photo: Marcos Takamatsu I’m so excited. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s follow-up to The Black Swan is now available in the UK ? entitled Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand. My hardback copy is winging its way to me. Hardback? Yes, I …
Ah! It would be lovely, wouldn’t it ? if Manchester and the north west of England emerged as the new Florence and Tuscany of Europe? Just imagine cypress trees and vineyards scattered among the Pennine foothills and the Cheshire Gap. In A Calcul…
via guardian.co.uk Here’s a great article in today’s Guardian Books Blog by Lee Rourke. I couldn’t agree more and I love novels with fractured narratives. Here’s one point that Lee makes that I particularly like: Life isn’t like the narratives tha…
This was a surprise: A Calculated Life reached the Kindle Bestseller List for Science Fiction on Amazon’s UK store, on launch day. So was it Flukey-Tuesday, or what? I’ve been mulling this over and . . . I suspect I’ll never know the reason. It’s …
I clicked the ‘Save and Publish’ button yesterday morning and just seven hours later A Calculated Life went live on Amazon’s websites as an ebook. To be precise, at 18:28:12 GMT on Monday 12 November.I’m impressed by the smooth operation of Kindle…
Baby at Manchester University So why did I chose Manchester and the North West of England as the main setting for A Calculated Life? It’s not simply because I know this city and region (I could have chosen London, which I know well enough).The fac…
It all began . . . at the turn of the millennium when, after I’d recovered from the celebrations, I read a long review in The Guardian’s New Year edition of Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines. His predictions were a wake-up call. He…
Along with most authors I?ve opted to go, initially, with Kindle Direct Publishing because, quite simply, this reaches the highest number of potential readers. Indeed, many indie-authors don?t bother with any other ebook or any Print-on-Demand…
After weeks of tortuous research, I?ve now finalised my indie-author strategy for publishing my first novel. I?m mightily relieved that I?m releasing A Calculated Life this month rather than six months ago because at least one major problem facing…
Six pages into my manuscript, for the final (absolutely final) read-through before e-publication, I decided to check whether em-dashes require character spaces. Here’s the two lines of dialogue that prompted this check: ?You were worried. I wasn?t…
