My true identity

Just to make it absolutely clear, I am not J.K. Rowling writing under a pseudonym.

Thank you.

Happy birthday Kate Harper!

This week marks the first anniversary of the e-publication of Looking for Buttons, so it's obligatory for me to mark that by sharing some of the things I've learned from the experience:

1.  People like free stuff.

I've shifted hundreds of copies of the book.  I've sold far fewer.  Despite this, I did get my first UK royalty cheque earlier this year.  Should have had buns a la Nesbit for tea, bought fish and chips instead and the rest went on the rent.

2.  Being a writer is not 24/7 glamour.

See rent comment above.  And I still haven't had an opportunity to wear my frivolous shoes.

3.  People are fab.

People I have seldom or never met have helped me with technicalities and promotion.  Friends have read the book, bought the book, plugged the book, listened patiently to me fretting about the book and generally been very positive about the whole thing.  Complete strangers have sent me nice messages via Twitter, Facebook and the Kindle Users' Forum and posted reviews on Amazon.  As a shy and retiring hermit, I find this all slightly overwhelming.  Thank you, all of you.

I won't witter on.  You're busy people and I'm supposed to be writing an essay (being a mature (immature) student is a great way to put off writing the Difficult Second and Third Novels).  But it's been an interesting and sometimes fun year, so if you're reading this, thank you for coming to the party.

Do help yourself to tea and buns.

Getting technical

No matter what non-scribblers may think, writing is a technical occupation.  You don't just dream up characters and storylines and nurture them into a novel.  Before that happens, you have to get to grips with the tools of the trade.

I suspect as long as people have been writing, there have been writers muttering dark imprecations about those tools.  There must have been stone tablets that shattered just as the chisel was reaching the good bit.  For every breathtakingly illustrated medieval bible, there must have been countless sheets of screwed up vellum lobbed into the fire by a frustrated monk.  The advent of the printing press must have created so many new ways for things to go wrong that Caxton must have been cursed in the same way as a Windows fatal error that occurs just as you were about to save that crucial file.

Which brings me (clumsily) up to date: the writer's relationship with modern technology.  Now you may have noticed by the paucity of illustration and zippy effects on this blog that I am not the techiest of people.  For all their shiny futuristic glamour, computers are merely tools, albeit less straightforward than a hammer, sometimes to the point where I am tempted to juxtapose the two.  But when you dip a toe or ten in the chilly waters of self-publishing, you need to get to grips not only with word processing but with creating a cover image (OK, I ducked that - thanks Graham!), maintaining an online presence and grappling with uploads and downloads, all the time suspecting something somewhere has gone arwy (I'm yet to receive any royalties from Amazon, not sure if that's because I haven't earned enough or because I did something wrong when I put the book up for sale).

Regular writers have publishers to worry about that sort of thing.  When you're a one (wo)man band it can start to creep in and suck out the time and enthusiasm you were saving for the actual writing.

So what I think I need is something to take the next book out of my head and drop it straight into yours, for a small fee of course.  I'll see what I can dream up.

PS Looking for Buttons will be FREE from Amazon this Valentine's Day.  That's got to be better than some wilting roses and an overpriced box of chocolates.

Writing? It's child's play.

I used to play with dolls as a child.  I gather this is What Children Do.  I used to stage grand extravaganzas, big budget, all action, non-stop thrills, conscripting all manner of household items.  Those aren't stairs, that's a cliff and there is a heart-stopping clifftop rescue going on.  That's not a mirror, it's a portal to another dimension.  The lift has broken off the Sindy house and is swinging freely: cue Towering Infernoesque disaster movie.  There were sagas that went on for weeks, if not months: the tangled on-off courtship of Barbie and Ken, the backstabbing world of the pop diva, the tragic little orphans in their garret.

Recently I spoke to a friend about this.  She seemed taken aback.  Didn't she used to play games like that? "No," she said, "I just used to brush their hair and change their clothes."

So:

Writers are born and not made.

Discuss.

Radio Ga Ga

Writing's a funny pastime.  You'd think all types (if you'll forgive the pun) of story would be the same, but it doesn't work like that.  At least, it doesn't for me.  Some come out as prose, others don't want to work that way and insist on attempting to be drama, and some are amenable enough to let me try them out in different ways.

