I don't imagine there really is such a thing as a happy commuter, but once I've got my seat on the train (and preferably one of those side-on seats with all the leg room of the aisle) I suspect I get closer than most. This is really just because it's reason, excuse, justification - whatever - and time to read. When I was in America, Jenna showed me the little booklet she made years and years ago to keep track of all the books she reads. Naturally she's read far more than me as I've known more than one dyslexic who can read faster than myself. Jenna made me an identical booklet, though for me this meant trying to recall all the books I've read from memory. I think I got most of them, because I was 4000 miles away from home but when I got back and looked for ones I'd missed I didn't find more than one or two. I could only think of about 100, excluding any TV or movie novelisations, and books read as a young child, which might have doubled the number off the back of the Three Investigators alone. It does mean that, looking at the list now, I've read about a third of the books I've ever read whilst commuting this year.

And before I review most of the ones I've read since the last such post (about the final Harry Potter) I should comment about the effect on my writing. I'm pretty sure one of the main reasons I didn't get onto the Creative Writing MA at UEA was because at the interview I said I wasn't much of a reader-writer; to me it was impulse-driven, based on feeling and mining personal experience rather than a literary tradition. I later read an interview with the author who interviewed me in which she said the complete opposite, that all writing is merely a product of what we've read. I'm still not sure if I completely agree with her zealously entrenched position on this; if all writing is merely a product of books we've read then that's a reductive process, and eventually we'll get to a stage where everyone is just regurgitating what they've read. Perhaps we are. I don't know. So I'll only eat a few of my words right now, and keep the rest on the plate. Because whilst I don't think my writing is a direct response to what I've read, the increased input has made a marked difference to the way I think about it, the ideas I am now having, and even the practice of writing, which if not easier, then is certainly more obvious, more natural. So perhaps there's a middle ground between my position and that author's, where the books you've read aren't the raw material, but they are the tools. Without knowing how other people have made a chair before you, you could still work out how to build a chair yourself, but you'll have to make your own saw and hammer first.

Since finishing the last Harry Potter I thought I might give a few acknowledged classics a go. To spare you the unrewarding bother, "Wuthering Heights" is the story of a screamingly insane woman who falls in love with a loutish, thuggish boor, as told to a complete stranger by a gossipy old maid. And pretty much everyone dies. And all the women are mad. And most of them are called Catherine, which gets confusing when you're really not interested enough to pay close attention. I really cannot see the appeal of this deeply unpleasant novel. It isn't a romantic story in the slightest. Heathcliff and Catherine are entirely unsuited to each other and their brief relationship is entirely unconvincing. Heathcliff's utmost expression of love for the mad bitch is when he has her grave opened and jumps in with her years-old corpse. Utterly absurd tosh.

Actually, the rest of the 'classics' I've read recently have been of the modern variety, written in the last hundred years. This week I read "The Great Gatsby", which I found rather similar to Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" (also know as "Fiesta" for some reason), which I read a couple of weeks back. They're both about America's lost generation in the 1920s, living life to the full, or throwing it away on hedonism, depending on your point of view. They're both about a man lusting after a woman he can't have, and how this ends up destroying everything. The thing is, every generation gets labelled as the next lost generation, and I've already read these novels' clear descendents. After Bret Easton Ellis had a freshman at college being vomited over whilst being raped whilst being videotaped by another guy in "The Rules of Attraction", the frivolous dancing and polite banter of their 1920s equivalents seems rather innocent, not so much a lost generation as one entirely salvageable. So it really does just confirm what I've said before about there being a right time to read certain books, and clearly my view of "The Great Gatsby" and "The Sun Also Rises" is if not spoiled then skewed by having read Bret Easton Ellis first, but I just don't know if I'd been interested in reading them the other way round during my first year at university, when it is the right time to be reading Bret Easton Ellis novels.

The other modern classic I read in the last couple of months was "On the Road", which I very much enjoyed to begin with, but it went on for about 20,000 words too long. I gather Kerouac had already merged several of the road trips together, and perhaps he should have done that with the final escapade that took them out of America. It fizzled to a very slow halt and then finally ended about 5,000 words later. Despite this, the characters and the verve have stayed with me, and even now as I write in my journal I find a certain Kerouac cadence creeping in. Perhaps that's just the natural voice of stream of consciousness, but I don't ever remember starting to write like Molly Bloom.

I've read two Steinbecks since summer. Summer's the right time to read Steinbeck, because even if his themes aren't exactly light reading material, it tempers the transportative effect to read summery prose about California when it's grey and cold and windy and English outside the window. I was planning to finally get round to "East of Eden" this summer, but it just didn't get or stay hot enough for long enough. Anyway, the first I read was "Tortilla Flat", his first really successful novel, which was very much the same kind of thing as "Cannery Row" and "Sweet Thursday", just with a few mythic overtones that didn't really add much overall. The second, "The Pastures of Heaven", immediately leaps into pole position as one of my favourites of his, up there with "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Cannery Row". It's one of his lesser known works, and less popular, perhaps because it's a short story collection, loosely based around a single valley, connected by a few characters that float in and out of each story. Steinbeck said his intention was to write a book of short stories where each had a plot worthy of a novel, so basically you get a dozen Steinbeck novels in about 200 pages. Now that's what I call a bargain.

Other books I've read, enjoyed but don't have much to say about include "Restless" by William Boyd, "Lighthousekeeping" by Jeanette Winterson and "Gents" by Warwick Collins. "Restless" is one of Bloomsbury's biggest hits, largely because of being featured on Richard and Judy if I recall. It's about a female spy for Britain in the early days of World War Two, infiltrating the American press to insert stories of varying degrees of truthfulness that will sway the American public toward joining us, rather than signing a non-aggression pact with Hitler like most of George W Bush's Republican Party wanted to back then. So little changes much. It's pure potboiler thriller fare (including some truly dire Dan Brown-style dialogue), but only really takes off when Boyd himself realises that and gets carried away with his plot, ditching the forced attempts at literary pretension.

Jeanette Winterson's "Lighthousekeeping" is about a little girl adopted by a lighthouse keeper just before they all got automated. It's typically unique Jeanette Winterson fare, for better or worse, though one bit did stay with me, where the little girl Silver starts reading a book she loves in a bookshop after the library closes, and the shop assistant tells her she has to either buy it or stop reading it. "We live in a world of buy it or leave it," Silver notes, "Love does not signify".

I got "Gents" through the Amazon Vine program, where they give you free books in exchange for reviews. I read this short, punchy novel in two sittings, both train journeys one day. It's about three immigrants from Jamaica who get jobs as public toilet attendants in London, and who are ordered by the council to rid the place of its reputation as a haunt for cottagers. It's a very well written fable about not really wanting what you thought you wanted when you actually get it. My other thoughts are on Amazon.

