RIP E. L. Doctorow, Jan 6, 1931 – July 21, 2015

E. L. Doctorow. A hell of a writer. Not familiar with his work? Read Ragtime. His fictional characters mingle with the likes of Henry Ford, Booker T. Washington, and Harry Houdini. It’s a great novel, and Doctorow was a true New York original, now gone to the great melting pot in the sky. RIP, Edgar…

Playing as if the World Mattered: An Illustrated History of Activism in Sports – by Gabriel Kuhn

                      Elite sport has a lot to answer for. Rabid consumerism, blind nationalism, rampant cheating, endemic corruption. Just in the last couple of years we’ve witnessed FIFA’s corruption scandal, mass protests in Brazil against expenditure on huge stadia, and the saga of Lance Armstrong. And…

Rookie mistakes made by fiction writers

        I’ve been editing a lot of manuscripts recently – a couple of novels and a whole bunch of short stories, mostly by unpublished writers. While making notes I realized I was repeating myself across different authors. I won’t go into the big issues of fiction: plot, character, style, etc. Here the…