My Response to ‘The Good Men’s Project: The Day I Went for an Abortion’
At the age of 10, I lived in Madrid. The first thing I remember about the event was watching my mother carry a basin-full of blood out of our housekeeper’s room. There was so much blood, and it scared me. The Spanish doctor came, and I heard he and my mother shouting at each other. […]
The Handmaid’s Tale Revisited: All our Dystopian Tomorrows @MargaretAtwood
I was 22 years old when I read Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.‘ I remember being angry for days after I read it. My father, who read it at the same time, laughed at me and told me to be a more critical reader. He said it was a novel that typified feminist hysteria. My […]
20,000 Bosnian Women Want to Know… @toddakin @RepPaulRyan
… why their mysterious feminine juices didn’t protect them from pregnancy, Mr. Akin. And you, Mr. Ryan. Yes, you. The man who solidly and passionately backed a bill that would deny women the right to an abortion in cases of rape. Let me tell you a story, both of you. Because perhaps you are too […]
The Sense of an Ending
I feel free to appropriate this title because, although it happens to be the title of Julian Barnes’ celebrated piece of literary fiction, he borrowed it from an older, and much wiser book by Frank Kermode: The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Despite the title, Kermode’s book isn’t really about […]
Cover Design for T.R. Verten – A Co-operative Working Model #bookcovers
T.R. Verten is a novelist with whom I had the pleasure of sharing a publisher – Republica Press. As publishers change, covers must be changed as well, because the cover is IP that has usually been paid for and is owned by the publisher, not by the author. I asked T.R. to allow me to […]
Chip Kidd on Book Covers
Best quote: “don’t treat people like they’re idiots” Chip Kidd at Offset 2009 on designing book covers And my tribute to a James Ellroy:
Who Do You Write For? Are we simply producers of product? Can I get a refund?
This question should haunt every writer. Certainly, there is no writing course in the world that doesn’t confront students with it. It seems like an easy one to answer, but it has levels of complexity that, for the most part, only get discussed within their own, embattled spheres. There is, philosophically, the overarching issue of […]
Prigs with Web Hits
This article at at the Guardian made me see red: Ebooks roundup: Fifty shades of new erotica and roll the dice for a price Populist titles tick the genre boxes, publishers get creative with eshort tasters and price-setting takes a new twist I love how the author manages to get her web-hits by name dropping […]
A Market Survey: My Final Plea for Non-Conformity #bookcovers #historicalromance
Can you tell I’m a little OCD? Well, I spent the spare moments of my day surveying the world of historical romance fiction in order to try and construct my last argument for why romance authors should consider breaking out of the ‘typical’ romance cover mold. I think a huge hurdle with trying to persuade […]
The Challenge – Redefine the Regency Romance Cover #bookcovers
A couple of historical romance authors challenged me to offer an alternative to the ubiquitous ‘girl with a flounce’ covers on most historical romances. Doing this right would involve paying my father’s old friends in the antique business a visit – I could only work with what I could find lying around on the web. […]