If you had to choose, would you prefer a million pounds or a penny that doubles in value every day for 30 days?

It’s a no-brainer, right? Of course everyone would choose a million pounds!

Well, not so fast. Stop for one second and do the maths. The results might surprise you. Continue Reading

So begins Stardust, Brian Cox’s second instalment of the wonderful Wonders of the Universe on BBC One. I highly recommend it and if you have missed it, all three episodes are still available on iPlayer.

The premise of Stardust is that we are all born from the destruction of stars, which sounds far-fetched. But it’s not at all. Brian Cox’s starting point in Wonders of the Universe is also that of Uma Jakobsdóttir in The Human Race: that every atom in our bodies was once part of something else, be it a dinosaur, a dormouse or a tree. Everything is made from the same basic ingredients and chemical elements, which are the building blocks of everything on earth. When living things die, their physical elements are released back into the world so they can continue the cycle of creation, usually as something else. So far, so good?

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Over the years I have become obsessed with what I have termed my ‘writing statistics.’ I religiously record the amount of words I write and the number of pages that these words equate to.

When I see the figures in front of me, sometimes I celebrate, or at least I do when I manage to beat my monthly target! Yet inevitably, sometimes I fail to reach that golden target number and the sulking begins. Continue Reading

A recent blog post by Mark Charan Newton, author of Nights of Villjamur, has set me thinking. His post was inspired by an editorial in The Globe and Mail:

“Among the recognizable Canadian publishers that have laid off editors since the economic downturn are Penguin Canada, McClelland & Stewart and Key Porter, which stopped publishing altogether early in the new year. Even plucky Gaspereau Press, the Nova Scotia publisher that brought out Johanna Skibsrud’s Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning novel, The Sentimentalists, has laid off its only full-time editor. Continue Reading

When I wrote The Human Race, I wanted it to portray something I had learned on one of our last excursions to Iceland: that this mesmerisingly beautiful country is being torn apart. Literally. One half of the island sits atop the Eurasian Tectonic Plate while the other half straddles the North American Plate. The two are slowly but inexorably separating at the rate of one inch per year. You can actually see it happening.

Þingvellir National Park is littered with consequential tears in the earth, and we were fortunate enough to scramble inside one that must have been 20 feet deep and 10 wide (and this was 10 years ago, so now the void will be much deeper). It was an eerie yet thought-provoking experience; in Iceland, Mother Nature rules with a fiery fist. Continue Reading