A film from the past

I wrote and shot this (with the invaluable assistance of Miss Waterfowl) in a couple of hours not long after I got my camera. For innumerable reasons it is only now that I have finally finished editing it. Anyway, t'is done, t'is done. You can view it all nicely embedded here, thus:

8 Jokes from David Beris Edwards on Vimeo.

Or, failing that, follow this link a-here, thus.

Playtime!

I suppose I might as well mention here that a short one-act play of mine will be performed later this month at the King's Theatre in Gloucester as part of the local one act play festival.

I've been working with the wonderfully generous, accommodating and talented folks at Nailsworth Dramatic Society to put together this silly little production. Here's a little poster with details and whatnot:




I hope you can be there, at least in spirit.

Lost & Found

Eleanor's clearing her desk right now. She's just handed me an old, crumpled envelope with my handwriting on one side. Apparently at some time in the before-now I wrote the following two poems. The first didn't have a title (rather unusually, as I often start with the title these days) so I've given it a somewhat unimaginative one for now. Other than that I've changed practically nothing in either.

Things I Have Seen

I've seen a fire engine.
Its red hands were clasped in a gesture of horrible anticipation.

I've seen a blade of grass.
No one was looking so it probably got away with it.

I've seen an old window.
"Too wooden," said the giant tortoise underneath, "far too blue and wooden."

I've seen a modern rock band.
They sang about anal sex and synthetic textiles.

I've seen a wasp.
It was carrying a dead shoe in its claws.

I've seen 14 other things as well,
but they're not quite so consistently engaging.


A Chant for Mellotrons

CHAFFERY
SLIPINCH
SPOOLESS
CORDLING
FUCKFUCK
FUCKFUCK
FON-DLED

I've written a foreword!

Mouse Milk's just published a lovely little collection of poems by some exciting young up'n'comings and I was very kindly asked to provide a preamblage.

A link to a link.

United America

Shortly before I went to the states, my dear friend Joble organised a 24-hour writing experiment type thing for reasons apparent only to himself. He'd suggested that anyone in our writing group could join in but in the end only Amy and I stayed and wrote with him.

We turned up for the nightshift armed with books, scissors and glue. Lots of things were produced that night, but the one project to which I devoted the most time was cutting full-page pictures out of a copy of Alistair Cooke's America and sticking nonsensical captions onto them using a small selection of text from said book, which gradually dwindled (I chose not to restock once I'd started selecting images), making it harder and harder to even achieve grammatical accuracy in the captions.

By morning I had about 17 of the buggers and no idea what to do with them.

Then, a couple of months ago it struck me: why not try my hand at writing a book about America myself? After all, I'd recently visited the country and thus knew it like the back of my elbow, and Cooke's account was a good fifteen years out of date, at least.

Thus, I present to you:

United America: Country of Liberties

Have at it!

PS - A little DVD extra for you. One of the pictures I scanned but couldn't squeeze into the final version of the book:

Hooray for Nicer Hosting!

All 7 of my recent PDFs (A New Stench, A Body of Water, Selected Prose Works Vols. 1-5) are now all availble for download from the following address:

http://www.box.net/shared/1evg3om030

Feel free to bookmark it, because all future PDF publications will be going into the same folder.

Hopefully this will be easier for all concerned.

Do check back regularly, 'cause I'm planning on churning something else out in the next week or so. I've no idea what it'll be yet - there's a few half-finished things I really ought to wrap up, but it may well be something entirely different. We shall see.

Anyway, that's it for now.

TTFN, old egg(s)!

Selected Prose Works Vol. 5

And so, at long last, here is the final installment in what I hope has been an entertaining and diverting little series.

I won't say much about this story, other than I personally think it's one of the best things I've ever written. It should be noted, however, that I tend to be a terrible judge of my own work. Regardless, here it is:

Selected Prose Works Vol. 5 - The Great Tower of Greenwich, the People Who Built It and the Boy Who Swam to the Top in the Rain

A quick note on the setting: In the real world, Greenwich is a district of London. This is a fact which I have completely and utterly ignored whilst writing this story, choosing instead to treat the setting as though it were a small town in Yorkshire circa 1957. I'm not entirely sure why I didn't just use an actual Yorkshire town name instead, but I didn't. Greenwich it is, though Greenwich it isn't.

PVIM!