Hello blog

I've neglected you terribly this year - a combination of working at artsHub, and spending so much of the energy I once would have devoted to blogging to Twitter and Facebook. My new year's resolution is to try and blog more frequently in 2013. Let's see how we go with that, shall we?


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Doing the Beats: Kerouac, sexuality and On the Road

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The long-awaited film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking novel presents the perfect opportunity to re-examine the lives of the Beat Generation, writes Richard Watts. It’s not hyperbole to say that the Beat Generation – a small coterie of writers who met up in New York City in the spring of 1944 – changed the world. Without their individual quests for personal freedoms – a quest for sex and drugs before there was rock and roll; a quest which spawned the western world’s first counter-culture, the beatniks – the hippy movement of the Sixties would never have happened, and punk would have been a quiet snarl rather than a global reaction. Of all the Beat Generation writers, Jack Kerouac, author of the autobiographical beatnik bible, On the Road , is unequivocally the most famous. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, to working class French-Canadian parents, Kerouac aspired to be a writer from a young age, though he was also a keen football player. Indeed, it ...
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Recent Call of Cthulhu work for the Miskatonic Repository

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The last time I posted on this poor, neglected blog was in August 2023, and a lot has happened since then - I've been meaning to blog about it for ages, but time got away from me. So, consider this post a quick catch-up on some of the creative work I've been doing over the last 12 months or so. I say quick, but given I'm an all or nothing kinda of guy, let's see how long I write for this evening and how much detail I go into, shall we? Last year, starting on Friday June 8th and continuing on over the weekend, I was a Guest of Honour at the innaugural Chaosium Con Australia ; a celebration of the games published by Chaosium Inc , a company whose work I've long admired and was once a regular contributor to, especially their game of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, Call of Cthulhu , which I first encountered in 1984; I also contributed significantly to Chaosium's Stormbringer and Elric! game lines, roleplaying games based on the work of enormously influential Englis...
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I wrote this piece in early 2020 on spec for the editor of the travel section of a nameless newspaper, having visited Ireland for the second time the previous year. Of course, shortly after I submitted it, COVID hit, and the editor said she could no longer publish it despite her liking for the piece. So, here it is on my blog - my first blog post since 2017! ***  Low clouds are rolling down the mountainside towards Teelin Harbour, where the River Glen meets the choppy waters of Donegal Bay. Outside, a chill wind is blowing but in the front bar of the Rusty Mackerel in County Donegal, the Guinness and the craic are flowing and it feels like the most welcoming pub in the world. Located in remote north-west Ireland, Teelin scarcely seems to qualify as a village. There’s no church that I can see, not even a shop; just the pub, an Irish language college, and a cluster of houses scattered along the road leading to the harbour. Wild fuchsias bloom along the road’s edge; in the green fi...
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