I’ve been a bit flat and crow-ridden for the past week or so, for a bunch of reasons. I had some last revisions to do on Honey Trap, and then I tried to jump right back into writing Girl from Mars without a break, which was a stupid thing to do. Then between one thing and another I haven’t had much time to write. In general, writing begets writing, so when I can’t do it I start to feel disconnected from my ms. It sounds a little bit weird, to be saying in one breath that I needed to give myself a break and in the other saying I can’t be away from the writing, but it’s one thing to take a deliberate break and quite another to be prevented from writing by outside stuff. I failed to do the first and found myself in the second.

I had a great workshop with my writing group on Wednesday, but in general I was feeling rundown and tired and dispirited.

And, of course, I’d reached the place in my book where I didn’t know what was going to happen next. This is always tricky and entails much moaning and whining on my part.

However. I’ve taken some steps to climb out of my funk. First off, I’ve been taking vitamins and this might be a placebo effect, but I’ve immediately felt better physically. I got my hair cut and it’s amazing what that can do to make you feel better. I’ve had a bit of time to write, and I’ve got the story started again; more than that, I’ve started planning a bit and so I have a general shape of where I’m going (though it is very general).

I think what’s helped the most, though, has been reading, researching, and absorbing stories. Liz Fenwick posted on her blog today that reading Freya North’s Pillow Talk (which won the Romantic Novel of the Year award this year–it’s on my TBR list) has helped her see a way forward with one of her mss. I went to the library and got out several graphic novels to help inspire me with my comic book artist heroine, all of which I devoured in a matter of hours. I also went to Smiths and bought the latest 2000AD. They reminded me of tight story structure, and of the particular constraints and strengths of visual storytelling–an important theme of my own novel.

I’ve spent some time exchanging emails with a guy who writes comics scripts for DC, and he’s got me thinking, too, about visual storytelling, and some of the issues that my hero and heroine are going to have.

I also got, on the recommendation of my agent, The Rose of Sebastopol, which I started yesterday and have hardly been able to put down; I’m now about a third of the way through. It’s about a very conventional Victorian woman who finds her world challenged by her cousin and the Crimean war. One thing that is really striking me in that book is the sense that things are bubbling under the surface, that the narrator does not understand all that is happening, or is perhaps holding something back. There’s also an excellent sense of two very different worlds colliding, or about to explode onto each other. It’s fascinating and makes me turn the pages.

Last night I deliberately didn’t try to write; instead I watched Bobby, which I loved. It’s the connected stories of several people in the Ambassador hotel on the night in 1968 when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and it showed me some valuable lessons about drawing characters quickly and sympathetically, especially the lovely and understated relationships between the characters played by Helen Hunt and Martin Sheen, Sharon Stone and William F Macy, and Lindsay Lohan and Elijah Wood. What it really hit me with, though, was how these individual relationships were played out against a context of a tragedy that affected the whole course of US and global history. It’s a good lesson about how to raise the stakes in a story.

So…I’ve learned some stuff. Raise the stakes. Make worlds collide. Look at bigger things. Even in a romantic comedy about a comic book artist, I can use these lessons.

What have you learned lately from your reading?

Hey, Dumbledore is gay.

I’m about two chapters from the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and what I thought was going to happen hasn’t happened yet! I wonder if it will. I did cry at one point, which is new for me with Harry Potter. The middle of the book is slow (that said I whizzed through it), but the ending is explosions, excitement, and emotion aplenty.

I had to put it down to take care of the Fecklet and can’t wait to finish it with dinner tonight.

It’s nice to know that Dumbledore is gay though. I didn’t really suspect it. I guess it was his haircut that fooled me.

I have some quibbles with JK Rowling’s writing style (especially her use of punctuation!! AAGH!!) , but I like her world and her characters and that she knows lots more about them than she reveals in her books.

When I’m writing furiously I rarely get time or head space to appreciate other stories–if I read, it’s nonfiction. So now that I’ve finished I’m having a great glut of fiction.

