Last night, my partner introduced me to Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, starting with the infamous Amy’s Baking Company episode where shit hits the fan, then working our way back to the UK editions of the show which involve marginally less schadenfreude. There’s a joke when I make in writing classes about writers being reluctant to […]
The first blog I truly followed belonged to Neil Gaiman, when he added the American Gods dairy to his website back in 2001. It was quickly followed by Caitlin Kiernan’s Low Red Moon journal, which quickly metamorphosed into her Livejournal (and has stayed there, even now, after Livejournal has become an archaic thing occupied by […]
For years, I worked on the theory that I was not built for podcast listening. I didn’t like the formats people used, and the signal-to-noise ratio didn’t add up when I looked at fitting them into my schedule. Then I discovered the genre of podcasts I really enjoyed: short, topic-focused essays and the interview series, […]
I was lured into reading Damon Suede’s Verbalize after hearing him do interviews with Kobo Writing Life and Joanna Penn’s podcast. In both, he laid out his approach to writing by focusing in on character strategy and tactics rather than psychology and background, with a particular focus on how this dynamic plays out in Jane […]
Just prior to my dad going into hospital last month, I wrote an entire blog post about choosing who gets to monetise your attention as an artist working in the early 21st century. If you got something out of that post, I recommend that you set aside an afternoon to read Mike Monteiro’s Ruined By […]
Right. Friday. Back at work this morning, teaching a two-hour tutorial on Georgette Heyer’s Venetia and writing craft. It’s interesting teaching the same books two years in a row, because I can see the impact current craft interests have on the way I read. For instance, reading John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story over the […]
I didn’t expect to enjoy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I picked a copy up on the cheap a few years back, part of a workshop I was taking where one of the exercises involved best-selling novels. There was a remarkable dearth of best-sellers on my bookshelves at the time, so I grabbed a […]
ONE: MAPS by the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s A few years ago, I noted a trend where every autoplaylist I left running would eventually return to the Arctic Monkeys Do I Wanna Know. That epoch in youtube has apparently moved on, for now it is an inevitability that all playlists will find their way to Maps […]
The most interesting essay in Tom Bissell’s collection, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation, takes a close look at the differing styles of writing books and the kinds of promises they make to prospective writers. Ostensibly a survey of several different books, Bissell pithily outlines the rules of engagement for each type: the users […]
My friend Lois shared this post about the difference between Supper and Dinner, and the meaning of dinner changed as a result of industrialisation and the rise of the middle class. Meanwhile, this week’s my newsletter will feature a short semi-essay about the origins and goals of of the Short Fiction Lab series. If you’ve […]
The free period for Winged, With Sharp Teeth is over, which means I’m now sitting here and prodding the numbers with surprise, saying things like, “Really? That many people from the German store? Who’d have thought it?” Some people went on and pre-ordered Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight, which is out now if you live in Australia […]
I’m reading Randall Garrett’s collection of LORD DARCY stories at the moment, and it’s proving to be hard going. The kind of book I dip into a story at a time, then set aside for a long stretch while I go find something that’s more my speed as a reader. I have issues with Garrett’s […]
