Try imagining a famous painting or bringing to mind a favourite song.  It's a simple matter to play with the image or sound in your mind, but much more difficult to do likewise with a smell, however familiar it may be.

Yet certain odours can trigger intense emotions and associated memories and, despite my warning about overdoing the madeleine effect as a cue for flashbacks, smells have an important part to play in our writing.

Some novelists have used smell as a motif throughout, to powerful effect.  In Andrew Miller's Pure, the smell of rotting corpses is ever present – not a book to read if you are feeling at all queasy.  In Alison Moore's The Lighthouse, the protagonist is obsessed with the perfume of his long-lost mother, which he tries to recreate in all kinds of ways.

In the fourth of my June short stories (yes, I know it's now the end of July), A Smell of Paint, a mother awaits her artist daughter's homecoming, gradually coming to realise that the lingering odour in the newly decorated bedroom is the least of her concerns.

I expect you've seen Emma Darwin's post on preparing for the one-to-one sessions (shame on you if you haven't) but have you looked at my interview with Shelley Harris, winner of the Friday Night Live session the year before last which led to a choice of agents and a subsequent publishing deal?   There's another rags-to-riches conference story on Rachelle Gardner's blog across the pond, but you needn't be the one whose foot fits the glass slipper to benefit from the networking, workshops and feedback sessions at one of these writing carnivals.  Dive in and enjoy the ball!

Don't know what I'm on about?  Don't care?  Call back tomorrow or the next day for a post on writing smells, or a little later for what my harvest of the vegetable garden makes me think about my writing.

As they crouch to catch the babe, I wonder what might soothe their minds.  I don't mean the medical team in the delivery room, but the anxious hacks hovering outside. After the lambasting of Hilary Mantel, it takes guts to say anything intelligent on the royal process, but there was good sense in the other Saturday's Guardian from Marina Hyde.  If that's not enough to shame them into leaving the poor woman to get on with the job, the hospital could pipe out the glories of Handel, or read them Kate Blackadder's beautiful story, Oldshoremore from The Back of The Beyond.

As I said in my introduction to this series of posts, psychologists and psychological therapists are intriguing fictional characters, but can be tricky for writers to pull off.  How much that matters will differ from one reader to another.
The House of Sleep is set in a clinic and research centre for sleep disorders that was previously a student hall of residence.  Although it relies on a number of coincidences to reunite the characters from the past, it's a cracking read.
Somewhat wisely, Jonathan Coe doesn't show us clinical psychologist Dr Chloe Madison going about her work, although we do hear some rather raucous laughter from the other side of the door, which I thought she explained rather well.  Less well justified – i.e. not at all – was her need to live in at the clinic, leaving me quite concerned for her ability to maintain her professional boundaries, especially when her relationship with her main colleague, the psychiatrist Dr Gregory Dudden, was so poor.  This might account for why, when she had concerns about his practice, instead of raising them with the Royal College of Psychiatrists, she tried to get a journalist to investigate.  (Yes I know she's just a fictional character, and it probably worked better for the plot, but it made me anxious.)  In this context, the fact that she found her job through an advert in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, a research publication, rather than the appointments memorandum of The Psychologist where real-life psychologists tend to look for new posts, matters only when I'm being especially mean.
Knowing little about Lacanian psychoanalysis beyond its complexity, I loved his set piece on Russell Watts's presentation to the psychiatrists on his analysis of Sarah, one of the point of view characters in the novel. The analyst had come up with a profound but extremely partial formulation of her difficulties, presented with a blatant disregard for confidentiality and a marked phallocentric bias.  I'd be interested in what a Lacanian practitioner would have to say about the privileging of intellectual understanding over practical application – would they feel as prickly as I did with the clinical psychologist, or would they be able to see the funny side?
Finally, like many in the helping professions, although few would be so consciously aware of it, Dr Madison is using her work to fulfil some of her own psychological needs, but to spell out how would spoil the book for those who haven't read it.  But let's face it, however much I harp on about the professional issues, it's those underlying vulnerabilities that draw us to a character.
I'll be posting next in this series in a month or so on The Rapture by Liz Jensen.  In the meantime, do let me know what you think.

The seed of an idea that grows into a story.  The fact that, however much you plan, some seeds take root where you least expect.  The backache and sheer hard graft.  The dreadful dependence on powers (like editors and weather) beyond your control.

A job or a hobby, an itch or obsession, something to dip in and out of according to the seasons or your whims.  It can be wonderfully therapeutic to feel the soil between your fingers or the pen in your hand.  Such a thrill to finally see the fruits of your labours: the food on the table; the words on the printed page.  Yet the disappointments of both writing and gardening could have you climbing the walls in frustration, and often will.

Is writing like gardening or is this forced analogy my apology for being a total* ignoramus on the subject of Japanese fiction (I've decided that Kazuo Ishiguro's work would be cheating) as I announce the online publication of my short story The Japanese Garden?

*Not total, but forgotten: on my bookshelves I find
Black Rain Masuji Ibuse
Masks Yukio Mishima
Both now transferred to my To Be Reread pile!

How concerned should you be when you fall out of love with your work in progress?  Is writer's block a genuine affliction or an affectation dreamed up to convince the world we're sensitive souls?  Are there any lessons for writers of fiction in the research of a long-deceased English psychoanalyst and paediatrician?
My post is up this weekend on This Itch of Writing.  Love it or loathe it, I'm sure you'll agree it's an honour and privilege to have my work on so illustrious a site.

