It's a tough business, writing.

All those hours, days, years even, of sweat and toil, writing and rewriting to turn out something heartfelt, original and possibly even brilliant, only to discover that you have merely completed the first leg of a far more arduous journey, one that will probably end with your finely wrought prose being discarded and read by nobody.

Take this podcast, for instance. Blimmin' ages, it takes. The writing, the recording, the editing, the coming up with something pithy and enticing for the blurb (is this one succeeding? probably not). And for what? A handful of listeners, a few compliments, a modicum of attention in the ghastly vastness that is the world wide web. Mere crumbs, dear listeners - and you can't live on crumbs.

(I am, by the way, most grateful for the listeners, the compliments and the attention. Do keep them coming.)

Publication, though: that's the Holy Grail for many an author, and in this day and age it is not easily won. Still, if you have talent, if you're prepared to learn the market and perservere, if you can counter rejection with resilience, and keep making your writing stronger and more marketable, then you're in with a chance. That's what they say.

But what if they're not telling you quite everything you need to know...?

A story (as yet, unpublished) about the murky underworld of literature, and why you can't always trust your agent.

"You know what I reckon? They’re so up against it, right, with the state of the hospitals and underfunding and so on, that they don’t know who’s in for what. So they do everything on everyone to be on the safe side."

You will, no doubt, have your own views on the state of the NHS and the reasons (calculated or otherwise) for its 14 years (coincidental or otherwise) of neglect and underfunding. Do feel free to bang some pots and pans on your doorstep if it makes you feel better, but whatever your political viewpoint, I think we can all agree that our health service has been through some rough times lately.

Even so, there are some things one doesn't expect from a routine operation.

But mistakes happen, don't they?

Folklore tells of a town where everyone was a mathematician. Each person was an expert, whether in arithmetic, algebra, geometry or topology; thanks to this expertise, measurements were always very precisely measured, definitions very precisely defined and costs very precisely calculated.

Yet, as a mathematician called Simplex discovered, just because people think they've got everything worked out, doesn't mean they won't find themselves confronted by new ideas...

A story about quadrilaterals, and the difference between knowledge and understanding.