Smyth Díaz

Category: Uncategorized

  • An excruciating kind of nudity

    Since the release of Dolores and Other Sorrows, I have been to several open mic nights around Brussels. The book is a collection of short stories, so it lends itself to this format: I sign up to read, I enjoy some authors of poems, short stories or songs and then my name gets called. The…

  • Non-Amazon ways of buying Dolores and Other Sorrows

    The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Oops, sorry, I got carried away there for a second. The world is quickly becoming a scary place in an increasingly tangible way. Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to start talking about…

  • Honey, I Killed the Cats

    Before anyone freaks out, the title of this blog entry is simply the title of the latest book I’ve been reading, and I wanted to talk about it. Needless to say, there might be spoilers ahead. I’ll try to be discreet, but it’s easy to slip up inadvertently. Honey, I Killed the Cats was written…

  • Living in metaphors

    One of the things that I think all writers do is constantly have their mind elsewhere. If you see a writer, from the amateur beginner to the seasoned professional, with their gaze lost somewhere in the distance it’s likely that they’re actually thinking about a story they’re writing or else planning on writing. In some…

  • Tsundoku

    Today’s entry is one that will hopefully have all book lovers nodding quietly and smiling to themselves. However, I will get there the long way round. Part of what makes a linguist tick is the kind of thing that makes other people think ‘well, if you say so…’ or ‘and how does that help?’ or…

  • Here’s one I did earlier…

    ‘Art is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration’. You’ve heard this quote before, I’m sure. If you’re Proust or Mozart or Picasso, those percentages may change to 10%-90%, but not much more than that. I’m sure anyone reading this is nodding and smiling. ‘Yep, been there, done that’. Personally, I couldn’t agree more. However, I’d like…

  • Beta reader checklist

    I’m in the process of writing a novel (yep, brain about to explode, paranoid about changing even a comma in case there’s a butterfly effect and it causes continuity problems downstream), and I realise that one of the things I’m going to need is beta readers (people who read the book before it’s published to…

  • You can learn from everything

    Continuing on my series about the life of a struggling amateur author, the other day I got a rejection letter from a competition. Another one, I should point out. I keep them in a folder on my computer, and the day I get an acceptance letter I’ll count how many rejections it took me to…

  • Books that I wish I’d written – Middlesex

    Today’s entry is going to be slightly shorter because it’s going to be about the book Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Plenty has been written about it, and by people way smarter than I am, so there’s no real need for me to explain why the book is great. It’s actually one of the most important…

  • On the need for small bookshops

    I have just come back from Librebook, a bookshop in Brussels where my book is on the shelf. This sounds nonchalant, but it’s a big deal. Not for the world, granted, but it is for me. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s a surreal feeling to know that my book is available for…