I’d been planning to blog about what I recently discovered in our loft when it was emptied to be re-lagged. No, not an alien life-form or a fortune in used fivers, but lots of thought-provoking and memory-evoking stuff from my past. However, a pleasant surprise popped up in my email in-box yesterday that links very nicely to a plastic sleeve of old letters I unearthed a few days earlier. The sleeve was labelled ‘competitions’.

When I was growing up, the choice of what food we ate and the cleaning materials Mum used was often dictated by which brand was holding a competition at the time. Back then there were no phone-ins inviting you to answer an insultingly simple question and call a premium-rated number. Instead you had to collect labels or tokens and often come up with a witty slogan to support your entry. A level of skill was usually required.

There was even a publication called ‘Competitors’ Journal’ that my Mum bought regularly, offering advice on how to improve your chances of winning. Her wins included 144 teabags and several pairs of tights. She never bagged ‘the big one’: a holiday or a car.

Recognising that we eventually emulate much of our parents’ behaviour, even that which we used to scoff at, I became a keen ‘comper’ too when I left home. And judging by the file of letters congratulating me on winning, amongst other things, an electric sewing machine, a power shower, bedding and pine furniture, I was pretty successful at it too.

These days few competitions are based on skill, so I don’t enter many. I’ve put a few short stories into writing competitions, and was shortlisted once. But over the past couple of years my creative efforts have been concentrated on writing The Novel; short stories are a distraction. One exception, though, was the 2009 Harrogate Crime Festival competition: Condense a Crime Classic. It was only looking for 50 words (although I reread Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for it). I sent my entry off with few expectations – and won. So I got to go to Harrogate 2010 for free. To me, that’s a ‘big one’. I was a happy bunny and my Mum was so jealous!

Anyway, back to my pleasant surprise yesterday. I subscribe to the Bookdagger site, mainly for the Martin Edwards column, and recently spent an hour or so scouring the site and its sister Bookswarm sites to answer the questions in a Christmas quiz. The first prize was a Kindle, something I don’t feel motivated to purchase (yet) but would be happy to own if someone gave me one.

I revisited the site earlier this week and discovered with a tiny pang of disappointment that I hadn’t won the Kindle. However, yesterday I was notified that I was a runner-up and could choose a prize from several book bundles. I raced through the list, hoping to find a good crime selection, but came across something far better: a bundle donated by publisher Cannongate which includes Alasdair Gray’s A Life in Pictures. As regular readers of this blog may remember, I blogged in October about being a big fan of Gray and wanting this book, despite its £50 price tag.

So, once again I must thank my Mum. Not only did she instil in me a love of crime fiction, but the competitive spirit I inherited from her is helping some of my wishes come true.

The postie brought me a parcel yesterday – and I opened it immediately. Unable to wait for my Christmas pressies? No, it was from the Open University: the first tranche of study materials for Course AA310, Film & Television History.

AA310 kicks off at the beginning of February, and will be the third module I’ve studied towards a degree in Humanities. After this I’ll have just one more module to complete my studies, as I was awarded credits for the year I spent at Edinburgh University as a mature student.

I can’t praise the OU enough. The courses I’ve done thus far (Introduction to Humanities; Creative Writing) have been challenging, interesting and extremely well-run. Each time I’ve picked up the phone with a query, it has been answered with charming efficiency. And thanks to an Individual Learning Account, a scheme run by the Scottish Government, the reasonable fee of £650 this year has been reduced to an even more reasonable £150.

Being of an autodidactic nature, I did an AS Level in Film Studies a few years ago at Berwick High School. Although I’ve always loved films, I’d never written essays about them before. But I took to it straightaway, because it’s so like studying literature, often using a similar vocabulary. For example, here’s my concluding sentence from an essay I wrote examining an early scene in Jane Campion’s The Piano:

"To conclude, this first sequence depicting New Zealand starkly contrasts Ada’s old life with the new one she can expect. It establishes the stylistic qualities of the entire work as well as introducing several of its main themes: alienation, communication and the role of women in Victorian times."

