One of my pet projects is finally off the ground - now I have to do some work to fuel it. WSPA called me yesterday and we spoke long and hard about my quest to save a bear that's been locked up all its life. It's very sad out there and it turns out that nothing is as easy as it would first appear. I probably should have known better but when freeing up a bear in the backwaters of Romania, you will come across that old favourite of a troll under a bridge: international politics. I won't bore you with the details but consider my Big Bear Rescue launched. I have nine months before I have to actually do the thing I'm going to do and in the meantime, I need to get my head around raising some funds. This involves some art, some stories, some clothing, some auctioning and finally an appointment with ink.
All will become clear - like I said, there's a lot of things for me to do behind the scenes. As a bi-product of this, I'll be spending some time here:
Known in the real world as Bran Castle and in the fictional world as the likely setting for Mr Stoker's Dracula, if this isn't a good place to stay and write for a day, what is? I'm excited to be finally getting on with this. It's going to be tough but "if you're gonna be a bear, be a grizzly" - is £10,000 too ambitious? No, I don't think it is. Let's do this. More to follow...
I'll hook up some kind of bear symbol thing and newsletter shortly. it will be fun keeping track and logging all of this he said scratching his head.
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In other 'going outside' news, I've decided to head out for the Aarhus Art Convention in Denmark sometime in mid-June. If I can tie it in with some other ideas or projects (of which I have far too many to be entirely practical) then I will. If you're reading and headed out that way, drop me a note - it looks like quite a trek from the airport!
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I realised yesterday evening that a lot of people subscribed for posts to be delivered by email - which means you'll miss anything I throw around that's not actually in the blog. Bearing that in mind, I'll start rounding off my posts with any of these things so nobody misses anything. If missing something was your intention, simply don't click on stuff. It will look like this:
WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING:
I started a new section on the site called Scaramanga Bag. Although it sounds like a small pouch to keep your third nipple safe if you happen to be Christopher Lee, it's actually a new series of Hard Boiled Travel Writing (thanks to Wayne Simmons for the tagline). The first story - Clan of the Heart Punch - is out there already. If it makes you chuckle, you like it and want to share it with somebody, knock yourselves out - I've also filtered it out to the website Medium to catch other people in the net. I don't like going third party but let's just think of it as a test...