so who’re your influences (redux)
The month of October was lost. I didn’t write a word. (I took notes, arranged footnotes, read, made bullet points - but all for school.) I read a novel so toe-stretchingly good that I was paralysed under the squatting weight of my own mediocrity for an entire month. What do you do with that? I never thought confidence was something you really had to have to write, because I never felt like I had a lot, and yet I was writing. It wasn’t just my confidence that was decimated, though: it was the notion that I could bring a new narrative to the canon. If I couldn’t be exactly as good as this author - or better - there wasn’t any point. So every day I op

the learning curve
If you follow my tweets (if you don’t, you should - I’m a riot), you’ll know that my computer has been giving me a bit of trouble in the past little while. Strange electrical noises, freezes - you know, the things you expect from a laptop that’s less than a year old. The last time it wigged out on me I had a massive Twitter Tantrum, mostly because my husband was at work and I didn’t have a second head to put to the problem (not to mention my own head isn’t so good to begin with). Mike got home, said ‘Lessee here…’, went click-clack-boom, and the computer was behaving again. As though the problem never was. I should have been ha

‘congratulating the present’
Can you love a person whose beliefs are abhorrent to you? The first thing a freshman historian is warned against is something called the Grand Narrative, sometimes called ‘Whig history’: the idea that history has served no purpose but to lead us to now, the grand apex of evolution. The past, we are told, should be judged within the context of the past, uncoloured by present-day knowledge, understanding, values, or experience. To judge the past in the context of today is called being ‘present-centred’, and it is Very Bad. It’s difficult to put ourselves and our own worlds aside to understand history as objectively as possible, but we get the kna

in defence of writers
The ever-wonderful Editorial Anonymous posted this week about the fact that editors and agents shouldn’t be able to dash writers’ dreams by rejecting their manuscripts, the argument being two-fold: first, that it’s your manuscript, not all your dreams, that they’re rejecting; and second, that you have to come into this business armed with a better-than-average dose of confidence and thick skin if you expect to get anywhere. The premise is true, and the arguments are dead-on. Someone in the comment thread even likened the entire effort towards pub

the virgin queen’s women
It is an oft-repeated truism that two people independently invented the radio. If something so unique and intricate can be imagined by two different people, what hope does a book idea have? When you get a book idea, you develop a bit of an eye twitch when you walk past displays in bookshops, your semi-conscious always on the prowl for that author who got there before you did, for that dustjacket that will nullify the magnificent octopus in your word processor that you’re going to finish just-any-minute-now. (Redouble this eye twitch if you’ve dared to believe that you’ve a new take on as obscure a figure as Anne Boleyn, by the way.) My eye twitch was set off in a