I've watched celebrity chefs make Eton Mess on TV; it's a concoction of meringue, cream and strawberries dumped into a glass bowl.  It tastes wonderful but looks, as you would expect, a mess.  I do not know, but have no doubt that it came into being because one day someone dropped a perfectly formed strawberry Pavlova and, rather than waste it, scraped it off the floor, put it into glass bowls and named it an Eton Mess.  Why Eton?  Maybe they thought only old Etonians ate Pavlova.
Well now we have our own version of the Eton Mess, called Pasty Mess, or maybe Cornish Mess or maybe Mess of Pasties.  The name is still to be decided.  
I am one of those lucky women whose husband likes to cook.  Today after spending all morning on the golf course he decided that we would have Cornish Pasties for lunch.  Delicious.  I don't know what went wrong, maybe the pastry was too soft or he forgot to put the greaseproof paper under the pasties when he was preparing them, but they refused to be removed from the work surface where they had been made.  No way could he lift them up and put them on the baking tray without them falling apart.  Frustration took over and he scooped them up a skillet and dumped them on the baking tray.  
'Throw them out,' he said.  
'No way; they'll be fine like that,' I replied and popped the mess in the oven.
The result was unorthodox but delicious.  Onion, carrot, potato and meat mixed in with broken bits of pastry, that looked a disaster but tasted great.  Now we just have to decide on a name for it and it too can become a TV star.

At the end of last year I received a phone call from a distraught mother who wanted me to ghost write a book for her about her missing daughter.  Amy Fitzpatrick had disappeared on her way home from a friend's house on New Year's Day 2008.  There has been no trace of her since.  Ghost writing is not my usual occupation and I was reluctant to start but it was obvious that she needed to get something written, so I agreed and spent the next few months talking to the mother Audrey and her boyfriend Dave about the ordeal they had been going through.  I would drive along the coast to where they were living in Calahonda and tape our interviews, then return home to write them up.  Email was a boon and I could email them chapters for their approval as we went along.  I tried to remain detached from their distress but it was not easy.  It was a very emotional experience.  Relating what had happened was terribly hard for them and more than once one or the other had to break off and leave the room, tears beginning to flow.  I would arrive home emotionally drained.
Being a mother it was all to easy for me to relate to their suffering.  What could be worse I asked myself, over and over again, than to lose a child and not know if they were alive or dead.
In the end the book I wrote was never published.  The family returned to Ireland and were approached by a national newspaper who wanted to publish their story but insisted on using their own writer.  This week the new version of the book is on sale.  It is entitled Please Find My Amy.  I hope lots of people buy it and that one of them remembers something, some small detail that will help the police find out what happened to Amy Fitzpatrick that night in 2008.

Last Saturday's showcase for local talent on the Costa del Sol was, in itself, an inspiration but sadly poorly attended.  It proved an excellent forum for networking and talking to like-minded people about their work but unfortunately members of the public were notable by their absence.  The authors who read extracts from their books were varied in their subject matter but of an equally high standard in the quality of their prose.  Jean Gilhead's novella "Living in Bright Shadows" was both an evocative and touching portrayal of families.   There was an emotional extract from Patrick Stokes' first novel "The Harvest of Inadequate Lives", the story of a homosexual serial killer and JG Harlond read a scene from her newly published novel "The Chosen Man" which had listeners begging to hear more.  A talk by Alison Proctor on introvert and extrovert personalities generated lots of discussion and was particularly relevant to the authors and artists in her audience.  Most people of an artistic leaning have an introvert personality; they like to internalise their thoughts and work through things alone before committing themselves.  Today however, that is not enough, artists and authors have to reach deep inside themselves and find an extrovert side to their nature in order to market and publicise their work.  No wonder we find that part so hard.  It goes against our natures, literally. 

Guest interview with the novelist JG Harlond:

In your latest book, "The Chosen Man", you have an array of interesting and vivid characters.  How did you come up with them?  I particularly like the incidental characters, such as the mother-in-law and McNab.  What inspired them?

My new novel was something of an accident. I was working on the sequel to The Magpie, to cover the years 1940 – 1950, and went back to Cornwall to do some research. The house manager of Cotehele, which is the Tudor house in Cornwall that is the model for my fictional Crimphele, took me on a private tour, starting in the old Great Hall. As I walked in out of the watery English summer sun, I saw a tall, sinister figure step out of the shadows near the fireplace and disappear. His name was McNab. I knew that immediately.

