Let me break the rules by quoting a negative critique of Trading Futures by someone to whom I was hoping to sell it three years ago:   [read more]

Sitting at a computer, writing a novel, is quite a monotonous activity. It needs livening up. It would be better if I could listen to music while I wrote. But I don’t like music; I like songs. I like music with words (unless it’s opera). But then I start paying attention to the lyrics, rather than to the words I’m trying to write myself.   [read more]

Every evening last week, at 10:45 pm, I was to be found on the sofa at home, listening to Radio 4’s ‘Book at Bedtime’, hearing Trading Futures read back to me by Toby Jones. This was a surreal experience.   [read more]

So, anyway, there I was last Thursday evening, several feet up a step ladder, as one is, haranguing a multitude of friends and well-wishers, wondering if this was fantasy or reality, and concluding that it was a mixture of the two. ‘The scene’ – as Matthew Oxenhay might have said, and in fact does say at one point in the novel – ‘was a distillation of life present, of life cumulative to date.’  [Read more]

The problem is that I’m not entirely sure how I wrote it. This is partly a fault of memory, and partly because the novel had no single origin, no notes and no coherent development.   [read more]