Heather Parry
@HeatherParryUK
Followers
10,418
Following
2,407
Media
1,093
Statuses
17,826
breakfast enthusiast // ELECTRIC DREAMS March '24 // CARRION CROW Feb '25 // ORPHEUS BUILDS A GIRL // THIS IS MY BODY, GIVEN FOR YOU // editor @extrateethmag //
Glasgow via South Yorkshire
Joined February 2013
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Send us removal request.
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Pinned Tweet
"some news", as the kids say
CARRION CROW will be landing via
@DoubledayUK
in Feb 2025, with an unhinged short story collection to follow in 2026
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my piano teacher's cat is an absolute icon of feline shitheadery
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years ago now we were at a bookshop quiz & got the question: what are the final lines of Little Women? and my partner genuinely and with certainty said "and it was then they realised they were no longer little girls; they were little women" which is the Simpsons pisstake version
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can't get a doctor or dentist appt and bins are left rotting and the roads are destroyed and you can't afford childcare or food or heating and there's no funding for the arts or mental health but we are about to go to fucking war in Yemen to ensure Israel can continue a genocide
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it really, truly breaks my heart to hear very prominent 'feminists' on the radio saying that what defines a woman is whether or not you can become pregnant. this is just so obviously, brutally exclusionary and essentially takes womanhood away from so many women
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my youngest nephew has just been allowed his own email address so I popped him a cute first email earlier. he's responded like an overworked father trying to draw boundaries with a colleague he doesn't much like.
he is eight
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Freelancers! Do yourself a solid and add this to your invoice template right now—and then make yourself a promise to enact it next year.
If we want 2019 to be the Year of Getting Paid on Time, we are going to have to do this. All of us.
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I try not to be angry about this all the time, but 4.5 years ago we had the opportunity to vote for a different reality, where public services were going to be funded better and things were going to be nationalised and affordable and the entire media class destroyed it
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So. A (male) publicist was trying to book a (male) colleague and I for podcast. We gave availability but didn't get confirmation. The publicist informed us with hours notice that we were on today.
My (male) colleague and I both said we couldn't do it. Here are the two responses.
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Freelancers!
It's the time we're all freaking out about self assessment tax returns, which means it's time for my now annual (and updated) thread about how it's not actually that bad. Here are some things that should help:
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My advice: if you are going to be unbelievably rude to a woman and entirely reasonable to a man about the same issue, at least remove her from the CC field so she doesn't see.
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just saw a tweet saying it's fine Shamima Begum is being stripped of her citizenship because she joined an organisation that threatened the safety & wellbeing of 66 million Brits, and all I can say is that's a terrifying precedent for everyone who's joined the Conservative Party
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if you want to get people out of their cars (and we do, because climate catastrophe) you are going to have to run public transport at a loss. it has to be cheaper to get on a train than it is to drive or fly. this is no longer a choice; it has to happen, and quickly.
You asked for it so we've delivered it. You can now book return journeys between Glasgow and Edinburgh with the return ticket valid for up to one month.
Travel any time of day for £30, or with off-peak travel it's just £18.40.
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Just to shed a tiny bit of positivity on this - there are good feminist men and my colleague is one of them
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why does Glastonbury get singled out for being expensive when a) on a per-band basis it's cheaper than you'll ever see any major act b) you can take all your own food and booze for the weekend c) all the food and booze stalls are local biz and d) they incentivise green travel
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we ALREADY PAY for GP and A&E appointments. and operations and treatments and everything else. WE PAY TAX FOR THE NHS
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can't describe the rage I feel at Tory ministers saying the NHS now requires an insurance model. the reason the NHS can't function is because the Tories have been systematically underfunding it, on purpose, for over a decade. what's needed is a new government, not a new model
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"no money left" is the kind of thing you say when you are either too stupid to understand how money works at a government level or you think and hope regular people are too stupid to understand it, and either of these makes Labour completely unfit to govern the UK right now
'There just, frankly, is no money left'
Shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell says the Labour Party can't make promises it 'can't afford to keep' as she defends Keir Starmer's plan to keep the two-child benefit cap in place
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who knew there were Wes Anderson sets in the Southside of Glasgow?
(actually it's a converted school from the 1800s)
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you shouldn't actually have to give up your social life, access to culture, health, travel, safety, comfort or pleasure as a resident of the fifth richest country in the world. you shouldn't have to shiver and get sick in your flat or batch cook the cheapest possible ingredients
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I have never wanted anything more in my life. I am physically pained by the existence of this. I would marry this robot bar. Pls someone help me
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the thing about feminism is that if you believe in women's autonomy you have to also believe in their right to do things with their body that you don't personally like: a type of sex you don't agree with, sex work that you don't like, surrogacy, whatever. you don't get to say.
