Sweet Success

My story ‘Visions’ appears in The Best of CafeLit 2012, a collection of stories from Debz Hobbs-Wyatt’s Cafe Lit website.  ‘Visions’ is about a journalist who gets killed before she is able to file her story, but she does get to have a nice chat with St Peter.  I have to confess that it is a story I wrote a very long time ago… er, about 3 years ago actually.  ‘Small Ones Are More Juicy’ by Patsy Collins, whose blog I follow, is also included, although the other authors I don’t know.  The Kindle version costs £2.04 and the paperback £6.   Please do support it.  (I don’t benefit personally but Debz has put in a lot of hard work on this.)

I’ve just finished reading ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’, the first book of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Novels, and have just started the second book, ‘Goodbye to Berlin’.  Although I will review both together when I finish GTB, I can reveal that Isherwood’s work fills me with awe.  The level of detail in which he writes is just phenomenal.  To give an example, the first three pages of ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’ is taken up with an account of how the main character lights the cigarette of a stranger – Norris, as it turns out.  Throughout the book, he describes every nuance of characters’ reactions, every movement of the body, every fleeting shadow moving across the eye.  It seems to me that, whereas most writers just throw in a few actions to lighten up the ‘he saids’ and ‘she saids’, Isherwood just worked at it and worked at it, until he’d shown the reader everything.

…And next week, I’ll be in Berlin.

(From http://www.tripadvisor.com)