Time to talk about three new books. My students on the MA in Creative Writing at NTU have just published their new anthology 3D/07 which they launch at Nottingham Waterstones tonight (7-9PM, admission by free ticket, brief readings at 7.30). It’s a really handsome looking book (I don’t have a cover image to hand, but it looks very classy) and features outstanding work by current students together with contributions from visiting professor David Almond (‘Finding Jesus’, an exclusive extract from an adult novel in progress), veteran broadcaster Ray Gosling (‘Words…’ a memoir), prize winning MA graduate Nicola Monaghan, new work from course tutors Georgina Lock, Graham Joyce and yours truly (a new short story which follows the one that appeared in last year’s ‘In The…
The venerable novelist and poet Barry Cole turned 70 last year, and I wrote a very short story for John Lucas to include in a celebratory sheath of work from friends which was given to Barry on his birthday. Martin Stannard has published my story for Barry, ‘Bravo Books: a brief publishing history’, in his literary webzine Exultations And Difficulties and you can read it here.
It’s the things you don’t do that won’t go away. In the third year at Grammar School they streamed us into two half years. My on-off mate Phil went into the bottom group. I went in the top one, where I tentatively established a friendship with the coolest kids in the year. They spent their lunch hours smoking and listening to sounds at the home of Chris (who spelt it ‘Kris’) nearby. I was always on the edge of this group, though, the new kid. Taking Kris as my fourteenth birthday guest to our first gig, the Pink Floyd at Liverpool Empire, seemed like a smart move on my part. Then the ground shifted again. For the fourth year, a middle group was created –…
‘Where do you find your new music?’ the Radio 2 DJ asked me, when we were off-air. ‘MP3 blogs? What are they?’ Taking it easy today, as I was struck down with pleurisy earlier in the week and the antibiotics have yet to really kick in. I dragged myself up to the computer because today’s Observer listed a free download of a track by Uffie, a new soul singer I like. The link didn’t work (maybe the track had been taken down) but I got several other good tracks from the site it led me to, and it turned out I had the Uffie track already, downloaded elsewhere. Since I’m sitting here, I’ve decided to update my mp3 blog bookmark folder (many mp3 blogs, like…
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…