Graham Holliday's Blog, page 15

all men eat dog leg

Unfortunately I can’t remember the context of this quote I found it in an old notebook from Việt Nam. I do remember it was an aside I was told by a middle-aged customer at a tofu stall in Hà Nội’s Old Quarter. However, it seems a little old-fashioned now. Almost all the old dog meat […]

hà nội night time

Photographs taken by me in Hà Nội in the night time on a Ricoh GRD3 during the first week of October, 2013.

all the trouble he caused

I have two copies of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. I’d long wanted a first edition hardback in good condition and I finally found a copy I could afford over the summer. The paperback below is the edition I bought during my first week living in Hà Nội in 1997. It’s photocopied, of course, and […]

purgatory must be a bit like editing

Printer ink low. Available funds lower. I decided to edit “first pass” of my book on screen. I didn’t expect to find too many changes, so whenever I noticed something wrong I jotted down the page number and a note of the action needed on the back of an envelope. In the end, I needed […]

more time than writing

After the 100+ times I edited my book myself, the four or five times my first editor edited it with me and then the three times I edited it with the Publisher’s editor, the pass my editor-in-chief made of it, followed by the first time I edited it with the copy editor – that entire […]

Hà Nội filmed in Super 8

Here’s a quirky wee bit of footage from Việt Nam. It’s a short film about bicycles in Hà Nội made on Super 8 in 2002 by the illustrator, artist and cartoonist Oslo Davis. There’s no sound, which only adds to the atmosphere created by the non-digital film. Oslo has captured on film a sense of […]

The Wedding Present interviewed in 1985

In 1985, after hearing The Wedding Present’s first single played on John Peel, I decided I wanted to interview them for a fanzine I was writing with some friends. In 1985, that single was the first record since The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Upside Down that interested me. However, I was 15 years old and […]

eating vietnam book cover

My book, Eating Việt Nam – Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table, is coming out in the U.S. and Canada on March 17, 2015. This is the cover. I like it. The interior design is quite something too, but you’ll have to wait until March to see that. And to read it, but only if […]

somebody else wrote it

Ted Thompson writes about writing and selling his first book. As a good rule of thumb it’s usually a full year between when you turn in your final edits and when your book comes out. I, for one, was rather vocal among friends about this glacial pace… I know that feeling… However… The upshot of […]

400,000 words

Paperless writer and blogger Jamie Todd Rubin writes about the writing process in The Daily Beast. He wrote a staggering 400,000 words in a year… In among his six writing tips, which are well worth a look, I’ve been thinking more and more about the last one on his list, Have multiple things to work […]