They say: Here’s a list of some people we think wrote good books.

We hear: We looked at your book too, but it was so bad we all read out bits to each other in funny voices and had a good laugh about it in the pub.

I loved your book. It was the most moving, exciting, beautiful thing I have ever read –but by the way there’s a typo on page 94.

Your book sucks and I’d rather pluck out my own eyeballs than read another word you write

Random Twitter Personage: ‘I just read a book that I didn’t like very much but I’m not going to say who it’s by’.

I obviously mean yours, [YOUR NAME HERE]. You’re such a bad writer that the pens flinch when you come into the room.

Sales haven’t been as good as we hoped yet, but it takes time.  

There’s the door, sunshine. Don’t let it hit you on the way out.

You clearly have an exciting career ahead of you.

I see McDonald’s are hiring for floor staff.

Have you heard of A N Other Writer? I really like them.

And I hate you, loser.

I saw you at that event – you seemed to be having fun!

You were clearly hammered on all the free room-temperature chardonnay and made a complete tit of yourself, especially that bit when you tried to compare Baudelaire to Taylor Swift.

I read your book – wasn’t it funny about that bit that was very similar to something I once said or did?

I know it’s about me and you’ll be hearing from my lawyers post-haste.

It took me a while to get into your book, but I ended up loving it.

I hated it. You’re boring.

‘_____________’ (the deathly silence which emanates from one you know has read your book but not responded

I hated it. We’re not friends any more.

Oh yes, I read your book.

I hated it but am afraid to say.

Oh yes, I read your book.

I didn’t read it.

Oh yes, I read your book.

I have no idea who you are.

I tell you, it’s exhausting being this neurotic. I might go and have a lie-down in the cupboard under the stairs, or anywhere else that has no internet connection. At least the spiders definitely haven’t read my book.

When writing this post, I really struggled to think of seven things people might not know about me. Which is probably a sign that I tweet WAY too much. Also, I haven’t really done anything that interesting with my life, expect for read a lot of books, and then write a lot of books (most of which ended up in the Great Recycling Bin in the Sky), inbetween travelling around a bit and obsessing over boys. But here goes anyway

1. I lived in China for a year. After university, I took myself off to live here, nursing a broken heart, several unfinished novels, and a largely useless degree that involved a lot of medieval French. I had a great time, learning to speak Chinese, doing many tequila shots, and spending a lot of time writing. When I came back I did it overland, travelling across Asia and Europe for three months. I think this also helped my writing a lot- if you’re on a train for five days you really need to fill that time.
2. I’m morbidly afraid of sharks, but I watch everything about them. I used to be so scared of sharks I couldn’t go in the local swimming pool, because it had a mural of dolphins on the bottom of it (I know, I know, but I was six). But I’m also obsessed with them, and no matter how rubbish the film – Shark in Venice, Shark Night, Swamp Shark –if it has sharks in, I’m there. Every time I write something I think wistfully how I can shoehorn a shark-related scene into it. As my new series is set in Northern Ireland, it’s unlikely, but one of these days…..
3. I have 23 first cousins. I’m from a large-ish Irish Catholic family and my mum is one of seven children. That’s not even very large by Irish standards, but it tends to impress and/or scare people in England.
4. Hardly a new fact, as I tweet about him incessantly, but I have a beagle dog who spends most of his life crammed onto my knee as I try to type. This despite not even liking dogs before I got him. He has ruined my garden, my house, and all my clothes, and he once ate through the cable of my computer, but I love him
5. According to various exes, my worst faults are ‘you swear too much’, ‘you’re too obsessed with the difference between your and you’re’ and ‘your jeans have too many holes in them’.
6. I speak fluent French, and spent a year living there teaching small French children how to sing Shakira songs in English (Miss, Miss, what does ‘underneath your clothes’ mean?’. This put me off teaching for life, and children for a long time. One my friends caught scabies off the kids. Like, seriously.
7. I was under-15 Connect 4 champion at my Irish summer school. Connect 4, the real sport of kings.

