I’m trying something new today. I’d like more readers for my books and you might be tempted to become one of them. There’ll be one a week, in no particular order. My first published novel, Breaking Faith, is a romantic thriller. With elements of betrayal, excitement, tragedy, sex, despair, hope, longing, fulfilment, and love it’s …
Continue reading Have You Read Breaking Faith?
I’ve finally finished the stage of adding contemporaneous events to the storyline. Rendering such happenings in a way that allows them to integrate seamlessly with the story, rather than appear as mere markers in time, isn’t easy, but I believe I’ve managed it.Now I need to begin the slightly more tedious technical edit to spot …
Continue reading More Progress On The WIP
I should’ve done this last weekend, but life events can sometimes get in the way of best intentions, can’t they?No matter, here’s the latest update on the current novel I’m wrestling into presentable form. I last updated you on 3rd April, here. At that time, I’d already started inconspicuously inserting historic events into the timeline …
Continue reading Further Progress On The WIP
The edition of this book that I read is the two-volume hardback from the Folio Book Club. It is illustrated and very well presented, making it a pleasure to hold and behold, but the content is the same as that published in the ordinary single volume. The Greek Myths: what a tangled web of history, …
Continue reading The Greek Myths, by Robert Graves: #BookReview.
As promised, surprisingly I’m managing to convert intentions to action, so here’s a brief report on current activity on the WIP. See my post on 22nd March here. The process of adding factual, real events to the novel is moving forward. Perhaps not as rapidly as I’d hoped, but movement is movement and we have …
Continue reading Progress On The WIP?
Photo of me working on this post, taken by my lovely wife. I realised today, whilst doing some work on the WIP, I hadn’t reported on progress since Boxing Day last year! My apologies for that neglect. It wasn’t intended. It was incidental, partly dependent on events and priorities beyond my control. No excuses, but …
Continue reading So, What About This Work In Progress?
Photo is mine, but modified by Julia Kalman for the interview. I have been interviewed by Julia Kalman for the New Literary Society journal. The interview is published on Medium. Dear Readers,We’re honored to introduce you to Stuart Aken — a writer whose creative life is shaped by justice, memory, and the quiet discipline of …
Continue reading Author Interview
Having read many of Stephen Kings excellent books, I expected to find this as easy to read and enjoy as all the others. But it has an inbuilt problem for me as a reader from the UK. The language and cultural references in the first chapters are frequently confusing and sometimes even incomprehensible.Generally speaking, if …
Continue reading sleeping beauties, by Stephen King & Owen King: #BookReview.
If you haven’t seen the show (BBC1 and variously repeated on other TV channels), you probably won’t get the best out of this amusing collection of facts, opinions, jokes and odd asides. But don’t let that stop you giving it a go. It’s a well-written book. Lots of humour. Some of the ‘pointless’ items you’ll …
Subtitled ‘A neuroscientist’s guide to a healthier, happier life’, this book is just that. An extraordinary piece of work that, read well and applied to everyday life could be a life-changer for you. It already is for me. In just 8 chapters, this book demystifies both the workings of our most complex organ and our …
Continue reading How To Make Your Brain Your Best Friend, by Rachel Barr: #BookReview.
A pool in a Greek Hotel. Here's the next short story in my intention to give you one each week for the whole of 2026. I have a couple of anthologies of short stories, too, for those who love such collections. The one that would be most relevant for those who enjoy the one below …
Continue reading A Perfect Solution: A Short Story
I last wrote about the WIP on the 8th of August. How is it possible I’ve allowed all those days to pass without a single catch-up piece?At that time, the MS stood at 122,237 words over 282 pages. As I write this, it stands at 120,705 words over 280 pages, having been through a number …
Continue reading Is There Progress In The Work In Progress?
What is ‘Outline’? Is it a novel, a collection of essays, a piece of philosophy, an account of the physical, mental and emotional wanderings of the gifted author? It is all these things, and more.Whilst I discovered it was possible to put the book down, it was not feasible to do so without finishing that …
Continue reading Outline, by Rachel Cusk: #BookReview
Subtitled ‘A new author’s guide to publishing and marketing for success’ this book was recommended to me by another writer, who thought it might be of use to me. It is! First, I’m a published writer, both self-published and published with a small indie publisher, so, on the face of it, this book could seem …
Complex, moving, full of insight, and harrowing in places, this novel haunts the reader with its rich, expressive prose and its comprehensive depiction of its characters. Set mostly in Ireland and Africa, it uses the emergence of Eire as a republic and the difficulties that separation from mainland Britain imposes on that society during the …
Continue reading The Temporary Gentleman, by Sebastian Barry: #BookReview.
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Antidote to the Novel
Stuart Aken 