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 The whole concept was, and is, to create a festival for unpublished but enthusiastic writers.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
Train, planes and … Well, just trains, really.
I am not good with trains. A few months ago I went visit some excellent friends near Windsor, and then on to stay at the house of some other friends. I had a great evening. Too great, really. Spike drove me into the station the next morning, and the rush hour was not good. When … 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
Immigration and Customs – Help!
OK, a brief diversion. I mentioned to a friend on Twitter yesterday that I had a chequered history entering Canada. There was the time I was picked up by the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police to you) and driven off in the back of their cruiser, or the time when I was refused entry … … Continue reading
Tripping again!
Here in Britain, we have a new education leader who has been excoriated in the media and by teachers since he took his job. His name? Michael Gove. Mr Gove is a man who invariably causes fury. He has stopped increasing funding for schools and colleges, he has cut budgets all over, he has presided … 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
Making Movies
It’s been an interesting time just recently, which is why you may have noticed that I’ve been noticeable by my absence. Now that my daughter is a well-established teenager, naturally she has realised that her father is a doddery old twit without the brains he was born with. And he needs controlling and managing.It took … 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
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