Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 335

On Being A Professional Writer No.5: My Working Week

This will give you a good idea of how I spend my working week. Not included here are my evening meetings, emails, social networking and which gigs are paid (answer, as in all creative trades, very few of them).

Monday: Write ‘Invisible Ink’ column for following Sunday publication. Read and review two books for Financial Times. [...]

Hallowfawkes Week

I’m getting scary fatigue and there are still several days to go…

Thanks to the confusion that now reigns between Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes Night, we seem to have one week here in Central London when fireworks go off non-stop and the streets are full of people in peculiar fancy dress that’s neither one event or [...]

The Backstreets Of London

It seems I’ve spent at least half of my life trudging alone through the backstreets of London, lugging shopping or books through squalls of rain and bursts of blue sky so sudden they almost make you jump, and through it all they stand as an almost invisible backdrop, the marshalled houses of London, their mean [...]

A Thick Moment

I’ll level with you, it’s been a bad week. I need something to pep me up before I go on today, and news that ‘The Thick Of It’ has come to the end of Series Four isn’t it. So before we bid farewell to Malcolm Tucker and pals, let’s glance back at Malcolm’s attempt to [...]

Why We’re All Doomed

Nobody likes to be caught in a storm – but yesterday, it was as much to do with the storm of comments that followed online articles about Hurricane/Tropical Storm Sandy that provided the unwelcome blizzard. As the torrential rains hit New York, the deskbound classes went into overdrive. The result provides proof of why our [...]

Re:View – ‘Little Shop Of Horrors – The Director’s Cut’

This was a long time coming. Muppet man Frank Oz’s take on Roger Corman’s no-budget two-day wonder famously flopped in cinemas despite a prestigious production peppered with star turns. 1986 wasn’t a good time to be opening a film that mixed horror parody with science fiction and retro-pop songs, but there was another problem; Ellen [...]

Nice Place – I’ll Take It

Amazingly, there are still a few London buildings that don’t house retail opportunities. The Guardian is featuring seventeen of London’s hidden interiors here – well, some aren’t all that hidden, but they’re certainly less well-known – and the challenge would be to visit them all, as the opening times of such places tend to be [...]

Give Them The Creeps This Christmas

My Christmas gift to myself this year was purchased last night. It’s ‘Ghost Stories For Christmas’ – the box set issued by the BFI. It’s a five-disc set containing;

Disc 1
Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968 & 2010 versions)
Jonathan Miller and Christopher Frayling discuss the 1968 version
Introduction to the 1968 version by horror writer Ramsey [...]

Phantoms By Firelight

The time: Wednesday 31 Oct, 7-9pm.

The place: Blacks Club, 67 Dean St, London W1.

The event: Phantoms by Firelight. Where better to celebrate Halloween than in the atmospheric old drawing room at Blacks, with its flickering fire and guttering candles? As dusk gathers around the eaves of the old Georgian house in Soho, and the wind [...]

Stupid Research For Hallowe’en

According to a new study by researchers at the University of Westminster, viewers who watch a 90-minute horror film are likely to burn up to 113 calories – roughly the equivalent of a half-hour walk. Some movies are more effective than others, however: of the 10 films studied, the top calorie-burners were the Stanley Kubrick [...]