RichardB

UNTITLED (as usual!)
89 words, so a bit on the short side, and I don’t mind if this makes no sense to anyone but me 🙂

I saw the prompt and thought I would
Write a poem, if I could,
I took a vintage text (or two)
And tried to fashion something new,
Nothing worked till I caught sight
Of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight
And so my Transformation…[Read more]

Fab review! Well done – she clearly really enjoyed it & picked up on all the things that I love about your writing! 🙂

What a brilliant review. I hope this generates some activity/interest/sales!

Incidentally, I see that Carol McKay wrote a pandemic novel that just beat the actual pandemic to publication, as did Kimmery Martin and Lawrence Wright. But they got splashed all over the papers and radio for it. Not a fair world.

One week left for the March comp, with one excellent entry as yet.

Wow, that’s not far from me at all. Half an hour by car. A pilgrimmage might be in order

@bellam, perhaps you can help me. I remember as a child hearing about a pirate radio ship that had been caught in a storm and had to put into Harwich, when it was impounded. I was there with my Mum and she pointed it out to me. I just remember a small, red ship. This was in the mid 1980s. I can’t find any references to it. I know we still had…[Read more]

You brought back so many memories Richard. Begging for my own radio so I could listen to Radio Luxembourg at night. Was the Power Play a RL thing? Anyway thanks for the chance to remember my youth!

Lovely, elegiac blog, Richard. I don’t think I realised how hard it could be to access pop music, especially anything out of the mainstream, until the late 60s.

As you know, Fairport is one of my favourite bands as well. I’d never heard the live version of Percy’s Song but just listened to it, and I know what you mean – both versions have…[Read more]

Interesting to see this pop up again – thanks for those podcasts Libby, looks interesting – and it has sort of kicked a thought into the foreground.

As a writer, my books *are* me (when it comes to fiction, that is). They are fragments of my being that I have extracted and slapped down on paper. I find it impossible to conceive of someone who…[Read more]

Publishers vary a lot in terms of the extent they will consult and take account of author suggestions. Mine have ranged from asking me for examples of covers I like and making changes to the design at my behest, to not even showing me the cover until the book is published. In the middle was making some changes to a first iteration, showing a…[Read more]

It’s a great cover because it hints at characters and themes and atmosphere enough to give a sense of the book, without doing so too overtly

@Daedalus, that’s so unutterably awful it’s tipped all the way over into wonderful!

@libby, @athelstone, thank you. I’m delighted with my foxy. 🙂

I think you’re right in that figures are often used as a massive ‘THIS IS WHAT THIS BOOK IS’ flag, like for bodice rippers or YA urban romantic fantasy, or twee historical rags-to-riches stories.…[Read more]

So. Many. Ways. That’s horrifying.

It is, isn’t it?