Bear Faced Bloggery

Now the blackened ends of fireworks and empty champagne bottles* languish in the bin, along with the sad remnants of the year just gone, I find myself gazing from my window across frosted blades of grass and considering what 2025, like Monty Python's Romans, ever did for us. On the plus side, an update of my website ( kbwillson.com) revealed that writing-wise it wasn't a bad year at all. As well as getting my grief memoir out there, I had five stories published in various anthologies and magazines, as well as being commissioned to write the story of 'The Woodland Ball' for NT Kingston Lacy's Christmas offering. So all things considered this has been my most prolific year yet for getting my writing before the reading public. I also attended Fairport's Cropredy Convention and World Fantasycon - both of which were excellent - and did the usual smattering of work to keep the wolf from the door. A few trips away with van and dog helped maintain both my equilibrium ...

  In my last blog I promised to give my impressions of World Fantasycon, which I am more than happy to do. I've not attended a major convention in many years, falling as they do at times when more often than not I am working, but thanks to an extremely generous gesture from a very dear friend I was able to turn down work and head off to Brighton over the Halloween weekend. And what a wonderful, invigorating time it turned out to be! Brighton was alive with marauding packs of young people in spooky/horror garb whooping and hollering as they moved from pub to club in the perennial search for a good time. I am happy to report that I felt neither unsafe nor intimidated as I navigated my way between them on my way back to my hotel late at night - for believe it or not, I too was once a young, intoxicated and staggering student. It is for many a rite of passage, after all. The convention was excellent, well organised, extremely informative on a wide range of subjects concerning Fantasy a...

 As I write this, the sun is streaming in through the window and there is a slightly chilly north-easterly wind ruffling the leaves of the shrubs in the garden. We have had quite an extended period of good weather for this time of year, and life is all the better for it... which is a very good thing indeed, for just as meteorologically speaking it has been a time of more sunshine than showers,  metaphorically speaking the opposite is true. Not that these last few months haven't had their high points... I had two stories published in March, one (The Melusine Pact) in ParSec magazine and another (Pulse) in Black Cat Weekly, and my grief memoir ( Precious Dreams and Living Nightmares - written under my real name, Kevin Burke) continues to garner a truly wonderful (and frankly humbling) response from readers. I also had an extremely positive road trip at the beginning of April, taking in lots of old friends and revelling in a week of unmitigated sunshine. But for those who have re...

 ...and just like that, another year draws to its close.  I can scarcely believe that in just a couple of months I will have completed my second year as a widower... a year which, though slightly less emotionally fragile than the last, has nonetheless been jagged with grief. I feel my loss as acutely as ever, though life has expanded around it, subsuming it into the warp and weft of everyday existence. I am working more, I am writing again, I am filling my time with the minutiae of daily life to such an extent that, to the casual observer, I would seem to be little different from the person I was prior to the terrible events of Easter 2023.  But the casual observer would be wrong.  If they were only to look a little more closely they would see the continuing sadness behind my eyes, feel the pain of loss that hangs heavy on my heart, and perhaps begin to get some inkling of my daily struggle to keep going. Reading back my blog from this time last year, I can see that ...

  As those who have read my previous posts will know, since suffering a devastating personal loss last year, I have not been able to write - having neither the motivation nor the concentration required to create a story, much less to hone and edit until it is fit for human consumption. But I have been recording snippets of how I have been feeling on my phone, and once Christmas was over I listened to them back.  They are, as you might imagine, quite soul-wrenching and I wept many new tears as I listened, but it also occurred to me that perhaps they should be transcribed into a form which might pass for a book. I have read several books on grief over this last year, but because grief is such a personal thing, and everyone reacts to it differently and in their own way, in any one book there tends to be only a few passages that chime with you. So while you can appreciate and empathise with the writer's own experience of loss, it does not necessarily mirror what you are personall...

  "We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener." Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot. The last time I visited this blog, I was dwelling  (perhaps a little overmuch?) on the speed with which life was hurtling by. Well, it will come as no surprise that it hasn't slowed down any. If anything, it seems to be accelerating, like my foot is to the floor and there's no way of lifting it off.  I can't believe that it has been ten years since I made the decision to 'take my writing more seriously'... ten years since I won a writing competition which led to the publication of my first short story, and which gave me the confidence to try to establish myself as an author. Over that time I have, like most writers, been trying to fit my writing around work and family commitments, meaning that there have been whole swathes of time when I haven't managed to put any words down on paper at all. I have also, over this period, got ma...

 A Traveller through Time ... sounds like a great title for a piece from a Specfic writer, doesn't it? Conjuring a mental image of some deliciously Whovian flight of fancy; an exploration of strange worlds with even stranger inhabitants, or a dip into the far reaches of our own history, and the extraordinary voyage of discovery that may be found there. So I'm sorry to have to tell you that today's little mental ramble is going to be far more prosaic than the title might lead you to expect. For we are all, of course, travellers through time - all on a shared journey to one inescapable destination - and what we do with that journey depends on an extraordinarily complex set of factors: ambition, opportunity, character, family background, desire, environment, mental and physical wellbeing, education, luck... the list goes on and on, yet in the words of the old adage, what it really comes down to is how well (or otherwise) we play the cards we are dealt. Sometimes the choices we...

Welcome to this, my first attempt at Blogging! To those of you who don't know me, let me introduce myself... my name is Kevin Burke. I have lived with that name all my life, through good and bad, thick and thin. At school it did me no favours,  (though there was also a Pratt in my class, so I'll leave you to ponder on who got the most ribbing) but this inevitably led me to mount a fierce defence of the name whenever it came under fire. There have been several times in my life when I had the chance to ditch the name, but perhaps because of the struggle I'd had with it throughout my formative years, I have always stuck with it. When I fulfilled my ambition of becoming an actor I had the great good fortune to be able to keep my name, even though had there already been a Kevin Burke registered with Equity, the actor's union, I would have been forced to change it. Then, when I moved into the world of entertainment, I passed up the opportunity to take a stage name o...