Actually people never ask me that, but I’ll tell you this for free – one of the things I do is help out with publicity for Homespun Theatre, an emerging children’s theatre company.  This entails running social media, making publicity materials,  sending out press releases and coming up with other promotional ideas – one of which you can actually see right now on the right hand side of this page.

Homespun Threads is an eBook of 35 fairy stories, gifted to us by emerging writers from across the world to help raise money to keep making children’s theatre.

But why am I telling you this?  Well, because for the holiday weekend (as in May 24 – May 27) Homespun Threads is ON SALE!

This is to celebrate the fact that Homespun are doing two performances of East of the Sun, West of the Moon at the Rondo Theatre in Bath this weekend, and to compensate those unfortunate people who can’t get to Bath for their dose of fairytale goodness.

I edited the book so am biased in favour of it (Amazon won’t even let me post a review), but I genuinely do think there is something for everyone.  There are funny stories, dark stories, ones to read out loud with the kids and some that are just for the grown ups.  Please check out other work by the list of contributors here, and read an extract of The Snowbirds here if you want more convincing!

The book will go up to the usual price of £6.17 at midnight on Monday, but as of RIGHT NOW is only £1.04 on Amazon (I tried to make it 99p but they added VAT) or $1.50 on Smashwords (which I think is 99p but I’m not totally sure).  This works out at just under 3p per story, which I think is an amazing bargain.

If you don’t have an e-reader you can still read the book because we have made it available in all the formats – if you can see this blog post, you can see Homespun Threads.  More information here if you’re unsure.

What I’m saying is, please buy and share and review this book – it will help an emerging theatre company continue to grow and develop, and it’ll cheer up your bank holiday weekend exponentially.

Also, if you’re in Bath, pop along to the Rondo and see the show!

Least convincing Conan ever.

My first contribution to The Working Barbarian is now live! You have just under a week to read it and vote on what happens next. 

To explain  – I recently became involved with an online Choose Your Own Adventure story.  Every week someone writes a section, You The Public vote on what happens next, and the baton is passed on to the next writer who writes their bit of the tale based on the results.

Preparation for my section included making a Pinterest board with pictures of barbarians and Jala’s home in the snowy North – not because I needed those things to help me envisage it, but because Pinterest is like crack – and reading over the previous instalments several times to make sure the story was as joined up as it could be.  The main thing I learned from the Pinterest research is that most female barbarians have red hair and don’t wear very much, so it’s nice that our lead, Jala, breaks the mould by being blonde and fully clothed.

So far the writers haven’t spoken behind the scenes about what they see happening in the story – each new part is totally new to all of us.  I found when writing my bit that there was a lot of temptation to put things in to screw with the others – although I didn’t really do that, in the end!  However, as the project progresses I can imagine people relaxing a bit, perhaps starting to introduce random plot points or recurring niggly character traits that will need to be continued by the next contributor…

Catching up is still perfectly possible – not a lot has happened yet!  The story so far is that Jala, a barbarian, has been booted out of her home in the snowy north and is now travelling south in search of adventure.  In the newest instalment she may have found it… or she may not’ve.  You decide, by reading and voting and sharing with other likeminded folk who may also want to read and vote and share.

You’re also welcome to leave comments and suggestions, either on the main site or the facebook page – such missives will be read with interest, although I cannot guarantee they’ll be taken on board as I’m not the boss of the other writers involved.

Enjoy.

Part of my issue was that the page is run by my boyfriend, so I knew that when he gave me a deadline he actually had a few posts in hand and there was no real sense of urgency.  If I missed my deadline, something else would take its place.

The other problem I had was that it was not like anything I’ve ever written before.  I had a lot of false starts, because it turns out I’ve never written a proper fight scene – my stories and articles are generally pretty light hearted.  I had no idea how to make it convincing, so in the end I didn’t bother.

It turns out, therefore, that I don’t actually have any helpful advice to give on the subject of writing a fight scene.  Sorry for the misleading title of the post.  Still, if you want an example of how not to do it, you should probably check out the site.  FYI, you may benefit from familiarity with Pride and Prejudice and a thick skin in terms of creative language, as my fight is between Mr Darcy and Malcolm Tucker.

If you want to write a fight, by the way, he is always looking for contributors – you’ll find contact information on the top right of the Fight! Fight! Fight! page.  Hooray for the internet!

Jala by Eoin Hurl (http://ultimatehurl.tumblr.com/)

You may remember a post I posted at the beginning of April, explaining that one of my internet friends had concocted A Brilliant Scheme to pay homage to Choose Your Own Adventure Books via the power of the internet.

