A Little Help from Friends

I’ve just been read­ing very kind words by writer Ken MacLeod on Déjà Vu:

I wasn’t the only reviewer who thought the book, and the writer, deserved a lot bet­ter. Ian’s efforts to become a prop­erly pub­lished writer were ser­i­ous, unavail­ing, and in the end heart­break­ing. He had another life than being a writer, and reckoned it was time he got on with it.

It was a day in the Christmas hol­i­day imme­di­ately fol­low­ing pub­lic­a­tion of the book that I got Ken’s email telling me how much he liked it (together with some busi­ness advice). That was the moment I breathed a sigh of relief. If Ken liked it, there was good chance it wasn’t rub­bish. Grand days.

The Racoon in the Room Full of Rocking Chairs

Anthony Horowitz quotes an inter­view with Giles Foden, author and pro­fessor of cre­at­ive writ­ing at the University of East Anglia.

At any event, he was asked—broadly—about the place of lit­er­ary books in the new world and he replied: “It’s hard to estab­lish what is good and what is not. Barnes, Amis and McEwan were the last people through the door and then the door closed and the build­ing fell down.”

I don’t think the situ­ation is get­ting worse for lit­er­ary writers. Yes, lit­er­ary fic­tion com­prises a small por­tion of the mar­ket, but this has been the case for dec­ades, per­haps longer. And while the chefs’ books and celebrity mem­oirs are pop­u­lar dur­ing their mar­ket­ing win­dow, they don’t last. Literary fic­tion — and good fic­tion in gen­eral — has a long tail.

► Falling down | theBookseller.com

Twits Books | guardian.co.uk

Well, this looks like huge fun. Apparently, some agents on Twitter have been tweet­ing about bad quer­ies (tag #query­fail). And now the writers strike back:

It was bound to hap­pen – the only sur­prise is that it’s taken a whole month. Writers were angry and wounded by March’s “Queryfail” on Twitter, which saw a group of agents tweet­ing about the worst sub­mis­sions they’ve received from would-be pub­lished authors.

► Writers hit back at agents over query­fail | Books | guardian.co.uk

Blogging with the Stars

I’ve been hibern­at­ing over the winter. To be spe­cific, I’ve been mark­ing assign­ments. There was no time for updat­ing this blog. But when I say ‘no time for updat­ing’, I mean I had no time to write longish art­icles. There was cer­tainly time to write shorter ones.

This morn­ing, I had an idea. Maybe two.
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The Genre that Dare Not Speak Its Name

What do nov­els about a jour­ney across post-apocalyptic America, a clone wait­ress rebelling against a future soci­ety, a world-girdling pipe of spe­cial gas keep­ing mutant creatures at bay, a plan to rid a col­on­is­able new world of dino­saurs, and genetic engin­eer­ing in a col­lapsed civil­isa­tion have in common?

They are all most def­in­itely not sci­ence fiction.

My favour­ite bit about this post? The graphic at the top shows a fly­ing sau­cer in Earth orbit; the cap­tion makes it clear that the space­ship is CGI.

Thanks for that.

► David Barnett: Science fic­tion is the genre that dare not speak its name | Books | guardian.co.uk

You mean they haven’t even heard of James Bond?

Remember when, as a child, you’d sud­denly see things from a new per­spect­ive? I must have been about nine, or per­haps eight, when it struck me that there were people in the world who had not heard of James Bond. That thought held me in a tighter grip than the notion that some people had no access to drink­ing water, or the Bible…but no James Bond? What kind of alien exist­ence would that be?
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Jackson to write The Hobbit screenplay

According to the Beeb, Peter Jackson is going to write the scripts for the new Hobbit movies, to be dir­ec­ted by Guillermo del Toro. This, I would sub­mit, is a good thing.

A Recipe for a Good Blog

Merlin Mann shares his thoughts on what makes a good blog. Via Daring Fireball.

The Situationist

The human being is a pecu­liar creature. While all of its senses, and almost all of its capa­cit­ies, are matched and exceeded by count­less other anim­als, some­thing strange and unim­it­ated lies between the ears of Homo sapi­ens sapi­ens. I speak of noth­ing less than the mind.
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Fiona Robyn’s ‘Small Stones: A Year of Moments’

Readers of this blog will be all to famil­iar with my own attempts at flash fic­tion, which I try to keep as ‘flash’ (i.e. short) as pos­sible. Fiona Robyn, how­ever, goes one bet­ter. She goes for the ‘f’ of the ‘flash’ like Linford Christie used to go for the ‘b’ of the ‘bang’.

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