Writers’ Centre Norwich

Redesigning Noirwich

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…)

By Simon Jones, ago

Online serialisation – free webinar!

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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By Simon Jones, ago

Simon Sinek and the digital addiction

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:

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By Simon Jones, ago

Strategic use of pomodoros

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…)

By Simon Jones, ago

I’m leaving FXHOME: here’s why

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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By Simon Jones, ago

Fierce Light & Dan Carlin: returning to WW1

Through most of 2015 I was listening to an enormously long audio documentary series about World War 1. It’s called Blueprint For Armageddon and is part of the Hardcore History show hosted by Dan Carlin. It has a very rambunctious intro, which might make you think that it’s going to be frilly and overblown. Don’t be put off – the show itself is nothing like its intro.

What you get is a six episode series, with each episode being about four hours long, in the form of a free podcast.

I’ll just let that sink in for a moment. We’re talking 24 hours of audio documentary. That doesn’t come around often. (more…)

By Simon Jones, ago