What's more the relative success of William Heaney has rather put Graham Joyce's prominent hooter somewhat out of joint.  Firstly you would think that a writer with a career spanning almost twenty years, a quiver full of awards and a loyal readership and would easily be able to outsell a complete debutant.  Certainly this is what you come to expect in the writing world: the idea is that you build a career, supported by booksellers who recognise your name and reviewers who know your pedigree.  Well you can pretty much forget that.

What goes out of the bookshops is governed by what goes into the bookshops.  All those three-for-two offers, thumping-good-read recommendations, window-displays and dump bins are important revenue earners for the shop.  A Book Of The Month award is there because the publisher paid for it, not because it thumps.  With even spine-on shelf-space at a premium, the midlisters are squeezed by the extra space now devoted to Katie Price's "Saddle Up Your Little Pony" or Colleen Rooney's "The Brave Little Lipstick Tube".  In the UK we have EPOS (electronic point of sale) and in the US they have Bookscan.  The order numbers for your book are determined at a keystroke.  Thus if you sold ten copies last time, it's very like that the store will "take eight for now".  Next year, five.  After that, two.  Any midlisters (and that's 98% of all writers) are trapped in this downward spiral; and some very good ones struggle to get their books published at all.

When that young upstart William Heaney stepped up to the plate, he had no EPOS record. The booksellers had to go on their instincts about whether the book might sell or not.  They decided it might, and promptly ordered into the stores a larger number of copies than they would have, say, a Graham Joyce novel.  That meant of course that the customers had sight of these copies in the store, whereupon they brought them.

Now if you've read the book already you will know that it contains the same feverish interests as any other Graham Joyce novel.  It just happens to have sold better.  So what's a fellow to do?  Publish more work under the name of William Heaney? Kill off Graham Joyce?  Invent more pen-names?  (I rather fancy something with a flourish next time.  Perhaps Peregrine Nash?  Or the sexually ambiguous Japonica Stark?  Suggestions on the back of ten-pound note, please.)

But the deployment of a pen-name has generated one or two other interesting confusions.  Let me clear: I outed myself on these pages because I didn't want to make a secret about the pen-name, and secondly because the psudonymised Memoirs Of A Master Forger genuinely contains within it a critique of publishing, which is why I allude to fraudulent memoir, ghost-writers of celeb "novels", fake British-Council sponsored "poets", forged books, and, by way of metaphor, demon-infested manuscripts.  You get the idea?  Well not everyone does.

Most commentators and reviewers seemed to have done a bit of simple detective work, and either named me as the author or hinted that they knew the author's real name.  The Guardian reviewer Eric Brown suggested that this couldn't have been a first-time novelist.  The Daily Telegraph's literary column speculated on why there might be such "skullduggery" (their word) about the identity of the author behind the book, even though a quick read might have suggested to them the answer.  But the most extraordinary response came from a full-sized review in the Times Literary Supplement. 

The book carries a reference to a fake blog.  http://butforthegrape.livejournal.com/

The blog comprises just a few entries purporting to be from William Heaney.  Well the reviewer couldn't have looked very far back, because she swallowed whole the fiction of the blog - and the notion that William Heaney is an inveterate blogger -and on that premise proceeded to review the book.  The reviewer in question is an Oxford Professor of - and this should be noted - textual studies.  The review itself is intelligent, rather neutral, but utterly wrong-headed, and a spectacular illustration of an academic capacity to discover in a text exactly what you set out to find in the first place.  Proceeding from the assumption that William Heaney is a blogger, the review goes on to list the standard weaknesses of blogging as a literary form (backwards chronology, random association of events, undeveloped characters, no structure) and concludes that this novel displays those very weakness.  I wanted to write in and say: madam, it may or may not be a crap novel, but certainly not for the reasons you say. Because you don't.  Well, William Heaney might, but I wouldn't.

No structure?  I'm sort of relieved, because I was beginning to think that I was Mr-Bloody-Boring-Structure.  So calloo-callay.  Turns out I'm more of an artistic type!  I'm going to cavort and wear a paisley cravat around my throat if I don't have any structure.

