Emailed the publishing exec yesterday to congratulate her on one of her crowd’s books being on the Booker list and she called me back to give me all relevant gossip and other publishing titbits. I took this opportunity to share with her my various woes (excluding the very annoying fact that the CD player won’t play any of my slightly upmarket Patisserie of a Sunday morning music – you know what I mean, soundtracks from Amelie and the Piano, Naxos samplers – I didn’t want to overwhelm her with my grief). Also I told her that I had thought I might start writing a book but it’s actually a lot harder than you might think and had given up on paragraph 2.
She offered the following 1) writing a book is hard and it’s nothing to do with intelligence, it’s just like rolling your tongue, you can either do it or you can’t and if you can’t, you just can’t (of course, she may be aware that if I do write a book I will send it to her crowd and force her to rescue it from the slush pile and read it, so that may have coloured her advice) and 2) she would prepare a cheering goody bag for me. Oh yay, a publisher’s goody bag. The excitement. Three cheers for the publishing executive.
on 24 September 2004 at 14:43
Routledge-Falmer? Never heard. However, if we now write to you Waffle complaining about stuff, will you then send us a goody bag? Nothing too big, but expensive obviously. 
on 24 September 2004 at 14:53
Nah Silver, but I was thinking I might ask you to blog sit for me over the Christmas holidays. I feel that you deserve another chance and that Heather was unduly harsh on you. Also, we don’t have a cat.