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I don't know much poetry by heart, but I know this one, by Maggie Smith.
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@voodoodledoll
We watched Muppet Christmas Carol yesterday and I was taken aback that the sign on the door to Scrooge's office says "Scrooge and Marley" when it should obviously say "Scrooge, Marley and Marley" which, IMO, is now canon.
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nurses, rail workers and posties are trying to ensure we have a functional NHS, a functional railway and a functional postal service after more than a decade of tory privatisation which has left *everything* in this country worse. this is about what we all will have in the future
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a man assaulted my friend on a busy street in front of all of his friends and many more people. they laughed. men assault women on packed underground carriages surrounded by people. in clubs. at work. it's not at night, it's not when we're alone. it's everywhere, all the time.
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Network Rail are proposing a 50% reduction in safety checks as well as 2000-3000 fewer staff, making rail travel less safe and less well staffed while you still pay through the roof for it. Remember that today as journalists constantly go on about how much train drivers make
'We haven't got an offer that suits the needs of the dispute'
Some 40,000 workers at Network Rail and 14 train operators are on strike across the UK
Mick Lynch from the
@RMTUnion
spoke to
#BBCBreakfast
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ten years to the day since I bought a kids' version of Kafka's Metamorphosis to help me learn Spanish and received what I still think is the funniest book cover of all time
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Unbelievably I am doing my tax return at the almost-last-minute AGAIN despite having TEN MONTHS OF NO FUN to distract me, so yet again here is a thread of boring but hopefully helpful advice to any freelancers in the same boat who might be doing their return for the first time:
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"My obsession is about the future and the political rights of all people. Benjamin Zephaniah OBE - no way Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen. I am profoundly anti-empire."
Gutted to hear of the passing of one of the greats far, far too young.
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its almost like having a billionaire in charge of the country is a terrible idea. it's almost like a wildly privileged man who took half a million quid's worth of private jet journeys in a single week hasn't got a fucking clue what 99% of the people in this country want
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since there seems to be a concerted effort to refute this fact: the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft *was* in fact a sexology institute in Berlin from 1919 to 1933, run by Magnus Hirschfeld, and it *did* cater to trans and queer people, and it *was* targeted by the Nazis
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Very cool that we've just decided as a country that we don't need trains on a Sunday any more. I mean who needs to get around? Why pay unions what they're demanding when you can just leave the entire country without 1/7th of a service for half a year? Very helpful, very normal.
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it is absolutely insane that 10 months and 75,000 deaths after the first lockdown we are here again, in almost exactly the same place, because the people that run this country, and by that I mean almost every political party, were absolutely desperate to get us back to work
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can't stop thinking about the taxi ride in A Castle for Christmas: from Edinburgh Airport to the quite vague "the highlands" via Inverary Castle and Culross, a truly chaotic and nonsensical route
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we were told that very mild social democracy was Stalinesque, dangerous, unelectable, student politics, wishful thinking, unachievable etc etc and now we have an opposition party offering nothing better than the Tories and everyone complaining about how shit the country is
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@JamieDunnEsq
"Most landlords have multiple mortgages" - yes, in an attempt to extract rent from people as a secondary income source. He's acting like these mortgages are children he's picked up off the street and is now providing for.
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@jasebyjason
If there's an emergency at a private facility they take you to the NHS. Stunning that people don't know this!
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women are not exempt from criticism and criticising a woman's actions is not misogyny. if you cry misogyny every time you're criticised I would suggest you're cynically using feminism as a shield for something you know is indefensible
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genuinely can't believe how many people seem to believe a "15 minute city" means you will be shackled to your front door and shot in the head if you leave your street rather than it meaning you can get tahini and a library book without having to drive
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this is simply a non functional country. this is for two people to get to the south coast in three weeks fine
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If you know you'll be buying books for Christmas and you have the means to, get your orders in to your local indie in the next few weeks. They can order books they don't have, they can recommend titles, and they need you a lot more than Amazon does.
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On March 17th New Zealand announced that they would pay everyone to stay home for eight weeks, almost $4700 for full time workers, and it worked. Only 25 people have died. None of this, including the 67,000 deaths in the UK, was inevitable, and the govt are to blame.
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do you ever think about the fact that any conversation about fair pay for writers is hamstrung by the fact that so many writers are financially supported by their partners but don't mention it
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so over a year ago I started making this, a very large octopus from very thin yarn, planning to gift it to one of my favourite babies for his birth
well, i finished it just in time for his first birthday, meaning this officially took longer to gestate than a human child
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@EmmaRitch
Giving availability is not confirming and I feel like a publicist should probably learn the difference!!
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"how did we end up in a situation where the sick are forced into work and no one can afford anything?"
