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The Oxfam Second-Hand Bookshop Dilemma Solved
I have a dilemma when it comes to second-hand bookshops. It’s daft, illogical, and perhaps even eco-unfriendly I know, but I worry that by buying a second-hand book I’m letting down its author, who will receive no payment from me for reading his or her work. Don’t get me wrong: I think second-hand bookshops are…
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An Open Apology To The Train Gods
Dear Sir or Madam, I apologise for the vagueness with which I’m addressing you; mythological literature is somewhat lacking in detail when it comes to determining just who is responsible for train-based transportation. Regardless, it is now clear to me beyond all reasonable doubt that you exist. A few weeks ago I informed a colleague…
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Review: The Elfish Gene, by Mark Barrowcliffe
The writer and journalist Mark Barrowcliffe seems to be many things to many people. To some, he is the author of the excellent D&D memoir, the Elfish Gene (Amazon.co.uk link). To others, he is the author of the vicious attack on D&D and its players, the Elfish Gene. To me, he is the man who…
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Why I Think “Free” News Could Be A Dangerous Thing
It’s just been announced that the London Evening Standard is to become a free paper (at present it’s 50p) and will most likely merge with it’s already free London Lite sibling. Now I have a number of issues about this, not least of which is that I like the Evening Standard and generally buy it…
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Three Pieces Of Creative Writing Advice For School Children
Marie Phillips (@mpphillips), author of Gods Behaving Badly, tweeted the following this morning: Preparing my first ever day of Creative Writing teaching for teens for First Story http://bit.ly/aCq9A Any advice welcome! Well I figured I’d bash my advice out, random and uninformed as it is, as a blog post, and then tweet that. So here…
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Strictly Week One: Thoughts and Musings
Last night, my other half and I finally got round to watching last Saturday’s Strictly Come Dancing (what the rest of the world calls “Dancing with the Stars”) on catchup. It eventually came down to a dance off between former tennis player Martina Hingis and former policeman and now TV presenter Rav Wilding, with the…
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On The Simularity Between Signing Queues and Bus Queues
One of the many misconceptions that people of other nationalities have of English people – Americans chief among them I’m afraid – is that we’re all so reserved and private that we’d rather die than exchange words with a stranger. Like most such stereotypes this is, of course, rubbish. It’s people like me from the…
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The Old New Labour Playbook
I’m not a fan of Margaret Thatcher by any means. Hell, while back in the 1980s my teen-aged self might not have considered her to be the Antichrist, I probably would have figured her as the Antichrist’s John the Baptist. Now, whilst still disagreeing (sometimes quite violently) with the probably the majority of what she…
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Saving Stone: Six Gods Sit Down To Spend Another Evening Roleplaying Really Badly
Back at the start of the year, I released in PDF form a free novella-length prequel to my novel Game Night. The 30,000 word novella, Saving Stone, told the tale of an earlier adventure by Game Night’s roleplaying gods and their poor, confused mortal “characters”. What are Saving Stone (and Game Night) about? Well here’s…
Jonny Nexus 