CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

So what are we trying to do when we say ‘grow’? I’ve argued that the compulsion to grow commercially or economically is just that - a compulsion, driven by social, cultural and perhaps psychological pressures that we have become so used to that to question them seems heretical. It’s part of the general belief that modern life consists of being active, reaching for some kind of advancement, defeating competition, striving to be ‘upwardly mobile’, and so on. Unless one is eng

There’s a tendency to think in terms of numbers only when it comes to growing anything, especially a commercial enterprise. I have argued that chasing numbers is not the way forward either commercially or for any other reason - all too often this kind of pursuit of the notion of ‘the bigger the better’ leads to disappointment, as the realisation dawns that ‘bigger’ usually means drowning in the anonymity of disinterested masses. Anyone posting a book on Amazon and expecting i

Having established the idea that there might be something called a ‘prejudice of amplitude’ - a notion that if something is bigger it must somehow inherently be better - I wanted to extend that concept into other fields of thinking. Physical size can dwarf and impress us - from tall, muscular bodyguards to vast, ocean-going liners, we are supposed to be awed by size. But that awe can trickle into other areas of thought by a kind of associative osmosis. We can come to feel t

I wanted to talk to you about size. The Facebook arm of the Inner Circle Writers’ Group hovers around 12,500 members. The group adds members every day, in ones and twos, and has grown consistently since it was launched back in July last year. (A handful leave when they realise that the group is not just a rolling billboard of ads on which they can constantly promote their own book, unlike many other writers' groups.) A few members are wary of this - they don’t want the thin

This universe is built on emptiness. Or so it seems, at first. Regions of space so vast that the human mind gives up seeking for comparatives; eons of time so long that clocks torment us; quantum mechanics so indisputably weird that they defy logic: it all adds up to a reality which is fundamentally a void. And yet, there isn’t just nothing. Something, whether it is ‘there’ in any comprehensible way or not, spins around in those voids, lasts through those epochs and occup

I’ve written in many earlier blog articles about the fact that we are living through an Ironic phase of human civilisation. In brief, this means that almost the entire culture is built around undermining convention, breaking down traditional relationships, and focusing on the inner world of thought and emotion rather than any outer, ‘harder’ realities. Paradoxically, humanity's perception of 'reality' - as in external space and matter - becomes correspondingly 'empty' and w

Another name that pops up in writing groups on social media is that of Gary Bonn. Many of us read quite a few short stories in the course of a month or so, and they are often exciting, well-crafted pieces with an emotional ‘punch’ at the end. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these kind of tales, which make up the backbone of the short story world whether they are happy stories of romance, grim adventures with sad endings, or tragic episodes in the lives of interesting

There are times as a writer which are joyous in the extreme. In ways which are often hard to describe to a non-writer, the act of writing can take one into a different world - not a fantasy construction like Middle-earth (though that happens too) but a kind of trance in which reality seems not less solid but in some strange way more real. When we are ‘in the zone’ as writers, it is as though we have engaged some other set of perceptions and are able to make connections whic

I have seen quite a few conversations on the web over time in which the process of editing is questioned and most often misunderstood, so I thought I’d offer you some insights into the way editing should be done and the way I do it. First of all, we’d better define what is meant by the term ‘editing’. When I’m talking about editing here, I don’t mean the simple correction of language which comes under the title of 'line editing' or even ‘proofreading’ - that’s almost entire