I can't wait for the Oscars. There's something so inspiring about all that team work, even when it's individuals winning the gongs. I think that's what I miss most about being a writer - I love all the tittle-tattle and stupid jokes that go on when a group of people work together. So one of my missions for this year is to do something that involves working as a team, not just teaching. Anyway the full list is here.

So it's the third day of Lent, and I've kept my pledge to eat no sugar, so no biscuits. How can writers write without munching a constant supply of biscuits to keep them going? This one is struggling anyway, and fruit just doesn't do the trick. Instead I'm fantasising about them - squashed fly biscuits, chocolate bourbons, hobnobs. Oh yes... But perhaps not fantasising about them as much as the Chinese artist, Song Dong, who is creating a whole Asian city out of biscuits in London's Selfridges department store. I might just have to give it a visit. Have always fancied eating my way through a whole street... and that's going to be my writing prompt for today!

I'm very pleased to announce that the edition of Pulp that I've been 'looking after' is now up. It's been an amazing experience, not least to see how hard the real editor, Elaine, works to put it all together. One thing I'll take away is that when I've got a rejection from an editor saying 'Not right for us', I'm going to pay it a bit more attention. To be honest, there were many more stories received that I would have been proud to publish, but for various reasons - not least getting a mix - just didn't fit. However ... I really love the three stories I did pick. They're worth a read, and I'd love to hear comments if anyone's got them.

We found this lovely inscription on a park bench in Primrose Hill, London, last weekend when watching my daughter run in a cross country race. It sums up all I love about these memorials - they actually tell so much about a personality (in this case two!) in so few words. I can really picture these two men, with their view over London, discussing life and everything. A real exercise in character development!

To my mind, there's no better television than the first series of Little Britain and much of the humour came from the fact, it was all only one whisker away from possible truth. So imagine my delight, please, when I went to a pub in Sussex recently. While we were sitting there, in walked three respectable looking old men with a small dog. Nothing odd about that UNTIL the dog climbed up one of the men and sat on his head. None of the three men blinked. They just carried on talking as if nothing was happening. And then when the dog got bored, it just walked across the shoulders of the men to one of the others, and back again. And the barman kept serving, and everyone in the pub was treating it as a perfectly normal thing to happen....

And my writing prompt is ... a strange thing on your head.

"There is no perfect time to write. There's only now." --Barbara Kingsolver

It's a grey February day here, slightly drizzling and no sign of the sun which was popping out briefly yesterday, but being a writer to me is all about using my imagination, so today I'm going to keep watching this slideshow with sound, and join the Jain Festival in Southern India!

Something for the weekend?

Great story here from Justin Crouse. I came across it on the link for the Million Writers Internet story competition, that I followed from Myfanwy's blog. This is a worthwhile competition - do nominate your favourite story. Nothing to lose!

My writing prompt for this weekend ... running towards, running away.

Ay, ay, ay... how could I have forgotten Breaking the Waves from my list of top Seven films? I don't think I breathed once during the whole time I was in the cinema watching it, and even now, on DVD, it still has a powerful effect on me. There are bits I could do without - Emily Watson not blinking got on my nerves, and the end was just TOO sick-making - but these are petty things compared to how I felt that film in my whole body, and not just my mind. I think I went into shock. Perhaps it's what most of us actually think we want when we're so deeply in love - to be able to hurt ourselves for the other person just to prove we really care that much. (Luckily, that stage quickly passes over to wanting to hurt them for not making a cup of tea properly etc etc etc). Anyway, thanks to Debra for reminding me, by putting it on her list. Actually another thing I'd forgotten about Breaking the Waves was the sign in the foyer of the cinema in Edinburgh, which was that the handheld camera used in the filming could induce sea-sickness and if so, film-goers could claim their money back!

USEFUL WRITING DISTRACTIONS - Number Three
Changing the photograph on your desktop...


This is mine at the moment. It's taken from near the top of Cader Idris, which we climbed when we were in Wales last year. Some of us (well, ok all but me) swam in the lake, but we didn't camp there. Apparently, legend has it that if you spend the night out on the mountain, you're either a madman or a poet ....

And my writing prompt for today is ... liqueur chocolates

Hah! Patti and Jai have tagged me, so here is one set of my seven groups of seven answers. And a confession - I don't have seven friends who have blogs to pass this on to, so maybe that should be one of my things to do before I die? But no, there's so much else I want to do - that was the hardest one for me - so I'll put up with being the loner in the playground. Thanks, Jai and Patti - this was fun, and I've loved looking at your lists too!


