Wait until next year

Been on a bit of a Joan Didion binge this week. I wish I’d read more of her work earlier. I also wish I had something profound about what I’ve read so far. She certainly knows her way around a sentence – it is one thing to tell a compelling tale, it is another thing to tell it beautifully.

Image from Incase. via Flickr

Right, a brief dispatch amongst all the fun and games of Real Life (some genuinely fun, some a little less so). In the absence of my awkward writing, why not read something worth reading? To wheel out the tired old saying, if you read one thing this week, read this:

The Ghost Writes Back

It is a longform essay from a former ghostwriter of the Sweet Valley High books. But bear with me here. It is not only a great insight into the dark art of ghostwriting, it is a meditation on authorship and ownership and a lovely memoir of a writer making compromises and being necessarily multifaceted to get on in life. Writing teen dramas sounds like fun too. Anyway, enough of my babbling, go and read it now. It is brilliant.

I’m aware that I promised myself that I would post at least once a week this year. I’m also aware that I haven’t managed that this week, not even a YouTube embed or a link to somewhere better than here. Apologies folks, but this placeholder is all I can manage this week – a very, very hectic week on which I’m sure I’ll blog about at some point. But right now I’m shattered, idea-less, and computer-less, tapping out this rubbish on my phone. Bear with me!

• That’s Life – personal essays are not easy to get right, but this one on mental health manages it, although it does make for some tough reading in places.
• In Praise of the Language Police – editing, style, translations and bending the rules.
• The Secret Lives of Stories: Rewriting Our Personal Narratives – humans are storytellers, but how do we construct those stories and why?
• False wins and the machine zone – Las Vegas, capitalism and how we’re more comfortable interacting with screens than with each other.
• Drang nach Osten – excellent stuff on Bowie, Berlin and more.

Image from New York Public Library, via Flickr