Normal service will be resumed shortly ...

... now that the standard November pile of work has been whittled down almost to a reasonable level. (And don't think I'm not grateful to have work. Au contraire, for how else would I ever hope to pay the dentist?)

I heard the most wonderful interview with Paul Kelly on the car radio yesterday and wrote a long post about music in my head but of course it's all gone now. Well, nearly all; hands up anyone else who remembers Peter, Paul and Mary singing 'I'm in Love With a Big Blue Frog'. Sigh.

Listen to your Auntie Pav

Yes, it's Agony Corner. I haven't even been asked a question, I just feel like dispensing some good advice.

I don't know what it is about flower arranging that sets the mind to wandering, but, following a particularly leisurely train of thought as I tried to coax a bunch of curly-stemmed nasturtiums into a champagne flute, it occurred to me that I know not just one but two stories -- both told to me by reliable sources, about people I know personally -- of people being told they are no longer required by their employers. These people have, in a rage, gone straight to the computer and deleted all the records -- in both cases, indispensable, unique and sometimes irreplaceable records -- relevant to their (former) jobs.

In both cases, the dismissal was unexpected, and was not entirely kind or fair. One can understand what prompted the hitting of the red button. It's all very well having internalised excellent life rules like 'Don't slam the door on your way out', but sometimes the red mist simply descends of its own accord and then all bets are off.

But Reader, do not do it. Do not. Ever.

Because if you do, nobody will ever forget it. It's too good a story -- Shakespearean, really: power, drama, revenge, you know the kind of thing -- and you will carry it round your neck like a dead albatross for the rest of your working life. If you have any more working life. Five years, ten years, fifteen years after you do it, people will still be standing at the kitchen sink putting the first nasturtiums of Spring into champagne glasses and thinking Gee, I wonder what happened to whatsis/ername, you know, the one who deleted all the files.

Notes towards a definition of bad writing

Opening paragraphs, as any Creative Writing teacher will tell you in Week 1, are crucial to any writing venture but most particularly short stories or novels. Here's how not to do it (NB this is a real book):

Rose Season stood at the threshold of her sister's bedroom and silently watched the shadows of an oncoming storm stretch like plum-coloured talons across the empty bed. A great gust of icy wind from Lake Michigan howled at the windows.

Now then:

1) Calling your introductory and therefore likely-to-be-major character Rose Season ensures that the reader will not be able to take her seriously. You might as well have called her Cherry Season, or Rose Blight.

2) By 'at the threshold' do you mean 'in the doorway', which is more concrete (whereas 'at the threshold' is often used figuratively) and therefore easier for the reader to visualise the scene? [Reader thinks: 'Ooh look, a door', but probably not 'Ooh look, a threshold.']

3) 'Silently' is redundant. Presumably if Rose were not silent then she would be talking, and there would be dialogue.

4) Shadows are not plum-coloured, indeed they are not any colour, just a blockage of light. If you mean that the clouds are plum-coloured, say that.

[Here an internal warning is sounded to the reader: this writer apparently cannot think her way out of a paper bag and presumably neither can her editor -- either that, or her editor couldn't persuade her to change it. Either way, the horrible prospect of 445 pages of woolly thinking stands before one.]

5) Talons are not plum-coloured, either. Mixed metaphor.

6) Where there is a talon-shaped shadow, it is almost always the shadow of a talon, or, more usually, several talons, since talons tend to occur in groups. It's very rarely the shadow of a cloud. You are thinking of horror movies, or Foghorn Leghorn cartoons with chicken hawks in them.

7) You need to get rid of at least one of 'great', 'icy' or 'howled'. Three exclamatory adjectives in one short sentence is at least one too many, and in any case all three are clichés.

8) Do gusts howl? Are gusts not, rather, more inclined to bang?

9) And in any case, wind is by definition a thing in motion, but in order to howl at a window, don't you need to stand still at it?

First paragraph FAIL.

Adelaide Writers' Week, Day 3

On which of course I am at home, preparing for today's chairing gig, a session with Michelle de Kretser late this afternoon which I am expecting, and intending, to enjoy a lot. I have also acquired a new late-breaking 'In Conversation' gig with Robert Dessaix on Thursday.

