Got totally stuck this week. Couldn’t write. Couldn’t focus. Couldn’t even concentrate on research. Sleepless. Tired. Had a couple of good solid writing bursts, but not like my usual marathons.
Walks on the beach didn’t help. Extra coffee was no use. Watching Food TV made me hungry (there wasn’t anything on the History Channel apart from endless hours of mummies or stupid US documentaries like “The Wonders of Engineering” – is the BBC on strike or is it just Mediocrity Month?).
Reading something completely off-topic or web grazing made no difference – although it did fill in the time and I know much more about Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebrations and Pushkin than I did last week. And you never know when that’ll come in handy.
It’s a new book, nothing to do with pirates, and so I tried to analyse my way around the blockage: behave like a fiction plumber. Connected to the fact that pirate book three was delivered last week? Need to let go before working on something else? Fourth book syndrome? Performance anxiety? Can’t write about anything but pirates? Total loser?
Tried printing out the patchy draft and reading it on paper. Made lots of corrections. Bored even myself. Had another coffee.
Then yesterday I had to leave the rock (to go to the mainland cinema for Harry Potter). Sat on the ferry in the sun. There was a manta ray in the shallows.
Before we’d even left the pier, the notebook was out, novel subversion was underway, pipes unblocked and all was well with the fictional world.
Diagnosis: Simple case of cabin fever.
Next week I have to return to the land of the living for a couple of weeks to earn a crust. I’ll spend the whole time cursing my wasted stuffed-up week.

More excited than any kid there, I lined up for the new Harry Potter film yesterday (Goblet of Fire). It must be nerve-wracking to one of those pedants, of any age, with every line of dialogue and potion recipe crammed into your brain, sitting and watching and waiting for a directorial slip-up. That way, surely, lies madness and disappointment. There’s been much Myrtle-moaning about various characters and sub-plots omitted from the screenplay, but the only essential ingredient missing for me was JK Rowling’s wonderfully dry humour, which lights up the books and is often lost in translation to the screen. Key to her success, if you ask me, but funnily enough the pedants often ignore it in plot-obsessed film and book reviews. Chill out, giggle, and be scared. Much more fun.
Goblet of Fire is the best of the series in its special effects, narrative drive, the kids’ performances, and the ratty school-like reality that was also a feature of the last. It creates a sense of wonder. Magic.
I’m easily scared, and jumped clear out of my seat a couple of times, having completely forgotten everything that happens in the book. My nine year-old friend Maddie gripped my hand really hard a few times, and admitted afterwards she’d thought it was so “freaky” her legs were shaking. She’s going back tomorrow to see it again.
By the way, if you’ve never seen JK Rowling’s website, take a look. It’s fascinating, because it’s designed specifically for the way kids scan the screen and use their mouse. For people like me who worked on the web for years and get grumpy about usability, it’s a lesson in designing for a specific use. Kids run the cursor over everything to find links – their eyes simply don’t do what adult eyes do faced with a computer screen – and Rowling’s web design team has developed what is arguably the smartest kid-focused index page on the web. Of course.

The year’s most excruciating literary award is announced tonight (give or take the international dateline) in London: the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Award.
This year promises to be fabulous, with some of the most grandiose names in the literary world among the dozen nominees: John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Theroux. Even Marlon “I coulda been a contender” Brando is a contender, for the “incomprehensible sex scene from his posthumously-released novel Fan Tan“, according to the Guardian.
The prize was founded by Auberon Waugh and aims “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”
Most winners have managed to retain a sense of humour, although Tom Wolfe refused to accept his prize last year – I can’t wait to see what happens if Theroux wins this year.
I can’t quote any of the nominated extracts because I don’t have the stomach for it, but you can read them in all their context-free glory here.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
– Edith Sitwell

All these “Best Books of the Year” lists make for nice weekend reading, great Christmas shopping lists, and the occasional snort of incredulity, but they have one insidious message: YOU MUST READ THESE BOOKS.
It’s not like reading reviews, which I could do (and do) all day. It feels more like getting your high school text book list for the coming term.
I hate that. If anyone tells me there’s a novel I simply must read, I don’t. Won’t. Haven’t read Tim Winton for years because I’m sick of the sound of his name. The poor man hasn’t done a thing to deserve it, but I hate it when people drool. If everybody raves about a movie and insists I simply must see it, I refuse (silently, but implacably). It’s especially true of people who wouldn’t know me if I stood up in their porridge, who have met me six minutes previously at a party, and say, “Oh you must read this – I just know you’ll adore it”.
Word of mouth is very good for everyone else, and for book sales, but on me it has the opposite effect.
This doesn’t seem to happen with non-fiction, partly because nobody I know ever says things like, “Oh you simply must read Stalingrad, it’s divine”. Instead, wise friends slip me a copy and understand that they won’t hear from me for a few hours. But for some reason, novels and independent films make people blurt out these desperate pleas to share their passion (I’m sure I’ve done it myself, but that was in another country and besides the wench probably stole my copy).
There may come a day when I’m stuck on a plane for thirty hours and there’ll be nothing to read but Tim Winton and no movies showing but Jesus of Montreal and I’ll hang on every word of Dirt Music and watch Jesus of Montreal twice and wonder what I’ve been missing all these years.
On the other hand (sorry Tim) I had to read The Da Vinci Code between Dubai and Singapore a few months ago and if I could’ve opened the plane window either one of us would have been out of there. And four million people rave about that.