I've read a few books aimed at the age group (or perhaps slightly older) I've been writing for lately. Yesterday I finished "Teacher's Dead" by the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, which was a truly excellent book very clearly inspired by the murder of Philip Lawrence. It reminded me a bit of "A Strange Case of the Dog in the Night-time" in its plot about a loner boy who sets out on his own to discover the truth, though in this case the victim is a stabbed teacher rather than a dog, and Zephaniah explodes it outward to look at broken society, not inwards to look at Aspergers. There were times when I thought the book would trip over its own right-on liberalism, especially when it was baiting the media and politicians, but Zephaniah (or his slightly less irreverent editor) always reined it in, so that when his lead character comes to see the culprits as victims too, these are not excuses, just reasons.

The other two books, despite being for teenagers, were about that old favourite theme of mine: nuclear war. Of the two, "Brother in the Land" by Robert Swindells was the better; it was like "Threads" for kids, except it didn't really spare the brutality. This edition had a new ending, a more hopeful epilogue, which must have spared a few nightmares for kids left hanging by the nastiness immediately preceding it. This one was very convincing, particularly in its untempered depiction of a return to feudal society and how, if we were all honest, if we were the guys at the top of the hill with the last of the remaining food, we'd probably want it to stay that way too.

The other book was "Children of the Dust" by Louise Lawrence, which was broken into three parts, each decades apart, but following interrelated characters. It started well, especially when the main character died a third of the way into the book, which caught me off guard in a way I like books to. But it went a bit too far in the direction of science fiction with its third story about the furry mutant descendents of radioactive Brits developing psychic powers whilst the descendents of the people who sheltered in the government bunker can't come outside because they haven't adapted to the ultraviolet light, and are destined to become extinct, dinosaurs hiding underground.

Both of these books were written in the 1980s, and you know you've read too many novels about nuclear armageddon when you start to find the dated politics that run through them like a vein to be somewhat confused. Both of these, for example, seem to argue that (from a perspective at the height of Thatcherism and Reaganism) only socialism can save us from imminent global thermonuclear annihilation, whilst at the same time firmly putting the blame for the end of civilisation in the hands of insular governments with too much power. But you can't be a socialist and a libertarian at the same time. I don't know what 1980s mullet boy would have made of it. As far as I'm aware we did manage to survive the Cold War, and it didn't take Michael Foot and Tony Benn to make it so.

When you're reading books fast in the kind of scheduled, regimented way that commute-reading entails, generally it doesn't matter how good they are, because you'll be finished in a couple of days anyway, and what else are you going to do with the time? So when you find a really good book, and you are consciously aware of the moment when you realise, it's a clear sign you're on to something special. Most of the time, this doesn't happen. I waited and waited for "The Great Gatsby" and "The Sun Also Rises" to really take off, but they both ended before they did. By contrast, the second book I read in this commuting saga, back in January, was "The Kite Runner", which immediately became one of my favourite novels. Even now, whilst the impression of Khaled Hosseini's follow up "A Thousand Splendid Suns" has started to diminish, "The Kite Runner" continues to shine over everything I've read since. When I was reading it I didn't realise how enchanted I had become until I had to stop to get off the train about fifty pages in, and realised I'd much rather stay sitting down. I wasn't acutely aware of precisely when it grabbed me, the precise paragraph, but it was quite quickly, and before it really reached its heights, too.

Of the dozens of books I've read since, even amongst the good ones there haven't really been any truly great novels, or rather any that have been as good as "The Kite Runner". In fact, only one has come close, and only one has warranted its addition to my Facebook page, and that is a book called "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky. I know the point where the book got its claws into me and I recognised it when I read it, to the extent where I read it again with more interest and paying more attention this time. It is on page 24, when a subsidiary character called Bill asks the narrator, whose letters comprise the novel, "Do you always think this much, Charlie?" To which Charlie replies, "Is that bad?" Bill says it isn't necessarily so, "it's just that sometimes people use thought to not participate in life." After that point I hung on every word, so that when I finished it a couple of days later it felt like something had died, like something was over, but I wanted more.

I did wonder if I'd left "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" too late, seeing as it is a novel about someone still in high school, in the vein of - a sort of touchy-feely 1990s version of - "The Catcher in the Rye". But reading this next to those two nuclear war books for young readers, I'm not sure if "Perks" is for teens, or just about them. I've since discussed the book with two people who did read it as teens and they both missed - or misread - integral things going on. Regardless, the book worked for me now. That's not to say now was the right time for me to read it. Part of me now wishes I'd read it when it had come out, but remembering what I was like in 1999, least of all in the sense of being a reader, I suspect I would have missed the important stuff too.

"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" is about a disaffected, detached loner whose only friend and confidante commits suicide on the second page. I know, I thought it was going to be a maudlin 'emo' fare after that too, but this isn't an aggressively cynical book like "The Catcher in the Rye", nor is Charlie an unlikeable anti-hero like Holden. In fact, despite the similarities, this book is the polar opposite of "The Catcher in the Rye". This book is about as positive and life-affirming you can get whilst being almost hypoglycaemic in its lack of saccharine sweetness. After the death of his friend, Charlie starts writing letters to somebody who doesn't know him, because there are things he just has to tell someone, about his increasing confusion about people in general, and his infatuation with a girl named Sam. This book is about the spirit of the artist without being about art; it's about getting in touch with the infinite, and embracing it rather than running in fear from the perhaps perilous enormity of the potential of life.

It couldn't really be more different from "The Kite Runner", but one thing they both have in common is a glaring flaw, an almost distracting one. In "The Kite Runner", as I noted before, the main antagonist is a gay German Nazi paedophile member of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a purely one-dimensional baddie that makes Dr Evil look like a well-drawn character. The flaw in "Perks" doesn't come until page 208, and the book ends on page 213, an epilogue really, and one I'd wish I'd never read, because it almost threatens to change my overall impression of the novel. The thing is, I can see past it, just like I can see past the one-dimensional baddie in "The Kite Runner", which means that the novel is strong enough aside from the niggles to withstand their negative gravity. It also means something else, because both of these criticisms could have been easily sorted out by a jobbing editor. It means what we're getting is the raw version, the honest version, the purest distillation of what the writer was feeling at the time he wrote it. It might be rough around the edges, but at the end of the day, it is the author's untempered truth.

So if that's made you want to read "The Perks of Being a Wallflower", just be warned about the epilogue. Don't read it. You don't need to. It doesn't add anything to the novel, but in its pat simplicity, in its attempt to explain what doesn't need explaining, to tie up loose ends and round things off nicely like a well-made porcelain vase, it might just take something away that it shouldn't.

Wednesday 31st October 2007, 10.26pm

Hello, I am indeed online, and for long enough to post an entry this time. I haven't been around on MSN much lately, to a large extent because I spend all day at work on the computer more or less, and usually by the time I get home looking at another monitor is the last thing I want to do. It's funny, that, how once compelled to do something you used to do just for kicks, it quickly loses its appeal on the latter front. And so the transformation into a technophobe continues. I usually read on my commute (I'm going to write an entry on this soon), but on those weary-eye days (usually Fridays) when I take music I've noticed a few bemused looks from cool kids with their iPods, as if my little CD player was actually a gramophone I'm lugging around. Frankly, if it doesn't have moving parts, I'm naturally suspicious nowadays, and those little white boxes that apparently hold songs are clearly powered by witchcraft.

