Posted by: Jill Murray - author of Rhythym and Blues

Signing a book for dance buddy Jane, at Babar en Ville

WHOOSH! That sound you just heard? That was February rushing by. And the thump? That’s me, landing on my butt in March, thinking “did that just happen? Did I just do that?”
Do what, exactly? Everything. Seriously:

1- Launch Rhythm and Blues (a teen comedy of ambition, identity and Auto-Tune!) with my favourite Montreal writer friends, at Babar en Ville.

Reading and mingling with guests, including authors P.J. Bracegirdle, Monique Polack and J.L. Scharf, and illustrators Susan Mitchell and Suana Verelst.

2- Keep the party going all month with SweatFest, with my dancing buds at Studio Sweatshop, where we all did twenty eight street dance classes in twenty eight days.

3- Finish a whole manuscript draft for a future project of unknowable fabulousness.

4- 4- Read 5 ½ books, including C.K. Kelly Martin’s I Know It’s Over, Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, Chris Cleave’s Little Bee and Gayla Trail’s Grow Great Grub.

5- Do fun authory things like go to writers union workshops, and speak on a panel for Yes Oui CANSCAIP, to help other writers figure out how to get their books out there.

The Babar en Ville party was warm, and fun, with lots of food. I got up and did a reading, and there was plenty of time to chat with new friends and old, and sign a few books!

At the end of SweatFest, there was a prize draw, and two intrepid SweatFesters, Janice and Julio, won copies of Rhythm and Blues, and Break on Through.

SweatFest Winner, Janice

And here’s a hot tip: February is over, but the winning is not! If you’re in Montreal, and want to pick up a copy of Rhythm and Blues or my first book, Break on Through if you go to Babar en Ville between now and March 17th, you still have time to enter our contest to score dance classes and Reebok, shoes!

Posted by: Beth Powning - author of The Sea Captain's Wife

On the evening of January 15, 2010, the Sussex Royal Legion in Sussex, New Brunswick, was transformed into an 1860s sailing ship for the launching of my new novel, The Sea Captain’s Wife.

Angelika Glover, my editor at Knopf Canada, came from Toronto. I had obtained a costume for her from Kings Landing Historical Settlement. We helped each other into vast crinolines, long dresses, detachable sleeves. In our 1870s house, I was struck by the sight of Angelika as she stood in the hallway adjusting her collar in the mirror. And then again as I saw her coming through the back door into the winter dusk, and as she and I rustled our long skirts over the snow in the deep country quiet. This is what literature is about, I thought; the thrill of entering another time, another world.

Perhaps it was this feeling that gripped every visitor to the Legion that night. People were greeted by high school students in costume, a six-foot-tall lighthouse, the sound of a fog horn and a cloud of fog. The room’s lighting was low, with pools of light illuminating photos and paintings of nineteenth century sailing ships and shipyards, and tables covered with objects gleaned from attics, or on loan from museums: ship’s logs, sextants, tools, even a captain’s sea chest. The Sea Captain’s Wife spilled from a leather trunk on the Indigo table; the manager and her assistant had travelled an hour from Saint John. There was the swish of long skirts, the half-giddy pleasure of women dressed in period costume. One woman wore a wedding dress from the 1840s. My son was resplendent in a brown beaver top hat and silk ruffled vest. A pirate appeared wearing a hoop earring and eye patch. The room smelled of chowder that simmered on the kitchen’s big stoves, attended by many volunteer cooks. Hundreds of biscuits were baked. A sea shanty group, “Before the Mast,” sat in a boat at the front of the room next to the stage - and the stage itself was a ship’s prow, with a life-sized figurehead made for the occasion, a huge canvas jib hung from a spar, and a ship’s wheel.

At seven o’clock, people began pouring in. They came and came. People reported that three adjacent parking lots were filled and that a line stretched far down the snowy sidewalk. The sea shanty group began to sing as the chairs filled and people jostled for space along walls. My neighbour and friend Kevin, dressed in a period captain’s outfit, was the emcee. I was introduced by the event’s organizer, Patricia, the high school librarian who had worked tirelessly, serving as the hub of a wheel of about 25 volunteers. As I read, I experienced the palpable energy of 500 utterly silent people. Afterwards, I thanked people in the crowd who had helped with the book in diverse ways: the veterinarian who told me how horses were disposed of in the 1860s, the doctor who had researched nineteenth century medicine. The sea shanty group sang again. People milled about, chatting with the women who had made the chowder, swapping yarns at the artifact tables, buying beer at the Legion bar, meeting old friends.

And they waited patiently in line to buy books. I signed and signed, for two hours. One man said to me, “I heard about this event on CBC. I told my wife we were going to go to it. ‘Harry, you don’t read!’ she said. ‘I’m going to read THIS book, I told her.’” To my astonishment, a couple told me they had come from Nova Scotia. And others from Fredericton, Saint John, Sackville.

It was a success beyond the wildest expectations of SLICE, Sussex Literary Initiatives and Cultural Events. We will all be talking about it in years to come, a warm, vibrant outpouring of community pride and support - just as we still tell tales of the Age of Sail.

Posted by: Beth Powning - Author of The Sea Captain's Wife

Last Thursday, I was invited to read from my memoir Edge Seasons at The Eclectic Reading Club. It is a private club, whose evenings are black-tie events. I wore my little black dress and grey silk scarf. Peter had the usual struggle with his bow tie. It was a foggy November night, and we drove cautiously down the highway to the Rothesay exit, where we convoyed with the woman who had invited us. Through the fog we went, beneath tall trees, over a leaf-softened lane. An enormous house loomed from the mist, light shafting from windows, men in tuxedos and women in evening dress crossing the porch.

The scene was not that different from the way it must have been in 1870, when the club was formed in Saint John by a group of people who decided to dress up and entertain each other. Every particular of the evening has been maintained with scrupulous care, from dress code to refreshments to the evening’s unvarying format. Although the house was new, the two adjoining living rooms had the look of a Victorian parlour, with rows of chairs, a standing lamp with shade, and an old desk in what was the “stage” area. The recording secretary sat at the desk, pen in hand. Seats were taken with rustlings of silk. Minutes from the last meeting were read with spirited humour. Then the evening began, exactly as if we’d been transported to a damp, lamplit evening one hundred and forty years ago.

The evening is always planned by one person, who decides on a theme, chooses readings to illustrate it, and asks members to read or perform (“eclectic” being paramount). The event began with an introduction by Carole, the evening’s planner, consisting of a history of the season and its pagan underpinnings. In this first twenty minute segment, four people rose and stood beside the lamp, reading aloud. We heard an early Dickens Christmas story, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Christmas at Sea,” a Maigret story, and Hugh Oliver’s “The Christmas Gift.”

A break for drinks. We milled and circulated, carrying glasses of wine.

The second twenty minute segment commenced with a stir. Four tuxedoed mummers wearing masks, capes, and wigs burst into the room - St. George, the dragon, a doctor and a narrator. The dragon was stabbed, and expired before our eyes with a flowering of blood caused by the extravagant flailing of a scarlet chiffon scarf. Once the shrieks of laughter had eddied to a pause, with occasional eruptions of half-stifled giggles (mine among them), I took my turn by the lamp and read my piece, “Christmas Rites,” to an attentive, refocused audience.

Another break for drinks. Peter’s cough was quelled with Scotch.

In the last segment, we were treated to Dylan Thomas himself - lilting and rollicking his way through “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” And then, led by a strong soprano voice, a lusty group singing of “The Holly and the Ivy.”

The evening ended with plates of sandwiches and hot chocolate with whipped cream dense as Devon clotted cream.

Loose and jolly, transported to another time and in a holiday mood despite the mild weather, we took our leave.

I loved every minute, and I hope we’re asked back someday.

Posted by: Michelle Wan - author of the Death in the Dordogne mystery series

Researching a book on location in France is more than it’s cracked open to be. I say “cracked open” because you start with a Fabergé egg - the jeweled prospect of a long-term stay in France where you will write The Book (call it the omelette). Give the fragile shell of irreality a tap and a Bruegelesque scenario spills out. Example: flight Toronto-Paris, dog in hold, smooth. Train to Bordeaux not too stressful. Bordeaux train station awful because Bordeaux station is all stairs, no trolleys, and Tim and I have 4 large bags, an immense dog crate, 2 backpacks, 1 dog who needs to pee, and only minutes to make connection to Le Buisson. Arrival at final destination hell because first thing dog does on entering house is eat rat poison. We make him vomit (all over livingroom carpet). Max’s fecal matter is neon orange for the next few days, but no lasting damage.

When we try to open bank and internet accounts, situation goes from hell to Helleresque. Can’t get internet without bank account. Can’t get bank account without proof of residence (utility bills). Don’t have utility bills because house belongs to my sister who lives in California. Eventually a compassionate bank employee breaks the deadlock. Now we’re clicking, life is good, sun is shining (weather lousy in Ontario, we hear). Sun shining through magnifying glass burns a hole in my desk. Two day before my sister arrives, dishwasher, oven, fridge and phone die. We attend an outdoor theatre presentation. It is washed out by a powerful storm. As we drive back in a monsoon, avoiding fallen trees, someone accidentally powers down all the car windows. Back at house, electricity is out, and the kitchen is flooded. My sister puts gas in her diesel rental car.

When I’m not dealing with detours, if not outright road blocks (i.e., life), I do my book research. I realize that one does not have to know French to speak French. You can say, for example: “Regardez les pompom girls en blue-jeans qui mangent les chips au ketchup,” and you will be perfectly understood. On site, Tim and I hike the scrubby plateau of Gramat Causse and the foothills of the Pays Basque, spend time in the High Pyrenees, surrounded by splendid peaks, pure air, mountain livestock and dizzying switchback roads. You are warned when you enter tunnels to watch out for cows, who like the shade. They’re there all right, lying about, not inclined to move, eyes glowing trustingly in your headlights. Back in the Dordogne the hedgerows are full of sweet plums and blackberries. The trees are heavy with golden fruit. Tim and I are putting on weight (all that gastronomic research), and Max has become a thoroughly French dog (everyone calls him Maxsou, he is welcome everywhere and has developed his own star rating of restaurants). I am aware that existence here is secure, tranquil, and deeply satisfying. Guess I’d better get busy creating a murder or two.

Posted by: Mary Novik - author of Conceit

A 36-seat plane delivered me to Halifax the next morning. No reception committee was there to meet me. Big city, I thought, setting out to explore on my own. Lonely and hungry by late afternoon, sure no dinner would be in the offing, I treated myself to a giant steak and garlic mashed potatoes. Back at the inn, my phone rang. It was my host, Alexander MacLeod, arranging to take me to the reading. Young, hip, intelligent - it was too much to expect old-world gallantry. But maybe not - he dashed ahead to his car to open the passenger door for me.

The reading took place in St. Mary’s University Art Gallery, a fantastic backdrop, and Alexander’s introduction was superb. When it was over, he and fellow faculty member Stephanie Morley insisted on taking me out for dinner. Alexander regaled us with insider tales about local writers. Romans-à-clef, the pastoral versus the gritty, new “comers” versus the old guard, defections to Upper Canada, writing clans and outsiders, scandals and feuds—this was juicy stuff. The pints of beer were being drained and I felt, for a moment, like an honorary member of the Atlantic tribe.

I gulped down more Shiraz. “Why am I the only one who orders wine?”

“Too snooty,” they told me, grinning. “People here don’t have money for wine. It shows you’re from away, not from here.”

In my head, names of fiction writers were swirling: Wayne Johnston, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Bernice Morgan, Lynn Coady, Michael Winter, Lisa Moore, Joan Clark, Michael Crummey, Ami McKay, Donna Morrissey, Don Hannah, Mark Jarman, Edward Riche, and Alexander himself, son of Alistair MacLeod of Cape Breton Island. Add in the poets Anne Compton, George Elliott Clarke, Brian Bartlett, Anne Simpson, and Ross Leckie’s new ice-house gang. And that’s just the tip of the eastern iceberg. It hit me that the Atlantic is experiencing a boom surpassing anything across the country. A renaissance, if that isn’t too snooty a term for it.

Driving me back to my inn, Alexander detoured to the citadel to show me Halifax at night. Although I’d missed Saint John’s reversing falls, I would journey back to the other ocean buoyed up by Maritimes hospitality and the rising tide of Atlantic literature.

For more about Mary and Conceit visit www.marynovik.com.

