“These are my words” – some recent (non-academic) writing projects

By my low standards I’ve been pretty prolific the past few weeks working on non-work related writing projects. I always loved doing this sort of thing but for various reasons I haven’t done anything like it for a very long time.

First up, 280 Stops. Absolutely loved working on this. I’ve often talked with Ben Whitehouse about our mutual admiration for 253 – a hypertext novel written by Geoff Ryman about a group of passengers on a London tube train. Recently I suggested to Ben that we put together a Birmingham based homage locate don the 11 bus. Realising that we could launch this on 11th November (11 bus day), 280 Stops was pulled together in just over a week and draws on the talents of a load of folk who worked on Dirty Bristow (and me and Ben). I can’t tell you which character(s) I wrote, that’s become a little game within the story.

Secondly, I’ve written a few entries for 101 Things Birmingham Gave the World. Apparently my entry on Star Wars is over reaching a bit, but I got away with New Zealand.

And finally, a chance conversation with Neil Holland has led to us striking up a hand-written correspondence based on the fact that we can make our work photocopiers tweet. If you take a read of that there’s some important personal news in the mix.