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Writing Slopes, by Neil McGowan

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I’ve finally managed to obtain something I’ve wanted for a while – an antique writing slope, almost identical to the one below: It’s probably taken a couple of years of looking to find the one I want, at the right price, and in the right condition. I must’ve become a bit of an expert on them since I started looking. I didn’t want to buy new – part of the appeal, for me, as the history attached to it. I also didn’t want a restored version, for similar reasons. But I did want something that was more than just a pile of broken bits – surprising how hard it was to find something to match the image in my head. I want to put my own stamp on it, give it my own twist to make it mine. I was also looking for a chance to flex my woodworking skills, and challenge myself with something different from the usual DIY or garden furniture. My most complex woodworking project so far has been a guitar, which I built many years ago; starting a family and changing jobs has meant less time
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My Top Ten Books of 2023

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  As we head towards Christmas and the end of the year, it's time for me to reflect on my favourite books of 2023. There are still lots of books on my TBR pile but I do have a top ten to tell you about. And not all of them are crime fiction! So, in no particular order...  The Mother by TM Logan You wake up, your husband is dead and YOU are the prime suspect. Your children have been taken away, your life sent into freefall - and yet you can barely remember anything about the night you lost everything. Ten years later you are released from prison. What do you do? Do you accept your fate, your conviction and leave your children to be raised by someone else? Or do you stop at nothing to find out the truth about what  really  happened that night - and to get your family back? I absolutely loved this from TM Logan! A couple of his books have been made into TV adaptations and this one will be joining them soon. End of Story by Louise Swanson YOU KNOW HOW THIS STORY BEGINS Once upon a time
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Artificially Intelligent or Intelligently Artificial? by Debbie Bennett

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(c) Mikko Paananen, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons AI. Artificial Intelligence. I’m sure there have been many posts here and elsewhere on this topic as we all become more and more outraged about how the machines are taking over the world. People are polarised in opinion – either it frees us all to be artists, or Skynet is on the horizon and before we know it, Arnie will be hunting us down!  Actually, the first thing I think of when I hear the term is the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence . A hauntingly beautiful modern retelling of Pinocchio where a little robot longs to be a real human boy. I love this film. But then I have fond childhood memories of a beautifully-illustrated hardback book of the Pinocchio story and used to dress up as the Blue Fairy when I was little! But AI in writing is a relatively recent thing. I suspect it’s been around for years, quietly scraping content from the internet without our knowledge or permission. A
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Seasonal Hope and Cheer (Cecilia Peartree)

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  In this post I bring you a little taste of hope, and an example of the joys of working as a team. In case you are wondering where I’ve gone and who has hi-jacked my blog, I must confess to having watched a few seasonal movies, mostly terrible ones, in my efforts to stay awake long enough to complete the blanket I’ve been knitting since last February. So some of the spirit of Christmas might have infected me despite my long years of resisting it. I’m writing this 5 th December post on the 4 th , which goes against my earlier resolution not to leave it to the last minute in future after being out of action at the exact time when I had intended to write the April one. This month I planned it like this, because I wanted to report back on the Christmas Fair that took place at our local community centre over last weekend. Of course, I had half-expected things to go wildly wrong at that event, and to have a tale of disaster and mayhem to tell here. However, not only did things not go w
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A writer’s year by Sarah Nicholson

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December is a time for looking back and although I’ve written a few Christmas letters in my time reminiscing about what we have been up to as a family I have never looked back at what I have achieved as a writer in the past 12 months. To be honest I tend to play down many of my writing exploits, but with my memoir about to be published in the New Year it’s time for a change, a time to be bold and update my writing CV. In January I discovered a new opportunity writing for Paddler Press magazine .  My piece based on Silence was accepted on January 6th and the magazine arrived all the way from Canada on the 28th.   According to my diary I was also very busy writing lots of 100-word stories for my memoir. At the beginning of February I wrote a 100 flash for the Retreat West monthly microfiction competition.   By the end of the month, I was crowned the winner and I took home the People’s Prize as voted for by the readers. March was a month where life took on a new direction. I
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Ho ho ho! Gifts of the Season -- Umberto Tosi

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 Happy Holiday from your AE Santa! NOTE: portions re-posted from 2015: Musings of a undercover Santa: The thing about being a writer is that we're forever superimposing narratives onto our experiences, even the most mundane. Of course, to tell stories is human. Writers just get deeper into that stream of consciousness. Our imaginary hypertexts can seem compelling, even brilliant, until we sit down and try to write them coherently with a semblance of style. Then they jackknife, ideas askew as a wrecked train. Although I didn't get around to making a story out of them for a long time, my thirty straight days as a Macy's Department Store Santa Claus in downtown San Francisco were like that – mental voice-over video-cams running the whole time, a multi-dimensional theme park ride that stays with me, a Yuletide LSD trip, during which I teetered on the edge of delusion just to see how far it could go. Writing is a kind of madness, after all. T'was the month before Christmas a
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Blindness in Gaza -- Peter Leyland

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Blindness in Gaza*   I have been taking The Observer, an English Sunday newspaper, for as long as I can remember, and my story arises from this. When I first began teaching History in Guildford in November 1973 I was asked by my 12-13 year old pupils to explain to them about the Yom Kippur War. This had just broken out when the Egyptians and Syrians had invaded Israel in an attempt to recapture The Golan Heights which they had lost in the 6 Day War of 1967 against the same enemy. I was a recent graduate in English Literature rather than a historian, but to help explain the conflict I spread pages of The Observer, then a broadsheet paper, across the blackboard. I did my best to tell them what I knew.    The Observer was a newspaper which did then and still does favour the liberal arts. I was trusting it then to give both me and my pupils a fair and unbiased view of what was happening in the Middle East. Fifty years later this November in The Observer I read Kenan Malik’s Comment and Ana
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