As a child, whenever I heard the expression “More than one way to skin a cat,” I knew, despite the gory scene it evoked, that the phrase was meant as a middle-finger gesture (or a V-sign in UK) to authority. Or … Continue reading
The process I saw evolving in the Wolverhampton South West constituency of Enoch Powell in 1968 wasn’t the burgeoning of racist violence that he alluded to in his infamous Rivers of Blood speech, which he delivered that April 20th — … Continue reading
I’ve been reminded the last few days how being in unfamiliar surroundings has often been inspiring for my writing. I can’t count the number of times that first lines came to me while travelling alone. The first line of my … Continue reading
One can’t help but think that the world would be a better place if politicians were forced to study plot development. They always seem surprised that unfortunate things happen as a result of their policies, when fiction writers could have … Continue reading
Nine months ago I was so dispirited by the growing preponderance of right wing extremism in the world — particularly the burgeoning of Donald Trump’s popularity — that I decided I had to take steps to stop myself descending into … Continue reading
Yet-to-be-published authors on the long and winding road to finding an agent and/or a publisher might like to stop reading now. This whingeing blog by a whiner of a published writer is likely to annoy, irritate, and piss you off. … Continue reading
It would be folly to suggest that all fiction writers are mentally unstable, but the preponderance of authors with ‘problems’ does appear to be endless. Sylvia Plath: bipolar. Jonathan Swift, Emily Bronte, and John Milton: all thought to suffer from … Continue reading
The tempest raging around ‘cultural appropriation’ in fiction. Last autumn, just before my novel, The Speech, was published, Lionel Shriver — British resident, and American author of ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’ — scared the hell out of me. … Continue reading
Often a place is as strong a character in a novel as any human. For example, it’s impossible to imagine Bronte novels set outside of the West Yorkshire Pennines, an area now referred to as ‘Bronte country.’ The town of … Continue reading