Shortlist.com has recently produced an infographic showing the age at which various famous authors produced their most famous work. It’s worth having a look at, especially if you are approaching a landmark birthday, 30, 40, or 50 and are worried that you are perhaps too old now to make it as a writer. Continue reading
SPACEWRECK: GHOSTSHIPS AND DERELICTS OF SPACE
Stewart Cowley (ISBN 0 600 32990 9)
One of the great joys of being my age is that the books I remember with fond nostalgia from childhood libraries have been appearing in secondhand bookstores for a few years now. These dimly remembered tomes are either library cast-offs or the result of persons older than me culling their shelves I suppose, but I am happy to be the beneficiary either way. I was recently rooting through the shelves of a secondhand bookstore in small town New Zealand to discover my favourite of Stewart Cowley’s Terran Trade Authority books. Yes, I realise I could have bought a copy online long ages ago, but that undermines the joy of unexpected discovery now doesn’t it? Continue reading
The short story was once the grandame of the fiction world. Writers like Arthur Conan Doyle made their fortunes off the short story. Writers like Dickens turned out a lot of short stories to supplement their serial income (and the serial was itself, in effect, a short-storyisation of the novel). Nowadays, the short story is a bare flicker in the background of the landscape of the novel. Writers produce the occasional book of collected tales, but only after writing the stories in drips and drabs over years. No sane editor commissions a collection of short stories from scratch and expects to make real money. So what happened? Continue reading
Today I’m going to discuss covers and design. A hugely important aspect of self-publishing is creating (or paying someone else to create) a cover that conveys what your book is about and entices readers to click it, download it and even perhaps pay for it. Continue reading
The Poems of Ossian were in their day one of the most influential works of the romantic movement. Collected from oral storytellers by the scholar James Macpherson in the Scottish western highlands and islands, the poems relate the exploits of the legendary Gaelic figure Fionn mac Cumhaill in their Scottish rather than Irish forms.
Only they don’t, as they were more or less completely faked.
I’m not going to go into great depth because by now you will either be aware of the Serial podcast (if you make use of any social media at all), or not (if, like me, you tend to avoid the bulk of social media chatter). Continue reading
A Strunk & White’s Elements of Style rap.
via Brainpickings
THE SECRET WORLD OF WOMBATS
Jackie French; Illustrated by Bruce Whatley (ISBN 0 207 20031 9) 2005
For those who have read Diary of a Wombat – and more than a little bit fallen in love with the book – The Secret World of Wombats is likely to be just as much of a treasury of delight, perhaps even more so. Whereas Diary of a Wombat (and other successive titles by the duo of Jackie French and Bruce Whatley) was an illustrated children’s book long on charm and short on words, The Secret World of Wombats is a children’s non-fiction book about the author’s enduring life with and love of the eponymous animal. Continue reading
I have been thinking a lot about the craft aspects of writing recently. Earlier I posted about Social Setting. Today I wanted to take a look at the villain or antagonist.
If you hunt around online, poking sticks at essays on writing, you’ll find a reasonable amount of advice on how to make your villains unique, or human, or something different from the cliches. The villain who is evil and knows it obviously strains credulity, but I wanted to do a little more careful thinking about this. Below the cut are some points of thought. Continue reading
Ursula K. Le Guin recently accepted the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 65th National Book Awards on November 19. Her rather marvellous acceptance speech is below the cut.
thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
On May 19th, 1942, a BBC crew were recording the songs of nightingales when a flight of one hundred and ninety-seven Allied bombers flew overhead on their way to Mannheim. The broadcast was abandoned, but the recording was continued. Continue reading
What is the dividing line between literary fiction and the fantastical? Is there a line? Is there also a distinction between fantasy and science fiction? Are these even meaningful questions?
In thinking about this and discussing it in the past, I’ve tended to prefer the terms used by Moorcock and Le Guin in their literary essays, ‘realist’ and ‘imaginative’ fiction if a dividing line must be drawn. Realist fiction tends to favour close simulation of ‘realistic’ human experience, and is most highly characterised (I think) in modern fiction by stream of consciousness narratives about ordinary things. Imaginative fiction tends to lean towards an exploration of the possibilities of human experience, and both fantasy and science fiction tend to be more imaginative than realist in bent. Continue reading