I'm hoping the US version How To Make Friends With Demons might be available by the time you read this.  The Night Shade edition will feature a cover by Mike Dringenberg (yes, the original artist of the Sandman comics) a brilliant artist whom I met at The WFC in Calgary. 

Oh did I mention the British Council above?  I can't believe their Literature Department, and I can't let the following go without comment.  The British Council Literature Department: doesn't that sound reassuring, silver-plated?  Doesn't it suggest that someone is out there doing good work on our behalf in a benighted world?

Right.  If you go here

http://www.encompassculture.com/readinggroups/readingthecity/grahamjoyce-teachers/

you will see some of my work displayed on the British Council web pages.  They contacted me a while back to ask if they could use some of my writing for their "educational English language work".  They don't pay, of course.  They get paid, of course, but they don't pay, of course.  Sure I said, go ahead.  Then later one of my foreign publishers who wanted to promote my work wanted to know why I wasn't on the British Council "List".

What list, I asked.  Well it turns out there is a list of writers "with whom the British Council work".  News to me, but there you go.  So I checked out the list, which contained a few famous names and dozens and dozens of obscure ethnic poets whom the British Council seem to dispatch around the world to unload their bloody awful unpublished poems.  No I don't read the Daily Mail: I'm just telling you how it is.  Certainly my name wasn't on the illustrious list so I contacted them, and a lady with a scary double-barrelled name came on the phone.  She spoke like someone from the diplomatic core circa 1935.  'Yes,' she said, 'I can confirm you are not on the list.'

'Uh, why not?'

'The list,' she sniffed, 'comprises only those writers with whom we work.'

'Nice diction,' I might have snorted back at her.  'What about my work you use free gratis and for nothing on your web-site?'

There was a lot of sniffing and snorting, and eventually - and with huge reluctance - she told me I could go on a waiting list.

'What? A waiting list to be on a list?'

'That's right.'

'But I'm already de facto on your web site!' I protested.

'Well, yes.'

'But not on your list "of authors with whom you work"?'

'Well, no.   Do you want your work taken off our website?'

'*&%!!!*****'

I swear to you I'm not making any of this up.  She then actually told me that the waiting list had 300 names on it, and that they were "processing" them at the spirited rate of ten a month.  I pointed out that that would mean a three year wait before I moved from the waiting list to the list - a list which would show that I appear on another page.  What's more, it's not like they have to crowd all these scruffy writers into an ante-room outside their offices, is it?   That's the grand virtue of cyber-space.  It doesn't take up any room.  You could have a virtual list of... oh forget it.

We taxpayers pay these people good salaries.  Folding cash.  Real spending money.  Just for being like this.  It's all such fun.

So I waited for two weeks and phoned up again, pretending to be one William Heaney and speaking in an equally posh accent - one that could strip paint.  William ranted on for a bit and demanded -rather imperiously - to be removed from her list.  When she asked why, William said he didn't have to give a reason.  It took her half an hour to establish that William Heaney wasn't even on the list; whereupon he demanded to know why the hell not.

In this life, and with these odds, you have to get your revenge any way you can. 

Initial reviews look very spicy and the book has gone into early reprint, so, reasons to be cheerful part three.   There's a glowing (otherwise why would I draw it to your attention) review from John Berlyne at http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=7623

And another from Adam Roberts at

http://punkadiddle.blogspot.com/2008/06/william-heaney-memoirs-of-master-forger.html

If you find this sort of blatant gargantuan egoism distasteful skip a few paragraphs, because I'm warming to it myself.  (Oh come off it!  We spend all this time putting a book together, why shouldn't get an emotional jacuzzi out of it around publishing time?  Give us a break!)  So, meanwhile, two writers I admire enormously have these things to say.

"Beyond the wonderful clarity of line and inherent word-music that draws a reader into the story, qualities of Graham Joyce's writing we fans of his have come to expect, in his new novel he performs a breathtaking juggling act of the literal and metaphorical to tell a serious/hilarious story of our time, for all time, about the nature of good and evil. Joyce is undoubtedly possessed by the Demon of Great Writing." -- Jeffrey Ford

"Anyone who isn't reading Graham Joyce is doing themselves a huge disservice. No matter what kind of story he takes on, his work immediately becomes the standard to which all others have to be compared. The only disappointment with a Joyce book is that, at some point, it has to end." --Charles de Lint

If you're still not persuaded after all that, well, I give up.

