celticman's blog

Command forms in writing are written with an exclamation mark. Keep out the boozer! Old dogs bite too! Carpe diem! Fuck there’s old Pat Powell! Drop dead! Yes, he did the last of these yesterday. My brother Bod phoned to tell me. He was going to go up and see him, but like many other things in life something else came up. Old Pat would have understood. They say when people stop eating that’s their time’s up. In old Pat’s case it was probably...

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The evidence is meticulously laid out here. Piketty is saying quite simply, prove me wrong. He asks for transparency of sources and is quite willing to give it for his own work. He is also saying that this trend which can be traced to the laissez-faire policies of Thatcher and Reaganites, in particular, have led to an increasing concentration of wealth that undermines any idea of...

Think of the number of times you’ve said: I just can’t do that! Really, I can’t. You’d expect a Noel Edmonds-like figure to pop up on your shoulder, although perhaps not with a gingery beard, to tell you off for being negative. Give some advice about having the right mindset and some superbabble about if you want something enough the universe will provide it. I love that kinda crap. In the nineteen-century novel such dreams are anchored in...

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-paedophile-next-door/on-demand/57601-001 Historian Steve Humphries narrates and produced this programme. Going back thirty years to a conversation I had with a girl named Joyce who had big tits, I was quite keen on that kind of thing in those days, long eyelashes which she batted at me when she spoke, and she was now I come to think of it, more and more, quite pretty, but we never actually did it, not that...

Anybody that knows me should by now know I’m under contract to UNITED AUTHORS PUBLISHING LIMITED trading as UNBOUND . I’ve agreed to deliver a novel currently entitled Lily Poole and it will be around 72 000 words (ahem, 84 000, but that’s word inflation for you). The Deliver Date will be 1st October 2014 or a later date agreed between the two parties, or in more simple terms – whenever. The production costs currently stand around £5 100 and I’m...

Nostalgia is good for you. Americans it seem love Downton Abbey and weep over the history they never had. Nostalgia sells. I should know that better than most. Writing is an act of nostalgia, an attempt to capture the past that’s never been, or to re-create the past as we remember it. This can be applied equally to fact or fiction. Downton Abbey is set on that golden past when everybody knew their place. The master was always right, even when he...

This collection of nine short stories was winner of the Pulitzer Prize 2000. It gets my vote. Not that anyone asked me to vote, or even to read the long list or the short list. But if anybody had asked me which was the best of these short stories I would be flummoxed. I’d ask myself if they were all equally good. Janice Galloway, a writer I hold in the highest esteem, in comparison, wrote about the same number of stories in her collection of...

https://www.itv.com/itvplayer/broadmoor/series-1/episode-1 Broadmoor is a bleak sounding name. Its 150-years old, an asylum, sixty miles from London that is expanding out to meet it. It used to provide a daytrip for gentile Londoners to go and gawk at Broadmoor’s inmates. Now the cameras have been invited inside. I’m not really sure why. Broadmoor we are told holds 200 ‘patients’ at a cost of £300 000 per year, per patient, an annual cost to the...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04ndsb3/storyville-20142015-8-exposed-magicians-psychics-and-frauds ‘The Amazing Randi’ is indeed amazing. He’s in his mid eighties, stooped and worn and looks like he should be cast as Grumpy, or one of the other seven dwarves. But he has a very eloquent speaking voice and was awarded the MacArthur ‘genius grant’ about thirty-years ago. When he talks you should listen. He exposes fairy tales, New Age liars...

We all need a bit of help with editing, making our stories a little better, and a lot sharper. I’m certainly no exception to that rule. We often project what we think we mean onto the page. It’s often easier for someone else to pick up the faults and fault lines in our story. We need that other reader to see what we cannot. What I propose is to offer my editing skills. Pledge to Lily Poole ( http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole )and send me...