All writing is genre writing, literary fiction is just another genre. And genre is just a way of working out where to put the damn thing on the right shelf in the book store. One day, I keep promising myself, I’ll write a series of posts on comfort food, the books I have come back […]
A little shout out for the NSW Writers’ Centre’s Speculative Fiction Festival (click on the highlighted text to be taken straight to their webpage), being held a the centre in the beautiful grounds of the former mental asylum at Callan Park. I have previously enjoyed many speakers and panels at the Speculative Fiction Festival and […]
And of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, there were novelists who didn’t get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. Probably plenty of them. – Stephen King Or in the words of my dear friend Brett, ‘get a fucking move on’. Mate, the finger is officially out.
“I’m looking for the dope with the microscope” – Iggy Pop One of my favourite lines, from the theme song from one of my favourite films, Repo Man, I was horrified to read yesterday that the quote is actually “looking for the joke with a microscope”. Several googles later, I was reassured by other sites […]
Christopher Lee is dead, and no one is going to bring him back by dripping the blood of a virgin on his ashes in a deconsecrated London church (I walked past many such buildings last Christmas, I didn’t notice any jaded covenists hanging around waiting for dark, they all seemed to have been converted to […]
Gentle reader, after something of a drought, I am very pleased that a story of mine, ‘This Neil Armstrong is not dead’, has just been published in the latest edition of Cafe Irreal, and I am very grateful. I am particularly pleased that story has found a home. Click on the story title above and […]
Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain. – Georges Braque
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 […]
Nobody is looking 