This last month, after my daily spell of writing, I've mostly spent my time cramming my way through Flemish literature. There are reasons for this, it's not just the fact that I'm caught in some strange masochistic urge. (Though halfway through the seminal 1860 classic, Max Havelaar, or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, something very close to pleasure came through the pain, and I began to take genuine joy from the four-page-long paragraphs about colonial iniquities.)

I may have mentioned this before - but next week I'm acting as a lecturer on a cruise around the Low Countries. I was asked last year whether I felt I was up to the task of being one of the resident 'experts' employed on the rather posh end of the leisure cruise circuit, and naturally enough I was thrilled to accept. I love cruises - I love the fact that every day I'm in a different city, seeing new things; I love the people that I meet on these excursions; and I love the ships themselves, the elegance and the calm. So my first trip is around Belgium and the Netherlands, and I'll be delivering a maximum of three lectures, specialising in the history of Dutch and Flemish lit, and the relationship between fine art and the way it's characterised in the modern novel (with especial attention given to Rembrandt and Vermeer, as we'll be looking at some of their masterpieces at the Mauritshuis and the Rijksmuseum on the way). Then, in July, it's a two week voyage around the Baltic, where I'll be talking mainly about Russian and Swedish authors.

It's enormous fun. And a great opportunity for a book collector like myself, who buys up everything in translation by the bucketload (I have a weakness for author's names I can't pronounce), actually to *read* the damn things I've been putting on my shelves all these years. And if Max Havelaar is a bit painful - it's seen by the Dutch as their Great Classic Novel, don't you know. I beg to differ - then it's introduced me to the work of Harry Mulisch, Cees Nooteboom, Edwin Mortier, and Hugo Claus. Terrific writers who otherwise might have just sat on my overstuffed shelves gathering dust. I'm really looking forward to wittering on about them at great length to an audience trapped on both sides by a great expanse of water.

The difficulty with all this is that I agreed to do the lectures at a time when I really wasn't too busy. But the workload has really crept up this year. Last week I *finally* finished my new book of short stories, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, ready for its release this Autumn. (No, really. The contract's all signed and sorted. I'm so pleased. More news on this later!) And I'm now going through a series of other commissions, both for TV and for books, and enjoying it all hugely. But I'm keenly aware to make it all fit in, and to reach all the deadlines, that as most couples on board the cruise ships will spend the evening gazing dreamily out on to the banks of the Baltic, I'll be scribbling furiously into my notebook in my cabin trying to get my plotlines making sense.

I'm not complaining, mind you. After all, how great can Baltic banks be?

I'm travelling rather too much at the moment. When I got back from my latest Doctor Who convention, in Los Angeles this February, Janie sat me down gravely in the lounge, and told me that the cat no longer missed me. Usually Nero would spend his time searching my office for any signs of his master when I was out gallivanting around the world - but I'd been gone so frequently, that he'd given up. Indeed, I looked at Nero, then and there, and realised he was somewhat bemused to see me in the house at all. But if I'm in Europe come May and July, then I'm at Doctor Who conventions in June (Toronto), October (Orlando) and November (Chicago). And in August I'm in Singapore. One of the stories from Tiny Deaths, rather to my gobsmacked surprise, has been picked up by the National Library of Singapore as its international short story representative, so I'm going across there to give a few readings and talks. All rather exciting stuff, of course - but it'll only add fuel to that particular fire of Nero's, so that by Christmas there's a reasonable chance he'll no longer have a clue who I am.

The thing is, I'm a sucker for a foreign trip. Here we are. It's mid-May. I haven't been abroad now for nearly three months. I keep on googling random cities worldwide, just to see what the rainfall or the exchange rate might be. I can't *wait* to be on an aeroplane again. It almost doesn't matter where. It doesn't matter that I'll have to talk about the colonial disputes of the coffee trade in Java to get there, either.

It's not my fault the bloody cat hasn't got a passport. That's what I say.

Hello!

Okay - so what's the deal with air conditioning in North American hotels? When I was in Calgary six weeks ago, it was chilly outside, but inside the Hyatt it was as warm as toast. And after a few days spent there, the dryness of that air conditioning did weird things to my throat. But that was nothing to spending Thanksgiving in Chicago at a Doctor Who convention - where the weather was not so much chilly as deliciously freezing (snow! blizzards! walking around in your shoes making crunching sounds on the ice! There's really nothing as wonderful as bad weather when it's pretty and it's Not Yours), and the hotel was not just as warm as *ordinary* toast, but toast that had just popped nice and crisp and steaming out of the toaster, but for some reason you thought still wasn't quite warm enough, and could take a couple of minutes' reheating in a microwave.

