The grim beauty of a deadline

I was chastened to see how long it's been since my last blog post. Many thanks to writer Talli Roland for leaving a comment on my last entry and reminding me that people do actually read this blog.

It's been an astonishing summer, work-wise. Things have just blossomed and ballooned, on a number of fronts. That's partly why this blog has been so silent, as I've been trying to spend some quality time with my three youngest children over their summer holidays at the same time as getting up to speed on some rapid developments in my career as a writer and editor.

I'll confine my comments today to my novel, since that's the least complicated situation. It's a long Tudor historical, set in 1575, and features Elizabeth 1st as a point-of-view character. Though the novel is not actually about the queen, per se. It's about one of her court entertainers. More I am reluctant to say at this stage. But the book is just over halfway through, and I've agreed to finish it by the end of the first week in October.

That's a tall order. We're talking roughly 60,000 words in just over 4 weeks. But it's not an impossible task. I need to knuckle down to a serious daily word count, improve my time management, and say 'No, thanks' to nearly all offers of other work.

What's brilliant in all this is that I'm up against it so severely, and have so many other things revolving about in my head whilst writing, that I am very unlikely to suffer from 'can't finish it' syndrome. That tends to strike when you have nothing else but the novel to consume you, and it's so large in the window the thought of waking up one day to an empty view begins to terrify you.

So you put off finishing for as long as possible, and keep polishing instead, or making 'necessary' changes, or suddenly get absorbed in some other non-writing activity that takes you away from the keyboard, or obsess about other, far better stories you could be writing.

Thank goodness for deadlines, that's what I say. The sine qua non of novel writing.

5000 page views in the first 48 hours

The first issue of Horizon Review appears to have been well-received so far and is certainly bringing in the hits.

Some excellent stats here from Chris Hamilton-Emery on the Booktrade info page.

Meanwhile, back at the word-face, this week I have:

offered some new poetry books for review to various magazines

started - but not yet finished - a tongue-in-cheek 1000 word article on poem titles for Mimesis

written two more poems

emailed 10 finished poems across to the organisers for the Warwick Festival Photography and Poetry Exhibition that's planned for early October

enrolled at Warwick University for a BA in English & Cultural Studies

made final arrangements to read at the Atherstone Arts Festival on Saturday 27th September

continued reading Simon Barraclough's Los Alamos Mon Amour (which I'm reviewing for Under the Radar)

blogged up some Warwick Words Festival and Birmingham Books Festival events on my Warwick Poet Laureate blog

booked a restaurant for Friday night - my husband's 43rd birthday! - which will be our first meal out together in months

emailed all publishers with books under review in HR with a link to the reviews pages

begun commissioning articles and reviews for the second issue of Horizon Review

set myself to learn some deponent verb forms in Latin - OU examination coming up on October 8th!

printed out the first three chapters of my Young Adult fantasy novel, for some last minute revisions before it wings its way to a highly recommended literary agent next week

managed to slot in some new last-minute names to read at next month's Festival Poetry Cafe in Warwick

groaned over forgetting again to review Brendan Cleary's pamphlet for Write out Loud

got more than five hours' sleep on at least TWO occasions so far!

Retreating

The inside of my mind right now ...

Always start with the second stanza, he said

At one time, one of the poetry books most likely to be found on - or sometimes under - my coffee table was Ian McMillan's marvellous Dad, the Donkey's on Fire. A highly recommended poetry collection, not least because much of it is side-splittingly hilarious. My husband and I still quote 'The Continuity Girl is Dead' to each other when spotting editing mistakes in films. And the short-short story about the commuter absentmindedly putting his unlidded takeaway coffee into his briefcase before boarding the train ... well, I used to cry with laughter on reading that, even after I'd read it so many times I could practically recite it from memory.

Sadly, I can't quote from it more fully, for fear of making mistakes, as I no longer own Dad, the Donkey's On Fire (so if anyone wants to buy it for me for Christmas, I'd be very grateful). A friend who shall remain nameless 'borrowed' my copy a few years ago, and never returned it.

