Day 5: The AJ Kirby Blog

July 26, 2010

6

Just a quick clarification. I hope nobody reading this mistakes me for a marketing guru or something (some chance!). What I was hoping to do was a marketing ‘apprenticeship’, learning the bare bones of the ‘dark art’ whilst simultaneously writing a blog about it… Hence the fact I may have mislead some people re. Wikipedia [...]

Poem of the Week: Milner Place ‘He said there’s nothing’

July 25, 2010

0

Day 4: The AJ Kirby Blog: Decapitation by Bathroom Tile

July 25, 2010

0

I had to nip back home today, ostensibly to get some more pens and paper, but in reality to check on the progress of the bathroom installation. I was hoping that I’d be pleasantly surprised with what the builders had managed to achieve during my absense.  I wasn’t. We now have one missing wall and [...]

Day 3: The AJ Kirby Blog: The Little People v The Big Machine

July 24, 2010

4

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. My day starts off badly. Nursing a hangover I gingerly logged-on, hoping to see a few unread emails from editors who’d couldn’t be more delighted to review my novel or stick a free ad in their magazine or help me out wherever they could… But the very [...]

Day 2: The AJ Kirby Blog: Marketing for Lazy People

July 23, 2010

0

Day 2 in the Incwriters House and Andy is on a mission as outlined to him by a mysterious digital figure (who when you look more closely at him has armour made up entirely of 1s and 0s). It is a mission fraught with danger at every turn, a mission which could… Okay, I’m talking [...]

Day 1: The AJ Kirby Blog: If you build it…

July 22, 2010

0

We’re getting our bathroom done at home at the moment and I had to go somewhere to get away from all the dust, noise, ruined carpets and my new role as tea-boy. The installers have been in a couple of days now and despite the fact that I’ve told them over and over again that [...]

Day 8: The One About Tradition

July 22, 2010

0

‘The age of giants is past.’ As a contemporary reader of poetry, one is hard-pressed to disagree with Seamus Heaney’s declaration. It is perhaps singularly ironic that the genre, perceived in some quarters to have been in a state of terminal decline since the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, persists in proliferating, to [...]

Day 7: The One About Drafts

July 21, 2010

1

In my previous post, I mentioned in passing that I’m not very good at doing drafts. I can tell you exactly why that is the case. I tend to be a perfectionist when it comes to written work, so while intellectually I understand the necessity of revising what I’ve written, in practice what I tend [...]

Day 6: The One About Form

July 20, 2010

0

Although we get to explore different genres of writing on my course, I’ve always thought of myself first and foremost as a poet. It’s not that I can’t produce work in prose; I just find it very, very difficult to sit down and write something longer than 100 words that isn’t part of an academic essay. [...]

Day 5: The One About Writing

July 19, 2010

0

My tutor at university has remarked that poetry is the opposite of money. It was even set as a question for discussion on one of the past examination papers for our module on writing poetry. Peter Sansom’s book from Bloodaxe, Writing Poetry, does point out a number of ways in which poets can make a [...]

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