… is quite my favourite hobby, so this is one tattoo I’m very tempted by:

and from the same source, a salt and pepper set that makes me salivate with desire:

I’m not sure I’m overly keen on the title of the blog post – ‘Fancy Sarah Salway on your chest?’ – but there’s a chance to win a t-shirt for the new Cool EP over on the bluechrome blog. All you have to do is to buy one of the short story collections from Patrick, Sally or me. (You won’t actually get any of us on your chest, you understand, just a t-shirt, but that’s better for everyone, really.)

I’m going to be joining Oxford-based Your Messagers to read some short pieces as part of the Oxford Fringe Festival, on Wednesday 2nd April, 6.30pm at Borders, Magdalen Street. If you’re around, do come and say hello!

An email I’m happy to pass on from the charity, Refuge:

Thank you for kindly donating to Refuge during the past twelve months. As a valued supporter of our work, we would like to let you know that on Sunday 30 March 2008 Honor Blackman will be reading the BBC Radio 4 Appeal to raise funds and awareness for the Freephone 24 Hour National Domestic Violence Helpline (run in partnership between Women’s Aid and Refuge). This will be a chance to hear more about how your brilliant support is helping the thousands of women and children who are experiencing domestic violence.

The BBC Radio 4 Appeal is a three minute appeal on behalf of the BBC’s chosen charity for that week. It encourages listeners to donate over the phone, online, or by post.

The Appeal will be aired at 7.55am and 9.26pm on Sunday 30th March 2008, and then at 3.27pm on Thursday 3rd April 2008, on BBC Radio 4: 92.4 – 94.6 FM and 198 LW. You will also be able to listen again online at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/appeal for a week after the first appeal broadcast.

Please help us to raise as much money as possible by listening in and helping to spread the word! We want to tell as many as people as possible about the broadcast, so let your friends know and ask them to tell their friends as well! The more people who listen the more money will be raised – all of which will go directly towards providing a potentially lifesaving Helpline service for women affected by domestic violence.

Please spare five minutes of your day to listen to the Appeal and forward this email to as many friends and family as possible. Thank you.

With warmest wishes from all at Refuge and Women’s Aid

For further information on the appeal, please contact sarah_stockwell@refuge.org.uk
Refuge, International House, 1 St Katharine’s Way, London E1W 1UN
www.refuge.org.uk registered charity number 277424

One of our annual activities is the Great Wind-Up Animal championships. Every one gets to choose their own competitors. Some dogs have been known to try to get in on the act by pretending to be toys …

But when the confusions are sorted out, there’s a sense of tension you can almost taste when the animals line up on the starting blocks …

Of course, there are people who always spoil it by putting competitors in compromising positions …

And there are very complicated rules which, although I am the only person who understands them, does not mean at all that the stakes are against anyone else but me winning. Personally, I think it bad luck, and not cheating at all when someone gets a fish that sadly doesn’t move out of water..

Yep, these are the sort of intellectually challenging games I like …

I guess I’m a prime example of what Malcolm Gladwell is talking about in his book, The Tipping Point. I’ve had the book on my shelves for what seems like years but it was only when I read about it recently here that I opened it. We are all waiting for the right kind of information so that we can act. When that information comes at the same time to a lot of us, then that’s how something becomes a phenomenon. But it needs to be the right information, and it needs to come from the right source.

Phenomenons generally interest me, so in my latest novel I have a character who works in trend forecasting. Mind you, her job is a relatively small part of the plot – in fact, it hardly forms any part – so it comes back to that old question of just how much research you need to do in all the different aspects of your novel. I do know a little about trend forecasting but do I need to become an expert? My worry is that the more I get interested in the small details, and go off on tangents, the more messier the book will become as I try to fit EVERYTHING in.

But that’s a worry I’m trying to hold over until the editing process when I work out what can stay in and what needs to be lopped off. (And, look, this post has just gone off at a tangent.)

Gladwell’s book is interesting from another point of view. When I worked in PR, trend forecasting was part of my remit. I was working with high-fashion, quick-moving consumer products so I always needed to know what was coming next. Actually going out and just walking round the shops was part of the job, as jammy as that sounds now. Reading The Tipping Point reminds me of that time, and I started to think how I could apply it to my writing process. It’s certainly easy to spend too long isolated at the desk and not enough going out and seeing what’s happening in real life. But part of Malcolm Gladwell’s thesis is that it’s the small things that make the difference. So yes, it’s important that my big plot lines are working and my structure is in place, but at the end of the day, it’s just as likely to be the way my character unfolds and folds his handkerchief – as I watched a man do several times yesterday – that readers will remember and that give a reality to my bigger picture. Particularly when, for example, I’m trying to build up an obsessional character. So my walking round the shops yesterday has meant that the hanky folding entered the novel last night and fits perfectly – strange though how that man will never know his little habit has been captured in just this way!

One section of The Tipping Point sent shivers down my spine. It’s about an experiment which involved 59 couples who had been dating for three months, until, and I quote: ‘Half the couples were allowed to stay together, and half were split up, and given a new partner whom they didn’t know.’ (that was the first shiver – who would join in such an experiment – didn’t they mind having to split up!!) Anyway, all the couples – new and old – were then given 64 statements along the lines of ‘Midori is a Japanese melon liqueur’ each of which had one word underlined. (second shiver – I use to handle the PR for Midori but lets not go off on that tangent).

The couples were allowed to look at these statements for five minutes and then as a pair had to write down as many as they could. The pairs who knew each other remembered substantially more items than those who had the new partners. (oooh, BIG shiver.)

The conclusion is that when people know each other well, they create a joint memory system – based on who is best suited to remember what kind of things.

I’m tremendously excited about this. Just think of the story potential here if we’re writing about relationships.

Apparently it’s the loss of this kind of memory that makes divorce and presumably widowhood so painful. We lose the ‘storage’ we’ve had in our partner. Not just their physical presence, but half our memories have gone.

Given that I’m writing about old people, nearly all of whom have lost their partners, this is the kind of idea which sends me immediately back to the page. I do remember reading that in married couples it is the woman who holds many of the family stories for the next generation, I just hadn’t pictured it so effectively as some kind of filing cabinet before.

It’s exactly what Gladwell is talking about – we can do something completely different – like, for me, reading a business book – and start to make connections with our work. I find this the most exciting thing of all. Getting inspiration from just everywhere and seeing where the different routes will take me. Heck, it’s even quite cool.