AA310, as it says on the tin, is more about the history of film and TV than a detailed unpicking of individual works. I already possess many of the films we’re going to be studying: Cape Fear (both versions), The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Jaws and (hurrah!) the Coen Brothers’ very wonderful Fargo. I hadn’t intended to embark on this module until the following year, but AA310 finishes in 2011, so this was my last chance. It will eat into my writing time, but if I'm disciplined it shouldn't be damaging to my progress in editing The Novel.

I can’t wait to get started!

We got our first Christmas card today. It's only just over a couple of weeks until the 25th, so I shouldn't be surprised. As most of us, in Scotland at least, lost a week at the beginning of the month due to the snow, how about combining Christmas and Hogmanay into one big party at the end of the year? That would give us back that week to shop for presents, finish our work and get everything done which should have been done by the 24th but won't now. No? Oh, alright.

Our Christmas cards are mostly electronic these days, with so many friends having email. Last year we made a donation to my favourite charity, Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, instead of posting out cards. It's hard to know what good cause to donate to, there are so many, but I came across Hearing Dogs while I was doing some research for The Novel (one of the main characters is deaf) and it's the one I choose to support. Unlike Guide Dogs (another worthy cause), hearing dogs don't have to be specially bred, and many breeds and cross-breeds can be suitable for training. Even cocker spaniels, which I, as an owner of a particularly daft one, find hard to believe. As a result, rescue dogs are often excellent candidates.

Pictured is one little chap who's on his way to earning that red coat and making a big difference to a deaf person's life. Altogether now - aaah!

I've celebrated passing the halfway mark of the 'big edit' of No Stranger to Death by putting all 24 chapters into Wordle, the online toy for generating “word clouds” from text. And here's the result, in 'organic carrot' colours.

It looks gorgeous, but once again I'll need to check out my overuse of words like 'back', 'know' and (the old favourite) 'like'.

Remember when you were a teenager (go on– if I can, so can you) and some songs seemed to have been written with you in mind, because their lyrics so accurately captured what was going on in your life at the time?

It’s different with books. I’ve enjoyed reading many but (perhaps because I read mostly crime novels) I rarely think the author has peeked into my brain and written down what they’ve seen there. There was one book, though, which I read for the first time about 15 years ago, which did just that. And now there’s another one.

The first is called The Only Child: How to Survive Being One by Jill Pitkeathley and David Emerson. When I was growing up, being an only child (or unique as they say much more attractively in French) was unusual. It’s probably less so now. In many ways I was privileged (or, as is the common belief, spoilt) and of course when you know no different, your own life seems completely normal. But reading this book was a revelation to me. Suddenly I found out that many of my traits are there because I had no siblings.

For example, only children:

• Are good at planning (tick)
• Have a tendency to shy away from conflict (tick)
• Have a tendency to be a bit solitary (tick)

My ability to feel guilty about something when it isn’t even my fault, my inability to spot some types of joke and my reluctance to ‘lark about’ – all explained. Amazing.

And now I’ve read another book which evoked a similar feeling of familiarity: The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner. It’s billed as ‘an editor’s advice to writers’ but it’s so much more. Lerner (who also has an excellent blog) hasn’t produced yet another how-to-write book; it’s more what-it’s-like-to-be-a-writer. I recently read it in one sitting, like a novel, on the train from Scotland to the south of England to visit my parents.

She examines what both authors and editors want, and goes much further - into life after publication - than most of the books this one will be grouped with on the bookshop shelf. She also looks at different types of writers. I was pleased to identify most with ‘the natural’ rather than ‘the wicked child’ or ‘the self-promoter’.

There is so much I want to say about this book that I’ll return to it another day. In the meantime, here’s a brilliant quotation about that urge to write:

‘ . . . if you can’t give it up, if hearing how impossible the odds are only makes you dig in deeper, it doesn’t really matter if you’ve got natural talent. Your job is to marshal the talent you do have and find people who believe in your work. What’s important, finally, is that you create, and those creations define for you what matters most, that which cannot be extinguished even in the face of silence, solitude and rejection.’

Thanks, Betsy.