The Diary of a Debut | 8th, 11th and 13th January

Christmas grumps...

Hopes and Doubts — The Diary of a Debut

My first book, Before I Go to Sleep, first came out in April 2011. I’d completely forgotten that in the January of that year I started keeping a journal to chronicle things as they happened.

My entries were sporadic, and some intensely personal. But here we go.

NB. I’m much less of a grump about Christmas now. But this post shows what I was like 13 years ago…

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8th January 2011

Mentioned in the Guardian’s review section today. One of the books to watch in 2011, which is great. Plus I also received two more Amazon Vine reviews - one four star and one five, and both very reasonable, I thought. The four star one did take issue with the ‘literary’ nature of the journal section, but the other answered that (’S J Watson has made Christine a writer, explaining....’) so I didn’t have to,

All in all I’m pretty happy, although so far I seem to be getting much more publicity in Australia. I wonder if that’s because of the respect Michael¹ commands as a publisher?

11th January 2011

Spent the morning trying to do some work. Got a few words of Nine Lives² written, but I am finding it tough at the moment. I’ve been writing the same scene now for what feels like forever, and still I don’t know if it’s any good. That’s the really hard thing about writing, I think. Not knowing if it’s any good, but knowing that I have to do it anyway. I have to constantly remind myself that this is exactly what I went through with Before I Go to Sleep, and that the first draft of that book was pretty mediocre. Well, perhaps not mediocre, but it needed a lot of work. A lot.

I’m not being very nice at the moment. I’m finding fault all the time. I think it’s symptomatic of my anxiety about the book, about my ‘new’ life (which is the one I’ve always wanted, yes, but it’s also one I’m struggling to adjust to, to find a rhythm within), and about the civil partnership, which although I’m looking forward to, and know it’s what I want, I’m also extremely anxious about actually having to arrange.

13th January 2011

After a wasted day yesterday (I decided to give myself a day off, to ‘phone in sick’ as I would have had to if I’d had a ‘real’ job), during which I really only read, slept, ate a burger then watched TV (it’s a curse that I can’t write when hungover - I’d be on my eighth novel by now otherwise) today I was determined to actually achieve something. I spend some of the morning writing and catching up on admin tasks (the number of which is increasing exponentially) and continued in the afternoon while waiting for a delivery which never came.

In the evening we got a taxi to the South Bank and, after a snack in the bar, went to see Ayckbourn’s ‘Seasons Greetings’. N had booked the tickets and I’d forgotten it featured Catherine Tate and Marc Wootton, so when he reminded me I suddenly became excited. They gave great performances and it’s a wonderful, very funny, play. Very true, too. It deals with a family at Christmas, with additional extended members and hangers on, the children mysteriously off stage, the adults behaving more childishly than they ever could. One particular scene resonated for me - the wife (Tate) finds the cutlery that she’d asked her husband to put away left, half wiped, on the dining table. N nudged me - he knows, though can’t always admit, that he has an almost pathological fear of finishing any given task. Even when washing up he always leaves one teaspoon or one glass. It’s almost a point of principle for him.

So the play resonated with these truths and it really made me think about Christmas. Once again, my overwhelming thought is - yes, it can be fun, but is it worth the hassle? is anything? Yet everyone seems determined to go through it again every year. I mean, I love spending time with my family, my extended family, and so on, but the day itself is such a pressure cooker. After the months of energetic preparation that have preceded it, how can it not be? I flipped this year when, after a whole day in which I’d peeled and scraped and cooked and then tidied up,I finally get to sit down to watch TV and relax. And what happens? They put fucking Coronation Street on! Now, of course, I should have either said, ‘No!’ or else got a book and let them watch it. Instead I basically sulked about it.

1. Michael Heyward, my then Australian editor/publisher.

2. The book was eventually retitled Second Life.