It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Vita Sackville-West.

Today I have been busy writing, clapping the net over my own particular butterfly, and now I'm tired out. It's an almost physical exhaustion although I've hardly moved at all. I'm going to sit in the afternoon sunshine and just freewrite around my writing prompt for today which is ... a day slipping emptily by.

Hah! My email system has this rather weird and disconcerting habit of picking out words in my emails and offering 'appropriate adverts'. Today a friend wrote and asked whether I fancied going to watch some dance at the local theatre. I didn't particularly, but I was very excited by the opportunity offered in one of our appropriate adverts' to enjoy the excitement of a pole dance in my very own home with my very own removable pole, one of which I could even pack up and put in a natty bag to carry with me between office and home. Well, it makes a break from editing, I suppose. Mind you, I'm not quite a novice at these things - I went to a stripping class once with another friend. Actually I'm exaggerating, it was called Six Ways to Remove a Glove and all we did was dance with feather boas and remove gloves, plus a certain amount of 'bottom work' (don't ask), but I can't remember the last time I'd laughed so much. All my other 'class mates' were, like me, women of a certain age, and most seemed to be mothers at the local Catholic school. In the reception area before, one asked another whether her husband knew she was there. 'God no!' she replied. 'He thinks I'm learning how to knit gloves.'
And so my writing prompt for today is going to be ... gloves. I'm not sure whether they're to be removed or not.

Here are details of a BBC Radio 2 competition that looks fun:

“Imagine an encounter with your own music legend and use it to create imaginative, original drama. Be funny, be bold, tell a great story in less than 10 minutes. You can meet anyone, be anyone, go anywhere, do anything! Turn your dramatic ideas into a radio drama between three and ten minutes long and it could be broadcast on the Mark Radcliffe show. Deadline for entries midday Friday 2 June 2006.”

For more information, go to the Radio 2 website

English PEN presents Ghostwriters with Toby Litt, Hilary Mantel and Patrick McGrath

Tickets must be booked before the event.
Tuesday 16 May

Ghostwriters
People have been telling stories about them for millennia, but why are we so haunted by the idea of ghosts? As they say in Hollywood, there is nothing there in the dark that isn’t there by day – except fear. To put a shiver down your spine on a spring evening, authors Toby Litt, Patrick McGrath and Hilary Mantel get together to compare notes on their own spooky writing and ask what it is about ghosts that has a curious effect on writers’ imaginations, in a discussion chaired by PEN’s own Simon Burt.
Time: 7- 8.30pm

Tickets: £5.00
Venue: Adam Street Club, 9 Adam Street, London. WC2N 6AA
How to book: Call 020 7713 0023 or visit www.englishpen.org/events/

If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends -- you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.

Alice Duer Miller (1874 - 1942) US poet, author

I hope this is an urban myth, but one of the writing organisations I belong to, New Writing South, has this little bit in the newsletter about a would be children's author who, after receiving numerous rejection letters for his manuscript, decided that no-one was actually reading it.
So what he did was type out his washing machine user guide, called it The Tin Drum and sent it off. He got back the standard and polite reply: 'We think this work has merit but it's just not for us.'

And - I just have to do this - my writing prompt for today is going to be a rejection letter which tells more about the person doing the rejecting, than what's being turned down!

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities crept in. Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you should begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

It would have been the birthday of one of my most loved and inspirational writers, Angela Carter today. I was lucky enough to meet her once, when I was organising a literary conference for readers of Cosmopolitan magazine. We had a fantastic line-up - Fay Weldon, Deborah Moggach, even Maya Angelou, and the day was just full of inspiration, fun and naturalness. Magic. So whatever happened to REALLY good literature and women's magazines? Seems to me that the magazines that are continuing publishing new stories are the ones for older women.

And my writing prompt for today is going to be ... Freud spoke to me in a dream last night (because he did, and I'm definitely going to have to write about what he told me!)

Well, I'm ashamed to say it's taken me as long to work out how to do the format tags for this list as it would to read all these books, but finally I'm able to respond to Debra and Patti's challenge about what books I've read. Thanks guys, this was fun and I've learnt something! I will be underlining and striking with abandon from here on! So this is the list I received, with instructions....
Look at the list of books below.
Bold the ones you’ve read.
Italicize the ones you might read.
Cross out the ones you won’t.
Underline the ones on your book shelf.
Place (parentheses) around the ones you’ve never even heard of.
Here goes nothing!

