Charles Lambert with Little Monsters I have a particular yen for reading books about one place when I’m in another, very different one. I read The God of Small Things in Rekjavik, and The Bear Comes Home in Kerala (I refused to read Roy’s book while I was in her home state and it was […]

Okay, so what’s been happening? • Ren received a kindly review of ‘Lords of Light’, recently published in SF Waxes Philosophical – you can read it here, and signed a contract for a novella ‘Miss’ to be published• Carmel sold a story to Forum and another to Scarlet• Kay discovered what her new novel is […]

What happens to you when you write? I’ll tell you what happens to me when I start to write a piece of long fiction (novel/novella/play) as long as you promise not to laugh (or at least, not to laugh where I can hear you). The first thing is I start to dream as if I […]

My last post brought such excellent comments that I’m going to revisit it briefly, before moving on. Vanessa raised the question of whether we look at books as readers or writers, when we are asked to review them, and it’s an important, possibly crucial, point. What a reader wants from a book may be very […]

The downside of marketing yourself Just to prove that I’m being honest about the experience of ‘marketing’, the past week has actually slapped me with a whole messy handful of dilemmas that arise for many writers once they start being ‘known’. 1 – a writer I’ve never met, whose work I’ve never read, asked me […]

And so to market … It seems to me, to strain a metaphor to the point that I can get this picture to illustrate it, that something many writers don’t appreciate is how much of the modern writing life is about marketing. Like the submarine, with seven-tenths below the surface, and barely a ripple above, […]

Talking to Sally Hinchcliffe Today is a rare experience – I’ve interviewed an author whom I actually have met! Sally Hinchliffe, who used to work at Kew Botanic Gardens(one of my favourite places) turned up at a reading – not to see me particularly, but we got to talking, found we had much in common, […]

Tag, tag, tag … First, and most interestingly, the excellent Sandra Scoppettone tagged me with this exercise, which is to promote books of recent publication that might be sliding from the public eye. It was the brainchild of Patti Abbot and I think it’s a great idea. My choice is a novel by Jill Dawson, […]