A confession: I have had a lifelong love affair with the spoken word.  As a child I listened to my favourite stories over and over again on LP and cassette (oh, just google them, young people, I'm not going to digress now).  I spent teenage illnesses in bed listening to Journey Into Space (a repeat, I hasten to add - I'm not quite that old).  And had BBC Radio 7 (now Radio 4 Extra) not launched when it did, I'd have finished my thesis a year earlier instead of losing hours pretending to study simulation results while listening agog to Fatherland and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, headphones clamped over my unkempt studenty hair.  Which is why, despite its stubborn refusal to turn into anything coherent, I have persisted with the Difficult Second Novel.  It may not be working as a book, went my reasoning, but perhaps it would work for radio.  Perhaps the problem was that I was trying to tell the story in the wrong way.

So I'd poke and I'd prod and I'd try to work out the casting and play it in my head and still the damn thing wouldn't come.  And then last night I pulled at the threads again after a gap of nearly a year, expecting the knots to bite harder, becoming more intractable and impossible to resolve than ever, only this time I tugged from a slightly different angle and suddenly there I was, standing in a windswept garden near midnight (I'm not being poetical, I was out in all that rotten weather) with an armful of yarn that needs knitting into a workable narrative (yeah, that was the poetic bit).  And I think it's going to be a novel after all, not a radio play.

Which is a Good Thing, of course, but I've been so set on hearing this one rather than reading it that I'll have to get it published, just so I can have it as an audiobook.  Can I have Anton Lesser reading it, please?

Turning back at the last minute

I stopped writing a while ago.  Nothing was coming together and sales of Looking for Buttons have not been particularly encouraging (yes, I know admitting this is not good PR but I am nothing if not a realist) so I was pretty much ready to call it a day.

And then today, I wrote a poem.  It was a peculiar experience.  Past attempts at poetry have been jolly fripperies, pastiches of childhood favourites.  I did go through the adolescent angst-poet phase twenty years ago, but that - I hope - left no evidence to condemn me.  But today was something else entirely.  I wasn't trying to do anything writerly, in fact it was as crushingly mundane as brushing my teeth prior to getting one of them filled (I have a kamikaze wisdom tooth).  And there, without warning, was the poem, nebulous at first but clearer by the second, like wiping grime from a railway carriage window with the hem of my sleeve to catch a fleeting glimpse of something true.  It wasn't writing, it was more the process of remembering something I didn't know I knew.

I'm not going to publish the poem here, not now.  I need to live with it for a while and I suspect it might be more personal than I realise.  Showing it to other people might be like flashing my knickers at the Archbishop of Canterbury: perfectly feasible in this day and age but not terribly wise.  But it seems that although I've given up writing, my subconscious hasn't.

And so on I plod...

Gottle of geer

"Find your voice!" the writing handbooks say.  Which is fair enough.  But there's more.

"Find the voice of your characters!"  OK, yes, reading it back they seem to be distinct personalities.  Next.

"Find your narrative voice!"

Ah.

Looking for Buttons was written in the first person, narrated by Kate, the central character.  I like first person narrative, I like its immediacy and intrinsic bias.  It's why I prefer Ice Station Zebra to Where Eagles Dare, although filmwise I'd call it the other way.  (Yes, I do realise that writers of romantic comedy do not as a rule cite Alistair MacLean as their writing inspiration, but I am nothing if not, erm, yes, you could say odd.)  The Difficult Second Novel, which has more in common with MacLean and Adam Hall than with Looking for Buttons, has a first person narrative.  So, first problem - does the narrator of the DSN sound too much like Kate, i.e. do both books in fact just sound like me?

The Difficult Third Novel is shaping up to follow Looking for Buttons into the chick lit genre, but it's written in the third person, with an all-seeing impartial narrator (a bit like David Attenborough, only without the charm and erudition).  Reading it back, it's OK, but it's not quite right.  So, second problem - should I rewrite it from the point of view of the central character and see if that sorts it out?  Which itself brings me to the third problem, which is actually the first problem all over again.

I feel I should draw a flow chart at this point, but that's just the latent scientist in me, and if I sit quietly with my copy of Doctor Faustus for a minute the feeling will pass.

It's not enough just to put words on a page in the right order.  You've got to throw your voice at the same time.  But if you don't get it right it turns into a boomerang and comes back to clout you round the ear.

It's enough to drive you to drink a gottle of geer.

You know how to whistle, don't you?

