Shores of Night

Hello, hello. Sorry, got caught up again, I really must try to blog more (more on that later). My hand in for my Fiction coursework is Wednesday, but I am aiming to get it in on Tuesday, gods willing, fingers crossed and with a good wind behind me. Honestly, short of a massive panic induced rewrite the stories are good to go and the commentary just needs me to go over it a couple of times. Next up I have two short stories to write one for Fringeworks Raus Untoten collection, a story of zombies at Stalingrad which I suspect will be taking a different tack to what the editor's going to get otherwise and a follow up to last year's Asylum story. If you've read Prometheus Enslaved, I'll be picking up some of the characters from that story and taking them to America, where other dangers await. Also, starting this week I'll be starting a concerted attempt to blog everyday, for a full month, in a so called 30 Blogs of Night. I'll be making it up as I go along so...

Another task for the MA. This time I had to build a scene up by writing things separately, the dialogue, the setting and the actions. This is what I ended up with - hope you enjoy it!  Hannah was walking back into the station, idly running through the mental list of chores she had to do perform that day. The station was crowded, packed with tourists and other passengers coming and going through the tight, shop bound concourse. The morning rush hour had died to a trickle; the workers who straggled towards their workplaces now, looked out of place in their sober business attire against the more colourful, casual clothes the other people sported. More than few of them checked their watches or phones and quickened their pace. She circumnavigated a group of foreign students who noisily consulted a map, when someone caught her eye. All thoughts of laundry, menus, even of collecting Abi, her granddaughter, flew from her head as she saw the woman browsing the books in the station'...

HI, I put together the following for one of the MA tasks and thought I'd post it here. The task was to take pieces of conversation that I'd overheard and spin an idea for a scene out of them. Sadly some brilliant pieces of dialogue don't make the cut (including something to do with Gimpy Pigeon - which is a totem that's come up in conversations about Werewolf the Forsaken, an RPG I'm planning stuff for at the moment). These aren't necessarily the most exciting lines of dialogue, some of them are pretty mundane, but they seem to work. Some of the scenes are pretty much thumbnail sketches but I think all of them make sense. I do find that I want to write most of the stories here though... Quote – “Are you able to give us just five minutes?” Scene – A job interview, the candidate has just been caught out in a pretty heinous lie. The panel have just twigged and one of them has called a halt to the proceedings. The candidate told a lie because he thought it so...

Something very good and very strange started this September; I went back to university as a mature student.  I'd been thinking about studying for a while; in part because it's felt as if my life has been stuck in a place I don't particularly want to be for a while and I've been gnawed at by a sense of dissatisfaction for a long time. I applied to Birmingham City University, Warwick and erm, that ended up being about it to be honest. I had good intentions of applying to others but in the end I never completed the forms. In the end both institutions offered me places, but thanks to a snafu in my understanding of Warwick's procedures, BCU offered me a place first and by the time Warwick's offer came through I had already accepted the place at the more local university. I'm studying part time and I'll be honest that even with my book worm tendencies working and studying can be a strain, just as writing after work can be, but it's a wonderful feeling t...