But, in case you were wondering, there is an excellent reason why I've mentioned it here today. And that is Ian McMillan's very funny and insightful poem 'Stone, I presume', where he discusses always starting poems with the second stanza.

You see, I'm off on my annual writing retreat at the end of next week, armed with a partial manuscript of my novel and an assortment of useful books. And today, trying desperately to muddle through the chaos I left my novel in after last time, I remembered, in a sudden flash, Ian McMillan's incisive line: 'always start with the second stanza'.

And I threw away the first chapter. Just like that.

So now chapter two is the new chapter one, and everything else moves up. And the whole book is so much tighter now, I could almost kiss Ian McMillan. Except he wouldn't understand and would probably write a poem about it later in which I figured as some sort of mad bag-lady, attacking him in the street after a poetry reading and attempting to plant a wet one on his cheek.

So what's good for donkeys is good for poets. Or rather, what's good for poems is good for novels too. And if anyone has 'Stone, I presume' to hand, please do quote the relevant lines in the Comments box below.

Arvon Writing Retreat

The Arvon Foundation: Lumb Bank, Summer 2007. That's me at the front on the far left, in case you weren't certain; I nearly missed this group photo because I'd fallen asleep over my manuscript! Tutors Lee Weatherly and Malorie Blackman are sitting at the front. Lee is grasping the bench with both hands, as though afraid it may fly away with her at any moment, with Malorie Blackman beside her, clearly less horrified by the lens. On the far right, for some reason looking as though she only has one leg, is Bridget Collins, author of a debut teen novel due out from Bloomsbury this autumn.

This photograph appears courtesy of Claire McNamee.

At the end of this month - I'm not quite at packing stage, but am gearing myself up mentally - I shall be going on a five day Arvon writing retreat. It's untutored, which means there'll be plenty of time for some actual work instead of the more dubious options of chatting, lazing about and generally getting sloshed that are available on most writing courses.

Though having said that, the last Arvon course I attended was probably the one where I worked - or was worked - the hardest. It was a course on Writing Teen Fiction, and the tutors were Malorie Blackman and Lee Weatherly, both of whom are very stern disciplinarians. We had a two-to-three hour group workshop in the mornings, wrote up our daily assignments during lunch breaks and early afternoon, then would meet again for a slightly shorter workshop or reading after supper. At least two out of the four afternoons each of us would meet a tutor individually to discuss work in progress. We then had to present said work on the final two evenings in a series of individual readings of about ten minutes each.

Although that may not sound desperately arduous, by the time fifteen people have got their own lunch in a galley kitchen, sorted out any photocopying or typing that needed to be done, and found a quiet spot to compose for a few hours, suddenly it's supper time and after that, the late reading or workshop. So if you want to work on your own stuff beyond those few hours in the afternoon, you have to burn some serious midnight oil. Which means rolling into bed in the early hours ... and bleary eyes the next morning if you actually make the 9am workshop!

Don't think I'm complaining though. I thoroughly enjoyed the Teen Fiction course, and took away some brilliant advice from Blackman and Weatherly, even though my year has been utterly consumed by the Warwick Laureateship and the new editorship of Horizon Review!

So I'm eagerly looking forward to my writing retreat this summer, and spending some quality time alone in a room with my manuscript. One day soon, it will be ready to send out to some lucky, lucky agent ...

Weird fiction, writing methods, and radio plays

The novelist China Miéville has just joined the Creative Writing faculty team at Warwick University and was reading from some work-in-progress tonight at Warwick Arts Centre.

I went along to hear him with my husband, who's a big CM fan and massively well-read in the fields of sci-fi, fantasy and weird fiction. Which is more than I am, unfortunately. I have my compulsive favourites from which I rarely deviate, like most people who read fiction of those kinds, but my general understanding of 'fantastic' fiction is nowhere near comprehensive. So it was good to have him along with me, to answer my occasional whispered questions and to fill me in on China's background and development as a writer.

