You earn how much?

A one-liner from www.thisismoney.co.uk really got my back up recently - Not only did I feel it was hugely misleading, but it seemed to suggest all novelists enjoy a luxurious life of Riley:

"Novels are seemingly the business to be in if you want to join the rich list."

Really? And where do you get your facts from? This article on the top ten highest earning women in the UK seems to suggest that novel writing is more lucrative than being a WAG. A bit of a generlisation, don't you think? Granted JK Rowling is the highest earning femle in the UK, with Barbara Bradford Taylor coming in at number three. Number two was the Queen. So the journalist has probably looked at the top three and decided that all novel writers, from the self-published to the mid-listers, have gold plated teeth and indoor swimming pools.

Under the Barbara Bradford Taylor entry it states: "Her £174m wealth might seem minimal compared to the likes of J K Rowling, however that still means that two of the highest earning women in the UK are novelists – the other is the Queen. Barbara Taylor Bradford made her money from her 25 best-selling novels which have sold more than 82m copies worldwide and have been translated into 40 languages. She hasn't denied the estimates that she earns $24m a year so it's no surprise she's on the list."

And at number ten is Cheryl Tweedy whose book deal is worth a reported £5m. And did she even write a word of it? Not on your Brown Ale!

What stood out was one (male) commentator who said:

"It is lamentable that none of these are scientists or engineers who have made their fortune by manufacturing or software. Women have always, in my experience, the ability and brains to develop much needed new technology. Their ability to advance socially acceptable literature and performing arts is beyond doubt. I wonder what is holding our talented women from developing careers in area of technology? As an aside, the best engineering student in my class was a woman. She was of the highest calibre."

So is novel writing really the business to be in if you want to blow your nose on
a £50 note? No, definitely not. Anyone who earns over £30,000 from novels alone per annum, please drop by.

The space inside your head

The brain is the primary sensory apparatus of sight, hearing, balance, taste, and smell. As we all know, the brain is an extremely complex organ - in a nutshell. But what does the brain really look like when it's dissected? And where do those fantastic ideas come from? Where exactly are they stored?

Do the ideas simply start off as foetuses and simply grow until they're ready to be 'born' as a stream of words? And how do we remember the storylines of all those novels we have read? Is the brain simply a library with small compartments, each featuring one book, or is it one big unstructured mess, with our favourite novels vying for the most prominent places within the brain? What is the memory capacity in gigabytes? How many books can the brain hold? And is it true that we only use a tiny fraction of our brain throughout our lifetime? If we used it to its full potential, would we churn out magnificent masterpieces in quick succession?

When you write your own novel is it stored in a special elevated place within the brain, so that you can recall the storyline, characters, sub-plots and incidents more easily than you would a novel in your collection?

It's all very complicated. I realise these are a series of questions, rather than an opinion as such. But the simple answer is that none of us know for sure how the brain functions.

And what about those 'bottom drawer' novels, the ones which are bastions of cringeworthy-ness? They're the ones which illustrate clearly ignorance of POV and the ones where we start the paragraph in first person and end in third. Do we instantly want to forget them as if they never existed, and do we urge our brain to push them further and further into oblivion in case they tarnish our well-written novels?