Posy Simmonds Posy Simmonds is a brilliant artist, acute satirist and eye-watering cartoonist who, in Literary Life Revisited, exposes authors, publishers and the book trade. Her work is currently on display in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She has the essential gift of making you laugh at yourself. Funny Feminist Cartoons I became addicted to Posy Simmonds’s Mrs Weber’s Diary […]
Horror hidden in the Woman in the Wall
‘I hate horror stories.’ I said as we watched the first episode of The Woman in the Wall. ‘Turn it off now!’ I wasn’t alone in switching away and other viewers did too. Did we do so for similar reasons? One viewer thought it ‘weird’. The next day I heard Ruth Wilson talking about the drama and why she chose […]
Saving my stories
What are the risks to my stories Saving my stories required an agent, high-profile reviews, media links, book launches, hard work and lots of money. I had none of those and I had to save my stories myself. Publishers told me that if a book is not successfully marketed in the six months after publication, it will die. As a […]
The stories behind my stories
Right now, my stories are in danger of vanishing from the world. Does that matter? Ought I stop them from disappearing? Does anyone care, except me? This is how I often feel, as I know many authors do, after a long day of marketing discussions, or time spent following up with publishing and distribution contacts, rather than writing! My stories […]
What are novels for?
Ah – this was a fun coincidence. I was starting a post about my books when this article by Jacob Brogan appeared in The Washington Post. He writes about Joseph Epstein, an eminent American literary critic, who has written a book that asks if we need novels. Well – I need novels – good ones of course – and I […]