Here at The Stevens Institute (charitable status pending, we shall be seeking your donations shortly), we seek to ethicise omnivorism (and invent new words to patent). We are trying folks, we really are. We have put all of this week’s grant money into considering balloon animals. Some of you may be scoffing, as you associate […]
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 the week after that. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
News of the bus misadventure high in the Canutes caused me to reflect on an incident from my school days. Those of a certain age will remember the tightening of the local school curriculum, when a scientific fine tooth comb was drawn through the hippy length hair of what in those days passed for the […]
The real reason to write fiction, after all, isn’t to make money, nor to show the human heart in conflict with itself, nor to give a picture of one’s time, nor to call attention to the plight of any oppressed classes, but to show off. You want to be able to say to visitors, “Sit […]
The world of rejection slips is probably more impersonal than it ever was, now that form letters have been replaced by form e mails. As a person who is able to work out what people were thinking by the way they placed a stamp on an envelope, (I have a story about that somewhere), I […]
I’ve been blogging in a few places under a nom de guerre, which was all lots of fun, but the years pass by and the things I meant to do remain undone, and I realised blogging had become another distraction, or worse, an ersatz alternative to writing fiction, a trick that allows me to think, […]
Nobody is looking 