All that aside, I've managed to squeeze rewriting "The Thieves of Pudding Lane" into weekends and the odd day off. I've got another few chapters to rewrite, but up to the point I am now it is done and dusted, rewritten, reworked, rearranged. I've deleted a couple of thousand of words and added quite a bit more in the detail and dialogue departments, so that my overall total word count stands at around 50,000 words, which was my original target that I didn't reach. I remember reading in Stephen King's writing book that you should aim to cut 10% of your first draft in the second, but that's from the guy who later went back and added several hundred more pages to "The Stand". Plus this wasn't really a first draft in the first place, given how many times I reworked and rewrote certain sections as I went along. I'm aiming to get it completely wrapped up this weekend, and then we'll see what happens next week.

Saturday 22nd September 2007, 3.18pm

I've decided to wrap up my little sideline selling second-hand books via Amazon. There's an abundance of reasons why, and other than clearing out my shelves, I can't think of a reason to keep going with it. The final decider was the postal unions announcing yet another four day strike spread across the first fortnight in October. Deliveries still haven't recovered from the last strike, in that this week we only got post through our door once, and that included a birthday card sent ten days before. Buyers on Amazon pay £2.75 postage, and for that they should expect to get their books the next day when I send it first class. Lately first class has been nearer a week. I reckon I built my success on Amazon for being so quick (I even got a five-star rave from someone who bought a book mid-afternoon last summer and got it the next morning), and I don't see the postal system getting back to being a quality service this side of complete privatisation, unfortunately.

Things have been getting slower and slower on Amazon for over a year as well. One week in July 2006 I was selling on average four books a day and made £100 from it in one accounting cycle. This slowed to a couple of books a day, then a couple of books every other day, then three or four books a week, to sometimes less - despite, as of shutting it down, having the most things for sale since I started (300+). It wasn't the expensive, rare and new quality books that were selling either, it was my grotty old paperbacks I was trying to offload for what amounted to about 50p profit. And given that lately I've been queuing up in the Poland Street post office for up to 40 minutes at lunch (though naturally, this branch is being closed because it isn't profitable enough), 50p isn't worth it when I would earn ten times as much if I stayed at my desk. Maybe the money I made from Amazon just seemed like more when I wasn't getting any from elsewhere; I've just done another two full weeks back to back and this weekend am wearing my freelance proofreader hat once again.

Which will all come in handy, given I've just changed the counter on the right.

Tuesday 4th September 2007, 6.27pm

I was supposed to be working today, but decided to schedule some off-days around the Tube strike. I left work early yesterday, at 4.30pm, and it was about as busy as it usually is an hour or so later. I did read on the BBC that some people working in Central London took five hours to get home a comparable distance because of the queues for overcrowded buses. I'm due in on Thursday, though, and apparently the Underground won't be fully operational again until Friday morning. I'm glad Gordon Brown's having a nice holiday and has use of an escorted motorcade that can ignore traffic lights, but six days of strikes in two weeks is a particularly militant union testing how far it can push the limits of a new government; don't nip it in the bud now and more will try it on. Brown should ignore his short-term poll lead and remember the long-term defeat that followed Callaghan's complacency before the unions in the 1970s. That 7-8% who switched to Cameron as soon as he became leader, then flip-flopped back to Brown a couple of months ago, despite nothing having really changed on either occasion, could easily go back the other way again if strike fever spreads beyond the Tube, the prisons, the postal service. It's almost scary to think the next general election will be decided by fickle, superficial, political illiterates, but then I'm generally finding it harder and harder to care who wins any elections aside from Barack Obama.

Apart from commuting woes, I have now been offered a permanent editorial assistant position at A&C Black, though it will continue to be one day a week (in addition to the three or four days a week I do in the Rights department across the road). Instead of being a temp job, coming in on a regular basis as and when required, it will be every Wednesday, and I will have an actual contract, initially for three months, but probably for longer - and best of all a payrise. I should also be getting some more freelance proof-reading work from them on the side.

Surprisingly enough, Dell actually came through in the end and my new laptop arrived before the weekend. I don't know if I could say it was worth the wait, but it's certainly nice to have a computer that doesn't sound like a small jetplane powering up when you switch it on. I think I got my money's worth out of the old one, given that it is six years old. Considering that it spent a good portion of my first year at university switched on (not discovering the standby option until my second year), had a glass of water spilt over it in 2003 and has slid out of my grasp onto surfaces varying distances away from my hands several times... I think it's done rather well. I'm still waiting for the new one to break down, as it invariably will shortly. I had only had the previous one a few days before the screen went completely blank and I was on the phone to the company I ordered it from to sort it out.

Wednesday 29th August 2007, 8.12pm

Been quite busy again lately. Even though today's nominally a day off, I've been spending it doing another freelance proof-reading job. I've also agreed to do another week covering my immediate supervisor next month, and this time I didn't say yes just because I was unable to say no. I'm quite looking forward to it this time, and not just because of the money. Though there's a three-day London Underground strike scheduled for that week, and I imagine what vestiges of sympathy I still have for people of that persuasion will be soundly quashed if I have to get up at 5am just to get to work at the normal time.

As of writing, I am actually expecting my new laptop to arrive within the next twenty-four hours. This is despite cancelling it the other day. After I enquired the first time and got the new estimated delivery date and initially tried to cancel, I was advised not to because it had just gone into production. A few days later I got another e-mail from Dell's customer disservice department somewhere in India, warning me that there was another ominous glass shortage (it must be the new oil) and that I'd have to wait another six weeks. Then I cancelled it once and for all, but the acknowledgement e-mail I got told me my order was in fact complete and would be dispatched in the next 2-3 working days. And so with sceptical reservations I agreed not to cancel - and today I got a phone call from the courier company asking when would be a suitable time to deliver. The manufacturer I used is called Dell, and the only recommendation I can make is that you remember all this should you be thinking about buying a new computer from them.

Last week I finished reading the Harry Potter books. I read the first one after seeing the first movie, the second one after seeing the second movie, and thought them both dull, unoriginal, blandly written and wholly over-rated, even for children's books (Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" books have none of these faults, after all). For some reason I later read the third book, and it wasn't quite as bad, but still nothing special. The fourth one was bloated, self-indulgent, poorly edited (i.e. not), but hinted at some potential in the whole concept. Not enough potential, however, for me to bother with the fifth one, so that when I picked it up for the first time a few weeks back, it had been over four years since I last read a Harry Potter book.

