Underwriter.

In fact I wrote this yesterday, being Wednesday, and forgot to post it…

I am taking five minutes in the middle of the day to tell you that I will not be writing anything later.

We have got lectures until practically the middle of the night. I do not know how anybody else is managing to leap out of bed, fresh-faced and youthful, to make intellectual remarks about literary ethics at nine o’clock in the morning. I was still yawning and shivering this morning, even though I was in bed by half past ten.

Hence I will be going straight to bed at the end of this evening’s academic ponderings, and so I thought I would drop you a quick line now, even though it is only lunchtime and I haven’t got anything much to tell you about yet.

It might only be lunchtime but we have already had a lecture about how not to get sued whilst writing uncharitable things about your friends and family in your autobiography, and I have had a tutorial.

I am fairly sanguine about the former, since I have no plans to write an autobiography, and if I did I don’t have anything to say which might get me sued. I can’t imagine anybody being remotely interested in my activities. As readers of these pages will know, my life so far has been unequivocally dull and uneventful. Nobody is going to want to read a story in which the jeopardy consists of: And then the taxi broke down.

Judi Dench could play me in the film, perhaps.

The most interesting piece of advice which came out of the lecture was: Plan your parenting from the starting point that your children might grow up to be writers.

Fortunately, none of mine have, so far.

After that I had twenty minutes before my tutorial, and it is gloriously sunny here, so I went to sit in the walled Tudor Physic Garden to do some editing of my story whilst I was waiting, except the weather was so wonderful and perfect, and the scents of the blossom were wafting everywhere, and the grass had been cut and was warm under my bare feet, so I forgot about writing anything and just loafed on the bench, breathing honey-smells and sighing with happiness. I can write things next week.

The tutorial was brilliant. My tutor writes children’s stories and was full of very sensible advice about what I ought to be doing now that I have finished my dragon epic. Put it down for a month and then edit it when you come back to it, he said.

I don’t know that I could bear to do that but he is right.

He jolly well ought to be right. He has just sold the film rights to one of his. He is an Ace Writer.

Did I tell you that I had finished it? Well, I have. It is eighty two thousand words, and I am frantically trying to cross some of them out, since it is two thousand words too long. In my head this process is called Un-derwriting.

He also said that he would help with my Letters To Agents. We get given an agent as a mentor in the second year but I can’t wait that long, so I am going to have to start synopsisising now, and trying to make myself look sensible and clever.

I am very excited, I can tell you. All I have to do now is to have written a story that isn’t rubbish, and I will be JK Rowling in no time at all.

I am going to go away and eat lunch and some more cake.

After that I am going to underwrite a bit more before the next class.

Did I mention that I was having the most amazing time here in Cambridge? It is utterly fabulous, and I am.