house showing back to back reruns of A Fine Romance. She sits there gin in one hand, fag in the other, thinking, ‘Those were the days’.

Plot idea. Monkey invades Latin American country with a hairbrush and a band of revolutionary former Big Brother housemates.

The first reviews are also starting to appear for Me and Mickie James. There’s a nice one here on Chroma. And I am in this month’s Dazed and Confused, page 44 if you happen to be drifting past WHSmith on your lunch break.


I liked the D&C article about me. I was worried about it, what the picture would be like and about what I said. But it’s nice. That’s another thing people say, “I don’t read reviews”.


I am always googling myself. Well, not myself, just my name. Because none of these things seem to be about me, not really. The real life is feeling tired because I’ve been at work all week. I need to go to the gym in a bit, and the tennis is on tv, then later the football. Come on Czech! And I have to go shopping. There are more Lorrie Moore short stories to read and the ten other books, more! waiting to be read by the side of my bed.



Plot idea. A world is formed and life begins.

Currently reading - Lorrie Moore, The Collected Stories. Read Debarking



Currently listening to - Coldplay, Viva La Vida

Woody Allen - Annie Hall

I was thinking about how much I like sci-fi earlier this afternoon when a spaceman came up to my door and put a letter through my letterbox. Actually on second thoughts it may have been a postman. But then I thought, why is a spaceman putting a postman through my letterbox and since when did postmen get so small?


Then the small postman started singing La Traviata. Is this space opera, I thought? For while I have always liked sci-fi I have never been that au fait with its terms and conditions.


Sci-fi, like masturbating your supposedly straight best friend into an old sock in the gazebo of his house after just having high tea with his lovely family, and your two god children! is something of a guilty pleasure. It is not something you talk of at the literary high table. Well I don’t, never being invited there. My tea is normally eaten at the £15 Ikea table in my kitchen on either my blue or red chair.


(In an aside and just to set the scene I have the football on behind me. It is Russia and Spain. One of the Russian players is called Jerkov. That can’t be right, can it?


Oi Jerkov, over here. On the head.)


(In another aside (for the scientists amongst you who have googled your way to this entry, does that make this blog a triangle?) have you all been following the release of the new Bond book? In my opinion asking Sebastian Faulks to write in the style of Fleming is a bit like getting Posh Spice to rework Beethoven. Anyway, I am sure he is laughing all the way to the French resistance.


‘Listen carefully, I shall say zis only once.’


For those of you who don’t know, that was a quote from Faulks’ book, Charlotte Grey.)
I’m just kidding. Perhaps Faulks, like Posh, has a handsome young footballer locked up in his cupboard. That would explain his jovial smile, wouldn’t it?


Asides aside I think I have been thinking about sci-fi for two reasons. The first is I read Damien Walter’s rather fine piece over on the Guardian website. And secondly I bought Star Trek Generations from the new iTunes movie service and watched it last night in my bed on my iPod.


I was excited. It was like seeing a digital watch for the first time. Mum and dad ran a pub and they took me downstairs to the bar one night. This chap was selling them. Wow, I thought. It tells the time! It doesn’t have hands!


We all watched the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on the tv together as a family. (I have all 5 radio series on CD now and listen to them often.) I liked Dr Who, Blake’s 7. I read George Orwell, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Aldous Huxley and slightly older I found I liked a bit of Dick.


Who doesn’t?


When I was living in Australia I read Red, Green and Blue Mars. I think I’ve written about them before. My then boyfriend throwing Red Mars into the sea, travelling almost naked on a city bound bus.


But I wouldn’t say I was a sci-fi fan. Or more that I know what I’m talking about when I talk about it. I don’t know that I can talk about anything seriously. I’d like to be able to, but writing for me is a bit like running. It’s fast.


And I’m dumb. But I have passion and I care.


George Bernard Shaw said the saddest thing was to live and not to have a passion. Or maybe it was my neighbour who said the saddest thing was to have one of those donkeys you get from Spain in your window.