But yesterday I got briefly to do the things you do at writers' festivals when you're there as a punter: went to a book launch and afterwards caught up with three lovely friends for an impromptu lunch of Cath Kerry's Vietnamese cold rolls (Adelaide Writers' Week does the best food you'll ever find in a tent) in the deep shade under the trees in the rose garden, where we had a fairly scandalous discussion about the SA Labor Party and its prospects for the March 20 election.

We'd just been to the launch of Peter Goldsworthy's new book of short stories, Gravel, being launched by J. M. Coetzee, who made the kind of speech that you take away with you and turn over and over in your pocket, a perfectly-judged book-launch speech in that it used the book as a starting point for more general observations about the world and lifted the occasion effortlessly above discussion of a particular thing to an abstract yet razor-sharp reflection on the way we live our lives.

Peter's stories, he said, were partly about life as a moral education, and moral education as a painful process by which we learn how to live good lives by processes of trial and error, and cause and effect, along the lines (my words now, not his) of 'Oh God look what hurt I've caused / how ashamed I feel / what a mess I've made: I'll never do that again.'

As has already happened several times this Writers' Week, I later felt a strong connection to something another of the writers was saying; talking late last night on the phone to Robert Dessaix as we discussed how his Thursday session might go and what sorts of things we might talk about, still mulling over what John Coetzee had said that afternoon, I was startled to hear Robert saying 'I'm interested in the question of what a good life is, and what we have to do to have one.' What I heard, when he used the word 'good', was a seamless meshing of meanings, both as in 'living the good life' and as in 'being a good person'. Some people might argue that these two things are mutually exclusive but not, I think, Robert. Something to ask him in the session.

One might be forgiven for imagining that the Dessaix conception of a 'good life' could be very different from the Coetzee conception of it, but maybe not, so much. They have a great deal in common: born only four years apart, happily settled in small Australian cities, much-travelled polyglot fellow-Aquarians, citizens of the world.

Two things I've learned already today and it's not even lunchtime yet

(1) If you're trying to think through/develop/write a complicated argument about Aboriginal writing and its relationship to ideas about 'literary merit', a 180-word book review being written to deadline is not the place to do it, and anyway you're far better off waiting for your dear friend L, co-author of Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature, to arrive tomorrow to give her seminar at Adelaide U so that you can pick her brains about the current state, if any, of academic debates around this question and her own ideas about it.

(2) Work really does expand to fill the time available.

There is a routine, of sorts

Every third or fourth Friday is Money Day, on which one pays any outstanding bills and chases up every little bit and bob of money one is owed (long, long gone are the days when they just automatically sent you a cheque), that number of bits and bobs today being, hmm, five, and let me tell you that the bigger the institution the harder it is to get your money out of them and the longer it takes. If the invoices add up to more than the bill payments, one is allowed to buy oneself a nice bottle of something.

If you must leave, make sure you leave in the middle of a sentence

Here's a trick I learned many years ago when writing my PhD thesis: don't leave off work on a piece of writing without knowing exactly where it's going. If you're writing in sections, don't stop at the end of one; make the transition, work through the segue, write the first sentence of the next bit, or better still half of the first sentence of the next bit, and jot down a few notes or keywords to remind you where it's going next. Then you can leap up with impunity to escape out into the garden, kill a few caterpillars, pull up a few soursobs, get a little sun on your face.

Otherwise you'll just sit there staring at it for twenty minutes after you sit back down to it, as I've just been forcibly reminded. Given how long ago I learned this lesson, I can't believe that I could have forgotten it even just the once.

Sydney, and other stuff

Wow, a two-week hiatus. I don't think I've not-blogged for that long since I started in October 2005. For some reason this time of year, anything between August and November, always seems busier than usual. Spent a week and a half attending all-day Arts SA meetings and doing my real job at night before leaving for three days in Sydney last week for the launch of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (UPDATE: Angela from Literary Minded, who I see shares my taste in images and the placement of images, went to the Melbourne launch a few days later), thus:

Thursday, June 30, 11 am: sample Adelaide Airport long-term car park. Discover walk from farthest reaches of car park to shuttle bus slightly longer than bus ride to Virgin terminal and daily rates add up to exactly two taxi fares between my place and the airport. Write experience off to experience.

