Sunday 14th June, 2015

Back at the beginning of May, I included all my social media links in a site diary. However, since then I’ve made a slight change to the way I use BookLikes [External Link] in that I only post quotes (when I remember to note some down) from things I’ve been reading. I decided to stop quoting my works in progress, and deleted the ones I’d already made, when I realised it was probably tantamount to spamming with stuff that no-one wanted to see on a site about published books.

I’ve also updated my languages page to include the fact that I’ve started learning Norwegian – and am now getting to a stage where I’m prepared to exercise it on occasion. I’ve also tweaked the details for my Welsh learning as I don’t put as much effort into that as I should, at the moment.

The change you’re more likely to notice about the place, however, is the announcement of another acceptance. Technically, Let’s Stay Together has been accepted for some time but the editor, Michael S Collins [External Link], has onyl recently been in a position to announce the anthology. So, here’s to The Christmas Book of Ghosts [External Link], to be published in aid of Chest Heart and Stroke Scotland [External Link]. They’re looking for submissions, so please take a look!

And news on my wordpress space! The Otherworld Gazetteer – based on (some more) behind the scenes notes for Hunting Unicorns – has come into being. So far, I have the about page [External Link] and the first entry [External Link]. The idea is to get a bit of a link-soup wiki-type thing going on, so fingers crossed that you all enjoy it. Of course, it goes without saying that I wouldn’t have decided to go with this particular project without having been talking to Djibril al-Ayad about The Future Fire [External Link], who picked up the original story in the first place. So, thank you, Djibril, for making me revisit notes and start making sense of them!

Monday 9th December, 2013

Yup, a slightly delayed weekly update. Only unusual in that I’m actually bothering to catch up instead of leaving it until next weekend. I have a good excuse, though. I spent the weekend in Oslo and decided to try being as telecom free as I could get away with.

Probably not all that surprisingly, it looks like I shall be attempting to add Norwegian to the other casualties on my language page. Does anyone have any recommendations for a website or android app? As you may have guessed from my use of SaySomethingIn [External Link] for Welsh and Duolingo for [External Link] French revision, I prefer something low cost or free that can be done in small chunks of time.

In Advent / Christmassy matters, the TTA Press [External Link] Advent calendar of free online fiction continues and the individual posts can be found here: [External Link] And for this weekend, I’ve decided to reuse the non-Christmassy Christmas hit from Freiheit, which I posted last year. Well, if nothing else, I still like the positive note:

The Importance of Words

This is a bit of an odd post and will start with a dose of life with Asperger’s – or, at least, how things are for me – and end up with a moment of (in)equality but I’m filing it under “language” because that is, basically, what it’s about.

Are You A Man Or A Mouse?

I have recently got involved with a women’s HEMA social group called Esfinges [External Link]. This is … Continue reading

Familiar Forms

So, here’s another post that springs from notes made while on my SaySomethinginWelsh [External Link] Bootcamp. Again, I’m going to be lacing in some Welsh examples – and some French as well. It will make sense when we get that far.

This is not just about the building blocks in the sense of having a vocabulary but to show some of the ways we can put these blocks together … Continue reading

Sunday 13th May, 2012

The first draft of my latest short story (current working title “An Honest Woman’s Child”) has been finished this week. I’ll be picking it up again next weekend. I’ve just been reading through some of The Gens stuff and I think I may actually be picking that up again this week.

You may have noticed a number of changes to the site this week. I’ve published a language related post and put up a language page. This also resulted in a bit of restructuring and then some slightly prettier (to me at least) adjustments to the layout. Anyway, returning to the language blog stuff, I think I have enough notes for another one (at some point) and I also may have the notes for another writing related one. Let me know what you think of “The Building Blocks” and the reshuffle.

The Building Blocks

Language – or, more precisely, words and vocabulary – is a difficult subject for me to talk about without getting into what they call “Linguistic Relativity” (Wikipedia: Linguistic Relativity [External Link]) and its environs. Even if you’re not familiar with language theory (and I’m not, I found out the term by accident when talking to someone cleverer than me) you’ll be familiar with debate about how language usage may or may not shape … Continue reading