Any port in a storm. You have to imagine me smiling to myself as I write this post. Not one of those ‘I’m the bee’s knees’ smug grins, but a gentle ‘groovy’ crescent on my lips. (I am making it a personal campaign to get groovy back in our everyday vocabulary.) Three novels published in …
Tag: Standpoint
Writer as Gardener
Autumn is a time of harvest. As a former ‘green living’ columnist* the environment and the page are inextricably linked for me. Whether it’s planning for the season to come, falling in with the rhythms of the year, or taking careful note of what’s developing, the metaphor of garden as creativity was – and is – …
Hats off to writers
Nature’s hatstand I love a good back story. Now we’ve decided to shorten the third thriller in the Bladen series (giving it more of a pulp novel feel in my opinion) I’ve busy doing some pruning. It’s entirely possible that some scenes, flashbacks and dialogue will live again in another form, but they’ll more likely …
What can you say apart from please buy my book? Pt 2
Sometimes you need to branch out. For a novelist, being published presents a whole new set of challenges. You suddenly have to do other sorts of writing, including writing about writing. There are online blurbs, interviews (I’ll mention in passing that I’m still available…), and the subtle – or not so subtle – art of promoting your novel. …
The Romance of Radio
Do you remember Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles? There’s wisdom in them there lyrics. Technology’s fab and groovy, but sometimes it lacks romance. When I was a lad we would sometimes go to a caravan park in Essex (a trailer park for the weekend, for our transatlantic cousins). I used to lie awake …
A Numbers Game
Safety in numbers? I love the poetry of numbers, and the certainty. Two minuses added together (or multiplied) result in a positive number. Prime numbers conform to agreed rules – although I have read fierce debates over the inclusion of 1 and 2. And that ‘adding up to 9’ rule is very handy when it …
Line of Sight – now available on Kindle
Line of Sight is published by Joffe Books There’s a certain irony in my absence from my writing blog. That’s right – I’ve been busy writing. Plus some editing too. And a few rewrites. And several sentence fragments. Like that one.My second thriller (can you have a debut sequel if it’s part of a series?), …
Authority
Making waves and creating a splash. Hello there. I’m writing this in advance, so this may only be accurate at the time of typing (on 22/04). My debut thriller, Standpoint, is doing well. I know it’s not a very British thing to say, and I’ll come back to British things later, but there it is. …
Standpoint – Glossary of British Slang Terms
It’s always struck me as slightly strange that we refer to this language as English when it’s really an amalgamation of many languages that have changed and enriched it over the centuries. Back in the day (the late 80s, in case you were wondering) I spent a year in the US and soon realised that their …
Standpoint – when characters come to life
The first time I thought my Brit thriller, Standpoint, might have legs was when I had an argument with the main character in a car. Yes, I know how ridiculous that looks on a screen, but it’s what happened. It was during a novel writing summer school tutored by Jane Pollard at University College Falmouth. …