Link(age) and more!

Hey all,

So, following my Bloody Heel blog and with this current one, I've officially blogged more this month than I did all last year! Hurray!

I'd also like to make everyone aware of a new link in the side bar there =>

You'll be brought to the Literary Den Campaign page at the Battlefront website. Worth a look (and a vote). Cheers!

Battlefront

Battlefront; you've heard it so many times on this blog already. What's it about? I hear you say. Young people making a change to the world, that's what.

In the next line up of potential campaigns, if they ever go that far, there are 58 potential campaigns to choose from, that the public can vote on. In the tv series, there were 20 campaigns. The names of them, the campaigners and a link to each of the Battlefront campaigns is below. In Italics beside each one is a jist of it in very few words.

STOP: Gun and Knife Crime (Peace)
Alexander Rose
Find out more about STOP: Gun and Knife Crime.

Bring Your Own Coffee Cup (Healthy Environment)
Aimee Nathan
Find out more about Bring Your Own Coffee Cup.

Random Acts of Kindness (Happiness)
Tom Robbins
Find out more about Random Acts of Kindness.

Who Wants To Be A Size Zero Anyway (Healthy Body)
Rachel Phipps
Find out more about Who Wants To Be A Size Zero Anyway.

Tune into Traffic (Road Safety)
Manpreet Darroch
Find out more about Tune into Traffic.

You smoke - I choke (Smoking)
Zander Percival
Find out more about You smoke - I choke.

More money for my time please (Raising the minimum wage)
Rachey Betty
Find out more about More money for my time please.

Free Newspapers Cost The Earth (Environment)
James Mummery
Find out more about Free Newspapers Cost The Earth.

Homophobia = Zero Tolerance (Human Rights & Tolerance)
Rachael & David
Find out more about Homophobia = Zero Tolerance.

Make a Big Change - With your Small Change (Relief Aid)
Siobhan and Becky
Find out more about Make a Big Change - With your Small Change.

Teenage Suicide (Young Deaths)
Josh McAuley
Find out more about Teenage Suicide.

Anti-Cyberbullying (Bullying)
Al Henderson
Find out more about Anti-Cyberbullying.

Muslims - Normal Too (Human Rights & Tolerance; Religion)
Zainab Daniju
Find out more about Muslims - Normal Too.

Condoms For Africa (Safe Sex)
Troy Kennedy
Find out more about Condoms For Africa.

Down with Tuition Fees (Education)
James Greenhalgh
Find out more about Down with Tuition Fees.

Anti Binge Drinking (Young Drinking)
India Harvey
Find out more about Anti Binge Drinking.

Stress and Strain of School (Education)
Laura-Liz Partoon
Find out more about Stress and Strain of School.

Music for a change (Music)
Zuhal Sultan
Find out more about Music for a change.

Making space for young people (Young People)
Angelina Munabi
Find out more about Making space for young people .

The Gift of Life (Organ Donation)
Holly Shaw
Find out more

There were a few unique ones, a few generic ones, and a few successful ones from each bracket. Out of the 58, there are several copies of the already-on-air campaigns, especially around Education, Bullying, Peace, Human Rights and Tolerance and Young People.

There are also a number of copies of the winner of the competition, Wrong to be Different. So many people have hopped on the bandwagon and set up individual campaigns rather than trying to support hers. It's a damned shame.

Then there's my campaign, and I'm not just tooting my own trumpet here. It's unique. You can tell just by looking at the list that no one has anything similar to it. In the competition, it came second in both the public and judges' votes; we've got proof that we're good, not just a name that reminds the public of other people's campaigns!

Yes, slightly ranting here. But with so many people copying Wrong to be Different, you'd think they'd get the message - be different! It's ridiculous how many people are submitting campaigns that are already on the show too. Ridiculous and annoying!

Okay, I better go before I get overly angry....

Just some ideas...

So here we are, blog time!

It's the Easter break from school, a painful time when parents force their sons and daughters to study, just as the Irish weather decides to stop crying. Naturally, I'm going to beat the study blues with some good old fashioned, Literary Den!!

Elizabeth Dyer, AKA Ellie, came up with some rather smashing ideas that I wanted to put past the general readership of this blog... many of you who look at this won't even realise what I'm talking about until it's seven months later and something has happened in the world to give you a reason to look me up.

So here we go! Firstly, there's a "Read Me, Keep Me" day! Now, this all sounds very vague, so here's the details: second hand books with a postet stuck on them (with the aforementioned title) are left all around the city (it will be in Dublin and various other places in the UK and Ireland). People find the books, as you might guess if they're left in public, and they get to keep them, and read them. That way, more people are reading. We're still discussing the details, but it looks to be quite fun. Some artists did this in Dublin City a while back, much to the delight of the people who found the paintings! We'll need second hand books to do this with, so you may end up getting a knock on the door by a member of the "Read Me, Keep Me" team, asking for donations (if you're willing to part with them!!)

