Anyway, last year I did have quite a neat idea for a new novel – a kind of literary sci-fi-ish sort of thing – and I duly started writing it. Unfortunately, what with all the running around (actual and virtual) promoting Mrs Darcy, I got interrupted, with the result that when I came back to it towards the end of last year, I found that I’d lost momentum.

So I did what any normal writer would do and reanimated a completely different project instead. This is a non-fiction thing (no clues yet, sorry) that I started work on several years ago and then dropped because I couldn’t see how to pull it all together. What’s interesting is that, having completed a novel now, I’ve got a much clearer idea of how to structure a narrative and the new version is (to my mind, at least) several thousand orders of magnitude better.

Ironically, having got stuck back into this project, I then found that the other one suddenly unblocked itself, so it looks like I’m going to be working on both simultaneously for the time being. I’m quite cool with this, because I can use each one as a distraction from the other – provided, that is, I don’t come up with a third project to take my eye off the ball, such as a sequel to Mrs Darcy.

Incidentally, if anyone out there has read Mrs Darcy and desperately wants a sequel, this is what you need to do:

1) Make sure you’ve “Liked” Mrs Darcy’s Facebook page.

2) Tell ALL your friends to go out and (a) buy it and (b) “Like” the Facebook page.

3) Give it an utterly brilliant a searingly honest review on Amazon.

And speaking of reviews, I’ve been catching up with my reading lately, and I really must get around to putting up some reviews myself. Wow, there aren’t half some wonderful books out there…

Some things fall apart under close analysis, but the sheer brilliance of this blows me away every time. It’s actually giving me shivers thinking about it now.

The only other song I can remember her singing is actually someone else’s, Bacharach and David’s “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again”, which contains what must be one of the worst rhymes of all time:

“What do you get when you kiss a guy?
You get enough germs to catch pneumonia.
After you do, he’ll never phone ya…”

 Just goes to show, even Hal David’s had a few bad days.

As excuses go it was a reasonable one, but one that became increasingly untenable as October stretched into November, until I was finally forced to face up to it at the weekend. What it was was this: I was quite keen on the first 3000 words, but I really was completely stuck on what to do next. Then I suddenly hit upon a neat narrative device that took the story to what I think will be a whole new level. And I’m now suddenly desperate to write like fury to get to the point where I can use that device, because I really think this will be something quite different.

Of course, having said that, I duly spent a fair bit of my writing time today coming up with a post for The View From Here. So this new momentum may yet stall. Hope not, though. I quite like this one.

In other news, there are now nine reviews for Mrs Darcy up on Amazon, every single one of them with five stars. So oi there, you national dailies and magazines, I’m over here!

Oh, and one more thing. If you’re a writer and you haven’t read all the stuff about the Brit Writers’ Awards yet, take a look here, here and here. You need to know this.

Weird business, being a writer. Weirder still, being a writer-who’s-about-to-have-two-books-published. Part of me is desperate to get the books out there so that I can point to them and say, “Look! I’m a proper writer now!” and part of me is terrified lest they are badly received or (worse) ignored altogether.

But until then, like I said back in this post, I’m in limbo, trying to work out what to do next. Project X, incidentally, staggered on to 3000 words, at which point I decided that I didn’t really fancy spending a substantial part of my remaining life in its company. So at the start of this week, I axed it – and almost immediately a completely new concept appeared out of the blue and proceeded to occupy the vacated space in my head. I threw together the first 1000 words yesterday and read it out to my writers’ circle last night, who seemed to like it too. I think I could have a lot of fun with this one.

Meanwhile, Project Y continues on its merry way and has now reached the end of the letter A. Project Z also emerged, in the shape of Wickhampedia. Hmmm. About time I wrote a few more entries for that, too. So as you can see, my writing life is wobbling about in several directions at the moment (and I didn’t even mention Project WhatevercomesafterZ, which grabbed my attention for an afternoon at the beginning of the month before being slapped down again).

Anyway, here are a few other things to divert you if you’ve a moment or two to spare. On Tuesday I went to a fascinating talk from several old-school SF legends at the British Library; read Oscar Windsor-Smith’s splendidly offbeat account of the event here.

Also worthy of scrutiny are my chum Sandra Norval’s excellent recent posts on cyber-networking in Fantasy Faction (here and here).

