This is a picture of Polly.  I've known her since I was about seven. Here she is standing in front of a sign telling us that we all want to be like Che (according to Fidel Castro). We were in Santa Clara visiting the Che memorial. This picture contains a lot of shared history leading up to the moment of the photograph! Click on "Read More" to read the story...

Still trying to collect myself after a dazzling two weeks in Cuba, with 40 hard-drinking Norwegian socialists. Because of bad weather in Paris, I was rerouted to Toronto, where I spent a bad night on two chairs in the airport, staring out at banks of shovelled snow heaped by the runways and wondering how the hell I'd ended up so far from the Caribbean....The Norwegian socialists, however, were perhaps even unluckier: they ended up in a Eurodisney hotel just outside Paris!

We were reunited a day later in a place called Playas del Este to the East of Havana. The Norwegians were all charming, funny, friendly and intelligent. Polly, my room-mate and very old friend (and the reason I'd been invited), hadn't changed a bit....

Carry on reading if you want to see a photo!

 Saw There Will be Blood last night in a ghastly Norwich multiplex, struggling through the usual popcorn chompers, chatterers, text-checkers etc... I didn't mind these irritations as much as usual, since the film was riveting; but was, however, downcast by the stampede for the exit the moment Daniel Plainview announced that he was finished.... My friend and I were the only people in the cinema who watched any credits at all, craning our necks round the departing hordes and finally watching alone in an empty auditorium, horribly aware of two impatient cleaners waiting with their black plastic bin liners to clean up before the next screening...

Sometimes you read a book, or see a film, or watch a tv drama, and wonder why the writer bothered and how the hell they ever got published/commissioned. Then there are the occasional jewel-like moments when you see or read something and you're left slack-jawed at the sheer genius of the writing...

Okay, this is a whingeing writer paragraph. It's dark, it's gloomy. The wind is howling round the trees outside, and rain is spattering loudly onto the roof window above me. I'm in waiting mode: waiting for notes from my editor on Draft Six of the book (yes, yet another draft...); waiting for a producer to contact me about an idea we're discussing; waiting for another producer to tell me when we're meeting in London to storyline the series we're working on. The telephone is silent. No-one's sent me an email. Not even any local distraction - everyone in the village is huddled indoors, no doubt leading lives far more interesting than mine.

Fifth draft of novel finished today. The editor turned out to be brilliant – she has cajoled and encouraged me through another draft when I didn’t think I had anything left to say. And I know it’s better than it was. It’s grown even longer, but not excessively so, and she’s inspired me to add more colour, more description. If you want a picture of what it feels like to write five drafts and feel like you might be at the end of the process, imagine a head full of chaos and utter exhaustion, with a thousand Medusa-like snakes of questions, worries and doubts writhing about on it... Now all I need is a publisher and a bit of self-belief… Film script, meanwhile has gone to a FAMOUS PERSON who has expressed interest in the subject. May be a long shot, but surely worth a try…

Agent thinks completed novel needs an extra something to sell it to publishers. I was totally depressed about this at first, but I've just re-read the whole thing and I think she's probably right (much as I hate to say it!)...

So now I'm meeting with an editor called Sally who has experience with these things, to progress further. I hope.

Am recording this, so any budding authors out there realise what an uphill struggle it all is...

But on a more optimistic note, I have finished my film script at last! Waiting for agent to read it. Fingers crossed...

I've FINISHED the novel! It's now called Silverstrand and is 517 pages long. 517 pages of angst, sweat, and despair. Now let's hope my agent can sell it to someone who has a penchant for psychological thrillers with a ghost or two thrown in....

Still working on the novel, of course. I'm going backwards now, doing the chapters I avoided doing properly before, the ones about Seattle in the sixties. I've got hold of this fantastic book called Rites of Passage; A memoir of the Sixties in Seattle by someone called Walt Crowley. I don't know what I would have done without it! - It conjures up a whole world of Vietnam draft-dodgers, sit-ins, underground magazines, demonstrations, coffeehouses with names like the Last Exit and the Deli.... Very similar to what was going on in Norwich, believe it or not! Reminds me of how exciting it all was. God. We could be living on another planet completely in 2007. Was so impressed by the book I Googled Walt Crowley (Walt! What a gloriously American name!) and found that he had created a whole history website devoted to the history of Seattle. Then at the end of the site, it said that he had had cancer of the throat, and in February this year had his larynx removed. I was so upset by this I sent him an email, and am happy to report that he replied and said he's on the mend.

I'm on Chapter Nineteen of my novel. I'm writing one, not reading one, in case you wondered. This will be my fifth novel. So far, it's been the most difficult. Why? I don't know. Maybe because it's more complex than the others - there are three story strands in this one and three main characters - a drunk, grief-stricken 30-something guy, an uptight, repressed woman in her fifties, and a Victorian ghost called Violet. I have to keep all three stories moving and intertwining and it gives me one large headache. According to my latest synopsis, there will be twenty seven chapters all together, so I know I'm past the halfway mark, but it still feels like an uphill struggle every day.