We’ve just come back from Oludeniz in Turkey – we only went for the weekend. One of my friends said “that’s a long way for a weekend”. I agreed until I realised it would probably take us longer to get to Wales from East London. So we did very little, sitting in the sunshine, powering through holiday novels, drinking beer watching the paragliders over the bay and just trying to let the sun burn off all the anxiety and stress that accumulates in a 21st century lifestyle. It’s amazing how quickly that chilled feeling can leave when you get back...

Ever have one of those weeks where it’s impossible to settle to any particular task, much less get on with editing the book that’s coming out before Christmas and starting to panic that it’s all going to go horribly wrong? I’m not expecting you to have experienced exactly those symptoms, but I think you probably know what I mean. “It’s not the heat it’s the humidity” is one of those saws that, while it may be true, doesn’t have irritate the hell out of me – and just about everyone else. So, the struggle this week is to concentrate. Concentrate,...

I’m currently reading R.J.Ellory’s The Anniversary Man and it’s made me think about what I write — and what I read. I do wonder sometimes if we are going too far with some of the things we write: do people really need to know what happens when someone’s head is ripped off? Where’s the line between informing and gratuitous? Crime writer Val McDermid (probably best known for her Tony Hill character) said in an interview during the recent Hay festival she doesn’t want to create cardboard cutouts that can be mangled and destroyed and discarded — the reader needs to...