Tolstoy is my Cat

4.7.11

Over-Egging the Pudding

As some of you may have noticed from my general absence and my slow comment replies in the first half of June, I have recently been away from my desk and en vacance around the south-western region of France. It was tres jolie et reposant, travelling from Bordeaux to Biarritz, Beziers to Bergerac (I didn’t plan those alliteratively) in weather conditions often not dissimilar to the UK (i.e. cloudy with a bit of rain) but occasionally glorious. Anyway, if you look at that route on a map, you’ll see it goes straight past Lourdes.

Book Quote Friday: Returning to the Book

From the film, I mean.

I was too young for Bridget Jones the book when it came out, but was ideally placed for Bridget Jones: the Movie and Bridget Jones: the book genre/purveyor of massive pants. I knew it was a book, of course, and knew it was a classic, but never felt any great urge to seek it out as I’m not the biggest fan of chick lit or British comic writing (sorry!). However, having finished the magnificent 'City of Bohane' earlier in the week (blog post about that coming soon), I found myself on holiday in my beautiful French farmhouse with nothing to read and someone else’s bookcase to raid; i.e. THE DREAM. So, Bridget Jones’ Diary finally entered my hand.

Warpaint: Harnessing a Mood

One day last week I went to see one of my current faves, Warpaint, play, and they were delish. DELISH. Wonderful. Sexy, heady, lo-fi joy. The whole set was an unrelentingly hypnotic and cohesive wonder (as is the album). How/why, I hear you ask? Well, my friends, it is because they have harnessed a mood. That’s how/why.

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...