One of those strangely busy (and busily strange) days, but I just wanted to alert you to the fact that, as of today, m’chum Steve is the proud father of a bouncing (if you throw it) baby paperback:
I’ve written about how much I enjoyed the hardback edition, and now you can buy it in a new, lighter-to-pick-up form (though I still maintain that the title should be in joined-up writing by way of consistency of theme). And it’s cheaper, too.
Go on, buy one. Make him happy. Or rich. Or both.
Well, after a while of threatening it, and one blind alley of trying a Flash version, I’ve re-vamped my website.
Some people have previously commented that they couldn’t see anything on the site – that may have been a side-effect of me creating it in Word and then HTML-ifying it, I guess – but hopefully this one will be more accessible across different browsers. It’s a bit more professional than the previous incarnation, I think, but I still aim to add some more stuff to it (particularly pictures, it’s a bit text-heavy at the moment), and thankfully the freebie software I found online to do it makes that sort of thing pretty straightforward.
Anyway, I’d be interested to know if you think it’s nice or nasty (or somewhere between those poles), so please feel free to have a look, and let me know. Thanks!
I’m painfully aware that there’s little so self-indulgent as blogging about blogging, and the following skates perilously close to it, so I’ll keep this short:
E-Mail
If you’ve sent me an e-mail in the last couple of days and not had any kind of reply, sorry about that, but I’m having some problems with my e-mail settings. Remember kids, don’t try to reset your e-mail account if you don’t know what you’re doing. The world of POP3 and SMTP is not for the dilettante.
Website
I’ve set up a revised, Flash-based, version of my website, which can be seen here. I quite like the look of it – it’s obviously more professional – but I’m not entirely sure that the Flash-based nature of it is a good idea (I know not all machines can access such sites). If you’d care to have a look at it, and let me know what you think, I’ll see if the general consensus is that it should replace my site, or if I should get on with updating it in some other fashion. Thanks.
This blog
I’ll probably be doing a bit of tidying up round here this weekend, including removing links to sites which are infrequently updated, that kind of thing. I’m also inclined to remove the Followers section from the sidebar, as it looks – as M’colleague has said in the past – a bit like the sort of ‘people collecting’ that Facebook, Myspace and Twitter seem to encourage, and I’m not at all comfortable with that. I genuinely appreciate people being kind enough to follow the updates to this blog, but I’ll probably hide that section in future, much as I appreciate your support. Unless, of course, there are violent objections. Do let me know.
And now, before I start telling you about the oh-so-funny thing my cat was doing this morning, I’m off. Proper update tomorrow, honest.
Seeing as how I haven’t heard anything yet about my entry into the Guardian’s
competition to write the first 150 words of a novel, and the notification date is almost past, and Laurence was kind enough to hassle me to share what I sent them, here it is.
The title of the novel was given as a springboard, so this is my first paragraph of The Letting Go…
“Life’s not about holding on,” her grandfather had once said. “It’s about the letting go.”
Years after his death, when she finally got round to sorting through his possessions, Heather realised that, in his life, he had let go of very little.
At the bottom of the fourth box, in an unmarked manila envelope, she found it: a curl-cornered black and white photograph of her grandfather, aged about twenty. With a full head of hair and an impish grin, he stood in front of a terraced house, with his arm around the shoulders of a woman who was definitely not Heather’s grandmother. And standing in front of them, scowling at the camera, a serious-looking young girl.
Her hand shaking only slightly, Heather flipped the photo over, hoping for a date or other explanation. There was a short sentence in her grandfather’s handwriting.
Don’t tell her you found this, it said.
As ever, comments are welcomed (though do bear in mind it’s too late for me to make any changes which might increase my chances of winning the competition).
I’ve mentioned his skills as a photographer before, but my official wedding photographer and pal Toby has started blogging.
As well as being skilled at filling SD cards with choice images, Toby’s rather a fan of eastern philosophy and the more ambient end of the musical spectrum, so I’m certain that his blog will provide a counterpoint to, say, this blog, which is all too often a series of cheap digs at things in the public eye, with the occasional comment on things related to writing.
So, hop over to his blog for a less sarcastic, and more mellow, outlook on things.
Now I’ve said that, I bet he posts something brimful with venom and bile. He’s contrary like that…
The absence of a question mark in this post will, hopefully, provide something of a clue to my feelings on this subject; I like Comic Relief a great deal, and I think it’s also very wise that 50% of the money raised goes to UK-based charities, and the other 50% to overseas work, because it rather defuses the whole “charity begins at home” argument which some people use instead of saying “I don’t want to give to charity”.
Granted, a lot of the comedy in the televised sections of Comic Relief doesn’t really float my boat, and I suffer a kind of emotional whiplash when they go from a Blackadder sketch to a film about children dying of some preventable illness, but that’s more my psychology than anything else, and it’s all aimed at making people’s lives better, for crying out loud. You can’t question that motivation without seeming curmudgeonly (even if it is regrettable that there’s a need for charities at all).
