Graham Storrs

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.) Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery by Stephen J. Pyne is a book that aims to set the West’s exploration of the Solar System in its historical context. Pyne, a historian at Arizona State University, has an “organizing conceit” [...]

In the brave new world of electronic publishing – in which we live right now – picking up an unknown book by an unknown author has become a much bigger risk than it used to be in the old, print-only days of a couple of years ago. This is because, on the major retails sites, [...]

Not being a religious person, I don’t have a handy reference book to guide me on moral matters. So I tend to put in quite a lot of brain-time working on questions of right and wrong. One of these questions popped into my head a couple of years ago – about the time when I [...]

Where do you get your ideas? Although no-one has ever asked me, I thought I’d answer the question anyway. I’ve just started writing a new book – a new trilogy in fact – and I’ve been watching myself as the process of coming up with the story unfolds. And this is how it happened. Almost [...]

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go. (from ‘The Waking‘ by Theodore Roethke.) Writing is a strange business. Last night I killed my babies. I woke at about 3 am, drenched in sweat, even though it was cool. My head was full of purpose. [...]

One of the first things that struck me when I became involved with writers’ groups, was that most aspiring writers can’t write. They may be full of wild imaginings, they may have stories in them, yearning to be told, but, as well as lacking the more esoteric skills of the craft, they can’t form a [...]

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t [...]

I’ve just spent half a day working on the schedule for the TimeSplash Blog Tour in March and April, contacting everybody involved and trying to firm up all 16 dates. Just another facet of the writerly life that no-one ever bothers to mention. I’d rope Wifie in to do all my admin (she’s great at [...]

The following email came to me from Ed Patterson. It was originally from Al Past. It explains itself, I believe. Do you know anyone deployed overseas, or even in the military? If so, here’s a simple way to do something tangible to help those folks get through their hitches: Operation E-Book Drop. Troops overseas are [...]

No, not a post about the Battle of Thermopylae just a few comments on building up a following on Twitter. Yesterday, you see, I had 300 ‘followers’ for the first time. Unlike King Leonidas, I won’t ask my gallant band to give their lives in a hopeless rearguard action against the armies of the Persian [...]