Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
I’m posting a new Kicking Dogs chapter every Tuesday, and an independent item every Thursday.
Let’s kick off this week’s SIDECAR post with a seven-year-old item from Jack Shackaway, my collaborator and, incidentally, the hero of my novel Kicking Dogs.
… Read moreSelling novels: What it takes
I’m probably over-reacting, but it’s already getting harder these days to take pride in thinking of yourself as a writer, since so can anybody with the price of a computer and
Announcing the upcoming serialization of Kicking Dogs on this very site.
The name is Jack Shackaway, and I’m a kind of freelance journalist. You meet some interesting people when you’re a hack writer living in Bangkok.
For example, the other day I was enjoying a few drinks with a pair of dubious characters name of Tommy Two-Toes and Wrong-Way Willie Wong. Actually, it was more than a few drinks, and these gentlemen were more than just … Read more
Scenario: I post ‘Three Strikes vs. Magic Circles’ (see my last post) and no one notices. So I post a second, even more inflammatory diatribe, which no one remarks, and then another and another, each more hysterically indignant than the one before. No one reads any of them, much less reads my novels. Eventually they are all collected in a book I call RANT, which becomes a bestseller.
I die before that, and Sara lives happily … Read more
Read your own compositions, and when you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson, from James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791
Excellent advice. (I once presented this maxim to a writing class, trying to remember which great man had originally proposed it. In fact, half the great writers in history have said the same thing in one way or another.)
Lose a few chapters, gain a book
But … Read more
In an earlier post, we had a look at Jack Flowers’ tattoos in Theroux’s Saint Jack, set in 1950s Singapore. Now we get a range of early-1990s attitudes to tattoos as described by David Foster Wallace in his novel Infinite Jest, which in parts can safely be described as noir. Very noir, in fact. In this excerpt, we find a broader sample population of tattoo aficionados, a variety of urban flotsam and jetsam conveniently washed up together … Read more
Not many years ago — and here we speak only of Western societies — having a tattoo assimilated you to a noirish rabble of able-bodied seamen, Foreign Legionnaires, ex-cons, circus performers, bikers, and boozers with a propensity for finding themselves in the vicinity of waterfront tattoo parlors. 
Read on for a look at early-1950s attitudes towards tattoos, and the roles tatts played in Paul Theroux’s Saint Jack, a novel set in 1950s Singapore and first published in … Read more
Jack Shackaway here. Of Kicking Dogs fame.
It’s true, as Collin says (here and here). Nearly everybody’s a writer these days. And — given all the media interest in current publishing-industry convulsions — the few who aren’t writers are experts on publishing and books.
I used to tell people I was a novelist. I don’t anymore. That’s as interesting to your average citizen as saying “Every night I go to sleep.” Who isn’t writing a novel?
But if … Read more
“[E]ssentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”
First published in 1973, Susan Sontag’s On Photography speaks to us with even more force today about what cameras and the mass reproduction of images have done to our appreciation of ourselves and our worlds. And she offers this insightful spin on our lemming compulsion to photograph our … Read more
I’m probably over-reacting, but it’s already getting harder these days to take pride in thinking of yourself as a writer, since so can anybody with the price of a computer and an Internet connection. You aren’t even permitted to die penniless and hungry in proper romantic style, since everyone will merely ask why you did that. Why didn’t you just take steps to flog your stuff?
Even if you decide you are going to flog your stuff, you aren’t permitted … Read more
The demise of the novel? This has been predicted again and again over the decades, if not the centuries, yet people keep reading novels. Here’s a recent vote of confidence in their persistence:
… Read more“The book-length text is coded in our DNA and will never go away; it is the written version of the oral myths and histories told on consecutive nights around campfires for 80,000 years. In each new generation, roughly the same percentage of people is born with