When I first started blogging just under a year ago, I did it because I thought it might be fun. It was also part of my attempt at trying out different forms of social networking. (I’d recently joined Twitter and was finally getting around to using Facebook. I know, I know, a little late to the party on that last…
There didn’t seem to be anything dodgy about going along to a hotel room for a Valleys Bloggers meet up when I first signed up for yesterday’s event in Pontypridd. I’d already been to a similar event at Pica Pica in Cardiff
The Nut Press is at the Guardian Hay Festival this weekend and, hopefully, it will look pretty much like it does in the picture while I’m there.
Do you ever find yourself drawn to something – a person or an object or an event – like, oh I don’t know, say, a bee to honey? It happens to me a lot. After having recently read Wasted by Nicola Morgan, I no longer know if this is my own gut instinct or some other higher power moving me around the chess board of life, but I’m happy for it to continue – irrespective of what’s driving it. It usually works out well.
If the title of this post seems a bit strange to you, I think it perfectly encapsulates the type of weekend I’ve just had and, if you persevere and read on, all will become clear-er. I was in London again, thanks to my trusty steed, megabus.com. And it was a scorchingly hot and beautifully sunny couple of days but very much a weekend of two halves.
I’m hoping that Bernhard Schlink’s thought-provoking novel The Reader doesn’t become a footnote to Kate Winslet’s Oscar success in the film adaptation. It is a book that deserves far more that the sorry footnote of simply becoming the book of the film.
When the brochure for this year’s Hay Festival plopped onto the doormat, I immediately settled down to spend some time going through it. Living as I do within an hour’s drive of Hay-on-Wye, the book town has a special place in this book squirrel’s heart already. But, for one magical week of the year, it becomes everything that I enjoy…
I didn’t know when I set out yesterday that my second outing to The Promised Land was to be my last. For Poetry on Tap, at any rate. (As far as I know, they’re continuing to operate as a pub and there will, therefore, continue to be beer and other beverages on tap.) Poetry on Tap, the monthly event which…
The second (afternoon) session of the London Book Fair Masterclasses was How to Write for Screen: Film & TV. Again, it was a panel discussion, this time chaired by Julian Friedmann (Agent, Blake Friedmann) with Paul Ashton (Producer, BBC Writersroom), Craig Batty (Author & Senior Lecturer in Screenwriting, Bournemouth University) and David Nicholls (Screenwriter) on the panel. Having met up…
I rarely start my days at 5am. In fact, I’m much more likely to be finishing them at that time. However, for my second trip to the London Book Fair Masterclasses (the first was in 2006) I decided to make the effort, get up at Stupid o’clock (that’s 5am to you) and sleep on the Megabus from Cardiff – if…