Andy Luke's Blog, page 3
July 4, 2020
Close-Up
Good day you and you. I have updates. June didn’t feel so busy, but apparently, well… Most shorts and poems are in publisher’s slush piles, waiting to be noticed like tidal waves. The first three chapters of Occupied were sent out to a dozen agents. Big Finish got my pitch and excerpt for the Doctor Who Short Trips audio. They offer an opportunity to a newb every June as part of the Paul Spragg Memorial Award. I’ll soon be editing a short tale callled ‘The Apology’, which features a Doctor-esque...
May 27, 2020
Introduction to Spide: The Lost Tribes
I’ve been a bit rubbish at promoting The Lost Tribes since publishing it at the tail end of 2018. In hindsight, it was a bad choice for a second novel. It has none of the hooks of altruism or education which have garnered me good reception. Indeed, it’s a nasty book with no redeeming characters, and the central epic of the Ulster Cycle is purposely anti-academic, told through an unreliable berate-r narrator.
(For an actual sourced rendition of these legends, buy up Patrick Brown’s Cattle Raid...
January 19, 2020
January 13, 2020
Goodbye Titancon, I’m free.
It is with great sadness I am publicly withdrawing my support for the Belfast SF event, Titancon. I’d been a fixture there since the first in 2011, appearing as a headline guest with Absence and The Magnificent One Day Comics Factory; making financial plans and promotions in the 2013-2014 committee, putting together comics creators who’d drawn Irish Myth: Will Simpson, Paddy Brown and Paul Bolger, teaching people how to self-publish…
Seven great years of workshops, panels, blogging, flyering,...
December 12, 2019
June 28, 2019
The planets are in alignment to blog!
Well, well. Helluva few months. I took time out for Ljerka’s visit. Together with Richard we got to Belfast Zoo were there are mostly monkeys, and I love monkeys.
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That is a capybara!
— Belfast Zoo (@BelfastZoo) June 4, 2019
I’ve been immersed in AS-Level History, teaching Germany and Russia, and it seems to have worked out. Since then it’s been clearing sweeps. Paid jobs: a poetry commission, some think tank research, and publishing and planning distribution for that agnostic mag I edi...
April 14, 2019
My Life in Bullet Points
February 14, 2019
My name is Luke, A. I live on the second floor.
Hello from Ballyhackamore cafe suburb, where the gale left behind a winter sun.
FOR LOVE is out. Sixteen lines of vital matter and maybe my finest poetic achievement. It’s on the Patreon Researcher tier and almost doesn’t have to be interviewed for my first collection.
GREENWICH MEAN TIME is the flip-side. Two thousand words of scary sci-fi, nasty horror and twisted romance. Speaking of which, the FUCK THE DUP SKETCHBOOK is finito in three months. Both come with being at a Ordained Preacher t...
December 5, 2018
Post NanoWrimo Roundup
[Link] Spide: The Lost Tribes has been released today in print through Amazon.
[Link] Four by the week posts on my NanoWrimo experience.
[Link] to interview with Eileen Walsh of Derry Drive 105 were we talk about 24 hour comics, Absence, Spide and NaNoWrimo.
[Link] I’ll be reading brand new poetry at Mixed Jam, on December 10th from 5-7pm. That’s at East Belfast’s 248 East Bistro, which is a lovely venue.
December 4, 2018
NI NaNoWrimo Week 4
It was... you know how in Superman 2 General Zod was made to spend all eternity living in a sheet of glass that spun through space... a month of that. Like a butterfly out on loan, writer on the storm. After a terrible third week fortunes turned. I wrote quicker, often straight to laptop. Once I even wrote 4,000 words in a day, a personal best. An uplifting, satisfying Week 4.
Aye, thirty days, often sixteen hour days. Don't picture it. My bottle of Jim Beam wasn't sitting capped waiting for me.
It was like in Mary Poppins, no Bedknobs and Broomsticks, yes more Angela Lansbury: the coffee levitated, kettle clicked on, coffee mug mysteriously full and the next, empty! I got up to make another and there was a knock at the door. Floating right there was a jar of hot chocolate and a bag of marshmallows. Then there was the time the gas went out and I had to collect up all the rare spider's webs and sell them to a collector. And the day I bought a fifteen foot long cigarette. I had to open the window to get it into the flat.
Core support group of Municipal Liason @OrbZine and @Hollie_Myles_85 were at Morton Community Centre during the final week with two other NaNo folk. Tiredness meant I left early, and for the same I couldn't attend the wrap party. When midnight on the 30th came round Jim Beam and I checked into a live Q&A with James Roberts on Instagram. James writes Lost Light, or did: it's come to an end after an eight year journey. He was generous with his time and words and it was a full treat.
Hollie is still working on her MS and I plan on going back to mine in a few days. It's been a wonderful experience meeting writers, supporters, and twenty odd fictional characters who have loved, infuriated and surprised me. For my Patreon subscribers I'll release a scene from the Nano draft before Christmas.
