Hello!

After quite a few delays, a name change, many internal dramas and crises, your copy of Music To Eat Cake By should be plopping through the letterbox any time now. I do hope you enjoy it and feel your *ahem* investment has been worthwhile. It is, as I say in the introduction, an experiment, one I've thoroughly enjoyed conducting, and one that simply couldn't have existed without you. A thousand…

Funny old world, publishing.

Here we are, just over two years since the launch of Music To Eat Cake By (which was at that time known as The Long and the Short of It), and still nearly five months away from its publication (12 November, in case you missed it), and I’ve only gone and written another book in the interim, and it’s only going to be published next week.

What’s that all about?

Well…

The trouble with thinking of a title for a book that doesn’t exist yet is… well, it doesn’t exist yet. And when I had the idea for this book, I had no idea what it would be about, just that it would be about forty different things.

What I did know was that the longest essay would be long and the shortest would be short, and that there would be a load of others in between. So when my son Oliver…

'Where do you get your ideas from?'

It's the writer's least favourite and most often asked question (although 'Will I have read any of your books?' runs it a close second). For The Long and the Short of It, though, the answer is easy: from The People. Forty pieces of writing, subject and length imposed by the book's funders, who have, after all, paid for the privilege.

When I put the book idea…

This book is going to turn out quite interesting, I reckon.

When I submitted myself to the wilful sadism of my devoted readership, I genuinely had no idea what subjects they would suggest for me to write about. Now all the 40 slots for pieces in the book have been snapped up (from 100 words up to 4000, in 100-word increments), I mostly know. I say 'mostly' because a few of those kind souls have…