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Continue reading →: Fixing common writing problems
As you might have gathered from my last two posts, I’ve been reading more than writing for the last couple of years. So far 2024’s tally is outpacing 2023 by some margin: I’ve just started reading book 48 of the year, which matches my total for the whole of 2023.…
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Continue reading →: Book reviews 2023
I think I’ve devoured more books in 2023 than in any other year. Almost all queer YA: a genre that didn’t even come close to existing when I most needed it. With two hours until 2024 smacks us in the chops, I know I won’t finish reading my current book…
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Continue reading →: Book reviews 2022
I’ve been reading a lot in the last few years. Since the start of 2022 I’ve been posting potted reviews of each book on Twitter and giving it an unreliable and inconsistent rating out of 5. Now that Twitter is even more of a raging bin fire than it ever…
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Continue reading →: Another gay footballer at last?
The older I get, the closer I come to losing it entirely at Pride — in a good way. I marched again this year, and the waters rose first somewhere along Regent Street, when the shockwave of joy and smiles and rainbows and goddamn whistles and acceptance and unrelenting positivity…
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Continue reading →: Anthony vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda
I turned seventeen in the spring of 1986. Days later Chernobyl’s nuclear power station huffed radiation across northern Europe, causing sheep to glow in the Scottish Highlands (subs: please check). At the time, the Soviet Union’s fresh, thrusting, young fifty-something leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was shouldering the tiller in an attempt…
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Continue reading →: Review: Armada
I confess I’ve struggled to articulate my thoughts on Ernest Cline’s Armada. As the tricky second book following a blockbuster like Ready Player One, the temptation for this reviewer is to throw down comparisons in an endless series of bullets: Ready Player One was like this, but Armada‘s like this,…
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Continue reading →: Review: Whispers Under Ground
And so to book three of Ben Aaronovitch‘s Peter Grant series: see my reviews of book one and book two to catch up with the meta-story so far. Whispers Under Ground is not the book I was expecting. I’m not sure what my expectations were, precisely: perhaps something focusing more…
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Continue reading →: Review: More Happy Than Not
It’s been a while since I’ve read an LGBT-themed book. Having finished Exo I saw the next few on my official to-read pile weren’t going to change that, so as a Christmas treat I decided to sneak in something new. Amazon opened its unwashed mac to show me a barely distinguishable selection of…
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Continue reading →: Review: Exo
Last year I reviewed Impulse, the third book in the Jumper series by Steven Gould. I’ve just finished Exo, the fourth. Yes, I’m still a way behind in my reading. As in Impulse, Exo follows the activities of the Rice family: parents Davy and Millie, written in third person, and…
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Continue reading →: Review: Moon Over Soho
Now that A Room Full of Elephants is out, I’m planning to read more. Top of the pile: Moon Over Soho, the second book in the Peter Grant/Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. If you remember, I enjoyed the first tremendously. Although not a sequel, Moon dovetails nicely with…
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Continue reading →: Elephants for everyone
A Room Full of Elephants is released today. I’m so glad that after a year of effort my deranged wittering is finally in people’s hands, and the feedback so far is tremendously pleasing. Release day is an odd one for an author. The excitement of sales, the checking of charts.…
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Continue reading →: How not to advertise on Facebook
For the launch of A Room Full of Elephants I’ve been considering running a short Facebook ad campaign: a couple of days before and after the release date, to drum up some eyeballs. The release date is next Wednesday. Yesterday, I thought it was about time I made the ad.…
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Continue reading →: ARFOE versus a DeLorean
I’m in a reflective mood. Perhaps it’s down to Back to the Future day, which I’ve spent marvelling at the thousands of hoverboards nobody has. More likely it’s because I finally finished the first draft of ARFOE not so long ago. Finishing a first draft is like riding a non-hovering…
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Continue reading →: Pride London 2015
