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!
Tag: writing
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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…
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Nominations continue to come in as the Literary Review prepares to announce the winner of the notorious ‘Bad Sex in Fiction’ prize, which aims to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction. Books nominated so far include The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet, The Destroyers by Christopher Bollen, Mother of Darkness by Venetia…
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When the Nothing in the Rulebook team were asked to review Nick Brooks’s Sexy Haiku – a collection of haiku that follow one man’s relationships – we did the only sensible thing and carried the book with us on a romantic trip to Paris. After all, nothing quite says ‘city of love’, as reading haikus that…
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I think I am, actually humble. I think I’m much more humble than you would understand. I do not have tiny hands. That is where I draw a line in the sand. Look at these hands. Are they small hands? I’m honoured to have the greatest temperament that anybody has. I have to start…
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If you’ve always suspected there’s a novel in you, one writing project could help you get it on to paper in just 30 days. Founded in 1999, NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month), is an internet hub built for budding writers. Participants agree to start and complete a novel of 50,000 words or more…
nothing in the rulebook 