Imagine if Dan Brown had the gumption to really whack us with a truly bizarre confection of a conspiracy about the Catholic Church, instead of that wimpy pile he served up. If you are going to show us an imaginary dark world hidden by a conspiracy of the ages, have a real red hot go […]
(Having published five short stories (one of them twice!) its fairly important that I make an arse of myself by drawing a comparison between George Orwell and, well, moi.) I purchased a copy of a slim George Orwell volume, ‘Why I write’, part of the Penguin Great Ideas series, last (European) summer when I was in […]
Anthony Burgess, book reviewer extraordinaire, amongst many other things, dared to opine that book reviews have no effect. That cannot be true, for when I saw the (very favourable) review of the first volume of his confessions, Little Wilson and Big God in the Sydney Morning Herald, I took my brand new Commonwealth Bank key […]
I am sad today to hear of the death of Tom Uren, a big man with a huge heart, one of those rare people, a politician of conviction who lived to be of service to others. He survived the horrors of imprisonment by the Japanese during the Second World War, and witnessed the atomic bombing […]
In her list of year’s best short fiction in her December Clavis Aurea column in Apex magazine, Charlotte Ashley gives an honourable mention to my story, ‘My Life as a Lizard‘. I am grateful to Ms Ashley for her kindness, and for her original review, and of course to the folk at Crossed Genres magazine who […]
It has been at least a year since I quoted this here, so time to do it again: Horace Tott spent an uneventful life in Cheshire always intending to write a large book on English magic, but never quite beginning. And so he died at seventy-four, still imagining he might begin next week, or perhaps […]
Souls just out of their graves having to answer for lives most of them never understood in the first place. Such hard lives. Lila, by Marilynne Robinson
Graham Joyce is one of my writers. Like you, I have a bunch of them. I come across them somehow, often at a book sale, buy something cheap, then after enjoying it, work my way through their back catalogue, and still enjoying them, buy each new book as it comes out. Too rarely I reflect […]
Have I mentioned that I cannot stand a cute rejection? It doesn’t make me feel better, and it makes me think I wasn’t taken seriously. I dislike them even more than normal rejection. At least I am used to normal rejection. Cute rejection is worse than chirpy morning people. I think I like rejections that aren’t […]
Far from home, I thought of a friend with whom I used to discuss books and religion, amongst other things. We are not in touch much, and it occurred to me I may only see him once or twice more in this life, if at all. I wrote to him about my family, and added: […]
Nobody is looking 