So there you have it, I’m a scruffy, sweary, multi-lingual shark obsessive. What’s not to like?

While you’re here, other blogs I enjoy are as follows:

This Itch of Writing – brilliant writing blog by Emma Darwin, covers most writing issues that come up

Help! I need a publisher – ditto, for publishing queries, and by Nicola Morgan

Julia Crouch – gives an interesting insight into the writing process. Julia is very good at breaking down what she actually does all day.

Steve Mosby – it doesn’t really have a theme as such, but if it did I would characterise Steve’s blog as ‘cogent arguments on the burning issues of the Twitter day’. If Twitter is the tabloid, Steve is the Times Editorial.

BACK UP YOUR WORK.

They laughed a little. Of course they backed up their work! Like, duh. So perhaps the fear of lost data has finally percolated into our collective unconscious, like the way we jump when we see a spider. But I still get a shudder when I see someone bandying about a USB stick. Those things need to go the way of floppy discs. They blow up. They get put through the wash. They get eaten by dogs. Likewise, laptops expire (four in four years for me…I pound ‘em hard). Hard drives get corrupted, screens become detached, occasionally you drop them and/or spill a pint of water over them. Or they get stolen out an open window or out of your bag. So back it up! Dropbox is your new best friend. Download it onto your computer and/or phone or tablet, and you’ll always have everything with you, plus a copy floating in the ether (I’m not really sure how this works). Better yet, email the work to yourself every day. Put a post-it on your computer saying: BACK YOUR WORK UP, YOU EEJIT. Then you will never again wake up in the middle of the night strangled by the panic that you might have left your memory stick on the bus.

Oddly, I never worry about the fate of the hard-copy notebooks I use to scratch out my first drafts. Maybe because no one would steal a flowery notebook filled with writing so bad it looks like a Soviet-era cipher. Maybe because I play a game with myself where I can write the first draft by pretending it’s there, looking through it like a Magic Eye picture. Really I should take a salutary lesson from these sorry tales of literary loss over the years:

1. ‘Oh you mean that old bundle of papers? Yeah, I burned that. That was OK, right?’ Many’s a literary gem has met a sorry end on the flames. Lucky for us this is most unlikely in these days of waning fuel and gas fire, but back then the fate of Samuel Johnson’s first dictionary (as Blackadder viewers know) was a real danger. Thomas Carlyle famously sent a manuscript to John Stuart Mill, whose maid then put it on the fire. Lesson – don’t annoy the staff, dude. Manuscripts of VS Naipaul were also taken out of storage and burned, mistaken for accounting archives (ouch!)
   

2. ‘Please take all personal belongings with you when you leave the train.’ A striking number of works have been lost on public transport. Jilly Cooper lost the first draft of Riders on a bus, and it took her fourteen years to try it again. TE Lawrence lost part of his epic work at Reading station (he’d have enjoyed the irony there, I bet). At one point, all of Hemingway’s work to date was stolen from a train his wife was travelling on. Lesson: Never trust anyone else with your work, especially if you’ve been busy eyeing up other Parisian laydeez on the sly.

3. ‘I hate you so much right now.’ Ever given a thought to who might manage your work after you die? Well, there’s a reason they call them ‘executors’, because it turns out they can’t keep their grubby mitts to themselves when it comes to passing judgement on your work. Be prepared to have things radically altered and/or destroyed. Ted Hughes made big changes to Sylvia Plath’s last great collection of poems, and burned one of her notebooks. William Blake’s executor also destroyed much of his writing. Lesson: do not pick as your executor someone who hates you.

4. ‘We tried to call but you were out.’ It’s not just nowadays you can’t trust Royal Mail. With an estimated half a million pieces of post going missing every year, never ever trust your only copy to the mail. A novel of Mary Shelley’s, Valperga, went missing this way on its way to the publishers.

