The People's Novelist

     Apologies for briefly turning this blog into a novel prize promoter, but another beginning-of-novel prize has come to my attention – the People's Novelist competition, run by The Alan Titchmarsh Show – which has basically the same requirements as thenextbigauthor.com competition, so I thought if anyone was to enter one they’d probably want to enter both.







Literary Locations - will your work always be better in you live in Paris?

       Many aspiring writers, myself included, have fallen for the idea that to write anything interesting or of worth, you must be living on the edge in one of the world’s great capitals, sleeping by day and slave to the bright lights and pen by night. One must really live, one must really feel, one must drink and smoke by the Seine with one hand on an earth-shattering idea and one foot in a pit of destitution. How could one write in a daylight hours after a good night’s sleep and a morning of adaptive suburban socialising? I must be Hemingway: leaving my wife whilst fighting the Fascists and spending my last dime on the whisky that is ruining my life.







Book Quote Friday: Why Limit Yourself?

     Why limit yourself to reality, when I know (I just know) that you can imagine so much more happening in your head? 

      There's a whole look of stuff that can happen to a whole lot of people in just an average day when you open the door to the surreal and nonsensical and dream-like, as hopefully today's book quote will illustrate...







Pledge Your Allegiance

     How cool are these?! Love them. Wear your favourite with pride.

[via]







A Bit of Character Inspiration?

      Will someone please write a story about this woman? Look at these photos; clearly she has quite the story to tell and, according to Fed by Birds, the blog I found this on, she has [quote] 'the best wardrobe in the world'. I'm inclined to agree. She's certainly rocking the classic peacock-train-plus-jewelled-headdress-bare-feet-cigarette combo.








That Strained Silence at the End of Songs...

     That strained silence at the end of songs is the perfect place to write; listening intently to hear something that was but is no longer, gone but can be again, is ideal, for me, I think.







Book Quote Friday: One Day in the Life

     Using a day to represent a lifetime; a lifetime to represent an era; a man to represent a people; a place to a represent a country. Everything in Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' uses a part to represent a whole: it is synecdoche made Nobel Prize winner made compellingly readable book about the real experience of far too many Russians under Stalin in the first half of the twentieth century.