Posted by: Mary Novik - author of Conceit

In January, I hopped an Airbus in Vancouver wearing new snow boots and carrying a down coat with a hood. I was heading to Saint John to read from my novel Conceit (Doubleday 2007) in the hugely successful Lorenzo Series, organized by poet-in-residence Anne Compton, the tastemaker of the Maritimes. Anne had arranged to bring me in a day early, in case of storms. Her last e-mail warned, “We are in a deep freeze here. You’ll need that new warm coat of yours.”

In Ottawa, the departures monitor showed flights cancelled to Halifax, but not to Saint John. I trudged across the snowy tarmac to board a Dash 8 55-seater, which taxied ominously into a de-icing bay to get sprayed. The 31 minute bumpathon came to a halt in Montreal.

“I wasn’t going to fly into Saint John even if told to,” confided the pilot, as we deplaned, “not in this weather.”

After four hours sleep, I was back at Montréal-Trudeau trying to fly standby. I’d missed my interview on CBC, but was damned if I was going to miss the reading. After two more aborted attempts to get to Saint John, I finagled my way onto a Dash 8 headed (after de-icing) for Fredericton. Once there, I jumped into a taxi and sped south on icy roads to the Fundy city.

Watch out for moose, a sign said. I could barely decipher the driver’s accent - soft, seductive, determined to entertain although I was clutching the door handle and straining my eyes for large mammals ahead. Soon, I had surrendered to the lilting rhythms of tales about the harsh life of the Miramichi and its famous son, novelist David Adams Richards.

I had heard him called the Canadian Faulkner. “What do you think of him?” I asked.

“I went to school with him. His books are all about us, his family and friends. A good man, well liked, still lives here.” (Richards has actually lived in Toronto for the past twelve years.)

When the taxi pulled up at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John, forty minutes late, the coffee and desserts were gone, but eighty people were waiting patiently. Chilled to the bone, I walked straight to the mike, glugged a small bottle of water, and began to read from the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Afterwards, I had my first taste of Atlantic hospitality. The enthusiastic readers lined up to get copies of Conceit signed, then Anne put me into a taxi to the Delta Brunswick, and told me to curl up in bed, watch a bad movie, and order anything I liked from room service. My tray arrived with a glass of pinot gris, poached Atlantic salmon, and a large thermos of hot chocolate.

The next morning, I caught a bus back to Fredericton, which was a balmy minus10°. Waiting to escort me to lunch was Ross Leckie, creative writing chair at UNB Fredericton. Listening to Ross talk about writers he admired, I picked up a purity of motive, a cultivation of language for its own sake, refreshing after the Vancouver writing scene. Fredericton is a city of poets, a culture going back to poet-in-residence Alden Nowlan and to the Confederation poets. Poets aren’t marginalized here as they are in the rest of Canada: they are the centre. Today, Ross’s talented students meet in the ice house where the ice-house gang, a group of writers that included David Adams Richards, workshopped in the early seventies.

Mark Jarman, the fiction half of the creative writing team, took me to dinner where we were joined by novelist-in-residence, the Irish writer Gerard Beirne. They ordered pints of beer and we dove headlong into another literary conversation. That night, I was asked to read long passages, something people squirm through in large cities, yet the audience was attentive. Afterwards, the faculty took me to Alden Nowlan’s house, now a clubhouse for grad students, where I was handed a pint of ale and taken round to look at the memorabilia by Brian Bartlett.

Posted by: Laurence Shorter - author of The Optimist

I flew to Toronto on the back of a great global wave of optimism and enthusiasm sparked by the publication of my new book - The Optimist: One Man’s Search for the Brighter Side of Life. Strangely enough, this coincided with the inauguration of America’s new pres, Barack Obama. I wonder if - deep down - Obama knew what he was doing, scheduling his launch so as to dovetail with mine. Still, even I was surprised to note the impact that my work seemed to be having. When I arrived in Toronto after my short flight from London everyone I encountered seemed cheerful, upbeat - despite the so-called ‘ecomonic meltdown’. The customs officials came across as courteous and polite; the taxi drivers talkative and warm. It was as if the section of their brains reserved for cynicism and impatience had been surgically removed. Was it the US election? Was it my book? I had no idea. Perhaps it was just Canada. It was my first time in the country.

The tour itself was wonderful: So much attention, so much conversation. There I was, staring at the great face of George Stroumboulopoulos, on TV, happy that I had not yet peed myself from stage fright. And he had actually read my book! Let me tell you something - in the UK, even if you are one of the most fashionable writers in town - people don’t have time to read your stuff before interviewing you. They’re way too busy planning their next piece of business. Believe me, even Obama has this problem. And it makes a big difference. There’s nothing like having a proper conversation to distract you from your stage fright.

We went to Niagara. We stared down on the primal beauty of the crashing ice. I sighed with envy as the icy water plummeted to its end in the chasm below. Ah life, ah death… I could already feel the next book forming itself in my mind. It would definitely have something to do with Canada, and Obama and… Why was my publicist tugging my arm? Is there something wrong with stripping off your clothes in the face of so much raw beauty?

Ah, Canada!

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series

Early winter is my favourite season, particularly if the sky is clear and the air sharp. Those are the sort of conditions we have been enjoying in Scotland recently - and I have found it ideal writing weather. So I have now finished volume ten of the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which rejoices under the title of Tea Time for the Traditionally Built. I finished it last Tuesday, when I wrote the final words: ’ … the lovely smell of rain.’ That was it. There then followed a few telephone calls: to Richard Beswick, my editor in London; and Edward Kastenmeier, my editor in New York; and to my agents, Caroline Walsh and Robin Straus in London and New York respectively. These are all people who have been intimately involved in the Mma Ramotswe books. And there are others: Diane Martin of Random House Canada, Neville Moir of Polygon in Edinburgh and Rowan Cope of Little, Brown have also played a major part in the publishing of these books. Others who play a big role are: my assistant, Lesley Winton; Jan Rutherford, who is my publicist and press agent in Edinburgh; Bobby Nayyar, who looks after this newsletter and a whole lot of other things in London; and Michiko Clark and Russell Perrault, in New York. (I could mention many other names, but this list is getting a bit long and those not mentioned will know how much I appreciate them too!) In a way, it’s a bit of an extended family, with you, the readers, ultimately being the most important members of the family. Obviously I cannot be in touch with everyone, but I must say that little gives me more pleasure than to hear from people who read the Mma Ramotswe books and the books in my other series.

In Edinburgh we had the launch of my new novel, La’s Orchestra Saves the World. It was a wonderful affair, held in the Queen’s Hall, with about six hundred people present. The Really Terrible Orchestra played a selection of pieces from the era in which the novel is set, and their rendition of ‘In the Mood’ brought tears (of laughter) to many eyes. The trumpet section did its best, as usual, but … A donation was made to the Gurkha Welfare Trust, which was received by a tremendously smart Gurkha officer who marched into the hall in full dress uniform to accept the cheque. He was in fact the Queen’s Gurkha Orderly Officer, sent specially for the occasion, and so it was a great honour. We also had another charity represented, Sistema Scotland, which has set up an orchestra for children on a housing estate where there is a certain amount of need. This orchestra sent a group of its very small players (they are aged about seven) who enjoyed themselves greatly playing a little of what they had learned. Sistema Scotland has been strongly supported by my friend Peter Stevenson, who appears - as himself - in the Isabel Dalhousie novels.

What’s next? Corduroy Mansions is still running in the electronic edition of the Telegraph. In January I go to India to appear at the Kolkata Book Fair and to deliver lectures at the University of Kolkata. Then on to Australia and New Zealand - the details of the events there are set out below. In February Abacus brings out the paperback edition of The Miracle at Speedy Motors.

I’m very much looking forward to one event in particular - the one that will take place on April 1 in the Town Hall, New York. Those of you reading this who live in that part of the United States (or indeed elsewhere) may wish to come along and hear that extraordinary orchestra, the Really Terrible Orchestra (RTO). I shall be talking about the books as well and I do hope that it will be an enjoyable evening. Quite a few people are travelling over from the UK to attend this event, so if you feel like splashing out and treating yourselves to a short spring break in New York …

It is almost Christmas, of course, and I would like to wish you a Happy Christmas and a very good New Year. I hope that we shall have the chance to meet at one of my events in 2009, but if we do not, we shall still be in touch through my newsletter and through the books. Thank you very much for your support over the past year.

Warmest wishes,
Alexander McCall Smith

Posted by: Terry Fallis - author of The Best Laid Plans

I had a wonderful day at the Ottawa International Writers Festival on Sunday. At 2:00 p.m., Sarah Dearing chaired our panel on Canadian literature. Bill Gaston started things off with a wonderful reading from his new novel, The Order of Good Cheer. I read next from my novel The Best Laid Plans. The crowd was very kind and laughed in all the right places. Then Stephen Henighan read from his book of essays, The Afterlife of Culture. Then, with all four of us on the stage, Sarah Dearing posed questions to drive a discussion on the state and future of our literary culture. I was a little intimidated by the topic but the discussion flowed easily with several questions from the floor as well. After 90 minutes (that seemed more like a half-hour), we moved to the foyer to sign our books. (The signing didn’t take long but it was fun.)

After our session, literary comet Joseph Boyden, hot off of his Giller shortlisting, read from his new novel Through Black Spruce, to a packed house. CBC radio personality Laurence Wall adroitly moderated the session. Beyond the moving reading and insightful discussion, the highlight of the session had to be Joseph Boyden performing three different moose calls (I kid you not!). The line up at Boyden’s signing table after the session snaked around the foyer and almost certainly left him with a swollen pen hand.

The final session I attended brought together three amazing writers for a reading and discussion. South African Booker nominee Damon Galgut read from The Impostor, Amitav Ghosh read from his Booker-nominated novel, Sea of Poppies, and then Kenneth J. Harvey read from his epic masterwork Blackstrap Hawco. What a thrill to hear these three celebrated authors.

I spent the evening choosing my selections for a reading I’m doing at the Ottawa Public Library tomorrow (Monday) and sifting through some great memories of a wonderful OIWF weekend.

Posted by: Terry Fallis - author of The Best Laid Plans

Appearing at readings and writers’ festivals is still a new and wondrous experience for me, as is bearing the surreal label of “writer.” If you’d have told me six months ago that this weekend I’d be reading, and on a panel, as a “writer”, at the Ottawa International Writers Festival, I’d have suggested reassessing your medication. Yet here I am.

I arrived in Ottawa by train on Saturday and met fellow writer and panelist Stephen Henighan, author of The Afterlife of Culture. Good guy. Smart guy. We checked in at the Delta and then headed over to the National Archives building a couple of blocks away on Wellington Street where the festival has been unfolding all week. We made it in time for a reading and discussion with prolific writer Bill Gaston, award-winning novelist David Bergen, and the much celebrated author Rawi Hage, recent recipient of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. What a line-up! These wonderful writers read powerful pages from their new novels. To coin a phrase, “the audience was listening.”

After the session, Stephen and I helped ourselves to some dinner laid on for festival staff and authors. I learned that tofu can actually look exactly like beef bourguignon and I was reminded why I remain an inveterate meat-eater. Did the tofu taste like beef? Not so much.

I’m looking forward to our panel discussion on Sunday afternoon. Stephen Henighan, the aforementioned Bill Gaston and I will each read from our books, and then we’ll be led in discussion by award-winning novelist Sarah Dearing on the current state of Canadian literature. Yikes! I expect I’ll be doing a lot of sage head-nodding punctuated by the odd “agreed” and “exactly.” A friend has also suggested that I consider “steepling” my fingers in a thoughtful pose. Good advice. Stay tuned.

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

This is Part 2 of Alexander McCall Smith’s March newsletter. You can catch up with Part 1 here.

The main book news is that volume nine in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series has now been published in the UK (and in some other countries, including Australia) and will shortly be published in the USA and Canada. The Miracle at Speedy Motors takes us back to the everyday world of Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi. There are anonymous letters flying around, and there will be no prizes for guessing who is writing them. And Mr J. L. B. Matekoni gets an idea into his head again — but Mma Ramotswe is, as usual, tolerant and understanding. Mma Makutsi continues to be engaged to Mr Phuti Radiphuti (when will they get married?).

While Mma Ramotswe leads her eventful life in Gaborone, I lead my own life here in Scotland. I am currently working on volume five in the Isabel Dalhousie series, and hope to finish that novel shortly after Easter. Volume five of the Scotland Street series has also just been finished, and will be published in hardback in the UK in July under the title The Unbearable Lightness of Scones.

In April I go to the USA for a lengthy tour (the details of which are set out below). I have just completed a German tour for my German publishers, in which I went to Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig. Readers of the von Igelfeld series may be interested to know that in Hamburg I visited my old friend, Professor Dr Dr (honoris causa) (mult) Reinhard Zimmermann, who plays a part — as himself — in the books.

