Updates and GOLD and First Lines.

Blimey, that was quick!

Have just sent in my last assignment for the Open University Advanced Creative Writing course. One more module next academic year and I gets me a degree and that.

It's been a very formative year for my writing. Last year was really about experimentation: whereas this year has been honing and fine-tuning and developing my own style and voice and tone and all those kind of things.

The last assignment was to hand in the first 4000 words of a 'novel'. My 'novel'.

It's not the novel I thought I was going to write, but darn it if it ain't shaping up quite nicely.

Think I'm going to have to finish it - the three people who've read the first chapter all want to read more, so I can't disappoint my public now, can I.

Well I can, as this blog is a long-winded way of saying I am going to be doing a lot of writing, but not as much blogging - although, to be fair, my blogging is a tad sporadic at best.

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Anyways, instead of reading things by me, go and buy some proper books. Like Gold by Dan Rhodes, which is my favourite novel at the moment. A charming story set in a seaside village in beautiful, raggedy Pembrokeshire, with lots of beer and walking and biscuits and funny old men and the deep complications of relationships and the importance we place on traditions and GOLD and tinned spaghetti on toast and watching contact lenses dance in a variety of styles and pub quizzes...

It captures all of that in a very humourous manner, and yet as you turn the last page OHMYGOD. I love the two other Rhodes books I've read, Anthropology and Timoleon Vieta Come Home: Gold takes all the humour and pathos and wonder from both of these and spraypaints it all into shining sunlight smiles and rainy winter days.

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Oh, and one more thing, check out the brilliant Literary mag The First Line, which I've found a wonderful source of comfort and inspiration over the last year or so.

If you like the kind of short story that I write, then you *might* want to look out for their forthcoming Summer 2011 edition. Just saying, like ;)

Jamiex