 But for anyone reading this blog in the US, the book is published by Night Shade Books under my own name and with the title How To Make Friends With Demons.  It's out next month (i.e. November) and you can order it directly from Night Shade if you want: http://www.nightshadebooks.com/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=130

What else can I shout about?  Well, the O Henry award I was braying about on my last blog gets better, in that the short story An Ordinary Soldier Of The Queen (which by the way is embedded in the above novel) became Juror's choice for two of the three judges on the panel.  This means that in the forthcoming anthology of O Henry awards I get to see a brace of commentaries on the story by no lesser lights than Tim O'Brien (have you ever read his The Things They Carried???) and AS Byatt.

Right, that's enough bragging.  British Fantasy Convention in Nottingham was fun this year.  Chris Golden flew over from the US and was a sparkling guest and Christopher Fowler was in superb form as Master Of Ceremonies.  But a sure sign that I really am getting old is the fact the most fun session was the British Fantasy Society's Annual General Meeting.  Yes, the glorious thing about the AGM is that there doesn't seem be more than two people in the society who know or care about even the most basic procedural rules for a meeting.  No-one knows how to challenge a chairman's ruling for example, or to put a procedural motion forward.  I say this is glorious because when I was a student I spent hours and hours of wasted time in procedural wrangles at pointless meetings at national level with a lot of people who are now big names on the political scene: Charles Clarke (former Home Secretary), Trevor Phillips (head of Commission for Equalities and Human Rights) and the brilliant John Denham whom I knew through my days at the British Youth Council and who is now Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills) are just three examples of people with whom I learned the rules for stopping other people from getting a fair hearing.

Anyway, we had the wonderful spectacle this year of a proposal that motions should be "anonymously" for fear of intimidation.  There was of course some speculation about which group of violent thugs might be hell bent on strong-arming their views on whether we scrap the "Best Newcomer Award" or not.  A priceless and excitable debate ensued, where someone even asked all those people present who felt like they wouldn't  want their views about anything to be known to "raise their hands".  Can't wait for next year.

On the subject of bizarre procedures I was on international duty (ahem) with the England Writers' football team in Madrid recently.  Victory.  We thumped the Spaniards 5-2 and I was moderately satisfied with my goalkeeping performance, discounting a shanked goal kick.  They fielded a fat-boy main striker, and after putting the ball wide his run carried him off the pitch.  He took an age to waddle back on but I did the fair thing of waiting for him to get into position before taking the goal kick.   Then I grew impatient and played it short to my full back.  Fat boy read it, pounced and flashed the ball in the net.  He looked at me afterwards as if to say Not so fat.

So much for sportsmanship.     Anyway then after ninety minutes with the score at a comfortable 5-2 in our favour we - insanely - allowed the game to run on because the pitch was booked for another fifteen minutes.  What? I was going, what?  Hell, I know what my boys are like.  Namely, knackered after ninety minutes.  I predicted a draw and was very nearly correct.  The Spaniards knocked two soft goals in and would have found another if we hadn't killed it off at the other end.  So it was either 5-2, which is respectable for a goalie, or 6-4, which isn't.  I can tell while you're reading this that you don't even care.  Any more than you care about procedural motions at the British Fantasy Society.

Next game appears to be in Israel, against the Germans and Israelis.  That's correct: while you are all installing energy saving light bulbs around your household, a load of wheezing middle-aged blokes are busting carbon around the world so that they can enact sad footballing fantasies.  

I've been writing some song lyrics with fabulous French musician and singer Emilie Simon.  I don't know how it will work out, but if some of my lyrics find their way on to her next album I'll tres heureux.  Indeedy.

Forthcoming appearances.  I'll be in Calgary for the World Fantasy Convention at the end of October.  Because that's Canada I'm not sure if I will be William Heaney or Graham Joyce.  I'll leave it until Thursday to decide.  The following week on Friday November 7^th I'll be in Birmingham UK, to talk to the Brum SF group.  I'll expect you at one or the other venue without fail.

(For recent past entries, go to archive.)

Hay Festival was bloody good.  I got to meet up with Jayne Evans, Hay's uber-librarian and someone I hadn't seen since college days in Derby, oh, ummm, duh, twenty-five years ago.  She said last time we met we were in a pub and I called her an "armchair Socialist", and she hadn't forgotten.  Jayne, it's what I called everyone on the left who didn't happen to agree with me.  It was designed to make me sound much more of an activist than anyone else when in truth what I was, by contrast, was probably a "languish-all-morning-in-bed Socialist". Anyway we met up and had a fun lunch to catch up after I'd done my festival appearance.  Later she twisted the arms of a few of her friends to come down to the library to give me a further good listening to, and it was great to see her.

We stayed in a pretty cottage near Hay owned by the Robinsons and when we arrived there was a lamb that had got itself stuck in the fast flowing running stream outside their door.  Sue, action woman and farmgirl, jumped out of the car, pulled on her boots and paddled upstream to shepherd it towards Sophie Robinson, who had splashed into the stream on the other side.  Sophie emerged from the stream with a dripping, tiny lamb in her arms to say, 'Hello, are you staying in our house?'  Sophie is an illustrator and Bruce Robinson, amongst many other things, wrote the scripts for Withnail and I and The Killing Fields.    What a great couple.  And Sophie, with that lamb in your arms you had us on hello. 

The Festival itself was a quagmire.  Actually with all the sandbags you had to step around it was reminiscent of the Somme.  The savages of course were rather bored and superior as usual, dodging introductions to this or that author, until that is we encountered Dr Who's assistant! in the green room.  Suddenly I went rocketing up in the savages' miserly esteem, because now we could rub shoulders with Dr Who's assistant!  Yes!  Catherine Tate, there to do a talk (just like your Dad is, I tried to point out to the savages, but they were too busy staring, hypnotised by the mere proximity in relative time and space to Dr Who's assistant!  Joe at the time has his arm in a cast (bit of unfortunate goalkeeping, on the back lawn, with me) and we asked Dr Who's assistant! if Dr Who's assistant! would possibly sign it.  Catherine Tate was very obliging and funny and suddenly the savages thought all this crashingly dull literary festivals routine might not be so bad after all.

Well, the quagmire that was Hay was merely a foreshadowing of what was to come.  If you didn't leave the greensward of these sceptred isles then you'll know that summer came for about three hours before creeping off into the chilly Autumn night about mid August.  Anticipating thus, we hauled the savages off to France for a bit of necessary solar top-up.  'What's that bright object in the sky?' Joe wanted to know.  'It's mythological,' said Ella, who is chomping through twelve books a week on average and collecting words bigger than she is.  'It's the Sun,' I said, 'and you're going to have to rub this warp factor 20 cream into your pale English skins.'

Alf from down the road had generously loaned us his gonflable boat and we slung it in the back of the truck and did a brace of fortnights in Britanny and the coast of Aquitane before the inevitable long drive back to the gloom and murk of the sun-cheated homeland.  (I think it's because Great Crested Orcs have been elected as mayor of London and in parliament that we're having such dismal weather.)  We're even deprived of a good crisp snowy winter these days: England soldiers on under one year-long mizzling grey blanket.  So, a near lethal skin-crisping solar assault on the skin follicles was just what the doctor might have ordered.

On a beach in Brittany the children encountered a delightful polpikin - which is the local word for a kind of spirited elfin or pixie creature - in the form a little girl called Marguerite - who danced into their lives, led  them a merry chase across the sands and insisted they go home with her.  Before that, with the waves looking a little threatening, Joe and Ella had to ride shotgun, making sure that the delightful Marguerite came to no harm.  I watched as she danced her way into the water and Joe gently led her out; only to see her go back in again and for Ella lead her gently out; only to see this repeated eight or nine times.  Joe ran up the beach, looking a bit sweaty.  'What do you do when a little kid won't do what you tell them?' he seriously asked me.  I felt like that ancient and white-bearded sage who sits cross-legged on a mountain peak, blinking at least twice before offering some impenetrable or gnomic answer.  'Ah,' I said to him, holding one finger aloft.  'A good question.'

