Showing posts with label Patrick Ness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patrick Ness. Show all posts

Saturday, 6 April 2024

Monsters and More Monsters by Paul May

I've always been happy to abandon a book after 50 pages (or less) if I'm not enjoying it.  Occasionally the first page is enough. Then, in March 2020, just before the first lockdown, I decided to read all the Carnegie winners in order, and write about the experience here. I don't think I realised how long it was going to take (maths was never my strongest subject) and here I am, starting on my fifth year of reading. 

There have been 84 winners of the Carnegie Medal so far and it was too much to hope that I would like all of them. When I haven't enjoyed a book I've found myself quite reluctant to write about it, but I'm interested in describing the experience of reading all these books as well as in saying a bit about the books themselves, and that means that occasionally I need to find ways of saying what I didn't like, or felt didn't work. And that, of course, is as much about me as about the book.  

Patrick Ness won the Carnegie twice in 2011 and 2012, both times with books that have monsters in their titles. I want to start with A Monster Calls, the 2012 winner based on an original idea by Siobhan Dowd. I was curious to know just how much of that original idea made it into the book which Ness wrote, and the answer turns out to be, not very much. (I've put a link at the end of this piece to an interview that goes into detail about this). Siobhan Dowd had sketched the characters of Mum, Conor and Lily, and a talking yew tree which was to have been a grandmother figure, but which Ness made into the monster of the title. Then there was the idea of the yew tree telling three stories, though the intended  nature and content of those stories was unknown, as was the ending of the book. A Monster Calls is very definitely Patrick Ness's book.



I found this novel much more engaging and powerful than Monsters of Men, and it also throws some interesting light on the earlier winner. That's one reason I wanted to take this one first. The other reason is that this book deals with a situation I know intimately—the early death of a mother with a thirteen-year-old son. And it was perhaps because of my special interest that I found the behaviour of the adults in the story incredibly frustrating. Conor's parents and grandmother never tell him that his mother is dying, but instead collude with his belief that the treatment she is receiving is working. As a result, rage and confusion are constantly building inside him.

This is not to say that anger and confusion won't happen if you know the truth. When we found out that my wife's illness was terminal, six months before she died, we told my son that she was going to die. We didn't realize that it still hadn't properly registered in his mind. It didn't do so until an afternoon in the hospice shortly before she died, when she told us tearfully, 'I don't want to leave you.' 

So, I spent most of the book saying to myself, 'Please, just tell him!' But they never did, not in so many words. Even when Conor did find out that his mum was going to die, the words 'death' and 'dying' never got a mention. I'd add here that Conor's mum is really hardly a character at all. We know only three things about her: she loves Conor, she loves her own mother, and she is dying.

Everything that Patrick Ness does in this book is done very well, and the final scene is very moving but I can't say that I felt, in the end, completely convinced by the story. Reviewers describe it as 'low fantasy' which is I guess, realism with a bit of fantasy thrown in. In this sense it's a bit like Margaret Mahy's two Carnegie winners, The Haunting and The Changeover, or like Skellig or River Boy, but with all those books I was completely engaged and I've been trying to work out why that didn't quite happen with A Monster Calls.

Partly it's that annoyance about the way the adults behave, but it's more than that: it's that I feel I'm being required to learn something. And that happens because Conor is very definitely being required by the monster to learn something. That's where the stories come in.

The yew-tree monster is a strange, wild, fierce creature of Conor's imagination which at times seems to leave behind evidence—berries, leaves—of his real physical presence, and at others appears to be a metaphor or proxy for Conor's anger. The monster wants to free Conor by getting him to tell his own truth, and that truth (spoiler alert) turns out to be that Conor wishes it was all over, and the implication is that, deep down, Conor knows the only way it will end is with his mother's death. While he's waiting for Conor to come clean, the monster tells him stories in which characters and events turn out to be not what they seem. But Ness does this in a way that exactly mirrors, in miniature, what he has done at far greater length in Monsters of Men.

Here's the heart of it: Conor says: 

'So the good prince was a murderer and the evil queen wasn't a witch after all? Is that supposed to be the lesson of all this?'

The tree tells Conor there is no lesson. A few moments later Conor says: 'I don't understand. Who's the good guy here?'

There's not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.

Conor shook his head. 'That's a terrible story. And a cheat.'

