FUEL

If you're producing words, you need to nourish yourself on words. You need a good-quality diet with plenty of variety, just enough roughage, and no pre-processed pap. Don't read rubbish; if it hasn't got you by the end of page 1 - if it hasn't even got a feeler into you, to get you turning to page 2 - put it down. Be ruthless. There are too many good books out there to waste time on the bad ones. Rubbish in, rubbish out.

And you need a lot of words to fuel you. When finishing The Fires of Grace I was on the equivalent of 5,000 calories a day. Three novels a week - more, many more, if you count the ones I started, and that failed to get a feeler into me. This gets expensive. The solution? The charity shop.

Where I live in London, there are 5 charity shops within a bookmark of me (my 'burgh specialises in florists, undertakers, and charity shops. Connection? Discuss). It's like having 5 circulating libraries just up the road. I take them the rubbish; I come back with diamonds. The latest of which is Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, the best of which, so far, has been D.J. Taylor's Kept.

Who is D.J. Taylor? I have no idea. His jacket photograph makes him look younger than me, which is annoying; the puffs from other writers on the jacket are a bit cut-and-paste, or a bit show-offily opaque. But I liked the jacket which his publishers, Chatto, had gone to the trouble of creating for him, he passed the page 1 test, he came home with me. And he's enthralling. Elegant, stylish, economical, unexpected in every and in every good way. He cost me £1.50. No expensive advertisting camopaign shoved him my way, he is just a glorious example of book-serendipity. He simply found his way into my hand.

Now, of that £1.50, I am well aware that D.J. Taylor, who apparently has three children to raise, will not see a cent. I have done other good things by buying his book - saved paper, raised money for those who need it far more than either he or me - but Deej, in real terms, gets nothing out of this than my grateful thanks, and the tiny recommendation I can offer here. Except that -

I began by calling this posting  'Fuel'. There is, out there, and at the same time in all our heads, a great virtual universe, a parallel reality, a mighty and invisible engine both made and fuelled by writers' words, and readers' reactions to them. It is perhaps the only true perpetual-motion machine ever created. It's going on out there right now. You're fuelling it as you read this.

Pass the word on.