Mark Charan Newton

The benefit of toxic car pollution, I guess: no paint required.

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So, I bought a ticket to see the the most pre-preview screening on Wednesday, at a fee of £13! Yes, I am that sad. Will it be worth that? I could wait another day and have it half that price, but hey. And tonight’s entertainment, Gotham Knight. If you hear nothing of me by the [...]

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A not so complete history of literary tattoos. (Link pinched from the blog of Jonathan Carroll.
Johannes Guttenberg invented the printing press in Germany in 1439. Samuel O’Reilly invented the modern tattoo machine in 1891. And sometime around the turn of the century the first literary tattoo was born. Whether nostalgic for the characters from a [...]

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Last night I sketched a map. A secondary world map, for Nights of Villjamur. There are some who may think this stretches into true nerdism, and you may be right, but I can’t deny it felt good. Can’t have a fantasy without a map, many say.
There’s something thoroughly satisfying about putting the world I [...]

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Because he has been outed.

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Interesting post on the Guardian website about what hitting the big four-zero does to male writers.
Perhaps the most complete accounts of midlife crisis come, as ever, from Shakespeare. Few would question the autobiographical nature of the The Tempest, in which an ageing Prospero breaks his staff and turns his back on “this rough magic”. It’s [...]

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That’s Kylie Minogue OBE to you.
Rumour has it she was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to the gold spangly hot pants industry. Although you would like to think it was for her stirling charity work and inspiration in her recovery from cancer. As well as the spangly hot pants.
You need to [...]

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I have returned form the Yorkshire Dales, and should hopefully have something interesting to say soon. I’ve been finishing my marathon re-read of The Book of the New Sun sequence, by Gene Wolfe, surely someone who deserves a mighty heavy and shiny medal for services to literature. No way I can review it, or have [...]

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I shall shambling across the Yorkshire Dales for a few days, investigating, amongst other things, this scandalous affair.
Pubs in Yorkshire have been ordered to ban people from wearing flat caps or other hats so troublemakers can be more easily recognised… “Asking a Yorkshireman to take off his flat cap - whoever heard of anything so [...]

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I have been tagged by James at Speculative Horizons with regards to the current trend in the blogosphere:
Pick up the nearest book, turn to page 123 and write down the fifth sentence.
In my case, I’m rereading Gene Wolfe’s New Sun series in Severian of the Guild. The quote is:
‘And you have known a great [...]

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