//
"equalising internet access is literally communism"
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I wrote a dark and very deathy novel, and it's won a prize, and I am delighted.
We are delighted to announce
@HeatherParryUK
is the winner of the
#LaxfieldLiteraryLaunchPrize
for her 'disturbingly brilliant' unpublished debut novel Orpheus Builds a Girl. 🔥🔥🔥 Many congratulations Heather!🎉
@writerscentre
@scottishbktrust
@newwriting
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either there can be better or there can't. either there is a different way to run the economy in this country or there isn't. you can't decry and destroy any attempt to change the course of the system then whine when the system drives us all into the ground
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I am staying in one of Scotland's most haunted castles and we have already heard an invisible person sit down on that leather sofa
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I'm sorry but why didn't I already know that Julia Child's interest in cooking stemmed from *checks notes* coming up with shark repellents to *checks notes again* stop them setting off explosives
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I really think it's important we tell younger/aspiring writers how few professional writers "write full time". Every email I get from someone saying they've just jacked in their job to "write full time" fills me with absolute terror for them
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The trans rights movement is no more 'turning lesbians into trans men' any more than the gay rights movement was 'turning young boys gay'. Same old rhetoric, same old bigotry. Signed, a queer woman who predominately wears jeans and has short hair and yet still isn't trans.
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take this money, which you've had to work unpaid to apply for, and toe the line; give up weeks, months of your life to the admin of it, allow yourself to be wheeled out as a success story, don't say anything against the grain. don't name the truth. be a good little artist
APNews: Arts Council England (
@ace_national
) has updated its policies, warning that "political statements" made by individuals linked to an organisation can cause "reputational risk", breaching funding agreements (1/5)
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it is impossible to remain sane in a society where it is called misogyny to say that Liz 'Pork Markets' Truss, a clinically incapable person who has somehow managed to get herself into a position where she can trigger nuclear crises, has managed to trigger a minor nuclear crisis
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I made myself a bag and now I understand that any garment made by a person should cost no less than a hundred millions pounds
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Not safe to see your family for more than a day. Yet retail staff at work for the next five days solid.
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She's done a book!!
So ludicrously excited to say my debut novel Orpheus Builds a Girl will be coming out through
@BelgraviaB
in the Autumn - with huge thanks to
@emmashercliff
!
"Orpheus Builds a Girl is an absolute marvel of a book. An extraordinarily confident and accomplished debut: chilling. strange and brilliantly written",
@BelgraviaB
signs
@HeatherParryUK
's debut novel! More here:
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Glasgow is completely frozen and it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen
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This is v promising but worth putting into context. This would give a yearly income of £19,200.
The current UK real living wage equates to £22,672. For London it's £24.856.
Minimum wage FT equates to £21, 674.
This isn't wild money, it's not even really a living income.
Universal basic income of £1,600 a month to be trialled in England
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I'm thrilled to say that as of February I'll be working (part-time) with the
@Soc_of_Authors
as their Senior Policy and Liaison Manager for Scotland (a
@CreativeScots
-funded role)!
A total honour to be selected to advocate for writers across Scotland. Can't wait to get stuck in!
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@ForsterImogen
Imogen its a tweet about some very obvious misogyny. Why did you feel the need to respond like this?
Leaving that lack of apostrophe btw because its a tweet and who cares
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the unconscious gendering of food and drink substances will never not fascinate me. if I am with a man and we order a cappuccino and an americano, the cappuccino will always be put in front of me. as if milk can only be consumed by the milk producer. the human cow
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I am going to take so many god damn classes post-vaccine. I am going to throw pottery. I am going to screen print. I am going to be that androgynous figure in a beanie and dungarees planing wood for a table in the freezing air of Scotland's autumn, sipping coffee with whisky in.
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well I made the mistake of reading a Times article about how Scotland has no brave female novelists and how we only write historical and fantasy fiction and how there are no Scottish literary magazines showcasing Scottish writers on a UK-wide stage and now I want to break things
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My unsolicited writing advice for the day: your absolute priority on a sentence level should be clarity. Sentences can be pretty, they can be freewheeling and weird and paragraph-long. But if I reader can't grasp what's happening more than once they can't care about it either.
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our GDP is $2.6 trillion. the richest ten families own half of all wealth in the UK. you are suffering so that they can get richer still. you can't 'make do and mend' your way out of a fundamentally unjust and extractive system
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ScotGov has truly screwed over the arts sector today. Organisations are already on their knees. Creative Scotland said 900 arts jobs would be lost, a third of orgs would become insolvent, 12,000 arts opportunities lost without funding. Is that what we are supposed to accept?
