Reviews to die for

The anti­pope — Charles Stross — has been brave enough to post his most neg­at­ive Amazon reviews.

‘The writ­ing is some of the worst I have ever exper­i­enced.’ (Accelerando)

‘Reminds me of cheap SF com­ics of the 50s and badly writ­ten online adven­ture games.’ (Halting State)

Déjà Vu had one abso­lute stinker of a review, and it was writ­ten for Interzone by Martin Lewis. It was his first review for Interzone and, as I under­stand it, his last. I can’t find it on the web and I cere­mo­ni­ally burnt my copy…but I think it said some­thing like, ‘Tedious char­ac­ter­isa­tion, awful dia­logue, gen­er­ally so bor­ing I wanted to poke my eyes out’.

(Via Charlie’s Diary.)

Materialism over at the Beeb

Melvyn Bragg’s Radio Four pro­gramme on the his­tory of ideas, In Our Time, rarely fails to be inter­est­ing and pro­voc­at­ive. This week the topic is ‘mater­i­al­ism’. Not the wor­ry­ing trend to dribble over the latest Apple hard­ware (I stand guilty), but the well-grounded notion that the uni­verse con­tains only phys­ical mat­ter, not non-corporeal entit­ies like the spirit (and per­haps, to an extent, dreams and beliefs). Do you have free will? Don’t be silly. Click here and let Baron Bragg screw with your head.

By the way, the OED lists Melvyn Bragg as the first per­son to use the word ‘prat’ in the sense of ‘muppet’/‘eejit’/‘pillock’. There appears to be no end to the man’s talents.

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Welcome to Cementum

What we have here is an exam­in­a­tion of my attempt at writ­ing a novel.

Says Richard Galbraith over at his blog. Looks interesting.

The book’s primary pur­pose from the begin­ning was an exer­cise in self-exploration, no real want or need to get it published.

Good grief. He sounds awfully bal­anced about the whole thing.

Book hoarding

I get this a lot, too.

“A vis­it­ing son, sur­vey­ing the crammed book­cases in every room (not to men­tion the piles of books on sur­faces and floors) asked me ‘don’t you ever get rid of any books?’ And the answer of course is no. ”

Yesterday even­ing, I spent almost half an hour stand­ing in front of the book­case in the liv­ing room. I was look­ing at each spine and con­jur­ing an impres­sion of the stor­ies. Reactivating them. It seems to help with the over­all feel­ing that I’m try­ing to con­jure, in my own little way, with my own books.

I won’t be sat­is­fied, of course, until I have at least one room whose walls are filled with books. And one of those moun­ted, mov­ing ladders.

(Via Macmillan New Writers.)

Academia’s big guns fight ‘Google effect’

An inter­est­ing piece over at the Grauniad sug­gests that aca­demic search engines (which have been, at points, the very bane of my life) are ‘less mediocre’ than Google but lack user-friendliness.

Scores of aca­demic search engines provide a heavy­weight altern­at­ive to the com­mer­cial ones and work against what Brighton University’s pro­fessor of media– Tara Brabazon has termed “the Google effect” — a tend­ency towards mediocrity.

Yeah, maybe. But Google will often pull up the pages of aca­dem­ics who put pre-prints of their papers online, sav­ing us the rig­mar­ole of try­ing to get a full text ver­sion of a paper via a uni­ver­sity lib­rary only to hit that ‘com­puter says no’ mes­sage at the end.

Via Academia’s big guns fight ‘Google effect’ | | EducationGuardian.co.uk

Things I Hate

I’ve just said au revoir to an old friend, Daniel, who came to stay for the week­end. Before he left, we had a chat about things we hate in rela­tion to lan­guage. I thought it might be fun to put these on my blog.

Linguistic thingies that I hate:

(5) Top five lists

Cynical attempts to cre­ate traffic via book­mark­ing sites like Digg.

(4) People who think that the let­ter H is pro­nounced ‘haitch’

Indeed it is not. It is ‘aitch’. It has a cock­ney feel, if you will, and if you say ‘haitch’ in my pres­ence I will bludgeon you with the object I find nearest to hand.

(3) Misconstruing verbs that end with ‘-ize’

When you bru­tal­ize a per­son, you are mak­ing them bru­tal. “The police bru­tal­ized the rioters” means that the actions of the police made rioters bru­tal. You don’t have to act bru­tally towards someone in order to bru­tal­ize them.

(2) People who write ‘invari­ably, but not always’.

Should be made to French kiss a dog.

(1.5) People who don’t dis­tin­guish between ‘that’ and ‘which’ in their rel­at­ive clauses.

I’ve given up try­ing to explain this, but I hate to see it.

(1) People who go, ‘Urgh!’ and look dis­gus­ted when you use a phrase or term that think is American in origin.

This applies, as far as I can tell, only to British people who feel that their lan­guage needs pro­tec­tion from the bar­baric Americans. Well, for start, there’s plenty of good stuff in American English. And British English doesn’t need pro­tect­ing. The rumours of its death have been greatly exag­ger­ated down the cen­tur­ies by mup­pet after mup­pet. It ain’t pure, either, hav­ing done the lin­guistic equi­val­ent of sleep­ing around with every other lan­guage that so much as bats an eye­lid in its dir­ec­tion. Furthermore, ‘closet’, ‘fall’ (for autumn) and many other phrases you care to men­tion are not at all American but decidedly British and in com­mon use at vari­ous points in the his­tory of our nation. Making verbs from nouns, using adject­ives in place of adverbs — irrit­at­ing, yes, but not American in ori­gin, and part of the steady, ongo­ing trans­form­a­tion of English.

There! I’ve made my grumps pub­lic, as I prom­ised Daniel.

Any other lin­guistic thingies that get on your nerves?

Fiction Flash Update

No time to blog any­thing prop­erly again this week, I’m afraid — busy like the bee. This is just a quick post to tell you that I’ll no longer be post­ing my weekly Fiction Flash pod­cast on This Writing Life.
Read more →

Fiction Flash

This week’s fic­tion flash audio pod­cast has been pos­ted. It’s a clas­sic from the pen of W. Somerset Maugham. Hope you like it.

What’s the story, Hocking?

It’s been an embar­rass­ingly long time since I updated this blog. The last proper entry was pos­ted on the 17th of March. While there are sev­eral reas­ons for the slow down — a trip to Germany, a ton of stu­dent mark­ing — the chief prob­lem is that this blog is meant to doc­u­ment my writ­ing life and, to put it plainly, I haven’t had much of a writ­ing life recently.
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Fiction Flash

This week’s fic­tion flash audio pod­cast has been pos­ted. It’s called Switch. Hope you like it.