And my throat paid the price. Some of you reading this will have seen me at Chicago, so you'll know that what I'm saying is no exaggeration. On Thanksgiving I arrived bearing my Usual Voice - boyish, a bit raffish, dare I say it, light and charming. By the beginning of Saturday morning it had dropped an octave, and I was now growling with the voice of a man who'd been chainsmoking since his days in the womb, a voice so sharp it actually made me feel each time I spoke that I was chewing barbed wire. And that might have been fine in itself - I rather enjoyed parading my new voice around a bit, trying it out for size, realising I could now join a Welsh male choir. But I spent six nights in that hotel, and every morning I'd wake to find my voice had got even deeper. It was strange. I'd go to bed at night, and my mouth would be so dry that I twice dreamed I was being forcefed salt. And by the time I flew home, my voice was *so* low that the airline staff at the check-in desk couldn't quite understand me and scowled at me as I tried to secure an aisle seat as if I were talking a foreign language - I suspect by that point I was on a decibel level that could only have been easily understood by great whales or bricks.

I wouldn't complain. Well, I obviously am. A bit. But it happened twice in two hotels in two months... and I don't remember this happening in hotels before. (I was in a hotel in Cardiff inbetween, and nothing of the sort happened. Possibly because there was no air conditioning. There was no comfortable bed, or friendly service, or clean duvet either - but that's beside the point.) So is it something new to North America, some plot to make the atmosphere in all the hotels so dry that we're forced to drink lots at the bar, or risk losing our very vocal identity? Or is it - more likely - something to do with me getting old? Hmm.

I may have coughed a lot, and my throat ached a bit, but I didn't get a cold. I was very healthy, and ate lots of fruit. Oh no - I waited until I was back in London to get the cold. So now my voice is still very low, and when I talk to the cat, he acts as if he doesn't recognise me. Mind you, he is extraordinarily stupid, so may simply have forgotten in the week I was away that we ever lived together at all.

Enough of that. Lots of writing stuff going on, which I want to plug shamelessly.

A couple of months ago, rising pop star, and really very witty lyricist, Penny Broadhurst, wrote to me asking whether I'd consider writing a short story to go inside the booklet for her Christmas EP. I'm very fond of Penny's music, so I was immediately interested - and okay, I was shamelessly attracted to the idea of having anything to do with pop music, because that sounds so 'with the kids' and exciting and stuff, and I thought I might look a bit cool from the association. Penny sent me the lyrics to her new Christmas song, and it's funny and acerbic and poisonous and really rather brilliant - and I was inspired to write something of that nature back (without the brilliant part, but there you go). The CD is now available on Penny's website, and it's a limited edition - go to www.pennybroadhurst.com and check it out.

And the Doctor Who novel which I've had a part in - The Story of Martha - actually exists too! I've seen it! I've held the hardback novel in my hands. (I didn't stroke it with my cheeks, as I *would* have done, because I was shown it at a BBC party, and there were lots of people about so I'd have felt self-conscious.) It's technically out, I think, on Boxing Day - because, naturally enough, Boxing Day is the traditional time of the year when all the children want to raid bookshops and buy more TV tie-in merchandise, they won't have received anything like that in their stockings for literally *hours*. But there's a not unreasonable chance that the more enterprising booksellers in the UK, looking to flog it as a last minute stocking filler, will release it earlier than that. That'll be all of them then. If you see it, do handle it, and admire the way they've spelled my name correctly on the cover. And if you feel the urge, stroke it with your cheeks. And if you *really* feel the urge, buy it afterwards.

Something which doesn't yet exist, but from today is available on pre-order from Amazon.com, is my book of X-Files criticism, 'Wanting to Believe'. (Look, here's even a link! That's what the cover looks like!)

I was pleased to see they'd spelled my name correctly there too. Hurrah and stuff. So if you've ever lain awake in bed at night, wondering exactly whether Rob thought Scully's character was compromised by the ending of season seven episode 'Orison', or at which point during the second season of Millennium you can tell from Lance Henricksen's facial expression that he's no longer any idea what the series is about, or which is the *one* halfway decent episode of shambolic spin-off series The Lone Gunmen... well, now those anxieties can be put to rest. You lucky lucky people. (Although if it was bothering you that much, you know, you could simply have emailed me and asked.) No, no, really, it's a very insightful book about the development of a TV series which summed up the 1990s zeitgeist. And only partly an excuse for me to watch all my old DVD boxsets again, and pretend there was practical value in doing so.

