Themself by James Kemp

Book review: I've read some short story and other writing collections before, and there is an element of stop/start as you move from one piece to the next. In this collection the author has created a flow by linking his writings to an OU creative writing course.

What we have here is a collection of short stories and poems, a military theme being evident in a lot of them, interspersed with little tips on writing that the author has found useful to himself and for his course. Therefore you can imagine that this book would be useful to OU students undertaking the same course, but also novice writers. 

From page 1 you can see that there are weblinks so if you have the paperback version you may want to have an internet connected device nearby. This will certainly help with giving some context of bits where there is assumed knowledge. Through the writing you can see that the author can hold a story but one of the problems with some of the writing is that he was restricted by word count (as he mentions in his reflection pieces where he analyses his writing and where he looks at things such as character, setting, conflict, show and tell...). For example a whole story on a complicated world is built up around a "creation myth I wrote for the primary god in a theocracy" with many twists and turns but is covered in just 5-6 pages. There is definitely scope for fleshing out that story and others. Also some of his analysis may be too detailed for a book like this, e.g. the author talking about word count: "taking the mid-point of words per minute, it's within a single standard deviation of the median, mode and mean...".

With most of the content in the book coming from the author's blog there were elements that could have been changed a little to reflect that they are now in a book, e.g. "tell me in the comments ...", plus some other pieces from his blog not written specifically for the course felt shoehorned into the relevant sections just because the author was proud of them. Having said that though they were good in their own right. I enjoyed reading about self-drive cars for example.

Also you could tell this was self-published as there are little edits that the book would have benefited from. For example after chapter 1 we go onto chapter 3.

But overall I liked it.

Amazon UK Link: THEMSELF

Publication date: 21 Jan 2016