This weekend SY and I went to Hastings, a southern coastal, town 50-odd miles south of London, to meet my Dad and Ailz, do sightseeing, see art, go antiques shopping, eat fish and chips and check out the ruins of Hastings castle. Hastings was the landing site for the 1066 invasion of England by the Normans (French), which saw King Harold getting his eye done in by an arrow, as enshrined in the famous Bayeux Tapestry. William the Conqueror became William 1, King of England, and three years later had Hastings castle built on a cliff overlooking both the bustling … Read More

Last night I went to a panel discussion at Regent’s University titled ‘The Future of English’ featuring several luminaries (the ‘great men’) of the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) world. TEFL is my day job. David Graddol was there, who inspired my MA thesis. He writes about the megatrends of the world, like demographics, economics, military, culture and so on, and how they affect the role of English in the future. For example- if China became the dominant cultural outputter (surpassing Hollywood in amount and quality, perhaps), then will we all be more likely to learn Chinese? Of … Read More

The stats from Amazon are in and I can finally represent, in hard-data graph form, the beautiful surfacing of my books net earnings- up from the depths of debt and into the dizzying clear sky of profit. It has been a long time coming (two years self-publishing now) and there was never any certainty I’d get even this far. It is a great positive milestone, of which I hope there will be many more. The green line is cumulative total revenue (not total profit as the key says), the orange line is cumulative total costs, and the blue bars are … Read More

So after years of thinking about it and months of gathering information on what such a group might actually do, I’ve finally made my own writer’s group on Meetup.com called London Indie Writers. http://www.meetup.com/London-Indie-Writers/ So far it has two other members: they’re both ladies, one writes romance with a high level of success, and the other writes ‘cli-fi’, or climate fiction, or science fiction about climate change. Both of them pass the group requirement of one book out with at least reviews. I’m looking forward to meeting them and talking shop. Why make this group? Because there’s strength in numbers. … Read More

My site was down the last few days- nobody knows why, not me, not my hosting service, nobody- so apologies about that if you were checking in and getting rebuffed. I spent a few days fixing it, with a lot of trial-and-error installing, deleting, reinstalling, moving around, password changing, syncing and other stuff later, and now it is back- with only a few of the more recent posts (and comments- sorry!) missing. Was it the 4000 comments piled up in the spam queue? Was it a hacker collaborative angered by my opinions about The Martian? Was it the fault of … Read More

We bought a Bible! Actually I should say we donated for a Bible, as it was offered to us for free when we went to church again today. Church AGAIN?! Yes church again, but not the brainwashing rock-out of the family service we went to last time, instead back to the regular solemnity of a proper service. Now that the structure of these things is familiar to us, I start to wonder how the vicar manages to do all the repetitive readings he has to do and not go a bit mad with it. “We have to do this every … Read More