another battle in the food wars

N is three. She has always been a fussy eater, what with rejecting pretty much all fruit and vegetable matter except, of course, chips - which she refuses to believe has anything to do with potato.

However, matters are deteriorating. Foods which she used to eat are no longer welcome and remain, untouched, on her plate while she claims they are 'not tasty' or 'yucky', while freely admitting that she hasn't tried them. Sometimes she will taste the sauce while the food is being cooked, tell us that it is delicious and then utterly reject it once it is on the plate in front of her.

At this rate, bread and butter will soon be all that's left. And when she decides to reject that, where do we go next?

I have decided that enough is enough and so have opened up a new battle in the food wars. N has tactically retreated and is lying in bed, strategically sleeping. This is an even better way of avoiding questions like, "Why won't you try fruit?" than the usual answer of "I'm not going to tell you."

(As an aside, I managed to defeat her with some infant logic last week. I had been trying to convince her to go swimming for ages. We used to go but stopped a few months ago when she kept on refusing. Finally, she said that she would go 'tomorrow' so, the following day, I asked her again. She said 'tomorrow' again to which I said that she had said 'tomorrow' yesterday and that it was now yesterday's tomorrow. She asked if today was 'tomorrow that day' to which, for want of a better answer, I said 'yes'. I then asked again if she wanted to swim, she said yes, so I stopped the discussion, got her in the car and went to the pool. And she loved it - it was difficult to persuade her to get out of the pool, even after an hour of splashing about.)

The worst part of all this food business is that I was the same as a child but, given that I gave up randomly rejecting food well over twenty years ago, I have lost touch with that inner child and so have no inside knowledge on how to reason with her. Bribery is not working - chocolate has been withheld for some time, with the promise that if she tries fruit (even if she spits it out after a couple of chews), she can have some chocolate. She appears to have resigned herself to having no more chocolate.

Since chocolate is the 'carrot' (excuse the horribly inappropriate analogy), then we need to find a 'stick'. Threats of gradually taking away toys has led to shrieks of horror - and some of them, frankly, were almost from me since this is something I really, really, REALLY don't want to do.

Can I let my child malnourish herself through obstinacy or should I descend to psychological torture? Is there a right answer on this one? Please - if there's anyone out there - someone must know how to deal with this. A signed photo of Derek to the person who comes up with the most useful advice.

Speaking of Derek, I'm really not sure whether the world needs a four-and-a-bit thousand word picture-less picture book about a psychedelic monkey. N enjoys it, although she mainly likes the bit at the end with her in it. If only it had illustrations, I might have a bestseller on my hands. Failing that, I think it could be read on the radio - apparently BBC Radio 7 does kids' stories - which certainly solves the problem of the absence of artwork.

And finally, the moment you've all been waiting for. I am proud to unveil the new Mr Grass-Head, with the original Mr Grass-Head (now Mr Straw-Head by deed poll), standing (?) in his shadow.

downtrodden and put upon

Literary agents - what a cheeky bunch they are. You may feel that making such comments cannot improve my chances of finding one of them who wants to live, breathe and sleep my writing - but someone has to take a stand when everyone else is either too obsequious, apathetic or busy doing something else.

I refer to the blog of Nathan Bransford, literary agent, (http://nathanbransford.blogspot.com), which came to my attention by dint of being Blogger's Blog Of Note on Thursday. Don't jump to conclusions, please. He comes across as friendly, helpful, approachable - and he even suggests that he reads queries himself and replies personally. He suggests (practically demands) that aspiring authors contact him before anybody else. Clearly I do not take issue with any of that.

However (yes, obviously there was a big 'however' coming), he also enters the dangerous world of how to write your query, your synopsis and your sycophancy. Maybe I'm just being naive here (and maybe there's no maybe about it) but I always thought that authors wrote books, that advertisers wrote advertising and that editors wrote synopses. In other words, people should play to their strengths. Were Shakespeare's synopses any good? Did Douglas Adams research some personalised titbit about the literary agent he contacted? Does Zadie Smith have a great-uncle who runs a publishing house? Probably not - I presume that people read their work and formed an opinion accordingly. Otherwise, published authors will be those skilled at self-publicity which, to put it kindly, will be a subset of the great writers in the world.

In a world where there are far too many aspiring authors, separating the manuscripts that are read from those which are moved straight into their return envelopes by evaluating the author's skill at toadying is about as sensible as the (worryingly plausible) story of the popular law firm which threw all job applications down a flight of stairs and only read the ones that fell on every seventh step. They reasoned that anyone not sufficiently lucky to have a form which knew which step to land on was not lucky enough to work for them. Clearly, one hopes this firm has long since gone into bankruptcy - yet there is not any great difference between this approach and assuming that an ability to write a ground-breaking, record-breaking, sleep-stealing novel will naturally lead to an ability to sum up the hundred-thousand words or so into a pithy single page and write a letter both fawning and informative enough to get the attention of the agent.

"What do I suggest?" I hear you ask. (Or I would, if anyone ever bothered to put a comment on this blog.) "Well, thanks for asking", I say. (Or I would, if etc.) Nathan - as a friendly, helpful and, by all appearances, useful agent, you could lead the way. Invite unpublished authors to email you a chapter or two. Make it environmentally friendly by refusing paper copies. And (here comes the clever bit) absolutely forbid anything in the covering email apart from author's name, address and email address. Yes, it will open the flood gates but, as you well know, you can stop after the first sentence if it's rubbish, or after the first paragraph if it's dull, or after the first page if you don't care what happens next, or after the first chapter if it doesn't drive you across the divide to chapter two like a rocket unexpectedly fired out of your trousers. And if you get all the way through and can't wait to read the rest, then and only then ask for a synopsis so you know whether the overall story will satisfy you or leave you feeling empty and hollow (like when you go out for a meal at a fast food joint and start feeling a bit peckish in the time it takes to get up from the plastic chair, deposit your rubbish in the bin and push the door).

In short, evaluate the BOOK writing, not the letter writing, not the synopsis writing and not the advertising writing. These people want to be authors.

What have you got to lose? Worst case, you might need to get Curtis Brown to increase the mailbox size but, hey, storage is cheap these days. You can get a terrabyte hard drive for about ninety pounds so it's probably ninety bucks where you are which makes it cheaper than a full tank of petrol for a Hummer.

Give it a go - we can all win. How about you give me 1% of revenue for any new authors you find this way? No harm in asking...

Since my last post, I have started to read Nathan's blog and like it. The above is intended as helpful advice. That is the full extent of my work towards publication and, shockingly, I have not looked at Authonomy for a while. This is not a change of opinion, merely an expression of laziness, inertia and a few good programmes on the telly.

I have also watched the totally wonderful in every way "Mr Maker" on BBC2. Technically, N has watched it and I have watched her watching it but, in reality, I probably like it more than she does. As his name suggests, he makes stuff out of old bits of, er, stuff - and the old bits of stuff are all stuff that you might have lying around. Yesterday we made Mr Grass-Head from an old pair of tights, some grass seed, a paper cup, three elastic bands, cotton wool and a biro. Oh, and some water on the top. Hopefully, in a week's time, he'll be sporting a good head of grass-hair. And if it doesn't work, we can have another go because the smallest pack of grass seeds I could find would enable me to plant a medium-sized lawn.

For the first time on this blog, I now present a photograph, showing Mr Grass-Head in his bald but aspiring to hirsute phase. Ideally, I would have used flesh-coloured elastic bands but all I could find were discarded Royal Mail red ones. If the sunshine doesn't help the grass to germinate and grow, perhaps the radiation from the mobile phone masts on the building behind will help.