The Blog
The latest witterings
Why some of your favourite authors are facing a grim future
Somewhere in the world, in the time it’s taken you to read this sentence, another book dropped onto Amazon’s shelves. Roughly 7,500 new ebooks are published every single day, which…
Continue reading →Saturday Morning TV Before Streaming
There was one morning a week where nine-year-old me would willingly leap out of bed, and it certainly wasn’t a school day. Saturday. Down the stairs while the rest of thew house slumbered…
Continue reading →Authors like Nick Spalding
There’s a kind of book you shouldn’t take into a doctor’s waiting room. You sit there in the medicated hush, minding your blood pressure, and then a line ambushes you. Out comes…
Continue reading →Authors like Caimh McDonnell (if you love a laugh with your crime)
It doesn’t take long, reading Caimh McDonnell, to work out that his detective intends to settle things with a hurling stick. Not as a figure of speech, but an actual ash hurley. Simple…
Continue reading →Feel-Good British Novels About Starting Over
Starting over is sold to us as a clean sheet of A4. Fresh, white, and untarnished. In practice, that page is bound to hundreds of others, and most of them are covered with scrawled handwriting…
Continue reading →The Sound of 1979
At eight years old, I didn’t understand that the country had begun to shift under my feet. I only knew that Top of the Pops looked stranger than the year before. Blokes with white faces and…
Continue reading →How Do Writers Deal With Writer’s Block?
Every writer is asked, sooner or later, what happens when the words dry up. People put the question gently, the way you might ask a friend how the diet is going. I always want to answer…
Continue reading →The Best British Time Travel Books to Read (From H.G. Wells to the Indie Upstarts)
“What are the best British time travel books to read?” It is a question readers of my sort of fiction ask a lot, and I understand the pull completely. There is something very…
Continue reading →Authors like Adrian Cousins
Adrian Cousins writes the sort of time travel where nobody builds a machine or explains the physics. A grumpy fortysomething divorcee simply wakes up in the sweltering summer of 1976, six…
Continue reading →Novels Written in a Matter of Weeks
People assume a novel takes years. It sounds respectable, the sort of timeline that justifies the faraway look authors adopt whenever someone asks what they do for a living. The truth is less…
Continue reading →Should You Write Your Memoir?
Every now and then, someone emails me out of the blue to ask if I’d consider writing their memoir. The pitch rarely changes. They’ve lived an extraordinary life, the story simply has…
Continue reading →Regret: The Most Human Emotion (and What to Actually Do With It)
Nobody sits you down as a child and warns you about regret. They warn you about strangers, about running with scissors, about the tide coming in quicker than you’d think. Regret is left for…
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