So my new book, This Way Up, was launched at the wonderful Book Lounge in Roeland Street on Tuesday night. If you haven’t been, and you like books, I highly recommend it. (My bank manager would tend to disagree, but don’t listen to him, he’s a complete shoe and book bigot!) So there I was…
Category: booksa
What James Ellroy said
For those of you who have been hiding under a crack pipe for the last month, I went to a literary festival in Cheltenham in October, and saw some authors speaking (here are my notes for Salman Rushdie and Bernhard Schlink) and took some notes. Here are my notes on a talk by crazy awesome…
How long do you give a book?
Some months ago I took a book out of my book club. It had won a Booker and four friends raved about it, so I nabbed it. 48 pages in I found myself bored and restless. I persevered for another three pages and then I did something I very rarely do (particularly with a Booker),…
5 things I love about fiction
5 THINGS I LOVE ABOUT FICTION: 1. Three minutes, or even just a split second can take pages to describe. Or a day can be done in a line. 2. There’s material in every breath. 3. You get to take things that have happened to you and try them out with alternative endings. Real fact…
writing sex scenes
I wouldn’t ordinarily spend too much time thinking about what to call my private parts, not usually finding a need to mention them in my day to day life. But as most of you probably already know, I recently had my first novel, A Million Miles from Normal, published by Penguin, and as it’s a…