"You’ve written a sci-fi novel. That’s just not sexy..."

The publicist and marketer assigned to me are horrible crones with pointed beaks for noses and beady slits for eyes. They are hideously ugly and evil and their personal hygiene is questionable. They won’t mind me saying this because we have agreed I should be honest in this blog.

I’m sitting at a large table with them at Harper Collins. They look at me like birds of prey studying a vole in a field. “So, I hear it’s going to take over a year to get my book out,” I say.

“That’s very standard,” Pauline tells me.

“Really?” I say sarcastically. I reach for my water glass and send it spinning across the table, big drops of water leaping out and scattering themselves across the wood. I manage to grab it with both hands before it topples, and bring it to my mouth like a model in a Cup-a-Soup commercial. They look at me as if they knew I was going to do that.

“Yes,” Mavis says. “We need time to build a buzz about you. No one knows who you are right now. We need to change that.”

“Well, just tell ‘em,” I suggest. “A quick phone call, job done. A day at most.”

“Tell who?” Pauline asks.

“Don’t know,” I admit. I reach for my glass and take another sip with excruciating slowness. “The press?”

“There’s a lot of press out there,” Pauline says. “Do you know how many books are released every week?”

“Not my problem,” I say, trying a new tact. “It’s up to you to let people know I’m the next big thing. I’ve written a great book and it’s going to blow people away.”

“We have to be realistic,” Mavis says. “If we tell people that every author we have is the greatest writer since Hemmingway then they’re going to get bored very quickly. They get told that every week as it is.”

“Not every author,” I say meekly. “Just me. Worry about me.”

“We have twenty writers to look after,” Pauline says.

“So? What can you do for me?”

“Well actually, we wanted to hear your ideas.”

“Mine?”

“Authors are expected to do a lot of the publicity themselves, I’m afraid. If you want to sell you’ve got to put yourself out there. Phone local radio stations, print up flyers for appearances, go to reading groups.”

I’m aghast. “I want to do multi-page spreads in broadsheet weekend supplements. I want to go on Mayo in the afternoon.”

They look at each wearily. “First time authors don’t really get that level of publicity.”

“What about Zadie Smith?”

“Phenomena like that are rare.”

“Look at me though. I’ve got a face to grace magazine covers. I’m a happening young thing. I’m the new Alex Garland.”

“Well, you’re not really young, I’m afraid.”

“And you’re not as good looking as Alex Garland…”

“Or Zadie Smith…”

“And, well, you’ve written a sci-fi novel. That’s just not…sexy.”

We look at each other in silence for a moment. “We could call it…a futuristic thriller,” I suggest.

“Even so,” Mavis says. “With a year we may be able to make something happen. Besides, it sounds like you’ve got a lot of re-writes to do.”

“That could take a year anyway,” Pauline adds.

I get up from my chair and lie on the leather sofa against the window.

“Are you stressed?” Pauline asks.

“Yes.”

“Just relax.” They pull up chairs next to me and Mavis strokes my head. “We can help you. Part of our job is to make sure the writers are happy. We can’t have you all conflicted. Tell us something dark about yourself.”

“Like what?”

“Something you’ve never told anyone else.”

“I can’t think of anything.”

“Come on,” they coax, “There must be something. We’ve heard it all. We can help you if you unburden yourself.”

“I have a fantasy…”

“Yes?”

“I fantasise about being covered in napalm and burning to death.”

“I see. What else?”

“I wonder if I held a lit match under my tongue would it sizzle.”

“Sizzle?”

“The spit.”

“Right.”

“I’d like to sleep with three groupies at once.”

“Sexual matters aren’t our forte.”

“Well, the napalm thing was specifically on my genitals. I didn’t say that at the time.”

“Close your eyes and relax.”



When I awake they have gone. No one can get hold of them on the phone. Nothing is resolved. They know too much.

"That's why I want my book to sell..."

I live in a ground floor flat in Ealing Common between two of the loudest households in Britain and below a young couple whose chief preoccupation appears to be dropping heavy objects on the floor.

Cheryl and I are sitting in our living room sipping wine and straining to hear our television above the cacophony surrounding us. DVDs seem to be mixed with the dialogue approximately three times quieter than the music and sound effects, and as the plot unfolds on The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and I edge the volume slowly upwards to a comfortable level, suddenly Reggie imagines his mother-in-law as a hippopotamus and the bassoon goes ‘wah-wah’ and the audience erupts in deafening laughter, the room shakes and the baby upstairs wakes up and screams. Oh, did I mention the baby upstairs? He’s one and he likes to run around and bang on windows. And, of course, he has been blessed with the dropping-heavy-objects-on-the-floor gene.

The man to our north owns ten records. Not ten different albums, you understand, but ten songs. And he is immensely proud of them. So much so that even on a November evening when it gets dark at four and dips below freezing shortly afterwards, he has his back doors open, singing along in broken English to his tunes. This way we can hear it throbbing through the wall and through our poorly insulated patio doors.

He always opens with The Animals’ 'House of the Rising Sun’. This is also the ring tone on his phone. So sometimes we have it playing twice simultaneously, at different stages of the song. Next along is ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You,’ a song played so often that terrible summer of its sixteen week stay at number one that everyone in the country except for him still reaches for the closest sharp object and begins to stab themselves absentmindedly whenever they hear Bryan Adams’ ghastly crooning.

Following these two, always in the same order, is ‘Civil War,’ ‘Comfortably Numb,’ and a return for Adams with ‘Summer of ’69.’ You can probably guess one or two of the remainder. Thanks to the way I consume these songs, I know every thunk, rattle and scratch of the bass lines, but little of the high guitar notes. His kid uses our fence for football practise and shouts in Arabic. His wife is fat and English. His daughter is a loud, surly teenager and appears to be Australian. It is deeply confusing.