I get confused.

Currently reading - The Steep Approach to Garbadale - Iain Banks


Currently listening to - The Best of Radiohead


Clip from BBC series Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy

(All writers steal. Thanks to Aliya Whiteley and Neil Ayres who wrote similar pieces to the one below. They also stole it from someone else.)

I was 28 and I had just come back from two years in Australia. I decided I wanted to write. I moved into my old room in my mum’s house. I didn’t work. I wrote. The result was The Brothers Mostecsky. It was hand-written, two hundred and fifty thousand words.


My biggest fear had been that I wouldn’t be able to do it, to think of a story. I saw that I could.


I bought a Brother word processor. It became my best friend. For the next year I typed up TBM. I did three jobs. I worked for a delivery company, I worked in an egg factory, I worked as a teacher. Finally TBM was finished. And much too long.


Make it simple, I told myself.


My next book, The Lodger, was simple. A gay man advertises for a lodger, gets one, and then the lodger drunkenly admits he has killed someone.


I sent it to a few publishers. I’ve never been one to send out hundreds of letters. You read about that. Luckily GMP said they would publish it. It’s not a quick process. Between sending it off and it being in the shops was two years.


The Lodger got good reviews. I still didn’t have a computer. The first review I saw was by chance on gay.com in Derby library. That was the best thing! The Lodger was a finalist in the Lambda Awards in America. It sold out its print run.


The Lodger took three months to write. After that I wrote a children’s book called The Fart Club (in 10 weeks). Then a book called Darts in a similar amount of time. The Fart Club wasn’t published, Darts nearly was. That’s a long story.


I wrote a sequel to The Lodger, called Rising Camp. As I finished it I found that GMP had stopped publishing. (The parent group was instead going to concentrate on the selling of dildos - they have a bigger mark-up). I sent Rising Camp to a publisher in America who said they were going to publish. Then they didn’t. That happens.


I wrote a more serious book called Zeitgeist. I liked this. Nobody else did. I was working full time now for National Rail Enquiries. I went back to Australia a couple of times. I had a two storey flat above a Chinese restaurant.


I stopped writing novels. I had found a website called AbcTales. I was writing short stories. Quite a few of them got published, in magazines, in short story collections, on websites. I’d never really sent stuff off to big publishers. I didn’t ever think they’d be interested in me.


A couple of years passed. I found that I’d written eight short stories about the same people, a pop group called Down By Law. It made a novel, if you squinted. I sent them off to an agent, just one.


I was surprised when they got back to me. They liked it but wanted me to change the ending and cut down one chapter. The now novel went through eight people at the agency. A year passed. They didn’t take me on.


In this time I split up with my then boyfriend. I moved into a house on my own. I was back to not having a computer. I work for the police and a computer is the kind of luxury you can’t afford - or cars, or holidays, or decent food.


A year later I was checking my emails when I found one was from an American coffee shop. They wanted to buy one of my 50 word stories for a coffee promotion. They asked if I had any more. I wrote loads. I used the money to buy a Mac.


Things started to happen.


A couple of months after that I was sitting at my new computer and I was thinking I should try and send out the Down By Law stories again. I googled literary agent sites. I didn’t have a printer, live near a post office or have a car so I looked for agents who had email addresses. There were five. I emailed them.


A few days later one of them got back to me. She asked to read the rest of my book and then to meet me. She took me on. We made some changes to my book, this time to the beginning. It got a new title, Me and Mickie James. We sold it to a publisher, Jonathan Cape.


That was a year ago. The book is now due to come out. I also have a story on Radio 4 in August, have just written a play for them as well, have also just had an erotic short story published, have another story coming out in Tell Tales 4.


I still get plenty of stuff rejected. I don’t know if I’ll ever have another book published. This could be it.


Or it might not be.





Currently reading - Boys in Heat


Currently listening to - Fink

Fink - This is the Thing

This morning I grew concerned that I was suffering from ADHD. Unfortunately I was not able to sit down at the computer long enough to fully research the matter.


