You are all madcrazy lunatic people who talk to invisible butterflies, but I love you anyway, and thank you for the thought.

But one person asked me when I knew. In other words, did I get a warning before the list came out that I wasn’t going to be on it?

Honestly?

I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be on the list when I typed the word ‘ninja’ and didn’t immediately delete it :)

Joking aside, we surely do have certain preconceptions about what kind of subject matter is literary. If you want to write a prizewinning literary novel about, for example, cows taking over Westminster, you’re going to have a longer journey than if you write about life in the Cambridgeshire Fens during the 1970s. (And of course, you’re going to have to distance yourself from Animal Farm at the same time. Tricky. Maybe not the best example, but it’s a Sunday morning and I’m covered in attic dust. Do not ask about the attic dust. I mention it purely for local colour. If you quiz me on it, I’ll cough on you.)

Lauren Groff, who wrote the gripping “Monsters of Templeton”, which I’m reading at the moment, called my book a hybrid, and I think that’s exactly the point. It’s an outlaw – and that pleases me enormously. But outlaws don’t get given the keys to the city – until there’s some kind of Kurosawa-style bandit invasion.

This has run away with me, hasn’t it? What the hell would a bandit invasion look like in literary terms? I’d have to write a book which shot a whole bunch of holes in the cult of celebrity biographies or something.

Look, anyway… thank you for asking. Wish me luck for all the others. But don’t fret. What makes my heart sing right now is reading something like this about the book when I get my Sunday morning Google Alert:

IT’S MADE FROM AWESOME