How to Get Published, for Dummies
2007-11-26 21:43:07
Dear Benji,
Thank you for submitting “This is the majesty of Dunstable.” Your poetry
is now being reviewed by our editorial staff for acceptance into the
International Library of Poetry and Poetry.com’s Open Amateur Poetry
Contest, as well as the Poets Choice: Rate My Poem Contest.
We will send you a follow-up email upon acceptance to our various
contests. This process should only take about two weeks.
But fear not, gentle reader, for if you cannot wait (or indeed afford) to read my masterpiece in the prestigious pages of Poetry.com’s latest Compendium of Truly Great and Outstanding Verse* then I can offer you an exclusive peak at my, no doubt, winning entry right here…
In fact, why not consider making your own entries to this reputable and world renowned competition? It costs you absolutely nothing (that’s right! Nothing!) to enter. Your poem is all but guaranteed to be published - it’s a dead cert! The only things you’d ever nee
Read more: Dummies
Portraits
2007-11-23 20:13:32
The box. The box is a metaphor in itself. It doesn’t exist in any tangible sense, but oh, what a metaphor. What a cliché. Open the cliché and BANG.
There it is.
The past preserved - buried, successfully forgotten about. Hermetically sealed scents and sounds of years ago, an album of feelings locked away because they were so damn heavy. They were so raw, so sore.
We look so young. You look so beautiful, so little different I realise now, after all this time spent forgetting. You cover your mouth in nearly every photo, but your eyes are always staring at me. Into me. They stare and do not blink. I look thinner, more stupid maybe. There’s a simpleness to the way I glance at the world that I can’t place, as if I’ve seen none of it before. We really do look so young. I can see something burning behind my eyes. There’s an urgency, like a heartbeat, heavy and furious beneath bones afraid to contain it. Something that isn’t there anymore. It’s in e
Read more: Portraits
A Note from Patrick Wolf
2007-11-30 09:16:34
Regular readers might have detected a slight fondness for a young musician named Patrick
on this blog in the past.
Now I’m not a groupie, honest. Nor am I an obsessive. Not really. I’m just someone who loves his music, marvels at his brain, and was happy enough to meet him earlier this year after a gig in Camden. Admittedly I was a little drunk, still deaf from the loud Glaswegians on immediately before him and a little excitable, but I’m sure Patrick just thought I was charming when I rubbed his arm for half an hour (drunk) whilst shouting his name from one foot away (deaf) and then all but headlocked him into a photo with me (excited).
Yeah. Patrick, I really am very very sorry about that. I already seem to developing a reputation as a creepy stalker.
So, when I found out his recent tour brought him to a charming little Canadian city called Vancouver (again, a place you might have heard mention of here before), I bullied a friend of mine there into at
Read more: Patrick Wolf
Stables Market. Gone.
2007-12-06 19:54:50
They certainly didn’t waste any time. Having only seen it today I’ve no idea when it began.
“You Maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
Retro World is gone. The arch the surplus army store squatted in has been demolished. Those insane little stalls, deep within the catacombs that sold everything from shop dummy limbs to old coins to military buttons, Britpop badges and 1920s cricket bats now no longer exist. This is because the catacombs now no longer exist. Stables Market
was Mos Eisley, Diagon Alley and the unseen vaults of the TARDIS all in one. It was one of my favourite parts of London. But now it’s all gone, forever. Irretrievably. It’s just rubble, bricks and dust.
The new Stables Market
Maybe the proposed redevelopment won’t look so bad. Maybe it will retain the character of the original Victorian market whilst improving accessibility, functionality and catchment, just as they say. Maybe it won’t be j
Tim gets festive
2007-12-17 18:11:21
Force restart
2007-12-17 05:43:55
>_ Crash.
Too full of crap. Too many problems. Too much running (at any one time). It just doesn’t work anymore. This is a permanent fatal error? Type 0. Type more. Backup (selectively). Uninstall. Empty the trash with nostalgia. Those silly attachments: those unread files, unopened folders. “That’s made some space.” All that space - all that vast empty space just waiting to be filled - pictures, ideas, words and memories. Reinstall. Wait. Watch the clock, the date. Don’t look at the trash. Suddenly all is a new version.
>_ “You shouldn’t have any memory problems now.”
Close the laptop as if it were a box. Outside, back in the past, there are twinkly lights lit up like synapses, memories wrapped in plastic like the smell of old tinsel on real and severed trees. Frozen sparks. Inside there is candlelight, untroubled by the wind - bright, orange, steady. Safe. We are in its glow, months before closing time. Every sip is a sentence, every
Read more: Force
Major regression in P minor
2007-12-11 19:27:38
I can’t think of a metaphor for finding old albums you used to listen to as a teenager. There must be one. Time travel, maybe. No, that’s not a metaphor. That’s what they do. Old teenage albums - dog-eared cardboard CD covers and sticky coffee-ringed plastic cases - they’re metaphors in themselves.
It’s a Fire - these dreams have passed me by.
Ten years ago, unsurprisingly, it was 1997. 1997 and 1996, which was the year before that. I was all black T-shirts and badly-bleached hair. I had a blue bedroom permanently thick with the scent of caked candlewax, belching out Portishead from every speaker. Beth Gibbons lived under my bed, didn’t you know? Playing Portishead now reminds me of paints - oil and acrylic, mostly, but white spirit is there too. The bedroom window view of a West London nowhere. Massive Attack’s Protection makes me smell glue. That’s smell, not sniff. The Boy Nextdoorâ„¢ with the pale blue eyes (Mr Ocean Colour Scene) who
Read more: Major
Anniversary
2008-03-04 02:41:38
Stupid things I remember about that love affair:
We met at a friend’s house. A huge house. I can’t remember the first thing who said to who, only that he was tired and wanted to go to bed, too polite to say so when I stopped him outside his room to talk to him. I had [...]
