Blog Archives

Genre Pacing: A question from Goodreads

On Goodreads, a nice person called Xena WP asked me Jo, after finishing Transcription by K. Atkinson I wished for a few paragraphs at least of Juliet’s happy discovery of Italy and enjoyment of motherhood, things you describe movingly in

Posted in Books, My Books, My Real Children, Writing

SF Books for Adults

This is the list I read out at LTUE today: Ada Palmer Too Like the Lightning (2016) and sequels C.J. Cherryh Cyteen (1987) Samuel R. Delany Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1986) Ursula K. Le Guin The Dispossessed (1974) Gene Wolfe The Shadow of

Posted in Books, Fandom

The Dark is Reading 1: Tonight will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond all imagining

I think if I were to read The Dark is Rising for the first time now, it would be a very different book. I was thirteen when I first read it on the beach in Hastings. Hastings is a town in

Posted in Among Others, Books, Fandom, Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

Scintillation: New goals, maybe better goals, and plenty

Very very exciting. Scintillation has reached it’s $15,000 stretch goal, and will be happening in 2018, 2019 and 2020. With 40 hours left on the Kickstarter, I have added some more stretch goals. Now people who support us at the

Posted in Books, Fandom

Images

I just realised that the things I know about my books before I write them, the thematic image bits, are very like the things I remember about books I have only read once a long time ago and almost forgotten.

Posted in Books, Writing

2nd May 2016: My Goodreads review of Petrarch’s letters

Five hundred and ninety years before I was born, Petrarch died in the middle of writing me a letter. What do you mean it wasn’t to me? It totally was. It was addressed to “Posterity”, and if I’m not his

Posted in Books, Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

29th January 2015: Everything alive and dead to weep as one

There’s a family anecdote about me that I’m not sure whether I actually remember or whether I just remember being told about it lots and lots of times. I was four or five, and we went to St David’s Cathedral,

Posted in Books, Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

1st December 2014: Best birthday present ever

So Marissa Lingen gave me a book. And lots of people have given me books before, and sometimes books I really really wanted, like the time my aunt gave me The Silmarillion when I was fourteen, and I had wanted it

Posted in Books, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

30th September 2014: A Kind of Rissole

One of the things I am reading is Boccaccio’s Decameron. It’s a fascinating collection of medieval stories, comparable to the Canterbury Tales but more Italian and with more sex. The frame story is that seven young ladies and three young

Posted in Books, Human culture

12th June 2012: Shakespeare, real thing

When I compared Martin’s A Dance With Dragons to Shakespeare’s history plays, some people got all bent out of shape by the comparison, and it took me ages to understand why. I was indeed comparing Martin to Shakespeare, because they

Posted in Books, Theatre