Secondly, our mentor programme. Now, I intend on annoying my friend Sam with this as much as humanly possible, but the rest of the public knows nothing about it yet. So, we're going to make a snazzy, and dare I say, sexy website to attract young writers into the group. This will be part of the Den, but an exclusive forum and independant website for the mentor programme. It's bloody excellent!

The group are now also getting ready for The Literary Den Book of New Fiction 2009, which will see the arrival of a large number of Irish writers! Myself and Anthea West were the only Irish writers last year; this time, we're going to have Brendan McLoughlin and Lisa Sills alongside us, and hopefully young Senan Warnock if he can throw something together. We also have a resident of Dublin and native to Bermuda, Jonathon Bell. Woo! In true Irish fashion, we're infesting the book, rather than invading. It's great craic!

So, that's about it for now. I'm still being too lazy to work on the new Campaign document. There's less pressure now, though. Battlefront opted to go for Wrong to Be Different? over our campaign, so we won't be on television. *sigh*

Anyway, if you want to "follow me" on Twitter, you can find me here!

Battlefront is a no go... for now

Well, the Literary Den did not make it onto the Channel 4 TV show, Battlefront. We came second in the public vote and in the judges' room, which I suppose is pretty damn good! The Campaign will continue as before, just without the handy Flip Camera and the associated videos (unless someone wants to make a donation....)

I've not got much else to say... I opted to enjoy my first Monday off since... well the last bank holiday, so I don't have that new file done yet. Maybe tomorrow. Definetely by the weekend.

So, until something new and exciting happens, I'll be off.

But feel free to follow me on Twitter!

I use it for my own life as well as the Den. People need to know the man behind the mask.... in this case, the author behind the Campaign!!

Campaign Update

Well, voting has stopped on the Campaign! In fact, we've even gone one step further to getting the Campaign into the show - I got a call from London on Wednesday. I liked that I got to confuse people with that piece of info for a little bit!


The call was terrifying to say the least. I was so afraid I'd mess it up there and then. Ultimately though, I may not get through. It could potentially cost too much to send a camera crew over to Dublin, when the other campaigns are all in the UK. Bummer....


Still, fingers crossed!


In other news, the How to Write Document has been updated. Basically, the date was in the wrong format, there was a typo in one of the questions (so it came up several times!) and one of the author's names wasn't underlined or centred. You can download the updated file here.


I'll find out on Monday if I've been accepted by Battlefront. Wish me luck!


I finished typing my story for The Literary Den Book of New Fiction 2009. Yay! And I have the same editor as last year - Claire Hack. So, we have ten submissions so far, and we're still waiting on a few. I'm so excited about this one. I think the book will be better, and there are already more writers from Ireland in it than last year! Yahoo! That'll make promoting it so much more fun too!! When it's released, I demand that you buy it. Afterall, the money goes to charity!

How to Write, Document 1

Well, the first of the How to Write Documents is finished and available for free! If you click the title of this post, you'll be brought to the download page. I love it already!

The second set of interviews will go out in the near future. I must also remember to begin interviewing again, to ensure the continued survival of the project. Free information for writers! Woo!!

Wish me luck! The Campaign may suddenly get more interesting based on Channel 4's decision!! I'll keep you updated.

Campaigning...

Well, I've finally found what I can blog about! Campaigning!! The Literary Den is at last becoming a place to support writing fully. I started off the Campaign by announcing our goals in a nice little .pdf file! To access this file, click here!

I had written up those goals a couple of weeks ago, just as our Battlefront page appeared. Today, I typed them up on a jazzy template, and added them to my new 4shared.com page for the purpose of sharing them with everyone. It's a pretty easy way of doing things!

Now I'm getting ready to go hunting for the advice several writers gave me a few months ago!! Wish me luck, ficticious reader!

It's been a while, etc...

Hello, valuable and non-existant readers!

I have been vanished for a good long while from this blog. I missed it a few minutes ago, and decided to give one massive update on it.... I've just checked my last post, and I discovered I used the term vanished then too.... righto!

Well, I completed NaNoWriMo. That was easy, and way back in November. I wrote a novel called Meet Sam, which I will get back to in a little while. I will tell you that it was super fun to write and came in at 50,074 words according to the NaNoWriMo drones. Following that, I was very lazy at writing, but managed to get Geneticide finished in January. Hurray for me! Since then, I've had Mocks (I did rather poorly in them), an oral Irish exam, and have had a huge number of writing related things happening. But let's do this properly - chronologically!

