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”
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.
Continue reading “Book Six Revisited”
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.
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?
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.
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!
This week’s photo challenge is to take you through a day in my life, so what follows is my Easter Sunday. I have tried to allude to the fact that even though I didn’t write much yesterday, I though about stories and storytelling a lot – that is pretty much how I exist from day to day. There are explanatory captions attached to these, and if you click on the first one you’ll get the pictures in an exciting slideshow.
It’s Thursday, it’s 7.30pm, it’s Top of the Pops Pictonaut Challenge!
This month, The Rogue Verbumancer (or Glempy, if you prefer) challenges the internet to write a thousand words on the topic of going for a walk over a bridge. Or y’know, anything else that springs to mind on seeing this picture… But as you will discover, my brain opted for a fairly literal interpretation.
Thus:
Continue reading “Going For A Walk (March Pictonaut Challenge)”
12 Books in 12 Months 
