Hi All,<\/p>\n
Happy New Year! I hope you\u2019ve all got nicely out of 2013 and into 2014: A perfect, clean page for us to fill with all the good things in life; may it live up to expectations.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve had a long break over the holidays. Few people apart from Alphas have the privilege of five weeks off for the Christmas break. That, however, is of course a total misrepresentation of reality, because break or no break we had plenty of work to do. If the urgent emails from those in charge of Alphaday 6 tasks are anything to go by, there may have been some hectic scribbling going on as the deadline approached. Some of us need deadlines to get a move on. It isn\u2019t rational, and no doubt we\u2019d be far less stressed if we liberated ourselves from the dreaded deadline whip and completed our work at leisure in advance. Some lucky (I mean: well-organised) Alphas actually do. Some don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
The first task of the long interlude was Olaf\u2019s Christmas quiz. It never fails to lure Alphas further and further into its convoluted web and this year was no exception.<\/p>\n
But there was also a challenge to write and the entries for the tweets to be judged. On top of that, of course, a lot of us are working hard on our personal writing projects (details in the Log) so that all things considered, perhaps five weeks wasn\u2019t very long when festive fun was on the menu as well.<\/p>\n
So well done to everyone for preparing this first Alphaday of 2014, filled with writerly treats.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve got the following ready for today:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure this will provide plenty of entertainment for us today and fire us up with enthusiasm for our writing.<\/p>\n
Alpha news:<\/p>\n
The re-vamped web site is something to be proud of. We\u2019re also proud of our publications:<\/p>\n
e-books and paperback versions of Alpha anthologies. Thanks are due to Rosemary for preparing them for publication. All profits go to Macmillan Cancer Research, and the books are sold at a nominal price. We have sold a few paperbacks (3) and e-books (1), but not enough to place us amongst the world\u2019s best-sellers\u2026 which is surely a mystery.<\/p>\n
Good news about Alpha successes crop up regularly in the Log. We\u2019re a great group of writers with a huge spread of skills that it\u2019s a pleasure to belong to.<\/p>\n
General news:<\/p>\n
There was a time when we made fun of people who\u2019d talk about the weather for want of more intellectual discussion topics. These days we seem to get more dramatic weather stories than even the continuing, senseless wars can scare us with.<\/p>\n
Britain is waterlogged. Canada and northern areas of the US have temperatures of nearly<\/p>\n
-40\u00b0C while in Brazil they suffer with over 50\u00b0C.\u00a0 Add hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis. Surely the weather has ceased to be the anodyne conversational topic of yore?<\/p>\n
It might soon replace the fanciful post-apocalyptic genres with a far more realistic angle. Isolated groups of mismatched people provide material for tragic dramas or uplifting sob stories. Maybe \u2018metcoms\u2019 will become favourite TV dramas.<\/p>\n
The Writing Magazine reports that the word \u2018selfie\u2019 is the 2013 \u2018word of the year\u2019 buzzword. It benefited from the example of Obama and the Danish prime minister during the Nelson Mandela funeral, when they should have been wearing their solemn faces and paid attention to the speeches. We Alphas are ever so delighted with our own excellent illustration of this famous neologism: Geoff\u2019s selfie with the cosy Ikea Christmas tree in the background and bombs going off outside his half-trailer in the middle of the Arabian desert is surely unbeatable!<\/p>\n
Christine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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