Category Archives: Writing & Reading

Week

What an ericacious exhausting sackbut amazing week. It started last Saturday morning when I discovered that I was being followed by the Literary Editor of the Times.  Followed, in the sense of Twitter. At least, I don’t think the Literary … Continue reading

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Ultramarine

One or two of you might have read By The Sea, my Gothick Bodice Ripper with Detectives, which was originally serialized by my Occam’s Typewriter Compadre Jenny Rohn on her LabLit website, but now published in book form and available … Continue reading

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Nautilus

I really can’t believe it. I’ve been writing books for thirty years, but have never seen the anticipation that’s buzzing around my fifthforthcoming tome, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth. When a book of mine is published, it’s … Continue reading

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Pliny

Pliny the Elder, yes, that’s the one, the author of Natural History, which got a very poor review on Goodreads at the time, one reader castigating the author as ‘that voluminous, industrious, unphilosophical, gullible, unsystematic old gossip’, who nevertheless died … Continue reading

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Scrabbungulate

I’m not sure whether either of you know that I am rather fond of Scrabble. I can be found haunting the Internet Scrabble Club under the name of zedwave, (playing Scrabble online with people you know only as nicknames is, … Continue reading

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Clichécollisional

Headline for this story, from the Daily Telegraph‘s landing page: BORIS JOHNSON PLEDGES TO RAMP UP VACCINATION ROLL OUT The italics are mine. Perhaps I am just unusually literal-minded, or oversensitive to cliché but this seems to mix metaphors such … Continue reading

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Bhooq

As I am sure you both know, I have been hard at work on a book. Refractory ‘t’s have yet to be crossed and the final recalcitrant ‘i’s dotted, but time waits for no-one, and as the remorseless schedules of … Continue reading

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Squintlepiece

The Turkey City Lexicon is a document from the SF Writers of America that offers advice to would-be authors of science fiction, pointing out the pitfalls that snare the unwary novice. A problem peculiar to SF is striking a balance … Continue reading

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AdHederance

Over the festive period I’ve been ploughing through a volume of some vastness entitled 65 Great Tales of the Supernatural (ed. Mary Danby). I bought this grimoire secondhand a long time ago. It contains many well-anthologised old chestnuts such as … Continue reading

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Litreview

Yes, it’s that time again, when I list the books in the year just passed that I have most enjoyed. I’ve been doing this since 2014. That’s when I started noting authors and titles of books I’d read in a … Continue reading

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