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IN WHICH THE AUTHOR INTERVIEWS HIMSELF
After the publication of 'Grace Notes'.

Why is it 14 years since your last novel ?

Maybe because it is a book about things that get in the way of creativity.A novel is not a bowel movement - it's not a regular thing that happens. To me at any rate. It's more like a meteorite strike. A very now-and-again thing. I write fiction. More often than not it is short fiction. But sometimes one comes along that needs a lengthier format.
And why should punctuality in fiction writing be of any importance ? Maybe I could have written a bad novel two or three years after the last one - as a matter of fact I did but I'm glad I didn't publish it. Would publishing it have improved the situation ? But if I wait 14 years and write a novel that satisfies me, I think that's okay. As some movie director once said 'Who ever went to see a movie because it came in on time and under budget ?' I could see a whole new school of criticism developing out of this. Blogg's new novel is a masterpiece of timing. He has published it at exactly the right moment after his previous book. Unfortunately it's terrible.

When IS the right moment ? Some great writers - Raymond Carver and Alice Munro - never ventured into the novel form and that is seen as a praise worthy thing.

I now devote all of my life to being a part-time writer.

There is a terrible WASP thing about work - you must produce a book every two years. I left teaching to get AWAY from such routines. In teaching bells went off every forty minutes. In writing must they go off every two years ?

How can you write a book about a woman ?

It is a book about a creative person and the things that can get in the way of creating. In a creative woman's case there seem to be more obstacles.

It is interesting the way that GRACE NOTES evolved. I realized a contract had to be fulfilled. Sammy Kahn was asked what came first, the words or the melody. He said the phone call came first. I was commissioned to write a novel and I cast around and found 2 or 3 stories which I had abandoned - fragments and they were all about a woman. And then I realized she was the same woman. It was the music and religion that welded everything together.