5. ‘Better out than in.’ You could also be especially unlucky and find your work meeting the same fate as a script of Werner Herzog’s. It was apparently vomited on, then thrown out the window of a coach. Lesson: never travel with Werner Herzog. Falling out of coach (maybe a different kind though) was also the apparent demise of a lost concerto by Mendelsson. Keep those windows shut! Or you could also be like Robert Ludlum or Dylan Thomas, who lost their manuscripts on drunken nights out. Thomas lost Under Milk Wood three times while drunk. What a guy.

Take heed, readers. BACK YOUR WORK UP. You will thank me for it one day when your masterpieces are not being lost on trains and/or burned by irritated exes.

Didn’t think so.

So here’s this week’s list, to remind us all that however fun and shiny it may be, if this were truly Dirty Dancing and Twitter the stage we got up on at the end, after we did our routine there’d be a deafening silence and they’d bring back on the tone-deaf sister, and NO social barriers would be broken down AT ALL. Engage in these online activities at your peril, for that way lies madness, ostracisation, and possible legal action.

1.       Responding to bad reviews

At some point, you really have to get over being upset by bad reviews. Don’t read them, if you find them so hard. Accept the fact that having a book out means you’re in the lucky position of having total strangers read your words, shorn of all knowledge about how nice you are and how you always let hedgehogs safely cross the road (much like Annika Rice). Otherwise you end up doing frankly terrifying things like finding out someone’s home address and hassling your publisher to see if this person really did buy your book (bet they loved that), then posting their details on the internet. See here for unparalleled lunacy.

http://voxday.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/a-rabbit-bites-back.html?m=1

Even million-selling authors have written of how they read every word of reviews and get really upset.  http://www.lisa-jewell.co.uk/2013/01/takes-deep-breath/ I’d have thought selling so much was a clear sign that many people think you’re amazing and those who are giving bad reviews are probably jealous, or maybe don’t like reading, or loved the book but deducted four stars because it looked bigger in the picture (it happens). Either way, they’re perfectly entitled to say what they like. Getting upset may be unavoidable, but responding is something you should never, ever, ever do. Some say you should try everything once, but they’re the kind of people you see at A&E on a Saturday night because they thought it would be interesting to ‘try’ snorting a mixture of Jeyes Fluid and sherbet dib-dabs.

2.       Looking up other people’s  rankings and reviews

It’s like Facebook-stalking the new girlfriend of your ex. Either you’ll be like, ‘she’s hideous, how could he leave me for THAT?’ or you’ll be like, ‘she’s gorgeous. I’m a troll.’ Eyes to the front, people. Don’t be like those runners who fall over because they’re busy trying to see how the Kenyan in lane 4 is getting on. Stay in your lane! I might write that on a post-it as a cool and gnomic motivational tool. Needless to say, I do this one all the bloody time.

3.       Keep track of who unfollowed you on Twitter

Seriously, why do people do this? Isn’t it just courting sorrow? Isn’t it a bit like making a list of all your exes, then going round to their houses to find out exactly why they finished with you? (A good idea for a rom-com and/or multi-selling song by Adele, but less advisable for real people who do not wish to find out what it’s like to be the subject of a restraining order). My followers go up and go down and whilst I notice this more than I wish, I never check to see who it was and I don’t know how. I have quite enough neuroses to be getting on with, thanks.  People unfollow for all kinds of reasons – maybe it was that Twitter ‘bug’ we’re always hearing about (yeah sure) or maybe they think you’re boring or dislike your politics or maybe your wild success has meant the rest of us can no longer bear to read about your life (I sometimes unfollow people because of this reason. Pathetic, but some days I just don’t want to see that you’ve won a prize/sold loads/got a Japanese rights deal/been on telly).

4. Looking at the shortlists for awards when they come out. Despite what that madly optimistic 1% of your brain is telling you, you won’t be on it. Especially if you never actually entered.

