News

Minus 14 at midday, a good scarf is essential in Bucharest in February.

It's been fairly full-on in the opening months of the year. On the down side, this is NOT a good time to be asking for large sums of money up front for projected books. Doesn't stop me trying, mind. On the up side a lot of smaller approaches have gone well, I’ve had the usual mixture of predictable and totally random work and a few things have gone way better than anyone expected. The main such – probably – being the gig in Romania, though well out of my usual comfort zone because Jane and I were running a weekend with live translation in the room and I took writing exercises that are hard enough in English. The whole thing went really well, and 24 hours after we landed back in England we got a request to go back next year. We said yes, and we're also looking at expanding this area of working together.

When Saturday Comes Workington fans do a 600 mile round trip

The usual work continues, and the new Blueseason is well underway. I did mention an odd football writing job in the last update. It's done and dusted now and it was a truly surreal day at work. Specifically, in January, I covered a Conference North game involving Workington travelling 300 miles to play at Bishops Stortford. That – basically – was the story; how the hell Conference NORTH came to include a football team with Stansted Airport as a neighbour and how the Cumbrians making the round-trip felt about it.

Wukkie bus in Hertfordshire; not a site we thought we’d see in Conference NORTH.

Around the time of the next update we’ll know for sure whether Blueseason 2011/2012 covers a season up to the start, or the end, of May. We should also have some news about when it will be available and if we’ll do a bookshop launch this year.

Current Blueseason links below:

Link: Paperback on Amazon(Opens new window)

Link: Kindle on Amazon(Opens new window)

Strangely beautiful artistic image of something familiar and also hard to define. You know, the kind of thing ‘consultants’ stick on business cards, leaflets and the rest.

A permanent feature on this page at present since I get the odd – and I do mean ‘odd’ – request now and again. As per usual: if you’re one of those likely to send in a request it might be worth noting that I’m trying to contain the gigs and one-off work to three main areas of work:

• Individual consultancy sessions; to help people or organisations in developing work for publication. (See 'The Day Job' item below for one topic generating some bookings).
• Specialist workshops; like the work I continue to do with therapists and counsellors.
• General one-off talks on aspects of writing for a living or creative writing. See this update's comments above about the work in Romania; I've done the same thing solo, and with my psychotherapist wife, in the UK.

The work publishing and editing books as part of my duties with Professional Writing and Media (Print) students continues and the results pepper the pages of Amazon.co.uk. I mention it here for two reasons:

Firstly, this is now an ongoing project, gathering some national publicity and expanding into retail as well as online sales, so any publicity I can generate is useful.

Secondly, I continue to take consultancy bookings in which I facilitate for other organisations wishing to get into cost-effective self-publishing. Our old site is linked here though it will disappear soon to be replaced by a wider ranging site covering a range of media work:

www.nwkmedia.com

The corporate work with Pennies Day Nurseries continues to throw random and creative elements into the day jobs. The main focus in the last few months has been on establishing the new offices and diversifying the business. Eight years ago I started writing the odd press release for our one nursery site with four rooms. A look at the current operation online gives some idea of how far we’ve come in this time.

Lennon, he's an accepted classic, not sure about my movie script.

This isn't exactly news, this is the copy I'll keep on this page until they make the movie, or the option agreement expires in July 2012.

Other than the Carlisle United stuff Mr Lennon still generates more traffic through this site than anything else.

No news on this since the last update so we're still in the position that 'half the budget' has been raised.

Great book, shame I missed the symposium!

Take it from me, if they appear in this news page it means I read them since I last updated my news.

The drafted wordage is currently 76,701 since starting in October 2010, which anyone with any familiarity with such research will realise it’s going to get severely cut soon because that level of production would take us way over the limit if it was maintained. On the other hand the three month update of wordage is the lowest quarterly production since I started.

Entitled ‘Me, Myself and I, UK: Explorations in British Creative Nonfiction,’ the research chronicles the history of “British” literature and sets it against the theory of creative nonfiction, so in getting to H.G. Wells we’ve covered most of the ground in years. It gets more expensive from now on, mainly because everyone left to study is either alive or dead within the last 70 years, making the lifting of their published works online much harder than those covered to date.

The Ph.D will eventually have its own online home. But whilst I’m in the first phase of grinding through the‭ ‘‬literature‭’ ‬I’ll spare you the tedium.