I also recently visited Paris and Madrid. In Paris I gave a talk at the American School and also in the residence of the American Ambassador. The Paris trip was organised by my American lecture agent, Steven Barclay, who does a lot to support the American School. He hosted a dinner for my wife and me, my New York agent, Robin Straus and her husband, Joseph Kanon (the novelist) and David Sedaris. Those of you who are not familiar with David’s work should look into it — he is very, very funny, even if his humour sometimes requires a strong stomach (he tells very funny stories about boils and other human difficulties).

I shall be in Botswana in June. I am involved in the setting up of a very small opera house there — the No. 1 Ladies’ Opera House. I shall write more about that in the next newsletter — in the meantime, I send you my warmest best wishes. And I hope that you enjoy The Miracle at Speedy Motors.

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

This is an excerpt from Alexander McCall Smith’s newsletter. You can visit his website here.

Last night I went to the premiere showing in London of the film version of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. It was a bitter-sweet occasion: that very morning the director of the film, Anthony Minghella, that good and kind man, died in hospital from complications following an operation. We were all shocked by this sad news: Minghella was the United Kingdom’s most distinguished film director and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is now his last film.

As I am sure you can imagine, I felt very sad. Anthony had been planning for years to make the film. I had complete confidence in him — indeed, I counted myself most fortunate that it was he who was going to make the film. And now this. And yet we must remind ourselves that the film he has made is a wonderful, joyous hymn of praise to Botswana and to Mma Ramotswe. Everything in it is perfect. The actors and actresses are just right: wait until you see Mma Ramotswe, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni and Mma Makutsi — each one of them is just exactly as he or she should be! And the whole film is permeated by love. The film is a stand-alone feature film that was designed to set up a subsequent television series. It will be shown on television stations throughout the world, but may also be shown in some theatres. We await news on that. But there is very important news on the television front: HBO in the United States and the BBC in the UK have teamed up to commission a thirteen-part television series which will start to be filmed in mid- to late-2008 and will be shown in the USA, the UK and throughout the world in early 2009. This is wonderful news indeed, and it came in time for Anthony Minghella to enjoy it. (I am not sure, by the way, when the film will be shown in the USA: I think that it will be shown by HBO closer to the time that they begin the series.) Anthony Minghella was a great man who brought happiness and a very humane vision to this world. I feel very happy that he loved Mma Ramotswe, and I know that she would have loved him.

Posted by: Erna Paris - Author of The Sun Climbs Slow

The strong response to The Sun Climbs Slow has truly surprised me. Like every author I hoped there would be interest in my book, but I hadn’t anticipated the Macleans bestseller list, especially a week in the top spot. Much of this is due to the topicality of my subject. The new International Criminal Court, which will open its doors for the first time this year, is a break-through for justice and the rule of law in a world made weary by war and the machinations of power politics. Imagine that the powerful of the world might be brought to account for their major crimes, such as fomenting genocide and crimes against humanity? This would never have happened in the past. Now, almost by chance, there is an independent tribunal to do this work.

That such a court came to be at the end of the violent 20th century was pretty much a fluke, since the world’s most powerful countries didn’t want it, for obvious reasons. (To learn more about this intriguing story you’ll need to read the book!) Like it or not, the ICC, as it is called, is now a reality. It is the newest institution in the international galaxy—and what it offers is cautious hope.

Canada has played a prominent role in bringing international criminal justice to the world stage. We have a right to be proud.

Posted by: Richard J. Gwyn - Author of John A

Winning a prize of the calibre of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, the premiere prize in its category, is like having an epiphany. You’ve spent weeks, months, scribbling and writing and re-writing, and staring out of the window and stabbing at the Delete button and then, suddenly, you’re told that you’ve actually done it—written a book that has something to say and says it pretty well, and that perhaps even says it better than have all other Canadian non-fiction writers through the past year.

There’s of course the 15 minutes of fame in the form of media interviews and the flashes of the cameras. And there’s the cash, that so far, has served to cover the cost of a splendid, if extravagant, dinner.

Neither will last, though I’ll always remember the congratulations, quick and generous, of the other four finalists.

What will last, for at least a decent length of time, is the knowledge that my peers—the jurors—judged that John A: The Man Who Made Us had actually done what I hoped it would do—to tell Canadians about our most interesting and important Prime Minister, and so to tell Canadians about themselves.

If the result will be to turn on more Canadians to their own history, and most especially so younger ones who are now taught so little about how our past remains part of our present and future, and also encourages more writers to set out to bring that past alive for today’s readers, then I just won’t be a happy guy today but a contented one for quite a while. Or at least I’ll stay that way until my research on Volume Two, which will go up to Macdonald’s death in 1891, is completed and I’ll go back to again staring out of the window and fingering the Delete button.

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

Here is the final excerpt from Alexander McCall Smith’s latest newsletter, with some updates on his latest projects.

During February, Scottish Opera will be performing part of the opera on which I have been working with Stephen Deazley, a composer, and Ben Twist, a dramatist. This will be part of a programme they are doing in which they are performing several works in progress, one of them being ours. It is based on my book Dream Angus. Also in February, I am going to Paris for a few days to do an event at the American School there. This has been arranged by my lecture agent in the USA, Steven Barclay, who has a strong connection with that school. Steven is great company and I look forward to being in Paris as his guest. I then go for a few days to Spain to do press interviews for my Spanish-language publishers.

In February the UK paperback edition of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive will be published. March sees the publication in the UK and elsewhere of the next Mma Ramotswe book, The Miracle at Speedy Motors, which will come out in the USA and Canada in April. In March I shall be doing a number of events in the UK and a tour of Germany for my German publishers. The details of these events will be on the website. In April I look forward to a major American tour, starting in New York and heading off in every direction thereafter. Those tours are pretty tiring, as they take me across the entire country and involve numerous flights. But they are really rewarding too, as they give me the opportunity to meet many readers of the books and I count that as a great privilege. Indeed I am very much aware of the fact that these books have given me a very great privilege in this life—that of being part of a prolonged conversation with many people throughout the world. Not a day goes past but that I think about the pleasure that that has brought me and how fortunate I am to have had that opportunity. So thank you for that. Thank you.

Finally: news of the film. It is now fully edited—the music put in etc. I have not yet seen it, but am told that it is stunning (I have seen a few excerpts). Jill Scott, who plays Mma Ramostwe, has done a really great job, as have the other actors. We will let you know when we have concrete news of when it can be seen.

Alexander McCall Smith

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

This is the third of a series of excerpts from Alexander McCall Smith’s newsletter. We’re rejoining him in Sri Lanka.

My wife and I also went to lunch with Geoffrey Dobbs on the tiny island that he has about twenty yards off the beach. You wade to it and are presented with a towel when you arrive on the other side. Geoffrey explained to me that when the tsunami hit he was actually swimming in the sea off the island. He was swept away, but a fisherman threw him a line eventually and he lived to tell the tale.

Back to Scotland for a week and then, I’m afraid, I set off again, this time to Florida, to carry out two public events. The first of these was in Lakeland, which is an attractive town near Tampa. I spoke at Florida Southern College there, and signed books afterwards. As always in the United States, I encountered great kindness and generosity, and had a very enjoyable dinner in an ancient Mexican restaurant with two professors of English, Mary Pharr and her husband Donald. They are close readers of the Scotland Street series and we got on extremely well.

On to Palm Beach, where I addressed the Four Arts Society and did a signing. Palm Beach is quite a place—very fashionable indeed, and I am happy to report that the ladies there do a good line in very large hats. I had lunch with the Director and the Librarian from the Society and at a neighbouring table there was a Palm Beach lady wearing a hat which was as large as the table at which she was sitting. Again the warmth and kindness of the audience was remarkable.

Now I am back in Scotland and hard at work again on the Isabel Dalhousie novel. In fact, it’s going very well and I hope to finish it this month. I have just written a scene in which Eddie, Cat’s assistant at the delicatessen, has tried out his newly acquired skills as hypnotist on Jamie—with unexpected results. Sometimes when I am writing I find that I burst out laughing. It must sound rather sinister to anybody else in the house to hear laughter coming from a room containing only one person.

Scotland Street is also going well. I should finish volume five in that series this month. Poor Bertie. His mother has arranged psychotherapy with a new psychotherapist and is also going to go to cub scout camp with him. Matthew and Elspeth Harmony are back from their honeymoon in Australia, and Domenica has recovered the stolen Spode tea cup from her neighbour’s flat (there is, however a complication in that plot-line.)

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

We left Alexander McCall Smith last week in Sri Lanka—this week we’re catching up with him at the Galle Literary Festival.

The Galle Literary Festival was founded by a very good man called Geoffrey Dobbs. Geoffrey spent much of his business career in Hong Kong before he ended up in Sri Lanka, where he set up a number of hotels. When the tsunami hit Sri Lanka he devoted a great deal of his time and energy to setting up a charity to help get the Galle region back on its feet, and he has done great and good work in that respect. He has been tireless in working for the benefit of people who lost everything in that disaster, and he is much appreciated in the country as a result.

But he is not one to sit about and, as well as being one of the inventors of the new sport of elephant polo, he decided that a literary festival would not only draw visitors to the region and help out in that way but that it would add substantially to the cultural life of Sri Lanka. And it has done exactly that. It is one of the most enjoyable literary festivals I have ever attended and I can thoroughly recommend to anybody who wants to spend a holiday in that part of the world to go to the festival as part of the trip. The next one will be in January 2009: details will be available on their website.

Who was there? As well as major figures from Sri Lanka, which has a lively literary tradition, international visitors included Gore Vidal, William Dalrymple (a friend of mine who writes books on Indian history) and Vikram Seth (with whom I share an editor in London). There were several remarkable parties and—this being a very important feature of the festival—a number of lunches and dinners where readers could choose to sit down to a meal with the writer of their choice. Those were wonderful, as they gave everybody a chance to meet a writer whose work they were interested in. I had an extremely enjoyable dinner attended by about sixty people, where I was able to speak personally to everybody and where we were treated to a superb meal by a famous Australian chef.

Posted by: Alexander McCall Smith - Author of The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

This is the first of a series of excerpts from Alexander McCall Smith’s newsletter. You can also visit his website, here.

January and February are months that I devote to writing and try to ensure that I have as few disturbances as possible. In theory. In practice, although this is a relatively quiet period, I have found that there have been several diversions, with more to come. Fortunately the business of finishing the next Isabel Dalhousie novel is going well, in spite of various other commitments.

The first of these was a trip to Sri Lanka to attend the second Galle Literary Festival. I have never been to Sri Lanka before, although I have been several times to India and have visited a number of other countries in the region. (Thailand and Singapore are both favourites of mine.) So the invitation to speak at the Galle Festival was one I was very keen to accept, even if it did fall in what should be a quiet period at home. I justified the whole thing to myself by saying that I would spend ten days writing there before the festival itself started, and that is, in fact, what I did. My wife and I established ourselves in a small, quiet hotel in the Old Fort at Galle (the Galle Fort Hotel) and every morning I wrote about Isabel Dalhousie while my wife read, swam, and saw the sights.

Sri Lanka is a gem of a country. We were in the southern part and did not visit the central area, which is hilly and where much of the tea is grown. That we shall do on our next visit—and I certainly intend to go back. Galle itself is a very old town that used to be a Portuguese and Dutch settlement before the British occupied it. These layers of history are all still in evidence, and one still comes across Portuguese and Dutch names in contemporary Sri Lankan families. The people, by the way, are particularly charming and make the visitor feel exceptionally welcome. It is a lovely place to visit, my only note of caution being this: you will not be able to visit the north and north-east until the tragic war which has simmered away there for so many years is finally brought to an end. The people I spoke to about this seemed to be universally distressed and despondent that the hostilities are proving so long-lived, and they all expressed anxiety about the ending of the ceasefire.

Posted by: Erna Paris - Author of The Sun Climbs Slow

George Bernard Shaw once told a friend that he was sorry to have written him such a long letter, but he just didn’t have time to write a short one. I remembered that great line when I learned that my first speaking engagement about my new book, The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice in the Age of American Empire, would be limited to fifteen minutes. I wondered how I’d be able to do justice to a book I’d worked on for more than four years in such a short time. It worked out well, I believe, but like GBS, I’m looking forward to the easier, longer variety.

I found this a highly interesting book to research and write because it’s a story that is little known: the creation of courts of international criminal justice to try the perpetrators of the worst crimes, and the take-no-hostages politics that swirl around them. If these tribunals are successful, especially the new permanent International Criminal Court in The Hague, old-style impunity for leaders who commit war crimes and crimes against humanity will at last come under threat—for the first time in history.