1.30 pm: hear slightly panicked air crew member come on, somewhere over the Hay Plains, and ask if there is a medical practitioner on board and would the rest of us please stay in our seats. It's times like this I'm glad I'm not a doctor, and that Virgin Blue offers only Mr, Mrs and Ms as choice of honorific when booking one's flight, the old days of being asked 'Miss or Mrs?' and enjoying replying 'Dr' being mostly gone and a good thing too; 20 years ago, having habitually done this with Qantas and the dead-and-gone Ansett, I used to worry occasionally that I'd be called upon to perform an emergency tracheotomy with a biro and a coathanger at 30,000 feet and have to explain that I couldn't, but if they needed an impromptu history of the Australian short story or an emergency fisking of a Clive James poem then I was indeed their woman.

2.30 pm: arrive Sydney, where the sky is a flawless blue, literally and metaphorically. Whenever the cab pulls out of that airport drive and into the sunshine made lacy through the subtropical vegetation, I can actually physically feel my heart lift. Never having managed to get a job in Sydney (applied for three, shortlisted for all of them, didn't get any of them, message in there somewhere) is the single biggest regret of my life, which is saying a great deal.

5 pm: arrive Admiralty House for the launch of the anthology by the Governor-General. Mill around on footpath in growing crowd that, by the time the uniformed dudes on the gate start ticking off our names and letting us in, includes David Malouf, Drusilla Modjeska, Peter Rose, and about twenty people I used to teach, research and/or go to conferences with, including former longtime Melbourne U colleague Prof Chris Wallace-Crabbe and the lovely Prof David Carter from U of Q, formerly a Melbourne boy, whom I haven't seen for many years.

5.30 pm: have surreptitious look around and confirm that I have dressed appropriately for the occasion. Just as well.

6 pm approx: listen to the Governor-General make her nicely personal and informal speech. Listen to David Malouf read his lovely poem Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian, in which the body addresses the departing soul at the moment of death, and which begins with the Emperor Hadrian's own actual words, which are, naturally, in Latin.

Wonder how long it's been since the sound of Latin poetry being read has been heard in Admiralty House or indeed anywhere else in Australia.

Wonder what degree of mischievousness informed David's decision to choose for this occasion a poem about death.

Am flooded by a sudden awareness of the history of this spot, and wonder about past ceremonies here and their participants' private thoughts as the sun set outside with ludicrous magnificence, then as now.

Reflect that the last time Australian literature got this much attention at this level of politics must have been the 1957 occasion, of which there is a photograph in the David Marr biography (an except from which is also included in the anthology), on which Patrick White was presented with the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award by the then Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies, with the Leader of the Opposition in attendance and looking on.

Wonder if current PM has been presented with a complimentary copy. Think must remember to suggest it. (Discover later that he apparently got the No. 1 copy of the signed and numbered Collectors' Edition. Hope he dips into it from time to time. Have my own collectors' copy, courtesy of Allen & Unwin, which I hardly dare take out of its box.)

7 pm approx: Mill about some more, as various sweet and discreet boys weave through the crowd bearing crystal jugs full of liquid rubies that turn out to be iced white rum with cranberry juice. Watch William Yang, whose writing is featured in the anthology, taking photos (the pic in that link will give you a good idea of what the gathering was like). Reflect that what I should really do is get out my iPhone and take a photo of William Yang taking photos. Many photos being taken, as you can see in this nice (though not by William Yang: see below) shot of SMH literary editor Susan Wyndham and me.

Photograph by Sam Begg

Note the way our drinks are colour co-ordinated with my necklace and Susan's shawl.

Friday, July 31, 9.30 am: arrive at ABC studios in Sydney, half an hour early because (a) nervous and (b) have forgotten that in Sydney if you want a cab you simply step out into the street and hold your hand up, and one will pull over. Do 40-minute live-to-air segment on anthology for Radio National Book Show, being interviewed by Ramona Koval with fellow editor Nicole Moore and Sydney U Professor of Australian Lit Robert Dixon. This goes much better than I was expecting it to.

