Gavin Inglis's Blog, page 2

Alone Against the Flames

During high school, my gateway drug to the literary horrors of New England writer H. P. Lovecraft was the pen-and-paper roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu. Set in the 1920s, it included silhouettes of marauding, tentacled creatures and a map of the world featuring lost cities and occult sites. It was an easy sell. The attraction of tabletop roleplaying games is that […]

Influences: Oor Wullie

In a book sale this year I found some classic collections of Oor Wullie. These normally attract collectors’ prices but in this case were cheap, perhaps because the pages were falling out and several had been coloured in by some Falkirk child of times past. And not by carefully selecting an appropriate colour and filling the area between the lines […]

Collaboration

The moment I knew we’d got it right was our one and only rehearsal, in a poky underground studio in Leith. It was fun fitting our narrative into the music. Poppy and John seemed much happier, and there were a couple of moments where the combination of words and music resonated very deeply. I took notes of how it all […]

Zombies, Run!

Lately I have been running around parks and hidden lanes in Edinburgh’s South Side. This is the first bit of running I have done since leaving high school. It wasn’t inspired by the Olympics; I wanted to play a game. I aspire to stay fit, but like a large percentage of the population I have trouble keeping up a exercise […]

Finding the Story

I remembered reading an article on sounds made from star vibrations. This endeavour combined music, astronomy, and maths, and conveniently, stars also lit up the Earth. It was a perfect fit for the enLIGHTen project. I Googled carefully and tracked down a page of sonifications from the Kepler satellite. Listening to them, I thought some could fit behind spoken word […]

The Rising Elocutionist

Today would have been the 100th birthday of my granny, Mary Fraser Anderson Young (1912–1995). She liked to be called Molly. Because of the leap year, technically it would have been her 25th birthday. She was a fun granny. I remember little details about her. When I was very small, she would make a swing by hanging a bit of […]

London

I often wish that my Edinburgh flat had a door which led to London. I suppose it might lead to complications with the Council Tax, but I would like to be able to drop into the city’s cultural schedule at will without that messy business of travel and accommodation. I used to live in a plasterboard half-room in Clapham and […]

Words and Music

I am jealous of musicians. There. I said it. As a writer you spend hours staring at blank pages, trying to manipulate your unconscious to come up with something startling and insightful which will touch people on a deep level. Then you crank out the first draft against psychological resistance. Then you hate it. Eventually you go back to it […]

Havers and Blethers

Festival time in Edinburgh can be strange for the writer who performs their own work. You walk around a city choked with shows, operating from every conceivable venue, and many, many of them are absolutely dire. Yet unless you got organised six months earlier and paid the almighty price of entry to the Fringe programme, you probably won’t get a […]

Edinburgh Spoken Word

Spoken word nights come and go. The earliest one I remember was Rodney Relax's Yellow Café in what is now Medina. Being a producer and avid consumer of stories, I’ve never been very interested in exclusive poetry nights like Big Word or Is This Poetry? and somehow I've never become a regular at the Forest’s lit/music/poetry institution The Golden Hour. […]