Blog: Personal

Check out my lush new business cards, designed by the super-talented (and rather sexy) Susie McConnell at Firebrat. I love them! Luckily you don’t have to go out with a graphic designer to have a fancy business card – Moo do lush typewriter and vintage notebook designs. Let me know if you want to order any, as I can wangle you a 10% discount.

Offline February is over, and I am back online! Observe this visual representation of being back on Facebook/Twitter: I missed reading about people’s lives as lived online, but I kept myself busy. Things I did: Listened to a lot of 90s hip-hop. Wrote a short story for Algebra, the new lit-mag app from the Tramway. Read eight books (mostly trashy). Had new stories/poems published in Parcel, Gertrude, and Frostwriting. Found the notes my father made for a novel he never wrote. Went on a…

British people are polite. We say please and thank-you and get very uptight when other people don’t say please and thank-you. I have visited eight countries in the past few years, and the only place where people were more polite than me was Japan (+1 manner skills to me). So I strut around, thinking that I really appreciate it when other people hold doors for me or give me presents or drop my name, thinking that I always send thank-you cards…

Dear drunk dudes in bars, You know those times I go to the bar and leave my girlfriend sitting by herself looking all cute? And you know how sometimes you come over and sit next to her and get all like ‘awright doll, how yeh doin’?’ Well, I get that. She looks adorable and fascinating, which is why I go out with her. And you know how I come back from the bar and I put down the drinks and…

My mother, like most parents, thinks her children are miracles. Everything that I do is not an achievement on my part, but just a manifestation of that in-born miraculous nature. When I graduated with my undergraduate degree, I was just doing exactly what she knew I would do. When I graduated with distinction with my Masters degree, she was unsurprised. When I won the New Writers Award or the Gillian Purvis Award or blah blah blah, she would have expected…

I’ve tried desks. They don’t work for me. I resist sitting down at the desk. I resist going to the desk. Sometimes I resist even going into the room where the desk is kept. But I have a little white MacBook and the battery lasts for hours and so I carry it around the house with me. Portability means no excuses. Say I spend the morning working at the kitchen table. By coffee-time (which, as you know, is around 11am)…