Friday 4.30 pm: meet up in Gleebooks with the lovely Viv aka Tigtog from Hoyden About Town, whom I have not previously actually met, and add her to my ever-growing collection of bloggers I've met in person. Decide we will go next door to soi-disant 'Chocolateria' (and so it proves to be, with a vengeance) and have a hot chocolate: thick hot chocky with chili and cinnamon, oh my goodness.

We have barely sat down when in come a couple of literary types I know, closely followed by two young women whom Viv knows and introduces to me as Wildly Parenthetical and Zero at the Bone. I thought this sort of thing only happened in Adelaide but clearly not.

Friday 6.30 pm: second and more informal, though still very structured, launch of anthology upstairs at Gleebooks. This includes wonderful readings by featured authors, and as Michael Gow reads a speech from Away and Michelle de Kretser a passage from The Hamilton Case, I remember very clearly why I chose those passages to put into the book.

Friday 8.30 pm: arrive at a most lovely restaurant in Rose Bay with my dear friend L who has come up to attend the one-day symposium the following day that has been arranged around the anthology launch. We have a quiet mates' catchup while we savour our duck and spinach, and look out at the festively-lit ferries crossing the harbour and the white birds swooping through the pools of light outside.

Saturday, August 1, 10 am: start of all-day symposium at the beautiful State Library of NSW, where I look around and regret for the millionth time my ongoing failure to score a job in Sydney. The symposium is programmed around the anthology and titled 'Australian Literary Futures'. My session is the one after morning tea, where the editorial team lines up on one side and, on the other, the country's two Professors of Australian literature, Robert Dixon and Philip Mead, plus co-editor of Southerly and immediate past president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Elizabeth McMahon. They ask us questions and we do our best to answer them. This session also goes much better than I was expecting it to, and everybody on the panel and in the audience seems to enjoy it.

Saturday 2 pm: Professor Ivor Indyk of UWS, holder of the Whitlam Chair in Writing and Society and a living national treasure to all who value Aust Lit, which makes this moment worse, gets up to speak in the session on 'Australian literature on the international stage' and shatters the good feeling that has prevailed in the room thus far by getting quite emotional about his view that there are not enough migrant writers represented in the anthology. For some reason I am reminded of the sight of Our Gough fifteen years ago as he launched the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature by making a speech in which he pointed out all the errors he'd found in it so far.

Given how conscious I was of this 'migrant writing' issue in my role as section editor, and how hard I and the other section editors worked to do it justice among the many other claims on tight space in the book, this accusation makes me cross -- cross enough to count a few stats, later after I get home, and ascertain that just in my own section (fiction and drama since 1950), ten writers out of 48 (ie more than 20%) were not born in Australia; eleven came from partly or wholly non-anglophone backgrounds; and thirteen of these stories or extracts specifically and directly address (and were carefully and deliberately chosen so to do) some aspect of the migrant experience.

In his address to the symposium Ivor acknowledges some of these, but argues item by item that each is somehow not legitimate, or not good enough. Or something. Can't quite follow his reasoning here. His real beef appears to be that none of his particular five favourite migrant writers -- two fiction writers who would have been my responsibility, and three poets who would have been that of my fellow-editor David McCooey, between us responsible for the period 1950 to the present -- are in the anthology.

All five are European. The many included writers with their roots in Asian countries, including a number of first-generation immigrants, have scarcely been mentioned; nor is there any acknowledgement of the entries by Elizabeth Jolley and J. M. Coetzee, both brought up in bilingual households in other countries and both adult emigrants to Australia. Can't help thinking Ivor has a few blind spots of his own. One of the poets he names as an 'omission' is someone David simply thinks isn't very good. One of the novelists he names is someone whose one novel available in English, a translation from her original Italian, I found unpleasantly hysterical and practically unreadable.

Saturday 4 pm: David McCooey and I have an extremely lively conversation in the cab we share to the airport.