As it happens I am texting this blog to a small Peruvian lady who offers such transcription services while simultaneously shopping, eating, watching the tennis and trying to read a number of books.


Reading is most traumatic. I fan books around me on the floor, pick one up, read a few pages, put it down, read a few pages of another, jumping from a novel, to a book on economics, to one on history.


Perhaps this accounts for my blurring of fact and fiction. Doris Lessing said that fiction allows you to talk about things that you would not be able to in normal debate. George Saunders said the same thing of comedy.


I can run with it.


The blog is late this week. Last Tuesday I took my cat to the vet to have a tooth out. At 11:00 I got a call from my ex-partner, with whom I share custody of the cat.


“Turn the music down,” he said. “It’s H. He’s got cancer.”


The vet said we should have H put down straight away. He would only live for another week, and then in discomfort. It was a shock, because I had no idea he was ill.


I wanted to write this whole blog about H, going to get him from the rescue place, worrying about him every time he went out, remembering how he used to grab your feet under the bottom of the duvet, sleeping with his head on the pillow.


But it’s a bit difficult, all this reality. Enough to say, I loved him. As did Gary, my ex. When we went back to his after, he went and got this black lacquer box.


“Look,” he said, “I’ve kept his whiskers. Every time one fell out over the years. I kept it.”


We’ll miss him.


Doris Lessing has a cat called Yum-Yum, named after a character in the Mikado. She was interviewed by Alan Yentob on Imagine.


“Watch out for him,” she said, “he’s rather spiky.”


Rather like Doris herself. I loved watching the interview with her, and the clips from her life. She didn’t want to talk about leaving her children. “Look, I’ve talked about that before” and I loved the way she imperiously dismissed other interviewers.


“When I took mescaline I rather wish they’d left me alone.” Because it’s all about putting on a face. At 88 she doesn’t have to bother.


“It doesn’t matter if they think I’m a loony now.”


Interestingly the warning on the iPlayer states of the Lessing programme ‘Contains very strong language’. For Kiss of Death it states, ‘Contains some strong language’.


Kiss of Death also contains in the very first scene, a body cut into pieces, later a head full of maggots, scenes of graphic torture, kidnap, imprisonment and murder. And Danny Dyer.


No warning for that necessary apparently.


I wonder if that’s what Lessing means when she decries the death of culture. What comes across though is her love of life. Even going out into the garden her eyes light up as she gazes out across her plants and trees. That was the biggest influence of her life she said, gazing up at the stars (her dad let her stay up to do this). It makes you feel very small.


Indeed.

Currently reading - The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein



Currently listening to - Catch the Brass Ring, Ferraby Lionheart

The Shock Doctrine by Alfonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein

It’s been a good week all round. Which is disconcerting. Weeks aren’t normally round. They start on Monday and head in a straight line through to Sunday. Then it starts all over again. Until you die.


I didn’t need any fake breasts after all. This was on Monday when I went to London for my photo shoot in the glamour palace of Bethnal Green.


“I’ve seen this nice tree,” was the first thing the photographer said to me. “Then we can go to the park. There are some really big slides.”


The park was great, enormous. I imagined myself running to the centre of it and disappearing like that character in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. I wondered if it was shot there. Then I walked through some trees.


“The light is great.”


It is, I thought. Sunlight, what would we do without it? Then I sat on the promised slides. They really were big. Everyone has nice memories of slides but my favourite one was Aqualand, South of France, zipping down it, laughing.


There is something very Zen about having photographs taken of yourself. Perhaps that’s what all those Buddha statues are about. A statue being a more concrete representation than a flat image. Therefore more Zen.


Everyone has their favourite Buddha statue. Mine was in Japan, Daibutsu. You could walk inside him if you wanted and there was enough room to spread out a picnic blanket. That day I ate potato ice-cream and my Japanese gave me this small bottle to drink out of. It was supposed to give you special powers.