Yet even though China Miéville isn't the kind of writer whose work I would normally read, I did find the extract from his current ms draft interesting and challenging, and the Q&A at the end particularly useful to me as a writer.

I asked about his basic writing methods during the Q&A. CM explained that he doesn't follow any set pattern or routine as a writer. During some novels, he may write 1000 words a day; with others, as much as 4-5000. And that daily word tally doesn't seem to have any discernible connection with quality. Often, he told us, the steaming 5000 word session has produced excellent writing, whilst the slower 1000 word effort has ended up being scrapped!

Apparently, his methods of revision are equally changeable from novel to novel. Some books have been revised only after finishing the first draft. With others, revisions have been necessary during the initial writing. With some of his earlier books he resisted the advice of editors; later on, he learnt to accept the editorial process and now feels it can be a good thing for writers.

He later revealed that he works with a flow-chart of the novel, preferring to plot his books down to the last detail. The chart is pinned up on the wall beside him as he writes, and if he deviates from the scheme in any way, he marks the deviation on the chart and re-jigs the whole schema to make sure he still knows how the book is going to end.

But the only certain thing he could say about the actual writing of a novel - for the benefit of those in the room who might be struggling with first novels in draft - was that every word you manage to write is one less that has to be written.

So it was a fascinating Q&A session, during which he also spoke at length about the increased focus on politics in children's writing in general, and the background to the writing of several of his novels. He also said that 'Iron Council' was his personal favourite amongst his books to date.

As I didn't take notes verbatim, I hope I haven't misrepresented China Miéville's views and comments here.

I took great heart from his description of varying writing methods, knowing how impossible it is for me to stick to any one way of writing anything. I've always considered it one of my great weaknesses as a writer, but if I can just keep pushing the words out, I suppose it doesn't need to be.

I also met someone who works in radio script development for the BBC, over drinks in the bar afterwards, and spoke to her briefly about a radio play of mine that has been languishing for several years on my - rather over-crowded! - back burner of ongoing projects. It would be good to work on that again, hard graft though it was; a particularly demanding medium, radio, coming close to poetry in its need for accuracy and a fearless grasp of the 'less is more' school of writing.

Plenty of work to keep me busy this winter, then. So much choice, so little time. But as China Miéville said, every word you write ...

Salt Autumn Party

I'm off down to London later today, for tonight's Salt Autumn Party at Foyles. This involves readings by a whole host of Salt poets who have new or newish books out, plus vino and nibbles for the rest of us.

I'm also hoping there may be a trip to the nearest pub afterwards, then I'll be back on the late train and home for about half past midnight.

Work for the train includes a sheaf of unpublished poems that need revisions and some Latin homework - a modern verse translation of a shortish passage from the Aeneid. I've finished the actual translation as a rough draft but I need to improve on the poetry itself, to avoid embarrassment in my evening class.


One of the big problems with my modern version of the Aeneid passage - she says, easily distracted from the main purpose of her blog entry - is that part-way through, it suddenly started to rhyme. And the effect was rather good in places. So I decided to rewrite the less mellifluous first half and 'fit in' some rhymes to smooth out the transition from blank to rhyming.

Disastrous!

To make matters worse, some of the rhymes were not only full but distinctly Victorian in places. For instance, 'fell' - in the sense of grim/terrible - to rhyme with 'hell'.

So the whole thing needs more work. To put it mildly. Okay, it may only be a short piece for my Latin evening class, but I still want it to be good, damn it!

Surprised and Chastened

Yes, hard to believe of yours truly, but I was both surprised and chastened tonight, attending a local writers' 'fayre' - a sort of sprawling Meet the Author affair - in Warwick Library. I was asked to come along in early October, during the Warwick Words Festival, and just blithely assumed that it would be a bunch of odd-bods and eccentrics, self-publishing their poems, or biographies of their - even more eccentric - grandfathers, or pamphlets on the history of local churches etc.

