Hello Last week, without giving it a lot of thought, I posted on Instagram a photo of the last pill in my last packet of anti-depressants. I'd originally taken the photo, and marked it up, as a kind of mini-celebration to share with people in my house. Obviously (?), I felt a bit exposed sharing this on Instagram, but why the heck not. After all, I’ve posted all kinds of things about having been mentally fragile in the past. Indeed, I've stood in front of huge numbers of strangers in busy...
15 days ago • 3 min read
Take a close look at these women, Audrey Heath (standing) and Alice May Spinks. For several years, while the men have been away fighting in the trenches, in France, these two have been running the office in London. Both women started work as secretaries. The war gave them a precious opportunity to do more, but with the war’s end their position became precarious: the economy was unstable, and the men came back. They could have reverted to being secretaries, if the company generated sufficient...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader Recently in the zooms about writing a book proposal, I told the story of a woman I worked with who printed a beautiful limited edition booklet of her work in progress. It wasn’t the whole work in progress, just a sample chapter that we agreed was in terrific shape. I don’t remember the exact number of copies she produced. Ten? Twenty? Not many, anyway. Each copy had a beautiful photograph on the front cover - a photo that had been supplied by one of her friends. - Having printed...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader Sometimes, the best way to learn something – anything – is to do it all wrong first, on purpose. It’s a bit like a vaccine: having absorbed the wrongness, we become stronger. To show what I mean, I’ve taken some fairly recent nonfiction books that have been hugely successful, and attempted to write bad pitches for them. To be perfectly clear, I invented these bad pitches myself – they’re nothing to do with the real authors of these real bestsellers. Don’t worry if you haven’t...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
In the late 1990s, Malcolm Gladwell was working as a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. Gladwell portrait by me. He had written an article about the sudden drop in crime in New York City, exploring the idea that small changes can have big effects. This concept fascinated him, and he began to see examples of it in various fields. He developed a book proposal expanding on this idea, which he called “the tipping point.” The proposal outlined how small actions or changes can reach a...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Go into a branch of Waterstones (or other well supplied bookshop). Take photographs of the front and back cover of books much like the one you intend to write. Use the text reading thingy on your iPhone to copy all the text on everything – or other type of phone, but I don’t know anything about other phones. Feed all that text into your favourite AI wotsit. Command the AI wotsit to make sense of it all. Repeat previous step a few times because let’s face it the AI wotsit won’t be flawlessly...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader Can you guess which film inspired these two drawings: Clatter clatter clatter ding! Some years after the Watergate scandal pictured here (oops, did I give away the answer?) I would spend many hours in my mum’s office after school and during half-term etc. Mum worked as a lawyer, and dictated letters into a dictaphone. The tapes were taken away to be typed by her secretary, Debbie. Other typing was done in a typing pool, where three women (yep, all women) typed and typed and typed...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader The typewriter drawings continue. This woman with a beehive is typing on a manual. For your info, the photo on which this was based is black and white. Tapetty-tapetty-tap. Ding! Etc You may wonder what has prompted this sudden interest in the old-fashioned typewriter. Well, it has a lot to do with my growing anxiety about AI. I’ll attempt to explain a bit more tomorrow. Plus, I’ll post a picture of a later typist with an electric typewriter. I bet you can’t wait! *** Thanks for...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Hello Reader I had a very positive response to yesterday’s email about the advantages of typewriters. Thank you. Here’s a less positive account. I invite you, as you read, to consider how much has really changed with the advent of computers. Erika Typewriter (Cyrillic). The Erika typewriter company was established in the early 1900s by Carl Laufer and Ludwig Kracker: Erika was the name of Kracker’s wife. By the 1930s, Kracker had stepped down. Under Laufer, the company became one of Germany’s...
4 months ago • 1 min read
