Paranormal Romance

Stuart Douglas has been setting up this whole website for me and has been brilliant. I've thought for years that I should have a site and a blog, and all the rest, and I've never quite got it together. I've read other people's and thought how great they were, and how nice it must be to have a place where you interact with your readers and give updates on all your news and gossip. (Maybe not all the gossip, but some, anyway.)

So here we are..! This blog, I bet will turn out to be mostly about what I'm reading. Which makes sense, since I spend as much time as I can reading novels and short stories. I love those blogs where people introduce me to stuff I don't know or have forgotten about. My reading is complicated at the moment because I seem to be reading about eight things at once. For a while, earlier this year, I decided that the perfect combination of different books left lying in different rooms would be:

1) in bag, current novel I'm on with.
2) in study, something comforting, like a fantasy novel or a cosy mystery
3) in kitchen, a kids' or teen novel - new or classic
4) living room coffee table with all the mags and papers - a non-fic hardback. Probably a literary or showbiz biography. And probably v trashy.
5) bedside table - two or three old favourites for rereading.

Anyway, it's all gone a bit haywire, and it's ended up with me carrying a stack of books from room to room, all the time. And getting stuck when I have to pack my bag to go out for the day to work or whatever.

So what have I liked lately?

Esther M Friesner's 'Druid's Blood.' A lovely, slightly deranged steampunk extravaganza with Holmes and Watson incognito and having the most outrageous of adventures. I'm feeling very at home in 221B these days, as I work my way through watching all the Jeremy Brett Granada episodes. I've become fascinated by the sequels, prequels and apocrypha to do with Holmes. And, back in March, I paid a v interesting trip to the museum at 221B Baker Street, which I enjoyed immensely. It was a hot little study, crammed with memorabilia and a little old man, inviting me to have a seat in front of the blazing fire so I could get my picture taken wearing a deerstalker and feeling a bit mithered on the first day of spring. Anyway, the Freisner was great fun, and I've been looking into her other novels - which seem wide-ranging, free-wheeling and fun.

Her books remind me of that remainder shop there used to be in Darlington, which sold american imported Ace Fantasy novels and similar stuff - all at 75p with clipped covers. It was there that I found some of my favourite novels for rereading: Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs, R A McAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon and John DeCles' The Particolored Unicorn.

What else recently..? I reread Armistead Maupin's 'Maybe the Moon' - and loved it as much as I did back in 1993, when my friend Alicia and I went to a swanky literary lunch in Manchester with him and a million others. All of us perched over the melon balls starter as he read from what's become my preferred novel about a midget. I've said it before - but it was Maupin who made me believe - back in 1990, when I was twenty and Gene sat me down with 'Tales of the City' - that it was okay to write fiction that sounds just how people talk. It's a hard thing to get right. People think it's easy. But it's that thing about the essence of style, isn't it? Make difficult things look simple and much easier than they are: that's what it's all about.

Remember - any questions, comments - let me know!