about me

'Fail again, fail better.' - Samuel Beckett

Lancastrian. Slow reader. Slower writer. I hold to Wyndham Lewis's axiom that laughter is the mind sneezing. Sneezing is good. Sneezing is a relief. But it shouldn't always be comfortable. I'm all for beauty, escapism, and feeling better, but I don't like the idea that art should be easy, reassuring or well-mannered - well, not always anyway.......................

Does that help? Probably not.

'Johnny Face-Ache' is the first novel I've finished and I've been working away at it, on and off, for at least a decade, more really, with some bits having origins in my student writings of the late 1980s... The whole thing exists and weighs in at just under 80,000 words but I'm currently redrafting in a fairly major way, so will upload as and when.

The book has no chapters, as such, so I will split it into 'bits' for Authonomous purposes.

Apart from 'Face-Ache', I'm also writing a novel for older children/younger teens called 'Dizzy and the Mouth-Monkey'. And I write plays and poetry. And academic stuff (because it stretches other muscles and suits other moods - and, besides, I like the students and lecturing pays the mortgage).

I tend to back books in moments of shiny enthusiasm and then add comments later, when I've calmed down a bit - so there is usually a lag between the act of shelving and the formation of words...

'Be sand, not oil, in the machinery of the world' - Günter Eich


NB: Please don't be upset by my user name: it's not intended as a blasphemy, a statement of faith, a gesture of egotism or of self-deprecation - it's just a reference to one of my favourite novels.....................

favourite books

The landscape shifts constantly, but there are a few constant landmarks................

Pretty much anything by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, or B.S. Johnson...............

Epic of Gilgamesh
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Chants of Maldoror by Lautreamont
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brönte
Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
The Master and Margerita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

Contemporary authors? Ali Smith, A.L. Kennedy, Nicola Barker, Alasdair Gray, Will Self, Michel Houellebecq - that sort of thing.............

And poetry. Lots of poetry. Lots and lots and lots of poetry.

my websites