Gareth S. Young - - 1000 Trillion Suns

I got the new Kate Bush album for Christmas this year: 50 Words For Snow. Now, Americans reading this will have started scratching their heads in unison since the name will be unfamiliar. Or maybe, if you've been around long enough to know who Peter Gabriel is, it will have tickled a small memory stuffed at the back of your brain like that discarded t-shirt in your closet that you used to wear when you were younger and thinner. Kate has been knocking around since the late 70's, after being discovered by Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd, and has only produced and recorded a handful of albums (10) and toured exactly once, way back in 1979. Her style can only be described as original and she has directly influenced an eclectic and bizarre range of artists from Tori Amos, Lily Allen and Goldfrapp to Tricky, Big Boi of OutKast and Coldplay. A true original. I've been a fan since she first showed up singing a song based on the book: "Wuthering Heights". I was a little b...

I completed NaNoWriMo! It was touch and go there for 29 days but somehow I made over the finish line, got my 50k written and won my little: See? My thanks to all the encouragement from my little brother Christie and my good friend Alan who both completed as well. Congratulations you two! Also, a big thank you to all of my Twitter friends who continually Tweeted encouragement at me. You guys know who you are and you rock! So, what now? Well, as I maybe mentioned before, writing is a form of Sisyphean Torture: you get the boulder up the hill only for it to roll back down again. And that's your lot in life. Even once you get your story finished, edited, rewritten, reedited, agented, published and then you sell a million copies and get a movie made about it, you have to be hard at work with your boulder, shoving it up that damn mountain again. And it's not just because your Agent wants a sequel to that one-off story you did, it's because while you were sitting si...