One of the unexpected benefits of comment moderation has been that I’ve picked up on some comments on old posts that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen – including some spam from China.So, it seems that my titanic struggle with Writers Bureau wasn’t quite the success I had thought judging by the new comment. I’ll see… Continue reading Moderation in all things
It’s a never-failing indication of creeping old age when icons of your youth die. I’m old enough to have been enthralled by Simon Dee’s tea-time show on TV. To an adolescent in grimy Moston, he seemed effortlessly cool, roaring off into the sunset in his E-type as the credits rolled at the end of the… Continue reading Dee Time
So I’m in the local Co-op buying a bottle of wine. Spotty youth at the checkout is trying to scan it but it won’t scan. He asks his camp co-worker why it won’t. “Well, it’s obvious”, he says. “This is an evil bottle of wine – it’s not Fairtrade, so it’s probably produced by enslaved… Continue reading Fair enough
Just a quick post to say that I’ve enabled a new widget called Apture, which should produce lots of multi-media links at the click of a mouse, as MC Desmo says.
I suppose blogging is a kind of vanity publishing. There’s no quality control – I can write what I like. But the main difference between Topsyturvydom and some execrable self-published collection of poems is that I can, to some extent, control the reaction to it. After all, an author publishing in the usual way is… Continue reading Trolls
You would think I might get these all right. No, I got 6 / 7. I even got the question on To Kill a Bleeding Mockingbird right. What I got wrong is the question on The Charge of the Light Brigade, where I was invited to declare why Tennyson had used certain verbs. All the… Continue reading Volleying and thundering
Authors routinely complain about boorish punters at book signings, but I don’t think any of them tried the Uttley solution. The formidable children’s author apparently didn’t like the prospect of dealing with real children: Dimly, she perceived an overwhelming mob running at her and with British pluck she unhesitatingly grabbed her duck-handled umbrella and waded… Continue reading Utt(er)ly barmy
In the brave new world of education, a “voluntary” contribution to the cost of a child’s education is actually compulsory. Sample:It read like a letter from a debt-collector. “Our accounts indicate you have not made a contribution,” it stated. “Our records indicate you have not contacted us.” In fact, it was a letter from a… Continue reading Voluntary = Compulsory
The mighty Normblog has a nice post about the way the notes in classic editions of novels give away plot details, assuming we have all read it before. Norm cites Nick Hornsby’s neat line about this: Even the snootiest critic/publisher/whatever must presumably accept that we must all, at some point, read a book for the… Continue reading Spoiling Charlotte
To the Lloyd’s Hotel, downtown Chorlton for a book launch by my friend and former colleague Robert Graham. His new collection of short stories, The Only Living Boy, was the main event, and a goodly crowd enjoyed his witty and self-deprecating chat, and his sensitive readings.I was moved to write a review on Amazon:This collection… Continue reading The Only Living Boy