And the fifth one was a mess, quite gloriously so. I think the reason I preferred the much maligned third Spiderman movie over its predecessors is because it threw propriety to the wind, just followed its ideas, no matter how chaotic and messy it got. Aiming for the stars and falling short, rather than aiming for Milton Keynes and being satisfied with a Little Chef on the M1. And I think that's what JK Rowling did with the fifth Harry Potter book as well. Unlike the fourth one, where she dwindled on entire subplots that the film adaptation was able to cut out without an iota of impact, the fifth one had focus, even though it dropped the clunking plot structure of the previous books (i.e. if something happens in chapter three that isn't explained straight away, you can guarantee it will be crucial to the ending, etc).

A big problem I had (still have) with the first four books is that Harry Potter doesn't have to learn anything to succeed at the end, doesn't have to develop as a character. He wins through by luck alone, by some flying deus ex machina that is explained at a later date in an expositional epilogue, or is conveniently rescued by someone else just in the nick of time. This is most typified by the second book, which ends with Harry facing a giant snake version of Voldamort, and just when things are at their most perilous... a bird comes along carrying a hat and in the hat Harry Potter finds a sword. Well, that was lucky, just what you need to happen, just when you need it to. Has he learnt anything? Has he had to develop to be able to succeed? Has he had to overcome any obstacles or personal failings to win? No. He was just a flat, boring character.

So the fifth book adhered itself to me right from the off precisely because it addressed this issue. Harry Potter became the reluctant hero, struggling beneath expectations, telling everyone who was now looking to him to save them from Voldamort that he had always survived through luck alone. The fifth book (or perhaps even the ending of the fourth) also introduced real threat into the proceedings. Without any threat or risk, there's no drama or suspense, and I can't imagine any but the most illiterate child thinking there was any danger of any of the main characters being killed in the first four books. And I imagine, had the books not been as successful, Rowling would have been browbeaten into abandoning such plans by an editor more keen on creating a sustainable "Worst Witch"-style franchise; nice, unchallenging, tepid, shit.

I read the sixth and seventh books back to back with the fifth, and more than approve of where she took it. Unlike Stephen King, who got drunk on his status and started writing any old rubbish about kids fornicating in sewers to defeat giant spiders, after the fourth book Rowling developed a sense of self-discipline divorced from external editorial command. It would have been easy for her to write any old rubbish and use the "Don't you know who I am?" line on anyone who suggested there was room for improvement. Instead, her status enabled her to break the rules. But it was only really in the final book that she seemed to realise she was invulnerable enough to have Ron say "effing" instead of any number of flipping Blyton-esque alternatives, and indeed, have his mother call one of Voldamort's sidekicks a bitch. All that was missing to make these teenagers more convincing was Draco Malfoy being caught dealing pot in the Slytherin common room and Seamus using the Room of Requirement as a prophylactic dispensary for midnight trysts with Cho Chang.

I knew from his first appearance in the first movie that Snape was far too obviously villainous to be a baddie, but I like where Rowling took him as of the last couple of books, turning him into a tragic hero, all his actions borne of unrequited love for Harry's mother. The chapter that consists of Harry watching a rapid cycle of flashbacks of Snape's life was probably the best five thousand words Rowling wrote in some two thirds of a million that made up this saga.

Even though I'll stand by my criticisms of the first few books, I can't really complain that they're so popular when we're told kids are stupid and would rather play video games and that the novel form is dying - not when ten million kids queue up at midnight to buy something as simple and traditional as a book. My only real complaint about the last book in the series is that the loose ends in the epilogue set a couple of decades later are tied up too swiftly. If Tolkien could go on for another book's length about where his characters ended up after the plot of "The Lord of the Rings" actually ended, then I think Rowling could have milked it for a bit more than half a dozen pages. Though I never was able to stop thinking of Ginny as the little first year in the second book, so the ending came across a little Chris Langham.

I've been reading a lot this year, mainly because I have an hour's commute twice a day, and from being the once proud wielder of a Psion personal organiser I have become a neo-luddite technophobe who doesn't even have an iPod. I've read a couple of Steinbecks ("The Moon is Down" and "Tortilla Flat") this summer, both the Jurassic Park books, some literary novels that left me with a varying degree of warmth (i.e. cold) - "Crabwalk" by Gunter Grass, "After This" by Alice McDermott, "Tales of the City" by Armistead Maupin being the better ones.

There are a few novels that have left on me what I suppose they mean by an indelible impression. Recently I read "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter Miller, which is the blackest, most apocalyptic of satires, set in the future about an order of monks who establish themselves around scraps of paper (such as a shopping list) they find in an ancient nuclear fall-out shelter. I had a similar idea for a story about three or four years ago after a particularly memorable alcoholic nightmare, and though I would have taken it in a different direction entirely, I don't know if I could now write it, knowing that it wouldn't be as good as this.

And then we come to Khaled Hosseini, my greatest of discoveries this year (thanks to working for his publisher, serendipitously, else I might never have found him), who seems set for a Nobel Prize in a few decades if he doesn't disappear off the map (or unless the Middle East does instead, which is always a possibility). He's only written two books so far, and the second, "A Thousand Splendid Suns", has only just recently come out. Whilst Hosseini is an American writer through and through, a part of him is still an Afghan at heart, and this makes him the perfect person to connect the Middle East to the Middle West.

In my Facebook Visual Bookshelf review of "The Kite Runner" I called it the best book written so far this century, though perhaps I'm not best placed to make such superlative judgements, given that I haven't actually read many books published this side of 1999. In amongst a forest of former trees offering a very considered view of a wealthy author's ideas about the world as seen from the shed in the garden of his or her's southern France property, "The Kite Runner" is about a subject I can actually care about. I really don't want to read yet another book by Ian McEwan about another middle class couple going on honeymoon, with some constipated plotline that could only come from the mind of an author who doesn't have any real concerns.

"A Thousand Splendid Suns" is about the two wives of a Taliban-supporting Kabul businessman, one of them being introduced to the family as a replacement in his affections for the other. The novel focuses on their relationship, being a generation apart, and like Hosseini's first novel, "The Kite Runner", it rides on the back of punchy dramatic plot concepts, like Betrayal, Redemption and the never-failing Self-sacrifice. It is, for all intents and purposes, better written (better structured) than "The Kite Runner", but at the end of the day, it just isn't "The Kite Runner", and indeed, loathe though I am to criticise it in such a way, the final third made me think of "Brookside".

"The Kite Runner" is an imperfect novel. It sometimes requires a suspension of disbelief (the main antagonist being a German Nazi homosexual paedophile member of the Taliban - Darth Vader is quaking...) and sometimes goes a twist too far. But like a lumpy bit of parmesan, you wouldn't want them to change the recipe just to improve the texture. In its bumps are its raw, undistilled honesty, a writer going with his gut rather than his grey matter. It's the story of two boys growing up in an Afghanistan nobody of our generation would remember, before the communist coup and Soviet invasion, an egalitarian society that was a popular tourist destination for Western hippies. When one of the boys is attacked and the other keeps quiet about it, they grow apart, and the story follows the life of one of them as he flees to America, away from the conquering Russian army. However, he hasn't escaped the guilt of his betrayal, and years later, as an adult, the need for absolution takes him back to Afghanistan at the height of the Taliban's rule, in search of his old friend.

