The Power of Geography

I am reading The Power of Geography by Tim Marshall. The world is an alarming place today and this book helps to explain the factors behind many of today’s conflicts. Tim Marshall explores some key regions of the world, with much information on how various states came into being, and how they are shaped by their geography and resources. It also illustratesbut also shows what these states have in common in today’s world, and the tangled political relationships as all manoeuvre for survival and success.

Is Grammarly Helpful

I’ve just finished re-reading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and it made me think about how much the process of writing has changed. No handwritten manuscripts these days, nor manuscripts laboriously typed out on a manual typewriter. When I think of how many revisions I make to my first draft I can’t imagine how long it used to take to craft a final manuscript.

Today, agents and publishers expect submitted manuscripts to be already edited to a fairly high standard and I guess most writers use some form of AI to help with that. Yet sometimes editing software is unhelpful, especially when one is writing a work of fiction. I have found Grammarly frequently tries to change what I have written into text that would completely lose my meaning. Sure it is helpful in correcting basic spelling mistakes, but the built in editor for Word does that efficiently.

Artificial intelligence is helpful to a certain extent, but it is certainly not always right and frequently quite wrong. I’ve disabled Grammarly in Word as it was driving me insane with its corrections, I did want to write quite and not quiet, I did want to write the sensation of moving through water, not the sensation of moving through the water. Grammarly translated ‘proud of the imagination he’d shown,’ into ‘proud of the images he’d shown.’ I could go on forever.

I’d be interested to know what other writers think.

Magpie Lane : October Thriller of the Month

Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins is my October Thriller of the Month. I found the main character, Dee, totally engaging, with the concern she may be an unreliable narrator. The story starts slowly and becomes increasingly absorbing, as Atkins weaves her tale. I particularly like thrillers that don’t follow an obvious plot, one more thriller about people trapped together and being killed off one by one, and I will lose the will to read.

Wild Dog : September Thriller of the Month

My September thriller of the month is Wild Dog by Serge Joncour. I love the folklore aspect of this story, the urge that many developed during lockdown to escape to the country, then the realisation that rural life is different from city life. The story is interlayered with events from the first world war, which still have implications one hundred years later. This book is well worth reading for an insight into how the natural world can be outside our control.

Pine : August Thriller of the Month

My thriller of the month for August is Pine, by Francine Toon. It has the advantage of being set in Scotland, one of my favourite places and conjures up the claustrophobia of small communities surrounded by big forests. Toon’s lyrical writing gradually builds a sense of menace in a dreamy gothic atmosphere.