5. Scouring the internet for mentions of yourself. There will either be nothing (think twice about setting up an alert for a title with generic words in, like, say ‘The’ or ‘Fall’), or you’ll turn up some nasty review from a man in Hull that will make you cry and then go and find out where he lives and post it on the internet, and then you’ll be right back to Crazy-Making Behaviour 1.

In short, heed the wise words of Irish writer Colm Toibin, speaking at an event last year. ‘Why are you even here? Why are you out? No one gives a fuck about your book. Go home and write.’

We mope about and never get on with anything

Really, writing is like any other job. You don’t turn in work, you don’t get paid. You don’t publish anything for a while, you no longer have a publisher and your agent most likely drops you. We don’t have the luxury of sitting around obsessing about our talent and failing to finish anything.

We have pools
I’ve noticed this a lot in American films. Does literally everyone there enjoy their own leisure facilities, complete with sun loungers, or do film-makers believe authors have pots of money?  I have a pool. A pool of vomit my dog left on the floor. Writers don’t live in gorgeous mansions, we live in small flats with odd smells on the landing.

We’re gorgeous and everyone wants to have sex with us

Hollywood thinks writers look like this:

But really we look like this:

This is by no means to diss George R R Martin, who has given more pleasure to the world than Bradley Cooper ever could, topless or no. But mostly, we’re not so hot.

We use old-fashioned typewriters

This one REALLY irritates me. Have you ever tried to type out 100,000 plus words on a wrist-shattering old typewriter? I’m old enough to remember using one as a child and they were rubbish. You had to keep moving the stupid carriage bit and all the keys would mash together, then one would always stop working and you’d have to ink it in, and they were noisy and they hurt your fingers and you couldn’t grow your nails. We spend hours at our computers. We need GOOD ones. Writing for a living doesn’t make you a Luddite, in fact it’s the opposite.

Our agents and editors are there to nursemaid us and mop our brows

Agents and editors usually have several dozen clients to look after, if not more. Despite what films would have you believe, they do not have time to drive us to the airport, pick up our dry-cleaning, or coax us into writing our next book. Ideally we don’t hate each other, but it’s a business relationship above all else.

People have heard of us
About the only realistic film I’ve seen that deals with this is Young Adult, where the main character goes into a bookshop and insists on signing all the stock of the series tie-in novel she wrote, before being restrained by the security guard. That’s what it’s like. You go into shops and say ‘I wrote that’ and the booksellers get a funny look in their eye. ‘Oh no, why do I get all the crazies?’ That kind of look. You meet people at parties and they ask what you’ve written and they say and they go ‘Oh. Is it….on Amazon?’ We don’t go around incognito and getting recognised on the tube from our author cover photos. Firstly because they’re all wildly over-flattering, and secondly because no one cares.
We have lovely tidy desks
Remember the desk of Emma in One Day? Flowers, jar of sharpened pencils, tidiness?

This is my desk. Note tea, sweets, mess everywhere, unpaid bills. Much more realistic.

We get writer’s block
There’s no such thing as a mythical block to writing. There’s writer’s loss of confidence, writer’s written-myself-into-a-corner, writer’s can’t-get-a-good-idea, and writer’s laziness, but that’s it. Having to pay bills is a powerful motivator to crank out some words.

Everyone in our life worships our talent and leaves us alone to get on with it

In films you get situations like Jack’s wife in The Shining agreeing to spend the winter in an obviously haunted halls-full-of-blood, mental head-fuck of a hotel, so her (unpublished) husband can write a novel. In reality you get moaning about why you’ve been staring at your computer so long and your parents questioning whether it wouldn’t have been better to train as an accountant after all and the assumption that ‘working from home’ means ‘free to entertain guests, make tea for tradespeople, and do the ironing’.

