It’s been an up and down sort of a year. It started during a miserable winter lockdown and has ended with lighter-touch restrictions back in force and the threat of more (thanks, Omicron), but there has been quite a lot of good stuff in-between. I found a lovely wee flat and moved back to Glasgow, which was great (because however nice East Kilbride is, it’s not Glasgow) but then got new neighbours with some seriously anti-social dogs. The year was bookended by failing to get two writing/editing jobs that I wanted and that would have paid decent money, but on the other hand I finished the novel I was working on and had a few smaller pieces published.
Continue readingIt’s Chriiiiiiissstmaaaas!
23 Dec
The race for Christmas number one is being fiercely fought between Ed Sheeran & Elton John, and Ed Sheeran & Elton John (with Ladbaby). The tension is entirely bearable. However, although I’m not a fan of Ed or Elton, I am a bit pleased that Christmas number one will be something Christmassy this year. It rarely is.
Continue readingChristmas Mythbusting
22 DecI am hoping to get another post written before Christmas about my favourite Christmas pop songs, but with my current workload I’m making no promises. Fortunately, a couple of articles I wrote last month have just gone live, so you can enjoy those instead.
Continue readingSmashwords end of year sale 2021 – your go-to for free presents!
17 DecAll my books on Smashwords are free in the Smashwords End of Year Sale (as they usually are), and there are also many other books by inferior writers (kidding!) that you can get for free or cheap too.
BUT…
this year they’ve introduced the ability to give them as gifts! Meaning you can now give all of your friends and relations my books without spending your own cash. So what are you waiting for??
Have a lovely Christmas, and don’t forget to read.
Copped out
17 Nov
I was going to tell you all about my exciting time during COP26, complete with getting drenched on the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice march (otherwise known as ‘the big march’) and doing lots and lots of smiling with the eyes and gritting with the teeth while helping to host fringe events at my church (climate activists can be surprisingly bad at putting recycling in the recycling bin) but after a slow weekend recovering from all that, I find myself horrendously busy again.
Continue readingFried green spaghetti at the postage-stamp kitchen
14 Oct
The secret to building a successful blog following, they say, is to post consistently and frequently on the same subject. As regular readers know, I take about as much notice of that as I do of the darts results, so here is a subject I’m not sure I have ever covered before: a recipe!
Continue readingA Question of Emphasis
14 SepOne of the things my church has done to help people feel connected during the last year and a half of craziness is get a variety of members to do readings. They don’t give the reader’s name, but you often recognise the voices, which is nice, or you spend the entire reading going “whose voice is that?”, which is a little distracting. Anyway, as part of this I recently recorded a looong Bible reading for my church (Jeremiah 7, if you’re interested – it’s available on YouTube).
Continue readingA very long musical pause
2 AugYesterday, I went to a church watch party. This is not, as my older sister suggested, a meeting where people compare wristwatches, but a social occasion when friends gather to watch the livestreamed church service together.
Continue readingSmashwords Summer/Winter Sale
13 Jul
As it’s about halfway through July already, I should probably mention that throughout July my books are available for free at Smashwords, the e-book publisher-cum-shop. That doesn’t include all of the books I’ve written, but there are five available on Smashwords, including the perennial favourites Leda (shortlisted for the Scripture Union New Fiction Prize) and Office Life (and Death), a short story collection that includes the prize-winning story “A Recipe for Summer”.
The front page of Smashwords is dominated by raunchy ‘romance’ novels with half-naked muscly men on the covers (Who buys all that stuff? It’s really not my jam.) so you might want to go straight to my profile page instead. Or check out all the books in the sale (gazillions) and pick your way through the forest of shiny flesh.
(By the way, Smashwords is not confused about what time of year it is, it’s just that they have customers all over the world, so the summer sale to Brits is the winter sale to Australians.)
Make a little birdhouse in your soul
22 Jun
Although it pales in comparison to all the other horror and tragedy in the world, I had a little loss of my own this week. My budgie Roland died at the not very advanced age of four years. He had been sick for a while with what turned out out to be a liver complaint and died at the weekend, whether from the liver problem or from the stress of being medicated for the liver problem, who can say? (Death from stress is a common problem with birds and small animals in general – apparently the trick is to get them happy taking fluid from a syringe before they ever get ill. Something to remember for next time.) But this is not a sad post – I thought this was a good time to introduce you to the birds who have shared my life. They each had their own unique personality and colouring, kept me company in lonely times and cheered up the house. You can keep your cats and dogs; give me a bird any day.
Continue reading
K C Murdarasi 