In retrospect, meeting some of the people who have faciliated this unprecedented development in world affairs, against the greatest of odds, was probably the highlight of my research. I was interested to discover that many of the judges of the International Criminal Court are themselves from countries where major human rights abuses have occurred. It was this primary experience that inspired them to work for justice. I’ll write more about some of these exceptional people in another post. Stay tuned.

Posted by: Katherine Ashenburg - Author of The Dirt on Clean

When people hear that I’ve written a history of cleanliness, they often assume that I’m a clean-freak. I’m definitely not: on the spectrum from complete-slob to clean-freak, I’m around the mid-point. And my initial interest in The Dirt on Clean didn’t stem from cleanliness as much as my curiosity about the everyday lives of people in past ages. But lately, I’ve been rethinking my connections with hygiene. Strangely, the first book I withdrew with my brand-new library card, at 6, was a book about hygiene, with photographs of 1950s children brushing their teeth and wielding their wash-cloths. I read every word because I was charmed with my new skill, but this earnest tome was not my choice: a friend had taken my card to the library because for some reason I was unable to go. For years, I laughed at that unlikely start to my life as a reader. Little did I imagine that I would ever write a book about cleanliness!

As a dreamy child who spent her time reading novels, I was the exception in a very medical family. My father met my mother when he taught bacteriology to nursing students; later he became a doctor, as did two of my siblings. I was the one who never got above a C in biology. But while writing my book, when I needed to understand how the plagues traveled to medieval Europe or how the 19th century discoveries of Koch and Pasteur transformed our understanding of disease, I realized that biology is fascinating. My parents are dead now, but I like to imagine them in some celestial reading room, where they pass The Dirt on Clean back and forth while discussing their least scientific child. “Did you read her summary of the germ theory?” my father asks fondly, and my mother replies, “And wait until you get to her discussion of the Hygiene Hypothesis!”

Posted by: Katherine Ashenburg - Author of The Dirt on Clean

People sometimes remark how different the subjects of my three books have been—The Dirt on Clean was preceded by The Mourner’s Dance, which was about mourning rituals and practices, and Going to Town, which looked at the 19th century architecture of Ontario towns. It’s true they’re very different on the surface, but when I think about them, I realize that they have something in common.

I’ve always loved the history of everyday things and actions, and it’s the way I connect with the past. Not political history, not economic history, but the stories behind people’s food, clothes, furniture, and the ways they planned their houses, mourned their dead and made themselves “clean” (whatever that meant for them). While writing Going to Town, I learned, among other things, that the second floors of houses often had slanted walls and low ceilings because no one in the 19th century spent any waking hours in the bedroom. The Mourner’s Dance taught me why bereaved people ate special foods and wore certain colours.

As for The Dirt on Clean, it led me into hundreds of fascinating byways and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. I learned how commercial deodorants got invented in the 20th century, what people wiped themselves with in medieval outhouses, why very few people used soap to wash themselves until the mid-19th century, and why peasant cultures feared bathing and glorified dirt. (“The more the ram stinks, the more the ewe loves him,” was a proverbial French expression for the sexiness of body odour.) I loved collecting those pungent, surprising details and, at least for me, it makes history anything but remote.

Posted by: Chris Turner - Author of The Geography of Hope

There’s apparently a book out there called Mortification, a compendium of stories about authors on tour. I’d like to add my own little anecdote, somewhere in the chapter by the title of “Mundane and Yet Exquisitely Unique Circles of Book-Tour Hell,” which I have to assume the book contains. The one that describes these remarkably specific cages you find yourself trapped in for what feels like All Eternity when you’re an author on tour? Yeah. Here’s one for those particular annals.

It begins with my unofficial Toronto “book launch,” by which I mean the pub night I threw for myself while I was in the city doing the media rounds promoting The Geography of Hope. Several of those in attendance are among my oldest and dearest drinking buddies—the sort of people who don’t even need to twist my rubber drinking arm so much as make a casual pantomime gesture across a crowded bar (the “drinkie-drinkie” gesture, as a lawyer once memorably called it on The Simpsons), and like that I’m out well past midnight on a school night.

…and then up far too early the next day for some morning interview…which turns out to be at CIUT, the University of Toronto campus radio station…which happens to be housed in a collapsing old Victorian pile…which happens moreover to contain a studio on its very top floor, a cramped little warren tucked under the eaves…which happens, returning to my point, to be the venue of my own brush with authorial hell on this tour…

What happens, to be specific, is that no one really properly greets us on arrival, and I’m so bleary-eyed that you could walk me out a second-storey window and I’d be picking gravel out of my chin before it occurred to me to ask where the hell we were going.

Anyway, so somehow I get ushered into this airless vault of a studio in the attic and seated in a folding chair off in a corner, and then I’m left alone in there until, presumably, the host sitting there begins our interview. Except he doesn’t even look up at me. He’s leaning in tight to the mike, an earnest undergrad in a hipster t-shirt, delivering a steady stream of words to the airwaves in a clipped monotone. For awhile I just sit there in a hungover haze, and then maybe five minutes in it occurs to me that he’s just reading a pile of news stories. Wire-service pieces about incidents of animal cruelty. One after another after another. In their entirety. Verbatim. He says “quote” and “unquote” to indictate the direct quotations, like it’s the ‘30s or something.

Not long after the reality of my surroundings fully dawns on me, it occurs to me that, while I’m by no means in favour of cruelty of any kind, I’d kill this kid with my bare hands if there was a glass of water in it for me. And I’d torch the whole building for something carbonated. I’m just dazed enough that it occurs to me what a strange headline that would make in the next day’s Varsity: “Author of book about ‘hope’ butchers animal rights broadcaster live on air.” Like an Onion headline, if The Onion was a much darker satire than it is.

Fortunately, my handler pops in to drag me to the right studio in time.

Posted by: Katherine Ashenburg - Author of The Dirt on Clean

While I worked on The Dirt on Clean, people began taking me aside and confessing. Sometimes the person didn’t use deodorant, just washed with soap and water; some people confided that they didn’t shower or bathe daily. Two writers told me separately that as the end of a project neared, superstitiously they stopped washing their hair and didn’t shampoo until it was finished. One woman reported that her husband of 20 years takes long showers three times a day: she would love, she said wistfully, to know what he “really” smells like, as opposed to deodorant soap.

Something similar happened while I was writing a book about mourning customs. Then, people would tell me privately about an observance that was important for them, even if it seemed superstitious or overly sentimental—how they wore their father’s old undershirts, or had long talks with their dead wife. As people confessed their washing eccentricities, I wondered if a failure to meet the standards of the Clean Police was as bizarre as full-blown mourning in the modern world.

Now that The Dirt on Clean has been published, I’m harvesting even more washing stories. At the end of a talk or interview, people will tell me about their Scottish aunt, who never got into a tub but washed herself “piecemeal” and always seemed perfectly clean. Or about their time in the south of France, when housewives used the kitchen’s pot of warm water to clean themselves quickly, in a few strategic places. Or about their decision to give up deodorant when there seemed to be a link between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease (never proved), and they’ve never returned to the practice. As always, I’m interested, and amused at the surreptitious way people reveal their “deviations.” It shows how thoroughly we’ve been conditioned to the one-bath-or-shower-a-day-with-soap-and-deodorant model. But, as our ancestors knew, there’s more than one way to skin a cat—or get clean.

Posted by: Todd Babiak - Author of The Book of Stanley

I used to make fun of writer friends who had websites and blogs. Given our busy lives, with families and jobs and leaves to rake and, most importantly, BOOKS TO READ, where was the time to express unconsidered opinions about, say, chocolate? Besides, it always seemed an embarrassing exercise in self-love. “Shoot me,” I remember saying, to my friend, William, “if I ever get a website. The sound of it: toddbabiak.com. Tasteless! Boorish! Actually, don’t shoot me. Stab me, with something that isn’t even sharp. Just press really hard, again and again.”

Three months later, I had a website.

It’s been difficult, avoiding William at dinner parties and the theatre. Perhaps William doesn’t know I have a website. Now that I have one, with handy links to Amazon and Indigo-Chapters pages where my novels are sold, I judge the quality of my friendships by the “comments” button under my blog entries. So far, it’s mostly my brother and Cousin Brad who respond to my provocative posts about those yellow ribbon magnets, that guy who peed in my garbage cans, and chocolate. Which leads me to conclude that my brother and Cousin Brad, who are blood relatives and therefore ineligible to be my friends, are my only friends.

The website has been most useful as a mechanism for contact; readers can hunt my address down and email me after reading the novels. The Book of Stanley, my latest book, contains religious themes. It hasn’t been nearly as controversial as some had expected, partly because people with serious religious views have so many holy texts to read, they aren’t interested in novels that include sasquatches, Busby Berkeley routines in schoolyards, and sex scenes in Montreal townhouses. But I have received a number of emails, more than thirty, from Scientologists who believe I am attacking them in the novel.

My internet research of Scientology has revealed little of substance, so if I have inadvertently attacked the religion it had to be either instinctual or supernatural. And by supernatural I mean spiritual. And by spiritual I mean religious.

Someone, God or the life force or possibly Yoda, wanted me to write what I wrote. He is omniscient, isn’t He? And omnipotent? How could I have slipped through His fingers? If He has fingers, which He assuredly does not. What would He use them for? You think God feeds Himself, or plays baseball? God.

I’m not sure if William has religion. He’s always been pretty slippery about that stuff, along with details of his salary and sex life. But just in case, I’m taking martial arts classes. In case he’s fashioned a blunt shiv, I want to be ready.

Posted by: Katherine Ashenburg - Author of The Dirt on Clean

Although our ancestors were much more relaxed about body odour than we are, I did find the occasional ancient deodorant recipe—like the 16th-century French one that recommended a compound of roses to counteract “the goat-like stench of armpits.” The first generation of commercial deodorants, at the end of the 19th century, tried to close the pores with wax, but in 1907 a Cincinnati surgeon invented the first modern deodorant. It was called Odorono (“Odor? Oh no!”), and it inhibited perspiration with aluminum chloride. A century later, our choices of deodorants are vast. And so are the problems associated with that choice, as I learned this week from two good sources, Heidi Sopinka’s Footprint column in The Globe and Mail, and Adria Vasil’s book Ecoholic.

Although the link between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease remains unproven, many people avoid antiperspirants, which almost always contain aluminum. Lots of antiperspirants and deodorants contain paraben, a preservative that is potentially carcinogenic. So is talc, and its illegal mining endangers Indian tigers. Even so-called natural deodorants contain propylene glycol—better known, in 100% concentrations, as antifreeze. Aside from not wanting to smear antifreeze on your armpits, it’s very harmful to aquatic creatures.

Bewildering as this sounds, Sopinka offers some sensible advice: “Avoid antiperspirants entirely, and if after reading the label you find no mention of parabens, talc or propylene glycol, you’re on the right track.” Even simpler, you could experiment with a regime more and more people are telling me about: do without deodorant and rely on soap and water. When Kermit the Frog complained about how hard it was being green, he must have been thinking about deodorant!

Posted by: Gail Anderson-Dargatz - Author of Turtle Valley

I wrote about my many days of collecting butterflies in my new novel Turtle Valley, how I found the butterflies on the shoulders of country roads by alfalfa fields where they had been struck by passing vehicles. As I wrote in the novel, in these areas butterflies “littered the ground like yellow confetti” and when I picked them up, “the luminous scales from their wings dusted (my) fingertips like eye shadow.” These insects became a precious commodity for me, a gift that I collected by the dozens and stored in boxes, a bit of summer that I would pull out to laminate onto bookmarks on cold winter evenings. It should come as no surprise, then, that my working title for Turtle Valley was “A Hatful of Tattered Butterflies.”

There’s a bit of irony here, that I would immortalize the act of collecting these butterflies within the novel that marks the end of my homemade bookmark tradition, because it has come to an end, at least for now. I hesitate to say I’ve retired from this venture altogether, as so many authors claim to have given up writing, say, only to come out of retirement when a good idea (and an empty pocketbook) strikes. But I now have a blended family of four kids, I teach in the UBC Creative Writing MFA Optional-residency program, I’m at work on the next novel project, and I have a new, high tech hobby — blogging and running a forum — so there is little time left over in the day for seeking out dead bugs.

