new year news

Fiction often goes slowly in this part of the year so I’m down in Kent cat-sitting for a month, doing as much reviewing as I can get.

Reviewing is good for you because quietly deep-reading other people’s writing, when it’s of any worth (& sometimes when it isn’t), makes you think not about your own books but about your own life. Here’s a look at Mark Danielewski’s new one, a horse opera called Tom’s Crossing. Long, and long-awaited perhaps, but perhaps not as satisfying as House of Leaves. Next for the TLS I’m reading the grimly enjoyable Crux, by Gabriel Tallent: from hybrid cowboy adventures in Danielewski’s Utah to highball bouldering in Joshua Tree. Tallent’s West Coast existentialism, warm and icy at the same time, is making me think. (After that, for the Guardian, The Delusions by Jenni Fagan & Lucy Caldwell’s short story collection, Devotions.)

In other news The End of Everything should go out as an ARC soon. We’ve already had encouraging responses to it in bound manuscript. Plans for three short story projects and a possible novel are in hand: to encourage me to sort the wheat from the chaff in that direction, my Mastodon & BlueSky accounts are now on hiatus/closed. Comments still interdicted here, see post below.

It isn’t quite snowing. Later the cat stalks a magpie on the lawn. The other side of the french window I stalk the half-glimpsed possibilities of a novel, always sticking to rule number one. Take care of your core aims, make sure you know the difference between what you do and anything else that’s going on, and move along quietly to the next thing.

(By the way, haven’t read this but it looks both good & fun.)