In the eighth decade of my life and after having three books traditionally published-a travel memoir 50 years ago and two novels more recently-I am pondering the wisdom of writing a very personal memoir.
For a decade while I was drafting it, my debut novel The Peach Seed had a different title, Peach Seed Monkey, which referred to a tiny monkey carved from a peach pit that had been a present to me and my sister when we were children. A book title has power to pique interest, crack open a gateway to readers, allowing the work to take it from there. Read more
I was going through my notebooks the other day when I came across a piece of paper; a torn scrap on which I'd written hurriedly a name and the plot number of a grave. Writing a family story is a question of finding where the bodies are buried and this, in very real terms, had been the first clue. Read more
Besides being a social burden I'm finding it to be a problem in my reading and writing. Facts/lines of poems/details of plot smear in my head, and often I find myself left with impressions of texts that are far too vague for me to build opinion around. Reading non-fiction or heavily referential fiction feels near pointless as things go in one ear and out the other. Read more
I've read thousands of books in my lifetime, so you'd think I'd be fantastic at trivia, know the Jeopardy questions, always win arguments, and bore the patience out of my friends. I'm terrible with trivia, mediocre at Jeopardy, vague in arguments, and spend most of my conversational time listening. For some reason, all that book knowledge just doesn't stick with me. Read more
‘I always quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said in the early part of his career he was dismissed as a science fiction writer and that critics tend to put genre books, including sci-fi, in the bottom drawer of their desk... It's true. I get the New York Times every Sunday. In 37 novels, I've never had a stand-alone review. I'm always in the crime round-up.
A survey of 787 members of the Society of Authors (SoA) has found that a third of translators and a quarter of illustrators have lost work to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Translators are also more likely to use AI to support their work, with 37% of respondents saying they have done so, followed by 25% of non-fiction writers.
The author Lynne Reid Banks, known for her novel The L-Shaped Room and her children's book series The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.
I launched my podcast Making It Up nearly three years ago with the goal of interviewing writers not for any particular work of theirs, but to talk to them about their lives. I didn't want to ask them what famous author they want to have dinner with or what their top five favorite books are ... yech. Read more
Until we have a mechanism to test for artificial intelligence, writers need a tool to maintain trust in their work. So I decided to be completely open with my readers
'In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.