She's the one that keeps the/ Dream alive.

Have fame. Will write. Clearly, if you're a celebrity, writing children's fiction is second only to adopting children of a different race .

The Guardian has a typically great take on it. Led me to wonder about celebrities I've read (and not just in children's fiction). Came to a stunning list of... two. Carrie Fisher. And Woody Allen. Alfred Hitchcock doesn't count, since he only featured in The Three Investigators, and all his introductions were ghost-written. Ethan Hawke could count, but doesn't (despite scarily high levels of cuteness), simply because I haven't read Ash Wednesday yet.

Back to The Autograph Man for now.

Gone, gone/ The damage done.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a test that required me to write 200-odd words longhand. Yes, longhand. Not only was it illegible (even to me), but it brought home the fact that independent ol' me was utterly, completely dependent on a box with a monitor on it -- to write.

Here's how I write, for instance. I put down a line. Rephrase. Rephrase again. Consider rephrasing it a third time, but change my mind, and undo my last two actions. This happens randomly till I'm left with a piece that sounds more or less like I want it to. And I have no idea how to recreate that on paper.

Considering that I now write on PCs and cellphones, and trust my own handwriting only for grocery lists and signatures, it's nice to run into other people's points of view on connectivity (the net, the cellphone, the TV, the radio, and all the overlaps in between), and how it's changed the novel today.

I'm the ghost in the machine/ I'm the genius in the gene.

It's Navratri, and I'm off the good stuff. Which makes me awfully sensitive to references to it, especially when they appear in my favourite online paper.

It seems that the Bard loved his booze, and often wrote while supremely hungover. The article uses Macbeth as a case in point, and it's a lovely explanation of the ungreat bits in Shakespearean writing.