It's a true story, the monster said.

As soon as characters start to have this kind of explicit conversation I start to feel uneasy. The tree may be speaking to Conor, but I can't help feeling that the author is speaking to me, and if I'm reading a novel then that is exactly the kind of thing I want to be shown, not told.

Conor's reaction to that story pretty much sums up how I felt about Monsters of Men, Ness's sci-fi epic that won the Carnegie in 2011. In Monsters of Men you can be fairly sure that if a character does something good they'll probably do something bad a few minutes later. I exaggerate slightly, but only slightly, and that makes it very hard to really like anyone. The characters all feel terribly slippery. So you'd think I'd be happy because I am being shown, at very great length, that people can be both good and bad. Well... 



By a clear 200 pages, Monsters of Men, is the longest winner of the Carnegie Medal. It is also, and by some distance, the most violent. It is the third volume of a trilogy entitled Chaos Walking. The first two volumes, The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer weigh in at 474 and 517 pages respectively. I decided that I couldn't really read the final volume without reading the other two first, and for the first few hundred pages I thought I'd made a good decision. I enjoyed quite a lot of that first book, but then the book's best character—a little dog called Manchee—was killed, and shortly after that I realised I wasn't enjoying Chaos Walking any more. The same things seemed to keep happening over and over again. Violence, betrayal, violence, more violence, war, anger, rage...

Nevertheless, I persisted. I read fifty pages at a sitting and eventually I reached the end. Given the huge numbers of glowing reviews printed on the opening pages of the books, and the thousands of five-star reviews on the internet I can see that I'm in a minority. This isn't the first Carnegie winner I've had trouble finishing but it's definitely the longest.

I wonder if it's possible to detect the influence of computer games here. I remember how children I was teaching would produce incredibly long stories and I'd start to read them thinking how great it was that they'd written so much, only to discover that what they were describing was a protagonist (themselves) fighting and defeating an endless sequence of enemies. Clearly, there's a lot more than that going on in Chaos Walking, but I think that I would have reacted very differently to the trilogy if it had been about 1000 pages shorter.

This is a book about war, and it invites the reader to consider, along with its protagonists, when, and if, killing and war can be justified. It contains genocide, murder, and misogyny. It describes the enslavement and branding of aliens and women, bombings and shootings and eye-gouging. There is hardly a second of light relief, with the exception of that little dog. I think it was Erich Segal who once said 'If you want to make them cry, kill a dog,' but maybe that's an apocryphal story. I didn't cry when the dog died but he made sense as a character in a way that none of the others did to me, and I missed him when he was gone. And I have to say that when that yew-tree monster said 'there is no lesson', I think he was lying. When the kind of dilemma that haunts this book is repeated over and over, as in: 'Is it OK to kill a thousand people to save the one you love?' it can't help but feel like a lesson, in the sense that you are being asked to learn something, even if that something is that there are no right answers.

There is a whole universe of science fiction out there which is published without any kind of age categorisation and is perfectly accessible to young people without being marketed to 'young adults'. An odd thing about this book is that the two young protagonists are 13 years old, or 14 in the years of the planet they're on, which is how old you'd probably make the protagonists in a 'middle grade' book. I was always told by publishers that you want the characters to be at the upper end of the age-range because kids don't really want to read about people younger than them. I was reading recently about how many younger children will 'read-up' as the industry has it. Maybe that's what happens here.

Nothing quite like Monsters of Men had won the Carnegie before. For the precursors of this kind of dark-tinted dystopian SF I'm looking back to someone like John Christopher (All Flesh is Grass, Tripods), who, like Patrick Ness, enjoyed presenting moral dilemmas to his readers and wrote for children as well as adults. Moral dilemmas were also meat and drink to early series of Star Trek, in episodes often written by top SF writers. Before YA was a glint in the eyes of its publisher parents, Science Fiction was acting as a first stepping stone away from children's books as is brilliantly described in Francis Spufford's memoir The Child that Books Built. If I recommended Chaos Walking to a young person I'd certainly suggest that they also read Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Iain M Banks and Theodore Sturgeon, to name just a few, and there's no shortage of contemporary SF either. I  hope this book will give young readers a taste for SF that leads them to seek out those writers. 