Her parents, Bertrand and Edith, invited us back to their extraordinary house stuffed with art, carvings and musical instruments, and turned out to be charming and inspirational.  Marguerite, who is three, gamely announced that she would like to marry Joe, so we look forward to that.

Meanwhile I learned that my story "An Ordinary Soldier of The Queen" published in The Paris Review has won an O.Henry short story prize in the US.  That's all right then, because the story forms part of my forthcoming novel.  And here's the thing about my forthcoming novel.  It has two titles and two authors.  Here in the UK the novel is titled Memoirs of a Master Forger under the pseudonym William Heaney.   The US edition from Nighshade Press will be How To Make Friends With Demons by, in case this is boring you to the point of narcolepsy, Graham Joyce.  It's the same book.  Yes.  So why the pseudonym?

 'Ah!  A good question.'

Well amongst the themes of the novel are matters of faked papers, forged books, fraudulent poetic persona, plagiarised publication, demon-infested manuscripts... and so on.  Further, so much of what is written today as memoir (all the misery memoirs) turns out to be fraudulent or gross exaggerations, so it is also a comment on all the faked books and ghost-written crap in publishing today.  Fake memoir, which is really fiction, outsells fiction.  So it seemed a wizard prang to use a pseudonym, to add to the layers of forgery, as it were.  But then none of us wanted Memoirs of a Master Forger to be a truly fake memoir (the subject matter is too outrageous anyway) and I also wanted everyone to know it's by me.  But Jeremy at Nightshade in the US didn't go for it, and though I love him like a brother he's a tough guy to argue with.  So in The US it's a Graham Joyce book with the title How To Make Friends With Demons. 

I never claimed to be an uncomplicated person.

On a completely different note I've sold a footballing memoir to Mainstream.  It's about goalkeeping.  No it isn't fake: in the book I let lots of goals in.  Anyway it's called Simple Goalkeeping Made Spectacular and I hope it's a laugh.  The thing was inspired by the England Writers Football team, and if you want to know more about that you can look here: http://writersteam.co.uk  The book should be out later in 2009.

Finally, that Catherine Tate signature on Joe's plaster cast.  Shortly after the Hay festival in an episode of Dr Who the Catherine Tate character Donna was returned to her original life, and had her memory of her travels with Dr Who wiped from her mind.  We were all a bit sad about that in the Joyce household.  Anyway Joe went to bed that evening, and overnight the Catherine Tate signature mysteriously faded from his cast.

Ooh-yah!  As they say in Leicester.

Ella:      "It's really just a lot of very greedy people, isn't it?"

Me:      "What??  What is?"

Ella:       "This so-called party"

Me:      "What do you mean so-called?  It is a party!  What do you expect: jelly and ice-cream?"

Joe:      "No it's not.  It's just people drinking and pretending to go Ho Ho Ho."

Me:      "Look, I won't bring you again!"

Ella and Joe: "Thanks Daddy!"

I've done something to make Ella profoundly unimpressed with writers and the writing game.  'Not be a writer,' is how she answers anyone who asks her what she'd like to do on leaving school.  It doesn't seem to make any difference that everyone else under the sun seems to want to be a writer, especially the super-famous.  Madonna: writes children's stories.  Paul McCartney.  Ditto.  Ginger Spice.  Ditto.  Wayne Rooney's girlfriend - and this is true - has just signed a five book deal with Harper Collins, for five adult novels.  How can she write adult novels?  She's only, what, seventeen or something like that.  Not that she will be writing them in the sense of arranging words in the best possible order, of course, but what do you we tell aspiring writers?  That you need to be a footballer's girlfriend or a grotesquely rich pop star to be a writer?  Let's change the subject.  I feel a haemorrhage coming on.

Oh no, haemorrhages everywhere you look.  I was a bit shocked to see Boris de Pfeffel Johnson win the race to become mayor of London.  What with the fact that his old Etonian chum David Cameron is now ten points ahead in the opinion polls I wonder if it all flags the re-emergence of forelock-tugging deference voting and the restoration of the glorious toffs.   Boris has arrived in his position as mayor not because of his demonstrable political ability but the very opposite; and not for his accomplishments but for his gaffes.  His is indeed funny.  He's like the twentieth century never even happened.  He talks like he has a mouth full of pebbles, like the permantly-sozzled old ventriloquist dummy Lord Charles and he actually calls black people picaninnies.  Boris has got everythinng except the monacle.  He even helped his friend the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy try to get a journalist beaten up, and that didn't work against him in the polls!  He's such a toff he is on Youtube showing that he doesn't know the difference between rugby and football.  And the people have lapped it up and voted for him, because he's a "character".  Boris is something like the original member of the Raving Monster Loony Party.  Even a middle name of de Pfeffel didn't put people off.

Democracy is in big trouble.

Meanwhile the Labour party bye-election campaign in Crewe has been criticised because they've been portraying the Tory candidate as a Top Hat Toff.  He is indeed a Toff millionaire but for some reason they're not allowed to say that and it has been suggested that the campaign might work in his favour.  The trouble is that Labour Party can no longer claim to represent the aspirations of the Working Class.  There is no longer any such party.

Though of course we're not allowed to say that there is still a class war raging, either.  Even though the rump end of the old Working Class (I mean the strata who buy but can't afford 54 inch plasma TV screens) are either despised and ridiculed on those same plasma TV screens as Chavs or sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.  I watched on (my much smaller) TV the Duchess of York going into a housing estate in Hull "to help fat people".  I had to view it all from behind the sofa.  To be truthful, Fergie has had some terrible abuse, and the family and the Duchess bonded over a history of shared misery.  But the class system of the UK was presented here stark, shivering and naked.  The Hull family, living on the breadline, were overcome with gratitude that someone appeared to care about them.  They responded to the Duchess as if she were a fairy godmother who might turn a pumpkin into a royal coach and mice into liveried footmen.  This "ordinary" family were all on the edge.  They joked and laughed, but when asked to talk about their situation, every one of them dissolved into tears.

I think a lot of people are living on the edge.  And there is no longer any political aspiration left in the country.  Even the Tories have copied the Labour Party and given up on ideology.  Perhaps they know that ordinary families from Hull and elsewhere will either not vote at all or they will happily vote for a joke candidate.  Give it the buffoon.  With professional buffoons elected to office, and footballer's WAGs contracted as novelists, from where I'm sitting today it all feels like the last days of Rome.

In an appropriately titled anthology about super-heroes called Who Can Save Us Now? I have a new short story.  The anthology is edited by Owen King and John McNally, out in the US in July.   My effort is called The Oversoul.  Apart from my recent Seamus Todd story in The Paris Review, which was a stand-alone extract from my forthcoming novel Memoirs Of A Master Forger, this is the first short story I've turned out in years.

I hope I don't go the whole hog and retreat back into writing poetry.  I cringe to confess that I was a poet in my twenties, and one of my really bad poems earned me the George Fraser poetry award, which was judged by Monica Jones, mistress and muse to Phillip Larkin.   I have this fun fantasy of her and Larkin sipping sherry in their flat and having a great time slagging off my poem.  So it must have been a bang to the head that made me kick around an idea for a new poem recently.  Luckily for me some local friends of mine, Damien and Lydia, encouraged me to attend Word, the slam poetry event in Leicester.  Recent headline-guest poets at the venue have been astonishing and mind-numbing, acting on me like a timely, homeopathic antidote to the idea of continuing with poetry at all. 

Though I do subscribe to the idea that writers should be able to turn their hands to all forms and all genres.  I was trying to say something like this recently while on a panel at the excellent alt.fiction event in Derby.  Trouble is we'd been aggressively forced to drink red wine from mid-day onwards and by 6.30 - when this panel took place - the mood of some of the panel (well, this one anyway) - had become rather excitable.  "We are writers; we are writers; we are writers" I might have said, thumping the table.  "I didn't quite get your third point," said either Phillip Palmer or Mike Marshall Smith, who were my fellow panel-beaters.  I think I'll have to behave better at the Hay festival, which is a much more gentile environment.

I thought I lived in a gentile environment in my leafy suburb of Leicester until there was a drive-by shooting on our street the other night.  Shots were fired from a speeding car at another vehicle in some kind of Al Capone style raid.  Suzanne and Joe crossed the intersection where this took place twice, a couple of minutes either side of the event but without seeing anything.  Shudder

Anyway, never mind that the drugs gangs are taking over the streets; never mind that democracy is eating itself, I'm off to Hay-on-Wye literature festival to listen to Wayne Rooney's girlfriend talk about narrative structure.

Our new dog Cassie. I told you about her in the last update. She's a beauty: smart, great to have around and like a shooting star if she sees a rabbit across a ploughed field. But she's an arch sniffer. And I can't seem to get her to stop. Now all dogs tend to be somewhat embarrassing with that canine propensity to sniff the genital area. No visitor to the house goes unchecked. But Cassie goes a bit further, in that she's rather too interested in the rear end of any passing homo sapiens. That is to say, she likes to get in behind anyone who comes into the house and get her nose right up there.

I don't mean a gentle sniff, either. It's a real bunt up the backside that she goes in for. It reminds me of a wine tasting course I once went on, where the instructor kept exhorting everyone to lift up the glass and "go on, get your nose right in there before you take a sip". It was like his catch phrase. "get it right in there." And now my dog has decided she is a connoisseur of the human posterior as she seeks to get it right in there for everyone who comes to the house.

I'm collecting different noises/expletives that come out from various surprised individuals. "Hoi!" is the most common male protest across the social classes, closely followed by "Whop!" from mainly middle-class women and "Na-ha!" from small children. I took Cassie down to see Chairman Bill in Keresley - who is doing well thank you all - and my dad's response to Cassie's research around his own fundament was "Chup! Hat!" I offer no deconstruction of these varied and wistful expletives, though I think there is a study to be done.

Anyway one day one of those blokes in an official blue coat came round to read the electricity meter, which in our old house is located in a tiny and somewhat inaccessible cupboard under the stairs. To get a look at the dials (and they seem to spin alarmingly fast and with luxurious consumption in the Joyce household) you have to get down on your hands and knees. Cassie was out in the garden when the man from the power supplier arrived so he didn't even know I had a dog. He was hunkered down on his knees, arse in the air, shining his torch into the spidery cupboard when Cassie trotted in and decided to investigate the proffered prize. 'Ha! Fresh new arse! Haven't sniffed this one before!" And before I could stop her she'd given him a vigorous bunt up the bum.

'Chup!' went the meter-reader, just like my dad! Same dialect and everything! I didn't know if he also said 'Hat!' because whatever he did say was muffled by the huge thump as he leapt up and hit his head on the underside of the stairs. He swore, and the dog immediately ran out of the house. The meter man backed out of the cupboard, one hand on his head and one hand on his arse. He gave me an old fashioned look like I was the one who did this thing.

'Sorry,' I said. 'but it was the dog.'

He looked around the hall. No dog. Not even any sign of any dog. No bones. No dog basket. Nothing.

'Honestly, it was the dog.'

I still don't think he believed me.

Never mind dog stories, publishing news, this is what we want. I know how many of you there are out there slavering to know when my next book is coming out. I know how it gnaws at your heart. Well we have some dates and we have some titles. Quiet a few actually. You might need a notebook and pen.

The title for my next novel will be different depending on whether you buy it in the UK or the US. If you buy it from the net, well, you'll be rewarded with the fabulous choice of whichever title you prefer, won't you? In the UK the preferred title isMemoirs Of A Master Forger, which I rather like. In the US the title will be How To Make Friends With Demons, which I also rather like. There. I'm sure you've made up your mind already, which shows you that you are a more decisive person than I am. The UK version will be published in October, and the US version, panting at its heels, sniffing its butt, as it were, will be in November. Perfect for Christmas presents I say. I'm thinking about an alternative title for Australia since I have so many new friends in Oz. Perhaps Never Blow Down The Dunny NowThey Use That Environment-friendly Sawdust. Maybe not.Better suggestions on a post-card please.