So, I support Comic Relief (in both the abstract and practical sense), and was suitably impressed with the group of celebrities who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for Comic Relief (you can find more details here), as I did the same thing a few years ago, and it’s hard work, so I recommend you sling them a bit of money by way of a well-done.
However, as well as the red noses and novelty singles which you can buy to funnel your money to Comic Relief, something which appears to have received slightly less publicity is the fact that they’ve made various Comic Relief Specials available to buy via iTunes. There’s a Vicar of Dibley one, a Mr Bean one, and a couple of others, but to my mind, most notable is the fact that you can, for the very reasonable sum of £1.49, download a copy of Doctor Who And The Curse Of Fatal Death.
Just in case you’re not familiar with it, this 23-minute special was the first televised DW story written by Steven Moffatt, and features a number of people you might have heard of (surname hints: Atkinson, Sawalha, Pryce, Grant, Broadbent, Lumley). Is it part of the Who canon? I dunno, but it’s not been released on DVD, and so here’s your chance to have a look at it, have a laugh, and some money to go to a worthwhile cause. If I may put it so crudely, cop this button-style-link (tsk, after that lack of manners, I hope it works):
If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll see the true meaning of the title of this post; if the Doctor, a fictional character, can support Comic Relief, those of us in this reality can probably make our own contribution, wouldn’t you say?
Thanks to Lianne for pointing out that the Tate Modern art gallery is running a story-writing competition; in conjunction with its current TH.2058 installation, you’re invited to write a 1500 word piece in keeping with the themes. The prize is quite an interesting one – six stories will be selected to be included in a downloadable audiobook, which will be read by Christopher Eccleston.
The competition closes on Sunday, and if you want to read my entry, Brittle, it was posted on the site this morning (they moderate entries to make sure there are no offensive or libellous aspects, which seems sensible), and you can see it by clicking here.
Let me know if you have a go, and if you want to comment on my story, by all means do so.
This morning I received a remittance advice for a wee bit of writing (a joke I sold, so it’s small in wordcount and audience alike), which makes it the first bit of money I’ve received for my writing in … oh, an alarmingly long time.
The dream, of course, is to make a living from writing and nothing else, but I’m aware that this is a long way off. One step at a time, of course, and I’m fortunate in that the day jobs I’ve had since I started writing (which would be, come to think of it, every job I’ve ever had since the age of 18) have generally left me with enough mental energy remaining to do some writing in my free time, and sometimes to even make a sale.
Anyway, selling the joke (and doing so in the first couple of days of the year) feels like a good start to 2009, though, and I hope it’ll just be the first of many… though of course it’s less a question of hope, and more one of
work, a fact which I’m very much bearing in mind.
Well, after much promising and even more delaying, the new version of My Website is up and running. I won’t pretend it’s a state-of-the-art cutting-edge site, but hopefully it’ll prove useful for people who are trying to track me down or scout me out for writing purposes.
More exciting, though – and certainly much prettier to look at, with pictures and everything – is the news that my friend and wedding photographer Toby has had some of his pictures made available for sale online. For a very reasonable fee, you can buy a royalty-free image of one of his photos, and use it to your heart’s content.
Toby’s stuff can be seen and bought here, so if you’re looking for a good picture for whatever reason, it’s worth a look. In fact, if you’re looking for a photographer for whatever reason, I can heartily recommend Toby – he’s a friend, yes, but that’s because he’s friendly, as well as being very skilled with the lens. You can contact him via the above links, I believe, and please do tell him I sent you.
Three predominantly IT-based things I wanted to mention…
Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost Too – as well as being a denim-stylee patch I had on my jeans in the late 1970s, this might well be what I, like Brian Cohen, now have to say, as according to Blogger’s dashboard, this blog has some ‘followers’. Crikey.
Please forgive me if I don’t return the compliment quite yet, I’m running a slightly older template for the blog at the moment, but I like to think I’ll upgrade soon. In the meantime, consider me very flattered and pleased.
Speaking Of Upgrades – This weekend I bought myself a new laptop. And like many writers I am convinced that I finally have the tool I need to capture my words with the appropriate speed and accuracy.
Be it pens or notebooks or formatting software, those of us who like to scribble all too often seem to be on a never-ending quest to find the right item. Truly, writers are a creative, superstitious lot…
And Finally – I’m delighted to see that this very blog is now included in the roll call of writing blogs included in Scribomatic. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s a rather nifty little widget that lists recent posts by all manner of writers, and it’s a fun way to find new blogs and stuff to read. I’ll see about adding it to this blog – probably when I change the template, as mentioned above.
And with that stuff out of the way, it’s on, ON, ON into the week!
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