I imagine that in decades to come, after the Middle East quietens down again, "The Kite Runner" will go on to become this century's "To Kill a Mockingbird". Depoliticising a politicised situation, and wrapping up its story in the tale of two kids, it disavows any pretensions to having solutions; it operates on the level of sheer undeniable injustice, the central tenet of every great story. Like "To Kill a Mockingbird", it has little precious to say about human nature, but it also has a little glimmer of hope in its redemptive plotline. My main concern is that, like "To Kill a Mockingbird", if it is foisted onto kids in schools between Shakespeare and U A Fanthorpe, they will naturally be immune to its power, and 29 out of 30 will sail by oblivious to the book's presence. Of course, that might be worth it just for the one that doesn't.

Thursday 16th August 2007, 8.59pm

What the world really needs are anti-commercials. For every minute in which companies' marketing machines can churn out gushing positivity about their products, there should be a minute for the truth, for the people who hand over their account number in good faith, to be anally pummelled over and over again in return.

Yes, I'm talking about a certain computer company whose name rhymes with Hell and Smell, who were due to deliver my lovely new laptop in a few days. I thought it was probably about time I made sure it was going to show up - and of course it isn't. I got through to their customer service department in India, working out a bit too late why they had asked if I was a business or public user. I naturally picked the wrong road at that fork.

But at least I now know that were I not intending to cancel the order and go round to PC World like I should have just done in the first place, then I could expect it to arrive in six weeks time. Possibly. And that, apparently, the reason there's been a delay (which I wonder they would have bothered telling me about had I not contacted them) is because of a "glass shortage". Yes, there's a glass shortage on, don't you know? Be careful with those windows; they're going to be rationed shortly.

Anyway, consider this my anti-commercial.

Friday 10th August 2007, 8.31pm

It's been a busy few weeks since I last wrote. From being a part-time temp with at least one day off a week I seem to have been properly assimilated, so that I even got my own company e-mail address this week. Needless to say, the first person I e-mailed was myself on AOL, which probably elicited more of a giggly pleasure than it ought to have done. In addition to my work in-house, I have also started doing proof-reading on a freelance basis, which at £15 an hour is the most I've been paid for doing anything. And, let's be honest, as far as making money being a necessity, is there any job I'm better suited to doing than being professionally anal? Not bad for someone who didn't get his head round the whole it's/its thing until his gap year (after getting an A-grade English A-Level).

I ordered a new laptop almost three weeks ago now, and am swiftly coming round to the idea that it was just laziness preventing me walking to PC World at the airport. Or even Staples next door to them, who also do computers now. Instead, I ordered one online from Dell, and have been checking their website every day (i.e. three times a day) since, and apparently it's still in pre-production, a week from their estimated delivery date. Somehow I don't think they'll keep to it. Funny, though, they only took twelve hours to take the cash out of my account...

Sunday 22nd July 2007, 6.08pm

This was quite an exciting week, given that I was doing holiday cover for my immediate supervisor, and it was the week of the biggest event in the books world (possibly) ever, and we (if I can now be permitted to use that pronoun) were the ones publishing said book. I didn't get to do the gig at the Natural History Museum on Friday night, unfortunately, though I'm sure I'll hear all about it tomorrow from those that did.

Monday and Tuesday were a stressful nightmare. I was right. I was out of my depth and didn't have a clue what I was doing. But around midmorning on Wednesday things started to settle down and I actually started enjoying it. My immediate supervisor's job is to field the calls, the letters and the e-mails from people wishing to buy rights to our books, be they a newspaper after a serial, an author after an extract or even film studios after movie rights. I sold a few permissions in the course of the week, and it was a bit like selling something over Amazon, except the money's much bigger, and (alas) I don't get a cut of it (besides my wages). There's often haggling involved, which is an artform in itself.

I didn't work quite as long as I feared I might end up doing, though I did go over forty hours, so the longest hours I've ever worked. But it didn't feel as long, given that there was always something to do, often more interesting than the last. It's a job of lots of little tasks, spread over several days, rather than single tasks that drag on and on.

Plus I really needed the extra money, given that my laptop has more or less officially expired. I got almost six years use out of it, easily over a million words typed on it, and it survived having a drink spilt on the keyboard, but the DVD/CD drive has now given up, joining the floppy drive that has been temperamental for years. I've been looking for another laptop (really not having room for a desktop), and I've been finding some basic setups for as little as £300. They've certainly come down in price. When I bought this one (top of the line as it was) back in September 2001, it cost only a penny short of £1000.

Sunday 15th July 2007, 9.15pm

Today, as anticipated, I finished "The Thieves of Pudding Lane". It came to a few paragraphs shy of 43,000 words, almost in the middle of the 40,000-50,000 ballpark for children's stories of this sort. The last word was "end". The penultimate word was "the". It didn't really need either of them, but after the slog that was this story for the better part of a year, I felt like writing them. It is ten days from the first anniversary of when I wrote the very first word (which was "Samuel"). All in, the actual writing took about three and a half months, but I mustn't disregard the time spent not writing it, because I wasn't writing it for a reason (and not just London, Jenna or Bloomsbury).

Anyway, I wanted to get it out of the way this weekend because for the next two weeks I am doing holiday cover for my immediate supervisor, who is herself assistant to the head of the department. See, there's a bit on this site I wrote about three or four years ago in which I said my problem used to be saying "No" all the time. Now my problem is not being able to say "No". I fear I am going to be completely out of my depth. I'm going to be working the longest hours I've ever done, at least forty, but hopefully not nearer fifty. Though that depends how out of my depth I really am. So I wanted to finish the story today, not just so that it's out of the way, but also so that I go in tomorrow on a high.

I'm going to let the story stew in the drawer (or computer) for the next fortnight, then, and then go back to it. I've been rewriting, sometimes substantially, as I've gone along, but there's at several bits I've already targetted like a Canadian with a club faced by a baby seal. And after that, who knows. We'll see.

Sunday 1st July 2007, 10.28pm

I don't really have much else to write an entry about, so I'm going to write about "Doctor Who". (I am deep into writing the final chapter of "The Thieves of Pudding Lane", but am saving what I have to say about that until all is done, which should be two weeks today if all goes well). This third season of the new show was a bit hit-and-miss in places, largely because it would naturally have a hard job meeting expectations after last year's triumphs, and because just like last year the cracking episodes this year made the weaker ones seem all the more weaker by comparison. The ones that I found largely forgettable (i.e. that I couldn't think of much to say about) were "The Shakespeare Code", "The Lazarus Project" and the especially disappoing real-time episode, "42", which were basically just chase-arounds with catchphrase-of-the-week monsters.

