Today is World Lupus Day. There’s a famous quotation from Flannery O’ Connor that sometimes floats past in meme form on my Facebook feed – “Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.” Wrong. That’s lupus, which is possibly the only thing I have in …
Poems for World Lupus Day When I decided to do the Open University Creative Writing course, I was so intimidated by the idea of the poetry module that I phoned up the course team and asked if it was possible to complete without doing the poetry TMAs – and I allowed myself to be talked …
Why write at all? It’s hard work – the hardest work I’ve ever done. It’s not a way to earn a living. It’s hard to get published – and although self publishing is now an option that’s more hard stuff you have to learn and do or pay for… Yet lots of us do it. …
Be aware that this is long and chock full of spoilers. There’s no way to write about the stuff which interested me in the novel without them, and I couldn’t find a way of minimising them. Still, if you’re planning to read it and you’re the kind of person for whom spoilers actually spoil the …
I’m working on the second draft of my memoir/fictionalised autobiography – keeping to a straight forward chronological structure, from earliest memories until now. At the same time, I’m doing a lot of thinking about a better structure. One of the problems with my current linear approach is that the first twenty thousand words are in …
It’s hard to know when to give up, especially on a piece of work which has taken years, but I’ve reached that point with my second novel. Another rejection arrived today, and it confirmed a decision I’d already made. Compared with the first novel, it collected a lot of personalised rejections, with praise for my …
Yesterday I discovered my memoir piece, “If…” was shortlisted for the Fish Short Memoir Prize. I am so encouraged by this – for a couple of reasons. First, when I wrote it, I instinctively felt it was a piece of writing I could be proud of, and I submitted it unusually soon after I wrote …
This meme surfaces on Facebook with depressing regularity. I wrote about it on my expired blog back in 2015, but I saw it again earlier this week. There seem to be a never ending stream of people who like and agree with it, and every time I see it, I argue. It keeps me out …
An eggcorn is a misheard word – eggcorn itself being a mishearing of the word acorn. I’ve always enjoyed the misheard lyrics – from Gladly the cross eyed bear in my childhood Sunday School days, to the more adult collection from Peter Kay which you can watch on YouTube. There’s something just a little bit …
Spoilers everywhere, so do read the book first. It’s only a very intense seventy pages or so… I read Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers at the end of last year (thanks Graham) and I immediately pre-ordered Lanny. I was nervous about Lanny because how could it measure up to such an extraordinary …