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (and went back to this recently because of the Capote film)
The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (this one's on the bookshelf but I'd be cheating to claim it because it's my kids!)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling (but it's on the bookshelf and much loved by the kids)
The Life of Pi—Yann Martel (heavily overrated in my view but I've got friends who LOVE it, so might have to go back and read again)
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (on the bookshelf but I've never actually finished it!)
The Hobbit--J.R.R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell (a treasured one, this one)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—J.K. Rowling (as above - not being snobby about not reading this, but I've tried and can't get into them at all)
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Probably my favourite on this list)
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (made me weep and weep)
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Atonement - Ian McEwan (cop out ending)
The Shadow of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Dune - Frank Herbert (keep getting recommended this)
(Sula by Toni Morrison) (hah, was feeling cocky, but am now ashamed. How have i not heard of this!)
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo
White Teeth by Zadie Smith (Was on my shelf but has gone walkabout)
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
The Moor’s Last Sigh - Salman Rusdie
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Schriver (Was reading this morning about the struggle she had to get this published!)
Disgrace - JM Coetzee
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kuresh (I love this man ... as a writer)
Small Island - Andrea Levy
Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
Ivanhoe - Walter Scott
Patrick Suskind - Perfume
Bernand Shlink - The reader
(Father and Son - Larry Brown)
(Crooked Hearts - Robert Boswell)
(She's Come Undone - Wally Lamb)
Postcards - E. Annie Proulx
(A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (stories) - Robert Olen Butler)
(Defiance - Carole Maso)
Being Dead - Jim Crace
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, by John Berger - Wonderful!
(Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard) (ashamed I haven’t heard of this – will read)
(Bear Attacks--Their Causes and Avoidance, by Stephen Herrero)
(Desert Notes--Reflections in the Eye of a Raven, by Barry Lopez)
(River Notes--The Dance of Herons, by Barry Lopez)
The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald
(Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow)
(The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus)
(The Last of the Just by Andre Schwartz-Bart)
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (Loved the film of this too)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (keep getting mixed reports on this one)
(A Bell for Adano by John Hersey)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Herzog by Saul Bellow

The books I would add are...
Ripening Seed, Colette
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Woman Warrier, Maxine Hong Kingston
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
The Lover, Marguerite Duras

And I'm tagging ...

Clare
Susannah
Shirl
Abhay
Keris

When I was young, I admired clever people. As I grew old, I came to admire kind people.
- Abraham Joshua Heschel

The heroine of my next novel, Tell Me Everything finds books by the French author, Colette, in the library just when she needs them most. Colette is one of those wonderful writers who can be a shivery role model - you admire, but aren't quite sure you'd have the courage to follow! However, it was a real pleasure in the writing process to go back to the novels and get lost in that summer hazy atmosphere the stories evoke for me. And even more of a pleasure to read Judith Thurman's brilliant biography of Colette's amazing life, Secrets of the Flesh - A Life of Colette.. It's one of those books where you spend as much time making notes as reading, because each page contains a gem. Sorting out my desk this morning, I came across pages and page of scribbles I'd made and each one is worthy of its own writing prompt...

'For I felt, each day better ... that I was, precisely, born NOT to write.'
'General ideas were like dangling earrings; they didn't suit her.'
'For a child, the unwillingness to thrive can also be a form of revenge.'
'There are people who fling themselves into the path of your existence, and plunge it into chaos.'
'He even had trouble controlling the pages of his evening newspaper.'
'So many women want to be corrupted, and so few are chosen!'
'Jealousy is the only suffering we endure without ever becoming used to it.'
'The widespread adoration of women was also an implacable way of subjugating them.'
'swindled of what I had been secretly plotting to relinquish.'
'no one who has tried both to mother and to write can honestly say they are not, at times, conflicting vocations.'
'that graceful, complimentary manner of unfaithful husbands.'
'A woman reaches an age when the only thing left to her is to enrich her own self.'

From my sister, about tomorrow:

wow....did you know that On the first Thursday of May, 2006 at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.
This will not happen again in our life time........ Theres an interesting fact to tell ur grandchildren!!

And on the subject of being 'sad', I can't stop drooling over this beautiful book cover which I found on Patricia Storm's excellent blog, Cover Me With Love. A must for everyone who enjoys the tactile/visual side of books, as well as their content!

There has been so much about happiness recently that it's easy to feel guilty about not being happy. But sometimes there are times when you're just going to feel sad. And you need to, without someone popping up to make you 'feel better'. I think that's why I like this site so much. The Saddest Thing doesn't seem to me to be about voyeurism or feeding a negative itch, but about giving space and recognition to emotion in all its different forms, and I appreciate the fact that it was artists who created it, rather than psychologists.

So that's going to be my writing prompt for today .... the saddest thing I own.

