Blogs

I get pretty much all my facts from Fiction. No wonder my quiz team has yet to win, it's a good thing we have one person who knows a lot about sport or we would fare far worse, but this is my comfort zone for the acquisition of knowledge. When I don't understand something in a book I then try the often maligned Wikipaedia. Books on social studies are sort of like guys I have a brief fling with but wouldn't take home; I flip though them briefly...

We always support the annual Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the details of how to enter the 2015 event can be found here: http://www.wasafiri.org/wasafiri-new-writing-prize.asp The competition is underpinned by the support of Routledge, The Open University and The Arts Council England. The closing date is not until the 24th July 2015 so plenty of time to prepare and refine. Whilst I'm in competition-adivisory-mode please don't forget ABCtales'...

I am watching her, I am being watched.I follow her everywhere she goes ,I am next to her everywhere she goes. I know when it's me, I know when it's her.I am conspicuous in the daytime, I see her sparingly in the dark. I am always me, I am occasionally her. I am her shadow, I am my shadow....The shadow of myself.....

Apocalypse. Apocalypses echo what we know. The world will end. Three score years and ten. Well I’m looking at the tens. I’m not thumbing my nose and saying ‘Har, Har,’ because I’ll be dead. Let’s face it that kills any argument. Nuclear Holocaust We all know what this mean. Helen Macdonald was a wee lassie in the nineteen-sixties. She was instructed by her teacher how to make a nuclear fallout shelter in the cupboard beneath the stairs with old...

'Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine...

MCW003 The Contemporary Writer: You will be provided with articles and poetry as photocopies or downloadable from the Moodle site. These will be essential reading. Additionally the list of books below are essential reading, and it is recommended that you purchase a copy. Most are available second hand through Amazon, or as kindle formats, or can be purchased from bookshops. The library also stock copies but not enough for each class member...

Sheenagh is serious. About whatever and whoever in the world she chooses to care for! Could be Geordie boys carrying their future hopes and meagre baggage, on the London train, the post-apocalyptic universe, her travels to Iceland, snooker... Warmth sits alongside conceptual and imaginative breadth, here is someone who cares about the environment and would like to see us husband it better. She has also written a book about 'fan-fic' where...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b051wkry/storyville-20142015-11-the-internets-own-boy You have 19 days left to watch this. I suggest you do. It says a lot about where we are. Aaron Schwarz committed suicide 11 th January 2013 in Brooklyn, New York. He was aged 26. Aaron’s girlfriend, Tarren Stinebrinckner-Kauffman, claimed that he wasn’t depressed, rather his suicide was the direct result of a vindictive prosecution and prosecutor out to...

In a surbaban homeland, there are four personas.The suppotive husband,the fortunate wife,the obedient daughter and the assiduous son. In a surbaban homeland ,there are four characters.The egocentric husband,the good wife,the plaintive daughter and the candid son.In a surbaban homeland, there are four people, the opportunist,the subordinate,the pretender,the truth.In a surbaban homeland, there is a recipe ...for the perfect script!

I've given this a try and I can't get into it. It's a story set in smalltown USA about a single Dad with two sons who takes in a schoolgirl Mum. It's OK, I suppose it simply gives me nothing new and hasn't any laughs unless I've skipped them. I liked George Eliot's Silas Marner a lot when I read it, so I've nowt against single Dad tales per se but GE's had more to it; the broken-hearted barmaid mother dying of an OD, the story of Silas'...