Margaret J Evans

Hi @johnalty it’s good to be back, though it would help if I came back and then didn’t disappear again for months! Sigh. I have good intentions and then life happens…

Well done, Raine! Thanks for the comp, John.

Oh yes, under 400 words

The Spring Has Sprung

‘The birdies is upon the wing, but that’s absurd.’

Tom was on his hundredth rendition of the poem when I clutched his hand and pointed to the merry-go-round.

‘Look, Tom. Your Uncle Fred and I used to play on that when we were your age. Do you want a go?’

He pulled himself free and ran to it with excited bouncing s…[Read more]

Wow, brilliant news, Elle. All I can say, apart from well done, is that with that much interest, your book must be top notch!

Brilliant news, Janette. Congratulations 😊

Aaaaggghhhhhh!! Brilliant. And it’s everything to do with your own talent and efforts and what you deserve.

Really good, Daeds – and IMO we could all go out and respond publicly to your and Kaz’s FB posts with words to recognise how good this story is. Fantastic.

Fantastic news. A great story. Very thoughtful and moving.

How astonishing that an event with so much loss of life has faded from memory. I mean, not literally, it’s still there in the records – and you’ve just blogged about it. That said, it’s coming up to 70 years, I suppose. Great blog as ever, Richard. I shake my head when you write about the prevarication and penny-pinching over AWS. Then I remember…[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]

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]

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]

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]