Jessica Swan
My blogs
| Gender | Female |
|---|---|
| Industry | Arts |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Location | London, England, United Kingdom |
| Introduction | though I hate to admit it, I’m a night owl. I’ve tried and wished as hard as I could to be a 9a-5p writer but it just doesn’t feel natural to me. Even if I plant myself in front of my laptop during the day, I’ll just spend painful hours staring at a blank screen or sometimes worse— writing and rewriting the same sentence for an entire excruciating day. But at night, things are different. The perfect word suddenly appears from the tip of my fingertips while creative ideas flow freely. With a pot of my orange pekoe tea, I’ll work from 11pm straight through up to 4am, when I start to hear the morning birds chirp in the trees outside. I can’t help it. Even if I force myself to go to bed early one night, I’ll just lay there in bed with my eyes wide open, tossing and turning and thinking, thinking, and thinking some more until I just get up out of bed and write it all down. |
| Interests | French gourmet cooking (although I absolutely detest grocery shopping); Tennis (yet I can't serve the ball properly to save my life); charcoal sketching (although i am unable to draw hands with fingers of any sort), and...writing (although my grammar is quite pitiful, I'm afraid. Thank goodness for my editor, Peggy!) |
| Favorite Music | Brazilian Girls. Morcheeba. The Smiths. Nous Non Plus. Chopin. |
| Favorite Books | FAVORITE FICTION: "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G.K. Chesterton, "Pale Fire" by Vladimir Nabokov, "The Thief and the Dogs" by Naguib Mahfouz, "Diary of a Madman" by Nikolai Gogol, "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka, "Lost in Translation" by Eva Hoffman, "The Lover" by Marguerite Duras. ............................ ............................ ............................ FAVORITE NONFICTION: "The Passion of the Western Mind" by Richard Tarnas, "Barefoot in Paris" by Ina Garten, "Saints and Madmen" by Russell Shorto, "Dark Night of the Soul" by St. John of the Cross, "Mystics and Zen Masters" by Thomas Merton, "Saint Francis of Assisi" by G.K. Chesterton, "Story of Philosophy" by Will Durant, "The Secret Lives of Words" by Paul West, "Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual Obscure and Preposterous Words" by Josefa Heifetz Byrne. ............................ ............................ ............................ As for magazines.... my regular reads are: Gilbert Magazine (from the American Chesterton Society, of course!) The Economist, and... secretly, Vogue and Italian Vogue. ............................ ............................ ............................ ............................ ............................ MY NOVELS: DEAR ISABELLE (published by Harbor House, May 30, 2007). THE SECRET LIVES OF A GHOSTWRITER (pub.date, TBA) INSIDE THE CLOUDS (pub.date, TBA). My 4th novel will be announced soon! |