Anyone who has experienced entrapment might find a resonance with this tale. The genders of the victim and the perpetrator are deliberately undefined. Lascaux Flash Continue reading The Spider and the Wire Wool Madness
“Vague but exciting…” is what Tim Berners-Lee’s boss scribbled on his proposal to build the worldwide web before giving him the go-ahead to start work. If today’s research proposal rules had been in place, I’d argue it might never have happened because, in health services at least, the process has become one of regimented, formulaic stultification. One that squeezes the life out of innovative thinking and pins it to endless rigid forms that will only admit x-number-of-characters-including-spaces. By the time a project has been approved and funding granted, the thing that so excited and wired you up to the mains … Continue reading Where’s the ‘vague but exciting’ tick box for today’s research?
Originally posted on paulgapper:
Forgive the irony, but sometimes you’ve got to grab a cliché with both hands. In Brain Pickings Weekly recently, they summarised the findings of Daniel Goleman in his book The Hidden Driver of Excellence. In short, he concludes that, contrary to received wisdom, just practising a new skills for ten thousand hours isn’t enough to become a genius. It needs to be a deliberate attempt to improve, often concentrating on just one aspect at a time. (And to keep that open to feedback.) As Stanley Donen, director of Singing in the Rain has said, ‘Talent is… Continue reading Writing Fiction: Raising the Bar
Readwave is a well-presented site for writers-looking-for-readers and readers looking for something bite-sized to read. Anyone can post a piece of flash (800 words – longer pieces have to be broken up) and your stats are clocked up next to each entry. While I’m not sure that a ‘read’ always means what it says, you do at least know someone looked and that your treasured bit of prose isn’t all on its lonesome any more. Upload is a simple copy/paste process with boxes for title and short description, and a place to put tags. There is a limited range of … Continue reading Readwave and Scribd: places for writers & readers
They are everywhere, aren’t they, those annoying little intrusions? Visual shorthand for the inarticulate; signposts for the emotionally illiterate; and evidence, as if more were needed, of the effect of the internet on our increasingly soggy brains. Or are they? Recently, a dignified row broke out on an academic forum because a student had used a smiley in a thread dedicated to formal critiquing of submitted work. The argument was that, as the course was about writing, writing should be the medium by which ideas and views should be communicated, and this should be constructed so as to convey maximum … Continue reading Emoticons: regressed cave paintings or evolved punctuation?
I had just started writing this when I saw that the author of Digging Deep, which followed mine on EDF, had done exactly the same thing. His account of the genesis of his story lets us into the history of it, the emotional drive, and also the subtext that, for better or for worse, is so often implied rather than exposed in very short fiction. Aaron Polson wrote in his blog about the intensity of feeling that underpinned Digging Deep because he wanted us to know, I imagine, how deeply he felt that connection. It is important to him and … Continue reading ‘No Animals …’ – the story behind the story
An SF piece in Every Day Fiction today and not for the claustrophobic: ‘[Neela] squinted into the matt black dark, wishing her optical enhancers would come-the-hell on line. She pushed up, kicked; no movement. “Shit!” [She] raised her legs, then both arms, braced her body to test the surfaces above and below. She made a snow-angel. Smooth, top and bottom — but where were the sides? Why couldn’t she feel the sides?’ Continue reading ‘No Animals Were Harmed …’: a deadly reality TV show
There’s been a right old rumpus going on via twitter, Facebook, blogs, and latterly, the national news here in the UK, over a Halloween Fright Night offering by Thorpe Park. This is called ‘Asylum’ and features ‘scary mental patients’, actors who chase and threaten visitors through a maze set up to look like a hospital. The issue, that a proportion of people don’t see, is the stigmatising association of mental illness with horror, fear, danger, and threat. Not to mention the idea that being scared witless by ‘mental patients’ apparently qualifies as entertainment. The whole back-story is here, if you’re interested, and … Continue reading Mental Health and Fiction: striking the balance
If you’ve been following the Thorpe Park ‘Asylum’ debacle, this open letter from the Royal College of Psychiatrists may help illuminate the problem. Thorpe Park has, all along, been asked to change, not to close, its ill-advised attraction; so far with no response other than bland platitudes. One hopes this latest reasoned request will finally get through to them. http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mediacentre/pressreleases2013/openlettertothorpepark.aspx For catch-up, much of the debate can be found here where onward links further fill out the debate. The twitter thread, #AsylumNO, has attracted considerable support and inevitably its detractors. Some of these I have found to be reasonable people who, after many … Continue reading Thorpe Park: Royal College of Psychiatrists’ open letter
I should have taken a screenshot but I intended to post this clip so I copied it for pasting. The last sentence of the first paragraph along with a summarising link, has been removed [2 below which now points elsewhere]. See Halloween: What’s wrong with evoking the “scary mental patient” stereotype? for an update. Thorpe Park is a theme park in Chertsey, Surrey, England, UK. After demolition of the Thorpe Park Estate in the 1930s, the site became a gravel pit. Thorpe Park was built in 1979 on the gravel pit which was partially flooded, creating a water-based theme for the park. The park’s first large roller … Continue reading Thorpe Park: the tricky wiki bit they removed
Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill 