A Literary Life

First up: I’m back from my boozy weekend in Cardiff. I had a great time, in which I learned a great deal and stole an awful lot of stories that will one day worm their way into my fiction. I saw a woman I was crazy about for a long time, and about whom I’ve already placed in a novel, and seeing her bought that stagnant novel back to the forefront of my mind, and gave me the ending I so desperately lacked. So thanks for that. On the train back, and during the rest of Sunday evening, I finished Patrick Rothfuss’s epic new novel, The Wise Man’s Fear, which I review spoiler-free below. I took a brief visit to Blackwell’s in Oxford where I picked up the Elizabeth Taylor novel my friend enthused about, and new book of essays from Orhan Pamuk. Nothing like a Nobel Laureate to get the brain stimulated. Oh, and I finished the teenage science-fiction pilot I’ve been working on, and that was posted off to the BBC’s Writersroom this afternoon. Now I face an agonising fe...

So I missed a few days. Let me fill you in. Thursday I spent the whole day going line by line through my BBC spec script, excising spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, and generally making sure each line sounded true. Thursday night was quiz night in a local pub, so I wandered over, had four pints, came second – done in my photographs of soap stars and a lack of knowledge of the English Premiership (I follow neither) – and woke Friday morning with an awful hangover. Four pints! Lightweight I hear you call. Yeah, probably am now. I drink once a week if I am, and sometimes not at all. I can go months. So when I do, it hits me. Hard. Like a pile of bricks to the forehead. So all day Friday I spent trying to sleep on the sofa, episodes of Being Human playing on the television. I also watched The Green Hornet film: really wish I hadn’t. That brings us to this morning. Up later than planned, I am today planning for another night of drinking a hundred...