Genius equals bouts of suicidal insanity

Hollywood does love a mad genius (see Shine, Proof, Iris, Sylvia…) but in reality there’s a handful of people whose talent was so great it burned them up before 30 and made them bloody miserable most of the time. For most of us, a spark of talent only succeeds when it’s coupled with sitting down every day for years and getting on with it. Millions of people want to write books. Actually finishing one is a different thing altogether.

Our lives are remotely interesting

I write this as respite from a day in which I’ve – walked the dog, been to the post office, made tea for some gasmen, put the washing on, and done my tax return. I can only conclude screenwriters secretly hope they can one day quit that harsh world and be a novelist, all creative and mad and being lusted after. Whereas novelists dream of being screenwriters, mingling at parties with Ryan Gosling and being paid actual money.

Films which proved this theory: Ruby Sparks, Eat Pray Love, Limitless, Romancing the Stone, Young Adult, One Day, Misery, The Shining, etc etc

 
The vagina is pretty amazing. It can expand and contract up to 200%. It’s self-cleaning, like an oven. It almost never gets caught in your zip. If you’ve got one of these essential bits of kit, be sure you know the rules of ownership. If not they might introduce a licence, and unmarked vans with vagina-detecting sensors will sweep down on your house and instantly fine you £1,000.

There comes a point in every woman’s life when she tires of reading about blow jobs (like, tell me something I don’t know) and yearns instead to read of paint jobs. The questions that keep you awake at night are no longer, What does he really think of my new leather hotpants? or, Is it possible the G-spot is just an elaborate con?, but rather, Should I paint my new sideboard duck egg blue or crushed biscuit beige?, and, Why can’t I get my home-made chutney to set?

Christmas these days seems to be all about the ads. What latest witchcraft have John Lewis employed to jerk upon our tear-ducts like the evil scarf-peddling puppet-masters that they are? Who’s that dancing in the M&S ad, a smile on their face as they quietly survey the ruin of their career and the inevitable slide into panto? Which Hollywood star is the latest to sell out hawking Eau de Starlette, or whatever? And the supermarket ads, of course. You’ve seen the Asda one. The woman does everything: decorating, shopping, wrestling with a turkey, preparing a Mont Blanc of sprouts (which no one likes anyway! Is there any more damning indictment of patriarchy than the fact that a woman has to knock herself out peeling a vegetable no one even enjoys? I’m going to write a feminist book on the subject: Burning Our Brassicas). At the end of all this costume-making, chopping, Christmas card addressing, and general slaving, she collapses into a chair with an expression that suggests she’ll be checking into a psychiatric ward as soon as she’s done the washing-up. Then her husband actually gets up off his arse and carves the turkey…this being beyond the skill of a woman who’s single-handedly organised Christmas, apparently.

I’ve been amazed at the backlash. Ranging from ‘I couldn’t get past the first paragraph’ to ‘I will hide all your Facebook posts until you finish that book’ to ‘you are dead to me’ (joke…I think?) you’d think I’d been delving into Mein Kampf or 100 Days of Sodom, not a romance novel. It seems to be me there are two main criticisms of it. 1: This book is badly written. It does not deserve to have done so well; and 2: this book is anti-feminist. I’ll leave aside the ‘she doesn’t deserve her success’ argument as it’s moot. Books don’t sell because they deserve it. They sell because people want to read them, and talk about them, and pass them on to friends. 50 Shades has been a genuine word of mouth success, and for all those decrying its poor prose style, someone’s sure buying the thing in truck-loads. So.  Don’t be bitter. I’m quite bitter most of the time anyway (I’m told it’s one of my most charming features), but I’m not jealous of EL James. This is a one-off event, a publishing Black Swan. No one can predict them. She was lucky, to a large extent, and she struck a chord (Unlike Mr Grey, who strikes a cord, ho ho).