If you'd asked me about feedback ten years ago, I'd have launched into an explanation of how amplified sound leaving a loudspeaker is picked up by the microphone, causing a cycle of further amplification until you get the whistling screech familiar at rock concerts or near a hearing aid wearer.  Possibly I'd have drawn a diagram.  If you'd asked me on a day when things were going particularly badly, I'd probably have gibbered into my copy of Fundamentals of Acoustics and lapsed into miserable silence while scrolling through the vintage jewellery listings on eBay.

But those days are behind me now and today I'm more concerned with feedback from readers.  Yesterday a friend told me I had my first US review on Amazon.  I was a little nervous.  I don't know anyone in the States so this was my first review by a complete stranger.  Eventually I plucked up the courage to read it and it was far kinder than I'd dared hope.  This was A Relief.

Writing is a solitary pursuit.  It's easy to lose all perspective over whether what you write is any good or not, and it gets worse once you've had a few knockbacks from literary agents (although I still cherish the rejection letter than described Looking for Buttons as "well-written and perceptive").  Until now, only friends had judged the book and, delusional though I am, I could not regard their opinions as totally unbiased.  But now Looking for Buttons is out there, fending for itself, being read and, I hope, enjoyed by people I will never meet.  I hope that some of them will tell me what they think.

Until then, I'll just have to whistle to myself.

At the end of the day, you need clichés

Flick through any guide to writing and the chances are you'll come across advice along the lines of 'Avoid clichés like the plague'.  Good advice, but I think that clichés can be useful shortcuts if you handle them properly.

Chick-lit is commonly held to be a grab-bag of hackneyed characters and scenarios: the ditzy heroine, always unlucky in love; the unobtainable perfect man; the all-too obtainable wrong 'un; the wisecracking best friend; the difficult relationship with a parent; the misunderstandings and complications that drive the plot along.

Having written that, my first thought was, "Oh hell, how high does Looking for Buttons score on the clichéometer?"  My second, gingerly relieved thought, was that this is the whole point of this post.  Yes, there are familiar people and scenarios but using something familiar doesn't make it dull (I hope).  The general framework is familiar, I grant you.  That's what the reader wants, that's what tells them it's their sort of book.  It's what you do within that framework that makes the difference.

When you take a romantic comedy and boil it down, you end up with a fairytale, shorn of its gorier elements.  We're brought up on fairytales.  Is it any wonder that we still want to read them when (if) we grow up?

Books offer us a happy ever after.  If you have to resort to a kind of cultural shorthand to reach that point, is that so very wrong?

[PS  This blog has just passed a thousand hits.  Thank you very much for reading it.]

A rather angsty post

I am having a bit of wobble at the moment.  Technically, I should be all smiles.  Looking for Buttons is out in the world, selling fairly steadily.  I am A Published Writer, albeit a DIY one.

But.

But but but but but.

It's said that everyone has a book in them.  What if Looking for Buttons is the only one I have?

I want to write.  It's what I do, spinning yarns when I'm not knitting them.  That's the image I've always had of myself.  But when I sit down at the keyboard I can't string a coherent sentence together.  I've re-read what exists of the Difficult Second and Third Novels.  They seem to have been written by someone else.  It's like watching Bradley Wiggins win the Tour de France.  I can ride a bike but no way could I do that.  I get the same feeling as I run my eye along the bookcase.  I've lost my writing nerve and with it part of my identity.

I hope this is just a temporary blip.

Heyer today...

When you find a writing style that works for you, it's very tempting to stick with it.  That's fair enough.  Developing a distinctive voice is part of maturing as a writer.  And perhaps one day your book will be published and you start to think about what comes next.  The question then is whether you've got more than one book in you.  Maybe you have, maybe you haven't.  But what if your readers just want the same book over and over again?

At the moment I am trying to read my way through my bookcase overflow pile, mainly for health and safety reasons as it's taller than I am.  I'm being very strict.  Once I've read a book it goes to charity, unless I have a compelling reason to keep it (i.e. it's written by Adam Hall, my hero - and yes, I'm aware that he might not be the obvious inspiration to a romance writer, but nevertheless, he was the guv'nor).  The last book but three was a Georgette Heyer.  I've read a fair few of her books over the years and time and again the same characters crop up: the sensible heroine, usually grey-eyed and on the verge of being left on the shelf; the semi-rakish hero, rich, titled and needing to be taken down a peg or two; the daffy ingenue; the young rascal; the bitchy socialite; the scheming in-law.  I need to be more scientific and read them in publication order, because I can't yet tell if she was writing to a formula or if she just got trapped by her own popularity.

