There’s nothing quite so burdensome as having a book to write. Maybe it’s not so bad when it’s your first book, but after that it’s a terrible chore. The publishing industry doesn’t help by paying authors up front. The temptation to pocket the advance and not deliver the manuscript is overwhelming. Believe me, when Douglas Adams said he liked the whooshing noise that deadlines make as they go by, he was speaking for all of us.
I signed up to write a book for Viking, part of the Penguin group, five years ago. Called Fully Comprehensive, it was going to be one part polemic about the shortcomings of Britain’s state schools and one part memoir about my misadventures at a series of sink comprehensives. I was due to hand it in in September 2010, but got sidetracked by the West London Free School, which became an all-consuming passion. At least, that was my justification for missing the first deadline.
My editor said she’d be prepared to overlook my tardiness if I knocked off a quick ebook for her and I ended up writing a 25,000-word essay called ‘How to Set Up a Free School’.
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