First, I read Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener. I did this because some of my nonfiction reading led me to the strange case of Anthony Godby Johnson, who was a 14-year-old author who didn’t exist. He’d written a book about surviving horrific abuse, but no one had ever seen him–not his agent, not his editor, no one. Only his adopted mother, who, years later, it was proven had been pretending to be Anthony all along (although she has never admitted to it).

Maupin knew Anthony (or whoever he really was) through telephone conversations, and came to have a close relationship with him. When he started to suspect Anthony was a fake, he fictionalised his experience in The Night Listener. I love fakes and frauds and find them endlessly fascinating, so a fiction about a fake is total candy for me. I couldn’t put it down.

Yesterday I went to the movies for the first time in ten months. I saw Superbad, just because that was what was on when I turned up, and I really enjoyed it, mostly because I liked the two main characters and their sidekick so much. There was a real warmth to the film, which I didn’t expect in a teenage let’s-get-drunk-and-laid movie.

Then last night I watched a DVD of Little Miss Sunshine, which was pure pleasure all the way through.

Meanwhile I’ve bought the last Harry Potter book and have started reading that (though I had to read the synopses of the two previous books on Wikipedia because I’d read the books so long ago I’d forgotten what happened). It’s a total page-turner, of course, so much so that I stayed up later than I wanted to last night.

It’s so great to read and watch films again! I should get revisions from my agent any time now, though, so I’d better enjoy the reading while I can.

Finished the Capote while the Fecklet napped…very good indeed. Next on the list is either Mr Knightley’s Diary, by Amanda Grange, or She’ll Take It, a Little Black Dress by Mary Carter.

Fecklet squirms when he nurses these days, so I’m not doing as much reading as I’d like to, and when I do, it’s preferably a book I can hold in one hand. I read a big, hardback copy of Lisey’s Story by Stephen King last week and I nearly gave it up, because it was slow to start and the book was so darn big I had to do some engineering work with pillows in order to read it. I stuck with it, just because it was Stephen King and I would read the phone book if Stephen King wrote it, but it was a struggle.

It was a mixed bag, as most of Stephen King’s recent books have been for me: I was completely gripped, I loved the thoroughness of his worldbuilding, and I liked very much the insight into how he sees a writer’s life (the heroine is the widow of a famous writer). But the character motivations were a little bit weak at a key point; the heroine’s sister, who was meant to provide a lot of motivation, was sloppily drawn; and the ending was slightly damp.

I wholeheartedly love some King books: Carrie, The Shining, The Talisman and Black House, and Misery which I love, love, love. And the rest of his books linger in my mind for a long time. So I’ll always read a book of his, even if it’s not portable.

On another topic, there are only eight more days until The Sun and Asda are giving away Spirit Willing, Flesh Weak, FREE!

In Cold Blood is really, really good. Seriously shivering good. I thought it would be a bit more of a mystery novel, a true crime where you followed police procedure, but in fact it’s a fascinating study of character.

The 1950s small Kansas town where the murder takes place is brilliantly painted–you can hear the voices of the different townspeople. What’s extraordinary though is the way Capote portrays the killers. You get inside their heads, and have a measure of sympathy for them–but then you see them from another characters’ point of view, and you begin to see a much more complex picture. He doesn’t go for caricature or easy answers; instead you get contradictory viewpoints, as in real life. And though the book isn’t dated, it conjures up 1950s America as if you were there.

There’s hardly any suspense in it, really: you know the victims died, and you know the killers were caught and executed. He tells you so. There isn’t really even any emphasis on how these things happened. What keeps me turning the pages is the gradual building up of character, the question of why these things happened.

I wasn’t expecting this–especially after seeing the film Capote–but the author is invisible; what you get instead is the impression that the people involved are speaking directly. Of course this is an illusion, but it’s interesting how Capote obscures himself. I’m about 2/3 of the way through and am trying to read slowly so it lasts.

Paranormal romance writers Kathy Love and Erin McCarthy have done something cool…

They’ve got a vampire band!

