Let’s get one thing out of the way, before we start the review proper. It is almost completely impossible to write a review of Archie Greene and the Magician’s Secret without using the words “Harry” or “Potter”. The titular character is an orphan who has grown up in the care of a relative who does… Read More
Author: John
21 years
On October 4th, 1993, which is 21 years ago today, I became a professional writer. Technically, I’d been paid for writing before – in June 1990, when I was 19 years old, a small-press magazine agreed to pay me £13.75 (0.5p a word) for my short story The View from the Window. But one cheque doesn’t… Read More
These days Haruki Murakami is so well known that his book jackets simply say “Murakami”. Which is a bit weird, as there’s another author Murakami – Ryu – who, while not as quite popular, is certainly not unknown, with works like Coin Locker Babies and Audition – which was made into a film – in… Read More
Competition time
In addition to submitting my work to agents in the (probably futile) hope of eventually getting a publishing deal through that route, I’ve sent my novels to a handful of competitions. The good thing about competitions is that you know that there is an actual possibility of getting published; that one person out of all… Read More
The first million is the hardest
They say the first million is the hardest. They’re talking about money, of course, but I imagine it’s the same with wordcount. In which case, I’m about a quarter of the way to my first million. Earlier this week, I finished the first draft of The Wreck of the Argyll, my children’s novel set in… Read More
Juggling projects
It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post, but that’s because I’ve been pretty busy with my other writing projects recently. I completed my conversion of Tales of the Ancient Rabbits into The Panopticon Papers and sent it off to a handful of literary agents and a couple of competitions. So far it’s meeting the same fate… Read More
A change of setting
The first three books I wrote were set in the same world – a pseudo-Victorian era Europe, where humans lived and worked alongside anthropomorphic rabbits, dogs, cats, bears, mice, and other animals. The first book, The Chimney Rabbit, was set in The Great City, which was basically London with the serial numbers filed off. The second… Read More
Robin Hood, in his many forms, has been an influence for virtually my whole life. The first film my parents ever took me to see at the cinema was Disney’s 1973 version, with anthropomorphic foxes, bears and wolves taking the parts of Robin, Marian, the Merry Men and the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. The 1984… Read More
A first draft, at last
A couple of days ago, I completed the first draft of my latest book, The Dragon on the Tower. It’s been a long process – I started the book on the 19th of October last year, so it’s taken me about five and a half months, which is quite a long time for a short… Read More
Up to my neck in books
We’ve just moved into a new flat, after nearly twenty years in our previous home. It turns out that you can acquire an awful lot of books in twenty years, so for the past month I’ve been trying to thin out the herd – I’ve taken loads of books into the office to let people… Read More