Caldwell's blog

I bore myself with my obsessive compulsion to endlessly create word puns in the worst dad joke way that leaves me groaning before I have even shared them, and yet they keep coming. This morning for instance I was considering grandiose titles of books and with a few letter changes diminishing their power. Tern of the Sentry - An old guard officer who had tamed a sea bird, and together, they would defend the gates of the palace. The Gapes of Roth...

I wore my drinking like a badge of honour. Somehow, the fact that I could keep it together—without my wife or kids ever really knowing—felt like an achievement. This was mine. My secret. I hid bottles everywhere: in coat pockets, hanging shopping bags, the tops of kitchen cabinets, under the car seat, even in the bushes by our gate. I was an adult, yet I treated this like some kind of game. Could I make it through a conversation without slurring...

How to encapsulate that feeling? Like loss, bereavement, a tender crushing feeling that you want to push you to tears but they just won't come. Like seeing beauty and feeling a kind of ache knowing that even as you experience it and it's there right now, you know that it's dying, that it's lost, that even as you're feeling it you can't quite touch it. Somehow like trying to draw a perfect circle freehand and searing it, slicing it, so balanced,...

As I sit here, in front of my screen, with the rain beating down outside, I feel a strong urge to register some reflection on my and all of our existences. The air is humid and slightly cold and there seems to be an energy in it - like a faint electric pulse. It's connecting everything. And even though I am tied to the mundane tasks of my job - writing code - which is something I have done for over 25 years now, I sense that there are epic and...

Two thesauri, a tonne of dictionaries, Biographical Quotations, Modern English Usage, C. G. Jung's ' Archetypes and the collective unconscious ', Vogler's ' The Writer's Journey ', Will Storr with ' The Science of Storytelling ' and Brody's ' Save The Cat! Writes a novel '. It's all on my shelves and all remain unread. I see them there, all eager to tell me their secrets but it all seems too much like work. I can't get rid of them because that...

Recently everything I have picked up and been inspired by happens to have an Irish author. These are those that have got me back into literature following a long dearth where life was just too complicated to even consider picking up a book. Claire Keegan (Foster in particular, but lots of her other stuff too) Colum McCann - Apeirogon Paul Murray - The Bee Sting Donal Ryan - A slanting of the sun There are more, but these are the ones that stand...