If you have a different perspective on Chaos Walking I'd love to hear from you in the comments. This was the book that nearly torpedoed my project to read all the Carnegie winners, and I was very close indeed to giving up. Only the fact that I'm so close to the end kept me going. Luckily for me, none of the others are as long as this one.

Finally, here are a couple of links to info/discussions about how Patrick Ness came to write A Monster Calls.  Firstly, a Q and A from Publishers' Weekly from 2011 with Patrick Ness and Denise Johnstone-Burt, the editor Ness shared with Siobhan Dowd. Secondly an interview with Patrick Ness from 2016.

My own blog/webpages are here.


Tuesday, 8 September 2015

Patrick, Paddington and the rest of us.

I've felt very proud to be a writer this week, and especially part of the children’s literature community.  Patrick Ness’s bold and generous gesture - to match £10,000 of donations to Save the Children to help Syrian refugees - has struck an entire orchestra's worth of chords. As I write this, on Monday night, the total is rushing towards £600,000.              
Patrick Ness

Among those pledging £10,000 were John Green, Philip Pullman, Francesca Simon, Suzanne Collins and Cressida Cowell.  Publishers have got involved too, and adult writers such as Jojo Moyes and David Nicholls. A group of YA writers in the US including Rainbow Rowell and Margaret Stohl banded together to put in their £10,000. Here, attendees at the Society of Authors’ Children’s Writers and Illustrators Group’s conference pledged £3,000, even though some had contributed already.
Most of us can’t afford anything like £10,000, of course. It’s more than the average writer’s annual earnings. But there's no need to feel embarrassed. Viewed as a percentage of income, some of us may have outdone the big-hitters in generosity. Each contribution counts - if everyone who reads this blog donates the cost of a cup of coffee, it'll be matched penny for penny, which could make a good few hundred pounds.
And if you can't spare any more cash, just share the all-important link -  which is HERE  -  again and again.
Having been involved in the Authors for the Philippines and Authors for Japan auctions (under the incredibly hard-working leadership of Keris Stainton), I've seen how keen writers, editors and agents are to donate, be involved, help in any way they can.  Some cynics jeered  saying it was  all about publicity. So what if it were?  The cash was raised for the people who needed it. 

But it’s not about publicity. It's about having the imagination to see what a charity like Save the Children or the Red Cross can do to help, and the suffering that will continue if they don't have the funds to do their work.
The best writers sow empathy in their pages, seeds that can grow and flourish in readers’ hearts and minds.  So that one day those readers  will read a news story about marauding migrants, and reach with their imaginations beyond the headlines, the politicians’ weasel words. They'll see scared teenagers, crying children, desperate parents, fleeing a dangerous home for an uncertain future. And they'll write letters, speak out, donate and even open their homes to people in need. 
One of the icons of British children's literature is Paddington Bear. I wasn't sure about seeing last year's film, worried that a favourite character would be rendered sentimental or just wrong. Instead it was a wonderful experience, funny and charming, gently passing on a message of British tolerance and caring, an openness to strangers in need.
In the books and the film, Paddington comes to Britain in need, and finds kindness and a new home. However the truth would be very different. This blog  post by an immigration lawyer spells out all the cruelties a real life Paddington would meet, seeking asylum in Britain.  Lord Ashdown said yesterday that Syrian children grudgingly allowed into Britain now, could face deportation at 18. The campaign to help child refugees won't end with the appeal reaching £1 or 2 million pounds. If we truly care there is a lot to be done to change attitudes towards refugees, to stop the distrust and antipathy that has been allowed to grow. Children's authors can and do play a part in an education process about the difference between legal and illegal economic migration, legal asylum-seeking and those who pretend to be genuine refugees but are not. 
But for now, thank you once again Patrick Ness, for channelling the spirit of Paddington, for doing this brilliant thing and taking us all along with you. And congratulations on your new book, The Rest of Us Just Live Here, as well.  

Sunday, 30 August 2015

What you learn in tents - Lari Don


It’s nearly the end of the Edinburgh Book Festival – a wonderful opportunity for booklovers to gather and get rained on in Charlotte Square in Edinburgh.

I live in Edinburgh, so as well as being fortunate enough to do author events at the festival (this year, I did an event on my new book Serpents & Werewolves, and one on the gorgeously illustrated Tale of Tam LinnI also spend a lot of time enjoying other authors’ events.

I learnt a lot about writing from the book festival when I was starting out, both from writers’ workshops and from asking questions at the end of authors’ events.

Do I still learn about writing from the events? Yes of course, though not in the waterfall way I learnt years ago, when I had no sense of who I was as a writer. I still listen and learn, but I no longer scribble frantically the whole way through events.

But writing isn’t the only part of being a writer. Author events, readings, workshops and Q&As are just as much part of my job nowadays as imagining and inventing and editing. So, having learnt how to be a writer by haunting the EIBF 15 years ago, is it now possible for me to learn how to do author events by watching what other authors do?

I mix going to see authors I already love to read and authors I’ve never heard of. I learn a little bit from all of them, from their writing process and their inspiration. But I also learn from watching them do their events. From their readings, dressing up, musical accompaniment, audience participation, powerpoint presentations, debates and discussion with other authors, and all the other things authors do at festivals. And the main thing I learn is - the most successful events are the most honest ones, the ones which genuinely reflect the author’s work. There is no point in trying to do the same event as another author, because the most important thing to do in an event is be honest and open about your writing process and your book.

I may love listening to Patrick Ness or Marina Warner, but I can’t copy the way they present their events any more than I can (or should!) copy their books. Whether talking to 300 kids in a tent in Edinburgh, or 15 kids in a library in Ayrshire, all I can ever do is share with my audience what I do and why I love it. (This is why I very rarely do an event without telling one of myths or legends or folktales that inspire my fiction.)

So, I learnt to write my own way from workshops all those years ago in Charlotte Square, and now I’m learning to talk about writing in my own way too.

But the tents will come down next week. And we’ll all need to stop talking about writing, get our heads down and start writing again!

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 22 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers.
Lari’s website 
Lari’s own blog 
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Wednesday, 8 July 2015

The More the Merrier? by Keren David

A small but beautiful indie children’s bookshop. The owner has a pile of new releases for teens stacked on his desk. ‘My problem is that there just isn’t room on the shelves,’ he tells me.

A few casual conversations with editors who publish YA and MG titles. They use almost exactly the same words. ‘There’s just too much good stuff out there.’ 

A chat with a school librarian. ‘I’m finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with all the new releases.’

And then, my own experience A TBR pile that grows by the day. A sneaking feeling that my latest book is jostling for space with rather more books than  my previous books had.
Advance copies, packaged to catch the eye

So I put up a few questions on Twitter and Facebook, to try and find out if my instinct was right. Are there too many YA books published in the UK?  I asked.  Can you keep up?The replies were fascinating. 

Fiona Noble previews children and YA titles for The Bookseller. She’s noticed a sharp increase in the books sent to her this year so far, and September is another huge month.  She expects a bumper Spring 2016 as well.  The increase, she says, is in home-grown teenage fiction - the UKYA that British authors and bloggers have put so much work into promoting. It seems the industry has taken notice. ‘The US is still dominant but the big increase in YA published seems to be coming from UK authors,' she said.  She estimates that UKYA titles have increased by 30% since last year.

This is great for British writers -  and readers -  but Fiona pointed out the downside: fewer reviews, less shelf space. Her colleague Anna James thought it was an industry-wide problem, not confined to YA. She finds it impossible to keep up with all the new releases she’d like to read, which makes her sad. ‘I think it's in line with too many books being published generally in all age categories and genres.’ Indeed, statistics show that the UK has more books published per person than any other nation. 

Most people who replied rejected the ‘too many’ line, although a few felt that there were too many similar YA books, and one reader said, bluntly ‘Yes, and they’re crap.’

More typical was blogger @emmaswriting who tweeted: ‘Impossible to keep up, but I love the diversity. There are YA books for everyone being released! Too bad I can't read them all!’ and @IamRachA201 who said:  There are loads of books, but they're all so diverse and i wouldn't give up that variety- plus that's what readathons are for.'

For booksellers, the increase in titles is good for customers, although several used the word 'overwhelming,' and mentioned shelves crammed to capacity. 

Laura B Main Ellen, lead children’s bookseller for Waterstone’s Piccadilly  said: ‘As a bookseller don't think there's too much, readers need choice and variety. Can feel a little overwhelming from blogger point of view though.’  

