Dedicated to the One I … Umm…
OK, aspiring authors, here’s the thing they don’t tell you. You won’t learn this on the creative writing courses. You won’t hear this from your agent, or your publisher, or your e-book self-publishing formatter. You won’t learn this from all those earnest blogs with titles like ‘Twenty-Five Things an Author Should Do Before Breakfast’. No. […]
The Dai is Cast
All novelists have a secret fantasy. Actually, it’s not terribly secret. It’s the cast list. Yes, admit it, my fellow authors, you know what I’m talking about. That cast list. The one for the film of your book – the lavish Hollywood spectacular or BBC mini-series based on our purple prose, the prize that we all dream about. […]
Battening Down The Hatches
Last week’s post attracted the most traffic ever to this blog, and certainly generated the biggest response in terms of comments, feedback on Twitter, etc. The moral of the story seems to be that saying vaguely rude things about David Starkey and/or Michael Gove strikes a big chord with perusers of this particular dark recess […]
Mr Stark and Mr Staring
Just when you’re starting to think ‘what shall I blog about this week?’, along comes good old David Starkey and solves the problem. (Actually, in true London bus fashion his intellectual soulmate Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Eton – sorry, Education – then came along too, but more of him anon.) For those […]
It’s History, Jim, But Not As We Know It
Something of a light digression this week, prompted by watching the first episode of the latest glitzy quasi-historical sword ‘n’ sex epic Da Vinci’s Demons, which appears to be from very much the same mould as the likes of Spartacus, Merlin, The Tudors, The Borgias etc. I’d expected it to be pretty risible, and in that sense it […]
Enter the Lion
A short blog this week, but one that marks a big event – The Lion of Midnight, fourth of the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’, is due to be published in the UK on 23 April! You can read the first chapter on my website. Lion marks a bit of a departure from the previous books in […]
