Arthur C Clarke Award

And so the life of a writer becomes increasingly isolated and nothingy. You write every day, you avoid book shops, and you don't ever Google yourself (I made that mistake once, and I didn't sleep for a week). After a while, you start to wonder if the 'writer' part of your life is really just a hallucination. And then an email comes from my editor, Dan Franklin, at Jonathan Cape. It says: 'Congratulations, I hope you win it.' I scroll down to work out what he's talking about, and discover that Martin Martin's On The Other Side has been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. I am still stunned.

Meanwhile, the fast novel stalled at 50K, after sending it to my agent. I think I'm waiting for approval from him before continuing, but I also realised that I had been working too hard and was very tired and stressed, so I decided to take a break for a few weeks, especially since I am working in a school in North Walsham at the moment, which involves being up very early and spending the day with excitable 8-12 year olds. Interestingly, one of the other people working there with me (on a Creative Partnerships project) is John Osbourne, whose book Radiohead (which is about radio, and not Thom Yorke's neo-prog outfit), has just been selected as Radio 4's Book of the Week. Aren't we the high-profile writer guys?

Day job work grinds to a halt throughout April, which is just as well, because I need to shoot the rest of the images for the exhibition and finish the fast novel.