Jenni Fagan’s debut The Panopticon is narrated by Anais, a teenage Scottish girl brought up in care. In the first scene Anais is in the back of a police car. Soon you find out she’s suspected of putting a policewoman in a coma. You don’t know if she did it or not, and you readContinue reading “Novels that inspired the Hotel Hokusai #3 The Panopticon”
Category Archives: Blog
6 Novels that influenced The Hotel Hokusai #2 The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet/Tokyo Year Zero
As an English language writer of fiction set in Japan, you can’t avoid the footprint of the two Davids, Mitchell and Peace. Both have lived there for extended periods, and though their writing styles are very different, both have succeeded in getting under the skin of its culture and people. In Tokyo Year Zero, Peace’sContinue reading “6 Novels that influenced The Hotel Hokusai #2 The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet/Tokyo Year Zero”
6 Novels that influenced The Hotel Hokusai: #1 Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Han, The Hotel Hokusai‘s young Korean protagonist, learned his English from reading Stevenson’s Treasure Island, given to him by a dubious Scots missionary who became his adopted father before cutting him loose. My Dad gave me Treasure Island when I was about nine I think, and I lapped it up. The scene where Jim isContinue reading “6 Novels that influenced The Hotel Hokusai: #1 Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde”
Battlefield Bardology
Fantastic to have a couple of my poems in a new anthology of writing from my local area, Battlefield. I love the cover image, transforming one end of the New Victoria hospital into something like a giant orange post-it note for the lives of all Battlefieldians to leave their mark on. The force behind theContinue reading “Battlefield Bardology”
On the trail of the Celtic Japonistes
My novel The Hotel Hokusai is due to be published later this year by Glasgow’s Ringwood Publishing. This is how I came to write about a Scottish artist and a Korean migrant eel vendor in 1890s Yokohama… In the summer of 2014, a couple of months before Scotland’s independence referendum, I was walking down LeithContinue reading “On the trail of the Celtic Japonistes”
Come buy, come buy…
Today I’ve got a meeting with the marketing team from Ringwood to discuss ideas for marketing my novel, The Hotel Hokusai. I’m sure it’s fairly common, unless the publisher is a big fish, for authors to have to share the responsibility for marketing their books. I guess it’s also pretty standard for this to beContinue reading “Come buy, come buy…”
Playing the long game
Whereas submitting work to indie journals is democratic and easy (see previous post), for the first-time novelist, finding a home for your novel tends to be a dispiriting process. For a start, almost all the publishers you will have heard of say they will not accept ‘unagented submissions’. So you follow the online advice andContinue reading “Playing the long game”
Exploring the Jungle of the Journals
If UK publishing was a rainforest, then beneath the canopy of towering Penguins and Fabers, an abundant ecosystem of indie journals thrives. Just like the flora and fauna of the Amazon, these are as bright and diverse as anywhere on the planet, and equally essential to prevent the decay of the behemoths above. The peopleContinue reading “Exploring the Jungle of the Journals”
T.Y. Garner Writer 