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Weekly Photo Challenge: From Above

My interpretation of this week’s photo prompt (from above) involved standing on the bed for an aerial view of some of my book collection – something I now regret, because it means having to put the books away again and in my enthusiasm for creating ART I forgot where I picked some of them up.  Also I am staggeringly lazy about tidying.

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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  I buy books like that Sex And The City woman bought shoes, if you need an outdated pop culture analogy.

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Public Service Announcement

If you are a Facebook user (and I do appreciate it is not everyone’s cup of tea), this post may be of interest to you.

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: Continue reading “Public Service Announcement” →

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Book Week Scotland

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

Continue reading “Book Week Scotland” →

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Book Six Revisited

Book 6 in my mind.
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:

Continue reading “Book Six Revisited” →

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Weekly Photo Challenge – Colour

The weekly photo challenge is ‘colour’, and as you can see I chose blue.  Initially I was going to write lots of different pages of a story I am working on longhand in different colours and make a gallery of those – but I appear to have misplaced most of my more interesting pen colours.  SEND PENS NOW.  Or, look at the blue things instead whilst I think of further ridiculous ways to procrastinate.

Some of the bluest books I own.
Blue desk tidy, featuring a blue ruler and some blue pens. Also the weird wicker owl thingy and Totoro.
Reading chair, covered in mostly blue blanket I knitted. The owl is Professor Lindsay.
Blue shoes, containing my blue degree tube and a blue light sabre.
Story I am working on in blue.
Blue DVDs.

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?

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An Awfully Big Adventure

I have a number of friends on the internet who I’ve come across through writing stories.  One such person is Glempy, also called The Rogue Verbumancer, who you may remember from guest posts like this one, and my almost monthly entries for the Pictonaut Challenge.

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.

Choose Your Own Adventure #45 You Are A Shark (1985)
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 8th.  Hooray!

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