It’s a few weeks ago now, but here are some photos I took during the Pride London march at the end of June. As last year I was walking with Families Together London, which supports the parents of LGBT children. Unlike last year, the sun came out. It’s my favourite day…
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Continue reading →: Cambridge Centre for Computing History
Today I spent a couple of hours at the Cambridge Centre for Computing History, revisiting my youth. If you’re under forty these photos might not mean too much to you. If you’re over forty, the chances are you had or used at least one of these…
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Continue reading →: Review: Impulse
I’m not sure where I first read about the Jumper books by Steven Gould. Possibly on Boing Boing. Impulse is the third in the series, following Jumper and Reflex. (There was an awful 2008 film called Jumper, loosely based on the first book, starring Billy Elliot’s Jamie Bell and Wooden…
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Continue reading →: Review: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember
I do love a good popular science book. I spent many a teenage year devouring books about the bizarro world of quantum physics and the magical future of nanotechnology, always fifteen years away with its promises of wondrous microscopic self-replicating devices and a planet eaten by grey goo. Annalee Newitz’s…
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Continue reading →: Review: Rivers of London
I’m scandalously late to the Peter Grant series from Ben Aaronovitch. As I write there are five books, and after making short work of book one – Rivers of London – I plan to read them all. When Rivers came out I remember spotting it on the shelves and thinking,…
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Continue reading →: Review: The Rapture of the Nerds
Well, isn’t this bonkers? The Rapture of the Nerds is 330 pages of Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross battering away gleefully at their keyboards about life on and off Earth at the end of the twenty-first century, post-singularity: when most of humanity has uploaded itself to the cloud, with the…
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Continue reading →: Review: Ready Player One
Next on my book pile: 2011’s debut novel from Ernest Cline, Ready Player One. It’s a few decades into the future, and as real life is far from ideal most of humanity prefers to spend its time in a haptically enhanced virtual universe created by a now-dead reclusive videogame genius…
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Continue reading →: Review: Homeland
Homeland by Cory Doctorow is the sequel to Little Brother, and like its predecessor is not so much a novel as a manifesto for change, for a better world dominated by altruism and individuals, not money and corporations – a bottom-up rather than top-down society. The book’s been on my to-read…
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Continue reading →: The Perils of Pauline
No plan survives contact with the enemy. As I wrote in my last blog about researching The Pauline Conversion, as you dig around in the archives you have to be prepared to unearth something that stops your neat idea in its tracks. If you’re unlucky it sends you reversing back…
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Continue reading →: Trying not to map paving slabs
A few days ago, as a friend and I were chatting about The Pauline Conversion, he said he’d bet any money I’d researched it to within an inch of its life. He believed I wouldn’t be happy until I’d followed every research thread to its end, mapping every paving slab…
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Continue reading →: Recovering
Coinciding with the release of The Pauline Conversion, I’ve given my other three books new covers. In two cases tweaks rather than wholesale changes: in one, something entirely new. I want to delve a little into the process. ATTENTION: INCOMING SUBHEADINGS. Background To state the bleeding obvious, covers are the…
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Continue reading →: The Pauline Conversion: out now on Kindle
A day ahead of my self-imposed deadline, The Pauline Conversion is now available for Kindle owners worldwide at the low, low price of £2.99/€3.49/$3.99. Here is a fragrant smorgasbord of links: UK | USA | Canada | Australia | India | Germany | France | Spain | Italy | Japan |…
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Continue reading →: Pride London 2014
There’s no better way to celebrate finishing the first draft of a new book than by marching in Pride, in sunshine and in rain, through the centre of London in bright turquoise (or teal, depending on taste). As last year I marched with Families Together London, and took my camera…
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Continue reading →: First draft: complete!