So, point 1. This book is badly written. To be honest, I don’t see it. Sure, the prose style won’t be troubling the Booker judges any time soon (but seriously, did you read Sense of an Ending? I’d rather go in the Red Room of Pain than wade through that turgid rubbish again). It’s clichéd – tablecloths and wines are always ‘crisp’, every secondary character is ‘an immaculate blonde’, and Christian’s business seems to consist of shouting into a phone at someone called ‘Bob’. It’s repetitive – he always smells ‘divine’, the orgasms are always ‘earth-shattering’, and that whole inner goddess thing is deeply, deeply annoying. She says ‘jeez’ and ‘oh my’ and ‘holy crap’ and even ‘crapola’ a lot. But, you know, Ana is 21, and at 21 people are often quite annoying. As for the good points, it flows well, the story bubbles along nicely, and it ends on a cliffhanger that I thought was quite clever, and means I’ll probably read the sequel, which I hadn’t planned on doing. There are some nice email exchanges that made me smile. And I found out lots about music and interior décor.

I’ve heard people say ‘but nothing happens’, and again I’d dispute that. It’s a romance novel. If you’re used to crime, then sure, there’s no dead bodies or autopsies or plot twists, but those aren’t common in most books anyway. Girl meets boy, girl and boy agonise over things, then get together, is the basis for most romance novels. So if you don’t like that, don’t read the genre. I found 50 Shades more interesting that a ‘women’s fiction’ book I read recently, in which the entire plot was ‘a woman is sad because her husband has died. She gets a new job and shags someone and is a bit less sad. The End.’

In conclusion – it’s a perfectly decent example of a specific type of book. It’s not the best-written one ever, but it’s definitely not even the worst-written I’ve read this month. At least I finished it. I’ve discarded about twenty other novels this week alone.

Now point 2 – it’s sexist. Being well-known for my feminist views, this interested me. When it comes to spotting sexism, I’ve been there, done that, and I do quite literally own the T-shirt (a feminist one). I scoured the book very carefully for signs, and I believe it comes (sorry) down to this – do you think it’s possible to be a feminist, and still enjoy being beaten by a man? I think it is, because sex is something different, with its own rules, and if we only got aroused by the right wholesome things this would be a very different world (and I doubt 50 Shades would have sold so many copies). It’s made clear that Ana always has a choice, and what she can expect is unequivocally set out in a contract. Incidentally I don’t think a contract is a bad idea for relationships. Imagine – ‘my hard limits are: misuse of apostrophes, wearing white socks, and voting Tory. The rest we can discuss.’ He only hurts her properly one time – which she has asked him to do, so she can experience it – and when he does she finds it painful and degrading and immediately breaks up with him. It’s also not an explicitly gendered thing – we’re told he too has been a sub, for a woman. It’s a sex thing, not a sexist thing, I would say. There is a difference, I think.

I’d say it’s his other behaviours which are more worrying. Telling her what to eat, what to wear, and who she can spend time with are all classic early-warning signs of domestic violence. I think it’s possibly a little dangerous to set up the idea that if a man does this, he will stop when you ask him, just because he loves you. Or the idea that a man who’s so keen to hurt you would change all his rules so quickly. A sample issue in the book is resolved thus:

Christian: I want to hurt you.

Ana: I’d rather you didn’t. Can we cuddle instead?

Christian: I don’t do cuddling. I am tortured.

Ana: Oh. I’d like it, though. Holy crapola, this is confusing.

PAUSE WHILE CHRISTIAN TAKES HIS SHIRT OFF TO PLAY THE PIANO

Christian: OK then. Shall we just snuggle? Seeing as it’s you. You’re hot. Let me buy you another Macbook.

However, it’s also made clear that when she asks him to stop, he does stop (I’m not sure this would happen in real life, but it’s a romance novel). And I don’t think EL James invented these dichotomies. She’s just reflecting issues that probably do come up for real women all the time- where’s the line between chivalry and control? There are plenty of women who want to be bought presents, flown in helicopters, and have a man look after them, just as there are plenty who’d vomit at the thought of being told they couldn’t pay in a restaurant because it’s ‘emasculating’ (seriously, you’re meant to have a massive knob. A woman buying you coffee won’t cause penile shrinkage, Mr Grey).

