A few reviews
I’m still astounded that there are readers who go to the trouble of analysing and writing reviews or lengthy posts online about Mortal Ghost. Though it makes me appear anxious...
The quiddity of bestsellers
occasionally has something to do with their oddity, I’m convinced. I’ve just received my 1100-page copy of Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, since I’ve been tripping over my understanding...
Closing the covers
Originally I was planning to write a long and well-argued piece about my experiences of publishing fiction on the internet, but after I sat down to do so, I realised...
Mortal Ghost dissected
There is a long and thoughtful post about Mortal Ghost at a blog I read regularly, Breakfast with Pandora. I’m very pleased to receive such frank and generous criticism, and...
Confessions of a teenage alien
I’ve just read Matthew Cheney’s YA story The Boyfriend from Another Planet, which is available over at his always interesting and thought-provoking blog The Mumpsimus. The story is great fun,...
Not even a suitcase
How much sadness we carry for the lives we ignore, or forget, or simply lose; lives that have made our own possible. My paternal grandmother spent the last third –...
The reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others
Thanks go to fantasy author Juliet E. McKenna for sending me Mark Twain’s Rules of Writing: 1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. 2. The episodes of a...
Jonathan Lethem on plagiarism
Highly recommended!From the Harper’s essay: At the same time, copyright is revered by most established writers and artists as a birthright and bulwark, the source of nurture for their infinitely...
Marketing Bling
Naive that I am, I hadn’t realised until this afternoon that publishers often send off nice little marketing presents, or at least gorgeous packaging, with their review copies. Now since...
Knotty problems, or when is a coffee cup identical to a doughnut?
Why knot theory should interest a writer of YA fiction is probably unanswerable, but Ken Millet, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has this to...
And then there are the mornings
when I wake very early, lie in the dark without rising, and ask myself why I do this mad thing – write words that at best a scattering of people...
I will always remember Africa singing
The men sang. The women sang. The old sang. The young. The drums sang, and the insects sang, and the rain sang, and the endless sky and numberless stars and...