I received good news from Editor Kerri Farrell Foley at Crack the Spine last week. Two of my poems, User Manual and Final Appearance, have been accepted and will appear in Issue #27. Crack the Spine publishes both online and perfect-bound print anthologies which feature...Read More Here

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This excellent production at The Old Vic has an imposing cathedral-like set that almost constitutes an extra character - one that is incredibily dark and menacing. It's as if all the forces of oppression are looming over the sole female of rank, a dignified and virtuous figure as portrayed by Eve Best .

The powerful poetic text, and strong lead performances make for a very striking version of this often performed but repellant play.

Like many Jacobean revenge tragedies, the story's set in Italy - a place of hot passion ( the sex scenes are explicit) and short tempers. Webster, according to TS Eliot, saw 'the skull beneath the skin' - in other words he was obsessed with death, usually of a particularly violent kind.





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Chekhov's portrait of a family in decline can make for tedious staging, but this productions injects a bit of comedy into the melange of languid characters waiting for something to happen.

When Madame Raneskaya comes back from Paris she exudes wealth and scatters rubles, but her estate's on the edge of collapse, as she's informed by her hired business adviser, Lopakhin. Having risen from the ranks by his bootstraps one suspects he's less than sympathetic . But nobody in this dysfunctional family does anything quickly. The time when the harvest from the prodigious cherry orchard supported the family, their servants and a raft of hangers-on is past. Now the developers gather like vultures before the start of the inevitable land auction.


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Stooge- ‘How do you become a publishing millionaire?’

Comic- ‘Start with a billion dollars…’

The great thing about comedy is that the above would work just as well if ‘publishing’ was replaced with oil, pharmaceuticals, software or horse-racing. But not all jokes are so portable. Consider this old classic:

Stooge- ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’

Comic- ‘To get to the other side…’

You maybe didn’t laugh out loud this time, but when it was new and fresh and original, people would have been rolling in the aisles from the complex interplay of self-referential gagging, tweaking of audience preconceptions and surprising statement of the obvious. Like the ‘three men walk into a bar’ trope, it has achieved greatness through familiarity, adaptation and reuse.

Try migrating that joke to writing and…

Stooge- ‘Why did the author write a story?’
Comic- ‘...

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I'd read two quite riveting novels by Nicci French - a portmanteau name for the team efforts of married journalists Sean French and Nicci Gerrard. Maybe that's one reason why I took a more favourable attitude than other members of the library crime reading group. I arrived five minutes into the discussion, so was surprised that the hostility was already established.

It's what usually happens - people say straightaway whether or not they like a book and then justify their opinions, which opens up a discussion about plot, characters and style.

The first, and main, objection concerned the structure. It's truly a book of two halves, with an unexpected switch in the point of view at the place where most crime novels sag : in the middle. There's a sudden increase in the level of interest, as the reader sees things from the murderer's point of view.


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When I'm talking to aspiring writers, one of the things I often find myself saying is, "Don't underestimate what being published does to your relationship to your writing." Even if you haven't been so foolish as to give up the day job - even if the next book is, or isn't, under contract - even if the way your book launches is bangier, or whimperier, than you could possibly have imagined - going public changes things. It sets up of all sorts of complicated stresses about being judged, and the expectations of others, and your expectations of yourself in our Western world which always thinks that if you're not selling more or winning more each time, you're failing.

But for most of us, a necessary precursor to that longed-for contract is a point at which we start taking our writing very seriously indeed; whether it's giving up everything briefly for NaNoWriMo, or your savings to a heavyweight course, or half your job to write, or just giving up going to the pub ... Your writing becomes, effectively, at least a part-time job. And, like a job, you can't just do it while you feel like it, and then stop, and only start again when you want to. It is, if you like, the moment when writing stops being the thing you do for fun - however much fun you have while you're doing it.