So you can imagine how silly I felt, one of only two poets in a room of successful novelists and other writers, sitting there with my two slim volumes, surrounded on all sides by talented and prolific writers. Right opposite my table was the fun and bubbly children's writer, Meg Harper, and beside her Justin Richards, a prolific writer for children, particularly well-known to my husband as a writer of Doctor Who novels and other associated titles. A few tables down there was Rosie Goodwin, with her highly popular novels, and a prestigiously brilliant salesman of his children's fantasy novels, the irrepressible Mark Robson.

There were many others, too numerous to mention, but they included a cluster of sci-fi authors, historians, a brand-new children's poet - whose name I will add when I discover where on earth I've put her book! - and the newly published Jill Fraser, with a substantial novel about life in a former vicarage, 'More Tea, Less Vicar', a fascinating writer with whom I chatted for some half an hour. It was a great evening, truly enjoyable, and a real eye-opener - I simply had no idea how many superb writers we have living here in the Warwickshire area.

So I came home tonight with renewed 'prose' energy, aware that I absolutely must finish putting together my third poetry collection for next summer, but also that I owe it to myself to finish that novel too - still on the back burner, after several years now. It's odd how dispiriting it can feel to have work systematically rejected, but also wonderful how quickly the creative juices can begin flowing again when you get to meet and chat in person with other writers, some of them at the same stage as you, others further ahead, and a few just starting out on that lengthy and often cruel journey to publication.

Onward and upward.

Still Playing Catch-Up

*
Okay, here it is - this week's TO DO list:

• Prepare books etc. for the reading/book selling gig I'm doing this Wednesday evening at Warwick Library - roughly 7pm, if you're in the area.
  
• Revise 'on screen' the large sheaf of poems I've been editing by hand in cafes and in bed since the start of last week. I find it hard to actually edit on screen, but still like to see the work as it might appear printed, so prefer to work by hand on hard copies of my poems and then type up the revisions to study the finished product. Sometimes the revisions work and sometimes they don't, which is when the whole process begins again.
  
• Keep working at my latest poem - now roughly two pages long, scribbled in pencil in my favourite black moleskin notebook, with much feverish crossing-out and many alternate versions circled or pointed to with arrows.
  
• Continue 'translating' the various extracts from Homer's Iliad in my Greek anthology - with the help of copious notes for the weak linguist, of course. Having spent the better part of the last two years studying Classical Greek, it would be a shame not to keep working at my Greek now the course has finished - even if only for a few desultory hours a week.
  
• Update my Warwick Laureate blog: it's been several weeks since my last confession and I don't want people to think I've died!
• Make a definite date in my iCal to touch base with my fantasy novel again, now about a third of the way through. It seems to be a recurring pattern that I work on it for about three months of the year - one month in the summer, and two months in the winter, usually around the Christmas holidays. I'm not sure why that is, except possibly that a novel always feels like it needs a longer 'run' than writing poetry, and those times of the year are more conducive to being set aside for long-term projects like that. If I had an agent begging for the book, of course, I would throw everything else aside and finish it. Instead my immediate priority has to be poetry, even though it doesn't pay as well as a novel, because I know I can place my poetry and it won't just get sent from publisher to publisher for the next few years. I've written three unpublished novels over the past ten years, and there are few things more depressing for a writer than having lovingly written and polished something that never sees a book shelf.
• Write up some notes I've made on a friend's poems and send them to him, before he also thinks I've died!
  
• Prepare a blog entry on my trip to the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. It's been several weeks since I came back from the east coast, weighed down with new books of poetry and criticism, and I still haven't blogged about my adventures there. Bad Jane.
  
• Finish the chocolate truffles left over from my birthday on Saturday. That has to be my favourite job on the list - definitely one to do today!
  

White-Hot First Draft?

There are two very basic schools of thought when it comes to drafting a novel.

