Not for shopping, but for shortlists. The Costa shortlist is out! Last year’s winning novel, A Song for Achilles, was one the few books I loved so much that when I got to the end I went straight to the beginning and started again. Always offering an alternative approach, for the first time, two graphic novels…
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Yesterday, to mark the occasion of the manufacture of the last typewriter, the BBC published an article about people – author Will Self among them – for whom a computer is not their first choice when it comes to writing. High on the list of reasons is the typewriter offers no time-wasting distractions…   

“Forget the peel. Get to the banana.” Chuck Wendig.

“You can’t edit a blank page.” Joanne Penn, The Creative Penn.

On 21st July 1977 Anthony Penrose lost his embarrassing mother – someone who had been known to appear bare-breasted when he brought his friends home to tea; someone who could barely darn a sock; occasional writer of cookery books – soon to discover that he had been cheated.  Born Elizabeth Miller, she would reinvent herself as Lee Miller and…
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I’ll admit it: I love cemeteries. Not because I’m a morbid person, but because the stories found on gravestones tend to carry a little more magic than ideas that start life inside an author’s head, simply because they are true. Until they grow wings.       At the Royal Hospital Burial Ground in Chelsea we find two examples of…
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Having just caught up with Jen Campbell’s lovely blog, and read about a poem called, ‘what is the most shop-lifted book in the world?’ I decided to look the answer up. The answer: The Bible. The most shop-lifted book of all time? Still The Bible. Where is your imagination? I had hoped for something that would be…
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Ian Rankin brought so many perfect sound-bites to BBC’s Imagine that I didn’t exhaust all my notes in one post. He drew from his father’s outlook, a ‘wonderful liar’ who could turn the smallest nick in his knee into a bullet wound.  He spoke also about writing as a way of making sense of the world, and more specifically…
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His novels translated into twenty-two languages, bestsellers on several continents, it would be fair to assume that crime-writer Ian Rankin can sit back a little and relax. Not so. Initially optimistic before setting to work on his latest project, he quips that, if you’re a novelist, one good idea a year is all you need. On the wall…
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Like many writers, I have been resistent to the concept of self-pulishing. All the more reason to attend the Writers’ and Artists’ Conference (those very nice people who bring us the yearbook). Alison Bavistock kicked off proceedings by reminding us of a few names who have taken this route before: Virginia Woolfe, Mark Twain, Beatrix…
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