And this too.... I LOVE this idea:

Legend Press looking for stories for new collection
Following the success of ‘The Remarkable Everyday’, Legend Press has announced details of the second book in the series, to be launched late-October this year. Developing the theme, Legend Press is looking for fictional stories of between 9,000 and 12,000 words that follow a character for a single day from a particular cultural angle. As with TRE, the story must provide an interesting and original everyday insight with a diverse range to be chosen for the collection. Legend Press is not looking for any political message or planning to provide an exhaustive list, but just a fictional snapshot into the lives of different people from different backgrounds. It also stresses that this doesn’t necessarily mean focusing on the main religious groups, but can be an examination of any cultural aspect of life. Again, Legend Press is looking for an individual insight, which means a strong focus on the character’s thoughts, actions and emotions. As an examination of the everyday, sci-fi, fantasy and thriller fiction is not recommended.
Legend Press is now open to submissions and hopes all writers will look to take advantage of this fantastic opportunity and challenge. Writers should send their work to Legend Press, 13a Northwold Road, London N16 7HL, along with SAE for returns. The deadline for submissions is 30 June 2006 and writers will receive royalties from the collection. Legend Press is also happy to answer any questions, which can be sent to info@legendpress.co.uk

From a New Writer email:

Arts Council website boosts budding authors
An opportunity to see your own work in print in a new X-Factor-style scheme called YouWriteOn.com, whose Bestseller Chart launches this month. YouWriteOn.com is aimed at publishing books by new authors and distributing them through major booksellers. New members join YouWriteOn for free. They review and rate the opening chapters of each others work before the site randomly sends them on to other members. Each month the five highest rated writers will enter the site’s Best Seller chart and receive a free critique from literary professionals, including established authors and a leading London literary agent.
The author with the highest rated opening chapters will win the site’s Book of the Year Publishing Award and the completed book will be distributed through major booksellers including Amazon, W.H. Smith and Waterstone’s.
Edward Smith, the Development Manager of www.youwriteon.com, said: “The website is a great way for new authors to develop as writers with the help of their peers and guidance from literary professionals. It will help talented new writers to get noticed and published. The Arts Council are really behind the project as a way for new authors to get a voice.”
YouWriteOn’s innovative ratings system was devised by professional authors, including Phil Whitaker, whose debut novel Eclipse of the Sun was shortlisted for the Whitbread.”
Edward Smith said: “We plan to launch new successful authors as all our members will be able to self-publish their completed books through the site. Already many members reviewing new authors’ submitted chapters have said that they would buy the completed books. Our aim is to help all writers develop, and to help talented writers get noticed and published."
www.YouWriteOn.com

The writer Mark Pritchard has been working on a really interesting series of interviews with writers, What Are You Working on? and I was honoured to be asked to take part recently. It's fascinating to see the challenges writers are going through AT THE TIME of writing, rather than when they've been overcome. I particularly liked the quote from Laura Krughoff about the differences in writing short stories and novels:

The first draft of a short story has always been my least favorite part of the writing process -- I've always felt subject to the tyranny of finishing. For that reason, I've been really surprised by how liberating and fun diving into a draft of a novel has been. I'm enjoying the feeling of having a work in progress -- knowing I get to be with these characters and this material for a good long while.

From The Writer's Almanac today:

It's the birthday of lyricist Lorenz Hart, born in New York City (1895). He's famous for writing the lyrics to songs like "Blue Moon" (1934), "My Funny Valentine" (1937), and "The Lady Is a Tramp" (1937).

As a young man in his twenties, he was drifting around, writing verse in his spare time, when someone introduced him to a teenage composer named Richard Rodgers. They worked on a series of amateur musical comedies together, but their future didn't seem promising. Rodgers was just about to give up on music and go into the underwear business when their show The Garrick Gaieties (1925) became a huge success. They went on to write several successful musicals together, including Connecticut Yankee (1927), The Boys From Syracuse (1938), and Pal Joey (1940).

Lorenz Hart wrote,
"Blue moon,
you saw me standing alone
without a dream in my heart
without a love on my own."

And my writing prompt for today is going to be .... watching someone standing on their own.

Two strong messages about just getting on with the writing today. First of all, a quote sent in an email:

"Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time. The approach must involve getting something down on the page: something good, mediocre or even bad. It is essential to the writing process that we unlearn all those seductive high school maxims about waiting for inspiration. The wait is simply too long." --Leonard S. Bernstein

And secondly, an interview with novelist Matthew Sharpe in the current edition of Glimmer Train. Asked whether he thought it important to have a disciplined plan as a writer - writing every day etc, he replied:

"Oh yes. Otherwise I'd die. I think the more you show up at the computer or the writing pad, the more likely it is you will discover the inspiration. There's a nice metaphor, which I am going to mangle, from Mary Oliver, the poet, where she talks about this wild part of yourself that doesn't want to be tamed, but if you show up at the same place and time every day and you offer it your rigor, it will trust you more and it may be more likely to show up, too."

And my writing prompt for today is going to be ... discipline.