The Oscar's Oscars 2010 Hi-Five Roll of Honour

The inaugural Oscar's Oscars recipients have been notified, in suitable cutting edge style via the magic of Twitter. Details of the tar-studded awards ceremony were reported in an earlier post. Nothing now remains but to record those awards and accolades in a less transient medium. Here:

Early recipients (the ad hoc cohort) and accolades:

   •    Vanessa Gebbie - For metaphoric mechanics and literary lubrication.
    •    Paul Conneally - For being Journo with the Buzz.
    •    Flash Fiction Online - For excellent literary taste and content ;) .
    •    Mrs Darcy v the Aliens - For Georgian tension with tentacles.
    •    GUD Magazine  - For a truly eye-opening cover.
    •    Captain Isambard Smith  - For being Pym's Number One (The John Pym, that is).
    •    Greg McQueen - For his heroic Hundred Stories for Haiti.
    •    Alex Brown  - Just for fun.

Inaugural recipients (the annual cohort) and accolades:

    •    Katie Fforde - For 'Love Letters'  - and being a very nice person.
    •    Guardian Books - For literary guidance in depth.
    •    Verulam Writers' Circle - For good friends taken as read.
    •    TransWorld's Simon Taylor - For Three Very Patient Minutes 20/02/2010.
    •    Sandra Norval - For wildlife, badgers and Libertine (WIP).
    •    Stephen Fry - For erudition and the ridiculous in sublime combination - and playing the Wilde card.

This may be all very  silly, but it has been great fun and the good wishes expressed are genuine. Thanks everybody for taking it (I hope) in the spirit of fun in which it was intended.

To be continued.

Please don't forget the light as you leave.

Have a great weekend.

Oscar's Oscars Night: OO=^v

'A Tar-studded Event' - Leading dry cleaner

'Tux Among the Trucks' - Leading lorry driver from Brussels

Stephen Fry,  Cheryl Cole, Sharon Osbourne, Julia Roberts and Simon Cowell were among scores of glittering A-list celebrities who were absent on the red carpet at last night's  prestigious Oscar's Oscars award ceremony at the luxurious and world-renowned Scratchwood Service Area. In fact the red carpet was also absent, having been repossessed on Wednesday morning by my Aunt Elsie and replaced in her hallway. This minor glitch did nothing to detract from the warmth and sincerity of the moving ceremony. It had to be a moving ceremony because the security guys claimed we were causing an obstruction, but I've worked around this problem for next year. I'll hold the ceremony on the M25 in the rush hour, which will give us much more time to socialise without fear of being moved on.

Press Release

I'm calling this a Press Release because nobody has volunteered to report on the event (or to accept the awards, for that matter) so I'm having to press the lot on whoever I can and not release my vice-like grasp until they agree to my reasonable demands.

I'm frequently asked to explain the meaning of the formula: OO=^v. Frequently... I just thought you might like to know that.

I also sense other unasked questions: 1) Why Oscar's Oscars? and, 2) Who the hell do you think you are? Well, to tackle those tacit questions in order: 1) Oscar is my name, so calling them Arthur's Oscars would be disingenuous; 2) I think I'm Oscar, but if you know otherwise, please do inform me. Thank you.

For the record... or should that be: For the CD/MP3, nowadays? Well, whatever, like so many things I've done in my life, Oscar's Oscars began as a spontaneous piece of silliness. It would have remained a piece of Friday silliness, in isolation, had it not been for a couple of acquaintances finding it amusing... If you've got children you'll have heard the plea many times, especially in connection with boys: 'No. Please don't laugh, it will only encourage him.' Yea, well. Right. Who says men never grow up? Right again. So here we are.

What's it all  about?

Nothing more than me - Oscar - giving people I like and/or admire a hi-five (there you are), and sometimes... just  sometimes, doing a leeetle bit of creeping. This is the inaugural annual ceremony, but Oscar's Oscars are also presented on an ad hoc basis, and when I feel like it, too.

