Musical inspiration for The Tolworth Beacon

For those of you who have read The Tolworth Beacon, you may understand why I found real inspiration from this DJ mix of music by Gregory Esayan. The first few minutes of this mix really helped me get into the right headspace for the subject of the novel, but I would often have the whole thing playing while I was writing it.

The link is here.

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Turning Fifty

I woke up early this morning on my 50th birthday. It was as bright outside as it would ever be at 5am due to it being the summer solstice, the longest period of daylight time. From here on, the nights get longer. Sitting in bed with a cup of tea I started to think about some of the first stories I wrote, and a few memories came back to me. The first thing I remember writing was in my penultimate year in primary school, so we're talking 1983-4. Successfully combining two major phobias of mine, it was called "Tarantursnake" and took up a whopping four pages of my English workbook. I remember getting a decent mark for it, but the only thing I could remember from the story itself was a man hanging on for dear life to a pole suspended over a pit of tarantursnakes. In fact, that may have been the whole thing. I'm not so sure it followed any conventional rules of narrative. Later, in 1987, in high school, a collection of us smuggled copies of the newly published paperback of

From "Idea" to "Published Story" in 24 Hours

On Friday 18th November 2011 I managed to do something that I never thought possible. Whilst walking to work I was listening to an old Level 42 album and pondering a new idea I had for a story. When I got to the office, to preserve the idea, I opened up Google Docs and jotted down a couple of sentences. At lunchtime I re-read my notes and decided to turn it into a story. By the time I'd written about 400 words I realised that this would easily work as a 600 word story for 365tomorrows.com, who publish a daily flash-fiction piece in the sci-fi genre. The last time I submitted something to 365tomorrows they rejected it weeks later, on the grounds that there was no narrative to the story (the story was written in pure dialogue). Once this new story was completed I made two changes. I changed the gender of one character and the name of another. By the end of the day I had submitted the story, entitled "Freedom Someday" to 365tomorrows. The usual turnaround response

Interactive Fiction

Proof that the internet has a page for everything (I think we already knew that) is that I found a good many sites full of love for the old Choose Your Own Adventure book series from the 1980s, of which I had a shelf full. Those old books were about 100 pages long and featured a branch-like narrative with multiple endings. With titles like "The Cave of Time", "The House of Danger" and "Journey Under the Sea", these books worked for readers of my age (which was about ten). "You reach a fork in the road and find an old man sitting there. To turn left in the fork, go to page 45. To turn right, go to page 56. To talk to the old man, go to page 80." That sort of thing. Later on, when computers came along, I fell in love with the text adventures of Magnetic Scrolls (yes there's a website for them too). With games like Jinxter, The Guild of Thieves and Corruption, I was hooked by the way that these games built worlds in your head. Even now t

Huw Langridge

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