7 Movies That I Love
1. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café
2. Nuts in May
3. Cabaret
4. Spirited Away
5. Spice Girls - the Movie
6. Mary Poppins
7. Nine and a half weeks


7 Things I Want To Accomplish Before I Die
1. Grow a beautiful vegetable garden
2. See my kids happy and fulfilled – and have them still want to spend time with me
3. Get a play produced professionally
4. Get my heels flat in Downward Dog pose in yoga
5. Write a book that really matters to people
6. Continue to love, and be loved
7. Live in Paris


7 Things I Often Say:
1. It’s not fair
2. You’re so beautiful
3. Yes
4. Jeeze
5. Sorry to rush you but ..
6. Well, just a bit of chocolate can’t hurt…
7. I’ll do it tomorrow


7 Things That Attract Me To My Partner:
1. The way he makes me laugh
2. His patience
3. Our kids – and the way we agree (mostly) on bringing them up
4. How I can depend on him
5. The strange things he gets cross about
6. The space he allows me
7. The fact after twenty years, I still want to spend time with because he interests me most


7 Things I Can't Do
1. Ice skate without falling over
2. Stop teasing my kids
3. Go on roller-coasters without feeling sick
4. Give up coffee
5. Do a headstand
6. Get really cross without crying – or stay cross
7. Enjoy fear

7 Books I Love
1. The Little White Horse, Elizabeth Goudge
2. Penguin Book of Greek Myths
3. A Writer’s Diary, Virginia Woolf
4. Forsaking All Others, Alice Duer Miller
5. Madame Bovary, Flaubert
6. All of Colette’s Books (I know, I know, I’m greedy!)
7. The Earth, Zola

We are just back from a short holiday to Stockholm, where it snowed so whitely and perfectly on the little cobbled streets, it was like being in one of those snowglobes you shake up. We drank hot chocolate in little cafes lit by candles, went ice skating (the couple skating in the photo above were dancing so beautifully and romantically it made me want to cry) and all of us fell in love with Swedish women, who don't seem to have been told that you need to be invisible and dull after the age of fifty. They were so funny and intelligent and ... well, just sexily alive.
The strange photo at the bottom is the view from the ground floor up the winding stairway of our hotel. It was right in the old town, and full of shipping oddities. Perhaps not surprising given that Stockholm consists of 14 islands, something I didn't know before going.

I read The Accidental by Ali Smith on holiday - a whole book, just like that, and with no theory. Bliss. I was breathless with how much she leaves out, and how much she could, because she trusts the reader. Also breathless at seeing a writer coming into her prime - can't wait to see what she does next.

And my writing prompt for today is ... an old photograph I've never seen.

Best Valentine's feast in town here. Thanks for letting me bring pudding!

And my writing prompt for today is: envy at the flower stall

There are many things to be cynical about, but food shouldn't be one of them. I'm ashamed, therefore, that I've just been looking through my writing to find something suitable for P A Moed's Valentine's Feast, and I can't find anything sensuous, or loving, or even tasty to share. So I'm going to have to steal crumbs from other people's tables this year, but make a promise to myself that this time next year, my cupboards are going to be over-filling with good things to eat.

But in the meantime, here's an extract from one of my favourite books of all time, Never Eat Your Heart Out by Judith Moore:

"As a child rolling out mud crusts I felt much as I feel now, wearing an apron in my kitchen--that making a pie I'm handmaiden to a miracle. I will begin, let's say, with pale green and ruby rhubarb stalks, sour red pie cherries, McIntosh apples, butter, sugar, flour, salt, and shortening. I peel the coarse strings off the outer blades of the rhubarb, pit cherries, peel and core apples. I spoon the raw fruit into the bottom pie shell, daub the fruit with chunks of butter, dribble sugar and strew flour, the latter for thickening. I sprinkle all this with no more cinnamon than will lightly freckle the fruit. I fold the second round of pie dough in half and gently lift it onto the heaped high fruit with the fold in the pie's center. One half of the pie's fruit, then, is covered. Last, ever so painstakingly, I unfold the top crust across the pie's other half and crimp the edges of the top and bottom crusts together. With a fork I prick the top crust in several places so that while the pie bakes steam can escape.

"A transformation that is almost sorcery begins when the pie is set on a middle rack in the heated oven. While I wash the bowl and knives and dust flour off the pastry board, the baking fruit's aroma begins to perfume the house. Thirty, forty minutes later, I open the oven door a few inches and peer in. The oven's radiating heat rises around the pie in indistinct waves, like the contours of a dream. The heat is insinuating itself into the pie's interior, creating between the sealed crusts its own steamy, primordial climate, a site (to use the French postman-philosopher Gaston Bachelard's translated-into-English words) of "thermal sympathy" and "calorific happiness," in which apple and rhubarb and cherry cell walls break down and sugar crystals alter and butter melts.

"Another half hour passes and I lean over, open the oven door. Heat rushes out onto my cheeks. What I take out from the oven (my hands protected by potholders) seems precisely like those childhood pies: born rather than made.