I have finished my X-Files book, but most of it still exists in handwritten first draft form. Normally at this point I'd be typing away quite merrily, but this is rather a *large* book, with *lots* of words in it, and I'm really lazy. So whilst I was in Chicago I bought myself some voice recognition software, so that I can now read my scrawl into a microphone whilst wearing a really tight headset, and the words just magically appear onscreen. It's brilliant. It may revolutionise writing altogether. (Although it doesn't recognise the word 'Duchovny', and always interprets it as 'so cough me'. It's a bit of a bore having to correct it every paragraph, and I'm actively considering changing it to 'David So Cough Me' for the entire manuscript.) The only real worry I have is that the software tells me it's designed to adapt to my voice, and the more I use it, the more it'll recognise the unique way I sound. And yet at the moment I'm still operating on several octaves below zero, and best able to speak to the aforementioned whales and bricks. When my voice gets better, when I recapture that youthful, dare I say it, raffish and sparkling turn of speech I'm used to, the software might give up the ghost and reject me. And then there'll be no book after all.

...North American air conditioning. You'll be the one to blame.

 

I've kind of resisted writing about the World Fantasy Awards for the last few weeks for a number of reasons. Partly because it was such a strange whirl I'm still not *entirely* sure I understood it, or what was going on - and therefore can't quite believe that I actually came back from the thing clutching one of the statuettes in question. (Well, all right, not clutching. Buried in the bottom of my hand luggage. Smothered in bubble wrap, which was itself inside a separate bag, which was itself concealed beneath piles of underpants and socks. I'd been warned by Steven Jones that whenever *he* won one, that airport security always threatened to smash it up in case it had drugs smuggled inside. And clearly I thought that trying to hide the award as much as I could was the best way to avoid suspicion.) Where was I? Oh yes - and partly because, well, I *did* win - and that was great and incredible and frankly a bit tearjerking, but I'm British, damn it, and I hate to sound as if I'm showing off.

But also partly because there's a danger that the Awards and the Statuettes and All That Stuff can seem a bit too important, and overwhelm the rest of my time there. And although if I'm honest, once I *did* win Best Collection, overwhelming was just the start of what I was feeling - up to the moment they announced I'd won I was perfectly happy with the *probability* of losing. I'd had a great time. I'd met some terrific people. I'd bought some expensive books, and laughed at airport welcomers in cowboy hats. I'd have flown home to London perfectly happy with my lot, still proud as punch to have been a nominee, and not wanting to have missed the experience for the world.

So, let's get the award out of the way first. Okay. Not to sound ungrateful, but it's the ugliest thing I have in my house. And I have pictures of me on my wedding day. It's a bust of H P Lovecraft's head. H P Lovecraft probably wasn't a looker at the best of times, but frozen in statue form he's been caught on the worst day of his life, with a streaming head cold and an allergy, having just received a letter in the post telling him that his house is to be repossessed, with the neighbours next door playing very loud bass music. It's not a happy statue. Lovecraft's eyes has no pupils, for one thing. And his lips are curled in a sneer. And the back of his head bulges like a knobbly arse. All cast in silver resin. Mmmm. Steven Jones was wrong about airport security - they didn't want to give it a closer inspection when it passed through X-ray, they didn't want to *touch* the thing. It now sits in my library. Where it wards away the cat. Because it scares him. It scares me a bit too.

But I have never been prouder of something so ugly. The award ceremony itself was agonising. It was a reasonably smart affair in the big dining hall, and advertised it as a Banquet. I like banquets. They sound medieval and sumptuous. The difficulty was that said banquet was set to take place at 12.30 pm - and as greedy as I am, my stomach is not really equipped to deal with something as grand as a banquet at a time of day when it hasn't quite yet started to think overmuch about a light lunch. There were starters and entrees and desserts, and lots of bread rolls, and wine - and I didn't want to have any of it. Because I was far too nervous. For the past few days the award nomination hadn't mattered a jot to me, and now, suddenly, horribly, it actually did. I saw fellow nominees up for the same award as me, also nervous, also unable to eat - and we'd all become friends over the convention, and mutually supportive, and now I wanted them to *lose*, ha ha! And a part of me had never wanted to prepare an acceptance speech, because the assumption I might win might seem terribly arrogant, and now I began to worry about that too. That I'd win, get up on the podium, say something embarrassing, and everyone would throw their banquets at me. Or, if not actually *throw*, perhaps *flick*. With a spoon. Janie texted me during the meal to say that it didn't matter if I won or not, she'd still be proud of me. And so when my name was announced, and I was genuinely shocked (I thought there was a chance I might win Best Short Story, but Best Actual Book Of The Things was so clearly an impossibility I almost wasn't listening when they read my name out), all I could think of what to say when I got up to receive the award was to mention that text. And give it a comic reversal, so that I pretended my wife had said I wouldn't be welcome home unless I'd won, that she'd dump me. It got a laugh. Which was reassuring. And then I looked at the award, picked it up - it was bloody heavy! - and thought, "Shit, that is *repulsive*!" I nearly said so. I doubt that would have been politic.)

