13 June 2026
Hello there
There’s a typo on the back cover of my new book. The first ninety copies say “shinging” where they should say “shining.”
A bigger publisher would pulp them. I am not a bigger publisher, so I sat down to type ninety erratum slips on a manual typewriter – and promptly introduced dozens of fresh errors, including several misspellings of the word “erratum” itself.
I decided to keep the spoiled ones. (That link shows a few of the most dreadful ones.)
After all, the book is about being hopeless and carrying on anyway.
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In other news: two excellent upcoming literary festivals in London: The Idler and The Financial Times.
Here’s a picture I made at last year’s Idler Festival. As you see it now, it’s covered in tissue paper, but if you click on the picture the tissue paper will magically disappear:
Go on, click!
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Late last year I ran a course for people who want to publish some kind of micro-memoir (44 pages or so) in a month.
My own new book (yes, the one with the typo on the cover of the first 90 copies) was written in just a month, as a kind of test to see if I could do what I promised others could do.
My own book, as it happens, is much longer (128 pages).
I recently started running the Micro-Memoir course again, for a new cohort. Participants are about half-way through.
It’s much as it was before, but with a few tweaks. And it’s not automated because I actively engage with participants by email every day.
Next intake starts in August, in time for me to go off and run a week-long residential memoir course at Arvon, alongside Lily Dunn.
I’ve raised the price of the Micro-memoir course because I want participants to understand that the course demands real commitment.
Here’s what a picture-led micro-memoir can look like.
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Thank you for reading.