Getting things covered

We're in the process of deciding on a cover for my new collection of short stories which takes the title of the first story, 'Used to Be'. My great publisher, Chris Hamilton-Emery, is designing the cover himself, and last night he revealed the draft below for discussion. It's not at all the final cover, and can easily be changed. I know I'm really lucky to be consulted like this, and its also great to have the chance to garner the opinions of others, so I'd be very grateful for any comments on it you may wish to leave here.

Personally, I think it's really striking and intriguing, but I do have a doubt. I love the Magritte echo, which beautifully underlines the stories' theme of hidden things/truths and things turning out to be not what they seem and alternative realities/lives. My doubt about it is that the hairdo/coiffure perhaps suggests something of a fifties-ish Mad Men or Stepford Wives vibe, and indicates that the stories are about the role of women, which they're not. Any comments would be enthusiastically received!

Are books ever finished?

Well, I've been working on the proofs for The Birth Machine, my first novel which is to be reissued by Salt in October. This will be the third edition of the book, and I've written before about why I published my own second, revised edition after the rights reverted to me.

Well, there I was recently reading the proofs for typos (the whole thing had had to be rejigged from old files), and guess what? I wanted to change it again! Not in the way I changed it for the second edition (that was a change of structure, a reversion to the one I began with before the book was ever published). But you know, inevitably over the years my writing has changed (developed, I hope). Apart from anything else, in the period since I first wrote this book I've had a career as a radio playwright and under a different name I wrote a series of TV novelisations for children. The disciplines involved in those forms/genres must have contributed, although probably it would have happened anyway: in any case I think that nowadays my writing is sparer. It was very difficult therefore for me to read through the text of The Birth Machine without wanting to work on it, and I couldn't resist making a few tiny changes, and as a result this will be the 'Third, further revised edition' !

It makes you realize that in reality a book is never, ever finished...

And of course I am utterly grateful to Salt for allowing this one to go on living and breathing in this way...

Too many typos...

Well, I would never go about the place saying that I have a fault-finding mother, but...

Last night my mum rings me. She is on page 9 of Too Many Magpies. She has found three ruddy typos!!! (A missing pronoun and two indefinite articles, the last two side by side!!) *!!@!!. I must have looked at those proofs six times! And of course others did! (I am telling myself that the more engrossing a text is, the less easily you can detach in order to see the typos...)

Fortunately, she has now read to page 34 and has found no more...

Publication day for Too Many Magpies

Today is official publication day. It's an understatement to say I'm chuffed. These things are always a little fuzzed nowadays - advance copies have been available on the Salt website since it came back from the printer nearly a fortnight ago, and our lovely Didsbury bookshop, Morten's, immediately stocked it to sell at our Didsbury Arts Festival reading last Friday. So it's kind of 'out there' already, but there is of course something special about official publication day. Maybe I'll have a little glass of champagne tonight, even if it will be on my own, since John decided to stop drinking four days ago, and I wouldn't like to spoil his resolution!

It's been an amazing process, getting this book published - so quick, and seamless, even taking into account the nail-biting period in late May, I think it was, when it looked as though Salt would have to fold and the novel wouldn't go ahead after all. It was only late last November that I wrote to Jen and asked her if she'd like to look at it, and by Christmas she had said she would like to publish it (the best Christmas present I've ever had), and in the autumn. I never really got upset about the scare in the summer - guess I'm too used to the knocks of the writer's life by now, and have learnt to accept such things as the norm and to see the successes as wonderful miracles. Also somehow I so believed in Jen and Chris's ingenuity and commitment that an opposite part of me didn't think Salt could really fail - and of course there was so much immediate support for the Just One Book campaign, and I made myself too busy with that to allow myself to think negatively.

As soon as Salt had drawn back from the brink Jen set to typesetting TMM. It's beautifully typeset and I'm so grateful to her - most especially as the stress of the scare had left her feeling unwell at the time. The cover just happened, out of the blue - almost literally out of the blue. I had been taking photos of magpies myself, just in case they were needed, to have one ready the moment the subject of the cover was broached, but quite frankly, they weren't much cop. Magpies are really quite hard to photograph: being pied they don't show up against any kind of cluttered background. They kept settling in the leafy tree outside my workroom window, but it was hopeless - though interesting: when I blew up one photo a little goldfinch was revealed sitting companionably beside the magpie, undetectable before then. Then one evening walking home I saw magpies perched very high up in the tree in reading-group Trevor's garden - an ash, still not properly in leaf in June, so the birds were silhouetted against the sky (and luckily I had my camera on me). That sky was a bright cloudless blue, though, and I sent the photo over to Jen and Chris with great doubts: it was far too peaceful and complacent, none of the haunting atmosphere we needed for the novel. But Chris took one look at it, and knew he could do something haunting with it, and the amazing spookily distressed design on the cover of the book is the result.

And now, all in ten months, here is the book - complete, concrete, a thing existing in its own right, separate from us who worked on it, and from me out of whose head it came in the first place, and ready, I hope, to become something else, whatever is made of it in the minds of others...