I'm not given to risk-taking, especially not on something as scary as the net where trolls can monitor your every move, so I thought long and hard before starting my blog. Mostly what I thought was: No, that's not for me. Quick, draw the curtains, you never know who might be peering in.
Then, all of a sudden, I had a new computer and a brand-new blog. Learning my way round both Windows 8 and Weebly at the same time, perhaps I should be grateful that it was the computer and not me that went into meltdown (miraculously only a couple of days shy of the end of the no-quibbles return period). Aside from the first post, which seems a bit pointless, but I'm leaving up as part of my ten-step programme for combatting shame (not that ten steps are anywhere near sufficient), I'm glad I've done it, but I'm still not sure what it's for. There's a part of me still thinks it's quite mad – but that might be the same part that thinks that any project not set up with the explicit purpose of pleasing my mother is mad, I'm not sure how seriously to take it.
Yet I’m seriously addicted and, I think, in a good way, so read on if you want to know the three reasons why I got into blogging and kept going.

In my early days of blogging, I took the 0 Comments by-line at the top of so many posts as an indictment my writing skills.  I needed more than the spikes on the website stats chart to convince me I had any readers at all.  Six months on I'm happy for you to use the site in any way you like as long as it's legal and decent, but still a little puzzled that so few of you seem to want to leave your mark.  Are you all fans of detective fiction, donning kid gloves to come visiting, or has that great poet Leonard Cohen convinced you that true love leaves no traces?  That's all well and good, but I can't help wondering if you might enjoy the blog more if it were interactive.
A few words for the hesitant.  The system asks for your email address: this is standard practice, presumably to deter trolls, and is never published or used to plague you with junk mail, so please don't let that put you off commenting.  For those more familiar with fancier systems that let you leave a thumbnail photo along with your comment, I'm sorry weebly is a bit Amish in that regard, but you could always keep it sparkly by linking to your gratavar if you have one.  Sometimes it looks as if you can't post a comment after I've done so, but trust the technology, you can.  And however elderly the post, or seemingly mundane your views, I'd be pleased to hear from you.
Overloading me with comments in response to a post on the shortage of the same would be a neat test of the popular misuse of the word irony, don't you think?  I welcome your feedback, or lack of it.

I'm pleased, proud and tickled pink to be one of the prizewinners in Emma Darwin's postiversary competition, even if it has taken me a few days to find the time to announce it here.  It will be a real honour to have one of my posts appear on This Itch of Writing, which is an excellent resource for writers, and one I've linked to often enough here. Hopefully I'll get some feedback on my post from some of Emma's many followers.  I'm also looking forward to reading the other winning posts, the first of which was up yesterday, and I'm expecting both to learn and to be entertained.
I think mine goes up at the end of next week and, in the meantime, I've got a short post on writing and gardening (!) in the pipeline to coincide with another short story to be published soon.  Now I'm endorsed as a proper blogger, I might even put up the full version of why-I'm-blogging that I was too coy to do a couple of months ago.  I also hope to bring you my thoughts on the credibility of the psychologist in Jonathan Coe's The House of Sleep as part of my mini series.  Those are the plans – who knows what will actually happen?

Like sex, you can do it on your own, you can do it with one partner dominating the other, but when two people approach the business of editing with an open minded desire to do nothing but improve on the writing, it can be a truly creative process.  Having yet to publish a novel, I don't have a vast experience of being edited and, I must confess, I feel slightly panicked when an editor wants to suggest some amendments to my short story.  I don't know why – apart from the fact that it's not so common in the world of short stories – because my experience of this has been largely positive.  Someone who appreciates my work enough to publish it has now read it so closely they've thought how to make it better: what's not to like?
Well, bad experiences do linger in the mind: once I chose to turn down the chance of publication because an editor (I've conveniently forgotten the magazine) edited and amended my short story beyond recognition and wouldn't brook any discussion. 
I suppose everything hangs on one's understanding of the term editing:

That editor presumably understood her role as correction and was probably quite upset that I wasn't grateful for her hard graft knocking my story into shape.  But some time later another editor was happy enough to publish my original version, so it can't be all that bad!  I don't want to make too big a deal of this – it was only one short story – but it still feels like a missed opportunity: that if we'd been able to really work together on it, we might have been able to come up with an improvement on the original.
It seems I'm not alone in the experience of having edits imposed on me. And it doesn't just happen in the world of fiction.  Back in the days when I was publishing academic papers, I once had the laborious task of undoing the work of a copy editor who didn't understand what my text was supposed to be about, and I had to go through all those proofreading symbols to reinsert the meaning back into the piece. 
Fortunately, I've been able to work with other editors who have applied their creative and human relations skills to make this a truly collaborative process.  It might be sorting out a clunky sentence.  It might be nothing more complex than word order and punctuation.  Once it was rewriting the story's ending.
I find if I'm free to say no, I'm more likely to say yes to an editor's suggestions, but it's often when I say maybe that it gets interesting.  That's when we find the in-between space, the ideas that neither of us would have thought of on our own.
After the isolation of writing, it's lovely to find that connection through getting the work published, but it's especially lovely to have a positive editing experience first.  So here's to Annie Rutherford my latest valiant editor, and my short story A Man Is Swinging (it's in The Back of Beyond).