SoAiS Conference 2011

I’m still buzzing with ideas and flush with the excitement of making new friends, catching up with fellow tweeters and sharing fruitful connections at the 2011 Society of Authors in Scotland Conference. Anna Ganley and Rachel O’Malley hosted an imaginative and well-planned day of talks and seminars, not to mention a very splendid evening drinks [...]

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Keep Calm and Carry On… Writing

From Michelle Kerns of Examiner.com, in two parts, a compilation of The 50 Best Author v Author Put-Downs of all Time Particular favourites are no. 24 Mary McCarthy on J. D. Salinger I don’t like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn’t a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don’t like it. Not at all. It suffers [...]

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Final Festival Jottings

Final Festival Jottings – Sunday 28 August 2011 I realised today that I hadn’t posted my last report – so here it is. As usual, you’ll find more pics in the bookrambler flickr photostream: Sunday Morning In the Bonham’s [free] ‘Ten at Ten’ tent, Tracey S. Rosenberg set the strident tone for the day with [...]

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Festival Jottings

Festival Jottings: Weds. 17th August Late afternoon is a good time to pop into Charlotte Square Gardens. By then, the early buzz has waned to a gentler pace. Unless, of course, you’re Neil Gaiman: he strode out of a mammoth book-signing session following one of his three sell-out festival events. In the festival bookshop, Stanza Director, [...]

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Q & A with author/agent, David Miller

Q & A with David Miller, debut author of Today (Atlantic Books) and literary agent at Rogers, Coleridge & White   Before his event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, I caught up with David Miller, who kindly agreed to give a more personal insight into his writing. As a reader, researcher and writer I was keen to [...]

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BookRambler at the EIBF

The beauty of the Edinburgh International Book Festival is that, while it’s grown from a modest series of ‘Meet the Author’ events into the largest public literary festival (17 days, 797 authors, 757 events),  it retains an intimacy unmatched by other sprawling book events. The iron railings which surround the Georgian splendour of Charlotte Square [...]

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Book Festival Blogging- #EIBF

The Edinburgh International Book Festival starts this Saturday and I’m thrilled to have tickets to hear some great writers talk about their books and about writing. Here’s a note of the events I’ll be going to – a good mix, I think, of mature authors, debut authors, fiction and non-fiction. And two poets. Jennifer Egan [...]

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On Writing: Conrad

“The Task of the Artist” Fiction—if it at all aspires to be art—appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, [...]

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Manuscript Monday

Finished a book that you’re just itching to submit? You could do worse than email it today to Pan Macmillan – hereafter called Manuscript Monday. Every Monday between 10am and 4pm [Australia-time, that is] they are opening up the floodgates – giving the gatekeeper the day off –  and accepting unsolicited submissions direct. It’s worth [...]

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What Editors Want

Andrew Lownie, Literary Agency, asked 34 editors from across the publishing world to give an idea of the kind of writing they are looking for in 2011. From fiction to non-fiction, from Bloomsbury to Icon Books, Yale University Press to OneWorld Publications, they all speak in wide-sweeping, general terms about what they’d like to publish. However, several key terms recur: clarity of [...]

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