Saturday 8 pm: Arrive home where am greeted ecstatically by cats behaving like dogs. This is quite new; usually they punish me for going away by doing that cat ignoring thing.

Saturday 8.05 pm Crack spine of first of four books that must be read and reviewed by Wednesday. Thank God and my editor that a couple of them are very short. Unlike this post.

Irritants: an occasional series

Yesterday I went to a meeting that was scheduled to begin at nine. It was a Public Service thing so we're talking fifteen or twenty people, city office, professionals, tight schedule etc etc. The meeting was due to go all morning with what turned out to be one five-minute break. A whole morning of not working (at my actual job, I mean; these meetings are bloody hard work) puts me far enough behind in the weekly schedule to get uneasy, and I'd made a special effort to get ahead beforehand.

As one who keeps owl hours, I was unable to go to sleep at a reasonable time on Sunday night so was up again at seven after five and a half hours of uneasy sleep, which at my age is not enough to get you, fully functioning, through an active day. In the car by 8.10, drive for 40 minutes through peak hour traffic including massive, extended, longterm roadworks at one corner of the CBD, find a city park, haul arse into the office and down to the bowels of the building and its claustrophobic and badly heated main meeting room.

Where we then sat for 25 minutes waiting for everyone to turn up. 'We' included one very senior public servant who is presumably handsomely paid for her time. The last latecomer (there were several) finally strolled in at 9.25 and did not apologise. After another ten minutes of faffing, the meeting finally began. The last to arrive said casually later 'Oh sorry, thought it started at half-nine.' This with the starting time in bold at the top of the agenda.

Given that we stayed behind schedule for the rest of the morning, it was inevitable that the harassed organiser would ask us if we could stay on over time, but before I could say 'Sure, if I'm paid for it', the last latecomer was -- inevitably -- the one who said 'Oh no, sorry, I have to be elsewhere.'

None of the latecomers were crucial to the meeting. We could easily have started without them at nine. And that's 25 minutes of my life I could have spent sleeping or working (or blogging), and that I'll never get back. Yes it's a tiny tiny thing, and I've said to myself several times now 'Let it go, Indy', but for some reason, and unusually, I can't. Am thinking blogging it might help. And the next time I'm running late I will try to remember how incredibly bloody inconsiderate it is of the poor sods who are waiting for you, having successfully made the effort to get there on time themselves.

Perversity: we has it

If I've sounded a tad snitchy around here lately it's partly because I think my head asplode. Don't ask me why anyone would give any date in early January as a deadline but lots and lots of people, I've discovered, do.

There are currently (ie this week) three urgent work tasks, two of them huge and difficult, one still demanding but regular and comparatively easy. The deadlines are all, um, around nowish.

So can anyone tell me why, to the neglect of the two big bad ones, I'm powering through the relatively manageable one, the one whose deadline is furthest away (like, not for whole days yet) and the only one I am totally unlikely to get a Please Explain hurry-up email about, an email that asks that unanswerable question 'When do you think you'll be finished?', some time between now and the end of the day?

Thought for the week

The number of people in the world who would ever dream of picking up a hitherto unfamiliar musical instrument and expecting to be able to play Mozart on it is presumably very small, so why is the number who think they can write a good novel without ever thinking or bothering to read up on the history, the theory or the techniques of novel-writing, or indeed without ever (apparently) having read a novel at all, so very very large?

This is a constant and undiminished source of astonishment.

Then again, a constant and undiminished capacity for astonishment is one of the paths to a happy, or at least a non-disappointed, middle age. So at least there's something in it for me.

Memo to publishers esp publicity/media staff

Dear all,

Never mind all the blurb and puff and comments solicited from patient and put-upon established writers and heavily edited extracts from old reviews (especially when permission to quote has not been sought and said reviews were written by moi*): could you please, please, please include some actual information -- RRP, total number of pages, ISBN and name of Australian distributor -- in the media releases you send out with review copies? I am sure you all read the reviews pages and journals and are therefore aware that reviewers and literary editors and the librarians who rely on them all want/need this information. It would save this reviewer and no doubt many others an average of 10-15 minutes' Googling, emailing and telephoning, plus associated costs, per insufficiently informative unit of publicity.