Still, I very much miss this exercise. When I hunted for materials to create my bookmarks, the world was suddenly full of riches. As Annie Dillard wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “…if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.” When I made bookmarks, finding the iridescent wings of a dragonfly literally made my day, as did stumbling across a clutch of skeleton leaves beneath a poplar, or, of course, finding the dead butterflies windblown and clustered along the roadsides like the petals from an ornamental cherry. I see these “pennies” less and less myself now, though I know they are there: my five-year-old spots and gathers them on our walks together, for his morbid and beautiful collection of dead butterflies and beetles, rocks, flowers, leaves and bones that he rightly calls his “treasures.” He whoops as he scoops up the pennies that I pass by. Still, the strange joys of this old hobby of mine linger on. When a butterfly flew through the open door into our house today, and my son captured it against the window within his cupped hands, I couldn’t help but notice the beauty of the insect’s wings, and how lovely they would have looked on one of my bookmarks.

Posted by: Katherine Ashenburg - Author of The Dirt on Clean

Often it’s hard for me to remember where I first got an idea for an article or book. But in the case of The Dirt on Clean, I can pinpoint it exactly. In the spring of 2003, Toronto (where I live) was the city outside Asia that was hardest hit by SARS. I was washing my hands 10 times more than usual and ruminating about the connection between washing and disease. At the same time, I happened to visit the 18th century rooms in the Royal Ontario Museum. A painting of a crowd was captioned, “The aristocrats in this picture are just as dirty as the peasants.” I don’t usually listen to audiotapes in museums, but I pressed the button and listened to a short tape on the subject.

What I learned was that the medieval Crusaders brought back the custom of bathhouses from the Near East. Medieval folk bathed together in communal baths, until the plagues frightened them into believing that sickness entered the skin through water. Most of the bathhouses closed by the 15th century and for the next couple of centuries, Europeans shunned water, wiping hands and faces without soap, and leaving the rest untouched. Wearing white linen, or “the linen that washes,” as it was called, substituted for real washing.

Listening to this, the proverbial lightbulb went on. By its light I saw a book title: Clean: The History of a Notion. The title evolved. But my sense of an intriguing subject, centred on the body but with connections to sexuality, disease, religion and other “big” ideas, remained pretty constant. I owe the ROM a thank you.

Posted by: Jeff Warren - Author of The Head Trip

In keeping with the associative spirit of my last blog entry, I would like to make some wild generalizations about science journalism. I would say that most science journalism is inherently conservative. That is to say, science journalists want to get it right, so they often ground their arguments in consensus. Like Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything or Jay Ingram’s Theatre of the Mind, they do chart the disputes, but the knowledge they deal in is essentially consolidated knowledge. It’s the hard foundational matter on which the sturdy edifice of workaday science is built. This is terrific and important science writing, the kind I love to gobble up, but it is not really the kind of science writing that I do.

I prefer to play around at the more dangerous leading edge of science. This, too, is where science happens. But it’s fraught with peril here because there’s a lot less consensus. This is especially true when it comes to the mind, which can be looked at through so many lenses—philosophical, neurological, psychological, phenomenological. Here everything is in flux. It’s a rowdy scrimmage of vague experiments, stirring anecdotes, wild speculation, emotional ego wars, new theories, old evidence, new evidence, old theories, and looming over at all, the dreaded “paradigm.”

Do we need a new so-called “paradigm” to understand the mind, or is that just New Age balderdash, relativistic Kuhnian wunder-fiddling, the kind that makes the Richard Dawkinses and Steven Weinbergs and Patricia Churchlands of the world reach for their guns? It’s too early to say. But it’s great fun for me as a writer to throw myself into this scrimmage and try to piece together a calm and coherent narrative. For me the best tools for writing this way are creative, and have to do with a book’s form and structure and tone. Which doesn’t mean you have to abandon all reason and sense—you don’t. There’s still a certain journalistic responsibility to point out the controversies and be transparent when transitioning from sober analysis to woolly speculation. But, as I say, it is more fun out here on the leading edge. This is where the Big Game graze—the freaks and the fights and the eerie sights. This is where to come to fire your imagination. Because—and this is the crucial point—scientists come here too. For many of them the leading edge may even be what drew them to science in the first place.

Posted by: Marie Phillips - Author, Gods Behaving Badly

Hello Canada! (Now I sound like I’m doing a stadium tour.)

Here’s my first novel: Gods Behaving Badly. Well, I say “first novel.” That’s not strictly the truth.

I wrote my actual first novel when I was 13. It was a gothic tragi-comedy entitled The Lone Bagpipe, inspired by a book found in the school library entitled The Joy of Bagpipes and is now sadly out of print. (The Joy of Bagpipes, I mean. It will come as no surprise that The Lone Bagpipe was never actually in print.) The Lone Bagpipe was followed by Lady of Spain, an erotic novel composed at age 15 in collaboration with two friends. It was the result of extensive book-based research as my erotic experiences at that point numbered nil. I didn’t embark on my first grown-up novel until I was 27. This one—The Talentless Miss Pidgeon—was ill-starred, though why publishers wouldn’t leap on a story of a homicidal screenwriter who becomes possessed by her imaginary twin, based on Macbeth, I cannot fathom.

By the time I started writing Gods Behaving Badly I was working at a London independent bookshop and wondering if I would ever see my own name on one of the covers that surrounded me every day. I thought I might be in with a chance this time, as Gods… had a relatively innocuous plot-line following the antics of Greek gods living in contemporary London. A sort of romantic comedy adventure fantasy with gods in it. Which didn’t stop people from asking me whether it was autobiographical.

Working in a bookshop is the perfect job for the aspiring author. You are surrounded by books all day, you talk about books all day, you read and read, books and reviews, you see books you hate become bestsellers and books you love sink without a trace. You get very opinionated about covers, stickers and blurb. You learn how the industry works (and doesn’t work). You are armed and ready for when your book enters the fray.

And as it turns out, Gods Behaving Badly would probably never have been published if I hadn’t been working in a bookshop. It was my boss who chatted up the UK Random House rep and made the discovery that Jonathan Cape was accepting unagented submissions. I needed no further encouragement and off the e-mail went with chapters one to four.

Shock number one: Dan Franklin, Cape’s publishing director, replied straight away to acknowledge receipt. That never happens.

Shock number two: the very next day he asked to see the rest of it. That never happens.

That was a Friday. He’d said he was going to read it over the weekend, and when Monday morning came I opened up the shop feeling queasy, knowing that this was the day I was due to receive my rejection. The phone rang. It was Dan, calling to offer me a deal. That so never happens it’s actually a black hole of not-happening, sucking things that do happen into its maw. Except that it happened to me.

Within a week I had found an agent and the book was making waves at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We sold it in fifteen countries, including Canada - hurrah! My father spent the war years in Banff, and I did my own winter trip when I was 18, walking the streets of Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City, wearing six coats, with a Margaret Atwood novel in my gloved hand. From what I understand, we have a December release date for Gods Behaving Badly in Canada, which is great as reading is my second favourite indoor activity. (My favourite is playing the piano. Why, what were you thinking?)

I very much hope you enjoy the book. If not, feel free not to mention it to anyone, but if you were accidentally to leave it lying face up on a table…

Thanks for reading.

Marie Phillips

Posted by: Todd Babiak - Author, The Garneau Block, The Book of Stanley

Since the publication of The Garneau Block, I have been invited to a number of book clubs. It is contrary to the nature of the contemporary man to join a book club (why is that, by the way?) so I have only encountered women on these genial evenings. There is always red wine, which helps do away with the social discomfort that I sometimes inspire with my squirrel-like anxieties.

I always wear a suit, which is always too much. The host invites me in and I sit down in a comfortable chesterfield and smile. As we introduce ourselves, I investigate, by the tone and tenor of their voices, whether any of them disliked the novel. Women in book clubs always seem to be attractive and intelligent, so I worry about being caught checking them out (after two glasses of wine, my gaze tends to linger). And, of course, I worry about eating too much hummus and horrifying these lovely readers with my garlic breath.

At the end of the evening, when it is time to sign books, I inevitably forget someone’s name. There is no elegant way to rectify this situation, and I always feel like a boor. If the forgotten name is a variation on “Kirsten,” I can sometimes rescue myself by asking how to spell it. If the forgotten name is “Liz,” I only end up seeming impure of heart. It is best to admit one’s flaws at a book club meeting, unless one’s flaw happens to be staring at the line of a woman’s collarbone while she asks whether my book is autobiographical.

The Book of Stanley, which contains satirical elements about organized religion, will make for even more anxious book club meetings. I’m eager for my first invitation, so I can work on behaving myself.

Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that every person in search of anything whatsoever is eager for publicity.

I used to dream of being interviewed. That and being included in Granta magazine’s regular ten-yearly Best of Young British Novelists issues. It was one of the things which kept me going pre-Curious[1]. I guess it was easier to imagine talking to someone from the Sunday Times, than it was to imagine writing a novel that someone would publish. Indeed, my failure to write a publishable novel was not unconnected to the fact that, in my imagination, doing so was pretty much interchangeable with doling out pearls of wisdom to an expectant public[2].

I’ve been interviewed in real life quite a few times now. Predictably it’s less fun than I’d imagined. As my wife said, early on, it’s like meeting someone at a party, talking to them for half an hour, then seeing them pick up a megaphone, climb on a table and say, ‘Listen up, people. I’m going to tell you what I think about this person’. It’s uncomfortable, however complimentary they are.

The biggest mistake is to think that interviews are a service provided to writers so that they can communicate with readers. The function of interviews is to provide good copy (and most editors will think nothing of ditching interviews if writers have failed to say anything interesting).

So I guess it’s no surprise that many journalists (even journalists I like and respect) take rough notes and reconstruct your quotes later (a few tape the interview and do the same thing). Maybe if you’re a politician or a footballer you don’t notice, but if you spend the greater part of your life trying to get phrases just right, you can’t help feeling uneasy when you appear in print speaking in a voice you don’t recognise.

During one of the very first interviews I did about Curious I was asked whether the book was going to make me a millionaire. It seemed like an impertinent question (discussing advances has always seemed to me a bit like flashing; it’s unpleasant however big it is). And, in truth, I didn’t know[3]. So, I said, ‘Not quite,’ in a tone of voice which sounded, to me, like a polite refusal to answer the question, but which was subsequently translated into the figure, ‘Three quarters of a million’.

During one of the most recent interviews I did about A Spot of Bother I was asked why I’d given up working as an illustrator and I said… well, to be honest, I have no idea what I said, but it certainly wasn’t that I’d given it up ‘because there was no glory in it’, which made me sound like a pillock, and was not very complimentary to everyone who’d commissioned illustrations from me at one time or another.

(In grateful recompense to the lovely people at the Nursing Times, who gave me a steady stream of work during some rather lean years, and who provided me with more than enough glory, here is one of the pictures I did for them…)

It’s not lying as such. Actually, it is lying as such. But it’s not something to ring your solicitor about. No-one is accusing you of eating children. It’s just part of the Faustian bargain struck between writers and newspapers. You get to communicate with your potential readers, they get to write something entertaining about you. And if they get a little carried away, well… there’s not much small print in a Faustian bargain. Writers are wary of biting the hand that feeds them. And any interview is better than none, surely. As Simon Armitage once said to me, you get a review saying your latest book is a pile of steaming crap and your Mum says, cheerily, ‘Ooh, look, you’re in the paper again’.[4]

The irony is that interviews are a rubbish way of communicating actual information to readers. I sometimes think it would be more efficient to write them individual letters, put them into bottles and hurl them into the sea. I must have answered the question, ‘How much research did you do for Curious Incident?’ [5] at least 500 times, and journalists still ask it on a regular basis.

The thing that interviews are extremely good for is winkling private information out of unsuspecting subjects. There is something sinisterly flattering about having a nice lunch and a bottle of wine bought for you by an amiable stranger who wants to listen to everything you have to say for an hour. I tend to pass on the offer of wine these days, because it is all too easy to forget that you’re not actually talking to an amiable stranger. You’re talking to everyone in the queue in Tesco’s. You’re talking to your neighbours, your parents, your friends, your GP, your bank manager. It’s just that they’re hiding really well. And it takes a while to learn that casual remarks that mean nothing over a mushroom risotto can cause inordinate amounts of unnecessary crap in your actual life.

(On the spur of the moment I once described my school as ‘like an open prison with really good cultural facilities’, and, well… that’s another story altogether).

I’ve been to quite a few literary festivals over the past few years. As a performer you’re usually offered free tickets to see other writers being interviewed on stage. I’m occasionally tempted. For at least thirty seconds. If I love someone’s writing I’d rather not run the risk of find out that they’re a complete arse. And if I don’t like their writing there doesn’t seem to be much point in finding out what an charming person they are off the page (the last time I went to see an author being interviewed, I subsequently found myself unable to read any more of their books ).[6]

As time goes on, I am more and more inclined to think that these is only answer to all the questions I have ever been asked in interviews: Read the book. It’s great. Honestly.