And to our south lies Party Central. We are not sure whether it is inhabited by ten people or one very popular couple. Either way, it is rammed every night with braying, shrieking youths. They do not play music or watch television, merely scream and cheer for hours. I have never heard anyone have so much fun, although the alarmingly vast quantities of dope they smoke may go some way towards explaining it.

Naturally I am far too cowardly to confront these people directly. Occasionally, usually towards the end of the wine, I may suddenly leap out of the chair and slam my fist against one or both of the walls, which appears to go unheard or just unheeded.

Tonight, Cheryl watches me sink back onto the sofa, clutching my throbbing hand and weeping gently. “I don’t think that achieves anything, Christopher.”

“I know,” I moan, frowning like a five-year-old.

The episode finishes and we sit in silence for a few depressing minutes, listening to our neighbours having conscience-free revelry.

“This is why I want my book to sell,” I tell Cheryl. “I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want to be excessively rich. I just want a detached house in the country where we can’t hear anyone else and no one can hear us. Everyone should be entitled to that. Why do they make us all live on top of one another?”

“Some people like living in a community,” Cheryl suggests.

I shudder. “I don’t ask for much. I don’t want celebrity friends, I don’t want to be a media whore, renewing our vows in Hello for a few grand.”

Cheryl tilts her head as if she thinks this might be worth considering. “No celebrity friends? What about Pete Doherty?”

She knows my weaknesses. “OK, maybe just Peter. My feelings towards him are conflicting, though. I want to help him, but I also want to do drugs with him.”

“Can I be friends with the Mighty Boosh?” Cheryl asks.

“Both of them?”

“Yes,” she says, putting her head on my chest.

“OK,” I concede. Party Central screams, the baby drops a piano and ‘House of the Rising Sun’ begins again. “I’d like a workspace at the bottom of the garden.”

“Away from the house?” Cheryl asks. I nod and she smiles. “That would be great.”



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"You're too old to be a young author..."

My agent, Sid, says this to me over the phone as I'm crashed out on my sofa, shattered and eating a duty free-sized Toblerone. I have called him for a pep talk, a pick-me-up from the man who believes in me more than anyone else alive because his pay check depends upon it.

Sometimes, it seems, he forgets this. I am merely talking aloud about my dream of being included in some magazine article called 'Britain's Best Young Authors' when he cuts me off mid-sentence. "You're too old to be a young author."

There is a stunned silence on my end and the sound of running water at his.

"Are you... flushing your toilet?" I ask when I recover the power of speech.

"No," he replies after an unconvincing pause. The water stops with a glug.

"I'm only thirty years old."

"Officially that's the cut-off point. Once you're out of your twenties you're a latecomer, if anything."

"Where did you read this 'official' ruling?"

The sound of a packet of crisps being torn open. "Well, perhaps not official. It's common sense though, isn't it? Perhaps the author of the article will have a different, more generous scale. Which magazine is it again? I'll give them a call, see what I can do."

"No, it's not real. I want to be in the next one. They have them quite regularly, don't they?"

"I don't know," he tells me through a mouthful of savoury snacks. "Do you fancy a pint?"

Perhaps we've become too friendly. At first I was pleased when Sid wanted to meet up for a few drinks on weekday afternoons, impressed with his spare-time generosity over evening dinners in Soho steakhouses. But after a couple of Saturday nights out during which my own drunkenness was ruined by Sid's shambolic, leering, abusive intoxication, then an intimate, confessional dinner with my wife Cheryl cooking at home, I quickly realised Sid was just lonely.

He refuses to talk about his other clients, and I suspect, sadly, there are none. And now that the book deal is signed he has relaxed and forgotten his job description.

Cheryl, of course, is great. All fledging writer's spouses are great because they allow most of their precious togetherness time to be spent apart while the writer struggles to yank this monster out of himself and onto a page on top of holding down a job that actually pays the bills. She rubs my head, and reads the words I write before anyone else, but she cannot change things in my creative life. Sid can. Sid should. He is paid to understand the business and make me feel positive.

The reason I am slumped on the couch in the spare bedroom/office, stuffing comfort food into my greedy mouth, is something he appears unconcerned about. I met with my editor, Chris, as he has now had a chance to "Study the manuscript" and "Take some notes."

He pulled some pages from a drawer in his Collins office and they thudded onto his desk next to my novel. They looked almost as long.

"How many copies have you made?" I asked him numbly.

"I am known for my thoroughness," he said. "At the front I've bullet pointed a summary of areas to work on."

I scanned the list. "But this is a complete re-write," I tried not to squeal. "I thought you liked the book."

"Oh, we do, we do. It's just that we think it could be even better."

I couldn't speak.

"It's a competitive market," he continued. "We need to make each product we put out as crowd-pleasing as possible." He leaned forward. "We think you're very talented, and we want to make sure you succeed. There's nothing more heart-breaking than seeing someone with potential failing on his first book because his editor didn't do the best he could for him. This is all standard procedure. Your agent should have gone through this with you."

I managed a bitter chuckle. "Well, this will take me months. Months. Surely we don't have time to get all this done."

"Oh, we've got about a year."

"What? A year? I've been telling acquaintances to look out for it in W H Smith."

He sucked breath in through his teeth. "Tough to get into Smith's. Tough."

"But why does it take a year?"

"You'll be surprised. Let me arrange a meeting for you with publicity."



"Sid," I say over the phone. "I've already started working on the second book. Now I have to write the first one all over again."

"There is some good news," he says.

"What? Tell me."

"No one knows anything about you. We can always lie about your age."