I'm not necessarily complaining that the books sometimes seem a little formulaic.  The best ones are very good indeed and had me willing the hero and heroine to get together (I loved Sylvester).  They're well-written and entertaining, with an extensive lexicon of Regency slang (ever been "bosky as a wheelbarrow"?), and sometimes it's nice to know what you're getting.  But it's interesting all the same.  A little further down the now-teetering overflow pile is one of Heyer's crime novels.  I'm looking forward to seeing how she tackled that genre.

I have a bet with myself that the heroine will have grey eyes.

A spell of casting

These days, if you ask a writer whether they've given any thought to the casting of a film or TV adaptation of their book and they say no, they're probably lying.

I've played the game with Looking for Buttons, bouncing various actors off friends (not literally, I must add, however much my friends would wish it otherwise).  And no, I'm not going to tell you who plays who.  But in my head the characters are real.  They don't look or sound like anyone else.

With the Difficult Second Novel, things are a little different.  Being bogged down with the plot, I've tried various ways of getting back on track.  One of these has been reworking the text as a script for radio or film.  It helps a little, in as much as adaptations have to leave a lot out so I have to cut to the bare bones of the story.  In theory this means I should have a clearer idea of which sub-plots are complicating matters needlessly.  In practice I'm still a little confused, but at least I know why.

The casting was proving problematic when I tried to replay these scripts in my head.  No-one seemed quite right.  Then the other night I had a minor revelation.  The DSN is set round about 1978 so (insert fanfare here) I need to cast it as it would have been done in 1978.

So I've done a preliminary casting (all those hours spent watching 1970s anthology box sets have not been wasted) and now when I work through the early parts of the book the pictures in my head have that slightly washed out look of seventies film.  It's not like Life On Mars.  This is a proper seventies production, possibly preceded by the Thames TV logo.  The soundtrack relies perhaps a little too much on wah-wah guitar and a hyperactive brass section.  The cast all have iffy hairstyles and there is a lot of brown floral wallpaper.  It is, in short, my idea of heaven and I can't wait to watch it.

So now all I've got to do is get on and write the damn thing.  And then build a time machine.

The pros and cons of sticking with what you know

I have a confession to make: I haven't actually written anything new since last year.  I'd lost confidence and had pretty much decided to call it a day.  However, the same compulsion that has been known to find me scribbling by torchlight at three in the morning led me to have one last try.  I'd put Looking for Buttons on Amazon as a Kindle e-book and if no-one bought it, that would be the end of my writing career.  To my delighted surprise, people are buying it.  (Thank you!)

And suddenly I've started writing again.  There's this blog and random appearances on Twitter as looking4buttons, and then, very late last night, I dug out part of the Difficult Second Novel.  I read it with a little difficulty, as the only reason the laptop was still on was that I'd been lying in the dark to catch up with the fabulously titled Before the Screaming Begins on BBC iPlayer and hadn't got my glasses on.  Even so, as I squinted at the screen, I realised it wasn't as bad as I'd thought.  It was written so long ago I was coming to it fresh and I found I wanted to know what happens next (it would help considerably if I've got to write it).  Better still, the narrator's voice was completely distinct from Looking for Buttons's Kate Harper.  The book seems to be a runner after all.

Which puts me in a dilemma.  Should I dust off the first ten chapters of the Difficult Second Novel and try to produce the rest of the book, or should I keep it on the back burner and carry on with the Difficult Third Novel, currently standing at a chapter and a half?  The DTN is probably going to end up falling broadly into the romance genre, meaning I could pitch it to the Looking for Buttons audience, hopefully resulting in a book that sells.  The DSN, however, is a thriller set in the 1970s, requiring a different pseudonym and a lot of research (watching re-runs of The Professionals is research, really it is, not an obsession at all, no).

I need to make a decision and soon.  Inside my head I can hear Gladys Knight and the Pips singing Come Back And Finish What You Started.  I can't decide if that's a sign that I need to take up the Difficult Second Novel once more or if my subconscious is desperate to hear a bit of Motown.

Keeping reality at bay

One of the joys of fiction is that it can transport you utterly to another place, another time, even inside the mind of another person.  However, the alchemy is a fragile process and it doesn't take much to shatter it.  Sometimes all it takes is a tiny reminder of the outside world.

