Sam Leith / Features / Untitled Books

"Being a paranoid self-googler, I sneakily check online. There’s only one review in the Sunday papers – an unenthusiastic one in the Observer. I practise shrugging it off with dignity, testing out various nonchalant faces in the mirror."

Sam Leith

Sam Leith, former Literary Editor of the Telegraph, writes of a week of two births: his first novel and his second child.

Sunday 3rd April

Tomorrow's the big day: my first novel, The Coincidence Engine, is officially released and my second child is due into the world. As you can imagine, I've made all the hay of this I can, publicity-wise. My novel is about a magic (well, effectively magic) machine that affects probability and causes outlandish things to happen. And its pub date is the same as my due date. What are the chances?

Actually, it's the first child that's currently making its presence felt. Alice and I come back from a party and get to bed at midnight. Marlene, to torment us, is up from 3:30 to 4:30am; then from 6:15am for good. Hollow-eyed, I watch my daughter running around shouting "Dora! Dora! Dora!" Not unreasonably, Dora the Explorer figures larger in her 21-month-old mind than The Coincidence Engine.

Being a paranoid self-googler, I sneakily check online. There's only one review in the Sunday papers - an unenthusiastic one in the Observer. I practise shrugging it off with dignity, testing out various nonchalant faces in the mirror. Later, I try to sleep while Marlene has her afternoon nap, but I'm woken first by a chugger ringing the doorbell, then by my daughter deciding she's had enough sleep after an hour. Later, Marlene refuses her supper and shits in the bath. Hot dog.

Monday 4th

I spend most of the day absorbed in The Pale King, the novel David Foster Wallace left unfinished, two and a half years ago, when he killed himself. I'm reviewing it for the Spectator. It makes me sad that the mind - sorry, not just the mind; the spirit -that produced Infinite Jest and those wonderful essays is gone.

There's no sign of the baby. Alice comes back from a midwife's appointment to report that the infant - we don't know whether it's a boy or a girl - is "engaged". It's now having a fag and a bit of a sit down, presumably.

Tuesday 5th

More of The Pale King. It's the funniest and only 500-page book about tax inspectors ever written, I suspect. Once I've got this done, and next week's Guardian column, that's most of my work hurdles out of the way. I reward myself with the traditional writer's activity: Facebook Scrabble. I have one regular opponent, who beats me about two times in three. He is the secret sharer of my writing life; we've played Scrabble for years. But I've never met him. Odd, but I quite like that.

No sign of junior. To bring on labour, according to various authorities, you're supposed to have raspberry leaf tea, or a hot curry, or sex. Alice says she thinks maybe we ought to go and buy some raspberry tea. I get as far as: "Or..." and she gives me a look.

Wednesday 6th

Up early with Marlene, again. It is my theory that toddlers are able to detect the pheremonal traces of an imminent birth in the family (this theory has no evidence to back it up), and respond by making themselves particularly difficult. This is because they know their dad is on the early shift.

In the evening - leaving my phone on just in case - I go into Soho to attend the launch dinner for my friend Philip Hensher's new novel, King of the Badgers. "Don't get too drunk," Alice said before I went. I return at 11:15 having honoured the spirit, if not the letter, of her injunction. "Are you drunk?" she says, after I try to take my trousers off without waking her up. "Are you in labour?" I say. "No," she says. "Move over," I say.

Thursday 7th

I should be reading for Samuel Johnson - the nonfiction prize that I'm helping judge this year. The spare room (where I read because that's the only place Alice will countenance me keeping my favourite snot-green velour armchair) is currently piled high with hardback books about Hitler, gardening, etc., with cantankerous notes scribbled in the margins.

I say, I should be reading. Instead we go out to try and buy a car. Our old BMW 3-series (bought from a friend of a friend for £1500 three years ago) is not the ideal family wagon. It has no back doors, a tiny boot, frequently breaks down, and even before the new baby arrived presented us with the problem that we could only ever fit two of daughter, luggage and cat in the car, but not all three. After months of dithering (even once you've decided on a colour, the sheer number of options - make, model, engine size and the other stuff - make car-buying nearly impossible) we go to a Skoda dealer in Watford and invest in a used Octavia Estate. I feel instantly like a dad. Our main stipulation was that it have those things that go "beep" when you're about to reverse into something. They're far and away the best thing about cars.

In the evening I watch myself sharing my "Bedside Reads" with viewers of the Sky Arts Book Show. Well, truth told I sort of squint through my fingers. Can everyone else see how terrified I am in front of the camera? I talk like a ventriloquist's dummy. Still, Mariella Frostrup says something kind and they show the cover of my book so this is Good Publicity.

Friday 8th

Back to Sam Johnson. It's like comparing apples with oranges. (A cliché, let it be noted, of the sort that would put the writer well down my Samuel Johnson rankings.) How do you compare the value of a dully-written book about fascinating science with a brilliantly written book about nothing much in particular; a highly original attack on a marginal subject with an exemplary instance of straightforward traditional biography? Are there bonus points for a book being thick or difficult? How important is breaking new ground? Original research versus masterly synthesis? And what about this one book that I'm slightly in love with, about a pet snail?

Saturday 9th

Marlene up at 5:45am, damn her eyes. Hoping there might be another review in one of the papers, but out of luck. (Later I find - hooray! - there's a friendly one in the FT.) I try to resist logging onto Amazon Author Central, the awful, awful resource of the online bookshop that allows you to track the sales rank of your book hour by hour. I've heard it called "author crack".

Today is a day for healthy extroversion: a long sunny walk and a picnic on Primrose Hill (they bring on labour, apparently: walks, not picnics).

"Duck! Duck! Quack quack quack quack!" says Marlene. I'm proud of her language skills. When I point to Alice's bump, and say, "What's in there?" she says: "Baboo!" Christ alive, is she in for a shock.

...........................................................................................................................................................The The Coincidence Engine by Sam Leith is published by Bloomsbury

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Thursday, 21 April, 2011