Monthly Archives: October 2013

II-V-I visual chord method

I’ve been trying to find a way to memorise 2-5-1 on the alto sax and I came up with this. If you’re into cycling through such chords, you may find this visual approach useful. N.B. the keys in small font

Posted in Movies and music

Pure evil… In my attic

Having spent the entire day fighting my way through rolls of fibre glass and rats, I finally discover THIS FIEND in the corner. It’s about four foot tall and smells of soot. Any takers?

Posted in Muse of the moment

Dirty Loops just hit me

Really excited finally to hear a new tune from Dirty Loops. I got to it when it had only had 300 views, an hour after uploading. Join me in watching it (again).

Posted in Movies and music

The library scene from Se7en

When I was chewing over the idea of children exploring a (potentially ominious) mirror world and spending years in the Replica reading books, I had this scene in the back of my mind. In a film that is largely characterised

Posted in Movies and music

Tracking shots that create tension

A number of people who have read The Mirror Children, say that it reads like a screenplay. I know that I think visually, but I realise now that when I am writing I am often visualising a scene in movement. With

Posted in Movies and music

Punctuating thoughts in prose

It’s taken me a long time to settle on a method for punctuating thoughts. A lot of the older children’s novels I read (from the 1950s and 1960s) punctuate thoughts with double or single inverted commas, but this makes the thoughts

Posted in The publishing process

Final draft… I think

I’m nearly finished with what I hope will be final draft of the book. To get to this stage, I converted a earlier draft into an e-pub (iBooks) file and emailed to as many people as I thought would read it on

Posted in The publishing process

Atari’s console dud ET to be re-animated!

This is old news but such a crazy story that I thought it worthy of mention. Perhaps the most appalling console game ever devised, Atari’s 1982 Christmas clanger ET, is to be dug up from where it was buried in Mexico

Posted in Muse of the moment, Uncategorized

The worst film in living memory

After sitting through Skyline last night, I wondered if it was just me or was this the worst film ever made? I had a look at some absolutely hilarious reviews, the funniest of which is here. Well, that’s 2 hours of my

Posted in Muse of the moment

How many days is the average life?

As a teacher I’ve been going on about the concept of carpe diem (Latin: seize the day) for ages, telling my classes that if they live to be just over 80, that equates to about 30,000 days on Earth. ‘It’s not

Posted in Deep and meaningful