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