The Life And Times of A Working Barbarian is now live, with a blog and a Facebook page to prove it (social media being the only way to gain any clout these days).

The titular Barbarian is named Jala, and thus far there have been three gripping episodes of her story (although for the time conscious amongst you, they are all quite brief, and catching up will be the work of a few moments).  These episodes were:

1. The Beginning
2. The Leave-Taking
3. Something Rotten

Voting on Something Rotten closes at noon on Sunday (May 12) and it is important to me that you go and vote on what Jala does next, the same as you vote for your favourites on the X Factor or whatever (to be honest I don’t really know what reality shows tha kidz are voting on these days – we don’t have live TV any more, but exist on a diet of DVDs of The Clangers and iPlayering Doctor Who).

Once you have exercised that inalienable democratic right (especially women readers, please – Emily Davison didn’t throw herself under the king’s horse just so that you could sit about not voting on internet polls) I will be writing the next thrilling instalment of the saga.  GO GO GO.

If you’re interested, the books are (starting at the top right and going clockwise, as per Sarah Rosso’s original cheese post) : Moranthology by Caitlin Moran, The Luminous Life of Lily Aphrodite by Beatrice Colin*, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, Return of the Last Gang in Town (a biography of The Clash) by Marcus Gray, Supergods by Grant Morrison*, Dawn of the Dumb by Charlie Brooker, The Digested Read by John Crace, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers*, The Infinite Plan by Isabel Allende, The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson*, The House on Falling Star Hill by Michael Molloy*, Labyrinth by Kate Mosse*, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond by Jon Agar*, The Complete Novels of Jane Austen, In Your Dreams by Tom Holt, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon*, The Blue Book by AL Kennedy, Game of Thrones by George R R Martin, Flora Segunda by Ysabeau S. Wilce*, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, Collected Folk Tales by Alan Garner*, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murukami, The Penguin Edgar Allan Poe, and The Children’s Book by AS Byatt.  In the middle are Forest of the Pygmies by Isabel Allende, Postsecret by Frank Warren, and a box of Puffin postcards of children’s book covers I bought to decorate my spare room (which also occasionally masquerades as an office/home studio for the recordings of DanDanDan).

Titles with asterisks, by the way, are ones I haven’t read yet.  One of the many reasons I could do with an eccentric millionaire patron is so I can take a year or two off to catch up with all the books on my to read list – these are but the tiniest fraction of the collection.  I buy books like that Sex And The City woman bought shoes, if you need an outdated pop culture analogy.

I recently found out via the always helpful Nicola Morgan’s author page that the site now requires page admins to pay them cash dollars to promote status updates to folk who already ‘Like’ something.  Essentially, if I don’t give them my money (which I haven’t, because come on) 10% or fewer ‘likers’ will receive 12 Books page updates in their news feeds.

What this means is that you are missing out on some super hilarious memes I’ve been scheduling, like this:

And you’ll also be missing out on the automatic updates when I post something on here – unless you’ve signed up to get updates by email (in which case thanks for doing that!).

If you only ‘liked’ the page in the first place as a favour to me and have no real interest in updates, please just carry on as normal.  However, if you liked it because you actually wanted to see posts from me in your feed, what you need to do is go on the page, hover your mouse on the ‘Like/Liked’ button below the main cover picture and select ‘add to interest lists’ in the drop down menu as per this helpful diagram:

You should do this with other pages you like and want to keep up to date with too.  I’m not trying to influence you in any way, but those pages might include this one for the new interactive Choose Your Own Adventure tale The Life and Times of a Working Barbarian (for which I will be writing the next gripping installment once voting closes), or this one for Homespun Theatre Company (where I mainly schedule pictures of adorable polar bears).

Denise Mina, Mairi Hedderwick and Richard Holloway at the launch of the Treasures campaign last week, by RobMcDougall.com

Last winter the Scottish Book Trust delivered the very first Book Week Scotland, a scheme that got people to focus on books, reading and writing for a week.  Naturally I am very much in favour of this sort of behaviour, and it turns out lots of other people were too because everyone had such a jolly time they have decided to do it all over again.

Book Week Scotland 2, Book Harder (not what the SBT are calling it, for reasons of that being a terrible title) will take place from November 25 to December 1, 2013 – perfect timing, because our tropical Scottish summer will be over again and everyone will be ready to curl up under the electric blanket with a book or twelve.

