One chapter completed, one manuscript rejected - All in a day’s work.

Great night in Nottingham @fiveleavesbooks.bsky.social for Will Rees' debut book.

My winning review for the Student Book Review Competition, run in collaboration between Everybody's Reviewing and the University of Leicester's Centre for New Writing: "On Agoraphobia" by Graham Caveney everybodysreviewing.blogspot.com/2025/06/revi...

The attendees are served their cream teas

My next stop @markcousinsfilm.bsky.social

“[A] moving, meditative and, at times, improbably comic series… The storytelling is first class, as is the darkly atmospheric sound design…” @fionasturges.bsky.social @financialtimes.com review of Half-Life this morning! Cc @joedunthorne.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/1a20...

Take some time out to consider "looking" www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzTG...

"It is the grit in the oyster that makes the pearl. And I am that grit!" Ian Shaw playing Robert Shaw playing Quint.

Last night the author Corinna Edwards-Colledge and myself engaged with the difficult topic of grief and loss. It was a surprisingly upbeat conversation with some great questions from participants. We celebrated the beautiful illustrations and lessons we took from loss. #asktheauthor #books

Eimear McBride comes to Leicester @faberbooks.bsky.social

Carla Denyer accuses Labour of failing to challenge Reform UK’s net zero ‘lie’

"Walking down the street at times eclipsed by trees." Cole Swensen (2004)

Ben Street on a collection of essays that collapses seeing and saying

"The plush / red flesh the fat / sac of seeds" Katha Pollitt

Every time I read a book of the collected letters between two writers, the book always ends the same way -- one of the writers dies and the letters stop.

"We shelter inside movies, at the movies. Cinema architecture as a Cold War topography: bunker, safe space, crypt." Ian Penman, 2023

"Reality had a way of coming back..." #memoir

distressing that the only people I see writing in notebooks in public (which I do a lot) seem to have a psychiatric illness

"Old Oslo" has been published by Cigarette Fire Magazine. cfiremag.wixsite.com/home/copy-of...

Every writer knows writing is rewriting and that process only really ends when the manuscript is wrenched from their exhausted and numb hands.

Last night near the bar at the Writers' Trust Awards a friend said to another person, "Hey have you met Michael?" and the person said, "We talked but we never met."

November

The research is coming together

you might think I'm a poor distributor of space for not including the top of this person's head, but the original sketch does have the whole head; however there are words I scribbled near the head that I'd rather not include, a confession too private for this forum

two attempts to catch a face