nothing in the rulebook
A collective of creatives bound by a single motto: There's nothing in the rulebook that says a giraffe can't play football!
Year: 2017
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The average British family is set to spend almost £800 on Christmas this year – and their American counterparts will themselves spend around US$950. That’s an awful lot of turkey and cranberry sauce to go with all those horrible socks for your uncle and those whisky stones for your hipster brother – not to…
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At the start of 2016, Nothing in the Rulebook reported that authors’ incomes had collapsed to “near abject” levels – with professional writers earning on average just £11,000 a year. Now, the trend seems to have accelerated, with a new report finding that a “collapse” in sales of literary fiction had seen advanced paid to…
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When we last wrote about computer algorithms producing works of creative writing, we were talking slightly off-kilter poetry from the ‘mind’ of a program called OGDEN. Now we’re back on the topic again – only this time we’ve abandoned poetry in favour of Harry Potter; the greatest selling book franchise of all time. Less an…
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When we last published our list of upcoming writing competitions, Donald Trump had just been elected to the White House and we weren’t entirely sure if we’d make it all the way through 2017. With that in mind, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if you – like us – spent the year feverishly writing…
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It seems old hat to say that mainstream publishing has been facing an existential crisis in recent years. As profit margins thin, the go-to response from the biggest publishing houses has been to retreat from investing in new ideas, and to banking on “sure things” – which, as Julian Barnes has noted, essentially amounts to…
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US author Christopher Bollen has been named the winner of the 2017 Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his novel The Destroyers. The judges voted him the winner after reading a scene depicting the book’s protagonist, Ian, with his ex-girlfriend on the island of Patmos. The following extract drew particular focus from this year’s…
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“Science-fiction [is] the only genuine consciousness-expanding drug.” — Arthur C. Clarke, “Of Sand and Stars”, 1983 First off, apologies for the title. It’s a shameless piece of provocation. Obviously, crack destroys lives, and I wouldn’t want to equate it – in all seriousness – with an addiction to spaceships, lasers, and aliens. Nonetheless,…
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A new speculative fiction project, ‘The 8th Emotion’, has launched on Kickstarter. Set in a utopian future, the story is about how humanity unlocks a new emotion, thereby gaining a radically different way of perceiving the world. This in turn precipitates a civil war. The Kickstarter is aiming to fund the design and printing of…
nothing in the rulebook 