The rest of the convention wasn't repulsive at all. And I had my appetite, and ate a lot of beef - which Calgary does rather pride itself on, hence the huge great bloody buffalo head on the wall in the bar looming over anyone brave enough to sit under it - and put on weight. Which is why I'm now back on a diet. I made some great friends. Mark Morris and Stephen Volk, terrific writers both, flew over to Canada on the same flight - and became the mates I could retreat to when all the socialising got a bit too much. (We explored Calgary together, and it was fun to watch Mark almost pick up the nerve to walk on the glass floor at the top of Calgary Tower.) Ellen Datlow was a sweetheart. I burbled my enormous love of 'The Arrival' to Shaun Tan, and to his credit, he didn't run away. Even on the third day when I was still doing it. I was able to discuss short stories with new pal Deb Biancotti, whose debut collection is out next year, and is clearly going to be great. My old Doctor Who writing pal Paul Cornell tried his level best to get me to meet everyone he knew, and encouraged me to network a bit. And was gloriously patient with me whenever my shyness prevented me from making the most of those opportunities.

And I loved Calgary too - whenever the sci-fi and fantasy got a bit too much, I'd escape into the city. It's small and friendly, and clearly only really comes alive during the Stampede in the summer, when everyone jumps about on cattle and wears cowboy hats and shoots revolvers into the air, most probably. But I loved it *because* it wasn't doing that, that there was some sanity in the air whenever I needed fresh air, and the only cowboy hats I saw were in tourist shops, and on the heads of poor elderly ladies in the airport arrivals lounge, whose job it was to present international travellers with a glimpse of Calgary which conformed to all the Wild West stereotypes of my guide books. (I don't know, because I'm always too tired to check - but maybe at London Heathrow we do the same, and we have beefeaters, and people driving red buses, and lots of miserable repressed people holding umbrellas and moaning about the economy.)

But maybe the most memorable thing... really... was the flight back. On the night of November 4th. When my plane took off, there was still no word on the US elections; the ballots were closed, but we were hours away from any announcements. At some time in the early hours, with most of the passengers still dozing, the pilot turned on the intercom and told us - very softly - that we might like to know that Barack Obama was the new President of the US. The resultant applause rippling around the aeroplane - and to be a part of it too - was wonderful. I'd left Britain with the world still feeling strange and uncertain, and a place where people were invited to listen to the words of Sarah Palin without irony. I returned to one which seemed rather giddy with hope. And one, too, in which I had a very ugly head in my hand luggage. Yay for both things, I say.

I'm off to Chicago on Thursday, for a Doctor Who convention I love. Lots more food - turkeys on Thanksgiving - lots more friends. Maybe the greeters at the airport will be dressed like Al Capone. I fully expect some other world changing announcement of glee to be given on my flight home the week later. I've come to expect it now.

I'm feeling cautiously celebratory. The last time I felt this celebratory was a couple of weeks ago, for no especially good reason, and to commemorate that I took Janie off to the South of France for a few days. There's a lovely town there called Carcassonne which boasts a huge medieval walled city on the top of the hills - as you fly in on the plane you pass right over the top of it and it looks like a cardboard cut-out with its cobbled walkways and arrow-slitted ramparts. We love castles, so spent the holiday in the baking heat (and it was *baking*) yomping up the hills three times a day to walk around the place and pretend we were living in the fourteenth century. And afterwards we'd sit in as much of the shade as we could find and drink ice cold lager, and eat cassoulet. (Cassoulet is the traditional dish in Carcassonne - it's a pot full of haricot beans, and every single bit of dead animal that they could find walking the ramparts. Some evenings I'd find sausage in it, other times bits of chicken and duck. I'm sure if I'd stayed in France long enough I'd probably have one day found myself picking out the odd bit of llama or penguin. I don't eat meat much any more, and my cassoulet experiences, as tasty as they were, sort of reminded me why. On returning to London I never would have believed a lettuce leaf would look so friendly and so *safe*.)