(I didn’t hold out much hope. I had had my fortune told to me in a Japanese temple - ‘You won’t die in a car crash’. Goodo!)


“You seem relaxed,” said the photographer.


Clickclickclickclickclick.


On Wednesday I received four nice emails. 1) From the BBC, the studio script for Teeth for me to check. It’s being recorded on 5th June. I also found out who’s going to read it. 2) From the editor at Gaydarnation re my interview with them. 3) The editor of Tell Tales who have accepted my story Gus. This will be published in October. 4) From my publicist at Random House to say the finished copies of Me and Mickie James are in.


My copies are in the post. So I am going to see the final finished thing. Next it will be in the shops. Then people will be able to buy it. Or not.


Now here’s the caveat. You work for years for this. Then it happens and you realise it doesn’t change your life. That crap job you are doing is still crap when you have a book published. That view of the housing estate outside your window doesn’t change.


I have decided to change my life.


Yesterday, I bought a Neil Diamond song for the first time. It’s good. But is that enough? I went to see Persepolis. It was great. I read another Albert Sanchez Pinol book, Cold Skin. This is great too, like HG Wells.


But I wish I had lived in the Enlightenment. London is destroyed in the Great Fire. I, astronomer select, give up gazing at the stars and design a new city. There will be broad boulevards, temples, no skip that, Big Buddhas. There will be potato ice-cream for everyone and water slides. Everyone will write books and read them. There will be public libraries on every corner. Music will play everywhere and everyone will get chance to be mayor even if you are a buffoon.


We will all change our jobs every two years and when bad things happen we will all pull up our socks and dig in to help. We will study all our lives and pass on our knowledge to our children. Or not if we don’t want.


And so on.

Currently reading Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine



Currently listening to Neil Diamond



Persepolis trailer

Tomorrow I am going to London to have my photo taken for Dazed and Confused magazine. In an effort to get myself in the right frame of mind I went into my local Sainsburys and perused the magazines on display.


Jordan seems to have the right look and one that the camera obviously loves. Should I get myself some enormous fake breasts? Could I do this by tomorrow morning? And where would I keep them after?


Actually I am not maintaining the right tone of gravitas. You see, in essence, this week I have decided I wanted to be a major economist.


I admire Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winner, greatly. His new book The Trillion Dollar War looks at the opportunity cost of the Iraq war. Could three trillion dollars have been spent more wisely than on lots of weapons and blowing lots of people into small pieces? You could have bought the country lock, stock and barrel for that amount and still got change for a new bathroom he writes. It’s a winning argument.


(In a brief aside I received a letter (a physical letter although they do have my email address - they provide me with an email service) from Virgin Media. They asked me if I would like to go over to paperless billing for the saving on £1 a bill. I was straight on the phone. I wondered if they would like to go over over to paperless letters. And had they ever thought of bill-less billing? I’m all for that!)


The next book on my list of books to read is Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. This is about the economics of disaster management, i.e. the global business that have sprung up around managing disasters.


Say, for example, a former superpower engineers a war in a middle eastern country, blows it to bits. Imagine the money to be made from reconstruction! What a brilliant idea!


At the same time we live in a world seemingly incapable of pouring money into where it is really needed. Shell this week pulled out of the Thames Estuary Wind Farm project siting limited opportunities to make a really incredibly enormous pile of money for their already super-rich shareholders.


Jeffrey Sachs was on the Start the Week was talking about his new book Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. He said the money involved in making a difference would be comparatively little. America under the Bush administration has failed to build even a single carbon capture coal fired power station.


(They have spent billions of dollars going to war. See above.)


In the same period of time Kennedy decided that man would go to the moon, sent them there, and brought them back in time to see his brains get blown out because someone didn’t like what he’d done in the Bay of Pigs.


Actually that might be all wrong.


What it needs is someone to take matters into their own hands. Sometimes I feel like putting everything I own into a kit-bag, setting off to China, become a leader amongst men (think Mao with a heart), engineer a war with a former superpower, and then rebuild the world in a more sensible image.


