Posted by on Jul 31, 2009 in Jennifer Donnelly, Young Adult novels | 2 Comments

Blown Away by YA Sometimes strange things happen. I’ve been reading Young Adult novels, for a project I’m hoping to be chosen to work on and – to be blunt – it’s been a chore. Most of what I picked up seemed angsty and febrile, neither of them in a good way. I know young […]

Posted by on Jul 28, 2009 in swine flu, writing to deadlines | No Comments

More swine flu, more writing, less fun every minuteSwine flu. Which I still don’t have. I have a headache and I have aching joints, but that’s probably because I’m doing a bit more than I should be post-operative wise, because there isn’t actually anybody else to do it when OH has swine flu. When you’re […]

Swine flu and racism More pigs. I seem to have a bit of a pig phase going on this month. OH has swine flu and anti-viral treatment and I have a headache … whether it will turn into swine flu I have no idea but I do know there’s nobody to go and get me […]

Novel Review: The Mistress of Nothing Kate Pullinger’s novel, The Mistress of Nothing, is an historical work that has a number of layers. First there’s some historiography – the characters in the novel, by and large, were real people with a well-catalogued reality, like Lucie Duff Gordon, darling of Victorian intellectual society. Second, there’s an […]

From the troubled to the troublingHaving struck a chord with a lot of readers earlier this week, I’m going to probably alienate many of them right now. The How Publishing Really Works blog declared 17 July Anti-Plagiarism Day. Okay, I can see why. I do understand how galling it is to have work stolen and […]

Why your novel, beautiful as it is, will never get published …• Procrastination is the thief of time • The best drives out the good • You are a writer – so write, damn you! These three sentences rotate on the corkboard above my computer. They are written on three post-it pads, which are pinned […]

Hashish, Wine, Opium Not my methods for getting through convalescence, sadly, but an excellent book published by Oneworld Classics and which they were kind enough to send to me. I’ve said before that Charles Baudelaire has a strange place in my heart, having been both my introduction to French literature and my introduction to the […]

Entering Contests (a cautionary tale written in the second person) You had always known better. You grew up in a pub, where the late night drunken phone call was a regular joke. At first it was the call made to the pub’s payphone and, woken by the ringing, you would creep down in your dressing […]

Why blog? It’s a long time since I started blogging. I’m in awe of those people who remember writing anniversaries and notice their hundredth or five hundredth post or whatever. I don’t. I think I would go insane if I knew how long it took me to write a novel or thought about how many […]