So, yes. I'm feeling celebratory, and it seemed that this time I should curb my impulse to get on a plane to another country, only to return with nothing to show but a tanned nose. (Seriously, in that heat - and the only part of my body that caught the sun was my *nose*? It still glows in the dark. In order to sleep, I have to hang curtains off the end of it and keep them drawn when I turn the lights off.) This time I thought it would be cheaper to express my celebratory urges by writing a post on Livejournal. Not as exotic, but just as exciting, I'm sure. If you keep your mind open.

I'm celebrating because I've almost - but not quite - finished two books. I've never worked on two books at exactly the same time before, and it feels peculiar timing that they've both come to an end (almost - but not quite) at precisely the same time. The first of these books is my new collection of short stories, due out early next year, called Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical. There are still a couple of stories I'd rather like to write for it, but I'm beginning to wonder whether the book actually *needs* them - it's getting to be a pretty hefty tome as it is. So I'm cautiously going to say the book is completed, and wait to see whether over the next couple of months the absence of these still unwritten extra tales keeps me up all night worrying at them and chewing at the duvet in frustration. (It probably will. The bite marks all over the duvet are testament to my inability to let things go. But I'm trying to fool my brain. If I announce the book *is* over, and tell my brain it's now switched off, then I can creep up to it sideways and mug it into making a decision.) So - there you are. New collection of short stories. Completed. (Save for the yarn about the woman who marries a camel, and the one about the Von Trapp family member who can't sing.)

I've been writing the fiction during the day time. Of an evening, as a bit of a hobby, I've been writing a critical guide to The X-Files and its related spin-offs. It's been enormous fun, actually, unwinding on the sofa watching Mulder and Scully pursue yet another mutant that eats human body parts, or seeing whether Frank Black might actually crack a smile on Millennium. Then I nip upstairs and write an essay about them. I worked out at the beginning of the writing that there would be 283 separate instalments to sit through then analyse, and for some reason (forgetfulness? mathematical naivety? plain stupidity?) I didn't quite see what a mountain that was to climb. Well, I've almost - but not quite - finished. Inasmuch as I've now written up 279 of them. Three final episodes of The X-Files to go - this is about the time the series is struggling a bit to find a pulse, but once in a while I'm delighted to find a heart beat, there *is* still life in the old show yet - and then off to the cinema later this week to see the new movie. (I've remained entirely spoiler-free on this, and I'm hoping against hope that it'll be very good. If for no other reason than that it'll be a better ending to my book. If the last chapter just says 'It was crap', then I'm concluding on a bit of a downer.) Is it any good, this movie? Tell me it is. Even if it isn't. Like Mulder and Scully, I want to believe. (Do you see what I did there? With jokes like that, you just know this book is a must-read.)

So I'm a little written out. Which is why so many of my friends must be wondering why I never email any more. Sorry. I'm sliding back into that now. I'll be in touch in a few days. I'm almost - but not quite - certain of that.

Other bits of news! I'm absolutely delighted to report that I've been nominated for two World Fantasy awards. One of which is for my last book of shorts, Tiny Deaths, up now for Best Collection. And the other is for one particular tale, 'Damned if You Don't' (if you've read it, it's the one about the man who goes to Hell and falls in love with Hitler's childhood dog), up for Best Short Story. I've no idea if I've even the remotest chance of winning, but I feel duly honoured to be given this attention. So this October I'm taking off to Calgary with my best suit and my fingers firmly crossed. I don't know much about Calgary, and I really think at some point I should check what it's like in a guide book - but for the moment it's rather lovely to just *imagine* what Calgary is like - it might spoil it if I saw photos of the place too soon. I vaguely think that I've heard something about Calgary sweaters in the past, so in my mind's eye Calgary is a big fluffy department store of winterwear. I'm hoping that's the case; and that the award ceremony will take place in the sock department. I like socks.

And I'm on my travels again soon. I've been invited as a guest to February's Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles, and I'm almost certainly going to go. (It's always at a slightly awkward time of the year for me - it's the same week not only as my birthday, but as one of my anniversaries with Janie. Not Actually Getting Married, nor First Meeting, but Getting Her To Finally Accept The Idea Of Going Out With Me And Calling Me Boyfriend. Janie's remarkably unsentimental about anniversaries, but I always wait and see each year whether she finds the numbers significant enough to celebrate. It'll only be my 39th birthday - so that's pretty nothing-ish - and our 12th anniversary - which is *probably* important if you're an astrologer and into zodiac related numerologies, but otherwise not much to write home about.)

