Since discovering The Crow Road, I have been a fan of the fantastic Scottish author Iain Banks, so it deeply saddens me that his next novel will be his last, and that his last writings will be on a website he has set up to keep his fans updated with his battle against cancer.
It used to be that you needed a newspaper column or book deal to log your journey through illness outside your social circle or the pages of your own diary. But the announcement by Iain Banks that he
English: Iain Banks, author, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2009 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
has months to live after being diagnosed with cancer shows the extent to which audiences have grown for those to whom sharing can be a form of treatment.
The writer said he was setting up a website at which friends, family and fans could follow his progress. It’s not clear how detailed posts at iain-banks.net will be, but its key feature is its very ordinariness. Social media and blogs have made potential publishers of us all, with immediate audiences.
Kindle-ing 