Anyway, the full list of 2010's annual awards will be published, and no doubt ignored, on Friday 5th March 2010.

Please do turn out the lights when you leave, after paying for all these expensive awards I really can't afford enormous lekky bills.

Bye for now.

Positive Rejection

Success is a fleeting, insubstantial thing. At the recent, excellent,  VWC Get Writing 2010 conference, one of the speakers quoted a saying that is worth repeating here: 'A successful writer is only a failed writer who did not give up.'

Success, however,  is an impostor, like Triumph and Disaster in Kipling's If, and yet we writers still labour in search of that spectral destination, sometimes to the detriment of health and relationships.

Perhaps, then, success should be regarded not so much as a destination but a journey? Framed in those terms, as R L Stephenson wrote, it may be '...better to travel hopefully than to arrive'. Indeed, the key to success may reside in something seemingly transient and painful but in truth substantial and positive, like receiving better rejections.

On Relativity and Constipation

I suppose a writers' conference seems an unlikely place to gain empirical proof of Relativity?

It wasn't the conference as a whole, of course. Said proof was contained in one – relatively brief (nudge, nudge) – aspect of it.

For the record, that same aspect of the conference kicked an adrenaline rush like the Winter Olympic Skeleton Bob run.

The Rhinoceros in the Room

Let's agree to ignore the elephant? I mean the visual joke that involved pulling out empty trouser pockets and unzipping, yes? Erase it from the New Year's party memories, like you erased that skew-whiff .jpeg… Please tell me that you did.

Anyway, the good news is: there is a rhino in my room – at last.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I took part in a few writing competitions last year. One of these was the excellent annual Whittaker Prize Competition run by the equally excellent The Write Idea website. Bottom line is that the 'Best of' anthology is now available – amusingly entitled The Rhinoceros and His Thoughts – and, tarah!: My copy arrived yesterday.

All That Glisters: Thoughts on 2009 and hopes for 2010

Mulling over the past is something I rarely do. The past, so far as I'm concerned, is gone. Events now and in the future are of more significance, being all we can truly experience.

So, this is pretty well the first time I have ever sat down to record my private thoughts for possible (Although I can't imagine anyone else having the slightest interest) public consumption. But it's a good writing exercise, so here-we-go.

2009 was not a bumper year for writing success; more of a consolidation year, gaining experience, experimenting in new fields, entering a competition or two and making new friends.

Early on in the year, I was fortunate in having a horror piece, Timelock, performed by Obstacle Productions at several London venues, including the Drill Hall, off Tottenham Court Road. It gave me real pleasure to share the bill [performance, not cost] with my old mate and fellow Verulam Writers' Circle (VWC) member, Jonathan Pinnock... oh, yes, and a couple of chancers, names of Edgar A Poe, and W W Jacobs.

TIME

Look out he's behind you!

Oh, no he isn't... Is he?

Is this Oscar Windsor-Smith as he once was? Or is this his next regeneration? Be afraid… (Etc., etc)

Time. What is it? Where does it go? To be sure, it's not what we think it is.

Like countless others here in the UK, on Christmas Eve I watched the first half of the final episode of Doctor Who with David Tennant as The Doctor. That was fine. My problems began with the trailer for the second half, due to be broadcast on New Year's Day. It seems that the Time Lords are returning from the dead. In teaser shots we saw disturbing images – disturbing, that is, to me – relating as they do to a period that I refer to, in my quaint old-fashioned way, as my past. The above pic is the damning evidence.

IMPORTANT NOTES: All the items illustrated above are genuine and employed with the full knowledge and cooperation of the Gallifrey General Council. Be aware that Daleks can go down and up, as well as along. Oscar would like to thank the manufacturers of Botox in anticipation of his next regeneration. No Daleks were hurt in the making of this post.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010 *

* Year of Get Writing 2010, Verulam Writers' Circle 's greatest ever conference, GW10.

Book now, because VWC's time reversal service remains unreliable pending the next software upgrade, due in January 1942.

AND FINALLY - A time link to ease you through to the next decade, here.