When did I become this dumb? Stupid. Unable to communicate. Where did the brain go and why didn’t it leave a forwarding address? I tried to MapQuest it, but my fat fingers typed in NapWurst. I think that’s a mattress factory in Zurich.

Anyway, I’m on manuscript edit number four and all 81...

A few years ago I was taking pictures along a rocky stretch of the coastal path in Cornwall. A coastguard was yomping the same stretch and stopped to give me a warning. "So far this year we've had to rescue six photographers who fell off the cliff taking pictures," he said. "So you be careful...

I watched What Happened in Vegas over the weekend. I figured with the ever-charming leads of Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher, it was hard to go wrong. The story was light and cute – perfect for wasting time instead of working on my outline.

However, the basic plot bothered me...

Just an excuse to go back to Venice? Well, I had to check the details ...

I didn’t set out to write a book set in Venice. I set out to write a book as different as possible from the one I’d just finished: and as that was boy-orientated comic fantasy for 9-12 year-olds, there was only one...

Background: a sudden fibromyalgia flare-up hit me in the middle of last week and put me out of action for five or six days.

I want to talk about some people operating in the legal system who move around enough or who have enough information that they might be useful to your stories. I’m going to tell you about them every once in a while. My book The Writer’s Guide to...

When can a poem land you in jail? How can you tell the government what it can do about copyright infringement? What's the latest inside scoop on publishing contracts? How did an author win big bucks in a royalty dispute? These and other stories are up in...