celticman's blog

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...

August 2007, Peter Connelly, a cherubic, 17-month old, blond-haired, blue eyed boy was unlawfully killed – beaten to death. Among other injuries he suffered were broken ribs, a broken back and a missing fingertip. His mother and her boyfriend were found guilty of those crimes. This is not the story about the 260 children that have died since the, 26 of them known to the local authorities. Or the story of the five to ten familial homicides every...

Not many people read dictionaries, especially, a dictionary of money-talk that will be out of date by the time it gets to print, but I was always a bit weird. One of the few and therefore scarce O’grades I got was in the ‘dismal science’ of economics. I got a B grade. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. I know you’re secretly impressed. I was surprised. I’ll tell you my secret: if it wasn’t supply; it was demand. I could even pontificate about...

I admit to googling Michael Cannon to see if I knew him. He comes from the West of Scotland and has had a wide variety of jobs (snap), wasn’t very good at school (snap), has written a couple of novels (well I’ve kinda) and they’ve been published. Snap out of it. I don’t know the lucky bastard, but I have read his book. What attracted me to Articles of Faith wasn’t the author but the subject. The narrative setting in my hometown Clydebank, a...

Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories , is published by Penguin Classics. That can mean the book is quite old. It does seem to be, with the stories I’ve read so far being set in post-Second World War America, or it could mean a guarantee of quality. An imprint that says - this is really good. The book is in five sections, with short stories in each section. I’ve finished section one and started on section two. My feeling was of...