Independent bookseller Cat Anderson of the Edinburgh Bookshop sells YA to customers aged 8 to 80, and has had to increase shelf space for YA books to accommodate the growth in titles. ‘ A quick survey showed our customers are not influenced by social media. All choices down to me and word of mouth. This makes it tough on me to keep up. What if I'm denying my customers something truly awesome?’

The pressure on space means she’s having to rotate titles more frequently than before.
Far more are sitting unsold than previously so they have to go.’

She loves publishers who make their advance copies stand out with special packaging -  Hot Key was singled out for special praise -  showing me pictures of books tied up in twine, and Benjamin Zephaniah’s Terror Kid which came in a police evidence bag. Basic information about the likely readership for a book was also appreciated.  ‘Covers are SO important to us,’ both in ARC and finished copy. 

‘YA is awesome but I feel like I'm perpetually missing out on something,’ she said. ‘We're missing the quieter quirkier voices championed by booksellers because there's so much noise.’

Librarians can also struggle to keep up. Matt Imrie, a Carnegie judge this year said: ‘The term "Golden Age of Young People's Literature" gets bandied about a lot but it is so true for quality, quantity & availability!’

But he warned: ‘With so many public library book selections having moved to supplier selection many quirky 'niche' YA books will be missed.’

How do librarians decide which books to read?  Rachel Maskelyne used to rely on reviews and shortlists, but finds her priorities have changed since joining Twitter.

When lots of people tweet about a book you want to read it to be able to join in the conversation. I find myself being pulled into the publication hype surrounding a book without really stopping to think if the book will appeal to me or suit my taste. I've found myself skimming and reading books quickly to keep up and it has taken away a little of the enjoyment to be honest. I've really struggled in the last week or so to find a book to hold my attention and I think I need to slow down and be more selective.’

Jim Dean, the hard-working blogger who does so much to promote new books, with his monthly #countdownYA and his various blogs, has also noticed an increase in books. He’s disappointed though that relatively few feature the diversity that we hear so much about when YA is discussed. He calculates that only 12% of 385 teen books published in the UK this year feature diverse main characters (his diversity categories are People of Colour, Transexual, LGBT, physical and mental health issues). Only five books had main characters fitting into two or more of those categories, my This is Not a Love Story is one, with James Dawson’s up-coming All of the Above; Patrick Ness’s The Rest of Us Just Live Here; Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give you the Sun and Leah Thomas’s Because You'll Never Meet Me.    This suggests that while we hear and talk a lot about diversity, in practice, most of the books out there are super-cautious about truly reflecting our diverse world.

So, what does this all mean for writers? Is it good news that so many of us are getting published? Yes, it has to be, surely?  As Holly Smale, writer of the best-selling Geek Girl series put it, ‘More readers, more buyers, more money = more published.

But she agrees that the pressure to succeed is greater, adding:  ‘Easier to get in, harder to stay in maybe.

The growth in UKYA is something to celebrate, I think, but it does make it harder for authors to make a living. All those books are also competing for the shortlists that get us noticed, and the foreign deals that earn us money. How can we translate more books into more sales and more readers? 

We need booksellers to reflect the increase in numbers by selling like Cat Anderson does -  in more space, and to all age groups. We need the publishing industry to come together more, to promote UKYA as a distinct brand.  Why have posters for John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, which has already sold ten million copies, when you could be promoting a ‘Best of British’ selection, which could bring new readers into bookshops to discover so many more writers?   We need events, awards, readathons and blogs. More review space in newspapers would be nice too.  The Bookseller's YA Prize which showcased a wide range of YA fiction was an inspired idea. At YALC this month, publishers have a chance to promote all the books they produce, not just those of the authors handpicked for the panels. We've also seen more author-led events, and I think that's only going to get bigger. 

And we authors need some luck and tenacity, and the ability to sell without being obnoxiously in-your-face. We need to get our books noticed and talked about, while not forgetting that boosting UKYA as a group helps all of us.  Most of all we need to write quirky, individual, books that stand out. 

Because it’s hard to get noticed in a crowd.

(PS. My new book This is Not a Love Story is out! Best for 14+,. Amsterdam setting, unconventional love triangle, ground-breaking because it features British Jewish teens. And bisexuality. Heart-warming, modern, fun. Great cover. I can tie it up in twine if you want me to.) 


Saturday, 12 July 2014

Making words count

I have become more than a little obsessed with word counts.