Meet Sam is a fantastic novel (for me) following a helplessly poor writer through one day of his otherwise dull life. He's single, and miserably so, and decides to invent a narrator for himself. Sam Richards is in fact a wee bit crazy. His narrator abuses him at every opportunity, but in the 24 hours that she exists, his life changes dramatically. The book is that story! As part of the deal for completing NaNoWriMo, I got to get a free proof copy of Meet Sam from a group of people called CreateSpace. They even covered the postage. That was nice of them. The book is a delightful addition to my collection, and has caught the attention of my mother's friends at work.

Geneticide finished with a much higher word count. I don't even know what it is, only that it's rather good. The story went exactly as planned, which I'm happy about. It took very long to write, but I think it'll do well if it ever goes anywhere.

In February, I turned 18. Normally, I don't celebrate my birthday with such excitedness, but this was the February midterm break too. This called for celebration. I threw a house party. It was a delightful gathering of my friends, during which there was a movie and a giant personality test. I'll expand on that now! The movie was in fact a home movie of sorts - Meet Sam, as done by my friends Karl, Andrew, Ciarán and Conor. They gave up a few afternoons to do it. Karl has since failed to upload it onto Youtube a dozen times, so I cannot share it with you. The personality test was the BBC one. It was rather fun, and had my friends bashing against each other in my kitchen. It was not built to hold 14 people in a tiny square.

Then came March, this month. I can tell you that things really changed this month. It's almost at an end too, so if there was nothing to report, there would be a problem. Now, I can't remember what happened first in all this, so I'll just ramble on about the various different things that have happened.

Let's start with dear old Patricia Scanlan! She did a book signing a couple of weeks ago to promote her new book Happily Ever After? at my shop. It was a great experience in itself to watch it and help out, btu then something really fun happened! She found out that I'm a writer, and told me to give her a call when my novel (Meet Sam) was editted, so that she could give it to her publishers! I was utterly gobsmacked!! Imagine me, a published author! With Transworld Ireland!!!

Then there's Battlefront. This is a Channel Four television show that encourages a whole set of campaigns from young people to help change the world. I submitted The Literary Den Campaign to them... and we're second in the voting stages. In a few days, voting stops and it goes to the "judges." If they pick my campaign, I may be on television!! That would be amazing!

The campaign is all about making reading and writing cool again. People seem to get bored with them ratehr easily these days. They abandon the thoughts of them for a TV show or a movie, or for mindless internet games. It's an awful shame, because they really are valuable skills for both work and life. Writing is a way of ridding oneself of the weird little ideas in their heads that can cause us troubles. I have not heard of any dangerous writers out there, so I must be right.

The campaign also sets out to start a mentoring system to help younger writers with their stuff. I'm one of the mentors, although we are without mentorees. I'm hoping to convince my good friend Sam to do it. He started writing a book way back in the summer and since stopped doing it. If I can spark his interest in writing again, and be his mentor to guide him along the way, then I'm doing something right. From there I'd like to see what the group can do. We may even be able to organise talks at schools! That would be sweet!

So, there's my campaign. Some of it, at least. If you wish to support us, you can vote at: http://battlefront.co.uk/campaign/the-literary-den-campaign Thanks a million in advance!!

Moving on now, I've subscribed to a magazine called The Stinging Fly. I've also submitted to them. By the end of the month, or in early April, I should hear from them to see how my submission of a short story and two poems went down. I imagine the story, called The Wounded Angel, stands a better chance than the poems, but who am I to judge? Fingers crossed anyway!

Now here's another big thing! The Literary Den Book of New Fiction 2009 is underway! We're putting the stories together as I type. Well, I mean people are writing them. If they're anywhere near as uncomfortable as I am right now, they might just be finishing them. This year, we're still supporting the Laura Crane Trust, but we have a few fresh faces! Brendan McLoughlan has joined our ranks from Howth, and Lisa Sills has returned to submit this year (she vanished just before it was announced last year, and arrived when the deadline passed). Jonathon Bell from Bermuda (living in Dublin) has submitted, and his wife, my good friend Liz, is due to submit too. It's a wonderful group of Irish writers joining the fray! I'm delighted with it.

The 08 Anthology is still on sale. I do hope you'll consider purchasing a copy. All the money goes to the charity. We're not greedy or anything. But we do like to bring it up a lot. For instance, today I had to tell a teacher in charge of my school's awards system about it for Charity and Public Service. If I win.... well I'll be well chuffed!! Purchase the book here: http://www.lulu.com/content/2619890

I may also be up for Best All-Round Student, but that's still in doubt. A teacher, the one in charge of the school magazine, said she'd nominate me for it. I've been a "one man army" in the computer room trying to get the 09 issue under wraps. Then I'm done with that establishment for good. That'll be weird! But I can't wait. Fingers crossed for the awards!

So, I think that's it for now. I've been extremely boring I bet, but I don't mind all that much. I've just needed to get all that out at once. Hopefully I'll be back. Whatever happens, always remember that the pen is mightier than the sword - violence is not the way forward. Books are!