And its just struck me I haven’t mentioned Pike! Have I mentioned Pike yet? I don’t think I have, which is unforgivable. My mate K J Bennett has bravely decided to follow Mrs Darcy’s lead and is now serialising his wonderful novel Pike’s Quest here. Do please take a look: it’s hilariously daft.

Finally, I should also let you know that the super-snazzy new Ether app was officially launched today, so go here to download it if you haven’t done so already, and then go and buy some of the fab stories on there (preferably one of my three, of course). Perfect to read on the train when you get stuck outside Basingstoke owing to points failure.

OK, blog. Happy now?

Good. I won’t leave it so long next time. Promise.

I’m in an odd kind of limbo right now, whilst I’m waiting for Mrs Darcy to come out in September, and I’ve been feeling quite unsettled for a while. I’ve been writing odd bits of stuff, some of which I really like, but I haven’t felt like committing myself to anything longer than around 500 words. However, last night I finally got down to writing the first scene of a new project that’s been bubbling under in my head for the last four or five months.

I think I’ve been putting off doing this in case it self-destructed on impact. But it didn’t. What’s more, whilst I was writing it, a couple of things that worked perfectly appeared out of the blue, completely unasked-for. Which is great, because it means that my subconscious knows where it’s heading. It used to happen with Mrs Darcy sometimes, too, and I’d forgotten how good it felt. So Project X is now officially under way.

I’ve also finally kicked off Project Y, otherwise known as “Too Many CDs.” This is where I systematically trawl through my record collection seeing what turns up. The subtitle of the blog says it all, really. Could be fun.

So now those two are up and running, I’d better start thinking about Project Z, hadn’t I?

So last week I signed up for the Slingink Scribbling Slam, which is the new name for the old Eurofiction competition, which I took part in in 2007/8 and 2008/9 and which provided me with plenty of stuff to work with. For some reason, I’ve gone in for both fiction and poetry, which may turn out to be a mistake. But both the judges (Nik Perring and Mandy Pannett) are excellent writers that I have a huge amount of respect for and it seems too good to miss. If you fancy a go yourself, it’s not too late to register. Even if you get a low score in a round, you’ll still have written something, and it’s possible that the judges may have got it wrong. To name just one example, my BBC story, “The Amazing Arnolfini and His Wife” scored a measly 4 points out of a possible 20 when I wrote it for round 2 of Eurofiction 2007/8. But I wouldn’t have written it at all if it hadn’t have been for Eurofiction.

I’ve also gone and signed up for this year’s TWIWrite Zone, another imminent six-round competition but across different disciplines (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, etc. etc. – kind of a literary hexathlon) and over six weeks instead of twelve. I must be mad.

One last thing: Greg McQueen, who organised the recent “100 Stories for Haiti” project (which to my shame I failed to submit to, thinking I’d got nothing suitably optimistic to use) is now organising a similar anthology in aid of the Pakistan flood appeal. Details on Tania Hershman’s site here. I’ve actually sent in something this time, so if my name doesn’t appear on the list of contributors, for once it’s not through laziness. It’ll simply be because my effort was a bit pants.

Readers in the UK will probably be familiar with Swiss Toni from the Fast Show, played by comedy God Charlie Higson. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the character, Swiss Toni is a bouffant-haired used car salesman whose shtick is to liken everything to making love to a beautiful woman – and it struck me that maybe this is the way to explain what I’m looking for in a short story. Because, after all, isn’t writing a short story like … well, maybe not, but it set me thinking. Now this could get a little cheesy, but stick with me, because I think it might be a metaphor that’s worth working with.

Reading a novel is like getting into a long-term commitment, even if sometimes you feel the need to break it off early on because you know it’s not working out (I’m looking at you, Umberto Eco’s “Island of the Day Before”). You’ll probably take a good look before becoming involved in the first place – perhaps you ask your friends if you think it will work for you, or maybe you just study the blurb on the back. Either way, by the time you get to the end of the book, you will have spent a considerable amount of time in its intimate company.

The kind of relationship you have with a short story, on the other hand, is more like a one night stand with a stranger that you happen to pick up in a shady downtown bar. It’s a far more risky proposition, and yet one which can be just as exciting. So I hear, anyway.

So let’s for the moment pretend that I’m not an unprepossessing middle-aged beardie bloke and imagine instead that I’m that beautiful/handsome editor sitting a couple of stools away from you. How are you as a short story writer going to make this a night to remember? Here are a few suggestions.

