Kit Whitfield's Blog, page 4

#2024MakeAMonster Day 3: Cake

 #2024MakeAMonster

(I don't recommend this one if disordered eating is a sensitive subject for you.)

CakeThere's a woman in the neighbourhood who does the most elaborate decorated cakes for YouTube. Daisy Makes, it's called, and she's Daisy - she never used a last name. When I say decorating, we're not talking fondant sculpture, that paste that looks great but nobody actually likes to eat. We're talking buttercream, the real stuff, soft as mousse and rich as velvet, piped into the most elaborate d...

#2024MakeAMonster day 2: Toothy

 

#2024MakeAMonster
ToothyI never understood why they called food 'toothsome'. You see it in old stories; there's a moment in Anne of Green Gables where they wonder how to divide some 'toothsome' raspberry tarts, and it sounds delicious, but I wondered how teeth came into it.There's a vintage food store in my local farmer's market, you see, and they sell raspberry tarts. Lots of traditional treats, actually, with a lovely organic taste to the fruit. Funny old man runs it; thin as a rake, he is, w...

#2024MakeAMonster, Day 1: Garden

 

So: a friend shared this with me and I've decided to take on the challenge: a piece a day for the month of October. I can't draw, so it's going to be short stories, varying in length, probably varying in quality, and definitely scrappily edited - but why not? My agent's currently reading my latest novel and it seems a good time to fool around. Today we begin...

#2024makeamonster

GardenI love the feel of compost. I never did keep a cat; animals don't tend to live under my roof. Kept fish for a whi...

In The Heart Of Hidden Things

 As of today, this book is available to buy! 

To get a hardback copy from a site that supports local bookstores, click here.

To buy the Kindle version, click here. 

"Warm, witty, compassionate ... with a village and woods in which it's sweet to get lost ... You should get this book the minute it's out."

- Francesco Dimitri, author of (among many other books) The Book of Hidden Things


I'm not blogging much these days - lack of time, basically - but you can follow me on Twitter @KitWhitfield, and a...

Short story: The Pond

I'm sorry to have to announce that the publication date of In The Heart of Hidden Things has been moved from March to June 2022. This is nothing to do with the book or with Jo Fletcher Books; it's simply that Britain is facing shortages in pretty much everything at the moment, and for the publishing industry, that includes paper. 
Well, I'll try to be amusing in the meantime. We play a game on my Facebook page: people post pictures in the comments, and I write little sketches inspired by them. Wh...

Hello again

 

 (Available for pre-order here.)

 

Well, I promised you a hiatus, and boy did I deliver. What happened there?

Well, at the time I stopped blogging, there were two things going on:

First: I was dealing with an undiagnosed case of PTSD. It didn't get diagnosed until later that year, by which time it had been going on for four years, which is a lot of time I just didn't have it together to write, and honestly only hazily remember at all. My mental health was pretty much all to cock. It was p...

Till further notice

...I'm afraid this blog is on pause. Apologies to anyone this disappoints; personal and family reasons have called for a complete change in my schedule, and this blog, which isn't as high a priority as my fiction and which doesn't generate money, has had to be moved down the list.

If you're looking for something to read in the archives, I'd recommend the Opening Line series; you can find a complete list of posts here.

Have a nice day.

There's been a hiatus...

...and will be for a bit longer, I'm afraid. Because of two interrelated factors:

1. Personal reasons.

2. The next book I plan to do is Moby-Dick. I'd never read it before I decided that its famous first sentence was worth a look; now I am reading it, it staggers me that I wasted the last thirty-six years of my life failing to read that wild, warm, wonderful, bizarre and beautiful work. I don't know what was wrong with me. Happily, I am in the process of correcting that deplorable absence. The...

Opening Line: The Visit of the Royal Physician by Per Olov Enquist

This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of the Opening Line series can be found here. 

Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed Royal Physician to King Christian VII on April 5, 1768, and four years later he was executed. 

Sounds like the beginning of a popular history book, doesn't it? But in fact, this is The Visit of the Royal Physician, an historical novel by multi-award-winning Swedish author Per Olov Enquist. If the setting sounds familiar, it's probably because of...

Opening Line: Persuasion by Jane Austen

This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of Opening Line posts can be found here. 

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somerset, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs,...