And, rather oddly, I'm also starting a new part time job soon, where I act as a lecturer on luxury cruises. I was approached a few months ago to see whether I'd be interested - and the lure of being on a ship, visiting exciting new destinations, and eating nice food, made it very appealing. (And I like writing on ships too, it's very peaceful.) I've been on a few cruises before, mostly as a Doctor Who guest on the 'sci-fi sea cruises'. This would be very different. Those boats had a passenger total of maybe 2500, and the whole experience was rather like being on a floating holiday camp. The lecture cruises are much smaller, more intimate - probably no more than a couple of hundred people on board - and I'll be discussing the history of literature, and the particular cultural touchstones of each city we visit. Not a mention of a Dalek, I'd have thought - instead it'll all be Flaubert and Pushkin and Kadare and other heroes. Years ago, if I hadn't been waylaid by a job in the theatre, I was making moves to stay in academia and be a university lecturer. It'll be rather lovely to get back to that, with the backdrop of the sea behind me.

So, there we go. Celebratory. Cautiously. Life is good. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to put some more lotion on my blistered nose.

I drank coffee yesterday. I don't drink coffee, the whole thing was very accidental. The last time I had coffee was in February 1997. I was directing a play in Rome, and one day the producer told me that the next morning he'd booked me to go to a school some thirty kilometres outside the city and give a two hour talk to 600 teenagers about theatre. My Italian is not very great, and I really don't know enough words to fill two hours, let alone in any order that could be deemed grammatical. And I'd already met a fair share of Italian teenagers since I'd arrived - they all looked very cool, wore heavy leather jackets, and chewed toothpicks. (And don't get me started on the boys.) So I was naturally apprehensive as I was driven to the venue, not knowing what I was going to talk about, practising the first few sentences that would get me through - ooh - the first forty seconds of the ordeal, and showing no interest at all in the ancient Roman aqueducts my host kept on pointing to me out of the window. At one point we made a loo stop, and from out of a catering van I was bought a spicy sausage and an Espresso. It may have been the combination of the two, it may just have been the coffee - but I was so wired after that I not only survived the two hour speech, I even began to enjoy bits of it. But I've never quite dare to drink the stuff since, it made me so hyper I thought my heart was going to pop. (I bought a leather jacket that same day. My very first. Just to fit in with the cool kids. I didn't start on the toothpicks, though.)

So I was walking down a street in London, trying desperately hard to think of not only an ending to a story I'm writing, but a beginning and a middle too, when I suddenly found myself handed a tub by a young girl in an apron. There was some sort of sales thing going on, and *everyone* was getting this free tub, and I'm a sucker for free handouts, they could get me to have medical injections if I thought it was a freebie. I thought it was an icecream, actually - there was some sort of syrup on it, and lots of cream. I didn't stop to wonder why it was so hot. So I swigged the thing down, and thought it was really rather good. I went back to find out what it was. It was coffee. I hadn't remembered coffee tasting like that! I thought it tasted of adrenalin and fear and Italian toothpicks. I can now see why so many of you out there drink the stuff. Okay, you probably do without the whipped cream and the sauce, and maybe it wasn't a *real* coffee - it began with a 'frap' syllable - but it still made me feel quite adult. I may have coffee again.

The thing I was trying to write - and the coffee did nothing to help me with, sadly - is a Doctor Who story. I can say this because today the BBC not only announced the thing, they also released the cover. And here it is! http://www.gallifreyone.com/picview.php?ret=news&sub=news&id=Story_of_Martha2.jpg I'll never ever get bored with seeing my name on the cover of a book, but I feel more than usually something of a fraud in this instance, as my contribution to this novel-with-excerpts-from-guest-writers hardly earns that sort of attention. But it's very odd to see it out there, all designed, when I genuinely haven't written it yet. I think this is a wake-up call. I'd better start the thing. It sort of fulfils a childhood urge. I've written Doctor Who for the telly, for radio broadcast, for audio CD, as short stories and as a comic strip. Now I am - technically - a Doctor Who novelist too. (Sort of. If you squint.) That's me sorted now. I need never do anything else. Until the day they reinvent it as a ballet or as a mime piece.