Lots of love,
Pav xxx


*This has happened at least half a dozen times to my knowledge. If you must do it, could you at least identify the reviewer by name instead of just naming the paper or journal?

The Saturday numbers

As at 10.17 pm Sunday night update:

Christmas presents bought: 2
Christmas presents delivered: 3 (not the same ones)
Morning coffee dates kept: 1
Family visits paid: 2
Christmas Day arrangements made: 1
Boxing Day arrangements made: 1
New Year's Eve arrangements made: 0.5 1
Christmas cards written: 0 3
Dishes washed: 0 1 sinkful, still not enough
Reviews written: 0
Christmas trees up but still not decorated: 0 1
Minutes Hours spent on tax preparation (accountant appointment Monday morning): 4.5 and still not finished!
Pages of weekly fiction for review read: 0 263
Pages of 700-page biography for 2000-word review (due 1/1/09) read, in total: 13. Still. Gahh.

Sigh. Sigh.

Whole lotta bloggin' goin' on ... not

Not around here, anyway. Because here is my deadline calendar for the next couple of months:

Nov 12: 900 word total -- short reviews of 4 novels

Nov 14: 8-900 word review of 216-page book

Nov 19: 900 word total -- short reviews of 4 novels

Nov 21: Six MA theses in Creative Writing due back with grades and examiners' reports (not yet received, I have to pick them up this afternoon)

Nov 24: Ten Honours theses, on assorted subjects, due back with grades and examiners' reports (seven received so far, three still MIA)

Nov 26: 900 word total -- short reviews of 4 novels

Dec 3, 10, 17, 24 and 31: 900 word total -- short reviews of 4 novels

Jan 1: 18-1900 word review of 714-page biography

Jan 6: Return 1400-page manuscript to publisher, proofread

Jan 7: 900 word total -- short reviews of 4 novels


And that's only if nobody offers me any new work between now and then, which would in itself be cause for alarm. At all times, but especially in times of economic panic, the freelancer must make like the ant*, in preparation for the time to come when grasshopper behaviour will be the only available option.

At least those dates are staggered. As opposed to moi, what am staggering:




As one form of time-saving, but also for nobler reasons, I shall be doing most of my Christmas shopping out of the Oxfam catalogue. Actually it is such a ripper this year that I might devote a whole nother blog post to it, thereby avoiding all of the above for another ten minutes or so.

*Except for the nyerdy nyer part at the end, of course.

Sometimes you just know

One of the eponymous characters in the second of this week's four work novels, Rudolph Delson's Maynard & Jennica -- Maynard, to be precise -- has just observed on page 54 that the expression 'prevailing wisdom' is an oxymoron. And there's my Pick of the Week right there.

Good writing, bad writing

Some years ago I found myself being called upon to say what I thought good writing was. I ended up choosing a paragraph from near the beginning of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and doing a good old-fashioned close-reading number on it, saying exactly what I thought was good about it and why. I chose it because when I'd first read it, every little hair on the back of my neck stood up, and the body test is as good as any other when you're thinking about art (best seminar paper title I've ever seen: 'If It's Crap, Why Do I Cry?').

This also works in the other direction. Sometimes, not often but even once is too damned often in terms of the time it wastes, I find myself thirty or forty pages into one of my books for review, my 'work' books, when I am alerted by actual bodily sensations to the fact that I am not going to be able to go on.

Probably about half of the books I receive for review, maybe a bit more, would come into the category of popular fiction, 'popular' in the sense of 'not literary fiction' or 'genre fiction' or whatever. Some of the more high-minded of my friends wonder, I think, though they are rarely tactless enough to say so, how I can bear to read some of this stuff. They are the same mates who are sniffy about commercial television and I think the impulse is the same.

The answer is that I read and write and think about fiction for a living and have always done so. It is my profession. I think about it in a fundamentally different way from the people for whom literature is, precisely, not a part of their everyday lives but a magical escape or a well-earned reward or some other kind of special treat.

