The thing I like most about having had a book or two published is the random stuff that tends to happen. Once you have a book out there, you have NO IDEA who is going to read it or what they’re going to think about it. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it is less than […]
On paper, this sounded amazing. A high-adrenaline heist thriller shot in a single take on the early morning streets of Berlin. No cuts, no trickery, just one long hand-held take. I love a narrative gimmick, me, and this sounded right up my street. Here’s the trailer. Fun, eh? I should have been warned. Last time I […]
I’m suffering from a cold today so I’ve given myself permission to do something silly. I was recently Googling my name (don’t tell me you don’t do that, because I won’t believe you) and I thought I’d have some fun and try Google Scholar instead. It turns out that my work has been cited in […]
Time to take a look at the books I read last year. According to my spreadsheet, I seem to have only read 70, which is considerably down on 2014’s 95 and 2013’s 92. No idea what went wrong, but it doesn’t really matter as long as I got something out of the ones I did […]
Last Wednesday I delivered my 40000 word (well, 41439, words to be accurate) manuscript to Bath Spa for marking. Since then I have been tidying up a few things that got slightly out of hand during that final burst of activity, and now it’s time to breathe some life back into this thing. At some […]
In the immortal words of Granny Weatherwax, I aten’t dead (in case you were wondering). I’ve been quite busy with one thing or another – some of it to do with the day job, some of it to do with writing and the rest to do with real life – which means the blog has had […]
My book ‘Take It Cool’ is sad because no-one has reviewed it. Actually, that’s not strictly true, because the Herald really liked it and Family Tree Magazine made it their TOP CHOICE for September 2014. Even Songlines … well, let’s not go there, because I don’t think they got what I was trying to do. Several […]
Last year I read 95 books. I was a little disappointed at this, because I really wanted to break the 100 barrier. I suppose I could have got a bit closer by counting all four volumes of “Dancers at the End of Time” as separate items, or indeed breaking up Lydia Davis’ collected stories into […]
So, do we start this with “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” (always a bit suspect, that one) or “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about” (which doesn’t really stand up to close inspection, either)? Oh well. I got reviewed by Songlines magazine. I like Songlines. I’ve had […]
The lovely Maryom over at Our Book Reviews has given a definite thumbs up to TAKE IT COOL. This is what she says in her 4* review: Having read Jonathan Pinnock’s fiction, I expected him to turn what could be a plodding piece of research into something interesting and fun – and he did! The different threads […]