Mmm, the smell of new-mown grass, the tang of rosehip syrup, and in a flash, your heroine's whisked back twenty years to that fateful night in Paris.  Don't do it – or at least think twice before you do!
Why not, if it was good enough for Proust,  surely it's good enough for you and me?
Well, according to the latest research on involuntary autobiographical memories, it just won't come across as natural that way.    Although such memories do spontaneously occur around 3 to 5 times a day in real life, they tend to be triggered by abstract verbal/linguistic cues more often than sensory/perceptual cues.  
Don't say I didn't warn you!    Jim Reeves is here to back me up on vocals and a virtual prize for the first person to spot where I haven't followed this advice in my own work.
What's next?    I still haven't produced the promised post on blogging, so maybe we'll have that, although, after Carlie's interesting feedback on my last post, I maybe ought to prioritise a thing I've got in draft on what qualifies you/me/us to call ourselves a writer.
On that point (both the last post and self-abasement), did you notice the gaffe in advertising today's post?    Something touching on the psychology of writing: were you expecting something poignant or something pertaining to?  English is such a complicated language, luckily we have our whole lives to learn to use it correctly.
If you haven't done already, do pop over to sit awhile with Isabel Costello on the literary sofa for a fabulous post and discussion on writerly and readerly frustrations.

Good news!  One of the shorts I wrote when I emerged from fiction hibernation has been accepted by a new literary magazine called Far-Off Places and an email comes asking for a bio.  My attitude to author bios is pretty well summed up in this line from the one I've been using lately:

but the far-off editors were, quite reasonably, hoping for something in keeping with their house style.  So I came up with this:

(although it was slightly different at the end as I obviously provided a link to the website and blog).

It's perfectly true.  I've travelled quite widely in an area bounded by Iceland to the north, California to the west, Patagonia to the south and Shanghai to the east, yet I haven't been out of Europe since the trip that inspired the story that inspired the post about confusing memory and imagination, and I even have to psych myself up for a weekend catching up with much loved friends.  I actually think the stay at home life is perfect for a writer yet, apparently, once you hit the big time, or even the mid-list time, it can be, depending on your preference, a traveller's nightmare, or dream.  The literary Grand Tour seems compulsory: Charlotte Rogan, author of The Lifeboat, next in the chair for my author interviews, wouldn't be free for another six weeks due to travel commitments; my first interviewee, Alison Moore, when we met for real at the fabulous Lowdham Winter Book Festival told me she was appearing at a similar event roughly once a week.  Having an audience must be wonderful but, as A L Kennedy points out, sleeping night after night in a room not one's own decidedly isn't.  Especially for a writer who feeds off that mental inner space.  Especially for someone like me who's lost the travel bug.
Nevertheless, balancing my personal preferences with my ambitions, I did toy with adding another line to my bio:

What do you think?  Do you like to travel and does it help or hinder the writing life?
Coming next: something touching on the psychology of writing.

A lot of my fiction is transformative: I'll take a disturbing event from my own life or what I see around me and, by re-authoring it, make it more manageable.  It tends to be a retrospective process, the idea for the story coming long after the event has taken place.  But something different has being happening with a short story I've been working on last week.  I'd never have imagined I'd have written a story with a backdrop of Margaret Thatcher's funeral.  I'd never have imagined I'd be following the events on the telly.  Yet shortly after her death was announced, the seed of the story had been planted inside me.  Then, in place of the rage that the government could fritter away £10 million of taxpayers' money for a not-quite state funeral when they are so mean about disability benefits, I'm calm and curious.  Sometimes it's hard being a writer but it makes sense for surviving these topsy-turvy times.
But that was the state of play as far as Thursday.  You know that thing about too much research?  Never my problem, generally, as I take a lazy/pragmatic attitude and do as little as I can get away with.  I had enough for my story with what the funeral might mean to people who feel their lives been blighted by her political career.  Yet even as an extremely passive researcher, I couldn't shut out the other things that were happening, other reactions and protests.  So now I'm left wondering whether somehow I've got to fit that Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead song into my story.  I won't really know until next week when all the pomp and protest has died down if my story has been killed or not.  Don't you ever wish real life would just shut up and go away?

My next post will probably be on author bios and the published novelist's itinerant lifestyle.  Do come back -- I promise you the writing will be sharper than these photos.

Of course not, but Mid Devon district council has apparently decided to remove them from their street signs because some people are confused about how to use them.  Lucy Mangan regards this response as symptomatic of a political short termism that refuses to address the underlying causes. I also wonder if the attack on correct grammar – as if it’s somehow elitist (and elitist meaning bad when it’s about knowledge but not when it’s about “earning” as much in an hour as others do in a year) to know your its from your it’s – partly stems from the repressed grief of little boys who started school too young.  At some level, reading and writing is always going to be hateful if it’s forced upon you at four or five before you are ready rather than at six or seven as, for example, in Hungary and Spain.

Because this is no mere plea for flexibility, it is an attack.  Even as we roll our eyes, we tolerate – don’t we?  – the misspelt signs outside the
greengrocer’s and celebrate the fact that we still have a greengrocer’s and the proprietor can calculate the bill in their head.  But public institutions are
different.  They need to follow the rules.  The rules of grammar are there to make things easier for everyone.  Yes even for those who don’t know how to work them.

