Sunday 26 June 2011

The Sunday Round-Up on a Sunday? How novel.

First of all, this weekend's film viewing. We saw THE FIGHTER with the always excellent Christian Bale. Really good film. Then it was a film that was so horrible that I don't even want to mention its name. I didn't watch most of it. Instead, at one point, I rushed out of the room saying "I can't watch this" and went and lay down on the bed and had a good cry. Silly cow, but it was truly horrible. After that, I needed a cinematic scouring brush to scrub my brain clean of that one, so we saw the quirky and touching GET LOW with Robert Duvall and Bill Murray.

I also spent some very pleasant kindle time with the lovely boys and girls from Radgepacket. I read volumes 1 and 2 while travelling on trains over the weekend and most excellent they were too. Reviews to follow. In the meantime, they are both over at Amazon for less than a quid.

And now, on to the Scottish crime fiction news.

The Mutant Bookshelf reviews Philip Kerr's FIELD GREY. And a review of the audio version of Charles Cumming's THE TRINITY SIX .

Congratulations to Alex Gray on her new book deal, and to Doctor Val McDermid.

Chris Ewan's audiobook narrator talks about the Good Thief series.

An interview with Jason Isaacs about his role as Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie.

Finally, a plea - if anyone has any suggestions for either writing exercises or groupwork exercises for both teenagers (from age 15-ish) and adults, please e-mail me! I'm looking for things which are fun and interesting and not too heavy.

6 comments:

  1. Donna, ye cannae do that! Go on about something and not tell us what it was. Ma heid's burstin' wi curiousity.

    I've got a neat wee exercise for you. I'll pop it in the email.

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  2. I think that Morag Joss review goes to the wrong place (Bernie G again) or maybe I'm being thick. Interesting that she's got a new one out, I rather enjoyed the one about the woman who house-sat and ended up with those runaways- sorry can't remember the title!

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  3. Doctor McDermid? I wouldn´t want her to doctor me (but she really deserves it - she is among the very best).

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  4. This is not a super exciting writing exercise but I've done it with a few different groups now and it always gets results: Pick six words at random from a dictionary then give everyone 15 minutes to write a short story that gets all the words in.

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  5. or, following up on Helen's suggestion, you get the group to come up with the words (before you tell them why). Tell them the stories can be as wild as they like, just so long as they get the words in.

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  6. Michael - you know full well that if I tell you, you'll just go and look it up, won't you? Hmmmmmmmmmmmm?

    Maxine - you are correct! Thank you for that. I've removed it, cos I can't find it any more!

    DJ - you are absolutely right, she is.

    Helen and Tim - thank you both very much.

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