Having said that, in case the promise of seven days where it’s totally OK for you to eschew all other activity in favour of reading* wasn’t awesome enough, there’s also a rather fun writing campaign attached to this.  SBT are asking people to submit a piece of writing about their most cherished object for inclusion in an online collection, and there will also be a free book put together featuring the best stories and poems they receive about Scotland’s Treasures.  This book will be given out to loads of people across the country during Book Week.  That’s nice, isn’t it?

There will be lots of other things going on, although full details of the Book Week Scotland 2013 programme aren’t available yet.  To be the first person in the know, you should probably sit on www.bookweekscotland.com and continually refresh the page until they update it.  You could also follow @Bookweekscot on Twitter, and like the Book Week Scotland Facebook page.

Meanwhile if you want to enter a piece of writing into the Treasures collection, you have until July 31 at 5pm and you can submit online here: http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/treasures.  It’ll be interesting to see what people come up with – I wonder whether irn bru bars will get a look in.  They are some kind of radioactive orange booty…

*Fun fact – it’s actually illegal for your boss to get annoyed with you for reading instead of filling in spreadsheets during Book Week.**

** For the silly people amongst you – of course that is not true.  You have the dates, book it as annual leave now.

Book 6 in my mind.

So, I was re-reading Book Six because in my mind there were sections of it that I might be able to remove and adapt into a story for a magazine submission.  It turns out I was wrong – those bits existed in my head, but I neglected to write them down.

Here’s what I discovered on revisiting that draft.

1. I didn’t write anywhere near as much of the story as I had previously imagined – which is sad because I thought about it a lot and had tons of ideas.
2. Most of what I did write was background stuff that happened about 5 years before the story actually begins.  It’s not badly written, but it’s not relevant to the book either.
3. About 2000 words of what I did write consisted of a folk tale about an evil brooch, the justification being that one of my characters reads said story at a difficult time in his life and goes a bit wrong.
4. I wish I was making that up, but I am completely not.
5. See:

In the past, everything was a lot muddier.  You may already be aware of this due to the film Braveheart, or even through the study of history.  And nowhere was muddier than Scotland, a country beset by rain and sleet in all seasons as picture postcard stereotyping has made plain.

Once there was a warrior, not significantly muddier than any of the other people, but half a foot taller and with a much stronger jawline.  His name was probably something like Fergus or Dougall, or an unpronounceable Gaelic thing with too many consonants.  We’ll call him Fergus for ease.

Fergus was admired and loved by all who knew him, because although he was fierce and powerful and strong he was also wise and loving and kind.  And he liked to sing.  In many ways he was a renaissance man, long before the renaissance ever existed – which is hardly surprising for everyone knows how Scots like inventing things.

Fergus was married to a woman, as was the style at the time.  She had knee length golden hair and boundless energy, and her name was Mina.  She bore two strapping sons and two strapping daughters, although the names of the children have been lost in the mists of time and the author not quite being arsed to think of them.

Fergus and Mina and their children lived in difficult times, but they were hardy folk and not inclined to allow poor weather or war or famine or disease to get them down.  It was a bit like that wartime blitz spirit you sometimes hear older people talking about in wistful tones, as though in this modern world everyone deliberately goes out of their way to be horrible to each other when really they’re just being a little thoughtless here and there.

Anyway, that was all background, much like the rest of this book so far and certainly this story.  The point I would like to make is that Fergus loved his wife very much, as she was the kind of woman who never had a cross word to say and was utterly devoted to him – as well as being a pure stunner by the way.  He had loved her since first they met at the age of 8 and 3 quarters, and she him (she was 9 at the time).  He loved her more fiercely than the sun loves the moon, and more than the ocean loves the shore.  He loved her more than life itself, and often thought that if there were any situation where he had to die for her then he would do so (even though he knew that without him in her life she would very likely kill herself, thus defeating the point of his noble sacrifice).

Sometimes when people are in love, they like to give one another tokens of their affection to prove the way they feel.  You might have read about it in books, like this one.  One day Fergus was consumed by the need to give his lovely lady wife such an item, not because he thought she did not know how he felt about her, but because he particularly loved her today.  She was utterly radiant: her voice sounded like music, her hair was shining, and her skin aglow with peachy secrets.

When your wife is a woman such as this (which, by the way, applies to all wives – and indeed husbands, for true love makes hotties of us all), the only question you must ask is what on earth can you get her that truly represents how awesome she makes you feel.  Fortunately we have already established that Fergus was a renaissance man, and he had a gift idea to blow any other gift ideas out of the water (a simile he invented, in spite of the fact that gunpowder and naval warfare didn’t exist yet).

