FOR an author, I'm not doing a lot of book writing at the moment. I'm trying to, but I seem to be at a creative crossroads.

People are always asking, "How's the book going, then?", a question I try to deflect by inquiring about their house renovations/pet rabbit/recent holiday, which usually puts them off.

Not Tom.

"How's the book going then?" he asked. I had put out a neighbourhood request via Yvonne, who knows everyone, for a strong bloke to help me move some bunk beds. Tom, who is Janet-across-the-road's son, had promptly been fished out of the bath and arrived still faintly damp.

Anyway, Tom not only moved the beds, he pulled up the carpet, mended a broken floorboard and put everything back again, thus saving me from cancelling a sleepover, breaking four little girls' hearts and triggering an asthma attack in the husband, who is allergic to house dust.

'What are you working on now?' he inquired, hammering. I explained about The Novel. More questions. I trotted out my usual excuses about why I'd only written three chapters, but they sounded lame, even to me.

Eventually I broke cover and admitted I'd got fed up and was planning on writing an environmental book instead.

Tom shook his head - clearly, it didn't sound like a money-spinner - and said, "Why don't you just write another Harry Potter?" I told him that children's books were notoriously hard to do.

He looked unconvinced, especially after the daughter piped up that actually, she was writing one.

After Tom left, I found myself thinking about our conversation, and came to the conclusion he was right. Never mind about literary fiction or saving the planet. I should be scribbling something unapologetically commercial, preferably with orphans in it and potential for TV tie-ins. I'll sneak a look in the daughter's Tracy Beaker notebook; she's written chapter three already.

One of the problems I'm having with my novel is that everyone else seems to have got there first. How can I make my midlife marital crisis novel stand out from all the other midlife marital crisis novels on the 3-for-2 pile, especially when they've all got pink covers with shoes on them?

My agent, who continues to be very enthusiastic about The Novel, claims it's just unfortunate timing. Chick-lit is out; all those singleton authors have got their men and had babies (that was when "Mum-lit" peaked) and now they've become disillusioned and they're all writing about that.

I, being a second-timearound author, am under no illusions at all. Maybe that's why it's not working.

YORK is a city of bookworms, according to the Royal Mail, which claims that York residents and their counterparts in North and East Yorkshire have more books delivered to their doors than anyone else in the country.

I guess we must be buying them on Amazon, or eBay, or perhaps they're being ordered through book clubs or being sent as presents by dutiful daughters such as myself.

My father loves reading and always asks for books for his birthday, which is a nightmare if Dick Francis hasn't published anything recently.

My sister went for the safe choice - Dame Stella Rimington's latest spy thriller - but I was stumped. I usually send him a book token, but since he's moved to the wilds of south-west France he has nowhere to go and spend it.

So I've bought him Daisy Waugh's Bordeaux Housewives because it's about ex-Pats living in - you've guessed it - the wilds of southwest France.

I'm reading it first, for research purposes. It's simple, commercial and terribly silly and does exactly what it says on the girly cover.

I can't put it down.