Archives
John Crace Being Dead. Begins with a gruesome murder and then traces the victims’ lives leading up to that moment, and describes in detail the putrefaction of the corpses. I was too squeamish for this, though John Crace as a writer of beautiful and evocative prose is second to none. Margaret Drabble The Dark Flood Rises. A ... Read More
Special event at Blackwell’s: a workshop by that excellent writer and teacher Richard Skinner, Head of Fiction at the Faber Academy. We began with a mini story-telling task relating the events of our Sunday. (Mine was singularly event-free.) He had us cut our words and twist our paragraphs around and for most of us that ... Read More
Imagine a beautiful woman on killer heels standing unsteadily under a lamp post in a dark street. She’s got lost on the way to what may be the most important engagement of her life. It is six fifteen on a July evening in Oxford, England. See what I mean about a really nice bit of ... Read More
Another short list: for my first and probably only ghost story, which bears the peculiar title ‘Potter, Dimity, Lilies.’ When they announced this news, Spooky Tales/What the Dickens? Magazine promised an ebook anthology and – how lovely! – a paper edition as well. Several months and emails later I have discovered that the anthology has ... Read More
Now I look at it again…I’ve found infelicities: sentences that go on and on and cliches and ‘-ngs’ and ‘-isations’ that I somehow failed to see before. And inconsistencies that have demanded a lot of working out on bits of paper: dates of events, ages of people, things happening in the wrong order, wrong flowers ... Read More