Monthly Archives: March 2010
Incoming! ‘Hellion: The Curse Of Snakes’ is my first teen novel, and should shut the little buggers up for a few hours while they ponder the meaning of life and death before they return to carving their initials in the foreheads of their enemies with switchblades. It’s written in concise, clear language that even a […]
Posted on 3rd March 2010 |
London
I photographed this in a framing shop – I wonder if there’s an equivalent ‘Desiderata’!
Sylvain Chomet, the director of the wonderful ‘Les Triplettes De Bellville’, is returning with a new film (apparently different in style and rather downbeat) called ‘The Illusionist’, based on an unproduced script from the legendary Jacques Tati. Thinking abut Tati (when I should have been writing) and noting comments from some non-French viewers that they […]
…where the title for the collection ‘Old Devil Moon’ came from, it came from here. One of the few films ever made about drugs, racism and the problem of leprechauns. Fred Astaire’s last movie, rather nicely directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
Over the course of creating short stories (my collections usually take three years to accumulate) all sorts of disturbing and unbelievable things happen in the news. These are just a few I noted during the writing of ‘Old Devil Moon’. In Stockton-On-Tees, a poverty-stricken family succumbed to heroin use, and as her son died, the […]
I love a good doomsday scenario – they make great stories. I’ve got one coming shortly in an Ellen Datlow collection that will knock your eye out. But now the world’s most powerful investors have been advised to buy farmland, stock up on gold and prepare for a “dirty war†by Marc Faber, AKA Dr […]
It’s being reported this morning that Starbucks allows its customers to openly carry guns in its shops – not here, obviously, but in America. However, this story is a little more complicated than that. What’s happening is that gun nuts are confronting public places with their right to bear arms, and Starbucks is a target […]
On my bedside table there are always two books – one is a volume of short stories. At the moment it is ‘Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime & Other Stories’ by Oscar Wilde. In the title tale, Lord Arthur Saville is told by a ‘cheiromancer’ that he will commit murder, and as he is about to […]