At the beginning of each new term, I stand up with the rest of the choir and listen intently as the pianist plays the  introductory bars of the music.  I
watch the conductor but I don’t dare open my mouth when he gives us the signal to sing.  I follow the dots on the page as best I can as the rest of them go through the first trial run.  I know the very basics of the grammar
of music, but not nearly enough to join in until I’ve got at least the ghost of
the tune in my head.

Sometimes, looking at a mass of squiggles I thought I’d mastered the week before, I think it would be easier if none of us could read music, then we’d all be the same boat.  I wouldn’t feel so stupid.  But then there wouldn’t be anyone to explain what that little cap over  that note means, and we wouldn’t be able to sing such complex music, or so much of it, because we’d have to learn it all by heart.

I wonder if those who are frustrated by grammar could be supported to recognise its value the way I appreciate my musical scores.  I’ve still a bit more practice to put in before the concert, but I’ll be taking my place along with the other sopranos, tuned into the music with everything I’ve got.  These are my favourite parts of the programme:

You can listen and follow the music to Locus iste (of course we sing it better).  Or dance along to John Rutter’s  Gloria.

Got to dash: I'm off to a rehearsal.

I won't even pretend I've got anything to say on this but merely refer you to
Rachelle Gardner.  Who says I can't do economical?

The blog's gone rather Tristram Shandy this month, don't you think, promising certain posts, and then digressing on to other topics before I've delivered?  In fact, it started with that snowman back in March.  Darley Anderson says you shouldn't write about the weather – and how right he is: just look what chaos ensues when you do! 
I'm sorry, but I do feel you need to shoulder some of the blame.  If you don't slap me on the wrist when I go off on a tangent, I'll get the impression I can write what the hell I like here, and who knows where that will lead?  Don't you see, part of the function of the comments box is to rein me in.   So you can hardly complain, if I act like I'm talking only to myself.
Anyway, back to the main topic.
As I was saying, I wanted to spring clean my categories.  There's a part of me that loves systems as much as Macon does in that wonderful novel The Accidental Tourist and I really believe that if I just try hard enough, I'll come up with a way that will have all my bits neatly compartmentalised.  So I was a bit miffed when I realised I'd saddled myself with way too many categories (having confused categories with tags, most blogs having both but weebly providing facilities only for the former).  But when I thought it over, this blog really does have only one category, which is writing, from the inside and the outside, from back and front, underneath and upside down, and all the rest are variations on theme.  While it might not be something to boast about, I think I'd struggle to assign any of the posts to a single unique category.
I used to listen to Alistair Cooke's Letter from America on BBC Radio Four.  I liked how he'd start out in one place and take you somewhere you'd never expect.  I'm not saying I'm trying for that effect – to be honest I'm not trying for anything, I'm just playing around and seeing what happens – and I don't think anyone would accuse him of a lack of focus, but for some people sometimes it works to approach your argument in a roundabout way.
The disappearing apostrophe is coming very soon …

The work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, claims he can live like common people on benefits of £53 a week, 15% of median earnings, apparently.  Well, obviously that's a red rag to a journalist who will find very good copy in showing it just can't be done (Lucy Mangan) and would prove nothing if it could (Zoe Williams: what's one week of discomfort in the midst of fifty-two in relative luxury?).  Might also have been a red rag to this blogger, given that I live in the computer, walk everywhere and my favourite food is lentils.  I thought I might manage it if I pretended I wanted to do the 5:2 diet and the last two days were fast days, until I remembered that I wouldn't be able to use the computer I bought back in January because, at a cost of 13 weeks' benefits, I couldn't have afforded it.
More disturbing, however, than these glib comments that suggest our politicians have a limited understanding of living on the breadline, is the continual drip feed of misinformation about the poor that comes from official channels.  The DWP could soon start running masterclasses in point of view and the unreliable narrator.  Perhaps that would be a healthier way of managing the debt than demonising a group of people who are already down:

I've been doing some maintenance on the website to smarten up the visuals, although I may have overdone it.  Having conceded that readers are as likely to make as many assumptions from the absence of a mugshot as from a poor one, I've gone from hiding myself away just behind the homepage to cloning a mini-me beside the title on every single page.   And that outfit, while it's a step up from the five fleeces I've been wearing all winter, whether or not I've just come back from a walk, is going to be a little toasty once summer finally arrives.  
I'm not sure about the books in the header either, although pretty nifty to have that subtle difference between the website and the blog, eh?  Obviously I've selected some of my heroes (of both genders), but will it look as if I'm trying to emulate rather than admire?
Nevertheless, I'm always impressed when I tackle a new bit of technology, although I seem to have left it rather late to find out about SEO keywords for a Google search.  I wish I knew how to spring clean my website categories.
I'll leave you with Here comes the sun with George Harrison and my short story Spring Cleaning.  A more reflective, writerly post coming very soon.

I've no plans to play any April Fool tricks on you today, but it is an opportunity to reflect on the naive and foolish notions I've harboured about my writing.  Like believing that fixing the problems identified in my novel would necessarily make it better, or that winning a short story competition with significant prize-money might launch my career.  Or that doing what I loved would bring fulfilment.   (If that sounds bitter,  I don't feel it.  I think it's being realistic about the disappointments, what – in Kleinian terms – you might call reaching the depressive position, which in the bizarre terminology of psychoanalysis, is actually a really positive place to be!)

Regarding my last post, the snowman lost his head yesterday, the revisions are going well and I haven't forgotten the blog posts I mentioned.

Meanwhile, I'll leave you with Kate and Anna McGarrigle on foolishness in love, and perhaps you'll share some of your thoughts about foolishness in writing.