Plan A: The White-Hot First Draft Method of Writing a Novel
As I recall, which means I could be wrong, this method was first made popular by John Braine in his book How to Write a Novel.

The writer should dash through the first draft of their novel at white-hot speed, ignoring mistakes and bad writing, just concentrating on totting up the page count and finishing the damned thing. Only once it's finished is the writer allowed to return to his or her mss with a cooler head and rewrite, tidying up erratic spellings or punctuation, and smoothing out bumps in the story detail, plot or character arcs.

Clearly, this approach requires the ability to 'switch' between writing brains: the creative brain, working at full tilt, and the editor's brain, moving critically and methodically through the finished mss.

Unfortunately, I'm not terribly good at switching off my inner critic. This means the white-hot draft option, though appealing, is never going to be the easy one for me.

Mistakes leap off the screen at me and demand instant revision. Characters insist on changing their dialogue as soon as it's spoken. And the plot ... well, the plot either has to follow a smooth and unvarying schedule or be kept under constant supervision, with each new plotpoint demanding a quick fix or rewrite in the previous chapter(s).

So I'm the sort of writer who prefers ...

Plan B: The Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back Method of Writing a Novel
This is the way I write novels, mostly. I do plan some within an inch of their lives, prior to starting work, but still can't quite bring myself to ignore what I've just written.

The writer constantly scrutinises their work for possible errors: these can range from spelling mistakes or unhappily placed colons (see ten words back) to major problems like poor character development, jumping tension within scenes, and implausible or disastrous plot points.

There are advantages to stopping every few pages to keep your writing under control. It means you have far less editing and polishing work to do, theoretically, when you finish the book. It also means you shouldn't have to scrap the novel in the closing pages and start again at the beginning because Daisy turns out to be a man in drag on page 347 which means the man she married on page 12 is either into men in drag or has never shared a bed with her. Either of which needed to be made clear to the reader before the last chapter of the book ...

So here I am at the start - or restart, due to structural and other changes suggested on my recent Arvon course - of my teen fantasy novel. Do I write a white-hot first draft, as advocated by both Lee Weatherly and Malorie Blackman, our tutors, and also by Melvin Burgess, our mid-week reader, or do I continue with my plodding knit-one, purl-three approach to novel making?

I'm rather inclined, in my present mood, to rush into a white-hot draft. Onward and upward! But can I sustain such a punishing pace or will I start backsliding in a few days by making secret corrections while my other brain's sleeping?

And if I type too fast, will my dreaded RSI problems resurface?

Back to the Wordface

I'm just emerging from a long dark tunnel brought about by a week at Arvon and moving house at the same time. I've got my computer up and running, my printer connected and my favourite books out - though not yet on shelves - and have at least a rough outline prepared for what I'm meant to be doing, work-wise, over the next few weeks.

My Arvon course was for writers of teen fiction. (I've had a teen fantasy novel on the back burner for the past year or so.) I turned up at Lumb Bank tired, preoccupied with the house move, and not really in the mood to write. On the first day, I considered myself an experienced writer who only needed help with the structure of teen fiction. By the last day, I felt I'd be better employed as a plongeuse in a backstreet café, so greatly had my sense of ability as a novelist been shaken.

But all this is good. I now have a far stronger vision of where my story is going and, importantly, why it's headed in that direction.

I have also learnt a few stylistic tricks from the two tutors, Lee Weatherly and Malorie Blackman, which will stay with me forever in every type of writing I attempt. For a writer, even a published novelist and poet, it seems there's always something more to learn.

Before I moved house two weeks ago, I was absolutely intent on building up a portfolio of new poems towards my third collection. That work will continue - my third collection is scheduled for publication in 2008 - but with less immediate emphasis, as I put the bulk of my efforts into finishing this teen fantasy while the inspiration and desire to write is still inside me.

Thanks to the Arvon course, I have a solid synopsis prepared, and a strong story structure in place; now all I need is to sit down at the keyboard every day for the next few months and grow me a novel!

