The Night Circus
When Crox Minima (13) urged me to read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, which happened to be a favourite book of one of her classmates, I assumed that it would be the kind of book one would...
View ArticleTsundoqueue
I have written in these annals about the phenomenon of tsundoku – and judging by the hits that post continues to receive, it’s a topic perennially resonant with readers. For the hard-of-linking,...
View ArticleBecause The Night
Kids are wonderful. Also generous. When they were small and running with stenchly ichors from various orifices, they donated a wide variety of microscopic organisms for the amusement of my immune...
View ArticleThe Doings Round My Parts
What have I been up to these past six years? Well, some of it can be found in the archived posts below. For those disinclined to delve, I shall attempt a succinct summary. But how does one even start...
View ArticleExpectation
I’ve been writing books since my twenties. In fact, I have been working on one book or another almost constantly since I finished my first — which was my doctorate thesis, resting unread in a dusty...
View ArticleNaturistical
Thirty-three years ago today Sgt Pepper taught the band to play I started work at Nature. I joined as a junior news reporter on a three-month contract. It’s the longest three-month contract anyone has...
View ArticleLitreview
Yes, it’s that time again, when I list the books in the year just passed that I have most enjoyed. I’ve been doing this since 2014. That’s when I started noting authors and titles of books I’d read in...
View ArticleAdHederance
Over the festive period I’ve been ploughing through a volume of some vastness entitled 65 Great Tales of the Supernatural (ed. Mary Danby). I bought this grimoire secondhand a long time ago. It...
View ArticleSquintlepiece
The Turkey City Lexicon is a document from the SF Writers of America that offers advice to would-be authors of science fiction, pointing out the pitfalls that snare the unwary novice. A Pitfall for the...
View ArticleBhooq
As I am sure you both know, I have been hard at work on a book. Refractory ‘t’s have yet to be crossed and the final recalcitrant ‘i’s dotted, but time waits for no-one, and as the remorseless...
View ArticleClichecollisional
Headline for this story, from the Daily Telegraph‘s landing page: BORIS JOHNSON PLEDGES TO RAMP UP VACCINATION ROLL OUT The italics are mine. Perhaps I am just unusually literal-minded, or...
View ArticleScrabbungulate
I’m not sure whether either of you know that I am rather fond of Scrabble. I can be found haunting the Internet Scrabble Club under the name of zedwave, (playing Scrabble online with people you know...
View ArticlePliny
Pliny the Elder, yes, that’s the one, the author of Natural History, which got a very poor review on Goodreads at the time, one reader castigating the author as ‘that voluminous, industrious,...
View ArticleNautilus
I really can’t believe it. I’ve been writing books for thirty years, but have never seen the anticipation that’s buzzing around my fifthforthcoming tome, A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth. When a...
View ArticleUltramarine
One or two of you might have read By The Sea, my Gothick Bodice Ripper with Detectives, which was originally serialized by my Occam’s Typewriter Compadre Jenny Rohn on her LabLit website, but now...
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