The highlight of the series was definitely "Blink", this year's left-field episode, which by the description alone sounded like it was going to be in the mould of that other Doctor-lite (and dreadful) Peter Kay episode last year. Except this one was written by the same person who wrote last year's classy "The Girl in the Fireplace", and just like that episode, it had a great, simple story, an original idea and was perfectly executed (particularly the "Signs"-like bit in the cellar). Similarly, "The Family of Blood" two-parter, which was like old-school "Doctor Who", a historical story that goes back to the series' horror-themed roots.

"Utopia" also caught me unawares, in that it initially seemed like a typical filler episode, but then in the final fifteen minutes turned into quite a different show altogether. It was a perfect link between "The Family of Blood" and the season finale, even though they were entirely unconnected. In fact, I dare say "Utopia" was better than what came after it. I don't doubt that John Simm is a talented actor, but back in his 1970s heydey, it usually took four episodes before the Master would get into hysterial Dr Evil territory. There was just no arc present here. The Master was simply kerr-aazy from the start, not evil. And very, very camp. The very last episode was an improvement, in that the Master got to be mean and criminal rather than silly, but still, overall not as great as last year's finale (though a marked improvement on the first year's story about three Daleks and a CGI army taking over Planet Earth via Big Brother). And at least they didn't resort to bringing back the Daleks for the finale again.

The Dalek two-parter this year was probably their best outing since the show came back, in that it actually had a plot, the Daleks had a goal, and it wasn't just take over Earth, well, merely for the sake of good TV. And there was precious little of them whizzing around in CGI, flying and zapping people willy nilly.

That leaves two earlier episodes unaccounted for. The opening episode was probably the best of the opening episodes of the three seasons so far, but then, they're generally pretty average fare. The character of Martha never really took off in the way Billie Piper's Rose did. Pretty much the only dimension to the role was fancying the Doctor, but her love being unrequited, and they introduced that straight away, and then just repeated it over and over in subsequent episodes. So it wasn't any great loss to have her grow some metaphorical balls and ditch the Doctor. Just as long as she isn't one of those mind-gaming bitches just trying to make him pine and beg her to come back to him...

I liked "Gridlock" as filler episodes go, and given the killer twist about who the Face of Boe is at the very end of the last episode, I want to go back and look for any clues. In fact, I want to do that with the other Face of Boe episodes in previous years too. So I might do that. But it'll have to wait until I finish writing this story (I originally wrote "until I finish burning London down", but I thought that was tempting fate just a bit given this weekend).

Tuesday 12th June 2007, 9.43pm

This is going to be a writerly post, but it's been about eight months since once of those. By way of a confession, I've been lying to people for that period. When people asked about my writing, I told them I was writing a children's novel called "The Thieves of Pudding Lane". Which was only really a half-truth at best. Because the whole truth was that I had been writing it, but then stopped. Eight months ago. I haven't written so much as a paragraph since the second week of October 2006. Well, until today, that is.

It'd be wrong to assume Jenna's arrival in the first week of October 2006 was the cause behind this writing-less void, the longest single period of non-writing since I was in high school, when I thought a lot about writing, and even more about being read, but did precious little of it. The truth is, I burned out. I started the thing in late July, and was aiming to get it finished before Jenna arrived two and a half months later. But I spent the last five weeks before she came, and then one after she arrived, on just one chapter. I rewrote it twice, until the third version was 4500 words long (the average being 3000 words long). The point is I could have finished it, in some shape of form, but I didn't. I didn't just lose the will to write it, I lost the will to write full-stop, and that's why I call it a burn-out.

It wasn't what they call writer's block. You have to force yourself to write through writer's block, and it's usually as simple as telling yourself you just have to write one word every day - after all, it's impossible to write just ONE word; you then have to follow it with others. It was a burn-out because I still thought the story was a great idea, I still thought what I had already written was good, and I knew exactly where the story would go next. It's just that the bulb went out, and didn't come on again.

For a few weeks, the very idea of throwing myself back into the writing of it provoked a physical reaction I probably could have got medicated for. But after a while, the memory of those six weeks slogging through that one chapter faded, and I knew that one day I would feel the urge, the need to finish it. I admit Jenna being around provided me with an excuse to do something more productive in the short-term, though it was after Christmas, when I started at Bloomsbury, that those excuses started becoming apparent as excuses, not really reasons.

So anyway, Jenna left two months ago, and after I settled into my new job, and finished the second phase of research, there really was no excuse at all. It took a while to get into the right mindset to do it, and indeed, the creative impulse grew so strong it burst out in the wrong direction like a hernia, and I've now taken up oil painting, but more on that at a later date.

Today was my only day off this week. My job at Bloomsbury is usually three days a week, but I've also taken up a second temporary job as an editorial assistant over at partner company A&C Black, which is another day a week (tomorrow, actually). But today I had nothing to do, and it was really an impulse that gestated on Sunday, that today I would set about finishing "The Thieves of Pudding Lane".

I didn't finish it, but I didn't expect to, seeing as there were two and a half (i.e. epilogue) chapters left to write. But now there is only one and a half left to write. Today I wrote 3100 words. I try not to do that whole "how many words did I write today" thing, because it would only matter if they were good words. At my word per minute rate I could probably type twenty thousand words in a day. That's how pointless word-o-meters are. However, I'm citing my wordcount today because of what it represents, as my most successful day working on "The Thieves of Pudding Lane" so far, and that is how my complete break from writing has regenerated my creativity. It even feels different now.

There's one main chapter left to write, and it's going to be the longest, and everything has to come together, characters and plots resolved, and it's already pretty much written itself out of its in-bred sense of necessities. I don't know if I'll do it this weekend, given that I really can't write when there's noisy children running rampant outside my window (and from one noisy child plus dogs we have gone up to two noisy children with the hyperactive energy of dogs). But it's coming. It's coming now and it can't be stopped.

Thursday 10th May 2007, 8.51pm

I often feel out of kilter with mainstream popular opinion, and today was little exception, reading some of the tributes to Tony Blair, as if he'd died, not simply jumped before he was pushed. As far as I'm concerned, his achievement amounts to turning a liberal socialist party into an authoritarian conservative one, and from there turning it very much into the Party from "Nineteen Eighty Four".

With 25% of the world's CCTV cameras watching 1% of the world's population. With the unelected, unaccountable civil service running the country. With giant databases planned to hold every bit of sensitive information you might expect to consider your own private business. With bugging equipment monitoring what people have in their bins. With secret informers inside the premises of private companies monitoring what people choose to do there. With Britain becoming Air Strip One of America. And of course, with wars for peace.

I don't challenge the idea that we are living through a period of unprecedented stability and growth. Likewise I don't challenge the idea that this was possible because of the uncomfortable economic reforms of the 1980s that Tony Blair and his compatriots bitterly opposed throughout.

For me, there are two news stories that come to mind as I write which define the Blair era. One of them happened today, in fact, when it was revealed the identity card scheme will cost more than half a billion extra to the previous bloated budgeted amount. This, when the Treasury can't provide breast cancer drugs due to lack of funds. Why was this information released today? Surely only a cynic would suggest the timing had anything to do with the media being distracted by the resignation of the most powerful man in the country. That'd be like suggesting the trial of Saddam Hussein was scheduled to coincide with the US midterms.

