Author In Rainy City Shock: Pictures

The competition to set the competition appears to be judging itself, but in any case I will give you until Monday to enter, and then I will run the competition itself through next week.

Meanwhile, I have had new author photos taken, by the lovely Alexandra Scannell whose website you can find over here.

Here is a cheerful black and white pose:



And here is me in sultry mode, in full colour:



If you look closely you can just about see evidence of Washington DC's wettest May in 55 years running down the background of the B&W one...

Hope you like them. If, for whatever reason, you want to reuse them (odd thought, but have to remember am proper author now) please credit Alexandra Scannell.

My paperbacks have arrived at last!

They look triffic. So much so that I'd like to give a couple away. I should really run a competition, but I can't think of a good one. So what I'd thought I'd do is run a competition to come up with a good idea for a competition, and then run the competition. The person who comes up with the best competition idea, and person who wins said competition, each get a signed copy with inscription of your choice, or if you'd rather I'll just go freestyle.

All with me? I am a bit confused myself, I said "competition" once too often.

Anyway, off you go then, ideas ahoy!

And now the votes from the WWTTM jury:

Ceremonial nul points: Spain, for the chickens and the falling over and for being the worst song of the night
1 point: The one where they did a lightning outfit change under a giant sheet
2 points: Russia, for the ugliest ice skater in the world
3 points: Poland, for the astonishing amount of surgery the singer had put herself through
4 points: United Kingdom, for not being humiliatingly awful for once
5 points: Iceland, for the evil Ice twins
6 points: Norway, for favouring funky horns over the strings everyone else had this year
7 points: Albania, which was really kind of catchy
8 points: Azerbaijan, for the angel versus demon opera
10 points: France, for actually having a decent song

And the 12 points go to.............

I am feeling better

You can't really get pissed off about not getting a prize, because it just means someone else would have missed out. Also, I am going to kill those ants. And contest that parking ticket. And get a lot of spare keys cut.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a novel to write.

A Lousy Day

I didn't make the shortlist of the Desmond Elliot Prize, but all congratulations to those who did.

I think I'd be feeling a bit more equable about this if I hadn't locked myself out without money or phone collecting the parking ticket off my car at lunchtime today, and had the spend the whole of the rest of the afternoon sorting it out. Not the best frame of mind for receiving bad news.

Not to mention that the ants have moved in behind the light switch, so only a matter of time before a freak electrical surge turns them into giant evil mega-ants with superpowers (e.g. ability to open the fridge.)

Am hoping for a better day tomorrow.

Ants (Evil)

I have ants. They are scaring me. They are doing weird things. They are acting as if auditioning for role in new, Stephen Moffat-helmed Doctor Who, in which everyday things such as ants suddenly take on terrifying resonance.

For example: If I must have ants, and it appears I must, I think it is normal, if I have not washed up, to come home to find inquisitive ants in my kitchen checking out the food scraps. I think it is normal, if I have left fruit in the fruit bowl for too long, to come home to find hungry ants swarming over a busted pear. I do NOT think it is normal, when I have not washed up AND I have left fruit in the fruit bowl for too long, thus allowing the ants a multitude of NORMAL ant choices, to come home and find ants SWARMING ALL OVER THE LIGHT SWITCH.

I am afraid. I am afraid of the ants.

The Dead iPod Post

My iPod has died. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-iPod.

It wasn't murder - I have done nothing that could have killed it. Nor did it die of old age: it was only two years old. So I can only assume it was suicide, maybe because it had heard the rumour (true) that I was planning to download 'All Night Long' by Lionel Ritchie to listen to on it. A machine can only be pushed so far.

So now I have to buy a new iPod, and when I say have to, I mean have to. Having had one I can no longer live without it. I am breaking out in a cold sweat just thinking of taking the bus without my lovely Pod (though the writer in me in enjoying eavesdropping on other people's conversations). I can't think of anything in my life that I treasure more, aside from my dishwasher. It is an essential.

I do however resent the price of a standard iPod which is £159, quite a lot when you consider I have to pay that once every two years. (Nano is too small.) I no longer feel like I own an iPod, more like I am renting one at vast expense. I can't think of anything else that I own which just stops working like that so suddenly, so traumatically, after such a short time, and is completely unfixable. It reminds me of some relationships I have had. These are not happy thoughts.

There is no point to this post. Just moaning.