What other news? Oh, I received my invitation to the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the ceremony taking place in Liverpool on July 3rd. It's a very nice looking invitation, they used a good printer, I was impressed. And so I shall have to dress up smartly again. There are press releases about the thing now, with pictures of all five of the nominees. I'm alarmed to see that all the other writers look very professional and authorly, and none of them are smiling. Whereas I'm grinning at the camera as if I'm being given birthday cake, and look like the comedy warm-up. I suspect the entire prize will be judged by the quality of the photograph, so I'm sunk. BBC Radio Three are being very supportive, and have asked me to appear on an arts programme just before the ceremony, and to write them a new short story they can recite for the occasion. I wrote this a few days ago, just a very short thing. They've said they'll hire a good actor for the job - but I suspect they'll run out of money, so it may well just be me. (And because I have a very weak command of the letters 'l' and 'r', I tried to write something that would use them as little as possible, just in case.) I've also just conducted a big interview with a Malaysian online mag called Quill, in which I get to pontificate somewhat pretentiously about the State of the Short Story. It's here if you're honestly interested. There are pictures of me grinning again. They call it 'On the Couch with Robert Shearman', which is more suggestive than I'd have expected. I don't like couches - they don't help my posture, and you just know I'm going to pay for that when I'm older. http://goodbooksguide.blogspot.com/2008/05/on-couch-with-robert-shearman.html

And I've been invited to direct again in India this autumn. Last year I took a play of mine over to the Old World Theatre Festival in Delhi. The producer, a rather scary old lady called Vinod whose face seems to be a perpetual scowl, has visited London and summoned me and my cast for coffee. (I didn't drink *coffee*. Obviously.) This time she proposes an extensive tour, taking in Calcutta and Mumbai as well. The annoying thing is that all the company are looking to me to make the decision, and seem interested in going - and I have to be honest, I'm not quite sure I can face India two years running. It's a fascinating place to visit as a tourist, I'm sure, and the Taj Mahal is just one of the extraordinary sights I was gobsmacked by. But its charms wear somewhat thin when you're trying to conduct technical rehearsals via lighting engineers who only speak Hindi. So I'm thinking about it. If I reject the thing, though, I feel as if I'm denying everyone else their chance of an adventure. Hmm.

That's it for me! I'm off now to panic about this bloody Doctor Who thing. ...No, not panic, what am I saying? Let's call it 'undergo a period of intense creative barnstorming'. Yeah, that'll hold.

This weekend, I have been mostly eating cucumber. I quite like cucumber - although, you know, if I were sentenced to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and were allowed one foodstuff to have with me, I don't think the cucumber would be in the running. But I read somewhere that it's mostly just water with bits of green stuff round it, and you can eat tons of it and become ever so slim and impressive looking. I'd quite like that. That'd be useful.

I wouldn't normally care, but tomorrow night I go to the Sony Awards. The Sonys are a bit like the Oscars, and a bit like the BAFTAs. But they're for *radio*, so no-one takes much notice. I've been nominated for some writing I did, and I'm duly invited to sit on the table of My Production Team in a rather posh hotel off Park Lane, drink champagne, and pretend to look mature and not-bitter-at-all when someone else wins. I thought that would be rather fun. I think it will. But a few days ago the BBC sent me my formal invite. It instructs me that it's a black tie event.

I haven't been to a black tie event in years. To be honest, the only awards I've ever been won before have been in the theatre. In theatre, they're usually impressed if you show up wearing trousers and a clean shirt. On Friday I went to a dress hire shop, and spent a couple of hours being measured and prodded and quizzed, just so I could get clothes which make me look like James Bond. ...Or, more likely, in my case, the waiter in charge of the dessert trolley. Looking smart tomorrow night will be something of a treat. I quite like looking smart, once in a while. I shall take a camera, and demand to be photographed from every angle. (But, I must say, hiring posh evening wear isn't half expensive. When I lived in Devon, you could get a mortgage for that.)

So that's it. It's going to be a heatwave tomorrow, so I'll be heading off to the BBC in scruffy shorts and a T-shirt. There I shall miraculously change into a waiter. Possibly a very sweaty waiter, if, as usual, the BBC are being cheap on the air conditioning again. And from there I'm being taxied to the Sony equivalent of the red carpet walkdown. Which, in this case, will probably involve us all filing into the hotel via the tradesman's entrance trying to avoid the bins.

The best laugh I had all weekend was when Janie asked if the award ceremony for radio was going to be televised. (Spouses are not invited. Which seems a bit churlish. Or, alternatively, something of a mercy.) There is, however, a live webcast of it, at www.radioawards.org - I won't be tuning in, for obvious reasons. If you're especially bored, mind you, at half past six tomorrow evening, that's where I'll be. I'm the one who'll keep getting asked for the lemon meringue pie and the chocolate fudge gateau. And trying to lose weight by munching on cucumber just *slightly* too late for it to have any physical effect. And gasping with absolute astonishment if I actually do end up winning something.