Behind that serious time the rest of life has a depressing way of piling up into mounds of dishes to wash and head teachers to email and pets to feed... So serious writing can have a disconcerting way of counting as work in how much you drive yourself to do it, but not counting as work because it's your great (serious) joy, so you don't deserve a proper break and re-fuel when you've done a long stint.

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I’m delighted to welcome another bold adventurer in e-publishing, Maria (MG) Harris, author of the popular Joshua Files series of thrillers for pre-teens and teenagers, Invisible City, Ice Shock, Zero Moment, Dark Parallel and Apocalypse Moon, all published by Scholastic. Maria has now self-published a further e-book, drawing on the same fictional universe, The Descendant.

RM: Maria, you’ve written on your own blog about the increasing numbers of authors ‘dipping a toe in the self-publishing waters’. What are your own reasons for going down this route?

MG: For the last twelve months or so, seems to me that I’m hearing more about self-publishing than traditional. Maybe it’s just an obsession with the new, or a kind of opportunism, that’s gripping authors right now. Maybe in a couple of years everything will return to normal.

I tend to trust my instincts about business: I started working in biotech when the UK had just one ‘proper’ biotech company – and then watched the sector boom. I left bioscience in 1996, to set up an IT business because I sensed that the Internet sector was about to take off. Mind you – both sectors went through bubble periods too…

That’s how I feel about self-publishing right now. I can’t explain it any better – it’s a gut reaction to what I’m picking up. And – when this happens – I have to get involved!

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Today’s adventurer in e-publishing is Seumas Gallacher, author and self-publisher of The Violin Man’s Legacy ebook. Seumas has achieved staggering success with his novel, reaching no.3 in the Amazon UK bestseller thriller chart.

RM: So, Seumas, could you start by telling us how many sales and/or free downloads of The Violin Man’s Legacy there have been so far—if you don’t mind sharing that information?

SG: I’m delighted to share the numbers with you. Paid downloads are 16,000+, and the Kindle free promo just completed drew another 8,000+, for a total so far of 24,000+, which just blows my mind as an unknown unpublished new author.

Enviable figures indeed. What do you put your success down to?

The flippant answer would be ‘sheer luck’, and from what I now understand about the writing industry that I’ve learned in the last four years, that’s not so far off the mark. I’ve been putting in a lot of the leg work since finishing the book, and have caught on to the phrase and concept ‘building a platform’. Rachel Abbott, the darling of the indies at the moment, has done tons of research and generously shares in her blogs the ‘how to get it to the market’ after the writing’s done. The business approach calls for budgeted time, split among writing; reading other writers; blogs; reviews; social networking, particularly with peers on the like of Twitter. As a businessman I appreciate that model and I’m trying to emulate that now.

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This recession is taking a heavy toll on students as graduates search in vain for jobs. In September 2011, BBC News reported that 28% of UK graduates who left university in 2007 were still not in full-time work three and a half years later.

Worse, I sense a growing climate of blame and diminishing sympathy, as if young people are not doing enough to help themselves. Claire Rogers, writing recently in The Independent, strikes me as naive and out of touch: ‘There are several different ways a graduate can fight off the depression of being unemployed while simultaneously improving their chances of landing the right job. One thing that all disenchanted graduates should certainly do is get work experience, even if unpaid.’ So off you all go - take what’s going, don’t expect any pay, don’t complain and don’t get depressed.


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Press nights at Jermyn Street Theatre seem to be packed with luvvies come to support their fellow thesps. They aren't hard to spot in the tiny 70 seat theatre down some steps in Jermyn Street. Last time I came it was for a musical version of She Stoops to Conquer, and I saw Stephen Fry and James Coden. The latter slept through the second half, which I thought was odd (and rude) until I read that his wife had given birth to their first child three days before.

This time I saw one of my favourites, the actress who plays Mrs Warboys in One Foot in the Grave , in the row in front of me. Further along was another actress who played a very watchable Inspector Gina Gold in The Bill. Actors certainly make an appreciative audience ; they know the hard work goes into making difficult parts acceptable, and always shout 'Bravo!' at the end.


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