I’m a big believer in Simon Sinek’s Start With Why notion. It posits that before you get to the how and the what, you really need to figure out the why. This applies to any endeavour, be it personal or professional and as an individual or a group. It’s what separates companies and organisations with Read more…
The Noirwich Crime Writing Festival 2017 is fast approaching and tickets are swiftly disappearing. It’s going to be a pretty great festival when it hits next month. Noirwich 2016 was the first major event I got my teeth into after starting at Writers’ Centre Norwich last year. Though crime fiction isn’t my thing, I do get genre fiction – even if mine tends to be scifi/fantasy, so it was something I immediately understood and it proved to be a lot of fun.
This year I’ve been involved from the beginning and as a comms team we’ve refreshed some of the core design principles behind the festival. I thought I’d take a look at some of the thinking behind the changes to the logo. (more…)
Just over a year ago I started working at Writers’ Centre Norwich, primarily to help deliver the International Literature Showcase. I wrote about my reasons for changing job over here. Last week, 20-23 June, saw the ILS converge on Norwich for its physical portion, shifting from a digital project to a conference-ish setup.
I learned a few things. (more…)
I made my first HitFilm tutorial for about 10 months! It was all based around an image I made for an article header over on the International Literature Showcase website. Hopefully I’ll find the time to do more stuff like this.
Last weekend I was part of the Publishing Day School at Writers’ Centre Norwich, speaking about online serialisation alongside an excitingly broad mix of traditional, digital and self publishers. Here’s a webinar version of the talk:
About eight years ago I went to Eastercon, my first science fiction convention. It was a great weekend full of fascinating panels, including the likes of Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow and China Mieville. As engrossing as the discussions were, there was a narcissistic room in the back of my brain which wanted to be up on the panel, rather than sitting in the audience.
Being part of the Publishing Day School, sitting on a panel alongside other writers, I achieved that goal. It was another critical step along the road of becoming a writer.
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Simon Sinek has a made a career out of cutting to the chase and distilling otherwise complex concepts into simpler, more manageable ideas which can be acted upon. He’s influenced my approach to marketing at work and how I appraised what was important in my life. Anyone who works with me will know that I bang on about his Start With Why concept all the damned time.
He’s back in a new video which seems to have immediately reached a massively larger audience than his previous stuff. Here it is, in case you haven’t stumbled across it yet:
Yesterday something called the International Literature Showcase was launched, over at litshowcase.org. There have been International Literature Showcases before, but this one isn’t like those. Not this time.
The previous events have taken place over a handful of days, bringing literature professionals to Norwich from around the world to talk about Exciting Things To Do Together. This time round, it’s a predominantly online concept which runs for about 10 months. We’ve scaled it up a tad. Here’s a video I made about it:
My life is in a very different place now than at the start of the year. One of the bigger changes is working at Writers’ Centre Norwich, a hugely ambitious and progressive organisation which always has a dizzying array of active projects, where I’m tasked with using skills both familiar and unfamiliar to navigate a complex political and cultural landscape involving all kinds of external partners and stakeholders.
I’ve had to completely redefine my understanding of words like ‘challenging’ and ‘busy’. I wasn’t using them correctly before, it turns out. (more…)
After 14 years, I’m leaving FXHOME at the end of this month.
14 is not an insubstantial number of years. One of my colleagues was 10 years old when I started working there. Back then, the Internet (and thus, the world) was very different. No Facebook. No YouTube. Google was still just a search engine. The iPhone hadn’t been invented. George W Bush and Tony Blair were getting ready to carve up the world. Nobody had seen the battle for Helms Deep. Half Life 2 was still two years away, as was Steam.
Anyway.
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