misc.
Literary Art for Sale
This is your big chance to own an original work of art by John Burningham, Catherine Anholt, Esther Freud, David McKee, Anthony Horowitz, Polly Dunbar, Helen Oxenbury, Maureen Lipman, Bill Oddie, Sean Bean and lots lots more. Oh, and me. It’s for an amazingly good cause — the St Elizabeth Hospice in Suffolk, of which [...]
Creative writing 101
I don’t usually make a big noise of the fact that I went to Harvard. It wasn’t so hard to gain admission back in the pleistocine age. And it was filled with all sorts of people who seemed to be there on some pretext other than sheer weight of intellect (we used to call it [...]
Let’s hear it for the little green men.
According to the nice man on the BBC, more Americans believe in alien abduction than believe Barack Obama is doing a good job as president. This statement was followed by an interview with a woman in Nevada who felt quite strongly that aliens had been coming to earth over the past hundred years to help [...]
Your subject will find you.
At least that’s the theory. You’re supposed to be open to it. Let it insinuate itself into your life, hunt you down, insist upon being written. Unless of course you’re the sort of crass commercial writer who wakes up one morning and thinks, ‘Vampires! They’re popular.’ And then an hour later, ‘Pirates! They’re popular.’ And [...]
How Jilly Cooper Writes
According to my sources (this week’s Time Out), Jilly Cooper types all her (very long) novels on an ancient manual typewriter called Monica. Now I am NOT going to get into the naming of inanimate objects. OK. I am. Only to say that it is exceptionally silly to have a car named Clara and a [...]
Some deep philosophical musings on the new TOAST catalog for men.
Is it just me, or is the whole world starting to look like a parody of itself? Tonight, I found this in my inbox. For those people living in caves (or abroad), the TOAST catalog has become required reading in every British household of a certain complexion — households that either boast a genuine wafty [...]
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