The means of communication used by the characters in Looking for Buttons may strike some readers as a little behind the times: they text and e-mail and sometimes (heaven forfend!) actually talk to each other.  No-one tweets or posts status updates to Facebook.  This was deliberate.  It is not just that I am a dinosaur (an eleanorbrontesaurus, perhaps).  As I wrote, I was aware that techonology moves on apace and using the wrong gadget would date it far more than the actions of the characters.  (One of my guinea pigs was quick to point out that at one point Kate Harper, the narrator, was watching a video rather than a DVD.  I didn't even consider bringing Blu-Ray into it.)  Even so, I'd far rather that someone thought I was a little old-fashioned than be jolted out of the book completely by something being so odd that it made them question the workings of the world within the book.

And what prompted this post?  It wasn't even a book I've read.  No, it's the behemoth that is Fifty Shade of Grey (again).  And the thought that is going to prevent me ever being able to buy into the story, should I read it, is this:

What does Christian Grey's cleaner think of it all?  Or does he dust his dungeon himself?

It never does to have a practical nature when dealing with escapist fiction.

Tumbleweed

Not much happening round here, is there?

Thank you for noticing.  That's because a lot has been happening elsewhere, not much of it related to writing, unless you subscribe to the "all experience is material" school of thought.  However, there are a few molecules of relevant information, so here they are:

1.  Looking for Buttons is doing the rounds with agents again.  I'm unconvinced I could cut it as an indie writer, especially since the 70s bonkbusteresque attempt at a cover image (not the idea I wanted to convey at all).

2.  I have a pen name at last, which I shall reveal when I am certain I'm not pinching anyone's identity in a heinous way.

3.  The thriller-with-no-name has a name but a blog about Looking for Buttons is not the place to reveal it.  I may have to start a new blog. Again.

4.  The follow-up to Looking for Buttons is underway.  I have characters, a plot with a beginning, a middle and an end and the actual writing has begun.

None of this is terribly exciting, I'll admit, but it is progress.

Do say hello if you're reading this.  It feels a bit like talking to myself, only with no-one answering.

Busy doing, well, a little more than nothing

There isn't a great deal of progress to report.  I've scrapped the initial attempt at an e-book cover image, mainly because it made Looking For Buttons look like a seventies bonkbuster.  I can only think that most of what passes for my creative brain was tied up in 1978 working on the thriller when I did it.

Otherwise it's been business as usual:  tweaking the text after Norfolk Bookworm's feedback and submitting to another agent.  The thriller staggers on and the new romantic comedy is percolating nicely in the depths of my subconscious and should start to take shape on the page soon.

Right, can't hang around here all day.  I have to eavesdrop on some imaginary people and see if I can make a book out of it.

Beginning at the beginning (or perhaps not)

I think I'm going to have to start a blog notebook in which to jot down all those wise and witty observations on the writing process that come to me when I'm clearing out the attic or wiping down worktops.  It would save a lot of time spent gazing at a blank screen with a mind that is even more so when I come to post something.

Having said that, occasionally what passes for my mind does throw the right thing up at the right time.  And time is what this post is all about.

Where does a book start?  Page one?  The first page after all the copyright declarations and the dedication to the author's mum?  Or does it start somewhere in the middle?

This isn't going to turn into a musing on the nature of space and time, even though I did finally get round to watching the BBC's docudrama on Stephen Hawking last night (to my consternation, I caught myself thinking there wasn't enough physics in it for my liking; obviously I'm more of a scientist at heart than I realised).  No, big bang theory and superstrings aside, I'm wondering how much the first paragraphs you write influence the rest of the book.

I don't necessarily mean the beginning of the story.  Looking For Buttons started with a young woman trapped at a party she didn't want to attend.  I wanted to know how she'd got there.  Several years later, the book was finished and, yes, the scene did make the final cut.  It's the set piece of Chapter Nine.  By the time I'd written the preceding eight chapters, I knew how the book would end and it was more or less a case of joining the dots until I reached the final line.

The book I'm supposed to be working on now sprang from watching a 60s spy show and disagreeing with how the hero dealt with a sticky situation.  My somewhat less than heroic protagonist deals with a similar situation in quite another way and does so in Chapter One.

As I flounder partway through Chapter Ten, I wonder whether this is the problem.  With Looking For Buttons, I knew where I was going and just had to find where to begin the journey.  With the new book, I got where I was going almost before I'd begun.  Maybe this is why it's taking me so long to get anywhere else.

