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Plot. I have issues with plot. I have a mental block when it comes to getting my characters from one big event to another via smaller events. Perhaps it’s just a confusion, a lack of being able to see the big picture, and the plot really is there and I just can’t see it. If…
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Some sessions at alt.fiction 2010 were done as podcasts. They are being posted weekly on the alt.fiction website. So far they have two; Dark Fantasy vs Horror and An Audience with Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Jones.
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Book club time! This month we read One Day by David Nicholls. It’s mainstream fiction of the Nick Hornby type. I don’t really know what to say about this. The writing was amazing. It was so deft, assured and done with such a light touch that I was left feeling very disappointed that this talent…
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So, I’m making my way through the Fantasy Masterworks series – this is going to take some time, bear with me – and lately I read The Broken Sword by the prolific Poul Anderson. It’s number 32 of 50; obviously I’m not doing this in order. For the record I’ve already read numbers 13, 17,…
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The Book People come to where I work and sometimes you can gets lots of books for little money. The last time they had eight Sookie Stackhouse novels for a tenner. Even taking off the two I’ve already bought, it was still a bargain, so here I am, reading more pulp fiction. Club Dead by…
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I use the word ruthless quite a bit and the other day I was wondering whether there was such a word as ruth, so that one could be absent of it. In one of those marvellously serendipitous coincidences a couple of days later my dictionary.com Word of the Day was ‘ruth’. It means compassion or…
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Confessor is the last of a long cycle by Terry Goodkind. Once again, I haven’t read the others; it’s just something I found on my shelf. I enjoyed the writing. There was extensive philosophical dialogue that was nicely handled. It made me realised that my characters tend to talk in short, clipped bursts, trading swifts…
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Wow, what a difference two years makes. I’ve just got back from alt.fiction 2010 and it was thought-provoking and inspiring. I went to alt.fiction 2008 and it was a fun event. I met some people and learnt some things about writing and getting published, but it wasn’t such an amazing experience that I was keen…
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As I’m working my way through my enormous pile of unread books, which is not getting any smaller as I keep adding to it, not that I have some sort of addiction to buying books, I’m reading books that are in a series where I haven’t read the first one. The first of these is…
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I was reading ‘The “Tyranny of Sex” in the Saudi Novel over at MuslimahMediaWatch today and it got me thinking about sex and writing, or more specifically, writing sex scenes. While the MuslimahMediaWatch article is more focussed on reflecting on Saudi society, this caught my eye: It was government cultural head Mahmoud Al-Watan who complained…
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Boudica Marginalia 