I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

The more melancholy side of my literary personality is much in tune with BS Johnson's.

I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it - nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything Id attempted before, and that maybe my talent just wasnt up to it and the book would have to be abandoned, or would turn out not to work at all when it was finished.

As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?

I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.

I had no sense of any reputation that What a Carve Up! might acquire - at the time I didnt even have a publisher, so my main worry was whether it was even going to see the light of day or not.

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.