Tag: books
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The Billy Elliot syndrome
Continuing my informal series on the journey of an amateur writer, I would like to speak today about the effort it takes to finish a writing project. The gruelling, excruciating, mind-warpingly hard, but at the same time supremely rewarding effort of finishing even the shortest haiku. Many people embark on the adventure of writing, and…
Smyth Díaz 