Well, the site still needs a nip here and a tuck there, but I think that the new design is starting to take shape. Essentially, what started out as a business site with a blog has become a blog / magazine site which also offers a service. So, why the changes? (Keep reading …)

While brief biographies have their place, sometimes there’s no substitute for the brick, the breeze-block examination of an author’s life and work. I’ve been through Ian MacNiven’s biography of Lawrence Durrell twice, and I’ve been meaning to repurchase and reread Ted Morgan’s Maugham: A Biography for a while now. This summer, Jonathan Cape have added to the goldmine of big biographies with Semi Invisible Man: the life of Norman Lewis, by the writer (and sometime editor of Lewis’ work), Julian Evans. (Keep reading …)

David Benioff’s new novel, City of Thieves, tells the story of two young men—one in his teens and one just out of them—who are arrested during the siege of Leningrad and given a stark ultimatum: find a dozen eggs for the Colonel’s daughter’s wedding cake, or be shot. As they begin to search the ruined, starving city on their impossible quest, City of Thieves unfolds into an involving and well-told adventure, that suffers only from a distracting and unnecessary framing device.

David Benioff can write. There is proof on almost every page of City of Thieves, passages I want to show to my clients or bookmark for future use as examples. There’s no empty description here; everything is shown in terms of how it relates to the things around it, and to the story. See how he reminds us of his characters’ precarious physical state, not by bludgeoning us with repeated, shoehorned references, but by bringing it up where it’s relevant, and where we can see how it influences the story:

We ran for the stairway door, abandoning our firefighting tools, racing down the dark stairwell. We were fools, of course. A slip on one of those concrete steps, with no fat or muscle to cushion the fall, meant a broken bone, and a broken bone meant death.

This is much, much better than just peppering the text with synonyms for “skinny”. And as Lev and Kolya walk around the city, we see not just what they see, but how they see it and the impression it makes on them. Read the full review >>

Rome can be a dangerous city to write about. There’s so much culture and raw information tied up in the city’s streets, buildings, and monuments, that it’s easy for a writer to get distracted from the job in hand. In The Creator’s Map, author Emilio Calderón has trouble setting aside the guidebook and concentrating on the story. Read the full review >>

Of the many different sorts of shark that operate in the freelance editing business (and more specifically, the critiquing business), one of the more uninspiring varieties is the critique copy-and-paster. When you get a critique from one of these guys, what you actually receive is a collection of barely personalised pieces of generic advice, copy-and-pasted from their database. They pick whatever seems to fit the bill, and slap it in. It’s the equivalent of modern customer service emails, where you get a barely-relevant, generic reply. Only, of course, you pay a lot more for the critique. (Keep reading …)

What marks out a new detective series? There’s the era, of course, with historical crime fiction becoming ever more popular. Then there’s the character of the detective, whether an alcoholic Ethiopian tramp in a Roman suburb or a forensic anthropologist in Canada, and then there’s the nature of the crimes to be investigated.

Finally, there are the tools of justice; crime stories don’t always have to end with the amateur sleuth peering over the bridge into the torrents below (where a top hat can be seen being tossed to and fro in the foam), or handing their prey over to an obliging if misguided constable. For example, in The Widow’s Secret, Brian Thompson has created Bella Wallis, a nineteenth-century sleuth who settles her quarries’ hash by ruining their reputations through thinly veiled caricatures in sensation novels. (Keep reading …)

I often get emails from teenagers and younger writers looking for advice (or simply moral support) on their writing. For a while I’ve had a sort of generic advice email that I’ve sent them, but I thought it might be worth expanding on that and posting it here in the blog. (Keep reading …)

While the love of a favourite author can sustain a reader’s interest through a more in-depth biography (for example, I wouldn’t give up my copy of Ian MacNiven’s 800-page monster on Lawrence Durrell for the world), it’s not really practical to read one of these for every author who takes your interest. You can get some information from Wikipedia but—potential inaccuracies aside—there’s only so much detail you can get from a web page (and you can’t read them in the bath, or on the beach). Enter the new Brief Lives, a series of bite-sized author biographies from Hesperus Press… (Keep reading …)

Faber’s new website, Robin Cook’s latest thrilller promoted with controversial “webisodes”, and more… (Keep reading …)

Many of the manuscripts that cross my desk are written in the present tense, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. The present has a lot of pitfalls, especially for new writers. It’s a bit tricky and unnatural, so while it can be used to good effect in a brief passage, over the course of an entire novel it can be tiring. It’s also hard to get the grammar right, especially when you start bringing in things like the past perfect. Finally, it’s often seen as an early danger sign of amateurish prose.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I find myself advising the writers to drop the story back into the past tense.

It was interesting, then, to read Blackmoor, published last month. It’s the debut novel from young British author and UEA graduate Edward Hogan, and substantial pasages are written in the present tense. (Keep reading …)