Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail: how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair... (read more)
So, I've had a heck of a 12 hours. First I fell out of bed - it was inevitable, my bed is 8 feet off the ground, in a little loft.... (read more)
Q: Just how much Graham Greene do you intend to read, anyway? A: Every word he wrote.... (read more)
Emily Bronte (lived at home her whole life), Virginia Woolf (threw herself in the Thames), Dostoyevski (epileptic), Hemingway (shotgun blast to the head), Salinger (complete withdrawal from public life), John Fowles (self-imposed exile in rural Devon), Pynchon (whereabouts unknown, only a couple of photographs exist), Camus (died in car crash - accidental?), Mark Twain (lifelong depressive), F. Scott Fitzgerald (died of alcoholism)... (read more)
From David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest - "You burn to have your photograph in a tennis magazine." "I'm afraid so." "Why again exactly, now?"... (read more)
No, I don't mean the Saturday that's Ian McEwan's novel, though it's really rather good and you should probably read that, though not at the expense of reading Atonement, which is just amazingly good.... (read more)
An amateur novelist doesn't think he's done until his book is under a cover and piled on display tables across the land. Why do these people think this is likely to happen? Moreover, why do they imagine that it will be a rapturous, fulfilling, life-changing event if it does?... (read more)
The following excerpted piece appears in full in Shots, The Crime and Thriller E-Zine. - When I wrote my first novel, I knew I wanted to include an awful lot of gunplay... (read more)
I'm a Martin Amis fan. There, I said it. Ordinarily, when people ask me who my favourite contemporary novelists are, I usually slip Amis in - but almost always add that "he's a guilty pleasure" or some such similar wiggly qualification.... (read more)
Yesterday I went on a bit of a Suck.com nostalgia trip. Since I'm the very modest and unassuming fellow that I am, I declined to make any mention of the fact that I myself was published in Suck once or twice back in the day.... (read more)
This month sees the paperback release of Pandora's Sisters in the US - theoretically (though probably not actually, unless you ask them to order it) available in bookshops but definitely from Amazon.com. Makes a dandy Christmas gift.... (read more)
D.T. Max has a totally stunning piece in The New Yorker: The Unfinished - David Foster Wallace's struggle to surpass Infinite Jest.... (read more)
More evidence for my solidifying theory that anything you see being read on public transport, more than about once, is rubbish.... (read more)
There's a word for a writer who never gives up... published.... (read more)
One or two of you have kindly inquired why the dispatching has all gone silent. After a feverish pace through 2010 and the first not-quite-half of 2011, I've withdrawn from the field to try and get my new book written.... (read more)
Well, it's done. After eight months of bashing full-time... and two years of doing story and structure work... and coming out of probably six years of reading and research... I've finished the new novel. It's by like a factor of four the most ambitious thing I've ever attempted. But I think I may have just pulled it off.... (read more)
So I got such a good reaction to my experiment of publishing the actual browsing history of a writer of high-tech, special forces, nuclear terror action thrillers, that I've done it again. Also, here are the very last two short stories that I amused myself by doodling covers for.... (read more)
Having dashed out, all atremble, to see the Avengers movie, I'm now able to offer a clear judgement and recommendation: You're much better off watching this (two-and-a-half minute) trailer. It had better writers.... (read more)
I've just been meme-slapped by novelist/psychologist Ian Hocking with a Ten-Questions-About-Your-Book thingy that's going around. So come with me now for a candid, behind-the-scenes, insider tour of the making of ARISEN : GENESIS.... (read more)
Since two days ago I meme-slapped a first-time novelist who (scandal!) doesn't run a blog, I'm pleased to post her responses here. You should check out her new book. Compulsion Reads describe it as a "highly passionate and cerebral character study of a woman on a mission to make the world a better place" which paints characters in "vivid colors and spins truly sharp and erudite dialogue."... (read more)
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I've used this famous quote, about how nobody in Hollywood has any idea what is going to work at the box office, many times - most often, to reapply it to the publishing industry. Here's the fuller version from Hollywood screenwriting legend, and novelist, William Goldman.... (read more)
