Literature . Novels . Research . Variable Stars
Books I’ve Read This Year
On 30 November 2010 by AdminNow that the Best of Year book list season is upon us, it seems a good moment to compile my own – a snapshot of my reading over the year. The trouble is that three books – the usual number in such round-ups – isn’t nearly enough. I started off with twenty, thinking I’d probably
Literature . Novels . The Dark Tower . Undiscovered Country . Writing
What’s in a name?
On 10 November 2010 by Admin‘What’s in a name?’ asked Shakespeare – ahead of the game as usual – and it’s certainly a question I’ve been asking myself a lot recently, with regard to titles. Ah yes, titles… that most difficult of things to get right. Perhaps only naming a rock band is more fraught with complexities, and potential pitfalls…
A Mild Suicide . Literature . Novels . Undiscovered Country . Venezuela . Writing
Living Your Life In Fiction
On 22 October 2010 by AdminNovels don’t always stay within their pages. The revelation, last week, that the Swedish novelist and campaigning leftwing journalist Stieg Larsson, author of the best-selling Millennium trilogy, was instrumental in training Eritrean women fighters during that country’s civil war, might have come straight from one of his own novels. Nor are Larsson’s the only works
eBooks . iPad . Kindle . Literature . Novels . Writing
Fiction Can Save Your Life
On 7 October 2010 by AdminFlying back from New York a couple of nights ago, on the ‘red-eye’ – and never was an unaffectionate nickname more aptly bestowed – I found myself once more confronting the fact that a good book can save your life. I’m speaking figuratively, of course – although there are doubtless instances, from the bullet-stopping Bibles
A Mild Suicide . Historical Fiction . Literature . Novels . Research . The Dark Tower . Undiscovered Country . Variable Stars . Writing
Writing Historical Fiction
On 1 September 2010 by Admin‘I don’t like historical fiction,’ a friend said recently and, until a few years ago, I might well have agreed with him. I mean – what’s the point of setting your story in the past, when there’s so much about the present that’s worth describing? Of having to go to all the trouble of recreating
A Mild Suicide . Literature . Novels . Sex . The Dark Tower . Undiscovered Country . Writing
Writing about Sex
On 2 August 2010 by AdminWriting about sex is hard, as everybody knows. Unless you’re as breezily unafraid of double entendre as Kathy Lette, or as secure in the knowledge of your own literary genius as Philip Roth – whose depictions, in successive novels, of liaisons between septuagenarian men and thirty-something women, are offered without a trace of humour –
Encore Prize . Literature . Novels . Undiscovered Country . Venezuela . Writing
Rediscovering Undiscovered Country
On 27 July 2010 by AdminFor the past six weeks, I’ve been retyping one of my previously published novels – a task that might strike some people as entirely pointless. There’ve certainly been times when I’ve identified with the deluded hero of the Borges short story who, having transcribed Cervantes’ Don Quixote line for line, believes himself to be the
Novels . The Dark Tower . Writing
On Not Being Stephen King
On 20 July 2010 by AdminStephen King and I have quite a lot in common. We’re both writers, for a start – although, admittedly, his sales are rather better than mine. We both have names that mean the same thing, and that begin with the same letter: he’s just before me on the shelf half-way along the ‘Fiction’ wall in
Literature . Novels . Writing
Writing for profit and pleasure
On 13 July 2010 by AdminWhy do people write? Novels, I mean. Short stories. Plays. Poetry. It’s hard, unremitting and – with some much-publicised exceptions – financially unrewarding work. You get up each day, and are faced with a blank page – or screen – which you have to cover with words. Those words have to hang together, not only