Some people who like to see and hold a printed copy, and that is what you can provide at a book launch or a literary festival talk. And meeting people is fun, even if you don’t break even when you have factored in your time and the refreshments. I have arranged two launches for my ... Read More
Here’s another piece of flash fiction. I’m a new member of the Romantic Novelists Association and I wanted to show you that we can be unromantic too. Squint: ‘A condition in which the visual axes of each eye are not directed simultaneously at the same fixation point (i.e. each eye is not pointing at the ... Read More
Or is this a sort of poem? This little piece was first published in an anthology called Oxtail Soup: Stories of Oxford and Oxfordshire, edited by Sara Banerji, and is available as a Kindle ebook. I have tried to improve it slightly. I can see the Castle Mound from my kitchen window. No snow so ... Read More
I don’t remember any buzz around my non-fiction books. Rather expensive lunches with my old-established publishers and a smart party with no books for sale certainly did nothing much for promotion. There were some reviews in the journals, and they appeared in bookshops and libraries, and that was the extent of it. Now I have ... Read More
In my late teens I exchanged one dream, to marry a vicar, for another: to inspire great poetry. My favourite poet was Goethe, who wrote several series of beautiful poems inspired by his long line of beautiful mistresses. (Odd, looking back, that I didn’t dream of writing my own material and finding a handsome chap ... Read More
What follows was intended as a competition entry, but they wanted 1000 words and there wasn’t any more to say. I like to practise ’emotional economy’. The master of that is Colm Toibin, by the way. ‘My Writing Day’ or ‘What I did yesterday’ I lived other people’s lives, mainly. The lives of my imagined ... Read More
Am I alone in muttering ‘Aw shucks!’ and turning pinkish when WordPress tells me that another blogger considers my little unpublished short story or a few random reflections about writing to be ‘pretty awesome’? Couldn’t they just say the kind person ‘liked’ what I wrote? Certainly when I ‘like’ or start to follow, it may ... Read More
Found this unpublished and rather strange little story and thought it might brighten up my rather earnest blog. A Tale of Tails The famous surgeon Mr ‘Snippy’ Maloney was to be best man at his brother’s wedding. He went to Moss Bros to be measured up for a morning suit. There was a sad-faced rat ... Read More
When I first moved to Oxford in 1975 I was amused when my elderly neighbours called me ‘my duck.’ I haven’t heard that recently. I love these regional variations and I’m sorry they are dying out. My parents lived in Cornwall and a colleague who visited there was so delighted with the Cornish habit of ... Read More
