We need you to re-subscribe (sorry!)
I hate to do this, but I need to ask all our subscribers to re-subscribe. And encourage anyone not subscribed to subscribe, because it’s awesome. I promise it’s for a good reason.
After the huge response to our competition and the massive increase in audience both for About Writing and Little Wonder, we’ve been having some logistical problems. Basically, Microsoft thinks we’re a spambot. Many of our mailings are getting rejected, bounced, chucked in junk bins or just going where they’re not wanted.
Giving you a better service (or, erm, any service at all)
To fix this, we are switching back to the Jetpack/WordPress subscription system. The good news is that it will let us be GDPR compliant, make posts you receive easier to customise, and make it more straightforward to unsubscribe if you don’t love us any more (sob).
The bad news is that means we have to unsubscribe everyone then ask you to re-subscribe. Manually. Uurgh. If you are on our current subscribers list, you should receive an email in the next couple of days asking you to confirm that you want to be subscribed. Please click confirm! If you don’t receive the email, or you aren’t subscribed and want to be, then fill out the subscription box to the right or at the bottom of this email. Hell, as long as you’re here, just stick your email in the box. Better safe than sorry. I strongly recommend this if you are taking part in the competition/are interested in are radio shows or writing articles/if you want the good karma that comes with doing nice things to writers. You can see a picture of what it looks like at the top of this post (don’t try to fill in the picture. It won’t work).
The other bad news is that we won’t be able to do our monthly newsletters anymore. I’m going to put our last roundup in this post, and after that you’ll get more prompt notifications when we have new content (lets face it, I was never very prompt.) So, if you’d like to hear more about stuff that happened this month, press more. And please do subscribe!
August was, basically, insane.
298 entries to our radio play competition
First, we closed our radio play competition after an amazing 298 entries. We’re compiling the longlist now – for more information about when you can find out if you’ve made it/when you’ll be able to hear the plays, check out this link here.
2 brand new writing articles
Second, we had two writing articles.
The first was an analysis of one of my own plays, “Mine”, focussing on the importance of empathetic characters, how a weak bad guy plot can leave you buried in exposition and the challenges of cutting out saggy middles. There’s also a rant about Brexit and racism, but it comes with a warning, so you can skip that bit.
The second article was the long awaiting “Metaphor as Embodied Simulation.” Well, long awaited by me, anyway. Based on the excellent work of Gibbs and Matlock it explores how your brain works to understand metaphors, and the way we can use this understanding to create better metaphors. Or, more specifically, metaphors more appropriate to our audience and the type of text we are writing.
3 Original Radio Plays
Third, and finally, we released three new plays (yes, I know, we’re amazing.)
The Third Bridge, by Anni Walsh, is a tense thriller about a police officer and a miner in a crowded Cardiff café with a gun on the table between them. And a waitress named after a crepe.
Loopie-Loop is a comedy starring a three-year-old (who was very chuffed to play a four-year-old), Kester Lovelace as an impeccable RAF Pilot and two fraught parents trapped in an out of control aircraft. This was made in three days as a bit of fun and a thank you to everyone who helped us pass 2000 plays (we’re, erm, approaching 4000 now.) It’s proved one of our most popular plays.
Space State Zeta: Episode 1 is our long awaited 5-part comedy series about intelligence, spurned love and Chairman of the Federation Ronald Dump. Episodes are coming out weekly, it has at least one explosion per episode (usually two), and the very best sound work we’ve done to date (good work Chris). Check it out:
Thanks everyone for supporting us, and for taking the time to re-subscribe. We promise to continue to produce cool free content from amazing actors and brilliant writers, because obviously we have some sort of compulsive addiction and need help desperately.
Oh, and here’s the subscription form again. Just in case 😀
