11/5/2014 I Am a Muse in issue 2 of V&OAKThere is a review of my debut novel, I Am a Muse, in issue 2 of the new biannual vintage fashion and culture glossy, V&OAK (VINTAGE AND ONE OF A KIND). Independently produced in Colchester, this magazine is a must for all fans of vintage, vintage-inspired and retro. I have to say that I was very surprised - and yes, very pleased - to find that the review took up a whole page in the "Culture" section! And it was a bit of a shock to see my picture so big too...After all, it's all about the book... Overall, I am very, very pleased with the review, which describes the topics tackled in the book pretty well, with a good style. It didn't start well, though. There is only one bit of the article I have a slight issue with: talking about Constance, the reviewer says: "An elite events planner, her story begins along a similar vein to your typical chick-lit narrative..." WHAAAAT? "CHICK-LIT"? *Hit head on the wall*. No bloody way, I say. I did cringe when I saw it... Believe me, this is no chick-lit, and I most certainly do not write for women but for everyone who likes reading! Constance is just a single, rather flamboyant person who lives in London and works hard, has affairs, has housemates, doubts and hopes... My character is not an "elite events planner" either. She manages an arts and media centre in Shoreditch inspired by the Tea Building - artists and start-ups rent units to work in - and runs a monthly club night inspired by the legendary Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. But I happily "forgive" the writer, because the rest of the review is rather spot on and beautifully written - and she changes her mind about the chick-lit tag! Go to the "Review and press" section of this website toread a few more reviews from readers and some features and reviews from a few magazines and newspapers. There is also a small article about my partner Matt ArtPix in the same issue of the magazine. He is a designer and has his own little venture. He also works on all the Arcane Publishing books and promo material!
I'm very busy these days. Things are moving fast and a lot needs to be done. I am just glad freelance work has dried up this month so I can get on with stuff (Ok, no money in, but we won't panic just yet!). I still need to promote Book 1, I Am a Muse, and my imprint and bookselling venture, Arcane Publishing. More on that later this week I hope, I am waiting for something to come in to share it with you on this blog. I should also be able to tell you more about some forthcoming events and ideas! Watch this space... By the way, talking about I Am a Muse: Steve Pottinger, the poet and publisher who created the independent imprint Ignite Books and who so generously shared publishing tips with me and typeset I Am a Muse last year, is on the BBC news website because of a letter he had written to Caffe Nero about their tax-evasion tactics (someone has done some research about it, see the results HERE). Steve is a very passionate and eloquent speaker who deserves your attention. He will be appearing at quite a few events over the next few months, so try to go and see him! All dates HERE. The manuscript of book number 2, The Book of Thoth, is now finished. Draft 4 was completed yesterday and I am giving it a quick once-over this afternoon. I am quite pleased with it, it is definitively the book I wanted to write. I could probably fiddle with it for another six months or so but time is running out: publication date is December 2014 and I would like to have the freshly printed books piled up in my lounge by the end of September latest. The manuscript is now going to Matt ArtPix who will be designing the cover and typesetting the whole book. No pressure, then! I am now turning my attention once more to The Right Place, which will be book number 3. I wrote the opening chapter during my week-long Culture Lab "On Writing Fiction" at Metal in October 2012 and read an updated version of it at the Shorelines literary festival last November. Now is time to start the next phase of my research: I need to build up the back story, plan the plot, etc. Unfortunately, my Arcane Publishing funds are severely depleted and will be even more so once The Book of Thoth has been printed (it is a big book!). I hope to find a solution to this state of affairs in the forthcoming months and keep the ball rolling! I love using boards. I pin anything I think will help me put the book together: pictures, notes, postcards, maps, ideas, etc. The one I have for The Right Place only has the two pictures above on it; I pinned them this morning. The images come from The Sunday Times Magazine's Spectrum section. They are part of Italian photographer Marina Rosso's project "The Beautiful Gene". Kat Moorhouse, one of the main characters, is a red-haired girl. I'd like to inject a bit of Pre-Raphaelite beauty into the book... Another character in The Right Place will be the Dorset landscape and its relationship with the people who inhabit it. The book might not feature any straightforward supernatural phenomenon like The Book of Thoth, but the mythical and mystical qualities of the countryside there will definitively have a strong influence on the story.
