Little Update
Posted by bencooper | Filed under News
Hey all,
Just a brief post to update y’all. I’ve been hard at work in my new job as Assistant Editor for Acoustic Magazine. It’s been a busy old week getting to grips with the various roles I have to perform.
At the moment I haven’t had the energy to do any new writing what so ever 
I’m hoping this will change over the next month or so as I become acclimatised to the work. Nonetheless I’m loving the work and it’s a wonderful environment to be working in, with lots of fun as well as work!
Well, I don’t have too much more to say at the moment so I’ll say adieu for now!
Work, the final frontier.
Posted by bencooper | Filed under General, News
Well, I’ve finished university now. All I’m waiting on is my dissertation to be marked and then I’m done and dusted. Of course there’s the graduation ceremony but I’m not intending to attend that, I’ll just wait for my degree certificate to arrive in the post. I’m not the sentimental type and sitting around for three hours while the whole arts faculty lines up to collect theirs just doesn’t appeal.
But the point of this post is to pass on some good news. After all my worrying and agonising over the future and employment I’ve managed to land a great job. I am the new assistant editor of Acoustic Magazine. A series of events just happened to dovetail all at the same time and I start on Monday!
The job is a multi faceted one. It incorporates not only assisting in deciding what goes into the magazine but also feature/review/interview writing, sub-editing, proof reading, liaising with the graphic designers over layout, being the port of call for industry contacts, chasing up and arranging interviews and all kinds of other jobs. It looks like it’s going to be stressful but fun, the environment is great and the job sounds genuinely rewarding, with some nice perks.
Of course I’m wondering what effect this might have on my fledgling writing career. Although the job is a Monday-Friday one it’s obviously going to be busy and creative, and could leave me drained. On the other hand I’ll be doing a lot of writing for an internationally distributed magazine, which can only improve my skills. Hopefully, after an intial settling in period, I’ll not only have the time to write but also be inspired to.
Gareth Powell touched on the issue of job vs writing in this post.
Anyway, I’ll be sure to let you know how it all goes, and if you happen to play acoustic guitar/mandolin/banjo etc. or are just into the acoustic music scene please be sure to get the latest issue, which you can find in W H Smith’s and, from the next issue, Tescos too.
Ta ta for now
Tags: acoustic magazine, Gareth L. Powell, job, News, writing
And so, the end is near…
Posted by bencooper | Filed under General, News
Yup, my dissertation is all done. It just needs to be printed, bound and then handed in to face the cruel ministrations of university tutors!
It’s been a fun three years, not least because I’ve largely avoided work (of the remunerative sort) and so had a lot of time to play videogames, go to the cinema, hang out with friends…oh and read lots of fine works of literature and improve my analytical and critical thinking, as well as my writing.
Now of course I face the impending world of work which I have so skillfully avoided…oh well.
In truth, like many people of my generation (and I suspect of other generations, regardless of what grandparents like to say of a simpler time where men were men, and women were second class citizens: “But at least we all knew who we were, dear”) I’ve never really known what to do, and I think this is the root of my worries about the future.
Ah well, as the Romans used to say “Your problems sort themselves out by walking”. It worked for them, until a load of Goths come walking in the other direction!
PS I’ve posted a new link to a fellow aspiring writer, Leigh Barlow. It’s over on my side bar and in the weblinks page. Have a quick gander…go on…go on…go on…ahh you will…go on…
Poetry for my peeps
Posted by bencooper | Filed under General, Poetry
Just posted a couple of little poems for your reading pleasure in the poetry page. They’re both SF themed haikus.
The haiku is a Japanese form of verse that found great popularity in the West, mainly America, from around the 1920s onwards. In English the traditional form is 3 lines of 5,7 and 5 syllables. Of course in its orignal Japanese the haiku is simply a column of characters running down the page, but with the 5,7,5 morae.
Ezra Pound was a big fan of the haiku (and other Easter forms of poetry) and the similarities between haiku and some of the Imagist poems is evident: the compression, the distilling of an image into as few words as possible. Pound also had a real thing for Japanese and Chinese ideograms because they mean the thing that they represent (this isn’t the place to start talking about language and the limits of representation, but he has a point).
It is taken almost for granted that Western haikus don’t compare favourably to the original Japanese ones. Indeed many Western haikus (my own ones included on the poetry page) don’t adhere to the Japanese “rules” such as nature imagery, a seasonal representation (e.g cherry blossoms = spring) and so on.
Nonetheless they are a fun form of poetry to write, and if taken seriously can be very hard to write well. I don’t claim that my own are anything special but I enjoy them anyway. Hope you do to.
Bye.