Time to take a look at the books I read last year. According to my spreadsheet, I seem to have only read 70, which is considerably down on 2014’s 95 and 2013’s 92. No idea what went wrong, but it doesn’t really matter as long as I got something out of the ones I did […]
It’s all go today. To coincide with the opening of entries for the Willesden Herald New Short Stories Competition, I hereby announce that the winner of the great anthology giveaway, out of no less than 15 entries, picked out of a hat at random by international celebrity cookery blogger Rachel Pinnock, is… Drum roll, please Is… […]
Sorry, blog. It’s just… well, I’m not sure, really. Let me try to explain. Weird business, being a writer. Weirder still, being a writer-who’s-about-to-have-two-books-published. Part of me is desperate to get the books out there so that I can point to them and say, “Look! I’m a proper writer now!” and part of me is […]
Well, today started nicely with an acceptance from Every Day Poets for my parody “Now We Are (Practising Safe) Sex”. A.A.Milne’s corpse should probably get ready to spin now. In other news, I received my signed copy of Nicola Morgan‘s “Write to be Published” today and it looks terrific. Especially page 246. Page 246 is […]
The Sixth Annual Café Doom Writing Competition came to a close today. It’s quite a feat of endurance for the participants because all the entrants have to read everyone else’s entries and then pick their top three. This year there were 50 in all, with a maximum length of 5000 words, making a potential 250K of […]
Toby Frost has done it again! A year on from last year’s splendidly festive Space Captain Smith Christmas special, “When Slay Bells Ring”, he’s just brought out “The Celery and the Ivy”. Here’s the blurb: Toby Frost has put aside his iMelodiatron to decree: By popular demand it has been declared that the universe of […]
I’ve been away and otherwise busy over the last two or three weeks – hence the rather sporadic posting. So here are a few random sweepings from the floor … 1) On Tuesday night this week, I took part in the NYC Midnight “Tweet Me a Story” competition. Basically, I got a word at midnight […]
In case anyone out there’s feeling a bit, you know, icky after watching this week’s Question Time, here’s something that I picked up from Vanessa Gebbie’s blog that will go some way towards cleansing the image of Nick Griffin’s ugly fat face from your mind. It’s a talk given by Chimamanda Adichie at TED on […]
Talking of Lawrence of Arabia (well, we were two posts ago – work with me here), my father recently had to move out of his house and I’ve been sorting through some of his old books. In the middle of this I came across an old two-volume hardback edition of Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”. […]
I had a light bulb moment today. I’m finding that my new computer has had some unexpected effects on my on-line life. One of these is that I’ve found that Safari has a way of managing RSS feeds that is just that bit neater than Internet Explorer, with the result that I’ve been collecting RSS […]