Read more: Anniversary
Why do I keep a blog?
2008-03-02 13:41:10
Saturday, 1st March, 1.43 pm - Highgate Wood
Deep in the wood. No one could find me here without looking for me. Who would look for me? Called Little One - wanted somewhere to go whilst strangers view my flat and remind me of what I’m doing, of where I’m trying to go, of how I [...]
Final Fantasy at The Forum
2008-03-01 05:12:10
Read more: Final
, Forum
, Final Fantasy
An earthquake in London?
2008-02-26 19:10:17
1.10am The room just literally shook. Very gently, but very definitely. At first, with my quaint little history of petit mal and red wine, I thought it was just me, but a few other people say they felt something too.
Was that an Earthquake in England just now?
1.23am The BBC is now reporting this
February Dregs
2008-02-19 08:23:26
Miss Havisham: burned to death
Potter about. Diddle on work website. Scratch as iTunes peppers the day. Stare at the piles of unpacked books and unsorted clutter and feel like the end of university all over again. Door goes. Ignore it. Hear key at the door. Throw on dressing gown. Politely suggest to buzzarding estate agent [...]
Read more: February
Blind Fate
2008-02-17 18:22:57
Sometimes when we don’t want to hear the answer to a question, it’s easier not to ask it.
It doesn’t make the answer any easier to hear of course, regardless of whether you ask.
Read more: Blind
Authors’ Cribs
2008-02-11 13:02:14
Read more: Cribs
Blog for life: You’re Not The Only One
2008-02-10 13:57:21
The pretty Miss Peach has come up with a practical exercise for people who love the sound of their own keyboards. A small group of bloggers are putting together a book of short pieces by, surprisingly, other bloggers all over the world.
You’re Not The Only One will be a collection of submissions from blogkeepers [...]
So long Camden Market
2008-02-09 21:42:32
The cynic in me can’t help but think that the recent fire will conveniently pave the way for a total redevelopment of the existing market as a whole.
Read more: Camden
, Market
The price of love
2008-02-07 05:09:48
Read more: price
The first time you discovered microphone feedback
2008-03-17 16:53:14
read. just read. sit back with your feet up on white sheets and listen to owen. don’t fear the reaper. read, as you turn the pages of a tobacco-yellowed 1960s paperback just to feel them between your fingers. pretend you’re rich. pretend this is all just a novel and you’re holding your breath because you’re [...]
Read more: microphone
In vino, ovis aries
2008-03-25 16:21:33
Leaving Highgate
2008-04-01 07:00:09
From the journal…
Friday 22nd: The first day of summer
I watch the leaves wave like abandoned wives beyond the glass as clouds roll majestically away behind them - moving west, always ever further west. I sit unblinking in my almost empty room and watch the world move, change and grow - the clouds cruising away like [...]
Read more: Leaving
How to stay sane in West London
2008-04-02 18:29:12
I’d like you to meet my new cellmate, Mr Chauncey Rapscallion. I found him lying facedown, half drunk behind the radiator. He says he likes it there, that the fluff is comfy and the heat stops him thinking about crows. He’s going to keep me company during the rest of my sentence. Tomorrow night we’re [...]
Pallett en Paris
2008-04-04 09:01:47
Read more: Paris
Beasts of the Finished
2008-04-21 17:20:14
13 chapters. 125,327 words. Two and a half years. And several grisly deaths, naturally.
How better to quietly celebrate actually finishing a novel for the first time, than listening to Together in Electric Dreams, drinking a can of Becks lager and gnawing a slab of chocolate?
I heard a cow cough
2008-04-23 04:43:55
a st andrews breakfast - two cups of coffee and two marlboro lights, looking at 9am as it trails warm pools in its cloak across the valley opposite. brecon has never looked so pretty as regina sings, and sings and sings, daffs dancing all around me like teenagers at a concert waving unsteady lighter flames. [...]
Best Unsigned Artist Find in the Whole of Today Award
2008-04-25 04:40:39
goes to Bark Cat Bark! Have a listen
Or a read
It’s good.
Read more: Unsigned
, Artist
, Whole
, Today
, Award
Nerd Joy
2008-05-18 17:55:12
At last reunited with my faithful Kodak cable, I’ve been able to finally transfer the many photos that have been sitting idle on my camera for the past few months since moving.
Tim Wandered Lonely As A Cloud
2008-05-20 18:05:45
Read more: Lonely
, Cloud
This is it, by childhood and home
2008-05-20 14:37:29
fingers tense against the gnarled oak chest, clutching at drawers, scrambling, fumbling inside. i am blind, my vision having died in darkened rooms, blindfolded by dirty sheets and smothered by anything without an edge. paper cuts my skin as i claw within the dark for clues, for something soft and warm, familiar, breaking my knuckles [...]
Morpheus reads Tim the Sheep
2008-05-23 05:50:15
It happened again, somehow more as teenage viscera than the teenage innocence of before but no less warm in effect. Only there were three this time. One was a boy - a cheeky, impudent libertine. Another was an ex, tacitly competing with me for the libertine’s attention’s. And one, curiously, was a girl.
I know. [...]
Read more: Sheep
How not to brainstorm a sitcom
2008-05-26 07:04:12
An actual transcript…
BEN: You know you said just go for the zeitgeist - y’know, like Amy Winehouse - take something old and make it modern?
LITTLE ONE: Yeah.
BEN: Like, put a modern spin on it by throwing in a few swear words and talking about being wasted?
LITTLE ONE: Uh huh.
BEN: So how about ‘The Two Ronnies’, only
Read more: sitcom
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