Detox

Just back from a week in the lovely Tyrone Guthrie Centre and although I got a lot of work done I also drank a lot of wine. It is really a very special place and there were lots of wonderful artistic lovely people there, but we were 15 women to one man at one stage!The poor fella - he only turned up to dinner once. I guess there's only so much female babble anyone can handle!

So I'm in the self-inflicted pits of detox - will I ever learn? Rhetorical question of course.

Ghost writing project going well but into panic time now because only 40k words actually down and the rest is on tapes and in notes and may not all be usable. Its due to publisher end of March and I will be glad to see the back of it.

I'm sticking to fiction in future - it's easier to make things up than to try to accurately portray someone's life from their own perspective etc, while still making it interesting for the reader, especially as you can't physically get inside the subject's brain. Does that make sense?

Mind you sticking to fiction will probably mean never being published. Made the longlist for Fish so in top 20% (used different name) but not the shortlsit about 8%. A shortlist of 140 seems a little excessive - I hope they're paying the judge well!!

It is a hellish market out there, particularly in fiction - of which short stories are definitely the poor relations -and I thank God for the day job, because my kids wouldn't eat otherwise. But it is the writing at night that keeps me sane.

Yes I am!!!