Joy, pride, relief, disbelief, sadness, emptiness… I’d forgotten what it feels like to finish a first draft. There’s a moment when your brain switches from “what’s next?” to “oh, I’m finished.” It’s anticlimactic. It’s strange. And then the emotions kick in. This story has been gestating for so long it…
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Continue reading →: The Guardian Legend Self-Published Rights Grab of the Month
UK newspaper The Guardian in conjunction with Legend Times has announced a new monthly literary prize for self-published authors. On the face of it this is great news. Finally some recognition of quality writing outside the world of traditional publishing. It could be a great way to throw off that invisibility cloak. But as…
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Continue reading →: The perils of writing in public
At the moment, when I’m not working on a freelance job, I’m outlining and/or writing and/or procrastinating in a variety of locations across Cambridge. I try to keep my destinations random, not turning up at the same places on the same days each week. It’s harder than it seems: habits…
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Continue reading →: Back matters
Beside one of my bookcases lies the Pile of the Unread, from which I pluck the next book to devour (yes, I still read dead trees). I don’t chomp through them nearly quickly enough. I’ve just finished one, Robopocalypse by Daniel H Wilson, that’s been in the pile for a…
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Continue reading →: One hundred days
As an experiment, for the last 100 days I’ve written every day. No matter how full the hours, I’ve found some time. I’ve been trying to discover if the “write every day” mantra works: whether the writing flows more easily, whether it instills a new discipline. In those 100 days…
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Continue reading →: Twenty-five years
It’s twenty-five years this month since I started at Downing College, Cambridge. I can scarcely believe it possible. The calendar used to be so friendly, and now it mocks me. My route to Cambridge was unorthodox. I had my A-level results before I applied, and so my admissions interviews the…
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Continue reading →: The poor, powerless IOC
“But one should not forget that we are staging the games in a sovereign state and the IOC cannot be expected to have an influence on the sovereign affairs of a country,” says departing IOC president Jacques Rogge. No indeed. The IOC’s hands are tied. They can do nothing, nothing,…
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Continue reading →: What I’m up to
I’m working on a new book. In fact I’m working on two. Before you get too excited I’m not entirely sure what these books are yet, and I’m still very much in the procrastination stages — which involve a great deal of staring into the middle distance with tea, and…
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Continue reading →: What would Putin do?
It’s a big few years for sport in Russia. In a couple of weeks Moscow hosts the World Athletics Championships. Next January the Winter Olympics bandwagon stops in Sochi. And in 2018 FIFA’s World Cup peppers the country with 32 national teams playing the world’s most popular sport. Meanwhile, let’s…
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Continue reading →: Man Booker Prize
The longlist for the 2013 Man Booker Prize was announced today. It contains no self-published books. Why not? Because they are, by design, ineligible for the prize. The organisers have gone to some lengths to make sure no self-published books slip through the net. Here’s the rule: 3 d) Self published books…
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Continue reading →: Pride London 2013
You may remember last year I marched with Families Together London for Pride. Last Saturday we did it all again, except with better weather and, I think, bigger crowds. I thought I’d share some of the photos I took. I’d also love to find any photos or video of me…
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Continue reading →: And with one bound, he was free
I won't ever forget tonight! I love my new home @lagalaxy. — Robbie Rogers (@robbierogers) May 27, 2013 Robbie Rogers is playing football again, for LA Galaxy. He’s the first openly gay player in the MLS — the North American equivalent of the Premier League. And he wants to make…
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Continue reading →: Jason Collins, the coming gold rush, and an interview
Since Disunited came out at the end of January we’ve now seen two male sports stars do the same — and a few female sports stars too, let’s not forget. Jason Collins is the first NBA player to come out and continue playing. The second might be newsworthy too. The…
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Continue reading →: The Other
The fear of The Other is not new. It’s hard-wired, like the fight-or-flight response and our ability to detect movement far away to the left or right in the corner of our eyes. These are defence mechanisms, selected by evolution, that help explain why we dominate the planet with our…
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Continue reading →: Free offer: the results
As you might have noticed — especially if you follow me on Twitter or on Google+ — for the last two days Till Undeath Do Us Part has been free to download on Kindle. At the moment that book — but not the other two — is signed up to…
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Continue reading →: Special offer: Till Undeath Do Us Part – FREE!
UPDATE: The offer is now closed. Thanks to all who downloaded. I’ve blogged about the experience. How would you like a free copy of Till Undeath Do Us Part? For a very limited time I’m making it available absolutely free for Kindle. To download it, please head over to Amazon where…
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Continue reading →: The FA is to blame for discrimination in football
Dear David Bernstein, You must have a splendid view from up there, perched atop football’s pyramid as Chairman of the Football Association — at least until Greg Dyke replaces you in July. I wonder how the state of the game looks to you? The top clubs are awash with cash,…
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Continue reading →: Review: Comedy Rules
Part-autobiography, part-tutorial, part-ramble, Comedy Rules: From the Cambridge Footlights to Yes, Prime Minister is Jonathan Lynn’s look back at his career in acting and directing and in particular in comedy writing, and it’s full of excellent advice for those aiming to succeed him. The rules of the title pepper the book…
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Continue reading →: Appearing in print since 1976
My first appearance in print was in a Captain Britain comic in 1976. A less exciting debut than it sounds: I’d been to a event in London, met Stan Lee (praise be upon him) and got his autograph — plus Spider-Man’s — and was photographed holding up my copy of…
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Anthony Camber 