Why do so many female comedians struggle to be taken funnily? Is your mother to blame? Do you like broad beans? And why is there an ‘X’ in First Person?
The terrifyingly powerful Tark and Mara form a plan to find a true and quantifiable value for art, so that they can quadruple it, and then watch it increase. And if you have a spare million or three lying about, you can do it too.
Time for my now-annual tradition of reviewing the events of the book world before anything has actually happened, because I’ll be far too busy in December 2016 – smiting my enemies and sewing appliqué onto my elbow patches, etc – to do it after events have passed. This also saves you time: after reading this, you needn’t bother with the end of this year at all. Isn’t that wonderful?
In just 6 days, you became fat, ugly, lazy, stupid, weak, and a failure. How did all this happen in the seconds since Christmas? But just try the Anti-Resolution Diet for Writers, and watch the self-loathing fall away.
Sometimes I feel like I’m very harsh on authors for merely doing the same things everyone else does. Granted, sometimes it’s deserved, for being too pushy, or rolling out marketing techniques that were last employed by the Stasi or the KGB. Earlier this year, I did a pillory piece on authors who are so pushy that they…
I did my review of 2015 last January, because I was confident that I would be far too busy in December with things I hadn’t made up yet. At the time, I was fairly certain I’d be flat out right now with glittering parties, dazzling the hoi-polloi with my witty repartee. Sadly, I had to ditch that in…
It’s been a while, ladies and gentlemen… remember How To Know If You Are A Chick-Lit Heroine? Or How To Know If You’re A Cop In A Crime Novel? Not to mention How To Know If You’re In A Young Adult Novel, and my personal favourite, How To Know If You’re In A Literary Fiction Novel. Well,…