I cannot wait to get started! We had another day in London yesterday. It was genuinely lovely, the sky was blue and the capital didn't look as busy as usual - maybe Londoners and tourists had decided to make the most of the sunshine outside of the metropolis on this Bank holiday weekend... First a visit to the Charing Cross market stamp fair on Northumberland Avenue (you can also find coins, currency and postcards). This is held in an underground car park underneath Charing X station every Saturday. My personal finds were an envelope used by a firm of solicitors complete with broken red wax seal (I was really happy about this one as I have a scene with an old-fashioned letter sporting a red wax seal in my second novel, The Book of Thoth, and I have never seen a real one before, funnily enough!). What was sent in it, I wonder? I really regret now not getting that 25 billion dollars Zimbabwean banknote... I could have gotten 3 for £1!!! That's what I call a good change rate. Then I got my hands on quite a moving item... A "postcard" sent by a French soldier, Lucien Legouge, to his godmother - whom he has never met - from one of the German prisoner of war camps (Stalag VII-B, which was located in Memmingen in Bavaria) . The godmother lives in the French occupied territory. I have done a bit of research, and I have found a video of the liberation of that very same camp on YouTube! Amazing footage! Then we were off to The National Portrait Gallery to see The Great War Portraits exhibition. My favourite items in the exhibition are Jacob Epstein's futuristic The Rock Drill, La Mitrailleuse by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, William Orpen's self-portrait, Selbstbildnis als Soldat by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and an elegant portrait of the great war poet Siegfried Sassoon by Glyn Warren Philpot. A very sobering and poignant exhibition. You can listen to a tour of the exhibition with curator Paul Moorhouse HERE. Back on the Central line then to go back to East London. We went to one of our favourite places, Old Spitalfields market, where So Vintage London were having their monthly vintage market. We were there on a special mission but we cannot say more at the moment...
We love walking around all the markets in the area, it is so incredibly vibrant! We love the Brick Lane Tearooms and all the other Truman markets, which is packed full of marvellous antiques! I couldn't resist those two fabulous Edwardian ladies in Swallow and Pips! I wouldn't cross them if I were you! 1/5/2014 Squid Publishing Inc author page!I now have an author page on the Squid Publishing Inc website! I am thrilled to be in such good company: Ignite Books, Steve Pottinger and Joolz Denby are on there as well!
Draft 4 of The Book of Thoth has been a bit neglected today but I am now going back to it! There is a small review of the Shorelines literary festival written by yours truly in issue 16 of Southend's cultural magazine, Level 4 (my long report from the festival can be found HERE).
This should have been a printed magazine, but unfortunately the editor didn't receive enough advertising revenue to pay for the printing. The magazine is available to read online HERE. There are quite a few interesting articles in there so make sure you go and have a read! 23/4/2014 Book number five ...I know, I know...
