View my posts about books, life and everything in between.
Suspense and Secrets : The Double Life in Contemporary Fiction
The ‘double life’ or secret identity is a recurring theme in contemporary fiction. Characters conceal their true selves or roles, leading to complex relationships and suspenseful narratives. Contemporary fiction borrows themes and tropes from the classics. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a portrait serves as a visual representation of Dorian’s double life and…
Continue readingCorona, the Baker and the Snail
I confess that I tried to make a sour dough starter and failed. Before. Lockdown Level 5. My niece passes on the idea and sends a video link. I watch a charismatic and patient young London baker explain his life’s passion. During. I spend two weeks feeding (too sporadically?) my ravenous potential-loaf-of-bread child. It doesn’t…
Continue readingLa Stanza – The Room
How queer it is to be moved by a room. It happened to me in Sils-Maria, a place I now carry with me. I stood on the doorsill of the cordoned-off restricted space where a man of great intellect had sat at a small desk – the original piece of furniture still there – and pondered…
Continue readingOde to an Arum Lily
There I was at the Franschhoek Literary Festival, vacillating as I always do between a feeling of morose despondency (why is it that I never feel less like a writer than when I’m surrounded by the books of other writers?) and a feeling of nerdy joy at the pure bookishness of it all. It’s…
Continue readingHigh as a kite
Today I reached the end of School Side Road and a madwoman was yelling at a figment hiding in a tree. I slowed to a walk and went right up to the tree and peered into the electric-green leafy boughs (given that we’re in the midst of a drought this seemed odd) and there was no one there, at…
Continue readingA new cover for The Good Cemetery Guide
This latest e-book cover version arrived quietly, over time… As small good things do. What can I say? I suffer from book cover OCD. It explains everything. The long hours, the diversions, the steep learning curve as I hunted the right image and then the right cover design down… Evocative cover art attracts me as a…
Continue readingAnd then there were three (NYNs)… Do you find plot more difficult than character? | Roz Morris
Originally posted on Nail Your Novel: Phew, the plot book is ready. It seems to have taken a marathon of effort; much longer than the characters book. So much that I’m wondering if this tells me something about the nature of plot. In writing the book, I’ve been pinning down the ultimate essentials –…
Continue readingJoyce Carol Oates: ‘People think I write quickly, but I actually don’t’ | Books | The Guardian
The books interview: The prolific author on the unreality of romance, the fickle memory of Americans and how tweeting has got her into trouble. When Joyce Carol Oates, the 77-year-old author of well over 100 books, told the New Yorker last year that she thought of herself as “transparent”, before adding “I’m not sure I…
Continue readingJoyce Carol Oates: This Love Has Come Upon Me Slowly
This love has come upon me slowly, quite unsought for and quite unexpected. I see now that it has stealthily wormed into way into my heart, this love of the intricate way you work upon words. The craftsmanship is so honest, so dedicated, so pure, that it was perhaps inevitable that I should succumb, but I did…
Continue readingA Swashbuckling Premise
The Fall by Indian movie director Tarsem Singh is one of those big-screen wonders that catapulted me into unexpected wonder. Its swashbuckling premise is that if you can trust in a paradigm where reality and fantasy are allies then anything can happen and brave little girls get to be Zorro. The heroine Alexandria, a small girl…
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