Category: Uncategorized

The date on the first post wasn’t the date it was actually written. It’s too complicated for me to explain why — besides it’s Hallowe’en. Anything could happen and anybody could arrive at the door at any minute.

Suffice it to say, the blog has arrived. It will not be very blogg-ish. But it will update what’s going on with HappenStance publications. It may also include some of my moans and groans, but at least they will be poetically expressed.

This weekend, The HappenStance Story Chapter 3 is to be completed somehow. Martin Reed’s forthcoming chapbook has now got a title: The Two-Coat Man. It’s not far from finished.

Gillian is thinking about The Two-Coat Man‘s cover design from some place in the depths of Forres where Jamie is playing a gig…

This is announcing a page, a presence, a mini-blag of bloggery, a little log of loggery, an amateur fog of foggery. But it is not a forgery.

In progress at HappenStance: Chapter 3 of the HappenStance Story and a new chapbook by Martin Reed. There will also be a meta-story (story about the story) about D A Prince’s book Nearly the Happy Hour by Colin Begg. Colin observed and commented on the process behind this publication as part of the work for his M Litt and has agreed to share the results with you. It’s lively, interesting and objective. Also it will quite soon be available as a free download. But not quite yet…

This weekend in the UK the hour changes. That is to say, there is an hour’s extra sleep on Saturday night, which is very welcome since we are approaching peak hibernation instinct. It’s been dark lately anyway, and wild and windy in Scotland. Anybody in their right mind would like an extra hour in bed once a year…

Thirty-seven more parcels in the post today, many of them review copies going hither and thither. And the PoemCards are done – I just have to pick them up from the printer and start sending them out. I’m dying for them to be ready because I need to use them myself. Also I love the whole idea of this. I want to send Matt Harvey’sTens Times Table to all my maths teacher friends . . .

Meanwhile, we’ve agreed the long-list for the STORY comp and it’ll be on the website imminently. Long discussion and some re-reading went into this but it’s reassuring to find that Sarah and I (both of us having read ALL the entries, and all the longlist at least twice) made substantially the same choices. Soon Janice Galloway will get the short listed stories.

A friend from university, Sue Brackell, sent me a moving self-published set of poems titled Losing Liam. The sequence of poems centres on loss, the loss of a son in his twenties. He was mentally ill and took his own life, and this book deals with grief, terrible grief, head-on. He would have been roughly the same age as my own son – a little older. The rawness of the feeling, the reality of the anguish is more intense than any comment I could possibly make. I read it and wept.