Flight is a VERY short seven episode book I wrote last month. Each episode contains 50 WORDS and no more. Additionally, every episode is a stand-alone story in and of itself. Right now you are 50 words along in this article. In short, it won’t take long to read an episode. If you would like to have READ MORE...

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A selection of poems.

A selection of short stories.

We spent three days at Twin Lakes fishing and writing. Tip-ups were set out on the ice and the word processor was fired up. Six little fish were all that came up out of the water over those three days so we didn’t consider feeding the multitudes. However, they did make a great meal for the two of us. Deep fried fish fillets and baked potatoes constitute the perfect winter meal by my way of thinking. Mmmm.

The post title refers to the writing portion of the weekend. Allow me to digress… Last June I stopped writing prose. I stopped writing thank-you notes. I stopped writing announcements. In fact I stopped writing and reading everything EXCEPT poetry. I quit watching the news and reading newspapers. Read more...

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It was a mistake to try to see two shows in one day, I admit, but the ensuing fiasco wasn't entirely my fault. I'd applied to review the Chekhov play well in advance but only got news about Legally Blonde the day before, and confirmation of tickets on the same day as the matinee

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‘So,’ says the very kind photographer. ‘I can use this lens to take soft-focus pictures, or this lens to make you look thinner.’

Urgh. The reality of this book-publicising business is hitting home. My novel, The Making of Her, will be published in April. My marketing efforts have resulted in a local magazine requesting a Q & A interview and a ‘good photograph’. The interview I can manage. The photograph, not. So a friend introduced me to another friend, and here I am with Jon Leavins, a delightful man who has courageously offered to commit my image to pixels. Little does he know that photographs generally feature me with a) eyes clamped shut and mouth wide open in a ghastly chasm or b) looking stern, angst-ridden and wistful (aka very, very old indeed).



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As I sat listening to my colleague today fairly hammering the keys of his keyboard, it occurred to me that he had probably learned to type on a typewriter decades ago, and had simply never realised that a keyboard is not a system of levers; that there are no letter heads that have to be whammed against the screen. It's amazing how unadaptable human beings are. Once we learn to write with one hand, we could never conceive of writing with the other. I grew up writing stories in a certain style which is probably wearily familar to those who know my work, and it's not so easy to bust out of it.

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This is the rough draft of a song that I did a couple years back. For some reason, unknown to me, it has been getting quite a few click throughs lately. Either one person likes it a lot, many people found the link somewhere else, or Byonce recorded something with the same name and they are here by mistake. No matter, if you care to give it a listen without downloading for your own please feel free to do so. Enjoy.

Many thanks for the congratulatory emails and Facebook Likes regarding my poem that was published yesterday at Every Day Poets. They have accepted two more of my poems for future publication. (The next one will be April 17th.) .... Read More...

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One of the good things about teaching creative writing for the Open University is that I have permanently at my elbow one of the best and most comprehensive writing-courses-in-a-book, Linda Anderson and Derek Neale's Creative Writing, which is the coursebook for A215. But it was a student who mentioned something that the poet W. N. Herbert says, in his chapter on "Theme":

There may be a set of subjects we write about which, on examination, share an underlying theme. Like voice, this is better discovered than imposed, but this does not preclude the search. The attempt to address large issues or grand abstractions often occurs when a writer has little idea of what they write well about.

I've talked before about how we tend to assume that first we get an idea, and then we bring our craft and talent to bear on it, and use them work it out into a story. And I went on to think about how it might be a good idea to think sometimes in reverse: working out what ideas and kinds of stories your particular capacities are most suited to, and writing them. What gets your best writing out of you, in other words? One of the reasons I ended up putting the novel before the WIP in a drawer is that I had deliberately given myself a kind of story which didn't play to my known strengths. I wanted to do it, and it was very good for me: I learnt a huge amount, as you always do when you set yourself a challenge, and one thing I learnt is that the story hadn't allowed me to do some of the things I'm best at. In the long term, by taking more such risks risk I shall learn to write well what that kind of story needs, stretching both my repertoire, and my toolkit. In the short term, I couldn't make the novel work. But it was worth it, for everything I learnt.

So this relationship between what you want to write, and what you write best about, isn't straightforward.

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I love to attend London Fringe Theatre performances in return for writing reviews and I'm especially happy to attend press nights at the Greenwich Playhouse. Over the past 17 years or so I've seen many excellent European classics in the inimate studio setting of the 80-seater theatre above a pub.

The Prince of Orange, as it used to be called, was located next to Greenwich Rail and DLR stations. The Galleon Theatre Company, under partners Alice de Sousa and Bruce Jamieson, who undertook acting roles, directed and translated plays, guaranteed a modestly priced but thoroughly enjoyable night out.

The name of the venue is now Belushi's, no longer pub but a wine bar, with a backpackers hostel accessed to the rear of the bar, through the same door that leads to the upstairs theatre.

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