[1] The first came out in 1983 (Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes…) before I had admitted that this was what I wanted to do with my life. The second, in 1993 (Iain Banks, Louis de Bernières, Anne Billson…), was a painful reminder of my increasingly delusional ambitions. By the time the third came out in 2003 (Monica Ali, Rachel Cusk, Peter Ho Davies…) I had written Curious and, more importantly, turned 40, and was therefore spared the indignity of not being picked.
[2] I don’t think I learnt how to write properly until I realised that having something you wanted to say was actually a hindrance, whereas everything depended on how you said it.
[3] Mostly because the novel had been sold - and was still being sold - to different publishers in different territories for different advances under different contracts. Weirdly, and for similar reasons, neither I nor anyone else knows precisely how many copies of Curious have been sold throughout the world. Someone could certainly sit down and plough through paperwork from fifty or so publishers and come up with a figure, but it seems like a waste of time when the only result would be the ability to brag with precision.
[4] He was talking in general terms and no reference was, or is, intended to a specific review of a book of his. Or indeed mine. I’ve only ever had one genuinely nails-out, eye-scratching review (‘nothing can prepare one for the tendentiousness, the formlessness, the sheer ghastliness of Haddon’s verse’ - brilliant; we almost put it on the cover of the paperback) and my mother never mentioned having read it.
[5] Answer - almost none.
[6] No names, no pack drill.

Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

Being an introduction to a book of rather wonderful photographs of refugees, How the World came to Oxford, taken by Rory Carnegie, together with their testimonies gathered and edited by Nikki van der Gaag, which was published by the Oxford Literary Festival.

I first saw Rory Carnegie’s photographs of young asylum seekers a couple of years ago at Modern Art Oxford. I have no memory of the rest of the exhibition, but those six photographs have been floating around the back of my mind ever since.

They’re included here (Albert, Amina, Behar, Daphne, Florence and Vassan) and you can probably see why I’ve found them difficult to forget.

It’s due, in part, to the way Rory photographed them. But, more importantly, it’s due to the way they look back at him. And at us.

They’re self-possessed, yet vulnerable at the same time. They sit in empty rooms, or stand in featureless gardens where nothing happens, but the threat of something hangs in the air.

You can see what I mean when you compare them with the pictures of some of the older people in this book. Mohammed Bushara, for example, or Annelie Rookwood. Time has slowed down in these photographs. The rooms are full of objects. These are people at home with themselves and with the world around them.

When you read the stories they have told to Nikki van der Gaag you begin to understand why the photographs are so powerful.

Becoming an asylum seeker is not something that happens to people by accident. We talk of people being forced to flee persecution in their home countries. But the brutal truth is that no-one is forced to flee. Fleeing is what you do if you have the guts to leave. Most people stay and hope for the best. But the best rarely happens. If they’re lucky, they lie awake at night waiting for the knock on the door. If they’re unlucky they’re killed, or tortured, or thrown into prison.

That’s the self-possession you can see in these faces. These are people who had the strength to do something most people are incapable of doing, leaving everything behind and starting their lives all over again in a country that often makes this very difficult indeed.

Read the testimonies and you will understand the vulnerability, too. Many of these people have seen their families, friends and neighbours killed. And many of them are still running.

Look how empty these houses are, and how few possessions these people have. A book. A football. A flag. A patterned throw. These are people who are fearful of putting down roots in case they have to move on again at a moment’s notice.

See how much more at ease everyone is inside their house, but how they still keep the curtains closed so that no-one knows they are in there.

Then notice how these things change as the years pass, as people get older, as they turn from asylum seekers into refugees, and from refugees into people who no longer think of themselves as refugees.

For this is the heart of the book.

Most people are wary of strangers. Tabloid newspapers have always sought to whip that wariness into fear. And governments, in turn, have always used that fear to win votes.

But time does its usual work. Wariness fades, newspapers get bored and it takes a great deal of effort to carrying on being frightened of something that offers no threat.

In fifty years’ time, it will be unremarkable to have a grandmother who escaped from Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. Just as it is unremarkable now to have a grandfather who escaped from Nazi Germany.

And this has always been true. If you think you have no refuges in your family it is because you have not looked hard enough, or because the records have not been kept.

This is not a book about how refugees are human beings just like the rest of us. Most of them have had experiences the rest of us cannot even begin to comprehend.

It is a book about how some extraordinary people become an important part of who we all are.

Albert and Amina

Behar and Daphne

Florence and Vassan

Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

For the sake of completeness, really (see above)

This is the picture I sometimes add to signed copies of Curious:

I did it a few times in Italy, where it was not received as well. Though having done it, I now know the Italian for ‘Ah. With flies!’. Which I may be able to use in a restaurant one day.

Sometimes, when signing stock copies for Random House (2,500 was my record, I think; my wrist survived, but after seven hours bent over a book, my distance vision went a bit odd and I bumped into several people on the way back to the tube) I would relieve the boredom by adding a few of these drawings. Last year I met a woman who said she’d bought a signed copy of Curious. She was especially pleased because it had a drawing in it. A dead dog. And lots of little love hearts. I decided it would be unkind to disabuse her.

Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

Being an addendum to the previous.

If you are American you may have read the last entry (The Many Wounds of Little George) and decided that I am in need of psychiatric treatment. Or incarceration. Obviously, you may be English, or Japanese, or Russian and have come to the same conclusion. But bear with me.

I lived for a year in Boston, MA., and became something of a connoisseur of minor transatlantic cultural differences.

Obviously, it goes without saying that irony is not one of them (Though there is a kind of earnestness which is more prevalent in the States, but which in the UK is generally confined to members of religious institutions. I remember vividly going into Borders one day in the Atrium Mall on Route 9, dumping my purchases beside the till and being asked, ‘And how are you today, Sir?’. I was not at my cheeriest and said, ‘You’re not really interested, are you?’ To which the reply came, ‘I’m one of the few people in retail who really do care’.)

Putting toilet humour aside, there were two areas where I most regularly put a foot very wrong.

I had not realised the extent to which many British people show affection for one another by being extremely rude. Nor had I realised how difficult it is to explain to someone that the phrase, ‘Three months in boot camp should sort you out’, is a comment one would only make to good friends and is not meant literally.

Nor had I realised that the world doesn’t share the British amusement with stories of pain, mutilation and trauma. There was, for example, a news story shortly after Bonfire Night last year, about a man who given himself serious colonic burns by launching a rocket from between his buttocks. I shared this story with various friends to universal amusement. When living in Boston however, I would sometimes read similar stories online and make the mistake of sharing them with American friends. The usual reaction was one of horror. Partly at the story itself. Partly at my laughter.

(Canadians, I found, were more partial to this kind of thing. Indeed, on one occasion, an American friend laughed uproariously at my story of someone accidentally stapling their genitalia to a plank, or similar, then stopped short and excused themselves on the grounds that they had ‘spent a lot of time with Canadians’).

Many years ago I was a student on a creative writing course, during which the tutor asked us to write a curse poem, addressed to anyone who had particularly annoyed us. We set to the task with gusto and an hour later we read out the poems we had produced. They were, on the whole, rather good, very funny and almost universally good-natured. Then an American man read out a poem about a neighbour whose dog routinely relieved itself on the grass outside his house. It was one of the most frightening poems I have ever heard. I forget the details. But weapons were involved and the neighbour did not live.

Now that I occasionally teach creative writing myself, I habitually steal workshop ideas from tutors who taught me (and hand on my own ideas to other tutors). But the curse poem is one I have decided to leave on one side.

So, to my American readers who have not spent too much time in the company of Canadians, a belated apology for the bleeding man. It was funny, honestly. If you happened to live in the right place.

Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

It began at the Edinburgh book festival.

In the Author’s Yurt there is a guest book for visiting authors. Being an artist of sorts, and having been looked after very well, it seemed only proper that I illustrate my signature. By the time I got around to doing it, however, the stakes had been raised by another writer (I didn’t recognise the name) who had decorated an entire page with a meticulous and terrifyingly proficient life-drawing of the yurt’s interior. Realistic figures. Rigorous perspective. The lot.

Clearly I had to go for simplicity.

For the previous three years when signing copies of Curious Incident for friends I would add a drawing of a dead dog beneath a cloud of flies (it was more charming than it sounds). I wondered if I could concoct a similar drawing for A Spot of Bother. I decided eventually on a simplified graphic illustration of a central scene in the novel:

I did a large version in the guest book and some smaller versions in copies of the novel. I was growing rather fond of my little, bleeding man and found myself taking him on further adventures over the following weeks.

I began adding the pictures to the bottom of e-mails and one of my (nameless) respondents said how much she enjoyed my drawings. I explained that my aim was to proceed from amusing and relatively minor wounds to more graphic traumas that no-one could possibly find funny:

Our exchange ended with one of the most memorable e-mails I have ever received. BRING ON THE ANAL BLEEDING. Like that. In caps.

I brought it on.

Though it is the nipples that remain my favourite:

The sheer volume of blood. The mildly pissed off expression. The arms inexplicably raised. The intangible and almost certainly offensive religious symbolism that I can’t quite put my fingers on.

It seems to demand something more than a pen drawing. A T-shirt? A book cover? An edition of two-colour lino prints, perhaps…

Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

(Swindon wins)

While I was writing Curious I had no idea that it would be published, let alone end up in a Faroese edition. It was my sixth adult novel (five remain unpublished, and with good reason), so I would keep my spirits up by indulging in the occasional fantasy of literary success. Writing my Booker speech, designing covers…

At one point, I remarked idly to Sos, my wife, ‘If it’s a bestseller, do you think I’ll get the freedom of the city of Swindon?’

She replied, ‘Not if they read the passage where Swindon is described as the Arsehole of the World’.

I told this story at the Swindon Literary Festival after the book had been published. There was laughter (thank God). Then, when the houselights came up for questions, I saw that the mayor of Swindon was sitting in the front row in all his regalia. His hand was raised.

The microphone was passed to him. ‘You have described our city as being like a lower fundament of the human body,’ he said. ‘If you were given the freedom of our city - and I stress ‘if’ - what would you do to improve it?’

It was one of the more difficult questions I have been asked.

I paused. ‘Well… I got here early tonight, as I always do before this kind of event, thinking I’d find a café and go over my talk with a cappuccino and a sandwich’. There was even more laughter (thank God). ‘So, I think a café Nero between here and the train station would make it pretty much perfect’.

Just before A Spot of Bother was published, I did an event at the Edinburgh Book Festival. I was asked about Peterborough. I said that I had spent one night there in order to check a few facts and added (unwisely, in retrospect) that it was ‘horrible, but not in a funny way’. I was perhaps a little harsh, but I think I could defend myself in a court of law. It has a beautiful cathedral and the countryside and villages to the West of the city are picture-postcard stuff. But the city centre has been throttled by a large car park and shopping centre complex which close down at the end of the working day (the same thing happened to Northampton where I grew up). I went into the city centre to get something to eat in the evening and found absolutely nothing, apart from an empty coffee bar which was, luckily, still open due to late-night shopping. I had my coffee and sandwich while they swept up round me.

A few weeks later, my quote was reprinted in a national newspaper (the name of which I shall withhold in case they decide to take the gloves off). For some reason known only to them, they added the phrase, ‘But the inhabitants of Peterborough are too lethargic to complain about the book’.

Peterborough local radio began a campaign to get the book banned from Waterstones in the city. The manager of Waterstones had to go on air to defend me. I had to thank the manager of Waterstones. I had to talk to The Independent who were running a news item about the row. In the article they wrote that I had been ‘quoted out of context’ (so now I know what that phrase means). The journalist Adrian Durham, who grew up in Peterborough, backed me up, saying, ‘I’d rather live in Beirut than go back’. Ian Hutton wrote to the Independent to say, ‘As an old Peterborian I would like to leap to the defence of Peterborough […] Unfortunately I can’t […] It now stands as an object lesson in how to ruin an historic city.’ Then someone from the local tourist office (I think) sent out a press release, saying, ‘Everyone is welcome to visit Peterborough. Except Mark Haddon’.

So that was my next summer holiday buggered.

Maybe we’ll go to Swindon instead.

Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

Being a few of the most enjoyable questions I’ve been asked over the last four years, together with my answers

1. Name the best Simpsons episode of all time, and explain why it’s the best. (Ink Magazine)

‘Time and Punishment’, the one where Homer ‘mends’ the toaster, accidentally turns it into a time machine, and finds himself repeatedly sucked back to the Age of the Dinosaurs where he keeps squashing something, thereby altering the course of evolution with horrific consequences. There’s a crescendo of high-density jokes at the end which made me almost sick with laughter the first time I saw.

