Kristin Gleeson – writers talking

I’ve recently been interviewed by Kristin Gleeson and here’s the link to her blog:
http://www.kristingleeson.com/blog.html

There’s plenty of other interesting stuff here – go and see!

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More about books and reading

I’ve just joined Good Reads:
http://www.goodreads.com/
a community that reads and talks about books!

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learning curves

Today I made a resolution. It’s time I learned the B,C,D of blogging. When I set up this site, I only got as far as A, and thanks to terminal laziness/not being specially techno minded, I have left it at that. BUT a move is afoot. I have signed up for the Society of Authors workshop on how to blog better. Its on 22 Feb in London, and you can sign up by visiting their website. You don’t have to be a membe,r as far as I know. 

Expect a slightly higher standard of blog from me in future.. 

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a very lucky girl

http://blog.authonomy.com/2012/01/one-to-watch-wednesday_11.html

My book  THE DOLLYWAGGLERS was just chosen as Authonomy’s book of the week by the Administrator.

I recommend this site to anyone who is interested in reading, writing, or hearing what other writers think about your work.

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welcome to the world of ‘Dick lit’

I’m having a mad holiday on the ‘Authonomy’ site, reading two or three unpublished novels a day – well, all right, maybe just some chapters of two or three.  Not everyone uploads the complete book. But yesterday I happened upon what I perceive to be a classic example of the ‘Dick lit’ genre.

Dick lit is chick lit, for men. Contemporary, yet strangely unreal, full of people who are high-achieving and spectacularly attractive.

So a dick lit book might be about some chaps who are each other’s best mates, in a strictly hetero way, in search of adventures in a mythical, high-powered world of expensive drugs, fast cars, helicopters and two-dimensional women who are adept at any form of sex and who in addition make no emotional demands on the hero, but who have amazing, exotic, athletic bodies.

Just when things could not be more perfect and they have three thousand pounds to spend on watches that emit a distress signal to anywhere in the world [these apparently do really exist], the chaps have a moment of vulnerability and share feelings, just like girls do with their bezzies.

And Love, with a real life angel,  is a final goal of happy-ever-afterness.

Aimed at men, naturally. But highly enjoyable, in the way the Bond films are.

Any titles spring to mind?

Dick lit. Remember, you heard it here first!

 

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my friend the secret poet

My friend Helen lives in Scotland and her day job is gardening.

In her secret life, though, she’s a poet, and a good one, I think. I don’t often get to read her poems because she doesn’t like showing them to anyone. Not just me, anyone. I’ve asked her why she never sends them – even anonymously or under a pen name – to a magazine or in for a competition. She says she knows she is a poet, and she doesn’t have to do things like that to prove it.

While I appreciate that she has taken a valid standpoint in her own eyes, I find her attitude frustrating. How do you ‘be’ a poet – or any kind of writer? Does it not, at some stage, require witnesses?  

I hate to think that when she is no longer here to receive the responses of her friends, her family, and the wider reading public, we will find a little – or perhaps huge – stash of unread verse.

Look, I’m asking you, the reader. I write plays – you cannot give a more public display of your creativity than making actors say your words on a stage.

But can you be a secret poet, or painter, or musician? Isn’t art a relationship?

Oh, and I hope 2012 will bring us all joy in whatever form we want to express ourselves. 

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