Anselm Audley's Blog, page 2

An author’s life

The Word documents are closed, the chapters linked up with their synopses, the ‘Send’ button is pressed, and I’ve actually had a night’s sleep for the first time in five days. My kitchen now no longer resembles a student house at the end of term, I actually went shopping for real food instead of cobbling together five-minute meals from dubious greenish things I pulled out of the back of the fridge, and I had time to go out for something which wasn’t actually essential. And, y’know, I already...

This day is called the Feast of Crispian

This was the first Shakespeare I ever came across, and it seized my young and impressionable mind with great fervour. And since there’s nothing I can write with the rhythm and beauty to match this, I shall let Kenneth Branagh say Shakespeare’s words for me, and in my flowing cups remember Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester – and the man who made their names immortal.

To Shakespeare!

He that outlives this day and comes safe home

Will stand a-tiptoe w...

Voyagers

I was going to write a post on Voyager 2′s encounter with Neptune, which took place 23 years ago today, but it seems there’s a sadder milestone tonight.

There is little I can say of Neil Armstrong’s life that the world’s press hasn’t already said. He was both an ordinary American and an extraordinary one, a man who served his country, was chosen for an epochal task and performed it with skill, grace and a quiet dignity that lasted the rest of a long life. He lived eighty-two years upon the Ear...

Formatting your manuscript

Over the last few weeks, in both my freelance and acquisitions editor capacities, I’ve been working on a lot of manuscripts – reading, editing, converting, and typesetting – and I’ve had to spend a fair amount of time taking out formatting which is either actively irritating or simply doesn’t need to be there.

I don’t mind this too much, because mostly it takes about five minutes to fix, but those five minutes add up over a lot of manuscripts, particularly for someone reading a hundred 3-chapt...

Architecture and heritage

You have destroyed that which was unique in the world, and you have built that which you could have built anywhere.

- Emperor Charles V to the city fathers of Cordoba.

This is mostly a rant, I warn you, and purely for my own self-indulgence. It’s not even a rant about York Minster, thought it may seem so at first. But it’s a rant about architecture, history and heritage.

York Minster: three centuries in the making.

Credit: york-united-kingdom.co.uk

Architecture is an old and deeply rooted interes...

Books to feed the imagination

It was my birthday recently, so I have sitting on my table a very satisfying pile of great chunky historical hardbacks (and a couple of slim paperbacks to complement them) which are a pretty good cross-section both of the kind of history I like to read and the kind of history which flows down into my subconscious to become fantasy through the alchemy of imagination.

Arcadia, Adam Nicolson – an beautifully woven account of an aristocratic family and their tenants in the century or so before the...

Editing

This was going to be a short administrative post about how I’ve changed the site and blog and homepage and blahdiblahdiblah, but you can all see that for yourselves and it would be dull. So, instead, this is a post about why I like editing.

Growing up in a family where words were not simply piled around the walls in book form but formed the source and fountain of all prosperity, it’s not entirely surprising I became a writer, and moreover the fourth generation to take up the pen*.

Words were ev...

The living I – Writing and worldbuilding in the first person

[image error]I'm reading right now, and will probably review when I'm finished, God of War, an enormous and fantastic historical about Alexander the Great; It's a superb read in a ton of ways, but one of the real pleasures is the viewpoint. It's told, aside from the opening chapter, in first person by – inevitably – Ptolemy, just like the film (about which the less said, the better). And it's a superbly handled first person, immersive and authentic and full of snappy asides to his listener, and Ptolemy's ...

Pentecost

The second (and considerably shorter) installment of my 'David Edgar is awesome' series (following my earlier post about Written on the Heart) concerns his older play Pentecost, which I saw on Saturday evening in St Leonard's, Shoreditch, in its first UK revival. It's very good, and exceedingly well produced and acted, and it's not getting anything like the audiences it deserves if Saturday was anything to go by. There's very little PR, and no website for the production, so I am doing my bit ...

Reading is magic

From a fellow author's son finishing film school in San Francisco. I love the soundtrack.