It seems redundant to say that this year has not been what I expected. Unless you’ve been living in an isolated Amazon tribe (in which case I’d love to know how you’re reading this) you already know that 2020 was the year that said ‘no’. If you want to read about my experiences of the first lockdown, click the link. This winter lockdown feels much less new and exciting and much more of a dull, dark slog. However, life goes on regardless, so I will give you a quick review of my year as a whole.
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Being topical, accidentally or otherwise
19 Nov
One of the worries when you are writing for magazines is that your article will already be outdated by the time it’s published. It takes longer than you might think to put an edition of a magazine together, and articles are usually commissioned weeks or even months in advance. When I wrote my latest article for Christianity magazine about the effects of Covid-19 and associated lockdowns on vulnerable children throughout the world, we were in lockdown. By the time it was published, we were in that beautiful period of semi-normality between the first and second waves of the virus.
Continue readingSomewhere behind the rainbow
7 Jul
My latest piece in Premier’s Christianity magazine is about the effects on children of coronavirus and associated lockdowns around the world. If you think things are a bit pants here, what happens when you add in war, famine, pestilence and other assorted horsemen of the apocalypse? (And isn’t 2020 the most apocalyptic year you’ve ever experienced?? It certainly is for me.)
Continue readingThere was a young woman from Glasgow…
15 JunVery quick post to say that I have a limerick about lockdown published in On the Premises, a fiction e-zine I subscribe to. And they paid actual money, which is always helpful in these straitened times. If you want to read it, and the other winning entries, click below. If not, move on with your life.
Reducing your misery footprint
9 JunIt seems quite appropriate that, just after the statue of a man who profited from the slave trade is pulled down, my article on modern-day slavery comes out. I started writing it way before the incident that kicked off the recent protests, of course, and even before lockdown (although it’s been edited to reflect the new situation) but the problem has not gone away.
Continue readingThere are more slaves now than there have ever been.
Noir from the Bar
5 Jun
Some of you may have virtually come along to session five of Virtual Noir at the Bar when I was doing a reading from my unpublished novel The Sarcophagus Scroll. Virtual Noir at the Bar has been running all through lockdown, and 100 authors have taken part to date.
Continue readingJoin me at the (virtual) bar
27 AprThis Wednesday, 29th April 2020, I’ll be reading from my unpublished novel The Sarcophagus Scroll at Virtual Noir in the Bar.
Noir at the Bar is a crime fiction event that used to take place in pubs in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Newcastle, but has now moved to Zoom, like everything else in the world. Continue reading
Five stars for Robin Hood
22 Apr
I just got another lovely review for Why Everything You Know about Robin Hood Is Wrong, this time from Reader’s Favorite. As it was a five-star review, I now have the right to put their lovely badge on my book, if I like (as in the picture above) or buy some sheets of sticky badges for oodles of money. I think I’ll make do with the digital kind.
The woman who did the review gave me too much credit for original research, when WEYKARHIW was really just a synthesis of existing research. But a five-star review is a five-star review and I’ll take it, thank you very much.
If you want to read it, it is here: Reader’s Favorite review. Otherwise, you can just coo in admiration over the rather snazzy metallic-effect badge superimposed above.
Robin Hood Review
27 MarJust a quickie to say that there’s a new review of Why Everything You Know about Robin Hood is Wrong from Reader Views. The nice girl who reviewed it, Rachel Dehning, describes the book as being “akin to a humorous research project” which seems entirely fair. Sometimes it seems my whole life is akin to a humorous research project…
Anyway, I’ll let you read it in its entirety if you like:
WEYKARHIW review on Reader Views
And hopefully in the not-too-distant future I’ll be posting about my experience of self-isolation. Just like every other blogger in the world.
K C Murdarasi 