1. First Impressions

Let’s consider how you are going to make that all-important good first impression. The first thing of course is the title. Does it stand out from the crowd? Is it intriguing? Or is it so wacky that I’m going to think you’re a nutter and move away from you?  What about the opening sentence? Does it draw me in? Does it pose questions? If you start off talking about the weather or introducing the characters, one by one, chances are I’m not going to stick around. Cut to the chase. Make me want to find out more about you.

2. Show Me You Know What You’re Doing

I really don’t want to leave this bar in the company of someone who’s a complete klutz. I want someone who’ll look after me and isn’t likely to trip me up as we’re getting into a taxi. And I sure as hell don’t want to catch you picking your nose when you think I’m not looking. So please make sure your writing flows and doesn’t jerk me out of the fictive dream.

3. Don’t be Cheap

If you ask me what I want to drink, don’t complain if I ask for Bollinger. I’m not going to give myself to anyone who isn’t prepared to put in the mileage. So I’m looking for someone who takes care in their writing and doesn’t resort to adverbs as a cheap way of describing action, for example. No shortcuts, please.

4. There Are Two of Us In This Relationship

I really don’t want to spend the evening being talked at. Sure, you’ve got loads of interesting things to say, but I want to be emotionally involved too. So show me things. Ask me questions. Let me work things out for myself. Don’t just tell me stuff.

5. No Unpleasant Surprises …

If I do decide to go home with you, I’d prefer it if you don’t suddenly produce the handcuffs and gimp mask as soon as we walk in the door – unless, of course, we’d previously established that that kind of thing was likely to be on the agenda. In which case, I would of course have no problem with it all. So no sudden appearances of zombies in the middle of a regency romance. Actually, that might have been a bad example. But you know what I mean.

6 … Particularly Late on in the Proceedings

I’m also probably going to take it badly if the glamorous woman that I’ve left the bar with turns out to be a bloke when things are just starting to get steamy – unless the clues were all there for me to work out (like that time when she went to the Gents) and it was my problem that I failed to add two and two together. So, please be very careful if you feel the need to spring it on me in the last paragraph that the protagonist is actually a cat, for example. Or dead. Don’t do this kind of thing unless you’ve properly foreshadowed it earlier on in the story. And even then, think twice before doing it at all.

7. Don’t Kick Me Out as Soon as It’s Over

Avoid the temptation to finish the story too soon. If there’s a big revelation at the end, you may well be able to extract more mileage out of it by looking at the impact of this revelation. One of my favourite stories, Graham Greene’s “A Little Place Off the Edgeware Road” is a perfect example of this. I don’t want to spoil it for you in case you’ve never read it, but there is a wonderfully gruesome twist right near the end. A lesser writer would have been tempted to end it there, but Greene adds a further paragraph in which the protagonist tries to face up to what he’s been told, increasing the emotional impact of the story one hundredfold.

8. I Don’t Just Want a Meaningless Fling

OK, it’s a one-night stand, but I’d like to think it meant something for both of us. So tell me something about myself I didn’t know before, even if it’s something uncomfortable. Or tell me something about the world that I didn’t know before. Or maybe just make me laugh. Or cry. Whatever you do, don’t leave me thinking “Well, that was a waste of time.”

9. But … Anything Goes

Notice that in none of the foregoing did I say anything about subject matter. Or whether you write in the first, second or third person, or whether you use the past, present or future tense. I haven’t even said anything about whether or not adult themes or language are acceptable.

Because, frankly, I’m not bothered. All I’m looking for is good writing, full stop. What you choose to do with it is entirely up to you.

(With apologies to Charlie Higson, who I hope will forgive me if he ever finds out about this. By way of recompense, I would like to urge anyone reading this to go straight to the Facebook group “Bring back Bellamy’s People” and join it, in the hope that the BBC change their mind and commission a second series after all. What? You never saw it? Oh, you’re in for a treat when the DVD comes out.)

1) On Tuesday night this week, I took part in the NYC Midnight “Tweet Me a Story” competition. Basically, I got a word at midnight UK time and then had five hours (yeah right, I said midnight UK time) to write three twitter stories using it. The word for group 19 was “attack”, which could have been a lot worse. Anyway, I threw my three together in half an hour. I find out next Tuesday if any of them are going to go forward to the next stage of voting.

