I started a new novel ... writing one, I mean. Unlike Rolf Harris, I can't tell what it is yet.

It might to be a nostalgic paean to the 1980s featuring drainpipe jeans, proto-hip hop and bad haircuts (lately, it seems, made good). If so, it will definitely have a touch of the Kureishis and what I have recently come to call 'the commercial ache'. Then again, it might be a postmodern, metatextual navel gaze that has much of Bulgakov's ambition but little of the compensating panache. If so, it will most likely sell three copies; assuming, indeed, it finds a masochistic publisher prepared to watch it squeak and die.

Naturally, I suspect it will emerge as the latter, even though I know it's a bad idea and I hate novels like that. God knows why I work this way. I'd love to plead some kind of undeniable artistic impulse, but I suspect it's really no more than stupidity and bloody-mindedness. Then again, maybe that defines 'artistic impulse' just perfectly.

Anyway, the point is that, either way, it will definitely feature talking foxes. Why? Partly because I want to explore some of the ideas I loitered over in The London Pigeon Wars (and what a riotous bestseller that was) and partly because I seem to hold the belief that talking animals in books is intrinsically a good thing (Bulgakov again, but, more to the point, Roald Dahl).

While writing Pigeon Wars, I developed an eerie relationship with the species. Essentially, I began to see them everywhere and they peered at me accusingly with their beady little eyes. Of course, pigeons are ubiquitous and beady-eyed creatures, so this hardly adds up to 'eerie'. But, as I was approaching the end of the novel, I found a dead pigeon on the balcony of my flat and a couple of weeks later I found another. Thereafter, I became quite convinced that the birds were trying to tell me something in some kind of suicidal Morse.

When I finished the book, I forgot all about it. But, now I've started writing about talking foxes, it's coming back to me ...

Look at the picture above - two pigeon carcasses that I stepped over a few feet from each other on the pavement outside my house. What's more, you might not be able to tell from the crappy photos, but these remnants had been expertly butchered in a way that surely signals vulpine involvement. What am I getting at? I'm not sure really. I can only guess that, in writing about London's foxes, I have somehow disturbed the natural order. As old Will would have it, 'Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles.' Oh yes indeedy ...

A couple of thoughts. First, my solipsism apparently knows no bounds. I mean, are all writers like this? Or, rather, is this an inevitable part of the process of creating narrative? I suppose most individuals consider themselves, more or less, the stars of their personal stories. But I don't imagine many are so arrogant or, perhaps, psychotic as to consider themselves the sole masters of their fate. Now, I don't really consider myself very powerful at all. And yet there is something about the process of telling a story that seems to make me believe that I may bring anything into existence - a scary admission probably best saved for therapy. Second, whatever my state of mind (assuming I'm not actually delusional), what the hell's going on with all these pigeons and foxes?