He went to his friend Colm, a metal worker and maker of stuff and things, and asked him to fashion a piece of jewellery to a very particular design.  Colm wasn’t doing anything that day and readily agreed, not realising the design was very intricate and would probably take several weeks to complete.

When the jewel was made and Fergus bestowed it upon his wife, she was so overcome with the beauty of it she had to sit down.  She sat on a grassy mound bedecked with daisies and other wildflowers indigenous to the region, and the other people that lived around that place came to see her and gaze in wonder at the gem.  There were few women that did not go home to their own husbands to demand why such a token had yet to be bestowed upon themselves, and thus a market was born.

But Colm was unwilling to make these other jewels as intricate as Mina’s, for that design had been especially devised by her husband.

“Fergus,” he said, “that brooch was your own special design, uniquely created for your wife.  To copy it for everyone feels wrong to me – but the villagers will give me no peace.  What should I do?”

Not wanting to cause his friend further mental anguish, Fergus made a new design – similar but not the same, so Colm could make jewels for everyone that asked.

The copies looked by and large the same as the one Mina wore, but none ever seemed to sparkle and shine quite as hers did.  Some of the villagers suggested Mina’s inner beauty and kindness made her brooch seem to shine brighter, but others whispered Mina was a witch, that she had dressed up her jewel with magic and was not to be trusted.

Fergus laughed when he heard these silly rumours, for he knew they were the jealous whispers of silly types.

“One day they will think to ask Colm if he made them all the same,” he said, “and they will be embarrassed by their foolishness when he says to them nay, there is but one in the original design.”

But people do not like to think critically when the option to gossip and scapegoat is given.

“What if you gave the brooch to Aibhilinn?” one of Mina’s daughters asked, after a particularly trying day of being given the evil eye by everyone they met as they tried to go about their business.

Aibhilinn was the villager who stirred the most trouble against Mina, for she was the most jealous of them all.  Her eyes were a troublingly bright green – the colour of envy as all of them knew – and she was always discontented with her lot.

Mina was uncomfortable with the notion she should allow the other woman to win, but Aibhilinn was not only making things hard for herself, but for her daughters.  None of them was guilty of any crime save that of being loved by Fergus, and it seemed wrong that they should be made to suffer for it.

She tried to reason with Aibhilinn one day as she walked by the edge of the woods, asking why she had told the local people lies about how she was a witch and was out to steal their children away.

“I think you are a witch,” the other said.  “Or at least one of the fey.  If not, why do you always look as glamorous as you do?  Why does your brooch sparkle more than any other woman’s?  You have put a spell on the thing to taunt us.”

“All the jewels are different from one another in their own way,” Mina said, “they were each made by hand, according to what was asked of Colm.  Perhaps Fergus asked that mine be cut in a slightly different way than yours.”

But Aibhilinn did not listen, or if she did listen then she did not care.  She walked away without another word, and told the village Mina had confessed to putting a charm on her jewel.  She also claimed that Mina had confessed she could do the same for them all, but would not because they were not as beautiful as her and did not deserve it.

Most of the women did not completely believe this, but Aibhilinn and Mina had been seen walking together by several of them, so they knew some conversation had indeed taken place.  Some gave Mina sympathetic glances, but all were cowed by Aibhilinn’s all seeing eye and found little opportunity to show their support.  Most people will do anything for a quiet life, and getting on the wrong side of a bully like Aibhilinn guarantees the opposite of a quiet life.

One day a storm came, and Aibhilinn lost no time in telling everyone it was caused by Mina’s unhappy mood – ‘surely you have noticed the way she wanders around with a face like a dead cat?’.  She did not appear to notice any irony in telling people the foul weather was caused by something that she herself was responsible for – the sadness of a woman she was bullying without mercy.

“We must cheer her up,” said someone, “or the skies will remain black and we shall be in the cold and the wet and the dark for ever more.”

“But how?” others chorused, some wondering whether throwing Aibhilinn in the burn might be an appropriate treatment.

“It is her brooch,” Aibhilinn said, in one of the first documented examples of blatant opportunism.  “Her unhappiness began when she received the jewel.  Perhaps… she did not bewitch the thing.  Perhaps it is actually cursed.”

They ruminated on this for a time, whispering and wondering whether that explanation was likely or probable or even remotely possible.

“We must help her,” Aibhilinn encouraged, “by taking her brooch and burying it deep so the spell cannot harm her anymore.”

