Trick or treat
This is a story about Halloween, a packet of toffees, and a bloke. The toffees are easiest to describe, so I’ll start with them. Chewy treacle, a whole 1,35 kilos...
This is a story about Halloween, a packet of toffees, and a bloke. The toffees are easiest to describe, so I’ll start with them. Chewy treacle, a whole 1,35 kilos...
As someone who is skeptical about editors – though committed to brutal self-editing – I must get a look at the new edition of What We Talk About When We...
Whilst only in my wildest daydreams could my numbers begin to approach Neil Gaiman’s million blog readers, I did a tally today for the fantastic people at Carmarthenshire who have...
A few guidelines: Don’t check your stats after each new sentence you write. Don’t read the latest Richard & Judy or Oprah titles and gnash your teeth. Don’t search every...
Over a long and caffeine-fuelled breakfast with Hamburg-based painter Miwa Ogasawara, so thin and elegant that I can’t work out where her deep laughter comes from, I ask whether anyone...
of a novel is whether I flip straight from the last page right back to the first in order to reread it. Another is whether I bash my head against...
Hilary Mantel in today’s Guardian: The whole process of creativity is like that. The writer often doesn’t know, consciously, what gods she invokes or what myths she’s retelling. Orpheus is...
Whenever I tell people my children are bilingual (and in one case, multilingual), without exception they say ‘how wonderful!’ But is it? Yes, it’s convenient to be able to ask...
is a case in just what I dislike most about YA publishing: a stereotypical angsty teen; a clever bag of tricks like the Voice of Fate, an imaginary (or maybe...
An interesting 2006 interview with Anton Zeilinger, philosophising professor of physics at Vienna University: We’ve learnt in the natural sciences that the key to understanding can often be found if...
Dear Grandma, Tomorrow is my eldest son’s birthday. He’s at least twice as old as I was when I last saw you, yet how little he knows about his maternal...
The Hydra is a mythical beast.The Hydra lives in the swamp of our imagination.The Hydra has many heads, 9 or 99, which regrow if severed.The Hydra has noxious breath which...