Today I learned two things in quick succession from this news article in the Graun: There is currently a CO2 shortage in the UK This is affecting the production of a number of food items, due to CO2 being required for use in their packaging, not least of which is crumpets! Oh no! What will we do without crumpets to
This is not the blog post I was going to write. I was going to write about how my outlook has changed over the past year – politics, changes in the genre I tend to hang round in, understanding more about my own writing, and working my way through a few issues in said writing. I was going to write
It’s November 30th, aka the day of reckoning in the world of NaNoWriMo. I’ve not “won”. I did write a total of just over 25k words, which was my minimum target, and I almost achieved my bigger target of writing every day (total of 3 days over the month with no new words added: 1 due to family day out,
Every so often when I’m writing I come across something which, when I look at it again, I realise “Oh! I wouldn’t have thought that a few years ago!” It’s not just age/maturity/extra life experience which causes these moments for me, it’s also where I live, how we live, and sometimes more exactly who else lives here… Our little village
I’ve spent most of the last year writing – or trying to write – short stories. Most failed at the first hurdle: I found out while writing that the story was too long to be short, so those ideas have been put to one side to be worked on later. Thankfully, I did eventually manage to write two stories which
Not very busy recently with the ‘getting words on page’ part of writing, alas, though I’ve been plotting, making notes, and reading around for the two projects I want/need to get on with this Autumn. First up is a short story for Manifold Press’s No Holds Bard anthology. I decided quite a while ago that this would be set in Antarctica,
There’s different types of dangerous books. We’ve all heard tales about books which are directly dangerous to your health: either the arcane knowledge they contain will drive you mad, cause you to become possessed, or some other terrible fate – possibly ending with the book reading you rather than the other way around! These kind of tomes (they nearly always
It’s nearly a year now since Under Leaden Skies was released. It seems both far longer and far shorter than that – I’ve certainly learned a lot in the last 12 months, and my writing has developed in ways I hadn’t expected. My confidence has too – I’ve had to come to terms with being seen by some people as
It’s taking me a while to work through all the words I wrote whilst at Gladstone’s Library a few weekends ago, but here’s another bit of my musings – I remembered I hadn’t yet posted it when I found myself checking the time & thinking “Not long before 5, I’ll have to start prepping dinner in a bit”… One of
I spent last weekend at Gladstone’s Library. Between my arrival on the Friday afternoon and when I packed up to check out on Sunday morning, I wrote over 9,000 words: mostly story drafts (of which I posted a short one the other day), but some of those words were drafts of blog posts, from thoughts I had while I was somewhere slightly