Work Is Art

I’m just back from seeing the Ford Madox Brown exhibition at  Manchester Art Gallery. Unfashionable but essential. Ford Madox Brown, (1821 – 1893), was a Pre-Raphaelite who stood out by depicting ordinary people (eg ‘Work’, 1852-65). This ensured he was out of the pop charts to this day. Talk about the path of most resistance. It’s [...]

How to Become a Global Market Leader

Price Delivery Impartiality Integrity Economy Thoroughness Service Accuracy and Tiger Hugs Oh yes. And here’s an update on my viral marketing campaign for TH. The thread so far: Belief Systems Northern Exposure How Can People Change? Sometimes I Feel Like Throwing My Hands Up in the Air Do You Believe in Free Will? Circling the [...]

Make Mine a Pint of Creme-de-Menth

Or Perversity and the Anti-thesis of Everything Courtesy of the World of Publishing In my constant search for gems, I found a 400 word blurb for A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Haven’t read the book. Can’t comment, but the blurb that appears on every bookseller web site encapsulates the negativity of [...]

Coming Out of Left Field

As you probably know if you’ve been following Super Mario, in September I uploaded my novel Tiger Hugs on Harper Collins’s web site for aspiring authors, authonomy. A few title changes and a radical rewrite later, it’s gaining support, probably because other authors are away at November’s National Novel Writing Month website NaNoWriMo. It’s a novel about something, [...]

The Misery of Provincial Theatre

Last night I went to see an am-dram production in the village hall of John Dole’s (who?) play ‘Lucky For Some’. Never heard of it? Same here. Set in an English holiday camp in the nineteen-sixties, it was always going to be a Hi-Di-Hi farce, but nothing prepared me for the embarrassing misery of ‘Lucky [...]

Does Five-a-Day Apply to Vegetarians?

For a vegetarian, the five-a-day advice is akin to asking a marathon runner to walk to work. If we didn’t do five pieces of fruit and veg a day, we wouldn’t eat anything. A bit of bread and cheese perhaps. So, I have an ongoing argument with my “five-a-day” preaching partner. We shouldn’t be doing [...]

Welcome to the Bank of Ideas.

The opening to my novel Tiger Hugs satirises the fashion for in media res narrative. In media res is Latin for stuck-in-the-mud. Of course, I know it’s actually Latin for in-the-middle, a place where shadows materialise in no such place, go nowhere and say nothing. It’s just next door to the status quo, and it’s the same old, same [...]

My Writer’s Diary 2001

It’s ten years since I started an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, so I thought I’d post the diary I started that year. It was the first year  I’d written a diary, so it looks a bit sparse but it does cover a few important developments for me. 5th [...]

A kind of psychological suspense

      With laughs. Tiger Hugs is a novel on authonomy. Suki Chen never thought she’d hug a tiger until she discovered the Bar at the End of the Universe where anything is possible, even love.

In Media Res and Other Devices

    My satirical romcom Tiger Hugs now has a whole new opening chapter due to me deciding it needed one. I was reading about how important in media res is, and other hair-raising non-linear narrative ideas I’d never heard of.  It’s the absolute antithesis to my straight line, emotional shift, suspense style. I blame [...]

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