Mike’s week-long marathon is at an end and Shaggy Blog Stories is digitally published. You can buy it here for a mere £8.96 of which £3.63 goes to Comic Relief (the online publishers, Lulu, have donated all their profit but note you have to add postage). I had trouble coming up with my own contribution to the book (I don’t really do ‘funny’ which was the qualification for inclusion). Then I looked at my handful of deleted posts. Most of these were ones I removed when I wanted to keep entries about a conference I was running high on the site, but the one in the book (I can be found at number 78 of 100)… let’s just say that while it’s a wry, kind…
My old mucker Mike, aka Troubled Diva, has come up with a splendid idea to raise money for Children In Need, for Red Nose day (a week today in the UK). He’s putting together an instant anthology of blog writing, to be called ‘Shaggy Blog Stories’, which will be published next Friday (proper print published, with a designed cover, via the wonders of digital technology). An appearance in the book is open to all UK bloggers (resident or abroad) and entries (taken from your blog archive) should be briefish (max 1,000 words, though exceptionally, 1,500 – no images or html) and, it being Red Nose Day, funny. If you want to contribute, the deadline is 6pm UK on Wednesday March 14th, but the earlier the…
The poet Julia Casterton died on Saturday, after a short illness, as a result of a long standing blood disorder. Julia was a fine poet, a remarkable tutor of Creative Writing and a lovely woman. She wrote the landmark ‘Creative Writing: A Practical Guide’, still one of the best books on the subject. I first met her in 1990, when I discovered that she had been largely responsible for the acceptance of my first published story in Ambit Magazine, fighting for its controversial content the previous year. She remained an editor at Ambit and was always a generous teacher and editor. Perhaps these were reasons why her only full length collection was long coming. ‘The Doves Of Finisterre’ is a powerful, intelligent, wide ranging book,…
This weekend marks the launch of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio website and to mark it, there’s a big piece in the Nottingham Evening Post featuring an interview with Jon McGregor, who founded the studio, Michael Eaton, Nicola Monaghan and yours truly. (If you buy the paper, I think there’s a photo of the four of us, but, as I type, it’s not on the street yet). Erik Petersen does a good job of describing the studio’s purpose and history, so I won’t bang on about it here, except to say that, if you’re a writer in the Nottingham area and need a place to work and/or to meet other writers, you ought to check out the studio on Heathcote Street, which has social events on…
Jarvis Cocker’s first Sheffield gig for five years was my first visit to ‘The Plug’, a club complex reminiscent of Rock City, had it been built 25 years later without a balcony. The place was rammed and we didn’t bother trying to get a drink, but had a terrific view. The big change, now that Jarvis is solo, is that he gives his repartee full range (last time I saw him in Sheffield, with Pulp ten years ago, the old City Hall acoustics meant nobody could hear the jokes). So, although he only had the (patchy) new album to play, the set was stretched out with a load of humour, ranging from the early ‘be nice, me mam’s here’ to a bunch of local references…