Poetry Competitions & 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel

Poetry Competitions

Ever since a minor but giddying success last year in the Warwick Words poetry competition, I've decided that poetry competitions may be worth entering after all. In the past I've rarely bothered. The winning poems always seem to possess that bland, small-town air of the ones nobody on the panel of judges really disliked. Either that or, usually in those competitions where there's a single judge with idiosyncratic tastes, they are distinctly unpleasant in some way, the sort of thing one would never write oneself ... !

I'm mocking the poetry competition machine here, of course, but I can't mock the money on offer. The acquisition of money is always a very serious thing, especially for poets, whose usual remuneration for poems published in magazines, books and anthologies tends to be slight to the point of indignity. So I've decided to keep a rolling stock of likely 'poetry competition winners' in hand this year - rather than sending them straight out to magazine editors as I would normally do - and when each poem fails to get placed in a competition, out it will go again in the next wave of entries.

This week I'm putting together an entry for the Poetry London Competition which closes on June 1st. Jo Shapcott is the judge.

First prize £1000
Second prize £500
Third prize £200
Four commendations £75

The money on offer is easily more than you would get in most British poetry magazines or journals, many of which don't pay at all for poetry. But winning a competition does appear to be a lottery, the winners almost randomly selected by a process we can only wonder at from our computer desks. I once judged a competition myself, back in the late nineties in the Isle of Man, as part of an Ottakars National Poetry Day tie-in. My tastes quite naturally informed my own choices of winner and runners-up, but since it was a panel of judges, I then had to persuade the others, not always successfully, that my favourites should make it into the top ten. And their own choices were often inexplicable to me too.

I shall probably enter two poems for this competition, saving a few for other competitions which close later this summer. I don't hold out much hope of being placed though, as both poems are still 'under construction' and I think their unfinished air will be apparent. But I've more or less run out of time to tinker and fidget, so into the envelope they must slip, ready or not ...

13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

One final thing I must mention before closing this blog entry: I've just got hold of Jane Smiley's comprehensive '13 Ways of Looking at the Novel' (Anchor Books, 2006), and am enjoying it vastly.


This is a genuine doorstop of a book, difficult to lose even about the most chaotic of book-strewn households, and it makes fascinating reading. Jane Smiley is not only highly astute as a critic, but her own prose is a delight: highly intelligent and stuffed with fabulous insights and titbits of information about the world of novels and novelists, yet transparent and lacking in pretension at the same time. A real masterpiece of modern criticism and analysis, something my mother would have absolutely loved to read and savour over many sleepless nights, and one which is making my own fingers itch to write.

Bare Bones, Old Friends & Big Guns

I've just had a striking idea for a new novel - 'Lit Lite', I suspect! - which is desperately inconvenient as we're in the middle of being evicted here. I have ideas all the time, of course, like most writers. But this one has particular promise, not least because it makes delicate little connections with some of the emotional hurdles I've faced over the past ten years.

I've put the bare bones of the plot down in a notebook and will revisit it in a few weeks, just to see if it still resonates with me. I'm pleased to have come up with a new idea anyway, even if it ends up being unwritable. I have to finish something else I've been working on before I can start work on a new book, but at least this will mean I have an interesting project lined up for that twilight time just after you've moved house, when your brain is still shifting aimlessly about in the dust and chaos, looking for something solid to cling onto.

I met the editor of established poetry magazine SEAM the other week, the formidable Anne Berkeley. It was at the Cambridge CB1 reading; she very kindly bought a copy of Boudicca & Co., and asked me to send her some poems for the magazine. Of course, I do have some new poems available, but I'm not entirely convinced by them yet. Another month or two, perhaps. They don't seem quite bedded down into themselves, still something a bit provisional about them. But she put me onto an old friend, via email, whom I first met at an Arvon course many years ago: former editor at SEAM, Frank Dullaghan, who now lives and works in Dubai, and has a collection of poetry forthcoming from Cinnamon Press next year. It was good to touch base with him again.

