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Book Review – Stettin Station by David Downing
Stettin Station by David Downing My rating: 4 of 5 stars In the third of the series the focus widens to also include Effi Koenen, John Russell's film star girlfriend. She's been there in the first two as a strong supporting character, but she really comes into her own in this one. This story starts in the Autumn of 1941 leading up to the entry of the Americans into the war. Having been largely left alone for a couple of years following the outbreak of the war by the Germans and the Soviets Russell has been working as a foreign correspondent for some American papers. On the side he's been doing some investigative reporting on the fate of the Jews he's known. As the entry of the US to the war approaches the journalistic work becomes less worthwhile, only authorised…
Interview Questions
Since I put up my review policy on the blog I've been getting regular contacts suggesting that I review things, but there have also been suggestions that I might do some author interviews or guest posts. Generally I think this is a good idea, so I thought I would come up with some standard questions. Here's what I came up with. Interview questions How long have you been writing for and what made you start writing? Do you write for a living, or do you also do other work? How did you get into being a professional writer, and how much effort did it take to be able to write full time? Were you always good at telling stories, or has it come to you as an adult? Were you good at English in school? What do you read for…
World Book Day 2015
Tomorrow is World Book Day 2015 and in response to a query as part of the World Book Day campaign, I’ve been asked by MVC to tell my personal story of how literature and books changed my life, and what inspired you to start blogging about literature. Early Reading Like most people I've been reading since I was about four years old. I can't be sure when I fell in love with reading, I was very young. Two books stick out though, because they lived in my primary school bag and were re-read until they literally fell apart. The Facts Factory by Gyles Brandreth was a compilation of esoteric statistics and stuff that appealed to the small boy that was me aged about 8. The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier was the other. It told the story of a Polish boy and his…
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Book Review – Scotland’s Stories of Home by Alan Warner
Scotland's Stories of Home by Alan Warner My rating: 4 of 5 stars A good collection of wee stories and poems from the Scottish Book Trust. Most of the content only uses a couple of pages in print, so there is a lot of content crammed in from a variety of sources. Some of it is from established writers but most seems to be from ordinary people sharing their memories of what home means to them, whether now or when they were growing up in Scotland. There's a high level of social history from the mid to late 20th century baked in here. Primary sources rather than analysis bit worth reading nevertheless. It's well put together and an easy read, although there are a few thought provoking bits. For example, how many people really died during the Clydebank Blitz? It's…
Could You Write Five Million Words?
Five million words. That's about a hundred NaNoWriMo winners worth of words. More than most authors will publish in a lifetime. Yet it's not far off what you need to write to become a good writer. Ten Thousand Hours There's a theory, most famously expounded by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, that you need to spend about ten thousand hours practicing a skill before you get to the world class level. He cites The Beatles and Bill Gates amongst others as examples of this. There's more to success than just putting in the hours, but it certainly counts for a big chunk of it. So what counts as practice as a writer? You'd think this was obvious, writing stuff, and maybe a bit of reading. However I'd disagree with that, or rather modify it a bit. What I think makes you increase…