Graham Holliday's Blog, page 4
March 14, 2017
Do Koreans Dream of Electric Kimchi?
My working title for Eating Korea, my second book which went on sale in the U.S. & Canada today, looked destined to stay in my head and lay forgotten in a file on my computer forever more. However, it can now see the light of day as the title of this blog post and of […]
February 14, 2017
old school korean food blog
I came across this Korean language, Korean food blog yesterday. It appears to be written by someone who is particularly keen on old school Korean restaurants. Places like the ones in these two photos from this post are not so hip with young Koreans, rapidly disappearing and yet are often more interesting than many new Korean restaurants. There are […]
July 29, 2016
designing eating korea
This is the cover of my forthcoming book on food in Korea. Sara Wood at Ecco Books designed it, as she also designed my first book, Eating Việt Nam. I’m really happy with this for a number of reasons and, to give a little bit of background, this post looks at how we reached this cover. But first, I have to […]
April 1, 2016
taking notes
It is always interesting to hear how other writers work. This is a very good post by Tracy Chevalier on her note-taking process. A couple of points jumped out at me. Whenever I’m writing a novel and arrive at a point where I’m not sure about a detail and have to check it in the […]
February 12, 2016
Music to listen to while concentrating very, very hard on work
I can only listen to certain kinds of music when I work. Almost anything with singing on it is a big no-no. Some people use white noise apps and the recorded sounds of coffee shops to help them work. This is the music I prefer to listen to when I write or edit. Brian Eno […]
on sending a manuscript
Yesterday, I sent the manuscript of my second book to my agent in NYC. It’s quite a moment to send that file. A year of work boiled down to a single email attachment. A document of 323 kilobytes. It sounds like nothing. Like something you could churn out in an afternoon. This morning, I looked at […]
January 18, 2016
taking photographs as notes
I filled nine notebooks in Korea. Small details are very important. But, you can only write so many notes when you’re in the field. If you’re taking notes all the time, you’re not really experiencing anything. That’s why I take a lot of photographs of ordinary stuff. Stuff I might need to remember. But don’t […]
January 14, 2016
on pinboard
Pinboard is one of four absolutely essentials tools for me when writing a book. I used it to save all the research for past, current and future books. I have 797 bookmarks for the Korea foodalogue I am working on at the moment. I saved those links over the period of a year or more. […]
January 13, 2016
cutting into korea
Today, I edited a section of my next book about the shack pictured above. At a couple of points during the writing I couldn’t think of a description I liked. So, I went to the cut ups file I keep, and which I keep adding to, and scrolled through it at random. I copied words […]
November 27, 2015
Three tips for writing a book
Firstly, Phone notes. If I’m out and about, or wake up in the middle of the night, and I think of an idea, sentence, anecdote, metaphor, whatever. I tap it into the notes application on my phone and email it to myself. And, no, I don’t worry about spelling… Secondly, Word compost. I have a […]
