Marie Phillips's Blog, page 2

My latest for the Pool: why didn’t the women tell? Exactly whom were they supposed to tell?

My latest for the Pool: why didn’t the women tell? Exactly whom were they supposed to tell?

In which I address rumours that I am a man, speculate that Shakespeare was the author of the Elena...

In which I address rumours that I am a man, speculate that Shakespeare was the author of the Elena Ferrante novels, and compare meringue books with heavy cake books. Yes, it’s a new update on my Unbound page for Oh, I Do Like To Be… (at time of writing at 198 supporters - will you be the 200th?)

I’ve got my health, so what do I care?

This was a particularly nice piece to write, given my Unhappy post of six months ago - on how I learned to value health over happiness, for The Pool.

I once used to hire a desk in a co-working space next to an anatomist. After I’d been working...

I once used to hire a desk in a co-working space next to an anatomist. After I’d been working there for about a month I noticed that she had brought in a full-sized human skeleton to work from. I remarked on our new office mate, and she told me that it had been there the entire time. How does such an unobservant person become a writer? I really have no idea.

My latest for my Unbound blog.

“In total, the comedies, plus commentaries, run for 767 pages, and there are good bits, lots of...

“In total, the comedies, plus commentaries, run for 767 pages, and there are good bits, lots of them, don’t get me wrong, dude knew what he was doing, but I do kind of wish I had read these in the seventeenth century, back when I would have known a hawk from a handsaw (Shakespeare in-joke) and could have actually understood what was being said. Humour does not travel, and it definitely does not time travel. (My novel will be a horrendous read in 2517.) The relief when you make it to the tragedies with all the drama and doomed heroes and villains and dead bodies and To Be-s Or Not To Be-s is IMMODERATE. (That relief is in many ways misplaced, because you still have all of the poetry to go, including seventeen near-identical sonnets about why having babies is a good idea, but by then you’re into the last few hundred pages, and nothing bar death or your hands no longer being able to hold the book up can stop you.)”

My latest update for Unbound: on reading the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

My latest for The Pool. This one’s about not having kids, and how that can make me feel like I’m...

My latest for The Pool. This one’s about not having kids, and how that can make me feel like I’m still a kid myself, and not in a good way. I shouldn’t have read the comments on The Pool’s Facebook page, but I did, so now I have to append this by saying that the kids in the first paragraph were very small, but it did happen. And that I asked them as a fun experiment and not for validation as one commenter seemed to think, but you knew that, right? I am never reading the comments again.

While I have you here - your regular reminder that I’m crowdfunding my new book Oh, I Do Like To Be… and that the sooner it’s funded, the sooner I will shut up about it.

I’ve written a new post for my Unbound blog, about the book that I was writing when I got the idea...

I’ve written a new post for my Unbound blog, about the book that I was writing when I got the idea for Oh, I Do Like To Be…, and why I never finished it. The book was an adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and I’ve included a few extracts from it in the blog post. Nobody has ever read a word of it before: not my agent or my publishers, no one. As this is unseen work, I wanted to keep it exclusive, so I’ve made this particular post private, so that only supporters of the book can read it. If you want to join them, you can pledge at the Unbound site: https://unbound.com/books/oh-i-do-like-to-be

Here’s a little bit of the blog post, to whet your appetites:

I was completely incapable of coming up with a good personality for Snow White; maybe she could have been sweet but stupid, or so good-hearted that she is almost impossibly irritating. I can’t remember what options I considered; in the end I made her bratty and teenage. And vegetarian. It’s never a good sign when your key character trait for someone is ‘vegetarian’. Similarly, my entire character plan for Otto the dwarf appears to have been 'secretly alcoholic’. I can’t remember which of the dwarfs he was meant to be, which is a major issue when I was supposedly basing him on one of the Disney dwarfs who are literally named after their personalities. Perhaps he was Doc.

Oh, I Do Like To Be...

Excited to announce that I’ve just started crowdfunding my new book, ‘Oh, I Do Like To Be…’ on the Unbound website. The title’s a mash-up of Oh, I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside, and To Be or Not To Be: the book’s a seaside-based updating of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, with the twist being that the central pair of identical twins are both clones of Shakespeare. Of course they are.

Here’s the blurb: Shakespeare clone and would-be playwright Billy has just arrived in an English seaside town with his sister Sally, who was cloned from a hair found on the back of a bus seat. All Billy wants is a cheap B&B, an ice cream, and a huge hit in the West End. Little does he know that their fellow clones Bill and Sal are also residents of this town. Things are about to get confusing…

To celebrate, I’m blogging over on my Unbound page about the process by which I came to write the book. Yep, I’m finally regularly updating a blog, and it isn’t this one. But you can read the blog, and find out more about the book, over at https://unbound.com/books/oh-i-do-like-to-be. Click the ‘updates’ tag for blog posts, and while you’re there, peruse the many different support levels for the book, from e-books and hardback copies, through seaside postcards and souvenirs, a one-off revival of my old Book Swap event, book group appearances, all the way to your chance to name a character in the book.

Excited to share the complete premiere performance of ASSAIL,...

Excited to share the complete premiere performance of ASSAIL, recorded at Bimhuis Amsterdam, June 2nd 2017. Text by Anne La Berge and Marie Phillips, music by Anne La Berge with the MAZE ensemble.

Homesickness and Doctor Who

Without wishing to generate an orchestra of tiny violins playing just for me, I have written a piece about homesickness for The Pool. They put it up a few days ago but ironically I was visiting my family and so I missed it. I will try to find a few more cheerful topics to discuss in the coming time, in fact if you have any requests just let me know. For example, though I’m several episodes behind in Doctor Who, I have watched the most recent one and I will say that the new companion is so good I am willing to overlook that bit where they were hanging out with some space monks in a pyramid and they all had to stick their hands into a shower curtain, saw the future and then staggered back in unison with the enormity of the horror, in a special effect costing about 45p plus the cost of some archive footage of a windswept palm tree. (Doctor Who actually makes a cameo appearance in that homesickness article, so now everything is relevant, hurray!)