Today, winter officially begins. Evenings darken. It’s hibernation time, time to turn inwards. This week also marks the beginning of NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month: when tens of thousands of would-be writers dedicate thirty days to the sustained act of writing a novel – or at least, 50,000 words of one. Whoever chose November for this mini-marathon of writing was inspired. What better time to go for it than in this dark and otherwise uninspiring month?

Maybe NaNo should be renamed NiNoWriMo (Nike Novel Writing Month) since the overarching theme is Just Do It. This is the bungee-jump method of writing. The pinch-your-nose and leap method. The kamikaze method. No safety net. No pause for thought. No gentle mulling and meandering. This is the apply-the-seat-of-your-pants-to-the-seat-of-a-chair and never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width method.


Read Full Post

I’ve just joined another writing site – oh yes I did. Some of my online friends from another site are there but under different names. I know that they belong to lots of other places, but wonder how they remember who they are? I can’t depend on my memory remembering who I am at any one time so must be consistent; there will only ever be ireneintheworld for me from now on. I have loads of old email addresses lying around in the ether, and domain names I’ve long forgotten; and MySpace places etc.



God, I come across pieces in my notebooks and stagger back in surprise, saying, ‘Did I write that?’

Read Full Post

I don’t believe in coincidences as a rule, but what happened last Sunday made me wonder.

I was attracted by the title of a book in the window of an upmarket souvenir shop: ‘Un sueño de Barro and Piedra’. The cover had a reproduction of a painting of a road leading into a village of red-roofed houses.



Read Full Post

If you're on Twitter, as well as looking me up (@nikperring) you may also want to have a nosy at #ilovethisbook which has had a bit of a revamp today, courtesy of Scott Pack (@meandmybigmouth) - it came about a couple of weeks ago when I was wondering which books I loved enough to recommend to pretty much anyone. There are quite a few, it turns out. And now there are a fair others posting the books they love enough to recommend to other people. So, I'd strongly suggest getting yourselves over there and getting involved. It's all good. I've ordered three or four already - some of which I'd never heard of.

***

And talking of books I love, Monday coming sees an interview here with A.C. Tillyer, author of An A-Z of Possible Worlds.

And let me tell you, it is something special. It's a collection of short stories, each about a possible world (ones where golfers are robots, or your fellow commuters might well be hunting you, or a whole country that's a great big labyrinth...) each bound seperately and presented beautifully in a claret box.

Read Full Post

As a historical crime writer, I’m naturally interested in the forensic methods and knowledge of earlier times. I try to track down old handbooks on the subject, one such being Henry Cadwalader Chapman’s Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, Insanity and Toxicology. It’s slightly after my period, but a lot of the techniques it discusses were in use during the time I’m concerned with.

Interestingly, the section on medical jurisprudence takes up about 200 pages, and that on toxicology about 80 pages, with a mere 19 given over to the massive subject of insanity. The writer does acknowledge it is an extensive subject and therefore he is only going to limit himself to giving the salient points. But this is presumably intended to be enough to qualify the reader to undertake the following essential task: “Every practitioner should appreciate the importance of the fact that at any moment he may be called upon to visit a person said to have lost his reason, and should be qualified, therefore, to express an opinion as to his sanity.”

Read Full Post

Your Inner Critic's real nature is the anti-writing demon: personify him/her as you will (mine is short and plump, with blue and green scales and a tail: he's well-intentioned, and his intention is to protect me from failure, shame, embarrassment and danger, by stopping me writing). In a coda to Making the Skeleton Dance I was suggesting that anything which stops you writing can also be a costume hung in your Inner Critic's wardrobe, because most of the time the demon's in disguise.

For the avoidance of doubt, I should define my terms: there's all the difference in the world between the Inner Critic, hard-wired by parents and teachers and the world in general, and what I call the Inner Editor. The Inner Editor engages when there's there's a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter or a novel on the page to edit: s/he reads the words, and from that reading decides what needs to be changed. None of us would write anything worth reading without an Inner Reader-Editor. The Inner Critic, on the other hand, spends most of his/her life in costume, pretending to be something entirely useful. This is particularly true when you've learnt to ignore her/his obvious "you're no good" "you'll never succeed" schtick. Then s/he opens the wardrobe, and with fiendish (s/he is a demon, after all) cunning, picks out the costume of whichever adult in your life you're most attuned to, and begins to talk:

Read Full Post

I have a notion that Wordsworth’s line, I wandered lonely as a cloud, has nothing to do with walking the Cumbrian hills but is a metaphor for the poet’s mental state when he wrote. Writers mooch lonely in their thoughts whilst under the tips of their fingers the novel forms and grows as they tap at the keys. Sometimes they think they have created fields of daffodils but even the prettiest words that appear on the screen have no guarantee of making it into the finished piece; at any moment they could be dragged and dropped, substituted or deleted, leaving not a trace.

But there comes a day when the writer has to say (like Pontius Pilate when asked to change what he’d written on Christ’s cross): ‘What I have written, I have written.’ No more revisions. The last pre-submission draft is printed out, is packaged up as if it's the stone on which is scoured the Ten Commandments, and sent to the publisher or agent.

Read Full Post

The first was an email I received. It was a review of my book by Archie Clark. It put a big old grin on my big old face.

Archie said:

"I Met a Roman last Night, what did you do? By Nik Perring.



Review by Archie Clark. Aged 8.



The book ‘I met a Roman last night what did you do? ‘ is a very good book. It starts with a boy called Jack who does not want to go to bed, he wanted to find out more about the Romans he’s learning about them at school. Eventually he went to bed and to sleep and in his dream he met a Roman and the next night he met a Celt and the

next day when Jack was at school the teacher, Miss Bean told them they were gong on a surprise school trip. That night he dreamt he met a Viking the next morning Jack went on a school trip. That night Jack wanted to stay up to find more info on the computer but he knew he needed his rest for sports day, so he went to sleep and he met a young girl in the war then he woke up and went to sports day.



Make sure you buy this book for your child. I would rate it age 7+ and the story 9+."



Thank you so much, Archie, for such a well written and brilliant review. I hope you find lots of other really good books to read.

***

And the second thing that made me very happy today was the postman delivering me this, Heaven Can Wait, by Cally Taylor.

Read Full Post

Dear Impressive Agent,
I’m enclosing a sample of my first novel - ‘Brilliant'.
I’m not bothering with a synopsis because the book speaks for itself. I know you probably get a lot of letters from nutters who write in green ink and it must be a relief when some real quality turns up in your slush pile.
I want to be a writer because I think it would be cool to see huge posters with my name on them on the Tube. It must be great to be paid to sit around all day and make up stories. I know that you will work hard to get me a really good deal with a reputable publisher. I’m thinking a six figure deal is probably about right. [By the way, I’m not sure I’d want to do anything like book signings but I’m sure you can get round that.]


Read Full Post

You're tuned into the Joker Channel. Coming up: more pithy analysis, quirky observations and unique insight from the bar.

We're all mini-broadcasters now.

Many of us still have a weakness for traditional sources of information such as television news, the national newspapers and even the good old-fashioned library; but if you also have any kind of online existence, you'll have noticed how much richer the information-gathering experience is these days.

Read Full Post