Author Archives: James - Page 47
Themself – now available on kindle
Today is publication day for my latest book Themself - Confessions of an open university creative writing student. As the sub-title suggests it is about my experience of studying creative writing with the OU. Although Themself goes further than that and includes the things I've learnt from my experience of writing, studying and self publishing. Themself - Confessions of an open university creative writing student You'll find some of the content in Themself here on the blog, but only about half of it. You'll also find that I've edited it since I first published it on the blog. Although I've tried hard to keep to the original character of the contemporary blog posts about how I was feeling. The bits I've updated are where I'm summarising what I've learnt. There is also a lot of new material. All of the stories and poems…
What if? by Randall Munroe [Book Review]
What If? : Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is just fab. It made me laugh out loud several times. Also science, lots of lovely science with nice twists. Well I say nice, but really evil twists. That's what makes it funny and interesting. What if? by Randall Munroe English: Last panel of the xkcd webcomic "Philosophy". On the xkcd site, it displays with the tooltip "It's like the squirt bottle we use with the cat." (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Randall Munroe is best known for the xkcd comics (and if you haven't read them then you really must). 'What if?' comes from an offshoot of the popularity of xkcd. People have been sending Randall their 'what if?' questions and Randall has been off to do some research to answer…
RK Gold – an Author Interview
RK Gold, the author (picture credit: RK Gold) The first author interview of 2016 is with RK Gold, an award winning author of magical realism. RK Gold is an American from Buffalo NY and has studied creative writing at university. RK Gold writes poetry and short stories as well as longer works. RK Gold - the interview How long have you been writing for and what made you start writing? I began writing when I was in elementary school, but it was more talking about writing and then occasionally jotting down a story. It was not until February 2014 (the final semester of my senior year) did I realize it was all I wanted to do. I wrote my first book in March that year, though I still have not done anything with it; it's my first book so I am…
2015 Top Ten Posts on Themself
During 2015 Themself had 14,500 visitors who viewed 22,640 posts/pages according to the Jetpack stats. The 2015 Top Ten Posts are a bit different from the 2014 Top Ten Posts, although there are some in both lists. I've commented in the list to show you last year's placing for the older posts. I've written 128 new posts & 1 new page in 2015, which added 81,509 words. That's enough for a novel. I also forked the games and military history bits over to which has had a number of unique posts. The originals are still here on Themself, but as I get round to it I will be setting the SEO so that they canonical version is on Hot Blood & Cold Steel. That's another thing new in 2015, I started using the Yeast SEO plugin late in the year.…
Looking Back at 2015
I posted some new year's resolutions for 2015 last January. So I feel I owe you an update on how I got on with them. It's progress but not full achievement. I made three resolutions 1. Write more 2. Read more paper books 3. Have a healthier lifestyle 1. Write More I'm not sure that I can count this as an unqualified success. I set some specific measures that I haven't fully achieved. However I did meet some of them, and I managed to write a lot of blog posts too. I was consistently blogging three times a week until I got promoted at work and started a 60 point level 3 undergraduate course with the open university. This is a partial success. I'm parking it for now though. I've got another 60 pointer (but only at level 2) to do…