TheNextBigAuthor.com

     Just out of interest, is anyone else doing this?

     For those who've not seen it, thenextbigauthor.com is home to a competition in which you upload the first 5,000-7,000 words of your novel at Arts Council-funded youwriteon.com between the 17th and 31st May 2011 and entrants rate each other's pieces throughout June. The top 5 rated pieces will then get a professional critique from Random House, Bloomsbury, Orion, Little Brown or Hodder & Stoughton, which I'm sure you'll agree would be worth having.
 
     I will be nervously uploading my 7,000 words tomorrow when the competition opens and will jubilantly respond to reviews with a review myself (although you need to have entered to view/review/participate), so hope to see some of you there. Any of you. Anyone? Anyone? Ferris? Anyone?







Literature in Art, Part Two: The Cult of Beauty

     After spending the morning at the V&A exhibit that featured in Literature in Art:, Part One, I spent the afternoon at the V&A’s newest exhibit, The Cult of Beauty. This major collection focuses on the Aestheticism that developed in Britain in the latter half of the 19th century, which featured Keats, William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with Oscar Wilde as the poster boy, believing in truth, love and beauty as raison d’etre - in fact, all those lovely, life-affirming things they sing about in Moulin Rouge!. 

     Of course, finding literary inspiration in a movement that contained quite so much actual literature was never going to be hard; especially when it was so coloured by bohemia and decadence, sensuality and romanticism and a deep appreciation of the ephemeral beauty of life. The poetry practically writes itself, doesn’t it? 







Vintage Classics Day

     On Saturday I attended my second event of the Vintage Book's 21st birthday celebrations (the first being the Vintage Open Day; read my account here), the Vintage Classics Day, at Foyles on Charing Cross Rd. It was a star-studded event that sold out days in advance and served very well to illustrate the beauty and depth of the Vintage backlist and our own literary heritage, the idea being that we were ‘celebrating classics with the writers who will be the classics of the future’. These writers were, namely, Sebastian Faulks, Lionel Shriver, Mark Haddon, Sadie Jones, Jake Arnott and Rose Tremain.







Book Quote Friday: Kew Gardens

     Today's post comes from a short story that entered my life long ago, but recently re-entered it thanks to the swag obtained from the Vintage Open Day: ‘Kew Gardens’ by Virginia Woolf. It is an ecstatic account of a sunny afternoon spent amongst the flowers, which sings with lyricism, colour and life. It is stunning, as hopefully the quote below, the first paragraph of the story, will demonstrate:







7 People I'd Like To Be [Friends With] When I Grow Up

Everyone needs role models. Here are mine:







A Royal Wedding Tribute

My friend's Mum provided all this
beautiful china... I didn't make all this :)

    So, the royal wedding day is upon us. I am beyond excited as I love a good wedding and there's going to be some awesome tea party action in my neighbours front room as we all swoon over the pomp and circumstance and Kate's sure-to-be-beautiful dress. Rare is the occasion when I find myself in a tea dress and hat in my local Co-op at 9am on a bank holiday, desperately clutching whipping cream and lemon barley squash, as I was this morning :) It's a lovely occasion I think; poo poo to the nay-sayers who need to lighten up a bit and have a bit of cake.







Is this Machine Lying to Me?

     At the beginning of last month I read a very entertaining post by Helen Caldwell on her blog 'My Writing Life' about a piece of online software called 'I Write Like...' which tells you, based on a passage or two, which famous writer your work most resembles.

     She got Agatha Christie for prose, Chuck Palahniuk for blog posts and H.P. Lovecraft for interviews. I just did it too and got the following results: