I am addicted to cookery books. I have a large number and like nothing better than to waste time looking at the splendid glossy photos and scanning the ingredients. Of course, most of the time, I never go on to cook the dish. Or if I do, I end up adapting that ingredients list, exchanging...
Fiction imitates life. That’s the idea, anyway. Fiction sets out to create situations, scenarios and settings with which we, as readers, can identify, relate or at least imagine. Yet in many ways, fiction is utterly unlike Real Life. Take the turning points the author has to create and inject into the story to propel the...
Except something within us which is always surprised by change. Not my words but those of Thomas Hardy. And I certainly agree with the sentiment. In fact, the sheer absurdity of how swiftly time goes – not just the days and weeks and months but the years. The decades. How is it possible, for example,...
Recently, I came across a post by a literary agency, claiming that the problem with too many fledgling novelists is that their novels are not sufficiently ‘page-turning.’ The article claimed that this was also the affliction of 19th century novelists who created too many diversions in their narratives. The contemporary reader, evidently, has no time...
There is a phrase which is often heard and frequently repeated that is used to describe people – people from the past who have made a particular impact or have striven and/or achieved something new. Something apparently unexpected. Original. Of course, they were ahead of their time. But it has struck me recently, hearing the...
Good literature, people agree, is long-lasting. It rides out fads and fashions so that years, decades, even centuries on, it still speaks truths to us. And I don’t just mean those huge universal themes to be found in Shakespeare – the perils of excessive ambition or jealousy or pride – the fatal flaws of the...
With all my precious books now packed away ready to be transported to their new home – only a few hundred yards or so from their current one – my thoughts are decidedly switching to where and how they will be displayed on shelves yet to be constructed. And for some of them, in a...
Anyone who has spoken to me in the past 23 months or so will know that I have become mildly obsessed with moving house. For those who have patiently stayed the course and are still talking to me, watching my anxiety levels escalate as Actual Moving Day begins to seem the stuff of reality rather...
And so it’s the Autumn Equinox – as unbelievable as it seems to think we’ve reached the point in the year when there are equal hours of light and dark. Another way of looking at it is, of course, that it’s head down now into the tunnel of darkness that comprises winter in the northern...
There are questions that I am frequently asked at author talks and events. What is your writing routine? How many words do you write in a day? Do you plan each chapter? Do you share your writing with a group? And I am sure I am not unique – that all writers are asked these...
