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March 2012

Literary Death Match Edinburgh

A Literary Death Match is a wonderful thing.

For some reason I had assumed that everyone would have heard of it by now, but apparently not, so I shall explain.  Literary Death Match is an event where writers compete against one another for the adulation of their peers, or failing that the approval of a live audience and panel of judges.  Four writers read their stuff for up to seven minutes (any longer and they get shot) and are whittled down to two according to the criteria of literary merit, performance, and intangibles.  They then go head to head in a final round that doesn’t involve reading, but is in some way literary – for instance Tuesday’s champion was ultimately decided by spelling bee.

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1

Interview: Steve Augarde

Steve Augarde is an author, illustrator and paper engineer who has written four novels for older kids and over 70 picture books for younger ones.  He also provided the artwork and music for Bump the Elephant, a cartoon you may remember if you were a small person or parent in the early 1990s.  I spoke to him about designing pop up books, 30 years of writing for children, and the possibility he may be responsible for electronic birthday cards…

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3

Should You Choose a Pseudonym?

Occasionally, the fact I sign my name as the fairly androgynous ‘Ali’ leads people to assume I am a man.  This belies the fact that however peppered with links to my online endeavours my email signature may be, most recipients of my missives can’t be arsed clicking them.

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13

Should Writers Use Social Media?

I was doing a bit of research t’other day for an article on The Edinburgh Reporter about the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Awards Showcase, and was struck by how few of the winners had an easily accessible social media presence.

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4

Foreshadows: Changing the way we read

Every so often, someone comes along and tries to change the way we do things.

This is particularly relevant in the world of the written word.  When some genius decided to go from cave paintings to papyrus scrolls* there was uproar in the publishing industry.  Nobody had done it before and so nobody could envision doing it differently, but now we wouldn’t read our ancient Egyptian texts any other way.  Similarly at the time of William Shakespeare, nobody gave a toss about fixed spelling (Bill spelt his name in several different ways) but these days we’re always getting ourselves worked up about kids using text speak instead of proper English.

Obviously we’ve had a lot of chat about the digital revolution on this blog, what with the Great Kindle Challenge and asking almost all interviewees for their thoughts on eBooks and such.  But what is the next evolutionary step in reading experience?  I’m glad you asked.

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2

Do Writers Need to Read?

I have written about the difficulties of conflicting advice for writers on a number of occasions, but one thing that always crops up everywhere is that you cannot write unless you read.  You have to do this all the time, widely and critically, fiction and nonfiction, books, papers, magazines and even blogs.

But why?

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9

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