Christopher Shevlin

This is a book about a slightly useless part-time Harrods sales assistant who inadvertently brings down the government.

That's the elevator pitch anyway, but there's so much more to it: an upper-class housewife who discovers that she is an excellent burglar, a low-speed car chase, a fight to the death on a very small balcony, a shadowy company taking over the government, a dashing detective/loss-adjustor who gradually changes his attitudes to women, an epic battle at the Ritz in which a relative of the Duke of Portland is thrown over an occasional table, a shop selling edible puns, a personal crisis in a life-drawing class, a beautiful beige-haired philosophy student, a murderer with a really comfortable balaclava, a missing one-eared cat...

All are packed into a book which quite literally several people say they like. Even I like it.

But don't take our word for it, read the first six chapters for yourself.

It is called either Cooking A Fish or The Scapegoat Farm. Let me know which you prefer, and tell me whether you are one of the people who like it or part of a new group who don't like it.

I finished writing this in late-January 2010 and am currently looking for an agent. I have sent samples to three agents so far – watch this space for news.

Penguin, £6.99

This book, published in June 2005, is part of Penguin’s new, accessible “Writers’ Guides” series. Click here to order a copy.

I wanted to call it “How To Write At Work”, because no man is a business, but most people who have jobs need to write. Here’s an extract from the introduction:

“This book is for anyone who has to write at work. It is for all of you who write most days, but have never been told how. It is for everyone who knows that writing more effectively could make a big difference to their prospects, their status and their usefulness. It is for everyone who wants to write more effectively.

In one way or another, most people these days are professional writers. If you're a marketing manager, a TV buyer, an executive assistant, an auditor, a banker, a mechanic, a policeman or a temp, you're a writer. You probably don't think of yourself as one, but you are. As Dr Carolyn Matalene, professor of English at the University of Southern California says, ‘The literacy demands made on job-holders in the Information Age are extraordinary; they must improvise their way through complex writing tasks never imagined in their English courses.’

‘Job-holders’ pretty much covers it. If you're self-employed, if you work in an office, if you sell things, if you have to advise others, or if you're in academia, you are a writer. Whoever you are, in the course of your job, you almost certainly write emails, notes, reports, letters, forms, proposals, brochures, promotional material, CVs, and on and on. Many of the things you write go to people who can, directly or indirectly, affect the course of your career – and of your life. The impression you make on them with your writing will have a huge effect on their opinion of you.

Although you are a writer, you are other things too, and those other things take time. You have work to do, deadlines to meet, clients, bosses, colleagues and spouses to appease, and bills to pay. You probably lack the time, inclination and shelf-space required to plough your way through the innumerable style guides, thesauruses (or should that be thesauri?), acknowledged authorities on English usage, concise dictionaries of phrase and fable, and so on.

What you need is a structured way of improving your writing in as short a time as possible – so that you get the benefits without the pain. You also need a single source of answers to the questions you face when planning, writing and editing your work.”

Well, after at least two years and 120,000 words, I have finally shelved this book. I don't like to abandon things, and maybe I'll go back to it one day, but for now it is dead.

When I first started out, people seemed to really like the chapters I did and I enjoyed doing a serious and quite sad historical novel. Then an agent got in touch with me, saying he liked what I had on my website, and in talking to him I changed direction. He didn't like what I eventually sent him, which was a blow.

In about September 2009 I finally lost faith in it. I saw that lots of good signs that had been there at the beginning and for some other things I've done weren't there for this. And then there were (all at once) a lot of bad signs. A friend told me it was 'well-written but ordinary'. Another took a long time to get past chapter two. An agent said that the writing was wooden. Some new people at a writing group I go to all said it was terrible.

I realised I was writing a bad book.

I also realised that I wouldn't be able to sort it out in a reasonable amount of time. Writing a book, even writing a bad book slowly, takes a lot of time and concentration, especially when there's historical research involved. You become preoccupied and other areas of your life suffer. And if you have a tendency to depression then it isn't a brilliant idea to spend a great deal of time on your own thinking about tragedy and slaughter in a bygone age. I decided I'd rather have my time back and maybe write light stuff when the mood took me – I really enjoyed doing my new book, which took about three months.

Anyway, have a look at it, if you're interested. The beginning seems to be the worst part. I think the battle scene (in chapter five, I think) is good. If I went back to the book I would cut out most of the non-action stuff and focus on the battles, escapes and Emily, the governess who becomes a nurse, who I like. I could never make the main male character work.

Click on the icon below to download a PDF of the first ten chapters.

Tonyconomics is the working title for a book that's now on hold. It's about Tony, a freewheeling bohemian who prepared himself for a life of indolence and fluke but somehow becomes a minor corporate functionary. He leaves his job, falls on hard times and then discovers that he is the best beggar who has ever lived. This brings him to the attention of an entrepreneur who, among other projects, is trying to inject market forces into vagrancy. There's a sample chapter for you to read, if you like.

When he was five or six my nephew, Sammy, called something or other we were trying to foist on him a “terribly unnecessary pudding”, and I thought it would make a good name for a children’s book.

You can read a sample of it here.

These are some rough illustrations I did for it:

Sammy

The pudding in its tin

The pudding stands

Pearson Education, £7.99

I wrote this book in 2002, and it has the distinction of being the only thing I have ever written that has been translated into Polish. Nevertheless, it seems - along with every other book in the series - to have gone out of print. The rare copies still available are like gold-dust, but slightly larger and more expensive: Amazon won’t take less than £18.72 for its single second-hand copy.

Here’s what I said about it when it was first published:

“Email has created a whole new kind of communication, with new conventions, demands and rules. It can make your life - socially, creatively and commercially - incomparably easier, if you know what you are doing. Jam-packed with essential information, tips and tricks, this comprehensive and clearly-presented handbook is exactly what you need to master email.”

And here’s what other people said:

“Shevlin proves he can help you write well by writing exceptionally well himself . . . a wonderful book about writing great emails.”

About.com

“A good read at a good price. Yet another quality entry in the Simple Guide series.”

Micro Computer Mart

“A Simple Guide To Email is perfect for its target audience. As a one-stop shop for those new to this popular form of communication, it covers everything you need to know, from how email works and how to write it, to its various pitfalls, privacy and the law.”

What PC

I won’t say too much about this, except that it is one of the first things I ever wrote for money - a ghost-writing project about online communities. It was commissioned at the height of the dot-com boom and didn’t survive the crash. I wrote it for an American, and so have used an American voice and spellings.