My publisher gave me an excited phone call just now. "Tiny Deaths is up for an award!" he squawked.

"I know," I said. "It's that international short story prize. I'm on the longlist. Nice, isn't it?"

"Not that one," he said. He'd been at a literature festival, and at the closing ceremonies they'd announced the shortlist for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. It's an award given to short story collections from the UK by a single author. There's a shortlist of five books, with the prize awarded in July. Last year it was won by Booker nominee Colm Toibin, with Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things runner up.

Comma are especially delighted because Tiny Deaths is the only book on the shortlist from an independent publisher. They think that'll guarantee us a lot more publicity when the press release is announced on Monday.

I'm rather amazed by it all, really. When I wrote my book, I honestly expected that not a soul would be interested in it. That it'd drown without a trace in the wastelands of the Amazon website. Now it's a nominee for two of the biggest short story prizes in the world. And, as Comma say, we actually stand a chance of *winning* this latest one...!

I phoned my Dad. He nearly cried. So did I.

Right. I'm starting work on a new story tomorrow. 

I'm telling this to Livejournal, because I know the first thing I'll do when I get up in the morning is go on the computer. And I'll find - as I have these last few days - a dozen good reasons why I shouldn't start. ...Actually, they're not *good* reasons, and mostly involve my trying to get a 'Q' a triple letter score on the scrabulous application on Facebook. But if I go on to LJ, as I'm wont to do, and see that I've declared to the world that I'm writing something new, then I might be able to guilt myself into it.

I'm supposed to be writing a little Doctor Who thing which is due worryingly soon. So it's only natural that I shan't be working on that at all, but something which has a deadline so many months away it looks from this vantage point vaguely futuristic and dystopian. I'm writing instead a love story for the new book, which happens to involve a certain amount of cat exorcism. It's a measure of how addled my brain is that I've just spent the best part of an hour on google, trying to research how cat exorcism actually works - only to remember it doesn't exist, that I made it up. I'm an idiot.

So I'm heading off to the South Bank and the Thames Path in the morning with my notebook and pen, far away from the lures of the triple word scores (if I only had a 'U' to go with the 'Q', how much easier life would be), and I'm not coming back until I've got something pretty damn concrete written. If not actually finished, at least a reasonable stab at a first draft. And if not exactly a first draft, then at least a half draft. ...Oh, look. I'll be cheerful if I come back with a paragraph spelled right. It'll be a beginning, won't it?

And I'll be wearing shorts. It's surprisingly warm here in London at the moment. I don't like being in shorts. I managed to avoid wearing in shorts in both Los Angeles and Perth earlier this year, in spite of enormous provocation. I only have two pairs of shorts: the so-called respectable ones, which aren't respectable at all but rather embarrassing, and the so-called leisure ones, which are just as embarrassing but coloured a slightly brighter hue. I'm not built for shorts. In ordinary trousers I stand just shy of six foot tall, thirty-eight years old, and of average build. In shorts I look like a four foot tall monkey with an ageing disease and a fondness for lard. I'm not sure which pair I'll plump for yet - I'll see what the morning brings. When I read this post on LJ, and realise with a sinking sensation that I'll have to go out writing after all.

Hi, everyone!

I haven't many words for now about this - I'm somewhat too excited, and utterly too surprised. But the longlist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize has been announced, and I'm on it with my book, Tiny Deaths.

It's sort of the equivalent of the Booker Prize for short story collections, really. (And indeed my fellow nominees include Roddy Doyle and winner of this year's Booker, Anne Enright.) It's widely seen as the most prestigious award for the form - and certainly the wealthiest - and is given to single author collections written in English over the last year. So fellow nominees are from Ireland, the US, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan - and elsewhere in Britain, of course.

I'm somewhat flabbergasted. I don't think I have a chance of winning the thing - most of my fellow nominees are internationally renowned. I'd say that to get on to the longlist is something of a dream come true, except it was so far out of my sights I'd never even started to dream about it. The stripped down shorlist will be announced in mid-July, and the final winner in September. But just to get this far is absolutely extraordinary - and I hope it raises the profile for the book a little, as well as for Comma, my publishers.

Sorry for bragging. I can't help it. I won't stop smiling for days. Or squirming, probably. I can barely sit still as I type this.

And now I'm off to eat a celebratory meal of frankfurters in pasta. Yum!