2) I’ve just sent my story off to Jim Wisneski‘s ‘Twelve Days of Christmas” project; I’m one of the ones doing “Eight Maids a Milking”. It’s a rather odd piece altogether. I’ll let you know when it appears.

3) I’ve decided that the perfect in-flight movie is “GI Joe – The Rise of Cobra”. Why? Because it’s full of action (read “guns and explosions”), has an idiotic plot and (crucially) you don’t need to be able to hear any of the dialogue in order to follow it. There is no excuse for watching it outside a plane, however.

4) Weirdly, two out of the five writers shortlisted for the National Short Story Award (Sara Maitland and Jane Rogers) were judges in competitions where I won prizes this year. Following this logic, if Zoë Heller wishes to make an impression on the NSSA next year, she knows what to do. OK, Zoë?

5) By the way, well done to both of them for getting onto the shortlist, and especially to Sara Maitland for getting the runner-up prize. I read her collection “Far North” earlier this year, and I can strongly recommend it – especially the title story, which is quite extraordinary.

While acting is what she wants to do for now, she nonetheless hankers after writing, for which, she says, she needs to spend time in London. “I need to interact with the city,” she says, “to meet people, to have strange things happen to me – otherwise what would I write about?” She writes more and more as she gets older, feels that she’s improving and may end up doing the Open University’s creative writing MA when she can afford to take a year off.

What?! Did she really say “otherwise what would I write about”? Yes, I’m afraid she did. I have a feeling that she may have taken on board the “write about what you know” dictum a little too literally. Although to be honest, I would have thought that even at her tender years, as an international actress she’s probably had a few more unusual experiences and met more peculiar people than the rest of us who have spent our long working lives in open-plan offices and cubicles.

No, the crucial point about writing that she seems to be missing is that it’s all about imagination. Unless she can learn to put hers to good use, however many bizarre things that happen to her as she “interacts with the city”, chances are that the end result is going to be a more than a little flat. But I wish her luck anyway – I hope I’m proved wrong.

Curiously, you could say that it was in many ways a failure of imagination that resulted in the recent BBC adaptation of “Emma” (in which Ms Garai took the title role) being so uninspiring. Everyone involved seemed to be under the impression that it should look as much as possible like the Gwyneth Paltrow movie of a few years back, rather than something new. By contrast, the most interesting adaptation of “Emma” in recent years remains “Clueless”, a film that remained 100% faithful to the source material and yet created something completely original out of it.

Here’s a thing. I can write all manner of unpleasant stories involving things like murder, cannibalism and brain transplants, and my family will read them quite happily – even if they sometimes give me a bit of a funny look afterwards. But if I mention that I’ve written another poem, there’s a fair chance that I will be shunned for up to a week. My daughter actually went so far as to say that if I ever call myself a poet, she would refuse to speak to me ever again.

You could say that poetry has a bit of an image problem. A lot of the problem lies with free verse, which is essentially the conceptual art of the poetry world. If it doesn’t rhyme, it’s often hard to see the craft in it. It’s like “my four-year-old could have written that.” The other problem is that it genuinely is a lot easier to write a bad piece of free verse than it is to write a bad story. So there’s a lot of really bad free verse out there.

Even writers have issues with poetry. We’ve been having a discussion recently in the on-line forum of my real-life writers’ group, the Verulam Writers’ Circle, about supposed non-poets being worried about critiquing poetry put up by other members. Notice I said “supposed” there. I know all about this. I’ve been there. Up until very recently, I would most definitely have described myself as a non-poet. So I know exactly where they’re coming from.

Poetry is scary. I’ll qualify that: free verse is scary. It’s scary because you have to make the rules up yourself as you go along, and trust that you can give the reader enough hints as to what those rules might be. Every single word counts. (See where I’m going here?) Actually, it’s more than that. It’s not just every single word that counts – it’s where every single word goes that counts. It’s where you break the sentences, where you break the lines and where you break the verses.

Or to put it another way: it’s all about how you write it.

Which is why I think that anyone who wants to write anything really well needs to get to grips with poetry. Because if you can learn to control the flow of a free verse poem, imagine the power that will give you over a piece of prose. And it is of course also possible that, like me, you will get completely sucked in. But I’m still not calling myself a poet quite yet.