I love these people. They are the ones who turn up at writers' festivals and ask intelligent questions at question time, having -- unlike many of one's former students -- read the books, often with great intensity and love. They are the ones who belong to readers' groups and turn up at them faithfully and have boisterous discussions of the book at issue. They are terrific people, but I am not one of them; my relationship to fiction is far more mundane and workmanlike than theirs.

Now obviously the issues at stake here are fundamentally ideological, which I won't go into because the people who care about these ideas are already familiar with them and the people who don't care about them don't care about them. Let's just say that in the last nearly-two years of reading four novels a week minimum, I've read an awful lot of excellent genre fiction and quite a lot of crummy 'literary' fiction, what you might call 'art fiction' in the sense of 'art music', fiction in which the gap between the writer's obvious aspiration and her or his actual achievement has been wide enough for a whale to swim through, and I mean sideways.

Actually this fiction/music categorisation thingy is a parallel worth pursuing, though not now, because I've just wasted however long it took to read the first forty pages of the new Dean Koontz, whose writing has aspirations to literariness but is 'popular' in the sense that lots and lots of people read him, with a view to a review. Fortunately I get sent more books than there is space to review, so I get to make choices and I have just chosen to let the already obscenely rich Dean Koontz do without 180 of my own words because let's face it, he doesn't need them and it wouldn't make any difference to the people who like to read him, of whom there are many millions, and if readers want to vote with their wallets then that is absolutely their prerogative.

But I finally put down The Darkest Evening of the Year, knowing I would not pick it up again, when I got to this passage on page 40:

Here in the venereal aftermath, Harrow has no fear of any blade she might have buried in the bedding. If ever she tries to kill him, the attempt will be made between the motion and the act, at the ascending moment of her fulfilment.

It was at this point that I began to feel the way you do when you've eaten something you should have thrown out the day before, or possibly the day before that. You know how, when you've been poisoned, there's always that moment of realisation that there's something seriously wrong, and that quite soon it's going to get much worse? I think the blade at the ascending moment of her fulfilment was that moment.

I'm guessing the phrase 'between the motion and the act' is an allusion to T.S. Eliot (see Stanza V and no I don't know what it means either) -- Koontz at 63 is exactly the right age for Eliot to have been the dominant literary influence of his formative years, and one can only wish that Eliot had been a bit more of an influence, though perhaps in a different way -- but if anyone can tell me exactly what that phrase 'between the motion and the act' actually means in the context of a hypothetical pre-post-coital psychotic homicide, I will give her or him $10,000 and a free kitten.

At which point I turned for relief to a nice novel about vampires called 13 Bullets, and so far I have not been disappointed. The heroine-narrator appears to be some kind of cross between Kinsey Millhone and Buffy, and there's blood everywhere by page 2. If you're going to write popular fiction, do it properly.

On being a one-woman small business

Should you have ambitions to become a one-person small business, allow me to offer the following advice:

* Do not, ever, underestimate the amount of time it will take you to keep track of the money.

* If as in my case the money is coming in in oft-tiny amounts from a rich diversity of ever-changing sources, multiply that estimate by six.

* You will have to invoice almost everyone. Almost everyone will require you to invoice them in a particular format and all the formats will be different.

* Even if you continue to have an income stream from the same source over a period of time, the source will change its name regularly. Checking every time you have an invoice to send that you have in fact made it out to the correct body under the correct name will save you even more wasted time later.

* Keep all your sent invoices in one place. Make backups/copies and keep them all together in a different place.

* You will find that you need to cross-reference and cross-check your own invoices with your bank statements and match both to your tax records. Don't forget that some employers are into electronic banking, others not so much, so you can't rely on just the one set of records.

* The financial year in which you get even remotely sloppy about income and expenditure will be the financial year in which you get audited. Do not, however, think that keeping good records will necessarily save you from this. My paternal grandfather, a wheat and sheep farmer, was once investigated by the taxation people because his records were too good to be true. Investigation revealed there was no fudging, just perfect record-keeping. My grandfather was a Virgo.

* Being a Virgo helps a lot, as indeed does being a Taurus. The rest of you should get help.