Playing football last Friday I broke the little finger of my left hand. The bone has also twisted, meaning that I might need surgery to straighten it. This means my left hand is more or less useless. Just living simply becomes a chore. Anything involving water is particularly tough, the hardest two tasks are washing up and shampooing my hair. But more or less every activity involves both hands, I have sadly discovered.
Whilst writing my first book Swindon Orbital earlier this year, I learnt something important about the act of writing. It was a crucial lesson, but not one I can share with you right now, because it went on to form the key idea around which my second book Blakes Road is being built, and to share it would be to spoil that.
With the ever growing interest in the weekly session posts I write for FlashBrighton, last night I compiled the best of them - those written since early February of 2009 - into a pdf and added to it to the writing page of this site. You can find it here.
I am about to post this letter to my MP, the representative for Brighton Kemptown Des Turner. I would encourage you all to write similar letters to your MPs.
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Dear Mr. Turner,
I’ve seen many things online over the years but few as impressive as this simple and unassuming webpage:
http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/
Not because of irony, or some boring 404 gag or anything as banal as that; I just love it. It’s so graceful, elegant & simple, and there’s something about its visual & textual language that’s near Biblical, in a quietly Puritanical way. Clearly Random House are as keen to publish quality online content as they are to publish traditional content.
I sincerely hope that dead links & cyber backwaters like this are never lost from the Internet; it would become a much poorer place without them.
When I am writing, I am constantly aware of a contract that exists between the reader and I. It goes like this:
It’s a simple contract but works well because it leaves both parties free to pursue their goals whilst putting the onus of quality on the other, thus ensuring that they are both playing at the height of their game; and it also opens both parties up to criticism but only to a degree that is fair, with each party regulating for him or herself what constitutes ‘fair’.
It’s fine to take anyone’s idea you want and just use it without permission.
Well that’s it, that’s all I really wanted to say, but one has to justify these things, right?
i have always changed my life to account for climate change as soon as i discovered that i was contributing to the problem.
on the morning of monday 12th october 2009 i was invited down to the bbc’s brighton studios to take part in a live radio interview with bbc radio wiltshire’s mark o’donnell about about the book ‘swindon orbital‘. afterwards the whole show was released on the bbc’s iplayer and i ripped out the 10 minute section containing the interview for myself.
if you would like to hear it, you can find it here.
until today, this blog has been dedicated to the right angle and all its various causes & effects. whilst this still strongly remains a interest of mine it has, to my mind, become so deeply associated with this blog that i have found it hard to write anything else here, meaning that a plethora of what-would-have-been interesting posts have gone unwritten over the course of the last summer, and this blog has stagnated as a result.
i started the year seeing myself as a visual artist with an interest in the right angle but i seem to have changed into a writer with a broader set of interests instead. this was, i feel i should point out, unplanned but has happened and does seem to be continuing and strengthening, and it is only right that this blog reflect that.
so, whilst i plan to continue writing about right angles - as in the case of my ongoing and yet uncompleted history of the right angle - i am going to untether the sails and let this blog sail in the direction that it’s captain seems to be heading in: textwards.