Dear Everybody, by Michael Kimball is definitely up there in my all time favourites list. It is incredibly good. Wow. Read it.

***

And if you should so desire, you can read what Mr Kimball had to say to the excellent Kay Sexton here.

Read Full Post

Every so often I take a step back and wonder how the world hasn't been blown off course by the explosion of the internet.

We have entirely absorbed it into our lives: email, Google, online banking, job hunting, blogging, travel booking, price comparison, information, information, information galore.

One group especially that has been able to take advantage of the internet revolution is the writers of the world.

The other day I was writing a short story and needed a fictitious company name. I searched for my company on the web to check it wasn't already in existence, thus possibly saving me a lot of hassle in the future. Before this information was available at the click of a button I would have had to go... where exactly? I'd have contacted (written to/phoned) Companies House in Britain for a start. But where do I go to find out about the rest of the world? Does it matter for legal reasons? Again, I can research this very question now: the information is all there.

Read Full Post

I've just finished reading The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold and have found my reaction to it intriguing. I think I would classify it as literary crime, if only because it involves a crime. It reminded me in parts of Sex Crimes by Jenefer Shute, a favourite writer of mine. Both stories are told in the first person by women who have committed terrible crimes. Both stories use flashback to draw the reader gradually into the past, the unfolding of which provides an explanation for the shocking "conclusion". Shute's book does it better, despite the naff title she chose to give it which must have turned off swathes of female readers and picked up several unwanted male ones (I like to think they got a hell of a shock reading about the crime in question). Sebold's book lacks the disciplined structure of Shute's. The flashbacks are not given to us sequentially and I found at the end that I had a very muddy idea of why things happened the way they did. In part, I'm sure, this was deliberate. Sebold is writing about mental illness and she wanted to do justice to the lack of black and white, the toxic melting pot of need and resentment, love and hate. I enjoyed turning the pages of the story but at the end I felt disappointed, overall and in one particular instance. I'll come to that particular in a moment.

My reaction to The Almost Moon was a little like the frustration I felt after finishing We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Both books are page turners, Shriver's relentlessly so. She uses every trick in the plotter's handbook to keep us reading despite the increasingly disturbing subject matter. At the time of reading, she had my undivided attention. The book gripped me, completely. It was only afterwards that I started to resent the manner and extent of her manipulation.


Read Full Post

So much has been written about self-publishing and vanity publishing and the potential stigma attached, but nowadays it seems to be more acceptable to self-publish.

My husband Steve and I completed our science-fiction novel, "Einstein's Question" in the early Spring of 2008. We did our research and drew up a list of agents who specialised in Science-Fiction. There were various factors that meant we weren't an immediate choice:

* First-time novelists
* No follow-on book and definitely not the first part of a trilogy
* Joint authors
* Some heavy scientific content including equations

Read Full Post

'You know why you're having trouble putting that tent up?' I was struggling against the wind, and probably should have practised at home, but my new neighour from across the field had his own theory. I was glad to see him come over because I was beginning to have doubts about the whole venture.

There were only two poles, crossing in the centre and fixed at the ends to form a dome. The poles were made up of sections and I'd just bent one of the metal sleeves where they joined. Now how was I going to slide it through the outer sleeve, as per instructions, without piercing the material?


Read Full Post

Our regular novelists' group met the other day. We all seemed to be suffering from the same malaise. A sense of exhaustion, lethargy, lack of inspiration, inability to Buckle Down. Had we all mysteriously co-contracted M.E.? We began to share stories.

A cold virus which went on and on; a virus of the virtual kind which clobbered a computer and threatened to lose all its data; a printer which printed at a rate of one page per minute and then refused to print at all; ludicrously but painfully, an infected toe. And that was just me.

Read Full Post

This week’s Weekly Geeks challenge asks: tell us about a book (or books) you have been meaning to read. What is it? How long have you wanted to read it? And, why haven’t you read it yet?

Top of the list is….

Redemption Falls by Joseph O’ Connor


Read Full Post

I decided to read Lizard, by L. Schick (her debut) after reading what Scott Pack and Caroline Smailes had to say about it, (especially about it apparently winking towards Kafka) and I'm glad I did. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

In short, it's about a young girl, Eliza Young, who discovers one day that her leg has developed scales, yes, the sort lizards have. She goes to work as an au pair for a family on a sunny island where she come across a lizard civilisation. The story is about Eliza's struggle to understand and cope with her new leg, this new civilisation and, ultimately, herself.

Now, as a novella, it isn't perfect. It is, in parts, a little confusing - but I must say that I think that's a big part of its charm in that it reflects Eliza's own confusion - so it's a small critisism. What I liked most about it though was the voice: new, fresh, intelligent, convincing and not at all self conscious. And it's fun.

Read Full Post

Elizabeth McKay lives in Ayrshire and has been writing for about twelve years. She works part-time as an admin assistant in a day centre for adults with learning disabilities and writes the rest of the time. As well as short stories she has also had a number of features published in magazines. She has several stories awaiting publication, mainly in Woman's Weekly and Fiction Feast.


My first sale was...
To "Best" in 1997. It was the first story I ever submitted to a magazine and I naively thought everything I sent out after that would be published. It was another five months before I made my next sale!

My family think my writing is...
A good thing although I expect they’re as surprised as I am that it’s taken off as well as it has.

The best/worst thing about writing short stories for magazines is...
The best thing for me is when someone says they’ve read one of my stories and enjoyed it (well, they would say that, wouldn’t they!) The worst thing is when people ask when I’m going to write a ‘proper book’ as if short story writing is second class. (And the scariest thing is how the market for magazine stories is shrinking at an incredibly fast rate.)

Long hand first or computer?
Either, depending on how much time I have. If I’m short of time I write long hand and transfer/edit onto my laptop later. If I’ve got more time and know exactly where the story’s going I’ll write straight onto the screen.


Read Full Post

One of the most depressing books I’ve ever read, and also the most haunting. The Road stays with you long after reading for the sheer bleakness of this compelling, post-apocalyptic novel. It reminded me in part of the novella The Mist by Stephen King, in that there is no explanation of the events that have rendered the world a dying, burnt husk, lifeless and grey. Instead, it focuses on the unnamed central characters, a father and son, in their journey south, avoiding cannibals and torture, to find food and hope...

Read Full Post