6) Girl with a One-track Mind: Confessions of the Seductress Next Door by “Abby Lee” [Zoe Margolis]

Many of us who write blogs like to occasionally fantasise that there may some day be a market for our words of wisdom. (Of course, some who write blogs are already established professional writers, so this does not apply to them.) Very few, however, manage to make the transition from blogger to published author on the basis of what is in their blog; I doubt very much that my book reviews from here will ever appear in dead tree form in your local bookshop.

Of course, that’s because I write about books I have read, and occasionally sf cons I have been to, or arguments I have had, or speeches I have made, and not about sex. The Girl With A One Track Mind has written a very entertaining blog about the sex she has had for the last couple of years, and managed (somehow strangely) to persuade a publisher to take it on, and here it is.

And it is an entertaining, in some ways rather a moral read. Sex with strangers, or semi-strangers, is not always satisfactory. Wildly successful sex does not necessarily lead to a wildly successful relationship. By the end of the book, she is firming up her ideas about what she wants from a long-term partner. In that way, the novel format is more sustainable than the blog – done properly, as it is here, it imposes a duty on the author of character development, of story arc rather than the episodic narrative we get from the blog.

The Sunday Times wrote an incredibly spiteful article exposing the author’s real identity – typical of the trash rag it is (a friend of mine who was briefly its foreign correspondent had to help the then foreign editor work out where the Balkan states were, one of many events that I thought Evelyn Waugh had invented for Scoop). However, she has since made a few more media appearances on her own terms. Let’s hope that her fears of being finished in her film industry career are exaggerated, and that she continues to write entertainingly and for profit.