November 4, 2012
'If the oak before the ash, then we'll only get a splash. If the ash before the oak, then we're sure to get a soak.' I blame the rhyme for the way I always felt about ash trees. It wasn't that I disliked them, only that I never felt the same warmth towards them that I felt for oaks or hawthorns or limes. Somehow, they became associated with dismal, depressing days. I've always taken ash trees for granted, but since the news that they may now fall victim to an invasive fungus in the UK that has already killed 90 per cent of Denmark's ash trees, I've been looking at them afresh.
The oak usually beats ashes into leaf and the ash usually sheds its green before the oak. Their wood has been used for all kinds of furniture and tools for centuries, but it isn't as showy as walnut or mahogany, so it's never been as prized. Ash trees aren't iconic as oaks and holly are, they don't produce berries or acorns, but taking the dogs for a walk from one village to the next last week, I realised how many there are and what a huge gap they would leave. They shushed with the breeze, their optimistically upturned branches waving green frond-like leaves like a crowd come to cheer the Queen. How I shall miss them if they all go!
Oaks and horse-chestnuts are also under threat, and of course, I shall mourn them if they die, but if the ashes are wiped out, our future summers will be dull and dismal indeed.
Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
October 28, 2012
Last week, I reviewed Anna Karenina. This week it's Looper. Let's face it, you don't expect a Bruce Willis film to be sensitive or intellectual. What you go to see is wham-bam action, witty one-liners and (if you're lucky) clever plot twists. Looper had the first, but was rather short on the rest.
The plot puts a new spin on the Sci Fi time-travel cliché about someone returning to the past and being killed by their younger self, and the way Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as the young Bruce Willis...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Reviews
October 21, 2012
I wasn't sure that I wanted to see the latest adaptation of Anna Karenina. (SPOILER ALERT!) I've never read Leo Tolstoy's novel, but previous adaptations that I've seen on TV and film have shown it's all too easy for them to descend into depression and hysteria along with the eponymous heroine. However, this version, starring Keira Knightley as Anna, was creative, subtle and beautiful. The film is 'staged' in a theatre. A bedroom set becomes a real bedroom, the flies become a train platfor...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Reviews
October 14, 2012
I've just joined Good Reads. I've seen it recommended in several places, so I thought I'd give it a try. So far, I haven't done much with it, I haven't even included a proper profile. The trouble was, I got caught up in rating all the books I've read in my chosen genres. It was amazing (not to say scary) how many I can't remember properly, not because I didn't like them, but because it's been so long since I read them. I will take a thorough look at the site and no doubt enjoy all that it...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Reviews
October 7, 2012
Writers are lucky compared with those in most creative professions. We don't have to wait for anyone to give us a job to keep working. If actors are rejected at auditions they can't perform unless they want to declaim Shakespeare at the supermarket check-out. Singers can practise in the bath, but their performances are ephemeral and gone forever along with the bathwater. Artists can continue painting whether anyone buys their work or not, providing they have money for materials and enough...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
September 30, 2012
I had news this week that my story, 'Job Satisfaction' has been accepted for Plasma Frequency, a new magazine of speculative fiction. I'm not going to get rich on the proceeds, but it's great to be seen in a new publication. Who knows where this magazine might be in 10 years' time? It could be a respected SFWA approved market, have vanished completely, or have a cult following.
Submitting to a new, or relatively new, magazine can be chancey. Will the editors deliver what they promise? Wi...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
September 23, 2012
When you return to a place after a gap of years it can seem smaller and far more ordinary than how you remembered it. The same applies to re-reading books. The imaginative tale you remembered can now seem derivative, the creative prose clichéd. It's disappointing, and might deter you from revisiting these old 'friends', however there is an upside. Books that you once found incomprehensible or uninteresting might now reward you if you read them again. When I first read 'Ping' by Samuel Becke...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
September 17, 2012
Two weeks away on holiday equals two weeks' worth of emails to sift through. Amongst the Amazon, Facebook and Linked In updates I found several pieces of good news.
There was an offer from the organisers of the Frome Festival Short Story competition to send my entry to a magazine publisher. The proof of the Bridge House Science Fiction anthology, Otherwhere and Elsewhen, arrived, so it shouldn't be long now before it's available. Lastly, my story, 'Salvage', has been accepted by Daily Scie...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
August 29, 2012
I'll soon be off to beautiful Cornwall again. As well as pasties and clotted cream teas, I'm looking forward to rambles down narrow lanes gathering blackberries, going for a hack over the downs and the exhilaration of walking the coastal path. When I get back to the car or the holiday cottage, I'll make notes. In the past, these have come in handy for all kinds of things–characters, descriptions, plots–even poems. One Cornwall-inspired sonnet, won me second prize in Northampton Literature...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley. Posted In : Inspiration
August 19, 2012
When you have to juggle writing with a day job it can be hard to find time to focus. I've often seen it recommended that you should turn down invitations and become a virtual recluse if that's the only way you can make time to write.
Of course, you need to be disciplined, but if you shut yourself off from the world you lose touch with it. Not only do you risk forgetting how to make conversation (and therefore how to write dialogue), but you can all too easily lose perspective. If nothing...
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Posted by K. S. Dearsley.