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it says a lot about UK politics that there's going to be an anti-lockdown (so pro death?) party yet there is no party demanding universal basic income, secure home guarantees and free basic necessities while this pandemic goes on
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The usual "this won't play well with the Red Wall" chat is so demeaning, so patronising and so offensive to the north of England. It forgets that there are Black northerners, brown northerners, queer northerners, trans northerners, refugee northerners, immigrant northerners.
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Thanks to
@CreativeScots
,
@mariadraws
and I can now present The Illustrated Freelancer’s Guide: an accessible, practical resource to legal rights, professional troubleshooting and good practice for creative freelancers.
It's FREE, so please share widely!
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If you are being asked to be 'apolitical' at work, at school, at home etc you're actually being asked to give up your agency so you don't upset the status quo. It is all in service of the currently-powerful
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Yesterday I had an emerging writer ask me if it's true that you should quit your job if you're serious about writing and I can't stop thinking about it.
Every successful writer I know has another job, or at least a writing job outside books (teaching, editing, copywriting etc).
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don't make me tap the sign
Revealed: plan to brand anyone ‘undermining’ UK as extremist
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Ernesto has very much decided on A Mood for the day, and that mood is Goths Melting in the Sun
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defund
demonise
privatise
it's the model every single time. it's relentless, its why nothing in this country works any more, and why our standards of living are falling at a ludicrous rate
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is it too much to hope that Poor Things might create a lot more broad interest in great weird contemporary Scottish literature because there's a lot of it about and it deserves an audience
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having rewatched Dirty Dancing this weekend I'd like to enter this into the Discourse: more films should be extremely horny actually and it's not anti feminist or weird to show characters with sexual desire
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I simply can't imagine why the Tories have been trying to make protest illegal before presiding over astronomical hikes in living costs *and* the biggest fall in living standards in 30 years - after the number of billionaires in the UK reached a record high last year
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24.
@mariadraws
and I created a FREE guide to all things to do with running your creative freelancing business, which has info that should help you with this stuff (and lots more). It's completely free to download here - thanks to
@CreativeScots
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new/emerging writers in Scotland - save the evening of May 10th!
I'll be running a FREE event on how to get started with your writing, how to find community support, how funding + copyright works, what you need to consider when writing for publication and where to find help.
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when people like George Michael & Paul O'Grady die you're reminded of their roots, their quiet philanthropy, their bravery in the face of censure and bigotry, their strong class-based politics & their vocal hatred of the ruling classes. literally a dying breed amongst the famous
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Freelancers: would you come to a *free* zoom workshop of about an hour, all about the importance of contracts in creative work and how to make sure you're properly covered by one, with a template contract (+ supporting materials) given out at the end? And perhaps catbombing?
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My postman just brought me a copy of Nabokov's collected stories?!
"You read a lot of books don't you? I thought you might want this?"
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when the govt comes out and says it would be disrespectful to protest for a ceasefire on armistice day what they really mean is this: war or oppression is only supposed to be opposed after the fact, toothlessly, when it has already happened. when the people are already dead
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a smart country, a country serious about tackling climate change, would be investing massively in the rail system (basically undoing the Beeching cuts) making rail jobs highly desirable, slashing train and bus fares, etc etc etc. not thirty quid returns for AN HOUR'S JOURNEY
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To add: the arts in Scotland already relies of ludicrous amounts of free labour; on artists creating opportunities, spending weeks writing funding applications, going through endless bureaucracy to be allowed to beg for a tiny budget on which they're supposed to move mountains.
ScotGov has truly screwed over the arts sector today. Organisations are already on their knees. Creative Scotland said 900 arts jobs would be lost, a third of orgs would become insolvent, 12,000 arts opportunities lost without funding. Is that what we are supposed to accept?
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It's a weird time to receive nice news. But I am very grateful for this.
Orpheus Builds a Girl by
@HeatherParryUK
publisher
@GallicBooks
shortlisted for the Scottish Fiction Book of the Year 2023
#SNBA23
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Polari Prize longlisted? My dark and gothic wee book? I'll take it!
Introducing the 2023 Polari First Book Prize longlist!
Love From The Pink Palace - Jill Nalder (
@HachetteUK
)
A Visible Man -
@Edward_Enninful
(
@penguinrandom
)
The Whale Tattoo - Jon Ransom (
@MuswellPress
)
Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness - Kevin Brazil (
@Influxpress
)
(1/3)
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if you're wondering what it is that will help writers to be more creative and take chances and commit fully to something massive and write bold and brave work the answer, most of the time, is money
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Last year Children in Need raised £48 million. A few years ago Hugh Grosvenor, the 7th Duke of Westminster, avoided paying £4 *billion* in taxes on the £9 billion estate he inherited in his mid 20s. That's *eighty* times the Children in Need 2019 total.
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do you ever sit and think about what your creative practice would look like if the state paid you 17k a year
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just remembered a baby puffin is called a puffling and it's saved my whole day
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