But I probably won’t.


For a start would my orange Ikea Klippan 2 seater sofa fit in a kit-bag? And I, like Nicholson Baker, am a pacifist.


Baker has just written a book, Holy Smoke, about Hitler and the Second World War. He forwards the argument that if we had made peace with Hitler things would have been pretty bad on the continent but Jews would have been allowed to leave. America and England didn’t want this, they didn’t want more immigrants.


Baker was the same radio programme as Jeffrey Sachs who took exception to this argument.


Fight, fight, fight said Andrew Marr banging the desk with a clenched fist. It took Sarah Walker, there to talk about Chopin and his lover the French novelist George Sand’s stay on a windswept Mediterranean island to sort the whole goddam mess out.


Actually that might not have happened.





Currently reading - George Saunders, Civilwarland in Bad Decline


Currently listening to - Kula Shaker, Strangefolk

Joseph Stiglitz talks on Globalisation

Thanks to everyone who’s said they are coming to the launch. It will be great to see both of you. No, really. And yes, I will have that money I owe you. Yes, and the interest. But 27%? What are you? The bastard brother of Barclaycard.


In an effort to get the blog more widely read I have decided to make it funnier. Anyone know any jokes?


No, really.


This week I have been invited to be part of a discussion on the subject of the usefulness (or not) of writing courses at an event being put on by Pulp.net at the Guardian newsroom on 21st May. Details here.


As I mentioned last week I am very busy. At the time the call came through I was asleep on the living room floor in front of the snooker. Hendry vs. O’Sullivan. One of the most exciting matches in Crucible history!


Seeing the unidentified 020 number on my mobile I was at first confused, thinking I had somehow become part of a new sex chat line. (I don’t get many calls). Then I realised that would probably be an 0800 number (would it?) and would they be calling me, this sex searching hoard? Probably not. Especially as I hadn’t had a shower for three days or changed my underpants. (Well it is the World Championships! Mind you, there is a certain market…)


But I am getting off the point. If I ever had one.


“I just need to check my diary,” I said to the nice young lady, in my best up-and-coming novelist voice.


I clicked open iCal on my Mac (very professional), clicked over to the correct month.


“Yes,” I said. “I’m free for the whole of May. You’re lucky.”


It was that final ‘you’re lucky’ that clinched it, I think.


Or the fact that I’ve never been on a writing course. Well, not exactly true. When I was at Sixth Form College we had some visiting writers. One of them, I remember, was an up-and-coming young poet who had had some poetry translated into Flemish and had been quite a success (sold three copies!) and for next twenty years she had been visiting minor colleges of education to spread the vibe.


Those interested had to submit their writing and then attend two workshops in place of our regular afternoon A level English classes.


“What we’ll do,” said this poet, “is read out the bits we like the best and then after, we can all discuss what we like about them. We won’t mention names.”


“Oh shit,” I thought. As each piece was read out I just wanted to leap up and admit it was me. You see, it was like one of those Agatha Christie novels where they are going to reveal the killer. I thought all eyes were on me. I had done it.


At the end of the eighth extract of teenage suicide and angst, actually angst and teenage suicide, that way around, the young poet stopped.


“What I liked about all your work,” she said, “was its deep and serious nature.”


I had submitted a piece about a man who dresses up as a woman in order to engage a private dick and ends up having an affair with him. It was a parody of a Damon Runyon story. It was supposed to be goddam funny!


After the session came to an end my English teacher came up to me. “I didn’t give them your story,” she said. “I didn’t think it was representative of what you could do.”


That’s true.


And true of what I feel about my writing today. Not good enough to be taken seriously. In my head it is serious, it just comes out funny.


That’s true too.

Currently reading - Pandora in the Congo, Albert Sanchez Pinol


Currently listening to - Play Moolah Rouge, I Am Kloot

Story Hour in the Library, Oakley Hall with Michael Chabon