Chris Stanley's Bazaar

"Thirty-five years and what do I get? Another year older and deeper in debt…" Apologies to Tennessee Ernie Ford for massacring his song 'Sixteen Tons', but as it was my birthday yesterday, I wanted to mark the occasion by being both curmudgeonly and over-dramatic. Thus achieved, I can get on with life with the minimum of fuss. To those of you that wished me many happy returns, thanks very much. To those that didn’t, why are you reading my blog? The internet is full of nudes, for God’s sake. Ostensibly, at age thirty-five, I am officially middle aged. Medicine being what it is, I can expect to target a number far beyond three score and ten, so I don’t think it’s all cardigans and tartan booties for me yet. When a colleague asked me today if I felt old now, I replied, ‘I have a thirty-five year old body, a seventy-five year old’s knees, an undergraduate’s urgency and an eighteen year old’s sense.’ I didn’t really, I thought of most of it later, when I was p

Just a short post this, to let you know that I've started to add a few 'should have been written' things I've been involved with during my time as a writer. The reason that they're lost is not because I'm embarrassed, but more because I either didn't save them properly on some ancient PC, or I lost them in a fire about a decade ago. I'm not making that up - perhaps the only comparison my own archive has with the lost library at Alexandria! So I don't have any extant writing from these projects, but remembering them and describing their context makes me smile. I'm sure we all have a few fond memories knocking around, but thankfully I can look back on these with a fair bit of affection. You can find these projects on the right under the banner Great Lost Projects, and I'll add to it occasionally. If there's enough demand, I may go back to them one day in my comfortable retirement. Enjoy!

There's a famous story about the film Marathon Man . Due to film a scene where his character was strung out, Dustin Hoffman apparently stayed up all night to achieve the desired look. Seeing him in a state of some disrepair, his co-star Sir Laurence Olivier asked after Hoffman's welfare. Explaining the "method", Larry responded, 'Dear boy, have you tried acting? It's much easier.' I tell this story because I've neen struggling with one of my characters, Alex. In The Sad Club , Alex is an upcoming movie star who is known under the identity James Lorenzo. The real Alex is a nervous, pessimistic man, while James Lorenzo is a surly, closed (and somewhat attractive for it) type. Because my own personality only contains traces of Alex or what I think he may feel, he’s been quite a challenge to get to the bottom of. To me, the idea of being at the start of a spectacular career seems amazing, yet in the story, it’s necessary for Alex to both hate it and desi

There’s been a significant gap in my blog posts lately (though I’ve yet to beat the previous record of thirty-four years, between my birth and setting up the thing), and it’s been down to a few things. Firstly, after my podcast  was published, I spent quite a lot of time trying to spread the word, which worked very well. I now have over twice the Twitter followers than before the recording, and I now have twice as many book recommendations from each and every one of them, because they all want me to read their new novel. That leads me into the second, more obvious reason for my delay: it was all a bit of a comedown after that. Realising not only how much work is required to publicise my work even though we’re in the middle of the most unprecedented time for free communication in history was a hell of a shock, and added to this I’ve seen that even if I had a concrete product that was polished enough to sell, I would be shouting along with tens of thousands of others, all of whom are c