Alex Christofi's Blog, page 2

Life as a journey

I’ve finally been out of school for as long as I was in it.

School takes ages, doesn’t it? It used to feel almost like a waiting room to me. You get ushered into a room and told to sit quietly for hours at a time and the reading material they’ve laid out maybe isn’t what you would choose for yourself. After what seems like forever, your name is called and you’re finally ushered through the door and on the other side you find… Another waiting room. It’s like a recurring nightmare. I always ima...

Drone Swarm: Witness Report

Subject is security guard at Henley Dynamics, military contractor specialising in ‘soldier-borne sensor’ drones, other UAVs, conducting advanced research in self-reconfiguring modular robots, distributed systems. PTSD, narrative disjointed. Details emerge under repeated questioning, conducted over several hours in Site 4. Subject fixated throughout on being seen and followed, remains in fear for life, despite measures to tranquilise.

From 03:00 (approx.) on 3 May, Subject heard faint buzzing...

On Chris Power’s Mothers

Chris Power’s first collection of short stories, MOTHERS, is peopled by the restless – forever walking, running, travelling, holidaying, city-hopping, doing anything not to stand still. They are displaced, impulsive, sometimes desperate. The narrator of one story summarises it as ‘the lightness of being far from home, the pleasure and terror of being free to do as I liked.’ It carries the logic, though decidedly not the tone, of picaresque: travellers, like orphans, are liberated to situate t...

How to fix Amazon reviews: let me count the ways

Amazon introduced its five star customer ratings system over two decades ago as a way to improve clickthrough and sales. At first, each book’s rating was the pure average of all its customer reviews. But no one ever said that system was perfect.

Six years ago there was a widespread scandal of ‘sockpuppetry’ in the world of book reviews. Then, three years ago, Amazon sued four sites selling reviews for pay, and began using machine learning to give books a weighted average biased in favour of n...

The Millennial Story

A little while ago, I found myself smiling at a book that had just arrived in the post. ‘Hello Alex,’ the front cover said. ‘What’s standing between you and success?’ That must be the name of the protagonist. I allowed myself a moment to enjoy the feeling of synchronicity that comes with finding that you share a name with a fictional character. (Imagine, someone writing a book that was really about you, the partially fulfilled promise of all novels, only ever glimpsed through the leaves.) I t...

World Book Day talk for primary school

My name is Alex and I have the coolest job in the world (or at least, I think it is). My job is to sit down at a desk and try and think of a story that nobody else has ever thought of before. There are lots of clever people in the world so it’s difficult to think of something that no one else has thought of but it’s very very fun.

The trick is to use your imagination. I can close my eyes and travel anywhere in the world. I love learning the names of new places and imagining who lives there –...

Five Strange Paris Histories

While researching my new novel, Let Us Be True, I became fascinated by the history of Paris. Wherever I looked, there were incredible stories to be found, of pioneering gardeners, hidden wine cellars, put-upon architects and bloody clashes in the streets. A few of these stories I couldn’t let go, and they made it into the novel: here are my five favourites.

1 – The Tour d’Argent

Overhead, the clouds bruised and cracked. There was a brief flash of lightning, the thunder inaudible behind the gl...

Tumbleweeding

One day in early November, 2014, I arrived at a little book shop facing Notre-Dame in Paris and sheepishly explained to a staff member that a friend of a friend had said that I could perhaps sleep here, in the book shop, while I researched my new novel, Let Us Be True. I half expected them to start laughing at me, but instead, they led me to the back, up the stairs, through a little library with beaten up leather armchairs, unlocked a door to a stairway landing, unlocked another door, and led...

Q&A (with spoilers…)

The last book you read? (Inquisitive bookworms would like to know) I tend to consume books like tapas, so this is actually quite hard to answer. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, or a selected volume of Voltaire, or Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari, or Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang.

Books or authors who have inspired you to put pen to paper? Mikhail Bulgakov, Emmanuel Carrere, George Orwell, George Saunders, Michel Faber, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Gustave Flaubert, Joseph Roth...

How to make photofits of your characters

When I was planning out my second novel, Let Us Be True, I knew I didn’t want to give too many physical details about the main characters, Ralf and Elsa, but I still wanted to know exactly what they looked like myself, so that I could imagine how they might appear to each other and how they would fit together as a couple.

I decided to make photofits of each of them, and spent a long time figuring out a way of doing it without any complicated software (in the end, I used PowerPoint). I started...