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mr.shelley

rank: 305

Last week's position: 301

first registered 01.02.09

last online 13 mins ago

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about me


I'm here to learn more about writing and make friends of the writerly kind.

Please don't spam me. If you want me to read and comment on your work, go first. I'll respond. I may or may not back you.

If you're not a good friend, don't expect that I give two kicks of a monkey's whether you 'need' to stay on the desk, or 'need' to get there. Why on earth should I?

Contact: pshelleyb AT googlemail DOT com

favourite books


An evolving list, but it would usually contain works by:
Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, Kerouac, Camus, Lawrence Durrell, Julien Gracq, Italo Calvino, Alex Trocchi, Martin Amis and DH Lawrence. Kesey's 'Sometimes a Great Notion' is THE great American novel for me.

I'm a big fan of short stories too:
Chekhov, Carver, Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, Henry James and Daphne du Maurier, amongst others.

my websites

    

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my books

The Alchemy of Chance

Peter S Brooks

Literary and culinary road-movie mystery of the heart, with a blind map-maker at the centre of a web of synchronicity.


Spring 1977, 28 year-old Aurélie Pêguissoux sets off alone on the train from Paris to Brittany, with her braille books, tactile Scrabble kit and cello. Her journey's purpose is to rediscover the places and loved-ones of her childhood summers, and to come to terms with her recent loss of sight.

Starting out in Brest, she visits her family's hometowns, all dotted along the North Brittany coast. She terminates her journey in Dinard, unaware that her lifelong fascinations with postcards, twins and the stars will soon explode, as others - strangers all - head towards Newquay, Dinard's twin-town.

Dafydd, a Welsh film-maker, he's also in Dinard, sent to France by his father to find his brother Sean, who went missing there ten years before. His only lead, a trail of cryptic postcards, one from Nantes and three from places he's barely heard of.

Aurélie and Dafydd bump into each other, and embark on a journey through France in search of Sean. By cracking the codes on the cryptic cards, they manage to find his house, but not him. On the way back to Aurélie's home in Paris something in the stars over Newquay prompts her to suggest a change of direction.

 

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latest

ScottTrimas wrote 13 days ago

Hi would you mind reading and commenting on my book The Chimera Facto....

ChristinaN55 wrote 38 days ago

Hey Mr. Shelly, How have you been? Did you have a good Christmas a....

leelah wrote 39 days ago

Thanks, Peter! Happy New year! Leelah

Jack Hughes wrote 39 days ago

A pleasure, happy new year. Jack

earthlover wrote 55 days ago

Waiting for your take on my story. I hope you enjoy it. I hope it's....

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my comments

latest

I wrote 109 days ago

Loved the new opening (ch.2), not least because more than once I’ve sung for my supper at a Mediterranean seaside town and then slept under under the hull of a boat on the beach. Beautiful descriptive set-piece, as to be expected, and a couple of enigmatic characters that invoke the reader’s curi... view book

I wrote 164 days ago

Well you can write, bunderful. Crisp taut prose, highly original sentence construction with objects and others as subject (hardly an ‘I’ in sight, some paras), and wonderful imagery created from the simplest of words. Terrific opening, one of the most extraordinary I’ve read anywhere. The cooing dov... view book

I wrote 311 days ago

Gordon, we are together on authonomy but any similarity in our approaches stops there. I told you, your idea, you go first. In the meantime, you have not had the commonsense or the decency to read my profile before recommunicating. So I'll tell you now. I'm already published. See homepage here t... view book

I wrote 321 days ago

Ch.2: One of the things that makes your writing sing is the lyrical beauty behind the ideas that lie behind just about every sentence, be it narrative or dialogue. That I happen – in the main - to subscribe to those ideas, be they philosophical political or aesthetic, is neither here nor there, b... view book

I wrote 341 days ago

I like autobiographies, and this one didn’t disappoint. :) My problem is I’m cursed with a serious defecit in the humour department. I have to get by on about 20% of the average human quotient. As a result, much of this went clean over my head. But I did get some, and it’s clear that the whol... view book

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