What others are saying and what I might be thinking about right now.

Comments and words heard in the passing often spark some thoughts, profound or flippant. As too do more serious works. Right now, much of my booky-thinking is about whether or not to have anything to do with Amazon publishing. @booksaremybag are clear on where they stand and they have a point; Amazon and it’s associates dominate the scene and smaller indies cannot get a foot hold or compete. A couple of small independent bookshops I’ve been in recently have strong views. I think I will be joining them.

I’ve just read in The Guardian newspaper (so it must be true, right?) that Reese Witherspoon has written a novel. Good luck to her, I say. Reading a bit more on the matter, it seems that she has co-written it with Harlan Coben. Good luck to them, I thought. But, here’s another thought. It does seem that having a novel/fiction as part of your portfolio of accomplishments as a celebrity is now almost expected. This all depends how we define celebrity, of course, but it is increasingly “a thing”. The books are invariably sort-of-thrillers, and are usually forecast to enter the best-seller charts somewhere near the top. Good luck to all of them, I say. But (there’s always a “but”) it does make even less room for those of us who are trying to be heard in the cacophony of the publishing world. There is a decreasing amount of oxygen for the vast majority of writers…and then there’s AI.

Another focus of my thinking is around the role and expression of research in fiction. I recently attended a virtual workshop, run by the Creative Writing and Social Research Network based at Manchester University. (Below is an image of one of the books referred to in the discussions) The focus was on the use of fiction and creative writing as a means of presenting social research data. The discussions therefore came from an academic and Social Sciences perspective. However, my own work and that of an increasing number of writers of fiction straddles the fiction/creative non-fiction divide too. Of Human Folly, for example, leans heavily on scientific research and historic and seminal environmental books. I have therefore taken the decision to include an academic-style set of references at the end of the book. I will do this in my up-coming novel too. In a world too often mistaking fiction for truth, it is necessary to be clear with the readers what you are writing but also, even in some fiction, where there is support for the assertions and facts, these could (should?) be identified.