Today someone on the Poem Forum was asking for hints and tips on approaching literary editors about writing reviews for them. Coincidentally I had just been reading some superb past issues of Mslexia - to be picked up for a song via their website if you're a woman writer or interested in women's writing - including one which featured an article on approaching magazine editors as a book reviewer. I've been thinking for some time myself about stepping up a gear in terms of reviewing, but haven't yet motivated myself to send a sample poetry review to the big guns (TLS, LRB etc), so it was a jolt to my ambition to answer the guy's post with some salient points. I've become contented, I think, just to review for the 'usual suspects' and not look any higher. But one of the points Mslexia frequently makes is that women writers tend not to be as ambitious and inclined to aim high as their male counterparts.

Time to do something about that uncharacteristic lack of inclination, I think ...

Is Blogging another form of Blocking?

Poets On Fire is now on MySpace!

Blogging versus Writing Poetry

I seem to spend inordinate amounts of time online these days, mostly blogging - not here on Raw Light, which as you've no doubt noticed rarely gets updated, but generally on Poets On Fire, where I tend to post something up every single day. Sometimes more than one event per day. Sometimes as many as five or six, in fact. Which is a time-consuming business and does effectively mean that I'm not writing as much as I could be if I didn't run Poets On Fire.

But, of course, if I didn't have all these tiring nooks and crannies on the net, and run a resource like Poets On Fire, which is visited by many thousands of poetry-interested people every month, would I have as high a profile in poetry as I do now?

When I was first starting out in poetry, as an ex-snooker player with almost no knowledge of the British poetry scene, or multiple British scenes in fact, the quickest way I could see of getting my name known and actually discovering something about the process of writing and editing poetry was to run a small magazine myself. Which I did, for nearly four years, and its name was Blade.

Now I don't have time to run a magazine, and frankly wouldn't have the patience nor the energy for such a vast undertaking. Complicated and emotionally fraught stuff like dealing with masses of poetry mail every day and putting a 60-odd page magazine to bed every few months seemed easy and fun in my late twenties and early thirties. Hard work, yes. But still fun and not so difficult to do.

In those days I had two daughters around the 10 - 12 years mark. Now I have three young children at home every day, being home schooled, and I just don't have the same levels of energy as I did when I was younger and fitter. So running a magazine is out of the question.

But writing up a few blogs in the wee small hours when all the kids are in bed seems like a fair sacrifice of my time if I get useful publicity in return, and perhaps the odd offer of a reading. After all, there's little point writing poetry all day in your lonesome garret if no one is ever going to hear of your work or offer you a paid spot at their local guest poetry night or literary festival.

Besides, it amuses me to post up all these strange and dynamic live poetry events all over the country, knowing that people actually visit and read the Poets On Fire blog every day, and that most of them will take some sort of useful information away with them. And it pleases me to think I'm providing a free service for other people like myself. Even if I'm sometimes a bit too weary and over-run with kids to provide it until quite late on in the evening.

So blogging probably is another way of blocking the creative outlet. But since buying a laptop recently, I've discovered that I can now write up my hand-scribbled poems on that in another room - even in bed, sometimes! - and not be tempted to go online and start blogging when I should be writing. Then I transfer them back to my Mac via a USB pen at some more convenient time.

Once a Novelist, Always a Novelist ... ?

Poems, blogging, all that is going well at the moment. But when a good friend of mine was recently surprised to hear that I was also a novelist, once published by Sceptre - seven years ago - it struck me that I have done very little by way of pursuing my fiction-writing career lately.

This is not through laziness - I have three full-length manuscripts lurking in dusty computer files, written over the past six or seven years - but simply through feeling very despondent about EVER getting an agent. I send these things off periodically and they come back with a 'No thanks' every time. It's hard not to give up and stick to writing the sort of things I know will get published.

But my friend was right. It's time to push harder at the prose, get back to my roots as a fiction writer.

Onward and upward!