Who Is This Guy?

Richard and Judy (The British Oprah) are running a competition for unpublished novelists. I've already sent them Devilkins (my latest).

But the rules say nothing about multiple submissions so I thought I'd also send them Saxon River (which I wrote a couple of years back.) But, oh dear- who is this guy who wrote this stuff? It's so arch, so clumsy, So naive!

Do I want to try and rewrite it, or do I just drop it back into the bottom drawer?

Two years ago this was the story I desperately wanted to tell and now I can't see why.

Political Logic

It's the party conference season. We've had the Lib Dems and Labour and now it's the Tories' turn. Michael Howard was just delivering his keynote speech. He wants to withdraw from the 1951 treaty on refugees and severely prune immigration. And then, as a sentimental coda, he told us how his grandmother died in Auschwitz and how he'd have died there too if Winston Churchill hadn't let his family in.

I don't get his thinking here; I really don't.