Luckily, I have another scene in my head from much later in the story, as vivid as the reruns of The Professionals they're showing in the afternoons at the moment.  So all I've got to do now is strike out in that direction and hope it points me towards the end...

Ms Frankenstein regrets

I've tried to move on.  I really have.  I've bought shoes.  I've bought myself jewellery.  I would have my hair cut if the salon were open on my day off, but since it isn't I shall progress through mildly unkempt to becoming prey for yeti hunters until I can get there at the end of the month.  I've even tried a little flirtation with others but all to no avail.

I am still in love with Fergus Palmer.

Now on paper, this is no bad thing.  He is kind.  He is charming.  He is witty.  He is also very tall, somewhat Scottish and has hair of the most spectacular shade of auburn.  He's about my age, he's got a good job, his own flat, his own car.  On paper, he's just what I should be looking for in a man.

That's the snag, those two words: 'on paper'.

For Fergus, my lovely, dearest Fergus is entirely fictional, supposedly confined to the pages of Looking For Buttons, in which he isn't even the heroine's love interest.  Yet here I am, sitting here with the laptop on my knees, sighing in a distinctly piney* fashion for a figment of my imagination.

Surely I'm not the only one who does this?  I've been falling for fictional men for as long as I can remember but when I started to write I never suspected it would happen with one I'd created.  I have the nasty suspicion that part of the trouble I'm having getting going with the next book is that I've yet to get over Fergus sufficiently to produce anyone to take his place.

But isn't this what writers do?  We put together people in a curious hybrid of doll's house and photofit and if we get it right by some elusive alchemy they step right into our heads and let us report on their lives.

I just wish he'd take me out for dinner while I'm doing it.






*piney as in yearning unrequitedly, not piney as in forest-fresh

A little ado about nothing

I wrote a little anxiously a while ago about the dangers of over-editing.  I knew I needed to make alterations to Looking For Buttons but I wasn't at all sure I'd know when to stop.  In the end, after far too much faffing about I read an excellent book by Jane Wenham-Jones that gave me the boot up the rear I needed.  I got stuck in.  I read.  I reread.  I tweaked.  I cut.  I rewrote.  Occasionally I laughed and then felt sheepish at laughing at something I'd forgotten I'd made up.  But I persevered.

Until tonight.  Right, I thought, time to do some writing.  And nothing sprang to mind.  Nothing at all.

Oh, I hear you sigh with no noticeable sympathy, another post about writer's block.  But no!  This was quite a different class of nothing.

I have nothing more I want to do to Looking For Buttons.  My subconscious seems quite happy to leave it alone.  So it's time to print out the manuscript, give it one last check for typos, and then send it to the next agent on my list.

I would like to celebrate, but unfortunately the Difficult Second Novel has woken up and is demanding attention.  Excuse me, I have plotlines to organise...

This is not about me

Looking For Buttons started out as an idea: what happens if your teenage crush goes on to become a worldwide star?  How do you get over them when their face is everywhere?  I started playing around and soon I had a set of people in my head, doing things that I wrote down.  After a while, I found a beginning and got to the middle, which was actually where I started, and eventually I reached the end.  Gosh, I thought, I've written a whole book.  And then I thought about trying to get it published.  The problem with publication, however, is that people might read it.  People I know.

I'm a thirty-something woman writing about a thirty-something woman and it's my first novel, so readers may assume the book is in some way autobiographical.  It's started already.  One of my guinea pigs read an early draft.  She rang me: "Charlie [the Hollywood star] is a mixture of X and Y, isn't he?", X and Y being two gentlemen of our acquaintance at university.  Another claimed delightedly to recognise herself in yummy mummy Poppy on the grounds that she is married to a man in Poppy's husband's profession - which she wasn't when I began writing the book.

The thing is, I didn't set out to write barely disguised portraits of my social circle (actually, these days it's more of a social arc: I don't get out much).  It's fiction.  Poppy is not a sketch of my friend, she's a figment of my imagination.  And Charlie is simply Charlie (though he'd dislike being thought of as simply anything).  But now, as I prepare to send out the manuscript to another agent, I'm starting to worry.

What if people I know read it and think it's about me?  What if my friend who isn't Poppy reads the whole thing and ends up mortally offended?  What if my family read it and think this is the sort of thing I get up to?  And, most alarmingly of all, what if X or Y reads it and thinks the book is about them?

Excuse me, I have some nervous editing to do...