Ali Shaw's Blog, page 5

Creatures of the Wind

We think of ourselves as land animals, but in truth the air is our element.  We live on the seabed of a gaseous ocean, and just because the air we inhabit is invisible to us that does not mean it does not exist.  What is invisible to us is so often what is most important.  While writing this book I have come to think of the air as something reassuringly connective.  Something that links me to you, as it does you to everyone you know.  We are all submerged in it and drawing upon it together.  ...

In Conversation at Blackwell’s Broad Street – 17th Jan

Happy New Year, my dears. I hope those mince pies were piping hot and that mulled wine was topped up with enough brandy to make you giddy.

I’m going to be at Blackwell’s Broad Street, Oxford, at 7pm on Tues 17th January to talk about The Man who Rained with the fabulous Roma Tearne. It would be wonderful to see you there if you can make it. This is going to be my first time talking in any depth (in public, at least) about the novel so it will be an exciting first for me.

If you’d like to come,...

In Conversation at Blackwell's Broad Street – 17th Jan

Happy New Year, my dears.  I hope those mince pies were piping hot and that mulled wine was topped up with enough brandy to make you giddy.

I'm going to be at Blackwell's Broad Street, Oxford, at 7pm on Tues 17th January to talk about The Man who Rained with the fabulous Roma Tearne.  It would be wonderful to see you there if you can make it.  This is going to be my first time talking in any depth (in public, at least) about the novel so it will be an exciting first for me.

If you'd like to...

2011 Adieu / A Book on the Shelves

I love this time of year.  Mistletoe and wine (and port, of course, and brandy and mulled ale if you can), and trying to grab an hour to read beside the Christmas tree.  I enjoy the retrospectives that appear in the press, the closing year's events considered at a pace there's no time for during the preceding fifty one weeks.  That said, it's tricky for me to be retrospective this particular year, with The Man who Rained published on the 1st January.  It's nerve-wracking, to say the least.  I...

The Man who Rained

Regular readers may have noticed that I haven't talked a great deal about my novels here.  There isn't a lot, if I'm honest, that I feel it's helpful to say about them beyond what you'll find between the front and back covers of the books themselves.  I can't add to or qualify the prose, and I don't think that anything supplementary I write can enhance the experience of reading them.  Hence I prefer to talk about the things I enjoy or that inspire me, in the hope that those who enjoy my...

Site Redesign

As you can no doubt tell if you visit here often, I've just given my website a lick of paint.  The only kind of web design I know is that of Doctor Frankenstein, and as such this site is more stitched together than coded.  I figure if I throw enough lightning at the thing it will eventually get up and walk, but I apologise if it leaves a mess of torn links, mauled images and hankerings for a bride in its wake.

 

More soon.  The new book is on the horizon…

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Stop-Motion Film Night

Inspired by the new Grandchildren.tv video for Fleet Foxes, and by the way people enjoyed the stop-motion clips at the end of my post about Scrapefoot, I thought it would be fun to start a Stop-Motion Film Night, an occasional series of clips and films from this most painstaking and enchanting school of effects and animation.

I can't pretend to be an expert on this, I just love digging up moving pictures and bits of old puppetry.  Anything I do  know comes straight out of Ray Harryhausen and T...

Coyote Dances with the Stars

Ah, Coyote.  He's one of the many glories of Native American folk stories and, for me, perhaps the prime glory.  He's a lot like the fox in European folk stories, in that he can be good or bad, wise or foolish, or all of these things at once.  In short, he's very human, and that's why I love him.  Now, after seemingly endless airbrushing, I've finally finished work on one of my favourite Coyote stories.  It's a Cheyenne tale, and one of the places you can find it is in the fantastic American...

Stars, Turned Inside Out

The book industry's an odd one.  About three weeks ago I finished handwriting the first draft of my third novel, which I've since been typing up to see what I've got on my hands.  In the meantime my second book, The Man who Rained, is at the printers being turned into something glossy and pretty and ready, come January, to go out into the big wide world.  Always as a writer you're working on something a step ahead of where it appears you are now.  I was writing The Man who Rained when The...

Luke Pearson

In the last couple of years I've waited until the end of the year to put together a list of things I've loved from the preceding twelve months.  I probably shan't be doing that this year, because I'll have a new book out in January and lots to say about it.  So, in the meantime I have a few things I'm itching to recommend to you, things I've recently enjoyed that I hope might tickle your fancy too.

I discovered Nobrow Press after a trip to the fabulous Gosh Comics in London.  I'd just been to ...