Words and Music at MILK Café is one of Scotland’s longest running open mic nights, which I co-host with fellow poet Gayle Smith. It was founded by writer and former reporter Pamela Duncan, poet Janet Paisley and poet Hughie Healy in 1990. They met every month in Sammy Dow’s pub in the south side of […]
About a week ago as part of National Crime Reading Month, I attended a talk about writing Historical Crime. Three authors, Matthew Booth, J. C. Briggs and Deborah Swift spoke about historical crime and how they went about their writing. As an author, I find the writing process fascinating and I’m always looking for advice […]
The dissertation is something that has been on the horizon for any student. I had wanted to do a creative writing dissertation since I knew it was an option and I was lucky that I managed to get in. I wanted to challenge myself. Instead of working on a project I had already started or […]
It was 2009. When I noticed some of the cool girls in my small primary school had made a Bebo account, I thought I’d give it a shot. I had fun with it, but I drifted from Bebo to Facebook when I started secondary school as more people were using it. In 2014, I became […]
Book signing is the affixing of an author’s signature to a page in their book, usually the title page or endpaper. Sometimes authors will sign bookplates and affix them to the page instead of directly writing on the page. J.K. Rowling has a hologram to accompany and authenticate her signatures. Bookshops and Libraries will often […]
When reading a great book you will always come across a few lines or paragraphs that will make you pause for a moment, they will make you laugh, cry, gasp, look inwardly at yourself, and say ‘wow’. These parts of the book are often quoted again and again by other readers in book reviews and […]
I Submitted My Poems and Prose To 100 Different Places… Now What? For the past two years, I’ve taken part in a challenge I’ve named the 100 Rejections Challenge. I’ve explained a bit more about it and my reasons for undertaking such a challenge in another blog post, but for the purposes of this one, […]
The Lord of The Rings The Lord of the Rings, written by J. R. R. Tolkien was published over the course of a year from 29 July 1954 to 20 October 1955, in three volumes. The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, produced by New Line Cinema and released in three instalments as The Lord of the Rings: The […]
It’s August 2018: the worst month of my life. My paternal grandparents died of cancer a week apart, and at each funeral I had to see my estranged father and his wife. I haven’t had a relationship with them since 2012. My love of karaoke was being strangled by the dismal pubs I was placed […]
I’ve been collecting Literary and Science themed coins for the last several years. I collect circulated and uncirculated 10p, 50p, and £2 coins from the U.K., Gibraltar, Isle of Man, Guernsey, and Bailiwick of Jersey. I decided on sticking to themes for my coin collections but unfortunately for my bank account, more and more coins […]