Both Erin and Kathy are writing books about members of the band. They’ve set up this excellent website about it, too, with blogs from members of the band. It’s interesting to see what an undead musician thinks about life…

The whole thing is lots of fun so go check out The Impalers!

Because I have so much reading time while I’m feeding the baby, I’ve been trying out some new authors. So far this has worked quite well–I really enjoyed the children’s fantasy/adventure/comedy Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer, and fell in love with the hero of chick lit novel Making Mischief by fellow London RNA member Liz Young. I’m halfway through another children’s book, The Wind Singer by William Nicholson, which like Artemis Fowl is also fantasy, but of a very different sort, much more epic and serious.

I’ve also read a thriller by a mega-bestselling American author, and it was CRAP. Really, really awful. The characters were wooden with little motivation, and I saw the plot twists coming a million miles away–despite the fact that they made little logical sense. The writing was at about a fourth-grade level, only both clumsy and stupid; the children’s books I’ve been reading have had more sophisticated writing. There were continuity errors (people suddenly changing rooms, or what they looked like)–and yet despite this the author felt the need to repeat information over and over, in case you might have forgotten a major plot point over the course of ten pages.

What could have been potentially interesting plot or emotional development was skimmed over. At the risk of giving the identity of the book away, an example of this was when one of the main characters, a priest, is the only survivor of a plane crash. This should be an exciting, harrowing, thrilling incident, right? The entire scene takes about a page to recount; there are no details, and the priest sort of staggers off when it’s done without seeming to have really noticed what’s happened, or trying to help anybody else.

I only read to the end because a) I couldn’t move as had baby attached to me, and b) I wanted to know if I really had guessed the ending about fifty pages in. I had.

Yet this guy sells millions of books. It truly makes no sense.

I’ve been a bad little blogger recently–too lazy, and too much in love with that photo of Mr Tennant, below. I am enjoying pottering around the house, running little errands, taking naps, cooking good things, and every now and then thinking about my book. I’m trying to write 1000 words a day, which should give me a good strong start by the time the baby comes. Really if I were very efficient I would try to write a lot more than that, because who knows when I’ll be able to write again after the baby arrives, but I’m figuring it’s important for me to relax and potter, too.

I confessed to a fellow novelist the other day that I had never read any Nora Roberts, ever. She was shocked and promptly leant me some books. I started Birthright yesterday and haven’t been able to put it down at all. I think I’ll read just one chapter, and then I find I’ve read three. So the day goes. I find it difficult to get to sleep at night–because that’s when the baby starts headbutting my pelvis and stretching out my rib cage–and Nora isn’t helping much, either. I need to read something more boring.

I mostly procrastinated yesterday…did a bit of tidying, played around on the internet, talked on the phone for an hour and a half with Kathy, walked into town to buy a birthday present for Biddy and ended up trying on maternity jeans instead (I had no success, but did find a top and some leggings), then had to lie down for an hour because I was so tired and sore from walking up and down the hill and around the shops. Pregnancy really does for your feet.

I did call my agent. I’d sent her the synopsis for Close Encounters (that’s the erotic science fiction romantic comedy I wrote with Kathy), and she thought it was hilarious. Both of my editors have heard about the book now, and both of them think it is very funny, but unfortunately there isn’t much of a market for funny erotica in this country, so I guess we’ll be concentrating on submitting it in the US. The market is definitely different there, and we’ve had requests from three publishers (two big print houses and one e-pub) so we’ll see how it goes.

I picked up a copy of Alison Baverstock’s Is There A Book In You?. I was one of the many authors who Alison sent a questionnaire to when she was preparing this book, so I was thrilled to see myself quoted talking about writing along with such authors as Katie Fforde, Phillip Pullman, and Stephen King. (I’m not worthy, but I’ll take the association however I can get it!)

