01 Thursday Apr 2021
Posted in Scribbling
There is always at least one pupil like that.
Whenever I teach a writing course, the first time I give a maximum wordcount for an exercise, someone will look puzzled: how do you even know how many words are in a piece? Continue reading
25 Thursday Mar 2021
Posted in Poetry
Here in Italy Dante Alighieri is very much The Poet – the fellow who took it upon himself to describe in poetry a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
His Divina Commedia – the Divine Comedy – is the object of passionate study by hordes of scholars, and a staple of the school curriculum. As far as I know, no Italian kid is allowed to leave school without meeting Dante – more or less exhaustively (that depends on the kind of school), and more or less satisfyingly (and that mostly depends on the teacher).
Father of the Italian language or no, Dante is no easy read. His Fourteenth Century Italian, his rhetorically complex style, and the many references to his day make the Commedia less than immediate to our modern ears – and while some teachers really do their best to introduce their pupils to the power and beauty of it, some… don’t. A great pity… Continue reading
18 Thursday Mar 2021
Posted in Theatre
Yes, I’m a director now.
No longer an assistant, no – a full fledged director.
I won’t say it wasn’t in the air, because it was. Has been for some time perhaps. After the last summer season – which was a test I passed.
And now… Continue reading
11 Thursday Mar 2021
Posted in Books, Scribbling, Theatre
It’s a Dover Thrift paperback, thin, smallish, the pages rather yellowed at the edges, my initials embossed on the right hand corner of the frontispiece… and I can’t quite remember where I got it.
Published in 1997, the copyright note says – so it can’t have been in Cardiff, much less in Edinburgh. And it can’t have been London, because I know for certain that I already had the book by the summer of 1998 – and I wouldn’t move to London (however briefly) until a whole year later… No, my small collection of Crane stories must have come from Pavia, from one of several bookshops around the University that stocked books in the original language. Continue reading
04 Thursday Mar 2021
Posted in Theatre
Nellie Bly was a remarkable character. She was sixteen when she wrote her first article, passionately denying that marriage and motherhood were the only option for girls. The article impressed the editors at the Pittsburgh Dispatch, enough to earn her her fist job as a journalist. At 21 she spent six months in Mexico, writing correspondences, and getting in trouble with the regime of Porfirio Dìaz for championing press freedom. At 23 she spent ten days undercover in an asylum to expose the appalling conditions of the mentally ill. At 25 she journeyed around the world to beat Phileas Fogg’s 80 days record – and she did it! Continue reading
25 Thursday Feb 2021
Posted in Scribbling
Very brief. Flash excursions, in fact…
Because yes: after more than a year, I’m still tinkering away with flash fiction. Or perhaps, more accurately, I’m still struggling with it. I want to write flash fiction. I want to do it well. I try again and again (although perhaps not quite as much as I should), and still find my work wanting. And so I tinker on, and read flashes, and read craft books, and take courses, and try again, and spring my attempts on innocent readers. Continue reading
18 Thursday Feb 2021
For the first time in ages, I’ve listened to an audiobook. No, really – audiobooks and I… I absolutely love the idea in principle, only I find myself easily distracted by details. I begin to wonder about the exact lie of the land, the pigments that would have been used to dye a particular kind of silk, the sort of face this or that character would have… and by the time I come back from my wanderings, the narrator has gone ahead.
And this is why I usually regard audiobooks the way I would a tiger: fascinated but wary – from a safe distance.
Then I had this email exchange with Margaret Skea, who told me about having her Munro Saga turned into audiobooks, and described the fascinating process of choosing a reader and working with him rather in the way a stage director would… I was so taken with the whole that, when Margaret very kindly sent me a copy of Turn of the Tide’s audiobook, I was more than ready to face my tiger… Continue reading
11 Thursday Feb 2021
Posted in History, Scribbling
A few months ago, as I was working on Road to Murder, I found trouble in the form of a French town called Montreuil sur Mer.* Well, for various reasons, my sleuth Tom Walsingham finds himself spending a night there, much against his inclination, and I needed to have a good idea of the place for that… Continue reading
04 Thursday Feb 2021
Posted in Books, Scribbling
Would you object very much to some more slight gloominess? Or perhaps it won’t be so terribly gloomy by the time we’re done – but let us talk of endings and beginnings, and Stevenson. I’ve always liked this thing that Stevenson wrote in a letter written from Samoa to J.M. Barrie:
If you are going tho make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.
28 Thursday Jan 2021
Posted in History, Scribbling, Stories
Tags
Historical fiction, murder mystery, Sapere Books, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Henry Cobham, writing
They stopped Walsingham and Paulo, my Italian, whom they seemed resolved to rob [… and] another Englishman in his company, called Skeggs, as I remember.
On the twelfth of November 1581 Elizabeth’s Ambassador in Paris, Sir Henry Cobham, wrote to the all-powerful Secretary of State – and spymaster – Sir Francis Walsingham . It was almost in passing that the ambassador slipped in this bit of information about the misadventure of Sir Francis’s much younger cousin, nineteen-year-old Thomas, riding as a diplomatic courier between London and Paris. Continue reading
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