Archive | January, 2009
Night Bus published
My short story Night Bus was recently published in issue 13 of Smoke: A London Peculiar. Among all the young, drunk people on the top deck of the night bus, one quiet, middle-aged man stands out as different, and starts to attract unwelcome attention.
“The Politics of Experience” by R.D. Laing
What if the “delusions” reported by patients during psychotic episodes were not symptoms of a disease, but valid descriptions of their experiences?
House style
The editing is finished. The book is at the printers. An enthusiastic blurb appeared on the Legend Press website, so presumably they’re happy with it too (or perhaps they’re just happy it’s at the printers). I am relieved and scared. I am also pondering some of the odd little changes made in the name of [...]
The Triumph of Triviality
We are the people of tomorrow, we have more stuff than anybody’s ever had before, and we are so stupid and self-absorbed that we can’t even bring ourselves to care about our imminent destruction of the planet (voting on the X-Factor, now, that’s a different story). We are trivial. We are foolish. We are wilfully ignorant. We are lost.
Americans in the gulag
Just caught a fascinating piece in the Times Literary Supplement about the thousands of Americans who, either out of idealism or to escape the Great Depression, moved to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Many of them were then swept up in Stalin’s purges and ended up in the gulag system. It’s a piece of [...]
Proofing
Have been immersed in reading the proof copy of my novel for the last few days. I hate this part. Not reading my novel – it’s not that bad! No, what I hate is proof-reading, editing word by word, line by line, second-guessing myself, looking up each fact, each spelling, each grammatical rule. Writing it [...]
RIP Pick More Daisies
My favourite cafe in Crouch End, the cafe where I wrote most of my novel On the Holloway Road, has just put up a notice saying it has fallen victim to the credit crunch and closed down. It was a shock to me. The place was perfect for writing. It had friendly staff, American-diner-style bottomless coffee, [...]
New short story published
My short story Safety was recently published in Carillon Magazine. A woman tries to keep herself safe from life by never leaving her flat in her gated community. But eventually, of course, she has to leave…
Consume less, live more!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4OPFl2Kxhs&hl=en&fs=1] From Friends of the Earth, http://www.foei.org/en/get-involved/livemore. Seen originally as a cartoon in New Internationalist, August 2008
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The 20 best Caribbean book blogs
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Liebster Award reloaded
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The cafe killer
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The Kindle Report: does it beat paper?
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The next big thing…