And then there is the one that really typifies what Tony Blair has done to the Labour Party, to politics and to the country in general. It was during the 2005 election campaign, when Tony Blair visited a secondary school and got booed by the students. Except by the time the Downing Street Press Office had dealt with the story, the kids weren't booing him, they were doing this thing called 'booming', apparently, not going "Boooooo!" but going "Boooooommmm!" And far from this being an expression of discontent, it's what all the cool kids do these days to show their approval.

Yes, and 2 + 2 = 5. Good riddance.

And in more important news: the giant toads have returned for another summer haunting the area outside our back door.

Monday 7th May 2007, 9.13am

Well, it's a bank holiday, and I haven't posted anything in a few weeks. There's not much to write about. I settled in at my job with Bloomsbury quite quickly. And the irregular hours/days are leaving me with a certain amount of unstructured time that really gives me no excuse not to finish "The Thieves of Pudding Lane" once and for all now. I'm doing the last of the research before going back to it, which is probably how I should have approached it to begin with, given that of the 100+ pages of notes I collected before even starting, everything I've actually used could probably fit on about seven sides.

Amazon has picked up a bit since my last post. I scoured a few charity shops in Rochford last weekend and picked up over twenty new-quality books, about a third of which have sold already, doubling my original outlay for the lot. I guess it's just that now I have a proper income as well, making £30 a week off Amazon doesn't seem like very much any more. Unlike when it's all you've got coming in. Sales are generally down, though; it's not just my imagination. I have 300 items for sale at the moment, more than ever before, and it's a case of a trickle, or a few sporadic bursts. Still, summer is coming, and that's when things always sell best. So how things go in June and July will reveal the true extent of any decline.

I did vote last week, or rather, for the elections last week; the postal ballot came almost a month back. And it was numbered once again (any similarities to the Iranian voting system whereby they can check who voted what and then bury you in a pit purely coincidental). I was thinking of voting Green. I mean, nobody can fault you for voting Green. It's a bit like voting for Father Christmas. But then I thought the Conservative resurgence might unseat our incumbent LibDem, and a protest vote against Ming Campbell would be counter-productive. I suspect he's got the message that his position is untenable from the nationwide wipe-out, anyway. So our LibDem councillor held onto her seat (with only a 150 vote majority, which is how much the Green got in total).

Quite scarily, the BNP beat the LibDems into fourth or fifth position in several wards in Southend, and even came second (though distantly) to the Tories in a couple of others. Hopefully (and likely) this is more of a comment on dissatisfaction with the main parties than a mounting trend. I mean, the BNP is becoming the party of the protest vote. Nobody bats an eyelid if a Green gets a seat on a council anywhere in the UK, but if a BNP candidate gets one, it's headline news. So really the media just feeds the idea that a vote for the BNP will get noticed, which is probably what their voters really want, rather than besuited skinheads goose-stepping around town halls.

On another note, I'm glad the LibDems didn't sell out to the SNP (like admittedly they had been doing with Labour) and agree to prop up a nationalist administration in Scotland. There may be a dick in front, but at least there are some balls behind.

I've also finally succumbed and joined Facebook, though I think I'd done that by the time I last posted. Anyone who hasn't added me already can search for me by name. Though be sure to get the right Jonathan Eyers. I knew there were at least two of us in the UK. I got e-mailed by one out of the blue a couple of years back; it got rather spooky when he told me his dad was called Brian Eyers as well (not the same one, but still). I guess the other one must be him. I resisted the lure of Facebook for so long because it is like a cliquey version of MySpace (just without the annoying customisable graphics and music), but I must admit getting itchy fingers and typing the URL in at work to see who's up to what right now.

Hmm, nobody seems to be awake at the moment.

Saturday 21st April 2007, 11.53am

Stormy seas over at Amazon at the moment. I've noticed a serious dip in the number of sales this past month, going down from an average of two or three books a day to the last ten days' all-time worst dry period of only one paltry sale. This despite the fact that I have more things up for sale now than at any other time. I've sold some absolute rubbish that I thought nobody would ever buy, but now, not a bite. And I've got some good books up for sale, and at not much more than I paid for them.

I decided it would be worth checking out how other people with copious quantities of items for sale were doing, to see if they were doing any better. So I headed over to the seller discussion forums at the Amazon site, and it turns out, I'm not alone in the slightest. A lot of them are putting it down to Easter, it being a holiday, and a religious holiday, and things always being slow, and being slow to pick up after it. Except this isn't America. People don't stop using the Internet on Easter Sunday. I sold something on Boxing Day last year. Plus it's been two weeks since Easter now. People aren't still on holiday.

I reckon the real cause of the slump probably has more to do with what happened a week before Easter. I've noticed from the addresses that a notable majority of the items I sell are going to people living in less desirable postcodes of big cities like London, Manchester and Birmingham. People perhaps of limited means to whom £8 is a lot to pay for a brand new copy of a book, but £3 is a bargain for a secondhand copy in new condition (after all, who of us with money to burn would go for the latter when we could have the former?). Unfortunately, these are also the people who have had their income tax rate doubled in the latest Budget.

Isn't this how a recession starts? I mean, if people have less expendable income, they spend less on non-essential consumables. If less people are buying non-essential consumables, less people are required to be employed in the manufacture, transport, selling, repair, whatever of these consumables. So then you have even more people with less expendable income. And the vicious circle starts over.

Perhaps I'm just being bleak and pessimistic. Perhaps it's a complete fluke that people have suddenly stopped buying books secondhand, and a coincidence it happened shortly after the Budget. Perhaps by doubling the income tax rate for the poorest in society, Gordon Brown has made everyone better off, and they've all suddenly started buying brand spanking new copies of everything!

Or maybe they're just not buying it at all, because when you're counting pennies instead of pounds, and you've just been told from next year you've got to double your subscription to Iraq War R Us, food is a slightly higher priority than books.

Friday 13th April 2007, 7.22pm

So, where are we? I probably should have covered this yesterday, it being my first post in a month. And now we have two in as many days. I did pay for another two year lease on this place, so this is me getting my money's worth. Jenna's visa ran out the weekend before last, so she has gone home for the time being. This week I started my new job at Bloomsbury, and no, I can't tell you how the final Harry Potter book ends because no, I haven't seen it. It's so much of a secret, in fact, I get the impression it's even a secret who knows the secret. On a related note: click here or click there. Go on, you know the only way to avoid the hype is to pre-order it.

Thursday 12th April 2007, 10.13pm

Vonnegut is dead. So it goes.

He was actually on the syllabus for one of my third year units, on Postwar Fiction. "What's this?" I thought. "Science fiction on a university course? Really?" Except, of course, they were adamant "Slaughterhouse Five" wasn't science fiction. Yes, Vonnegut had dabbled in the Dark Arts before and since, but "Slaughterhouse Five" wasn't science fiction, no sir, not if you read it properly. As if Vonnegut was sort of like Iain (M) Banks, indulging his whimsical side between writing serious literature.

