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Read: 1 poem, 1 short story, 1 essay every week. Write: 1 short story every month. Blog about it. To find out more about the challenge and why I'm doing it, you can find the first post about it here: The Blackthorn Challenge - Week 1 | Shona Kinsella

I can't quite believe that we've made it round to Thursday already this week! I had been aiming for Tuesdays for this weekly post, but as you can tell, I have not settled into that rhythm yet. Maybe we'll get there. Or maybe it'll just be whatever...

Read: 1 poem, 1 short story, 1 essay every week. Write: 1 short story every month. Blog about it. To find out more about the challenge and why I'm doing it, you can find the first post about it here: The Blackthorn Challenge - Week 1 | Shona Kinsella

I'm weighing in a little later than planned this week because I was at Bristolcon last weekend (which was excellent, as always) and it took me a few days to recover, not least from the two very long train journeys to get there and back. Let's get...

A friend recently shared this video on Bluesky, An Evening with Ray Bradbury, during which Bradbury recommends that new writers read a poem, a short story and an essay every night for 1000 nights. The goal is to fill your mind with lots of different voices, topics, styles of writing, metaphors and ways of looking at the world in aid of making you a better writer. Now, I am not a new writer, and I also know that if I tried to read a short story, a poem and an essay every day, I'd probably have...

Well, it's been a week, and I've finally started to recover. What a weekend that was! As usual when running the con, I didn't get to see that much of the event, but the buzz around the venue as I dashed from one thing to another seemed great and I'm hearing that people had a really good time. I was so proud to be able to bring Fantasycon to Glasgow, and not just that, but to fill the venue. We had somewhere around 750 attendees, which just goes to show that the convention is going from...