Welcome to the Orion Blog!
14/07/2008
Welcome to the Orion Publishing Group blog. Over the weeks and months to come, a variety of authors and staff will be contributing, and we hope it will develop into an interesting and illuminating forum. We intend to update it several times a week, though not necessarily every day. Comments are very welcome, but will be moderated before being added.Kicking off will be R.J. Ellory, whos...
Richard Hammond As You Do Trailer Script
03/09/2008
RH MH RH in garage fixing bike Hello…I'm Richard Hammond. Firstly a big thank you if you bought my book On The Edge last year. In fact it ended up being the biggest selling biography of the year. My wife, Mindy and I wrote it together to tell the story of how two people came through an ordeal and emerged stronger, as individuals and as a team. Mindy walks past door&n...
Who am we?
By Annie Sanders – 18/08/2008
Ever seen a two-headed writer? No? Well, step this way. Annie Sanders is probably the closest you’ll ever get. Yes, we’re actually two people. And not in the way that requires medication. Or at least not often. Annie Sanders is, in fact, a mixture of Annie Ashworth and Meg Sanders. And that’s us.We know it’s unusual, although not unique, for two people to write a novel, an...
The ups and downs of writing
By Marcus Sedgwick – 14/08/2008
There are up moments and down moments in a writer’s lifecycle and they usually come pretty close on each other’s heels. A couple of weeks ago, with time running out and a quarter of a book still to write, I was not impressed with the business of being a writer. However, thanks be to the God of Deadlines who saw me safely over the finishing line in time. Having handed in the manuscript...
How to Cope with the End of the World
By Stephen Baxter – 04/08/2008
On 17th July I was invited onto BBC Radio 4’s Material World to discuss my new novel Flood. Preparing for the show, the researcher asked me if I was concerned about causing panic – what if people took my depiction of a world-drowning flood too seriously? It’s not a foolish question. A disaster novel like Flood works precisely because there’s some plausibility behind i...
Nowt As Queer As Folk
By Richard Morgan – 04/08/2008
Not long ago, I received a curious communication through the fan-mail portal of my website. It was from an American reader who’d picked up a copy of my last novel Black Man (or Thirteen as it’s rather more primly known in the US) was about a hundred pages in and had now, he informed me, closed the book and wouldn’t be continuing. Well, them’s the breaks, ...
Creating Cities at the End of Time
By Greg Bear – 30/07/2008
For decades, I’ve been haunted by William Hope Hodgson and his stories, ever since I first read The House on the Borderland in an Ace paperback edition in 1964 or 1965. Anyone who’s familiar with my own Dead Lines knows that I love ghost stories, but Hodgson went well beyond simple spooks and scares - he tapped into something at once supernatural and cosmically scientific, combining th...
The locations that inspire me
By Kate Mosse – 23/07/2008
Why is it that some locations inspire while others – just as dramatic or interesting at first sight – leave us cold? I’ve tried to explain how I work in an exhibition of photographs showing the real-life places that inspired Sepulchre. They’ve been on display at the Southbank Centre as part of the London Literature Festival and I hope they go some way to showing why, f...
I’m Not Sure About the Cookie
By Linwood Barclay – 22/07/2008
Linwood Barclay is currently number 1 in the paperback fiction charts with No Time for Goodbye. However it was not always this way…Things have been going not badly lately. No Time for Goodbye is a number one bestseller. A Richard and Judy pick. A movie option.It was not always this way.One of the things I’ve learned since my first book – a humourous take on fatherhood – ca...
So you want to be a writer...
By R.J. Ellory – 14/07/2008
Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire, and then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer -- and if so, why? So wrote Bennett Cerf – publisher, man of lett...