Articles

The year 2017 was my Year Zero for non-fiction. Although I wrote plenty of non-fiction in the past I never took it very seriously. I tended to do it as a chore rather than a pleasure. But I eventually decided to go over all my former pieces, to adjust them, rewrite them, get them into much better shape. And I also started writing new articles. Now I am putting as much effort into non-fiction as I do with my fiction. I intend one day to transition fully to a non-fiction writer.

I plan to keep a list of every article I write here and to update the list each time I add a new piece. So far my total stands at 57. Whether I ever attempt to write exactly one thousand articles to match the one thousand stories I hope to write is unknown to me at present.

(2017)
* The Ultimate Existential Horror
* The First Science Fiction Novel
* When Satire Goes Too Far
* Desperate Straights
* Géza Csáth (1887-1919)
* On Strawberries
* Every Writer’s Favourite Author
* Three I Don’t and Three I Do
* An Appreciation of Metafiction
* A Walk Along Portugal
* Dinosaurs in France

(2018)
* Background Writing Music
* Pierre Louys, his Life, Perversion and Work
* The Ritual Maze
* The Futility of Not Believing in Ghosts
* Three Ghosts in a Boat
* What Scares Me!
* Never Giving Advice
* Three Truly Bad Fantasy Films
* Trouser Hermits
* Angels: are you one too?
* Penguin Cafe Essay

(2019)
* Rum Doodle and Talking Fish
* On the Shoulders of Surreal Dwarves
* Green Candles and Crimson Pools
* Impossible Nostalgia
* Predatory Males

(2020)
* Immortality
* Memories of Who
* Strange Useful Juxtapositions
* Pyrrho and Ockham
* The Cinnamon-Coloured Suit (C.P. Cavafy 1863-1933)

(2021)
* For a Few Hollers More
* Lear and Far: Beyond the Owl and the Pussycat
* Never Knowingly Understood: the Sublime Daftness of Ivor Cutler
* The Scottish Homer
* Pessoa and Cavafy: one man?
* My OuLiPo Constraint

(2022)
* My Favourite Poem
* The Origin of Wuxing Lyrical
* The Best Underrated Offbeat Humorous Fantasy Books
* Some Mini-Sagas
* Crossing the Date Line
* OuLiPo Interview
* Some Differences Between Wales and India

(2023)
* I Went to Kerala
* Climbing Sri Pada
* India Pale Ale
* A Welshman Abroad
* Tarzan in India
* What I Thought I Knew About India When I Was Young
* My Love for R.K. Narayan
* Ghee-Wizz
* Tintin in India
* Some Differences Between England and Wales
* Some Differences Between India and Sri Lanka
* Productivity



Some or all of these articles will hopefully appear in my first non-fiction book, which with luck will be called Bullshit with Footnotes. My scheme is to make unexpected connections between a very wide range of disciplines. There are lots of footnotes too. In some of my future articles, the footnotes will have end-notes that will also have footnotes*. * because that's the kind of man I am.

This is the brief list of some of the subjects I am planning to write articles on (or already have). It's not a comprehensive list but good enough for the present purpose. It gives an idea of what my first non-fiction book might contain:

• Brexit: some thoughts on Europe
• A most underrated writer, the work of Barrington Bayley
• Parallel Universes, how even their non-existence will prove their existence
• Alain Resnais, his films
• Life after death, a new way of looking at this question
• Kizomba, the most sensual dance
• Paradoxes, why they are so intriguing
• The Empathy Problem, some thoughts on empathy
• Mountaineering, a pure pursuit
• Coconuts, the floating food
• Jacques Tati, his films
• Perpetual Motion, the joy of mechanical absurdity
• Logic and the monsters, an imaginary film script
• The hazards of being a pedestrian
• The perils of checking out women
• A logic flaw in the horror genre
• Italo Calvino, an appreciation
• Not in my name, usurpation through accidental nomenclature
• Unusual titles for stories
• The Workshop of Potential Literatures
• Some thoughts about Richard Dawkins
• The art and designs of Rodchenko
• Rules for an imaginary literary society
• The problem of evil, a possible solution
• Romanticynicism, an outline for a new literary movement
• Magic Realism, what it might be
• Metafiction, married a fiction, had lots of microfictions
• Stories never to be written
• John Sladek, an appreciation
• Creative writing classes, a few doubts about them
• Uranus, a planet neglected in science fiction
• Pretension, and what it really is
• Why songs are often illogical
• First band without the definite article in their name
• Rinky Dink Panther, Time Traveller