Yesterday, the day went to the Wantage (not just) Betjeman Festival.   After giving the dog his customary walk, and failing to do my daily yoga, leaving at nine to drive to Portsmouth and pick up a big fan of The Marlowe Papers who I’ve got to know a little over the last few months via Facebook and Twitter.  She’ s disabled and the public transport between Portsmouth and Wantage isn’t the easiest to negotiate even for the most sprightly of us – and I thought, what the heck, spare seat in the car, only a small diversion off an alternative route, maybe half an hour longer in total.  We got there an hour early so we could have lunch which was on her as a thank you (she also gave me a very lovely planted flower arrangement). The disabled badge was handy parking-wise.

I ran a creative writing workshop for seven people from 1-3pm;  they were a good bunch, willing and good-humoured, and Dorothy, chief organiser there at the Vale & Downland museum, commented on the laughter coming through the walls.    Between 3.15 and 5.30 I wrote just over 400 words of the next novel at a table in the cafe.  From 6 until 7 I did my scheduled reading and talk on The Marlowe Papers.  A fabulously lively and interested audience asked some great questions after the reading and – as usual – we could easily have gone on, but there was another event slated.    Then back to Brighton via Portsmouth, roof down all the way (the chief benefit of travelling by car, in my view) and pretty much straight to bed. Read the rest of this entry »

I have made a commitment, for about five years now, not to expose myself to the daily news. I neither listen to it, nor watch it.  If a news bulletin begins, I immediately switch over or mute the volume until it’s over.  Because the news is always bad news, I find it has a toxic effect on my mood, and since I discovered that my success in life is significantly dependent on how joyful and positive I feel, I recognised that banishing the news was an essential career move.  I balance my need for positivity with my need to know what’s going on in the world by subscribing to The Week – a condensed, politically-neutral overview of current affairs that brings considerable pleasure to my leisurely weekend breakfasts.  I often get a whiff of what’s going on via Twitter, but as I’m now fully immersed in the writing of the next novel, I’ve been deliberately working in the library these last three weeks in order to escape the distraction of Wifi.  Thus I had no idea until today that a five-year-old girl had been abducted, and that her name was April Jones.

I saw it as I was leaving the gym after my morning swim – they have News 24 permanently on one of the monitors there, spewing out its subtitles under the tedious moronically-lyricked dance music.  And as I was passing there appeared on the screen ‘police have arrested a man suspected of murdering missing 5-year-old April Jones’.  I stopped dead.  April Jones is the name of the central female character in my new novel.
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