When B-Grade stands for Best

Do you have to hand in your hipster card if you love film noir? This is the serious love affair my protagonist Steele Hill confesses to in the short story Lady Madonna Meets the Martians. http://amzn.to/1H0fPdf

       In the 1990s, 20-something Hill scours video shops for noir classics and when caught watching the vids at home has to explain his abnormal behaviour.

       Twenty years on, are we noir lovers to be even more pitied or have the hipsters caught up with the joys of black and white crime films?

FREE BOOK --- STARTS YOUR JOURNEY WITH PSYCHIC DETECTIVE TRUDY

 Free for a limited time: get your copy now

YOU  have probably come across Jane Sharp’s eBook which began the Vision series of psychic mysteries. “I should look into that one,” you have probably said.

               Well percolate the coffee and break open a bar of Swiss chocolate, these bite-size ghostly tales are free for Kindle.

                Australian author Jane Sharp is offering you her first published work in the hope you will be hooked and itching for more of Detective Trudy’s Harper’s adventures.

Vision: the Reluctant Psychic Free

Put the single story to bed

2015 Man Booker winner Marlon James

IT was a good week for those of us listening hopefully for the recognition of new voices in world literature.

Marlon James became the first Jamaican born winner of one of the world’s most highly regarded literary awards, the Man Booker Prize.

His winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings traces a murderous lineage in Jamaica and the United States which began with the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976.

James, who teaches creative writing at an American college, received the prize along with a big bauble of £50,000 Great Britain pounds (J$9.2 million Jamaica dollars) at a black-tie dinner at Guildhall in London.

But the glitz and the gold could not cover the irony that James in hoisting the trophy above the stage would be looking down on some of the publishers who collectively rejected his first novel John Crow’s Devil, 78 times, before it was eventually accepted in 2005.

Break our addiction to the predictable

WE have all done it. Find a book from one of our fave genres and we are ¼ the way through but it hasn’t grabbed us. It’s the Least Favourite Jelly Bean Color Syndrome

       We are consuming our least- favourite- color-jelly-bean book and contemplating putting it aside. It is after dinner and we might put it aside and we might move on to social media or even television. Just one more chapter.

Michael come into my office

I WOULD say most of us have worked in the public/ civil service or at the very least are one degree of separation from someone who has.

       Public-service jobs are so ubiquitous, often we don’t know when we are standing in one. Literally. 

      

 As a teenager I took a self-imposed sabbatical from university and landed a job in the Gold Coast Sewerage Department. We worked in the trenches, doing all sorts of things with sewerage pipes. One day they bused a bunch of us to chip weeds in rectangular concrete ponds containing spent sewage.