It looks like a very good book, though I haven’t read it through yet–full of little nuggets of information, advice, and experience. It’s the second general “how-to” writing book I’ve bought recently, because my friends Lee Weatherly and Helen Corner, of Cornerstones Literary Consultancy, have written a book called How To Write a Blockbuster. The books are different–the Blockbuster book is more about clearly explaining technical aspects such as structure, genre, characterisation, and submission, and Book in You is more about discovering how you, personally, fit into the world of writing and publishing. I think they compliment each other quite well and I think they’ll both be very useful for reference and enjoyment.

I also wrote 1300 words, which is over my minimum, though not quite as much as I wanted to. I couldn’t figure out my hero’s motivation. I’m having a little trouble balancing the conflict for this book, possibly because my attention span is about ten minutes long. This morning I got up and wrote nearly 900 words of just musing about what the hell my hero thinks he’s doing dragging the heroine hundreds of miles to see his mother. I’m still not entirely sure it’s correct, but I’ve got enough to work with now, and maybe I can change in the edits. It’s not bad enough so that I think it sucks. Yet.

Yesterday went well. It was a hot day in Birmingham and I have to admit that the venues were not ideal–one was a very dark night club and one was a very hot meeting room. But the people were all very friendly and everyone who attended my talk was the best–fun, intelligent, considerate people.

I’m glad I went–I enjoyed the talk, I met some lovely articulate people who love reading and discussing books, and I got to see Rosie. And they gave me ice cream. I have to say I’m still undecided about BookCrossing. This isn’t meant to be something inflammatory–I think the people at the convention were fantastic, and I believe they are idealistic and kind. I also believe that the reasons behind the group are, on balance, well meant. It’s fun to find a book “in the wild” and to set it free for someone else to read. I could see first-hand that the convention allowed all the participants to share the joy of reading with each other, and that’s got to be a great thing.

But there is that tricky issue of authors making a living, and publishers staying in business. A BookCrossing book has many readers, and the author only makes his or her very small profit on it once. A book traded is a book not bought. It’s also not a book taken out of a public library, which pay authors PLR and which need everyone’s support.

On the other hand, I’ve borrowed many books, enjoyed them, and then gone out and bought the author’s other books. If this is what BookCrossers do, then that can benefit authors. Is it?

Let me make it clear again–I’m not in any way questioning the validity or benefits of the organisation to its members. I saw that yesterday. And personally, the convention was an opportunity for me to get my work more well known, which will benefit me. But how about authors in general?

What do you think?

With the teaching job and the writing job I’m finding I have less and less time to read, so one of my resolutions for this holiday was to do some reading.

I’ve read three books since Saturday–or rather two and a half. The first one is called Stuart: A Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters. It’s a biography of a homeless man in Cambridge, and is a funny, poignant, appalling, and life-affirming book that gives an insight into a way of life I couldn’t possibly imagine.

The second is my April shelfmate Kate Hardy’s Modern Extra The Cinderella Project, which I read all over London yesterday. Fitting, because Kate has written a very hot scene set on the banks of the Thames! I always enjoy Kate’s sympathetic heroines and romantic heroes, and this book was great fun, particularly the Dirty Dancing references.

Right now I’m reading The Ship of Brides by Jojo Moyes. This book is on the shortlist for the 2006 FosterGrant Romantic Novel of the Year award and I am loving it. It’s the story of Australian war brides being transported on an aircraft carrier to begin their new lives in England–not the sort of story I usually read, but it’s transported me to life on that ship in that time, and I keep on thinking about the characters whenever I put the book down. The love stories in the book are wonderful–and the skill of the writer is in portraying this love between separated people, or between people who have been thrown together for only a very short time and know nothing about each other.

I’ve also bought The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred, mainly, I must admit, because of the title, but also because the back said it was “a Perfume for a new generation,” and I loved Perfume.

This isn’t really helping me get my book written but I am having a wonderful time.

I also received an email from a reader yesterday who said she rarely has time to read, and yet she read my Featured Attraction all in one sitting, and then emailed me at 1.30 am to tell me so…so I am inspired by that .