You ever see those Formula One cars on their warm up lap, how they waggle their tyres, zipping sideways across the track, warming up to make sure they don’t crash and burn? That’s how it felt starting my practice-based research PhD in Creative Writing: I  found myself zig-zagging in the early weeks.  I’m trying to do something extraordinary in crime fiction: ease a way through what others seemed to consider a dead end. The first pressure was to deliver something, anything, that might pass muster with the Supervisor.  I handed in a rattlebag of oddments: literary curiosities I ‘d engineered that were tenuously related to the subject – a poem, a roll of flash fiction, some prose patches, various sketches of characters not yet connected with any plot. It was plenty and yet wasn’t anything.
To keep switching metaphors, I felt like I was attending the barbers with a bald head…