Most Recent Blog Posts

  • RIP Elmore

    I just read on line that Elmore Leonard died. I can’t let that go by without recording this acknowledgement: everything I know about dialogue writing (which might be very little) I learnt from reading Elmore Leonard and copying what he did as best as I could. He was the guy who said, if you’re doing Read more

  • The Problem with Sequels

    So I am, for the first time ever, trying to write a sequel, and in the first few chapters, a couple of revelations have come to me out of the blue: 1) It’s damned difficult to write when one half of an audience know nothing about your main character and the other half know the Read more

  • The Bizarre Truth About Athletes

    So here’s something weird I learned recently:  elite athletes are generally asymmetric.   For some reason, I find this surprising.  I always thought that being good at something implied a kind of physical perfection and physical perfection always struck me as meaning you had the same perfect form on both sides.  For example, if you Read more

  • Working on a new book with a new theory

    Today, I have a new theory about plot. Succinctly stated, it goes like this: There are only three questions that can hook the reader: what’s happened, what’s happening and what’s going to happen next? It goes along with a new theory of what questions engage readers with character: who are they, why are they like Read more

  • Post-Olympic Depression

    OK, so the Olympics are over and we’re into the endless analysis by our endlessly illogical media who wouldn’t recognise either truth or rationality if it turned into a dog and bit them in the street. Usually, I ignore all this, but this time it’s got my heckles up. Time to man up before the Read more

  • Orthogonate Maths

    Just putting the finishing touches to a chapter of my latest project, the Time Traders and stumbled upon this interesting definition: “Orthogonate Maths is the branch of mathematics in which all new quantities are assumed to exist in their own dimension, orthogonal (i.e. at ninety-degrees) to all other dimensions. Thus Orthogonate Maths applies Pythagoras’s Theorum Read more

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