Jo Danilo's Blog

In which a song Jo fell madly in love with turned out to be a very special song indeed...

In which a clever bird does an odd thing, which leads to the author having a near-miss with a lorry and doing a bit of research.

In which an annoying coincidence occurs, featuring a bad song and a good book.

Incredibly proud of my eldest son today, who has just released his fifth album aged just 20 years old. He's a musical storyteller, and goes all wild west with this one. If you're looking for music to write your Western-themed novel to, try this one ...

Some song lyrics are just irresistible, and this one always jumps out at me as being so dramatically macabre. The gloriously unexpected combination of cake and the death of enemies is strangely quirky and satisfying.

“The brightest and best of you,” says Mrs Holloway, clapping her hands with palms flat and fingers pointing upwards, so that each clap is a prayer of thanks. And so begins the Annual Parade...

How much coffee is too much? They say three to four coffees a day is a good number but twenty-five is judged by the experts to be too much. If twenty-five cups sounds like a hell of a lot of coffee, I'd like to introduce you to prolific, 19th Century, French author, Honore de Balzac...

Many thanks to Allan Hudson from the South Branch Scribbler, who chose my short ghost story 'Saturday Girl and the Heavy Breather' for his regular feature - 'stories from around the world' - in which he shares a new tale every two weeks.

I was invited to create a shepherd.com book list, and chose magical, modern fairy tales. If you read that kind of thing, check out my page, and see if you agree with my picks. What would you have chosen instead? I was impressed with the cover versions they picked for each of my choices - my own copies are quite plain in comparison!

I could pick hundreds of satisfying sentences from Elbow songs, written by Guy Garvey. As NME magazine once said “Garvey is a poet, and one of the most creative and goddamn heartbreaking wordsmiths we have in the UK.” This is my all time favourite… 💙