It must be late November. Newspapers everywhere have started publishing their annual lists of Best Books.
The New York Times hedges its bets with its list of 100 Notable Books of 2005. You understand these are notable, rather than necessarily brilliant, books, and the list seems to be a miscellany gleaned from previous reviews. That means Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince appears in the same category as the latest by Elmore Leonard, E. L. Doctorow, and Zadie Smith. And why not? (I haven’t read, for the sake of my health, Camille Paglia’s new essays, but the NY Times describes them as “written without ego”, which is the best evidence I’ve ever heard for alien abduction theories.)
In London, the Sunday Times doesn’t go in for any such mealy-mouthed nonsense. Its Best Fiction of 2005 has a go at the Man Booker judges (“John Banville’s numbingly pretentious The Sea has brought the prize’s reputation to a low ebb”) and selects Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George to top a sensibly argued list of favourites.
The good old Observer sought advice from “leading figures” including Jan Morris, who selected Charles Nicholl’s Leonardo as best biography and Tom Holland’s Persian Fire as “most exciting historical narrative”. Sarah Waters chose Rory Stewart’s Afghanistan odyssey, The Places in Between, while Deborah Moggach raves about Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.
The book reviewers over at the New Statesman are a terrifying lot – the list includes names like Byatt, Toibin and Dalrymple, usually on these lists as contenders. Hilary Mantel, an expert on public executions (note to self: add A Place of Greater Safety to favourites list), liked The Tyrannicide Brief by lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, while J G Ballard can’t decide between Tony Judt’s Postwar: a history of Europe since 1945 and the anonymous diary, A Woman in Berlin.
You’ll know it’s December when they start on the Books to Watch in 2006 lists.

No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.
– Van Wyck Brooks, From a Writer’s Notebook

This morning I woke up bleary after a sleepless night and thought: I’m in italics.
Don’t ask me. It’s a half-asleep editor thing.
I remained in italics for half an hour, until my girlfriend woke up. She decided that since I was in italics I couldn’t be trusted to make a pot of tea. She’s an editor, too. She understood.
By the time my cup of tea arrived I was back to Times Roman Normal.

The redoubtable Agnes Nieuwenhuizen has retired from her position as manager of the Australian Centre for Youth Literature (based at the State Library of Victoria). In a recent interview, The Age describes her as a “writer, editor, cultural warrior and champion of reading for teenagers and older children.”
The interview echoes the concerns of writers and experts in many countries:

In Australia, she says, we have writers who produce “fantastic fiction”, and courageous publishers who put it into the marketplace. But a lot of the time, the young people who would enjoy reading these books don’t know about them.
“There isn’t a reading culture,” she says. “We don’t have any kind of concerted national program. Our promotion of books is very poor. Reading is not valued in schools. We are losing librarians. And with very notable exceptions, I think things are slipping.”

You can get the full story here.

Harold Underwood has noted a similar trend in the US. At the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI) conference earlier this year, he presented his “weather report” on trends in children’s publishing:

One strong influence on the climate today and for many years past is the reality that many children’s books are bought by schools and libraries, and so political decisions and trends affect the children’s market somewhat more than they do the adult market. What’s the global warming of children’s books in the US? I think it’s the anti-tax movement, which going back to the ’70s has increasingly affected state and federal budgets. All across the country, there has been less money for schools and libraries, and less of what is called institutional spending.
And publishers have responded… Publishers have closed or cut back their library imprints – both the ones that publish nonfiction series and the ones that publish “review-driven” books – and have put their money more into the consumer market. That’s great if you can “write to spec” for book series based on TV shows, but not so great if you are writing literary novels or serious nonfiction.

Read his notes from the presentation on Purple Crayon.

This morning the sea gleamed like rubbed glass. I walked on the beach, and the air was so clear after yesterday’s rain that I could see the gullies and the treeline on Great Barrier Island, miles away. There was a lovely old timber ketch moored in the bay, its crew taking tea and toast on deck in the sun. I’m not sure what made me most jealous – the cup of tea or the ketch.
I didn’t walk yesterday. I vanished into a writing vortex and didn’t realise until 5.30pm that I hadn’t yet cleaned my teeth or had a shower. I seem to have eaten lunch, as there was evidence, but I have no recollection of it at all. I must have listened to Missy Higgins over and over on the headphones, because it’s the only CD on my desk, or maybe she finished and I didn’t notice and sat with my headphones on for no reason all day. Some days it’s like that.
Other days I’m easily distracted by blogs or books or the History Channel or doing a load of washing, or I start researching something specific and end up somewhere completely different (not always a bad thing). If I force myself to write on distracted days the work is less good than the vortex days. But I still have to do it. It just takes more revision later.
Some people sit down at a certain time and write a certain number of words, or have to use a certain colour notepaper and grade of pencil, or write for fixed hours. I have to have the dishes washed and the house straightened before I start (even if I am dishevelled myself). I have to make myself work for at least the same number of hours as I do when I do my paid job, or I know I’ll fall apart and act like I’m on holidays.
But now there’s a tui in the flax outside my window, and the rooster’s practising his crow (he’s not very good at it) in the back yard.
So it’s hard to believe it’s work, sometimes, when the sun’s out and I can walk on the beach at low tide, wear my pyjamas all day, and just write.