Now, I know what you are thinking, Modern Reader – burying things out of reach does not seem an entirely fool proof safety precaution.   What if the evil seeps out into the soil around it and spreads?

But these women were less scientifically minded than we, and very much in the habit of burying things out of harm’s way.  The countryside was littered with evil jewels, evil urns, evil plates, evil bits of weapons, and the bones of evil men, women and children.  As they say, out of sight, out of mind.

The villagers banded together and went to the home of Fergus and Mina, where they explained their burying plan to her.  Fergus was not there, for he had taken the children fishing, so he could not tell them the truth or help Mina to fight them off.  She protested, but they overpowered her and took the jewel.

“Do not be afraid of what Fergus will think,” said a village man, “he will see it is for the best.  I’m sure he wouldn’t want you to wear an evil, storm bringing brooch anyway.  He’ll be quite embarrassed when we tell him.”

“And don’t worry about being reminded when you see all of us wearing our own brooches,” said a village woman.  “We will all bury our good brooches with yours, so that the evil one will be hidden and disguised in case anyone else tries to take it and use it to do harm.”  She looked meaningfully at Aibhilinn as she said this.

Mina sighed as she realised she was going to have to give in.  She had loved the brooch very dearly, not just because it was pretty but because of what it symbolised – so twas hard to let it go.  Still, at least she still had Fergus and the children.

They dug a very deep hole, and one by one solemnly threw in the jewels.  Everyone watched carefully to make certain Aibhilinn threw in both her own piece and the one she had ripped from the unfortunate Mina, for nobody really trusted her.  She did so reluctantly, but knew full well she did not have enough skill or sleight of hand to fool anyone by switching the thing for a stone or other piece.

At first Fergus and Colm were put out about what had transpired, but their rage soon passed and they moved on to other trials and tribulations, including a further change in the weather necessitating a move to the south – it seemed that burying the brooches could not stop the second ice age.  But whilst Fergus and Colm distracted themselves with moving house, with their dying breaths the brooch burying villagers put a secret curse on the jewels – for they were associated with the end of the good times and the coming of the bad (they all hated moving house, which is a complete hassle).

Aibhilinn returned under cover of dark as many had expected her to do, but she could never relocate the spot where they had buried the brooches and so they lay unclaimed under the soil until their origins were forgotten. Meanwhile the curses of the dead infected the metal, which grew and changed under the soil.  In later centuries some were accidentally found, but they caused such ill feeling they were buried again.  Whispers were passed down the generations and songs were sung of their powers, until they were forgotten by everyone save fans of illuminated manuscripts and ancient folk songs.

It is said that one day someone will find the gem, but the brooch is lost for now – and that this is the most comforting thing in the world to those few souls who know of its mysterious power.

In other news, The Life and Times of a Working Barbarian is now live – why not go forth and vote on who you want the hero to be?

As the general setup of Pictonaut implies, Glempy is one of those writers who likes to get other people writing.  This predilection could stem from pure philanthropy, or it might be orchestrated so the man in question has a ready-made support network of peers gnashing their teeth and churning out #amwriting tweets at the same time as him – it’s impossible to know for sure.  Still, whatever his reasons, the outcome is a positive one – lots of stories for you to read.

With that in mind, I would like to tell you about Sir’s latest project – The Life and Times of a Working Barbarian.

Picture by Paxton Holley (http://blog.paxholley.net/)

Do you remember Choose Your Own Adventure books?  You read some of the story, then had the option to choose what happened next – for instance, ‘to go through the spooky arch turn to page 62,’ or ‘to climb the rickety ladder turn to page 4.’  The story was in your hands, and anything could happen – if you made a bad choice the hero might actually die, or at least be horribly maimed.* 

The idea of Working Barbarian is to resurrect this storytelling model.  Glempy has assembled a group of writers, including yours truly, who have agreed to relay The Life and Times of a Working Barbarian in gripping internet instalments.  After each instalment there will be a list of ‘what do you want to do next’ options and you, the general public, get to Choose Your Own Adventure by voting on whether you want the Barbarian to go through the spooky arch, climb the rickety ladder or stroke the adorable cthulu kitten.   

I’m really excited about this project, and if you’re excited too then you should CLICK HERE whereupon you can subscribe to email updates or follow the blog so that new posts appear in your reader.  You’ll also be able to find out a bit more about the merry band of people involved in writing the thing.

The first part of the story, penned by Glempy himself, goes live on Monday April 8^th.  Hooray!

*Bear in mind this was pre Song of Ice and Fire / Potter – main characters being senselessly killed was unusual back then.