Another publication, of a very different sort

A nine-year old article of mine has made its way, lightly edited, into a new and frankly astounding, heavyweight coffee table book about the band The Wedding Present, entitled Sometimes These Words Just Don't Have To Be Said by Richard Houghton and David Gedge. I'm on pp333-334.

My contribution is a bit journalistic if I'm honest, being a gig review for a blog rather than something I wrote with more generic publication in mind. I might have edited it a bit differently too, but I can't quibble about that. All in all, I'm quite chuffed about this, being a huge fan of the band.

If you're a fan too, you can buy Sometimes These Words Just Don't Have To Be Said from the band's Scopitones website. It's not a cheap book, but then it is a monumental slab of hardback. I'd buy it, even it I wasn't in it.

What do you call a non-fiction short story?

Because to me, "story" implies fiction. But calling it an "essay" seems too formal, too academic.

I only ask because I thought I should probably do something with my one-time attempt to be Dave Gorman, the non-fiction short story (or essay if you'd prefer) about what happened when I tried to live for a month without using any supermarkets chains.

Yes, Tesc-No - Living without supermarkets is now available for your Kindling pleasure, and joins the growing number of non-fiction titles in my back-catalogue. And when I say "joins", I mean "doubles".

I may have appropriated a logo there...

Narrative. Maybe a non-fiction short story is just a narrative.

Non-fiction!

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away another world (it sometimes seems), I was made redundant from a job I quite liked but was never particularly taxing. One of the things I did in that job was develop databases using a Microsoft product called Access and, if I do say so myself, I'd become rather good at it. To the extent that, in the six months I spent bumming around and travelling before I got another job, I actually entered into discussions with a publisher about writing a textbook on the subject - a sort of "build Access databases my way". But then I got that other job, and parked the idea permanently.

Now though, I've sort of revisited it. Because back then, in that former life, I also developed a website full on tips, tricks, code samples and other info for Access developers. Enough info, in fact, to fill a book...

And so my first piece of non-fiction is published: Accessory - the real-world workbook for Microsoft Access developers. I know - snappy title. You can buy it from Lulu as a PDF (the only format that would support embedded hyperlinks), right here.