RIP iPod.

Doctor Who: The Unicorn and the Wasp

Well. It was twaddle, wasn't it? But for the most part, entertaining twaddle. There has been a serious shortage of comedy Who this season, which is my second favourite Who mode (after heartbeaking Who but before scary Who, which, not being eight years old, I don't think actually exists. Blink was not scary if you are an adult. Seriously.) After the whole New Earth cat nuns debacle I know I am alone in this, but basically the whole Doctor gets poisoned interlude - "IN WHAT WAY IS HARVEY WALLBANGER ONE WORD??" - was the best bit of slapstick since the Doctor / Rose / Cassandra body-swapping sequence in said reviled episode which I loved and everyone else hated. You can't throw stones, you don't know where I live.

I liked most of this one so much that I really don't want to have to go to the final third, in which it turned out, in an interminable and increasingly dismaying denouement, that Felicity Kendle had been impregnated by a giant wasp in India and the resultant offspring turned into a ginger vicar until his mind was filled with the plot of six Agatha Christie novels via the powers of a magic necklace and thus went around murdering people as if within a giant game of Cluedo. No, it's not any better written down.

Let's distract ourselves with the kiss. I'm a little disappointed that every single series there has to be a contrived non-kiss kiss, a device which is wearing rather thin, but I have to confess that being a huge fan of the Doctor-Donna relationship I quite enjoyed it anyway. They've got that great sexual chemistry going on where you are mates and the only way you can stay just good friends is by pretending to be repulsed by the very thought of each other but secretly you quite fancy each other anyway, but you can't say so because YUCK and NO WAY and GROSS. Or, to put it another way, just like when I was fifteen and my best friend was a boy and I really wanted to snog him but it would have ruined everything so instead we used to go out onto the grass after tea and beat each other up and once he broke my little finger because I wouldn't say mercy.

(You've forgotten about Barbara from The Good Life having sex with an alien wasp now, haven't you? Excellent, excellent.)

So verdict - look, I LIKED it, OK? Most of it, anyway. Leave me alone.

OMG! The paperback is out!

And in windows across London! (Or Waterloo at least.) It's not officially out til June, so if you want a sneak advance copy hurry on down to Crockatt & Powell now. Of course, Vintage could probably get them shut down for breaking the embargo, but I will passionately argue their case on account of their being my old place of employment and therefore a Good Thing. And in the latest Mike Leigh movie too, trivia fans.

Would you believe I haven't even seen it yet? The book I mean - not the Mike Leigh movie (though I've not seen that either). My complimentary author copies got lost in the post while I was on holiday, which I am a bit upset about. I'm going to C&P on Monday just so I can hold one in my hot little hands. Will probably sign a few while I'm there if anyone is interested...

Studio Sixty on the Rainy Strip

Why is it that every single time I go away there is a heatwave in the UK followed by unseasonal bad weather at the exact moment that I return, and that the opposite is true for the country that I am visiting? While you were enjoying unprecedented sunshine (and doubtless the only period of good weather we will have all summer, so throughout the whole of the rest of this year I will have to put up with people consoling me as I look out on a rain-smeared windowpane with "remember May"?), I was in Washington DC enduring several days of Biblical downpours so severe that they played a cyclone warning to make people take shelter in their cellars. On the other hand, that was the exact excuse that I needed to blow off a couple of the less interesting-sounding museums I had on my itinerary and sit on the sofa for one entire day and a number of smaller subdays, watching the entirety of Studio Sixty on the Sunset Strip on DVD with my dear friend the DC Diarist - which is exactly what I wanted to do, but wouldn't have been able to justify if the weather had been nicer. So in fact the rain was a good thing. A good thing, I tell you.

(Studio Sixty on the Sunset Strip is excellent right up to the point where the makers start panicking that it's going to get cancelled and start shoving all the romance storylines to the front and resolving everything far too quickly and making knowing script remarks about how a pregnancy in peril storyline is the best way to bump up ratings just as they use a pregnancy in peril storyline to bump up ratings. A knowing cliche is still a cliche.)

I know you want to know more about my holiday than what I watched on TV but the thing is that it was a holiday and part of the holiday was that I wasn't writing anything at all the entire time I was there, and writing about it now feels a bit like retrospectively intruding on it, whereas writing about the TV I saw there just feels like writing about TV like I usually do. But I did have a lovely time.