For some reason, my blogging brain staged a shut down after my latest post on October third, and here I am now on 5th November, wondering, to the sound of exploding gunpowder, if some part of that missing month is hiding in my attic.

I blame the accumulation of clutter in our house over the last two decades. I could stand it no longer and embarked on a frenzied clearout that could not be completed methodically, step by step. What was done in room A, would affect Room B, and room C had to be half emptied, to make space for refugee pieces of essential items that were banished from room D . And so on, from mild untidiness to chaos, then utter chaos and eventually, after several trips to charity shops and the municipal tip, to soothing order.

Phew! I was able to draw breath, and after producing a couple of passable poems to ease my creative famine, I turned to my neglected blog and started browsing some of the headlines on my daily updates from the on-line Bookseller. Poetry and clearouts were combined several months ago here in the post

During the last month, there seems to have been a glut of articles about the state of publishing, such as this,
this
and this

Last week I received an email from one of my favourite bloggers, Litlove of ‘Tales from the Reading Room’,
asking if I would take part in an on-line interview with her. Coincidentally, publishing was the topic. Litlove was interested in my own venture into publishing, Novel Press. Though probably it wasn’t such a coincidence, since Litlove feels that small publishers and publishing cooperatives are going to be important in the years ahead. She is not the only blogger to be investigating publishing trends, as you can see from this post.

I was pleased to spend time in looking back on my experience of being published and becoming a publisher. All sorts of half-forgotten details came to the fore, and now I can see more clearly what a challenge it has been – and, in spite of some frustrating moments, how satisfying I have found the whole venture.

Thank you, LitLove, for asking me in the first place, and also for tidying up my rather rambling answers to your stimulating questions!

This hasn’t been the only interview I’ve taken part in this week. I’ll wait till my next post before I tell you about Tuesday afternoon, when a small BBC team brought their own clutter of lights, tripod, camera, monitor and numerous trailing wires into my own little writing room. Very exciting, even though the focus wasn’t really on me and my writing.

I never know quite what I’m going to stumble across when scanning the headlines of the Morning Updates from The Bookseller that accumulate in my Gmail Inbox. Most of these are clearly more relevant to well-established publishing houses than to individual book readers, (or to brand new, very small publishers like my own Novel Press) but the Feed Reader comes up with more variety – the one that caught my eye is from last Thursday’s update, with the heading: A week without books, from The Guardian World News.

Bibi van der Zee is a bookaholic who was going cold turkey for a week. She gives an amusing account of how she copes with the deprivation, but I was more interested in the wider questions that she raises when she wonders if her reading habit is ‘actually is some kind of drug’

I was aware that ‘that our brain experiences what the characters we are reading about experience’ and it was no surprise to learn about a piece of research where scientists got people to read while they were in a brain scanner. ” When readers were engaged in a story, the researchers found that, at the points in which the story said a protagonist undertook an action, the part of the brain which was activated was the part which the reader himself or herself would use to undertake the action”

What I hadn’t really taken on board was the fact that, ‘For most of our history, reading has been done by just a few specialists, and aloud.‘ In the fifth century, Saint Augustine was famously perplexed by the weird habits of Saint Ambrose: ” When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.”

We take it for granted now that fluent readers don’t have to sound out each word. Take a look at this article and remind yourself how novels have changed our attitudes to reading, using them as recreation and an escape from stress.

Reading is such a part of our lives it’s hard to imagine a time when a reader like Ambrose was able to astonish onlookers with his eyes scanning the page. I love the way that this was expressed – especially ‘his heart sought out the meaning ‘.

I don’t read anything like as much as I used to – maybe only one or two novels a month. I feel a pang when I visit some readers’ blogs and read their enticing reviews, adding them to my mental t.b.r pile - but what with my money-earning job, my own writing, and now my publishing venture, Novel Press, there really isn’t much time left over.

At least I know I can last a week without reading. It’s almost a year since I wrote any poetry and I do miss that.

Would you find it hard to give up reading for a week? If not, what would you miss most?