John Baker’s Blog

Lauren Kirshner, whose first novel will be published in Spring 2009, remarks:
I don’t know how I come up with metaphors. Anytime I’ve consciously “tried” to make a metaphor the result has been a little, uh, forced.
She gives examples of very bad metaphors, but it prompted me to think of some of the best ones:
Orwell’s Animal [...]

Ballad of the Moon
The moon came into the forge
in her bustle of flowering nard.
The little boy stares at her, stares.
The boy is staring hard.
In the shaken air
the moon moves her arms,
and shows lubricious and pure,
her breasts of hard tin.
“Moon, moon, moon, run!
If the gypsies come,
they will use your heart
to make white necklaces and rings.”
“Let me [...]

‘Say again.’
Robin - everyone else called her Rob because her second name was Berry and they liked how it sounded, especially when she took up with a guy called Nick King - looked me in the eye and with no sense of irony, said, ‘Be careful, I’m just emerging from my second-longest relationship.’
There’d been a [...]

Danuta Keen in The Independent interviews Karin Slaughter. The subject is extreme violence:
Two years ago I interviewed Ian Rankin for this newspaper. In the middle of a wide-ranging discussion he said something he may have since come to regret. “The people writing the most graphic violence today are women,” he told me, then continued, “They [...]