I'm still in my flat – extraordinary how boring that can become. Plus, it's amazing how many things have gone wrong since I last really lived here. (I have been mainly away for most of the last three years … ) So while I sing and hoot through my, no doubt excruciating for the neighbours, voice exercises in preparation for the Fringe, various tradespersons have fiddled with my boiler, my bathroom sink taps, my gas fires and all and sundry. And it is indeed pleasant not having to brush my teeth in the bath any more.

Meanwhile, the new book What Becomes is being reviewed, even though it's technically not out yet. It's always good and helpful to be reviewed, rather than ignored, but it is slightly frustrating to think of potential readers coming to the end of a piece and thinking, "Oh well, I might buy that then … wonder if it's in a shop? I haven't seen it in a shop … Ooh look, a shiny thing. And a biscuit." And they are lost forever.

In theory, the book emerges, blinking and coughing, on the sixth of August, but publication dates do seem to be entirely theoretical these days and I have already given readings where copies were available and am beginning to think Pub Dates are all designed as some kind of eBay scam – authors sign and date copies before the stated date and then they're worth a florin more than they would have been if we'd left them undefaced. Who can say.

I don't read the reviews until I put them on my website – so that's one, long afternoon of feeling fumbled with, paranoid and queasy and then it all goes away again. And yes, "I don't read reviews" does sound as if I'm happily tucked away in my own colon – but book reviews are odd things. They emerge months, if not years after the book is done with, so they're not that much use to the author. If the book's a car crash, it's already happened and we've walked or crawled away long ago. They are usually written (and should really be written) for readers, but may on occasions wander off and end up being about the reviewer's idea of the author, or a literary theory, or even some kind of personal issue the reviewer is working through. (This seems to be quite common in US reviews.) Yes, I personally want feedback on my work, but I get that from my editor and my agent (who used to be an editor) and from readings of work in progress and (extremely) occasionally from people upon whom I inflict sections of whatever heaving mess I'm wrestling with at the time. I get opinions from people I trust whose judgement I know and understand.

And just try writing a book of short stories. (I mean that rhetorically – obviously there are very few commercially- or personally-viable reasons for your writing a book of short stories. Unless, of course, you harbour a love of the form, you foolish and adorable moppet.) But if you did try it – and my first ever book was a collection of short stories – imagine how utterly bloody confusing the reviews are bound to be. First opinion – "Story A is rubbish, B is okay, C is middling." But then you read, "Story C is transcendent, A's okay and F should be illegal." And on and on it goes. It's incredibly difficult to review short stories without mentioning individual stories and opinions will differ and multiple reviews will simply confuse the young and tender brain of the scribbler concerned.

So my first crop of reviews was also my last. My publisher tells me how they're going.
And, in many ways, reviews are for publishers – are about trying to get anybody to know the darn thing is out there, whining and weeing on the concrete floor of the big Unowned Books Shelter and staring with big eyes through the chain link fence in hopes of going home with you. (See what I did there ? Trying to get you to buy it. Sorry. Inexcusable. It's been that kind of month. Please ignore me.) And then review quotes are cut out and arranged in ways that will make the paperback jacket read as if the Archangel Gabriel came down to earth and produced the volume in question with his very own heart's blood and anyone who doesn't buy it is not only crazy, but possessed of a leprous soul and likely to bite the heads off kittens. Sadly, every other book jacket will read like that, too – reducing the reader to a guilty, cognitively dissonant mess on the floor of Waterstone's café.

It has been particularly easy to not read anything in the last two weeks because I have mainly been battering up and down a rehearsal room, putting the shiny on WORDS in preparation for next week's previews and then off we'll go with a show a day until the end of time. Or the end of August, whichever arrives soonest. This means I am fitter than I would usually want to be, louder and currently addicted to bananas. There's nothing like seven or eight bananas to get you through a long day of trying to walk and talk simultaneously.

The whole rehearsal process means that I'm exhausted and yet quite cheery. I do like performing the show – partly because it's an opportunity to talk to people about words and writing and meaning and the silliness of being a writer in an unmediated way. It also means I get to go back to what made me start writing in the first place – hearing and feeling language. Any readers of this blog would, of course, be hugely welcome to turn up and see how it all turns out. Feel free to say hello. Meanwhile, there's hooting to be done. Onwards.