Kolymsky Heights (1994) The American poet, Kenneth Koch once said ,"You cannot not be influenced by great writing", and this book was one of those 'turning points' in my writing. Steven Spielberg, before filming, always watches John Ford's The Searchers , when I start planning to write, I always read Kolymsky Heights . I think its the best thriller ever written. Kolymsky Heights is the third book on my list of the 9 books that inspired me to...

Stephen Fry, who had his own much publicised breakdown, writes on the back fly-leaf: ‘A perfectly extraordinary, not to mention an extraordinarily perfect – tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of descent into madness.’ A.K. Benjamin is a therapist working in London. His patients are given nom-de-plums and anonymised, ‘JB,’ ‘Lucy’, ‘Michael,’ ‘Jane,’ ‘Dr Samuels,’ ‘Brad76,’ ‘Murray,’ ‘You...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$3,290.39 ) Week - 26 Ogres may be like onions, but small startup stocks are like trees! ------------- Continuing along the tree branch... --------------------------------- Before a tree can begin to grow tall and strong it must first develop a sturdy root system. Before a stock can begin to show real growth it needs time to develop the same sort of unseen yet crucial root system to...

I read the first 40 pages of The Lying Life of Adults . I’ve read most of Elena Ferrante’s fiction and non-fiction. It was to me a familiar story of Neapolitan middle-class life in a fashionable apartment. A brilliant father who studies and lectures and publishes. A beautiful mother, who is also brilliant, but less so, being a woman. And an insecure daughter that needs to be both brilliant and beautiful and fears she is nearer. Imagines herself...

Legion (1983) Long before it became a tourist attraction, Dublin's Temple Bar in the 1980's was a ramshackle collection of dilapidated warehouses, earmarked for demolition. The area was hidden behind a stockade of music postered hoardings. Along the street amid the buildings was a bookshop called The Alchemist's Head (sadly gone now). It was a long, narrow shop with shelves full of fortean magaines. movie magazines and a healthy stack of sci-fi...

Great Scottish Writer—Neil M.Gunn (1941 [1989]) The Silver Darlings. The Silver Darlings , referred to in the title, are herring. Neil M.Gunn’s most popular novel was published by Faber & Faber in 1941. Think about that. T.S.Eliot was the main man at Faber & Faber. The phony war with Germany was over. Britain was in retreat and awaiting imminent invasion and possible starvation as U-boats sunk tens of thousands of tons of merchant...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09qkrq8/daisy-maskell-insomnia-and-me I watched this last night. The programme started at 10.35pm, and I was almost falling asleep. A poor joke, which also happens to be true. My partner has problems sleeping. The woman across from us said she doesn’t sleep much. My sister goes to bed in the afternoon, and her son isn’t much better. As Henry Marsh writes in Do No Harm , exercise is supposed to help prevent...

Salem's Lot - (1975) Salem's Lot is the first book on my list of the 9 books that inspired me to write . This was my first 'grown up' book, a battered trade paperback found in a second-hand bookshop in Dublin's long-gone 'Daffodil Market', I paid £0.60p for it in 1983. The premise like JAWS, parks an unspeakable threat into a small American town and its corrosive impact on the locals. Salem's Lot was a gateway book for me to the works of John...

I am currently reading Peter Swanson's excellent 'Eight Perfect Murders' and a thought occurred to me; What 8 novels inspired me to write? I gave it some time and came up with (in this instance), 9 novels that inspired me to write. The rule of thumb for these books is that once I reached 'THE END', I flipped through the pages back to the beginning and re-read them. In several instances over 10 times. So each day (or week), depending on how lazy...

$5K - 52 Weeks - 20 Penny Stocks One Winner!! Current Status ( -$3,359.73 ) Week - 25 Current Status ( -$3,245.93 ) Week - 24 behold the bounty that is the dawn, unbound by promise, yet ripe with expectation --------------------------------- I wrote that, that’s my jam you know, I come up with a good line thinking I should do something with it and … pfft! It’s been laying around collecting dust for a few years, I stumbled across it and decided...