Ludo, for instance, why did you choose such a squash-buckling rogue for your main character?  

After the Great Hall we wandered through the interconnecting bed chambers, examining Belgian tapestries and chatting about trade between Britain and the Low Countries then we onto the flat roof of the original 15th century fortress. I looked over the wall at a familiar scene, I used to live in the area and I know the River Tamar well. But this wasn’t now and it wasn’t 1940 - I looked down on the river and saw an inland barge bringing the charming rogue hero from The Magpie (set early C20th) upriver in the mid-17th century! After that we went over to look down at the interior Retainer's courtyard. And there was that nasty McNab again crossing to the stables, pretending he wasn’t watching me. But he was - I could feel it. Thinking back it's rather spooky, but to be honest, at the time it felt totally real. The man coming up river on the barge was Leo's ancestor Ludovico - Ludo because life’s all a game for him! Another charming rotter.  

And Alina?  She is an intriguing young woman, we are never sure, until the very end of the book, what she will do.  

Alina, who is the heroine, arrived that day as well, and virtually wrote the first half of the novel herself! The sequel to The Magpie was set aside and she started to dictate her life to me through colours - the colours of her tapestry wool. 

However, before I could let Alina take us much further I had to stop and do an awful lot of research. I hadn't planned to write about the tulip scandal in Holland in 1636, although I did know a little about it - fortunately. I had to read a good deal about the Hispano/Vatican conspiracy, starting with Eric Frattini's work 'The Entity'.

And the other characters, such as the mother-in-law?  She has a particularly strong personality.

 About the secondary and minor characters - well, that creep McNab in the shadows - all I can say is that he was there. Lady Marjorie, the mother-in-law? In the end I felt rather sorry for her. Very few people are wholly bad, like McNab: Lady Marjorie felt threatened and believed she had a lot to lose. 

I have to say I'm particularly fond of the witch/cook Crook-back Aggie. Years ago when I was a student, I had a menial job in a local hotel - there was a Crook-back Aggie there, but nowhere near as interesting.

Thank you Jane, I look forward to reading your next historical novel.

Why is it that some successful writers want to be considered as literary?  What is a book of literary fiction anyway?  Literary, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary is: Of, constituting, occupied with, literature, polite learning, or books and written composition (especially the kind valued for form).  So, there you have it.  But where has the idea come from that some books can be categorized as literature and others not? Who do we consider to be the authors of literature?  Is there a list?  Why do we consider the books of Tolstoy and George Elliot  to be literature and not, say Ian McEwan or Graham Greene?  Or maybe I have it wrong.  Maybe the net of literary writing is much wider, maybe it includes the aforementioned and even Brenda Bainbridge and Margaret Attwood.  And, more to the point, why do we all want it so badly?

The publishers of one of my favourite authors, William Boyd, who has made a good living I imagine over the years with his excellent books, many of which have won prizes and been made into films, have taken to adding the word ‘literary’ to the blurb on their covers.   “A combination of suspense and literature” is attributed to one, while another sports the legend: “the art of the literary page-turner.”  Mr Boyd does not need this.  His work stands on its own merit.  His stories are readable, entertaining and well-written.  What more can we want?  Maybe, in a world where so many below-standard books are published, his publishers feel the need to point out that his work is written composition, especially the kind valued for form. 

Jane has some good points, but her opening statement that fiction writers are liars does not sit well with me.  On the contrary, good fiction is all about the truth.  OK, maybe it is elaborated, maybe some scenarios are far-fetched but to be believable the characters have to be real.  Not real in the sense that X is a pen portrait of Mrs Y down the road, but real in the sense that their characteristics, the things that have happened to make them who they are, should be real.  The characters in my books are an amalgam of people I have known or met over many years.  No-one will recognise themselves but the accumulation of information I have absorbed about people's behaviour helps to make my characters credible.  

Even with historical fiction it is the same.  Human behaviour has not changed over the years.  This is what is so astonishing.  The overlay of fashion, speech, social mores and life style maybe, but read Georgina, the Duchess of Devonshire and you will find beneath the 18th century facade, a very modern woman.   Read Anna Karenina and you will find her heartbreak and problems are universal.  Read about the intrigue and double-dealing in Tudor England and you could be in a John Le Carre spy novel. Human nature remains unchanged, no matter what century you are in.

If you want to write historical fiction get your background 100% correct and then create your characters.