THE THINGS WE DID FOR LOVE publishes in two weeks.  I am fighting the temptation to bury my head in the sand by burying my head in a book instead.  I'm going through a Penelope Lively phase right now, having been given HOW IT ALL BEGAN for Christmas: I'm on holiday in a friend's cottage in lovely Salthouse in North Norfolk, and from her well-stocked bookshelves I have plucked AFTER NATURE, ART, a delightful novel about a "creative retreat" in a run-down ancestral home in the British Countryside.  There wannabe artists are conned into believing that they will become better painters/experimental sculptors/poets/potters whilst the loathsome owner of the home holds secret conversations with "the man in London" as he tries to sell off the house and secure financial backing to expand his business.  It's funny and witty and wry, but with an unmistakeable sense of menace provided largely by descriptions of the nature which surrounds the house. Owls hunt.  Small animals scream. Stinkhorn mushrooms give off corpse like odors. There are all sorts of other things I should be reading - about a hundred manuscripts for work, the editorial revisions of my own book (AFTER IRIS, more on that in a few months time!), the book prescribed by my book group (THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ and no, I can't get into it).  But all I want to do is curl up with Penelope and find out what happens next to her host of unpleasant, quarrelsome, very human and (in some cases) very endearing characters.  This is how I want to write - stark, limpid, evocative prose which has the reader feverishly turning pages.  Penelope, I salute you!