When I tell people that my recently completed novel is called Juliet, Naked, they pretty much always make the same joke: Oh, you’re trying to sell some books!  My stepmother and my mother-in-law both provided variations on this theme  within twenty-four hours of each other last week. Gosh, how we laughed!

And though it’s true that all extra sales accruing as a result of promises made in the title will be welcome (and we cannot, I’m afraid, refund anyone who might be disappointed when they discover that Juliet, Naked is the title of a fictional album), I think the days when people are prepared to shell out for prose nakedness are long gone. Now that each of us possess the means to watch real women having sex with real men, or real women, or real animals, at the click of a mouse, I¹m not sure there’s any real money to be made by from a few paragraphs of fictional smut.

Incredibly, those days existed even within my lifetime. Who now would dream of reading the almost unreadable Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the hope of arousal? And yet when Penguin published the book in 1960, it sold two hundred thousand copies on the first day, two million in the first year. Many of us can remember our fathers buying copies of Lady C, as it became known, and then John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, written in 1749, but banned for over two hundred years; I can even remember seeing a copy of Couples by John Updike in the boot of my dad’s car, and I doubt he’s read an Updike novel since.  Another book marketing tool gone; another advantage nullified. We’re doomed.

A long time ago, I interviewed Jilly Cooper for the Sunday Times, and asked her about an image in her latest novel that troubled me: she had compared a pair of  female nipples in a state of obviously extraordinary arousal to a couple of biro caps. ‘Awful’, she agreed cheerfully. ‘Terribly unsexy. It was probably because I was writing in a great hurry and casting around for some image and there were masses of biro caps all over my desk with no biros in them …’ Perhaps we writers only have ourselves to blame.

…just given up ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading’, my monthly column in The Believer, after five years. The column worked best, I felt, when I’d read three or four books in a month, and pretty much any Dickens novel, apart from Hard Times, my least favourite, takes time. So I’m marking my retirement by re-reading Great Expectations, an experience all the more enjoyable for knowing that I won’t have to write two and a half thousand words about it.

  One of my favourite literary facts is that Dickens is estimated to have created thirteen thousand characters, an astounding number – the population of Ely! – that’s always taken as evidence of his extraordinary energy and indefatigable imagination. Every now and again, though, you start to wonder whether it’s not some form of incontinence.  For example, he introduces fourteen new characters between pages 209 and 214 of my Penguin edition of Great Expectations – fifteen if you count Mrs Pocket’s deceased father, who gets a couple of pages more or less to himself anyway. Do the Pockets have to have seven children? And two nurses? And two lodgers?  And a quirky next-door neighbour? There’s something almost animal about this level of production – this is Dickens as seahorse, popping out tiny creatures apparently uncontrollably, and with very little effort. It’s not his best passage of writing, understandably, those six pages. Maybe someone should have taken him discreetly aside and told him what precautions were available for great novelists.

…British film in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is “Love You More”, a short film directed by the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, and adapted by Patrick Marber from the very sexually explicit story he wrote for “Speaking With The Angel”. We at TreeHouse (the school received all profits from the book) are very proud.
 
  I received two complaints about “Speaking With The Angel”, and the writers of both letters were unhappiest about “Love You More” and Irvine Welsh’s story. One of these outraged people wanted his money back. “Am I really that out of touch?” he asked plaintively. I told him that he was, and refused to give him his money back on the not unreasonable grounds that he’d clearly already read the book.  He then wrote back again, saying that he would send TreeHouse their portion of the cover price if I would send him back the rest. At this point, I’m afraid, I decided that the correspondence was over.
 
  Anyway, I am now going to ask Penguin to produce a movie tie-in edition of Patrick’s nine-page story, with a suitably shocking cover. It’s all in a good cause.

My current projects….Actually, there are no current projects. I have just finished dealing with the copy editor’s last few queries relating to SLAM, a novel that is about and hopefully for teenagers; the nth draft of the screenplay I’ve been working on for the last couple of years, an adaptation of Lynn Barber’s autobiographical essay AN EDUCATION, is out in the world looking for a director. Martin Amis once said that you should never talk about a film you’re connected to until you can rent it from your local Blockbuster. I don’t mind talking about it, but you must understand that anything I say is likely to look like preposterous bullshit in a couple of months, maybe even in a couple of hours. A few weeks ago, AN EDUCATION had a director, but no cast and no money; now it has a pretty good cast, it’s just about financed, and our director has gone. This is what happens in independent cinema, and it makes you yearn for the comfortable and gentlepersonly reassurances of publishing. If I write a book that I’m happy with and my editor is happy with, then it will get published. If I write a screenplay that I’m happy with and the producers are happy with, there’s probably a ten per cent chance that the film will get made. So now I’m making up my mind what I want to do next. Penguin is planning a series of illustrated novellas, and I’m pretty sure I’d like to have a go at one of those – there’s something I’ve been thinking about that my work in this form. And I have an idea for an original screenplay. If I start on both now, then one might see the light of day next spring, and the other in four years’ time, if it even lives that long. Meanwhile, it’s hot, and there are books to be read, films to be seen, bets to be made….

Update: Penguin’s plans for an illustrated series have collapsed. And the film business is insane. And I’ve temporarily given up betting, because I know nothing about summer sports. There are still books to be read, though.