You want to know what it's about. Okay, so you're only reading this because you know something about my writing; so you already know that it won't be much like the last one, or like the one before that. I promise you, if I could be more consistent, more predictable, more branded an author, I would be. I don't do it out of cussedness. The books just keep on coming out of the bread oven different. From a marketing point of view it's a disaster I suppose. Luckily for me I have editors who believe in what I do enough to find a space on their publishing schedules, and as a writer you can't ask for more than that.

You probably guessed from the above waffle that I have no intention of telling you what it's about. Though if anyone readsThe Paris Review, there is in the latest edition (Number 83 Winter edition) a chapter from the novel that reads as a stand-alone story. But even though you should abandon the cow to calf and the baby to cry to rush out and purchase The Paris Review, it will mislead you somewhat, because it doesn't exactly reflect the novel itself.

Then there is my next YA novel, with the charming and witty, I think, title of Three Ways To Snog An Alien, which will be out in June. Titles titles titles. There is so often a transatlantic dissonance in the choice of titles that I often pause to think about the significance of the fact, but without ever reaching any intelligent conclusion. Anyway, what was in the UK Do The Creepy Thing will be out in the US, also in June, as The Exchange.

Film developments update. The Tooth Fairy option has lapsed, so nothing happening there. A shame cos we have a really good script. So the option is for sale all over again. Incidentally, yet another movies called The Tooth fairy is scheduled for production this year, starring wrestler The Rock. This dismays me somewhat if only because I'll have to spend the next three years saying, 'No, it's nothing to do with my book,' just as had to for the awful Darkness Falls and the equally crap British TF comedy. Duh. As for the French production of Dreamside I'm somewhat more hopeful, since the option was renewed and the producer/director's (Eric Barbier) most recent movie The Snake/Le Serpent has been well received. Beyond that I know nothing.

Last month I was summoned back to my old alma mater when Derby University decided to award me an Honorary Master Of Letters in recognition of my work, for which I was very touched. Chorus please of There's posh! It was a great day and the graduation ceremony for all the degree students was a very joyful one. I got to meet Roy Wood, who was being similarly honoured for his achievements in music. Roy Wood is one of the truly great British pop songwriters and is the inspiration behind 60s band The Move who gave us great songs like Blackberry Way and I Can Hear The Grass Grow, not to mentionNight Of Fear. He then went on to form ELO and Wizard and many other musical formulations in a long and accomplished career. Suzanne and I got to have dinner with several representatives from Derby University, Roy and his daughter Hollie and other Honorands (as we were titled). And what a fabulous bunch of people they all turned out to be.

But it was odd for me, and stirring, to go back to the place where I went to college (it was called Bishop Lonsdale College before it became Derby University) but in this other capacity. I got to say a few words to the graduating students and all their proud mums and dads, and it all brought back many warm memories. There is a gang of my old student buddies whom I still see on a regular basis, but the visit was made more strangely contoured by the fact that I've just used my old college setting for part of the book mentioned above, Memoirs Of A Master Forger/How To Make Friends With Demons.

Different times. There were no university tuition fees. There were more grants around. Students didn't take out bank loans to enable them to study, and very few students started their post-college careers deep in debt. I don't know that I valued my education any less just because I didn't have to pay for it. But, unforgivably, I never thanked any of my tutors formally when I left, and I should have done. Going back to speak at the degree ceremony gave me a chance to put that right, even though my thank-you was thirty years late in arriving. I was also able to say that - three decades on - I can still repeat almost word for word small chunks of some thrilling lectures.

Education education education. Tony Blair's empty slogan. Well, he didn't mean it, but plenty of people in Derby do.

Finally I want to recommend a lunatic blog I'm quite enjoying. He keeps ranting about his creative writing teacher, whom I identify with somewhat. It's quite good for learning about wine, too: http://butforthegrape.livejournal.com/