If I make any attempt to describe the jokes I’ll kill them stone dead. But anyone who’s seen the episode will remember the bit where it rains donuts.

Actually, to be precise, ‘Time and Punishment’ is a mini-episode contained with the ‘Treehouse of Horror V’ Halloween special, which also contains the rather wonderful ‘ Nightmare Cafeteria’ where the staff at Bart’s school are killing, cooking and eating the children…

2. Which are your favourite flavoured crisps, and why? (Guardian online Q & A)

I’ m not really a crisp kind of guy (though my wife quite rightly points out that if I have to buy crisps for any reason I am a sucker for any big bag with the words ‘hand-made’ and ‘gourmet’ on it). In truth, if I am going to indulge myself, white chocolate and flapjacks would be my unhealthy snacks of choice.

3. How important were your five unpublished novels to your development as a writer and eventual success? (Writer Magazine)

Hugely. Most of them were absolutely dreadful and coming to that realisation each time was not a pleasant experience. Curious Incident was a better book, I think, because I put into practice everything I’d learn when writing for children (brevity, humour, a well-shaped plot…). Doubtless if I got to the age of sixty with twenty unpublished novels in my bottom drawer I would be on a locked ward somewhere full of heavy-duty tranquilisers. But I now realise that I am in the enviable position of having spent a great deal of time under the bonnet (or hood, as you say). I know why my writing works when it works and I know why it doesn’t when it doesn’t. And that’s the kind of knowledge I don’t think you get if you are one of those writers who are blessed with a natural talent and produce a wonderful novel at twenty two.

4. Why did you decide on a poodle as the murder victim [in Curious Incident] - don’t you like poodles or are all breeds as likely to meet an equally horrible end in one of your novels? (Dogs Today)

I don’t bear a grudge against poodles per se, though if I had a dog it probably wouldn’t be a poodle. It is simply that, for some obscure reason, a dead poodle seemed funnier than a dead Alsatian or a dead Boxer (though come to think of it, a Jack Russell with a fork through it would also be quite funny). Oh dear, I’m going to attacked in the street by dog-lovers now, aren’t I.

5. Which are your models of Bildungsroman? (Italian Vogue)

None, to be honest. For the simple reason that I have a shamefully bad memory for the novels I have read. To take one example, I read Catcher in the Rye [occasionally cited as a model for Curious Incident] many years ago and can remember, quite literally, nothing about it. This is true of most of the thousands of novels I’ve read in my life. It used to scare me. Why spend so much time doing something if you can’t remember having done it? These days I realise it’s a blessing. If you can’t remember, you can’t copy. I now think of my brain as a compost heap. It’s not an efficient place to store stuff, but if you keep adding things to the pile it makes good fertiliser.

6. What activities/ideas/discoveries outside of your field most excite you? What makes you think, “Damn, I wish I thought of that?” (Seed Magazine)

Perhaps if I’d been born in the late 18th century and possessed a large private income I might have been able to fulfil one of my early childhood ambitions to become a scientist and attempt to make some great discovery, if only because that was a period in history when an intelligent young person with time on their hands and money at their disposal was still able to push back the frontiers of geology or astronomy or biology. But nearly all scientific discoveries in the last fifty years have come as a result of years of hard and often tedious labour illuminated by occasional flashes of insight. And that’s something I could never have done, if only because I have no eye for detail. You miss a zero out of a mathematical equation and it crashes through the guardrail into the ravine. You make a spelling mistake in a novel and it’s neither here nor there.

If anything, it is music which makes me think, ‘Damn, I wish I had thought of that’. Sometimes when I’m listening to a well-loved CD (whether it’s The Flaming Lips or Harrison Birtwhistle, Radiohead or Elliott Carter) I find myself moved almost to tears and wish I could have made something that wonderful. Being an amateur guitarist and viola player I can sometimes kid myself that it would have been possible if my life had been a little different. Though I do like a nice cup of tea and an early bedtime, so being in a band was never a genuine possibility.

7. What were your favourite books as a child? (Oh, loads of people)

Origins of the Universe by Albert H Hinkelbein.

I read very few picture books and very little fiction as a child (The Night Before Christmas, Diggy Takes his Pick, The Log of the Ark, a boxed set of Puffin war stories I got as a school prize but which I have no memory of reading…) Mostly I read encyclopaedias and science books. I knew that I was not butch enough to go into space, and at that time astronauts had all been fighter pilots in their previous jobs and Trained Killer was never an appealing career. So, for a long time, I wanted to be a paleoanthrolopgist searching for Australopithecus bones in the Rift Valley in Kenya. Stupid, really. These days, I find even Southern France too hot in the summer.

Writers, publishers, librarians… everyone interested in literature and education seems to believe that books are the golden gateway to personal fulfilment and productive citizenship. It’s a bit like footballers thinking everyone should play football. The important thing for any kid is to find a passionate interest, some way of making the world thrilling.

And if you love science and end up writing novels, well, there’s sure to be some way of marrying the two.

Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

Because earlier this year I appeared on The Sky Book Programme to discuss, among other things, my favourite novel, so I reread it, for the eighth or ninth time, taking some notes because explaining why you like something is harder than explaining why you hate it, for me at any rate, but the interview took at least fourteen seconds (see above), and it seems a shame to waste all that pondering time.

Philip Pullman said (correctly) that studying literature at university equips you very badly for writing the stuff. You spend three years reading (often disconcertingly good) books, thinking about their relationship to the author’s life, their structure, their influences, their social context… Then you sit down to write a novel of your own and realize that you have never considered some of the basic questions. Who is narrating? Is it one of the characters? Or many? Is it you, or a dramatized version of yourself ? Do they have access to all the characters’ minds? Do they know they future? What is their relationship to us? Do they have an arm around our shoulder? Are they whispering conspiratorially? Are they standing in front of the fireplace declaiming…? Whether we like a book often depends on how an author has answered these questions.

And if the author writes well, we rarely notice how they’ve done this. For a good novel (or poem, or play) is a magic trick. The machinery works with such deftness that we’re too dazzled to notice the wires and the secret doors.

This is particularly true of To the Lighthouse. Yes, it’s about the clash of masculine and feminine world-views, the breakdown of the Victorian family, class, art, money, power… all that lit-crit stuff. But it’s the prose which dazzles me.

There is no narrator as such, more an narrating spirit which moves, with fairy quickness, in and out of people’s minds, and back and forth in both space and time. Sometimes it is hard to work out, immediately, who is thinking, or to put a date and time to the scene being described.

It sounds complex when spelled out (and one of things I love about Woolf is that she is a true Modernist, restlessly pushing at the boundaries of what fiction can do) but more than any other writer I can think of, she captures the sense of what it is to inhabit a human mind and to be a member of a family. The way our thoughts overlap and coalesce with those close to us, the way we complement and contradict one another.

She describes with absolute precision how the mind slips from the Wagnerian sublime to the trivial and back again without the slightest bump. You wonder if your life is a failure. You remind yourself to buy biscuits. You are entranced by the patterns in an oily puddle.

“How incongruous it seemed to be telephoning a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in meadows of asphodel. Yes, he would catch the 10:30 at Euston.”

Then, every so often, that narrating spirit breaks through the membrane which keeps us from the seeing the true nature of things, and the world catches fire.

“Mrs Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air like a rain of energy, a column of spray…”

It happens, again, in one of my favourite passages, which keeps its power every time I return to it.

“There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain on the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath.”

I’m an underliner. I don’t think I’ve ever really enjoyed a book without wanting to scribble in it, to highlight the passages where the wheels leave the tarmac. My tattered copy of To the Lighthouse has underlinings on nearly every page. And in different coloured inks. For every time you return to a really good novel you find yourself reading a slightly different book. This time around (being the father of two small boys), I realised just how good Woolf is at describing parents and children, that fierce tenderness, the see-saw of love and hate, the pride and the sadness, the closeness and the distance.

The novel also gets funnier every time I read it.

Here is Mr Ramsay, the paterfamilias, once again, trying to convince himself that his academic career has not been a failure.

“[His] was a splendid mind. For if thought was like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q […] But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmer red in the distance. Z is only reached by one man in a generation.”

Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

Because it’s in the shops.

I won’t be writing much about A Spot of Bother here.

I talked far too much about Curious Incident. It has become like one of those favourite family stories that get told and retold and retold. I no longer remember much about writing the book, only what I have said about writing the book. Which is sad.

Besides, novels aren’t crossword puzzles to which you have accidentally forgotten to append a set of answers. If a writer knows their onions and their novel raises questions, that’s because the reader is meant to answer them (one of the more annoying questions that interviewers sometimes ask is, ‘Why does George do this?’, or, ‘Why does Christopher do that?’; well… because it seemed believable and appropriate, and if he didn’t then the rest of the plot wouldn’t happen).

In any case, if I like a writer’s work, I prefer to hear them talking about the other books they enjoy reading, their political opinions, their preferred flavour of crisps, the music they listen to… (I shall get around to all of those at some point below [1]).

Nevertheless, for those who want to know…

A potted answer to some of the questions which keep coming up:

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve written (or indeed why you wrote it) until many other people have read it. In retrospect, I realised that I was trying to write an artless novel (a number of reviewers simply thought I had forgotten to put any art in - which is a different kind of novel).

For all it’s seeming simplicity, Curious was tricksy. I wanted to write a novel with no tricks. Or to avoid the obvious ones. No literary showing off. No purple passages, no convoluted time schemes, no characters talking from beyond the grave, no thinking dogs, no mini-essays on cosmology…

I wanted to write about ordinary people living ordinary lives in an ordinary place, because they seldom feature in fiction and because it felt like fallow ground ready for harvest.

I didn’t want to write about fascinating characters having abnormal experiences in exotic locations, because it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking those things are the meat of the novel. I wanted to write about families, about love and marriage, about childhood and ageing, work, death, sex… the stuff that The Novel seems tailor-made for grappling with.

It’s an easy read and I put a good deal of work into making it an easy read, but most of that work went into making the work invisible.

Because there’s no authorial voice, it’s a little like eavesdropping on someone who lives down the road. Consequently, many readers tend to see it as a kind of mirror. For some it’s light and funny. For many, who have personal experience of some of the darker events in the book, it’s painful. Middle-aged men tend to describe it as a book about a gentlemanly middle-aged man going quietly mad on account of his self-centred wife and impossible children. Middle-aged women tend to describe it as a book about a passionate woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a self-centred man and tied down by her impossible children. Several gay men have told me that it’s a relief to read a book which contains a young gay man who is entirely ordinary. English readers, on the whole, think it’s a book about growing old. Every singe Italian interviewer has told me that it is a book about love.

Much to my amusement, even those interviewers who have clearly not liked the book a great deal, have nevertheless gone on to talk about the characters as if they are real people they know intimately.

And that, I think, is all for now (more Spot-related facts will doubtless leak out later), except to say that the rear cover of the UK hardback bore a small silhouette of a dog, despite the fact that there is only one dog in the story, and its role is extremely tangential. The US hardback cover showed a silhouette of a wedding cake. On top of the cake are silhouettes of the six main characters… and a dog

One day I will write a novel called Cat, and they will put a picture of a dog on the cover.

[1] See White Chocolate and Flapjacks.

Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

Hot tips for anyone entering the lion’s den.

1. Only Smaller

Many years pre-Curious my wife and I were walking down Broad Street in Oxford when she pointed to the window of the Blackwells Children’s Bookshop. My four Baby Dinosaur books were on display.

I was very excited. I’d never seen any of my books in a shop window before. My wife, however, who is always quick to puncture any delusions of grandeur I might be harbouring, said, ‘Just think. If you ever become famous, people will point at you in the street and say, Look, there’s Mark Haddon, only smaller’.

The truism is half-true. It’s not that television makes everyone seem larger. It’s that television makes everyone seems pretty much the same size [1].

Some years ago I wrote the script for the BBC’s adaptation of Fungus the Bogeyman, starring, among others, Fay Ripley and Martin Clunes. I visited the set on a number of occasions and was surprised to discover that she came up to his navel (I may be exaggerating slightly). When I walked round to business side of the operation and looked through the monitor however, the difference in their heights seem to have been equalised by the Magic of Television©.

For the record, Martin Clunes, who appears to the viewer as a loveable man with a face made of sausages, is in real life quite strapping and unexpectedly good looking. Fay Ripley looks exactly the same, only smaller.

