I am ashamed My friend John, from Kerala, emailed me. ‘What are you telling me now, about sending my son to England for his university education?’ he asks. What indeed? Big Brother is the worst form of reality TV, and it has revealed the worst form of reality – racist bullying. Shilpa Shetty is a […]
Resolutions Did you make any? Were they literary? My favourite psychologist (yes, I do have a favourite) the excellently offbeat Professor Richard Wiseman, has been talking about resolutions and how little we know about the process of making (and breaking) them. He points out that the advice given in every agony column and on every […]
So much to say The problem with only blogging twice a week is I have to save things up! 1 – Take this from Publisher’s Weekly back in September – Last week’s announcement of the Sobol Awards—in which online submissions from unpublished fiction writers compete (for an $85 fee) for thousands of dollars in prizes […]
Quickies Yesterday afternoon I had an idea for an article – just a tiny one, around 700 words, about breaking into a certain magazine market. The reason it occured to me was that I was filing all my last year’s queries, and spotted a pattern to the acceptances that I hadn’t recognised before. Hmm, I […]
How was 2006 for you? In the spirit of transparency, here’s how it was for me – as a fiction writer, rather than as a fully rounded human being. Lots of wonderful, terrible, and mundane things happened to the human being, but this is simply the writer’s year: Submissions – 181 (112 still outstanding) Print […]
Happy New Year! A great way to start is to have the invaluable (for writers) service of Google Alert tell you that something has been published, in this case, my latest Moondance column … http://beta.moondance.org/2006/winter2006/columns/sexton.html And I have a 2007 resolution to share with you – I’m reducing posting on this blog to twice a […]
Clairefontaine I wasn’t going to post again until after Christmas, being somewhat in the doldrums, but yesterday I went shopping in Brighton and came home with a Clairefontaine notebook – buff faux leather cover, (that’s buff as in hue, for Americans who think I think my notebook has a sexy body) stitched pages, ruled … […]
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