JT.

Wow, thanks Libby! Well done to the other participants. I’ll think up some devilishly difficult competition for March and post later tomorrow.

I’m astounded by all these badly behaved agents, because bad behaviour it is. It’s just rude, and they must understand how galling it is for an author to get their hopes up needlessly – or maybe they don’t. And as for not replying after requesting a full – well, it’s appalling. @janette your experience in particular has me fuming. How can he gush…[Read more]

Incidentally, as this year I am coasting towards the age where I am ‘losing my hair’, and wondering whether I will be locked out at quarter to three (never mind getting a bottle of wine for my birthday or a Valentine’s card), I suppose I should resign myself to joining that league of elderly no-hopers that includes Hilary Mantel, Philip Pullman…[Read more]

I sort of worry a bit when I see agents pushing writers this way. In fact, my hackles start to hack or rise or whatever they’d do if I had them. Book Club fiction is Literary Fiction that agents reckon they should be able to sell better than average. As for this splitting of work into ever more categories as though this is some kind of scientific…[Read more]

Oh blimey Hilary! What a demoralising experience! Did she mention your age ina negative ‘this is offputting’ kind of way? Because that’s outrageous if so. And you’re right – I see so many ‘I got my first book deal at x yrs old’ that I would never have expected it to be an issue. My guess/hope is that this agent is perhaps the exception rather than…[Read more]

I’m late to this debate, but it’s a very interesting one, so I hope no-one minds me resurrecting it.

My view on this is very utilitarian (I think), in that I always – consciously or unconsciously – try to work out whether the value of the book/music/art/movie/whatever is greater to me than the cost of reading/listening/watching it.

And the…[Read more]

Very little time this week, so throwing this one up before I read it again and spot all the errors!!

Enter the darkness

One hundred days, of which this is the first. We stand in snow that has crusted metallic overnight, not yet deep although that will come tomorrow, I think. It is eleven forty-five and we stand in a ragged line at the edge of…[Read more]

Of course, I hadn’t fully considered how many cases there are until I started this. For instance, I read We Need to Talk About Kevin long before I knew anything about Lionel Shriver – possibly before she had begun the process of disseminating her curious bag of libertarian views* across the media and the web. I still consider it a beautifully…[Read more]

New Day

The smoke from cooking fires lay like a grey blanket over Alexandra township and a tangerine sun rose behind it, then burst clear and threw its warming mantle over the land. The windows of the high-rise buildings on the distant Johannesburg skyline glinted like slabs of molten gold. A typical autumn dawn on the highveld but this was not a…[Read more]

Just seen an interesting twist on this. A bookshop is making a donation to a charity supporting trans kids every time they sell a book by JK Rowling

I agree with what you say, Raine. I should have clarified what I meant by problematic. For instance there are readers who boycott writers just on someone else’s sayso – I think you should always do your due dillifence and try to find out the whole story in as far as you can. Three independant sources of verification and I won’t boycott a book…[Read more]

I guess the line I draw with this is slightly different – it kind of depends if the work is current or not (or still within copyright, I guess). Partly because I don’t want to financially benefit anyone whose beliefs I find harmful (and that includes Roald Dahl’s estate). It feels like a condoning of their views to say ‘yeah you are hateful to x…[Read more]

This is something that I end up discussing a lot with my co-dragon on Dissecting Dragons. Ultimately, I think it’s fine to read and enjoy problematic art by problematic artists. The important thing is that you are questioning both within your own mind. I’ve boycotted certain YA authors because they’ve been involved in horrific online bullyimg…[Read more]

One of the more bizarre aspects of Social Media is that Michael Rosen has indeed been labeled as an antisemite, and the ‘wrong kind’ of Jew. In fact, just a couple of months after the publication of his book The Missing: The True Story of My Family in World War II, which investigates the loss of family members in the holocaust, Rachel Riley lumped…[Read more]

I wouldn’t put up with a thousandth of the crap Michael Rosen gets every single day for all the tea in China. The man is.. I was going to say saint, but you know what I mean. I didn’t mean you to alter or amend the original blog by the way, it’s at the very least a widespread view of Dahl and I wouldn’t say it was any less valid than mine (and I…[Read more]

You are not A BAD HUMAN BEING in spite of your assertion, and I have to point out that I am never wrong about these things. I note what you say, that I have no evidence other than a few sensational articles to confirm the smears, and most of all that he has been forgiven by Michael Rosen* He stays in my blog but with an amended text. I would love…[Read more]

I know I’m a bad human being, but still. I admit the Roald Dahl thing caused me a great deal of distress – not least because some of the articles circulating about him in the last few years contain a whole lot of horrible smears as well as the couple of horrible facts. But it’s difficult to come out and say ‘well yes, he did say a couple of…[Read more]

There are also examples in art – Paul Gauguin, Picasso and Freud, for example, were not particularly nice folk, it seems.
If a writer’s work doesn’t reflect his obnoxious views, does that make it OK? Or if his views are expressed in a work of fiction and not an educational piece?
Some very good people write fiction that contains extreme views, but…[Read more]

It was. I have a bit of a confession actually – in the first Cloud monthly competition I ever entered, I got more than one flash of inspiration and asked if multiple entries were permitted. The competition setter said OK, but after my third entry, suggested that maybe enough was enough 🙂