Now, the sex – it is frequent, yes (and yet at no point does Ana come down with a nasty bout of cystitis. Clearly this is the most unbelievable part of the story), but it’s not THAT kinky. I’ve read much filthier stuff in mainstream Jilly Cooper, which I started on at the age of thirteen, and no one minded, even my mother, who banned Neighbours on the ground of inappropriateness. There’s never any other people involved, for a start (not something dear old Jilly could say), and although Christian says he will never spend the night with her, he does it ALL THE TIME. All mouth and no trousers – typical. Perhaps it’s damaging to suggest to young women that they will have three orgasms the first time they have penetrative sex, but I don’t think EL James is alone in peddling that particular myth. So no, I don’t think it is sexist. I think she has written a slightly stereotypical hero (rich, tortured, hot), but you know, that’s why people READ romance. Isn’t it? Women DO fancy rich, hot, tortured men. Otherwise, again, no one would have bought the book. So it’s not like James invented sexy, unsuitable bastards. To go back to Jilly C, her main hero, Rupert Campbell-Black, is an utter twat, who beats up women and horses, shags everything that moves, forces his pregnant wife into a foursome, and has dinner with General Franco (to be fair to Jilly, it was the seventies, when fascism and foursomes were socially acceptable)…yet we’re still supposed to drop our La Perla knickers for him – hello! Whereas Christian Grey is SAVING THE WORLD FROM HUNGER, by, er, doing something in Darfur involving Bob mumble mumble no one read those bits anyway did they?

Essentially, I think this is a love story, about a young woman who falls for a man with very serious flaws that keep them apart. We’ve all been there. Even if he doesn’t want to tie you up in his Red Room of Pain, he’ll probably enjoy watching cricket or vote UKIP or blow his nose loudly or something. Getting past the flaws of people we love is an issue we can all relate to, surely. Clearly, the millions of readers of 50 Shades have done.  I don’t think it’s the best book ever, or even the most erotic, but I quite enjoyed it and I didn’t feel violated as a woman or a feminist. Believe me, if someone was sexist-ing me, I’d definitely notice.

So, in conclusion, stop hating, start masturbating. If you want to, I mean. If you don’t just watch telly or read something else or have sex a man called Kevin who owns a push-bike and makes you pay for your own Pot Noodle. It’s your choice! That’s what feminism is.

So the prospect of a weekend in a full-service stately home with a group of other writers appealed instantly. I packed my hot water bottle and six packets of biscuits. West Dean college is a residential place near Chichester, where you can stay for conferences and the like, but also just book a room. It’s actually a stately home, with oak-panelled rooms, stuffed giraffes’ heads, suits of armour, and extensive grounds. If you stay there you can work either in your room, in the library, or in any of the nice quiet spots round the place. It was £75 a night for your own room, plus bathroom (my bath could have fit three people, easy, though I didn’t try), all meals (huge, delicious, cake-heavy), and use of the facilities. The peace is overwhelming, and the cake helped too. There was always someone around for a quick chat if I felt my brain was imploding it on itself, but plenty of alone time too. I managed 11,000 words over the weekend, and also edited 6 chapters and did some plotting. Book Three is definitely on track now.

I’d fully recommend it if you need some space away from home and family and work. There’s no shame in admitting it, but sometimes we just can’t produce creative work when the dishwasher needs emptied and the dog walking and your spouse is asking you where do you keep the sellotape and other ridiculous queries. Some weeks, days just fall from my hands like casino chips, and I have no idea what stops up the minutes and hours and why all my time drains away like dishwater. On this retreat, I found all that time again, stacked up and waiting for me.

http://www.westdean.org.uk/

Is this the coolest toilet you’ve ever seen or what?