Book Review: Hector and the Search for Happiness This is one of those self-help books that masquerade as narrative. Reading back the sentence above, it sounds a little dismissive and it shouldn’t. Most people need help at differing points in their lives – fulfilling potential is rarely something that the average human achieves alone. Self-help […]
Wishing I was eighteen again Not because of the ‘rejection’ of not making the Sunday Times shortlist. Not even to relive my misspent youth, become a notorious tart and then write a book about it (see review of Belle de Jour later this week), but because I had lunch with Louise Halvardsson earlier in the […]
Why success changes writers Okay, first define success. Is it a success to have been long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG competition? Shortlisted for the Willesden Herald when it was still a £5,000 prize? Runner up in the Guardian flash fiction comp which brought nothing but glory (and precious little of that)? Yes. And I’ll […]
This month I’ve had an essay entitled Losing the Space Race published in Gastronomica. It features my mother, purple mini-skirts and the Smash robots and has made me very happy. Just call me Nigel Slater … And yes, I am also very happy to have been longlisted for the Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award.Of course […]
Mini book reviews and other literary things I had the most amazing time at West Sussex Writers’ Club! If the assembled members enjoyed themselves even half as much as I did, then a good evening was had by all. Now I’m looking forward to judging their romantic novel opening competition. I do have something I […]
Why small presses don’t get many books reviewed Today I am not happy. I have the comet’s tail end of a migraine, complete with weird black floaters and the sense that if I didn’t have my wonderful medication, I would also have pain. A world of pain. On Friday I had the full-blown, shutters-down start […]
2010 is a better writing year already … Last year was depressing beyond expression (which is probably why I spent the year writing a novel about autism, suicide, adoption and race! Art imitating life etc) but already I am enjoying 2010 more because: On 5th February a story of mine is being read aloud at […]
Writing about unattractive characters I’m wading my way through A Game with Sharpened Knives by Neil Belton and thinking about how people write unlikeable characters. When I say wading, I don’t mean that the book is badly written because it’s not; it’s an allusive, complex, disjointed narrative that opens up the lives of Erwin Shrodinger […]
Snow interrupts play Or rather, it interrupts work. I have just finished writing a commissioned erotica (paradoxically, featuring a parasol and a tropical waterslide, very inapposite to the snow outside) and spent several days turning over a pile of short stories, deciding what to send where. It’s a thankless bloody task, as any writer will […]
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