The Fiction Desk Blog

Nobody knows how to spell email. You might say, ‘nobody knows how to spell e-mail,’ but you’d be wrong. Or would you?

The issue of email vs. e-mail clearly raises blood pressures across the world. At the time of writing, the spelling question is right at the top of the Wikipedia article on e-mail. Meanwhile, a group calling itself the Email Experience Council has declared the official term to be email. They’ve even got a petition (more…)

Irregardless is a word that people love to hate. In fact, many would say that it isn’t a word at all, but rather the hideous result of a collision between irrespective and regardless (more…)

A little while ago, I finally managed to visit Rome’s Porta Portese market. The main stretch is comprised of an infinite number of stalls that sell a depressingly finite range of stock; like a British high street, it seems to be the same half-dozen stores repeating themselves as far as the eye can see. The more interesting, more unique, stalls are in the side streets, where it’s more like a car boot sale. Here, on a table with perhaps a dozen English-language paperbacks, I came across a couple of books of a type I hadn’t seen before.

They were paperback novels, printed wide rather than tall, with two columns to each page. Maybe six titles in all; I bought Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and a volume containing Typhoon and The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. Perhaps American readers of this blog will be familiar with these editions, but the Brits I’ve spoken to haven’t seen anything like them (more…)

Last month I finally managed to make my book lover’s pilgrimage to the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Almost—but not quite—the legendary bookshop that first published James Joyce’s Ulysses (the original shop, owned by Sylvia Beach, was at a different location and closed for good in 1941), the modern Shakespeare and Company is still a unique bookshop.

The shop is staffed at least in part by a team of enthusiasts, who work there in return for the use of one of the beds that are tucked discreetly between the bookcases. (more…)

Although all writers are different (or so we like to believe), there are a few reference books that are all but indispensable to all of us. As a first post in the Writer’s Bookshelf category, here’s a list of three books that no writer can do without. Whether you’re a novice writing a science fiction epic, or an experienced professional writing a pacy crime thriller, the following should always be within arm’s reach: (more…)

Peanuts is something you come back to. You revisit it in progressive stages, as you would an elderly relative; when you’re a child, they’re just a warm, friendly hug and the biscuits. When you’re a teenager they’re somebody who complicates family gatherings and about whom things are said in the kitchen, and then later they become an incredibly fascinating person with a unique life and a hundred stories…which you’ll never hear, because they’ve just passed away. (more…)

Welcome to The Fiction Desk, a website offering editing services and advice to fiction writers.

The Fiction Desk brings together my editing business and my “reading, writing, and editing” blog, The Serial Comma. I hope that by combining the two, I’m providing a more interesting website and selection of services both to my clients and to readers of the blog. (more…)