You are browsing the archive for March 2010.
Hello all, As you might have seen on the sidebar, I am conducting another workshop in “Writing Short Fiction” in association with the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray and International Book Day. This will take place 24-25 of April, 11am-1pm and costs €40. This includes a light lunch. Participants are encouraged to bring along a [...]
I had been noodling for some time about writing a post about how to manage failure in the writing life – when I was prompted by JBBC’s post Dealing with Life’s Disappointments. She talks about how the strength of her feelings of loss brought her face to face with the competitive elements in her own [...]
This post brought to you courtesy of Francis Urquhart, the lying, scheming, murdering, aristocratic, quasi-Fascist, cold-as-liquid-nitrogen British Prime Minister in the series House of Cards, which I was up all last night watching. This is a character brilliantly portrayed by the late Ian Richardson, who could transform Francis from patrician gentleman to snarling thug in [...]
I’ve been following the news of the collapsing banks with the same mixture of interest and outrage as everyone else. The price to be paid for embracing a capitalist economy is the founding of a social order on financial institutions. When we talk about “the country”, “the economy”, “the public” and differentiate them from “those [...]
Stephen King said, “for some reason, people love reading about work”. I thought about this today when I read about an incident in a call centre in the UK where a company fired a man and brought him to court for the heinous crime of being on the night shift, feeling peckish and eating some [...]
Onward and forward! Fish One-Page Story comp expiring midnight tomorrow. Sean O’Faoláin Short Story competition now open for entries. I note entry fee has gone up to €15; in previous years it was €10. Julian Gough’s opining on the state of Irish literature, about which I blogged earlier, has become the opening salvo of a [...]
Hello all Regrettably, owing to lack of uptake next week’s workshop has been cancelled. I hope to update the workshop page with this information soon. Apologies for any inconvenience in the meantime. Happily I have a slot with the Mermaid Arts Centre – it’s in the brochure – on the weekend of 23 April so [...]
I have had the good fortune to view M.C.A. Hogarth‘s series of columns in her livejournal about pursuing art as a business. Hogarth is a painter as well as a writer who crowdfunds her projects and has built up an extensive following over the years. She is a good example of someone who uses this [...]
Wikipedia quotes the Oxford New English Dictionary on modal verbs: In modern English the interchangeable use of shall and will is an acceptable part of standard British and US English. Hmmm. I know this will make me tremendously unpopular, but I believe that “acceptable modern English” often comes from people not bothering to figure out [...]
Spotted this in my local library. The charity Concern is running a competition with a deadline 21 March – that’s a week away. The Concern Creative Writing Competition 2010 is free to enter but do read the rules carefully. There is a section for schoolgoing folk as well as for adults, so check which section [...]
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