I got my first ever payment for writing - a cheque from riptide - and am wondering what to do with it.

If I am God (creator of universes = writer) then I should probably be amused at the thought of mortals paying me and show it off to my other God mates.

If I am to be a canonical author then I should probably save it for the "Museum of Gordon" along with my nail clippings and the best of my ear wax collection.

If I am to be a minor author/amateur scribbler then I should probably cash it.

Overall I'm going to interpolate status as somewhere between God and bum and cash it.

What the Dickens?

"Little Dorrit" is transliterated into little "Dorito" in Japanese. After buying this from BBC, Japanese television now plan to dramatise, "A Tale of 2 Pringles", "Nicholas Nik-Nakelby" and "Martin Chuzzlewotsit."

For some years now television programs have been made by the automated editing of CCTV footage and the pasting in of celebrities.

Now books too are made optimally cheap by following the work flow:

chinese sweatshop -> google translate -> celebrity endorsement -> supermarket shelves

However, as the world's economy is turned upside down, I predict we'll soon be writing our own books for suddenly unemployed celebrities to translate and flog in Chinese street markets.

Riptide

The wonderful "Riptide" are publishing my story "Evelyn Bess", all about despair, love, loss and carpet forensics. The ending is ambiguous unless you spot a clue hidden in the text.

You will be able to get it at http://www.riptidejournal.co.uk/

I'm reading it at the launch party on 5th December at Exeter University.

Laziness Justification

I'm working on the equation

Hard Work * Talent = Published

Or rearranging this we have

Published/Hard Work = Talent

Published is currently a low constant and so, to maximise my talent I have decided to minimise my hard work.

Quiz or Exile

The government has set a test to decide whether my wife can live with me.

Have you gone mad, Gordon? No. It's called "Life in the UK Test" and is compulsory for foreign wives wanting a settlement visa. I think the idea is that anyone settling in this country should be capable game show contestants. Britain is currently on top of the world league in pub quizzes about Britain and TV games shows. The phone-in competitions on TV are almost always answered correctly and there are fears that, of not for the "Life in the UK Test" immigrants will be ringing in wrong answers and not winning tickets to "The Lion King".

What is actually true is that the whole quiz thing is going to be expanded across all of society. By linking the "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" format to the benefits data-base, the GCSE, the university degree system, and the "Life in the UK Test" the government hopes to create a meritocracy that rewards people on the basis of their knowledge. Thus to get your income support you might have to answer simple questions such as "When was the coronation?" but to get paid really well you would be asked, "What are the 5 main alternatives to coronary bypass?" or just really useful questions like, "Where did I put my keys?"

Stop writing now

There is so much writing out there. A recent important survey showed that a certain percentage of people were writing a lot. It was a true. The idea is that society will reward you with money for what you write. Money buys things like food, kitchen implements and non essential operations.

How about if we were rewarded for how little we wrote? Writing grants seem to suffer from a fundamental problem. You can fund a writer to write his weird book about llamas wearing hats but it doesn't mean anyone will read it. It's not like funding art that people will see. What use are books unread? The solution is not to encourage writers but to discourage bad writers. The next time some dullard celebrity inflicts his memoirs the funding bodies should pay off the publishers and have them burn the manuscripts or make sure that each one has at least 10 pages of proper writing.

Ugly Veg Comeback

I was outraged and disgusted on the new European rules allowing misshapen vegetables. Do they mean to tell me that my new banana guard was a waste of money?

Yes we Kan-garoo

A black president of the US? It's not as amazing as a female president of Pakistan or a Japanese president of Peru. Wake me up when a panda is in charge of China. Then they'll all be saying, "He's not a real panda, you know, he's half badger."

Reading

Part of the job of being a writer is to read which makes reading much less pleasurable since it's a job. There is a ready replacemement though: poetry. I can now put poetry in the interests section of my cv. Of course I don't read poetry just as I didn't read fiction before I had "writer" in the employment section of my cv. That's what hobbies are: things you want to do but don't unlike work which is what you don't want to do but do.

Oh God!

The real real problem with getting published is this: When you write you are God - you create the world and the characters and then you control what they do. You can cause Armageddon or make the cow jump over the moon or anything. Then you finish being God and you send off your universe to those who decide which God they want and which universe will sell at that moment and they say, "Oh no, I don't like this universe, I don't think we should have llamas in it, I don't think that toes should be able to talk, I don't like the way that you spend so long talking about sandwiches. Oh no, I do not choose this God and his universe," and then you have to deal with a whole universe being rejected. When everyone is God then it doesn't feel so special.

Of course there's really only one God and his name is Mammon.

Extreme Agent Bothering

"Think Outside the Box" say those people who have their heads in boxes just reading out lists of cliches that they've written on the inside in an attempt to appear wise - management consultants.

Inspired by those who place their unpublished books on the shelves in Waterstones to look like they are proper authors I have come up with:

1) Befriend a literary agent's dying relative.
2) Have an offspring and raise her as a publisher.
3) Offer to be Salman Rushdie's double and gradually take over from him.
4) Write a novel concerning anything to do with a celebrity - "Fern Britton's Pyloric Sphincter"?

Fern Britton's Pyloric Sphincter

I see that Fern Britton's Pyloric Sphincter has a new auto-biography out. In "Keep it Flowing" Ms. Pyloric Sphincter tells of her early years as a conduit to Britton's gastric content. Fans of the nation's most pleasant person's tummy valve will be interested in the late night cake binges and the night's out with Phillip Schofield's ragged colon. Of course this all changed 2 years ago and Fern Britton's Pyloric Sphincter doesn't have much good to say about Fern Britton's Gastric Band. "You try your best and work really hard to get to the top and then along comes this untalented upstart and suddenly she's Britain's most famous stomach-based celebrity."

Cement

Got a new rejection that told me not to be disheartened since they receive 500 submissions a week and take on 2 new writers a year. "You may as well send it to a cement factory," a writer friend of mine has suggested and so...

"Dear Rugby Cement

I have recently finished my first novel and, given the outstanding reputation of your cement factory,..."

Dear Gordon X

Also, Gordon X, the literary agent who will save me and "Extreme Normality" from obscurity and crystalise the literary revolution that will bring down the age of celebrity. Also, you will know that in writing they say that, "3 examples make a case".

Eg.

He led a frugal life. He ate berries and lived in a hut.

compared to

He led a frugal life. He ate berries, lived in a hut and wore rags.

Ipso facto we need a 3rd Gordon to dominate the world.

It shall be me.

GORDONS

With a Gordon in the country's top job and another as our top swearing cook it is certainly no exaggeration at all to say that this is the Age of the Gordon. Long gone are the days when we had to look to bald newsreaders (Honeycombe) imperialists (of Khartoum) Ming fighters (Flash) morons (Gordon is a) or racing drivers turned expletive (Bennet) Now we can get behind Brown and Ramsay and conquer the rest of the spheres of human achievements just like the Andrews have been doing for years.

I'm taking on literature where so far we've been quite bad, managing only a middle name (George Gordon Byron) and who cares about a middle name?