news – Page 12 – Shady Characters

Housekeeping № 2: citations at Shady Characters

May 29, 2018

Giving credit where it’s due has been an important part of writing for Shady Characters since I started back in 2010. Where I use an image that I don’t own myself, for instance, I try my best to find the owner, obtain their permission and then credit them in the caption for their work. Equally as important, I try to link to or cite all of the sources I use when writing about a given subject. That last part has given me no end of grief, and that’s what I’m going to write about today.

The Book at the BBC: Book of the Week

May 13, 2018

Some exciting news! The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time is BBC Radio 4’s next Book of the Week! The first 15-minute episode will be broadcast on Radio 4 tomorrow, Monday 14th May, at 09:45 BST (it will be repeated again tomorrow night at 00:30) and will be followed by four more daily episodes to be broadcast and repeated at the same times for the rest of the week.

Housekeeping: your data at Shady Characters

April 8, 2018

Readers in the EU may have heard about something called the GDPR, or “General Data Protection Regulation”. This is an upcoming change to EU law that clarifies and expands on prior rules relating to how organisations (even one-man-bands such as Shady Characters) obtain personal data such as email addresses and how they manage that data once obtained. As such, I’ve updated my page on Privacy, Cookies & Personal Data to make it clear how I handle personal data. I’d encourage you to take a moment to read the new wording, but in brief:

The 2017 Shady Characters gift guide

December 19, 2017

The year is coming to an end and that can mean only one thing: it’s time for me to promote my books!

I’m kidding. Sort of, at least. Fatherhood has occupied most of the time that, in previous years, I would have spent hunting down punctuation-related gifts for you, the discerning reader. That said, I’ve been interested in the comings and goings surrounding emoji (“picture writing”, or symbols like “😊” and “🎁”) for some time now, and in doing so I came across Josh Williams’ pleasingly minimal “Unicalendar” for the year 2018.

Miscellany № 83: Thomas Jefferson’s ivory polyptych

November 25, 2017

“An ivory what?” you may well ask. In the process of researching and writing The Book (which is, need I say, available from all good bookshops, I came across any number of tidbits that lay just fractionally below the interesting-ness threshold required for inclusion in the book. One discovery in particular, though, has had me kicking myself since I first handed in the manuscript back in 2015, and I still wish I’d found a way to incorporate it into the narrative. Here it is!