My lax approach to shaving has lead to a full beard reappearing. Now when I look in the mirror I see a Guess Who? character. With my receding hairline, a bit like classic character Richard, only with blue eyes and hipster glasses.
See?
While Googling the above image of Richard I found this rather excellent video which explains what happened to the original (and best) Guess Who? crew of my youth. The guitar is a bit annoying, but the mini-epics explaining what happened to each of the characters after being axed from the game is one of the best themed short story collections I’ve come across. Children of the Seventies/ Eighties, enjoy:
Which character from the classic Guess Who? line-up do you most resemble?
Busy reading and editing and writing at the moment, inspired by the following:
Efterklang’s new album, Piramida:
From the Youtube page:
The making of Efterklang´s new album started out in unusual fashion in August 2011, when the members of Efterklang (Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen and Rasmus Stolberg) went on a nine-day audio expedition to an abandoned Russian settlement in Spitsbergen, an Arctic island located just shy of the North Pole. Spitsbergen is home to more polar bears than people and also to the ghost town of Piramida, which was abandoned overnight in 1998, and today stands as a slowly decaying ruin still full of physical memories like the world´s northernmost piano.
As you can see from this performance of The Ghost it’s a rather special album.
The short stories of Swedish author Stig Dagerman, whose collection The Games of Night I am taking my time over (inbetween mammoth novel reading sessions for my MA):
My writing and editing is being fueled by the new sampler from Hawk Moon Records, a free download by the name of Hawk Moon Records, Volume III.
From the website:
For our third Hawk Moon compilation, we charged a small band of selected artists with the brief of creating ‘music to sleep to’. If you look right back to the very roots of ambient and drone music, this idea is something that’s been explored many times over the years. Not striving for mere cliché, we wanted to give a current crop of artists the chance to express themselves with this oft-explored theme. We wondered what new techniques and textures might crop up and if our chosen few would draw influence from sounds explored previously for this conceptual venture…….the sound is drawn out to allow the subtle nuances of a drone to develop and activate the subconscious; an ideal state of mind for drifting off to sleep.
As well as being excellent sleeping music, it makes top draw writing music. Well worth a download.
From the MA reading list I have so far been disappointed by Everything is Illuminated and Going Out, but Will Self’s Dorian is proving great fun. Nice to finally be reading something wholly engaging.
Other than that, Happy Camper’s ‘Made To Be’ wanting is the latest track to get my story cogs turning, chewing up stuff ready to tackle round two of my MA novel:
This week marks the beginning of my second year on Manchester Metropolitan University’s Creative Writing MA. I have already begun plowing through the ten novels set for this terms Contemporary Novels II unit, having completed Everything’s Illuminated (some excellent bits punctuated with some not so much – short verdict: funny and touching in places but for the most part a bit Emperor’s New Clothes) and Going Out (nice enough but feels a bit like a short story/novella spun out to novel size because people don’t buy short stories and novellas apparently – short verdict: story starts far to early, plods for a bit, but not bad once it gets going), while listening to an audiobook of The Picture of Dorian Gray(short verdict: deserved classic) in preparation for reading Will Self’s Dorian, which I am very much looking forward to sinking my teeth into.
As I am teaching adult evening classes this year I have had to swap groups (there are two groups within my cohort) to avoid clashes and so this year is feeling even more new in ways which are both good (new people to meet and a chance to read their novels in progress as part of term two’s workshops) and bad (not being able to see how my colleagues from last year develop their already excellent drafts). Wednesday’s session is a settling in and general discussion tutorial so I should have a chance to find my feet within my new group. This year is a big one assignments-wise as well, with three due in the next twelve months. While that maybe doesn’t sound like a lot, they are in addition to working on my novel and reading the ten novels for this term’s unit. And once they are over and done there’s just me and the page belting to the finish in year three with (hopefully) a decent novel in tow.
Any of you watching my MA Novel word count and progress meter in the sidebar will know that I haven’t added any more words to it in a while. What writing time I’ve had over the summer has been spent on whipping some short stories into shape, one of which has been accepted for publication in Paraxis issue 4, while the others will be seeing the inside of Submittable very soon. I have a few little things to finish off as I power through the reading, the plan being to dive back into the novel in December. Having said that, if I am feeling confident/masochistic, I might well sign myself up for NaNoWriMo in Novemebr and power through the first draft. We’ll see.
At last count I have ‘collected’ at least six or seven out of the nine above, so I might yet at least make it as a novelist, if not a great one. I’ll leave it to you to work out which ones I’ve earned. How many do you have?
I often suffer from this kind of hangover. Richard Beard’s Lazurus is Dead has been hanging around in my noggin for a good few weeks now. What’s the last book to give you a hangover?
And some spot on advice from the recently departed Ray Bradbury, and no, the irony of posting this picture on a blog where talk about (amongst other things) my writing does not escape me. What’s your favourite bit of writing advice?
Remember to check out The Literary Man. The text posts are as thoughtful as the image posts are succinct.
As Leni walked home after another day in a cubicle of a low-ceilinged office building, a graffiti head spoke to her. What surprised her most was not the voice emerging from the stencil sprayed image on the closed steel shutters of a never-open shop, but the fact that the face, an image she had seen many times on her way to and from work, seemed familiar to her in some other way she could not recall.
‘Is there something on my face?’ the head said…….
Particularly pleased that this has found a home as it is one of the pieces I wrote in first draft while at The Hurst back in April.
If you do click through to read it, check out the other great flash fiction on the site, all of it written from photo prompts as part of the recent National Flash Fiction Day celebrations. Enjoy.
