Blogs

Given that we’re soon to be zapped like bugs under a magnifying glass from the 50,000 very-bad-idea mirrored satellites (although I do wonder if some are already up there causing fires destroying the French wine industry, English agriculture), it’s time to sell the self-help books. If I can dip into conspiracy theories at the drop of a sentence, then it’s likely I’ve self-helped as much as it’s possible for any self to help. It didn’t help that...

Lin Anderson’s Whispers of the Dead is sold as Rhona MacLeod Thriller. Ah, you might say. An established series. That’s good, in a way. Anderson is one of the top ten percent of writers that can afford to write and produce around a book a year. Front cover: The Daily Record labelled it (or her) The Best Scottish Crime Series Since Rebus . I know who Rebus is. I’ve even got a couple of his books lying around unread somewhere (I keep meaning to...

Being in an ‘escape mindset’, fancied an overnight trip to Edinburgh. Maybe get a senior railcard, travel first class for a treat. See the movie costumes at Dovecot, raid the art gallery shops. Check out medieval magical items at the Scottish National Gallery before the Oxford course starts. (What a swot). Go positively mad in Blackwell’s. However, an overnight tourist tax recently started, of 5% per night, so have changed my mind. Even with...

I’ve read J. Oliver Padgett’s work on ABCtales. I’d be able to pick out his writing from others by his measured style and a quirk that stands out like a thumbprint. I didn’t pay much attention to the title page or the title. But it made sense in the end. This is a short book. Just over 200 pages. It can be read in one sitting, which I could easily have done. But I left the last 20 or 30 pages until my concentration was better. And to give it the...

The pathway into the ‘Experimental Mindset’ is to make a pact with yourself. One at a time, no multi-pacting. A pact is not a generic or goal-based statement like, ‘I will write a book by Christmas’. Rather, ‘I will write 300 words each weekday for 100 days’, just to see what happens. Taking notes, recording observations of what happens along the way, not self-negating criticism, just data. In this way, everyday life becomes experimental and...

Camilla Läckberg & Henrik Fexeus’s Cult (2023) has sold more than 30 million copies. I like to say I’d read it, but I haven’t. I read around a fifth. The first 100 pages. For the record. My combined book sales lie about 3 copies, or more, maybe 4. Nordic noir is the new ABBA. Ossian is the kidnapped five year old boy whose disappearance drives the central plot. Frederik & Josefin, Ossian’s parents, are devastated by the abductor being a...

Was reading that people who complain a lot, say about other people’s fabulous movies not sticking verbatim to the book/poem, are responding from a cynical mindset. Of course, reading something nowadays doesn’t make it any truer than watching it on YouTube, doubly so if you read it via AI, but the notion of cynicism as blocked creativity chimed. I spend too much time complaining about complainers. Ergo ; it’s me who is stuck in a cynical mindset...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent There were forty-four speeches in that room on the Fourth of July, 1873, and a man killed every one of them with a single sentence, and I was there to watch it done. I was also, I should say at the front, carrying the forty-fourth. The occasion was the Independence Day dinner of the Americans in London, held that year with the full pomp the exiled patriot brings to the business of missing home. I...