And then, after I'd read it, I kind of saw where they were coming from. You can read "Slaughterhouse Five" either way. On the one hand, it's a perfect tragedy about a guy who makes up a complicated fantasy about a pre-determined universe that absolves him and his generation of any culpability for the horrors of World War Two. But on the other hand, read it as science fiction, take everything at face value, that Tralfamadore isn't just a delusion, and it all opens up, not just as a novel, but as a piece of existentialist philosophy.

In fact, the only slight downside to reading "Slaughterhouse Five" is that it will kill the genre of science fiction and fantasy for anyone who reads it. After you've read a book like that, you can't go back to reading about elves and dwarves, or people with special powers, or fantastic science. All of a sudden, you see those people who get precious about such books for what they really are. Their defence of science fiction and fantasy as a testament to superior imagination suddenly rings entirely hollow.

Insular science fiction and fantasy that doesn't open up the universe is the prose equivalent of a nonsense poem. Far from being evidence of imagination, it is the clearest proof that the author can't think of anything worth saying about the real world, that he lacks any real imagination, so settles to make things up instead. It's easier to find a word to rhyme with "dreamt" when you can just make up the word "yemt".

This isn't a one-sided snobbery, of course. I level the same charges at the likes of Ian McEwan and other literary darlings, the likes of whom teach on Creative Writing MAs, who, for want of a better put-down, are far too middle class in their writing to have anything worth reading. At the heart of every great story must be an injustice, something that is wrong. But the closest experience these writers (and their kin in the comfort zones of science fiction and fantasy) come to injustice is when their accountants fail to get them into the 30% tax band. They can try to be empathetic as much as they want, but at the end of the day, they're just making up words as well.

Meanwhile you have writers like Kurt Vonnegut. Or did. He's effectively been retired for the better part of a decade (barring his non-fiction book, published by Bloomsbury, so do buy, it pays my wages), but now we have to face a future where there will never even be the chance of getting another Vonnegut novel. I've wondered what it'll be like when I read the last Steinbeck novel, whether I will understand the man, his world, whether things will come together. Or whether it'll just be a case of there not being another Steinbeck novel to read. I think I can guess what Vonnegut would say.

Poo tee weet.

Saturday 10th March 2007, 12.15pm

Today is my website's fourth birthday. I know because Easily kept sending me reminders my subscription was running out. I've now renewed it for another two years, which should be enough time to decide whether I want to continue with it or not. I don't have anything special to celebrate the site's anniversary, not even a change of font, let alone an overhaul.

But I thought a post would be appropriate, especially given that I haven't made one in a couple of months. My two-week internship at Bloomsbury has morphed into several months, some of which I've spent at Bloomsbury's sister company A&C Black across the street, and has now been extended for another fortnight. I also have an interview for a more permanent position as an editorial assistant on Tuesday. And I'm going to be doing a course on copy-editing soon.

Obviously I can't write too much about what goes on behind closed doors (you have to sign a secrecy agreement about a certain big Bloomsbury title coming out in the summer - described in legal terms as 'The Book' - before you start), but the lessons I've learnt as a would-be writer have made up for the early morning commute. Such as when it says in the Writers' and Artists' Handbook a publisher wants three chapters, that's what they mean, not the whole thing, nor just a letter promising them a blockbuster before it's even written. And when they say they want a synopsis, that's also what they mean, not a hackjob attempt at writing a book blurb, teasing with you 'exciting' details but not actually telling you what happens in the story.

Whilst I knew publishers received a lot of unsolicited material, I suppose I was naive not to realise what, in terms of shelf-space taken up, that meant. And hours. I don't envy anyone who has to wade through it all, especially given the general trend that if it hasn't come from an agent, then there's probably a very good reason why not. I'm still two chapters and a tidy-up rewrite away from finishing "The Thieves of Pudding Lane", but once that's done, it'll either have to find an agent, or I'll have to find a better story.

Jenna is here for another month. Actually, she's not here right now, she's in Venice with Steph and Meg for a long weekend, which is how I suddenly and uncoincidentally had time to write all this!

Friday 12th January 2007, 12.17pm

Well, here we are in 2007. I thought it was about time I made a post, and about time I filled you in about what Jenna and I are up to. That said, I got a subscription renewal reminder from Easily about this domain, and haven't yet decided whether to do it for another two years. I've got until March to decide.

Anyway, you know what they say about waiting for buses, but after looking for a proper job for a couple of years, two have now come along at once. On Monday I will be starting an internship at Bloomsbury, who are the publishing company savvy enough to realise the Harry Potter books were going to be solid gold. They've also published books by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Jeffrey Eugenides, Will Self, David Blunkett, Gary Barlow and, er, Mr Bean.

Jenna started working at Bloomsbury through the same programme and now they have her employed on a temporary contract, working on a long-term project. Even though they could probably get her visa extended past April, she doesn't think she wants to do that. Part of me is glad, and she doesn't mind me saying this, because if anything, these past few months living here have quietly and steadily demythologised the romantic view of England that she used to have, and this is a good thing.

It's not just the problems we had living in London, because these are general problems across the whole country, and they only look to get worse. I could pick any one of a hundred issues, but there's the cost of transport for a start. It was in the headlines today that the average person spends 15% of their income on public transport. And last week they put up the prices for a train ticket again. It now costs over £16 to go to London from Southend. I remember a few years back paying less than £8.

Compare and contrast this to that time Jenna and I went to Chicago, catching the train from Michigan City in Indiana, travelling across the state boundary into Illinois, from one timezone to the next, and the whole journey cost us $7.55. That's about £3.75 at the current exchange rate. I couldn't even travel ten minutes along the LTS line for that much, let alone cross the country. Yet people pay because they have to, because to drive a car costs even more.

Compare and contrast once more to the other side of the Pond. A lot of Americans are incensed that their petrol prices have doubled since George W Bush became President. But they still pay half of what we do. It's just they used to pay a quarter.

I could go on and on, and maybe I shall, but then there's the housing market. The house next door recently sold for £200,000. Our house is worth a few thousand less because we don't have a modernised kitchen, but we do have a garage. At the beginning of the decade, this house was worth half that. It means you need double the salary to be able to afford this pokey little semi-detached house with small rooms and average garden. But salaries haven't doubled in six years, have they?

We're already looking at property in Michigan, though it's going to be a couple of years yet before we start going along that process. What with the dollar-pound exchange rate being so generous in favour of the latter right now, with our meagre combined savings, we could between us afford to buy - outright, without a mortgage - a house bigger than my home in this country, detached, with several hundred feet of backyard. And if you're willing to do repair work yourself, there are fixer-upper properties that are even bigger going for the equivalent of £4000.

The question remains, of course, whether my romantic view of America was sufficiently demythologised by three months there as a tourist not doing touristy things, too. On which I've been thinking for seven months, and will continue to ruminate.