A few weeks back I mentioned 25-year-old Keri Beevis, who is likely to chuck in her job in a Norwich travel agency after the 750,000 advance given to her by publishers Buckley-Bennion to complete three horror novels.
Nice work if you can get it. Indeed, commenting in the Guardian, Steven Poole sees Ms Beevis's good fortune as an encouragement to others who wish to break into the writing racket and who embrace Dr Johnson's dictum that only a blockhead ever wrote except for money. To this end, he has come up with ten rules that he thinks any aspiring author should find worth following. I think so, too, and here they are, in brief:
1. Find a hitherto unknown publisher, which is what Ms Beevis did. "Hitherto unknown publishers," Mr Poole sagely observes, "are desperate for media coverage, or they wouldn't be hitherto unknown."
2. Change your name. Ms Beevis will be published under the nom de plume Keri Leigh. Any aspiring writer called Butthead should take note.
3. Write a thriller. This will greatly enhance the possibility of movie rights.
4. Make it fashionable. Genes, virtual reality, serial killing, high finance and dinosaurs have had their day, but there are lots of subjects out there. Read Loaded, The Face and Scientific American to find out what they are.
5. Set it in America - especially, as Mr Poole observes, if you've never been there. He approvingly cites Nicholas Evans, who had never been to the US when he began The Horse Whisperer.
6. Write it as a screenplay: "Cinema's the thing, so think bare-bones, dialogue-driven stories."
7. Whatever you do, don't write well. This seems so obvious as to be not worth stating, but Mr Poole emphasises it with:
8. If you do write well, stop now. "You will have to educate yourself out of this obsolete habit."
9. Oh, and be Indian. It worked, he points out, for Arundhati Roy, who got a small fortune for her first novel, The God of Small Things.
10. You may now start writing.
There's one curious omission from Mr Poole's list, though - surely his ninth rule should read: "Oh, and be Irish," given that over the last few years writers haven't necessarily had to be any good to find fame and fortune abroad, they've merely had to be Irish. Does this mean that the Celtic Tiger is no longer roaring quite as loudly as before in international literary circles? Well, if that results in a demand for quality rather than quantity from Irish writers, it will be no bad thing.
I had been toying with the idea of dropping in to this year's Scriobh literary festival in Sligo, if only to attend the reading by Carol Ann Duffy, who is one of the best poets now writing in English, with a blend of feeling and form that's deeply impressive.
Alas, Ms Duffy won't be appearing - the reason, Scriobh's Mary Folan tells me, being a delay in the publication of her new collection. However, other interesting writers will be gathered at this fourth Scriobh, which takes place from September 4th to 7th and is mostly based in the town's Model Arts Centre.
From Scotland come two notable talents, poet Robin Robertson and fiction writer A.L. Kennedy. Ireland is represented by Kerry Hardie, Mary O'Malley and Michael Fanning, the US by Michael Donaghy and Molly McCloskey (the latter has been living in Sligo for some years), while writers from New Zealand, Jamaica, Colombia and Germany are also among the line-up.
If you wish to know more, you can contact the Model Arts Centre at (071) 41405.
Indeed, if you do go to the festival and subsequently can't get Sligo out of your mind, New Island Books will be issuing Eamonn Sweeney's There's Only One Red Army, a personal account of the author's fascination with the fluctuating fortunes of Sligo Rovers, in October.
Mr Sweeney's Waiting for the Healer was one of the more arresting novels of the past year, with a distinct voice of its own, but the publicity material I've received about the new book tells me that it has "strong overtones" of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. Gosh, not too strong, I hope.
Next month Bloomsbury are publishing The Proud Highway, a 700-page selection of letters by that gleefully unrepentant scourge of the American establishment and of conservative family values, Hunter S. Thompson.
A bit of a shock, then, to come across letters to his mother declaring "I'm going to hate being away from home" and "Thanks very much for giving me a good home and a happy childhood that I never tire of remembering." Fear and loathing, how are you.