2. Was that it?

Appearing on television is like falling off a building. One moment you’re thinking, ‘Shit. It’s a long way down’. The next you’re lying on the pavement.

If people being interviewed on television sometimes appear gormless or talk only in fatuous soundbites, it is not necessarily because they gormless or fatuous (though, obviously, some people are both [2]) . It is often because there is simply no time to think.

I was once flown to New York to do a high-profile breakfast television interview which cannot have lasted for more than a minute. Moments before we came on air I looked at the monitor and saw the preceding advert for Nestlé, who sponsored the show. I have spent many years boycotting Nestlé products (for reasons which you can discover here) and the slightly fazed look on my face during the interview was caused by me thinking, ‘Shit. I shouldn’t be here and now it’s too late to do anything about it’.

The only blessing is that…

3. Say Cheese.

Nobody really listens to what people say on television. Not unless they’re saying something bizarre or offensive (Gavin Esler’s wonderful interview with Mark E Smith after John Peel’s death springs to mind).

You look at someone on television and you decide, pretty much instantly, whether you like them or not. It’s like fancying someone at the supermarket checkout. It’s takes, oh, at least a second.

So… sit up straight, check your flies, don’t wear a comedy tie, smile pleasantly and suppress any Tourette’s style temptation to go down in broadcasting history.

And if you’ve just won a major book award and someone pokes a camera into your face, be polite. You’re talking to thousands of potential readers, not to the annoying person with the microphone. Scowl and you’ve just lost the sales that would have paid for the loft conversion.

4. There were Three People in this Marriage.

I don’t like hearing my answerphone messages. And I’m not keen on photos of myself. Being on television, and then accidentally seeing the result, is for me a queasy combination of both, with the added embarrassment of seeing how others have been seeing me for the past twenty-odd years.

It’s slightly better now, if only because I have learnt to iron out some of my more inappropriate on-screen behaviour.

I used to gesticulate and used my eyebrows a lot, believing this would give me ‘character’. It made me look as if I had taken amphetamines.

I used to pause between sentences (which I do in real life, much to my wife’s annoyance). I suspect that I do it to give the impression that I’m thinking deeply about what I’m going to say next. But television speeds time up (see above) and a pause between sentences can feel longer than the weather forecast. Do it twice and they cut to the item about the sheepdog that can play the piano.

I also used to slump, in an effort, I think, to make myself appear less visible. But the only way of being less visible on television is to be on the radio instead. Slumping makes you look like an overweight gnome. My mother was right. Sit up straight.

Most important of all, I have finally stopped tilting my head. It was what Princess Diana used to do. I think some part of my unconscious wanted to appear loveable and winsome, much as some part of her unconscious wanted to appear loveable and winsome. It was not a great look, even when she did it. It made me look as if I had some unresolved spinal problem.

5. The Evil Filter

There are some lovely people on television, who will help elderly ladies across the road and safely babysit your children. And there are some sociopaths. But they keep their jobs because they are able to remain calm and articulate while a producer screams into their earpiece, ‘Keep talking! Your next guest has had a heart attack in the green room! ’.

There is something deep inside the circuitry of the television camera, however, which makes it almost impossible to distinguish one kind of presenter from another when you are sitting on a sofa in Glasgow. When you walk onto a set, however, you can tell almost immediately.

Several years ago, I was asked onto BBC Breakfast TV to talk about my poetry collection, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea. Just before I sat myself down in front of the cameras I was told that the next two guests were both stuck in traffic and I might be talking for longer then I expected.

Now, whilst time usually moves at incredible speed on television (see above), when things go wrong it can slow down to an almost geological pace, much as it does when you’re involved in a road accident. And it seemed to me that talking about poetry on breakfast television for an indefinite period with two people who had not read my book was a good candidate for an on-screen road accident. I braced myself and sat on the sofa next to Dermot Murnaghan and Natasha Kaplinsky and realised, almost instantly, that they helped old ladies across the road.

To my amazement they had read the book and liked it and we chatted and time rolled on and I read a poem and it was rather like sitting in someone’s living room. And then the Minister for Releasing Dangerous Criminals into Society (or somesuch) finally arrived and I was allowed to go and felt slightly disappointed.

As for the sociopaths… you’ll have to track me down and buy me a couple of pints and sign a legal disclaimer before I part with that information.

[1] This is why, despite the considerable effort that has gone into making him seem tall, Hagrid’s height is never convincing (nor, indeed, is Madame Maxine’s).
[2] Occasionally they are the wrong person altogether.

Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

Being wholly unconnected to the previous entry, thereby establishing the pretty much random pattern of everything that comes afterwards

A while back I was asked by a newspaper to name the five books which have influenced me most. It was a tough question. Some of the books which have influenced me are those which have disappointed me, the books which showed me the artistic potholes which I wanted to avoid. It seemed churlish to list them. Moreover, I have a very poor memory (of which, more later). I recently reread Gravity’s Rainbow, which seemed to me like a work of unassailable genius when I first read it, but which had been replaced by an entirely different book in my absence. Again, I didn’t want to list books about which I could remember absolutely nothing.

I can’t recall the four other books I chose (they may have included the Selected Poems of R S Thomas and Patrick White’s Voss, which convinced me, at 14, that literature could be as interesting and complex as mathematics and the study of fossil man). But my fifth choice was The Impact of Modern Paints by Jo Crook and Tom Learner:

I picked it up in the Tate Gallery in St Ives (one of my favourite galleries, incidentally, not least because I am the father of two small boys and it has an excellent café and sits beside a fantastic beach).

The premise of the book is simple. From the 1930’s onwards, some artists began using synthetic, non-oil-based paints: nitro-cellulose paints, alkyds, PVAs and acrylics. The book examines how these new paints affected the work of ten artists (Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, David Hockney, Bridget Riley…). There are interviews with the artists and their assistants. There are preparatory drawings, close-up photographs, photographs in raking light and on infra red film… In short, you get to see how the paintings were made. And it’s a revelation.

Most of all you get to see the messiness beneath the perfection. Bridget Riley’s underdrawing and retouching. The lumpiness of the housepaint in Patrick Caulfield’s early work. The way Mrs Clark’s head is painted over the shutters in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy.

More than any other book, Modern Paints taught me how to look closely at contemporary art (David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge did the same for many earlier paintings).

And the way it influenced me…?

Artists (and writers) are often asked about the meaning and intention of their work. Their answers are almost always evasive and unrevealing. It’s the wrong question. Artist (and writers), in my experience, rarely think about meaning and intention. Mostly they are trying to solve practical problems (What is the next word? Where should this line go?). Meaning and intention are things which happen while these more concrete problems are being solved.

If you want to understand a work of art (as opposed to just saying clever things about it), you have to look at how it is put together. You have to ask specific, detailed questions about the process (when he was editing my poetry, Don Paterson asked, on several occasions, ‘What is the organising conceit of this poem?’, a phrase I have shamelessly stolen and reused many times). You have to look at draft versions, close-ups, editorial notes…

I have spent many years looking for books which do this (the Paris Review interviews comes close, albeit sporadically). Having found very few (none of which deal with more than one kind of art) I have begun to harbour a (possibly fruitless) ambition to write a book in which I interview a group of artists (a poet, a novelist, a painter, a musician, a composer…), each of them about a specific work, getting them to talk only about the process itself, and putting the interviews alongside sketches, photographs, scores, early scribbles, old drafts…

Thinking about it now, the book may have to come with a DVD so that readers could see artists and musicians working and listen to individual music tracks before they are Pro-Tooled into a seamless whole. In fact, the whole thing might work better as a DVD with a book attached. You can see the publishing problems…

Oh well, maybe when the kids have left home.

Posted by: Mark Haddon - Author, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, A Spot of Bother

Or… Hello, South Sandwich.

Some wonderful things have happened to me over the last few years.

I’ve earnt lots of money (if it all goes belly-up I will still be able to order the a la carte menu in my retirement home). I’ve met many people whose work I admire. I’ve been able to write a collection of poetry instead of Christopher Goes to University. And I’ve received a small library of letters, many of which have moved me almost to tears (and few from people who really ought to be under police surveillance).

And then there’s the publicity.

Here’s the paradox. If you sell 500 books only the local paper wants to talk to you, and you do it with gratitude. If you sell 500,000, everyone wants to talk to you and sooner or later, if you are to save your sanity, maintain a happy relationship with your family and get anything else written you have to learn the difficult art of the polite refusal. Indeed, it has often occurred to me that those writers who are infamously bad-tempered and reclusive might be wiser than we think, and are sitting at their desks writing their next novel while I’m talking to the man from Dogs Today. [1]

I must have done six hundred interviews, articles and readings post-Curious. Nearly everyone I met was kind and enthusiastic and welcoming. But after a while the glamour began to wear off.

A sizeable chunk slid off during the brief American paperback tour.

Because I have a profound fear of flying (of which, more later) my very considerate publicist had arranged that I should fly to North Carolina with British Airways (you can say what you like about BA, but I have spent a great deal of time being fed tea, biscuits and reassurance in the galley of an Airbus). There was a flaw in the plan, however. The second leg of the journey, from JFK on, was operated, on behalf of BA, by Sudden Death Travel (or something like that; I forget the actual name). There were thirty seats in the plane. I like my aircraft to feel like an expensive hotel lobby. Spacious, quiet, immobile. This was like being 30,000 feet up on a large tandem. I told the flight attendant that I’d been on three Fear of Flying courses. She said, ‘Don’t say that or you’ll get me started,’ then walked away. I took another 10mg of Valium and gripped the armrests very tightly.

Because of my fear of flying my very considerate publicist had also arranged that once in the States I would travel between cities by train. There was a flaw in this plan, too. On my second night I woke at 2:30 am and was driven into Raleigh Durham for the Washington departure at 4 a.m.. We arrived early and I assured the driver I didn’t mind waiting in the dark. The station master arrived a little later, juggling his keys and saying, wearily, ‘Four hours late’. I asked when the next train was. There was one a day. I sat on a plastic bucket seat and failed to sleep.

The train was five and a half hours late. It made the average Virgin train look like the Royal Yacht Brittania, though the Royal Yacht Brittania probably moved faster. I think the driver may have been pedaling. [2]

If you were in a sleeping compartment (which I was) you had a toilet to yourself. But it was next to the bed. Which was a little disconcerting. Whichever you were using.

I got into Washington late and missed all but one of my events. I did a reading at city centre bookshop, failed to get through to Sos, my wife, on the phone and thought how long it was till I would be at home again, and how getting there would involve risking death, for a second time, in an inferno of twisted steel and burning aviation fuel somewhere over Novia Scotia and it began to dawn on me that this was not my favourite way of spending my time.

Selling books is only one of the reasons for doing publicity. Most authors do it because it’s flattering to be asked and because it seems ungrateful to turn down requests from the people who send you cheques. Some doubtless do it because they want to put off working on their next book. And there are some, I’m sure, who relish time away from their families.

I once asked a film producer why writers did publicity and she answered, without batting an eyelid, ‘I thought it was the opportunity to have sex with strangers’. Which is not really my cup of tea, to be honest. Nor do you get many offers if you write a sensitive crossover novel (or maybe age has taken too heavy a toll). The nearest thing I ever had to an offer was two young women who came to the head the queue after a reading in New York. One of them handed me a copy of Curious Incident and said, coquettishly, ‘My friend wanted you to sign something else’.

Perhaps this is the moment in the film of The Thrilling Life of the Novelist when you add your mobile number to your signature. Or rotate your hotel key fob so that the room number is easily readable. Maybe Irvine Welsh would know.[3]

And here’s the second paradox. The most efficient publicity is done with the least effort. If you talk about your book on television for two minutes, you reach a million people. Do an interview in a national newspaper and a hundred thousand readers hear what you have to say. Visit a bookshop in Cardiff and fifty people come to listen, most of whom have already read the book you’re talking about.

Which is why I’m sitting here with a mug of tea and a bowl of Grape Nuts, and why you’re in an internet café in Oregon, or the Antarctic Survey Unit in the Sandwich Islands, or skiving work in Mumbai.

It’s why I’ll be back again tomorrow morning, and why, in between the two, I’ll have written some of my next book.

[1] I kid you not.
[2] In defence of the American transport network… the following day I took the train between Washington and New York. Because it is aimed at rich people who might otherwise be tempted to fly, the service was sleek, clean and fast.
[3] For legal reasons, I should point out that I know absolutely nothing about the personal life of Irvine Welsh (except, bizarrely, that he has run the London Marathon) and have no solid grounds for believing that he lives anything other than a life of monk-like continence.