Hail Fellow! Well Met!

Blog? What blog? I have a blog? Oh... Ooops. Sorry, I forgot...

Seriously, I've been a bit preoccupied of late, what with moving house and trying to deal with an ailment whose existence I'd have denied up until a year or so ago - namely, writer's block. Of which more anon, probably, but suffice to say I think I'm getting over it now.

However...

I am officially a Fellow!

To be precise, I have been awarded a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship.

Let me explain. The RLF Fellowship scheme works by placing writers in universities, where our jog is to help students who may be having trouble with their written work. Their difficulties may range from questions of style, the right way to structure a dissertation or how to cite an article in a learned journal all the way down to the level of basic grammar and spelling.

This might lead you suppose that I must be an expert in academic writing or have teaching experience or at the very least possess a sympathetic ear! But it seems that none of these is required. Apparently having written a few novels and short stories is qualification enough. If this seems odd to you, well, it does to me too, but I've spoken to plenty of authors who have done this work and it seems that it is so.

I'm not sure which that says more about - the superhuman abilities of writers, or the woeful state to which the teaching of English in schools has descended in recent years. I'm afraid I think it's more likely to be the latter. Still, I shall try to blog regularly on this subject during my time in the post, and maybe I'll have a better idea of what's really going on at the end of it.

For now, I'm looking forward to it - it should be a lot of fun, if nothing else.

And if you happen to be a student at the University of Kent's Medway Campus in Chatham Dockyard - well, it may be the partially sighted leading the blind, but I'm here to help anyway!