Preparing for a talk or two, and writing Nine Lives

All has been relatively quiet on the book front this week. I've been asked to do a quick talk to a few prospective Faber Academy students tomorrow (when I say 'a few' I mean ninety - I'm not that nervous, but only because I've decided not to think about how many there'll be and instead try to convince myself it's just to a couple of people in a living room) so I've been preparing for that. It's quite handy really - good practice for next week when I'll be guest tutor at the Faber course proper. It's the same course that I did, and when I was there we had Andrew Motion filling equivalent slot. I'm trying not to let that intimidate me - after all I have no hope of reaching the giddy heights of his talk. I'm just focussing on being intelligent and articulate enough that not too many of the students demand their money back.

Partly by way of preparation for my talk next week (and partly just so we could catch up and have a bit of a gossip) I met up for a quick drink with Richard Skinner and Louise Doughty - the two tutors on the course I did - the other day. It was so lovely to see them - Louise especially as she only taught me a couple of sessions (we were split into two groups and Richard taught mine) and so I didn't know her as well socially. Both are wonderful writers (I'd recommend Richard's brilliant 'The Red Dancer' and Louise's 'Whatever You Love' is absolutely stunning) and though I still feel very humble in their presence it was nice to just go for a good old chin-wag with them.

Other than that I've just been trying to press on with writing Nine Lives. So far I've not done that much onscreen (it's far too early to start talking about word counts, but let's just say when I told Louise how far I'd progressed she first thought I was talking about pages, not words) but the scraps of paper with spidery scribbles are gradually accumulating. (And not all of them are pointless doodles...) Oh, and I've got into a bit of a pointless argument about NaNoWriMo on a message board I occasionally frequent (I think I'm classed as a 'lurker' there) - my thoughts on which I won't go into, for fear of getting into the same argument here...

Finally, I thought I'd provide a link to the Facebook page for my book here. I rather suspect some of the people reading this have come from there, in which case I apologise, but for the rest, please consider taking a look, pressing "like", or even dropping a quick comment. It makes me feel popular, and I promise not post too often, and only with things at least moderately interesting and relevant...

Oh, and I've also started going to the gym, but no one's even remotely interested in that, surely....?