Image: Lizzy Siddal
And so, the madness is over for another year. Edinburgh is slowly returning to normality as all 250+ venues go back to what they did before—sell, display or hire out. Temporary venues disappear (goodbye Udderbelly) and backrooms and shops turn their attention back to quieter afternoons. Charlotte Square has emptied of readers and [...]
Image: Ed Fest Guide
Finally, it is here. The 2010 Edinburgh International Book Festival will begin in a little under two hours, and in a little under three my first of over thirty events shall begin. Between today and August 30th, I’ll be treading the famous boards in the Charlotte Square village for all but four [...]
Image: BigMamaCass
All that stuff about Leith in yesterday’s blog post has been building for a while. I had to get it off my chest. I go through good periods and bad periods with Leith (and to a lesser extent Edinburgh) and although there’s a good period coming up with the Edinburgh Book Festival, Leith is [...]
Image: Disko Duck
Behold, at the end of this post you will find a short slideshow of the best of my photographs taken in Portugal between the 17th and 31st July. Some are stupid, some are arty and some can be classed as research into a new story I’m toying with for this year’s NaNoWriMo. Whatever, [...]
Image: Black Knight
I mentioned yesterday that my wife only took a handful of photographs while in Portugal but the ones she did take were of a sunset. Well, I took some too, quite a few in fact, which is the reason they still aren’t ready to show off. I spent a while going through them [...]
Image: ralphbijker
Still struggling to get myself back into sync. I feel totally lackadaisical and uninspired with everything except literature. Call it the holiday blues without wishing I was actually back there by the pool. I’m still on a high with words and ideas—and that’s before the EBF even begins—but with the day job and everything [...]
Image: Metro
A day of two fascinating halves. On the one one hand I had the day job, which was busy and thick with challenge, and on the other was the live coverage of the stand-off between the police and the killer gunman running loose around Northumbria.
I won’t go into the day job much; lots to [...]
Image: Go Springboard
As mentioned previously, this is my final monthly plan of work for my writing year. When this set of GDRs began in January 2009 I was still running from January to December but came to realise how important the Edinburgh Book Festival was in my writing life; it’s a month of recharging, re-evaluating, [...]
Image: Weekly Reader
Looking back, June was a great month. May had been good and I had been wanting to build on it, so when carrying out my GDR review of the past 30 days I was delighted with the results of both the amount of work I’ve got through, the quality of my submissions, the [...]
Image: Spice London
Yesterday was a blast. I spent some of the morning up in town doing some shopping for my parent’s visit later in the day, which naturally included a stop off in the coffee shop and a read of the paper. When I got home I sat in the sunny paradise of my back [...]
Image: Green Office
I had a surprise day off work yesterday when I had to call in for some time so I could look after a sick family member. My doctor’s duties were called on until mid-afternoon, which meant I missed all of the warm sun that had been afforded Edinburgh. By the time I had [...]
Image: Place Connect
I had a fantastic start to yesterday with another couple of gigs lined up to my expanding superlist: The Charlatans in October in Edinburgh and then Roger Waters performing The Wall at the O2 in London next May.
I’m absolutely over the moon about the latter gig as it has always been a dream [...]
Image: Creaky Toe
I worked through seven chapters of GATECRASH last night. The further I creep into the story the better it seems to get. Some of the writing, though, leaves a lot to be desired. One can tell it was written with speed in mind—quantity over quality—a side effect of NaNoWriMo if ever there was [...]
Image: Queen’s Uni
The office was like a morgue yesterday. So many people took the bank holiday off as a holiday, it left the rest of us feeling rather depressed and hacked off that we were still in the office. Not to worry, next week I am off for a couple of days to go through [...]
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