I noodle around with writing. Bits pop up on here, other bits elsewhere. Nothing sustained, it's really on an if and when basis; still I like to lay a course of words down everyday. A day simply does n't feel like a day until I've put one word in front of another and hoped that from a distance this train of words looks like it's linked up, heading in one direction, strong enough to be able to hold together for the duration of the journey, and importantly, makes sense. And I'm more excited than a brace of paparazzi photo-hounds chasing celebs leaving sleazy nightclubs when I know someone has visited this site.

Nevertheless this is all low-level writing, noodling, for pleasure really; sure, there's an inner compulsion, a stimulus at work that I can't properly describe, and without this fuse firing, I would n't even be getting this far.

Any mortification I face is only ever going to be online - the tin ear phrase, a burst of ricocheting punctuation, confused sentences, teetering words; that's as far it goes. It will never be the public death by a thousand walkbys that I was sadly privy to earlier this afternoon in a local Waterstones. An author, surrounded by copies of their latest book, ignored by the crowds, who worked around her table the way ants walk around an obstacle in the sand, absolutely indifferent to the poor author's hollow-eyed, desperate look, the: "I've killed myself to write this, gone through the torture of, will it, won't it sell, and now this...and in public...why ? "

They could have been living in a shadow world, another dimension for all it mattered to the customers swarming through the store. An invisible author; there, but not there, corporeal, yet incorporeal at the same time. Uncanny and uncomfortable.

I bowed my head here, and coward that I am, the fairweather noodler of words, I slipped away myself, down the stairs and then to merge in the crowd, but not before I saw a miserable author leave their chair and begin to roam the store button-holing customers: "Do you like historical fiction ? This is my latest book, it's about....". No one tugged on that float, apart from one person, who innocently asked if the author wrote sci-fi because that's what they really liked.

I scarcely get any body reading what I write, but there can be compensations in that, I'll never face an ordeal like this. But, a few more readers would be nice...there's no door control policy here. Love all, serve all, that's my motto. Now just waiting for you to turn up..