I am still working on the editing of Book number two, I have written only one chapter of Book number three and I haven't really done any work at all on Book number four... And then up pops the idea for Book number five! After an animated conversation in the car with Matt ArtPix - those pesky creative couples, always bouncing ideas off each other all the time! - whilst on our way back from Devon, here's what I have come up with: a Hound of The Baskervilles-inspired vintage mystery set on moody Exmoor, with a rural detective named Barton Stacey - it is the name of a parish in Hampshire. When my partner saw it on the map, he decided here and there that it was the perfect name for a detective! I have no idea whatsoever whether I can pull it off or not. I want it to be a bit outrageous, a bit humorous (can I do humour?) and we'll have a cover inspired by vintage classic detective novels... I have my work schedule sorted for the next ten years, I think! 11/4/2014 Some great new finds!I came back from Devon two days ago with three new books - they will not be for sale via Arcane Publishing as they are for my own private collection, but I am so excited about them that I wanted to share them with you! The first one is "The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries" by Odhams Press, 1936 edition. The cover has a lovely embossed bat on it, there are great black and white illustrations and mini author biographies for each featured writer. It's a real treat, featuring people such as Joseph Conrad, Guy de Maupassant, M.R. James, D.H Lawrence, H.G Wells, J.B Priestley and many other very famous and less famous writers. I cannot wait to start reading these stories! Then I got my hands on a wonderful School Girl's Annual from 1930, full of exciting adventures and lovely illustrations of bob-haired girls that I will use to illustrate some blog posts in the future. And now, my favourite find of them all... A very rare copy of a fabulous book called Dorothy and Lillian Gish, written by Lillian Gish herself and published in 1973 (Lillian Gish still had two full decades ahead of her when she wrote the book!), and absolutely packed-full of incredible pictures - family, movies, theatre sets, etc. most of them from the sisters's personal collection. I am a great admirer of Lillian Gish - she inspired my pen name! - she was an incredible person, actress, scholar, cinema expert. She had a fabulously luminous, ethereal beauty, and you can perceive her incredible intelligence in those determined eyes... A real star and captivating individual. The sisters's lives and careers together spanned seven decades! I am absolutely thrilled to bits to own a copy of this amazing book; it is a true treasure! I love it when I find a newspaper cutting in a second-hand or vintage book. This one contained a cutting of Lillian Gish's obituary in The Daily Mail... A few examples of the incredible pages of the book...
31/3/2014 Matt ArtPix's new designsI know that after having blogged quite a lot over the past few weeks, it's all gone quiet. This doesn't mean nothing is happening backstage!
I am working on one or two things to do with The Book of Thoth but won't put any detail on here - if I pull this off, then I'll blog about it, if not then I'll keep quiet... In the meantime, as I have mentioned before, Arcane Publishing and Matt ArtPix are taking a break from fairs and markets. We need to think our promotional strategy through and decide what our next move is going to be! My partner in crime (and everything else!) Matt ArtPix is working on a new series of images, Southend postcards... He regularly posts updates about the designs, so head to his blog to read more about it! 25/3/2014 Draft 3 finished!I have just finished draft 3 of The Book of Thoth, and I am quite happy with it now. The word count is still just under 139,000, and I don't think I will make any more substantial cuts.
In early April, I will be getting the final feedback from my reader, and draft 4 will therefore take her comments into account; I will also be preparing the manuscript for typesetting. Now that the writing and editing of The Book of Thoth is almost complete, I need to put my publisher's hat back on and get on with several important tasks: 1. Prepare my Arts Council Grant documents to fund the research and publication of my third book, The Right Place. I need to do a budget for that... I foresee headaches. 2. Get the Arcane Publishing online shop up and running, which is not a minor task for a technophobe like myself! 3. Research events and markets where I could promote and sell books! PS: The illustration is here in some kind of ironic way. I always say that if I had the opportunity to land an agent and a "traditional" publisher (with a nice contract!), I would give it a good go before I dismissed it as "not for me". I want to make a living out of my writing, and at the moment, the self-publishing path is not ideal. Also, I like the creative side of things, not the marketing/business one, which I tackle rather reluctantly. WARNING: VERY LONG BLOG! Well, this was a hell of a week! After a relatively quiet winter, things have picked up on the culture front. Last Tuesday, we were off to the lovely Theatre Royal Stratford East to see the new version of Oh! What a Lovely War. I do hate musicals with a passion and would have to