And if you think that sounds like an incredibly boring subject for a blog, you might be right. But let's see what happens.

http://www.booksandsuch.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Word-count.png
When I first began writing, one of my many fears and doubts I had was that I didn't really know how long my book should be. I didn't even know how long a chapter should be. So I did some research, and discovered that the first Harry Potter was 76, 944 words long. But then again, The Golden Compass - another literary lodestone as far as my ambition was concerned - was more like 125, 000.

I ended up with a first draft of my first middlegrade novel which was over 100,00 words long, which as my agent rightly said was also too long for my intended readership. The Deathly Hallows, the last Harry Potter, is about 198,000 words long which just goes to show what happens when you're too successful to take notes. Sorry, I mean, which just goes to show how there is no limit to a child's reading stamina if they really love a world and the characters.

US kids in line to get their hands on 198,000 words of The Deathly Hallows

(And truly, of course there is no "right" length to a book. Some of the most perfect middlegrade books - A Monster Calls, Once, Holes - are all much shorter than any of those. I would broadly say that any book which verges on fantasy and involves substantial world creation, is going to always be on the longer side because part of the pleasure comes from luxuriating in the rich, embroidered nature of the imaginary universe conjured up. The story is the length of the story you need to tell. But it's always useful to have some kind of bench mark to work towards in your head, I reckon.)

Either way, I was no J K Rowling, and cutting 100,000 words down to the ultimate 67,000 words my first book was published as became something of a laborious task. Because word counts have real implications for storytelling. For every bit you hack out, you still need to compress or explain elsewhere, so word counts never strictly go down or up, they fluctuate, like a water table.

Which meant that when it came to my sequel, which I had less than a year to write, I was determined not to so massively overwrite the first draft, to avoid the later pain. Luckily, along the way, I discovered this marvellous software called Scrivener, which I'm sure some of you are aware of.  Some love, some are baffled, I'm certainly not here to evangelise, but there are two very useful word count features it has over MS Word.

The first is this. You divide your chapters up into your separate text files, which apart from being very easy to manage, means you can keep a constant check on your word count as you go along, like so. The word count appears automatically at the bottom of each part or chapter, and you can make a note in what Scrivener calls the 'binder' - basically a long column to the left of your writing window:








And I find this more than helpful. Patrick Ness (who has some great tips on writing and chapter length here ) said he decided each chapter of The Knife of Never Letting Go had to be pretty much 2500 words for reasons of rhythm. That gets to the heart of why I find word counts so important. There isn't always time to endlessly re-read and edit when you're drafting, and many feel that's counter productive anyhow. So word counts are an incredibly useful, visual shorthand for seeing if any part of your story is really out of balance. Like Ness, my view with these current books I'm writing is that if I can't tell the chapter's story in around 2000 words, it's too long. And generally - if it's way under 1500, I'm probably not there yet.

There's one last reason I find word counts useful, and that's for the daily routine. Graham Greene famously wrote 400 words a day, always only 400, even if that meant finishing mid-sentence. He rarely revised, wrote over 25 books and was a genius. Others I know like to binge-write - anything from 2000-5000 words a day, although that could be hard to sustain.

Which brings me to the second really handy feature of Scrivener. The daily word target. You type in your submission deadline, the target length of your book, and set various options like whether you write at weekends or not and this handy pop up window tells you - every day - what you need to write. Here's mine for Book 3 today.







It may sound horribly automated and soulless to some, but trust me, as that bottom progress bar begins at red and proceeds to green, nothing can be more motivating. The counter includes negatives, so if you delete loads of stuff, it increases accordingly. The truth, for me at least, is that in the wide empty sea writing a book can be - no end in sight, following a chart that keeps being affected by so many variables, feeling alone - just hitting my daily word target is an incredibly easy way to stay focused and motivated. Even on the dark days, when the ideas refuse to flow, if I can just get to my words, I feel I've achieved something. Even the greatest task feels manageable broken down into small chunks.

Speaking of which, I had better get on it...

*This blog is about 1000 words long, and the ideal average blog is considered to be about 500 words, so too long. I always overwrite. Which is why I'm not much good at Twitter. Sorry.

*My second book was longer than my first, and the third will be longer again. No matter how hard I try! Does anyone else have this problem?

Piers Torday
@PiersTorday
www.pierstorday.co.uk