Scams
This one fails on so many levels. Still, I’m glad that the Manchester employee is keen to apologise for his lack of English. BEGINS Hello, I am Richard Wong a staff of one of highly reputable financial institution here in Manchester, United Kingdom, and I am the head of operation. I am pleased … Continue reading
Today I Lost a Fan
This is horrible. This morning I got an email from a guy I’ve known a while now. He said that because I was showing my ‘middle finger’ to all my loyal readers and fans, he was going to stop collecting and reading my books. The reason? Some time ago an author in America called Douglas Preston … Continue reading
The End of the First AsparaWriting Festival!
And so, after a year of planning and working on the basic ideas, the AsparaWriting Festival is finally over. It’s been a really rewarding experience. The whole concept was, and is, to create a festival for unpublished but enthusiastic writers. We wanted to set it up, first: so that aspiring writers could come and learn … Continue reading
Krupp Can Wait
FIRE ON THE RUNWAY by Mel Bradshaw, Dundurn Toronto ISBN 978 1459703353 priced at £11.99 for paperback I was fortunate enough to be invited as the International Guest of Honour at the Bloody Words festival in Toronto this month. It was a huge honour, but more to the point, it was a great joy to … Continue reading
Toronto – Bloody Words 2014
I really have been inordinately lucky this year. One thing I always wanted to do, when I was young, was to take every opportunity to travel. I was hugely fortunate because my father took us to Austria, Italy and even Kenya. I saw a lot of the world when I was a teenager. Later I … Continue reading
The End of an Era
And so we come to the last day of the contract with the Royal Literary Fund. To be fair, it’s not quite the last day, but it’s my last day in the RLF office in Exeter University. The rest of my time will be at home, collating all the data for the RLF for their … Continue reading
New projects!
Every so often a project comes along that intrigues me, and recently I’ve had another one. Ever since I first saw the Arnolfini picture by Van Eyck – Jean Arnolfini and Jeanne Cenani, his wife, by Jan Van Eyck (1434) – which, from memory, was when I found as an illustration inside the Folio edition … Continue reading
YouTube? I Tube
There are some aspects of a writing career that just get in the way. There is no other way to look at it. When I started out (twenty years ago now, God help us!) the job was easy. An author was supposed to write. As my friend Quintin Jardine likes to remind me: “Writers write … Continue reading
Let’s Get Inky
A short while ago, the very nice people at Cult Pens suggested I’d like to have some new inks to play with. Who am I to refuse an offer like that? A year ago I started to use Cult Pens’ own Deep Dark Blue ink. This was a colour they designed to match their own logo, … Continue reading
YouTube If You Want To
There are times when it seems like there’s no time to sit at the desk and write, and this has been one of those weeks. University was – well, mayhem is a little too polite, I guess. From nine in the morning to four thirty, Monday and Tuesday, I had no time for even a … Continue reading
writerlywitterings 