be dragged to one kicking and screaming, but I knew that this one would be different. Highly satirical and poignant, it highlights the absurdity of the "war game(s)" and that of the military - not forgetting how naive the civilian population can sometimes be. The play has been visually freshened up and you have to admire the cast's energy and hard work. Note to Michael Gove: maybe you should have shut up before you criticised the play as you now appear at the beginning of it paired up with a donkey... Just sayin'... For a more comprehensive review of the show, go to my partner's Matt ArtPix's BLOG - he has been studying WW1 for years and is better placed than me to give his opinion about the show. On Wednesday, we were off to a venue we had never been to, Village Underground in Shoreditch, to see the infamous Laibach - whom we have seen before on numerous occasions! The Slovakian "avant-garde" art collective - whose main body of work concentrates on the links and interaction between ideology and culture - keep reinventing themselves with each project; their latest one, Spectre, is a brilliant, addictive collection of multi-layered tracks sung in English - a bit less industrial, a little bit more electro, with "quasi-pop" moments... Laibach have always been exceptional live and tonight's sold out gig didn't disappoint: the background visuals were striking; the live drums added impact to each and every track; Milan's presence was as impressive and authoritative as ever, his deep-seated, sonorous voice counter-balanced by the mysterious and charismatic Mina Spiler's clear, pitch-perfect vocals. Mina's place within the band has really grown; she now fully shares vocal duties with Milan (she is also given writing credits in Spectre) and exudes the confidence and attitude necessary for such a performance (she fronts her own band, Melodrom). The first 45 minutes saw the band play the whole of Spectre, revealing the genius of the new songs to their attentive audience. Then after a 15 mn interval, we got something completely different: a few tracks from their Iron Sky soundtrack with the movie's stunning visuals playing on the screens behind; we were also treated to everyone's favourite, "Tanz Mit Laibach", and of course to a few deconstructed covers, including Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" and Serge Gainsbourg's "Love On The Beat". As someone who absolutely loathe both individuals and their work, I was first taken aback by the choice of songs, but then I remembered that this is what Laibach do: they take the most absurd popular songs and give them the Laibach treatment: they redefine them entirely by reshaping and remodelling them through the industrial filter, injecting them with the harshness and the edge they never had and pumping a little bit of life into them. Fabulous. Saturday, we were in London for the Classic car boot sale at Southbank, organised by Vintage By Hemingway. The weather was glorious and the place was packed with loads of cool and happy people, wonderful cars and jam-packed stalls; the atmosphere was lovely and the location iconic... What else is there to say? Here are a few pictures! We made a detour via The British Museum to get tickets for The Vikings exhibition... Yesss! Then we ended up at The Barbican cinema to see Under The Skin... I have been waiting to see this movie for MONTHS.
Michel Faber is my favourite author, and I really wondered how on earth his unforgettable novel could be turned into a movie. I am still thinking about it; as my partner said when the lights went back up after the film: "I didn't want it to end". And I felt the same: it is truly mesmerising and gripping. It's bleak and unforgiving. There is very little dialogue; the music is brooding, distorted, haunting, basically: perfect... (soundtrack by Mica Levi). Scarlett Johansson, whom I have always thought of as being interesting as well as stunning, is deeply touching; a naturally fatale femme... (I have always been interested in the Femme Fatale concept; they are always the most interesting ones, remember Louise Brooks's Lulu?). Director Jonathan Glazer has removed a lot of the original story and changed quite a few things around; he has - dare I say it in the context of the novel? - removed the meat and kept only the skeleton of the story - but said skeleton is what keeps the body upright, isn't it? - Same here. Spared down to the minimum - namely, the alien and her reaction to the world around her, with a setting transported from the rural A9 road in the book to the decaying urban landscape of Glasgow. I was fascinated by the sequences in which the alien observes the strange behaviour of the humans around her - how many times have I found myself in the streets, in a venue, or simply in the same room as other people and thought that I didn't belong to the same world or species? My strong misanthropic streak made me feel completely at ease watching Under The Skin. It looked like the landscape in my head... I couldn't say whether Under The Skin is technically a good movie; I go for gut instinct, and I loved it. Tonight, I'm off to see the bonkers The Grand Budapest Hotel. This should be a fun evening! Pictures by Carya Gish and Matt ArtPix. |
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March 2024
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