Today I’m publishing a new story, In A Hot Place, on this website. You can download it here. The story is also published in a new book aimed at teenagers and in today’s Morning Star. ‘In A Hot Place’ is just 1500 words long and its inspiration is obvious. That said, the piece is not specifically about a particular secret prison, or one country’s involvement in illegal rendition. The narrator’s gender is open. It is pertinent to many stories in the news this week. I hope that, very soon, it will feel like a period piece. I wrote In ‘A Hot Place’ in December of last year. I owed the editor, who was in a hurry, and I didn’t have an idea. I opened the…

I’m reading with two debut novelists at Nottingham Waterstones on March 26th. I enjoyed Chris Killen’s The Bird Room over Christmas (see below). It’s a wry, witty novel about sex and ennui which has deservedly been attracting a lot of attention. Chris was one of my dissertation students when I first began teaching Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent in 2002. That makes me feel a little old. Mind you, I’ll also be talking about a debut novel – my first for adults, The Pretender, a literary thriller – that I began writing when I was Chris’s age. Reading from and talking about her first novel will be Brigid Rose, whose The City Of Lists is published on March 5th. I’ve just finished reading this absorbing…

A short while ago I heard that John Martyn had died, first via Twitter, which must be a sign of the times, then in mobile call from my brother, Paul. I doubt John knew what Twitter was, or had much time for the web. My first thought was, ‘how sad’, the second: I’m amazed he lasted so long, given his ill health and the vast quantities of drugs and booze he consumed. The first time I met him, in 1976, he blasely snorted a line of smack in front of me and the other people in the dressing room. The last time, just before he started doing those ‘heritage album’ tours, he was in a bad way and a lot of the fire seemed to…

Jon McGregor and I launched this year’s monthly readings at the Flying Goose Cafe last night. It was a lovely evening, where we both did old stuff in the first half (tho’ Jon hadn’t performed his postcards from a 2005 voyage to Antarctica before) and new material in the second half. I read a story about Guantanamo Bay, which I hope (especially after today’s news) will be out of date by the time it’s published. Jon read an extract from his next novel, ‘Even The Dogs’, which goes to Bloomsbury next week and is due to be published in February 2010. The only hiccup during the evening was during my last reading, when a mutual friend keeled over in a faint, luckily hitting the floor…

Happy new year. First, the news: I’m delighted to see that Martin’s back, with a a poetic new blog. And I can’t understand why they had to name the new Doctor Who quite so early, when he doesn’t appear until October 2010. Also here‘s something fascinating that I missed while we were away. We were in Cuba over Christmas. Havana is one of my favourite three cities and I found a copy of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez‘s ‘DIrty Havana Trilogy’ in the airport, where we had an eight hour delay (thanks for the warning to Virgin, who’d known about it for days and still let us get up at 5.45AM to hang about the airport all day). I read all three novels over the next three…