The Prolific Terence Pepper

Had lunch with Terence Pepper, the Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. I gave him a copy of my novels Crushed and Frantic. In return, he gave me his delectable, glossy books: Angus McBean Portraits and Horst Portraits. That's the best barter I've ever done! We spent most of the lunch trying to think of witty inscriptions for our books. In the end, his inscription was much more original than mine! Terence is currently curating the Vanity Fair exhibition for May 2008. It has already had loads of publicity - not surprising as 'some of the greatest portrait photographs of the 20th century' were published in Vanity Fair - a lot of them are going to be on show at the exhibition, thanks to Terence's curating skills. He's also bringing out a fully illustrated book (with curator David Friend) on the show which I drool to own. The snag is, I shan't be able to do another barter. No way am I going to finish my new book by May next year - unless a miracle happens.

My first interview

My first fan letter was from Danette Bocage, a 27 year old 'girl' in Hawaii. I was surprised that adults love Crushed besides 11-12 year olds at which the novel is aimed at. Danette Bocage has just interviewed me for her blog - it looks great - and she has asked me to stay in today, as we shall be chatting (on her blog). She lives in Hawaii and I live in London. She's ten hours behind, so I presume, due to the time difference we shall be chatting during the evening - my end.

The Impersonator

It's not every day one gets to have lunch with a novelist who has written one of your favourite novels. But, today I did. Diana Hammond lives in Paris, but came to London for a few hours, specifically to check out Waterstones in Piccadilly. She craved to browse/investigate new titles written in English.

I loved her novel, "The Impersonator" so much, I put it at the top of one of my Amazon Listomania lists. Diana is not just a novelist though. She's also a screenwriter and used to live in Hollywood, making a fortune from prolifically writing screenplays, irrespective if some of them didn't get made.

Over lunch, I confessed in the past I had showed my work-in-progress novels to people with horrific results. One well-meaning editor had even suggested a plot line for my new book which blocked me for months. Diana was horrified. She never shows her work to anyone until after she has finished it. We both agreed we belong to the breed of writer who doesn't like writing an Outline for their book before commencing writing. I find that when I do write a detailed synopsis of my unwritten book before I start, I feel I'm restricted by a straightjacket .... and tend to write to formula.