Musings

Just as one thought that lewdness, licence and let-it-all-hang-out had saturated contemporary literature forever, that morals and upright thinking had no place in fiction, along came Rebekah Roth.

There is a disconnect between writing and performance.

I’ve been here one hour, eleven minutes, thirty seconds, so far.  If you want to lengthen your life, or seem to, this is the way to do it.  Sit in the Disabled carpark in the cold, by a tall hedge, facing a row of blackthorn that haven’t bothered to blossom.  Wait at least two hours for Grandad to get out of the clinic.  Turn on the radio, by all means, but don’t change channels in case you can’t get back to Radio 3.

With regard to the damp and the cold and the endless rain, I buy logs to put on the fire. Even though I am surrounded by damp walls indoors, where the paint will not dry, and fallen and cut trees out of doors, I avoid struggling in the wet to cut up the free wood. I wouldn’t know where to begin.   Turn up the central heating: the real business of logging involves the noting down of work achieved this week.

It must be ten years since I published a book; and that is quite slack of me.  I don’t like letting a piece of work go unless and until I am satisfied with it.  You will be glad to hear that I have been working on Between the Shafts, but not very quickly or efficiently. Writing in the second person is experimental, to say the least; and I am finding that the second person narrator is often answered back by an infuriated protagonist, so that there emerges a dialogue.  That was