"If the weather's right I'll set the pie to cool on the windowsill. I have no trouble, all these years later, imagining that heat floats off the pie's browned crust out the window and sails in stylized whorls out into the courtyard and over the fence into the neighborhood. If I happen to be anxious, I may fear that the pie's aroma may tempt a distant wolf. The wolf will appear decidedly older, leaner, and more vicious than the wolves from my childhood.

"As a child with mud and as an adult with crust and apples, in the moment before the first cut is taken into a pie, I often have felt uncomfortable, as if I were about to violate a taboo. Someone has suggested to me that cutting into a pie is not all that different from cutting into a body. So I think it is good to make something of a ceremony of cutting a pie. The table can be laid with a pretty cloth and napkins and the best silver and your favorite plates.

"Once the pie is brought to the table, I like to take a moment to admire it. I like to give the pie a chance to wet the mouth with anticipation of its tastes (the mouth's imagination at work). I like to contemplate the lustrous lightly browned crust. I like to think one more time about inside and out. Because the moment the pie is cut, outside will have no more meaning. A new dimension, the dimension of this pie's delectable inferiority, opens up.

"Gathered around the table, those about to eat will say "Ahhh" and "Mmmmm, doesn't that look delicious." They will lean forward, noses alert. Sometimes you can hear them breathing in.

"The first bite rises toward the opening mouth. The sentinel nose having anticipated pie's arrival, a tide of saliva crests in the mouth, pools in the tongue's center, washes over the several thousand taste buds. The teeth bite through flaky, slightly salty crust and then into tart cherries and rhubarb and apple. The fruits' sweet and buttery juices, in a total immersion baptism of the mouth, flood tongue, teeth, cheeks. There is no more outside. Everything is in."

Oh, this book is beautiful. Do buy it, and enjoy rolling in the senses. Happy Valentine's Day!

One tried and tested route of teaching plot development is to get students to imagine the worst that could happen to their character, and then help them devise ways of getting out of it. Well, as possibly the clumsiest person on the planet - with the exception of my two kids so together we're a walking disaster zone - I offer hearty condolences to Nick Flynn who experienced my sweatiest nightmare earlier this month. Mr Flynn tripped on an undone shoelace, fell down a museum staircase and crashed into three priceless Qing vases, breaking them into smithereens. A small shard of the pain he must have felt was shared, however, by readers of the Guardian article about Mr Flynn's confession, as they had to put up with the headline: 'Taking it on the Qing'. I preferred the museum official's comment in the original press report which was that they were just thankful he was able to leave museum unharmed. Unharmed by whom, it doesn't say!

I went to school near the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge and used to be taken for numerous - oh so, so many - educational visits there, but reading the press coverage has made me realise how little I actually saw of it. I remember just three things - the chocolate cake sold in the cafe, a yellow plate used by one of the Chinese emporers which would change colour if the food was poisoned, and walking - not tripping - down the staircase. It's one of those Gone with the Wind circular ones, and we used to practice flouncing down in that elegant but haughty way teenage girls manage so gawkily. Still at least we did it better though than Nick Flynn.

And so, my writing prompt today is falling over.

My writing prompt today is to write about an object based on this quotation:

There is nothing that will not reveal its secrets if you love it enough.
- George Washington Carver

Two stories I've enjoyed recently are Ice by Joseph Young, and Not Guilty by Debra Broughton.

And my writing prompt for today is in honour of Joseph's story, and is the Chemistry of Water, the reason for the picture above which comes from the University of Arizona.

There's a very good reason why I don't share my dreams, and it has nothing to do with modesty. They really ARE boring, full of looming deadlines, reports and filing. The only celeb who has ever appeared was Paul Gascoigne (?!) and even then we looked at agendas together, before watching some football. Bit of a relief really when I woke up. Although once I did have a nice hairdo in my dream. Trouble was by the time I got to the hairdressers, I couldn't remember what it looked like.

What I do know though is that CDbaby is possibly the best place ever to buy music from. Thanks to Clare for the link. Not only can you listen to the music on your computer beforehand, get recommendations for whatever possible mood you might be in, and be given a good laugh with their order and delivery emails, I had the pleasure of receiving an email recently from one of the artists to thank me for buying her CD. Just imagine Robbie doing that. I had clicked on Stacy Jagger's CD without thinking too much, and then knew immediately this was music I wanted to listen to again and again. So it was really exciting for me, to see her name in my inbox. We've corresponded a little since, and she sent me an essay she'd written last night which proves that she is pretty perfect and talented. This is what I love most of all about the internet, when it turns into one big anarchic artists colony with the links between strangers going on and on.

And my writing prompt comes from the title of one of Stacy's songs - Take Me There.